Covenant (5 page)

His apartment seemed cold and sterile in the light of morning after a night in the wanton whimsy of Angelica’s bedroom. Joe couldn’t quite remove the smile plastered across his face as he kept revisiting the moves of the night before. Angelica had practically dragged him to her bed, and she was not a woman who should have needed to drag anyone. She certainly knew what she was doing once she got there, that was for sure. The muscles in his belly and thighs ached with the memory of her expertise! She was flexible and inventive.

But he doubted her motives. While she seemed aroused to the point of savagery when they tangled in her sheets, he somehow doubted that it had anything to do with his own rugged good looks. Because he didn’t really have any, he thought as he stared into the bathroom mirror. He pulled the razor across his cheek and tried to still the voice within him that kept asking why.

But his questions kept being obscured by the memory of her golden skin folding and moving around him, the feeling of his hands moving over the softness of her perfect breasts, and of her tongue in his mouth eagerly seeking his core.

He still didn’t buy the evil spirit explanation. Angelica was hiding something about the cliff from him, and incredible sex or not, he intended to track down exactly what it was. Maybe it was time to give the other ladies of this apparent circle a visit.

Starting, he decided, with Karen Sander.

Joe left his apartment intending to set up a meeting after work with the Sander woman, but the day didn’t go quite as he planned. There’d been a burglary overnight at the 7-Eleven on the west end of town, and he ended up spending the bulk of the afternoon tracking down the police chief and the witness, a slow-speaking high school kid, for comments. Which backed up his other stories. Which meant that when he got home it was ten
P.M.
and it was too late even for Hungry Man dinners. He collapsed into bed without thinking about deadly peaks or palm readers. And with Randy off on vacation to Florida for two weeks, he didn’t have time to think about them again for a while.

But it never quite left his mind. He carried the yellow slip of paper around with him everywhere, and he had sketched out a tree chart of the May 22 killings, starting with the swimming accident of 1981. He’d met four of the five survivors of that event so far. Fuck, he had slept with one of them! The only one who hadn’t lost a child to the pull of the cliff. As far as he knew.

Two weeks after sleeping with Angelica, he finally called and set up an appointment with Karen Sander. She didn’t sound happy to hear from him, but she gave him directions to her house anyway.

“I don’t know what I can do for you, Mr. Kieran,” she said. “But I’ll tell you what I know.”

Somehow he doubted that, but he climbed into his car after work and aimed it in the direction of her place anyway.

He was interested to hear if she would tell the same story as Angelica.

Somehow he doubted that she would.

And he was right.

The radio was blasting “Should I Stay or Should I Go” as Joe pulled his car into the gravel driveway at 154 Waveland Lane, Karen Sander’s house. His stomach was tight, but in a good way. Joe smiled to himself, remembering.

This was how being a reporter felt. On edge. You never knew what that next interview was going to turn up, but you barreled in anyway. Usually, it was an empty casket. Every now and then, if you didn’t slip up and rattle the source, you found not only the bones, but also the closet they were hidden in.

Joe smelled bones as he stepped out into the cool dusk of an early summer night in Terrel. And that musty smell made him smile.

“Mrs. Sander?” he said in his warmest voice when the middle-aged woman opened the front door. She nodded. The corners of her eyes crinkled up as she took him in.

“I’m Joe Kieran. We met at James Canady’s funeral. I called you the other day from the newspaper?”

“Yes Joe, I remember. Come on in.”

She ushered him into a sterile front room. The carpet was white; the walls, cream; the furniture a mix of deep woods and dull corn yellows.

“Have a seat. Would you like a glass of iced tea?”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

She dipped her head in acknowledgement and disappeared through an entryway into the kitchen. Joe sat, staring at the cool disassociation of the room. A picture window took up most of the east wall of the house. A large Magnavox TV, jet-black, dominated the floor space before the windows. Two earth tone couches, a couple of small end tables, and a picture on the wall. That was the one thing he realized that really didn’t go here. The rest of the room was bright, if empty of spark. But dominating the front room’s main wall was a huge painting of the ocean. In contrast to the whites and yellows of the room, the painting showed a dead gray expanse of steely sea shuddering against a rocky coastline. Far from shore, hidden in a plume of fog, he could just make out the jut of a mountain or steep hill. The whole painting seemed designed to exude frost.

“I call it
The Covenant
.”

Joe jumped at Karen’s voice. She was standing directly behind him; he hadn’t noticed her reenter the room.

“Here’s your tea,” she said, setting the glass on a wooden coaster on the table beside him.

Karen Sander was a woman who’d thought a lot about life, Joe decided as he took her in. Her face was broad and easy, her nose dipped up just enough to give her the appearance of blue-blood heritage, but her eyes looked worn and warm in their depths. And the lines running from their corners told him that Karen Sander had done a lot of living and dying in her forty years. He’d figured out on his murder tree that if the girls who were swimming in the bay on May 22, 1981 were all classmates, then they were all about 18 at the time of the drowning. That put them all just over forty now. Angelica looked—and felt—younger than her age, but Karen Sander was starting to suffer from its effects. Silver darted like schools of tuna through her once-black hair, and she groaned as she eased back into the sofa across from him.

“What can I help you with?” she said in a soft voice.

