The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  The road curved at the foot of the hill, winding out toward the desert.

  The houses here were farther apart, with stretches of sand in between.

  In his parents' time, this had really been the boonies, and the school bus had had to make a special trip out this way just to pick up him and Rich. More homes had been built since then, but this was still the least populated section of Rio Verde, and cactus here still far outnumbered people. Most of the time he liked it this way--it meant he could crank up his stereo to maximum volume without disturbing his neighbors; it meant he could target practice in the desert behind his house without fear of hitting anything but rocks but sometimes he felt isolated from the rest of the town, from the rest of the world, and at those times he wished that, instead of buying Rich out, he had sold the old homestead and both of them had moved closer to town.

  He swung the car next to his mailbox, rolled down the window, and checked to see if he'd gotten any mail. Pulling out three bills, he tossed them on the passenger seat next to him, then drove over the old boards that covered the culvert, and pulled to a stop on the dirt driveway in front of the toolshed.

  As always, the house was empty, the living room dark and silent as he walked through the door. He had been alone longer than he'd been married, but somehow he'd gotten used to certain aspects of married life and had never been able to wean himself of them.

  One was coming home to a warm lighted house.

  He threw his keys on the coffee table and turned on the lights in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The house seemed quieter than usual, and he walked over to the TV and turned it on, grateful for some noise. On HBO, a police detective was inviting a pretty young woman back to his apartment.

  He went into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the television. He could not remember the last time he'd invited a woman over. There had been a few after Julie, one-night sluts he'd corralled in the roper bars, but those he'd brought home more for spite than pleasure, as ammunition to use as return fire in case he and Julie ever got back together again.

  They never had gotten back together, though, had never even seen each other after, that last court appearance, and he had gradually stopped bagging the bimbos, realizing that there was no point to it.

  The frightening thing was that he did not really miss them. Sex had just sort of drifted out of his life, and he had not even cared. He could not even remember the last time he'd beat off.

  He sat down on the couch, feeling depressed.

  Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't just wasting his life in Rio Verde.

  He had never lived anywhere else, had never even been out of Arizona for more than a few days at a time, and he wondered what it would be like to move to a different state. Rich often told him he was lucky not to have made the mistakes he himself had made in moving away, but Robert wondered. Rich was different, always had been. Rich could be happy in prison if he had enough books to read. He, on the other hand, lived in the real world more than in his mind, and he needed physical, material things to make him happy.

  Periodically, he toyed with the idea of running away: packing a suitcase and taking off, not telling anyone, not looking back. It was a nice dream, but that's all it was. The idea was romantic enough to appeal to him, but he was practical enough to know that it could never be anything more than a fantasy. He had responsibilities here. He wasn't some nobody who would not be missed, He was the damn police chief.

  And there was a murderer at large.

  A vampire.

  He finished off the beer and dropped the can into the wastebasket. He remembered that he'd told Ted he would turn off the answering machine.

  Reaching over the arm of the couch, he switched the phone over to manual. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to watch TV for a few minutes, but he felt restless, fidgety, and he kept flipping the channels, unable to concentrate on anything. Finally he stood up and walked outside.

  The night was warm, the slight chill that had infiltrated the past few evenings gone. He stood at the edge of the porch, leaning on the railing, and looked up at the stars. Venus was visible, and the Big Dipper, and the belt of Orion, but the light of the moon had forced many of the minor stars to fade into blackness. His eyes moved from the sky to the ground. To the north, he saw an army of multi armed saguaro silhouetted in front of the faint glow of town lights. He shifted his weight, and a porch board creaked, scaring the cicadas into silence. From the area out toward ppache Peak came the faint howl of a far-off coyote, a lonely eerie sound that, even after a lifetime of desert living, he still associated with horror movies. Vampires.

  The chill returned, and as he glanced around, he realized that because of the lay of the land, he could not even see the lights of his neighbors' houses from the porch. The coyote howled again, its cry low but clear even above the buzzing of the restarted cicadas.

  Shivering, Robert walked back inside the house, locking the door behind him.

  Corrie dropped Anna off at preschool, then stopped by the video store to return the tapes they'd rented over the weekend. She was supposed to have dropped the tapes off yesterday, but she hadn't felt like doing it, and they'd sat in the backseat of the car until now. She'd been low and kind of melancholy for the past few days, and, truth be told, hadn't felt like doing much of anything. Usually, when she felt down, she was able to cheer herself up by reading or exercising or playing with Anna, but lately her mood seemed to remain constant no matter what she did, and she could not figure out why. She'd thought originally that it might be PMS, but she'd checked her calendar and that was still a week and a half away.

  It was Rich, she decided. It was their relationship. They were drifting apart.

  Or rather, she was drifting. :;

  Rich was staying exactly where he'd always been, anchored securely in place.

  The problem was that she did not seem to be drifting toward anything.

