The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  Also by David Corbett

  The Devil’s Redhead

  Done for a Dime

  Blood of Paradise

  Do They Know I’m Running?

  Killing Yourself to Survive: Stories

  The Art of Character

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 David Corbett

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477849446

  ISBN-10: 1477849440

  Cover design by Salamander Hill Design Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952440

  For my wife, Mette

  CONTENTS

  CHANGELING

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART II

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART III

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  PART IV

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  PART V

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  PART VI

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  PART VII

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  FINAL ENTRY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHANGELING

  In the predawn darkness the forest smelled peaty with mushrooming rot. She hacked a path through sword ferns and redwood sorrel and coiling blackberries spiked with thorns—a long-haired girl, eight years old, light-headed from little to eat for three days and stripped naked, shackled to a broken chain.

  She feared crashing through the woods in hopeless circles or, worse, just plunging deeper into the tangled undergrowth, lost for good. From time to time, glancing up through a feathery opening in the pine and eucalyptus branches, she stared at the drifting canopy of mist and felt abandoned by the moon.

  Then gravel, like bits of broken glass, stabbed the soles of her feet. She tripped on a jagged lip of asphalt—she’d reached the road: curving, two-lane, dark.

  Hugging herself for warmth—how long before she heard a car? Minutes, maybe, warped into hours.

  The thing rumbled up the fogbound hill, headlights a smeary glow then breaking the turn, and she stepped out onto the blacktop, breath visible, hands splayed.

  The car braked and lurched to a stop. Engine throbbing under the hood, tailpipe with its dervish of white exhaust.

  She realized it might be him, coming back. The man they’d identify as Victor Cope but to her was simply the creep, Mr. Menthol Meth Head—what if she got free and stumbled all this way only to make it easy for him?

  He’d chase her into the woods, take her down, grab her by the hair and drag her back to the moldy house—and then? He hated her enough already. She wasn’t like Marina, his little blossom, his perfection.

  The driver-side door creaked open. The ceiling light gave birth to a silhouette beyond the headlight glare. A man. He dragged himself from behind the wheel, got out.

  “Jesus H. Christ . . .”

  He edged closer. Some kind of redneck longhair—lumberjack shirt, thick black beard, scuffed boots. Voice like a chain-smoking folksinger.

  “Are you—Jesus fucking hell—you okay?”

  He took off the shirt, wrapped her in the thick coarse wool, warm from his body. Put his arm around her, then just as quick snapped the arm away, like he’d been bit. Cautious. Caring. He led her to the passenger-side door.

  “Go ahead. Get in. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  Ten years later, she’d wonder how she knew to trust that.

  An old El Camino, kind of car Richie, her brother, would cream over. Inside it reeked of cigarettes and black coffee, while Mardi Gras beads dangled from the rearview and the radio glowed, the music faint, nighthawk soul or some kind of R & B.

  He got in, slammed his door, reached for the gearshift. Stopped. Turning toward her, he stared for a second, like she was a fawn, an elf, a changeling, sitting in his car.

  “You’re that girl,” he said quietly. “The one got took up north.”

  No, she thought. I’m the other one.

  “What am I thinking?” He slapped his head. “Get us the hell away from here.” Throwing the El Camino into drive, he roared off down the curving mountain road. Velocity seemed to suit him. Glancing once his way, she saw his jaw was set but his eyes were calm, steady, and she took comfort in that.

  He switched off the radio. “Must’ve had you holed away in one of those houses back up the ridge.” He shook his head. “There’s coons and mountain lions and ki-yotes up in there. Lucky one of them didn’t spot you, slink on down in the dark, drag you off.”

  “I’m not afraid of raccoons.” Her first words in . . . how long?

  He chuckled. “Boy, you’re a tough one, aren’tcha?” He stopped at a T in the road, looked both ways. A sign read “Bonny Doon—1 ½ miles” with an arrow pointing right. He turned left. “Weren’t really the raccoons I was talking about.”

  “I know.”

  That seemed to tickle him even more. A muted kind of laughter in his eyes. She liked that, liked him. She needed to.

  “I’m taking you down into town, get you to a hospital. That be all right?”

  The word “yes,” it caught in her throat. Scared her. She nodded.

  “Well,” he added, “maybe not directly to the hospital.”

  Pulling the heavy shirt tighter, she eyed the chrome door handle, then glanced out through the windshield, looking for the next spot he might slow down.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get looked after and all. I just mean I
can’t get myself tangled up with the law. No cops, no questions.” He nodded, as though to confirm the end of an argument he’d been having with himself. “It’s complicated. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  It wasn’t till then she realized he’d not mentioned his name.

