Blue Twilight

by Jessica Speart

  “There’s another butterfly dealer whose name keeps popping up. I’d like to talk to him. I have reason to believe that he lives in the area.”

  I paused, hoping Trepler would respond. But his face maintained an expression of pained irritability.

  “Perhaps you can tell me where I can find him. The man goes by the name of Horus.”

  It was as if I’d just said the word Beelzebub, causing Trepler to twitch involuntarily.

  “Then you do know him.” I pounced, as if having already received my answer.

  But Trepler shook his head. “You don’t know what it is that you’re talking about. No such person exists. You’re chasing after a ghost.”

  However, his face was now drawn and his complexion had turned unnaturally pale.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, not believing a word.

  Trepler’s eyes darted from side to side, as if checking for something that wasn’t there. My heart began to sink, realizing that he probably wasn’t Horus.

  “Go ask around town. You’ll eventually figure it out for yourself.”

  Trepler ended our conversation by once again slamming the door in my face.

  I walked down the driveway, past the chickens, who this time clucked We told you so, we told you so.

  Getting in my Ford, I left Portuguese Flats and headed back into the heart of Mendocino. I drove past bed-and-breakfast places and little knickknack stores, all seemingly possessed by Laura Ashley, with their pretty pastel paint jobs and wooden filigree flouncing around windows, porches, and doorways.

  I parked my vehicle on Main Street and followed Trepler’s advice, going in and out of shops to ask if anyone knew of a resident by the name of Horus. The reaction was always the same. People looked at me as though I’d lost my freakin’ mind.

  I finally gave up, bought a sandwich, and decided to eat along the bluffs. I followed a path that continued to wind for miles around the cliffs, feeling as if I’d walked into a painting.

  The wind rippled through long grass that tickled my legs, each of the blades glistening with dew. I tried to carefully tiptoe through bright yellow daffodils and baby blue flowers, their colors as luscious as a Monet painting, but there was no way not to squish a few. Even the sky appeared dreamlike, having been kissed by the passing mist. A steel gray fog bank rolled off in the distance, making the scene all the more intense.

  It’s in these waters that gray whales trek to Baja, California, each February. They migrate back to the Bering Sea with their newborn calves in the spring, traveling a distance of twelve thousand miles round trip. I scanned the horizon now, hoping to spy a whale spout, but none was in sight. Sidling closer to the edge of the cliff, I glanced down at the small strip of beach below.

  Coarse sand was strewn with long strands of kelp and littered with pieces of driftwood. Logs the size of mastodon bones were buffeted about in the turbulent waves. Powerful swells had carved blowholes and grottoes into lichen-streaked cliffs as easily as if they’d been made of Play Doh. A batch of scummy foam bobbed about in a tide pool, where it was held captive, unable to escape.

  Mendocino had the appearance of a prim and proper New England town. Yet I had no doubt that a layer of violence simmered beneath the surface, just waiting to erupt. As if on cue, a wave crashed against the headland with such force that a fine cloud of spindrift shot into the air. It rained down upon me, leaving a salty taste in my mouth.

  Glancing up, I caught sight of a gull frantically flapping its wings, unable to make any headway against the breeze. The hoarse bark of a seal out at sea caught my ear. The creature sounded in distress and I leaned forward a bit more, wanting to see if I could spot it.

  “That’s where it was wrecked.”

  A voice like the rumbling of rocks caught me by surprise and I jerked in reaction. The next thing I knew, I lost my balance on the slippery edge. The situation quickly worsened as stones and soil began to crumble and give way beneath me. My heart lurched into my throat, knowing that I’d never survive such a fall. But there was nothing I could do to steady myself. Instead, I flung my arms out wide, as if hoping to fly, while mentally preparing to tumble. I knew I’d most likely land on the rocks below and drown, as my legs started to slide out from under me.

  I cried out, angry as hell at the turn of events and scared to death all at once. Rather than fall, however, I was plucked from the jaws of death by what could only have been an angel. A pair of strong hands grabbed onto my outstretched arm and pulled me back in the nick of time.

