Walkers (18 page)

"Ynez, I'm desperate," Joana said. "Maybe your grandmother can help me, maybe she can't. I don't know. I have nowhere else to turn."

Ynez studied Joana's face. Her coffee-colored eyes showed deep compassion. "I will speak to her, Joana, but you must not have your hopes too high. My grandmother has been badly used by people, and she can be very bitter. Now she only sits alone in her room and waits to die. But I will speak to her of you. I will do what I can."

"Thank you," Joana said with feeling.

"Where can I reach you when I have talked to my grandmother?"

Joana borrowed a notebook from Glen and wrote down her home and office telephone numbers. Ynez took the slip of paper, folded it, and put it away.

Joana touched the other girl's hand. "Ynez, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your helping me."

The nurse's dark eyes were grave. "I have done nothing for you yet. My grandmother may refuse to see you. And even if she agrees, you may wish she hadn't."

"I'll take the chance," Joana said.

Ynez looked at her with a sad smile, then nodded as though she'd heard what she expected. "Be careful, Joana," she said. "Be very careful." Then she rose from the table and walked away without looking back.

The next day Joana had a difficult time keeping her mind on her work. She made careless mistakes in routine tasks, forgot appointments, and had to keep asking people to repeat what they had just said to her. Just before lunch John Waldo, the manager of her department, ambled over and sat on her desk. He was a tall man with narrow hips and a gunfighter moustache. In the office he wore Western shirts and faded denims. The personnel of the advertising department, being "creative" and therefore a little strange, were given more latitude in dress than others in the corporate family. A touch of eccentricity was expected here, even encouraged. John Waldo's personal idiosyncrasy was impersonating the Marlboro man.

"How you doin', little gal?" he drawled.

"Okay. Well, not so okay, really. I'm not completely with it today."

"Shucks, I guess I can understand that. When some crazy galoot busts into your house, and then you got to go through a lot of palaver with the police, why, no wonder you're shook up."

"That's no excuse for messing up the job the way I am today."

"Don't worry about it, the back-to-school campaign is roped and branded, and we've got a breather until we have to saddle up for the Thanksgiving sale. Why don't you take the rest of the day off if you want to. Heck, take the rest of the week. You've got sick leave coming."

"Thanks, John, but I really feel a lot better here than I would at home. I need people around me." Live people, she might have added, but did not.

"Whatever you say, gal. If you haven't any plans for chow, how about comin' along with me to Dominick's?"

"Thanks, but I'm going to be eating in today. I'm expecting an important phone call, and I wouldn't want to miss it."

The manager pushed himself off the desk and hitched up his denims. "If there's any little thing I can do for you, Joana, just give a shout and I'll come a-runnin'."

"Thanks, John, I appreciate that."

Joana watched the Wilshire Boulevard cowboy mosey back toward his own office. She knew it was not easy for him or any of the others to know what to say to her. There was an accepted way to treat people who had been ill, or in an accident, or suffered a death in the family. You could go by the book. But what did you say to somebody who had barely escaped an attack by a maniac, watched her boyfriend kill the man, and spent several hours being questioned by the police?

At lunchtime Joana went out to the catering wagon that served her floor and bought a tuna-salad sandwich, an apple, and a half-pint carton of milk. She took them back to her desk and ate while trying to concentrate on a sheaf of competitors' newspaper ads. She waited nervously for the phone to ring.

Joana knew she was probably staking too much on Ynez Villanueva's grandmother. She was, after all, just an old woman who was said to have undefined psychic powers that Joana would have scoffed at until very recently. But now there seemed to be no other help available to get her out of this nightmare. So she sat tense, waiting for the call from Ynez.

It was three o'clock when the phone on her desk finally rang. Joana jumped as though it had bitten her.

"Joana? This is Ynez Villanueva. Am I interrupting your work?"

"No. I've been waiting for your call."

"I talked to my grandmother a little while ago. She has no telephone, so I had to call the man downstairs to get her. He was not very happy about it."

"What happened?" Joana tried to keep the terrible eagerness out of her voice.

