young man to Miles' right--"John Hawkes"--she nodded at the woman,--"John Engstrom."
"You haven't introduced us to your friends," Hal said.
Miles seemed rattled, preoccupied, on automatic pilot.
Claire remembered that behavior from the old days: he was thinking, his brain sorting things out. It's what he used to do when he was putting together the pieces of a case on which he was working--something that happened far too often at home, at dinner, in the bedroom, during what was supposed to be their time together. Miles motioned toward the man and woman. 'this is Garden Hawkes and Janet En gslom. Janet's uncle died and kept walking, like my dad. I brought her here with me from Cedar City. The same thing happened to Garden's grandfather years ago. We met him at the lake." He turned around. "Garden, Janet? This is my friend Hal. We work together.
This is Claire, my... ex-wife.
And this is a woman I met once at a mall before Christmas.
Apparently, her name is May. I guess it'll be explained to me why she's here."
'That's the witch woman I was telling you about," Gar den whispered.
Mi'les nodded distractedly.
"So who is he?" Hal asked otioning toward the man on the ground
"Agent Rossiter. FBI."
"No shit?" The detective whistled. "You got yourself involved in a big one here."
"Yeah."
Come to think of it, you got me involved, too."
"I'm sorry.
"Don't apologize." Hal shook his head. "Jesus Christ,
Miles, when are you going to stop playing Lone Ranger? I learned more from Claire in the one hour before we left L.A. than I did from you the past three months. If we really are friends, you need to include me here. I came all this way,
and I don't know what the fuck's going on, but this time you can't just tough it out alone. There are other people involved."
Claire knew exactly what Hal was saying, and she agreed completely, but this wasn't really the time or place, and she could tell from the set of his face and the tightening in his jaw that Miles was closing himself off. She reached out. "What happened to Bob?" she asked softly. "Did you find him?"
Miles sighed tiredly. "Yeah. I found him." Drawing in a deep breath, he explained what had happened since he'd left California. Hal interrupted with occasional questions, and Miles answered them all, Garden and Janet jumping in for clarification.
Claire could not help looking out at the lake as Miles told his story.
Somewhere underneath that black water was a submerged town, where drowned witches had spent the last few decades walking and to which the newly dead had trekked. The fear she felt was palpable, a physical sensation like the temperature or the wind.
Miles finished talking, and he held her sweaty hand tightly, as if for support. He was keeping something back, she sensed, and that was what was troubling him. Hal seemed to sense it, too, and she met his eyes and saw, beneath the forced good humor, a reflection of her own worries and concerns.
"So," Miles said dramatically, turning to May, "I guess it's time to hear what you have to say about all this. I assume you know what's going on. I assume that's why you're here."
"It is." May repeated everything she'd told Claire, describing how she'd been a New Jersey housewife pulled to Wolf Canyon by the strength of Isabella's will, like a moth drawn to a light. "Of course, I was a witch, too. So I knew all about Isabella."
"She's a witch?" Janet asked.
"She is not a witch," the old woman said. "Well, she is but she isn't."
Garden threw up his hands. "She's not even making any sense!"
"Yes, she is," Miles said. "Listen to her."
"Isabella's a predator, a parasite, a creature who lives off her own kind. She feeds off witches, absorbs their power. Yes, she's one herself, but she's also something more. At least, that's the way we figured it."
"And she was killed when the town was flooded," Miles said.
May shook her head. "Oh, no. Isabella was killed way before that. She might even be the cause of it. See, she was around when Wolf Canyon was founded She married William Johnson, the founder himself. No one knew where she came from originally. I guess she just showed up one day, and William fell under her spell. So to speak. But she was a bad influence on him. After she came, there were mysterious deaths and disappearances, murders. The entire town changed. There were purges of non-witches in the outlying areas, trials and executions of witches who did not agree with the way William and Isabella were running things. She was an evil creature, hated and feared, and eventually even William figured that out. No one knows what all happened, but he killed her one night while she was sleeping, cut off her head. They buried her in a cave outside town, sealing it up, weaving spells around it to keep her in. She was dead but her head was still talking, and she cursed Wolf Canyon and everyone in it, vowing revenge. She promised that they would drown and die, and that they would suffer even after death.
"And that's what happened.
"She called them back after they passed on, all of the people who'd had a part in disposing of her body, who had been living in Wolf Canyon at that time. And, from what
we could figure out, she fed off them, using their energies to right her way back. She was strong enough thirty years ago to reach out to me all the way over on the East Coast, and she's been getting stronger ever since. Her power has been growing with each passing year as the children of Wolf Canyon die off and she consumes their energy. Miles nodded. "And when she was strong enough, she reached out to the men who had worked on the dam and killed them, too. Only I don't see why, if they were just doing what she wanted done anyway."
"Because maybe they beat her to the punch. Maybe she's angry that they did what she was not yet strong enough to do. Or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes there just isn't an explanation."
"Where do you fit in?" Miles asked.
May smiled. "She killed a baby. Back in the town's early days. She thought the population had reached some magic number, and she didn't want it changed: no new people, no one leaving. So when a couple had a baby, she killed it. Her, I should say, not it. The baby was a girl.
The parents left, took off in the middle of the night to escape Isabella's tyranny. Years later, they had another daughter. That baby was my mother. And her parents taught her and she taught me about the town--and what went on there. Your father knew, too. He was born in Wolf Canyon, and he lived there until he was ten or so, until his parents moved to Los Angeles. That was long after Isabella, but long before the lake. I met him at the dam after I'd come out from New Jersey. I walked the shoreline.." and I found your father. I think he'd been called, too. He was here to make sure that Isabella hadn't escaped and was still down there." She nodded toward Garden. "John Hawks, your grandfather, had never left. He'd left the town, but he'd built him a house on top of the plateau." She pointed behind them at a flattened rocky bluff. "He's the one who told us about the
people in town who didn't leave, who couldn't get out, and we all figured it was her, keeping them there so they would be drowned. There were several of us, and we kept in touch for a while. We knew the stories, and we waited to see if she would return. But the years passed, and she didn't, and we drifted apart, drifted into other lives."
"I remember you," Garden said. "We almost told you when Grampa died, but. but we didn't for some reason, and then you were gone."
Claire looked at the old lady. It was as if she'd gotten all the craziness out of her system on the trip over, because she appeared completely lucid.
May shook her head. "Now you say she's come out of the lake. With all of the others." She squinted at Miles. "How many would you say?
"Dozens. A hundred, maybe." He shrugged. Maybe more.