Six Golden Pennies

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He had talked to her lawyer, and now he drove in a rented car across burned land toward the place where she had waited out her residence. A hot wind dried salt crystals along his hairline, flapped the short sleeve of his sport shirt. The highway shimmered ahead. Blue mountain ranges notched a monotonous cloudless sky. He looked at the shadows with an artist’s eye, wondering at the gaudy, improbable blues and purples in those shadows. Lizard land. Baked rock land.

Devlan, her lawyer, had been cool at first, saying, with a patronizing smile, “After all, Mr. Shelby, to be perhaps too frank, she was divorcing you, and she got drunk and she drowned. It is a tragedy. She was young and seemed to be a nice person, and she had a lot of living ahead of her. But not, may I say, with you. That’s why your visit seems to... baffle me a bit. You ask me how she was acting? Normal, I would say, considering this rather abnormal emotional climate.”

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