Night Relics (36 page)

She ran back into the bedroom, snatching the phone off the hook and punching the 911 button on the keyboard. She found the
gun in Klein’s nightstand when the operator answered. “This is Lorna Klein at 242 Parker in Trabuco Oaks,” she said. “Top
of the road. It’s an emergency.” Lance made a point of keeping the gun loaded. “My husband is being assaulted by an armed
prowler. Send the sheriff
as quick as you can. I’m leaving the phone off the hook.”

Without waiting for an answer, she tossed the receiver onto the bed and ran out into the hallway and through the living room,
pushing open the screen door with her shoulder. The wind blew her hair around into her face, and she brushed it away as she
charged straight across toward the poolhouse door. It had been broken in, and it turned now on the wind, swinging slowly outward,
hanging from its bottom hinge. The night was full of noise and movement, tree limbs lashing and spray blowing out of the storm-tossed
pool. Lawn chairs scraped across the concrete, animated by the wind, and one overturned in front of her, sliding in a rush
into the water.

Then she saw him in the moonlight—climbing over the redwood fence, into Beth’s yard. She saw the castaway shovel, knew she
was too late. She threw the gun up wildly and pulled the trigger, turning her head aside and closing her eyes, but even so
she could see the muzzle blast through her eyelids, and she flinched at the explosion of the gun going off in front of her
face. She looked up just in time to see the man disappear from the top of the fence, dropping out of sight beyond it like
a stone. She screamed then, hearing the wail of police sirens above the wind. The sheriff’s substation wasn’t a mile away.
They’d be here any moment.

She looked at the pistol in disbelief, only now really
thinking
about having pulled the trigger. It was heavy and cold, blue-black in the moonlight like a thing of evil. She nearly threw
it into the pool. But that was stupid. Hide it? What the hell good would that do if a dead man lay on the other side of the
fence? Who would they think shot him if not her?

She thought about Lance and made herself move, pushing a fallen chair out of the way and walking toward the poolhouse, not
letting herself picture what she’d find there. For a moment she stopped breathing, swallowing down the
stuff that rose in her throat, staring out at the moving hillside through the fence. Someone was running up toward the ridge—a
woman in a long black dress like a shadow. She thought she heard a scream trail down toward her as she ran toward the broken-in
door of the poolhouse.

I
T HAD BEEN A HELL OF A LONG DAY.
B
OBBY HAD FALLEN
asleep in Mr. Ackroyd’s car on the way home from the vet’s and had dropped into bed at about eight, totally zonked, as he
put it. The keys to the new dead bolts sat on the dining room table, and next to them a shoe box with the words, “Beth, Personal
and Confidential” written on it in the careful kind of lettering that draftsmen learn. She’d left the box lying there while
she put Bobby to bed, and it was just as well. Inside lay a gun—a little .22 rimfire pistol, big enough to cause a rat considerable
grief if you shot it between the eyes. It looked like a toy—tinny and without a trigger guard, like Bobby’s sparkler pistol
or Peter’s potato gun. She’d put the top back on the box and left it on the kitchen counter. Tomorrow morning she’d give it
back to Klein.

She washed the morning’s few dishes at the kitchen sink, watching the wind blow the night to pieces outside the window. The
Kleins’ yard, backing up to the hills, was a dervish of leaves, and she watched as a tumbleweed blew across the hillside in
the moonlight and slammed into the wrought-iron fence, scattering debris across the pool deck and into the water.

She looked at the shoe box and then looked away. She and Peter had hardly had a chance to talk today. This wind … Maybe when
the wind stopped they’d get clear of all this. The thought had come into her mind a dozen times today—if only the wind would
die down—as if the wind itself was some sort of dark spirit coming down off the deserted ridges to manifest itself in their
lives.

