Covenant (14 page)

Something had to be done about the reporter.

Chief Harry Swartzky sucked in an angry breath and closed his teeth on the well-weathered stem of his pipe as he listened to the woman in front of his desk.

“He’s been by to see me and Rhonda,” Karen was complaining. “And he has been out to Angelica’s a couple times that I know of. He won’t let this go,” she complained. Her eyes beseeched him to put a stop to the
Terrel Daily Times
investigation. And why shouldn’t he? This was a suicide, clear and obvious.

“He made us feel like we were responsible for Jim and Bill’s deaths. It was awful;
he
was awful. What if he goes to Monica’s? She’ll lose it. You’ve got to
do
something about him, Dad. Make him stop.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the chief promised his eldest daughter. She’d once been Daddy’s little girl. And then that business with Bernadette had happened. Something had changed in his little girl that day; she hadn’t been the same since. Oh, after the stories died down and time moved on, she’d gotten on with her life, gotten married for a while, had a child. But she never had quite the same open exuberance about life again. She had remained always a little distant. Removed. A wall had gone up between him and his baby that horrible day and he’d never managed to bring it down. It had only gotten taller when the water claimed her only son. But he still tried. And
when she needed something, really
needed
it…he was there.

“I can’t promise anything,” he told her, keeping his tone low and gentle. Fatherly. “He’s not doing anything illegal. You know, you don’t have to let him in when he drops by. Just call me—I’ll send Rod or Billy over. And if he won’t leave you alone, we can issue a restraining order on him. But one or two visits isn’t really enough for that.”

The chief fingered the warm bowl of his pipe for a moment. Karen recognized the signs that her father’s wheels were turning and remained silent. Finally, he looked up at her again and nodded.

“I’ll give Randy over at the
Times
a call to see if he won’t rein in his dog. He owes me a bark or two.”

She smiled then, one of the few rays of happiness Harry had seen on his eldest daughter’s face since Bill had jumped from that cursed cliff four years before. Karen gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and then was gone.

Fragrant fumes of blue-white vanilla-spiced tobacco drifted upward to the ceiling as he considered her complaint some more. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out an old Matchbox car. A yellow ’Vette. Its paint was pocked and the front windshield was missing. As Swartzky nudged it along the top of his desk, it wobbled to the left.

Anyone entering the police chief’s office at that moment would have thought the head of Terrel’s law and order had gone daft. Smoke trickled lazily from his nose to the ceiling and his eyes stared far away, hands resting idly on a broken kid’s toy. The chief was lost in a long-gone world. A world where William (
never Billy
) Sander was still alive and eight years old. A world where a sandbox waited in Grandpa’s back yard for that charged-up ’Vette. Roads aplenty.

“Grandpa, wanna drive to London?” William would ask, and imitating the sound of a racing engine, he’d disappear with a squeal around the corner of the kitchen, through the living room and out into the yard. He’d need to be hosed down tonight or sand would be everywhere.

Harry picked up the phone to dial the
Times
. He cursed the paper under his breath. Why couldn’t those damn reporters stick to informing people about the dates of the church socials and the plans for construction of a new civic center? There was enough heartache in the world without grave robbing to find old pain, picking at the gristle clinging to its bones to make it worse.

The night editor of the
Times
picked up the phone.

“Hello, Randy,” the chief began. “How’s the wife? Yeah? Those peaches were fine. Please give her my thanks again. Listen, Randy, I need to talk to you about one of your reporters….”

“
I need your help, Cindy. Will you help me?
”

Cindy raised her hand from between her legs. She’d been lying on the edge of the cliff, swimming in the languorous pleasure of His touches for what seemed like hours. It was funny how good He was to her, and she couldn’t even see Him. But every night He made love to her now, here on the edge of the world. An invisible boyfriend. Not exactly the kind you could take home to meet mom and dad. She had to laugh at the thought of
that
.

“Mom, I really love Him,” she’d say.

“Has he touched you?” Dad would growl, interrupting their mother-daughter chat from the other room.

“Yes,” she’d answer. “Every night since I’ve been home from school. He takes me passionately right on the cliff.”

The newspaper would hit the floor and heavy steps would pound into the kitchen.

“Where is this asshole?” Dad would bark, his face turning a beefy shade of crimson. “I have a few things I’d like to say to him.”

“Why, He’s right here,” Cindy would answer, and point at the air beside her. “And there,” she’d counter, pointing at Dad’s recently abandoned chair. “Say whatever you want; He’s everywhere.”

Cindy grinned openly at the vision, and pushed the damp hair from her eyes. The stars winked brightly above like
glittering shells on a dark beach. The moon was rising like a wounded orange to the southeast. It was a beautiful night.

