The lower end of the road cut through a gravelly section of river bottom where the canyon widened out. There were stands of sumac and greasewood and a few scrub oaks and stunted sycamores, but the low vegetation was upstaged by the hulks of stripped cars, rusty and shot full of bullet holes.
About a mile in, the canyon narrowed, and the steep walls rose away on either side, deepening the evening twilight. The Suburban navigated through the darkness, the headlights barely penetrating the black spaces between the heavy trees on either side of the road.
Peter was full of steak and french fries and salad, and could almost imagine being able to fall asleep tonight— something that would have seemed impossible to him a few hours ago. Beth and Bobby were coming over tomorrow. He would take things a day at a time.
The Suburban rounded a curve, its headlights momentarily illuminating the waters of Trabuco Creek, which was lined with alders and edged with enormous water-polished lumps of granite. Falls Canyon, where the hiker had supposedly seen the bodies, lay somewhere off to the left, and Peter slowed down, suddenly imagining the narrow, rock-strewn canyon again, littered with autumn leaves and fallen limbs.
Although no one had described the scene to him in any detail, he still pictured it with chilling clarity: the crumpled bodies of the woman and child, veiled by mist, lying half-submerged in the shallow pool at the base of the falls, their clothes buoyed up on the moving current, strands of the woman’s hair trailing away from her upturned face like delicate waterweeds.…
The Suburban crept along as Peter looked out into the night, abruptly certain that he would be able to see something meaningful in the dark tapestry of the forest. The trees and the shadows were suddenly compelling, as if he were reentering the abandoned landscape of a long-forgotten dream. Something, an answer, a cipher, lay hidden in the windblown darkness.…
He suddenly saw a movement in the rocks along the creek.
He stopped the Suburban, shifted, backed up far enough for the headlights to illuminate the rocks again. Then, shifting into forward, he pulled off onto a grassy little turnout, shifted into park, and let the engine idle.
He had glimpsed it only for a split second—something, someone, moving along the trail. What remained in his mind was the memory of dark fabric billowing in the wind, just as it had billowed on the top of the pool of water in his memory only moments ago.
He watched, barely breathing, slowly growing more and more conscious of the wind-haunted darkness around him, thinking about the disappearance of Amanda and David, automatically putting their faces on the bodies in the pool. Beyond the glow of the headlights the trees were night black, their ponderous limbs swaying against an inky backdrop of vegetation and rocky canyon wall.
He switched the lights off, leaving his hand on the knob. The Suburban shuddered in the wind, and dry leaves and twigs ticked against the door panels and windows. Moonlight gleamed on the creek waters. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see farther into the trees, making out a grassy little clearing across the creek and a cave mouth in the steep hillside.
But now nothing moved aside from the wind-shifting vegetation. Whatever it was—probably an animal—had gone. That it had anything to do with Amanda’s disappearance was impossible. His imagination was running him ragged. He pulled the lights back on, shifted into reverse, and glanced into the side mirror.
A face stared back at him, reflected in the mirror: a woman’s face, her flesh ivory white in the moonlight, her long black dress and black hair tossed by the wind.
He slammed his hand down onto the steering wheel, accidentally honking the horn, then slammed the transmission into drive, jerked the wheel savagely to the right, punched the accelerator, and drove straight through the brush alongside the turnout and up onto the road before stopping and shifting again into reverse, the backup lights blinking on.
He swiveled around to look, gripping the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking. The woman was gone. He slammed the door locks down one after another, catching sight just then of movement across the creek, someone— the woman in black—disappearing into the trees.
For one hollow moment he had been certain it was Amanda. He had known it. The sight of her ghostly face in the mirror had unnerved him. Now, although he could still picture the woman’s face, he knew absolutely that she wasn’t Amanda; and just as absolutely he knew who she was: the woman he had pictured lying dead at the base of the falls.
