by Thomas Perry
When she reached the house it seemed to be nothing but a mailbox, two gaps in the tall hedge—one the size of a door and the other wide enough for a car—and, as she passed the bigger opening, a glimpse of brick pavement, a six-car garage, and the high, dark shadow of a house looming to the left of it. All she could tell about the building was that the main part was three stories tall and there were two one-story wings. Then she was past it, and the hedge was opaque. Down the road the hedge ended, and there was a long expanse of wall that seemed to belong to the next estate, which looked even bigger. There were other driveways farther along, and long stretches between them.
About two miles farther on, she turned around and drove back. This time she came at a slow, steady pace, looking for practical features—places where a car could be driven off the road and left without attracting any attention, barriers that might prevent a person from walking from property to property. She kept her window open and listened for the barking of dogs, the distant sounds of mowers or tractors that might give her an idea of the sizes of the estates.
She had memorized the way here from the freeway, but she kept checking her mirror so she would see what each landmark would look like if she came this way again. That was one of the tricks her father had taught her when she was very little. They would wander in the big state parks to the southeast of Deganawida, and he would let her lead the way back. He taught her that finding her way out of the woods was more important than finding her way in. He said that some people got lost because they never turned around to see what things were going to look like the next time they saw them.
When Jane returned to the freeway she kept going until she was back in Encinitas, in Sharon Curtis's neighborhood. She went to a sporting goods store and bought a racing bicycle with very narrow tires, a black helmet, and a tire pump. At a hardware store she bought a can of black spray paint. She put her bicycle, still in the carton, into the back of her SUV, drove it to Sharon's house, and carried it into the garage.
She took it out of its carton and completed the assembly and adjustments so it fit her perfectly. Then she took it to the back yard, set it on its carton, and spray painted all of its shiny parts a dull black. When the paint dried she sprayed Teflon lubricant on all the moving parts, rode the bicycle around the block once, and loaded it into the back of the SUV.
Jane went into Sharon's house, made a sandwich and ate it, set the alarm clock for midnight, and slept until it woke her. She dressed in black jeans, a black pullover, a black nylon windbreaker and gloves. She drove back toward Rancho Santa Fe. At this hour, the traffic was fast and sparse, so she got on the freeway and didn't have to touch her brakes again until the exit for Solana Beach. She drove until she found her way to the North Coast Repertory Theatre on Lomas Santa Fe Drive, parked her vehicle behind it, and rode off on her bicycle. She got off the main road quickly, rode in darkness up County Road S8 for three miles, turned onto Paseo Delicias, then La Gracia, and then La Flecha. There were no streetlamps on her route, and the roads were nearly empty.
Now and then Jane would hear a car coming along the road far behind her, and she would pull off the road into the entrance of a driveway or behind the end of a fence, dismount, and stay low and motionless. The car's lights would appear, and then the car disappeared around a curve or over a hill. The people in the cars were all on their way home now, probably from restaurants or shows or parties. Somewhere ahead where she couldn't see them, they probably turned off into one or another of the nearly hidden driveways and closed their gates.
The trip was just over four miles. Jane rode at an average speed of around twenty miles an hour, working her way up the gears when she had a downgrade to pick up more speed. She couldn't read street signs well in the dark, but she had memorized the curves of the roads and the distinctive landmarks.
Then she was there, beside the two openings in the tall hedge. She rode to the end of the hedge where the next estate began, lifted her bicycle over the low wall, and leaned it against the inner side so she could reach over and get it again, then swung her legs over the wall, took off her helmet and left it with the bicycle. She walked away from the road into the trees. Jane had no doubt that there would be surveillance cameras somewhere inside the Beale property trained on the two gates set into the hedge, but the Beales wouldn't have anything like that aimed into the neighbor's yard.
She moved patiently, stopping beside tree trunks to look and listen, then moving to the next spot she had chosen before she stopped again. The sun would not be up until a bit after five, and if she was on the road by four-thirty, she would be virtually invisible. She had four hours.
When she was at least a hundred feet from the road, she altered her course to the left, toward the Beale estate. She kept the move gradual, still stepping from one piece of cover to the next. She couldn't see anything on the Beale property. It seemed to be simply a great blackness, a place where seeing ended. She moved toward it.
There was another wall, this one at least ten feet high. She touched its rough surface. It seemed to be cinder block covered over with stucco so the surface would be even and featureless. When she stood beneath it and looked up, she could make out a slight irregularity near the top, as though there were bricks up there laid at an angle.
She walked along the wall for twenty paces looking for a way over, or even a handhold. It was not beyond imagining that there might be a gate. Neighbors didn't have to be strangers. Sometimes they built gates. At forty paces she gave up the idea of a gate. She looked the other way. She was now far enough from the road so she could see the front of the neighbor's house. Could there be a ladder somewhere? Even a long board would do, or a rope. She could have brought a rope. Why hadn't she realized this might happen?
