Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  Bo knew the point, only one long block away, at which the sea cut a notch to within feet of the road. Another curve to the left there. A curve she could never make. The car would fishtail, flip backward into the sea. Ramming the gearshift into reverse, Bo heard the scream of warring metal as she clutched Mildred tightly to her right side and scraped the guardrail for fifty feet before plowing through it into a pile of boulders. The boulders, she remembered as the steering wheel bent under her weight, had been hauled there from the desert. Dumped there to buffer the sea where it chewed into million-dollar property. Dumped there, maybe, to stop a runaway car headed for a watery burial. As her head cleared Bo thought of the runaway truck ramps all over New England. She'd seen them as a child. Off-ramps leading to hills of gravel that could catch and stop an eighteen-wheeler with no brakes. Boulders, she smiled dizzily, were just big gravel. The BMW hissed a smell of burnt metal, but was stationary. Its front end had crumpled like a stiff blanket thrown against the rocks.

  Bo tried the driver's side door. Jammed. Most of the homes fronting the sea along the boulevard were lit and gleaming yellow in the black rain. But none of the doors was open. No one coming to see what had happened. In the roar of the surf, Bo realized, the headlong crash of a car into a rockpile might not be heard. Quickly she scooted to the passenger's side, tucked Mildred under her left arm, and tried the door. It opened into a cold torrent of rain and salt spray from the tumultuous waves lashing the cliffs twenty feet from the car. The man in his car might round the first curve any moment now. But there was still time to make a dash across the boulevard to one of the houses.

  As Bo struggled out of the car an enormous wave rose, serpentine from the darkness below the cliffs, and broke in a blast of spray that stung her eyes. Rivulets of seawater ran down the back of her nose, leaving a bitter taste. Mildred sneezed and lurched out of Bo's grasp, landing clumsily on the wet stone. In a second the little dog had vanished into the rocks ahead, down toward the sea.

  "Mildred!" Bo yelled pointlessly. Her voice was lost in the wind. As she clambered down the rocks after the dog, Bo saw a car's lights slicing the rain in wide, misty cones.

  Chapter 27

  Estrella Benedict watched as Henry threaded chunks of tequila-marinated turkey on metal skewers. The turkey alternated with ripe tomatillos and ruffled black mushrooms out of a jar. After a minute Estrella noticed that she'd torn a flour tortilla into four pie-shaped wedges and arranged them in an overlapping fan design in the sink.

  "Bo should have been here by now," she said, mashing the wedges into the garbage disposal. "I'm worried."

  "So am I," Henry Benedict agreed. "Maybe the storm's held her up."

  In a red polo shirt and baggy white cotton pants he managed to look even more like a blond Abraham Lincoln than he did in his naval officer's uniform. Estrella noted the ridge of muscle wrinkling his forehead above the brow line. The last time she'd seen the furrow that deep they'd been camping in the desert and found a nest of newborn Western rattlers writhing in a shady wash. He'd stomped them with a Tony Lama boot and then thrown up behind an ocotillo cactus. Henry Benedict, Estrella had learned in four years of marriage, didn't say much and considered the implications of everything as if those implications mattered.

  "I think I'll call LaMarche and see if he's heard from her," Estrella told the front of her toaster oven.

  "Already called him five minutes ago," Henry replied into a hardwood cutting board hanging from a leather loop on the wall. "He says the Indian woman called him, saying the little girl's all upset, thinks something bad's happening to Bo."

  "Hannah said that? Bo said she wasn't talking, that she's been mute since they told her her mother was dead."

  "Well, I guess she's talking now," Henry concluded. "LaMarche said he was going over there, to Bo's place. Nothing to do but wait."

  Estrella wrapped her arms around her husband's waist and listened to his heart beating slowly, its thump echoing through his back. "Bo's special," she said into his shirt. "Things never happen for her like they do for other people. She always goes deeper or something. It's scary."

  "Maybe it's just what she has to deal with," he answered. "The manic-depressive thing. Maybe she just sees deeper. But we're here for her, Strell, and she knows that."

