Covenant (6 page)

Joe shook his head and smiled as he backed out of Karen Sander’s driveway. He tasted a story here. A big story. The kind that gets the Press Guild to send you to a podium in the fall. The kind that brings in the county police scratching their heads and saying, “We don’t know how this could have gotten past us, but we’re certain that we’ll catch it if it ever happens again!”

He could see Chief Swartzky’s face as the TV cameras blinded him with the lighthouse strobes. Swartzky would swear he’d never had an inkling and no one had ever brought the issue before him.

“There’ll be a department overhaul starting next week,” he’d promise. “I’m embarrassed that no one ever put a pattern to those kids’ deaths. But I’ve known Karen Sander and Rhonda Canady since they were kids, and they never were anything but the sweetest women. Who could have suspected them of killing their own kids?”

Oh, when he pulled together some more evidence, he’d offer it to Chief Harry Swartzky. He had no doubt that Terrel’s police chief would find a reason to ignore or bury it.

And he’d offer the story that he was already writing in his head to the
Terrel Daily Times
, but he doubted that it would be published there. But there were bigger towns in this county. Maybe he’d take it up north to the
Port Haven Dispatch
. If he found evidence for what he suspected, he’d have no trouble
selling the story to a larger paper. And Terrel would be crawling with state and county cops for a week afterward.

Maybe longer, if he didn’t find the source of the Halloween murders. They’d have to start searching for that mystery’s solution if he handed them this one. Maybe they were connected. But he doubted it, for some reason. The May 22 Murders, as he’d begun to headline them, smelled like copycat killing to him.

One thing was certain: he didn’t believe that there had been a bogeyman hiding out in the mountain pushing people off one day a year for the past century. But there was also no way all these deaths were the off spring of a single psycho serial killer. This kind of regularity took organization.

As for the recent May 22 murders, well, it really all pointed back to five women, didn’t it? Or at least four. Rhonda Canady, Karen Sander, Melody O’Grady and Monica Kelly were all present over two decades ago when Bernadette O’Brien mysteriously drowned. And then twenty years later their own kids, one by one, were suddenly disappearing just as each of them turned eighteen. Was it some kind of sacrificial rite they’d sworn to as girls?

It was wicked. Twisted.

Unfathomable.

But it didn’t make any sense that the killer was outside the circle. Why the hell would a murderer wait twenty years to strike back at the girls who escaped death the first time?

And then strike back only indirectly, through their kids?

No, Joe felt that at least one of the five had played a part in the kids’ murders. They sure hadn’t been suicides. That was the one point he was completely sure of now.

The easiest person to point a finger at, of course, would be Angelica. She had no kids, and so was the only one who had not yet been hurt by the deaths.

Could
she
have drowned Bernadette when they were kids, and now, for some reason, was getting back at her friends for something?

Or, perhaps more likely, what if the other four girls had been responsible for Bernadette’s death? Maybe Angelica had been Bernadette’s best friend, and had been plotting revenge on the other four ever since. They would be blackmailed into not turning Angelica in as she played angel of death to their kids, because she could bring them down for their own ancient crime.

Could it be her? He tried to picture Angelica smuggling her friends’ kids off to the cliff on May 22, the year they each turned eighteen. Could she really be the one who took their lives at the same spot where their mothers had killed so long ago?

No. He couldn’t believe it. There were few mothers who wouldn’t give their own lives to protect their children. It was unlikely that all four of them were so cowardly as to allow Angelica to snuff out their babies, just to protect themselves. This had to be something that they couldn’t stop.

And as twisted as Angelica’s little magic act was, he couldn’t see those hands pushing kids off cliffs every spring. He was prejudiced in her favor, sure. A fiery night of sex after months of nobody but Lefty could sway anybody’s thinking.

But then again, were the other options any better?

Four mothers who each had killed their children as part of some weird pact from their pasts…

A killer who had waited for two decades for a group of women to birth and raise kids that could then—and only on a certain day—be shoved off a cliff…

Or how about the apparent town favorite: a devil who lured people to walk his plank and fall to their deaths on the blackened rocks and powerful surf hundreds of feet below?

They were all pretty unpalatable. But whatever the answer was, he had an idea it lay hidden in the hearts of one or more of the five. He had some more visits to make.

