Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  “I don’t think so,” Peter said. “I wasn’t very perceptive about her sometimes. That’s been part of the problem. But I think I would have seen that coming. She wasn’t that good when it came to acting. In fact, she wasn’t any good at all. She didn’t play games. It wasn’t in her.”

  Slater shrugged. “Maybe not. I just wanted to point out that there’s other ways to look at it. You don’t want to jump to any conclusions. Lots of missing people turn up again someday. She wouldn’t be the first person to just walk away.”

  “Well,” Peter said. “Thanks. I don’t think so, but I’ll keep it in mind. I hope you’re right, or that it’s something like that.”

  “Call me if anything comes up.” Detective Slater shook Peter’s hand again and pulled open the door. “Good luck,” he said, and went back in. The wind pushed the door shut behind him.

  14

  THE LINE OF SOUTHBOUND CARS STOOD STILL THROUGH Live Oak Canyon, and Peter found that he could barely stand the wait. Almost nobody approached from the opposite direction; it was too late in the day for northbound traffic, and Peter was tempted, in order just to be moving, to swing into the oncoming lane and bolt past whatever was holding things up. His hand played across the steering wheel, brushing the horn without pressing it, and he turned the radio on again, listened for a split second, and turned it off.

  Through some trick of inner acoustics, he could hear the blood rushing in his head, and he felt enervated, his thoughts scattered. The wind was blowing hard again, and the air was electric and dry. He hadn’t eaten lunch, or breakfast either, for that matter, and he was uneasily aware that he seemed to be letting himself slide, and had been sliding for months.

  The morning’s conversation with Beth returned to him. She had seen things in him that he himself had been denying, but which must have been obvious: getting up before dawn, wandering through the house, staring at photographs of his family …

  A horn honked behind him. Traffic was moving again, but he hadn’t noticed, despite having been full of nervous impatience only moments ago. He crept forward, edging around a bend and into the opposite lane, past the bumper of a pickup truck sitting sideways in the road, its broken rear axle visible beneath the truck bed. A man in a baseball cap stood at the truck’s bumper, talking to a tow truck driver who was hooking the pickup to an elaborately painted towing rig. Peter heard them both laugh, and it occurred to him that the man who could laugh at his own broken-down truck lived an enviable life.

  He swung back into the right-hand lane and stepped on the accelerator, watching the rear window of the car ahead, the shifting reflections of blue sky and oak trees in the sunlit sheet of glass. Into his mind slipped the image of a waterfall with two bodies lying at the base, broken and sprawled on the rocks, the dead woman’s eyes staring upward toward the top of the cliffs. He saw it clearly, as if it were an etching in an old book that he had looked at countless times. More clearly than that, he recalled the face, as if the dead woman were the shadow of someone he once knew….

  “No connection,” he said out loud. Then, startled by the sound of his own voice, he flipped on the radio again, loud, and rolled the window all the way down so that the wind blew into his face. After a moment he turned the radio off. It sounded like noise to him.

  He had only been back into Falls Canyon once, hiking with Beth and Bobby. He knew where the mouth of the canyon lay, hidden by trees and by the overlapping contour of the hillside. There was a path that crossed the stream and angled up the little box canyon. It forked halfway up, a second path leading upward toward the ridge. Another little path ran down from the ridge trail to the top of the falls. He had passed it a number of times when he was hiking into Trabuco Oaks, but he had never followed the path to its end, to the top of the falls.

  And yet now he could picture the canyon from above: the high narrow falls, the scattered boulders in the shallow pool, the night-black hair of the dead woman floating on the water, and the pale, moonlit complexion of her upturned face….

  He shook his head to wake himself up. They weren’t dead. There weren’t any bodies. Hell, it was probably a hoax.

  At the sheriff’s office he had learned nothing new. Detective Slater had been right. There was no “case,” no investigation. He almost wished to God that Slater had never mentioned any bodies. It had severed whatever grip he’d had on his imagination.

