“It’s too early for the World’s Greatest Ice Cream,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to go for a walk on the cliffs? You look pale. A walk would put some color in your cheeks.”
She gave it a lot of thought. He said nothing more, just watched her eat the rest of that dry toast that had to be cold as a stone. She stood, brushed the crumbs from the legs of her brown corduroy slacks, and said, “I need to put on my sneakers. I’ll meet you in front of Amabel’s house in ten minutes.”
“Excellent,” he said, and meant it. Now he was getting somewhere. He’d open her up soon enough, just like a clam. Soon she would tell him all about her husband, her mother, her dead father, who hadn’t called her on the phone. No, that was impossible.
She also seemed perfectly normal, and that bothered him as well. When he’d found her hysterical and frightened yesterday, it had been what he’d expected. But this calm, this open smile that, to his critical eye, held no malice or guile, made him feel he’d missed the last train to Saginaw.
When he met her in front of her aunt’s house, she smiled at him. Where the hell was her guile?
Fifteen minutes later she was talking as if there wasn’t a single black cloud in her world. “. . . Amabel told me that The Cove was nothing until a developer from Portland bought up all the land and built vacation cottages. Everything went smoothly until the sixties, then everyone just forgot about the town.”
“Someone sure remembered, someone with lots of money. The place is a picture postcard.” He remembered old Thelma Nettro had told him the same thing.
“Yes,” she said, kicking a small pebble out of her path. “It’s odd, isn’t it? If the town died, then how was it resurrected? There’s no local factory to employ everyone, no manufacturing of any kind. Amabel said the high school closed back in 1974.”
“Maybe one of them has discovered how to tap into the Social Security computer system.”
“That would only work in the short term. The fund only has money for, what is it? Fifteen months? It’s scary. No one would want to count on that.”
They stood on the edge of a narrow promontory and looked down at the fierce white spume, fanning upward when the waves hit the black rocks.
“It’s beautiful,” she said as she drew in a deep breath of the salt air.
“Yes, it is, but it makes me nervous. All that unleashed power. It has no conscience. It can kill you so easily.”
“What a romantic thing to say, Mr. Quinlan.”
“Not at all. But I’m right. It doesn’t know the good guys from the bad guys. And it’s James. You want to climb down? There’s a path just over there by that lone Cypress tree that doesn’t look too dangerous.”
“I don’t want you fainting on me, Quinlan, if you get too close to all that unleashed power.”
“Threaten to knee me and I’ll forget about fainting for the rest of my life.”
She laughed and walked ahead of him. She quickly disappeared around a turn in the trail. It was a narrow path, strewn with good-sized rocks, snaggled low brush, and it was too steep. She slipped, gasped aloud, and grabbed at a root.
“Be careful, dammit!”
“Yes, I will be. No, don’t say it. I don’t want to go back. We’ll both be very careful. Just another fifty feet.”
The trail just stopped. From the settled look of all the brush and rocks, there’d been an avalanche some years before. They could probably climb over the rocks, but Quinlan didn’t want to take the chance. “This is far enough,” he said, grabbing her hand when she took another step. “Nope, Sally, this is it. Let’s sit here and commune with all that unleashed power.”
There was no beach below, just pile upon pile of rocks, forming strange shapes as richly imagined as the cloud formations overhead. One even made a bridge from one pile to another, with water flowing beneath. It was breath-taking, and James was right, it was a bit frightening.
Seagulls whirled and dove overhead, squawking and calling to each other.
“It isn’t particularly cold today.”
“No,” she said. “Not like last night.”
“I’m in the west tower room at Thelma’s Bed and Breakfast. The windows shuddered the whole night.”
Suddenly she stood up, her eyes fixed on something just off to the right. She shook her head, whispering, “No, no, it can’t be.”
He was on his feet in an instant, his hand on her shoulder. “What the hell is it?”
She pointed.