by John Everson
“Get on it, guys. It won’t get any easier the longer he floats.”
Mack and Parent traded unhappy looks, and then shrugs. At last they trudged their way to the water’s edge and waded in.
“Mack went to school with the boy,” the chief offered, shaking his head.
“Did he have family problems?”
“Who, Mack?” The chief grinned sourly but Joe didn’t laugh. “No. No more so than anyone else, I’d guess. Kind of a quiet kid. Lived with his ma in the old section of town, on the other side of this bay here. Never heard of him causing any trouble in school or town.”
“Are you sure it was suicide?”
The chief didn’t answer for a beat. Instead he looked up to the top of the cliff overhanging the small bay. When he turned back to Joe, his eyes were gray with weariness.
“No evidence to suggest it wasn’t.”
Mack and Parent waded into the water, moving to stand on either side of the corpse. Together they grabbed the body at the shoulders and thighs and thrust skyward. It slid up the spike easily, a dark stain dissipating in its wake. They hefted Canady up and off the rock and quickly carried his body to the gravel at the water’s edge. Mack ran to get a stretcher from the van; his face looked green as he passed Joe. Scooping someone’s guts out of the water is never an easy task. Especially if they’re a friend’s.
Joe turned back to the chief. Randy had gotten him thinking. There was some kind of history to this spot, and who better to know it than Swartzky?
“Do you get a lot of jumpers out here?”
The chief’s steel gray eyes never blinked.
“What makes you think that?”
“Seems like a good spot for suicides, is all.”
“There’s been some over the years.” The chief nodded. He looked up at the rocky finger overhead as he spoke. “But we don’t publicize ’em much. You don’t know how kids’ll take this stuff. Some’ll romanticize it, and we’ll have a whole class jumping the rocks. Kind of like when one of those rock stars kills themselves, some of their fans’ll go do the same damn thing.”
Swartzky looked back at him pointedly. “So we keep it low-key.”
Joe ignored the hint, smelling a perfect three-part series on the subject of suicide, the cliff’s history and how to deal with the topic.
“How could I find out about the others?” Joe asked.
“Let ’em lie quiet,” Swartzky said in his quietest rumble, and abruptly walked to the van.
“Mack!” Swartzky yelled, and the ambulance driver poked his head out of the driver’s-side window. The two exchanged words that Joe couldn’t hear, and then Swartzky stepped back as the van pulled away.
“Joe!” The chief was standing half in, half out of his squad car.
“Yeah?” Joe answered, yelling to be heard across the beach above the wash of the surf.
“People don’t want to be reminded about friends and loved ones who killed themselves. Don’t go digging that stuff up. Just let ’em know Canady’s gone and be done with the business, you hear?”
Joe nodded and began retracing his steps to his own car.
But now he was more curious than ever.
There was stuff to dig up.
CHAPTER THREE
“It’s almost over, isn’t it?”
Karen Sander ran a weary hand through her kinked shoulder-length hair. She’d found gray in it this morning. Gray. She’d plucked it, but the twinge of needlepoint pain hadn’t blanked the feeling that the hair had given her. She’d deflated. When had it all gotten away from her?
“I don’t think it will ever be over,” Karen answered. Her voice sounded as worn as she’d felt when looking in the mirror. The reflection had been denigrating enough without its silvering reminder of death.
Black eyes staring cold and empty…
“But the only one left is Rachel,” the other woman persisted. “If she would just track down Andi, the circle would be closed. We’ll all have done it. The contract will be fulfilled. It’ll all be over.”
Laughter, deep and dark. The voice. “Have you girls ever heard of the Marquis?”
The other woman stared at a wet ring in front of her on the kitchen table. Her index finger traced the perfect O of the ring, round and round and round. Abruptly she dragged the wet finger across the center of the ring to draw a line inside the O.