She put the last dish away and dried off the counter, then wiped the chrome faucets clean of water spots before sliding the
towel through the refrigerator door handle. She looked at a picture that Bobby had drawn at day care a couple of weeks ago
and hung on the refrigerator door with magnets—a surfer wiping out on a wave that looked something like an iceberg. His head
was cut off at the neck and was flying through the air, the eyes wide open in surprised wonder. The caption underneath read,
“Eating It Big.” Walter, her ex-husband, used to surf, back in his salad days, and before their breakup he had always talked
about it with Bobby, but hadn’t ever found time to take him to the beach. She wondered if the headless surfer was Walter and
what a shrink would say about it. Immediately she decided it
was
Walter, just for the fun of it, and that she didn’t care what the shrink would say. She straightened the picture, trying
to neaten the impossible mess of taped and magnet-stuck papers.

Bobby’s Halloween drawings were still hanging on the side next to the stove, along with a crayon rendering of a Fourth of July rocket, a comical dog, and a construction-paper envelope containing the valentines Bobby had gotten last spring in school. There were outdated dental-appointment reminders and telephone numbers and awards for good grades and Little League achievements and who knew what-all else. The entire refrigerator was buried beneath layers of paper like some kind of weird collage. There was a sort of Velveteen Rabbit effect to it, though, the refrigerator coming to life because of all this attention it got from Bobby and her. She couldn’t any longer envision
it clean and white, like her sister’s refrigerator, which always seemed dead to her and metallic, like an alien monolith out of a science-fiction movie.

How long would it be before Bobby grew up a little and the refrigerator went back to being nothing more than a machine? Suddenly she was struck with the desire to have another child, if only for the sake of keeping the refrigerator happy and alive. She nearly laughed, except that she realized that it wasn’t funny; it was true. She thought about Peter again and about how everyone needed a second chance—a chance to do things right.

When she reached for the light she noticed the shoe box sitting there like a reminder of all the world’s horrors, another machine with an agenda of its own. What had Klein said last night? Not to worry, prowlers don’t usually come back anyway … And here he was switching out all the door and window hardware and leaving a gun, for God’s sake, on the dining room table.

She pictured the man at the back door, the gauze-wrapped face, the hand on the knob, and then thought about the creep Adams that morning out at Ackroyd’s, his hand torn up where Sheba had scratched him. Suddenly it dawned on her, cold as gunmetal—Adams had gone back out there and shot the cat. Of course he had.

Abruptly she took the lid off the shoe box and picked up the box of cartridges inside, sliding it open and looking at the flat little brass disks. She eased one out with her fingernails—a little-bitty thing about the size of a Good ‘n Plenty. You don’t threaten a man with a loaded gun unless you’re willing to use it. That’s what her father had taught her. And you surely didn’t threaten a man with a gun that wasn’t loaded.

Her father had taken her target shooting a lot when she was a kid. She liked that, putting holes in pieces of paper, and was pretty good at it. He had made her help clean and oil the guns when they got home from the range. So the pistol wasn’t strange to her. She knew she could empty the
gun into the creep in a half second if he threatened Bobby. That was what was dangerous—feeling that way. She wasn’t any kind of pacifist. But she wasn’t any kind of cowboy, either. And she was damned if she was willing to admit that she needed to be. If Southern California had gotten that bad, even out here in a quiet village like the Oaks, then she was taking Bobby and getting the hell out.

She thought about Amanda and David’s disappearance then, about Klein’s argument with Adams that morning, and Dr. Stone taking
the pellet out of Sheba’s spleen….

Just a prowler, scared away now. No threat of his coming back. Klein confident enough to lend her a gun …

She put the cartridges back into the shoe box and carried it into the bedroom with her, setting it on the nightstand. Then
she slid her dresser drawer open, glanced inside, and on impulse turned away, picking up the phone. She listened for a dial
tone, then laid the receiver down on the nightstand. If the bastard called tonight he could damned well talk to the busy signal.

She realized that she was staring into the open drawer now, trying to puzzle something out. Tired as she was, it took her
a moment to see it.

Her nightshirt, somehow, wasn’t on top where it should be, where she had dumped it this morning. It was an oversized T-shirt
with a picture of Sleepy the dwarf on it, a Christmas present from Bobby. Then she saw it, folded beneath her lingerie, down
toward the bottom of the drawer.

The lingerie was folded, too, neatly, arranged in little rows. Lying among her things was a stem of wildflower, a sprig of
blue aster, as fresh as if it had been picked that afternoon.

