Night Relics (40 page)

He looked wildly over his shoulder now, and in that moment he tripped and was flung face forward. He threw out both arms to
catch himself and felt the unmistakable snap of bones in his right wrist as he tumbled downward, smashing to a stop against
an almost vertical wall of stone, his breath slamming out of him as if his lungs had collapsed. Wheezing for breath, he managed
to stand up for a moment and stagger a few feet forward before his ankle gave out and he collapsed onto all fours, only to
be jolted by the rushing storm of tumbling, windborne debris that had followed him down from the top of the falls. He was
jerked to his feet, the sticks and limbs and wind working his arms and legs as if he were a spastic puppet, forcing open his
eyes and mouth and nostrils, stopping his breath with dry leaves and sand. Staring up into the sun, he tore at the stuff in
his mouth with the fingers of his good hand, unaware now of the roaring of the wind, of anything but the desperate need to
breathe.

P
ETER AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF A
car engine shutting off nearby. A door slammed, and there was the sound of footsteps on gravel. He looked around in confusion
before knowing where he was—at Beth’s, where he’d collapsed into dreamless sleep some time after midnight. He opened the blinds,
and daylight flooded the room.

“Awake?” Beth asked, pushing the door open a crack.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven. I’ve been down to Benny’s doughnuts. Coffee in a second.”

She shut the bedroom door, then opened it again. “Why don’t you take a quick shower?” she asked, closing the door again.

Peter got out of bed. He was still dressed in his clothes. He glanced in the mirror, unhappy at the reflection. He looked
as if he’d been dragged through the forest by wild pigs.

Beth had a tray set up in the bedroom, the windows open, sunlight streaming in. He sat on the bed and picked through the box
of doughnuts. “No jelly?”

“All out,” she said. “You don’t get to be picky this late in the morning.”

He pulled out a glazed and a strawberry frosted, and Beth took a chocolate-chocolate. “We’re going to get crumbs on the bed,”
Peter said, licking the sugar glaze off his fingers before trying to dust doughnut crumbs off the bedspread.

“Let’s not care about that,” she said. “Let’s eat these doughnuts as if we were millionaires and could buy a hundred bedspreads.”

“Millionaires eat doughnuts different than we do?”

“They just eat more,” she said. “Unlimited doughnuts. That’s one of the attractions of being rich.”

“Where’s Bobby? He ought to be in on this, eating like a rich man.”

“School,” she said. “It’s Monday. Holiday’s over. I arranged for him to spend the night with Julie and Simon. That way you
and I can investigate your house for monsters.”

Peter didn’t say anything. That wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, mixing Beth up in everything. “We’ll see,” he said.

“That’s right,” she said. “We’ll see together.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

She shrugged, as if she didn’t care what he meant.

After a moment he asked, “Why’d you get a dozen?”

“Cheaper.”

He didn’t ask the obvious question, but picked up another doughnut just to do his part. It was going to take a major effort
to make this pay. He looked at the doughnut but couldn’t bear the thought of eating it, so he put it down, noticing just then
a wooden, three-tiered Chinese box that lay on Beth’s dresser. It was lacquered a dark blood-red and painted with white flowers
and viney-looking gold leaves.

“Treasures?” Peter asked her, gesturing at the box with his coffee cup.

“Probably not the kind of treasures you’re thinking of.”

“May I?”

“Knock yourself out. Nothing very exciting to anyone but me.”

It dawned on him suddenly how little he really knew about her—her day-to-day habits, the things that made her laugh and cry.
He removed the lid from the top box. Inside
lay a little collection of baby toys—a plastic rattle in pastel colors, a comical stuffed dog with the name “Binky” embroidered
on it, a chewed-on pacifier, a fuzzy rabbit with a missing ear, a baby’s ID strap from the hospital. He lifted the first box
and looked at the contents of the second.

“More of the same,” Beth said. She picked up a baby bottle with a picture of a duck on it. “This was his last bottle. One
day I told him that when he threw it into the trash he would turn into a boy, with all the baby gone out of him. So he did.
Right then. Didn’t wait more than three seconds. He walked straight into the kitchen and jammed it into the can under the
sink. I started crying, and as soon as he wasn’t looking I took it out and kept it.”