  "Yeah." Estrella sighed and stared at a bright blue wall clock with hands shaped like crayons. Bo Bradley had given them the clock for Christmas last year, with numerous hints that the godchild she was expecting as soon as they were ready would undoubtedly learn to tell time within months of birth. "But this guy that raped Hannah's sister and killed the psychologist may be smarter than we think. He's really smart, Henry. What if he's gone after Bo?"

  Henry Benedict aligned the skewers evenly on a foil-covered tray and glanced at the rainy kitchen window. "What makes you think he's so smart? Do you know something about this creep I haven't read in the papers?" he asked.

  And then he listened as Estrella told him about a woman from a village in Chihuahua who would probably be heading there at this moment on a fumey second-class bus strung with Christmas tree lights, her children asleep on her lap. Somebody on the bus would have chickens in a cage, Estrella told her husband, crying. Somebody would be drunk. And somebody would be singing.

  "You did the right thing, hon," he whispered as Estrella wept into his chest. "You really did."

  "That's what Bo said," Estrella cried harder.

  Chapter 28

  Mildred, her pink skin visible under wet white fur, had wedged herself beneath a jagged rock at the edge of a drop into foaming black water that seemed alive. Bo found the white dog easily and then realized why. Her sodden blouse with its peasant sleeves and seven-button cuffs was white, too. If her pursuer were looking, he'd see her instantly.

  No time left to cross the narrow road, find safety in a lighted house where people would open the door, phone the police. Nothing to do but crawl further into the rocks and hide. Nothing to do but hope the man would assume she'd made it to one of the houses, and leave. Bo pictured the house on the corner across from her ruined car. A mansion. Painted unaccountably pink. A historical landmark, in fact, with a lighted American flag in the yard. Once the home of a sporting goods magnate who'd been a lover of the mystical Theosophist Madame Tingley. Maybe the man chasing her would think Bo was in that house, safe, phoning the police. She grabbed Mildred, huddled beside a black rock, and conjured an image of the long-dead mystic. Maybe Madame Tingley's ghost would stay the hand of the killer.

  As a flash of lightning tore the sky Bo looked across the vertical tube of angry water below to a flat ledge extending out to sea from behind another pile of boulders. Below the ledge was a tiny inlet, now swollen with surf.

  That pink house is the Spaulding Mansion, Bradley. The cave is there, remember?

  Holding Mildred in a viselike grip, Bo climbed down through ragged darkness to the surging trough of seawater she now remembered was usually a pleasant tidal estuary, full of hermit crabs and anemones. But how deep was it now? And how strong the pull as a thousand gallons of churning water receded through its channel after every wave? In the sea at the base of the five-foot-wide trough a jumble of sharp-edged rocks disappeared under the next surge of water. Barnacle-encrusted, they would shred the flesh of anything thrown against them by the outgoing torrent. Bo shifted Mildred to her right arm, waited for the thundering influx of water to peak and begin its rush back to the sea, and stepped into the trough.

  The receding water, ice-cold, only came to a point two inches above her knees. On her numb feet a pair of button-sided pumps, purchased to complete a costume that suggested Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, proved themselves worthy of the role and did not disintegrate. Bo made a mental note to send Nordstrom's shoe department a thank-you note, if she survived.

  In the next step her left foot found a fissure, pulled back and balanced the combined weight of woman and dog on the edge of a fin-shaped rock. The next wave was rolling in, its shape like a truck-sized
snake beneath the water. In a second it would arc against the rocks, higher than Bo's head, and then pull them both back down a frothing cataract to the sea. Bo pushed off, landed crookedly on her right foot, which seemed to bend, and in another step achieved the pile of rocks beyond the trough. The incoming wave plowed against her back with a force that pushed the air from her lungs and left her drenched in foam, but did not succeed in dragging her down the maelstrom of its backwash. Mildred shook her head violently against Bo's side, and struggled to be set free.

  "Forget it, Mil," Bo told the dog. "You got us into this. Just ride it out."

  After three more minutes of agonizing rock-crawling, Bo reached the cave. Not much as sea caves go, it looked like Atlantis to Bo. Just a hole in the continental shelf where the sea had dissolved a sandstone accretion when there was still a land bridge over the Bering Strait. Bo flung herself on the rocky floor and looked around. She'd been there before. The cave was a favorite local spot for picnics, esoteric rituals, romantic trysts. Also for the homeless, who had left mounds of trash and a stained orange blanket beside the sodden remains of a fire. Bo eyed the blanket with gratitude. It might introduce her to exotic skin diseases, but it would also forestall the effects of hypothermia. Edging toward the blanket, Bo realized there was something wrong with her right ankle. A throbbing pain. An odd limpness. Pulling off her shoe she tried to arch her toes, and watched as they responded with random, guppylike movements.

