Next to the cat, piled up on the floor of the box, was stuff that had been stolen out of his car and yard—a couple of insulators, the spud gun, David’s flute…. What the hell did it mean? Things were weird enough without this. This kind of thing made it vile, too. And he’d bet that the two of them, the woman and the boy, were even then up on the ridge, making their way down toward Falls Canyon, repeating the horrible scene that they’d played out at least twice before over the last couple of days. What they’d left here were more pieces to the puzzle, but the picture they seemed to want to form had the incongruous and unpredictably changing shape of a nightmare.
He carried the box up the stairs and back into the kitchen, setting it down on the old linoleum. Beth looked in and then quickly looked away.
“The kid killed it,” Bobby said. “I know he did. Just like the deer head.”
“I don’t think the kid did this, champ. Someone’s shot her. Probably the kid found her and put her in the box.”
“Actually,” Beth said to Bobby, “I’m pretty sure it was a lion that killed the deer. You could tell that from the bones. Something killed it to eat it. The kid just found what was left, that’s all. He probably found Sheba, too. Maybe he even wanted to help her. How do we know?”
“How could he help her?” Bobby said. “She’s dead.” He pointed at the box. “That flute there …”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “He stole it out of my truck along with the spud gun. I guess it was him that stole it.”
“Well, it was playing music.”
“What do you mean?” Beth asked, her voice tight. “The kid was playing it?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. It was ghost music, playing all by itself. And there was this green thing, like a floating glass thing. I think it was a pitcher of green Kool-Aid, only not real. The kid called it ‘bug juice.’ ”
Beth hugged him around the shoulders. “You probably heard the wind,” she said. “The wind whistles like a flute when it blows hard.”
“Wait a minute,” Peter said, crouching in front of Bobby and looking him in the eyes. “You thought it was what?”
“A real song. The flute was playing a real song.”
“Not the song, the other thing. What did you say it was?”
Bobby shrugged, stepping away from him as if he thought Peter had turned into a lunatic. “I don’t know.” He crossed his arms and chewed on his top lip, then looked down and shoved the box with the toe of his shoe.
“He said it was lime Kool-Aid,” Beth said. “What’s the deal? You look … You know how you look—like your usual self lately.” She shook her head a little, as if she wanted him to ease off.
“I guess nothing,” he said, standing up. “Tell you later.” Maybe he was wrong anyway. Maybe it was coincidence, synchronicity, whatever. He breathed deeply and tried to smile. Bobby was in bad enough shape already. There was no use going haywire on him. “So what was the song, champ? ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” He forced himself to laugh.
“Probably not,” Beth said. “It couldn’t have been anything half that silly. Probably it was that nitwit seventies song, ‘Dust in the Wind.’ “
“No, it wasn’t,” Bobby said. “And it wasn’t funny, either. It was that song from The Wizard of Oz, when they get to the Emerald City and everyone’s dancing….”
And suddenly Peter walked out through the open door and sat down on the wooden stoop. The wind blew through his hair. Leaves skipped and danced their way across the dead grass, which was bent nearly flat. For a moment he seemed to hear the buzzing of flies again, and for some reason he was desperately thirsty.
Whatever notions he might have had that morning about talking again with Detective Slater evaporated utterly. He heard Beth’s voice, speaking softly to Bobby inside, still cheering him up. “ ‘Merry Old Land of Oz,’ ” she said, and right then he realized that what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to gather them both up, climb into the Suburban, and drive away—to anywhere, it didn’t matter. Somewhere out of the wind, out of the canyon, maybe to the ocean or the desert, where there were vast, open sunlit places. He made himself stand up and go back inside.
“Could you close its eyes?” Beth asked, gesturing at the box. “We ought to take it back to Mr. Ackroyd, and I think it would be easier if it weren’t staring like that.”
“Sure,” Peter said. He bent over the box and touched the cat’s eyes, one eye with either hand, and right then, unmistakably, the cat blinked. Startled, Peter stood up.
“What?” Beth asked.
