She pictured the man at the back door, the gauze-wrapped face, the hand on the knob, and then thought about the creep Adams that morning out at Ackroyd’s, his hand torn up where Sheba had scratched him. Suddenly it dawned on her, cold as gunmetal—Adams had gone back out there and shot the cat. Of course he had.
Abruptly she took the lid off the shoe box and picked up the box of cartridges inside, sliding it open and looking at the flat little brass disks. She eased one out with her fingernails—a little-bitty thing about the size of a Good ‘n Plenty. You don’t threaten a man with a loaded gun unless you’re willing to use it. That’s what her father had taught her. And you surely didn’t threaten a man with a gun that wasn’t loaded.
Her father had taken her target shooting a lot when she was a kid. She liked that, putting holes in pieces of paper, and was pretty good at it. He had made her help clean and oil the guns when they got home from the range. So the pistol wasn’t strange to her. She knew she could empty the gun into the creep in a half second if he threatened Bobby. That was what was dangerous—feeling that way. She wasn’t any kind of pacifist. But she wasn’t any kind of cowboy, either. And she was damned if she was willing to admit that she needed to be. If Southern California had gotten that bad, even out here in a quiet village like the Oaks, then she was taking Bobby and getting the hell out.
She thought about Amanda and David’s disappearance then, about Klein’s argument with Adams that morning, and Dr. Stone taking the pellet out of Sheba’s spleen….
Just a prowler, scared away now. No threat of his coming back. Klein confident enough to lend her a gun …
She put the cartridges back into the shoe box and carried it into the bedroom with her, setting it on the nightstand. Then she slid her dresser drawer open, glanced inside, and on impulse turned away, picking up the phone. She listened for a dial tone, then laid the receiver down on the nightstand. If the bastard called tonight he could damned well talk to the busy signal.
She realized that she was staring into the open drawer now, trying to puzzle something out. Tired as she was, it took her a moment to see it.
Her nightshirt, somehow, wasn’t on top where it should be, where she had dumped it this morning. It was an oversized T-shirt with a picture of Sleepy the dwarf on it, a Christmas present from Bobby. Then she saw it, folded beneath her lingerie, down toward the bottom of the drawer.
The lingerie was folded, too, neatly, arranged in little rows. Lying among her things was a stem of wildflower, a sprig of blue aster, as fresh as if it had been picked that afternoon.
She pulled her fingers away from the side of the drawer.
Somebody had gone through her things. Today.
She spun around, looking suddenly at the door, half expecting to see the man standing there, already inside the house. There was no one. Only the sound of the wind in the eucalyptus trees, the eternal swishing and scraping out in the darkness.
Klein? She remembered her conversation with Peter, his suspicions about Klein. He’d certainly have had the opportunity to go through her things. She almost hoped it was Klein, but something told her it wasn’t. This was too crazy—folding things up and all. The flower. Whoever did it wanted her to know he’d been there.
She pulled the sprig of aster out, tossing it into the trash can, then shut the drawer and tipped the lid from the shoe box, opening the cartridge box before picking up the pistol. Her hands shaking, she disengaged the little rod beneath the barrel and snapped out the cylinder, then loaded four bullets into it, leaving the hammer over an empty chamber for the sake of a safety. She wouldn’t change her clothes at all. She’d sleep on the couch, dressed. She thought of calling the police, but rejected the idea. Maybe in the morning. If Peter had a damned telephone she’d call him, and she wondered suddenly if the Kleins were still up, and whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to let Klein know about this.
She heard something then, from outside—what sounded like a woman’s scream. Tense, she waited to hear it again, disbelieving her own ears, and almost at once there was the sound of gunfire—a single shot from somewhere out back. She ran out of the bedroom and into the kitchen again, carrying the pistol with her trigger finger along the barrel, hoping that Bobby wouldn’t wake up, and flipping out the kitchen lights as she headed onto the service porch.
