At that instant, when his hand was flattened against the wall of the house, moonlight reflected from the stone in his ring, and the brief glint of light resonated in Klein’s mind. For a moment he was stupefied with disbelief, and he couldn’t move.
Then he threw himself up onto the fence, trying to scramble over onto the lawn, levering himself around in order to drop down on his feet. The hem of his robe slid between two fence boards, wedging tight, yanking him back when he jumped so that he flipped around and sprawled on his hands and knees. The bathrobe cord wrenched loose and the sleeve nearly jerked his arm out of the socket.
“Shit!” he yelled, staggering to his feet and pulling savagely at the robe. It tore loose from the fence, and he hauled it back on as he ran past the back of the house, the wind cutting through his thin pajamas.
The street was empty by the time he got out there. He suddenly wished he had some kind of weapon, although at the same time he was certain he wouldn’t need it. The man wouldn’t show himself. The last thing the bastard wanted was a confrontation. He walked slowly toward the corner, looking into the shadows of trees and shrubberies, seeing again in his mind the reflected moonlight from the stone in the ring.
It was too weird to be true.
There was a Jeep Cherokee parked at the corner. It didn’t belong to the Smiths, who lived in the corner house. Klein was certain of that. He stopped right there, twenty feet from the car, wondering how much he wanted or needed to know.
Deciding, he turned back, walking toward the empty field across the street and the dark bunch of trees at the field’s edge, peering into the shadows they threw across the high grass. Someone had run through right there; Klein could see where the grass, brittle and dry, was mashed down. Following him would be nothing….
He turned around and headed up toward Beth’s door. He hadn’t even checked to see if she was all right. And the kid … By God, if the prowler had hurt either one of them, Klein would track him through the field and rip his lungs out.
He pounded on the door and shouted to let her know who it was. After a moment Beth looked out through the window, saw it was him, and let him in.
“You all right?” he asked. She was pretty obviously shaken up.
“Yeah.”
“How’s the boy?”
“He didn’t even wake up. He’s still sleeping.” Beth shuddered and sat down on the couch, holding her arms crossed in front of her. “I called the police.”
“Good,” Klein said. “There’s no point in Bobby knowing anything; it’ll just keep him up at night. If you’ve got to say anything to him, tell him there was somebody prowling around my house, and that I chased him off with a baseball bat. It’s important that kids think the good guy won. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling a little.
The smile instantly made him feel like a creep. But why should it? What did he really know? Half the men in the country wore big rings. “These prowlers usually don’t come back anyway, once they’re seen,” he told her. “Scares the hell out of them to think they might be identified. No need for either one of you to worry about it.”
She nodded her head. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for helping.”
Klein shrugged. Being thanked for things had always embarrassed him. This time it didn’t; it just made him ashamed of himself. Still, there were things a man had to do. He could make it up to her. “The cops are going to want to know if he broke in,” he asked. “Was he actually inside?”
“No,” she said. “I saw him through the back window.”
“It’s important if he was inside. If you can identify him as having been inside, the cops’ll take this very damned seriously.”
She shook her head again.
“Well, good,” Klein said, relieved. “Obviously just a peeper. I couldn’t see any sign of him out front. Probably jumped straight into a car and was out of there before I had a chance to catch him. When you screamed, I was out back, having a nightcap. I couldn’t sleep. Too much wind.”
Klein walked to the window and looked out, not really wanting to see anything but an empty street. “Did you get a look at him? See his face?”
“No,” Beth said. “Not a good look. He was turning the knob on the back door. He had something over his face—a bandage, maybe—wrapped around it. I panicked and ran back into the kitchen.”
“Of course. That kind of thing scares the hell out of a person. I’ll take a quick look out back. You be okay?”
Beth nodded.
“If the cops come tell ’em it’s me back there.”
“Right,” Beth said.
The backyard was empty; Klein knew it would be. Unless the man was an utter fool, he was long gone by now.
