Covenant (7 page)

Joe’s face clouded briefly. “You want the real answer, or the one I tell my parents?”

“Can’t a country girl git both?” she teased, tossing her head to one side and watching him expectantly.

“Sure.” He grinned. “But neither one is very exciting. Which first?”

“Gimme the lie,” she said. “I like to hear a good one now and then!”

“Okay. I came to Terrel because I realized that I couldn’t stand the hustle of the city desk at the
Chicago Tribune
. It was too impersonal, too harsh. I wanted to grow into a family business in a smaller town with a better climate.”

“Doesn’t sound too false to me. What’s the lie?”

“Well, actually, I love the hustle of the city desk, and I miss it quite a bit. I don’t miss the climate.”

Joe ruffled his hair and settled back into the driver’s seat. They hit the first sign of Terrel, an old abandoned barn, and turned onto the rim road that would take them into Parkside, the newer area of the city.

“The truth of it is, I came here to escape. And I have to say, the first time I’ve felt like a reporter in the months I’ve been here has been the last couple weeks as I’ve looked into the history behind that cliff up there.”

“What do you mean?” Cindy stared closer at Joe, her interest raised. He noticed her eyes were blue. Sky-on-a-fine-picnic-day blue.

“Well, what do you know about the cliff?” He threw the question back at her.

Cindy stared out the window a second.

“I know that everyone in this town is afraid of it. I know I never believed in it until this summer.”

“Believed in what?”

“You’ll think I’m silly.”

“No, I won’t. Really.”

Cindy shifted uneasily.

“People say the cliff is evil. That it’s dangerous. I used to think they were ghost stories and that the people were stupid for buying them.”

Joe pulled into the main entrance of the Parkside subdivision, two white pillars with ornate placards marking its beginning.

“Which way?” he asked.

“Right, up two more blocks on Ewing.”

Cindy stared out the window and was silent.

“I don’t know about the cliff being evil,” Joe hazarded. “But I do believe it’s convenient. A very easy spot for someone to get rid of people he or she doesn’t like.”

Cindy snapped at the insinuation.

“Everybody liked James! He didn’t have enemies. Except maybe his mother. But she wouldn’t
kill
him. She’s a bossy bitch, but she’s not psycho. But neither was James. He would never have jumped on his own. You have to believe that. If you had known him…”

She pointed suddenly at a slat-sided house on the right side of the street.

“There. That’s my house. Could you stop here? My parents would freak if they saw me pull up with a stranger.”

Joe hit the brakes and pulled over to the curb. Shifting into park, he turned to look closely at the girl next to him. She looked agitated now, after talking about the cliff. Much more so than when he’d first seen her dangling her feet off it.

“Would you mind meeting me sometime to talk about it more?” he asked.

She looked at his face and considered. Then decided.

“Sure. I guess that’d be okay. Are you doing a story or
something about it? I don’t think the paper has ever really run any articles about it. Mostly, everyone just talks.”

“Call it a story I’m doing for myself,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone will ever publish it, but I need to write it.”

She nodded as if she really understood.

“How about meeting on the beach at the foot of Terrel’s Peak this Saturday? I’ve been wanting to head down by the water since I’ve been home, but I keep climbing up instead of down!”

“Around noon?”

She nodded again. “Yeah. See ya there!” She opened the car door and got out. But before the door shut, her head popped back into the cab.

“You’re going to think I’m nuts, but for the record? All the rumors about that cliff are true. Seriously true.”

With that, she backed up and slammed the car door shut, blonde hair swishing as she pulled herself away from the car.

Her too?
Joe groaned inside. It had looked as if he’d found a good source for background on the cliff, but if she was another demon believer…

Cindy walked two houses down the street and then turned into a drive. Joe let the car creep forward until she disappeared into the gray house. Then he pulled away from the curb and turned at the end of the block toward home. For good or bad, he had a date on Saturday, anyway.

Now to set up some time with a couple others. And maybe it was time to call on Angelica again.

That night, sleep came slowly for Joe. The sheets stuck in humid tangles to his legs; the pillows lumped at every twist. The blue light of the clock radio silently ticked away the night: 10:45, 11:18, 12:23. He couldn’t stop thinking about Cindy. And the answer to her question. Why was he here? And could he really escape for the rest of his life?

