Night Relics Page 5

  “Linda!” Pomeroy gasped. His throat constricted and for a moment he was afraid he would pass out. Then he saw that he was wrong. It wasn’t Linda. Same blond hair, tall. Jesus, same build. It was her mouth, too, the full lips …

  For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was Linda, and he pictured her alone in her bedroom, unhurriedly sorting through the things in an open dresser drawer. Now she had come to him alone ljke this, out of the forest, having finally noticed him, understood him. He would forgive her, and together they would go into the trees….

  Now that she was closer he could see a certain suspicion in the woman’s eyes, and he smiled brightly at her and nodded.

  “Haven’t seen Mr. Ackroyd this morning, have you?” he asked. Before she could answer he said, “My name’s Adams. Henry Adams.” He almost shoved his hand out for her to shake, but his palm was slick with blood again. He dropped the rock behind his back. She seemed to have visibly relaxed when he mentioned Ackroyd’s name. Thank God she hadn’t been standing there two minutes ago when he was dropping rats into the water tank.

  Or had she?

  He stopped himself from turning to look at the tank.

  “Name’s Beth,” she said.

  She looked so much like Linda that he nearly couldn’t trust himself to speak. He had never had a chance to explain himself, his love for her. Beth—her name filled his mind.

  Then he realized that she was looking at him uneasily, and he made himself smile again. “I was just thinking that I knew you,” he said. “You remind me of … of a woman I knew once.”

  “I’ve got a common face,” she said. “What happened to your hand? It’s bleeding like crazy. My boyfriend’s place is right up the road. He’s got a first-aid kit. You ought to put some hydrogen peroxide on that and bandage it up.”

  “Naw,” Pomeroy said. He was pretty sure why she had mentioned the boyfriend. She was attracted to him, but was a little too modest to be open about it. She just wanted a little space at first, and that was all right.

  Or maybe she had seen him up on the hill, and was threatening him with the boyfriend. He tried to read her face, looking deeply into her eyes. He couldn’t see any suspicion there, or any fear. She trusted him.

  “I tried to pet Mr. Ackroyd’s cat,” he said, opening his hand now, “but the darned thing took a swipe at me. First time that’s happened. We’re old friends.”

  She nodded. “You ought to have someone look at it, old friends or not. Cat scratches as deep as those are dangerous.”

  “My car’s just up the road,” Pomeroy said, falling in beside her and heading toward where the Thunderbird sat at the turnout. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the trunk. Maybe you could help?” He looked her over, his eyes stopping for a moment on her breasts. She glanced at him and he pulled his eyes away, embarrassed. “Where you headed?”

  “Just out walking,” she said.

  “Like a ride somewhere?” He could sense that she understood him, or at least would be open to the idea of … He couldn’t define it too clearly. He wondered if she lived nearby, maybe in one of the isolated houses out here in the canyon.

  “No, thank you. I’m headed up toward the ridge, actually. I like to walk. Walking gives me time to think.”

  He considered asking her to drive his car for him. He could plead cat bite, say he was feeling shaky. But maybe it would be too much too soon. “What’s your sign?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s neon.”

  Pomeroy laughed. He liked that, a woman who could joke. He had worked hard to develop his sense of humor. That was invaluable for a salesman. It was a very human thing, a sense of humor, and was attractive to people.

  “You live out here?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “My boyfriend does.”

  “How about you? Where do you live?” He pictured her in a small house, lace curtains, far enough from the prying eyes of neighbors so that she wasn’t fastidious about her privacy. He wondered what her habits were when she was alone. Linda had been very free when she thought she was alone, very uninhibited.

  “Locally,” she said.

  They were at the Thunderbird now, and he opened the trunk and took out the first-aid kit he carried. The canyon was full of hazards—snakes and animals. He liked to be prepared. It was the boy scout in him.

  Beth dabbed the cut with a gauze pad soaked in liquid from a little spray can of antiseptic. The bite was ragged and deep, but the bleeding had nearly stopped. She covered his palm with another pad, fixed it in place with tape, and then wrapped his hand with a strip of gauze bandage.

