Strawgirl (28 page)

"I can't believe you're losing it over a simple storm," Bo told the dog as the phone rang on the shadowy counter defining the kitchen. Bo tripped over the vacuum cleaner in a dash to answer.

"I'm leaving now, Es," she said into the phone.

"Leaving?" the voice of Rombo Perry replied. "Martin and I were thinking you might like a catered dinner and some company tonight. How about it? Breast of chicken in an orange brandy sauce over wild rice, steamed Japanese eggplant, rolls, of course, and a milk chocolate mousse. Martin's version of meals-on-wheels."

Bo leaned over to rub her ankle where it collided with the vacuum. "Sounds like heaven," she answered as she stood again, "but ..." Something was wrong. Something moving in the dark outside. Not a potted plant. A man. "Oh shit, it's him."

Accustomed now to the dark, her eyes had been able to discern the dripping figure standing on the redwood deck. A figure in a black T-shirt with a white face on it. A bearded, old-fashioned face on a T-shirt. Distorted and ghostly on its black background. The figure wearing the T-shirt was holding something above its head in both hands. Something big. A deck chair. He was standing in the rain on her deck holding a chair over his head. As if in slow motion she saw the chair begin its descent in an arc toward the glass doors.

Bo heard the bell inside the phone jangle as it fell from the counter and hit the vacuum cleaner. Then a splintering of glass as she grabbed Mildred and ran from the apartment, leaving the door open to the wind-driven spray that blinded her as she stumbled on slick stairs, caught herself, and made it to the deserted street.

Her car was half a block away, wedged between a pickup truck and an illegally parked motorcycle with a faded surfboard chained to its gas tank. In the streetlight the hard rain made little inverted cups, brief and glasslike, as it hit the surfboard. Bo ran toward the car, imagining splashing footsteps in pursuit, the reach of a wet, pale arm. Her legs felt numb; the contraction and then expansion of large muscles necessary for running had to be thought about. The BMW seemed a receding mirage until Bo finally touched its metal surface. Grabbing her keys, she unlocked the car door and dived inside, pulling the door closed behind her and locking it. Through her rain-

blurred rear window she saw the soaked figure jump the last three steps from her apartment stairs to the street, and look straight at her car. Mildred, cowering on the front seat, glanced nervously at Bo.

"We're outta here!" Bo bellowed, starting the car and pushing the motorcycle over the curb and into a streetlight pole. The surfboard cracked and split lengthwise, its two pieces making a twisted white fiberglass X over the crumpled bike. The BMW's rear wheels sent clouds of spray over the running figure whose hands grabbed and slipped on Bo's right fender as she spun out on Narragansett, away from the beach.

As he began to sprint after her, Bo thought he was going to try to catch her on foot.

"You imbecile," Bo yelled out the window, "you can't chase a car on foot!" The wind gripped her words and carried them away as the running man veered across the street and was lost between a darkened bungalow and an apartment complex whose backlit stained-glass lobby door featured dolphins rising through watery bubbles. Bo thought she felt his soul behind her like a globe of frozen ammonia. Not like dolphin bubbles. Caustic. Poisonous. She accelerated and then jammed on the brakes at Sunset Cliffs Boulevard where a fallen eucalyptus limb bisected the intersection diagonally. There was no option but to turn right, but so what? He must have gone to get his car. He'd never catch up. Bo turned onto Sunset Cliffs Boulevard where it snaked along the continent's edge. Something about his running unnerved her. An assurance, a businesslike determination that made no sense. Bo pushed down on the accelerator and within three blocks could no longer see the intersection where he'd vanished.

Six blocks later Bo took her foot off the accelerator to slow the car as the road curved left above the famous Sunset Cliffs, a sea-torn granite shelf from which the sunrise in Honshu, Japan, could easily be foreseen in North American twilight.

The car was heading into the curve too fast. Bo pressed the brake pedal gently. Nothing. Pushed it to the floor. Still nothing.

Shit, it's the brakes! He's cut the brakeline and you just pumped the last of the fluid out at the intersection. He's back there, not far, and you have no brakes!