  The storm was diminishing. On the fissured granite shelf that sloped downward thirty feet from the cave's mouth to a wave-lashed precipice, the rain fell now in steady, vertical strings. Bo wrung out her hair and the heavy folds of her khaki skirt. Then she dragged herself and Mildred to the fetid blanket and wrapped it around them, covering her own head so that anyone looking into the cave would see a dirty blanket thrown over a rock. Not a helpless woman with a badly sprained, possibly broken, ankle.

  There was no way out of the cave except through its mouth facing the sea. Behind her left arm Bo felt the rough surface of a cement patch in the cave wall, five feet high and wider than her shoulders. Spaulding had made his fortune in more than pigskin footballs. During prohibition, Bo knew from an article she'd read in a local paper, the millionaire had dug a tunnel from a closet in the mansion and under Sunset Cliffs Boulevard to the cave. Mexican rum-runners, anchoring in the tiny cove below, would haul wooden cases of ron negro up the cliffs and through the tunnel to luxuriant safety. The tunnel was still there, under the street, but sealed over at both ends. Bo tried not to think of the historic crawlspace as a last, dashed hope. Mildred, snug against Bo's side under the odorous blanket, appeared to have fallen asleep. Bo hated herself for the warm tears she felt running over her cheeks.

  Quit sniveling, Bradley. If it's time to die, do it so as not to disgrace your ancestors.

  The words, straight from the mouth of Bridget Mairead O'Reilly, made Bo smile. Her grandmother, it seemed, never shut up. Under her breath Bo sang the Irish national anthem.

  "Tonight we man the bearna baoghal," she crooned to Mildred. "In Erin's cause, come woe or weal ..."

  Beyond the cave mouth, waves crashed repeatedly over the jutting granite apron. Rain fell through winds that moaned eerily among the rocks. Mildred snored. Bo sang softly. And nothing happened. No drenched figure in black leapt to the cave's door. Nothing moved at all except the thundering surf and an occasional pebble shaken loose from the chamber's walls, probably by a car on the street above.

  But if there were cars, wouldn't somebody have seen the smashed BMW and stopped to investigate? Bo glanced at the stone ceiling above her. Of course. The police would have been called by now. Might even be eight feet over her head at this very minute, asking door-to-door of the beachfront residents if anyone had seen the driver of the wrecked car. Bo focused on the churning foam beyond the cave's long, flat lip. Were there flashing red lights reflected from above? Once she thought she saw a shard of red bounce off the water, but maybe not. What if she were just sitting down here while a dozen rescuers walked above? Eventually they'd abandon their search, tow her car away, and leave. And the tide was turning.

  The realization felt like a slab of ice laid over her chest. The waves beyond the cliffs loomed larger, their spray splattering closer to the ragged opening of the cave. Bo scanned the walls for a high-water line and found it two feet above her head. There was a high shelf to her left at the cave's rear. If it came to that, she could climb up there and simply wait out the storm. She probably wouldn't drown. It wasn't the threat of drowning that froze her heart. It was the Celtic belief that souls leave bodies at the turning of the tide. The time of wrenching, final transition. But whose?

  In the rain-sliced dark at the cave's mouth something moved. A lump of shadow indistinguishable from a hundred others shrouded in mist became a human figure, rising from a crouch before the ragged cave opening. In his right hand an open pocketknife gleamed as raindrops slid off its four-inch blade. A short, pale man whose sodden visage was oddly reptilian, the eyes unblinking.

  Bo knew he couldn't quite see her in the gloom, yet his gaze was locked to hers in a psychic connection more damning than a spotlight. He knew where she was. In that connection Bo felt the force of something alien, something savagely empty. The man was not a man, but merely a form whose hatred of what he was not. seethed like invisible spume around him. Something sick and deformed from the moment of its conception. A damned soul.

  "You're nothing." Bo thought into his eyes, her heartbeat throbbing in her fingertips.

