ho would be visiting the Beachwoods in the middle of the night?" Sadie asks, stabbing lustily at a sauteed mushroom.
"That's what I can't figure out," Delia replies, dumping more syrup on her french toast. "And just last week, they changed the code to the security gate."
                 "I'll bet they're swingers," Sadie says, "and they've got hot-to-trot rich couples doing nude cartwheels through their picture-perfect palace all night long. It's always the uptight ones who surprise you."
                 Sadie is Delia's 58-year-old aunt, and decidedly not uptight, with twinkling eyes, sun-damaged skin and long, silver hair that looks like it hasn't been cut since the Summer of Love. It was Sadie who convinced Delia to move here, and helped her land the gallery job. Delia even shacked up in Sadie's crystal- and windchime-appointed Carpinteria cottage until she found her own guest house on the mysterious Beachwoods' estate.
                 Now, they meet each other for movie nights and sometimes, like today, a late brunch at the Summerland Beach Cafe.
                 "No, wait!" Sadie continues, slurping her tea. "I'll bet they're making home porn movies."
                 "Ew!" Delia says, with a husky chortle.
                 "I'm serious," Sadie says. "I saw Chaz Beachwood's last few comedies and man, were they stinkers. We're talking straight to video. 'Dude, What Did You Do Last Summer?' was the only one worth watching. They've got to be hurting for money, so they're probably using his movie equipment to make low-budget skin flicks in their living - "
                 They simultaneously spot Kevin Costner walking past their table with a beautiful woman and a couple of stylish kids. Delia and Sadie try hard to look nonchalant while kicking each other spastically under the table until he is out of sight.
                 Leaving the restaurant, Delia is very nearly mowed down by a pack of 30 or 40 crazed bicyclists wearing primary-colored Lycra and expressions of grave determination. Delia leaps out of the way, and remembers hearing about a group of Vespa scooter owners who take weekly social rides through Santa Barbara. She wonders if she and her Honda would be welcome among them.
                 On the way home, she takes a detour off 192 to an estate sale at a storybook Tudor mansion on a shady Montecito lane. Delia desperately loves antiques, and lingers more than an hour letting her fingers trail delicately over an old Victrola, velvet settee, silver tea service, Tiffany chandelier, etched vanity mirror and mosaic garden table.
                 "Can I answer any questions for you?" says a woman sitting at a card table with a strongbox full of cash.
                 Yes, why am I still standing here when I have no room in my budget, on my scooter or in my cramped rental house for any of your exquisite castoffs?, she thinks, but utters a polite, "No, thank you."
                 Delia takes her leave, wondering what she was thinking by moving to a place where she'd be constantly surrounded by beautiful things, but ever unable to have them.
                 Back at the cottage, though, such covetous inklings give way to the pure pleasure of tending her narrow window box. She buries a lone hyacinth bulb in the tight space between five already blooming tulips, and finds a square inch in the back corner for an iris.
                 A cold ocean breeze whips up, and Delia heads inside. She slips Washboard Sam's 1938 recording of "Suspicious Blues" onto her old record player, squirts a bottle of L'Oreal Starry Night hair color onto her head and plops onto the floor beside her bed.
                 As the sky darkens, her imagination runs wild with theories about the Beachwoods' bizarre behavior. What's so secret that it must be done under cover of darkness? Could it really be swinger parties or pornography? Maybe, she thinks, one of them is having an affair right under the other one's nose. The record ends and Delia is startled to hear a loud thump against the wall, followed by twigs snapping in the bushes outside her window. She is seriously freaked out, and the high-inducing fumes of her hair dye are not helping the situation.
                 "Hello?" she hollers. "Is someone there?"
                 She wipes a black drip from her forehead, grabs a steel-toed combat boot from the closet, unlocks her front door and steps silently outside.

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