A thigh straddling hers, smearing the blood. It was warm and sticky. The blood that was not their own, but of their own…
“What makes you think it will stop with the children?” Karen’s voice was quiet, tinged with pain. And fear. “All these years, we’ve focused on the children. I never thought I could do it. Neither did you, right?”
The other woman nodded, her gray eyes hazing over with tears. Karen had another flash of her in a younger time.
Possessed lips swollen with kisses, naked breasts painted with her blood…the blood He baptized them in…
“But you did. We all did. He made us keep our bargain. And he could certainly make us do more than that. After all, what will he have to do when the last of the children are gone?”
“But there are always others,” her friend protested. “There have been lots of them that we had nothing to do with. There always have been. We all kept our contract, except for Rachel, and I think after Andi, he will leave us alone. He will just find others to take, that’s all.”
A gash on her forehead, blood streaming down her cheeks unnoticed. Black, empty eyes staring at them; black empty eyes laughing at them in a voice not her own…
Karen stared blankly a moment, and then shook her head.
“What’s a contract to a monster?”
Let’s make a little promise, he’d said. A Covenant…
The other woman began to cry and Karen got up, knocking back her chair with a screech, and embraced the other woman, trying without success to stop her mounting sobs.
She understood the pain—the spiraling pit of despair that dredged ever deeper into the darkness. It was a devilish, secret pain that only five girls who had somehow become graying women could understand.
It was a Covenant they dared not break, though they couldn’t be sure that their benefactor would honor his end of the deal. Their contract was more than sacred, especially to a monster.
Their contract was written in blood. And more than their souls were at stake.
Karen hugged the other woman closer, and began to sob. Not for herself, but for the children.
CHAPTER FOUR
“…and we could have the last part of the series be on the psychological aspects of the problem. I could talk with a psychiatrist I know back at the University of Chicago, giving tips on how to recognize suicidal kids, and how to deal with the loss of loved ones who killed themselves.”
Randy looked incredulous.
Stunned.
About as hungry for the idea as a vegetarian for roadkill.
“You’re bound and determined to rub salt in this town’s wounds, aren’t ya?” Randy finally said. “Don’t you get it? When something like this happens, people need to forget, not be reminded. Leave this alone. I want a six-inch story about James Canady. Straight facts as you’ve found ’em, and move on. It’ll run on page seven. I need a story on the Presthill Theatre renovation for the weekend section, so get on that and quit wasting your time on a simple jumper story.”
With that, Randy stalked past Joe and into the paste-up room. Most papers had converted to computer-generated layout and design systems, but not the Terrel Daily Times. Here the computers still ran out the stories on long strips of heavy, glossy column-wide paper. Then with an X-acto knife and a pot of wax, the stories were pasted down column by column on long sheets of paper the size of the final morning edition. When the whole newspaper for the following day was “dummied,” each page was shot on film using an ancient camera the size of a small car. At this hour of the day there was no one in the paste-up room but Randy. Who was just using the room as an escape.
Now he had to know. It was no longer a story to Joe. It was a mission.
Nobody—nobody—told Joe Kieran to back off a story. That simple fact was one of the reasons he had sentenced himself to Podunk Terrel instead of moving up the editor ranks at the Trib. There were consequences to digging. And Joe didn’t have nine lives to sacrifice to his curiosity.
Or nine hearts. He’d lost one of the latter in Chicago.
The newsroom was quiet; this early in the day, you were lucky to find three people in the building at once. Shrugging in resignation, Joe left Randy in paste-up and sauntered down the hall to the junk-food haven. The snack machine was tucked into an alcove near the most important spot in the building for Joe, aside from his computer. The room beyond the vending machine was dimly lit and musty, and crowded with row after row of steel shelves. This was the morgue, the newspaper’s library of old editions. Sorting through the stacks of yellowing paper in the morgue was the only way to find old stories. And if you were writing about something new in Terrel, it probably had ties to something old. So in the few weeks he’d lived in Terrel, Joe had spent many hours researching town history here.
