Free Night Relics by James P. Blaylock Page B

won’t even extradite
    in cases of custody kidnap. Texas is a good bet for that. Living’s cheap, too. She could buy a house with cash and bank the
    rest.”
    “I don’t think so,” Peter said. “I wasn’t very perceptive about her sometimes. That’s been part of the problem. But I think
    I would have seen that coming. She wasn’t that good when it came to acting. In fact, she wasn’t any good at all. She didn’t
    play games. It wasn’t in her.”
    Slater shrugged. “Maybe not. I just wanted to point outthat there’s other ways to look at it. You don’t want to jump to any conclusions. Lots of missing people turn up again someday.
    She wouldn’t be the first person to just walk away.”
    “Well,” Peter said. “Thanks. I don’t think so, but I’ll keep it in mind. I hope you’re right, or that it’s something like
    that.”
    “Call me if anything comes up.” Detective Slater shook Peter’s hand again and pulled open the door. “Good luck,” he said,
    and went back in. The wind pushed the door shut behind him.

14
    T HE LINE OF SOUTHBOUND CARS STOOD STILL THROUGH Live Oak Canyon, and Peter found that he could barely stand the wait. Almost nobody approached from the opposite direction;
    it was too late in the day for northbound traffic, and Peter was tempted, in order just to be moving, to swing into the oncoming
    lane and bolt past whatever was holding things up. His hand played across the steering wheel, brushing the horn without pressing
    it, and he turned the radio on again, listened for a split second, and turned it off.
    Through some trick of inner acoustics, he could hear the blood rushing in his head, and he felt enervated, his thoughts scattered.
    The wind was blowing hard again, and the air was electric and dry. He hadn’t eaten lunch, or breakfast either, for that matter,
    and he was uneasily awarethat he seemed to be letting himself slide, and had been sliding for months.
    The morning’s conversation with Beth returned to him. She had seen things in him that he himself had been denying, but which
    must have been obvious: getting up before dawn, wandering through the house, staring at photographs of his family …
    A horn honked behind him. Traffic was moving again, but he hadn’t noticed, despite having been full of nervous impatience
    only moments ago. He crept forward, edging around a bend and into the opposite lane, past the bumper of a pickup truck sitting
    sideways in the road, its broken rear axle visible beneath the truck bed. A man in a baseball cap stood at the truck’s bumper,
    talking to a tow truck driver who was hooking the pickup to an elaborately painted towing rig. Peter heard them both laugh,
    and it occurred to him that the man who could laugh at his own broken-down truck lived an enviable life.
    He swung back into the right-hand lane and stepped on the accelerator, watching the rear window of the car ahead, the shifting
    reflections of blue sky and oak trees in the sunlit sheet of glass. Into his mind slipped the image of a waterfall with two
    bodies lying at the base, broken and sprawled on the rocks, the dead woman’s eyes staring upward toward the top of the cliffs.
    He saw it clearly, as if it were an etching in an old book that he had looked at countless times. More clearly than that,
    he
recalled
the face, as if the dead woman were the shadow of someone he once knew….
    “No connection,” he said out loud. Then, startled by the sound of his own voice, he flipped on the radio again, loud, and
    rolled the window all the way down so that the wind blew into his face. After a moment he turned the radio off. It sounded
    like noise to him.
    He had only been back into Falls Canyon once, hiking with Beth and Bobby. He knew where the mouth of the canyon lay, hidden
    by trees and by the overlapping contourof the hillside. There was a path that crossed the stream and angled up the little box canyon. It forked halfway up, a second
    path leading upward toward the ridge.