Peter sorted through the dozen or so photos that had lain beneath the bottle—Bobby in all sorts of moods, wearing little hats,
grinning up from his bath in the kitchen sink, toddling across the carpet. “This was taken on his third birthday,” she said.
“I made him a three-layer cake with three colors of frosting.” The photo was cut neatly in half lengthwise. Whoever had been
sitting next to Bobby at the table had been trimmed.

“Cutting-room floor?” Peter asked, remembering the photo on Ackroyd’s wall. Somehow he had never wanted to cut Amanda out
of his life, not that way.

She nodded. “It was Walter. Later, when we were splitting things up, I sent him his half of the photos. I should be ashamed,
shouldn’t I?”

“Clear and effective statement, I’d say.”

“Maybe. But it’s the kind of statement you make when you’re out of your mind. Later on you wish you’d kept your mouth shut.
I’ve got the negatives. Someday I’m going to have a new set printed up.”

“For Walter?”

“For me. I’ll mail him the other half of the ones he’s got.”

Peter picked up a pair of baby shoes, the laces tied together.
He could have worn them on his thumbs. “First shoes?”

“They look like little cartoon shoes, don’t they? Like mice would wear. Check out this bib with the duck on it. He used to
bring this to me when he wanted to eat. He’d just walk up and hand me the bib.” She laughed softly and shook her head. “Don’t
ask me why I save all this stuff. Just nostalgia. Even Bobby thinks it’s silly.”

“I don’t think any of it’s silly,” he said.

“I guess it is a little like a treasure chest or something.”

“Remember the end of ‘Pandora’s Box’? When she lifts the lid and all the evil spirits fly out into the world, and she just
sort of takes it in stride because at least she got all of them out of her house? ‘Now our house harbors only hope,’ she says,
and that’s the end of the story. I wrote that on a piece of paper once and carried it around with me. Finally lost it somewhere.
Turned out not to be true in my situation anyway.”

“I always thought ‘Pandora’s Box’ had an
un
happy ending.

He shook his head. “It looks that way, but then she manages to hold on to the good thing and let go of the rest.”

“She was lucky. With me, all this stuff is more like
The Velveteen Rabbit.
That’s a story I can believe in. I think that all these baby trinkets have a kind of magic power because they belonged to
Bobby. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s not crazy at all. You’re right.” He watched her stack the boxes and set the lid on top, and at that moment he realized
that he loved her. Whatever indecision he’d been muddling through during the last couple of days and weeks vanished. He sat
looking at her, as if he were just now seeing her clearly.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, seeing his face. “You look goggle-eyed all of a sudden.”

“I love you.”

She blinked at him. Saying nothing, she turned toward the dresser, moving the box carefully so as to position it to
precisely cover the dust-free square of mahogany where it had sat ten minutes ago.

He was suddenly sobered. She had no humor at all in her eyes, just a sudden thoughtfulness, as if she’d been reminded of some
long-forgotten regret.

“You’d better say just what you mean,” she said after a moment.

“I just did.”

“You’ve been a little doubtful over the last couple of days.”

“I had the right to be.”

“Probably so. But what happened to all the doubts? Where did they go? Out the window with the bad spirits? Now there’s only
hope left?”

He shrugged, suddenly not trusting himself to speak. “I figured out what I want—what you told me to do yesterday morning,
remember?”

Abruptly she smiled. “Did I advise that?”

He nodded.

“And so this is like the first day of the rest of your life?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Yours, too. Look how it started—sleeping late, waking up to doughnuts and coffee. Not a bad life.”

“That’s what you’ve got planned? You sleep in while I go out for the doughnuts and brew the coffee?”

He picked up the doughnut box and held it open in front of her. “Now this box harbors only leftovers,” he said.

