“Huh?”
“Run away. Not very far. We can get some supplies with your money and then hide out in town. If we see her, we can just duck around the corner. Then, when Mom and Dad come back home, we can show up and tell them all the nasty stuff she does.”
“I don’t want to be a squealer.”
“Okay, I’ll do the squealing.”
“But the only other babysitter’s big and ugly.”
“So what? You expect Mary Poppins? I just don’t like Jenny. I thought you were in love with her, though, so I kept my mouth shut.”
Mark sighed. “I was. I thought she was nice. But she’s naughty.”
Teresa got up. “Let’s go. But we have to be sneaky about it. We don’t want ‘the witch’ figuring it all out and stopping us.”
As they snuck out the back gate, Mark heard Jenny on the phone.
“Tommy?” She said. “Sure. Yeah. No, really. I got the whole place to myself. Come on over. Hey, how often does a chance like this come around? No, no, they’re real little. I’ll pop The Lion King on the video player and shove some cookies in front of them. Really private. Yeah. Just you and me and a choice of bedrooms.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Let’s explore,” Carly said, pulling at Trey’s hand.
They had managed to catch the errant horse, and now both animals were tethered to some scraggly trees off the riding path. The road from Avalon was below them, but it was cut-off near the high rocks because of a mudslide that still had not been completely cleared from the unusually heavy rains of the late spring. Half the hillside there was difficult to navigate because of the way the rocks had fallen.
Trey glanced up the side of the hill. “All the way up there?” He turned and caught a glimpse of one edge of Avalon. They had come around the island far enough to barely see anything but the tip of the town.
“Sure,” his wife said, letting go of him and running up the thin trail ahead. It lead to the caverns which tunneled back to the sea. He had hiked this area with his father when he’d been twelve and thirteen, on vacation then. Carly stopped half way up the hillside to read the sign. “The Kirk-In-The-Rocks,” she said. “ ‘Where the Spanish monks lived in solitude from 1605-1620. It became known Capilla Blanca, for the white chalk cliffs on the ocean side. Enter at own risk.’ You want to risk it?”
Carly led the way, weaving between boulders and brush, until she came to the mouth of the cavern. A large chain-link fence had been erected there. “I guess there’s no risk involved here. Wish we could get in. Smell that? It’s bat guano.”
He leaned against the fence. “My dad and I used to come up here. He knew all the trails through this. There’s a carved out room where the monks slept. He used to take me there and tell me ghost stories.”
“Nice nightmare material.”
He laughed. “They were more funny than scary. He was a complex man. He drank. He could be a bully when it came to getting his own way.” Trey’s voice seemed to die down like a sudden gust of wind that was over. Quietly, he said, “But he was a good father in other ways.” Then, he brightened, as if the good memories were coming back. He spread his hands out as if creating a canvas for his memories. “He could be amazing, too. He told great stories. He was cheap—really cheap. When I was in college, he sold all my old furniture from home. I came back the first summer, and I didn’t even have a bed.” He could smile at these memories now, from the distance of years. Suddenly, another memory hit him. One he didn’t savor. He remembered the old man at the kitchen door of the San Bernardino house.
Trying to break in.
The gun firing.
The look on the man’s face, the gray hair, the shabby clothes.
“I wish I had never killed that man.” Trey went and glanced through the fence, down into the chasms and paths of the cavern.
Carly leaned against the chain-link fence. “It was an accident. Of course, you wished you didn’t. He was trying to break in. We had three break ins in that house. I’m sorry he died, too. But it wasn’t your fault. Get over it.”
Trey shook his head. “I don’t think I can. If only I hadn’t bought that gun. I was just too paranoid.”
“I know you were. With good reason. That inmate, what was his name? The one who had escaped. Watson?”
“Wilson,” Trey sighed. “Just like Agnes Hatcher. I assumed he would come for me. I assumed I would be his target. I guess I was wrong on both counts.”
“It’s a moot point in Hatcher’s case, now that she died in the crash.” Carly went over, slipping her left hand across the back of his neck. It felt cool where she touched him. “It’s okay, Trey. It’ll all be okay.”
He barely heard her voice. “Looking at that old man, lying there, dying. Dead. It was like watching my father die all over again, only I pulled the trigger.”
A silent moment passed between them. He felt the cool of the shade from the nearby rocks and trees. He smelled the fresh salt of the sea below them. The soothing heat that rose, incongruously, from Carly’s cooling hand at the back of his neck.
“When we get back, I want you to go to a counselor to deal with this,” Carly said, gently. “I love you, I love our life together, but you have obsessed on this long enough. Between this and your job, part of you is numb. I don’t want my children growing up with a father who’s numb in that part.”
“What part is that?”
Carly took a deep breath. “The part about forgiveness. Of even yourself. Now,” she said, turning so that he couldn’t see her tears, “Tell me the legends of the bat-cave.”
