marquee with black Grecian-style letters that marks the entrance to an area called Mount Olympus, where the streets are named for Greek and Roman gods.
On your left is mountain wall. In some spots the wall is a bare, unadorned reddish-brown; in others it’s dressed for company, wearing a petticoat of oleander, eucalyptus, fir, the occasional palm, and other trees that stretch to the sky. There are houses, too, some street-level and rather shabby, some wedged into the mountain, most of them higher up and grander, their foundations supported by sturdy wooden beams that seem to be doing the job. Signs placed at intervals along the canyon road warn against smoking and flooding, and while I’d love to live in one of those aeries, breathing in the scent of wildflowers, taking in the spectacular views of city and valley, I worry about the heat and dry air that, every now and then, bakes the trees and brush into tinder for the fires that lick at those sturdy beams and snap them as if they were Pick-Up Sticks, leaving the parched earth and the houses sitting on them defenseless against the rush of swollen rains.
Every so often I
am
tempted. The area is beautiful and enticing, and the houses I saw last year and the year before and the year before that are still standing. Like I said, though, I’m an expert worrier.
Lookout Mountain is one of the few streets on Laurel Canyon with a traffic light. Nearing the signal, I wondered exactly where Lenore had been standing when the car had struck her, and I darted nervous looks around, as if the road still bore bloody evidence of Sunday morning’s events. There were a few stores on my right, but I doubted that they’d been open at that time.
The light turned green. According to Connors, Lenore had been found north of Lookout, so I continued a few hundred feet, passing the famed wide stone steps and bridge of the three-and-a-half-acre former Houdini estate, all that remains of the original mansion that fire destroyed in 1959.
At Willow Glen I turned right. I’d never been here before, and I felt hemmed in by the densely packed, two-story homes and unnerved by the cars coming toward me on the narrow, serpentine one-lane road that climbed higher and higher. I guess if you live here you get used to it, but I felt as though I’d done 180 curls on an Ab Roller. The good news, I told myself, was that there were plenty of potential witnesses. Connors or another cop had no doubt questioned the residents days ago, but experience has taught me that a great deal depends on the questions asked, and the questioner—people are often leery of becoming involved in a police investigation. And maybe Connors hadn’t talked to everyone. Maybe I’d be lucky.
Luck had eluded me so far. After returning from the hospital, I’d spent the rest of my morning and most of the afternoon accomplishing little. I blamed it on the mild headache from fasting, a headache that lingered for a while after I dry-swallowed two Advil tablets, but I knew it was Lenore, and that I’d failed her.
There were several pages of Weldons in the Pacific Bell directories (I have the whole set, covering the city and Valley), half a dozen with the initial
N
, but not one Nina. I began with the six, heard six answering machine messages—two delivered by male adults, three by females, and one by a squeaky-voiced, singsongy child whose parents obviously thought he was the cutest thing since Macaulay Culkin.
I had fared no better trying to track down Darren Porter: There were numerous Porters, many of them with the initial
D
, but none of them were home except for a Doreen, to whom I apologized for calling the wrong number. People, of course, aren’t always home when you want them to be, which was why I’d braved the traffic and come here now, close to dinnertime.
I fared no better now. None of the residents had seen Lenore in her nightgown. None had witnessed or heard the accident, even those within yoo-hoo-ing distance of Laurel
On your left is mountain wall. In some spots the wall is a bare, unadorned reddish-brown; in others it’s dressed for company, wearing a petticoat of oleander, eucalyptus, fir, the occasional palm, and other trees that stretch to the sky. There are houses, too, some street-level and rather shabby, some wedged into the mountain, most of them higher up and grander, their foundations supported by sturdy wooden beams that seem to be doing the job. Signs placed at intervals along the canyon road warn against smoking and flooding, and while I’d love to live in one of those aeries, breathing in the scent of wildflowers, taking in the spectacular views of city and valley, I worry about the heat and dry air that, every now and then, bakes the trees and brush into tinder for the fires that lick at those sturdy beams and snap them as if they were Pick-Up Sticks, leaving the parched earth and the houses sitting on them defenseless against the rush of swollen rains.
Every so often I
am
tempted. The area is beautiful and enticing, and the houses I saw last year and the year before and the year before that are still standing. Like I said, though, I’m an expert worrier.
Lookout Mountain is one of the few streets on Laurel Canyon with a traffic light. Nearing the signal, I wondered exactly where Lenore had been standing when the car had struck her, and I darted nervous looks around, as if the road still bore bloody evidence of Sunday morning’s events. There were a few stores on my right, but I doubted that they’d been open at that time.
The light turned green. According to Connors, Lenore had been found north of Lookout, so I continued a few hundred feet, passing the famed wide stone steps and bridge of the three-and-a-half-acre former Houdini estate, all that remains of the original mansion that fire destroyed in 1959.
At Willow Glen I turned right. I’d never been here before, and I felt hemmed in by the densely packed, two-story homes and unnerved by the cars coming toward me on the narrow, serpentine one-lane road that climbed higher and higher. I guess if you live here you get used to it, but I felt as though I’d done 180 curls on an Ab Roller. The good news, I told myself, was that there were plenty of potential witnesses. Connors or another cop had no doubt questioned the residents days ago, but experience has taught me that a great deal depends on the questions asked, and the questioner—people are often leery of becoming involved in a police investigation. And maybe Connors hadn’t talked to everyone. Maybe I’d be lucky.
Luck had eluded me so far. After returning from the hospital, I’d spent the rest of my morning and most of the afternoon accomplishing little. I blamed it on the mild headache from fasting, a headache that lingered for a while after I dry-swallowed two Advil tablets, but I knew it was Lenore, and that I’d failed her.
There were several pages of Weldons in the Pacific Bell directories (I have the whole set, covering the city and Valley), half a dozen with the initial
N
, but not one Nina. I began with the six, heard six answering machine messages—two delivered by male adults, three by females, and one by a squeaky-voiced, singsongy child whose parents obviously thought he was the cutest thing since Macaulay Culkin.
I had fared no better trying to track down Darren Porter: There were numerous Porters, many of them with the initial
D
, but none of them were home except for a Doreen, to whom I apologized for calling the wrong number. People, of course, aren’t always home when you want them to be, which was why I’d braved the traffic and come here now, close to dinnertime.
I fared no better now. None of the residents had seen Lenore in her nightgown. None had witnessed or heard the accident, even those within yoo-hoo-ing distance of Laurel
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