Strawgirl (29 page)

After three more minutes of agonizing rock-crawling, Bo reached the cave. Not much as sea caves go, it looked like Atlantis to Bo. Just a hole in the continental shelf where the sea had dissolved a sandstone accretion when there was still a land bridge over the Bering Strait. Bo flung herself on the rocky floor and looked around. She'd been there before. The cave was a favorite local spot for picnics, esoteric rituals, romantic trysts. Also for the homeless, who had left mounds of trash and a stained orange blanket beside the sodden remains of a fire. Bo eyed the blanket with gratitude. It might introduce her to exotic skin diseases, but it would also forestall the effects of hypothermia. Edging toward the blanket, Bo realized there was something wrong with her right ankle. A throbbing pain. An odd limpness. Pulling off her shoe she tried to arch her toes, and watched as they responded with random, guppylike movements.

The storm was diminishing. On the fissured granite shelf that sloped downward thirty feet from the cave's mouth to a wave-lashed precipice, the rain fell now in steady, vertical strings. Bo wrung out her hair and the heavy folds of her khaki skirt. Then she dragged herself and Mildred to the fetid blanket and wrapped it around them, covering her own head so that anyone looking into the cave would see a dirty blanket thrown over a rock. Not a helpless woman with a badly sprained, possibly broken, ankle.

There was no way out of the cave except through its mouth facing the sea. Behind her left arm Bo felt the rough surface of a cement patch in the cave wall, five feet high and wider than her shoulders. Spaulding had made his fortune in more than pigskin footballs. During prohibition, Bo knew from an article she'd read in a local paper, the millionaire had dug a tunnel from a closet in the mansion and under Sunset Cliffs Boulevard to the cave. Mexican rum-runners, anchoring in the tiny cove below, would haul wooden cases of
ron negro
up the cliffs and through the tunnel to luxuriant safety. The tunnel was still there, under the street, but sealed over at both ends. Bo tried not to think of the historic crawlspace as a last, dashed hope. Mildred, snug against Bo's side under the odorous blanket, appeared to have fallen asleep. Bo hated herself for the warm tears she felt running over her cheeks.

Quit sniveling, Bradley. If it's time to die, do it so as not to disgrace your ancestors.

The words, straight from the mouth of Bridget Mairead O'Reilly, made Bo smile. Her grandmother, it seemed, never shut up. Under her breath Bo sang the Irish national anthem.

"Tonight we man the
bearna baoghal
," she crooned to Mildred. "In Erin's cause, come woe or weal ..."

Beyond the cave mouth, waves crashed repeatedly over the jutting granite apron. Rain fell through winds that moaned eerily among the rocks. Mildred snored. Bo sang softly. And nothing happened. No drenched figure in black leapt to the cave's door. Nothing moved at all except the thundering surf and an occasional pebble shaken loose from the chamber's walls, probably by a car on the street above.

But if there were cars, wouldn't somebody have seen the smashed BMW and stopped to investigate? Bo glanced at the stone ceiling above her. Of course. The police would have been called by now. Might even be eight feet over her head at this very minute, asking door-to-door of the beachfront residents if anyone had seen the driver of the wrecked car. Bo focused on the churning foam beyond the cave's long, flat lip. Were there flashing red lights reflected from above? Once she thought she saw a shard of red bounce off the water, but maybe not. What if she were just sitting down here while a dozen rescuers walked above? Eventually they'd abandon their search, tow her car away, and leave. And the tide was turning.

The realization felt like a slab of ice laid over her chest. The waves beyond the cliffs loomed larger, their spray splattering closer to the ragged opening of the cave. Bo scanned the walls for a high-water line and found it two feet above her head. There was a high shelf to her left at the cave's rear. If it came to that, she could climb up there and simply wait out the storm. She probably wouldn't drown. It wasn't the threat of drowning that froze her heart. It was the Celtic belief that souls leave bodies at the turning of the tide. The time of wrenching, final transition. But whose?