He began to recount for her tales of the passages around the cavern, the stories which his father had told him, the lives of the order of monks which lived in silence among these chalk walls. He told her that he knew most of the trails, because his father had led him through each one, showed him the Great Room, where the monks had created their small chapel. “The statue of the Virgin Mary was in one of the recesses in the room, and it was long gone, but they’d painted the walls like a chapel, with the stages of the cross and angels and all kinds of things on white. It was really beautiful. It’s too bad you can’t go in there anymore. I guess graffiti taggers might ruin it.”
Carly sighed. “I wish we could see it. Don’t you think we could sort of break in somewhere? If you know all the trails, there must be another entrance.”
“That might not be too smart,” he said. “Some of those trails weren’t even very sturdy when I was a kid. And there’re these big drops, like wells, down hundreds of feet. Besides which, I don’t think it would be a really good example to our kids if we were caught breaking in, do you?”
“Oh, it’ll give them something to remember us by for years to come.” She grabbed his hand, tugging. “Come on, we don’t have to go in too far. Just a little ways.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Who are you?” Cobra asked.
“I’m you.”
“Me? I don’t get it.”
“I know what you hunger for.”
“You mean, what I done before? The killing?”
“More than that. The pleasure in it,” she said.
Cobra and Agnes Hatcher had spent their morning washing up at the beach showers. Cobra sunned on the beach while she walked among the shops, hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. She brought him a lunch of hamburgers and French fries. She ate nothing. Her hunger was not for food.
By the time Trey and Carly were riding, she was asking a local realtor about rental cottages. She was shown several photographs, and given directions if she wanted to walk around the town by herself and look at them.
About the time Agnes found the exact location of the cottage she was interested in, which would be available the following week, Trey was thrown from his horse two miles away.
When she and her newfound friend trudged up the road to the cottage, it was late afternoon.
Chapter Forty
“It’s not dark at all,” Carly said, leaning against t
he cavern wall. A shaft of afternoon sunlight cut from above and to the side. It lit most of the craggy rocks, and they could see all the way over to where the white chalk walls, which were smooth, began. They had climbed around part of the bent chain-link fence, obviously where local kids had been doing it for years. The cave was silent, except for the sound of waves crashing against its rocks, far below.
“I’m telling you, we shouldn’t be doing this,” Trey said. In spite of his own warnings, he was leading, every now and then reaching back to touch Carly’s hand to make sure she was staying balanced. The trail was not particularly narrow at this point, but at its outer edge, there was a fifty foot drop into another cave.
“This is fun, Trey. This is like being kids.” Carly tried to pass him, but when she did, he pressed her back. “Sneaking into a cave that’s off-limits. It’s like playing hooky.”
“One at a time,” Trey thrust his arm out so she couldn’t go around him. “I don’t care if it seems like there’s room to walk side by side. All it would take is for your foot to slip…”
Carly huffed. “We’ve hiked trails up at Big Bear more narrow than this. Give me a break.”
“The difference is, if we fall here, no one can get here immediately to help us.”
“You are such a stick in the mud,” his wife said. “So, where’s the room?”
“The Great Room? I’m not sure we can get there from this trail. Maybe we can look down on it.”
“Well, let’s go,” she pushed lightly at him.
After taking a few wider trails into dead ends, Trey finally got the right one. The light from above, where the caves opened up at the top of the hill, was growing weaker. The sun’s light was shifting.
As he walked ahead of Carly, he almost stepped over the edge.
The trail ended abruptly.
Although he couldn’t see them, he could smell the bats—this must be where many of them congregated. He glanced at the ceiling of rock. He could see their huddled, shadowy forms. He pointed at them to his wife. She gasped.
He whispered, “No loud noises, please. Nothing’s worse than having a hundred bats swipe at you.”
She nodded.
He brought her to the edge of the trail, where the rock dropped into a chasm.
The feeble sunlight descended where he pointed, and then seemed to grow brighter.
“There it is,” he whispered.
Below them, a round chamber of pure, almost glowing white.
“It’s not all chalk. Some of it’s other minerals.”
“It looks like baking soda,” she whispered, mindful of the bats. “How do you get down there?”
“You don’t get down, you get up. There’s a trail that winds from the water level upward.”
There were drawings of figures all along the white walls. It was hard to figure out what exactly they were from above, but Trey had seen them from the chamber’s floor when he’d been twelve.
He said, “There’re the stations of the cross. And see? In that recess? There’s the Queen of Angels.”
“I guess the paint faded over the years.”
“It was probably really colorful when the monks were here. It’s weird how I feel comfortable in here. Maybe it’s all those hikes with dad. I’ve never been scared in this place. It’s so…beautiful,” he said, for lack of a better word.
“This should be some kind of national landmark,” Carly said.
“I think they tried that. They just couldn’t keep the kids from writing over it. Look.” Trey pointed towards the far wall of the chamber.
Scrawled across a carved religious saint, the words Cheryl and Robert 4-Ever.
“It’s still so beautiful.” Carly hugged Trey. “It’s like our secret garden.”
He kissed her forehead. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here before these bats wake up.”
“Wait. What’s that in the middle?” She pointed downward.