He looked closely at the doorknob and at the crappy little twist-’em dead bolt holding the door shut. It had about a quarter inch of throw. One good kick, that’s all it would have taken. Lucky Beth had seen him there and screamed. He might have been inside otherwise.
Klein looked back into the house. Beth was still in the living room, waiting for the cops.
He took up the corner of the hem of his bathrobe, spit on it, and very carefully rubbed the doorknob, polishing off any possible prints. Then he worked over the door around it before walking back down to the end of the house and rubbing down the dusty siding where the prowler had grabbed on when turning the corner.
It would look screwy that there were no prints of any kind at all on the doorknob, neither Beth’s nor Bobby’s, but that was the best he could do. Whether or not anyone could explain it, they would be sure to blame it on the prowler. There was no way they’d suspect him of anything.
29
FIRE SPRANG UP IN THE RUINED FIREPLACE.
Peter stepped backward into the doorway, hearing his name spoken as if from a distant room. It was a familiar voice, the same he had heard that morning.
The heap of old furniture in the parlor receded into the shadows and became a black ill-defined mass. Four chairs sat before the fire now, two on either side of the butcher-block trestle table from the kitchen on Monterey Street. Two figures, a woman and a boy, slowly materialized in the firelight, sitting in two of the chairs and playing a game of cards. The woman was Amanda; the boy was David. Amanda dealt out the cards with a quick, staccato flickering of her hands, her body hunched forward as if she couldn’t get close enough to the cards to read them clearly.
David rocked forward and backward on his chair, his unblinking eyes staring at the deck, his hands darting, picking up the cards that slid across the surface of the table. A glass pitcher of green Kool-Aid, beaded with moisture, sat beside two half-full glasses. A plate of broken cookies lay alongside the pitcher. Playing cards clicked and whirred like insect wings. The wind rose outside, drowning the low murmur of the cardplayers’ voices, and the curtains blew inward on a sudden draft, and the cards scattered on the table.
There was a sudden movement among the shadows of the old furniture, only dimly visible, a darkened screen at the remote end of the room. A circle of light glowed against the darkness like a lighted tunnel. The figure of a man appeared, deep in the tunnel of light, as if walking straight at Peter across an immense distance, drawing closer and closer, his face lit by firelight. He wore a black frock coat, a loosely knotted tie. His dark gray hair was the same color as his eyes.
The floor seemed to recede, leaving Peter at the windy edge of a cliff, and within the dark maze of furniture shadows he saw the unmistakable shapes of the bodies among the rocks, water falling into the black pool, the mist rising up, the woman’s hair drifting on the dark water. He felt the wind blowing against him, and he was surrounded by black trees and the noise of falling water. He groped his way forward in the windy darkness, listening in horror to the sound of approaching footfalls, seeing through the trees the measured approach of the man in the black coat.
And then, like an abrupt counterpoint to the wind, there was the sound of crying somewhere off in the night, and like a heat
mirage, the man wavered for a moment in mid-step and then winked out of existence. The trees and the sound of water vanished on the instant. Peter stood in the parlor again, watching Amanda and David play cards at the kitchen table. He could still hear the sound of crying somewhere off in the forest.
The windows along the wall slammed open, and the wind tore through the room, raising a cloud of plaster dust, shrieking up the chimney, sweeping the table clear and sending the playing cards end over end like leaves toward the fire. Shocked into movement, Peter reached for the back of Amanda’s chair, but his hand swept straight through it. There was nothing there, no resistance at all.
The light dimmed and for one last moment he could smell Kool-Aid and cookies, and he heard someone, David perhaps, say something in a voice so creaky and slow that he couldn’t make out the words.
The chairs and the table were gone. David blinked out of existence. Amanda’s face hung for a moment like a mask in the air, her disembodied hands empty but still dealing imaginary cards. Then, like David, she disappeared utterly.