Here it was. Joe either hooked her here or left without learning a thing. “A source either trusts you in your first few words or they never will,” one of his editors used to caution. So far, he’d found the advice fairly accurate. And you didn’t generally gain people’s trust by lying to them. At least
he
hadn’t found a good way.

“Ma’am, I’m the guy who wrote the obituary for the Canady boy’s death last month. For the
Terrel Daily Times
. Now, I’m fairly new here in town, so I didn’t know what to think when nobody wanted to talk about a boy jumping from a cliff at such a young age. I thought that especially odd when the boy seemed to have so much to live for. That got me looking around a bit, and pretty soon I found that James was not the first kid in this town to jump off that cliff, not by a long shot. I found out that you lost a boy, and Margaret Kelly lost her daughter. And then there was the boy before her.”

Karen’s eyes didn’t look away from his at all as he gave his litany. She almost looked ready to smile.

“Now, I still wouldn’t have thought too much of this—kids in Chicago, where I’m from, knock themselves and each other off all the time. Not a big deal. What got me about this, though, was not that some kids here in Terrel were copycat jumpers; what got me was that they all jumped on
exactly the
same date
.”

Karen didn’t look shocked at his bomb. He hadn’t really expected her to. Instead she gave a sad grin and shrugged.

“And you want me to tell you what, Mr. Kieran? That there was a calendar in my son’s room that said ‘May twenty-second, the day of atonement’? What are you asking me?”

“I’m asking you if you have any idea why four kids over the course of five years decided to jump off the same cliff in the same town on the same day. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”

She stood up, smoothing the loose-fitting fabric of her blouse to her waist.

“Odd, Mr. Kieran? No.”

She crossed the room to stare at her painting.

“Sad. Heartbreaking. Maddening, even. But not odd. We all deal with grief in our own ways, and the kids were all very close. If you’d been here long enough, you’d know—and maybe you’ve found this out already from your ‘investigations’— but all of us mothers have been friends for a long time. So the kids were always around one another.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sander. I didn’t…I shouldn’t have said
odd
. But I’m trying to understand what’s been going on in this town. And nobody seems to want to talk about it. It’s as if they’re all afraid to speak, as if they’re protecting someone. I’m inclined to think that these kids didn’t jump off that cliff of their own accord, and I was hoping you could steer me in the right direction.”

“Do you see this picture, Mr. Kieran?”

Karen pointed at the gloomy sea painting in front of her.

“Yes.”

“I told you I call it
The Covenant
.”

“Yes. You painted it yourself?”

“I did. Almost twenty years ago. It was the first time I held a brush.”

“That’s incredible,” Joe said, wide-eyed. He looked harder at the painting, with a critical eye. It gave one a chill—its melancholic depiction of the sea looked almost real. The detail in the piece was intricate, even for a seasoned artist.

“Have you ever done a gallery showing?” he asked. “If this was your first, I’d love to see what you’re painting these days!”

“I’ve never painted again,” she said.

Karen turned and took Joe by the shoulders. Her eyes were lit with an inner fire as she spoke.

“The Covenant, Mr. Kieran, is that in Terrel, we live off the sea, but ultimately, the sea will take us all. What we take from it, we merely borrow. It will drown us and choke us and pull us under. It will dash us on the rocks and spit at us when salvation looms just ahead. The Covenant we keep is death. My child kept his part of the bargain, and I’m betting I’ll get mine before long. And you’ll get it too. Sooner rather than later, if you keep asking people about their dead kids.”

She took her hands from his shoulders and stepped back, covering her mouth. Then she brushed her eye and stuttered, “I’m s-sorry. I…I still miss my boy.”

Karen pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe her eyes, and Joe sensed it was his moment. He could push and lose it all, or try to soothe her, and still find out nothing.

“Mrs. Sander, I wouldn’t ask you any of this if I thought there was the chance that your son’s death was something normal—some statistic that all parents have to grow old dreading. But I think your son is a special case. As are Margaret Kelly and James Canady.”

Karen looked up with reddened eyes at him.

“What do you mean?”

The moment.

“Mrs. Sander, has anybody ever noticed that the date that Margaret and James and William and Bob died, May twenty-second, is the same date that Bernadette O’Brien died while swimming with five of her friends in 1981? Those same five friends who have, one by one, been losing children off that cliff for the past five years?”

Karen sunk back into the sofa and just looked at Joe. Her eyes were surprised, yet seemed relieved.

“If you had grown up around here, that wouldn’t seem like such a strange thing, Mr. Kieran.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because everybody knows that Terrel’s Peak is the home of the devil,” she whispered.

Joe did his best to keep from smiling. Karen leaned forward. Her face grew thin.

“You think I’m kidding. And coming from a town of thieves and murders like you have, you probably can’t think of anything but that when someone dies, there must be a knife holder. Well, you’ve found the cradle of hell, Joe Kieran. And the knife is invisible. But the chopping block is not.”

She pointed to the hint of a cliff poking through the swirling mists of the painting. “It’s there. It’s Terrel’s Peak. If you want to understand, go up there after sundown tonight and listen to the wind. But don’t presume that you’ll come back to talk about it.”

With that, Karen Sander turned and walked from the room.

Over her shoulder she called, “Please finish your tea, Mr. Kieran. And then let yourself out. There is nothing more I can tell you.”