  She had toyed with the idea of going back to school to get her Master's. She had even halfheartedly considered having an affair. But nothing sounded good, nothing seemed right. Rich, of course, was oblivious to it all. He was as happy as ever, puttering around with his little paper, writing feature stories on ranchers who were making methane gas from steer manure and little old ladies who had once dated the cousins of B-movie actors. She didn't know if he actually thought his job was important, but she knew that he was content with it. He had no desire to do anything more ambitious, no desire to be anything more than the unread chronicler of these unlived small-town lives. And there was nowhere he would rather be than Rio Verde.

  She wanted more. She'd known that from the beginning, from the first time he'd brought her back to this town to meet his brother. She'd tried to make a go of it for Rich's sake. She could see how much this meant to him, she knew how much he'd hated California, and she'd wanted him to be happy. But, damn it, she deserved to be happy too, and perhaps it was time for him to do a little sacrificing for her.

  And for Anna.

  She was not sure what she wanted for their daughter.

  She wasn't sure Rich was either. She could see his point about the crime and the drugs and the gangs in the cities, but she knew that he could see her point about the intellectual disadvantages of small-town life as well.

  She sighed. Great parents they were turning out to be. The bottom line was that she was not happy. It was time for a change. Even if she didn't know what that change was. Something in her life had to be altered. She was feeling stifled, smothered, though by what she didn't know. She did know that if something was not modified soon, she was liable to crack under the pressure.

  It had occurred to her more than once recently that she should try to find another job, get away from Rich and the paper and do something separate, on her own. She had not mentioned this to Rich, but the more she thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed to her. A new job might not solve all of her problems, but it might be a step
in the right direction.

  She stopped at the crosswalk by the post office, waiting for an old cowboy to cross the road, and looked past the end of the street to the flat desert beyond. To the right, she could see into the unfenced backyards of houses on the next street over: colored shirts and ragged white underwear hanging on crooked clotheslines, rusted cars and parts of cars sinking into sandy lots, discarded bikes and Big Wheels strewn carelessly about depressingly under grown lawns.

  God, this was an ugly town ..... An ugly dying town. Despite the influx of Phoenicians on summer weekends, despite the presence of the Rocking D, Rio Verde was slowly but surely turning ghost. It had never been a thriving business community or cultural showplace, but with the closing of the mine in the late eighties and the loss of jobs, what little economic stability the town possessed had been decimated. Rio Verde could not survive on tourism alone, particularly not the kind of weekend recreational tourism attracted to this area of the state, and gradu!!y businesses had started to bite the dust as people began to look elsewhere for work. In the past year alone, three stores had closed, and there were now six empty buildings in the two-mile stretch that constituted the downtown business district

  The old cowboy reached the curb, and Corrie applied pressure to the gas, moving forward. She turned left at the next corner, onto Center, and slowed down in front of the care, pulling into the parking lot of the newspaper office.

  She was conscious of another feeling beneath the vague discontent and dissatisfaction. read. A murky, intuitive premonition that disaster was on its way. Her mind skittered over the emotion, preferring not to dwell on it. The feeling was strange and darkly alien, having nothing to do with Rich or herself or their relationship but with something bigger, something on the order of an earthquake or a war, and though it scared her to even consider the source of such a strong but undefined impression, she could not help but wonder if this feeling of dread was somehow contributing to her own personal sense of un She turned off the ignition and grabbed her purse from the seat next to her, getting out of the car, locking it, and walking around the side of the building to the front entrance. She nodded to the receptionist as she entered.

  "How are you today, Carole?"

  The older woman smiled. "It's still too early to tell. Ask me again after lunch." ,

  ""Ah, one of those days." Corrie smiled at the receptionist and walked around the modular office divider that separated Carole's desk from the newsroom. Rich, as usual, was on the phone, scribbling furiously on a scratch pad he had somehow managed to find amidst the mountain of paper before him, and he waved good morning to her as she dropped her purse on the desk against the opposite wall. Ordinarily, she would have sat down and sorted through her mail to see if there were any items of local interest that she could put in one of the columns she edited, but today she simply leaned against the desk and waited for Rich to get off the phone.

  She found herself looking around the newsroom, at the paste up tables at the far end, at the printer, waxer, and dryer, and she realized for the first time how truly sick she was of this place. She stared at the wall decorations-one Pena print, an aerial photograph of the town, and two framed issues of the paper that had won minor awards in the Arizona Press Association's annual newspaper competition-and wondered why she had never put her own stamp on this room, why she had never attempted to decorate even her own desk area.

  Perhaps because she had never considered it hers.

  There was a crackle of static from the police scanner on the shelf above Rich's desk, and he automatically reached up to increase the volume as he continued speaking on the phone. The police dispatcher recited a list of garbled numbers, then fell silent. Rich once again turned down the volume.

  A moment later he hung up the phone, and she walked over to his desk.

  "We need to talk," she said, sitting down in the chair opposite him.

  He frowned. "What's wrong? .... She looked at him, sighed, and shook her head.

  "Rich," she said, "I want to get a job."

