He heard a noise behind him, light feet scuffling along a carpet, and he turned and looked through the window into the dim house. A light was burning in the parlor—an oil lamp; he could just see it beyond the edge of the open door. The light dimmed as a shadow passed before it, and in that moment a man walked out of the bedroom, carrying an open book, his dark form a moving silhouette on the curtains.
“Are you listening?”
“What?” Peter asked. The man was gone, vanished, and the oil lamp with him. “Listening for what?” The air was full of whirling leaves. He tried to recall what they’d been talking about, where they’d left off.
“To whom, you mean, not for what.”
“Oh,” Peter said. “Of course I was listening. What were you saying? I was distracted for a second. Sorry.”
She looked at his face. “Are you all right? You look distracted.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“I was asking why, if it was Klein, and he just happened to see my light on and get this crazy idea, why would he call me on the phone first?”
“I don’t know. I guess he wouldn’t. Unless he was trying to throw everyone off the scent.” He rubbed his forehead. His head ached vaguely and he felt drugged, as if he’d just waked up from an afternoon nap. He looked back through the window again, into the empty house.
“I don’t quite get it,” she said.
“You know.” What? He couldn’t think. “It wouldn’t be a bad ploy, Klein doing something that didn’t make any sense so that you’d think it couldn’t be him, because it didn’t make sense that he would do something like that.”
“I think you’re not making any sense. What the hell’s wrong with you?” She stood up, cupping her hands against the window in order to peer in. “What did you see in here?”
“An old man walking across the room.”
She stepped away from the window. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m not kidding.” Then, seeing the look on her face, he added, “It might have been a reflection.”
“Of what?”
“Something … I don’t know. Maybe the leaves blowing.”
“Is that what you think it was?”
Peter shook his head. “He came out through the parlor door, carrying an open book. I heard something, too, a scuffing, like I could hear him walking. You hear anything?”
“I was talking too much.” She looked in the window again. “The parlor door’s shut now. Did he shut the door behind him or leave it open?”
He shook his head again and gestured helplessly. “He left it open, I think, but …” A movement near the creek caught his eye. “There!” he said, pointing at the dark stand of alders and willow. Beth stepped closer to him, both of them looking out toward the wind-lashed trees. The dense shadows were alive with movement as the wind scoured leaves and twigs from the forest floor and tore them from the limbs overhead. A small cyclone of autumn debris rose and fell near the ground, spiraling in a slowly eddying pool, expanding and contracting as if the mass of dead verdure were a living, breathing thing. The wind sculpted it, tearing away clumps of leaves, stretching and bending it into the form of a human—someone bent forward, as if struggling to get up, its mouth and eyes merely black shadows like small windows into some infinitely dark place.
Beth gasped and clutched Peter’s arm, and right then there was movement in the darkness beyond the struggling thing, something shifting among the alders as if a fragment of shadow had come loose from the rest. There was a sound like a cry from a human throat, and the thing made of leaves, standing nearly upright now, burst into fragments, the wind picking them up and flinging them out into the open air.
A woman stood now where the moving shadow had been. She looked back at the house, the hem of her black dress whipping in the wind. Her face was contorted with fear and anguish as she turned and hurried away up the creek-side trail, the wind carrying back to them the sound of her voice, crying out the name of her lost child.
“That’s her,” Peter shouted, and just then the wind slammed into the house with enough fury to make the walls shake. There was the sound of a shutter banging and then of breaking glass. A scattering of shingles hit the dirt of the driveway, skidding out toward the road, and Peter grabbed Beth and dragged her back up under the shelter of the porch roof.
“Bobby!” Beth said, yanking away and then pushing past him and down the couple of porch steps. The wind blew frantically now, churning up dust along the road, whipping the heavy branches of the oaks and sycamores. The house thrummed with the sound of it, the wind whis-tling under the porch and through the latticework that enclosed the cellar.
Peter followed Beth out onto the drive, grabbing her shoulder and leaning in toward her ear. “Upstream or down?” he shouted, but she shrugged helplessly, shaking her head. Of course Bobby hadn’t said where he was going. He might be anywhere—up along the ridge, visiting at one of the other cabins….
“He knows he’s not supposed to go past the Forks,” she shouted, pointing west, down the canyon. Her hair blew out behind her in the wind, and she sheltered her face from flying debris. Reaching out for his arm, she turned him around, shouting into his ear. “You go that way, and if he’s not there, turn around and come find me.” She turned and ran then, down toward the creek, disappearing in seconds into the dark shadows of the trees.
15
POMEROY TURNED THE ISUZU AROUND IN KLEIN’S DRIVEWAY and headed down Parker again. Klein’s truck was gone. If Lorna was home and saw him, so much the better. The phone call this morning would have unnerved her, especially with her husband still out of the house, probably chasing around through the hills with the woman next door. Maybe later in the day he’d call her again and let her in on that aspect of Klein’s life, too. It would certainly be doing her a favor.
