Night Relics (14 page)

For a moment he lay there catching his breath, looking up into the foliage, dazedly assessing damages. The palm of his right
hand was scraped and oozing blood, but his leather jacket had protected his arms. He flexed his fingers and then sat up unsteadily,
realizing that the wind had once again diminished, leaving the night warm and still.

The base of the falls was clearly visible below him now: the rock-strewn pool reflecting the starry sky, the falls tumbling
into it and throwing up a veil of mist. Nothing more. Nothing even remotely similar to the broken, nightmare shapes he had
seen from the ledge above.

A
BUSY SIGNAL AGAIN, AND AFTER NEARLY TWENTY
minutes had gone by. Clearly she had left the phone off the hook. If only she’d given him a chance to say something! Lonely
women like that didn’t know what they wanted sometimes. They were afraid of their own urges, their own unfulfilled needs.

He couldn’t risk haunting the only pay telephone in Trabuco Oaks, not in the middle of the night. At least he had gotten rid
of the red Thunderbird. That was a real eye-catcher in a hick town like Trabuco Oaks. He had managed to rent a Jeep Cherokee,
which was about twenty times as practical as the Thunderbird when it came to negotiating the local dirt roads. Cherokees were
common as acorns out there, too.

He dialed the number again—another busy signal.

He wondered how the conversation would go, how she would respond to him when she found out the depth of his feeling for her.
He could only imagine it—gaining her trust, her interest. “I’m a little shy,” he said out loud, then smiled just enough. She
responded with a warm smile of her own, opening up to him. He took her hand….

He tried one last time, got the busy signal, and regretfully
hung the phone up. The wind blew dry leaves up under the back wall of the pay phone, and he closed his eyes, turning away.
Then he climbed into his car and drove slowly up Parker Street, the headlights dark. He would just drive past her house one
more time and then head for home. Maybe tomorrow he would see her again.

He turned around in front of Lance Klein’s driveway, noticing now that there was a light on in the back of Beth’s house. Without
thinking, he cut the engine and coasted silently into the deep shadows of a stand of roadside trees. He set the brake, the
car facing downhill. The street was deserted. Even the wind seemed to have died out. Except for a couple of porch lights,
all of the houses were dark.

Even then he told himself that he would only watch and wait. When her light went out he would leave. He might risk another
phone call, but nothing more than that.

The light was probably on in her bedroom. The window was too big to be a bathroom window.

He wondered what she slept in. Despite the wind, it was a warm night….

The street was absolutely empty.

A person back in her driveway would be hidden by the corner of her house and couldn’t be seen from Klein’s, which was dark
anyway. Across the street was an open field—high grass and trees. A redwood fence blocked the neighbor’s view on the other
side.

He released the parking brake, shifted to neutral, and coasted downhill. He was nearly to the general store again before he
started the engine. Then he turned around and drove back up the street, pulling off onto the little road that led down to
the preschool. He turned around again and parked near the corner.

He would give himself two minutes. That’s all. Just a quick look. Would he knock? Of course it was late, but he was in the
neighborhood and he saw that her light was on …

He smoothed his hair in the mirror, then took a bottle of
breath freshener out of the glove compartment and sprayed his mouth.

A thrill of fear surged through him. He mustn’t be caught. Not this time. They would never believe that he wanted nothing
more than to
know
her. And he was on the edge of success with Klein—too close to screw things up.

He pictured her lighted window, the dark driveway.

Swiftly he unwrapped the gauze bandage around his hand. Then, carefully, he wrapped it around his face, leaving slits for
his eyes and nose and mouth, tying the two ends behind his head and checking the result in the mirror.

Without another thought he climbed out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition and all the doors unlocked. He jogged
up the street, turning his face away from the few houses he passed. He slipped into the shadows of the eucalyptus trees that
edged her driveway, and took one last look down the empty street, wishing there was more wind, if only to mask any noise he
might make on the gravel drive. It would come up again any moment, but he couldn’t wait. Even now she might be turning out
the lights, and he would have lost an opportunity.

