|
I didn't like Santa Barbara much, even when I first arrived.
Outrageously expensive real estate bakes in the sun while equally outrageously wealthy retirees endeavor to amuse themselves. Once a decade there's a forest fire, earthquake or oil spill. Between these disasters there is the calm and boring life of the people who've "made it."
It was an unlikely starting point for adventure.
I came to Santa Barbara to either find or lose myself. I couldn't make up my mind. I was forty and had accomplished all the things I had dreamed of - and then realized that my life of accomplishment had brought me no happiness at all.
|
My exit visa to the real world was delivered by the woman who had provided the one deeply painful romantic experience in my otherwise calm and superficial post-divorce love life. Looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised; but on the April day when Hera telephoned after more than a year, I didn't see it coming.
"Robert! How are you?" greeted my hello.
My stomach hit my ankles. "Fine, Hera. And you?"
Hera is the granddaughter of a genuine Texas oil tycoon, now deceased. She is tall, slim and, at thirty-five, at the point which embraces both the charm of youth and the poise of maturity. I met her while hosting British royalty at the well-known riding stable (an "equestrian center", if you please) I once owned, and was infatuated with her before I ever spoke to her or knew her name - first or last. I had looked into her eyes and felt as though I were sixteen again.
Hera had lived in Santa Barbara during a brief marriage and still had friends there. Between Texas and California we had a whirlwind romance of exactly seven weeks, in which I felt I had found a soulmate. We found it easy to share the most simple parts of life - birds singing in the trees, shopping for groceries, walking, cooking, books. With Hera, I reckoned I had rediscovered quiet, peace and joy. It was all so easy and so sweet.
Whereupon she whirled out of my life without a farewell.
|
"How much money is missing?"
"About a million U.S. dollars," Alicia said quietly. "About a million dollars a month."
No one in the restaurant seemed to have felt the earth move in that instant but me. Perhaps I am peculiar. It took me twenty years to earn my own modest fortune. A million a month seemed like enough to take notice of.
|
Fire trucks were just leaving when we drove up to the hotel. We thanked the chauffeur and made our way with the crowd to the elevators. We stepped off at our floor into a group of three fire marshals, five detectives, four uniformed patrolmen, five senior hotel staff, three reporters and two cameramen. The hall wasn't very big.
|
Mario and I escorted three giggling twenty-five-year-old schoolteachers from England to the café. Alberto was not there. We sat for hours, flexing our charm, drinking, smiling and making conversation while we waited. At one in the morning, Alberto walked in.
|
|
