Night Relics (18 page)

“I guess I rather
do
believe in such things, although I also believe that an overactive interest in the paranormal is massively unhealthy. Maybe
you’re better off scoffing at it.”

“I’m not doing much scoffing these days.”

“No, I guess you’re not,” Ackroyd said. “I can tell you absolutely that the woman and boy seen last week out in Falls Canyon
were not your wife and son. That much I’m sure of, for reasons that would only strike you as nonsense. My advice is to leave
it alone. Stay off the ridge at night. It’s a dangerous place even during the day—areas full of
sinkholes and dense brush. You’re liable to walk straight over a precipice.”

“It very nearly happened last night.”

“There. What did I tell you? The most rational explanation is that the woman you followed moved into one of the cabins up
in Holy Jim. Wilson’s old place at the forks is a good bet. It’s been empty for months. You’re doing the right thing knocking
on doors.”

“Actually I don’t think so. I told you I wasn’t in the mood for scoffing.”

“Well, my way of thinking is that if you get curious about that sort of thing, and start digging around in it, you’ll unearth
things that were better left buried, if you know what I mean. Probably there’s nothing but grief there.”

“I believe it, but maybe I don’t have a choice. Under the circumstances, maybe I’ve got to start digging.”

Ackroyd shrugged, then picked up the teapot and pointed it in the direction of Peter’s cup.

Peter stood up and stretched, shaking his head. “Had enough, thanks.” He looked out the open front door. The air outside was
nearly motionless now, waiting for the wind to start up again. Something wasn’t being said here. The old man was holding on
to something. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to another photo, this one hanging near the door. It was a long stretch of
tree-lined dirt road passing in front of a white, ranch-style house with chickens on the lawn in front. “Modjeska ranch?”

“Parker ranch. Nineteen twenty or so.”

Peter looked closer. There was the edge of a low, wood-sided building beyond the house and what looked like an orchard beyond
that. “Beth told me a little about it,” he said. “Klein pulled down the old Parker place, didn’t he?”

“Wind pulled it down,” Ackroyd said, sipping from his coffee cup and letting the pause underscore what he’d said. “Klein just
had it hauled away. There was a Santa Ana wind back in fifty-seven that blew the roof off the old ranch house. Knocked all
the windows out. Wrecked the place.
Wind blew for fourteen days. Maybe you remember that one.”

“I would have been seven,” Peter said, “but I remember there was one wind back then that lasted about forever, knocked down
some eucalyptus trees in our neighborhood.”

“Force twelve on the Beaufort Scale,” Ackroyd said. “That’s hurricane force—a record breaker for Southern California. Hills
were full of wildfires. Fifty thousand acres burned in the San Gabriels. They had to close the streets to the public after
the wind blew a man right through a storefront window in Santa Ana. Toppled trees. Millions of dollars in property damage.
Old Lydia Parker, of course, had been dead since the late thirties, and her daughter Anne had lived on there alone through
the war. She was eccentric, a recluse. Passed on right around mid-century, and the place was abandoned except for the hired
man who lived in the bunkhouse. He stayed on until the wind wrecked the place. By then it was beyond repair.”

“So this was after the murder?”

Ackroyd sat in silence, as if the mention of the murder had stopped him cold. “
Long
after,” he said finally. “Parker’s son was killed in the early twenties. Very bloody, terrible thing. They put a lid on it.
These days the press would have a circus with it, but back then things were different. Justice was small time, much more personal.
Often much less just.”

“What I heard from a waitress down at Cook’s Corner is that my place sat empty for so long because it was built by the murderer.
What was his name? Dr. Landry, I think. That’s why it was cheap. No one wanted to buy a house with that reputation. My good
luck, I guess.”

“Something like that. Landry left a certain amount of money in trust, actually, and a firm out in Tustin looked after the
place for years, kept it locked up tight. Inflation ate the trust, though, and there wasn’t enough in it to make structural
repairs. There were no heirs. It was finally put
on the market when the old lease ran out. I suspect that if you hadn’t bought it, the Forest Service would have pulled it
down.”

“You’ve been out here a long time. You must have known Landry. What happened to him?”

“Disappeared,” Ackroyd said.

