1
ANOTHER WINDY NIGHT, warm for late November and smelling of sagebrush and dust. Restless autumn dreams. The night haunted by a slow and deliberate creaking in the bones of the old house, by the rattle of doors shaken in their frames, by the sighing of the wind beneath the eaves, murmuring past the stones of the chimney. Tree branches tossed and rustled out in the night, and dry leaves skittered across the screens and scraped along the brick path.
The full moon hung above the ridge like a lantern on a dark wall, and leafy moon shadows swayed across the kitchen floor. Peter Travers put a match to the mantle of a propane wall lamp, and the lamp hissed alive, turning the shadows into pale, flitting spirits. He measured coffee grounds and water into the shell of a stove-top percolator and lit the burner beneath it.
Leaning against the counter, he looked out through the window, waiting for the coffee to boil. Beyond the oaks and sycamores, the hillside glowed under the ivory moon. Dust devils rose off the dry earth, whirling up out of the sage and sumac like uneasy spirits. The first smells of percolating coffee leaked out into the air of the kitchen, masking the desert smell of the wind. Ghosts. Even coffee had begun to smell like the ghost of mornings past.
A gust of wind shook the house, moaning past doorjambs and windows and through the crawl-space cellar under the floor. How Beth could sleep through such a racket was a mystery, especially in a nearly strange bed. He felt a quick pang of guilt for not being there himself. It was almost like leaving a good-bye note on the bureau, except he wasn’t going anywhere and this was his house.
The wind simply made him restless. For the past couple of days it had whispered across the back of his mind even when he slept, and he had awakened a dozen times in the night to the sound of the casements rattling and the walls creaking, sleepily certain that the wind would pull the old house apart piece by piece and shingle the canyon with it.
Another gust shook the house now, and an unlatched shutter banged open against the clapboards, hard and flat like someone beating on the wall with a wooden mallet. He walked into the living room and pulled open one of the casements in the bank of windows on the back wall. The loose shutter swung out on its hinges, leafy moonlight reflecting off the chipped white paint. He pushed it all the way open and locked it in place with its iron hook. The night air smelled of oak and sycamore and just the faintest scent of jasmine. He leaned out the unscreened, open window and watched the dark woods and the high shadow of the ridge beyond. After a moment the wind fell, leaving behind it an uncanny silence, as if the night had abruptly quit breathing.
And then very faintly, from somewhere in the trees behind the house, there arose on the still night air the desolate sound of someone weeping….
THE HOUSE WAS a quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbor. There was no phone or electricity anywhere in the canyon. The refrigerator, the lights, the stove and water heater, all of it ran off propane. Although it was only five miles to the highway and civilization, it took half an hour to drive there on the badly maintained dirt road that followed Trabuco Creek on its winding course out of the mountains.
The canyon widened out at the Trabuco Arroyo, where the dirt road dead-ended at highway pavement. On the ridges east of the Arroyo, hundreds of nearly identical stucco houses crowded the edge of the wilderness, the far-flung fringe of neighborhoods that sprawled for eighty miles across what used to be cattle ranches and farmland and orchards. When the Santa Ana winds cleared the air, much of Orange County was visible from the Holy Jim Trail that climbed toward Santiago Peak, a couple of rough miles north of Peter’s house, although often the coastal plain was obscured by a yellow-brown layer of smog.
Six months ago, when he and Amanda separated, he had said good-bye to all that, to the smog and the suburbs, and bought a piece of solitude in the wild back country of upper Trabuco Canyon.
“PETER?”
He shut the window and latched it. “In here,” he said. He was relieved that Beth was awake, even though he’d done his best to let her sleep.
He walked back into the bedroom, where she was sitting up in bed, clutching a pillow. She looked rumpled and sleepy. Her blonde hair was a mess, falling across one eye. “Prowling around the house in the dark again?” she asked.
“Yeah. I heard the weirdest damned noise just now.” He sat down on the bed. “I didn’t mean to run out on you. I was making coffee.”
“A woman like me can’t compete with a good cup of coffee,” she said. “What time is it?”
“At least four.”
“Four,” she said flatly. “Maybe I’ll go ahead and sleep late, at least until five or five-thirty. After this morning I’m a parent again.” She collapsed back onto the bed and pulled the covers up to her neck. Bobby, her son, had been visiting his father in the east somewhere; Peter couldn’t remember the place and didn’t want to. The less he heard about Beth’s ex these days, the better.
“Listen,” Peter whispered, sitting at the edge of the bed.
After a moment she said, “I don’t hear anything but the wind.”
“Ssh. Wait.” Peter held his hand up.
For a moment there was nothing, just trees rustling outside the window. Then, very clearly, the sound of crying again.
“Did you hear it?” Peter asked.
“Yes,” Beth said, turning over and plumping up the pillow. “I heard it. You can come back to bed now if that’s what’s got you up. That’s not a psycho killer. Wrong kind of noise for that. Psycho killers laugh; they don’t cry. Horrible rasping laughter.”
“What is it then? Sounds almost like a lost child, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds like a fox,” Beth said. “They cry like that, especially if they’ve lost a mate. Foxes mate for life.”
“People should study their habits,” he said.
“Come back to bed and we can study them now.” She turned to face him, smiling sleepily and propping herself up on her elbow.
“I guess I’m a little edgy,” Peter said.
“The coffee will help that.”
Peter sat there silently.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to be snotty.” She squeezed his forearm and then lay back down on the bed.
“That’s all right,” Peter said. “It’s this wind. Get some more sleep.”
Beth shut her eyes and shifted around, as if trying to make herself comfortable. She pulled one of her hands out from under the cover and patted his knee, then put it back again, turning over onto her other side. “This mattress feels like a sack full of rope,” she said, and then was silent.
After a time Peter heard the crying sound again—the fox that had lost its mate, if that’s what it was. The sound came from a long way off now, and shortly dwindled away to nothing.
• • •
THE WEEK BEFORE, he had spent four days in Santa Barbara, staying with his brother near the harbor. They had sailed his brother’s catamaran every morning. Next month, maybe, if they got a few days of good weather, he would do it again. He would bring his son David along this time. Right now David was in Hawaii with his mother. If Amanda could take David vacationing in Hawaii, then Peter could take him sailing in Santa Barbara. It had gotten to be something like a contest between them since their separation six months back.
BETH LAY SLEEPING, or pretending to. He kissed her lightly on the cheek before getting up, thinking that the last few months had changed everything and nothing. His marriage had dissolved, but his past still held on to him, more tenacious ghosts....
Closing the bedroom door, he walked out into the living room again. The moonlit curtains moved in the draft, and behind them the silhouettes of leaves tumbled past on the wind. Peter walked slowly toward the windows again, listening to the wind’s whisper, imagining that he heard laughter on it now, buried under the moaning and whispering and rattling like a counterpoint to the crying he had heard just minutes ago. The floorboards creaked beneath him. A branch scraped against a window screen.
Then, from somewhere far beneath these other sounds, like the echo of something whispered into a deep and narrow canyon, he heard his own name murmured, breathed like a sigh in the air of the old house.
A shadow flicked across the parlor doorway just then. And slowly, as if someone were turning up the flame in the propane lanterns, a pale light illuminated the open parlor door, casting a silver glow out onto the living room carpet.