Back on the couch, huddled under the blanket. And the brief scene from yesterday afternoon, when he’d come back inside with the load of wood, replayed again in his memory.
“I want a divorce.”
“… Jesus, you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Like what?”
“Like strangers. You keeping things from me, hiding from me. Two people can’t live together without communicating.”
“Swear to God, it’s not intentional. I don’t mean to shut you out—”
“But you do. Sins of omission, Jay.”
“I love you, you know that—”
“It’s not enough! Once, yes, but not anymore. There’s just too much distance between us. And I don’t see any way to bring us back together.”
He’d tried to tell her then, to rip that one glued down page right out of the Macklin book. The words were all there, a huge glob of them in his throat, choking him. He’d hacked up some of them, a disjointed, fumbling few, but it was too late, he’d waited too long. She didn’t want to listen; clapped her hands over her ears and got up and walked out of the room.
If he’d gone after her, tried again … but he hadn’t. Too late. Nothing he said now would change her mind.
She was dead serious about the divorce, the way she’d acted the rest of the day proved that. Avoiding him for the most part—reading in the bedroom or staring out the oceanfront windows or into the fire while Vivaldi or, worse, Saint-Saëns throbbed gloomily out of the boom box, not answering or responding in monosyllables when he spoke to her. Drinking too much, eating nothing. And then saying in a flat, distant voice that she didn’t want to sleep with him and going to bed early, shutting the bedroom door after her, maybe locking it for all he knew.
He kept telling himself to talk to her anyway, get it all said—keeping everything bottled up at a crisis point like this was senseless, self-destructive, an indication of some sort of dementia. Telling himself it might, it just might, make a difference after all. But he didn’t believe it. The feeling of hopelessness was oppressively strong.
Maybe part of it was the environment here, the close confines of the cottage, the nasty weather. Maybe the familiar atmosphere at home would make it easier to talk, give him a chance to change her mind.
He didn’t believe that, either.
He’d already lost her. Just as he’d lost baseball and the ability to have children and Macklin’s Grotto and the Conray job and everything else that mattered in his life. It didn’t make any difference anymore whether or not he got past this lunatic compulsion to keep things locked up inside. Too late. When she’d said, “I want a divorce,” it had been the marriage’s death knell.
Shelby stayed in the bedroom most of the morning—sleeping, or maybe just avoiding him. How did she feel after yesterday? Happy, sad, relieved? Or as depressed as he was?
He drank two cups of strong black coffee, forced himself to swallow half a glass of grapefruit juice and part of a container of yogurt. Washed and dried the dishes. Tidied up the front room, using the fireplace brush to clean ashes and soot and flecks of bark off the hearthstones. You don’t have to be maid as well as cook. The hell he didn’t. What else had he been good for the past six months? What else was he good for now?
Wrapped in his raincoat, he made a couple of struggling trips through the gale to replenish the firewood supply. The storm was already among the worst he’d encountered; the wind gusts must be forty or fifty miles per hour, shaking the cottage like a dog shakes a bone, bending the trees low to the ground and sending twigs and needles and small torn branches skittering across the lawn and side patio. The rain was like a whipping bead curtain, thick strands of it blown inland at an undulant slant that was almost horizontal. Huge waves lashed the shoreline, gouting up clouds of white; the ocean’s surface was like foam-flecked water boiling in a cauldron.
When he came in with the second carrier of firewood, Shelby was in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee. Still in her bathrobe, hair uncombed, her face pinched and baggy-eyed. She hadn’t slept any better than he had.
He said tentatively, “I can make you some breakfast.”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat something …”
“Later.”
He’d left the drapes closed over the windows; Shelby opened them, then folded herself into one of the facing chairs and stared out at the rain-distorted view.
Tell her, he thought as he unloaded the carrier into the wood box. Go ahead, do it now. But it was a dull thought, without resolve. The sense of fatalism overwhelmed him again and he said nothing. It was as if he were trying to fight his way out of restraints, a goddamn mental straightjacket that had his will bound and helpless.
Long day ahead. Long, long day.
At one thirty the power went out.
They knew it immediately because Shelby had switched on the floor lamp next to her chair. As soon as the bulb went dark, she said, “Perfect. Just perfect.” The baseboard heater made one last pinging noise, like a death rattle. “Perfect,” she said again, and stood to close the drapes while Macklin got a fire going.
Shelby poured her first glass of wine a little after two o’clock. Sure sign of how troubled she was; she seldom started drinking so early in the day. But he didn’t say anything to her about it. There was nothing to say and even if there had been, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She hadn’t spoken to him since the power outage; it was as if he weren’t even there.
Misery loves company. Where had he heard that recently? Oh, right, from Paula Decker on Sunday night. Well, it was bullshit. Misery didn’t love company; misery wanted to be alone, curled up in some dark corner with a blanket over its head.
Paula Decker. And Gene Decker, suddenly dead, another victim of the Coastline Killer. He’d never known a victim of violence before, random or otherwise. Only met the wine salesman once and hadn’t liked him, but still a human being he’d had brief contact with just a few nights ago. Nobody deserved to die the way Decker had, with a psycho’s bullet in his brain. Frightening and unsettling, when that kind of random lunacy touched your life like this.
