Runner

29

Andy Beale's twenty-acre estate in Rancho Santa Fe was in the tax rolls, but not in the lists of holdings that were being offered for sale, rental, or lease. It stood out in the tax payments list, not only because it was especially big and expensive, but because no notation indicated what it was. At first Jane thought it must be a parcel that was being subdivided. She had seen lots of these tracts in California—groups of little mansions, forty or fifty homes that looked like miniature Tuscan villas. Every street was a cul-de-sac, and the houses were all built from the same three or four sets of plans, so there was an illusion of variation. But then she happened to see an internal memo about a bid on a building site. It directed that a copy be sent to Andrew Beale at the Rancho Santa Fe address. It looked to her as though it must be company property, held ostensibly as an investment, but really an expensive residence for the company's owner.

She looked at road maps to determine exactly where the house was, and then after lunch she drove out to see it. The landscapes of California were oddly familiar, like places in dreams. Every film, every television series, every commercial was filmed in some part of Southern California. People from the east like Jane came for the first time and stepped into places that had already been established in their memories. Rancho Santa Fe looked like landscapes in old movies. The road from the freeway began on a two-lane new black asphalt trail that ran among stunted live oaks and native brush. She had already learned that California roads like this always led to places where rich people lived—Malibu, Montecito, Hope Ranch, Rancho Santa Fe. It took millions to have a big house anywhere in Southern California, but to keep broad margins of land untouched around the whole community required people with great fortunes who were determined to maintain their exclusivity and quiet.

She began to see large rectangles of grassy land with the high white wooden rail fences that were the sure sign of horses, and then the horses themselves, smooth chestnut and brown bodies far off in grassy paddocks. It was hard to see any of the houses. In most cases only the mouths of the long driveways that led to them were visible—really no more than a gap in the trees with an iron gate across it, or a place where a long, unchanging wall suddenly fell back a few feet.

When Jane came upon the central square of the community, it was a mild surprise. There was a rustic post office, a brick structure that might be another public building, a couple of restaurants of the sort that were too good to post their names or even concede that they were restaurants. They simply looked like elegant residences built with broad entrances and tables in their gardens. Jane followed her map away from the square and up a long road with tall hedges on the left side and more oak trees and dry grass on the right.

When she reached the house it seemed to be nothing but a mailbox, two gaps in the tall hedge—one the size of a door and the other wide enough for a car—and, as she passed the bigger opening, a glimpse of brick pavement, a six-car garage, and the high, dark shadow of a house looming to the left of it. All she could tell about the building was that the main part was three stories tall and there were two one-story wings. Then she was past it, and the hedge was opaque. Down the road the hedge ended, and there was a long expanse of wall that seemed to belong to the next estate, which looked even bigger. There were other driveways farther along, and long stretches between them.

About two miles farther on, she turned around and drove back. This time she came at a slow, steady pace, looking for practical features—places where a car could be driven off the road and left without attracting any attention, barriers that might prevent a person from walking from property to property. She kept her window open and listened for the barking of dogs, the distant sounds of mowers or tractors that might give her an idea of the sizes of the estates.

She had memorized the way here from the freeway, but she kept checking her mirror so she would see what each landmark would look like if she came this way again. That was one of the tricks her father had taught her when she was very little. They would wander in the big state parks to the southeast of Deganawida, and he would let her lead the way back. He taught her that finding her way out of the woods was more important than finding her way in. He said that some people got lost because they never turned around to see what things were going to look like the next time they saw them.

When Jane returned to the freeway she kept going until she was back in Encinitas, in Sharon Curtis's neighborhood. She went to a sporting goods store and bought a racing bicycle with very narrow tires, a black helmet, and a tire pump. At a hardware store she bought a can of black spray paint. She put her bicycle, still in the carton, into the back of her SUV, drove it to Sharon's house, and carried it into the garage.

She took it out of its carton and completed the assembly and adjustments so it fit her perfectly. Then she took it to the back yard, set it on its carton, and spray painted all of its shiny parts a dull black. When the paint dried she sprayed Teflon lubricant on all the moving parts, rode the bicycle around the block once, and loaded it into the back of the SUV.

Jane went into Sharon's house, made a sandwich and ate it, set the alarm clock for midnight, and slept until it woke her. She dressed in black jeans, a black pullover, a black nylon windbreaker and gloves. She drove back toward Rancho Santa Fe. At this hour, the traffic was fast and sparse, so she got on the freeway and didn't have to touch her brakes again until the exit for Solana Beach. She drove until she found her way to the North Coast Repertory Theatre on Lomas Santa Fe Drive, parked her vehicle behind it, and rode off on her bicycle. She got off the main road quickly, rode in darkness up County Road S8 for three miles, turned onto Paseo Delicias, then La Gracia, and then La Flecha. There were no streetlamps on her route, and the roads were nearly empty.

Now and then Jane would hear a car coming along the road far behind her, and she would pull off the road into the entrance of a driveway or behind the end of a fence, dismount, and stay low and motionless. The car's lights would appear, and then the car disappeared around a curve or over a hill. The people in the cars were all on their way home now, probably from restaurants or shows or parties. Somewhere ahead where she couldn't see them, they probably turned off into one or another of the nearly hidden driveways and closed their gates.

The trip was just over four miles. Jane rode at an average speed of around twenty miles an hour, working her way up the gears when she had a downgrade to pick up more speed. She couldn't read street signs well in the dark, but she had memorized the curves of the roads and the distinctive landmarks.