  "What do you mean? You have a job."

  "No, a real job. One where I get paid. I'm tired of having to scrimp and save for every little thing. I'm tired of only eating food that we can get on double coupons."

  "But I need someone to help me paste up and type out the columns. If you get another job, I'll just have to find someone else to take your place, and that'll cost us even more."

  "No, it won't. I'll get a full-time job, you hire a part-time person.

  You only need someone one or two days a week.

  Besides, you'll be teaching. That'll bring in some extra cash."

  "But what about Anna?"

  "She gets off school at noon. You can pick her up and let her hang around the paper with you. Or we'll see. It depends on my hours." ;"

  :

  He shook his head. "Well, what kind of job are you thinking of getting? The economy in Rio Verde is not exactly booming. You think there's actually an opening in this town for a woman who got her degree in Liberal Studies?"

  She met his gaze. "That's not the point."

  "Then what is the point?"

  "I want another job. Away from you. Away from the paper."

  "Why?"

  "Because if I don't," she said, "I'll go crazy."

  They stared at each other across the desk. Rich broke the stalemate first, shrugging, picking up his pen. "Fine." His voice was resigned, his attitude dismissive, and though he sounded as though he was too weary to continue arguing with her, she knew from experience that this meant he was going to emotionally cut himself off from the rest of the family for the next week or so, speaking only when spoken to, spending most of his time alone in the den, hiding. Pouting.

  Right now, that suited her fine.

  She stood. Part of her wanted to make an effort to ex plain things more clearly to him, to try to make him understand what she was going through, even though she didn't really understand herself, but another part just wanted to take the path of least resistance and that was the part that won out. "I guess I'd better start looking then." .. "Let me know if you find anything."

  She nodded. "I will. And I'll pick up Anna after school." She walked over to her desk and picked up her purse. She was about to walk out and throw a short "good bye" over her shoulder, but something made her stop. She tried to smile at him. "We'll talk about this later, okay?"

  Rich was already writing on his scratch pad and did not even look up.

  "Fine. Whatever you say."

  She stood there, waiting for something more, but it was obvious that nothing was forthcoming, and she started walking.

  "Good luck!" Carole called out to her as she walked out the door.

  "Wait a sec. He just walked in." Steve put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone as Robert stepped into the office. "Chief?

  I've got a woman here who thinks she might've seen the guy who killed Torres."

  "Who is it?"

  "Someone I don't know. She said her name's Donna Sandoval."

  Robert's eyebrows raised in surprise. "I know Donna," he said. He walked around the side of the counter and took the phone from the deputy. He'd been half-expecting a crank: a panicked old lady who'd seen an unfamiliar man on her street, one of the small handful of do-goo ding loonies who claimed to know the perpetrator of every crime.

  He had not expected to hear from someone like Donna Sandoval, who worked at First Interstate and was, as far as he knew, intelligent, trustworthy, reliable, and utterly devoid of imagination.

  A perfect witness.

  Maybe he would get some breaks here after all. "Hello?" he said into the receiver.

  "Chief Carter? This is Donna Sandoval. I .. . I heard what happened to Mr. Tortes, and I think I might've seen the man who killed him."

  "On the level?"

  "I saw a man walking with Mr. Tortes that night, just before he was supposed to have been killed."

  Robert's pulse began racing. He pressed a button on the phone and anothe
r button on the connected tape recorder. "I'm going to record this conversation, Donna. If it's okay with you, I'll take this as your statement, have it transcribed, and you can come down to the station and sign it at your convenience. Would that be acceptable?"

  "Sure. Whatever."

  "All right. Please state your name and address, then tell me exactly what you saw."

  "My name's Donna Sandoval. I live at 55 Gila Lane." She cleared her, throat. "On last Friday evening, around six o'clock, I was driving down Copperhead Road toward home. I'd stopped by the store to buy some groceries after work. The street was empty, but I saw two men walking along the side, away from Troy's Garage. When I got closer, I saw that it was Mr. Torres and another man. Mr. Torres .... I don't know if I should say this, I don't want to impose my own feelings on what I saw--"

  "Tell me everything. We'll sort out later what's important and what's not."

  "Mr. Tortes seemed nervous. At least to me. That's why

  I remembered seeing him. He was .. . sort of moving slowly and looking over his shoulder, like he didn't want to be walking with the other man, like he was looking for a way out of it."

  "What did the other man look like? Did you get a good look at him?"

  "Yes." She paused. "He was about six feet tall, about 250 pounds, and he was limping. He had a big thick mustache, a walrus mustache, and he was completely bald. He was wearing jeans and no shirt, just a Levi vest."

  They were both silent. Robert was aware of the fact that the tape recorder was running, but did not know what to say. He stared down at the top of the desk as the hope he'd held dissipated and disappeared.

  Donna had just de scribed Caldwell Burke, the man accused and convicted of molesting her daughter Charlotte in 1979. There was only one problem.

  Burke had died five years ago in a knife right in the state prison in Florence.