“Tell me more,” Hicks said, closing his eyes and dropping his chin to his chest. He chunked out a loud fake snore.
Lloyd pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator. “Just trying to make conversation.”
About a mile in, Hicks spotted the mailbox and directed Lloyd to take the gravel driveway that jabbed up further into the hills. Finally they came to a stop in front of a low aluminum gate attached to wire fencing. Lloyd stepped out, leaving the engine running. He squinted toward the property cut out of the woods. A house sat near the back of it. Lloyd pushed on the car horn.
A terrible sound came back at them: a howling, high and excited, followed by a collective yipping whine. Dogs, of course. Tom Singer was a breeder. One of the best on the West Coast—at least according to Tom. The horn had kicked off a frenzy, and the noise grew, the piercing, goosebump-raising noise of penned-up animals, marching back and forth in their own feces, desperate for freedom and attention, panicked that something was not right.
“Huskies,” Lloyd said. “Great dogs.” Last year, Lloyd had been forced to put down his elderly black lab, Einstein. He’d agonized over it, and he mourned the loss for weeks afterward. He wanted to get another dog—he felt they provided a valuable companionship that even a loving spouse couldn’t offer—but he hadn’t. He’d had Einstein for fifteen years, and he just couldn’t bring himself to replace him.
Hicks and Lloyd waited for two or three minutes, and still the huskies barked and yowled and whimpered. No one came out of the building to quiet them or to walk down the drive to the men responsible for the racket. Hicks was a patient man, and he was loath to trespass, but enough was enough. They were possibly dealing with an emergency situation. He lifted the latch, walked the gate out of the road, and put it back in place after Lloyd had driven the truck through. Hicks climbed back into the Bronco, and they bumped down to the house. It was a small, single-story cottage. Bags of leaves leaned into one another at the porch railing, directly under the reason for them, an oak tree that twisted out of the house’s way so that it could loom over the roofline. A rake stood against the tree’s base, looking cowed. No truck, Hicks noted. Tom drove an old Chevy, parked it right in the front. As the officers rolled up, they saw that the front door to the house was open. They looked at each other, and Hicks nodded. Lloyd climbed out and unholstered his Beretta 92. Hicks did the same.
They were small-town cops, but there was enough domestic violence in Mammoth that they knew how to play this scene without strategizing it. Lloyd went first, skittering like a Texas two-step champion until he pressed himself against the house, one boot tipping into the doorframe. Hicks came along behind him, loping with staggering steps, annoyed at the feel of flab shaking in his middle. The vain, irrelevant thought embarrassed him, but he couldn’t help it. He nodded at Lloyd, waited for acknowledgment, and then dropped low and turned into the house. Lloyd wheeled into the doorway a moment later, staying upright.
A thick torpor hung over the front room. The drapes were closed, which, along with the shade from the oak out front, gave the air a brackish quality. A ragged orange couch lazed against a wall. Across the room sat an old black-and-white television. The shag carpet had walking paths worn into it. Hicks and Lloyd moved through to the back, poking their heads into the kitchen, the dining room, a bedroom. Hicks felt himself judging what he saw and chastised himself. The place could use some freshening, but no more than any other house without a woman. Tom kept it tidy enough.
“Hello?” Hicks called out. “Tom, you here? It’s Chief Hicks.”
This caused the dogs outside to ratchet up their mewling and barking. Hicks and Lloyd checked every room, peered into closets. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Hicks stood in the kitchen for a minute, taking in the space. He flipped through the butts in an ashtray on the counter, looking for a spark.
“He hasn’t been gone long,” he said.
Lloyd, reading the plate on a trophy he’d found, didn’t hear him.
Heading back outside, they walked around the side of the house. The kennels—large, four-foot-tall wire cages with wooden flooring—stretched length-wise down the right side of the house and wrapped around the back. The dogs banged against the enclosures, biting at the holes in the mesh. A half-empty, forty-pound bag of dog food lay on the ground in front of the first cage, a smattering of spilled kibble lingering around the unsecured flap.
“What do you think?” Lloyd asked.
“I don’t know. He could be running an errand. The wind could have blown the door open.”
“No. I mean,” he indicated the dogs, “should we feed them?”
