“What are you talking about?” She’ stopped the car with a bump.
“The note your father found in that silver box on the dog’s collar. You thought he must have destroyed it.”
“I told you I looked for it and it wasn’t there.”
“Suppose I do the looking.”
Laurel stared. Then she laughed and the Austin jumped.
The Hill house spread itself high on one of the canyon walls, cheerfully exposing its red tiles to the sun. It was a two-story Spanish house, beautifully bleached, with black wrought-iron tracery, arched and balconied and patioed and covered with pyracantha. It was set in two acres of flowers, flowering shrubs, and trees ― palm and fruit and nut and bird-of-paradise. Around the lower perimeter ran the woods.
“Our property line runs down the hill,” Laurel said as they got out of the car, “over towards the Priams’. A little over nine additional acres meeting the Priam woods. Through the woods it’s no distance at all.”
“It’s a very great distance,” mumbled Ellery. “About as far as from an eagle’s nest to an undersea cave. True Spanish, I notice, like the missions, not the modern fakes so common out here. It must be a punishment to Delia Priam ― born to this and condemned to that.”
“Oh, she’s told you about that,” murmured Laurel; then she took him into her house.
It was cool with black Spanish tile underfoot and the touch of iron. There was a sunken living room forty feet long, a great fireplace set with Goya tiles, books and music and paintings and ceramics and huge jars of flowers everywhere. A tall Japanese in a white jacket came in smiling and took Ellery’s hat.