When he did finally get to sleep, his dreams were troubled.

In one, he stood dressed all in black at the outermost point of the cliff, staring over the water. It lapped blackly against the shore, each wave crashing like a white noise explosion, the whitecaps glinting like teeth with the light of the moon. Cindy hung on his outstretched arm, only it wasn’t Cindy, not really. It was Ann, the reason he’d left Chicago.

“You couldn’t just keep it quiet, could you?” she cried at him above the rush of the waves. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, their trails glimmering in the moonlight.

“Don’t you know you ruined my life?” she accused. “Why couldn’t you mind your own business?”

“I was just doing my job,” he answered.

“I hate you,” she screamed, and beat at his chest with her fists.

“I loved you,” he answered, and planted both hands on her shoulders. With a shove, he pushed Cindy/Ann over the edge of the cliff and into the black night air. Her scream was deafening at first, but quickly grew faint before disappearing altogether.

He didn’t even look over the edge. Instead, he turned away from the water and walked back to his car. He was smiling.

Joe woke up in a cold sweat. “Shit,” he cried. “
Shit
, shit!” The clock radio read 3:19. Bunching the pillow over his face, he tried to blot the images from his mind, but instead kept seeing Cindy/Ann’s face as she accused him.

You couldn’t just keep it quiet, could you?
he heard over and over again in his head.

“Not my job,” he mumbled.

Angelica hadn’t called him since the night he slept over, and the two messages Joe had left on her machine had remained unanswered. But he pulled into her driveway anyway.

He didn’t expect her to come to the door, but she did.

Promptly. She was, again, in full costume: purple silken robe, this time covered with stars. Beneath it he caught a glimpse of a tight-fitting black shirt. Her legs were bare tonight, and he felt a surge of lust at their smooth curves.

“C’mon in, Joe,” she said, looking none to happy to see him. “I don’t know what I can get you; I haven’t been to the store in over a week.”

“Don’t need anything,” Joe answered. He sat down on the small couch where their last session had begun.

“Then what can I do for you?” she asked, her lips pulled tight. She gave off none of the friendliness or eros of the Angelica he’d seen last.

“Well, you can start by telling me why you haven’t answered my calls,” he offered.

The room was silent.

“I’ve called you a couple times,” he said.

“I’ve been…busy,” she answered with a shrug.

This was going nowhere quickly. So he switched subjects.

“I met James’ girlfriend the other night up on the cliff.”

“And how is she?”

Angelica settled on the arm of the couch, obviously not ready to sit for a long talk. Joe decided that small talk was out.

“She’s dealing with it.” Then he blurted, “Hey, I’ve been wondering. How come you never had kids?” It was the kind of personal question that he always hated springing on people. But they usually flushed out some leads too.

Angelica arched a dark eyebrow. “Who said I never did?”

Now there was one he hadn’t expected. He waited a beat before continuing. “I’ve just been thinking over the last couple weeks that it’s strange that out of the group of five who were there when Bernadette O’Brien was killed, you were the only one who didn’t have a child. I guess I assumed you hadn’t had one since I didn’t see one when I was here last, and, well, not to be rude, but I haven’t heard of any Napalona’s who have gone over the side of the cliff.”

She didn’t smile.

“I was too young when I got pregnant, Joe. I did have a child. But I gave her up for adoption as soon as she was born. I haven’t seen her since. Who knows? Maybe she has been one of the people who have been killed. Or maybe my giving her up saved her from the curse. I hope so.”

“You’ve never tried to find her?”

“It doesn’t seem like a very wise move, does it, given what’s happened to all the kids of my friends?”

Angelica stood and paced the room, her violet robe dragging slightly on the floor behind her. She peered out the front room window, and then turned back to Joe.

“I think it’s over now, Joe. Whatever it was, it’s done. Something in that cliff wanted a piece of all of us kids that day, and it took Bernadette completely. Now it’s stripped our kids from us. What do you suppose is more important to a mother? Her life, or her children? It took the most painful part. After that, death would be easy. So I think it will let us live now. Story’s over Joe, so let it lie. It’ll just wake up and bite you if you don’t—trust me.”

She held her hand out to him.

“I’m expecting someone for a reading tonight. Thanks for what you did for me last time. I appreciate it.”

