“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 breathtaking, 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.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Stay here, Sally. Just stay here and I’ll check it out.”
“Oh, go to hell, Quinlan. No, I don’t like Quinlan. I’ll call you James. I won’t stay put.”
But he just shook his head at her. He set her aside and made his way carefully through the rocks until he was standing just five feet above the body of a woman, the waves washing her against the rocks, then tugging her back, back and forth. There was no blood in the water. “Oh, no,” he said aloud.
She was at his side, staring down at the woman. “I knew it,” she said. “I was right, but nobody would listen to me.”
“We’ve got to get her out before there’s nothing left of her,” he said. He sat down, took off his running shoes and socks, and rolled up his jeans. “Stay here, Sally. I mean it. I don’t want to have to worry about you falling into the water and washing out to sea.”
Quinlan finally managed to haul her in. He wrapped the woman, what was left of her, in his jacket. His stomach was churning. He waved to Sally to start climbing back up the path. He didn’t allow himself to think that what he was carrying had once been a living, laughing person. God, it made him sick. “We’ll take her to Doc Spiver,” Sally called over her shoulder. “He’ll take care of her.”
“Yeah,” he said to himself, “I just bet he will.” An old man in this one-horse town would probably say that she’d been killed accidentally by a hunter shooting curlews.
Doc Spiver’s living room smelled musty. James wanted to open the windows and air the place out, but he figured the old man must want it this way. He sat down and called Sam North, a homicide detective with the Portland police department. Sam wasn’t in, so James left Doc Spiver’s number. “Tell him it’s urgent,” he said to Sam’s partner, Martin Amick. “It’s really urgent.”