Chapter Four
Tori, propped on an elbow, tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. The blob that had followed them along the running path, the drunken redneck, had unnerved her. They had told the coaches about him when they returned to camp, and Coach P. went to call the Mammoth View Police Department. That hadn’t been the response any of them wanted. They wanted to hear that it was nothing to worry about, that it was their imaginations running wild. An incredulous snort would have been nice. Mary Bowen didn’t help matters when she later said that Coach P. couldn’t get through to the police. The phone was out. Tori had just reread the same sentence for a fifth time—“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning”—when Robin banged into the cabin. “Where’s Liesel?” she barked, her eyes jumping around the room.
Tori swung her legs off the bed. “Bathroom,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“An attack. An invasion. Come on.” She dashed out of the cabin, and Tori, barefoot, raced after her. They ran into Robin and Adrienne’s cabin, where half a dozen girls were pushed together on Robin’s bed, leaning into a clock radio. The radio crackled and sputtered, searching vainly for a signal and then suddenly finding one.
“. . . seen anything like . . .”
Static ate the rest of the sentence, but then the signal caught again.
“. . . at least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field . . .”
Robin turned to Tori. See, her look said.
The radio continued: “. . . will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of military operations . . .”
They caught a few more half-sentences and snatches of words— “Eyes!” the announcer seemed to say more than once—before the static took over completely.
“What does this mean?” one of the girls finally said. Tori couldn’t tell who it was.
Everyone started to chatter about what it meant, about making phone calls to their parents, about bomb shelters. Alice, the girl who lived half a mile from Disneyland, started to cry. She jammed the back of her wrist into an eye to stanch the flow. Somebody patted her on the back, harder than was necessary.
Adrienne broke away from the babble. On the camp’s first day, Tori thought the pimply girl might be her friend, but Adrienne was desperate to be part of Mary Bowen’s coterie. With her frizzed black hair and general gormlessness, she had no idea how to go about it, except to make a fool of herself. She was still trying. “Bad, bad, Leroy Brown,” Adrienne sang at the top of her lungs. “The baddest man in the whole damn town.” She leaped onto her bed, bounced, and yanked her shirt up to flash the group. “Ahhgh!” Robin screeched, covering her eyes as if she’d been tricked into looking at the sun. Tori couldn’t take it, either. What was wrong with Adrienne?
Tori walked out of the cabin, slammed the door behind her, and sat at a picnic table. But there was no escape. Girls were spilling into the courtyard from other cabins; they were hurrying from the rec room. None of them seemed to notice Tori. They lingered in the open space: one with a foot on her knee like a pink flamingo garden ornament, another stretching her arms over her head as if warming up for ballet class. Summer, the redheaded girl who had the cabin next to Tori’s, appeared to be ho
lding her breath. Her name was actually Dana, but everyone called her Summer, short for Summer Peach, her father’s nickname for her—because she was “so soft.” It was not a compliment, she said, her father also being her high school cross-country coach. The girls—there were ten of them standing around by now—looked like they were getting ready to do a Monty Python skit. After a moment, Summer ruined the tableau. She backed up slowly in a series of unsteady stutter-steps. Tori could see that she was crying, her breathing hard and scattered.
Tori thought about the first time she had noticed Summer, early in the camp’s first week. The girl was out on the track, white legs pumping with awkward, mechanical efficiency, a human Newton’s cradle. Now, once again, Tori found herself unable to take her eyes off the knobby-kneed girl. Until, with a sudden scrabbling of feet, Summer ducked inside her cabin and shut the door.
The sound of the door crashing against the frame set off a panic. Girls screamed and ran, looking over their shoulders. Liesel appeared on the path, her legs gleaming in the sun. She dropped her toiletries bag. It landed on the stone path with a thwock, the lid contorting into a silent scream. A plastic bottle fell out and rolled. Liesel made no effort to retrieve it. Tori followed her roommate’s eyes until she found the cause of the scene.
The dog stood at the gap between two cabins. Tori smiled. It hadn’t been a redneck or a bear across the ravine from the nature path, she realized. It was just a lost dog. A big German shepherd. The dog’s yellow eyes flicked there and there and there, marking the girls. It was panting heavily, like a pig snuffling in slop. The animal’s incisors flashed, but Tori noticed something else as well. She stood up without realizing it and moved around the side of the table to get a better look.