The fire vanished, and the room was as it had been, the old furniture ratty and dank and empty, the cold fireplace choked with rubble. The wind blew fitfully outside, rattling the shutters. Peter found himself crouched against the wall, staring at the dead fireplace.
SUNDAY
It looks more to me as if this wind were made of dead men’s souls.…
—John Ruskin
The Storm Cloud of the
Nineteenth Century
1
PETER FIDGETED WITH THE PIECE OF MATERIAL THAT covered the arm of the sofa in Mr. Ackroyd’s living room, drinking instant coffee that the old man had mixed in a teapot. Ackroyd was dressed for church, wearing a long-out-of-date coat and tie that were scrupulously clean and pressed, and Peter worried vaguely that he was holding the man up, asking strange questions about Amanda and David’s disappearance. There seemed to be no hurry, though, and probably he wore his Sunday clothes all day long. Last Sunday he had been away from home all day—church duties—so he could offer nothing helpful about Amanda and David. But there was something in his response that Peter couldn’t quite fathom, as if the story reminded him of something or had struck him in some odd way.
After an awkward silence the old man set down his coffee cup and said, “Wind’s dropped a little.”
“I’d just as soon it stayed that way,” Peter said.
“Not much hope of that. Come nightfall it’ll get worse.”
Peter nodded. The wind always seemed to be worse at night. He looked around at the forty or fifty years’ worth of stuff that cluttered the room, although “clutter” was perhaps the wrong word. Everything was clean and in perfect order, and there was the smell of lemon oil on the air, as if the woodwork had been recently polished. Sunlight had bleached the rose-colored sofa fabric, but under the swatch of Navajo weaving that covered the arm, the fabric was like new. Two walls of the room were piled with bookcases full of books and art pottery, and the leftover wall space was hung with framed topographic maps and old photographs.
The largest of the photos showed a woman with bobbed hair standing among a grove of trees. Beside her stood a boy of around six or seven, smiling awkwardly. The woman had a clown-around look in her eyes and was holding the boy’s hat out to the side, as if she’d just then snatched it off his head.
“That looks like Irvine Park,” Peter said, pointing at the photo. “I’d guess the sycamore grove across Santiago Creek. I recognize that big sandstone formation. The water stain on it looks like a giant shoe print.”
“Nineteen eighteen,” Ackroyd said, pouring Peter another cup of coffee and then walking over to look closer at the photograph. “My sister and I.” He gestured with the spout of the teapot and then set it down on a piece of ceramic tile lying on the dining room table. Next to the tile sat an oil lamp with a hammered copper base, and opposite the oil lamp stood a vase holding a couple of stems of roses from the bush out front.
The whole room had a homey look to it, as if the books and photos and flowers and Indian rugs were well satisfied to be there. Peter couldn’t help liking Ackroyd for that. Over the years the atmosphere of a house came to reflect the inclinations of the people living in it, and the atmosphere of this house, with the breeze blowing through the bleached muslin curtains and sunlight glinting from the polished wood, said a lot in the old man’s favor. It was the freshly cut flowers on the table, though, that signified the most. That sort of trifle was something he himself might do on a whim. But Ackroyd apparently did it seriously and steadily, as a daily routine, as if somehow he believed in the vase of flowers in the same way that he believed in putting on a coat and tie on Sunday morning.
Peter looked again at the woman in the photo. “She looks familiar, somehow,” he said. “I can’t help thinking I’ve seen her.”
Ackroyd stared at him. “Where might that have been?” he asked. “She died a few years after this was taken.”
“Sorry,” Peter said, wishing suddenly that he hadn’t opened his mouth. “I didn’t mean it literally. You know—something familiar about her face. Beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“More than that,” he said.
