Covenant (2 page)

“It’s almost over, isn’t it?”

Karen Sander ran a weary hand through her kinked shoulder-length hair. She’d found gray in it this morning.
Gray
. She’d plucked it, but the twinge of needlepoint pain hadn’t blanked the feeling that the hair had given her. She’d deflated. When had it all gotten away from her?

“I don’t think it will ever be over,” Karen answered. Her voice sounded as worn as she’d felt when looking in the mirror. The reflection had been denigrating enough without its silvering reminder of death.

Black eyes staring cold and empty…

“But the only one left is Rachel,” the other woman persisted. “If she would just track down Andi, the circle would be closed. We’ll all have done it. The contract will be fulfilled. It’ll all be over.”

Laughter, deep and dark. The voice. “Have you girls ever heard
of the Marquis?”

The other woman stared at a wet ring in front of her on the kitchen table. Her index finger traced the perfect O of the ring, round and round and round. Abruptly she dragged the wet finger across the center of the ring to draw a line inside the O.

A thigh straddling hers, smearing the blood. It was warm and
sticky. The blood that was not their own, but of their own…

“What makes you think it will stop with the children?”
Karen’s voice was quiet, tinged with pain. And fear. “All these years, we’ve focused on the children. I never thought I could do it. Neither did you, right?”

The other woman nodded, her gray eyes hazing over with tears. Karen had another flash of her in a younger time.

Possessed lips swollen with kisses, naked breasts painted with her
blood…the blood He baptized them in…

“But you did. We all did. He made us keep our bargain. And he could certainly make us do more than that. After all, what will he have to do when the last of the children are gone?”

“But there are always others,” her friend protested. “There have been lots of them that we had nothing to do with. There always have been. We all kept our contract, except for Rachel, and I think after Andi, he will leave us alone. He will just find others to take, that’s all.”

A gash on her forehead, blood streaming down her cheeks unnoticed.
Black, empty eyes staring at them; black empty eyes laughing
at them in a voice not her own…

Karen stared blankly a moment, and then shook her head.

“What’s a contract to a monster?”

Let’s make a little promise,
he’d said.
A Covenant…

The other woman began to cry and Karen got up, knocking back her chair with a screech, and embraced the other woman, trying without success to stop her mounting sobs.

She understood the pain—the spiraling pit of despair that dredged ever deeper into the darkness. It was a devilish, secret pain that only five girls who had somehow become graying women could understand.

It was a Covenant they dared not break, though they couldn’t be sure that their benefactor would honor his end of the deal. Their contract was more than sacred, especially to a monster.

Their contract was written in blood. And more than their souls were at stake.

Karen hugged the other woman closer, and began to sob. Not for herself, but for the children.

“…and we could have the last part of the series be on the psychological aspects of the problem. I could talk with a psychiatrist I know back at the University of Chicago, giving tips on how to recognize suicidal kids, and how to deal with the loss of loved ones who killed themselves.”

Randy looked incredulous.

Stunned.

About as hungry for the idea as a vegetarian for roadkill.

“You’re bound and determined to rub salt in this town’s wounds, aren’t ya?” Randy finally said. “Don’t you
get
it? When something like this happens, people need to forget, not be reminded. Leave this alone. I want a six-inch story about James Canady. Straight facts as you’ve found ’em, and move on. It’ll run on page seven. I need a story on the Presthill Theatre renovation for the weekend section, so get on that and quit wasting your time on a simple jumper story.”

With that, Randy stalked past Joe and into the paste-up room. Most papers had converted to computer-generated layout and design systems, but not the
Terrel Daily Times
. Here the computers still ran out the stories on long strips of heavy, glossy column-wide paper. Then with an X-acto knife and a pot of wax, the stories were pasted down column by column on long sheets of paper the size of the final morning edition. When the whole newspaper for the following day was “dummied,” each page was shot on film using an ancient
camera the size of a small car. At this hour of the day there was no one in the paste-up room but Randy. Who was just using the room as an escape.

Now he had to know. It was no longer a story to Joe. It was a mission.

Nobody—
nobody
—told Joe Kieran to back off a story. That simple fact was one of the reasons he had sentenced himself to Podunk Terrel instead of moving up the editor ranks at the
Trib
. There
were
consequences to digging. And Joe didn’t have nine lives to sacrifice to his curiosity.

Or nine hearts. He’d lost one of the latter in Chicago.

