14
THE LINE OF southbound cars stood still through Live Oak Canyon, and Peter found that he could barely stand the wait. Almost nobody approached from the opposite direction; it was too late in the day for northbound traffic, and Peter was tempted, in order just to be moving, to swing into the oncoming lane and bolt past whatever was holding things up. His hand played across the steering wheel, brushing the horn without pressing it, and he turned the radio on again, listened for a split second, and turned it off.
Through some trick of inner acoustics, he could hear the blood rushing in his head, and he felt enervated, his thoughts scattered. The wind was blowing hard again, and the air was electric and dry. He hadn’t eaten lunch, or breakfast either, for that matter, and he was uneasily aware that he seemed to be letting himself slide, and had been sliding for months.
The morning’s conversation with Beth returned to him. She had seen things in him that he himself had been denying, but which must have been obvious: getting up before dawn, wandering through the house, staring at photographs of his family …
A horn honked behind him. Traffic was moving again, but he hadn’t noticed, despite having been full of nervous impatience only moments ago. He crept forward, edging around a bend and into the opposite lane, past the bumper of a pickup truck sitting sideways in the road, its broken rear axle visible beneath the truck bed. A man in a baseball cap stood at the truck’s bumper, talking to a tow truck driver who was hooking the pickup to an elaborately painted towing rig. Peter heard them both laugh, and it occurred to him that the man who could laugh at his own broken-down truck lived an enviable life.
He swung back into the right-hand lane and stepped on the accelerator, watching the rear window of the car ahead, the shifting reflections of blue sky and oak trees in the sunlit sheet of glass. Into his mind slipped the image of a waterfall with two bodies lying at the base, broken and sprawled on the rocks, the dead woman’s eyes staring upward toward the top of the cliffs. He saw it clearly, as if it were an etching in an old book that he had looked at countless times. More clearly than that, he recalled the face, as if the dead woman were the shadow of someone he once knew….
“No connection,” he said out loud. Then, startled by the sound of his own voice, he flipped on the radio again, loud, and rolled the window all the way down so that the wind blew into his face. After a moment he turned the radio off. It sounded like noise to him.
He had only been back into Falls Canyon once, hiking with Beth and Bobby. He knew where the mouth of the canyon lay, hidden by trees and by the overlapping contour of the hillside. There was a path that crossed the stream and angled up the little box canyon. It forked halfway up, a second path leading upward toward the ridge. Another little path ran down from the ridge trail to the top of the falls. He had passed it a number of times when he was hiking into Trabuco Oaks, but he had never followed the path to its end, to the top of the falls.
And yet now he could picture the canyon from above: the high narrow falls, the scattered boulders in the shallow pool, the night-black hair of the dead woman floating on the water, and the pale, moonlit complexion of her upturned face….
He shook his head to wake himself up. They weren’t dead. There weren’t any bodies. Hell, it was probably a hoax.
At the sheriff’s office he had learned nothing new. Detective Slater had been right. There was no “case,” no investigation. He almost wished to God that Slater had never mentioned any bodies. It had severed whatever grip he’d had on his imagination.
On impulse he pulled off the road, stopping the Suburban alongside the river-rock wall that skirted the edge of O’Neill Park. He slid out, shut the door, and climbed over the wall, walking up a grassy hillside. Wind rippled the grass like a Kansas wheat field. Beyond the top of the hill there was no traffic noise, nothing at all but the sound of the wind and the cawing of crows somewhere off over the picnic grounds. He sat on a rock and looked down into a little grassy valley that had been cut by a seasonal stream. It was dry now, but a few willows grew up out of the rocky sand. He stared at the willows, trying to focus his thoughts. Beth and Amanda. He had known Beth for something like eight years, since right before she had married Walter. His attraction to her had always had to be tempered by his marriage to Amanda. As pretentious as it had probably sounded, he had meant what he said about being monogamous. That hadn’t changed.
And that was the trouble. Clearly his life was still tied up in Amanda and in David and in the house on Monterey Street, in things as crazy and simple as Kool-Aid and Oreo cookies and playing Crazy Eights at the kitchen table, as if those things were magical amulets that carried the broken-off pieces of his soul. He had never come to terms with losing them.
He picked up a stone and threw it down into the sandy creekbed. So what did he want? When he saw Beth again he would have to give her an answer. He owed her that. He owed himself that, which of course had been her point. He had fooled himself into thinking that his recent freedom meant not having to set a course at all, and so he had been drifting. And as was often the case with drifting, it hadn’t gotten him anywhere.
Abruptly he stood up and hiked up the hill toward the car, the wind blowing the hair back out of his face now. What he wanted, what he had to do—at least for the moment—was to find Amanda and David.