Suddenly Missy stopped and yanked at her mother’s hand.
“Someone’s here,” she said.
Rebecca flashed the light around with a shaking hand. “Robby?” she called. “Roobbeeeee!”
She turned so that her back was to the wind and called out again. There was no answer, but she suddenly felt the sharp sting of an electrical shock as a bolt of lightning flashed out of the sky and grounded itself in the nearby forest. And, she was sure, there was something behind her: an unfamiliar presence.
A presence she knew was not her son.
She dropped Missy’s hand.
“Run, Missy! Run as fast as you can.”
And then, as she watched Missy dash off into the darkness, she felt something slide around her neck.
It was an arm, a strong arm, and it was choking her. She tried to scream but her voice wouldn’t respond. She tried to batter at the arm with the flashlight, but the pressure on her neck only increased.
No, she thought. Not like this. Please, God, no …
Missy ran into the darkness, not knowing which way she was going. She only knew she was going away.
Away from her mother.
Away from whoever was with her mother.
Then she stumbled and fell into the sand, crying out into the darkness.
“Missy? Is that you?” She couldn’t see who was calling to her but she recognized the voice.
“Robby? Where are you?”
“Over here. Come on.”
She scrambled toward his voice and found herself blocked by a log.
“Climb over,” Robby urged.
Then she was beside him, crouched down behind the log, peering over the top of it into the darkness. In the distance the beam of the flashlight danced crazily, then suddenly fell to the ground and went out.
“What’s happening?” Robby asked.
“It’s Mommy,” Missy sobbed. “Someone’s out there—”
A bolt of lightning split the darkness, and the two children saw their mother. She was on her knees and there was a shape behind her, looming over her, holding her neck, forcing her head forward …
A shiver of excitement made Robby tremble, and he could feel every muscle in his body tense with anticipation.
The light faded from the sky and the roar of thunder rolled over them, drowning the scream that was welling from Missy’s throat. It was as if the storm was clutching at Robby, immobilizing him.
“Let’s go home, Missy,” Robby whispered. He forced himself to take his sobbing sister by the hand and lead her into the woods. Then, as the beach disappeared from their view, he began running, pulling Missy behind him.
Rebecca’s struggles grew weaker. She was blacking out. Time began to stretch for her, and she thought she could feel her blood desperately trying to suck oxygen from her strangled lungs.
Then she heard a crack, sharp, close to her ear, and she realized she could no longer move. It was as if she had lost all contact with her body.
My neck, she thought curiously. My neck is broken.
A second later Rebecca Palmer lay dead on Sod Beach.
26
The Coleman lantern on the dining-room table began to fade, and Glen Palmer reached out to pump it up just as the bolt of lightning that had illuminated Rebecca’s death a hundred yards away also flooded the Randalls’ house with light. Reflexively, Glen snatched his hand away from the lantern, then chuckled. Brad Randall looked up from the chart he was poring over.
“Maybe we should give it up for today,” Brad said. “I don’t know about you but my eyes are getting tired. I’m not used to lantern light.”
They had been at it all afternoon, charting the various events that had occurred in Clark’s Harbor, from the deaths of Pete and Miriam Shelling all the way back to the frighteningly similar demise of Frank and Myrtle Baron years earlier. Over the years there had been several fatalities in the area, usually in the vicinity of Sod Beach, always on stormy nights when the coast was battered by high winds. And as far as they could tell, most of the victims, if not all, had been strangers to Clark’s Harbor. Strangers who had come to the Harbor for various reasons and intended to settle there.
“It’s like the Indian legends,” Glen commented as they stared at the charts. “It’s almost as if the beach itself doesn’t want strangers here—as if it waits, gathers its forces, then strikes out at people.”
“Which makes a nice story,” Brad said archly. “But I don’t believe it for a minute. There’s another explanation but I’m damned if I know how to go about finding it.”
Glen thought a moment. “What about Robby?” he asked.
“Robby?”
“You said that the beach affects him. If that’s true, couldn’t it affect someone else too?”
Brad smiled wryly. “Sure. But it doesn’t help the problem. Until I know how the beach affects Robby, how can I figure out who else might be affected? So far I don’t have the slightest idea what the common denominator might be.”
Elaine appeared in the doorway. “Getting anywhere?” She looked drawn and tired.
“I wish we were,” Brad said. “But so far it’s nothing but dead ends. Apparently the storms are killing people, which is, of course, ridiculous.”
“What about Missy? Hasn’t anybody talked to her?”
The two men stared blankly at Elaine, wondering what she was talking about. A memory suddenly flashed into Brad’s mind, a memory of Robby, talking to him on the beach.
“Missy thinks she sees things.”
Did Elaine know something about that too?
“What about Missy?” he asked quietly. The tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he asked the question, frightened Glen, but Elaine’s answer frightened him even more.
“I think Missy saw Jeff Horton get killed,” she said. There was a flatness to her voice that somehow emphasized her words. “I haven’t talked to her but she said something last night. I—I told her that her daddy had gone out on the beach, and she said, ‘He shouldn’t have done that. Bad things happen there.’ That’s all she said, but I got the strangest feeling that she’d seen what happened to Jeff, or at least had seen something.”
