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yard, and the fact that this other world had dead animals in it, and naked people, and predators, just made us want to discover more.
    The days stretched out, one after another, vast and unbroken as the grassy landscape of that hillside and the darkening sky overhead. Other kids had to go inside at dinnertime. We’d hear their mothers calling to them, though often they knew, without being called, when it was time to head in. For us, there was never anyone calling, and no worry or guilt that our mother had worked all afternoon to make a steaming family dinner now left to cool on the table. Dinner was whatever cold cuts we located in the refrigerator, whenever we got home to eat them.
    Going back outside after we ate, we might stay out until ten o’clock, just making up stories or prowling behind the houses, looking in windows to see if anything interesting was happening, which it never was. When we let ourselves back in, we’d hear our mother’s radio in her bedroom and smell her cigarette smoke, call out “Good night, Mom,” and head into our own room, where we’d set a stack of records on the record player. We’d lie on our beds and read out loud to each other—from a joke book, possibly, or one of the biographies I got from Scholastic Book Club, or another one of the wild stories from My Secret Garden (though these mostly baffled my sister)—and whisper to each other until one of us fell asleep. Usually Patty.
    With the window open, you could hear the sound of crickets, or an owl, or a coyote howling, and on rare occasions, a mountain lion. You could look out to the mountain and see stars, and when the light came in the morning, there were the horses grazing—horses mating even—and hawks circling overhead.
    It was the place we found out about everything, that mountain. Animal bones and deer scat. Birds, flowers, condoms. The bodies of dead animals, the bodies of men. Rocks and lizards. Sex and death.

 

    Chapter Four
    S ome years before—when I was around ten, Patty eight—an old woman who lived in a house on the cul-de-sac at the far end of our street died following a long illness, and her husband moved to a nursing home. Their house sat vacant for close to a year while their children worked out what to do about the place. Then sometime in the spring the house had been sold. All we knew about the new residents was the name on the mailbox, Armitage.
    They had no children. Over the months we’d become vaguely aware of Mr. Armitage—a man of stocky build and thinning hair, who evidently worked (this much we learned from Mrs. Gunnerson) as a teacher at a ballroom dancing studio in San Rafael. We saw him walking to the bus stop a few blocks away most afternoons and returning home around nine o’clock at night. Later, when hardly anyone was out but us, he’d walk their small dog.
    On rare occasions—only at night, if we were out later than normal—we’d see the woman we determined to be Mrs. Armitage carrying a large pocketbook and wearing some unbecoming dress over her shapeless body, and (a little strangely) a hat, regardless of the weather. She always wore high heels, as if she was headed someplace special, though from the looks of things, her walks around the neighborhood with their little dog—a mutt who seemed to have some Jack Russell terrier in him—took her to no particular destination. Other than those times—no more than three of them—we never saw her, and because the hat featured an odd little veil in the front, we never got to see her very closely either.
    Somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Armitage appeared to be an outdoorsman. Sitting on our back steps, eating our Pop-Tarts or granola bars, Patty and I often observed him heading up the mountain, carrying a walking stick, with his little dog trotting alongside and a pair of binoculars around his neck. Mrs. Armitage was never part of these expeditions, we