The Walking (31 page)

A shadow passed over her face. "My uncle's dead. I'm

SO "

She started to close the door.

"I know. That's why I'm here."

Something in his voice must have caught her attention, because she paused.

"His body's missing, isn't it?"

"No." "

"No?"

"We buried him on Sunday."

Still, she did not close the door completely, and Miles took that as a good sign.

"Can I come in? I'd really like to talk to you."

"About what?"

"Your uncle. I've come all the way from Los Angeles."

"You're not a reporter?"

"No," he assured her quickly. "Nothing like that. I just want to... talk."

"You know," she said matter-of factly

He nodded.

She met his eyes for a second, then glanced away and stepped aside to allow him entrance. The interior of the apartment looked simultaneously as though it had been lived in

for quite some time and as though she had never fully unpacked after moving.

She sat down hard on the couch. The features on her face remained immobile, cemented into place, but Miles saw tears welling in her eyes.

"You know," she said again.

"Yeah." He sat down next to her. "I know."

The first tear escaped from the invisible barrier that had been holding it back, and a slew of others followed, rolling out from beneath her long lashes and streaming down the sides of her face.-He reached over to wipe them away, but she pulled back and stemmed the tide herself, using a thin, graceful finger to clear her cheeks.

"Are you okay?"

She nodded, a movement that started another cascade of tears. "It's... it's just that it's been so long since I had someone I could talk to, since..." She looked up at him, tried to smile. "You saw the Insider article?"

"That's how I found you. I'm a private investigator."

Her body tensed, and she moved back on the couch, away from him.

"No, that's my job he explained quickly. that is what I do. It's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here?"

"I want to find out about your uncle. I want to find out about my dad." He took a deep breath. "The same thing happened to my father."

The expression on her face was complex, a look that was at once pained and relieved, frightened and sympathetic, angry and understanding. "I knew you knew, and I thought there was something personal about it. I could tell. That's why I let you in. I had a feeling about you." She looked at him, cleared her throat. "So what happened? Your dad died?"

"Yeah." Miles nodded. "He had a stroke in November, just fell over in the supermarket. They said he would never fully recover, but I was led to believe that he could still live

for quite a while--just in sort of a diminished state. So I hired a home health-care nurse, who basically took care of him when I was at work, administered his medications and all that, did physical therapy." He was silent for a moment, thinking. "It happened out of the blue. I came home from work one day and the nurse was gone. She'd barricaded the door of my father's room with furniture, and he was inside.

Walking." "

"In a circle?"

"Yeah. Around the perimeter of the bedroom. And the bed and dresser and stuff was moved into the middle of the room. Not because he'd pushed it there but because he'd bumped into it, forced it over while he walked. I could see the marks on his body where he'd hit the edges of the fur "So what happened after that? What did you do?" "I called the coroner's office. A friend of mine works there. He eventually stopped the walking with some kind of muscle relaxant and took my... took the body. He wanted to study it, find out what was causing my dad to keep moving even though he was dead. They kept him at the morgue, kept his body filled with drugs and, I think, strapped down, but well, one day he disappeared. The coroner was looking for him, I was looking for him, the police were looking for him, and we all assumed that he'd walked away, but we couldn't find him. Couldn't find a single trace of him.

"Then yesterday I saw the article in the Insider. And here

Janet's reaction was a non-reaction. She seemed to shut down at the conclusion of his story, and when it was clear that she wouldn't be asking any questions and that she wasn't planning to say anything herself, he prodded her. "Your turn."

"It's a long story."

He smiled. "I've got time."

She nodded solemnly. "Okay." She licked her lips. "You want something to drink? Water? Coke? Wine?"

He shook his head.

"I think I need a drink first." She stood, walked into the kitchen, emerged a few moments later with a stemmed glass filled with red wine.

She sat down again, then cleared her throat and took a loud swallow.

He waited patiently.

