Night Relics (27 page)

“And if you get a call from any ghosts,
you
leave. We can meet halfway and camp in the woods like refugees.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. So am I. Anyway, Klein’s putting new dead bolts on the doors right now.”

“Klein
is?”

“Uh-huh. New latches on the windows, too.”

“I could have done that,” Peter said.

“I’m not even sure it’s all necessary, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I almost think …”

“What? You don’t think it was
him,
do you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not? It would be easy as pie for him. Think about it. He’s out in the middle of the night and notices a light on in the
neighbor lady’s bedroom. It’s too much temptation, and he sneaks through the gate and looks in the window, and when she sees
him and screams, he simply pretends to be chasing the bad man off. Then he’s terrificly helpful afterward, and the neighbor
lady ends up saying, ‘Thank God for Mr. Klein.’ ”

“I can’t believe that.”

“And to top it off, he ends up with copies of the new dead bolt keys.”

“Too crazy.”

“That’s what I’d do if I was him. I mean, I wouldn’t do that in the
first
place, but if I did, that’s exactly how I’d explain being out and about in the middle of the night. Why did
he
say he was out there?”

“He couldn’t sleep. He was having a drink.”

“Not very original.”

“That’s why it’s probably true. You don’t know him as well as I do. He just
wouldn’t
—especially the breaking-in part.
Especially
not with Bobby in the house.”

“And there were no fingerprints on the doorknob?”

“Nothing but a smear.”

“So the guy was wearing gloves.”

She shook her head. “No. I saw his hand when he turned to run. He wasn’t wearing any gloves.”

“Why did you say you ‘didn’t know’ a moment ago when you mentioned Klein? What don’t you know about him?”

“Just that I don’t know how he’s mixed up with our friend Adams, but I know he is. He was lying about that last night at the
steak house. And I think he’s lying for some good reason.”

Peter listened as Beth told him about the overheard conversation that morning, but he was distracted by the wind and by Bobby’s
being gone. Brown leaves blew out of the woods, carpeting the drive nearly ankle deep in places.

“I thought Klein was going to kill him,” she said. “I’m not kidding. If Lorna hadn’t got in the way, I think he would have
shot him. He threatened to.”

There was a blast of wind just then that rattled the house, picking up the fallen leaves and filling the air with them. The
trees creaked and swished in an orchestra of wind noise. Beth paused for a moment and then went on with what she was saying.
But Peter barely heard her now. He stood up again, listening for stray sounds, for human voices on the wind. There was something
urgent in the atmosphere, something wound tight.

The dense shadows of the alders along the creek moved rhythmically, casting over and over again the shapes of swaying, gesturing
limbs across the ground. There was the suggestion of animation in the shadows, of arms sweeping the sunlit spaces, of someone
running forward only to be pulled backward again into the dark formless spaces among the trees.

He heard a noise behind him, light feet scuffling along a carpet, and he turned and looked through the window into the dim
house. A light was burning in the parlor—an oil lamp; he could just see it beyond the edge of the open door. The light dimmed
as a shadow passed before it, and in that moment a man walked out of the bedroom, carrying an open book, his dark form a moving
silhouette on the curtains.

“Are you listening?”

“What?” Peter asked. The man was gone, vanished, and the oil lamp with him. “Listening for what?” The air was full of whirling
leaves. He tried to recall what they’d been talking about, where they’d left off.

“To whom, you mean, not for what.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Of course I was listening. What were you saying? I was distracted for a second. Sorry.”

She looked at his face. “Are you all right? You
look
distracted.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“I was asking why, if it was Klein, and he just happened to see my light on and get this crazy idea, why would he call me
on the phone first?”

“I don’t know. I guess he wouldn’t. Unless he was trying to throw everyone off the scent.” He rubbed his forehead. His head
ached vaguely and he felt drugged, as if he’d just waked up from an afternoon nap. He looked back through the window again,
into the empty house.

“I don’t quite get it,” she said.

