“No.”
“But if he’s guilty of something—”
“I don’t know that he is. Don’t you go invading his privacy either, Harry.”
“Not me. No, sir,” I said. “Sure you can’t give me an idea of what it’s all about? A man can’t help being curious—”
“I’m sure,” Novak said. He slid his window up, swung around, and drove back out to the highway.
Well, I thought. Didn’t I see it coming? Didn’t I know Faith was trouble the minute I laid eyes on him?
I waited a couple of minutes to make sure Novak didn’t decide to come back. Then I took out my passkey and headed for cabin six.
Storm Carey
When Neal was alive we almost always ate breakfast on the sun porch, no matter what the weather. The upper halves of the three outer walls are glass, with panels that slide open to let in air and garden fragrance, and you can look down the sloping rear lawn to the lakefront and the white finger of our dock, north to the sloughs, east all along the sharp, shadowed folds of the hills, brown now with their dark-green spottings of oak and madrone, south down the lake’s thirty-mile length as far as Kahbel Shores at the foot of Mt. Kahbel. A lordly view, Neal called it. Lord and lady of the manor, surveying their domain.
But the lord is dead and the lady is a tramp, and I seldom eat on the porch anymore, or even go out there. This morning, however, I felt drawn to it. I sat at the rosewood table and drank my coffee and ate my two pieces of toast and surveyed what was left of the domain and thought about Neal. He’d been warm in my thoughts when I’d awakened, almost as if he were still alive, as if he’d gotten up before me and was waiting on the porch for me to join him. Some mornings it’s like that, the feeling that he’s still here with me so acute I actually believe it for a minute or two. But, of course, the illusion soon fades and again becomes unbearable loss — a cramping deep inside like severe menstrual cramps, or what I imagine childbirth would have been if we’d ever managed to conceive. Then that, too, fades and I’m able to get up, shower, dress, do all the things that begin another day, that lead to another night.
The bed was a mess this morning, the sheets stained and even torn in one place, smelling rankly of the Hunger. Him, too, last night’s fodder for the voracious mouth. Here for two or three hours, and then gone again in the early-morning darkness. Night phantom, incubus. Strange, but when I closed my eyes I couldn’t picture his face or remember his name, even though I know him as well as I know anyone in Pomo, even though he’s been in my bed before. Instead, it was Neal’s face I saw, Neal’s lips and hands and body I remembered.
Before I showered I wadded up the sheets and pillowcases and the bathroom towel he’d used and took them out to the garbage. The girl would be in to clean today and she would remake the bed, but I didn’t want her to have to handle the Hunger’s dirty leavings. Some more residue of propriety, I supposed. And a pathetic residue at that: I seem to care more about a cleaning woman’s feelings than I do about my own.
So I sat alone on the porch and watched the clouds race across the sky, creating patterns of light and shadow on the lake’s surface, on the brown and dark-green hills, and drank more coffee to ease the dull hangover pain behind my eyes, and thought about Neal. The first night we’d met, at the party to celebrate the opening of a new winery in the Alexander Valley: the shy daughter of a Ukiah farmer and the handsome real-estate developer with hair that was already starting to silver even though he was only a dozen years older than my twenty-three. The first time we went to bed, and how patient he was with me... the evening at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco when he asked me to marry him... the month-long honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean... the day this house he’d built for us was finished and the way we’d celebrated, naked in bed, drinking Mumm’s, pouring it on each other’s body and then licking it off...
Those, and so many more memories. But I wasn’t allowed to be alone with them this morning. Other thoughts intruded, another face appeared in my mind’s eye — not the face of last night’s incubus but the ugly visage of John Faith. An effort to block it out did no good; instead it was Neal’s image that blurred and turned to shadow and faded away.
The Hunger wasn’t satisfied. I’d known it in the shower earlier, when the mouth began to stir again inside me. For some reason it still wanted John Faith. Another surrogate like all the others, another incubus... or was he? The Hunger seemed to sense a difference, something to do with the part that remained hidden from me. It wanted Faith — that was enough for me to know now.
It wanted him and so I would have to find a way to feed it what it craved.
I left the porch, the lordly view, the warm memories of Neal, everything that had once meant something, and went to do the Hunger’s bidding.
Audrey Sixkiller
I kept blanking out on my class notes, on what the kids were saying and doing. Usually I have no problem maintaining order in my classes; today I couldn’t even maintain order in my own mind. The prowler last night had shaken me more than I cared to admit. That, and not being able to reach Dick until after three, and then not being able to sleep again after he left. Zombie woman. I probably shouldn’t have come to school at all, but at dawn it had seemed more important not to give in to the anxiety, to plunge right back into my normal routine. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Well, I could still take the afternoon off. Hang on until noon, then go home and regroup in private.
I wondered if Dick had found out anything. Chances were he hadn’t. He’d said he would have a talk with John Faith, but if the man was guilty he would hardly admit it; all Dick could do, really, was to try to scare him into leaving Pomo County and not coming back. And if he was innocent, there was nothing to point to anyone else. Dick had come back this morning, a while before I left for school, and searched my yard and the neighboring yard and hadn’t found even a scrap of evidence. He’d tried to convince me that the shot I fired would keep the intruder, whoever he was, from trying it again, but we both knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Being shot at could just as well make a would-be rapist even more determined to finish what he’d started.
Dick worried me, too. His concern had been genuine but he’d seemed remote, as if other things were weighing heavily on his mind. All he’d say when I asked where he’d been so late was that he couldn’t sleep and had gone for a long drive around the lake. He suffered from insomnia — Verne Erickson once told me it started after his wife left him — and quite a few insomniacs are night riders, but he’d never admitted before to being one of those. There was so much about him I knew little or nothing about.
Yes, and a few things I did know and wished I didn’t. I couldn’t help wondering if he was seeing Storm Carey again, if that was where he’d really been last night...
Giggle. Giggle, giggle.
The sounds penetrated, and all at once I realized the entire class — my ten o’clock, California History II — was staring at me. I’d been sitting there God knew how long, lost inside myself. The expressions on their faces told me what they’d be saying to their friends later on. “Wow, Ms. Sixkiller went brain-dead for a little while this morning.” Or “It was, like, you know, she lapsed into some kind of Indian trance thing.”
I cleared my throat. “Okay. Where were we?”
“We were right here,” Anthony Munoz said. “Where were you?”
That broke them up. I laughed with them; you don’t get anywhere with kids nowadays by being either authoritarian or humorless, a lesson a couple of Pomo High’s other teachers have yet to learn. And Anthony was the class clown, a leader the others followed. A poor student, barely passing, and a sometime troublemaker, particularly when he was around his older brother. Mateo was a bad influence — drugs, antiauthority behavior, Attitude with a capital A. He’d been expelled two years ago when another teacher and I caught him using cocaine inside the school. Anthony looked up to him; it troubled me that he might be led in the same direction, drop out or get himself expelled, too, one of these days. Underneath, Anthony wasn’t a bad kid. All he needed was to use common sense and develop a purpose in his life, one that would settle him down. Meanwhile, you had to walk a very careful line with him.