  On impulse he pulled off the road, stopping the Suburban alongside the river-rock wall that skirted the edge of O’Neill Park. He slid out, shut the door, and climbed over the wall, walking up a grassy hillside. Wind rippled the grass like a Kansas wheat field. Beyond the top of the hill there was no traffic noise, nothing at all but the sound of the wind and the cawing of crows somewhere off over the picnic grounds. He sat on a rock and looked down into a little grassy valley that had been cut by a seasonal stream. It was dry now, but a few willows grew up out of the rocky sand. He stared at the willows, trying to focus his thoughts. Beth and Amanda. He had known Beth for something like eight years, since right before she had married Walter. His attraction to her had always had to be tempered by his marriage to Amanda. As pretentious as it had probably sounded, he had meant what he said about being monogamous. That hadn’t changed.

  And that was the trouble. Clearly his life was still tied up in Amanda and in David and in the house on Monterey Street, in things as crazy and simple as Kool-Aid and Oreo cookies and playing Crazy Eights at the kitchen table, as if those things were magical amulets that carried the broken-off pieces of his soul. He had never come to terms with losing them.

  He picked up a stone and threw it down into the sandy creekbed. So what did he want? When he saw Beth again he would have to give her an answer. He owed her that. He owed himself that, which of course had been her point. He had fooled himself into thinking that his recent freedom meant not having to set a course at all, and so he had been drifting. And as was often the case with drifting, it hadn’t gotten him anywhere.

  Abruptly he stood up and hiked up the hill toward the car, the wind blowing the hair back out of his face now. What he wanted, what he had to do—at least for the moment—was to find Amanda and David.

  15

  POMEROY DELIBERATELY PREVENTED HIMSELF FROM catching up with her. Instead he slowed down, causally checking driveways and side streets, his heart beating hard enough so that it seemed to be running on ahead of him.

  He forced himself to be aware of everything—of cloud patterns in the sky, street signs, the faces of people in passing cars—anything that might be a warning. He knew that something had shifted in him, that minutes ago, when setting Klein up outside the post office, he had been full of careful calculation, arranging the future, stacking the deck. Now his mind was loose and staticky. He was full of anticipation, and yet the future, even five minutes away, was nothing but darkness to him. What he anticipated couldn’t be expressed, and that could be a dangerous thing if he didn’t take things very damned slowly. It was broad daylight, and that was a limiting factor that would protect him from himself, from the kind of rash mistakes that had got him into trouble the last time.

  He switched that thought off and paid attention to what he was doing, realizing then that he was heading up toward Klein’s place. He braked in order to turn around. He didn’t want to spook Klein now. But just then he saw the Volkswagen, parked in the driveway of the house next to Klein’s. Beth was halfway across the yard, heading for the front door. Pomeroy could see now that there was a child in the car, horsing around in the backseat.

  On a hunch he swung around in a tight U-turn, then took an immediate left on a little dead-end street full of old houses. He turned around again and parked on the shoulder, cutting off the engine and reaching for a map in the glove compartment. He unfolded the map and watched Parker Street over the top of it.

  Within a couple of minutes the bus reappeared, heading back down Parker. He reached for the key, thinking to follow, but the bus slowed and turned down toward him. He jerked the ma
p up to hide his face. Would she recognize the car? He had to get something else to drive, something less showy than the T-bird. He watched in the mirror, wondering where the hell she was going. What had she been doing at the house up by Klein’s? A friend’s house? Her own? Or was she heading home now?

  He turned on the ignition. He had to get out of there. His mind was suddenly chaotic. If she’d seen him and recognized the car, then he couldn’t take the chance of compounding the error by lurking around. What could he accomplish anyway, until it was dark? He pushed the thought aside. He wouldn’t ever again put himself at risk by … in that way.

  But something prevented him from leaving—the barest chance that he would see something, know something. Human relationships were cumulative, a snowball effect. The more you knew about the person, the closer you got to her. He shut the engine off and studied the street behind him in the rearview mirror.