20
THE TELEPHONE WOKE BETH OUT OF A DEEP SLEEP, AND she sat up in bed confused, her heart pounding, unable to identify the source of the ringing until the last remnants of her dream evaporated from her mind. Then she fumbled for the phone, wanting to silence it before it woke Bobby. There was something fearful about a late-night telephone call. Never good news.
After saying hello she waited. There was only silence at the other end. She could tell that the line was open, but that’s all. Then a man’s voice said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“Peter?” she asked, but when there was no immediate answer, she hung up. Peter didn’t have a phone. It hadn’t sounded like Peter’s voice.
She sat for a moment, waiting for the phone to ring again. She was certain she had locked both doors. The wind blew outside, shaking the wooden screens on the windows and rustling through the eucalyptus trees that grew at the edge of the driveway. Moonlight shone through the wooden blinds, dimly illuminating the room. Probably the call meant nothing, a sick prank.
Wide awake now, she climbed out of bed and crossed the room. When the phone rang again she was almost to the door. She ran back to the nightstand and snatched up the receiver, not saying anything, but listening again to the airy silence of an open line. Then the same voice said, “I’m close by.” The sound was muffled, like someone talking through a bundle of cloth. She could hear a metallic scraping—the sound of a steel telephone cord against the metal wall of a phone booth. “I was wondering …” but she slammed down the receiver, holding it against the phone as if it would jump off by itself.
She picked it up again and after listening for a dial tone, set the receiver on the nightstand, waiting out the thirty seconds it took for the recording to come on advising her to hang up. She muffled the receiver while it pulsed, then put it back down.
She walked out into the living room and checked the dead bolt, which was locked, just as she remembered. There was no sound from Bobby’s room; he was still asleep. She went into the kitchen and looked out at her neighbor’s house. It was dark, but she could see that their Jaguar was parked in the driveway, blocking the closed garage door. No doubt they were home. She found their number in the phone book and wrote it out on a piece of paper that she brought back into the bedroom with her, laying it next to the phone.
Completely awake now, she roamed through the house again, looking in on Bobby, who was sleeping among a heap of stuffed animals. After pulling his comforter over him, she went back into the living room and moved the blinds aside, looking out at the moonlit street. The wind had diminished a little, and the night was quieter than it had been.
Why had he said he was “close,” unless he was? And why disguise his voice, unless he knew her?
Nothing more than to frighten her, probably. Well, it had worked. She dropped the blinds and went back to bed, where she lay with the light on, aware of the uncradled receiver on the nightstand, picking out and identifying stray sounds beyond the window. After a moment she opened a book and tried to read.
21
PETER THREW THE DOOR OPEN AND JUMPED OUT ONTO THE road. “Wait!” he shouted, but the woman was already gone and the wind tore the word away so that he could barely hear it himself. He had to speak with her. He had seen her face in his mind a half dozen times that day. A single question …
Tree limbs lashed overhead, and the night was full of the sound of tearing and breaking. Shrouds of leaves rose from the forest floor, whipping into the air, whirling away down the canyon. He turned his head away from the on
slaught, grabbing his leather jacket off the seat before slamming the door and loping down the hillside trail that led to the creek.
The woman had disappeared into the leafy darkness of the alders, moving upstream toward the foot of Falls Canyon. Looking for a crossing, he followed the creek until the trail was blocked by thickly growing willows. The water ran fast and shallow there, and he stumbled his way across, the half-exposed rocks shifting and tilting under his weight as he stepped from one to another.
The trees grew thick on the other side of the creek, old oaks with such a heavy canopy of limbs that their shadows were unbroken by moonlight. Darkness swallowed the steepening trail and there was nothing but night and wind. He peered into the gloom ahead, looking for movement issuing from beneath the trees at the verge of the steepening hillside. Here the trail forked, one path angling steeply upward toward the ridge, the other winding through grass and brush into the mouth of Falls Canyon, which lay hidden in the distance beyond a heavy tumble of rocks. There was nobody visible in either direction.