  I was so shaken to the core that my breath came in jagged spurts. I turned to thank my rescuer, only to be further surprised. Standing before me was the homeless man whom I’d seen striding along the cliffs just a few days ago.

  “You need to be more careful, miss. Didn’t you read the signs back there?” he asked, looking concerned.

  His voice churned and reverberated in the air as he bent down to pick up his walking stick.

  “No. I guess I must have missed them,” I replied, taking a giant step back from the edge, still afraid that my quivering legs might buckle beneath me.

  “Well these cliffs are pretty hazardous. You saw that for yourself. Lots of the rims are unstable. We’ve also got what are called sleeper waves around here. They crash real high onto the rocks, much more than normal waves do. People tend to get in trouble when they turn their backs while standing too close to the edge. You never know what can happen. The ocean might just reach up and grab hold of you,” he advised with a straight face.

  “I’ll remember that,” I said, and meant it. “Thanks for saving my life back there.”

  The man nodded, and I noticed that strips of gaffers’ tape covered threadbare spots on his pants and jacket, though his dreadlocks appeared to have been freshly shampooed. They glistened sleek as strings of licorice in contrast to his skin, which looked to be permanently chapped and reddened by the weather.

  “I could really use some company after such a close call. Would you mind sitting with me for a while?” I asked, and motioned to a nearby bench.

  The man remained standing for a moment, as if unsure what to do. Then he finally sat down. I joined him, remembering the sandwich that I’d shoved into my purse. Pulling it out, I offered him half. He accepted and we chewed together in what seemed like perfect syncopation.

  “I’m Rachel Porter,” I volunteered, hoping to break the silence.

  “People call me Big Sam.”

  I furtively glanced at the man, wondering if he was an old white hippie from the sixties who’d once visited Jamaica, smoked too much ganja weed, grown an awesome set of dreadlocks, and never mentally returned. However, that didn’t seem like an appropriate question, so I decided to follow up on something he’d said before my near fall.

  “You mentioned a wreck of some kind. What were you talking about?”

  “The Frolic, of course.”

  I shot him a questioning look, still not understanding what he meant.

  “That’s how the town came to be back in 1850. The Frolic was a schooner loaded with cargo from China. It crashed on the rocks and shifting sandbars in that water. A salvage crew was sent to retrieve whatever bolts of silk and chinaware they could,” Big Sam explained. “Instead they discovered something far more valuable—a huge redwood forest. This was during the Gold Rush, when San Francisco needed lots of building material. J. B. Ford, the schooner’s owner, also happened to be a lumberman. When he heard about the redwoods, old J. B. rushed out here from Maine as fast as a train would carry him and established Mendocino as a logging town.”

  “So that’s why the place looks like a New England village,” I replied, realizing it now made sense.

  Big Sam nodded. “Ford set up a sawmill on these headlands. Only it was quite a trick trying to get the lumber onto those boats and transport it out, what with all the dog holes around here.” He chuckled, as if having witnessed the scene himself.

  “What are dog holes?” I asked, never having heard the term before.
>
  “They’re the rocky inlets and shallow harbors all along this coastline. They earned the name because schooners couldn’t dock safely. The inlets are only large enough for a dog to come in, turn around, and go back out. That’s why they had to design chutes and slides that extended out to sea from the cliffs. Those wooden pilings that you see lying all over the beach? They’re the remains of an old cargo loading system. Mendocino was quite the place back then. In fact, it was known as the original skid row.”

  I took another look at Big Sam, and wondered if he was putting me on. “What do you mean? That there were a lot of down-and-out folks living here then?”

  Big Sam finished the sandwich, pulled a tissue from his pocket, and fastidiously wiped each finger.

  “What I mean is that the poor came to Mendocino looking for work. They ended up sleeping alongside the skids that were used to haul big tree trunks down to the sawmill. That’s how Skid Row first got its name.”