  “Beth.” He said her name out loud, almost tasting it. She had pulled into the nearly empty lot of a preschool. She got out of the bus now, together with a boy, and went inside. So that probably was her house then, up next to Klein’s.

  He wondered suddenly if perhaps he shouldn’t drive back over there, have a look around while she was busy.

  Not in daylight. Not with Klein at home next door.

  He felt the familiar emptiness in his chest, the place left hollow when he was in danger of losing control. At the same time he knew he could control himself if he tried. Maybe he hadn’t been able to in the past, but he had learned something from that. You could put your mistakes to good use if you paid careful enough attention to them.

  After ten minutes, an old Chevy Suburban turned up the block, and Pomeroy knew right away who it was. He’d seen the piece-of-shit car back in the canyon. This would be the boyfriend. What a piece of junk—faded paint, beat-up rack on top. No way was this guy suitable for Beth. He raised the map to hide his face.

  When the Suburban pulled into the school parking lot, Pomeroy started the engine and drove slowly away, forcing himself by sheer will to turn left toward the highway rather than up toward the top of Parker Street.

  16

  PETER TURNED LEFT ONTO PARKER STREET, WHICH WAS named after the rancher who had lived at the top of the hill and had once owned most of what was now Trabuco Oaks. Back in the twenties, according to Beth, Parker’s son had been murdered when a jealous husband had found his wife and young Parker together in the ranch bunkhouse.

  Only a few years ago, the old, long-abandoned bunk-house was torn down and the bloodstained floorboards hauled away with the rest of the debris. A new house sat on the property now, the lot overbuilt, expensive cars in the drive, all of it an example of the kinds of changes that were threatening to turn the canyons into suburbs.

  A few years back the village was a Sleepy Hollow sort of place, with dogs dozing under the live oak trees and lots of vacant land. Now it was built up: old houses renovated, new houses selling for two and three hundred thousand dollars. There were still a few dogs shambling around, bit they were wary, as if they knew that times had changed and things weren’t quite so sleepy anymore.

  Parker Street itself was only a half mile long, ending against a chaparral-covered hillside where the terrain got steep and wild enough to discourage casual development. Sometime in the future they would find a way to blast it into submission, but for now the hillside marked the point where civilization ended at the edge of the wilderness.

  Beth rented one of the houses at the top of the street, the last house but one. It was unlikely that she would rent it much longer. She was thirty, nearly ten years younger than Peter, and was a graduate student in cultural anthropology. Bobby was six. Unless something compelling kept them there, they would almost certainly move on. Peter had isolated himself in the canyon in order to avoid moving on.

  Bobby laughed a lot and acted silly. He couldn’t sustain anger at all. He preferred a world in which things were cheerful and easy, starting with himself. Better to play than to sulk. Peter had learned more from Bobby’s philosophy than from all the preachers and teachers he’d ever heard. But like all wise-sounding philosophy, the knowledge was nearly impossible to apply—easier for a kid, maybe.

  He saw Beth’ s bus in the gravel parking lot of the daycare center, an old house that had been painted schoolhouse red and fenced with chain link. It was a cheerful-looking place, half the playground shaded by a pair of enormous sycamores. Plywood cutouts of Winnie the Pooh characters decorated one long wall. Peter pulled into the lot, cut the engine, and set the brake, but he didn’t get out.

  He watched the wind rustle the leaves on the playground trees. Five kids, one of them Bobby, burst out of the back door of the center, followed by a teenage girl in a ponytail who pulled a soccer ball out of the high grass alongside the fence and kicked it at them. The five kids chased the ball, pushing each other out of the way, and soon all of them were kicking it back and forth, using a set of parallel bars as goalposts.

  Bobby wore his black cycling cap backward over his blondish brown hair, which dangled over his collar in back. He had on a pair of black sweatpants and an oversize black T-shirt with a skeleton on it, riding a skateboard up a concrete wall that folded over the skeleton’s head like a breaking wave. The words “Bone to Skate” were scrawled on the wall in hatchet lettering.