“What did you have in mind?” she whispered to the empty air. In her mind, He began to explain.

The Hyundai spun rocks into the night air as it slid around a graveled corner and began the ascent to Terrel’s Peak. Joe knew they were up there somewhere. They had to be. Where else would a meeting about Bernadette take place? The trees slipped by in a shadowy blur and soon the sound of surf rushed through his window. Normally he found its rhythmic noise soothing, but not tonight. Now it sounded like the siren song of death. A song of swan dives from sixteen stories high.

The car’s headlights picked out weeds and boulders on the side of the road, and a faded, single yellow line cracked down its middle. The darkness was fading as Joe left the forest behind and climbed to the peak he’d grown to know so well over the past few weeks. He could almost taste the scent of death in the air. It stank of the bloody tang of brine and betrayal. He didn’t feel right about this at all. His inner ear was tremulous, listening for a voice to come out of the darkness and speak inside his soul. Praying the surf would remain the sole sound he heard from the cliff, Joe pulled over to the side and switched off the ignition. Then he stepped out of the car and into the sighing wind and gentle refrain of crickets.

It was a short walk up the rocky rise. The stars and moon gave Joe plenty of light to walk by as he made his way to the only place he could think to go to look for Angelica. But even as he moved toward the edge of the cliff, he knew that it wasn’t right. There had been no van, no other cars alongside the road near here. And there was no place for them to have ditched the vehicle. What purpose could they have for bringing her here anyway? Unless they planned to push her off the edge. And his sense wasn’t that Angelica’s death was
the aim of their meeting. No. The summit of Terrel’s Peak wasn’t the right place.

His feet faltered and he considered turning back to the car. This involved the cliff, and the devil inside it. Somehow, somewhere…

“Joe?” a familiar voice called. He started, then peered ahead. A figure stepped around a stony outcrop. A figure in a sun yellow tank top and faded jean shorts.

“Cindy?” he answered, and smiled. It had been days since he’d heard from her, and he hadn’t realized how much he missed her until now. “What are you doing up here?”

Her face grew clearer as she moved close, and he could see that she’d been crying. Wet streaks marred her brown cheeks, and her lips looked heavy and sad.

She didn’t answer, and he hurried his steps, wrapping his arms around her slim form when he finally reached her.

“What’s the matter, baby?” he whispered, pushing her face into his chest as he said it. His heart ached for her.

Cindy looked up at him then, eyes wide with a mixture of pain and relief.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, and he felt his chest flutter.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been working overtime this week. This cliff thing has—” He stopped short, realizing that the reason for her tears was likely part of his “cliff thing.”

“It’s okay,” she said, shaking her head. Then she strained upward and kissed him softly on the lips.

“Just hold me, okay?”

He did, and felt her body cave into his own. Her hair smelled of surf and flowers, and her warmth made him tingle with feeling.

“Why are you up here?” she asked after a moment. “Were you looking for me?”

“No,” he answered. “Actually, I was—” He stopped, realizing how what he was about to say would sound to the girl.

“What?” she persisted, and then took his hand and led him up to the edge. They sat there on the roof of the world, the
waves breaking frothy white in the darkness so far below them. The light from the moon lit an eerie trail from the horizon to the inky line of the shore.

“Tell me,” she pressed and he found he couldn’t lie.

“I was at Angelica Napalona’s tonight,” he said. “The fortune-teller?”

Cindy nodded.

“She believes all the local legends about a demon living in this cliff.”

Cindy looked nonplussed.

“She says that it has some kind of hold over her and the women who have lost their children here, like Mrs. Sander and Mrs. Canady. She said that it can possess people, and that it has taken the children of her friends.”

Again, Cindy nodded. She didn’t seem to find his brief sketch at all preposterous.

“The really weird thing about it is that when Angelica and Mrs. Sander and Mrs. Canady and a couple other girls were kids, they used to swim down here, probably right where you and I were that day. One day when they were out there, a girl named Bernadette drowned. The rest of them were okay, but now, each one of those women who survived has lost a child. Except for Angelica, because she doesn’t have any kids. Anyway, the point is, tonight I was at her house, asking her about some of this stuff, when the other women showed up. She hid me in her bedroom, and went to meet them. While I was waiting, I found a note from someone that said tonight was a meeting about Bernadette, the girl who drowned all those years ago. And then I heard Angelica scream. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want the other women to know I was there, so I looked out the window, and saw them all getting into a van. I came out of the bedroom then, and Angelica was gone. They kidnapped her. But why, I have no idea. I came up here, thinking that this might have been where they took her. Crazy, huh?”