  I was beginning to wonder if Big Sam might have been a history professor at one time. How else could he have known so much about the town? I was toying with that idea when a brainstorm hit me. This was the perfect person to ask about Horus.

  “I’m trying to find a man who lives around here. Maybe you can help me.”

  Big Sam shrugged. “Could be. I know lots of people in the area. What’s his name?”

  “Horus,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t let me down.

  Big Sam looked at me with eyes as tempestuous as the sea. Then he turned and pointed toward town. My eyes skipped from building to building as I tried to follow the direction of his finger, unsure of where it led.

  “Over there. Don’t you see it?” he scolded.

  I looked again, and realized he was directing my attention to the large winged figure holding a sickle. So much for my fantasy that Big Sam was a brilliant academic gone astray. I should have known a homeless man wandering the bluffs wouldn’t be completely lucid.

  “That’s Horus,” he emphatically stated. “Why are you interested? What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent.”

  “So you protect all the animals?”

  “Uh-huh,” I responded, my thoughts focused on how I would ever find Horus.

  “Even little blue butterflies?”

  I tried to take a breath, but all the oxygen in the air had mysteriously disappeared.

  “What do you know about them?” I asked in a scratchy whisper, barely daring to hope that Big Sam held the magical key to their existence.

  “Just that I see them around sometimes.”

  “Where?” I excitedly questioned, my heart starting to race out of control.

  “Everywhere. On the headlands. Fluttering over the waves. Sometimes even flying around in my dreams.”

  Damn! Once again, my eagerness had played me for a fool. Blue butterflies were probably the equivalent of pink elephants to him—the West Coast version of a psychotic hallucination. Even so, I decided to try one last question.

  “Can you tell me who owns the property outside of town that used to be the old Baker place? I think it was called the Sanctuary at one time.”

  “Sure. That belongs to the brother now.”

  The brother? What the hell did he mean? Was Big Sam referring to his own brother? A fraternal brother? Or a soul brother of some kind?

  “What sort of brother are you talking about?” I asked, hoping to straighten out the confusion.

  But Big Sam seemed to have become as impatient with me as I had with him.

  “I’m not gonna to keep answering these dumb questions if you can’t understand a single thing I say,” he grumbled, his mood changing as drastically as the current around the coastline. “I don’t have time to waste. Just leave me alone!” he warned.

  Then he got up and rambled away.

  I watched as Big Sam followed the trail around the bluffs in the late afternoon light until he disappeared from sight.

  I sat for a while longer, listening to the waves crash against the rocks, watching as the dimming light made a final stab at the sky, its pink fingers reaching so deep inside the clouds that it filled them with blood. The sun slowly sank into the Pacific, turning the water a muted lavender. Cormorants made a last dive for dinner, popping back up to the surface with the exuberance of bobbing floats. That’s when I saw what could have been whales. Only the shapes revealed themselves to be massive gray rocks that melted and disappeared in the darkness, and I knew it was time to go home.

  I made my way back to the Ford, buckled on my seat belt, and headed out of Mendocino, leaving its ghosts and secrets behind. What had been a challenge in daylight now proved to be downright harrowing as I maneuvered as best I could along the coast road. Fog billowed toward me from across the Pacific, silent as a pale river, moving stealthily as a cat on the prowl—and I, its unwitting prey. I tried to make good time but couldn’t see where the road ended and the cliffs began, everything having become shrouded in a ghostly mist. As if that weren’t enough, it now began to rain, so that my vision became obscured. Angry drops beat furiously against the windshield with the cumulative force of a thousand tiny fists.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as I turned off Highway 1 and entered the redwood corridor, only to experience fear of a different kind. I’d never before known that darkness could have so many different layers, ranging from murky twilight to impenetrable blackness. However, one thing about the night remains eternally true: The darkness is filled with unseen things that exist solely to taunt you.