  Wind buffeted the quiet sun-warmed car, and the kids’ voices, muffled by glass and metal, came to him as if from a great distance as he watched them play. They were completely abandoned to that business. He envied that kind of talent. A few more years and they’d trade it for a handful of beans, and they’d have to make do with the memory of playing soccer in a schoolyard on a windy autumn afternoon.

  Bobby spotted Peter’s Suburban, waved at him, and shouted something that Peter couldn’t understand Peter shrugged and shook his head. Bobby made eating gestures, then rubbed his stomach like a fat man contemplating a meal. Peter gave him the okay sign, and Bobby ran off, chasing the soccer ball.

  Feeling almost cheerful, Peter picked up the spud guns from the backseat, took one of them out of the bag, and put the other one into the glove compartment. Then, thinking about it, he climbed out of the car and tossed the first gun back inside onto the passenger seat before shutting the door. It wouldn’t be fair to give it to Bobby in front of the other kids. He didn’t have a potato for it anyway. They could pick one up down at the general store later.

  He stepped into the relative darkness of the day-care center. The low tables were covered with cut-up construction paper and scissors and glue. An aquarium bubbled against the wall, a half dozen rubbery-looking newts bumping their noses against the glass as if they were anxious to see who had come in. Beth stood in the kitchen doorway with her back to Peter, talking, probably, to Julie, the director and teacher. Their talk sounded serious, and so Peter waited in the empty room, not wanting to interrupt.

  Beth’s long hair was pulled back casually and caught with a clip of Navajo silver. She was wearing dark green jeans and hiking boots and a khaki, long-sleeved shirt like a ranger would wear. Peter sat down on one of the tables and stared at the linoleum floor.

  Three weeks ago Beth had taken him on a hike, over the south ridge and down into Bell Canyon. She showed him a big granite rock full of metates—smooth holes where Indians had ground acorns hundreds of years back. Once she had found a few pottery shards back in there and a fragment of some sort of stone tool, treasures that were no doubt well worth the hours of scrambling around through scrub oak and sage and prickly pear.

  On their hike they had discovered fresh mountain lion tracks along the streambed and Beth reacted as if she’d seen a Hollywood celebrity in a café. She insisted they follow the tracks up a little perpendicular canyon, just to see if they could catch up with the lion, and Peter went along without complaining because he didn’t want to look like a city boy.

  Tirelessly, she told him all about how California grizzlies with three-inch-long claws used to roam the Santa Ana Mountain
s, coming down into the ranchos and crippling full-grown cattle with a single blow to the back, then dragging the hundreds of pounds of meat miles up into the scrub to devour it. She seemed to think it was a terrible tragedy that the grizzlies had been hunted to extinction, and Peter agreed that it was a dirty shame, that he’d been looking forward to being devoured back in the scrub.

  Bell Canyon was wild and empty. The north-facing hillsides were shaded by immense old oak trees, and the deep green heads of new ferns pushed up through the dark oak mulch. The trail finally more or less disappeared beneath a carpet of autumn leaves, and Peter lost all sense of direction and time as he followed Beth uphill, content merely to watch her move against the backdrop of rocks and trees and sky.

  “Here we are,” Beth had said to him finally.

  They had come out of the woods onto a sunny patch of meadow grass that grew right down into the waters of a clear spring. A succession of mountains and ridges rose one behind the other in the east until they disappeared on the horizon.

  Clearly she had led him on the hike with this lonesome destination in mind. She opened her daypack and pulled out a checkered tablecloth, unfolding it on the grass. The two of them lay down on their backs, listening to the silence. A distant pair of vapor trails materialized in the blue sky, the jets moving so high and fast that no sound at all fell to earth.

  On the hike, Beth had been talking about bears and lions and edible shrubs, about how you could make soap out of yucca plants and leach the tannic acid out of acorns with lye and water. But as they lay in the grass there was nothing at all worth talking about, and they watched the vapor trails slowly turn into cloud-drift and move off down the lazy afternoon sky.