He wondered again how Paula was taking the news. It couldn’t be an easy thing to deal with, no matter how she’d felt about her husband. As bad as things were for Shelby and him right now, Paula was a lot worse off. Claire Lomax, too. Always somebody worse off than you are.
Yeah, he thought, but you don’t have to live their lives. The only life you have to live, the only visceral misery you have to face, is your own.
Three o’clock.
The storm was massive now, roaring and rampaging like the dream creature, assaulting everything in its path. Hurricanes were unheard of on the California coast, but this was what Macklin imagined the beginnings of one must be like. They were probably safe enough forted up in here, but there was no certainty of it; when one of the stronger wind gusts slammed into the cottage, the walls and windows shimmied from the impact.
As early as it was, most of the daylight was already gone. A thin puddinglike gloom had settled around them, relieved somewhat by the firelight and the rows of candles Shelby had set out. But all the flames flickered and wobbled, creating restive shadows; both cold air and dampness had seeped in past the weatherstripping on windows and doors and lingered despite the fire’s heat. The atmosphere was oppressive. As if he and Shelby were the only two silent mourners in a storm-battered funeral home.
He said, “I can’t stand listening to that much longer. How about putting some music on?”
“Let’s see if we can get a news broadcast first.”
She switched on the boom box, fiddled with the radio dials. Static, mostly, on the AM and FM stations. She managed to tune in a local station whose announcer was giving a storm report, something about a bad slide that had closed Highway 1 near Anchor Bay, but it broke up into static after half a minute or so. Briefly she switched over to the po
lice band. More storm-related chatter—road blockages, a traffic accident in Point Arena. Nothing about the Coastline Killer. Why would there be? Even a psycho wasn’t demented enough to go out looking for people to shoot on a night like this.
Shelby said, “Find a CD you want to listen to,” and headed to the kitchen for a wine refill. Macklin stood up, thinking he might as well join her—self-defense, to take the raw edge off his nerves—and that was when he heard the sudden boomlike cracking sound.
It came from outside during a brief lull in the wind squalls, loud enough to override the tempest. His first thought was a thunderclap. But no, it had been different—
In the next second there was another blast of sound, this one of a crashing collision that shook the floor, rattled the furniture.
“My God,” Shelby said from the kitchen, “that felt like an earthquake.”
“Couldn’t have been. No shaking.”
“Close, whatever it was. Somewhere out front.”
“I’d better go have a look,” he said. “You stay here—no use both of us getting wet.”
He hurried to the utility porch, dragged his raincoat off the hook, shrugged into it; pulled on his waterproof gloves and jammed the rain hat down over his head. Then he grabbed the flashlight, just in case; unlocked the door and opened it just far enough to squeeze his body through.
Out on the patio the banshee wind almost bowled him over as he struggled ahead to the gate. A rain-laden gust ripped it out of his hand, hurled it against the dripping shrubbery on the other side. He staggered through and down the drive onto the lane.
The blacktop’s surface was littered with needles, cones, boughs, bare limbs; a runnel as wide as a small stream paralleled it on the inland side. Macklin swung the flash beam left, then right, slatting rain out of his eyes. Dimly, then, through the sodden half-daylight, he saw what had happened, what lay some fifty yards ahead to the south. He took half a dozen faltering steps in that direction before he stopped and stood bent and staring, his jaw clenched so tightly small shoots of pain radiated up both sides of his face.
Down tree. Big one aslant across the lane, blocking it just beyond where the Coulter property joined that of the neighboring estate.
Macklin pushed ahead for a closer look, stopping again within a few yards of the fallen tree—a dead bull pine from the woods on the inland side, its trunk encased in some sort of parasitic vine, its upthrust branches bare except for rows of decaying cones. Vine leaves, loose cones, snapped-off limbs littered the lane and the soggy ground along its length. The upper branches had collapsed a section of the estate’s border fence; the lower end of the splintered trunk was half-hidden among the standing pines, cracks in the asphalt radiating out from under its middle section. The lane was completely blocked. It didn’t look like you could even walk around the damn thing on either side, you’d have to climb over it.
He’d seen enough. He battled the wind back to the cottage, pushed his way inside, shouldered the door shut behind him. Shelby was waiting next to the dinette table.
She said, “What was it? A falling tree?”
“Yeah. Across the lane near the end of the property.”
“You mean we can’t get out?”
“No way to drive around it on either side. I’ll see if I can get through to emergency road service on my cell.”
“Don’t bother. I tried mine Monday morning—no signal.”
He tried anyway. Nothing. Dead.
Shelby said, “Is there any way to push the tree off with the car?”
“Doubt it, too big and heavy.”
“With two cars? I think that SUV we saw belongs to the Lomaxes.”
“Maybe.” But he didn’t believe it. The pine bole was thick and the splintered end had looked to be wedged between the trunks of the pines surrounding it. “There’s a better way. If Ben has a gas-powered chain saw, we ought to be able to cut through the upper end once the storm passes.”
“Maybe in that locked shed behind the carport.”