  “I’m Jacquelina Garza,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.” A nod, like a gentleman tipping his hat. “Seriously, let’s leave it there.”

  He drove down the winding hillside road until they reached a main drag leading south into Santa Cruz. At a little diner called Bernadette’s he pulled into the parking lot, killed the ignition, glanced at his watch. The diner glowed like a spaceship serving breakfast.

  He turned toward her, arm perched on the steering wheel, eyes warm but wary. “Here’s how it is,” he said. “Got me a friend who works here, great lady, name is Dawn. I’m gonna go in, let her know I found you up in the hills, then hand you over to her so she can get you seen to. Gonna be a lot of hoopla surrounding that and it’s just not what I’m into. Right? I’m glad I could help, real glad. Happy you’re safe. And you are, you’re safe now.”

  His hand reached out. She stiffened, not ready to be touched. But he didn’t touch her. He dug a cigarette pack from the shirt pocket, tapped out a smoke, lipped it, thumbed in the dash lighter.

  “I need you to forget me now, okay? Forget this car, forget my face. A stranger picked you up, saw you standing there by the road about two miles east of the Bonny Doon cutoff on Woodbriar Ridge—remember that, they’re gonna need to know the spot so they can backtrack, find the house you escaped from.” The lighter popped, he plucked it from its socket, touched the red coil to the tip of his cigarette. That intimate hiss as it singed the tobacco. “This stranger, one who found you—some kinda holy roller, let’s say, do-gooder type, no reward necessary—he dropped you off around here, you stumbled into the diner on your own.” He exhaled a long plume of smoke. It smelled like him. “Sorry to make it complicated, but it’s for the best.” He smiled with a wary sort of kindness. “Think you can do that for me?”

  Of course she could. And she did.

  She gave him back his shirt and let the woman named Dawn bundle her up in a big soft sweater as the El Camino drove off, and she sat at a table inside the diner with some buttered toast and a cup of hot chocolate till the highway patrol arrived. She never mentioned the stranger in the El Camino who’d appeared out of nowhere, though from that day on she’d envy his ability to become invisible. She said a man in a suit and tie and glasses picked her up, prayed when he found her and prayed as they drove off down the mountain, praising the Lord and his mysterious grace and refusing to accept recognition for his good deed—that would be unchristian, he’d said, the sin of pride—leaving her within an easy walk of safety.

  She lied, the first in a blizzard of lies, until it became the easier thing, the truth so unforgiving.

  PART I

  1

  Phelan Tierney made his way around the palatial Nordic monstrosity housing the center and followed a winding gravel path lined with Japanese maples—the graceful, meticulously tended trees in winter silhouette—continuing back to the sprawling garden, where he finally spotted the woman he’d come to see, Lonnie Bachmann, kneeling in mud.

  Dressed in a hooded yellow parka and shapeless jeans, she neither greeted nor even acknowledged him as the crunch of his footsteps stopped. Bracing himself against the blustery cold, he watched as she submerged one gloved hand in a bucket of slop—he could smell it from where he stood: coffee grounds—while the other smeared the gritty black muck around the base of a freshly planted azalea.

  “Lonnie?”

  Startled, she flinched, then turned to glance up, nudging back the kerchief securing her blondish hair. The face possessed a weathered loveliness, evidence of both her homespun youth and twenty years chasing the crack dragon, turning tricks to pay the freight.

  She spanked her gloved hands together, creating a small cloud of black specks. “Well, well. The man with two last names.”

  How many thousands of times . . . “I thought I’d explained that.”

  “You did.” The ghost of a smile. “I’m teasing.”

  His mother’s maiden name was Phelan. She’d been, perhaps, overattached to it.

  “Thanks for coming so quick,” she said. “Mind if we talk out here?” She gestured to six or seven unplanted azaleas lined up along the swerving flower bed, each with its own predug hole, root balls mummified in burlap. “I’d like to get these in the ground before the rain.”

  A major storm front was moving in off the Pacific, only the second this winter. Good news, given the drought, and despite the threat of landslides, overtopped levees, and flood plains turned into lakes.

  He said, “We can chat wherever you like.”

  They’d met at a fund-raiser for her little operation here, and Tierney had taken an instant liking to her. They shared, in a sense, the same reason for being.

  Lonnie had turned her life around at the cusp of forty, the prodigal beauty, steadying her legs beneath her through five years of rehab, battling relapses, gradually acquiring a wise gentle strength.