The wind fell off abruptly, the night quiet and still. He listened for the sound of footsteps, sliding rock, broken branches. Nothing. She had disappeared. She’d been hurrying, but so had he, and it struck him uneasily that she was close to him at that very moment, perhaps watching him.
When he had looked into the car’s mirror he had seen Amanda, and although he knew it was crazy and impossible, it was Amanda’s face, Amanda’s presence, that he felt now, along with a wild, indeterminate fear for her safety. The smell of sage and oak leaves rose up around him as he stood listening, and in the momentary silence he heard from somewhere above him the plaintive sound of a child crying.
Fear slammed up into his throat, not for himself, but for the woman and her child, a wild despair, the certain knowledge that unless he found them, the dark dream of their death would become solid and real. Suddenly he knew that she had taken the path to the ridge, that she had somehow moved far ahead of him, too far. He ran, clambering up the trail, slipping and sliding on broken rock, scrabbling with his hands. The wind rose again, and the stiff brush on the hillside shuddered in the silver moonlight, animated like images in a jerky old film. There was the sound of crying again—faint, distant, muffled almost immediately by the rising wind and followed closely by an answering cry, a woman’s voice, calling from somewhere above.
He threw his weight forward, grabbing the stiff shrubs along the trail, hauling himself up the scree-covered slope. Rocks scattered from beneath his feet and rattled away down the hill. He slipped, slid backward, rolled into the brush and caught himself, then immediately scrambled upward again, tasting dirt in his mouth, windblown debris stinging his face.
The path leveled again and he found himself on a broad, rock- and scrub-covered terrace, the trail running parallel to the canyon now, wind coursing unhindered out of the east. The trail switchbacked through the brush, so that the canyon was sometimes visible away to his left, sometimes hidden from view. Somewhere ahead lay the dense line of alders that shaded the stream at the top of Falls Canyon. He stopped momentarily, cocking his head to listen, and although it must have been impossible above the rush of wind, he thought he heard the sound of footsteps somewhere ahead. There was a smell in the air, traces of jasmine, like a woman’s perfume.
He began to run blindly, the trail nearly level now, and in a moment he broke from the dense chaparral onto an empty, moonlit meadow some hundred yards across. Wind swept the meadow grasses flat, animating the limbs of a pair of oaks that stood on the far edge and cast a broad circle of dense black moon shadow. Shapes moved within the shadow. Peter’s throat constricted, his breath jerking out in short gasps.
The woman in the black dress stepped from beneath the trees into the moonlight. She held the hand of a small boy. Peter was in plain view, but neither the woman nor the boy looked back. They disappeared beyond the underbrush again, still moving east along the trail.
Whoever they were, they weren’t Amanda and David.
He set out warily across the meadow, following them, the trail narrowing again as dense brush closed it in on either side. He could see nothing ahead except darkness. There was no crying, no voices, just the sound of the wind and the noise of his shoes scuffing on the dirt and rock of the trail.
Suddenly a sharp, anguished scream rang out ahead of him, cut off with a chilling abruptness, like a snap.
The wind died. The night waited—one vast, dark silence for the space of five seconds. Then, with a wild shriek, the wind sprang up again without warning, slamming against him so furiously that he lurched forward, nearly falling, running toward the scream, knowing without any doubt what it meant. Ahead of him lay the dense stand of trees along the top of the falls. There was a dark hollow between the moving branches, like the mouth of a cave. He bent into the darkness, picking his way across the rocky streambed. The precipice itself was hidden by undergrowth, but the sound of cascading water rose from below, and he looked carefully out over the rocks into empty air. Creek water cascaded ankle-deep off the edge in a windblown spray, falling toward the rocky canyon floor nearly invisible in the shadows below.
Holding on to overhanging brush, he leaned out to see into the shadowy depths, trying to make out shapes, movement. He could just discern the gray-black outlines of rocks that edged the canyon floor, a glimmer of moonlight on the pool…
… and then, interrupting the spread of moonlit ripples, the twisted shapes of the two bodies that had fallen together a minute ago.