“It blinked. I swear it blinked.” He knelt by the box, sliding his hand under Sheba’s chest. She was warm. Where the hell did you find a cat’s pulse? There it was, her heart beating faintly. He could just feel it.
“She’s alive,” he said, picking up the box and heading for the door. “In some kind of shock.”
Bobby bolted past him, around the side of the house toward the road. “Hurry!” he shouted, and Peter ran after him, cradling the box and holding it as steadily as he could. He should have taken the rest of the stuff out of it, but he didn’t want to stop to do it now.
Bobby crossed the creek ahead of him, leaping from rock to rock, but Peter slogged straight through the water and up the steep driveway to the road, jogging downhill toward Ackroyd’s place. Beth was out of sight behind him, and he stopped suddenly and turned, mentally telling her to hurry. He still wouldn’t leave her in the woods alone. But just then she appeared out of the trees along the creek, and seeing him there, she waved him on. He turned and jogged down the road in wet shoes, past his own place and rounding the last bend that would lead past Ackroyd’s house. He could see it now through the trees. The old man stood on the porch, listening to Bobby, then looked down the road at Peter before turning around and going inside. In a moment he was out again waving the keys to his car and heading around the side of the house.
“I’m going with him,” Bobby said, running back to be with Peter. “We’re taking Sheba to the vet and save her life. Come with us.”
“I guess not,” Peter said. “You can do the job.” He set the box down and hauled out the rest of the debris, piling it by the roadside.
When Mr. Ackroyd opened the car door, Peter slid the box onto the backseat and Bobby climbed in beside it. “She’s been shot,” he said to the old man. “With what, I don’t know. Maybe a pellet gun. We thought she was dead at first, or we’d have brought her quicker. No telling how long she’s been in the box—at least an hour, probably longer.”
“The dirty bastard,” Ackroyd said quietly, shaking his head. “If I knew who did this …”
“Do you know a vet?”
“Dr. Stone out in El Toro. Open for emergencies on weekends. He saved her once before when she got mixed up with a coyote; maybe he can again.”
“Hurry. Let’s go,” Bobby said from the backseat of the car. “Let’s pick up my mom.”
Mr. Ackroyd got in and started the car, backing out onto the road, gunning the engine and sliding to a stop next to where Beth was just then coming over the hill. After saying something through the window, she climbed into the front seat, and the car jumped forward, braking again in front of Peter.
“I’ll take your car home!” he shouted through the window.
“Keys are in it!” she said, and Mr. Ackroyd gunned the engine and drove off, the car disappearing around the bend.
22
KLEIN WAS SHAKING SO BADLY WHEN HE WENT INTO THE garage that he had to sit down on a pile of lumber to compose himself. He looked at his watch: two minutes to go. He stood up and pulled the framing hammer off the wall. Push had come to shove. If Pomeroy was utterly out of control then he’d still be there, screwing around in the house, not about to let Klein scare him off and get one up on him. Klein hefted the hammer, feeling the weight and the balance of it. One halfhearted blow would crack a man’s skull like an eggshell. He set the hammer onto the bench top, checking his watch again, surprised that only thirty seconds h
ad ticked past. If Pomeroy had any kind of brains he’d be gone.
There was a noise, and he glanced up. Lorna stood outside the open garage door, looking in at him.
“Where’d you take off to?” she asked.
“I didn’t ‘take off,’ ” Klein said. “I went down to the hardware store in El Toro. I’m replacing the latches on Beth’s windows for her.” He picked up the hammer and walked out onto the driveway.
“That man that tried to break in last night—the one you chased off. That was him, wasn’t it?”
“Who?” Klein asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The same one that called me today. I think this is worse than you’re saying it is.”
Klein looked at his watch. In a couple more seconds he’d be late for killing Pomeroy. He shook his head. “Nobody knows who the prowler was. Probably just some vagrant or something.”
She stared at him, clearly unconvinced.
“I’ve got one more thing to do next door,” he said, nodding in the direction of Beth’s house. “I’ll just be a second.” If he didn’t keep his word to Pomeroy now, he might as well kiss it off. It was time for the showdown.