"As I thought, she did not want to see you. I told you she sees nobody anymore. But I talked to her and talked to her. I told her, forgive me, that you were an old and dear friend of mine. Finally she agreed to let you come and talk to her, but just the one time, and just for a few minutes."

"That's wonderful, Ynez, I can't thank you enough. Where does she live?"

Ynez gave her an address in Boyle Heights. Joana wrote it on her desk calendar pad and tore off the sheet.

"I'll go there tonight," she said, "right after I get off work."

"No," said Ynez abruptly. "My grandmother will not talk to you tonight."

"But why?"

"That I cannot tell you. She has strange ways, and I never question them."

The disappointment Joana felt was all out of proportion. She struggled for control. "When can I see her, then?"

"Tomorrow will suit my grandmother. After sundown. That is when she agreed to talk to you, and no other time."

"Tomorrow," Joana repeated. "Must I go alone, or is it all right to take somebody along?"

"She said nothing about that. I think it will be all right to take Glen."

"Did you tell her what it is I want to see her about?" Joana said.

"I told her nothing. My grandmother needs no one to tell her things like that."

"I see. Well, thank you again, Ynez. I'm really grateful."

"I hope you still feel that way after you have talked to my grandmother."

There was a click on the line and the telephone went dead in Joana's hand. Thoughtfully she cradled the instrument. For a moment she wanted to laugh out loud at the crazy scenario she was acting out. Here she was sitting at her everyday desk in her familiar office, talking on her own business phone, and making an appointment to visit a witch.

After sundown
. Marvelous. Why not make it at midnight with a full moon? Better yet, with an electrical storm booming and crashing around the witch's old house on a craggy mountain top.

With an effort Joana got hold of herself. The urge to laugh was uncomfortably close to hysteria. She immersed herself in her work and managed to get through the next two hours. At five o'clock she called Glen and told him what Ynez had said.

"What the hell is wrong with seeing the old lady today?" he demanded. "Why do we have to wait till tomorrow?"

"I don't know," Joana said. "Ynez says that's the way her grandmother wants it, and she's the one making the rules."

"Yeah, I suppose she is," Glen conceded. "It's just that I hate knowing you may be in danger and not being able to do something about it."

"I know," Joana said, "I'm frustrated too, but we're doing all we can."

"I'm still not happy about it. What about tonight? Do you want to come to my place?"

"What I'd really like to do tonight is go out," Joana said. "I don't like the feeling of hiding away behind locked doors."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"I was home Sunday night. How safe was that?"

"You've got a point," Glen admitted. "Where would you like to go?"

"Tell you what, I'll take you out. It will be your birthday dinner. We can go to Seacliff. You always liked the lobster there."

"My birthday isn't until next month."

"So what? I feel like celebrating it tonight. You may not get another offer, so what do you say?"

"You're on," Glen said.

Three hours later they were driving north on Pacific Coast Highway. They passed the funky beach houses of Topanga and the moneyed colony of Malibu, and climbed the cliffs above Pepperdine University where the mountains marched right down to the sea. They drove by the blackened skeleton of an unfinished condominium, victim of one of the devastating brush fires that sweep annually through the California hills. A group of scruffy young people now lived in the burned-out shell. Throwbacks to an earlier decade, the last of the flower children.

Sitting erect in the bucket seat, both hands on the wheel, Glen did not have much to say. Although he had made adjustments to his thinking to accommodate the changing times, he was still not comfortable with a woman taking him out to dinner, instead of the other way around. Joana knew this, and she knew that taking her car too would be crowding him, so she agreed to ride with him in the Camaro. In truth, she did not much like driving, so it was an easy compromise to make.

The Seacliff Restaurant was perched on a rocky promontory where the winds converged and turned the sea below into a foaming caldron. The Seacliff was famous for its huge lobsters, for which they charged outrageous prices, and for serving the best margaritas north of Puerto Vallarta. The building was gray stone and driftwood to match the cliff, the view on a clear day was spectacular. Geologists issued periodic warnings that sooner or later the point on which the restaurant stood would break away from the land and send the Seacliff tumbling fifty feet to the rocks and smashing surf below. Californians, however, living in a land undercut by earthquake faults, pay little attention to the doom prophets. The restaurant enjoyed a booming business.

