THE SHORE
ROBERT DUNBAR
THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
The phone rang.
'Look, I told you--I have to take these keys back. We can start looking for Ramsey in the morning and...'
She stopped talking. She knew.
'No need to look further, dear woman.' The words pushed through with a mushy quality. 'She will die. Can your limited mentality comprehend this? If the boy spots anyone around, if he so much as suspects the police are after him, he will take her life.' The voice slurred and choked. 'You cannot imagine what he is.' Groaning wind all but drowned out his words. 'And for my part, I cannot let you endanger her with your meddling. Do you understand? I cannot allow it.'
She leaned over the phone, as though sucked in by his words, and she gripped the receiver so tightly her fingers ached. 'If you have any information regarding this...'
Branches rattled in a sudden gust; then the dial tone rose loudly.
'Hello?' Panic settled on her. Get him back on the line. Try star sixty-nine. Her numbed fingers stabbed at the buttons. Get him talking, get him to say something useful. Act like a cop for once.
In the distance, she could hear a phone ringing. Not over the instrument, but faintly through the windows behind her. She replaced the receiver, and the ringing ceased.
The phone booth outside.
For Carl, who loved a good scary story...
late at night on the roof...
with the wind off the Hudson and the sky full of stars.
...the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whispered me through the night, and very plainly
before daybreak,
...the low and delicious word...
DEATH...
Hissing melodiously,
But edging near...rustling at my feet,
And creeping thence steadily to my ears...
DEATH...
~Walt Whitman
PROLOGUE
Pines glow, branches clawing at moonlight as the car hurdles past.
She turns up the radio, but music dissolves in static as she fiddles with the dial. Only a religious talk program emerges clearly. Switching it off, she rifles the glove compartment for a disk.
At last, jazz trombone smokes through the interior of the convertible. Though tension still sings in her neck, she sighs. Hellish shift tonight--the faces of the players, desperate and sweating, swim in her mind. One more year of this, she thinks, and she'll go back to school; then she laughs aloud, wondering how long she's been telling herself this. She increases the pressure on the gas pedal, and bristling shades stream around the car, melting in the periphery of the headlights as the road throbs beneath her.
A sign flashes past. Instantly the channel narrows, and she eases up on the gas. A tall tree seems to writhe in her head-lights. Fringed and tufted with needles, its limbs seem to reach for the fleeting brightness.
Darkness coils like a river, and a chill seeps through the canvas roof. The music swells with anxious melancholy.
Her high beams scythe the night. No one uses this road much. It has been almost an hour since she glimpsed house lights or even another car, and isolation makes the night seem chillier. Yet she cracks the window to let freezing air whistle in. Her lungs still burn, and the acrid stench of tobacco clings to her clothing. Above the windshield, skeletal trees vault, endlessly frigid and unsullied, as her mind drifts on the music.
The road twines through the pressing tangle, widening again, sloping up toward a house on a rise, the convertible now a shadow among shadows. As the woods fall away, a few more dwellings gather at the top of the hill. Some little town, she guesses, but still raw, still clean.
The road humps downward, and suddenly the sea spreads before her.
Her shoulders relax, and the charred rasp in her chest eases. As the car bounces past, shocks squeaking like mice, a big old house with gabled windows peers blindly. Cranking the window shut, she slows the car to a crawl. Black conifers claw over ledges and rocks, edging onto the shoulder of the road.
There--a gap in the scrub growth.
Tires skitter off the graveled edge of the dirt trail and wallow in softness, things crunching beneath the wheels. A moment later, she eases the convertible out onto a small beach.
Private probably, but not posted, at least not that she can see. Not that she cares much anyway. Not tonight. What's the worst that could happen? Silencing the wail of music, she sets the hand brake. It's been months since she found a spot this perfect. Hardly any beach at all really, just the trees, then the rocks and then surf--right there. She clicks off the headlights.
Waves flicker.
She listens to the muted hiss, relishing it. The dash lighter pops. Briefly rummaging in her bag, she lights a joint and inhales deeply, then zips up her coat, brushing an ember off the sleeve. It's a new coat, too expensive for her. A gift. Like the car. Her teeth clench grimly, and she shoves the door open. Cold floods in. Hunching her shoulders and lowering her chin, she clambers out. Normally, on a night like this, she might only sit in the car and watch the ocean, maybe play a CD. But tonight she needs to walk, if only for a moment, if only as far as the rocks. Pines seethe in the wind, and the door slams softly.
Shale and beach grass crackle underfoot as she heads for a blunt wedge of stone. The raw materials of creation seem to have been abandoned here. Lumpish boulders squat. Scrub growth struggles onto a thin strip of gravel, not so much a beach as a shoal of crushed shells, primeval, unfinished. In the wind, sparse sand grits loudly, and waves slide against the rocks with a tumbling whisper.
