Riptide (4 page)

Some cops appreciated her contribution. Some didn’t. Most, like Roy Draper, utilized her insights while remaining skeptical of her methods. Resistance, she thought, arose mainly because people didn’t want to believe that they revealed themselves with everything they said and wrote. What she did was too much like mind reading—a scary prospect for people who wanted to keep secrets.

And everybody had secrets. She touched her left arm, feeling the scar beneath her sleeve. Everybody.

Her arm began to shake. She watched it, bewildered. Then she became aware that the examination table was shaking, too.

The whole damn room was shaking.

A wrenching jolt slammed the table to the left, knocking the lamp askew. Her chair pivoted under her. Somewhere nearby came the tinkle of breaking glass. Her UV light, which could reveal erasures and scratched-out words, had fallen.

“Hell,” she muttered. The lighting element was expensive and a pain to replace.

The table lurched again with a prolonged burp of its legs against the hardwood floor. Car alarms, jostled by the quake, began a clangor of honks and whoops on the street.

And then it was over. The last of the tremors passed away, rolling underneath the house like a slow comber spending itself on the beach. She sat and listened as the car alarms hit their automatic cutoffs one by one. Then there was stillness.

Slowly she released a breath. Though she had grown up in Los Angeles, she had never gotten used to earthquakes. It wasn’t a fear of being crushed under debris. It was more basic than that.

four

The house was still standing. Jennifer verified as much with a walk-through of the ground floor.

Her power was on. Ditto her phone. In the living room her collection of sea glass, the product of years of studious beach-combing, had been dislodged from the fireplace mantle, dropping like hailstones onto the flagstone apron. The jars holding her treasures had shattered, but the sea glass itself—broken glassware from shipwrecks, tumbled and sanded smooth by wave action—appeared undamaged.

The photos lining the wall of the stairwell had been jostled from their hooks. They lay scattered on the steps. For an instant she was back in Marilyn Diaz’s bedroom, looking at the framed snapshots on the floor.

From the streets came the distant wail of a siren. Fire engine or ambulance. In quakes, gas mains broke and people had heart attacks. A second siren arose, competing with the first.

Upstairs she found two fallen lamps in the bedroom and a thin but worrisome crack snaking up the plaster wall. The view from the deck revealed a few red roof tiles strewn in the backyard. Her power had failed momentarily, and the display screen of her DVR was blinking.

She went downstairs, tuned the kitchen TV to Channel 4—her cable hadn’t gone out—and watched enough of the coverage to learn that the quake was a relatively minor 5.2 on the Richter scale. Preliminary reports indicated that Venice received the worst of the shaking. The newscasters reminded viewers to check for gas leaks. Jennifer sniffed. No sour smell.

She wondered if she should look in on her neighbors. But she didn’t know any of them.

One thing she could do was call Richard. She was reaching for the phone when she remembered the cellar.

Cellars were rare in southern California, except in older homes. In the early 1900s Venice had been populated largely by transplants from the Midwest, people who grew up with storm cellars and fruit cellars. They wanted the kind of houses they were used to.

The entry to the cellar was a trapdoor in the floor of the pantry, next to the kitchen. Kneeling, she grasped the handle and pulled it open. On the underside of the trapdoor was a dead bolt that could secure the cellar from the inside. She had never understood why anyone would feel the need to do that.

A stairway plunged into darkness. When she flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs, nothing happened. The bulb in the ceiling had burned out. She hadn’t known. The cellar was musty and claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been down there in years.

From the kitchen she retrieved a flashlight, then returned to the trapdoor and angled the beam down the stairs. The cone of light picked out a brick wall wreathed in cobwebs and a concrete floor strewn with dead insects. No damage was visible from this vantage point.

She descended the creaking stairs, inhaling the odor of mildew. At the bottom she let her eyesight adjust to the dimness, then stepped forward into the gloom. Dry beetles crackled under her shoes.

Slowly she fanned the flashlight beam over the grimy walls and along a ceiling crisscrossed with exposed plumbing pipes. The room measured nine by thirteen feet, and the ceiling was uncomfortably low. It occurred to her that an aftershock could take place at any time, and underground would be the worst place to be.

At the center of the cellar, she turned in a slow pivot, her flashlight coming to rest on the wall below the staircase.

Part of the wall had crumbled, the old bricks tumbling out to expose a dark cavity three feet wide.

Here was genuine damage, which she couldn’t afford. Like most Angelenos she had no earthquake insurance, trusting that the Big One would hold off for her lifetime.

She played the beam along the underside of the staircase, wondering if she should be worried about the stairs collapsing under her when she went back up. But they looked secure enough. It was only the wall that had failed, and not much of the wall, at that. Possibly she wasn’t looking at more than a minor repair job.

She moved closer to the wall. Something was inside. Something yellowish, whorled in cobwebs, a strangely complicated assemblage of shapes. Straight lines and curves and acute angles...

Bones.

That was what she saw. Not the small bones of vermin. These were human remains. A human skeleton, entombed in the wall.

She didn’t react in any particular way. The reality of what she was seeing was too difficult to process.

Her flashlight picked out a jawless skull, the eye sockets strangely white, not hollow, as if cloudy eyeballs still occupied the holes. There were no eyes, of course, only layers of gossamer spinnings from a succession of insects who had cocooned in the sockets.

Eerie, though—how the eyes seemed to watch her. How the milky strands of webbing reflected the flashlight’s glow.