  Pomeroy barely noticed the throbbing in his hand now. Her face was close to his—closer than Linda’s had ever been. Beth trusted him. She cared about him, for him. He cocked his head and smiled at her, putting his whole heart into it.

  She stepped away. “There you go,” she said. “You still ought to see a doctor. Bacterial infections are pretty common in cat bites.”

  He nodded. “I will. Thanks. You know, it’s a pleasure to meet a beautiful woman out walking like this. Quite a surprise. Sure I can’t drop you somewhere?”

  “Very sure,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

  Near the parked Thunderbird she stepped off the road and onto a trail that angled down toward the creek. He could see that it wound away upward on the other side, and there was a cut in the steep mountainside where the trail lost itself in the brush. Pomeroy unlocked the car, and got in, watching her as she crossed the creek. Almost at once she was lost from view. He should have gone along with her. She would have enjoyed his company.

  He started the engine, certain that he would see her again. Synchronicity had brought them together. He could sense it. This was meant to happen, to make up for … for what had happened before.

  The cat bite throbbed worse than ever. Beth had been right about seeing a doctor. That had been good advice. He would keep an eye on his hand. Right now, though, he had a couple of other things to do.

  He smelled dead rats and realized that the plastic bag was still tucked into his pants pocket. So he wound down the window and threw it out before driving away west, toward civilization. Things were going well. Even the damned cat bite had paid out. He grinned suddenly, anticipating his phone conversation with Lance Klein.

  10

  KLEIN WATCHED THE HILLSIDES THROUGH THE WINDOW. He knew it was crazy, but something inside him, almost like a memory, whispered that at any moment she would appear. He’d been waiting for her, expecting her. He could picture her face clearly—the pale porcelain cast of her skin, her dark eyes and hair. Her name flitted into his head without his making any conscious effort to invent one for her, as if he had always known it.

  The wind fell suddenly, and the shadows and trees were still, the hills empty. He imagined it was dark, late at night, the moon high in the sky over the ridge. Heavy with expectation, he walked toward the hills through the high grass. She appeared in the moonlight, and he went out to meet her, taking her hand and leading her to a room that smelled like pine and wool and tallow. Her clothes were a puzzle of ties and buttons, but with practiced hands he undressed her, the two of them moving together slowly in the sepia-toned candlelight….

  When the telephone rang he nearly knocked it onto the floor. It took a moment for him to recognize Pomeroy’s voice.

  “I think we’ve got a live one out at the end of the road,” Pomeroy said.

  “Which cabin?” Klein forced himself to look at the countertop, to yank his eyes and his mind around to business and away from the windy hillside.

  “Thirty-five,” Pomeroy said.

  “They settled on a price?”

  “Nope.”

  “You make any kind of offer?”

  “Nope.”

  Klein waited. He did a lot of waiting when he talked to Pomeroy, whose pronouncements were full of pauses that seemed to imply things, except that Klein never knew if the pauses implied stupidity or secret knowledge. “So
what did you tell them?” he asked, finally giving in. Two points for you, he thought.

  “I told the woman to talk it over with her husband. My idea is to drive back out there in a couple of days, after they’ve had time to get worked up, and tell them I’m not interested. Then one of the new fronts can pick it up.”

  “All right,” Klein said. “I’ll go for that. Give me the name and phone number.”

  After listening for a moment he hung up the phone and shook his head, immediately punching in a number. The phone rang three times before a man picked up at the other end and said, “Callaway.”

  “Bob, this is Lance Klein, calling about that little real estate deal we talked about at the Spanglers’ party. That’s right,” Klein said. “She was a riot, wasn’t she? I am a lucky man. You don’t know the half of it. Anyway, about that little deal, it’s easy money, payment up front.”

  Klein nodded at the phone, peering out at the hills again. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got the particulars if you’re interested. That’s right. Vacation home out here in the canyon, party name of Monroe. They’ve got a year-round home in Southgate.”