But first he would take a ride out to the instrument of this little Kevorkian festival. He could still hear the vinegar in Karen Sander’s voice.

If you want to understand, go up there after sundown tonight and
listen to the wind
.

Okay, he thought to himself.
I can do that
. It wouldn’t hurt to have a look around the diving board before jumping into the pool.

He’d skipped dinner in order to meet with Karen Sander right after work, and his stomach was growling angrily. But instead of turning off Main Street to head back to his apartment, Joe followed the road straight out of town.

It looked to be a good night for a little ocean gazing anyway. The cicadas were buzzing as he drove through the already darkening canopy of trees at the edge of Terrel and began the steady climb toward Terrel’s Peak. The sun would be down in twenty or thirty minutes, and then maybe he’d see some stars before heading back to the four walls and bed he hid in every night.

The road only allowed you to climb so high in your car, but the hike up the last stretch of hill to the peak would do him good.

If he didn’t decide to jump, he ribbed himself.

But somehow, it didn’t seem very funny.

He kept hearing the other thing the Sander woman had said:
Don’t presume that you’ll come back to talk about it
.

The climb for her had become a pilgrimage.

Every night by seven o’clock she was here. And every night she found herself staring over the edge.

Listening.

She’d never bought into all the stories about Terrel’s Peak that she’d heard all her life. There were dozens of stories about ghosts and demons and haunts that lived inside its deadly face. The most popular was of a single demon that lies in wait for the unwary after dark, ready to feed on the souls of the unwary after breaking their bodies on the rocks below.

Old women used the cliff as a prop to scold their grand-kids. She’d been behind an old crone in the park just a few days ago who had had her hands full babysitting three preschoolers. The oldest of the three, a ruddy-faced boy with a shock of blond hair, a face full of freckles and jeans whose stains declared him “a handful,” was trying to push one of the smaller kids off the jungle gym. The smaller child was screaming, and finally the old woman got up from her park bench to mediate. Cindy had been sitting on a bench nearby, and shook her head when the old woman grabbed the bully by the ear and pointed toward the ocean. You could just see the top of Terrel’s Peak from the park.

“You keep pushing people around like that, and He’ll come for you, just like He’s come for all the others. You want Him to push you?”

The boy had shaken his head in terror, and ran away from her and the other kids to play by himself on the swing set.

Devils and ghosts and evil, people in town claimed of the peak. But Cindy had always smiled sadly and raised an eye at such things. The peak was not a playground for ghouls, she believed. She didn’t believe in ghosts at all. Even when James had told her earnestly about its deathly lure.

There’s a presence in the cliff that waits for all of us
, he’d say.

It’s a piece of rock
, she’d laugh.

But not anymore. She knew now that it was alive. Or something in it was.

She knew because it spoke to her.

The first night Cindy had heard the voice, she’d been afraid. She had climbed up to the peak still freshly wounded from James’ funeral, looking for a reason behind his death.

She’d found it. But it wasn’t something that anyone outside of Terrel would believe.

On the night of James’ funeral, the tears had rained from her eyes onto the rock beneath her like the tides hitting the shore below. Her nose began to run and she was so glad she could just let it all out at last, with nobody around for miles to see or hear her blubber. She’d cried in great gasping bouts, then slowed, and then, just as she had caught her breath, she’d started bawling afresh. There on the edge of the cliff, probably in the same spot where James had jumped, she’d exorcised her grief, howled out loud to the ocean, the sky, to God if he was listening.

“Why did you take him?” she’d screamed. What she’d never expected was an answer.

But it came.

Because of a Covenant
.

She wiped a sleeve across her face to clear her eyes and turned her head quickly, right and left and then right again, searching for the source of the words.

“Who’s there?” she whispered. It had grown dark since she’d come up here. The sky was mostly covered by clouds,
and here and there, where they could break through, shone the dots of stars. The wild ocean rushed below with the steady, unstoppable sound of an angry gale. The ground near her was barely blacker than the rest of her surroundings. If someone was going to mug her, this would be the best time and place they’d ever get.

“Who’s there?” she repeated, slowly creeping back from the edge.

I won’t hurt you
.

“How do I know that?” she asked the wind.

Because of a Covenant
.

She realized then that the voice wasn’t coming from around her. She could hear the wind, and the voice wasn’t broken by the wind. It was still and clear. It was in her head.
Oh God
, she thought.
It’s all true—everything they’ve ever said
. She wanted to scream; she wanted to jump to her feet and run away; but instead, she stayed rooted to the ground. She needed to know more.