As she walked on, Jane noticed one tree on her side of the wall seemed much thicker and nearer to the wall than some of the others. There was a thick limb that extended almost to the top of the wall. She quickly climbed the tree to the place where the limb branched away from the trunk.
She crawled out on it, listening and feeling for some warning that the limb wasn't strong enough to hold her. She could see over the wall into the Beale estate now. It occurred to her that she could simply sit here on the safe side of the wall and watch and listen. She could see the shape of the house from here. It looked huge. In the center part of the house the side wall facing Jane seemed to be all glass. There were sliding doors at ground level and big panes starting on the frame above them, and then a framework above that, so the room was three stories high. There were small, dim, bluish lights low on the walls of the gigantic room, like the safety lights in movie theaters. At the second-floor level, a walkway lit by the same bluish lights stretched across the room. On either end of the room the high part of the house extended thirty or forty feet, then dropped so the two wings were single-story extensions.
Her eye followed the wings, and she saw something that excited her. On the right wing, the back of the house, really, there were four windows with bars on them. She crawled out farther, clinging to the limb, and swung her feet to the top of the wall, eased herself forward for balance, and let go. She had no idea whether she would find anything on the far side of the wall that would get her back up here if she went in, but she knew she had to go. Caution was insanity now. Jane turned around and lowered herself until she was hanging from the top of the wall by both hands, then dropped. Her feet hit a layer of pine needles, and she rolled to break her fall.
She lay on the ground and looked around her for a way out. If this was where Beale was keeping Christine, then she would have to get her out, too. By now she would either have had the baby or be about as pregnant as a woman could be. Neither condition seemed good for wall climbing. Jane was in a small pine woods. She could see that on the ground, resting on the deep layer of pine needles, was a tree about fifteen feet long that had fallen some time ago. The boughs that stuck out from the trunk at intervals of a foot or so had only a few dry, brittle needles clinging to them.
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br /> She used her pocketknife to carve off the boughs on one side of the trunk, then lifted the lighter end of it and propped it on the rim of the wall. The remaining boughs made the trunk roll to keep the bare side up. The protruding stubs from the boughs were like rungs of a ladder.
Jane began to advance through the woods toward the house. She stepped almost to the edge of the trees and studied the buildings. To her left was the long back wall of the six-car garage. Directly ahead was the main house, and close to it on the right was a pool house.
Adjusting her course, she put the pool house directly in front of her to shield her from the main house. She crossed the lawn to the pool house and looked in through the arched doorway. She saw a counter with a kitchen sink, a wooden table and chairs, a bathroom with two showers, presumably for washing the chlorine off after swimming, and another archway leading to the pool. She moved past the arch, skirted the iron fence around the pool, and made her way up to the first of the barred windows.
Over each window was an iron grate like a flat cage, a single piece bolted to the house. She knew that was an arrangement that had been popular in the forties and fifties, but it had become rare—maybe against building codes—in recent years because it prevented an occupant from getting out in a fire. She stepped back and stared at the house. A lot of modernist architecture was far older than it looked. This place could easily have been built in the thirties, and the bars could simply be relics.
But to Jane the bars looked like a sign of malicious intent. The old word otgont came to her. It meant more than simple evil. Witches—people who secretly had the power to cause disease and death—were otgont. It was potence, but it was also corruption, an unnatural degeneration from within.
She moved to the farthest window. In all the rooms in the wing the lights were off, so she had to peer in and strain her eyes to make out shapes. This one held an empty double bed, a dresser, a closet. The entrance to the bathroom was on her left. The small, high window in there had bars across it, too. She moved to the next window. The room was nearly the same, unoccupied but furnished. Jane kept moving along the side of the house until she reached the big room at the center. She stood perfectly still outside the glass wall and stared into the room. First there was a moving shadow, and then a figure appeared on the walkway above the room. There was a woman in a bathrobe and slippers moving sleepily from one set of rooms toward the other. She stopped and turned her head, as though she had to force herself to look down.
30
Ruby Beale saw the woman beyond the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder-jump, as all the muscles in her body tightened. It seemed to squeeze the scream out of her, so loud and high-pitched that she frightened herself, and her body dropped her into a crouch on the walkway. She involuntarily tried to curl up and be smaller as she stared down at the figure beyond the glass wall.
The woman was outside the glass, standing there without moving, her hands at her sides. She was all in black, and her hair was black, and Ruby couldn't make out her face with the moonlight behind her. She stood there staring at Ruby.
There were sounds of heavy, hurried footsteps on both ends of the hallway, and on her hands and knees, Ruby could feel the vibrations from the running men through the floor, and it scared her even more. Lights came on. It felt as though the walkway would be shaken loose. She looked back in the direction of her bedroom, and saw Andy running toward her in his pajamas, with a gun in his hand. From the other direction came Pete Tilton and Claudia Marshall, and both of them were carrying guns, too. The sight of so many guns did nothing to calm Ruby. Everyone was running, and all the guns seemed to be held in front of them and pointed downward, which was where she was.