“You know.” What? He couldn’t think. “It wouldn’t be a bad ploy, Klein doing something that didn’t make any
sense so that you’d think it couldn’t be him, because it didn’t make sense that he would do something like that.”

“I think you’re not making any sense. What the hell’s wrong with you?” She stood up, cupping her hands against the window
in order to peer in. “What did you see in here?”

“An old man walking across the room.”

She stepped away from the window. “Don’t
talk
like that.”

“I’m not kidding.” Then, seeing the look on her face, he added, “It might have been a reflection.”

“Of what?”

“Something … I don’t know. Maybe the leaves blowing.”

“Is that what you think it was?”

Peter shook his head. “He came out through the parlor door, carrying an open book. I heard something, too, a scuffing, like
I could hear him walking. You hear anything?”

“I was talking too much.” She looked in the window again. “The parlor door’s shut now. Did he shut the door behind him or
leave it open?”

He shook his head again and gestured helplessly. “He left it open, I think, but …” A movement near the creek caught his eye.
“There!” he said, pointing at the dark stand of alders and willow. Beth stepped closer to him, both of them looking out toward
the wind-lashed trees. The dense shadows were alive with movement as the wind scoured leaves and twigs from the forest floor
and tore them from the limbs overhead. A small cyclone of autumn debris rose and fell near the ground, spiraling in a slowly
eddying pool, expanding and contracting as if the mass of dead verdure were a living, breathing thing. The wind sculpted it,
tearing away clumps of leaves, stretching and bending it into the form of a human—someone bent forward, as if struggling to
get up, its mouth and eyes merely black shadows like small windows into some infinitely dark place.

Beth gasped and clutched Peter’s arm, and right then
there was movement in the darkness beyond the struggling thing, something shifting among the alders as if a fragment of shadow
had come loose from the rest. There was a sound like a cry from a human throat, and the thing made of leaves, standing nearly
upright now, burst into fragments, the wind picking them up and flinging them out into the open air.

A woman stood now where the moving shadow had been. She looked back at the house, the hem of her black dress whipping in the
wind. Her face was contorted with fear and anguish as she turned and hurried away up the creek-side trail, the wind carrying
back to them the sound of her voice, crying out the name of her lost child.

“That’s
her
,” Peter shouted, and just then the wind slammed into the house with enough fury to make the walls shake. There was the sound
of a shutter banging and then of breaking glass. A scattering of shingles hit the dirt of the driveway, skidding out toward
the road, and Peter grabbed Beth and dragged her back up under the shelter of the porch roof.

“Bobby!” Beth said, yanking away and then pushing past him and down the couple of porch steps. The wind blew frantically now,
churning up dust along the road, whipping the heavy branches of the oaks and sycamores. The house thrummed with the sound
of it, the wind whis-tling under the porch and through the latticework that enclosed the cellar.

Peter followed Beth out onto the drive, grabbing her shoulder and leaning in toward her ear. “Upstream or down?” he shouted,
but she shrugged helplessly, shaking her head. Of course Bobby hadn’t said where he was going. He might be anywhere—up along
the ridge, visiting at one of the other cabins….

“He knows he’s not supposed to go past the Forks,” she shouted, pointing west, down the canyon. Her hair blew out behind her
in the wind, and she sheltered her face from flying debris. Reaching out for his arm, she turned him
around, shouting into his ear. “You go that way, and if he’s not there, turn around and come find me.” She turned and ran
then, down toward the creek, disappearing in seconds into the dark shadows of the trees.

P
OMEROY TURNED THE
I
SUZU AROUND IN
K
LEIN’S DRIVEWAY
and headed down Parker again. Klein’s truck was gone. If Lorna was home and saw him, so much the better. The phone call
this morning would have unnerved her, especially with her husband still out of the house, probably chasing around through
the hills with the woman next door. Maybe later in the day he’d call her again and let her in on that aspect of Klein’s life,
too. It would certainly be doing her a favor.