“You took James?” she asked it.

Yes
.

She had known the answer before she asked the question, but still, its impact fell like a rock in her stomach.

“But why? He never hurt anybody. I needed him. I still need him!”

There was no answer.

Cindy curled her fingers into fists, and beat the ground in anger. Then she brought one hand to her mouth to bite. The pain almost stopped the tears from starting again.

“I loved him.”

But the voice said nothing more that night.

Since that night, she’d walked the long path up the cliff almost every evening. No one saw her come here; given its reputation, Terrel’s Peak was not exactly a popular spot for after-dark visiting. Too many people ended up not coming back when they did visit. But Cindy went there every day after dinner. Her parents said nothing about her long walks,
but she saw them glance at each other. They were worried. They would have been more worried if they’d known where she was walking to.

Mom tried to help her in the only way she knew how: mothering. Over the past month, she’d cooked Cindy’s favorite dishes a dozen times. She suggested shopping trips and pointed out how handsome the Miller boy was getting to be. None of which Cindy had much stomach for. But she smiled thinly and humored her mom, who was, after all, only trying to help.

The one thing that did seem to help was walking. It took her a good forty-five minutes to get to the top of the peak, and once there, she could sit on the edge of the rock face, feet dangling one hundred feet over the deadly ocean below, and think.

She would remember all the little things she’d loved about James. The way he’d tried to grow a mustache last summer, and ended up with a dirty line of thin fuzz. About when he kissed her the first time behind the old oak tree in the park. And about the other things they’d done, later that year, in the same spot.

Sometimes she thought about college and Becky. It was amazing how small Terrel felt to her after having been away at school for barely a year. For eighteen years this town had been the world to her. Then she went to a university that enrolled more students in its undergrad program than there were people in her entire town. And yet she’d had to leave Terrel and then return in order to believe one of the truisms she had rejected through most of her childhood: Terrel’s Peak was more than just dangerous. Something evil hid behind its stony face, waiting to steal the souls of those who foolishly trod there after dark.

But for some reason, she wasn’t afraid.

Because the voice continued to speak to her.

Not every night, but when she needed to hear a voice, it was there. Reassuring her. It told her that James had been sacrificed as part of a sacred covenant. It wouldn’t tell her
what that covenant was, but it assured her that James’ death had not been for naught. The voice said that James’ sacrifice, his soul, helped keep the rest of the people in Terrel safe.

For some reason, when it spoke to her, the grief went away, at least for a time. The voice warmed her in a way that the fancy dinners her mother was cooking couldn’t.

And so she returned to the peak, night after night.

Tonight the voice was silent. Cindy stared hard into the narrow band of purple that marked the last gasp of day on the edge of the horizon. It was almost time to head back home. She sighed heavily. The favorite part of her days now was her time spent here, staring out at the water and sky. Petty things like death and grades and careers didn’t impact the elements. She envied them their stability.

Cindy stood and turned away from the edge to start back toward town.

Where a shape moved against the sky.

Someone was walking in her direction!

There was no place for her to go, to hide. She didn’t know why, but she had an overwhelming urge not to be found here. She crept along the edge to the north, hoping that whoever it was would keep going past, without stepping out to the very edge of the peak.

“Hey,” the figure called. It was a man’s voice. “Who’s over there?”

She’d been spotted. And there was certainly no place to run. He blocked the road back to town and she wasn’t of the mind to take the other route. Defeated, she turned toward him.

“I’m Cindy,” she called, and walked slowly back in his direction.

“Joe Kieran,” he said, gasping a bit for breath as he got close to her. She took his extended hand and shook it.

He was older than her, she saw, but not much. His dark hair blew in the breeze from the sea, and his eyes seemed brighter than the dusk light. He had a strong chin and a firm grip, she observed.

“I’ve seen you somewhere…” She hesitated.

“I’m a reporter for the
Times
,” he offered. “I’m around town a lot.”

“Well, this isn’t town. What brings you all the way up here?” she asked. “There’s no news going on.”

“Not now,” he agreed, looking pointedly at her. “But I could ask you the same question. What’s a nice girl like you doing up on a godforsaken cliff after dark?”

