He searched the closet and the bathroom, but discovered nothing further of interest in either.
In the study on the ground floor, he looked for records of the Corley Foundation, but he found none.
And then he went into the garage.
| 43 |
Fluorescent tubes casting bleak light through frosted plastic panels. Cold rising off the concrete floor and off poured-in-place concrete walls painted white and mottled with water stains that vaguely resembled enormous crawling insects.
The immaculate condition of the house did not extend to the garage. Although the two double-wide roll-up doors were closed, in-blown debris littered the floor: dead leaves; loose feathers; the fragile skeletons of perhaps twenty birds, the flesh long stripped from their bones and eyeless skulls. Improbably elaborate spiderwebs, their creators dead or gone to other hunting grounds, trailed in tatters from the rafters, as if fragments of ghosts had snagged on the splintered edges of the beams and the exposed nail heads.
Because Corley had been a general contractor, David expected a home workshop, but there wasn’t one. Backboards bolted to two walls suggested that cabinetry had once been hung there but had been torn out and carried away. No vehicles were present. The large space felt hollowed out and decades older than the well-kept house.
The stillness here was equal to that in the residence. Maybe the wind had blown itself into exhaustion.
Leaves crunched underfoot and a smell of mold issued from the carpet of litter. He avoided the avian skeletons; some of the larger ones, as big as owls, seemed to be tortured constructions like the skeletal architecture of a winged menace in a dream.
In addition to the roll-ups, there were three man-size doors: the one from the kitchen, another that led outside, and one set in an interior wall. He went to the third and found it locked.
From a pocket of his pants he retrieved the key he had taken from beneath the rocking chair on the back porch. It fit the keyway and turned the deadbolt.
When he opened the door, he saw stairs descending into darkness from which rose a faint but unpleasant chemical odor. He felt for a switch, found it, flipped it, but no lights came on below.
The basement was not steeped in silence like the garage. The lower realm secreted a faint electronic hum woven from several frequencies and a soft rhythmic throbbing felt as much as heard.
No such noises had issued from the cellar in the Jessup house, where homicidal Ronny had kept his stolen girls, both the living and the mummified. Nevertheless, David grew convinced that something in these depths would prove no less disturbing than what he’d seen at the Jessup place—which was only forty minutes from here.
He needed a flashlight. He went into the house to find one.
As he searched through kitchen drawers, he heard what might have been a door slam upstairs. He froze and listened. Perhaps someone had come into the house while he had been in the garage.
Silence returned, perfect but for his soft breathing.
Then another door slammed, as though a rightful resident was searching rooms for an intruder, angered by the need to do so.
David was not prepared for a confrontation. Besides, he was at risk of being charged with housebreaking.
He stepped onto the back porch and locked the door. He quickly replaced the key in the little box that was fixed to the underside of the rocking chair.
The wind, which had not relented, tossed his hair, flapped the panels of his sport coat, and brought to him the scent of the sea. The gray clouds spilling out of the north had flooded three-quarters of the sky, roiling like smoke from a vast, uncontainable fire.
As he hurried around the side of the house, at least twenty shrieking crows cascaded from the roof as though the building had expelled them. They swooped low over David and arced off toward the Monterey pines, like a scrolling line of ciphers in a coded message.
Proceeding along the driveway, David glanced back a few times, but he never saw a face or figure at any of the windows.
In his SUV once more, he sat thinking about what he’d found in the Rock Point house. As ordinary as most of the rooms had been at the time he explored them, in retrospect the place seemed almost as weird as Richard Mathers had portrayed it. The silence had been uncanny, surely the result of something more than mere construction techniques. The condition of the garage, the lightless basement, the subtle electronic hum rising from below, along with the slow bass throbbing like the heart of some leviathan—all that now creped the skin on the nape of his neck.
His mind’s eye kept returning to the collection of photographs in Maddison’s bedroom, which seemed to suggest that she must be obsessed with him. God knows, he was obsessed with her, and any man might be flattered to find himself the object of such a woman’s adulation. But over the years, David had endured the obsession of two disturbed fans of his books, one young man and a young woman, and in each case serious security issues had required the hiring of private investigators and bodyguards for the duration of the threat. In spite of Maddison’s fantasy of being an assassin, David found it impossible to fear her, for she was the very image of the lost woman whom he had loved so long and passionately. On the other hand, the existence of that collection of photographs seemed proof enough that she’d schemed to meet him last Wednesday evening in the restaurant.