“I’ll go see. There’s a bunch of keys on a hook in the kitchen—one of them ought to open the padlock.”
He took the keys and the flashlight out into the thick, ropy downpour. Stood hunched in front of the shed door, the flash tucked under his arm with the beam steady on the padlock. Among the keys were two small ones; the second fit the lock. But the staple was rusty and it took him a minute to free it from the case. He shined the light inside the shed.
Gardening tools—pick, shovel, rakes, trowels. Dull-bladed ax that a lumberjack wouldn’t be able to wield effectively. Electric weed-whacker. Hedge clippers, a long-handled tree saw. Handsaws, hammers, and other small tools. A wheelbarrow, a push broom, a pile of roofing shingles, a clutter of useless odds and ends. Everything you needed for the maintenance of a cottage like this except a chain saw and the gas necessary to run it.
He closed up the shed, leaving the padlock hanging unclosed through the hasp, and struggled back to the cottage. “No chain saw,” he told Shelby.
“Lomax is a builder. He’s liable to have one.”
“Yeah.”
“He’ll have to be told in any case. They wouldn’t have heard or felt the tree come down—they’re too far away.”
“Might as well do it right now, while there’s still some daylight left.”
“You want me to go? You’ve been out twice already—”
“No, I’ll do it. I’m already soaked.”
Out into the blow for the third time, running bent to the carport. All he’d need now was for the car not to start … but that didn’t happen, the engine caught on the first turn of the key. He backed out onto the lane, got the Prius turned and moving—toward the fallen tree first, to see if there was any chance of moving it alone.
The wind slammed into the car with enough force to rock it from side to side; he had to take a tension grip on the wheel to hold it steady. The wipers, on high speed but with the one blade still sticking, were barely able to keep the windshield clear of sluicing rainwater. He hunched forward with his nose only a few inches from the glass and his eyes slitted; it was the only way he could follow the jittery path of the headlights.
When he neared the tree, he eased off to the right—letting the high beams pick out a place where he could nose up against it. If there was any chance of moving it, it would have to be at the slender upper end.
No chance at all. The blacktop was too slippery and cone-littered, the trunk too thick and its base too tightly wedged. The Prius’s rear tires couldn’t gain traction, spun futilely; the pine didn’t budge an inch.
Macklin jammed the gearshift into reverse, backed carefully to the cottage drive; turned and headed the other way.
House lights swam up out of the liquidy dusk; the Lomaxes’ auxiliary generator was still working. But as he neared the entrance drive, Macklin saw that the gates across it were closed. He braked alongside, left the engine running as he got out.
The gates, their stanchions anchored into socket holes in the blacktop, weren’t just closed, they were also chained and padlocked together. He caught hold of the two halves, shook and stretched them apart with enough force to rattle the chain. That created a gap between them, but it was too narrow for him to fit through.
He peered through the opening. No outside lights, no interior lights visible in the front part of the house. The ones he’d seen from down the lane filtered out from the living room at the rear. The bulky shape of the SUV loomed dark and dripping on the parking area.
He switched the flashlight on, aiming the ray at the front door of the house. It wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the downpour, and there was still enough daylight left to dilute the beam, but if either of the Lomaxes looked out this way they ought to be able to see it. He waggled the flash from side to side, up and down. Kept doing that for more than a minute, without getting any kind of response.
Finally he gave it up, slid back into the Prius and swiped trickling rivulets out of his eyes and off his face. It took
him three tries to position the car so that it was facing the gates. They were made of solid wood, but the high-beam glare penetrated the gap between the two halves and shone glistening off the curtain of rain. He flicked the lights on and off, on and off, a dozen times.
That didn’t get him anywhere, either. Even if Lomax noticed the signaling, he wasn’t coming out.
In frustration he leaned hard on the horn. More wasted effort; they wouldn’t be able to hear it through the wind shrieks and the ocean’s roar. He pounded the wheel with his fist. He was wet, cold, wired up as taut as a guitar string. And his breathing was off a little, coming short and painful, the same as in the aftermath of one of the nightmares; he hadn’t noticed it until now.
The hell with it. Tomorrow was soon enough to tell Lomax about the blocked lane, find out if he had a chain saw. None of them was going anywhere until then anyway.
S I X T E E N
THREE OF THE CANDLE flames had been snuffed by the incoming blast of wind when Jay shoved his way through the door. Shelby got the box of matches, relit the wicks. Still murky in there, like the gloom in an underground grotto, and it wasn’t even full dark outside yet; shadows and clots of blackness seemed to lurk beyond the edges of light from the candles and the fire. She was feeling the old fear of dark, empty places again. It never bothered her when she worked night shift on the ambulance; there were always lights, people, movement. But when she was alone in a closed-in environment like this, the fear crawled up out of her subconscious and scraped on her nerves, built an edgy restlessness.
The storm made it worse, screeching out there like all the pain cries from all the accident victims she’d ever heard combined. So did the fallen tree blocking the lane, trapping them. So did what had happened to Gene Decker. She’d had plenty of experience with death; watched Mom die by degrees, watched strangers die at scenes of mangled metal and flesh or in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. But proximity to cold-blooded murder was something new and unsettling.
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