  Klein loved the view from the backyard, especially on a clear, windy day. The Japanese had the idea that you should build your house so that you couldn’t see the view, so that you had to go looking for it. You wouldn’t lose your appreciation of it that way. Sometimes the Japanese were purely full of crap.

  Klein had cut, filled, surveyed, and built on the hills a hundred times in his head. It was a sort of mental exercise—creative thinking. Up behind the house there was a gradual slope for something like two hundred yards. Put in quarter-acre lots, ranch-style homes done right—plank floors, rock fireplaces, plenty of wood-frame windows. Nothing fake.

  Call it “The Woods” or “Country Acres.” Put out a couple of billboards along the Santa Ana Freeway—a painting of oak trees, the sun coming up, a creek, green grass, maybe a family of people hand in hand, watching the sunrise. Never mind that in ten years there wouldn’t be any “country” left out here except for a few strips of what was sometimes called “green belt” by the used car salesmen who passed for city planners.

  But then you didn’t sell people with the truth. Not with that kind of truth, anyway. There was a bigger truth that had to do with inevitability. The best you could do was give people something for their money. They were on their way right now, those people were, getting out of the goddamn city, trying to find a little bit of breathable air. That’s what the guy with the bumper sticker didn’t get. You couldn’t leave the canyons to the lions, not forever.

  Prices were skyrocketing out in the foothills. A couple of years ago you could buy up a lot with a house on it for sixty thousand bucks. A hundred thousand would buy you a buildable acre. But those days were gone forever, and any serious real estate considerations, even out on the fringes of the county, were strictly for high rollers.

  There was a lot of federally owned land in the county, though. The Cleveland National Forest stretched across most of the Santa Ana Mountains, and swallowed all of upper Trabuco Canyon. Most of it was wilderness. A dirt road ran back into the canyon, open to traffic for five miles or so. Some forty cabins were hidden back up in there, in Trabuco itself and in Holy Jim Canyon, which branched off and ran up toward Santiago Peak.

  Right now you could buy one of those cabins for pocket change. The same cabin in Modjeska, or in the little town of Trabuco Oaks, could set you back a couple hundred thousand. What accounted for that was partly that you couldn’t buy the land out in the canyon. You got it for twenty years, and then had to renew the lease. Built into the lease was what the Forest Service called a “higher use” clause, which meant that the fed could buy you out at market value if they wanted to put the land to some other purpose—like a park.

  Also, there was no electricity or phone out there. Water was sketchy, especially in drought years. What was worst was the bone-wrenching dirt road, full of potholes, that ran up into the canyon. Nobody went back in there casually. Klein would bet money that there wasn’t one person out of a hundred in the county that even knew the place existed. Probably one in a thousand.

  But it wouldn’t take much to change that. Pave the road, say, and run a wire back in there, and suddenly, very damned suddenly, you could put your pocket change away.

  In fact, Klein’s canyon enterprise operated on the brink of outright fraud. He wouldn’t have used that word in the company of any of the consortium of investors and front men that he’d managed to peg together over the past months, but he had never been one to fool himself.

  Just as soon as the county announced its intention of turning upper Trabuco Canyon into a wildlife park, something was going to happen to the value of the cabins back in there—something big. There were two ways it could go. The county could upgrade the road and run power into the area, and the value of all those fifteen-thousand-dollar hovels would increase tenfold overnight, literally. Or else the Forest Service would implement the “higher use” clause and eminent-domain the places, paying the owners off at market value.

  Klein was betting on the second scenario. There were only the forty cabins back in there, in Holy Jim and Trabuco canyons combined—pocket money for the government no matter what happened to market value.

  Somebody was going to make a piece of change, and the taxpayer was going to take it on the chin.

  So far, Klein and his “consortium,” as he liked to call them, had made offers on twelve cabins and had actually picked up six of them. It was Pomeroy’s job to hunt for more, and then, when he found a possible sale, Klein passed the name on to someone willing to front for the consortium for a flat fee. You were prohibited by law from holding more than one lease, and that’s why he needed the fronts— there were only a handful of investors altogether, looking to pick up something like twenty properties. Anyway, the consortium would ante up the money to buy each cabin and pay the front a flat fee to hold the lease.