  The looming trees surrounding me were no gentle giants, but threatening ogres watching my every move. They joined forces with the fog, which threw itself against my windshield, as determined as a voracious animal. A sharp cry pierced the silence, setting the night on edge. It was the howl of a wraith savagely wailing to get in. I let my mind wander, hoping to escape the ghastly sound, only to have it meander back to the old Baker property.

  I wondered, could the “brother” who now owned the Sanctuary possibly be the same Franciscan brother that Aikens had told me about? Did such a person really exist?

  I was so deep in thought that I nearly jumped straight through the roof as my cell phone rang.

  “Chère, where in the hell are you?” Santou demanded, sounding perturbed.

  Then I remembered: This trip had been so spur of the moment that I hadn’t told anyone.

  “Sorry, Jake. I drove up to Mendocino early today on a hunch, only it didn’t pan out. I’m on my way back home right now.”

  “Next time let me know when you take off like that, chère,” he reprimanded. “For chrissake, it’s bad enough you don’t have any backup. But what if you disappeared like that consultant of yours, and nobody knew where you’d gone? What then?”

  Harmon flit through my mind, and I knew in my gut the man hadn’t run off. The only explanation was that he was dead.

  “I didn’t mean to worry you, Jake. I’ll let you know where I am from now on. Okay?”

  I didn’t bother to add that Harmon had managed to vanish without a trace, even though people had known exactly where he was at the time.

  “All right,” Santou gruffly responded. “I’d appreciate that.”

  I no longer took offense at his chiding over my comings and goings, aware that he’d grown increasingly anxious ever since his accident.

  “Anyway, there’s another reason I called. I dug up some information on Carl Simmons that I think you’ll find interesting.”

  “Really? What is it?” I asked, trying to maintain my focus on the road.

  “The guy’s got one helluva diverse background. He was caught dealing in illegal butterflies during the late seventies, right after a number of them were placed on the endangered species list. You probably wouldn’t have heard about it. He received only a minor slap on the wrist back then.”

  “Naturally. Not that it would be any different today,” I cynically retorted, aware that people still didn’t take the idea of poaching butterflies
very seriously.

  “I discovered something else equally fascinating that should intrigue you. Big Daddy Simmons was a Franciscan brother at one time.”

  “Holy shit,” I uttered, totally floored.

  “Believe it or not, it gets even better than that,” Jake confided. “A complaint was once lodged against him by a runaway. Somewhere there’s a police report.”

  “What!” I exclaimed, nearly driving off the road. “What was the charge?”

  “That’s a tidbit I haven’t been able to uncover yet.”

  I had little time to digest the news, as a pair of bright lights appeared in my rearview mirror from out of nowhere. They swiftly grew in size from burning cigarettes to twin flashlights to two large headlights rapidly bearing down on me.

  “I’ve got to go, Jake. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  “Why? What’s going on, chère?”

  I hung up rather than answer, needing to fully focus on the situation. Whoever was behind the wheel was either drunk, rushing to a hospital, or possibly both. In either case, it made the road all the more dangerous.

  I angled as far to the right as I could, hoping the speed demon would simply pass by. But that wasn’t the vehicle’s intent. Instead it drew close, its brights flooding my side and rearview mirrors as if purposely attempting to blind me. Then there was a forceful bump against my fender, and I was thrown forward onto the steering wheel. Its hard edge angrily bit into my stomach.

  Great. Wouldn’t you know I’d get some joker on my tail that wanted to play? Normally, I’d have been happy to take him on, and leave the sucker in my dust. But I didn’t know the road and visibility was near nil, giving my opponent the homeboy advantage.

  Another powerful thump announced the initial fender bender had been no mistake. I was left with little choice but to speed up and try to outrun my assailant. Flooring the Ford, I cursed Trepler, Horus, and the impervious night, as well as the maniac driving behind me. But that did nothing to stop the twists and turns that gleefully jumped into sight, surprising me at the last possible moment. I gripped the steering wheel tight, as though that would help me stay on the road. But the bends and curves continued to playfully swerve while I struggled to maintain control. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, they seemed to taunt, like a gang of rowdy bullies running wild in a schoolyard.