In the rain-sliced dark at the cave's mouth something moved. A lump of shadow indistinguishable from a hundred others shrouded in mist became a human figure, rising from a crouch before the ragged cave opening. In his right hand an open pocketknife gleamed as raindrops slid off its four-inch blade. A short, pale man whose sodden visage was oddly reptilian, the eyes unblinking.

Bo knew he couldn't quite see her in the gloom, yet his gaze was locked to hers in a psychic connection more damning than a spotlight. He knew where she was. In that connection Bo felt the force of something alien, something savagely empty. The man was not a man, but merely a form whose hatred of what he was not. seethed like invisible spume around him. Something sick and deformed from the moment of its conception. A damned soul.

"You're nothing." Bo thought into his eyes, her heartbeat throbbing in her fingertips.

"Don't think this Irish girl can't see straight through you. You may kill me, but it won't make you human."

As he began to advance toward her, Bo threw off the filthy blanket and stood. In her head a thousand ancestral bones clamored in brogue. On the cave floor Mildred bristled and barked.

And then another figure filled the cave opening, spun the man in the black T-shirt around by his left shoulder, and sent him sprawling on the wet rock with an uppercut to the jaw. Bo watched the knife slide sideways into a puddle of foam. The second man wore black wireframe glasses and had a crooked nose.

"It's okay, Bo!" Rombo Perry shouted into the cave as he pulled the black-clad reptile to his feet and flattened him again with a murderous punch to the nose. "We knew he was down here, but we weren't sure you were until your dog barked."

Bo thought she could smell the blood bubbling from the face of the man scuttling away from Rombo toward the edge of the cliff. A smell like peat, swampy and burnt.

"Fight, you son of a bitch!" Rombo screamed, moving toward the cowering form. "You fucking creep, you wanna rape a few more babies? Then fight for it! Give me the chance to kill you."

Bo saw the knotted muscles beneath Rombo's wet gray dress shirt. And saw through the weakening rain what was coming.

"Don't do it, Rom!" another voice called from the rocks beside the shelf. "Let the police have him!"

Martin St. John, covered in mud, jumped down from the rubble. After him a fourth man, familiar and pale, rounded the cave entry and ran to Bo. She could only point as a huge swell, pitch black and silent, reached the southwestern edge of North America.

"Oh my God," Andrew LaMarche breathed as Martin St. John grabbed Rombo's shirt, Mildred barked, and a wave weighing more than the average two-bedroom house broke against the edge of the granite precipice. The splash knocked Martin and Rombo flat, surged up into the cave, and receded. Nothing lay at the cliff's edge now. The man in the black shirt was simply gone. Ten yards below in rocks like shrapnel something bobbed in the violent surf, and then vanished. But it wasn't a man, Bo knew. It never had been.

Bo awoke wearing a U.S. Navy T-shirt in a room she recognized as Henry and Estrella Benedict's guest room. She had helped Es pick out the white-on-white striped wallpaper herself. A chaste fashion statement with the white wainscoting Henry created from strips of wood floor edging. On a bed table stood a vase containing two dozen long-stemmed American beauty roses. Beside Bo in the bed were Mildred—and Dr. Andrew LaMarche, unshaven and grinning in a matching T-shirt and Navy-issue denim bell-bottoms that obviously belonged to Henry.

"I have not compromised your virtue," he explained, shielding his eyes from the sun streaming through uncurtained windows. "You were so adamant about not remaining at the hospital that I brought you here, still sedated from the minor surgery necessary to set a few bones. Estrella didn't think you should be alone."

"My virtue is unassailable," Bo replied, "except under certain circumstances. You might just try, Andy."

"Very well." He flung himself to one knee beside the bed. "Will you marry me, Bo?"

"Oh God, do I have a broken leg? And I've told you—I've already been married. Can't we just be ... something other than married? And why does my right foot smell like mouthwash?" Bo dragged herself up on her elbows and glanced at a porcelain clock beneath the roses. "It's 6:30. Plenty of time to get to court by 9:00. I would kill for a cigarette. And did all of that really happen last night, or am I delusional?"

"I take it that the issuing of banns may be premature." LaMarche shook his head, standing. "And I'd already sent my morning coat out to be pressed."