"I loved my Uncle John," she said finally. She swirled the wine in her glass, looked down at it. "He started walking before he died, actually. You probably read in the article that he had cancer, and he did, so I guess he was like your dad in that he was bedridden and had a lingering illness. Maybe that had something to do with what happened to them. I don't know. But three days before he died, he started walking. Around his room, like your dad. He hadn't been able to get out of his bed or move at all, really, for the past week, and then all of a sudden he was pacing like a lunatic." She paused, took another sip of wine. Then another here was something weird about it, too.

About his movements, I mean. It was almost like he was a puppet or a robot---"

"Like something was controlling him," Miles said. "Exactly."

"I thought these thing."

"Well, this went on for three days, and I didn't know what to do. I wanted to tell someone, but I didn't know who to tell, and I was scared. Then I came home from work on the third day, and he was outside, walking around the house, wearing only his old pajama bottoms.

Some of the neighborhood kids were throwing things at him, mud and stuff, and I chased them off, then ran around the back of the house. I thought he was delirious, and I wanted to get him back

inside." She shivered, thinking about it, and finished her glass of wine. that's when I found out he was dead."

Miles nodded. He understood completely. The memory of touching his father's cold rubbery skin was one that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Janet shrugged. 'that it, really. The police came, and the coroner.

They took him away, did an autopsy, and... that's all."

He smiled gently. "See? That wasn't such a long story."

She smiled hesitantly in return. "I gave you the abridged version."

Miles thought for a moment. "So he didn't keep walking after they took him away?"

"I guess not." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "I mean, I didn't really ask. I suppose I didn't want to know. He was still moving when they took him. It took several policemen -several big policemen--to capture him and strap him down in one of those what do you call them? Not a stretcher but..."

"Gurney ?"

"Yeah. They strapped him to a gurney and that's the last he'd stopped walking the time ybffburied him." She nodded.

"Was it an open casket? Did you see him?"

]anet breathed deeply. "We had him cremated so... so he wouldn't come back. We just buried his ashes."

"Are you sure it was him?" Miles prodded gently. "I mean, you didn't actually see his body after the autopsy?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. They said.." they said we wouldn't want to see him. They said, well, that there wasn't much left that was identifiable."

"Who suggested that he be cremated? Was that your idea?"

"No," she admitted. "It was suggested by the mortuary. But, under the circumstances, I thought it was a good plan.

I'd already had nightmares of my uncle digging his way out of a grave and walking through the city to find me. Cremating him would take care of that possibility." She met Miles' eyes. "You think he walked away, like your dad, and they pawned off some other body on me?"

He shrugged. "It's a possibility. I'm not saying it happened, but I'd feel a lot more secure about it if you'd actually seen his body to make sure it had stopped moving."

There was an awkward pause. Janet stood. 'q need another drink. You want something.

"Maybe some water," Miles said.

She returned a few moments later with a tumbler of water and her refilled wineglass. "You know," she said, handing him his drink,

"there's one thing that I've been thinking about. Something that stuck in my mind."

"What?"

"His last words. Or the last words he spoke to me. I was feeding him his dinner. He could barely talk at that point, his voice was just a whisper, and I had to lean close to hear him. After that, about an hour or so after I cleaned him up, he started walking. And he never spoke again."

"What'd he say? what'd he tell you?"

'The last thing he said, before he started walking, was, "She's here."

"

" "She'? Who's 'she'? .... "I don't know. Maybe he was just delirious, seeing things that weren't there."

"But you don't think so?" She looked at him. "No." She's here.

Eeeee-eeear = Miles recalled the noises his father had made in the hospital, the desperate, incomprehensible pleas that had been so earnestly addressed to him. She's here. Was that what Bob had been trying to say?

"I've thought about it a million times since they took him away. I've gone over it in my mind, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand it. I know he was trying to tell me something, but I have no idea what it was. There certainly wasn't anyone else in the room with us, and no woman has shown up since then, unless you count the Insider photographer. I've been waiting, hoping--or maybe not hoping--that whatever he meant would be revealed to me, but.." nothing."

She's here.