“He disappeared?”

“One day he was gone. Of course he might’ve been gone a month, and nobody would have known. He became a sort of hermit after
the murder. A local pariah.”

“And no one knows where he went?”

“Mystery was never solved. Some people think he wandered away into the hills and died.”

“Why didn’t they convict Landry for the murder?”

“Actually, they
did
convict him. They didn’t jail him, though. Lewis Parker, the murdered man, was his wife’s cousin. Dr. Landry caught them
in a … dalliance late one night. Back then you could kill a man for that. It evened the score. Ended Landry’s standing in society,
of course, what there was of it. The marriage was what people called ill-fated. Neither one of them did well by it, although
she fared the worst.” Ackroyd paused for the space of a long minute, as if lost in thought. “Maybe Landry tried, in his way,
to make a go of it. Tried and failed. It was the child that pushed him … that he couldn’t abide.”

“It was Parker’s child?”

“Maybe. People were certainly inclined to think so.
He
apparently thought so.”

“That’s why you said Landry had no heirs?”

He shook his head. “No, Landry had no heirs because his wife and the boy committed suicide on that same night that he hacked
Lewis Parker to death with a shovel. Esther took the boy up onto the ridge….” The old man stood up and turned around, examining
the old photographs on the wall again. “The two of them jumped into Falls Canyon.”

Peter was suddenly aware that he old man was crying. He sat in shocked silence. “I’m sorry if …” he started,
but Ackroyd held up a hand and stopped him.

“It’s nothing you did,” he said after a moment. “I’m an old man who’s lived here all his life holding on to a handful of memories
like a child clinging to an old worn-out blanket.” He sat still, recovering. Then, standing up and walking to the open front
door he said, “Esther Landry was my sister.”

T
HERE WAS A CERTAIN COMFORTABLE ROUTINE IN GETTING
Bobby set up in front of the television on weekend mornings. He seemed to think that there was a magic in getting things
just right, arranging his stuffed animals, wrapping up in his quilt. Beth wondered how long he would be allowed to believe
in that magic. Last night he had slept through everything, thank God, even the visit by the police.

“Could you bring me a little smackeral of something?” he asked. Having a “smackeral” of something to tide him over until breakfast
was a habit he’d picked up from Winnie the Pooh.

She put a coffee mug full of water into the microwave, and then poured Cheerios and raisins into a cup shaped like a hippopotamus
head. She carried it out into the living room and handed it to Bobby, who sat with his legs crossed on the couch, surrounded
by the menagerie of stuffed animals and covered by the worn-out dinosaur quilt even though he was already dressed.

“Here you go,” Beth said. “Try not to spill, okay? Especially the raisins.”

“Get cups for everybody, will you?” Bobby asked, taking the hippo head from her.

“Maybe not,” Beth said. “I brought a lot for you, plenty enough to share. And put your shoes on while you’re watching TV,
okay? So you’ll be ready to go.”

“Sure,” Bobby said. “You should have seen my dream last night.”

“A bad one?”

“About Dad.”

“Oh.”

“I dreamed that King Kong picked Dad up, you know? And dropped him, like from the top of a building.”

“How awful,” Beth said. Actually she envied him the dream. She hadn’t had any really pleasurable dreams in quite a while.

“Only Dad turned into a yo-yo, you know, on a string, and so he didn’t hit the ground, after all.”

Ah well, Beth thought, so much for happy endings. The microwave buzzer went off, and she went back into the kitchen, leaving
Bobby to watch the last couple of minutes of “Sesame Street.” After lifting the mug full of hot water out of the oven, she
heaped about twice the recommended amount of instant decaf into it. She stirred it idly, and through the window she watched
the wind blow through a distant line of eucalyptus trees. She felt dull, as if she were hung over from the iced tea she’d
drunk last night at the steak house.

If Peter had a phone she’d call him up right now and say something to him, although she didn’t know what.

How in the hell had she fallen in love with a man on the rebound, one who was so obviously blundering through an emotional
mine field? There was no explaining it. And he danced like—what? There wasn’t a word for it. Dreadful didn’t cover enough
ground. It was his eyes that had gotten to her first, years ago—always smiling and cheerful. That was partly it: he was easy
to be around, comfortable. And in about twelve thousand ways he was different from Walter,
her ex-husband. If Bobby had any dreams about Peter, they’d be good ones.

