Amateur Night

by K. K. Beck

  To her amazement, he pulled the camper sharply off the road up a slight rise into what looked like a turnaround for logging equipment. There were big tire tracks in the mud and gravel. Maybe he was backing out. Maybe he would leave her there. Jane said a prayer—saw Christmas card angels from her childhood swooping down, lifting her aloft, flying away with her.

  On three sides of the area was what looked like a drop-off into forest—on the fourth side, the side nearest the passenger door, there was a steep wall of rock about twenty feet high. Salal and huckleberry and moss grew there in patches.

  She'd go over the top of the rock, rather than down over the ridge into the forest. Not only was he a heavy guy, but he looked to be in his sixties. Downhill was tempting, because on the rock he could see her and she could see him and her impulse was to get out of his line of sight, but the rock would be harder for him to get up, and she could stomp on his hands if he climbed up after her.

  Downhill, he'd catch up with her just by letting the sheer weight of him propel him down on top of her.

  Before the vehicle had even come to a full stop, she tore open the door, threw herself out and flung herself at the rock. It was easier going than she'd thought. From the turnaround it had looked more vertical. She was six feet or so up before he had time to get his bulk around the car and come after her.

  She grabbed some salal for a handhold and felt its shallow roots pulling out of the little crevice where it grew. She switched to a huckleberry bush and barely cleared the top of his head. She could hear him huffing and puffing beneath her. Damn. He had looked so out-of-shape and old and sedentary, but men, even old crocks, were always stronger than you thought they were.

  Maybe the son of a bitch would have a heart attack scrambling up that rock. She'd like that, watching him wheezing and gasping, red in the face, dying on his back in the muddy tire ruts in that bleak little spot.

  Did she dare kick him? His head was right beneath her. Could he grab her ankle and yank her down? She kept scrambling—sideways this time where there were footholds— and then up again. By the time she got to the top of the ridge she had a couple of seconds on him.

  Her heart was beating in her chest like a huge bird flapping its wings against her ribs. She could almost hear the blood racing through her body. She reached down and picked up a big rock. But if it was small enough to lift and throw, would it be big enough to hurt him? She dropped it and found another one, a bigger one, and bending over because she couldn't get it above her waist and move at the same time, she went over to where she expected his head to appear.

  He was faster than she thought. She had imagined dropping it on that bald head from a foot above. Instead his head and torso had already cleared the ridge.

  Before he had a chance to let go of his handhold and pull himself up, she dropped the rock on his left hand. He let out a yelp of pain and slid back a little.

  She turned and scuttled away like a crab. All she'd managed to do was slow him down. And she saw that his other hand still held the knife.

  She was upright now—she could run. But she only ran a few feet before she realized she was looking at the tops of trees. She was standing on a high cliff and below her was a lake unlike any other lake she had ever seen.

  It was far beneath her, maybe a hundred and fifty feet down from the top of the cliff to the surface of the water, a perfectly circular lake with sheer rock walls most of the way around.

  From where she stood, she could look across at the cliff across from her, a rocky moonscape, a litter of peeled logs and boulders. Horrified, she stared down beneath her feet, into the eerily still water below. A jumble of logs and a gnarled old stump floated there in the center, all higgledy-piggledy, like a child's game of pick-up-sticks. They were still, and covered with moss trailing off into the water like a slimy green veil. Smaller trees grew on the backs of the logs, as if they hadn't moved in years. The surface of the water, a grayish blue, was flat and dead.

  Two thirds of the way around, the tall sides of this strange lake looked as sheer as the naked rock wall across from her, but where she stood there was vegetation— cedars and Douglas firs and ferns. It all seemed to be growing out of the rock wall itself, like a hanging garden, and she knew that if something grew there, there had to be some horizontal planes somewhere on the rock wall to accommodate soil and provide a space for the seeds that these trees had once been to lodge and grow.

  He was right behind her now, the knife in one hand, the other hand covered with blood.

  She had no choice. She had to go over the edge. A few feet away there was bare rock, and she could dive into the water from up here. But even if she could have dived into the water, like a cliff diver in Acapulco, she could break her back if she landed wrong. And she had no idea how deep the water was.

  She would have to go over the side with the trees and branches. She'd get scraped and scratched and bruised, and maybe she'd fall anyway and kill herself, but the only other alternative was staying here and struggling with a man armed with a knife on top of a cliff.

  Chapter 29

  At first, her descent was basically a fall, broken a half dozen times by tree limbs and roots. Finally, the fear of falling overtook her fear of the man, and she grabbed for a rough, dark fir limb.

  She didn't know if he was coming down after her. She was making so much noise herself, gasping noisily in fear until she told herself she shouldn't hyperventilate, and tried to breathe more shallowly.