They all converged and stood over her yelling at once. Andy was gasping, "Are you all right? What's the matter?" and other variations on the same theme, while the others were shouting, "What is it? What did you see?" Ruby looked over the edge of the walkway at the glass again.
The woman in black pivoted. Her silhouette was the same from the back, only the face was gone, and she walked into the dark in the garden. "There!" Ruby shrieked, and managed to point her finger. But the woman had dissolved into the night shadows.
Ruby said, "It's a woman—tall, thin, long black hair, dressed in black. She's out there."
"Sybil?" said Claudia Marshall.
"What?" It was Sybil Landreau, who had come out of another room on the top floor.
Claudia turned to see her standing behind her. "It just sounded like you."
"I was asleep."
Ruby was agitated. "It wasn't her. I would have said 'Sybil,' not 'a woman.'"
Jane was running. She knew they would come out after her, and that what she had to outrun was the light. The only sounds in the darkness were the balls of her feet pounding the lawn and her lungs taking in deep breaths as she sprinted. As she approached the place where the grass melted into the stand of pine trees at the end of the property, she heard the sliding of one of the glass doors at the side of the building where she had been standing. She knew they had done the right thing—they had gotten someone outside in the dark who would now get into firing position—but she knew that the tactic would give her an extra five or six seconds at a full sprint. She ran hard, counting the seconds. She dashed past the first few pine trees and threw herself down.
The bright floodlights came on, an explosion of eye-searing glare, but she could see that two of them were outside holding pistols in two-handed stance, turning their bodies as they scanned the back yard for a target. After a few seconds one waved to the other and they turned away from each other to move along the two wings of the house and then continue around toward the front.
Jane knew that this was either her chance to get up and run for the wall, or their way of inducing her to try. She guessed it was a fake, and lay still. A second later they both spun and aimed their weapons down the lawn toward her. She could see beyond the glare of the floodlights mounted along the eaves of the house that there were two people half-hidden beside the sliding doors, staring out at the gardens, trying to act as spotters.
Jane stayed low and moved toward the left, away from the long featureless wall of the garage. She was almost sure that was where they would go to wait for her, thinking she must have come by car and needed to make it over the gate in the hedge to the street.
She found her pine tree lying at the foot of the wall, propped it up so she could climb it to the top, then pushed it back down so it would fall sideways. Then she dropped to the other side. She hurried to the road, lifted her bicycle over the low wall to the street, put on her helmet, mounted, and pedaled hard. She built up considerable speed before she passed the opening in the hedge where the gate was. The only sounds were the whisper of wind in her ears and a slight hiss of her tires on the pavement.
She kept going hard, building her speed as she went. By the time she had traveled two hundred yards, she judged she must be going at least forty miles an hour. Jane knew she probably couldn't go faster than that on this road until the first downgrade. But she was sure it hardly mattered. The people who were hunting for her had not seen her leave or heard a car engine, so they would assume she was still there.
Jane heard a new sound. It was the throaty, burbling sound of a motorcycle engine starting. She had underestimated the hunters. She couldn't outrun a motorcycle, but her bicycle still gave her advantages. It was silent. She could pull off and hide while the motorcycle went past, or find a path that was off the road and try to avoid roads entirely. In a couple of seconds the engine sound rose to a whine, and then a roar as the motorcycle came after her.
She could hear it gaining easily on her and saw the pavement ahead of her begin to glow from its distant headlight. Jane saw a street sign ahead, and she pedaled harder for it, then veered to the right and took the turn around the corner as fast as she dared and drifted almost to the left side of the road. She came upon a grove of stunted oaks, so she steered off the road into it, avoiding the trunks and raised
roots until she could coast while she swung her leg over the seat and began to run with the bicycle. When she stopped her momentum fifty feet from the road, she dropped her bicycle in some high weeds and lay beside it.
She heard the motorcycle roar into the intersection, and looked in that direction, not raising her head, but staring through the weeds. There was the bright single headlight, the yellow motorcycle. Its helmeted rider was hunched forward over the handlebars, his legs bent so he held the motorcycle in a knock-kneed crouch. He had lost her, or maybe never caught sight of her, and just come this way because he knew she would be going in the direction of the freeway and the coast, not inland.
His single headlight turned in Jane's direction, and she ducked her head deep in the weeds, but he surged forward toward her hiding place only about thirty feet before he swung around, heading back into the intersection. He turned his motorcycle to the right so his light shone on the stretch of road he had been on before he'd turned, then rode a few feet up to the left, but didn't seem to see anything that way either. He came back along the road toward Jane. This time he seemed to have decided she couldn't have gone down either of the other stretches of road. He came along slowly, and as he approached, Jane saw the trees above her hiding place begin to glow brighter with his headlight.
The engine throttled back, so it was almost at idle again. Suddenly it grew much louder, and the motorcycle came off the road, over the shoulder, and into the grove, heading directly for Jane. She crawled behind a tree and stood, taking off her jacket. She pressed her body to the trunk of the tree, listening to the engine of the motorcycle and watching the beam of the headlight bouncing up and down on the leaves and upper branches of the oak trees around her.