She felt her first twitch of panic. She jerked the flashlight away from the skull, letting the beam fall elsewhere inside the cavity.

Another pair of eyes.

Two
skeletons.

Suddenly it seemed important to make no sudden moves. She was on the brink of a precipice. She must tread with care.

She guided the flashlight to the left and came across a third skull and a fourth. Behind those, there were others. How many in all? She couldn’t tell. A half dozen, at least. Interred here, in the cellar under her house.

Somebody had broken a hole in the wall and dug out an earthen cavity about two feet deep, then deposited the remains and sealed them inside. Probably the reconstructed portion hadn’t been as strong as the original, so it had failed when the rest of the cellar had held up.

She counted six skulls. There might be more. She couldn’t be certain. The bones were disarticulated, disarranged. A spoils heap.

The bones were mottled in mold. Some had crumbled into whitish gray powder. They were old. Decades old.

She didn’t know if her great-grandfather was the original owner of the house. But if he was…

five
 

As a child, Jennifer occasionally had the sense that her life was a movie and she was watching it. She had the same feeling now, as she climbed out of the cellar—a strange conviction of unreality. She lowered the trapdoor and knelt there, running her palm over the smooth wood, simply to feel something firm and solid.

It was hard to keep her thoughts clear. There were bodies in her cellar. She had to do something about that. There must be some action she could take.…

But first she had to check on Richard.

She called his number, letting the phone ring for over a minute. No answer.

He had to be home. He never went anywhere. He hated walking the streets, and he had neither a driver’s license nor a car. She saw to it that food and other essentials were delivered to his door.

She called twice more with the same result, then tried the building manager. Brusquely he assured her that everything was fine. “The place didn’t fall down, okay? It wasn’t that that big of a quake. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get back to work, okay? And hey, your crazy brother’s late on his rent again. It’s due on the first of the month,
every
month. Okay?”

Click.

That wasn’t good enough. She needed to know why Richard wasn’t answering his phone.

She dug her keys out of her pants pocket—she never carried a purse, too much of an encumbrance—and left the house through the kitchen door, entering the garage, a 1940s add-on. Raising the garage door, she scanned the street for signs of damage.

The day was bright and cool, the morning fog long gone. Seagulls flocked around an overturned curbside trash can. A For Sale sign stood on the sandy front yard of Mr. Beschel’s house down the street; the owner himself had already moved to an island off the Washington coast. Taggers’ marks and gang intaglios defaced tree trunks and utility poles.

There were no downed utility lines, no fires. Her street had come through unscathed. She heard the Rottweiler howling, disturbed by the event. She hoped the little boy and his mother weren’t too badly shaken up.

Her Toyota Prius was undamaged. She drove north, her radio tuned to KFWB. The newscasters were saying that the quake’s epicenter was in Culver City, on the western end of the Puente Hills Fault. Another segment of the same fault line had ruptured in 1987, damaging ten thousand structures citywide and causing eight fatalities. Today’s event was much smaller. So far there were no reported deaths.

Two blocks north of her address, a crowd of people were holding an impromptu barbecue, using up whatever meat and poultry they had on hand because their power was out. That was the thing about earthquakes—the damage was always scattershot, hopscotching from street to street.

Driving through Venice, she saw additional signs of hard shaking. Though the epicenter was several miles to the east, the coastal areas were particularly vulnerable to seismic waves. The tremors could literally churn the sandy soil into quicksand. Venice, built on swampland, faced the most serious hazard.

She passed the splintered remnants of someone’s deck, which had plunged onto the patio below. Farther down the block, a front gate had been wrenched askew, while across the street a palm tree had canted into the side wall of a two-story Mediterranean home.

All around her there was the same uncanny quiet she remembered from the aftermath of other quakes. Birds did not sing. There was an eerie calm, surreal as the stillness in the eye of a hurricane.

She put these thoughts out of her mind. It was best to be alert. She was entering Dogtown.

In the 1970s, when Venice had been a sprawling seaside ghetto with redevelopment still decades away, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods was the no-man’s-land straddling the district’s border with the city of Santa Monica. Some quirk of the law had left the jurisdiction of the area north of Navy Street and south of Pier Avenue undecided. Since neither the Santa Monica Police Department nor the LAPD could confidently claim authority there, the narrow slice of coastal land had gone largely unpatrolled.

Some of Dogtown had been reclaimed by the developers, but not all. The Oakwood neighborhood, in particular, was a nest of blight where tenacious gangbangers hung on in rent-controlled apartments while new buildings went up around them. The new arrivals lived behind locked doors, protected by security fences and dogs—like her new neighbors, she realized. Maybe Richard’s neighborhood wasn’t so different from hers, after all.

She parked outside the Oakwood Chateau, a ridiculously misnamed Art Deco pile, three stories of peeling paint and rusted fire escapes. The building had a security door and an intercom system, but both were broken, as usual. She entered the sour-smelling lobby and found an out of order sign tacked to the elevator. She didn’t want to ride the elevator, anyway. Being trapped in a confined space wasn’t the safest strategy in the Oakwood Chateau, and not just because of aftershocks.

She took the stairs. In the past she had sometimes encountered people sleeping on the landings, but today the stairwell was empty, any sleepers presumably having been roused by the quake. Weak bulbs screened by wire cages cast a dull yellowish glow over the concrete steps and graffiti-covered walls.

On the third floor she exited into the hallway. Most of the apartments had their doors open for a cross breeze. The screams of crying infants and the blare of television sets in many languages assaulted her.