Michael R Collings (3 page)

Thump
.

She straightened so suddenly that she cracked her head on the edge of Will’s bunk. This thump echoed the other ones, the mysterious sounds that had drawn her from her bed and sent her on this nighttime search. She pulled herself away from the bunks and stood in the center of the room.

Eyes closed, ears strained, she concentrated. After what must have been minutes, she heard it again.

Thump thump thump
.

It was coming from the roof! She was sure of it. She crossed to the window. The moon glowed faintly through a break in the cloud cover. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still high enough to rustle the elm in the corner of the lot.

Behind the tree, through its December-naked branches, she saw the lights of traffic on the freeway. Even at this hour, she thought, still as busy as ever.

Thump
.

Now she had a handle on the sound.

She left the boys’ room and went into Suze’s. She slid the newly hung curtains open and watched as the wind fingered through a line of black yew trees bordering the property next door. The branches seemed dipped in silver and sable, at once intriguing and subtly frightening in the intensity of light and shadow. Catherine shuddered.

Thump
.

Yes, that had to be it.

She left Suze’s room, with a final glance at the mound that hid her daughter, and returned to her own bedroom. Willard hadn’t moved. She stepped out of her scuffs and, still wearing the flannel robe, slipped beneath the covers, feeling their clammy chill where they had been turned back, the lingering warmth of her own body further down. Willard seemed to be radiating waves of heat, but Catherine knew that it was only because she had become chilled from her little trip. She put her feet on Willard’s calves. Part of her wanted him to wake up, at least enough to reach for her, perhaps enough to want to do more.

But another part urged him to remain asleep. She didn’t want to tell him what she had done.

She didn’t want to admit that the thumping of seedpods dropping from the yews onto the roof had nearly freaked her out as badly as had the hot water expanding pipes over a decade before. She didn’t want him to know that she had been nervous and upset her first night in the house...in
their
house. She snuggled against him.

Mentally she thanked the previous owners for being so desperate to move to their new, custom-built house in Newton Park, at the eastern edge of the Valley, that they took a deep cut in their asking price. After all, escrow had fallen through on two previous attempts to sell the house, and if it fell through a third time, Chuck Maxwell had explained, the other family stood a real chance of losing their new place. They
had
to sell.

And she thanked Chuck as well, with his creative approach to real estate that had gotten them just past the money requirements for the house. A five-thousand dollar landscaping allowance for the bare back yard, paid by the Merricks as part of the deal, had given them just the edge...and the house at 1066 Oleander was theirs.

Theirs
.

The word made her feel snug and safe. She nestled against Willard’s back and, her arm resting across his shoulder, finally drifted into sleep.

From the
Tamarind Valley Times
, 5 November 1989:

SEARCH CONTINUES FOR

MISSING VALLEY BUSINESSMAN

The investigation into the disappearance of Bryan Sidney, the Tamarind Valley realtor and construction executive missing since last Friday, expanded today to include county agencies. Sidney, 47, senior partner in Ace-High Construction and co-founder of McCall/Sidney Realty, was reported missing on October 30 when he failed to appear at a meeting of the County Realtors’ Association annual meeting in Santa Barbara, at which he was to deliver the opening address. A full investigation has been launched, said a County Sheriff spokesman today, although there are no substantive leads as yet.

A long-time bachelor, Sidney was last seen by his secretary when he closed his office Thursday evening. He had no scheduled appointments for that night, she claimed, but it was possible that he might have gone....

The Huntleys, January 2010

Settling In

1.

Catherine Huntley jerked awake. She shot a glance at the luminous dial of the digital clock by her nightstand.

It read 2:37
am
.

“What...?” she began, and then her sleep-numbed mind registered two things.

Sound...and movement.

The sound was a constant muted roar, an irritating rumble that vibrated on her ears like the approach of a heavily loaded eighteen-wheeler careening out of control down a city road, distant as of yet but drawing closer and closer. The movement was more subtle but for all of that infinitely more frightening. The bed quivered. The windows above her head vibrated tightly in their aluminum frames. The silver slats of the Levelor blinds rattled against each other, clicking like dozens of dice being rattled in a metal cup. Old hand that she was to Southern California’s geologic vagaries, Catherine Huntley recognized the signs.

Earthquake!

The shade on the lamp by her bed was swaying now, back and forth, back and forth, as if someone had jostled it in passing. The movement of the bed had intensified to a clear shaking. The roar grew.

The Big One!

Without thinking, Catherine punched Willard in the shoulder. ”Get up!” she yelled, then she was out of bed and pulling on her robe as she swept through the door, calling over her shoulder again to Willard, “Get up! It’s an earthquake!”

By the time she was halfway down the hall, the sound had stopped, the motion had stopped. The concrete slab again felt solid and stable beneath her feet.

Her bare feet.

She grinned in momentary embarrassment—she had broken rule one of Earthquake etiquette: NEVER WANDER AROUND BAREFOOT. There might be broken glass, broken tiles. All sorts of things that would not go well with bare feet. She could tell from the lack of sound behind her that Willard had remained dead to the world. As usual. Still, getting up at 5:00
am
Monday through Friday for the commute into L.A. wasn’t easy on him, so she shouldn’t complain.

