Shame

it was a slip of paper on which was written, “Mount Soledad Cross. Fifteen minutes. Seek and ye shall find.”
    He heard noises behind him and whirled around. The boy and girl were fleeing the gazebo. His sudden turn made the girl scream.
    “It’s all right!” Caleb yelled. “I’m one of the good guys!” He wasn’t sure if that was true, but they didn’t stop to listen anyway.
    The fog was rolling in. It looked as if the waves were carrying it ashore. Not twenty feet below him the ocean was pounding the shore. Caleb had an impulse to jump down and bathe his hot head and aching body in its water, but he knew he had to keep moving.
    As he started back, Caleb looked for the night divers but couldn’t see them. Their green, guiding lights had gone out.
    “I wondered if you were ever coming back,” said Lola.
    “Shh,” Caleb said. “He might be watching.”
    He started the car and drove off, maintaining the silence until he was sure they weren’t under surveillance.
    “We’re on our way to Mount Soledad,” he said.
    “To do what?” Lola asked. “Pray?”
    The large white cross that stood on the mount’s summit had been a point of controversy for years. Various groups had been lobbying for its removal, saying its presence was a violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and that it had originally been erected to warn off non-Christians from the area. Proponents said it was a war memorial and that it had graced the mount for too long to be removed. Everyone agreed it was a symbol, though no one could agree what kind.
    “He called me at the restaurant,” Caleb said, “and sent me on a wild goose chase down to La Jolla Cove. That’s where he left instructions for me to go to Mount Soledad. I’m sure he was watching me.”
    Caleb opened the window, let the wind whip his wet face. The mist wasn’t only along the coast. It was working its way up the hill.
    “Are you hot?” Lola asked.
    “Yes.”
    She was cold. Freezing.
    “You want me to close the window?”
    “No.”
    “We’re approaching the cross. We’ll have to stop talking now. He might be watching.”
    The cross was on an island in the middle of a turnaround. Several cars were parked along the perimeter of the lot, with people taking in the view, making out, or both. Caleb drove around the cross once, slowly, before parking the car.
    He sat and waited. No one approached him. The note, Caleb remembered, had read, “Seek and ye shall find.” He opened the car door and walked toward the cross, again afraid of what he might find. The image of Teresa Sanders flashed across his mind. She had been left for him. He tried to not think about her.
    Caleb had been atop Mount Soledad one time before, but that had been during the day. He remembered he had been able to seesouth all the way to Mexico. Now, with the fog, the viewing was severely limited, but that didn’t make it any less spectacular. The mist softened the world below him, bringing clouds to the earth. It was as if he were looking upon something not quite tangible, like looking at the world through a good dream.
    The cross, immense and whitewashed, was bathed in lights. There was a wrought iron fence around it. On one of the metal points, pierced, he found another envelope. Caleb started breathing easier. No body this time, and no pictures. He pulled the envelope down off the spike. It was addressed to “Junior.” There were enough lights illuminating the cross for him to read. The note contained only two words: “Call me.”
    “Why is he making us jump through so many hoops?” Lola asked.
    Caleb was too exhausted to answer. He was reaching for her cell phone to call, but Lola had this feeling, this premonition, and it frightened her.
    “I think he’s creating a trail through her phone records,” Lola said. “He’s purposely making calls from her phone and having you call him back. That makes me believe that Elizabeth’s still alive. And it makes me suspect that he wants her time of death to be the same as yours.”
    Lola took the blanket off her head. She needed to breathe. She didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to feel what was
out there.
Her second sight had never scared her so. She reached out to take back her cell phone from Caleb.
    “Don’t call him,” she said. “Don’t let him know you have a cell phone.”
    “Why not?” asked Caleb.
    An idea began to form in her head, the beginnings of a plan. “It’s better he doesn’t know