The moonlit backyard jumped into clarity through the window in the door, and her heart flew into her throat at the sight of a man hunched and running straight across the lawn toward the steps. Forcing herself silent, she stepped back against the clothes dryer, bracing herself, and raised the pistol, clicking the hammer back.
34
CAUTIOUSLY, WITHOUT LOOKING VERY FAR IN, LORNA flipped on the light inside the poolhouse door. What met her eyes looked like the aftermath of some kind of battle involving trees. Leaves and trash from the hillsides littered the floor and furniture, clinging to the curtains hung over the windows on the back wall. The Ping-Pong table was flipped onto its side and her ceramic elephant lamp lay smashed into pieces on the floor. Over all of it lay a carpet of twigs and dry mulch and autumn leaves.
She looked past the edge of the door toward the end of the room where there was a sofa, two chairs and a Franklin stove. Her husband sat on the floor beside the sofa, leaning against the wall. He was wild-eyed and scared, as if he expected God-knew-what to be coming in through the door, and he hugged one of the sofa cushions in front of him, his naked legs thrust out from underneath it. There were leaf fragments and twigs in his hair and stuck to his chin so that he looked like someone escaped from a madhouse. He swallowed several times as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t, and then looked around with the mystified air of a sleepwalker just waking up in the wrong place.
He noticed the gun in her hand at the same time the police siren cut off short out front.
He stood up, clutching the cushion to his abdomen and looking around. “A gun. What…? What did you do?” He shook his head back and forth, then spotted his bathrobe, lying against the opposite wall and entangled with his pajama bottoms, both of them covered with dead leaves and dirt.
“What did I do?” she asked, and tossed the gun onto the couch. “I don’t know what I did.”
As she turned toward the door he set the cushion on top of the gun and hurried toward the bathrobe. “Wait!” he said. “I can explain.”
She nearly laughed out loud. His voice was husky, as if he was about to start crying, and there was a begging tone to it that right at that moment enraged her more than what she now knew had been going on in there just minutes ago. The woman, clearly, had gone out the window and through the orchard. Lorna forced herself to walk to the fence and look over into Beth’s yard. There was no dead man. He was gone.
Two policemen came around the corner of the house just then, their revolvers drawn. One of them was big, like he’d played football ten or fifteen years ago. The other was a small Hispanic man, handsome and neat and with brushed-back hair that was apparently impervious to the wind. His uniform looked tailored.
The sight of the two of them looking around the backyard made her suddenly aware of where she was—of how things had declined over the last couple of days, and she put her hand to her mouth inadvertently, suddenly weary with shame. Lance came out of the poolhouse, tying his bathrobe, trying to brush the leaves off it. His hair still looked like he’d combed it with a branch off a dead tree and he had a horrible fixed grin on his face, worse than any car salesman.
“Freeze,” one of the cops said. “Hold it right there.” Lorna looked at him in surprise. “Put your hands where we can see them.”
She held her hands out in front of her, looking quickly at Lance to make sure he wasn’t too baffled to cooperate.
“Could you please identify yourselves?”
“I’m the one who called you,” Loma said. “This is my husband….”
“Your names?”
“Lance Klein,” Lance said. He looked at Lorna as if she’d committed the ultimate betrayal, as if th
e whole world were a sudden fearful mystery.
“I’m Lorna Klein.”
“Do you have any ID?”
“In the house,” she said.
“If you wouldn’t mind my going in with you to get it, ma’am….” the big one said.
He followed her in, and she collected both their driver’s licenses, handing them to him. Then the two of them filed back out into the night, past the couch made up with blankets, the scotch decanter on the coffee table. Outside he held the photos under the lamp, stared hard at both of them, and handed them back to her.
“Why don’t you tell us what the trouble is.” He looked at Lorna instead of at Lance. The wind had diminished now, and the moon was high in the sky. Both of them glanced around the yard again, taking in the overturned furniture and the windblown mess. She saw then that the chaise longue was in the pool, its wheels hanging on the edge of the deck and its front end, cushion and all, submerged beneath a solid layer of floating sycamore leaves.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I honestly don’t know.”