  "Don't think this Irish girl can't see straight through you. You may kill me, but it won't make you human."

  As he began to advance toward her, Bo threw off the filthy blanket and stood. In her head a thousand ancestral bones clamored in brogue. On the cave floor Mildred bristled and barked.

  And then another figure filled the cave opening, spun the man in the black T-shirt around by his left shoulder, and sent him sprawling on the wet rock with an uppercut to the jaw. Bo watched the knife slide sideways into a puddle of foam. The second man wore black wireframe glasses and had a crooked nose.

  "It's okay, Bo!" Rombo Perry shouted into the cave as he pulled the black-clad reptile to his feet and flattened him again with a murderous punch to the nose. "We knew he was down here, but we weren't sure you were until your dog barked."

  Bo thought she could smell the blood bubbling from the face of the man scuttling away from Rombo toward the edge of the cliff. A smell like peat, swampy and burnt.

  "Fight, you son of a bitch!" Rombo screamed, moving toward the cowering form. "You fucking creep, you wanna rape a few more babies? Then fight for it! Give me the chance to kill you."

  Bo saw the knotted muscles beneath Rombo's wet gray dress shirt. And saw through the weakening rain what was coming.

  "Don't do it, Rom!" another voice called from the rocks beside the shelf. "Let the police have him!"

  Martin St. John, covered in mud, jumped down from the rubble. After him a fourth man, familiar and pale, rounded the cave entry and ran to Bo. She could only point as a huge swell, pitch black and silent, reached the southwestern edge of North America.

  "Oh my God," Andrew LaMarche breathed as Martin St. John grabbed Rombo's shirt, Mildred barked, and a wave weighing more than the average two-bedroom house broke against the edge of the granite precipice. The splash knocked Martin and Rombo flat, surged up into the cave, and receded. Nothing lay at the cliff's edge now. The man in the black shirt was simply gone. Ten yards below in rocks like shrapnel something bobbed in the violent surf, and then vanished. But it wasn't a man, Bo knew. It never had been.

  Chapter 29

  Bo awoke wearing a U.S. Navy T-shirt in a room she recognized as Henry and Estrella Benedict's guest room. She had helped Es pick out the white-on-white striped wallpaper herself. A chaste fashion statement with the white wainscoting Henry created from strips of wood floor edging. On a bed table stood a vase containing two dozen long-stemmed American beauty roses. Besid
e Bo in the bed were Mildred—and Dr. Andrew LaMarche, unshaven and grinning in a matching T-shirt and Navy-issue denim bell-bottoms that obviously belonged to Henry.

  "I have not compromised your virtue," he explained, shielding his eyes from the sun streaming through uncurtained windows. "You were so adamant about not remaining at the hospital that I brought you here, still sedated from the minor surgery necessary to set a few bones. Estrella didn't think you should be alone."

  "My virtue is unassailable," Bo replied, "except under certain circumstances. You might just try, Andy."

  "Very well." He flung himself to one knee beside the bed. "Will you marry me, Bo?"

  "Oh God, do I have a broken leg? And I've told you—I've already been married. Can't we just be ... something other than married? And why does my right foot smell like mouthwash?" Bo dragged herself up on her elbows and glanced at a porcelain clock beneath the roses. "It's 6:30. Plenty of time to get to court by 9:00. I would kill for a cigarette. And did all of that really happen last night, or am I delusional?"

  "I take it that the issuing of banns may be premature." LaMarche shook his head, standing. "And I'd already sent my morning coat out to be pressed."

  "Andy!" Bo replied with bemused irritation. "What happened after we went to the hospital? Did the police fish that guy out of the water? Who is ... was he? Have they released Paul, now that the real perp's turned up? Did Rombo and Martin go over to my place and board up the deck doors like they said? Have you called Eva? And what about my car?"

  "You have sustained rather bad displacement of the tarsal ligaments and fractures in the tibia, two metatarsals, and the great toe," Andrew LaMarche began as Bo glared at her right leg, encased in what looked like pieces of beach furniture fastened together with Velcro. "Your car has been towed to a facility that specializes in the sale of spare parts. The frame was bent. You totaled it, Bo." His face paled at the words. "You could easily have been killed."