Cindy shook her head. Then her face went slack. Joe waited
for her to say something, but she seemed a million miles away, her gaze locked on the empty sky over his shoulder. Puzzled, he looked behind him and then leaned forward to pass a hand in front of her eyes.

“You okay?” he asked.

Her eyes locked back on his, and she spoke slowly, carefully.

“You know…” she began, her voice barely a whisper, “Angelica
did
have a child.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She told me that she’d given a baby up for adoption once.”

Cindy continued, her tone slow and deliberate. “And her name isn’t Angelica.”

“Huh?”

Cindy didn’t blink, just stared at him with eyes wide and still. “She wasn’t always called Angelica. Her name used to be Rachel. She changed it when she started being a fortune-teller. I guess she thought it sounded more Gypsy to be Angelica. Or maybe she wanted to forget about being Rachel.”

Joe said nothing. He thought back to the newspaper accounts of Bernadette’s drowning. How could he have not picked up on the name thing? Of course, as he thought about his sources, most of what he’d learned about Bernadette’s drowning had come from Angelica and Karen. The newspaper hadn’t even listed the girls who had been with her when the girl had drowned.

“What do you know about the baby?” he asked finally.

Cindy closed her eyes a moment. Her lips pursed briefly, and she looked as if she were gathering herself to recite a memorized speech. When her eyes opened again, they were staring over Joe’s shoulder. But she began to speak.

“Once Rachel—Angelica—had a lover. Nobody in town knows who he was. Maybe he was one of her clients. Maybe he was an out-of-towner who just passed through and got a little something extra while he was here. But Terrel saw the evidence. Her belly grew big and she delivered in the
hospital. She never brought it home, though. She gave up her baby for adoption as soon as it was born. Most people around here have probably forgotten the whole thing, since she never had the child in her home and has never married. Hell, it apparently happened back when I was a kid, or maybe even before I was born. But for a little while, Angelica was all the gossip there was here. Our fortune-teller was our town scandal.”

Joe looked out at the ocean, too stunned to speak. He thought of Angelica’s story of rape and murder. When she had been younger, Angelica had hidden away her child so the demon could never find it—the spirit had taken revenge on her for hiding her baby by staging the rape, and the murder of Harold, Joe bet. But what had become of the child?

A tremor shook Cindy and she shrugged her shoulders. When she opened her eyes again, they were bright and alert, as if she’d just successfully shaken off a nap.

“Out of all the women who were there when that girl drowned, Angelica is the only one who hasn’t had a child jump from the cliff, isn’t she Joe?”

It was his turn to nod now, and suddenly everything was clear to him. It was Angelica’s turn. Her child must die. She’d tried to hide it from Him, from the other women. And so they’d taken her, no doubt at His direction. They would probably torture her until she told them how to find the kid. And then they would kill it.

“You were a reporter in Chicago, right?” she asked, and put a hand on his arm. “Did you know anyone there that could help? Maybe someone who could help you find her child and warn it?” Her face held a look of deep concern.

Joe thought about his contacts back in Chicago with the child welfare department. He might still be able to pull a string or two.

“
Rachel
Napalona, huh?” he said, and Cindy nodded. “All the other kids died when they were eighteen. How much you wanna bet this kid’s just about eighteen years old?”

Cindy looked sad, and with a tired smile shook her head affirmatively. “It’s a good bet,” she said.

“I’ll try to find something out tomorrow,” he said. “I might be able to track the kid down.”

“What are you going to do now?” she said, a quaver in her voice.

Joe looked at her, saw the heaviness of tears in her eyes, but the desire for something else there as well. He needed to keep looking for Angelica. Who knew what they would do to her? But how was he going to find her, if she wasn’t up here on the cliff? His heart was torn, thinking of Angelica being tortured somewhere. Beaten and bled for information that would ultimately lead to the death of her only child. But here in front of him was another woman who needed his help. He didn’t know where he was going to go to look for Angelica, but he knew that he could comfort Cindy and see her safely home.

“I guess that depends on you,” he said finally. “What would you like to do? Can I drive you home?”

In answer, Cindy leaned into his neck and kissed his ear with a tremulous whisper. “Would you stay here with me a while longer?”

Visions of Angelica, tied to a chair in a white room, weeping mascara over bruised and bleeding lips danced through his mind. But where
was
that room? In front of him, with no question of where she was, Cindy’s smooth, perfect face pleaded for his attention.

Shit.

He slid a hand around her back and she melted in closer. Gently he stroked her hair and spine, and then, hardly believing that he was doing it himself, he moved his fingers up beneath her loose tank top and rubbed the silky smooth flesh of her back. She slipped sideways and demonstrated to him that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Presently, she wasn’t wearing a tank top either.