The newsroom was quiet; this early in the day, you were lucky to find three people in the building at once. Shrugging in resignation, Joe left Randy in paste-up and sauntered down the hall to the junk-food haven. The snack machine was tucked into an alcove near the most important spot in the building for Joe, aside from his computer. The room beyond the vending machine was dimly lit and musty, and crowded with row after row of steel shelves. This was the morgue, the newspaper’s library of old editions. Sorting through the stacks of yellowing paper in the morgue was the only way to find old stories. And if you were writing about something new in Terrel, it probably had ties to something old. So in the few weeks he’d lived in Terrel, Joe had spent many hours researching town history here.

Of course, when you were searching the morgue, you not only had to know what you were looking for, but approximately when it happened. The organizational system was simple: every new edition was stacked on top of the last issue. When the pile of old papers grew tall enough that the center of its shelf began to bow, a new pile was formed. Every now and then, someone even bothered to guesstimate the dates each pile represented and write them down on Post-it notes that were then taped to the shelves.

Joe stared into the empty shadows of the morgue and popped two quarters into the vending machine. He punched in the
code C4 without even looking at the selection within the glass case. C4 equaled Bugles. And he had a bag every day.

“Why don’t you just buy a box?” Randy had asked a week or two after Joe had first started at the paper.

“You just can’t depend on the freshness in a box,” Joe had answered with a grin. “These here”—he held up the bag and motioned with his other hand— “are fresh-picked. Listen.”

He crunched one loud for show.

As he did again now, grinning at the random memory. But the thought of trading jabs with Randy reminded him immediately of the editor’s uncharacteristic dourness over the past twenty-four hours. On a whim, he walked down the hall away from the newsroom, and knocked on an unmarked wooden door.

There was no reply for a moment, but Joe waited. Finally, he heard the metallic tumble of a lock clicking open, and the doorknob turned.

“Hey, Joe, whaddya need?”

George Polanski’s wrinkled face peered up at him from the shadows of the janitor’s back room. The old guy was supposed to be a part-timer, but everybody knew that at some point, George had begun sleeping here. Joe wondered if he still kept a house or an apartment somewhere else for his things. From the number of times and odd hours he’d woken the janitor from napping on the cot in this tiny room, he’d begun to doubt it.

“George, I was wondering something.”

“Oh, you were, were you?” The old man chuckled and motioned him inside. They stepped into the jumble of buckets and mops and detergents in the extended janitors’ closet and the old man pushed the door shut behind them.

“Have a seat, then.”

George pointed out a relatively empty area on the cot, which was currently piled with a litter of magazines, a tin of tobacco, and the remains of an interrupted game of solitaire. Joe obliged, and George pulled up a twenty-gallon barrel of
floor wax to sit on. He grunted as he eased himself onto the can and shook his head.

“Back ain’t what it used to be, Joe,” he said. “Now, what is it you were thinking of? It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you around these parts.”

“You’ve heard that someone committed suicide on Terrel’s Peak last night, didn’t you?” Joe began.

The old man nodded, painfully slow. “Sad business, that.”

“Well, nobody wants to talk about it.”

The old man studied Joe, his eyes piercing and blue despite the drooping hoods of age. Almost painful in their intensity. Joe began to wonder if he’d made a mistake in coming here. Would the old guy brush him off too? Then a slight, sad smile took the man’s lips and the lines in his face seemed to deepen.

“I’m gonna tell you a story, Joe,” he said, raising a finger to shake in Joe’s face. “But don’t you go taking notes now, you hear? Just listen.

“My best friend was a banker when I was younger, Joe. He dealt with some heavy risks and big money all his life. He had a stomach lined with lead, I always said,’ cuz the stress he was under would’ve burned a hole in my belly clear through to my back. But he seemed to thrive on it, he did. Early on in his life, the gambles seemed to pay off for him, but later, he saw just as many of his investments go sour. Things turned on him, lead stomach or not. He watched his wife grow mean and spiteful. She divorced him at forty-three. He lived to see his kids move away. He fought with the legislature and lost his business over taxes. He watched his bank go insolvent after the Feds came down and took a closer look at the books. He survived all that and yet he always kept a smile—you know, the kind of smile that says ‘I’ll buy you a beer but you cross me wrong and I’ll cut your liver out.’ Still, he told me once in confidence that he broke down and cried when a woman came home with him one night and he didn’t work. Impotent, they call it. He wasn’t all lead.”

George paused, then shook his head slowly.