Of course, when you were searching the morgue, you not only had to know what you were looking for, but approximately when it happened. The organizational system was simple: every new edition was stacked on top of the last issue. When the pile of old papers grew tall enough that the center of its shelf began to bow, a new pile was formed. Every now and then, someone even bothered to guesstimate the dates each pile represented and write them down on Post-it notes that were then taped to the shelves.
Joe stared into the empty shadows of the morgue and popped two quarters into the vending machine. He punched in the code C4 without even looking at the selection within the glass case. C4 equaled Bugles. And he had a bag every day.
“Why don’t you just buy a box?” Randy had asked a week or two after Joe had first started at the paper.
“You just can’t depend on the freshness in a box,” Joe had answered with a grin. “These here”—he held up the bag and motioned with his other hand— “are fresh-picked. Listen.”
He crunched one loud for show.
As he did again now, grinning at the random memory. But the thought of trading jabs with Randy reminded him immediately of the editor’s uncharacteristic dourness over the past twenty-four hours. On a whim, he walked down the hall away from the newsroom, and knocked on an unmarked wooden door.
There was no reply for a moment, but Joe waited. Finally, he heard the metallic tumble of a lock clicking open, and the doorknob turned.
“Hey, Joe, whaddya need?”
George Polanski’s wrinkled face peered up at him from the shadows of the janitor’s back room. The old guy was supposed to be a part-timer, but everybody knew that at some point, George had begun sleeping here. Joe wondered if he still kept a house or an apartment somewhere else for his things. From the number of times and odd hours he’d woken the janitor from napping on the cot in this tiny room, he’d begun to doubt it.
“George, I was wondering something.”
“Oh, you were, were you?” The old man chuckled and motioned him inside. They stepped into the jumble of buckets and mops and detergents in the extended janitors’ closet and the old man pushed the door shut behind them.
“Have a seat, then.”
George pointed out a relatively empty area on the cot, which was currently piled with a litter of magazines, a tin of tobacco, and the remains of an interrupted game of solitaire. Joe obliged, and George pulled up a twenty-gallon barrel of floor wax to sit on. He grunted as he eased himself onto the can and shook his head.
“Back ain’t what it used to be, Joe,” he said. “Now, what is it you were thinking of? It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you around these parts.”
“You’ve heard that someone committed suicide on Terrel’s Peak last night, didn’t you?” Joe began.
The old man nodded, painfully slow. “Sad business, that.”
“Well, nobody wants to talk about it.”
The old man studied Joe, his eyes piercing and blue despite the drooping hoods of age. Almost painful in their intensity. Joe began to wonder if he’d made a mistake in coming here. Would the old guy brush him off too? Then a slight, sad smile took the man’s lips and the lines in his face seemed to deepen.
“I’m gonna tell you a story, Joe,” he said, raising a finger to shake in Joe’s face. “But don’t you go taking notes now, you hear? Just listen.
“My best friend was a banker when I was younger, Joe. He dealt with some heavy risks and big money all his life. He had a stomach lined with lead, I always said,’ cuz the stress he was under would’ve burned a hole in my belly clear through to my back. But he seemed to thrive on it, he did. Early on in his life, the gambles seemed to pay off for him, but later, he saw just as many of his investments go sour. Things turned on him, lead stomach or not. He watched his wife grow mean and spiteful. She divorced him at forty-three. He lived to see his kids move away. He fought with the legislature and lost his business over taxes. He watched his bank go insolvent after the Feds came down and took a closer look at the books. He survived all that and yet he always kept a smile—you know, the kind of smile that says ‘I’ll buy you a beer but you cross me wrong and I’ll cut your liver out.’ Still, he told me once in confidence that he broke down and cried when a woman came home with him one night and he didn’t work. Impotent, they call it. He wasn’t all lead.”
George paused, then shook his head slowly.
“I’ll tell you another story. I’ll tell you about Margaret Kelly. She was a good girl, got good grades, had boyfriends. Lived in a nice house, got along with her family. Her parents are nice—I know ’em. She had a scholarship to a big college, talked a lot of becoming a doctor. Seemed like a happy kid.
