In Magic Beach, Hecate’s Canyon was legendary.
Along the California coast, many ancient canyons, like arthritic fingers, reach crookedly toward the sea, and any town built around one of them must unite its neighborhoods with bridges. Some are wide, but more of them are narrow enough to be called defiles.
Hecate’s Canyon was a defile, but wider than some, and deep, with a stream at the bottom. Flanking the stream-which would become a wilder torrent in the rainy season-grew mixed-species junk groves of umbrella pine, date palm,
The walls of the defile were navigable but steep. Wild vines and thorny brush slowed both erosion and hikers.
In the 1950s, a rapist-murderer had preyed on the young women of Magic Beach. He had dragged them into Hecate’s Canyon and forced them to dig their own graves.
The police had caught him-Arliss Clerebold, the high-school art teacher-disposing of his eighth victim. His wispy blond hair had twisted naturally into Cupid curls. His face was sweet, his mouth was made for a smile, his arms were strong, and his long-fingered hands had the gripping strength of a practiced climber.
Of the previous seven victims, two were never found. Clerebold refused to cooperate, and cadaver dogs could not locate the graves.
As Annamaria and I walked south along the greenbelt, I dreaded encountering the spirits of Clerebold’s victims. They had received justice when he had been executed in San Quentin; therefore, they had mostly likely moved on from this world. But the two whose bodies had never been found might have lingered, yearning for their poor bones to be reinterred in the cemeteries where their families were at rest.
With Annamaria to protect and with the responsibility to thwart whatever vast destruction was on the yellow-eyed hulk’s agenda, I had enough to keep me busy. I could not afford to be distracted by the melancholy spirits of murdered girls who would want to lead me to their long-hidden graves.
Concerned that even thinking about those sad victims would draw their spirits to me, if indeed they still lingered, I tried to elicit more information from Annamaria as we proceeded cautiously through the nearly impenetrable murk.
“Are you originally from around here?” I asked softly.
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Far away.”
“Faraway, Oklahoma?” I asked. “Faraway, Alabama? Maybe Faraway, Maine?”
“Farther away than all of those. You would not believe me if I named the place.”
“I would believe you,” I assured her. “I’ve believed everything you’ve said, though I don’t know why, and though I don’t understand most of it.”
“Why do you believe me so readily?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do know.”
“I do?”
“Yes. You know.”
“Give me a hint. Why do I believe you so readily?”
“Why does anyone believe anything?” she asked.
“Is this a philosophical question-or just a riddle?”
“Empirical evidence is one reason.”
“You mean like-I believe in gravity because if I throw a stone in the air, it falls back to the ground.”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
“You haven’t been exactly generous with empirical evidence,” I reminded her. “I don’t even know where you’re from. Or your name.”
“You know my name.”
“Only your first name. What’s your last?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Everybody has a last name.”
“I’ve never had one.”
The night was cold; our breath smoked from us. She had such a mystical quality, I might have been persuaded that we had exhaled the entire vast ocean of fog that now drowned all things, that she had come down from Olympus with the power to breathe away the world and, out of the resultant mist, remake it to her liking.
I said, “You had to have a last name to go to school.”
“I’ve never gone to school.”
“You’re home-schooled?”
She did not reply.
“Without a last name, how do you get welfare?”
“I’m not on the welfare rolls.”
“But you said you don’t work.”
“That’s right.”
“What-do people just give you money when you need it?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. That would be even less stressful than the tire life or shoe sales.”
“I’ve never asked anyone for anything-until I asked you if you would die for me.”
Out there in the dissolved world, St. Joseph’s Church tower must have remained standing, for in the distance its familiar bell tolled the half-hour, which was strange for two reasons. First, the radiant dial of my watch showed 7:22, and that seemed right. Second, from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, St. Joe’s marked each hour with a single strike of the bell and the half-hour with two. Now it rang three times, a solemn reverberant voice in the fog.
“How old are you, Annamaria?”
“In one sense, eighteen.”
“To go eighteen years without asking anyone for anything-you must have known you were saving up for a really big request.”
“I had an inkling,” she said.
She sounded amused, but this was not the amusement of deception or obfuscation. I sensed again that she was being more direct than she seemed.
Frustrated, I returned to my former line of inquiry: “Without a last name, how do you get health care?”
“I don’t need health care.”
Referring to the baby she carried, I said, “In a couple months, you’ll need it.”
“All things in their time.”
“And, you know, it’s not good to go to term without regularly seeing a doctor.”
She favored me with a smile. “You’re a very sweet young man.”
“It’s a little weird when you call me a young man. I’m older than you are.”
“But nonetheless a young man, and sweet. Where are we going?” she wondered.
“That sure is the million-dollar question.”