She pulled her fingers away from the side of the drawer.

Somebody had gone through her things. Today.

She spun around, looking suddenly at the door, half expecting to see the man standing there, already inside the house. There
was no one. Only the sound of the wind in
the eucalyptus trees, the eternal swishing and scraping out in the darkness.

Klein? She remembered her conversation with Peter, his suspicions about Klein. He’d certainly have had the opportunity to
go through her things. She almost hoped it
was
Klein, but something told her it wasn’t. This was too crazy—folding things up and all. The flower. Whoever did it wanted
her to know he’d been there.

She pulled the sprig of aster out, tossing it into the trash can, then shut the drawer and tipped the lid from the shoe box,
opening the cartridge box before picking up the pistol. Her hands shaking, she disengaged the little rod beneath the barrel
and snapped out the cylinder, then loaded four bullets into it, leaving the hammer over an empty chamber for the sake of a
safety. She wouldn’t change her clothes at all. She’d sleep on the couch, dressed. She thought of calling the police, but
rejected the idea. Maybe in the morning. If Peter had a damned telephone she’d call him, and she wondered suddenly if the
Kleins were still up, and whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to let Klein know about this.

She heard something then, from outside—what sounded like a woman’s scream. Tense, she waited to hear it again, disbelieving
her own ears, and almost at once there was the sound of gunfire—a single shot from somewhere out back. She ran out of the
bedroom and into the kitchen again, carrying the pistol with her trigger finger along the barrel, hoping that Bobby wouldn’t
wake up, and flipping out the kitchen lights as she headed onto the service porch.

The moonlit backyard jumped into clarity through the window in the door, and her heart flew into her throat at the sight of
a man hunched and running straight across the lawn toward the steps. Forcing herself silent, she stepped back against the
clothes dryer, bracing herself, and raised the pistol, clicking the hammer back.

C
AUTIOUSLY, WITHOUT LOOKING VERY FAR IN
, L
ORNA
flipped on the light inside the poolhouse door. What met her eyes looked like the aftermath of some kind of battle involving
trees. Leaves and trash from the hillsides littered the floor and furniture, clinging to the curtains hung over the windows
on the back wall. The Ping-Pong table was flipped onto its side and her ceramic elephant lamp lay smashed into pieces on the
floor. Over all of it lay a carpet of twigs and dry mulch and autumn leaves.

She looked past the edge of the door toward the end of the room where there was a sofa, two chairs and a Franklin stove. Her
husband sat on the floor beside the sofa, leaning against the wall. He was wild-eyed and scared, as if he expected God-knew-what
to be coming in through the door, and he hugged one of the sofa cushions in front of him, his naked legs thrust out from underneath
it. There were leaf fragments and twigs in his hair and stuck to his chin so that he looked like someone escaped from a madhouse.
He swallowed several times as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t, and then looked around with the mystified air of a sleepwalker
just waking up in the wrong place.

He noticed the gun in her hand at the same time the police siren cut off short out front.

He stood up, clutching the cushion to his abdomen and looking around. “A gun. What…? What did you
do
?” He shook his head back and forth, then spotted his bathrobe,
lying against the opposite wall and entangled with his pajama bottoms, both of them covered with dead leaves and dirt.

“What did
I
do?” she asked, and tossed the gun onto the couch. “I don’t know what I did.”

As she turned toward the door he set the cushion on top of the gun and hurried toward the bathrobe. “Wait!” he said. “I can
explain.”

She nearly laughed out loud. His voice was husky, as if he was about to start crying, and there was a begging tone to it that
right at that moment enraged her more than what she now
knew
had been going on in there just minutes ago. The woman, clearly, had gone out the window and through the orchard. Lorna forced
herself to walk to the fence and look over into Beth’s yard. There was no dead man. He was gone.

Two policemen came around the corner of the house just then, their revolvers drawn. One of them was big, like he’d played
football ten or fifteen years ago. The other was a small Hispanic man, handsome and neat and with brushed-back hair that was
apparently impervious to the wind. His uniform looked tailored.