She took it out of his hands and set it on the dresser. Then, shaking her hair back out of her face, she pushed him over backward
onto the bedspread.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING RESTFUL ABOUT THE CANYON—
the blue sky rising above the gray ridge, the north-facing wall dark green with fern and oak. On a Monday morning the place
was empty. It struck him for the first time that he wouldn’t mind having a little cabin back in here himself, maybe along
Holy Jim Creek, although if the park deal went through and the cabin owners had to clear out, then the whole idea would be
bust anyway. And if the park deal
didn’t
go through, well…

He almost wished it wouldn’t now. He could hardly face the months of dealing with the scheme as it got more and more top-heavy.
And as for Pomeroy, he
had
to be … dealt with somehow, once and for all.

He put the idea out of his mind and waved at a bearded man working next to a rusty gate that blocked a road into a little
side canyon. The man nodded to him, taking off his cap and wiping his face with his arm, and Klein shouted, “Must be Miller
time!” at him, hearing the man yell some kind of affirming comment back as the truck rounded the bend. Klein waved once more
out the window, passing the rusted, beat-up hulks of a half dozen abandoned cars and refrigerators and rusting debris that
you couldn’t quite recognize anymore.

He realized that he felt strangely good—clear and sharp. He couldn’t say why, after last night. He seemed to have lost weight
or something, gotten rid of baggage. And he had the feeling that he knew something now that he hadn’t
known before, something he’d learned from Lorna, maybe even from Pomeroy in a roundabout way. He didn’t feel like that very
often, which was probably a character defect. But it was probably a worse defect to think that you didn’t have any defects.
Of course it was a defect thinking like that, because you were secretly proud that there was at least one defect you didn’t
have.

He almost laughed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, the truck dipping across the creek, which ran across the road
some six inches deep. There was a sheer drop of three or four feet on the right, where the creek pooled up into a still pond.
There was something beautiful about it—the dark water beneath the overhanging oaks and alders, a scattering of leaves floating
on it like boats. Probably he was about to be screwed from every conceivable direction, but at least he didn’t have any illusions
about it anymore.

The truck angled up the rise, then swung to the left as he followed the road past the old lower campground. Maybe it was better
to let Lorna do the talking—the demanding—whatever it was she wanted. He would tell her straight out what he knew about last
night, which wasn’t one damned thing, really. There was a lot he hadn’t told her over the years, but as far as he remembered,
he hadn’t made a habit of lying to her, and maybe she’d appreciate that now and take him on faith.

He caught sight just then of a light blue car fender, and he slowed down, creeping up next to an Isuzu Trooper parked just
off the road. Pomeroy. It was a rental, without a doubt the same car he’d been driving yesterday morning. Klein braked to
a stop and sat there considering things, the wind suddenly kicking up dust in front of his bumper. Why out here? The lower
campground lay a good mile or so below the first cabins. There was no way in hell that Pomeroy would park out here and walk
up. He had to be up to something….

A bee flew in through the open window just then, and Klein noticed that there was a swarm of bees just across
the road, buzzing around a hollow tree. He rolled up the window and pulled off onto the turnout, cutting the engine and looking
around at the silent woods. There was no sign of him. The air was quiet, just the wind whispering. Across the creek lay the
trail that led back into Falls Canyon, its entrance nearly hidden by vegetation. That was really the only place Pomeroy could
have gone, unless he was hiding in one of the caves in the hillside….

Wait him out? Klein got out of the car and walked across to the Isuzu, looking in the windows before opening the passenger-side
door. He tripped the glove compartment latch and rooted around inside, pulling out what looked like a toiletries kit. There
was all kinds of crap inside the kit, including some kind of face makeup or cover-up or something. Maybe that wasn’t any kind
of surprise, given Pomeroy’s antics with the underwear yesterday. He flipped through the few papers, finding nothing but a
map and rental car folder containing registration papers and a Triple A pamphlet.

The rest of the car was clean. He shut the door and leaned against it. If Lorna left Ackroyd’s she’d have to drive right past
him to get out, in which case he’d stand in front of her car till she agreed to talk things out. Meanwhile, if Pomeroy showed
up …

He took the .38 out of his pocket, remembering what he’d said to Pomeroy yesterday about dragging him out into the woods and
killing him. The hills were rugged, full of dense brush, thick with coyotes and carrion birds. Even now he could see a half
dozen vultures circling up over the ridge, high in the sky. Nobody paid a damned bit of attention to that kind of thing out
here.