  She propelled herself downward, feeling desperately with her feet for footholds—any niche in the rock or well-placed sturdy limb, gauging whether it would hold her weight before daring to let go with her hands and working her way down further.

  The sounds of her body against snapping branches and thrashing leaves seemed incredibly loud in the stillness above the strange lake. Scratchy twigs whipped against her face, and she was gasping for breath, again, partly from exertion, mostly from fear. When she heard herself moan, she told herself to snap out of it, and again she tried to regulate her breathing. She thought it would help her to think more systematically.

  What was she going to do when she got to the water? She was counting on the fact that he'd be reluctant to scramble down after her.

  She wasn't sure where he was; she didn't hear him thrashing after her. That realization gave her a second's relief, a brief surge of achievement.

  But then she wondered what would happen once she reached the bottom. There was nothing there but that still water and that pile of logs in its center. Would he come down and get her eventually? She couldn't scramble up the other side. It was sheer rock. And if she did, he could come around and get her.

  She was about ten feet above the water when she heard him. From the yell above her it sounded as if he were still up on the cliff. “Where the hell do you think you're going?” he said.

  “Just go,” she shouted. “You can drive off now, and we can forget all about this.” She had yelled it as loud as she could. There was a shimmer of an echo in the rock basin.

  She clung to a tree trunk, waiting for his answer.

  “If you make me come down there after you, it'll be worse,” he said in a peevish voice.

  “I'm not coming up,” she shouted angrily. What the hell did he think, she was going to claw her way back up so he could slit her throat?

  She waited for an answer. When it came it was voiceless, just the thrashing of foliage. And then he swore. It was clear he didn't want to come down after her. It was all she had, so she had to use it. She gazed over at the pile of logs and the inverted old stump. Then she tried to figure just how much he could see and what his angle of vision would be from the cliff as he worked his way down.

  She climbed down the final ten feet or so to the water, and stood there for a second on a slippery log, the water soaking into her shoes.

  It was cold, just as she feared.

  “No, no,” she screamed as theatrically as possible. “Go away.” Her voice bounced off the stone walls.<
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  And then she flung herself into the water sideways, aiming her body so she made as big a splash as possible.

  The water was absolutely bone-chilling and well over her head. She submerged her whole body, on the theory that the cold wasn't so bad if all of you was wet, surfaced and tilted her head back to get her hair out of her eyes. Treading water, she listened. There was the sound of branches snapping, but he wasn't coming down nearly as fast as she had.

  She slapped the still surface with her hands, making thrashing sounds, and wondering how long it took someone to drown, or at least to pass out while they were drowning. Not too long, she supposed.

  “Help. Help,” she screamed. “I can't swim.”

  With a lot more splashing, and turning and tossing of her head, just in case he could see her properly, she made her way a few yards to the pile of logs in the center, trying to make real swimming look like panicky splashing.

  She remembered hearing about people going down for the third time, so she made a few desperate appearances above the water line, sputtering and choking, before slipping underneath and gliding underwater a few more feet until she came up to the collection of logs in the middle of the lake.

  What she did now had to look good.

  She submerged as long as she could. She couldn't see much underwater. The logs floated above her, making it even darker underneath; one of them, wedged between some others, knifed down at a forty-five-degree angle and disappeared into the dark below. The gnarled roots of an old stump dangled in front of her, immobile. She took care not to get her clothes snagged on any of the dead tree limbs. She imagined she could get stuck underwater that way and actually drown.

  Finally, exhaling slowly, she allowed her body to rise and float, facedown, until her head bumped against a log.

  She was as still as the logs themselves. Her goal was the huge old stump. She wanted to look as if her drowned body was wedged in there somehow, between the curling roots.

  Moving slowly, trying to look as if she were drifting, she arranged herself in a V shape between two arms of the stump, her head half submerged in the water, but turned away from the cliff so it would look as if her mouth and nose were underwater.

  The way she was positioned, one ear, one eye and her nose were above the water line. She hoped fervently that first of all he'd think she had drowned, and secondly that he would save himself the climb down to make sure.

  If he was smart, he'd get back up there and clear out, hoping like hell that if she was found they'd call it a suicide or an accident. Of course, they'd wonder how she'd got into the area in the first place. There wouldn't be a vehicle for her.

  Maybe he'd go for help, pretending he'd tried to save her. For now, she had to lie still, and will him away.

  She strained to hear signs of movement from the cliff. To her horror, she heard lots of agitated thrashing of foliage. She maintained her painful stillness. The cold was much worse when she wasn't moving. Staying perfectly still was excruciatingly difficult. If there had been any movement in the water, she could have cut herself some slack, but the water was as still as death.