Carefully he walked toward the window, which was shaded by louvered blinds. He barely breathed, stepping softly, keeping his
hands off the windowsill. He crouched just a little, trying to see between the close-fitting slats, his heart pounding in
his chest. He made out a dresser, the corner of the bed, the edge of a doorway.

The bed moved. He glimpsed a bare foot for a second as she shifted positions.

His breath caught, and a thrill ran through him that was nearly electrical. He swiveled his head around, again checking the
driveway. He had to see more. He was intoxicated with the possibility of what might be revealed to him. The window was badly
located, the angle wrong, most of the bed hidden. Unless she got up off the bed the night would be wasted.

He moved farther down the driveway, his crepe soles scrunching softly on the gravel.

Beth was aware suddenly that it was quiet outside. The wind had diminished, and the silence was eerie with premonition. She
lay in bed, propped up on her elbow, trying to read herself back to sleep. She had set the phone on the floor behind the nightstand
so that she didn’t have to look at it.

Beyond the bedroom door the house was nearly dark. She could see the dim glow from the night-light in the hallway, but that
was all. For a moment she considered turning on lights throughout the house, but that was foolish—the kind of thinking that
worked you into a state once you got going with it.

A cricket started up outside the window, and there was a rustling of leaves in the eucalyptus trees along the driveway. Somewhere
in the distance a dog barked.

She looked up from her book and listened. Silence again. And then the swish-scrape of a leafy branch against a window screen.
She couldn’t concentrate on the book, and found herself suddenly thinking about the disappearance of Amanda and David. Peter
had been hit hard by it, full of pain and confusion. For the first time now she wondered what
had
happened to them.

It was crazy, of course, to think that these phone calls meant anything at all, and twice as crazy to think that there was
some link between the calls and the disappearance. She wondered, though: if Amanda and David hadn’t left the canyon, then
where were they? What had happened to them?

The cricket abruptly quit chirruping. She had become oblivious to it, but she was immediately aware now of its sudden silence
and of the low-key swish and rustle of the wind.

She heard something else.

Footsteps on the gravel driveway, the measured crunching
of sharp rocks compressed by a shoe sole.

She held her breath, waiting. There was nothing more— only silence, the whisper of the wind and the scraping of dry leaves.

T
HE WOMAN ACKROYD HAD BEEN FOLLOWING HAD DISAPPEARED
, perhaps literally. The trees cast heavy shadows across this part of the canyon despite the moonlight, and minutes
ago she had vanished into the leaf-shaded darkness, utterly invisible in her black dress. He ascended the steep path that
led from below the lower campground up toward the ridge, stepping carefully, planting the tip of his walking stick against
half-buried roots and rocks. He had
no
business playing around like this in the darkness. If he fell he’d break a hip. God knows when they’d find him.

A half hour had gone by since he’d seen her through the window. He had been reading, the propane lamps off, no light but an
oil lamp. The road beyond the front porch had been lit by the moon, and the wind stirred the dark trees opposite the house.
When he read at night, he kept an eye on the road. It was common to see deer abroad at night. In the nearly fifty years he’d
lived out there he’d probably seen every kind of animal that lived in the Santa Ana Mountains, and he’d gotten into the habit
of watching the canyon at night like an astronomer watched the stars.

It wasn’t only animals that he watched for. There were rumors of other things wandering in the canyon at night. A few days
ago someone had seen two bodies at the base of
the falls. It was a matter of the wildest coincidence—it had to be—although he would have been more convinced of that if bodies
had been recovered. That would have ended the mystery. It was the inexplicable disappearance of those bodies that seemed to
signify.

The wind shuddered through the canyon now, and when he climbed out of the shelter of the narrow gorge and onto the open face
of the hillside it nearly staggered him. He had a clear view of the trail for another hundred feet, and she was nowhere in
sight. So she wasn’t ahead of him. Or else she was so far ahead of him that it was hopeless. He made his way back down again,
to where he was out of the wind and could rest. He was quickly tiring out, and if he had any hope of retracing his steps,
perhaps following the trail up the creek, he had to do it now. In another few minutes he’d be winded.