Then she was there, beside the two openings in the tall hedge. She rode to the end of the hedge where the next estate began, lifted her bicycle over the low wall, and leaned it against the inner side so she could reach over and get it again, then swung her legs over the wall, took off her helmet and left it with the bicycle. She walked away from the road into the trees. Jane had no doubt that there would be surveillance cameras somewhere inside the Beale property trained on the two gates set into the hedge, but the Beales wouldn't have anything like that aimed into the neighbor's yard.

She moved patiently, stopping beside tree trunks to look and listen, then moving to the next spot she had chosen before she stopped again. The sun would not be up until a bit after five, and if she was on the road by four-thirty, she would be virtually invisible. She had four hours.

When she was at least a hundred feet from the road, she altered her course to the left, toward the Beale estate. She kept the move gradual, still stepping from one piece of cover to the next. She couldn't see anything on the Beale property. It seemed to be simply a great blackness, a place where seeing ended. She moved toward it.

There was another wall, this one at least ten feet high. She touched its rough surface. It seemed to be cinder block covered over with stucco so the surface would be even and featureless. When she stood beneath it and looked up, she could make out a slight irregularity near the top, as though there were bricks up there laid at an angle.

She walked along the wall for twenty paces looking for a way over, or even a handhold. It was not beyond imagining that there might be a gate. Neighbors didn't have to be strangers. Sometimes they built gates. At forty paces she gave up the idea of a gate. She looked the other way. She was now far enough from the road so she could see the front of the neighbor's house. Could there be a ladder somewhere? Even a long board would do, or a rope. She could have brought a rope. Why hadn't she realized this might happen?

As she walked on, Jane noticed one tree on her side of the wall seemed much thicker and nearer to the wall than some of the others. There was a thick limb that extended almost to the top of the wall. She quickly climbed the tree to the place where the limb branched away from the trunk.

She crawled out on it, listening and feeling for some warning that the limb wasn't strong enough to hold her. She could see over the wall into the Beale estate now. It occurred to her that she could simply sit here on the safe side of the wall and watch and listen. She could see the shape of the house from here. It looked huge. In the center part of the house the side wall facing Jane seemed to be all glass. There were sliding doors at ground level and big panes starting on the frame above them, and then a framework above that, so the room was three stories high. There were small, dim, bluish lights low on the walls of the gigantic room, like the safety lights in movie theaters. At the second-floor level, a walkway lit by the same bluish lights stretched across the room. On either end of the room the high part of the house extended thirty or forty feet, then dropped so the two wings were single-story extensions.

Her eye followed the wings, and she saw something that excited her. On the right wing, the back of the house, really, there were four windows with bars on them. She crawled out farther, clinging to the limb, and swung her feet to the top of the wall, eased herself forward for balance, and let go. She had no idea whether she would find anything on the far side of the wall that would get her back up here if she went in, but she knew she had to go. Caution was insanity now. Jane turned around and lowered herself until she was hanging from the top of the wall by both hands, then dropped. Her feet hit a layer of pine needles, and she rolled to break her fall.

She lay on the ground and looked around her for a way out. If this was where Beale was keeping Christine, then she would have to get her out, too. By now she would either have had the baby or be about as pregnant as a woman could be. Neither condition seemed good for wall climbing. Jane was in a small pine woods. She could see that on the ground, resting on the deep layer of pine needles, was a tree about fifteen feet long that had fallen some time ago. The boughs that stuck out from the trunk at intervals of a foot or so had only a few dry, brittle needles clinging to them.

She used her pocketknife to carve off the boughs on one side of the trunk, then lifted the lighter end of it and propped it on the rim of the wall. The remaining boughs made the trunk roll to keep the bare side up. The protruding stubs from the boughs were like rungs of a ladder.

Jane began to advance through the woods toward the house. She stepped almost to the edge of the trees and studied the buildings. To her left was the long back wall of the six-car garage. Directly ahead was the main house, and close to it on the right was a pool house.

Adjusting her course, she put the pool house directly in front of her to shield her from the main house. She crossed the lawn to the pool house and looked in through the arched doorway. She saw a counter with a kitchen sink, a wooden table and chairs, a bathroom with two showers, presumably for washing the chlorine off after swimming, and another archway leading to the pool. She moved past the arch, skirted the iron fence around the pool, and made her way up to the first of the barred windows.

Over each window was an iron grate like a flat cage, a single piece bolted to the house. She knew that was an arrangement that had been popular in the forties and fifties, but it had become rare—maybe against building codes—in recent years because it prevented an occupant from getting out in a fire. She stepped back and stared at the house. A lot of modernist architecture was far older than it looked. This place could easily have been built in the thirties, and the bars could simply be relics.

But to Jane the bars looked like a sign of malicious intent. The old word otgont came to her. It meant more than simple evil. Witches—people who secretly had the power to cause disease and death—were otgont. It was potence, but it was also corruption, an unnatural degeneration from within.

She moved to the farthest window. In all the rooms in the wing the lights were off, so she had to peer in and strain her eyes to make out shapes. This one held an empty double bed, a dresser, a closet. The entrance to the bathroom was on her left. The small, high window in there had bars across it, too. She moved to the next window. The room was nearly the same, unoccupied but furnished. Jane kept moving along the side of the house until she reached the big room at the center. She stood perfectly still outside the glass wall and stared into the room. First there was a moving shadow, and then a figure appeared on the walkway above the room. There was a woman in a bathrobe and slippers moving sleepily from one set of rooms toward the other. She stopped and turned her head, as though she had to force herself to look down.