He didn’t hear a wealth of gratitude in her words, despite their meaning.

She led him back to the front door.

“Some things are better left in their graves, Joe,” she said. “Leave this one buried deep.”

The door shut behind him, and Joe realized he’d been expertly evicted. And he was more puzzled now than when he’d gone inside.

As Joe pulled away from the
READINGS BY ANGELICA
sign, he identified the odd pit in his stomach. He’d been used. Angelica had taken him last month, used him like a vibrator, and thrown him away like a wet condom. She didn’t even want to speak to him now.

A moment of recrimination briefly pricked at his conscience. Was this what his sources felt like when he was done pumping them for information? No, he told himself. He had better manners.

Saturday dawned with a promising glare of gold through Joe’s bedroom window. He stretched and rolled over, then forced himself to lift a bleary eye to the clock radio—10:14. He dimly recalled reading a Grisham novel until well past three
A.M.
Coffee would be a necessity if he was to be beach-ready in an hour and a half.

The shower steamed around him and brought with it a rush of questions, harbored since his midweek meeting with Cindy and his unproductive quest at Angelica’s.

He wanted to find out from her what the average person in town
really
thought of the cliff and of the murders. He wanted to know more about the five mothers. And the Halloween deaths. During the week, he’d hatched the mad idea that Terrel harbored a pagan sect of murderous Druids. That could explain how the annual Halloween string of death reached backward for a century, but he hadn’t had a chance to poke around much looking for the fringe element of Terrel. Maybe Cindy would be tapped in, or at least have friends who were.

By the time he got out of the shower and toweled off, Joe’s mind was back on track, churning ahead at full speed.

A strong pot of java still wouldn’t hurt, he thought, and after pulling on black bermudas and a Cure concert T-shirt, he plodded into the kitchen to grind some beans.

As the caffeine soup brewed, he pulled out the weekend
entertainment section from the
Times
and skimmed the local offerings. The theater was playing a Hitchcock revival this week:
The Birds
and
Stranger on a Train
tonight,
Rope
and
Psycho
tomorrow.

Did people in this town really need to see
Psycho
? Or to look at it another way, had the theater perhaps shown
one too
many
Hitchcock murders to the locals?

The Columbian Coffeehouse was hosting a folk singer this weekend. And Lower Space, the town’s one rock club (hidden on the outskirts of Terrel, near a cheap hotel) boasted Charleston’s punk saviors Toxic Gas. He grinned at that. Now
there
might be the perfect place to look for Terrel’s fringe element.

After retrieving a cup of coffee from the still-hissing machine, he brought a pair of scissors back to the table and clipped the ad. Maybe Cindy had been to Lower Space. He wanted to remember to ask her.

Joe stomped often on the brakes to keep his Hyundai below fifty on the curving path the local department of transportation defined as a road. The car shifted and bumped, complaining with multiple squeaks as he plummeted down its winding descent to the waterfront. The day had turned out splendidly— the sun was hot and high, the sky achingly blue. He’d thrown some chips and cookies in a bag with his suntan lotion and an obnoxiously orange towel. His shades were on.

Now if Cindy only showed up.

The thought brought a pang of fear to his belly, which surprised him. He really was looking forward to this! He’d known the girl less than half an hour, but he realized that he was going to be bummed out big time if she blew off this “date.”

The car rounded the last curve and suddenly the trees and brush disappeared, leaving him staring straight out into the blue-green waves breaking against a jumble of dark rocks. The cliff was less than a mile ahead.

He followed gravel-filled ruts that skated along the edge of
the waterfront the rest of the way. Driving this close to the ocean, it was hard to resist the temptation to watch the waves instead of the road. Then the gravel ran out and Joe kicked up sand with his tires as he pulled away from the beach onto a grassy stretch of earth. Despite the perfect weather, the sand was empty for as far as he could see, except for one figure just a few yards ahead lounging on a beach towel. Someone that looked tantalizingly female.

He grabbed his bag and kicked the car door shut.

“Hey,” the sunbather yelled out against the roar of the surf. “No reporters allowed. There’s no news here!”

Joe grinned and quickened his pace as Cindy mockingly shooed him away.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he answered when he got closer. “I’d like to get a statement from you.”

“What about?”

