Odd Hours

I said, “let’s go.”
    We climbed out of the sedan, and I used the flashlight to find our way to the man-size door in the south wall. The hinges creaked when it swung open, which I had not noticed previously.
    In the narrow passage between the garage and the tall hedge, no one waited to tear off our heads. So far so good. But they would be waiting elsewhere.
    After dousing the flashlight, I hesitated to lead her out to the driveway and the street, for fear that a sentinel had been stationed there.
    Intuiting my concern, Annamaria whispered, “At the back, there’s a gate to a public greenbelt.”
    We went to the rear of the building. Passing the steps that led to her apartment, I glanced up, but no one was looking down at us.
    We crossed the foggy yard. Slick yellow leaves littered the wet grass: fall-off from sycamore trees that held their foliage longer on this stretch of the central coast than elsewhere.
    In a white fence with scalloped pickets stood a gate with carved torsades. Beyond lay the greenbelt. A sward of turf vanished into the mist to the south, west, and north.
    Taking Annamaria’s arm, I said, “We want to go south, I think.”
    “Stay near the property fences here along the east side,” she advised. “The greenbelt borders Hecate’s Canyon to the west. It’s narrow in some places, and the drop-off can be sudden.”
    In Magic Beach, Hecate’s Canyon was legendary.
    Along the California coast, many ancient canyons, like arthritic fingers, reach crookedly toward the sea, and any town built around one of them must unite its neighborhoods with bridges. Some are wide, but more of them are narrow enough to be called defiles.
    Hecate’s Canyon was a defile, but wider than some, and deep, with a stream at the bottom. Flanking the stream—which would become a wilder torrent in the rainy season—grew mixed-species junk groves of umbrella pine, date palm, Agathis, and common cypress, gnarled and twisted by the extreme growing conditions and by the toxic substances that had been illegally dumped into the canyon over the years.
    The walls of the defile were navigable but steep. Wild vines and thorny brush slowed both erosion and hikers.
    In the 1950s, a rapist-murderer had preyed on the young women of Magic Beach. He had dragged them into Hecate’s Canyon and forced them to dig their own graves.
    The police had caught him—Arliss Clerebold, the high-school art teacher—disposing of his eighth victim. His wispy blond hair had twisted naturally into Cupid curls. His face was sweet, his mouth was made for a smile, his arms were strong, and his long-fingered hands had the gripping strength of a practiced climber.
    Of the previous seven victims, two were never found. Clerebold refused to cooperate, and cadaver dogs could not locate the graves.
    As Annamaria and I walked south along the greenbelt, I dreaded encountering the spirits of Clerebold’s victims. They had received justice when he had been executed in San Quentin; therefore, they had mostly likely moved on from this world. But the two whose bodies had never been found might have lingered, yearning for their poor bones to be reinterred in the cemeteries where their families were at rest.
    With Annamaria to protect and with the responsibility to thwart whatever vast destruction was on the yellow-eyed hulk’s agenda, I had enough to keep me busy. I could not afford to be distracted by the melancholy spirits of murdered girls who would want to lead me to their long-hidden graves.
    Concerned that even thinking about those sad victims would draw their spirits to me, if indeed they still lingered, I tried to elicit more information from Annamaria as we proceeded cautiously through the nearly impenetrable murk.
    “Are you originally from around here?” I asked softly.
    “No.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “Far away.”
    “Faraway, Oklahoma?” I asked. “Faraway, Alabama? Maybe Faraway, Maine?”
    “Farther away than all of those. You would not believe me if I named the place.”
    “I would believe you,” I assured her. “I’ve believed everything you’ve said, though I don’t know why, and though I don’t understand most of it.”
    “Why do you believe me so readily?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “But you do know.”
    “I do?”
    “Yes. You know.”
    “Give me a hint. Why do I believe you so readily?”
    “Why does anyone believe anything?” she asked.
    “Is this a philosophical question—or just a riddle?”
    “Empirical