“It’s just a drop. It’s not a well or anything. But the monks used it to raise and lower supplies from boats. Back then, the Spanish could get little boats into the water-level caves. They’d raise food and fresh water up in animal skins tied to ropes.”
“You mean those monks never left?”
“Not until they died.”
Carly shook her head. “That’s so weird. It’s like they were the anchorites of the island.” She shivered, and turned back on the path. She ducked to avoid an overhang, and then stubbed her toe and let out a brief but powerful cry.
Trey reached for her, and brought them both down against the floor of the trail.
The noise disturbed some of the bats, who flew as if stampeding the air over their heads, brushing Trey’s back. He lay on top of her.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Stubbed my toe.”
“The hazards of cave hunting,” he said. “But now that I have you like this…” He kissed the back of her neck.
“Between you and the bats, I don’t know if I’m ever safe,” she pushed him off her, and he rolled back against the rock wall. “Let’s get out. That whole monk thing has me feeling kind of creepy.”
Out in the open again, Carly said, “I feel like I’ve just come out of some ancient tomb.”
“You have,” Trey said. “When the monks died, they buried themselves at different places in the caves. Like catacombs.”
“And what about the last monk?”
Trey affected a bad Boris Karloff accent. “Maybe he’s still in there, waiting.”
Chapter Forty-One
“No,” Jenny said, pushing herself up to a sitting position. “I’m not going all the way.” She combed her fingers through her hair. All the buttons of her blue shirt were undone. Still, she had kept her bra firmly fastened, despite her boyfriend’s best efforts. She felt heat inside her, the kind that she would’ve liked to burn with, but she knew that boys like Tommy didn’t respect girls that went all the way. No matter how blue his balls got, and no matter how much sex might clear up his acne. He had even told her that he thought masturbation was a sin, so if she gave in to him, then she could save him from sin.
Tommy lay on his back. His shirt was off, but so far he had kept his swimming trunks on. He was definitely cute, but she didn’t intend to get a reputation in Avalon for him. The town was too small, and everyone would know in no time flat. She’d end up like her older sister, unmarried and pregnant at seventeen. Not in her plans. She was going to marry a guy like Mr. Campbell who would take her places. A guy who would treat her right. Not like the local townies. Jenny Reed was going to get off this island and go to Los Angeles. She was going to maybe wait tables until she got some parts in movies. She was going to be famous…
“If I begged?” Tommy asked.
She laughed, buttoning her blouse up. “Not if you proposed marriage.”
They were on the bed. They’d spent part of the day getting drunk, the other part making out and grinding against each other. She was winding down a bit from the wine, and figured she’d better fill the wine bottle up with some water so the Campbell’s wouldn’t notice that any of it was gone. Glancing at the clock, she cried out, “Damn—they may be back soon. It’s almost three. Get up, get up.”
“I’m up," he said, laughing. “That’s the problem, I’ve been up for the last two hours.”
“You are so crude,” Jenny said. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. He tried to pull her down again, but she resisted. She pushed him away. Jenny slid to the edge of the bed, and stood up. “I’ll get you one more beer, and after that, you have to leave. They never get back much before five, but you never know. Remember, if they surprise us, you’re twenty-one.”
“It’s what my I.D. says.” Tommy propped himself up on his elbows. “Where are those rug-rats? I ain’t heard a squeak outta them for hours.”
Standing in the doorway, trying to look sexy by balancing on one hip, Jenny said, “They ran away. But I think I saw Marky sneaking around the backyard a little while ago.”
“Some b
abysitter you are.”
“Hey, you get what you pay for. What’s going to happen to them here? As long as I don’t hear either one of them swimming, they’ll be fine. I think they’re just getting their revenge for you being here.”
“Maybe they’re watching us. Maybe they’re learning all kinds of things,” Tommy said, grinning.
“Like how to be drunk and stupid,” Jenny arched her eyebrows, mocking him. She turned and padded barefoot out to the kitchen. She checked the road from the small kitchen window. A few tourists were bicycling by. There’d be a million of them come the Fourth. They’d come in droves on the morning of the Fourth and stay through the weekend. It was always like that when the holiday was mid-week. But no sign of the Campbells.
Jenny opened the fridge and grabbed a Rolling Rock bottle from the back.
A sound behind her startled her.
“Tommy,” she said, turning. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
But it wasn’t Tommy.
Chapter Forty-Two
Teresa held tight to her little brother’s hand. He knew to keep quiet because the man with the tattoos all over his arms and back looked scary. The man’s shirt was in his hands, and he wiped it across his stomach and chest to get rid of all the sweat that was shining on his skin.
The tattooed man was stepping carefully through the French doors of the patio, into the cottage.
Teresa whispered in her brother’s ear. “Maybe it’s another boyfriend. She has a lot of them.”
Mark wished his sister would keep quiet. He didn’t want that man coming over and finding their hiding place. He was sure it wasn’t a boyfriend of Jenny’s, because Mark was positive he saw a small, slightly curved knife in the man’s right hand.
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