He wondered suddenly if he were right about Klein and Beth. The idea had been bothering him all morning. Beth wasn’t like that, but of course Klein was exactly the kind of man to take advantage of a lonely single woman burdened with a child. What Beth didn’t need was the poisonous influence of a degenerate like Klein who would take advantage of her being lonely and unprotected. He searched his mind for some contrary explanation: what had happened to him out in the canyon was just too damned weird not to be connected to Klein and their little enterprise.
He passed the general store and turned left onto the highway, driving slowly, watching the wind play through the dead grass at the edge of the schoolyard. As had happened last night, the car seemed to want to navigate, to lead him somewhere for reasons he couldn’t quite settle his mind on. He saw that a high white streak of cloud-drift angled down the sky, disappearing behind the hills.
Follow it….
The thought came to him like the wind whispering, and he turned the wheel hard to the left, across the highway in the direction indicated by the sky. A car honked and swerved around him, and he bumped across the far shoulder and back up onto the road that led down into Rose Canyon, pulling into the deserted parking lot of Senor Lico’s Mexican Restaurant.
In the back of the lot he cut the engine and sat for a moment in the quiet car, letting the afternoon speak to him. Against the glare of the windshield he saw the reflection of the slats of wooden siding on the wall of the restaurant, lying one over the other like the slats of the window shade that hid the interior of her bedroom. He bent his head just a little, peering into the bar of light where the one slat was caught open, revealing Beth’s bed and the soft curve of her leg, revealing a world that was separated from him by nothing more than a thin pane of window glass, and yet was as remote as the make-believe world of a television program. He stood outside in the windy darkness while Beth lay there reading and thinking, her mind examining bright objects that he couldn’t see or touch.
What separated them, two sensitive people alone in the world? Mere window glass? Chance? Hadn’t chance brought them together at last? He pictured her shifting her weight on the bed, getting comf
ortable. The boy was out of the house, gone to his father’s for a month. Pomeroy stood just outside the partly-open bedroom door. He could feel her loneliness reaching out to him, yearning for him. She saw him finally, and sat up smiling, pulling modestly at the hem of her T-shirt….
The few houses in Rose Canyon ran nearly parallel to the village of Trabuco Oaks, with just a low-lying ridge of hills in between. The little day-care center near where he’d parked last night couldn’t be more than a quarter mile northeast of where he sat right now. The cloud-drift in the sky had moved on, but had led him to this spot minutes ago as surely as an arrow on a road sign. The dry grass and lone sycamores on the open land between the two canyons were probably national forest property, and there was no law against his being out there hiking around.
He got out, holding a topographic map that he unrolled across the hood, flattening it to the blue metal with his hands to keep it from blowing away in the wind. His heart raced, and he licked his lips and looked furtively around, settling his mind again on a picture of the back door of Beth’s house, on the shadow that the doorknob had cast across the pale paint in the moonlight.
The house was empty right now. And its emptiness lent a note of urgency to the afternoon that was heightened by the wind and the silence. A car turned up the street, and he stared at the map, tracing the contour lines of a set of hills with his finger. He watched the car turn into a driveway opposite and disappear behind a hedge of oleander. The driver hadn’t even looked up. Pomeroy waited for the sound of the car door slamming before rolling up the map and tossing it back onto the seat of the car.
He would take a quick look around and then go home. That’s all. It wouldn’t hurt anything to see what things looked like from the back of Klein’s house. Ignorance in that kind of area could be fatal if things heated up, like last night, for instance. He clipped the thought off, rolling up the window in the Trooper and locking the doors.
Abruptly he turned and walked the fifty yards to the end of the road, vaulted the barbed wire fence, and headed straight through the tall grass up the hill, walking quickly but with his hands in his pockets. He ducked in behind a broad sycamore tree and stood with his back to it, breathing heavily. Ahead of him was nothing but scrub-covered hills and lone trees edging up toward where the hills steepened, angling away toward the ridge.
And if she came home while he was there? His heart quickened its pace. He licked his lips and set out again, reminding himself that he was merely going to have a look around, nothing more than that.
16
THE WOODS WERE FULL OF NOISES. THE WIND BLEW through the treetops with a continual rustling sound, and small things scratched through the dry leaves. Something as tiny as a bird sounded like a bear. Bobby wondered if there were bears out there. His mother said there weren’t, but how did she know, really? There were plenty of places for bears to hide. He knew there were mountain lions around. He had seen one once at the zoo in Santa Ana. Its fur looked like an old rug and its eyes were drippy and it always slept in the corner of its cage. What you did if you saw one was throw your arms over your head so that you looked bigger. Mountain lions didn’t like big things.
He looked back behind him, down the creek, but he couldn’t see Peter’s house at all anymore. Ahead of him lay the fallen sycamore tree, and he could easily climb up onto it and have a better view of things. Although the tree had fallen across the stream, maybe years ago, it was still alive, and you could walk across the trunk like a bridge. He could tell a sycamore tree because of its leaves shaped like hands, and because it had bark that you could peel off like paper, in sheets. He and his mother had made a treasure map out of it once.
Something hit him in the shoulder just then and fell to the path. Somebody throwing rocks? He looked around, listening hard, but he couldn’t see or hear anybody. The wind had fallen off, and the forest was nearly silent. A big acorn lay beside his shoe. It hadn’t fallen from the trees above, because they were alders and they didn’t have acorns. He picked it up, in case he had to throw it back at someone, and suddenly he wished he’d brought his spud gun along. But he’d left it back at Peter’s, and if he went back after it they’d probably make him stay.