The BMW sheared a guardrail on the right as it careened around the curve, out of control. Heavily traveled, the boulevard wore a chemical skin of oil seldom cleaned off by the pressure of a thousand rubber tires scrubbing in rainwater. San Diego's yearly rainfall could be measured with kitchen utensils. The road was an oil slick.

Bo knew the point, only one long block away, at which the sea cut a notch to within feet of the road. Another curve to the left there. A curve she could never make. The car would fishtail, flip backward into the sea. Ramming the gearshift into reverse, Bo heard the scream of warring metal as she clutched Mildred tightly to her right side and scraped the guardrail for fifty feet before plowing through it into a pile of boulders. The boulders, she remembered as the steering wheel bent under her weight, had been hauled there from the desert. Dumped there to buffer the sea where it chewed into million-dollar property. Dumped there, maybe, to stop a runaway car headed for a watery burial. As her head cleared Bo thought of the runaway truck ramps all over New England. She'd seen them as a child. Off-ramps leading to hills of gravel that could catch and stop an eighteen-wheeler with no brakes. Boulders, she smiled dizzily, were just big gravel. The BMW hissed a smell of burnt metal, but was stationary. Its front end had crumpled like a stiff blanket thrown against the rocks.

Bo tried the driver's side door. Jammed. Most of the homes fronting the sea along the boulevard were lit and gleaming yellow in the black rain. But none of the doors was open. No one coming to see what had happened. In the roar of the surf, Bo realized, the headlong crash of a car into a rockpile might not be heard. Quickly she scooted to the passenger's side, tucked Mildred under her left arm, and tried the door. It opened into a cold torrent of rain and salt spray from the tumultuous waves lashing the cliffs twenty feet from the car. The man in his car might round the first curve any moment now. But there was still time to make a dash across the boulevard to one of the houses.

As Bo struggled out of the car an enormous wave rose, serpentine from the darkness below the cliffs, and broke in a blast of spray that stung her eyes. Rivulets of seawater ran down the back of her nose, leaving a bitter taste. Mildred sneezed and lurched out of Bo's grasp, landing clumsily on the wet stone. In a second the little dog had vanished into the rocks ahead, down toward the sea.

"Mildred!" Bo yelled pointlessly. Her voice was lost in the wind. As she clambered down the rocks after the dog, Bo saw a car's lights slicing the rain in wide, misty cones.

Estrella Benedict watched as Henry threaded chunks of tequila-marinated turkey on metal skewers. The turkey alternated with ripe tomatillos and ruffled black mushrooms out of a jar. After a minute Estrella noticed that she'd torn a flour tortilla into four pie-shaped wedges and arranged them in an overlapping fan design in the sink.

"Bo should have been here by now," she said, mashing the wedges into the garbage disposal. "I'm worried."

"So am I," Henry Benedict agreed. "Maybe the storm's held her up."

In a red polo shirt and baggy white cotton pants he managed to look even more like a blond Abraham Lincoln than he did in his naval officer's uniform. Estrella noted the ridge of muscle wrinkling his forehead above the brow line. The last time she'd seen the furrow that deep they'd been camping in the desert and found a nest of newborn Western rattlers writhing in a shady wash. He'd stomped them with a Tony Lama boot and then thrown up behind an ocotillo cactus. Henry Benedict, Estrella had learned in four years of marriage, didn't say much and considered the implications of everything as if those implications mattered.

"I think I'll call LaMarche and see if he's heard from her," Estrella told the front of her toaster oven.

"Already called him five minutes ago," Henry replied into a hardwood cutting board hanging from a leather loop on the wall. "He says the Indian woman called him, saying the little girl's all upset, thinks something bad's happening to Bo."

"Hannah said that? Bo said she wasn't talking, that she's been mute since they told her her mother was dead."

"Well, I guess she's talking now," Henry concluded. "LaMarche said he was going over there, to Bo's place. Nothing to do but wait."

Estrella wrapped her arms around her husband's waist and listened to his heart beating slowly, its thump echoing through his back. "Bo's special," she said into his shirt. "Things never happen for her like they do for other people. She always goes deeper or something. It's scary."