They waited for a moment, as if that wasn’t what they expected to hear, then the other one said to Klein, “How about you, do you know?”
He shook his head hard, then managed to say, “A little quarrel, that’s all.”
The big cop nodded his head. “Someone put in a call to 911 and reported an assault in progress. You said that was you, ma’am?”
Lorna nodded. She wasn’t going to lie.
“Then why don’t you start from there? Tell us why you called 911.”
“Because I thought my husband was being assaulted. I woke up and heard a noise, and when I looked out the window I saw a man with a shovel.”
“A shovel?” the cop said.
“This one?” His partner pointed to the old shovel lying near the redwood fence.
She nodded.
“What was he doing with the shovel?”
“He was … he was standing in front of the door there.” She pointed at the poolhouse door, which tried to swing shut just then, dragging its bottom edge across the floor inside. There was a long gash in the wood, the white paint skived away where the shovel had bit into it.
“He was beating on the door with the shovel?”
“No. Well, yes. I didn’t see him hit the door. I heard it. But by the time I looked out, the door was already open, broken like that.”
“It was mostly the wind,” Lance said, “breaking the door like that.”
The big cop nodded at him, then asked Lorna, “What was he doing? You saw him assault your husband through the open door?” He sounded tired and there was an edge to his voice, as if he’d already figured out that he wasn’t going to get any straight answers.
“No, I turned around and ran for the phone.”
“So you didn’t actually see anyone assault anyone?”
She shook her head.
“Were you assaulted, sir?”
“No, sir,” Klein said quickly. “This was all a mistake. I was out here in the wind, you know, trying to get things straightened out. Wind was blowing the damned lawn furniture into the pool and all. Anyway I go into the poolhouse to switch on a couple lights, and when I turn around there’s this guy outside the door, like Lorna said, holding the shovel.”
“Just holding it?” the smaller cop asked. “Getting ready to dig a hole or something? Maybe he wanted work.”
Klein shrugged. “Stealing it, I’d guess. People steal any damned thing around here anymore. I guess I surprised him at it.”
“There was some activity out here last night, wasn’t there?” the smaller cop asked. “Somebody put in a call right around this same time. This related in any way, or just coincidence?”
“Coincidence,” Klein said quickly. “Could have been the same guy, of course—the prowler. Maybe he saw something to steal and came back after it.”
“So what did you and the missus have a quarrel about?”
“What?” Klein asked.
“You said you had a quarrel. That’s what all the uproar was about.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, that was before. Hell, I don’t want to get into personal stuff, but I guess I was pretty teed off when I came out here. And anyway, when I saw that this guy was in the yard, I started yelling. Anybody would have. I guess he thought I was going to take a shot at him or something and he started waving the damned shovel around. Then he dropped it and took off.”
“What do you mean ‘take a shot’?” the big cop asked. “Did you have a gun with you?”
“No! Christ, no!” Klein said. “Hell, I meant hit him, take a punch.”
Lorna almost told them about the gun. If someone heard the shot and reported it, then it was worse to lie, then the whole story would look like a lie. But she waited, and the cop went on, talking in a voice that made it clear that the whole story already looked like a lie.
“Uh-huh.” He nodded, looking hard at Lance. “So what we’ve got is that this stranger was stealing that shovel. Maybe it’s some kind of antique?” He grinned.
“Well, yeah,” Klein said. “You could say that. It’s old anyway. Maybe, like I said, he picked it up to break down the door. Probably he wanted to steal something out of the poolhouse.”
“I thought you were already inside the poolhouse,” the smaller cop said. “Wasn’t the door already open?”
“I guess the wind blew it shut.”
Both cops looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, neither one bothering to ask him anything more. Then the big one said to Lorna, “Do you have anything to add to that?”