He had recognized her—thought he’d recognized her— in that moment of utter clarity and certainty when she’d stepped out of
the shadow of the trees and onto the road a half hour ago. She seemed not even to see the cabin, or to see him behind the
window, even though he must have been clearly visible in the lamplight. He hadn’t bothered with his coat, just picked up his
stick by the door and went out, able to keep her in sight only for a few moments. After that he had listened for her voice
on the night wind, guessing the direction she’d taken.

Faintly, from somewhere up the canyon, he heard it again, a plaintive wail. God help her, he thought, setting out again, working
his way down the trail. She was searching for someone. It was what he feared—feared and hoped for. The trail leveled out,
running down toward the creek. There it was again, her voice, even fainter now. She was below Falls Canyon! He should have
guessed that she’d double back up the canyon.

He waded into the cold water, stepping carefully, pushing between the willows on the opposite bank. A little path edged the
creek—a game trail, running a hundred yards
down to where the creek crossed the road, then another fifty yards to the mouth of Falls Canyon. He stumbled forward, catching
himself with the stick, climbing the steep bank and crossing the road, then half sliding down to the creek again and into
a clearing at the edge of the old campgrounds.

Drifts of autumn leaves lay knee deep along the rocky outcroppings of the west wall of the canyon. He stepped through them
carefully, probing with his stick, breathing heavily, already worn out, and the climb up to the ridge still ahead of him.
Already it seemed to him that his imagination must have gone utterly around the bend. The woman he followed had died sixty
years ago.

Abruptly he stopped, stepping back into the shadows. There was a truck parked at the roadside, a battered Chevy Suburban.
Moonlight shone on foil-colored window tinting, stenciled with some kind of desert scene. He recognized the truck. It belonged
to his neighbor. Obviously the man had parked it and left it. But why? To follow her?

He hurried forward again, the trail angling upward now, rising between sandstone outcroppings. He had waited so
long
for this, watching, disbelieving the stories, captivated by them. He put one foot wearily ahead of the other, plodding upward,
listening to his heart thump in his chest, knowing that it was futile to go on—far too steep. He couldn’t hope to …

She screamed then—one long wail in the sudden stillness. He stopped and closed his eyes, waiting to hear something more, and
yet knowing what the silence meant. Wearily, he turned around and headed home. He had no desire to confront his neighbor,
to swap stories about what they’d seen and heard, about what it might mean.

“N
O
!” K
LEIN LURCHED AWAKE, SITTING UP AND THROWING
his hands across his face.

“What?” Lorna shouted, startled out of a sound sleep and instinctively recoiling toward the edge of the bed.

Klein’s chest heaved with exertion. Slowly he lowered his hands, looking around him at the dim room as if he only half recognized
where he was.

“It’s all right,” Lorna said. She put an arm around him. “There’s nothing there.”

“There was someone. The wind. At the edge of the bed …”

“Don’t
say
that,” she said. “How
could
there be? You’re not making any sense. You’re still half-asleep.”

“I … I don’t know,” Klein said. “I thought I saw …”

He lay down again. What Klein had thought he saw next to the bed was a man with an upraised shovel, his face a mask of jealous,
murderous loathing. There had been the sound of the shovel cutting the air, the blade descending …

“Well, whatever you saw,” Lorna said, “it was just a dream. It’s gone now.”

“Yeah,” Klein said.

But it wasn’t gone. He had seen it too often for it to be anything like gone. It was waiting for him. He had only to fall
asleep again. He looked at Lorna, who had shut her eyes and pulled the covers over her, and with a quick surge of passion
and longing he remembered the face of the
black-haired woman who had lain next to him in bed just moments ago.

He couldn’t sleep any longer. There was too much wind, too much moonlight. He lay still until he was sure Lorna was asleep,
and then got quietly out of bed, picked up his bathrobe from the chair, and went out into the living room, where he poured
himself a glass of scotch out of the decanter. He filled the glass with ice cubes and sat down where he could see through
the french doors, out toward the hills.