"Maybe it's just what she has to deal with," he answered. "The manic-depressive thing. Maybe she just sees deeper. But we're here for her, Strell, and she knows that."

"Yeah." Estrella sighed and stared at a bright blue wall clock with hands shaped like crayons. Bo Bradley had given them the clock for Christmas last year, with numerous hints that the godchild she was expecting as soon as they were ready would undoubtedly learn to tell time within months of birth. "But this guy that raped Hannah's sister and killed the psychologist may be smarter than we think. He's really smart, Henry. What if he's gone after Bo?"

Henry Benedict aligned the skewers evenly on a foil-covered tray and glanced at the rainy kitchen window. "What makes you think he's so smart? Do you know something about this creep I haven't read in the papers?" he asked.

And then he listened as Estrella told him about a woman from a village in Chihuahua who would probably be heading there at this moment on a fumey second-class bus strung with Christmas tree lights, her children asleep on her lap. Somebody on the bus would have chickens in a cage, Estrella told her husband, crying. Somebody would be drunk. And somebody would be singing.

"You did the right thing, hon," he whispered as Estrella wept into his chest. "You really did."

"That's what Bo said," Estrella cried harder.

Mildred, her pink skin visible under wet white fur, had wedged herself beneath a jagged rock at the edge of a drop into foaming black water that seemed alive. Bo found the white dog easily and then realized why. Her sodden blouse with its peasant sleeves and seven-button cuffs was white, too. If her pursuer were looking, he'd see her instantly.

No time left to cross the narrow road, find safety in a lighted house where people would open the door, phone the police. Nothing to do but crawl further into the rocks and hide. Nothing to do but hope the man would assume she'd made it to one of the houses, and leave. Bo pictured the house on the corner across from her ruined car. A mansion. Painted unaccountably pink. A historical landmark, in fact, with a lighted American flag in the yard. Once the home of a sporting goods magnate who'd been a lover of the mystical Theosophist Madame Tingley. Maybe the man chasing her would think Bo was in that house, safe, phoning the police. She grabbed Mildred, huddled beside a black rock, and conjured an image of the long-dead mystic. Maybe Madame Tingley's ghost would stay the hand of the killer.

As a flash of lightning tore the sky Bo looked across the vertical tube of angry water below to a flat ledge extending out to sea from behind another pile of boulders. Below the ledge was a tiny inlet, now swollen with surf.

That pink house is the Spaulding Mansion, Bradley. The cave is there, remember?

Holding Mildred in a viselike grip, Bo climbed down through ragged darkness to the surging trough of seawater she now remembered was usually a pleasant tidal estuary, full of hermit crabs and anemones. But how deep was it now? And how strong the pull as a thousand gallons of churning water receded through its channel after every wave? In the sea at the base of the five-foot-wide trough a jumble of sharp-edged rocks disappeared under the next surge of water. Barnacle-encrusted, they would shred the flesh of anything thrown against them by the outgoing torrent. Bo shifted Mildred to her right arm, waited for the thundering influx of water to peak and begin its rush back to the sea, and stepped into the trough.

The receding water, ice-cold, only came to a point two inches above her knees. On her numb feet a pair of button-sided pumps, purchased to complete a costume that suggested Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, proved themselves worthy of the role and did not disintegrate. Bo made a mental note to send Nordstrom's shoe department a thank-you note, if she survived.

In the next step her left foot found a fissure, pulled back and balanced the combined weight of woman and dog on the edge of a fin-shaped rock. The next wave was rolling in, its shape like a truck-sized snake beneath the water. In a second it would arc against the rocks, higher than Bo's head, and then pull them both back down a frothing cataract to the sea. Bo pushed off, landed crookedly on her right foot, which seemed to bend, and in another step achieved the pile of rocks beyond the trough. The incoming wave plowed against her back with a force that pushed the air from her lungs and left her drenched in foam, but did not succeed in dragging her down the maelstrom of its backwash. Mildred shook her head violently against Bo's side, and struggled to be set free.

"Forget it, Mil," Bo told the dog. "You got us into this. Just ride it out."