Glen sat in stunned silence, but Brad was nodding thoughtfully. “Robby told me awhile ago that Missy thinks she sees things on the beach,” he murmured.
Glen suddenly found his voice. “Things?” he asked, his word edged with hysteria. “What kind of things?”
“He didn’t say,” Brad replied quietly. “I was going to talk to her about it but then everything started happening, and …” his voice trailed off, his words sounding hollow.
Glen stood up and pulled on his coat.
“Then we’ll talk to her now. I’ll go get Rebecca and bring her and the kids back here.”
Brad glanced out into the blackness of the storm. “You want me to drive you? It’s getting pretty dark out there.”
“No thanks,” Glen replied. “I’ll walk along the beach. It doesn’t look so bad out there now.” He finished buttoning his coat and opened the door. The wind caught it and slammed it back against the kitchen wall.
“Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”
Glen grinned crookedly. “You mean because of last night? They say if you fall off a horse the best thing to do is get right back up and ride him again. If I don’t walk the beach tonight I never will.”
He pulled the door closed behind him and disappeared into the rain.
Glen leaned forward into the wind, his right hand clutching the collar of his coat in a useless attempt to keep the rain out. His left hand, plunged deep in his coat pocket, was balled into a fist, and he kept his eyes squinted tightly against the stinging rain.
He made his way slowly, keeping close to the surf line, keeping his head down, watching the sand at his feet. Every few seconds he looked up, searching the darkness for the soft glow that should be coming from the cabin windows. Then, as the glow failed to appear out of the darkness, he began to worry and picke
d up his pace.
When he had walked nearly a hundred yards and felt the cabin should be dearly visible, he stopped and stared into the darkness, as if by concentrating hard enough he could force the dim light of the kerosene lanterns to appear in front of him. But still there was only blackness, and his concern turned to fear.
He began to run, no longer watching his steps, but straining his eyes to find the cabin, the cabin where Rebecca and the children would be waiting for him.
He tripped, sprawling headlong into the sand, his right hand only partially breaking his fall, his left hand, suddenly entangled in his pocket, useless.
He tasted brackish salt water in his mouth and felt the abrasive scraping of sand on his face. As he thrashed around, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and trying to get his left hand free, his foot hit something.
Something soft.
He felt the numbness begin in his mind—the same numbness that had fallen over him last night. He moved slowly, almost reluctantly.
He touched Rebecca gently, caressing her face. Even though she was still warm, he knew she was dead.
Her head, cradled in the sand, lay at the same unnatural angle as had Jeff Horton’s the night before.
It was as if his mind refused to accept it at first. Glen crouched beside her, rocking slowly back and forth, no longer feeling the wind, the rain funneling unheeded down his collar.
“Rebecca,” he said softly. Then he repeated her name. “Rebecca.”
The pain hit him, washing over him with all the unexpected intensity of a tidal wave, and he threw himself onto her, wrapping her in his arms, sobbing on her breast.
“Rebecca,” he moaned. “Oh, God, Rebecca, don’t leave me.”
She lay limply in his arms, her head rolling gently from side to side, her unseeing eyes staring up into the night sky.
Glen’s pain changed from the wracking misery of the moment of discovery into a dull ache, an ache he was sure he would bear for the rest of his life.
Why had Rebecca been on the beach at all?
He thought of the children.
Where were the children?
He should look for them. They must have left the cabin, and Rebecca must have gone to look for them; she would never have left them alone, not Rebecca.
He stood up and looked uncertainly toward the forest, a black shadow set deep in the darkness of the night. If they were out here they would be in the woods.
But he couldn’t leave Rebecca, couldn’t leave her lying cold in the rain and the wind, the surf lapping at her feet. Before he went looking for his children he would have to attend to his wife.
He picked her up and began carrying her toward the cabin, his fogged mind wondering with each step at his need to care for the dead before tending to the living.
Where Rebecca had lain, there was now nothing but sand—and the darkly glistening form of a blue glass fisherman’s float.
When he got to the cabin he paused, something preventing him from going inside. At first he wasn’t sure what it was, but after a moment he knew.
The cabin wasn’t empty.
There was nothing about it that told him it was occupied, only an intangible feeling. Though there was no sound, he was sure his children were there.
He laid Rebecca’s body gently on the porch, then opened the door.
“Robby? Missy? It’s Daddy.”
He heard a scrambling sound, and then the children threw themselves on him.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Missy sobbed. “Something awful happened.”
Glen sank to his knees and drew the children close. “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry,” Robby kept repeating, over and over.
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” Glen told his son. “Nothing that happened is your fault. Nothing at all.”
“But I went out,” Robby insisted. “I wanted to go outside, so I did. And Mommy and Missy came to look for me, and then—then—” he choked on his words and began sobbing helplessly.