“I thought maybe we should really talk about this,” Lorna said. “Without all the anger and saying stuff we don’t mean.”
“I won’t be more than a minute,” Klein said, hoping he was right. “You go on inside, and I’ll be right there. Beth’s house is wide open. I’m just going to close things up.”
She looked at him and then looked at the hammer. It didn’t take any kind of genius to know what she was thinking—that he was up to God knows what kind of thing, and that whatever it was, it was more important to him than she was.
“Look,” he said, “this is all really simple. It won’t take three minutes to clear it up. I was way off base with what I said inside, and—”
“It was what you were thinking,” she said, interrupting him. “So you couldn’t have been that far off base, could you? And I got defensive about it, didn’t I? Both of us have been doing that, like we’re on different sides in some kind of war or something. But really we’re on the same side. And we’ve got to slow down and realize that before something happens to us.”
She was nearly pleading with him. And she was dead right. But he had to take care of Pomeroy first. Pomeroy was like a fire about to go out of control. You put the fire out first, then you could sit down and talk about it. He turned away, giving her the high sign with his fingers and thumb. “We’ll talk,” he said, winking at her. “But give me just a minute first.” She stood silently, watching him jog off toward the gate into Beth’s backyard. He felt like the creep of the world.
He searched through the house, walking from room to room, looking into closets and corners, constantly aware of the hammer levered loosely between his thumb and the palm of his hand. The house was utterly silent except for the creaking of floorboards and the sound of the wind swishing through the eucalyptus trees along the driveway. Outside each closet door he gripped the hammer handle and raised the hammer head high, half expecting Pomeroy to be standing inside in the darkness, waiting for him.
The door to Beth’s bedroom was nearly shut. With the toe of his shoe, he pushed it open hard so that it rotated all the way around and into the door stop. The bed was remade and empty of lingerie, and the room appeared to be deserted. The closet door was standing halfway open, probably the way Beth had left it.
Relief surged through him. Pomeroy had backed down! The bastard was scared, and he damned well should be. Maybe this would satisfy him—the simple knowledge that he’d pushed Klein too far. If Larry Collier had tried paying Pomeroy off, then he’d made a mistake; he’d lost the game. Once you showed them the inside of your wallet, they had you. The stakes got higher and higher. It was better to show them a closed fist, right from the get-go. Klein reached for the top dresser drawer, but then stopped himself. Pomeroy wouldn’t have left any clues. He was criminally psychotic, but he wasn’t stupid. And there was no reason for Klein’s prints to be all over the drawer pulls.
He took a last, quick walk-through, then let himself out and headed home. He would have his talk with Lorna, and this time he’d hold on to his temper. Somehow they’d hash through things, just like they always did, and then he’d come back over and at least get the dead bolts out of the way before the sun went down. In the garage, he set the hammer on the bench and immediately went into the house, phrasing in his mind what it was he would tell her.
Stopping at the sink to get a glass of water, he hollered Lorna’s name. There was no answer. The house was silent. Abruptly worried, he walked down the hall and into the empty bedroom, then back out into the living room, where he could see through the french doors into the deserted backyard. A big tumbleweed had blown down out of the hills against the fence, and the deck was a mess of broken twigs and leaves. A lawn chair had blown over, and the wind had nearly scooted it into the pool. The backyard was empty.
For a moment he stood there looking at it, thoughts of Lorna dwindling away as he searched the moving shadows on the hillsides, anticipating the approach of the woman in the black dress. Clearly Pomeroy had seen her that afternoon. She was no figment….
He shook his head, driving the thought of her out of his mind.
“Lorna!” he shouted again. But he knew it was futile. There was nothing but silence in the house and the swish and scrape of the wind outside, the sound of dry leaves blowing across concrete. She’d left. She hadn’t waited for him. He felt betrayed. What did she want from him? What could he have told her, that he was going next door to beat Pomeroy to death with a hammer? That Pomeroy had been inside Beth’s house, going through her things, but that there was damn-all he could do about it because he was up to his earlobes in fraud and all the rest?