  She told herself it was all right, he might only come as far as the water's edge, just to see if she was dead. If she could convince him she was, then he'd go away.

  But another thought occurred to her. There had been tire tracks on the logging roads. Somebody must come by here now and then. What if he decided to make sure the body was submerged—weigh it down with stones?

  One thing was sure: he probably wouldn't try and get her body back up the cliff.

  She listened to more thrashing foliage, then felt her heart sink as she heard the noise of someone entering the water, followed by the sounds of a sure, steady swimming stroke.

  Chapter 30

  She braced herself. When he got over to where she was, she'd fight like hell and scream bloody murder. With the echo off those stone walls, maybe some lumberjack would hear her. Or maybe this guy would get scared. But she'd play possum until the bitter end.

  Maybe he'd just poke her a little to see if she was alive. She lay as still as possible. Some trailing moss had wrapped itself clammily around her shoulders. She heard those strokes coming toward her and willed herself to float like a dead thing.

  She couldn't bring herself to wait, though. She felt a presence right next to her in the water, and instinct took over. She turned over on her back, pulled herself up on a log and kicked him in the chest. He grabbed her ankle and she shook it off, then propped herself up on her elbows. Nothing could have been more astonishing.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Treading water, and looking equally astonished at her recovery from drowning as she was at his appearance, was Steven Johnson.

  “I'm rescuing you, goddamnit,” he said. “I heard you scream you couldn't swim.”

  “But there was a guy, an older guy...” Jane felt slightly dizzy. It was like in a dream, where one person turned into another in midnarrative.

  “He's still up there for all I know,” said Johnson.

  Just then, they heard an engine start up and a vehicle leaving the area.

  “Correction,” said Johnson. “He's on his way out of here.”

  “Were you in his camper all the time?” said Jane.

  “No, you idiot. I was following his camper. I saw him tear up your tires at that coffee shop, and I followed.”

  “I thought that was you in the parking lot,” she said. Now that she was mostly out of the water, she was cold. Her teeth started to chatter. “But I didn't know you were behind us.”

  “That's the whole point,” he said. “Not to be observed. And once he got on these logging roads I followed his treads in the mud. Jesus, what do I have to do to get you to believe me? Are you coming out of the water now, so we can go follow the guy out of here? Or do you want him to get away while our lips turn blue?

  “You can swim, I take it. You were trying to fake it, right? Not a bad idea, but you wasted a lot of my time. I could have been finding out who the hell that guy is.”

  Jane pushed herself off from the jumble of logs and swam to shore. What else could she do? He swam next to her.

  Johnson pulled himself onto the tiny strip of shore first, then gave her a hand and yanked her up out of the water.

  Without much enthusiasm, Jane surveyed the cliff in front of them. Up would be worse than down. He went first, and she was glad he didn't turn around and watch her progress. She felt clumsy and numb. As they clambered, dripping and puffing up the side of the cliff, Jane asked him, “Why did you let me go off with him if you saw him slash my tires?”

  “Because you wouldn't believe me,” he said simply. “You thought I did it to your tires in Nanaimo, and you'd think I did it there too.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Every time I mix it up with you I get arrested or yelled at. This time I just decided to keep an eye on you. I'm glad I did. What the hell happened? Did he throw you over the side here?”

  “No,” she said, “that was my idea. He threatened me with a knife.”

  “Anybody you know?”

  “Not exactly. Ow.” He'd let a branch snap back into her face.

  “Sorry.” He didn't sound particularly remorseful.

  “Care to tell me why you were following me?” she said, testing a branch with her soggy tennis shoe. She'd learned that Douglas fir was more stable than cedar, and less slippery when wet.

  “I don't like it when I can't figure out what's going on,” he said. “I especially get upset about it when I find out someone I have a routine interview with in Seattle winds up murdered.”

  “Jennifer Gilbert?”

  “That's right. And I want to know who you are and what you're doing and who our friend was too. Is he mixed up in this, or is he just some loose cannon you took a ride with?”

  “I think,” said Jane, “that's he's mixed up in this.”

  “If you want a ride out of here,” he said to her sternly, “you're going to have
to tell me everything. Otherwise, you walk. And I saw a couple of bears going in. The place is lousy with them.”

  “I saw one too,” she said. “A black bear. They're not very dangerous. We have them in Washington.” She didn't add that they could get nasty when they had cubs.

  He'd reached the top, and he was leaning over to pull her up after him. She felt like managing on her own, but she was too tired. She gave him her hand.

  Standing there on top of the rock wall that flanked the turnaround, she glanced nervously down. The camper was gone. Instead, there was a white Ford. It had rental plates.

  She looked at Steven Johnson. She supposed it was rather ungracious of her not to thank him. Presumably he'd scared off her assailant, and he'd tried to save her from drowning.