A small voice stopped her. Sofia was crouched at the edge of the courtyard, about twenty feet from the dog. She wore a plush red tracksuit that made her resemble a swaddled baby. A lumberjack cap, pulled down low, framed her face like a bowl cut. Her brown head was as round as Charlie Brown’s. “Tori—no,” she said. “You cannot save it.” Tori nodded. She liked Sofia so much. She was so sweet and sad, just like Charlie Brown. Tori held up her palm, indicating that everything was fine—and started moving again. When she made it to the side of the table and realized what she was seeing, she gasped.
There wasn’t much left of the dog: a steady stream of blood rolled out behind it, establishing its path. The wound was located high up in its midsection. The dog’s back legs seemed to be attached by little more than a smeared strand of vertebrae. The poor thing obviously had gotten out of its house and been attacked by a wolf—or maybe a bear. Tori’s mind jumped to Orangey, she couldn’t help it. Her dad had found the orange tabby under his car when Tori was eight years old. That very first night the cat jumped onto Tori’s bed, kneaded her stomach and settled in to sleep. When Tori got up in the morning, the cat followed her. That lasted for two weeks, two weeks of bliss for Tori, who spent so much of her time outside of school alone. Then Tori came home and found Orangey sitting on the front step as usual, but she had a subdued, cockeyed air about her. When Tori picked her up she discovered that the cat was bloody and whimpering. Her father wasn’t around so Tori ran three doors down with Orangey in her arms, because Mrs. Riley was always home. But on this day Mrs. Riley wasn’t home, or wouldn’t answer the door, and by that time Orangey wasn’t breathing anymore.
Tori stifled a sob. She remembered Orangey’s wounds vividly, and, looking at the heaving dog, she changed her mind about her diagnosis. It didn’t look like another animal had mauled it. It looked like a gunshot wound.
“Get back!”
Tori, startled, tripped, tumbling away from the dog.
That wasn’t Sofia, Tori realized. Sofia had probably never yelled in her life. Swinging around, Tori saw Coach Clancy easing into the courtyard, crouched low. The coach held out her left arm and made a long sweeping motion. Some of the girls, their eyes swiveling between Coach Clancy and the dog, moved out of the way. The coach was cradling a rifle in her right arm. She jerked upright all at once, aimed and fired.
The dog twisted out of the smoke and noise. Pieces of the animal burst in the air like firecrackers. The torso landed with a wet, grotesque thump on the steps of a cabin. Tori stared at it on the ground, the smell of burned hair sticking to her nasal cavities.
“It’s OK. It’s OK,” Coach Clancy said.
Tori held her hands to her ears. The ringing—buzzing—was back, worse than ever.
“Everything’s fine now,” the coach said. “Don’t worry.”
Liesel—outgoing, self-confident Liesel—crumpled in on herself. She cried extravagantly into her hands and wiped them on her cheeks, a tragedian’s game of peek-a-boo. Adrienne rushed to her, kneeled, and hugged the curve of Liesel’s back. She vigorously rubbed Liesel’s arms, as if trying to warm her up.
“What’s going to happen?”
Tori swung her head around, but, like in Robin and Adrienne’s cabin, she couldn’t tell who said it.
“It’s dead,” Coach Clancy said. “It can’t hurt you.”
“Not the dog. The world. What’s happening?”
Tori finally located the speaker. It was Eileen Blum, one of the older campers. Eileen stood at the edge of the path that led to the showers, her eyes like open manholes. She drew rasping breaths through an equally black, depthless mouth. Tori had never spoken to Eileen; she was too afraid. Rumor was, her boyfriend broke up with her on the last day of school and she gained twenty pounds in the three weeks before camp started. Liesel mocked her behind her back, saying Eileen’s Indian name was I Not Lean. But Tori found her fascinating. She liked to watch the other girls warm up every morning before she got started herself, and she always made sure to watch Eileen, marveling at her round belly rolling beneath her shirt, the seam of her short-shorts disappearing under her doughy thigh and then popping free, over and over, as she pumped her legs. Eileen was a woman, not a girl like the rest of them. And even with the extra weight, she was still fast—three days ago she ran 220 yards in twenty-four seconds. The problem, of course, was her endurance. She didn’t have any. Eileen hadn’t finished a slow run in the nearly two weeks they’d been there. She told Coach P. it was because she wasn’t dull enough to be a long-distance runner; she needed constant stimulation. Coach P. pointed out that she’d been invited to the camp because she won the CIF cross-country championship for the San Francisco section last year. Eileen just shrugged at that.
