“Robby went outside,” she said.
“Outside? What do you mean, he went outside?”
“He put on his raincoat and climbed out the window,” Missy explained.
Rebecca dropped her knitting and ran to the tiny bedroom, hoping her daughter was playing a joke on her.
“Robby? Robby, where are you?”
“I
Rebecca ran to the door, pulled it open, and started to step outside, but the storm drove her back in. She shielded her face and tried to see into the growing darkness.
“Robby? Robby!” she called. “Robby, come back here.” But the wind and the pounding surf of the cresting tide drowned her words.
She thought desperately, wondering what to do, and immediately knew she would have to go find him. If only Glen were here, she thought. If only he hadn’t gone down to the Randalls’. But he had. She would have to find Robby alone.
“I’ll go get him,” she told Missy. “You stay here.”
“By myself?” Missy asked. She looked terrified.
“I’ll only be gone a few minutes,” Rebecca assured her. “Only until I find Robby.” “I don’t want to stay by myself,” Missy wailed. “I want to go too.” Rebecca tried to think it out but she was too upset. Her instincts told her to make Missy stay by herself, but the thought of having both her children alone frightened her even more than the idea of taking Missy with her.
“All right,” she said. “Put on your raincoat and your boots, but hurry!” Missy darted into the bedroom and came back with the coat and boots that Robby had already pulled from the closet. Rebecca pulled her own coat on, then helped Missy. A minute later, clutching a flashlight with one hand and Missy with the other, Rebecca left the cabin. A sudden gusting of the storm snuffed out the lantern just before she closed the door.
The wind whipped at her and drove the pounding rain through every small gap in her raincoat. Before they were a hundred feet from the house, both Rebecca and Missy were soaked to the skin.
“I want to go home,” Missy wailed.
“We have to find Robby,” Rebecca shouted. “Which way did he go?”
“He said he was going out on the beach.” Missy was running now to keep up with Rebecca.
They stayed as close to the high-water line as they could, hurrying down the beach. The flashlight was almost useless, its beam refracting madly in the downpour, shattering into a thousand pinpoints of light that illuminated nothing, but made the darkness seem even blacker than it was.
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.
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?”
