had been the marriage’s death knell.
Shelby stayed in the bedroom most of the morning—sleeping, or maybe just avoiding him. How did she feel after yesterday? Happy, sad, relieved? Or as depressed as he was?
He drank two cups of strong black coffee, forced himself to swallow half a glass of grapefruit juice and part of a container of yogurt. Washed and dried the dishes. Tidied up the front room, using the fireplace brush to clean ashes and soot and flecks of bark off the hearthstones.
Wrapped in his raincoat, he made a couple of struggling trips through the gale to replenish the firewood supply. The storm was already among the worst he’d encountered; the wind gusts must be forty or fifty miles per hour, shaking the cottage like a dog shakes a bone, bending the trees low to the ground and sending twigs and needles and small torn branches skittering across the lawn and side patio. The rain was like a whipping bead curtain, thick strands of it blown inland at an undulant slant that was almost horizontal. Huge waves lashed the shoreline, gouting up clouds of white; the ocean’s surface was like foam-flecked water boiling in a cauldron.
When he came in with the second carrier of firewood, Shelby was in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee. Still in her bathrobe, hair uncombed, her face pinched and baggy-eyed. She hadn’t slept any better than he had.
He said tentatively, “I can make you some breakfast.”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat something …”
“Later.”
He’d left the drapes closed over the windows; Shelby opened them, then folded herself into one of the facing chairs and stared out at the rain-distorted view.
Tell her, he thought as he unloaded the carrier into the wood box. Go ahead, do it now. But it was a dull thought, without resolve. The sense of fatalism overwhelmed him again and he said nothing. It was as if he were trying to fight his way out of restraints, a goddamn mental straightjacket that had his will bound and helpless.
Long day ahead. Long, long day.
At one thirty the power went out.
They knew it immediately because Shelby had switched on the floor lamp next to her chair. As soon as the bulb went dark, she said, “Perfect. Just perfect.” The baseboard heater made one last pinging noise, like a death rattle. “Perfect,” she said again, and stood to close the drapes while Macklin got a fire going.
Shelby poured her first glass of wine a little after two o’clock. Sure sign of how troubled she was; she seldom started drinking so early in the day. But he didn’t say anything to her about it. There was nothing to say and even if there had been, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She hadn’t spoken to him since the power outage; it was as if he weren’t even there.
Misery loves company. Where had he heard that recently? Oh, right, from Paula Decker on Sunday night. Well, it was bullshit. Misery didn’t love company; misery wanted to be alone, curled up in some dark corner with a blanket over its head.
Paula Decker. And Gene Decker, suddenly dead, another victim of the Coastline Killer. He’d never known a victim of violence before, random or otherwise. Only met the wine salesman once and hadn’t liked him, but still a human being he’d had brief contact with just a few nights ago. Nobody deserved to die the way Decker had, with a psycho’s bullet in his brain. Frightening and unsettling, when that kind of random lunacy touched your life like this.
He wondered again how Paula was taking the news. It couldn’t be an easy thing to deal with, no matter how she’d felt about her husband. As bad as things were for Shelby and him right now, Paula was a lot worse off. Claire Lomax, too. Always somebody worse off than you are.
Yeah, he thought, but you don’t have to live their lives. The only life you have to live, the only visceral misery you have to face, is your own.
Three o’clock.
The storm was massive now, roaring and rampaging like the dream creature, assaulting everything in its path. Hurricanes were unheard of on the California coast, but this was what Macklin imagined the beginnings of one must be like. They were probably safe enough forted up in here, but there was no certainty of it; when one of the stronger wind gusts slammed into the cottage, the walls and windows shimmied from the impact.
As early as it was, most of the daylight was already gone. A thin puddinglike gloom had settled around them, relieved somewhat by the firelight and the rows of candles Shelby had set out. But all the flames flickered and wobbled, creating restive shadows; both cold air and dampness had seeped in past the weatherstripping on windows and doors and lingered despite the fire’s heat. The atmosphere was oppressive. As if he and Shelby were the only two silent mourners in a storm-battered funeral home.
He said, “I can’t stand listening to that much longer. How about putting some music on?”
“Let’s see if we can get a news broadcast first.”
She switched on the boom box, fiddled with the radio dials. Static, mostly, on the AM and FM stations. She managed to tune in a local station whose announcer was giving a storm report, something about a bad slide that had closed Highway 1 near Anchor Bay, but it broke up into static after half a minute or so. Briefly she switched over to the police band. More storm-related chatter—road blockages, a traffic accident in Point Arena. Nothing about the Coastline Killer. Why would there be? Even a psycho wasn’t demented enough to go out looking for people to shoot on a night like this.
Shelby said, “Find a CD you want to listen to,” and headed to the kitchen for a wine refill. Macklin stood up, thinking he might as well join her—self-defense, to take the raw edge off his nerves—and that was when he heard the sudden boomlike cracking sound.
It came from outside during a brief lull in the wind squalls, loud enough to override the tempest. His first thought was a thunderclap. But no, it had been different—
In the next second there was another blast of sound, this one of a crashing collision that shook the floor, rattled the furniture.
“My God,” Shelby said from the kitchen, “that felt like an earthquake.”
“Couldn’t have been. No shaking.”
“Close, whatever it was. Somewhere out front.”
“I’d better go have a look,” he said. “You stay here—no use both of us getting wet.”
He hurried to the utility porch, dragged his raincoat off the hook, shrugged into it; pulled on his waterproof gloves and jammed the rain hat down over his head. Then he grabbed the flashlight, just in case; unlocked the door and opened it just far enough to squeeze his body through.
Out on the patio the banshee wind almost bowled him over as he struggled ahead to the gate. A rain-laden gust ripped it out of his hand, hurled it against the dripping shrubbery on the other side. He staggered through and down the drive onto the lane.
The blacktop’s surface was littered with needles, cones, boughs, bare limbs; a runnel as wide as a small stream paralleled it on the inland side. Macklin swung the flash beam left, then right, slatting rain out of his eyes. Dimly, then, through the sodden half-daylight, he saw what had happened, what lay some fifty yards ahead to the south. He took half a dozen faltering steps in that direction before he stopped and stood bent and staring, his jaw clenched so tightly small shoots of pain radiated up both sides of his face.
Down tree. Big one aslant across the lane, blocking it just beyond where the Coulter property joined that of the neighboring estate.
Macklin pushed ahead for a closer look, stopping again within a few yards of the fallen tree—a dead bull pine from the woods on the inland side, its trunk encased in some sort of parasitic vine, its upthrust branches bare except for rows of decaying cones. Vine leaves, loose cones, snapped-off limbs littered the lane and the soggy ground along its length. The upper branches had collapsed a section of the estate’s border fence; the lower end of the splintered trunk was half-hidden among the standing pines, cracks in the asphalt radiating out from under its middle section. The lane was completely blocked. It didn’t look like you could even walk around the damn thing on
