Immediately the flashlight beam stabbed out and pinned him. He blinked against the light, the icy bite of wind and rain in his face; lifted an arm to shield his eyes. The beam held on him for a few seconds before it lowered. The deputy shortened the distance between them to five feet, the lower halves of his slicker billowing around him like half-folded wings. Under the brim of an oilskin-covered cap, his face was young, pale-featured, tightly drawn. A thick mustache bristled on his upper lip.
Bewildered, Macklin said, “Anything wrong, officer?” He had to almost shout to make himself heard above the scree of the wind.
The deputy moved again without answering, past him and close to the Prius. He shined the flash through the driver’s window. Shelby’s white face appeared, then disappeared as the light flicked off. The deputy seemed to relax a little as he turned toward Macklin, but when he spoke, his voice was curt and officious.
“Something I can do for you folks?”
“We’re staying at a friend’s cottage three miles north of here, but we can’t seem to find it.”
“So that’s why you came back. I saw you pass through a while ago.”
“That’s why. We thought maybe you could help.”
“Never been to this cottage before?”
“No. First time.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Ben Coulter. He lives in Los Altos Hills—the cottage is his vacation place.”
“Not the usual time of year for a vacation, weather being what it is.”
“This week is the only time my wife could get off from her job.”
“Uh-huh. Your name?”
“Jay Macklin.”
“From?”
“Cupertino.”
“Let’s have a look at your driver’s license, Mr. Macklin.”
“Out here in the rain?”
“Unless you have some objection.”
“No, no objection.”
Under a pair of watchful eyes, Macklin slipped the license out of his wallet and handed it over. The deputy backed up with it, as if to establish a safe distance, and peered at it in the ray from his six-cell. The way he studied it, for nearly half a minute, told Macklin he was committing the information to memory.
The light flicked off and the deputy moved closer again to return the license. He said as Macklin put it back into his wallet, “Where’d you say your friend’s cottage is located?”
“Three miles north. One of three homes on Ocean Point Lane. The turnoff is just past Tobias Creek Road, but I couldn’t find a signpost for either one.”
“That’s because they’re gone. Stolen just before Christmas—kids, probably. The county hasn’t had time to replace them.”
“Can you tell us how to get there?”
“Do better than that. I know Ocean Point Lane—I’ll lead you there. Which of the properties is your friend’s?”
“The middle one.”
The deputy nodded, as if he’d gotten the right answer to a quiz question. “All right. Better get back inside before you get any wetter.”
“Thanks, officer. It’s a hell of a night.”
“That’s right, Mr. Macklin. A hell of a night.”
He was dripping wet, his hair plastered to his head, when he slid under the wheel. Shelby had dredged up the blanket they kept in the back; she handed it to him, partly unfolded.
“What was that all about?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Macklin said, wiping his face. “He was uptight about something, suspicious.”
“Having to work on a night like this, probably.”
“It was more than that.”
“On the lookout for somebody driving a car like ours, then.”
“Maybe. But the way he acted … I don’t know. It just didn’t seem like normal behavior for a sheriff’s deputy.”
“Who knows what’s normal up here. Did you get directions?”
“He knows where Ben’s cottage is. He’s going to lead us there.”
“Good. Then we won’t miss it again.”
The patrol car’s lights were on now, its engine idling—the deputy waiting for them. Macklin put the Prius in gear, looped around slowly to follow the cruiser out onto the deserted highway. Everything was okay now, the long drive almost over, but he couldn’t help the feeling that something about the deputy’s behavior wasn’t quite right. And for no reason that he could understand.
T W O
OCEAN POINT LANE WAS a narrow blacktop, its intersection with Highway 1 screened by timber on both sides. No mailboxes, which meant all three properties were second homes where the owners didn’t receive mail. Even if there’d been signposts, Ocean Point was all but invisible in the squalling darkness and Jay might have missed it anyway.
The lane curled in through dense woods that crowded close on both sides. The patrol car’s and the Prius’s headlights, moving in tandem, were like miners’ helmet lamps boring into a dank, stalactitic cave. The image lingered in Shelby’s mind, put a spot of cold between her shoulder blades. There was very little that she was afraid of; nurse’s training and ten years as an EMT had thickened her skin and toughened her defenses to the point where she could view all sorts of human suffering with professional detachment. But she’d never quite lost her fear of the dark.
She’d had it as far back as she could remember. Not of ordinary darkness, the light-tinged kind where you had some limited vision of objects or shapes. Of blackness so complete you couldn’t see anything at all, the kind a blind person must feel—she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible than losing her sight. Being alone in a place without light was like being trapped and slowly suffocating in an airless void. She’d made the mistake of saying this to her mother once, when she was little. Mom, the no-nonsense disciplinarian who didn’t believe in indulging “the silly notions of children,” who’d sought to “cure” the fear by forcing Shelby to sleep without a night-light and punishing her if she was caught doing otherwise, like the time she’d burrowed under the covers with a smuggled-in flashlight that Mom had found still burning in the morning. The fear hadn’t evolved into a consuming or crippling adult phobia; she had it under control. But empty, lightless places like these woods still had the power to scrape at her nerves, tighten her sphincter.
She wanted to be here even less now. Why had she let Jay talk her into this trip? Well, yes, because he seemed to want it so badly; he didn’t ask her for much and agreeing had seemed like granting a favor as well as taking the path of least resistance. Miserable year for him, for both of them; and the marriage was rocky enough without making it worse by fighting him on a relatively minor issue. She had her bad points, God knew, but selfishness wasn’t one of them.
Still, what was the point? Did he think four days and nights on this isolated section of the Mendocino coast would somehow bring them closer together, magically lead to a solution of their problems? If anything, the enforced proximity might just make things worse. She’d almost rather spend New Year’s Eve on the ambulance, dealing with all the carnage that ringing out the old, ringing in the new always brought. Or spend it with Douglas—
No.
She wasn’t going to think about Douglas. Not now.
The blacktop curved off to the left to skirt a long, high wooden fence—the first of the three properties. They passed a driveway barred by a pair of closed gates. Large parcel of land, whatever buildings that were on it hidden by more wind-whipped trees. Somebody’s summer estate. Dreary and lifeless in the driving rain.
A couple of hundred yards beyond where the fence ended, the woods thinned and Ben Coulter’s property appeared. His parcel was much smaller, the cottage built closer to the road and nearer the bluff’s edge because of an inland bend in the shoreline. The upper half of the cottage, squarish, sided by a brick chimney that extended above the roofline, was visible behind a wood-stake fence two feet lower than the estate’s. A covered carport stood just off the lane on the far side. The deputy slowed and pulled onto the verge beyond the carport, to give Jay room to turn in off the lane.