He wondered suddenly if he were right about Klein and Beth. The idea had been bothering him all morning. Beth wasn’t like
that, but of course Klein was exactly the kind of man to take advantage of a lonely single woman burdened with a child. What
Beth didn’t need was the poisonous influence of a degenerate like Klein who would take advantage of her being lonely and unprotected.
He searched his mind for some contrary explanation: what had happened to him out in the canyon was just too damned weird not
to be connected to Klein and their little enterprise.

He passed the general store and turned left onto the highway, driving slowly, watching the wind play through the dead grass
at the edge of the schoolyard. As had happened last night, the car seemed to want to navigate, to lead him
somewhere for reasons he couldn’t quite settle his mind on. He saw that a high white streak of cloud-drift angled down the
sky, disappearing behind the hills.

Follow it….

The thought came to him like the wind whispering, and he turned the wheel hard to the left, across the highway in the direction
indicated by the sky. A car honked and swerved around him, and he bumped across the far shoulder and back up onto the road
that led down into Rose Canyon, pulling into the deserted parking lot of Senor Lico’s Mexican Restaurant.

In the back of the lot he cut the engine and sat for a moment in the quiet car, letting the afternoon speak to him. Against
the glare of the windshield he saw the reflection of the slats of wooden siding on the wall of the restaurant, lying one over
the other like the slats of the window shade that hid the interior of her bedroom. He bent his head just a little, peering
into the bar of light where the one slat was caught open, revealing Beth’s bed and the soft curve of her leg, revealing a
world that was separated from him by nothing more than a thin pane of window glass, and yet was as remote as the make-believe
world of a television program. He stood outside in the windy darkness while Beth lay there reading and thinking, her mind
examining bright objects that he couldn’t see or touch.

What separated them, two sensitive people alone in the world? Mere window glass? Chance? Hadn’t chance brought them together
at last? He pictured her shifting her weight on the bed, getting comfortable. The boy was out of the house, gone to his father’s
for a month. Pomeroy stood just outside the partly-open bedroom door. He could feel her loneliness reaching out to him, yearning
for him. She saw him finally, and sat up smiling, pulling modestly at the hem of her T-shirt….

The few houses in Rose Canyon ran nearly parallel to the village of Trabuco Oaks, with just a low-lying ridge of hills in
between. The little day-care center near where he’d
parked last night couldn’t be more than a quarter mile northeast of where he sat right now. The cloud-drift in the sky had
moved on, but had led him to this spot minutes ago as surely as an arrow on a road sign. The dry grass and lone sycamores
on the open land between the two canyons were probably national forest property, and there was no law against his being out
there hiking around.

He got out, holding a topographic map that he unrolled across the hood, flattening it to the blue metal with his hands to
keep it from blowing away in the wind. His heart raced, and he licked his lips and looked furtively around, settling his mind
again on a picture of the back door of Beth’s house, on the shadow that the doorknob had cast across the pale paint in the
moonlight.

The house was empty right now. And its emptiness lent a note of urgency to the afternoon that was heightened by the wind and
the silence. A car turned up the street, and he stared at the map, tracing the contour lines of a set of hills with his finger.
He watched the car turn into a driveway opposite and disappear behind a hedge of oleander. The driver hadn’t even looked up.
Pomeroy waited for the sound of the car door slamming before rolling up the map and tossing it back onto the seat of the car.

He would take a quick look around and then go home. That’s all. It wouldn’t hurt anything to see what things looked like from
the back of Klein’s house. Ignorance in that kind of area could be fatal if things heated up, like last night, for instance.
He clipped the thought off, rolling up the window in the Trooper and locking the doors.

Abruptly he turned and walked the fifty yards to the end of the road, vaulted the barbed wire fence, and headed straight through
the tall grass up the hill, walking quickly but with his hands in his pockets. He ducked in behind a broad sycamore tree and
stood with his back to it, breathing heavily. Ahead of him was nothing but scrub-covered hills and lone trees edging up toward
where the hills steepened, angling away toward the ridge.