  She started working with teens and women trapped in the same circle of hell she’d escaped, proving good at the work, exceptional by some accounts, and with something of a reputation established she cobbled together enough grant money to transform the old Norse American Hall, with its hulking, neo-Viking timber and stone, its hillside view of the Napa River watershed and the North Bay wetlands, into a halfway house where working girls, struggling to stay clean and straight, could hole up, gain strength from one another, learn some job skills, visit with their kids.

  Tierney, who’d gained an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the building trades through twenty years litigating construction defects, first became involved with Lonnie’s venture by helping her negotiate with the contractors needed to reshingle the Gothic roof, replace the dry-rotted staves and cross braces, regrout the stacked exterior stone. More than once he managed to protect her from the old change-order shakedown, and in the span of nine months the place transformed from ruin to eyesore to local gem, enjoying the same kind of turnaround promised to the young women who came to live there.

  She called it Winchinchala House, from the Lakota word for girl, though some of the less enthusiastic neighbors dubbed it the House of Whores, or Casa de Crackhead.

  Trudging on her knees along the flower bed—two troughs of flattened grass in her wake—she reached for the next azalea, cut the twine, tossed the burlap aside, then combed loose the root ball with gloved fingers, showering the ground with potting soil.

  “You’ve been working with Jacqi Garza, preparing for the GED, am I right?”

  Recently he’d transitioned from construction guru to tutor, something he seemed strangely good at, dropping in twice a week to help the girls with their practice tests.

  “Jacqi and a handful of others.” He plunged his hands into his pants pockets, balling them into fists, not just because of the cold. “Is there a problem?”

  She dropped the plant in its appointed hole. “You got along with her okay?”

  “I suppose you could say that.” One of the trickier aspects of volunteering in a place like this was that the women could foster attractions, or grievances, which amounted to pretty much the same thing if they decided to start talking about you. He’d sensed no such problem with Jacqi. She took the prep work seriously, had reasonably good reading skills, and didn’t think of math as some tedious, draconian kind of magic.

  “She’s not in some kind of trouble,” he said, wondering as well: Am I?

  “I don’t know.” Lonnie plowed loose dirt into the hole around the azalea’s roots, patted it down. “You’ve lived here in Rio Mirada how long?”

  Where’s this heading, he wondered. “Six or seven years.”

  “Just curious if you know her stor
y.” She looked up at him with a kind of defeated concern. “Jacqi’s, I mean.”

  Realizing, finally, he wasn’t the one under scrutiny, he smiled. “I tend not to pry into the private stuff.”

  “Reason I asked,” she said, “about ten years ago, when she was eight, Jacqi was all over the news.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that, no.”

  “One day she was walking home from school and just vanished off the face of the earth.” Lonnie met his eyes again. “Sure you never heard about it?”

  He searched his memory—Jacqi Garza, or Jacquelina Esperanza Garza, as she signed her name on the practice tests. It began to ring a bell. A somewhat distant bell. “Remind me,” he said.

  “Two girls disappeared in a six-week period. Jacqi was the second. In a lot of ways the girls were almost identical. Physically, at least.”

  She turned toward the bucket of coffee grounds, which now lay out of reach. Tierney collected it for her.

  “Both girls were slim and pretty and olive-skinned, big brown eyes, long dark hair.” Lonnie extracted a helping of grounds and smudged them around the base of the plant. “But the first girl, Marina Bacay, was by all accounts a little angel—did well in school, made friends easily, good home.”

  Tierney, sensing a cue, said, “Jacqi, on the other hand . . .”

  Lonnie glanced up at the sky for a moment as overhead a ragtag flock of herring gulls circled and shrieked, the birds heading inland ahead of the storm. “Jacqi was different.” She brushed her hands on her pant legs, then moved on to the next plant, the next hole, same knee-march through the grass as before, this time clanging the bucket alongside. “But that difference didn’t matter much to the man who took them both.”

  No, it wouldn’t, Tierney thought, following slowly along. “I think I remember this now,” he said. “She escaped. Jacqi, I mean.” Adding to himself: Physically, at least.

  Lonnie nodded. “After three days. A local cabdriver named Victor Cope took her to a house in the hills near Santa Cruz, kept her chained up in the cellar. But then he left her alone for a few hours and she found a way to get out.”

  He pictured Jacqi as he knew her, slim but strong and still growing into her beauty, tried to imagine her ten years younger. He cringed at how casually he’d misjudged who she was, what had happened to her. “Pretty brave for a girl that age.”