She guided the flashlight to the left and came across a third skull and a fourth. Behind those, there were others. How many in all? She couldn’t tell. A half dozen, at least. Interred here, in the cellar under her house.
Somebody had broken a hole in the wall and dug out an earthen cavity about two feet deep, then deposited the remains and sealed them inside. Probably the reconstructed portion hadn’t been as strong as the original, so it had failed when the rest of the cellar had held up.
She counted six skulls. There might be more. She couldn’t be certain. The bones were disarticulated, disarranged. A spoils heap.
The bones were mottled in mold. Some had crumbled into whitish gray powder. They were old. Decades old.
She didn’t know if her great-grandfather was the original owner of the house. But if he was…
Then someone in her family had done this.
five
As a child, Jennifer occasionally had the sense that her life was a movie and she was watching it. She had the same feeling now, as she climbed out of the cellar-a strange conviction of unreality. She lowered the trapdoor and knelt there, running her palm over the smooth wood, simply to feel something firm and solid.
It was hard to keep her thoughts clear. There were bodies in her cellar. She had to do something about that. There must be some action she could take.…
But first she had to check on Richard.
She called his number, letting the phone ring for over a minute. No answer.
He had to be home. He never went anywhere. He hated walking the streets, and he had neither a driver’s license nor a car. She saw to it that food and other essentials were delivered to his door.
She called twice more with the same result, then tried the building manager. Brusquely he assured her that everything was fine. “The place didn’t fall down, okay? It wasn’t that that big of a quake. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get back to work, okay? And hey, your crazy brother’s late on his rent again. It’s due on the first of the month,
Click.
That wasn’t good enough. She needed to know why Richard wasn’t answering his phone.
She dug her keys out of her pants pocket-she never carried a purse, too much of an encumbrance-and left the house through the kitchen door, entering the garage, a 1940s add-on. Raising the garage door, she scanned the street for signs of damage.
The day was bright and cool, the morning fog long gone. Seagulls flocked around an overturned curbside trash can. A For Sale sign stood on the sandy front yard of Mr. Beschel’s house down the street; the owner himself had already moved to an island off the Washington coast. Taggers’ marks and gang intaglios defaced tree trunks and utility poles.
There were no downed utility lines, no fires. Her street had come through unscathed. She heard the Rottweiler howling, disturbed by the event. She hoped the little boy and his mother weren’t too badly shaken up.
Her Toyota Prius was undamaged. She drove north, her radio tuned to KFWB. The newscasters were saying that the quake’s epicenter was in Culver City, on the western end of the Puente Hills Fault. Another segment of the same fault line had ruptured in 1987, damaging ten thousand structures citywide and causing eight fatalities. Today’s event was much smaller. So far there were no reported deaths.
Two blocks north of her address, a crowd of people were holding an impromptu barbecue, using up whatever meat and poultry they had on hand because their power was out. That was the thing about earthquakes-the damage was always scattershot, hopscotching from street to street.
Driving through Venice, she saw additional signs of hard shaking. Though the epicenter was several miles to the east, the coastal areas were particularly vulnerable to seismic waves. The tremors could literally churn the sandy soil into quicksand. Venice, built on swampland, faced the most serious hazard.
She passed the splintered remnants of someone’s deck, which had plunged onto the patio below. Farther down the block, a front gate had been wrenched askew, while across the street a palm tree had canted into the side wall of a two-story Mediterranean home.
All around her there was the same uncanny quiet she remembered from the aftermath of other quakes. Birds did not sing. There was an eerie calm, surreal as the stillness in the eye of a hurricane.
She put these thoughts out of her mind. It was best to be alert. She was entering Dogtown.
In the 1970s, when Venice had been a sprawling seaside ghetto with redevelopment still decades away, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods was the no-man’s-land straddling the district’s border with the city of Santa Monica. Some quirk of the law had left the jurisdiction of the area north of Navy Street and south of Pier Avenue undecided. Since neither the Santa Monica Police Department nor the LAPD could confidently claim authority there, the narrow slice of coastal land had gone largely unpatrolled.
Some of Dogtown had been reclaimed by the developers, but not all. The Oakwood neighborhood, in particular, was a nest of blight where tenacious gangbangers hung on in rent-controlled apartments while new buildings went up around them. The new arrivals lived behind locked doors, protected by security fences and dogs- like her new neighbors, she realized. Maybe Richard’s neighborhood wasn’t so different from hers, after all.
She parked outside the Oakwood Chateau, a ridiculously misnamed Art Deco pile, three stories of peeling paint and rusted fire escapes. The building had a security door and an intercom system, but both were broken, as usual. She entered the sour-smelling lobby and found an out of order sign tacked to the elevator. She didn’t want to ride the elevator, anyway. Being trapped in a confined space wasn’t the safest strategy in the Oakwood Chateau, and not just because of aftershocks.
She took the stairs. In the past she had sometimes encountered people sleeping on the landings, but today the stairwell was empty, any sleepers presumably having been roused by the quake. Weak bulbs screened by wire cages cast a dull yellowish glow over the concrete steps and graffiti-covered walls.
On the third floor she exited into the hallway. Most of the apartments had their doors open for a cross breeze. The screams of crying infants and the blare of television sets in many languages assaulted her.
The door to apartment 32 was closed. She gave the door a single sharp rap.
From inside came a low, suspicious growl. “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” she said.
“Who?”
“Jennifer. Your sister.”
“What do you want?”
“Just seeing if you’re okay.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“There was an earthquake, Richard. Open the door, please.”
She wondered if he would just ignore her. Then she heard a tread of footsteps on creaky floorboards.
The door opened, just wide enough to pull the security chain taut. Richard stared at her through the gap. Though he was only five foot eight, he had the lanky build of a taller man-long bones, thin wrists and ankles, a narrow neck perched on coat-hanger shoulders. His chestnut hair was prematurely thinning on top, making him look older than twenty-eight.
“I’m fine. See?”
The door began to close. Jennifer jammed one sneaker against it. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Why?”
“I came over here to see you.”
“You’ve seen me.”
“To
Grudgingly he unhooked the chain and walked away, leaving her to push the door open and enter.
His apartment was a sad, dusty hole. No paintings on the walls. Minimal furnishings. An old portable TV on a battered stand. The windows looked out on a rusty fire escape above an alley lined with trash bins. There was a