The wind sighed through the treetops again, and the willow leaves shivered along the edge of the creek. He climbed out onto the fallen sycamore and sat down, dangling his feet above the moving water. He peeled two little pieces of bark off and tossed them into the creek a few feet upstream, and immediately they were swept up in the current and came racing back down at him, bumping around rocks. One of them got caught in a little whirlpool and slowed down. The other one sailed beneath the fallen tree and out of sight behind him. Next time he’d bring out a couple of boats to race, with two of the aliens for riverboat captains. Maybe he could follow them all the way down to the arroyo.
A woodpecker landed in the branches of an alder next to the creek. It stood there nearly upside down and began knocking a hole in the bark. Maybe the woodpecker had hit him with the acorn. After it made a hole in the tree it would come back and stuff an acorn into the hole, like a cork, and then the acorn would rot and bugs would get in it and the woodpecker could eat the bugs. His mother said that all those little holes were like woodpecker TV dinners.
He leaned back against the branch and listened to the creek water burble around the rocks below. His mother knew the names of every little thing out there, and was always talking about them as if she liked to hear the sound of their names. She could spend a half hour following a newt around. There was nothing wrong with newts, but there were at least ten million of them out there, and they all looked exactly alike—little gumby things made out of root beer-colored rubber.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move— something white down among the oaks along the base of the ridge. He sat perfectly still, holding on to a branch, ready to run if he had to. Whatever it was, he could be up the bank and out to the road before it could catch him. That was the quickest way back to Peter’s house.
It darted into the open now, from behind a trunk—a kid, throwing acorns! One pinged off the branch that Bobby leaned against and plopped into the water below. The kid disappeared, back into the shadows, then appeared again farther up the canyon, heading across a clearing toward the abandoned cabin. Bobby could barely see it through the trees—just the front corner of it and the edge of one dark broken-out window.
He jumped down onto the ground and began picking his way up the creek again. There were a couple of big oak trees not far ahead. He could fill up his pockets with acorns just in case the kid wanted to start a war. The creek turned in toward the ridge right there, and straight ahead of him was a sort of clear space, overgrown with weeds and autumn-colored poison oak and partly shaded by big, low-limbed trees. A stone chimney sat all alone in the clearing, half-crumbled and with weeds growing out from broken places and from holes between the bricks.
Bobby poked around in the leaves with a stick, picking up the biggest acorns he could find. He looked for the kid again, but couldn’t see him. A scattering of leaves lifted in a clump on a fresh gust of wind and blew away up the canyon, and the wind began to blow strong and steady. He grabbed a couple more acorns and then set out cautiously toward the empty cabin, which sat on the other side of a little grove of nearly bare fig trees. That’s where the kid would be, maybe inside, maybe outside. Bobby held his biggest acorn in his hand, ready for the kid to pop up and throw one.
He could see the house clearly now through the branches of the fig trees. Although the walls were still standing, the roof was caved in at the front corner and the porch had fallen into the dirt. A couple of boards had been nailed across the black rectangle of a broken-out window, and tendrils of wild grapevine grew up the wall and over the sill, the leaves yellow and falling because of the season. If the kid was hiding inside, that wasn’t really fair. There wasn’t any other cover around the outside of the house except for the concrete shell of an empty cistern twenty feet or so from the front
door.
At the edge of the trees there was a barbed wire fence, rusted and broken, the wire lying along the ground and most of the posts fallen over. Bobby stepped carefully over the wire, watching the house and listening for sounds, but all was still and quiet except for the deep drifts of leaves shifting and whispering in the wind. The kid was around somewhere. Bobby could feel it—eyes watching him. He crossed the driveway, making his way toward the cistern. The driveway was disused, overgrown with dead grass and scattered with branches.
Warily, he crouched behind the cistern for a moment, then broke from cover and ran across to the wall of the house, ready to turn and bolt for the cistern again if the kid stood up to throw an acorn. He should have brought more ammunition, especially if he was going to be trapped so far from any oak trees. Maybe the kid had a whole pile of it in there and was leading him into a trap.
Cautiously he looked through the hole where the window had been. Inside, the dirty wooden floor was covered with leaves and bottles and torn-up magazines. Clearly someone had been there off and on, but right now the place felt empty and was utterly silent. If the kid was there, he was in the back somewhere.
The wind blew hard just then, and a flurry of dust and leaves drove down along the side of the house, straight at him. He turned away, hiding his face with his jacket. It would only get more windy as the afternoon turned into evening. Santa Ana winds always seemed to blow hardest at night, just like it always rained more at night, or like it was almost always sunnier on Sundays than on any other day of the week.
The wind blew harder now against his back, pushing at him, and the sound that the wind made blowing through the broken-out windows of the house was almost like a voice whispering. Inside there was shelter. The leaves and trash on the floor barely stirred. It was quiet and warm. He walked slowly around to the front again, where the door yawned open now on the wind. He stepped to the doorway and listened.
Night Relics Page 21