Slowly he walked out through the front door to verify what he already knew. Her Jaguar was gone. She’d run off without even leaving a damned note.
23
PETER DROVE BETH’S BUS BACK INTO TRABUCO OAKS, then hiked home along the ridge trail. In a couple of hours he would walk on back up to Ackroyd’s place and find out how things went at the vet’s in El Toro. The wind drifted out of the east, skimming through the dry leaves and grass with now and then a gust driving down off the ridges, blowing hard for a minute or two before falling slack again. He listened for human voices on the wind, but the late-afternoon shadows were deep and empty, and the woods were quiet.
It was nearly dark when he got home, and, looking at the dimly lit parlor, he thought of Mr. Ackroyd’s warning about “unearthing things better left buried.” The idea was full of suggestion.
It took him two hours to sweep the parlor and clear away the tools and debris. He cleaned the rubble out of the old fireplace and then started a new fire with eucalyptus logs and the antique newspapers that had been stuffed into the wooden crates as packing material decades ago. He unrolled the carpet, swept it clean, and retrieved the tarnished candelabras, filling them with candles from the kitchen drawer. It was important that the candelabras be full—a matter of effect. He didn’t want the hiss of propane light or the white glow of burning gas mantles. He wanted to hear the wind, the variety of its tone and expression, and he wanted a flickering yellow light, dim and full of shadow—the light that had illuminated the room years past, when the room was newly built. That’s how he pictured the room in his mind. And as he worked, arranging and rearranging, reassembling the parlor bit by bit, that picture grew more clearly detailed until it became as whole and vivid as a memory.
He set the two chairs before the hearth with a small table between them and filled the bookcases with old books from the crates. The books were water-warped and terminally dusty, but empty bookcases wouldn’t have worked; they would have stood out like holes torn in a stage curtain. Slowly he was filled with an artist’s instinct for where each piece of furniture had to stand and each print had to hang—what the entire room must look like. As he worked he found the subtle depressions of tab
le and chair legs in the old carpet, like marks on the boards of a stage, and once he saw them they seemed to become even more pronounced, like slowly developing images on photographic paper. The room was a theater that had waited long years for the reenactment of a drama in which he was an understudy—an understudy with a lifetime of anticipation.
He fed the fire, watching the smoke whirl away up the chimney, listening to the crackle of the wood as the flames rose. Handfuls of dry leaves altered the yellow color of the flame, tinting it an autumn red at the edges. The air had turned chilly, and despite wearing a sweater he couldn’t seem to get warm. Finally he was drawn to the chair before the fire. He sat down wearily, looking around the room. The decayed furniture was shabby, the glass in the bookcase doors cracked, the wood stained and warped. But the old bookcases hid the crumbled plaster, and the flickering candles and fire threw a veneer of shadow and light over the room that muted the ravages of time and weather.
The chair opposite him was empty. Somehow it was a lonesome sight, a symbol of all the things he’d had and lost. He pictured her in his mind, sitting with a book in the firelit room, the wind moving through the trees outside. He recalled the shape of her cheekbones, the color of her hair, how much like Amanda she had looked in the melancholy photograph on Ackroyd’s wall. Somewhere, back in the recesses of his mind, he heard the scratchy, weirdly toned music of an old Victrola, and he tried to identify the melody. It was familiar to him, but at the same time alien, and it mingled confusedly with a dozen other random sounds—the clinking of glasses, footfalls on the carpeted floor, the rustle of papers, the wind, the mewling of a cat….
Until this evening he had never really lived in the house. He had been an outsider, an interloper, an audience. That had been his mistake. Amanda and David had become players in a strange masque to which he thought he had been denied a role. But he knew now that he had merely to submit to it to gain access. He understood why grieving parents maintained a dead child’s bedroom just as it had been when the child died—the clock stopped, the door closed, the dusty pages of the calendar stirred only by the passage of ghosts. The precise arrangement of things was as full of suggested magic as were the things themselves.
Night Relics Page 24