“Well, let’s see…Did you know that wearing a swimsuit like that is dangerous to the mental health of all males within a thirty-yard radius?”

Cindy made a face and gestured at the electric pink and yellow triangles that just barely covered her chest and the private patch of real estate below her belly button. “What, this lil’ old thing?”

“Exactly!”

She bent and picked up her beach towel, wrapping it tightly around her shoulders.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you gettin’ hurt!”

“No, don’t worry about me.” Joe laughed. “I’ve been specially trained to deal with these types of suits.”

“Oh, really? And tell me, how does one get that sort of training in…where was it? Um, Chicago?”

Cindy tossed a wisp of blonde hair out of her eyes. “Do they have these kinds of suits in Chicago? I wouldn’t think they’d be very comfortable to wear in the snow, ya know.”

“Oh, it gets above thirty-two degrees there now and then,” he quipped, playing along. “Heck, there’re even a few beaches— with real sand!”

“Yeah, but isn’t the water usually iced solid or slushy?”

“Solid, no. Slushy? Depends which way the currents from the Indiana refineries are moving—and what sort of waste they’re carrying!”

She laughed and let the towel slide off her shoulders, revealing a dark but not heavily tanned complexion. Cindy looked like the type who could tan easily, Joe thought, but she’d said that she hadn’t been out in the sun too much yet this year for all her cliff-walking.

“Well, you’re welcome to share a towel,” she offered, holding two corners and letting the wind spread it out in the air like a magic carpet above the sand. “If you think it’s safe.”

“I’ll take the chance.” He grinned and dropped his bag to the beach.

They sat cross-legged on the towel and Cindy nodded to the foamy water a few feet away.

“Doesn’t look so horrible from here, does it?”

Joe shrugged. “It’s all perspective, I suppose. Things seem a lot different depending on where you stand. Kinda like how people look at that cliff up there.” He leaned back to stare at the rock face that jutted out over the bay. “Some people think all those people are just depressed suicides. Others think there’s some monster in the cliff that draws people to their deaths. And then others, like me, think there are some people behind this whole death spree. All depends on how you look at it, I guess.”

Cindy’s eyes took on a faraway look as she followed his gaze. But she remained silent.
Shit
, he thought.
Diving in too
fast. Let the girl warm up to you a minute before dunking her!

“Um, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that stuff up right away like that,” he apologized.

She shook her head and looked puzzled for a second.

“Oh…no, Joe, it wasn’t that. Don’t worry about it. Believe
me, I know about things looking different from where you stand. A couple years ago I came out here and thought I knew everything about this town, this beach. And then I went away to school, and everything here just kinda shrunk, ya know? Like it wasn’t important at all anymore, like it never was? But then James…you know.”

She bit her lip and Joe stifled the urge to reach out and hug her. He hardly knew the girl, after all. But the way she always seemed to put that little question mark at the end of her sentences…well, he could just die for that!

But before he decided whether to reach out and pat her shoulder, she started talking again.

“Well, now I see that I didn’t know everything there was to know about Terrel. And I can’t look at it as just a sleepy small town anymore, either. I know you’ve heard some of the rumors about this cliff, and you probably think everyone’s stupid for believing them. I know I did until this summer. I thought people were crazy as cornflakes for thinking some evil spirit or whatnot lived in that rock. But now I know better.”

“Maybe that’s where I need to start,” Joe interrupted. “Tell me what the rumors actually say about the cliff. All I’ve heard is that I should stay away from it. You know, someone actually stuck a note under my door warning me if I didn’t leave the place alone, ‘death would find me.’”

Cindy’s eyes widened for a moment, and she looked up at the top of the cliff again, as if expecting an answer.

“That’s silly,” she said slowly, not really sounding like she believed it. “There’s a Covenant….”

Joe’s eyebrow lifted. “A Covenant?”

“Um…yeah. I don’t know. One story goes that old man Terrel, when he used to run his lighthouse up there on the cliff, well, he got lonely. So he used to read to himself a lot. Thing is, the guy had some pretty weird tastes in reading, which only got stranger the longer he sat up there on the hill. They say the ships that docked here used to bring him in
books from all over the world, magic and occult kinds of books. Supposedly, he used these books to summon up a demon to keep him company through the long nights.”

She looked at Joe and grinned. “Some company, huh?”