Anyway, the immediate crisis seemed to be over. She went down the hallway, straightening a favorite oil painting of a grey-and-brown rabbit huddling in unbelievably vivid green grass, done by a college friend years before. The nightlight in the bathroom shed enough light for her to see that the picture had been jostled well out of plumb by the temblor. With any luck, there wouldn’t be much more damage. Thank God they were still unpacking some of the moving boxes stored in the back bedroom. Grandma’s china and crystal were still safely crated away. If they had been on the shelves....

She glanced in at Suze. Sleeping as usual. The kid could sleep through fire, flood, and famine. Catherine envied her daughter that ability. Since moving into the new house, she had slept restlessly, lightly. She was easily awakened by the slightest sounds. Her cheeks reddened as she remembered the yew trees and the wind less than a month before.

The boys were also asleep. It seemed as if only Catherine had even felt the earthquake, let alone reacted to it. She was about to leave the room and make her way back to bed when one of the boys—probably Will—groaned. It was a long, fitful sound guaranteed to strike a chill up any certified mother’s spine. It was echoed by another moan, this time from the lower bunk.

She bent over Burt’s bedding-swathed head. She touched his bare stomach. The skin was cold and damp, sweaty almost. She pulled the blankets away from his face and was startled to see that his hair was plastered to his forehead, thick and dark even in the filtered light from the bathroom. He tossed his head several times, his eyes flickering up and down beneath their lids.

“Mmmnnhhh,” he murmured, as if trying to articulate a word.

“Burt,” Catherine said, whispering so as not to wake the others. “Burt, honey.” She shook him gently. “Wake up.”

“Mommy?” His voice was dark and thick with sleep, deep and disturbing, not at all like his usual boy’s treble. “Mommy?”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“Dream?”

Catherine recognized the signs. He was awake and not awake. But she hoped that she had roused him enough to dispel whatever was frightening him in his sleep.

“It’s okay,” she said, putting as much motherly soothing and reassurance as she could in her voice. “Go back to sleep.”

“’Kay,” Burt murmured, then: “’Night.”

“Goodnight, honey.” She kissed him and, careful to avoid the edge of the upper bunk, stood up.

And gasped.

Will was staring straight at her.

For an instant, the dim light in the room had caught his face, sharpening planes and ridges and reflecting from eyes so dark as to seem black even in midday. For an instant he seemed a stranger, piercing her with eyes that burned cold and deep. For an instant, he looked dead.

“Mommy?” he said, and the instant faded and it was just her son watching her from his bed.

“Yes, dear.”

“I dreamed I was at Disneyland. On the roller-coaster.”

Catherine smiled. Let him think that it was a dream. Tomorrow would be time enough to discover—in the reassuring light of day—that he had just experienced an honest-to-goodness California quake. If she told him that now, he would probably want to stay up all night waiting for the inevitable after shocks.

“Just a dream,” she said.

“And the man tried to pull me out of the car,” he continued, slowly but without a noticeable break, as if he was finishing his thought without being aware that she had interrupted. “And then I tried to run away but he chased me.”

She rubbed his arm the way she knew he liked. “It was just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

He closed his eyes. She felt a twinge of relief when the blackness disappeared beneath eyelids drained of color by the dim light. She tucked the covers around him, noticing for the first time that his skin seemed cooler than usual—just the opposite of Burt’s. She shivered. The room was cold as well. There was no cloud cover tonight, and that meant that there was a real chance of temperatures dipping to the teens.

Welcome to sunny California, and turn on the hot-air fans in the orange groves, folks. Come to think of it, turn up the heater as well.

Willard insisted that they set the thermostat as low as it would go at night. On the twenty-year-old furnace in this house, that meant somewhere in the forties. If it dipped below that, well, there were always more blankets and quilts, he insisted. But at around nineteen degrees, even quilts and blankets had a limited usefulness.

So in spite of the probability that Willard would wake up grumpy and complaining of a mild headache from the heated air (they were real headaches, she knew, and she usually tried to accommodate to his need for cool air at night), she decided to turn on the heater. After all, it was nearly 3:00, and Willard had only another couple of hours of sleep. And anyway, she thought as she made her way down the hallway, she could always open the window in their room a crack and close the door and turn off the vent. At least that way the kids would sleep a bit more warmly.

She followed the turn in the hall, already familiar with the feeling of the stiff-piled carpet beneath her bare toes. Their last place had been tiled, with only occasional throw rugs that rumpled so easily that were more bother than they were worth.

In the living room, she turned on the lamp by the thermostat, gave the circular dial a twist that re-set it to fifty, waited for a second to hear the reassuring
whoomp
of the gas heater kicking in and, with a clarity that made her mouth convulse, suddenly realized how extraordinarily good a cup of steaming hot Sleepy Time tea would taste.

It was the last time she ever associated Sleepy Time tea with pleasure.