Coach Clancy looked away from Eileen and scanned the rest of the girls. She took a step back, as if she feared they might charge at her. “I know you’re all scared about what you’re hearing on the radio,” she said, her voice a little wobbly at first. “None of us is entirely sure what we heard. But this much we know for sure; you’re safe here.”
Tori glanced at Eileen, who had let her eyes drop to her shoes. Tori knew what Eileen was thinking. They weren’t safe anywhere. They never had been.
Chapter Five
Downtown Mammoth View was two blocks of two-story red brick. There was a barbershop and a grocery, a little Italian restaurant and a clothier’s, a ski shop, a five-and-dime, a diner and a combination book-and-record store. The centerpiece, of course, was the Greek Revival bank, built during California’s gold-rush days, though in the Mammoth area it had been a short-lived silver rush. The bank’s soaring granite columns gave the business district some ambition, and, more important, made the wealthy skiers who arrived every winter feel at home. Around the corner on Second Avenue were the Moose lodge, a small one-story office building, a single-pump gas station—and the police department.
Jackson rolled the Buick down Main Street, making sure he abided by the fifteen-miles-per-hour speed limit. The little downtown was still empty. More than that: it was abandoned. Billy had begun to figure out what had happened. He surveyed the gaping buildings, second thoughts percolating. This was the kind of thing—this panic—that brought o
ut the state police, maybe even the National Guard. This was something that would make the evening news. Then what?
Billy noticed the wrenched-open doors of the grocery. A head of lettuce, a torn bag of chips, and squashed candy bars littered the sidewalk. Through the door he could see a row of shelves, but he couldn’t make out the items arranged on them, just the colors: orange, yellow, blue—a lot of blue. “Stop for a minute,” he said.
“What?”
“Stop the car.”
Billy stepped out of the Buick as it was easing to the curb.
Jackson leaned across the passenger seat. “What are you doing? You gonna hitchhike?”
“We need to eat something.”
“Sonuvabitch,” Jackson snapped. “What the hell is wrong with you? I should just leave you here.”
Billy leaned down to make eye contact. “We need to be able to think straight, and we need calories for that. Come on. Five minutes and we’ll be gone. Three minutes. When’s the last time you ate? You have breakfast this morning?”
Sam, ignoring Jackson’s glare, clambered over the seat and onto the sidewalk. He raced into the store. “Goddamn it,” Jackson said. He turned the car off.
The three men walked through the grocery. It was a small, rectangular room, but the overhead lights gave it the illusion of depth. Billy and Sam started grabbing wrapped sandwiches, bags of chips, Ho Hos and Ring Dings. Sam opened a bottle of Miller High Life and gulped it. Jackson picked through the bananas in search of one without brown spots. Billy felt a strangeness inch up on him. He couldn’t believe the store’s owner, or the hired help, or whoever, had just walked out and left the place wide open.
“Let’s get a move on,” Jackson whined. “We have to get out of here.” He’d found a good banana.
Billy whacked Sam on the shoulder to put a stop to his beer guzzling. When Jackson was right, he was right. The town made Billy uncomfortable, too. It had nothing to do with the fact that he’d left a dead man in the bank down the street, though that didn’t help. It just felt creepy. The town was what snobs called picturesque, and what he called fake. Even the grocery seemed more like a gingerbread house. He wouldn’t be surprised if he peered behind the row of soda bottles in the refrigerated aisle and found elves back there stocking the shelves and cackling. Billy hit the sidewalk, with Jackson and Sam right on his heels. They glanced around at the barren street, and climbed into the car. Jackson turned the ignition. The Buick jumped forward and accelerated. Billy looked at his watch: they’d been in there less than five minutes, just as he’d said, and now here they were leaving the town behind, no one the wiser. The squat brick commercial buildings had been replaced by modest, one-story homes, and then those quickly fell away, replaced by greenery, trees. Billy sighed audibly.
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