“I’ll tell you another story. I’ll tell you about Margaret Kelly. She was a good girl, got good grades, had boyfriends. Lived in a nice house, got along with her family. Her parents are nice—I know ’em. She had a scholarship to a big college, talked a lot of becoming a doctor. Seemed like a happy kid.

“You know what the difference between my friend and Margaret Kelly is, Joe?”

Joe shrugged, a suspicion dawning on where this was going.

“Margaret Kelly turned up on the rocks below that cliff last year, and my friend still lives over on Second Street. He ain’t too happy, but he’s alive. I’ll tell you, if anyone was gonna commit suicide in this town, it’d be my friend, not Margaret Kelly, who had everything still to live for.”

The old man seemed lost for a moment, eyes focused on a spot on the wall behind Joe. The reporter snuck a glance in that direction, seeing nothing but the ink-smudged white wall.

“Margaret and James ain’t the only kids to’ve gone over that cliff,” George said. His focus returned, and bored hard into Joe’s face. “Something’s driving these kids over the edge, Joe, and it ain’t because they don’t have fine lives. Seems to me the majority of the ones that go over are the ones that might have actually had a chance to make something of themselves and gotten the hell out of this hole-in-the-shit-stall town. I don’t know’s if I’d call it suicide, myself.”

“What do you mean, not suicide? You think someone’s pushing these people over?” Now, here was an interesting angle, given the responses he’d gotten from officials regarding the cliff. Maybe they were holding a lid on things until the killer could be tracked.

George’s brows creased, a salty caterpillar of consideration. Abruptly, he shook his head.

“Don’t know what I think. But I do know that it ain’t a healthy place to be around.”

“Who else has fallen off that cliff, George? Any family of Randy’s?”

George was silent; his gaze fell to his feet. Then he stood up and opened the door.

“I got to check the air-conditioning, Joe. It’s been leaking over in Jack Romand’s office.”

Joe took his cue and stepped past George into the hallway.

“You want town history, talk to Angelica Napalona. She’s seen it all. And then some.”

Joe nodded and turned to go back to the newsroom. But George stopped him.

“And Joe?”

The bags in the old man’s cheeks hung low, and he wouldn’t look Joe in the eye.

“Stay away from Terrel’s Peak. It’s evil. Trust an old man on this one.”

There was a feeling you got when driving through the Main Street of Terrel. A feeling of solidity, of history.

Of home.

Joe had felt it the first time he’d driven through the town; it descended silent and complete as an eclipse. One moment it was broad daylight, the next you asked who turned out the sun. One minute you were lost in the country, the next you were cozy and smiling in the middle of a town called Terrel. That womblike feeling of instant security was a big reason Joe had decided to settle here.

Or hide here
, his conscience taunted.

The storefronts were drawn with wide, come-on-inside-friendly windows. Every few doorways were embraced by awnings striped in green and gold, scarlet and turquoise. Welcome mats cheered every stoop. Most of the old brick buildings here were rimmed with ornate wood, the curlicues and ridges twisting to the right and left like architectural road maps. Most of the buildings had second-and third-story rooms above the storefronts that housed the shop owners or tenants.

A recent mayor with a romantic eye for history had put in new streetlamps designed to look old-fashioned. Ornate black poles divided each block with arms that stretched inward from the street to hold faux gaslights. And in the center
square of Main Street, across from the post office and village hall, the dirty tide of asphalt was dammed by a spread of uneven red cobbles.

It seemed comforting that the street supported a “Fill Your Pipe” shop, even though Joe didn’t smoke. He liked it that there was a hobby shop with model trains and large signs beckoning lionel in the window, though he never stopped and went inside. And he had actually spent hours browsing, though not buying, in Books and Baubles, where stacks of dusty, beat-up novels lay side by side with Donnie Osmond 8-tracks.

Today, however, the uncalculated quaintness of Main Street didn’t coax a grin from Joe. The white shutters revealed their peeling paint; the Raggedy Anns in the craft store window had their
MADE IN TAIWAN
tags clearly showing. All was not what it seemed in Terrel, he’d found.

“This is stupid,” he chided himself.

“A kid jumped off a cliff. At the same spot where lots of other people who never thought they’d escape a dead-end Rockwell nightmare also jumped. So what? It doesn’t have anything to do with the way the town looks!”

But the problem was, it did. Terrel looked different to Joe today.

Diseased.

Hollow.

In the course of twenty-four hours it had gone from Rockwell cozy to Bosch decay in his eyes. Maybe that was because he had found his first real story to uncover since moving here.
There are hidden things here
, that story cried, just as there were in Chicago. Cozy warm can also mean killing fire.