"Andy!" Bo replied with bemused irritation. "What happened after we went to the hospital? Did the police fish that guy out of the water? Who is ... was he? Have they released Paul, now that the real perp's turned up? Did Rombo and Martin go over to my place and board up the deck doors like they said? Have you called Eva? And what about my car?"

"You have sustained rather bad displacement of the tarsal ligaments and fractures in the tibia, two metatarsals, and the great toe," Andrew LaMarche began as Bo glared at her right leg, encased in what looked like pieces of beach furniture fastened together with Velcro. "Your car has been towed to a facility that specializes in the sale of spare parts. The frame was bent. You totaled it, Bo." His face paled at the words. "You could easily have been killed."

"I think that was the idea," Bo muttered. "So who was that creep?"

LaMarche walked to the window and clasped his hands behind his head, stretching. "There was no identification on the body," he said. "It could be anybody. The police are trying to establish his identity through fingerprints, but there's nothing to prove that man had anything to do with the deaths of Samantha Franer or Cynthia Ganage. What it looks like," he turned to face Bo but fastened his gaze on the roses instead, "is just some guy with a personal vendetta against you. A 'fatal attraction' is the term Detective Reinert used. You live in a rather bohemian area, Bo." He looked up warily. "Without knowing it you may have engaged the warped attention of—"

"Oh, come on!" Bo snapped, incredulous. "Out of the blue a total stranger smashes into my home after cutting my brake lines, chases me through a tropical storm and comes after me with a knife in a sea cave because I live in a bohemian neighborhood? That's a plot straight out of a right-wing guidebook for women. I suppose Cynthia Ganage asked for it, too. She had the gall to make a lot of money and lease her own suite of rooms in a posh hotel. And Samantha, of course, would still be alive if only her mother had known her place and stayed at home instead of getting a part-time job. No matter what brutal, vicious thing happens, it's really some woman's fault. Is that it?"

Andrew LaMarche sat in a wicker wing-chair that squeaked under his weight. "I only said the police have hypothesized—"

"The police can't spell 'hypothesized,' " Bo yelled, lurching to stand and then sitting back on the bed as a sharp pain exploded in her right leg. A picture formed briefly in her brain. The stranger, his wet, wispy hair the color of chewing gum under a school desk. His eyes barely blue, almost clear. Vacant as glass. "That thing out there on the cliffs was Samantha's killer. Eva said he might have ... changed, after knowing he killed Samantha."

"Changed?" LaMarche rubbed the stubble on his chin. "Changed how?"

"He might have been transforming into a ... a serial killer. It has something to do with power. First, sexual power over little children. And then murder."

"Ganage, and then you, right? I'm not disagreeing with Dr. Broussard's train of thought, Bo. I suspect she's on to something. But there's not a shred of evidence to support such a contention. Moreover, Dr. Broussard cannot be called to advance her theory in court because the court doesn't know she's here. And even if she did, there's really nothing in her theory that exonerates Paul Massieu. The whole city's on a witchhunt, edgy over the Satanism thing. Paul is demonstrably a member of a group whose beliefs are not routinely taught from pulpits. The human race is only an eyelash away from a past framed in barbarous superstition, Bo. When they're scared they want a scapegoat. No judge is going to release Paul Massieu today. It's just not going to happen."

"Why can't they scapegoat the creep with the knife?" Bo argued. "He looked demonic to me."

"Because nobody knows about him. Massieu's visible, different, barely speaks English. Add to that the fact that he was living without benefit of marriage with a woman who committed suicide the same day her daughter's rape was made public. What would you think, Bo?"

"What I wouldn't think," Bo said while gingerly edging to her feet, "is that any set of facts, in any situation, suggests the existence of a horned mastermind on little goat feet."

"It's not the mythological details so much as a projection of otherness," LaMarche continued, wincing in sympathy as Bo stood. "It's the Other that matters. People are prone to persecute anybody who can be identified as Other. Paul has been identified. Getting him out of that isn't going to be easy."

"I intend to give it my best shot," Bo told a space just above the doctor's head. "Will you drive me to my apartment? I need to get ready for the hearing."