“We were on the beach,” Missy said. “Something grabbed Mommy, and Mommy told me to run, and I did, and—and—”
“Hush,” Glen whispered. “You don’t have to tell me about it now. I have to take care of Mommy, and I want you to do something for me.”
He disentangled himself from the children and lit the small lantern that should have been lighting Rebecca’s work as she waited for him to come home, but instead had remained cold and dark as night fell over the beach. As the flame flickered to life the room seemed to warm slightly, and Robby and Missy began to calm down.
“Robby, I want you to take Missy into your bedroom. Put some clean clothes in a bag. For both of you. Can you do that?”
Robby nodded gravely.
“All right. Then wait for me. In the bedroom. Don’t come out until I come for you, all right?”
“Are you going somewhere?” Missy asked, her eyes wide and her mouth quivering.
“No, darling, of course not. I’ll be right here.”
Missy started to ask another question, but Robby grabbed her hand and began pulling her toward their tiny bedroom. “Come on,” he said.
“Stop pulling,” Missy cried. “Daddy, make him stop.”
“Don’t pull her, Robby,” Glen said. “And you stay in there with your brother,” he instructed Missy.
As soon as the door separating their room from the main part of the cabin was closed, Glen opened the sofa bed he and Rebecca had shared and pulled one of the blankets off it. Then he carefully reclosed the bed and went back to the front porch.
He moved Rebecca to the end of the porch farthest from the door and carefully wrapped her in the blanket. When he was finished he went back to the front door, then turned to survey his work. If he got the children across the porch fast enough, they wouldn’t notice that something was lying there only a few feet away. Struggling to maintain his self-control, Glen went back into the cabin.
Robby and Missy were sitting quietly on the edge of the lower bunk, their faces serious, their hands folded in their laps. Between them was a brown bag stuffed with clothing.
“Mommy’s dead, isn’t she?” Robby asked.
“Yes, she is,” Glen said steadily.
“Why?” It was Missy, and her face looked more curious than anything else. Glen realized for the first time that Rebecca’s death had no meaning for them yet. While it was painful beyond bearing for him, for his children it was still an abstract event.
“I don’t know,” he said gently. “Sometimes things like this happen.”
“Do we have to go away?” Robby asked.
“Go away?”
“Is that why I put our clothes in the bag? Because we have to go away?”
“I’m going to take you down to stay with Brad and Elaine tonight,” Glen said. “I’ll stay there too, but I have to do some things tonight and I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“Are we going now?” Missy asked.
“Right now,” Glen replied, forcing himself to smile. “Now it’s pouring rain outside, so I want you two to see who can get to the car first, all right?”
The two children nodded eagerly.
“I’ll open the door, and you two race. The first one to the car gets a surprise.”
“What is it?” Robby demanded.
“If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, would it?”
He led them into the other room and made them stay back from the door while he opened it. Tears were streaming down his face.
“On your mark. Get set. Go!” he cried, and the children, intent only on the race, streaked through the door and across the porch, vying to be the first to reach the ancient VW van. Glen picked up their bag of clothing, closed the door, and followed them.
“Oh, Jesus,” Brad Randall moaned as he opened the door for Glen Palmer and the children. The look in Glen’s eyes and the tear-streaked faces of the children told him something terrible had happened. He could guess what.
Hearing his words from the living room,
Elaine hurried in to find out what had gone wrong.
“Glen? Is something wrong?” She looked first at Glen, then at the children, and she too knew immediately. She knelt down and gathered the children into her arms. They clung to her, almost tentatively, then Missy, followed by Robby, broke into tears and buried their faces against her. As she held the children she looked up into Glen Palmer’s drained face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry …”
Glen swallowed and forced himself to stay coherent. “Can you … can you … ?” He couldn’t finish the sentence, but Elaine understood.
“I’ll take care of them. Brad, go with him. Help him.”
Brad had been silently standing by but he suddenly came to life, grabbing for his coat. A moment later the two men disappeared into the night.
Elaine steered the children into the living room and settled them on the sofa. Then, before she did anything else, she quickly went through the house, checking all the windows, making sure they were closed and locked. Finally she bolted the doors, rattling each to be sure it was secure.
When she returned to the living room Missy was staring into the fire, lost in some small world of her own devising. But as Elaine sank down beside her the little girl took one of her hands, squeezed it, and smiled up at her.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “Really it is.”
For some reason that Elaine never understood, Missy’s words made her cry.
Glen and Brad carried Rebecca into the cabin and laid her on the floor. While Glen poked at the dying fire, wishing he could bring life back to Rebecca as easily as he could the coals, Brad began a quick examination.
It didn’t take him long. By the time the fire was blazing he had finished.
“She was strangled,” he said. “And her neck’s broken.”
“Oh, God,” Glen said, shuddering. “It must have been terrible for her.”
“That’s something we don’t know,” Brad replied quietly. “I like to think the body has ways of dealing with things like this. We know we go into shock immediately when something happens to us suddenly and unexpectedly. I should think it would be the same with dying. Some automatic mechanism takes over and makes us comfortable. Anyway, that’s the way it should be. But we’ll never know, will we?”