“You know what the difference between my friend and Margaret Kelly is, Joe?”
Joe shrugged, a suspicion dawning on where this was going.
“Margaret Kelly turned up on the rocks below that cliff last year, and my friend still lives over on Second Street. He ain’t too happy, but he’s alive. I’ll tell you, if anyone was gonna commit suicide in this town, it’d be my friend, not Margaret Kelly, who had everything still to live for.”
The old man seemed lost for a moment, eyes focused on a spot on the wall behind Joe. The reporter snuck a glance in that direction, seeing nothing but the ink-smudged white wall.
“Margaret and James ain’t the only kids to’ve gone over that cliff,” George said. His focus returned, and bored hard into Joe’s face. “Something’s driving these kids over the edge, Joe, and it ain’t because they don’t have fine lives. Seems to me the majority of the ones that go over are the ones that might have actually had a chance to make something of themselves and gotten the hell out of this hole-in-the-shit-stall town. I don’t know’s if I’d call it suicide, myself.”
“What do you mean, not suicide? You think someone’s pushing these people over?” Now, here was an interesting angle, given the responses he’d gotten from officials regarding the cliff. Maybe they were holding a lid on things until the killer could be tracked.
George’s brows creased, a salty caterpillar of consideration. Abruptly, he shook his head.
“Don’t know what I think. But I do know that it ain’t a healthy place to be around.”
“Who else has fallen off that cliff, George? Any family of Randy’s?”
George was silent; his gaze fell to his feet. Then he stood up and opened the door.
“I got to check the air-conditioning, Joe. It’s been leaking over in Jack Romand’s office.”
Joe took his cue and stepped past George into the hallway.
“You want town history, talk to Angelica Napalona. She’s seen it all. And then some.”
Joe nodded and turned to go back to the newsroom. But George stopped him.
“And Joe?”
The bags in the old man’s cheeks hung lo
w, and he wouldn’t look Joe in the eye.
“Stay away from Terrel’s Peak. It’s evil. Trust an old man on this one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There was a feeling you got when driving through the Main Street of Terrel. A feeling of solidity, of history.
Of home.
Joe had felt it the first time he’d driven through the town; it descended silent and complete as an eclipse. One moment it was broad daylight, the next you asked who turned out the sun. One minute you were lost in the country, the next you were cozy and smiling in the middle of a town called Terrel. That womblike feeling of instant security was a big reason Joe had decided to settle here.
Or hide here, his conscience taunted.
The storefronts were drawn with wide, come-on-inside-friendly windows. Every few doorways were embraced by awnings striped in green and gold, scarlet and turquoise. Welcome mats cheered every stoop. Most of the old brick buildings here were rimmed with ornate wood, the curlicues and ridges twisting to the right and left like architectural road maps. Most of the buildings had second-and third-story rooms above the storefronts that housed the shop owners or tenants.
A recent mayor with a romantic eye for history had put in new streetlamps designed to look old-fashioned. Ornate black poles divided each block with arms that stretched inward from the street to hold faux gaslights. And in the center square of Main Street, across from the post office and village hall, the dirty tide of asphalt was dammed by a spread of uneven red cobbles.
It seemed comforting that the street supported a “Fill Your Pipe” shop, even though Joe didn’t smoke. He liked it that there was a hobby shop with model trains and large signs beckoning lionel in the window, though he never stopped and went inside. And he had actually spent hours browsing, though not buying, in Books and Baubles, where stacks of dusty, beat-up novels lay side by side with Donnie Osmond 8-tracks.
Today, however, the uncalculated quaintness of Main Street didn’t coax a grin from Joe. The white shutters revealed their peeling paint; the Raggedy Anns in the craft store window had their MADE IN TAIWAN tags clearly showing. All was not what it seemed in Terrel, he’d found.