“Only that he jumped over the fence,” she said, nodding at Beth’s yard. “He threw down the shovel and jumped the fence.”
The smaller cop walked over and looked down at the shovel, then walked over to the fence, jumped up, and grabbed the top, and easily pulled himself high enough to rest his elbows on the top. He looked around Beth’s backyard for a moment before kicking himself back and away again. He looked at his partner and shook his head, as if to say that there was nothing to see.
The big cop looked at both of them for a moment, as if sizing them up. To Lorna he said, “Ma’am, maybe you could get things straight next time before calling 911. We respond to assault calls with what’s called a code three. It doesn’t make us happy when we have to draw our weapons for no good reason.”
She breathed deeply, trying to keep her temper, telling herself even then that it wasn’t the cop’s fault. She had to keep a lid on it, get it over with. Get out of there and breathe a little, out of the wind. But damn it, she saw what she saw—a stranger in her own backyard. And the phone call. She couldn’t mention that without really tearing things up, but she was damned if she was going to pretend that this was going to be about a lunatic stealing a rusty shovel and her being some kind of panicky nut.
“It didn’t look like a man stealing anything to me,” she said, stony voiced. “I honest-to-God thought he was going to attack my husband, and that’s why I dialed 911. Whoever he was, he shouldn’t have been in our backyard. That’s trespassing at the very least, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the big cop said politely.
“Well …” She wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t like that. I …” She found that she was crying all of a sudden. All of it hit her, just like that—the phone call, the gun, the woman running away up the hillside, Lance stark naked, hiding behind a sofa cushion on the poolroom floor, his hair all full of leaves. She turned away, closing her eyes, the wind blowing softly into her face. She felt a hand on her shoulder and jerked away. Lance could put his hand on someone else’s shoulder from now on. This was it, the last humiliation.
She heard the police say something to Lance, but she couldn’t make out what and didn’t care. Then one of them said, “Why don’t you two call it a night. Close up and go to bed. Call us if something more happens.”
She stood there looking out at the blowing grass, listening to the wind as Lance showed them out through the hous
e.
35
THE CLOTHES DRYER SLID BACKWARD AN INCH, JAMMING against the wall, and Beth nearly stumbled sideways, frantic, thinking, Shoot through the window. And then, as he ran into the circle of porch light, he threw his head back, reached forward, launched himself up the few stairs, and hammered on the door.
It was Peter. Lunging forward, she threw the dead bolt and swung the door open, flipping on the inside light again. His face was bleeding, and he was breathing so hard that he was almost wheezing. Immediately he reached past her and turned the light back off, and right then she heard Bobby’s voice from what must have been the living room. “Mom?” he said, sounding scared. The police siren was winding out now, coming up the hill.
“In here!” Beth shouted. Peter looked like … she couldn’t say what he looked like. His face and clothes were dirty, his jeans filthy to the knees, like he’d waded through the creek a couple of times and then kicked dirt all over himself. The blood on his face was mostly dried, smeared across a ragged cut, dripped and smeared down the front of his shirt, which was torn open at the sleeve and with a blood smear there, too. His eyes were haunted, confused.
She twisted the dead bolt again, locking the door, and said, “Wait here,” then opened the dryer door, set the gun inside, and shut it again. Heading back into the kitchen, she met Bobby coming around the corner, sleepy looking and mussed up. She put an arm around his shoulder and turned him back into the living room, looking back to see whether Peter was following. He stood in the shadows, waiting. The police siren stopped abruptly, and through the curtains on the front window she could see the revolving blue light.
“What was that noise?” Bobby asked.
“Nothing,” she said. It sounded stupid to her.
“I heard someone banging. And a siren.”
“There was something going on at the Kleins’ house,” she said. “I don’t know what, but that’s where the police were going. See, there’s the light on top of the police car, through the curtains. See it?”
Night Relics Page 28