He laughed before she could answer, and pointed toward the ocean.

“It is something to look at though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems like a lot of people around this town look at it a little too closely though.”

She looked away, her forehead creasing.

“What’s the matter?”

“My boyfriend was one of those people.”

“James Canady?”

“Yes. He jumped from here just last month. Just a week before I was coming home from school.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Joe said, patting a hand on her shoulder. “I know about James; I wrote his obituary for the paper.”

Cindy looked up at him in the gathering darkness. “Now I know why you looked familiar. You were at the funeral, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You were arguing with Mrs. Sander there, right?”

“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. His eyes dropped to the ground. “Not good form for a funeral, I know. I’m sorry if I caused a scene.”

“No,” she laughed. “You didn’t, really. But any enemy of Mrs. Sander is a friend of mine. You wanna sit down for a minute?”

She gestured to her recently vacated seat overlooking the bay.

“I’d love to.”

Joe sat down Indian style at the edge of the cliff. Cindy let her legs dangle over the edge, something that made Joe just a little nervous.

“Do you come up here a lot?” he asked.

“Almost every night since James died. It’s peaceful here. I don’t know, I feel somehow closer to him when I’m here.”

“How long had you guys gone out?”

“Two and a half years. It would have been three this fall. I was hoping this summer I could convince him to go away to school with me. But he didn’t give me much of a chance.”

“He didn’t want to go?”

“Oh, he did. I know in his heart he did. But he wouldn’t even try. He’d say his grades weren’t good enough, or that he didn’t have enough money. Different day, different excuse. But the real reason he wouldn’t go was because of his mother.”

“Why?”

“She just had this…this hold on him. I don’t know—it’s tough to explain. James was a really nice guy when we were away from his house. He was a lot of fun, told a lot of jokes, but real natural-like, not obnoxious, you know? But when we’d get to his house, all the fun in him just seemed to leak away. He’d get real quiet and serious, and whenever his mom said to do something, he’d just do it. That was it. I mean, I don’t give my mom a lot of shit or anything, but I don’t act like her slave, either!”

“So you think she kept him from applying to college?”

“Oh, I know she did. I heard her tell him once. When I was getting ready to go away last fall she took him aside when she didn’t think I was listening and told him, ‘Now, don’t think you’re going to follow her, James. You’ve got a job to do here.’”

“A job?” Joe asked.

“Just a peon job. He worked at the department store. But he helped his mom pay for things around the house. I told him if he went to school, he could get a real job and send money back to her.”

“Sounds like the best thing that could have happened to him would have been to have gotten away from her.”

“That’s what I told him, but he’d just shrug and change the subject.”

Cindy shivered as the wind from the bay picked up. It carried the cool of nightfall in its wake.

Joe wondered where to take the conversation now. She was thoroughly bummed out, staring at the promontory where her boyfriend had abruptly become her ex. It just didn’t seem to be the time to dredge any deeper. A change in subject seemed in order. And perhaps a change in scenery.

“Hey, do you want a ride back to town? I didn’t see a car up here when I parked.”

“I walk it, usually. But sure, if you’re offering. It’s getting late and I should probably get home.”

“Well, whaddya say we hit the road, then?”

Joe settled behind the wheel of the Hyundai and tried to still his excitement. This was the break he’d been looking for—someone who was close to one of the jumpers and would talk to him about things in Terrel, not kick him out. And it didn’t hurt that she was cute!

Cindy settled in beside him, a wisp of lilac accompanying her. She flipped a spray of blonde hair back from her eyes and then pulled a seat belt over her T-shirt. He couldn’t help but notice the swell of her chest against the fabric as she tightened the belt.

“Where to?” he asked.

“You know where Parkside is?”

“Sure.”

He put the car into drive and spun around to face the town. In moments they were on the slope leading down to Terrel, tree branches grabbing at the car from the sides of the narrow road like leafy arms. Down in the valley the air was moist and still warm from the heat of the day, and Joe inhaled deeply. They didn’t have air like this in Chicago. Or girls like this, he thought, glancing at his buxom passenger.

“Lived here long?” he asked, looking for a new conversation starter.

“Long enough,” she grinned. “All my life till college. I used to think it was a small town—and then I went away and found out just how small it was!” She laughed, a cool but rich chime that Joe found irresistible. “What brings you out to a tiny place like this?”