He screamed hoarsely. He was too late. As if carried on the wind, the thought rushed into his head—again he was too late, and for one anguished, desperate moment he was possessed with the wild urge to throw himself off after them.
Startled, he steadied himself, forced himself away from the brink of the cliff, and scrambled along the ledge, his footfalls knocking loose layers of weathered shale that tumbled off into the darkness. In order to descend, he was forced to angle away from the sharp decline of the canyon wall and to break his own steep trail through the sage and greasewood. The sound of falling water diminished behind him, masked by the wind.
Soon the hillside fell away so steeply that he hung on to the gnarled branches of hillside shrubs, lowering himself step by step, searching out footholds against roots and trunks secured in the decomposing rock. He chanced a look downward, surprised to see the trail twenty yards below, zigzagging up from the canyon floor. It was little more than a rain-scoured line, losing itself almost at once among the oaks that lined the lower canyon wall. As close as it was, it seemed to him that he would never reach it, and he was filled with the maddening, slow-motion futility of a dream.
He sat down and began to descend on his feet and the seat of his pants, braking with his heels, trying to keep his center of gravity far enough back to avoid tumbling forward. Within seconds he knew it was a mistake; already he was sliding downward in an uncontrolled rush.
He snatched at limbs and roots to catch himself, tearing the flesh on his palms. His hand closed on something and he held on, but his momentum cartwheeled him sideways, his face smashing against dried sticks and leaves. He let go, sliding again, and slammed to a stop against the broad trunk of a tree some few feet from the edge of the canyon.
For a moment he lay there catching his breath, looking up into the foliage, dazedly assessing damages. The palm of his right hand was scraped and oozing blood, but his leather jacket had protected his arms. He flexed his fingers and then sat up unsteadily, realizing that the wind had once again diminished, leaving the night warm and still.
The base of the falls was clearly visible below him now: the rock-strewn pool reflecting the starry sky, the falls tumbling into it and throwing up a veil of mist. Nothing more. Nothing even remotely similar to the broken, nightmare shapes he had seen from the ledge above.
22
A BUSY SIGNAL AGAIN, AND AFTER NEARLY TWENTY minutes had gone by. Clearly she had left the phone off the hook. If only she’d given him a chance to say s
omething! Lonely women like that didn’t know what they wanted sometimes. They were afraid of their own urges, their own unfulfilled needs.
He couldn’t risk haunting the only pay telephone in Trabuco Oaks, not in the middle of the night. At least he had gotten rid of the red Thunderbird. That was a real eye-catcher in a hick town like Trabuco Oaks. He had managed to rent a Jeep Cherokee, which was about twenty times as practical as the Thunderbird when it came to negotiating the local dirt roads. Cherokees were common as acorns out there, too.
He dialed the number again—another busy signal.
He wondered how the conversation would go, how she would respond to him when she found out the depth of his feeling for her. He could only imagine it—gaining her trust, her interest. “I’m a little shy,” he said out loud, then smiled just enough. She responded with a warm smile of her own, opening up to him. He took her hand….
He tried one last time, got the busy signal, and regretfully hung the phone up. The wind blew dry leaves up under the back wall of the pay phone, and he closed his eyes, turning away. Then he climbed into his car and drove slowly up Parker Street, the headlights dark. He would just drive past her house one more time and then head for home. Maybe tomorrow he would see her again.
He turned around in front of Lance Klein’s driveway, noticing now that there was a light on in the back of Beth’s house. Without thinking, he cut the engine and coasted silently into the deep shadows of a stand of roadside trees. He set the brake, the car facing downhill. The street was deserted. Even the wind seemed to have died out. Except for a couple of porch lights, all of the houses were dark.
Even then he told himself that he would only watch and wait. When her light went out he would leave. He might risk another phone call, but nothing more than that.
Night Relics Page 10
