Praying for Sleep

vowed to be more circumspect.
    Still, over the past two years, they’d seen each other often, and when Claire mentioned wistfully on the Friday before the picnic that her mother would be away all Sunday, Lis didn’t hesitate to invite her along.
    That May 1 the picnickers set up camp on Rocky Point Beach. Portia left immediately for a run—an improvised 10K through the winding canyons. She runs marathons, Lis told Kohler.
    “So do I,” the doctor said.
    Lis laughed, astonished, as ever, that people actually engaged in this sport for fun.
    “We sat on the beach for a while, Dorothy, Robert, Claire and I. Watching the boats. You know, just chatting and drinking soda and beer.”
    They had been there for about a half hour when Dorothy and Robert began to argue.
    Dorothy had left Lis’s book in the truck. “Hamlet,” she explained. She’d been preparing for final exams and had carted along a well-read and annotated volume. “I had my hands full with picnic things and Dorothy said she’d get the book. But it had slipped her mind.” Lis had told her not to worry; she wasn’t in the mood to work anyway. But Robert leapt up and said he’d get it. Then Dorothy made some sour comment about his doing anything for anybody in a skirt. It was supposed to be a joke, Lis supposed, but it fell flat—since she’d managed to insult both Lis and Robert at the same time.
    “Robert asked her what she meant by that. Dorothy waved her hand and said, ‘Just go get the fucking book, why don’t you?’ Something like that. Then she told him he ought to jog all the way to the parking lot. ‘Work off some of that fat. Look, he’s getting tits.’ ”
    Lis was embarrassed for Claire’s sake. Robert jogged off angrily and Dorothy sullenly returned to her magazine.
    Lis had pulled off her shorts and unbuttoned her workshirt, beneath which she wore a bikini. She lay back on a warm rock and closed her eyes, trying not to go to sleep (daytime naps are taboo for insomniacs). Claire, with whom Robert had struck up an immediate friendship en route to the beach, had seemed the most anxious of anyone for him to return. After he’d been gone a half hour, she stood and said she was going to look for him. Lis had watched the girl as she strolled toward the towering, weathered rocks. Repulsive and fascinating, the cliffs seemed hard as polished bone. They reminded her of the yellow skull sitting on the lab table in the school’s biology classroom.
    Lis noticed Claire standing in the mouth of the canyon about a quarter mile from the beach. Then she vanished.
    “And I thought suddenly,” Lis told Kohler, “where is everyone? What’s going on? I felt very concerned. I picked up my purse and started toward the place where I’d seen Claire disappear.” Then she saw a flash of color ahead of her. She believed it was yellow, the color of Claire’s shorts, and leaving Dorothy behind she hurried into the canyon. Lis was perhaps a hundred yards into the ravine when she found the blood.
    “Blood?”
    It was right outside a cave. The entrance had been chained off at one time but the post holding the chain had been pulled out of the ground and flung aside. No way, she thought, was she going inside. But she knelt down and looked into the passageway. The air was chill and it smelled of wet stone and clay and mold.
    Then she felt a shadow over her. A huge man appeared just feet away, standing behind her.
    “Michael?” Kohler asked.
    Lis nodded.
    Hrubek started howling like an animal. Holding a bloody rock, he looked right at her and screamed, “Sic semper tyrannis!”
    Richard Kohler held up a thin hand, indicating for her to wait. He made his first notation of the evening.
     
    “You didn’t think of going to find a park ranger?” Kohler asked.
    Lis suddenly grew angry. Why had he asked her this? It was the sort of question the lawyers had asked, and the police. Did I think of looking for a ranger? Well, for God’s sake, wouldn’t we always do it differently if we could? Wouldn’t we recast our whole lives ? That’s why time doesn’t reverse, of course—to keep us sane.
    “I thought about it, yes. But I don’t know, I just panicked. I ran into the cave.”
    Inside, it wasn’t completely dark. Thirty, forty feet above her, shafts of pale light streamed inside.
    The walls rose straight up to an arched roof full of stalactites. Lis, breathless and frightened, leaned against a wall to steady herself. A high-pitched moaning of some