Past the black foundation you pick up a trail in the high weeds and climb a steep embankment. The trail levels off, then meanders back down to the canyon floor and follows a creek bed that is dry except after a rain. Moe led the way. He’s a real dog’s dog when it comes to the outdoors, always in the brush after birds or critters — true to his Labrador instincts. I’ve never hunted him. I quit shooting things for sport when Matthew died, just another one of those things I used to love to do and then didn’t love anymore. I miss the taste of quail and dove and pheasant. I miss those evenings when I’d take the birds out of the marinade and Ardith would make the salad and rice and Matthew would blunder around in the kitchen with his plastic swords or superhero gear.
We headed up the creek bottom. In the black sky a sliver of moon rocked on its back. The stars looked close. The hills rose up and away in the distance, and their shapes were black like the sky but without stars in them.
Around the first big bend the trail starts uphill again, rimming around the sandstone hill, winding up. It’s steep and narrow. It passes through a canopy of scrub oak and lemonadeberry that you have to duck through and walk with your hands in front of you so your face doesn’t get scratched. I could feel Lauren’s gift on my cheek, and it pulsed hard when I bent my head toward the ground. Then, on the far side of the trees, the trail opens into a nice flat outcropping of sandstone where you can look out to the city to your left, Laguna Canyon Road straight in front, and the dark hills on the right. Below is a long drop. Behind you is a hill face pocked with big and little caves that far-flung families of the Juaneño Indians lived in centuries ago. You wonder if they chose this steep abode for safety or beauty, or both.
The smallest cave on the left holds my hiking provisions — a quart bottle of good Herradura, a coffee cup and a wooden box of Dominican cigars. I keep them in a pillowcase, which is stuffed way back, behind a sleeping bag I bought just for this place. Some months ago, when I first found the caves, I liked to smoke and drink in the big one, way back inside where the Juaneños used to be. I’d listen for their souls brushing against the rock. It was a mess when I found it — all beer cans and trash, an old mattress, skin mags — the usual things adolescents would drag into their den. But after I cleaned it out, no one ever seemed to go there again. Maybe that generation of kids had outgrown the caves and gone on to serious things like colleges or jobs. At any rate, I finally got tired of being inside it, and moved my recreations to the flat outcropping in front, unless it’s raining hard.
I’m not exactly sure why I come here. Melinda doesn’t mind my tequila, or even cigars, so long as I smoke them outside, which is where I like to smoke them anyway. She’s never expressed worry about Penny seeing me do such things, though I have my own concerns about that. In fact, Melinda has come out here with me a few times and matched me drink for drink. No, the reason I come here has more to do with solitude and liberty — the same things that the teenagers used to come here to enjoy. And it has a lot to do with the memory of Matt, which is always more alive up here, more specific and present. When I spend the night here, which I did a lot last summer, I unroll the sleeping bag in the deepest part of the cave and, with Moe curled up beside me, sleep deeply. Often, when I wake up, I won’t remember where I am or how I got here or why I didn’t just walk home to my companion and bed. I’ve awakened other places than the cave and had no memory of how I got there either. This is due to somewhat massive tequila intake. Luckily, I have an iron constitution and always wake up before dawn, whether I can see the sun or not, whether I’ve slept eight hours or forty minutes. And not once in the year I’ve been doing this has a neighbor seen me stealing back to my home in the accusing dark before sunrise. So far as I know. I drink because it makes me happy and peaceful. Most of the time. God created booze to keep us Irish from taking over the world.
Frankly, I don’t sleep out here much anymore. The worst of it was six months back, when Mel was in her own darkness about her dad and I was culminating a year and a half of ardent self-destruction. I have more to live for now. Mel is better. Ardith is going to be all right. Matt won’t come back no matter how bad I feel. My work is more important to me than ever. Beginning six months ago, at my lowest point, I began to find a way to love this world again. I’m fine now.
So I sat and smoked and drank a little. Not a lot. I thought of my last day with Matthew, how bright and hot it was, how the water was so blue and calm. The kind of day that seemed like it could last a hundred years and nothing would ever go wrong. I thought about how limp and cool he felt, then how rigid and strong, then how terrifyingly relaxed. You can play things over in your mind a million times, even put different endings on them, but in the long run it won’t do you any good. They tell us to imagine the world we want to see, but how can you unimagine something you’ve already looked at? Matthew was my first real loss in life. My parents are still alive, still married. Up until Matt went away, I still had the vague, youthful notion that nothing bad would happen to me and the people I loved, for a long, long time. In the last two years I’ve tried to accommodate the facts and the givens. I haven’t been very good at it, but I’m getting better.
I thought of Danny’s surprise ending and wondered if I should have seen it coming. I tried to weigh the heaviness in my heart for him, but there really wasn’t much there. With all the good people in the world who suffer, it’s hard to bleed much for the creeps who suffer along with them. Still, you don’t see an act like that and not feel something for the suffering animal that carried it out. But feel what?
I looked to the west and imagined The Horridus, out there, waiting, planning. White male, with wavy, “reddish blond” hair. For his second abduction he drove a red van that was seen by the girl’s disbelieving mother. He takes them late night or early morning, knows the bedroom, cuts out the screen and a hand-sized hole to unlock the window. Opens it, climbs through and grabs the girl. Then out the door. His first time — the first time we know about, anyway — he was gone with the girl for six hours before her mother even knew what had happened. On the second, the mother heard something, woke up and found her daughter gone, saw a guy get into a red van then pull away from the curb. Both mothers have been single, but we don’t know how he knows this ahead of time. I suspect he’s ditched the van by now, traded it in on another one. Just a feeling. Both girls have had identical vehicle fibers on them. Late-model Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge, according to the second mother. The van is where he does what he does, we believe. The clothes he puts on them are thirty years old and in very good condition. We know this from some lengthy product research and the fine work of our crime lab. In addition to the “vintage” clothing, each girl has been outfitted in a white gauzy tunic attached at the neck with a safety pin. It’s made out of that netting you’d see in a ballerina’s tutu, or a Halloween costume, or a wedding gown. It extends from neck to ankles and gives the victims a floating, angelic look. Each has been found wearing a black velvet hood without eyeholes. The hoods are made by hand, and there are two small holes way down toward the mouth area, probably to help supply air. The first girl, Pamela, was five, and the second, Courtney, six years old. He took them twenty-six days apart. He let them go within five hours of their capture, in remote state park or U.S. forest lands. He seems to know his way around. Other than that we don’t have much. We’ll get an FBI profile early tomorrow, but profiles, good as they are, are still speculation. When I think of The Horridus my heart beats hard and fast and I feel like all my senses have been stripped back to bare, efficient essentials. I feel like I’m growing fangs. He hasn’t raped yet. And he hasn’t killed yet, but I suspect that he’ll graduate to both. What he hasn’t done scares me more than what he has. Criminologists call it an escalating fantasy, though it is not a fantasy for anyone but the dreamer. I’ve read case histories where the fantasy is played out in different ways, different terms. It always gets worse. Now I’m actually seeing it happen, right here on my watch. I know he won’t stop until he gets what he wants. And he won’t stop after that, because he’ll want it again. And again. And again.