There was something ominous about the phrase, and Miles gulped down his water. He was pretty sure that that was what his father had been trying to say, and he recalled the panicked urgency of Bob's stroke-slurred voice. His father had been afraid.

"Did your uncle seem, well, scared when he told you that?"

Janet nodded. 'that why I haven't been able to forget it, why I keep going over it in my mind. I can't help feeling that it had something to do with his.." walking."

The homeless woman in the mall, too, had warned him of a "she"

She's going after the ddnin builders, too.

He wanted to understand, but nothing made sense to him, no facts he could put together, no conjecture he could make that would provide an identity for this woman?... girl? witch? goddess?

"Did your uncle leave anything behind?" he asked Janet

"Any diaries? Any item that might give us some clue?" "Like what?"

"Like witchcraft paraphernalia."

She stared at him. "How did you know?"

He smiled wryly. "I found some stuff in my dad's safety deposit box. I have no idea what it's for or how to use it, but I could tell that it was supposed to be used for magic.

There was a dried, flat frog, a bunch of powders, some roots in bottles." He paused. "And a necklace made out of teeth. Human teeth."

"My uncle had a box in his closet. I looked through it, but it scared me, so I put it in a plastic garbage sack and haven't looked at it since. It's in my hall closet. You want to check it out?"

Miles shook his head. "Maybe later."

"There's no necklace, but there is some kind of arm bone with feathers attached to it. And, like you said, a bunch of powders and potions, I guess."

"No diary, though, huh? No book?"

"My uncle wasn't one for keeping diaries."

"Neither was my dad."

They looked glumly at each other.

"Do you know anything about this witchcraft stuff? Did your uncle ever talk to you about it? Do you remember... anything?"

She shook her head slowly. "What about your parents?" "Dead."

"Any other relatives?"

Yeah, but they're pretty distant. I mean, I was the one closest to him. If he was going to tell anybody, he would have told me? "Well, what about friends.

"I don't know."

"Where did he work? when and where was he born? If I have some background information, I can check up on him, build a profile from there."

"I know he was born in Arizona."

"Arizona?"

"A place called Wolf Canyon."

A shiver feather-tickled the back of his neck, moved down his back, spread into his arms.

Wolf Canyon. It was all circling back to that.

Miles realized that he did not know where his father had been born, and while he had never thought of it before, he understood now how strange that was. Would Bonnie know?

He was tempted to call his sister and find out, but he had a feeling he already knew what the answer was.

He played a hunch. "Did your uncle say anything about dreams he was having before he died? Recurring dreams about"--a tidal wave and the end of the world?"

Miles nodded slowly. "Yeah."

"I've been having dreams, too, he died. Not a tidal wave, exactly, but water.

"Me, too," Miles mentioned. "What's it mean? What is it? Janet sounded as though she were about to cry.

"I don't know, but there's more to come." He motioned toward her empty glass. "You might want to get yourself another drink. I have a lot of things to tell you."

He started from the beginning. Marina Lewis and her father. Montgomery Jones and the other men on the list.

Brodsky and Hec Tibbert. The homeless old woman in the mall. Liana on the fence.

And, at the hub of all this activity, Wolf Canyon.

When he was through, they were silent for a moment, staring at each other.

"So," she said slowly. "This town, Wolf Canyon. It was--"

"---covered by a lake."

"You think that's where your father walked to?"

Miles nodded. "I'd bet on it. And your uncle too if he escaped and they lied to you about it."

"But why?"

He took a deep breath. "I don't know. Let's go there and find out."

He called Claire at work to tell her what he'd learned and to let her know that he was going to Wolf Canyon. She was not happy to hear it, and when he said he was going with a woman whose uncle had met the same fate as his father, he could feel the tension over the phone. He thought of asking her to come along, but he didn't really want her to and he kept his mouth shut. She wasn't involved in this, not directly, not by blood blood and he wanted to keep her as far away from Wolf Canyon as possible. Whatever-was out there was dangerous, and he would not be able to live with himself if, through negligence or selfishness or stupidity, he allowed something to happen to her.