Praying for Sleep

twenty or thirty feet behind her. He was saying, “Come here. You’re a very beautiful woman but what’s that on your hair? I don’t like your hair that way. What’s that on your head? ” She’d gotten some of Robert’s blood on her hair. This upset Hrubek. He was very angry. She supposed that he was worried it was evidence. “What did you do to yourself?” he called. “That’s not fashionable. You shouldn’t’ve done that!”
    He stepped toward her and she dropped to her knees, rolling under a jutting overhang about a foot and a half high. It went back into the rock maybe six feet and there she wedged herself, shivering in the cold and fighting the panic from confinement. As she stared at the path, his feet appeared. He wore shoes. Huge ones. Wingtips. This astonished her. For some reason she expected him to be barefoot, with long yellow toenails. She wondered if he’d killed a man for the shoes. Then he bent down and lay on his belly.
    “‘Nice try,’ he kept saying. ‘Come on out here. You’re Eve, aren’t you? Beautiful lady. Ought to shave that fucking hair off.’ ”
    She wedged herself as far back as she could, her face pressing into the rock. When he groped for her, she screamed and the piercing sound of her own voice stunned her ears. He screamed too, crying at her to shut up. He grunted and tried again to grab her. With a huge effort he jammed his arm forward. The tip of his middle finger eased against her thigh. Those were the only parts of their bodies close enough to touch. Lis felt the feathery trail of his callused skin move toward her knee. The sensation was like a burn and it remained, searing, even when Hrubek stood and vanished.
    Lis lay, whimpering and fighting the grip of claustrophobia. Where was he? she wondered. Did she dare leave? It’d been a half hour since she’d disappeared from the beach. She knew Owen wouldn’t have arrived yet but Portia and Dorothy might’ve come looking for her. Claire too would be somewhere nearby.
    Outside she noticed rain beginning to spatter on the stone path.
    “I started to push myself out. Then I heard two things. One was Hrubek’s voice. He was very close and talking to himself. The other sound was thunder.”
    It shook the ground. She was worried that the rock above her might shift and trap her where she lay. But this fear was soon replaced by a more immediate one—that she would drown. Huge gushes of water suddenly flowed down the arroyo and the cave began to fill.
    She eased closer to the opening. If Hrubek had reached in again, he could have grabbed her easily. Her head was sideways—the only way it would fit into the narrow space—and she was twisting her mouth upward, desperately gasping for air. Soon, filthy water was surging around her face, flowing over her lips. She spat it out and started choking. More thunder, more torrents of water, tumbling over the stone. She pushed toward the opening but couldn’t make headway. Fighting the rush of water she finally got far enough through the current to fling her hand outside the cave. Blindly, she gripped a rock and pulled herself toward it.
    “Then the rock moved. It wasn’t a rock at all but a shoe. I pulled back quickly but a huge hand grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me out.” Lis looked away from Kohler. “My swimsuit snagged on a rock and tore open.”
    She was half-naked. But she had no choice—she couldn’t stay in the cave any longer. She remembered thinking she wished that she had the courage to choose to die by drowning rather than be raped and murdered by the madman. As she was drawn out of the cave, her mind was filled with images of Hrubek’s huge hands prodding her breasts and reaching between her legs. She began to cry.
    Then a man’s voice said, “It’s all right, ma’am, it’s all right. What’s the matter?”
    She collapsed into the arms of the park ranger.
    Leaning against the rock in the torrential rain she told him about Robert and Hrubek. He began asking questions but Lis couldn’t concentrate. All she could hear was a horrid keening that filled the air. It seemed to come from earth itself, resonating from the rocks, stretching out thinner and thinner, impossibly thin, an unsustainable note that nonetheless refused to stop. “ ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Make it stop. Oh, for God’s sake.’ ”
    And soon it did, Lis explained to the psychiatrist.
    For, as Lis found out just moments later from another ranger, an underground stream,