Nothing was going to hide those answers from him— certainly not a coat of paint or a home-sewn doll.

He’d gone straight for the phone book after his talk with George. Angelica Napalona had an address right here on Main.

2193 Main, to be exact.

Joe followed the numbers as they ascended from the 1001 of the village hall. As he moved farther from the center of town, the red and gray brick buildings diminished, giving way to white frame ranches and worn two-story homes. He began to wonder if he was going to run out of town before he found Angelica Napalona.

And then he was there: 2193 Main. A typical nondescript white frame ranch. At least it had once been white. Dirt and rot had leached any purity from the paint. The front yard had once been landscaped, but now was overrun by evergreens. Their wildly reaching boughs obscured much of the house. Three blue spruces dwarfed the house on one side, making it seem even smaller than it probably was. A stone path led from the gravel driveway to the front door, where a sign hung:
READINGS BY ANGELICA
.

“This is a joke!” He laughed out loud in the car.

George had sent him to a fortune-teller to find out the town’s history? Wasn’t that kind of like going to a circus to learn about physics?

He turned the key in the ignition to let the motor die, but still he sat in the car.

Maybe, he considered, she was the best source. After all, if you’re going to tell fortunes, it makes sense to know as much as possible about the people you’re forecasting for, right?

“A source is a source.” He shrugged and stepped out of the car.

As he raised his hand to knock on the wooden storm door, it opened at the hand of an attractive, dark-complexioned woman.

Good show for a psychic
. He silently applauded. She must have a motion sensor somewhere on the property.

“Come in, my friend, come in,” she urged, opening the door to him. “You are welcome here.”

He stepped into a narrow hallway and took a better look at his hostess.

Angelica Napalona took care of herself. She was short and trim, with sexy, strangling ringlets of raven hair bordering her face and eyes, which were too dark to make out their color. She overdid the makeup though, he thought. Her cheeks were violated by scarlet rouge and her eyes were rimmed in a raccoon’s shadow of mascara. She draped her shoulders in a long flamboyant cape crazily colored tangerine, gold and purple. But beneath the gaudy trappings of her trade, he could see that Angelica wore very down-to-earth blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt that hugged what he could see of her figure. At least her Italian name was legitimate, he thought, eyes dallying briefly on her nose.

“Follow me,” she beckoned in a musical voice, and led him past a dark dining room into what had been designed to be a back bedroom, but was no longer used for that.

Strands of translucent gold and silver beads hung from the top of the doorframe to the floor. The door itself had been removed, though the hinges remained in place. Angelica pushed aside the beads and took a seat at a small table. Joe followed, noting that the table and its two chairs were the sole furnishings in the room, which had murals of stars and astrological signs covering the walls. The shades were drawn, and Angelica had successfully lit a huge red candle on the table before Joe even entered the room.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing at the empty wooden chair. Italian or not, Joe guessed her heavy accent was fake.

“Look, Ms. Napalona,” he began, “I haven’t—”

“Call me Angelica, I insisst,” she purred.

“Angelica, then. I haven’t come for a reading.”

“You vant to play cards then? Here, I’ll deal you your life.” With that, she produced a deck and began laying out a series of cards facedown on the table. The backs were covered with mystical runes and figures. She turned one over and beamed. “Ah, ze Jack of Good Fortune.” She set the card to one side. “A good friend to have on your side. Now you pick. Which card will you choose?”

“I’m serious, ma’am. I’d just like to talk with you for a few minutes.”

“Time iss money, my friend.” She settled into her chair until the twin steeples on either side of the backrest were far above her head. She looked like a little girl playing in her mother’s clothes.

Joe had the feeling that this was a losing proposition all the way around, but, having gotten this far, he felt obliged to continue. He retrieved his wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill.

“Will this be enough?”

“Enough for hiring the services of a professional hamburger flipper, perhaps,” she taunted. “Enough for renting a copy of
Gone with ze Wind
, if you like. Even enough to buy a paperback novel. But enough to compensate a seer, who vill look into your life’s deepest tangles and help you to unweave them…?”

Joe rose to leave, chalking up this whole fiasco as a waste of time. But Angelica’s hand darted out to hold his own.

“As it happens, I have no pressing business right now, and I am curious about your reasons for seeking me.”

The five dollars somehow left his hand with hers.

“I will speak with you for five minutes. After that time, you may decide whether you wish to know more. And at what price.”