From inside her house she could see down into the next-door neighbor’s backyard, and right then Lance Klein came out through
their french doors and stood by the pool, holding a cordless phone. Beth couldn’t help but like Klein, despite his being a
little overbearing. He had called earlier that morning to tell her about how he was going to install new locks on her doors
and windows. He was going to loan her the cordless phone, too, with his number in the memory dial. There was no use arguing
with him.

Everyone, even his wife Lorna, called him Klein, as if he had never had a first-name sort of friendship with anyone. Lorna
had been a blond bombshell once, but now she wore her bathrobe until the middle of the afternoon. She was a closet lush, too,
probably to put up with his bullying. There was a lot to her, though, and maybe it would have been better if she’d kept her
job at the library after marrying Klein. Doing nothing hadn’t seemed to agree with her.

Lorna had told Beth that she herself had miscarried twice and then had never been able to get pregnant again. The doctor,
Lorna said, had wanted Klein to provide a semen sample, but he had indignantly refused, and had said, out loud, right there
in the doctor’s office, that no one could
ever
question
his
manhood. As funny as it was, Beth had wanted to wring Klein’s neck on Lorna’s behalf.

Like Peter, Klein was almost always up for a game of catch with Bobby, and Beth liked him for that, too. Bobby’s father hadn’t
ever had time for that sort of thing. And now, thank God, Bobby’s father lived in New Bedford, where he had a real estate
license and was married to a woman he had met when he and Beth were still married.

The woman was also “in real estate” as her ex liked to say. He was the king of jargon. The two of them, he and the bimbo,
had been fond of having “lock box sex” in houses they were selling for people. They would meet at predetermined houses, let
themselves in, and save the price
of a hotel. Except that one afternoon the woman who owned that day’s house had got off work early and found them rutting away
on the fold-out couch in the den. Before she called the police and the Real Estate Board, she called Beth.

So now he lived back East, and sent child support but no alimony. To hell with his alimony; Beth didn’t want his money when
they broke up, and she didn’t want it now. What she wanted was never to see him or hear from him again. She put the child-support
checks straight into a bank account in Bobby’s name. He could use the money when he went to college. In a just world King
Kong would have dropped Walter onto his head.

Yesterday she had talked to Bobby about his having to come home early from New Bedford. Bobby acted as if it didn’t matter.
He was too cool to care. And besides, his father couldn’t help it. He was a busy man, very important, tons of money. He even
drove a Porsche.

She didn’t want Bobby spending any time with his father anyway, even though Bobby still maintained some kind of love for the
man, despite Walter’s being a treacherous pig. Kids seemed to have that skill—loving people and things for reasons of their
own, without any help from anything on earth. But like other kinds of magic it diminished as time passed. It had for Beth.
Right now, for instance, Beth would just as soon her ex-husband dropped dead, if only because Bobby was so full of this selfless
love, and yet the creep had sent him home early from his Thanksgiving visit.

To top it off, here it was almost two years later, and Walter still had the power to make her this mad. That’s what
really
makes me mad, she thought, nearly laughing out loud. It didn’t figure. Just yesterday morning she had lectured Peter about
figuring out what he wanted, but it was the kind of advice she herself had never been able to put to use.

She wondered what was worse, to be two years out of a bad marriage and still want to murder your ex, or to be
consumed with doubt about the divorce. Somehow, whether Peter wanted her to or not, she was going to have to set him up on
the couch with a dozen stuffed animals and a hippo head full of Cheerios.

T
HE CABIN THAT
P
ETER SAW THROUGH THE TREES WAS
little more than a shack, what the locals called a “tear-down.” There was a mattress spring in the yard, stripped of stuffing
and left outside to rust along with empty paint cans and old lumber, all of it overgrown with poison oak and covered in fallen
leaves. What had happened to the paint in the cans was a mystery, because the cabin itself clearly hadn’t been painted in
years. The old rough-cut siding was full of woodpecker holes, and about half the windows were broken and filled with cardboard
and aluminum foil.