  Most of the longtime canyon residents had picked the places up years ago for six or eight or ten thousand bucks. If you offered them twice that they crumpled. Once you transferred the leases and picked up bills of sale, you sold the places back and forth among yourselves and drove the prices through the roof. In the end you’d divvy up, with a brokerage fee for Klein on top of his share.

  If you were quick and clean and smart, you’d all walk away happy when the government bought you out. If you weren’t, then the government would smell something— fraud, to be exact.

  11

  IT WAS NEARLY NOON WHEN PETER PARKED THE SUBURBAN in the lot behind the city of Orange civic center buildings. Wishing he was anyplace else than where he was, he walked around to the front sidewalk, past a tile-and-concrete fountain that had four painted steel egrets standing on top of it, spitting water into the air. The water blew away in the wind, out onto the lawn and walkway. A half dozen sycamore leaves floated like boats on the fountain pool.

  He had seen the fountain a thousand times, driving and walking along Chapman Avenue, but it looked strangely alien to him now. Abruptly he felt the urge to run—not in order to hide, but just to run, for the sheer sake of running, to make his legs work, to justify his heart. He found himself at the door of the police station without having run anywhere. His reflection in the glass looked back at him like a windblown ghost.

  There was no one visible inside, no activity at all. A line of empty chairs sat along the windows to his left. Straight ahead was a long, silent hallway, and to his right lay a glassed-in reception office containing three cluttered desks empty of people. Maybe nobody got into trouble on Saturday morning. He ran a pocket comb through his hair and straightened his collar. There was no use looking the way he felt.

  A woman appeared from a back room just then, carrying a cup of coffee into the reception office. He stepped to the window and said hello. She smiled at him, looking efficient and friendly, but her face changed when he explained what he wanted, as if she could read som
ething in his voice and eyes. “If you could have a seat for a moment, Mr. Travers,” she said, nodding toward the chairs by the window. At that, she turned around and went out again.

  He sat down, although he didn’t want to. Full of nervous energy, he was nearly compelled to get up again, to walk up and down the hallway or back and forth across the carpet, as if any movement at all would hasten him toward an answer. Eventually a man in a gray sport coat stepped into the reception cubicle. He patted his coat pocket and then paused for a moment to pull a pen out of a desktop penholder, looking out at Peter as if sizing him up before stepping out through the door. He carried a clipboard with several sheets of paper attached to it.

  “Detective Slater,” he said, introducing himself. “Ray Slater.”

  “Peter Travers,” Peter said back to him.

  “What seems to be the problem, then, Mr. Travers? How do you spell that? T-R-A-V-E-R-S?” the detective asked. The pen scratched across the paper on the clipboard. He sounded a little tired.

  “That’s right. My wife and child are missing. My ex-wife. We’re separated.”

  “Their names?”

  Peter reeled off their names and ages. He handed the detective a pair of photographs he’d brought along from Amanda’s house as well as an inked set of David’s fingerprints taken a couple of years ago during some sort of school safety program. After looking the photos over, the cop slid them under the papers on the clipboard, snapping the clip down across them.

  “Missing since when?”

  “A week ago,” Peter said.

  “A week?” He looked up now, a puzzled expression on his face, as if he must have heard something incorrectly. “Come with me,” he said then, turning around and walking away up the corridor. He pushed open the door of a small room, furnished with a couple of upholstered office chairs and a desk. He gestured at one of the chairs, and Peter sat down. “Cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” Peter said. This was the part that Peter didn’t relish—admitting that Amanda and David had vanished last Sunday but that Peter was only now getting around to telling anyone. Either it would make him look guilty as hell or incredibly stupid. “As I said,” Peter started in, “we’re separated, and it was only this morning that I stopped by her house and found out that she and David were missing.”