Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.
The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.
Or former koi pond, Jack thinks.
The pond is sodden with ashes.
Dead koi – once gold and orange, now black with soot – float on the top.
"Note," Jack says into the Dictaphone. "Inquire about value of koi."
He walks through the garden to the house itself. Takes one look and thinks, Oh shit.
7
He's seen the house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn't recognized the address.
Built back in the '30s, it's one of the older homes on the bluff above Dana Point – a heavy-timbered wood frame job with cedar shake walls and a shake roof.
A damn shame, Jack thinks, because this house is one of the survivors of the old days when most of the Dana headlands was just open grass hillside. A product of the days when they really built houses.
This house, Jack thinks, has survived hurricanes and monsoons and the Santa Ana winds that sweep these hills with firestorms. Even more remarkably, it's survived real estate developers, hotel planners, and tax boards. This sweet old lady of a house has presided over the ocean through all that, and all it takes is one woman with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette to do her in.
Which is a shame, Jack thinks, because he's sat on his board looking at this house from the ocean all his damn life and always thought that it was one of the coolest houses ever built.
For one thing, it's made of wood, not stucco or some phony adobe composite. And they didn't use green lumber to frame it up either. In the days when they built houses, they used kiln-dried lumber.