A little before nine o'clock Glen and Joana pulled into the Seacliff parking lot. They left the car with a red-jacketed attendant and went inside. The table they were given was away from the long window that overlooked the ocean, but tonight they did not care. They had seen the view before, and there were other things on their minds.

Glen ordered a broiled lobster tail, Joana decided on the succulent red snapper. They each sipped on one of the famous margaritas while waiting for the food.

Glen maintained a kind of petulant silence. He frowned more openly than usual when Joana lit a cigarette. She heard herself talking too loud and too fast, to compensate.

Finally she said, "Glen, this is supposed to be for your birthday. Couldn't you try to celebrate a little?"

"Sorry. It's not easy to be a barrel of fun just three days after bashing a man's brains out."

"Come on, we made a deal we weren't going to talk about that tonight."

"Sure. Keep it light and frivolous, right? Pretend everything is fun-fun-fun, and we don't have to give a thought to when the next walker is going to come out of the crowd and go for you."

"Cut it
out
," Joana said. It came out more sharply than she had intended. Glen blinked and said no more.

They ate their salads, crisp greens with a wine-vinegar dressing, in an uneasy silence. The waiter appeared promptly to remove their empty salad plates and to serve the main course with an appropriate flourish. When he was gone, Glen reached across the table and touched Joana's hand.

"Honey, I'm a drag tonight, and I'm sorry. This is a terrific birthday, even a month ahead of time, and from here on I am going to enjoy the hell out of it. Okay?"

She smiled at him, but her eyes were troubled. "I understand, darling. There's no use pretending the strain isn't there, because it is. Maybe coming here tonight was a bad idea."

"No way. It was a wonderful idea, and we are going to have a wonderful time. Tomorrow we can deal with the walkers. We'll go see the witch lady and get exorcised, or whatever it takes. Tonight we have fun."

They shared a bottle of Pinot Chardonnay with their dinners, and by the time the waiter came with coffee they were laughing together easily and naturally. Glen even managed a small joke when Joana took out her Master Charge to pay for the dinner.

They walked out to the parking lot holding hands like teen-agers.

"Honey, this was really a sweet idea," Glen said. "I do love you a lot."

"Still want to marry me?"

"More than ever."

Joana squeezed his hand and felt a rush of tenderness for the young engineer. Somehow his moodiness earlier in the evening, the evidence that he was less than perfect, made her love him all the more. She did not want to spend her life with a flawless hero, she wanted a flesh-and-blood man who could be wrong, and who could admit it.

Out over the ocean the clouds rearranged themselves and the moon came into view. It was fat and orange as a harvest-time pumpkin.

"Oh, Glen, look at that," she said.

"Spectacular," he agreed.

"Let's walk over for a minute and look."

Glen told the parking attendant to hold the car, and he and Joana walked over close to the edge of the cliff and stood by the guard rail looking at the moon.

"What is it that makes the moon so romantic?" Joana wondered aloud.

"Maybe because it rhymes with so many words in romantic songs. June, spoon, soon, lagoon."

"Buffoon," Joana offered, laughing.

"Macaroon."

"Baboon."

"Spittoon."

By now they were both laughing and holding onto each other. Suddenly Joana pulled back and gave a little sigh of exasperation.

"What is it?" Glen asked.

"I just thought of something." She opened her little clutch bag and looked inside. "Yes, I did, damn it, I left my credit card back there in the restaurant."

"I'll go get it," Glen said. "You wait here and think up some more moon rhymes."

Glen left her with a kiss and walked on back toward the entrance to the restaurant. Joana turned again toward the sea. Standing there alone, she saw the moon differently than when Glen was there to share it. The bland, expressionless face seemed somehow menacing. There was something about it that made her uncomfortable. Something dead.

She was about to go after Glen when there was a wild, high-pitched scream from the direction of the parking lot. Joana spun around and froze. Running toward her, bare feet slapping the asphalt, was a tall, thin girl in a filmy white dress. In the moonlight, Joana could see clearly the dead white face, the gaping mouth, the glittering eyes.