Angelica relaxed again in her chair, folding thin, braceleted arms across her chest. Joe smiled at her posture in spite of himself. Had she any idea how foolish she looked and sounded?

“I want to talk to you about Terrel’s Peak,” he began, watching her reaction closely.

Her face remained blank, but did her arms tighten?

“Go on,” she intoned.

“I’d like to know about who has committed suicide there, and when.”

The five-dollar bill suddenly appeared back on the table before him.

“I will not take your money for speaking of zat,” she hissed, and abruptly stood.

“Who sent you to taunt me like this? Was it Karen? Melody?”

As her voice rose, her accent slipped away. For a second, Joe saw through the getup and glimpsed a middle-aged small-town housewife wearing a loud robe over her daytime clothes. And then Angelica the Reader returned, eyes still flaring slightly, but otherwise in control.

“You can leaf now, sir,” she said, still standing.

“Please,” he began, suddenly sure that George had sent him to the right place. “I wrote a story for the newspaper today about the Canady kid’s death—he jumped last night— and I just wanted to find out more about the cliff. Nobody will tell me anything about it, but someone said you might know. So I looked you up.”

“Who zent you?” Angelica asked in a calmer, richly colored Gypsy voice.

“I don’t think I should tell you,” Joe replied, staring her down. “But it wasn’t one of those women you mentioned. Actually, it was an older gentlemen who said you knew town history.”

“Of that, he vas surely correct,” she said. The seer put a finger to her lips and stared hard at Joe. Pacing the room, she trailed that same finger across a tawdry collection of crystals, baubles and beads. She lingered a moment at a dull bronze key, hung from a nail on the wall near a collage of old photos.

“Listen closely, and I vill tell you what I know.”

Angelica straightened her cape with a hand, recrossed the room and eased back into her chair.

Her eyes were brown. A deep, forest brown that hid behind lashes too-black. They stared at him intently over the top of steepled fingers. Fingers each ornamented by a ring.

“There is an evil spirit in the cliff, my young reporter friend,” she began. She leaned across the table, so close he could feel her breath upon his face.

“It feeds not on the bodies, but on the souls of men.”

“The name’s Joe,” he offered.

Her gaze did not falter at his interruption and she continued to speak, soft and low. He was starting to see why people could be sucked in by her. When she spoke, her eyes flickered with an inner spark and her lips parted in some secret glee. He was sure she could be convincing.

“I have not felt where this spirit came from, or how long it has been here,” she murmured. “Perhaps it iss the haunt of Indians long dead. An earthen spirit that still yearns for sacrifice and in this age of unbelief finds only murder left to fill its belly. Or perhaps it is a demon chained for all eternity in ze bowels of that dark rock. Its history isn’t of importance, but its hunger is. Every year, that spirit drags at least one person off of ze cliff to crush them on ze cruel rocks below. Its hunger is great. And growing. Most of those who die are strangers to Terrel. Drifters. Businessmen from out of town.”

She leaned forward to whisper. “Walk carefully, Joe,” she warned, and turned away. When she looked back, her eyes were glossy with moisture.

“Every year, at least one of those unlucky enough to visit the rocks at the bottom of that cursed hill are stolen from this town. And we who live here mourn them quietly, and in fear. For we never know when it will be ourselves that the cliff calls.”

This seemed to be going nowhere fast, Joe thought. He should have known better than to expect anything but fairy tales from an astrologist.

“What can you tell me about the last few people who jumped?” he prodded.

“That they have met their destiny.”

Angelica stared him down at that, her hands no longer crossed, but palm-down on the table. She looked ready to either jump up or throw the table at him; he wasn’t sure which.

“So I suspected,” he countered. “But who were they? When did they jump?”

“Why do you vant to know these things?” she whispered. Her face was now as white as her hands, which were pressed hard against the table.

“Because I do, is all,” he snapped, and slapped himself inwardly for his irritated tone. “I saw them take the Canady boy out of the water. The police chief didn’t want to talk about it. Hell, my own boss didn’t want me to write much about it. I want to know why these people are jumping. And don’t tell me it’s because of some hocus-pocus monster locked up in a cave!”

“Your five minutes is up, Joe. And I’m afraid I have better paying clients scheduled for the rest of ze afternoon. We’ll have to do this another time.”

She nearly ran from the room, the beads exploding behind her as they clinked and tangled together.

“I guess I’m letting myself out?” he asked the room with a slight grin. He started to leave, but then paused in the doorway to look back at the table.

The five-dollar bill had apparently flown from the room as well.