Free The Hidden by Bill Pronzini

it up. She wasn’t feeble and she still had her coat and gloves on from the cell phone try.
    There were a pair of sheds tucked away behind the carport, squat structures with slanted sheet metal roofs. One had a padlocked door, probably a utility or gardening shed; the other’s door was closed by a rusted metal bolt thrust through a hasp. Inside that one were rows of neatly stacked logs and kindling, and a canvas wood carrier to make transportation easier. She loaded and lugged the carrier inside three times—more than enough firewood to last the rest of the day.
    When she finished rebolting the woodshed door, she thought she might as well do a little exploring and made her way down the slope. The sky was overcast and there were wisps of fog fingering among the trees to the north and south; the wind had died down and the day wasn’t as cold as she’d expected. Gopher holes pocked the weedy open space, some of them filled with rainwater. As she made her way down, she had a fairly clear whitewater view through the trees: waves breaking and creaming over the offshore and inshore rocks. The sea was the color of pewter, spotted with baby whitecaps.
    Near the bottom there was a footworn path that wound through patches of manzanita and Scotch broom, past a couple of bare-branched trees that looked dead and probably were. The path ended at a short wooden platform clinging to the bluff’s edge, enclosed on three sides by waist-high railings, anchored to a rock ledge on concrete posts crosshatched with boards. It looked unstable, but when she ventured a few steps onto it, she found that it was solidly constructed.
    Part of the cove was visible from there, south to where the land curved outward to the waterline, north to where tall jumbles of rock hid the inlet below the Lomax property; a piece of the perimeter headland was visible, but not the house itself. The beach, what Shelby could see of it, was about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide at its widest point—mostly a jumble of small broken rocks strewn with driftwood and brown, bulbous kelp; tidepools, leftovers from last night’s high waves, glistened here and there. She could smell the kelp, a faintly rank, briny odor on the light wind.
    A V-line of pelicans came into view from the south, skimming the ocean’s surface on their way to whatever fishing grounds they frequented. When they were gone, she found herself gazing straight out to sea—and remembering an exchange she’d had with Jay some years back, on a beach down near Pescadero. They’d been looking out to sea as she was doing now, and she’d said that what the vast expanse of water made her think of was what lay on the other side, all the different faraway lands and cultures that were touched and surrounded by it. And he’d responded that what it made him think of was how massive and empty it was, and how tiny you’d feel if you were out in the middle of it all alone in a small boat.
    There in a nutshell was the fundamental difference between them, the disparity in how they thought and felt and looked at the world—the broad view versus the narrow view, the positive versus the negative.
    Steps had been cut into the cliffside to the left of the platform, some carved out of bare rock and some made of wood, with a sectioned handrail following them down to the cove below—a winding, gradual descent through a natural declivity, a distance of maybe 150 feet. Rain puddles had collected on some of the steps, but the descent didn’t look too precarious … as long as that handrail was stable. Shelby went to the wooden landing at the top of the steps for a closer look. The railing seemed as solidly anchored as the platform.
    She went down a few steps, experimentally. The footing wasn’t bad at all in her thick-soled running shoes. She kept on going.
    At the bottom she picked her way over the rocky shingle to the south. Once she paused to peer into a tidepool, but there was a murkiness to the water and she