She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill, wishing that she had thought to put on a robe, wishing that the heater was more efficient, wishing that the press releases for Southern California would include the fact that on the rare occasions when it got really cold—sub-freezing cold—the humidity coupled with the woefully insulated housing made it seem much worse than winter had been when she was a child in Montana. At least there, she thought ruefully, the cold was honest, and everyone knew it was coming and what to expect, and dressed warmly and built sturdily to keep the cold out and the warm in. Here the houses were cracker boxes, with no insulation to speak of.

But wishing didn’t make it so. At least with a cup of hot tea in her, she would be a little warmer when she returned to bed. At the closed folding doors that separated the kitchen from the living room, she could have reached out and turned the dimmer switch on the living room wall next to the switch that controlled the patio light. She could have done so, and then pulled the folding doors open, and the kitchen would have been well lit and what happened next might never have happened, or if it did, it might not have been so horrifying.

Or perhaps it would have happened anyway.

But regardless of the infinite
maybe-
s and
perhaps
-s that infest and destroy so many lives like God-sent plagues, she did not touch the dimmer.

The dimmer was connected to a four-bulb light-and-fan affair in the dining room half of the kitchen, and she was still worried about the electrical costs in a house this size. Heaven knew that Willard’s salary was undergoing enough trauma with the sudden pressures of a mortgage frighteningly larger than their apartment rent. She was sure that they would grow into it eventually, just as she was sure that the way rents were spiraling in the area their house payment would seem increasingly small in comparison over the next couple of years. But right now, after only a little less than a month as homeowners, she was trying for frugality, systematically replacing 100-watt bulbs with 60-watters wherever possible, trailing after Willard and the kids to turn off lights left burning in empty rooms.

So instead of simply reaching out and turning the dial and flooding the kitchen with light, she decided to cross the dark kitchen. She knew where everything was, and anyway there would be some spillage from the living room lamp. If necessary, she could always turn on the swag lamp Willard had hung over the sink. She started to open the folding doors.

Most of the kitchen was still cloaked in darkness. She had drawn the curtains over both windows before she turned in the evening before, hoping that the thin material might help keep out even a bit of the cold. She blinked at the pocket of darkness that opened before her. For an instant, memories of dank cellars and musty attics in her Grandmother’s place flitted through her mind. Memories of childhood fears of things in the dark, of things that go
bump-thump-thump
in the dark almost overcame her good resolves to be a conscientiously cost-aware householder.

For an instant she trembled with a fear that froze the marrow of her bones, a terror triggered unaccountably by the angular wedge of light that cut across the table. She blinked, and the complex of light and shadow resolved into hauntingly familiar forms. In spite of his promise to clean up after himself, Willard had left his late-night snack things out for her to take care of.

Again.

The mundanity of a small white plastic cup, a plate and butter-and-jam-covered knife crossing it, and a loaf of bread with its plastic sleeve still open to the air penetrated her fear.

She shook her head in a gesture at once accusatory and forgiving and stepped into the kitchen

At the same instant, she realized with a panicky
thrummm
-ing in her veins that there was something wrong with the table. It was a relic from Willard’s family’s pioneer past, purchased by his great-grandparents at the turn of the century and handed down from generation to generation since, and finally officially his on the day of their wedding. But now, the once solid oak planking wavered and heaved as if it were undergoing its own California temblor.

And then her foot touched the cold linoleum floor...or rather, what should have been cold linoleum but was in fact even colder, frenetic and scuttering and dry and husky and cold and moving
moving
and the floor rose up to brush the sole of her foot and lap over like an incoming wave at Zuma Beach and rise higher, onto the arch of her foot, and then the foot was down before her mind could assimilate the shock and the horror, and her weight was on it and something
somethings
crushed beneath her and the floor was frenetic and scuttering and husky and cold and slimy-wet…. And Catherine Huntley screamed!

2.

For Willard Huntley, getting to sleep had become a real chore lately. Even with the younger kids in bed by 8:00 and Will, Jr., down by 8:30, even by staying up half an hour or so later than Catherine and watching the 11:00 news and then getting something to eat before padding down the hallway, even by consciously trying to wear himself out at work each day, he was finding it harder and harder to get to sleep. Except, he would have reminded himself wryly had he been awake at the moment Catherine screamed, and languidly contemplating his life,
except
after he and Catherine made love

But those occasions were rare enough. She was often tired nowadays, and there was always the chance—no, make that the high probability—of one of the kids waking up and calling “Mommy” at just the wrong moment, like they were all endowed with some kind of alien your-parents-are-having-sex radar. Or, worse, either he or Catherine might glance up at a moment of passion and see a pair of wide, dark eyes staring at them in sleepy bewilderment. That had already happened at least once (that they knew of), and now Catherine was wary of simply indulging in raw passion.

She had to check the kids first, she had to close the bedroom door (that always made Willard feel slightly constrained, slightly confined, slightly guilty), she had to remind him half a dozen times to be quiet, she had to do this or that. And the upshot was that since moving in, they had really made love only once—passionately, wildly, satisfyingly, that first night. Since then, a little touching, a little playing around— hell, he had seen more action in the back seat of his ’73 Chevy convertible when he was a kid than he had seen in his own bed for the past few weeks.