Peter looked at the other photos. One, in a silver frame too large for it, had clearly been cropped in half. Someone had been cut out of it—a man. The sleeve of his coat hid part of a woman’s arm. She stood looking downward, pensively, the same woman as in the other photo, but older and with her hair long, dressed in black now and holding a cut pomegranate in her hand. He knew suddenly who she looked like; she was a dead ringer for the woman he’d followed up onto the ridge last night. The resemblance was startling. She resembled Amanda, too—the smile, the unhappy look in her eye; Amanda when she was unhappy.
“What do you see?” Ackroyd asked.
“Nothing, really.” The question struck him as odd. “I’d guess she had an arcane sense of humor, holding the pomegranate and all. Looks like Persephone in the garden, doesn’t she?”
Ackroyd gazed out the window. There was no sign that he was listening. After a moment he said, “The woman you describe having seen last night sounds very much like a figure out of Mexican folklore. Maybe that’s your answer.” He turned away from the photos on the wall and sat down in a chair, pressing his fingers together nervously like a spider on a mirror.
Peter nodded. “Tell me about her. I’m ready to believe almost anything.”
“Well, legend has it that there’s a wandering woman, a ghost, named La Llorada. Always dresses in black, appears here and there weeping with remorse. There’s a complicated story that explains the weeping—involves the loss of her children. It’s very popular among the Mexican nationals living out here in the canyons. They’ll tell you that La Llorada has haunted this area for years. In fact, it’s funny you should bring this up, because Lorna Klein’s maid spoke to me about it only last week.”
“Really?” Peter said. “You know the Kleins?”
“Lorna worked for a couple of years at the library, right around the time she married him. When he got onto his feet financially, she gave it up. We’d become pretty good friends, though. Still are. I run into the maid every once in a while up at the general store in the Oaks.”
“I’m friends with their neighbor,” Peter said.
“That would be?…”
“Beth Potter.”
“I know her,” Ackroyd said, suddenly smiling. “Quite a naturalist. Her son’s a good boy. Has she seen this wandering woman?”
Peter shook his head. He didn’t think she had anyway. “Klein’s maid saw her?”
“She certainly thinks she did.”
“But you don’t?” Peter asked. “You surely don’t believe in this La Llorada character, do you? It’s a long hike from Mexico, even for a ghost. She’s probably got no green card, either. They’d deport her in a cold second.” He smiled, but Ackroyd apparently saw nothing funny about it.
“I guess I rather do believe in such things, althou
gh I also believe that an overactive interest in the paranormal is massively unhealthy. Maybe you’re better off scoffing at it.”
“I’m not doing much scoffing these days.”
“No, I guess you’re not,” Ackroyd said. “I can tell you absolutely that the woman and boy seen last week out in Falls Canyon were not your wife and son. That much I’m sure of, for reasons that would only strike you as nonsense. My advice is to leave it alone. Stay off the ridge at night. It’s a dangerous place even during the day—areas full of sinkholes and dense brush. You’re liable to walk straight over a precipice.”
“It very nearly happened last night.”
“There. What did I tell you? The most rational explanation is that the woman you followed moved into one of the cabins up in Holy Jim. Wilson’s old place at the forks is a good bet. It’s been empty for months. You’re doing the right thing knocking on doors.”
“Actually I don’t think so. I told you I wasn’t in the mood for scoffing.”
“Well, my way of thinking is that if you get curious about that sort of thing, and start digging around in it, you’ll unearth things that were better left buried, if you know what I mean. Probably there’s nothing but grief there.”
“I believe it, but maybe I don’t have a choice. Under the circumstances, maybe I’ve got to start digging.”
Ackroyd shrugged, then picked up the teapot and pointed it in the direction of Peter’s cup.
Peter stood up and stretched, shaking his head. “Had enough, thanks.” He looked out the open front door. The air outside was nearly motionless now, waiting for the wind to start up again. Something wasn’t being said here. The old man was holding on to something. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to another photo, this one hanging near the door. It was a long stretch of tree-lined dirt road passing in front of a white, ranch-style house with chickens on the lawn in front. “Modjeska ranch?”
Night Relics Page 13