“Yeah, I think I would have worked on conjuring up a woman, myself,” Joe said, feeling his face redden slightly at admitting such a thing to a relative stranger. And he couldn’t help but see
her
as the woman he’d conjure, which didn’t help his conscience. She only laughed, a delicate, easy sound that put Joe at ease once more.

“Well, supposedly, once old man Terrel died—and there’s one story that says the demon killed him during an argument— once old Terrel died, the demon was stuck here and
it
got lonely stalking around the light house every night. The city council tried hiring other lighthouse keepers to take Terrel’s place, but none of them would stay in the lighthouse for more than a couple weeks. They’d complain about noises in the night, and weird lights in the hallways. Some didn’t last more than a night. So pretty soon, the lighthouse just sat empty. But they say during storms, even though nobody was up on that cliff, people could see the lamps lit up and beaming out into the bay. That’s when it was most important for a lighthouse to run, ya know. To save the ships from crashing into the shore when the visibility got bad during the choppy seas and rain. The people said the demon had made a pact with old Terrel; they called it a Covenant, to protect the town. You know, when people started jumping off the cliff, it was never anyone actually from the town of Terrel. People got pretty superstitious about that, figuring that the demon took sacrifices in exchange for guarding the town. They figured, well, if they kept their mouths shut, then the thing would just take outsiders and leave them alone.”

Joe shook his head and grimaced.

“But that was, like, fifty years ago,” he said. “Are you saying everyone in this town still thinks that there’s a demon in
that cliff that’s watching over them and sacrificing the lives of outsiders once a year?”

“Pretty much!” she chirped. “Crazy, ain’t it?”

“Pretty much,” he agreed. “And everyone in town knows these stories?” he asked.

“Oh, geez, you hear ’em from the time you’re a toddler,” she said. “There’s all kinds of stories about the ‘ghost’ of Terrel’s Peak.”

“Like what?” Joe asked.

Cindy leaned back on her elbows, giving him a good view of her body. He found himself longing to kiss the thin pucker of her bellybutton, and imagining the heaven that was only barely hidden beneath her suit. He crossed his legs, not wanting to give her a good view of what her stretch had just done for him.

“Well,” she said, face staring into the blue of the sky as she thought. “There’s one that supposedly happened to a kid named John Ryan. I first heard it on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts. It’s one of those stories that you have to tell around a campfire.”

“Can we just pretend we’re by a campfire?” Joe asked. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “It’s starting to feel like we’re sitting by a fire out here.”

She laughed, and then sat back up, tucking her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around.

“You can see that Terrel’s Peak is this town’s haunted house,” she explained. “I mean, look at this beach. Any other beach like this in summer would be packed! But people do still go up to the peak sometimes. Usually on a dare. In other towns, kids dare each other to go inside abandoned houses. Here, we dare each other to climb the peak. So, the story goes that this kid, John Ryan, went with a group of high school seniors up the cliff to where the road ends up there to have an early graduation party. They sat around drinking and smoking and making out, right? So, after draining a couple of six-packs, it gets late, and someone dares John Ryan, who’s like, the wimp of the bunch, to take a flashlight and climb to
the top of the peak. He says no way, but they don’t let up. ‘Afraid of the bogeyman?’ they say, and they keep taunting him. This goes on for a while, and at last, humiliated and a little drunk, the kid grabs the flashlight away from one of the girls and starts up the trail.

“‘Flash the light when you reach the top so we know you went all the way,’ one of the gang shouts as John Ryan marches up the path that goes to the very top of the peak, where the old lighthouse used to stand.

“‘Flash it three times if you see the ghost,’ another of the kids says.

“They watch him walk up the cliff and out of sight, and everything gets real quiet. Nobody really wants to talk now, because they know that they wouldn’t have gone up that trail, and they all feel a little guilty for riding him that way.

“It was a moonless night, and the waves were loud against the rocks. When you looked over the edge, you could see the whitecaps, but just barely. And when you looked up, you could just make out the tip of Terrel’s Peak.

“So the kids all just stand there and watch, and the minutes tick by with no light and no sign of John Ryan. They start to get real nervous, watching the top of the cliff and then looking down below.

“‘He probably turned and ran right past us back to town,’ one of the football jocks said.