Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Several times the next morning, as she lay in bed in a stupor of despair, she heard the phone ring and go on ringing many times before it stopped. About nine-thirty she looked over and Llewellyn wasn’t there, and the phone was ringing again. When she got to the top of the stairs lane was playing with her toys; she looked up at her mother in confusion. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Lew, not in the study where she’d expected to find him, but sitting in the living room staring, as he had before, at the spots of blood on the carpet. The phone had not stopped, and Maddy picked it up. On the other end was Eileen Rader, who began speaking before Maddy had gotten out a word. “Listen to me, Maddy,” Eileen said. She sounded very cold. “Lee’s fortunate I’m not calling the police after last night. A couple of other guests still may, and why Larry Crow doesn’t I don’t know, unless Lee’s got something he wants. Whatever is going on in your house is none of my business, but how it affects Lee’s work is. When Lee’s ready to face things, I want to talk to him, and it had better be soon if he’s still interested in a career.”

“Police?” said Maddy. Eileen hung up.

Maddy walked into the living room and looked at her husband. “Lew,” she said quietly, “we have to talk now.”

“I have this poem in my head,” he whispered. “Not the last poem but the poem after the last poem: I keep trying to find it. I keep writing closer to it, because I know when I get there I’ll be at the point of no return. If it means losing the house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, I’m going to find this poem.”

“Lew,” said Maddy, “we have only one more chance before it’s too late.”

He nodded. He got up from the chair, he walked toward her and then past her, out the front door. She went over to the chair where he’d been and sat down in it. While she contemplated the blood on the carpet her daughter called twice from the top of the stairs. When the phone began to ring Maddy looked up at the kitchen door, struck by the huge silence from the back of the house. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the kitchen. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the back of the house, where she came to the open door of Catherine’s room and saw no one was there.

Llewellyn drove past La Brea up into the Hollywood Hills, the way he had taken Catherine the previous night. Then he drove back along Franklin. He kept his eyes open for Catherine everywhere he went. After hours of searching for her futilely, up and down side streets and main boulevards, he went home. When he got there, something about the house seemed odd. He wasn’t certain exactly what it was, but there was no doubt the house was different somehow. Then, after he had gotten out of the car and started up the small walk to the door, he looked at the red brick front with the white edgings, looked at the door and the two upstairs windows, and saw, distinctly, that one of the two windows was not where it had originally been. It was at least several feet over from its usual spot. Extremely annoyed, he went into the house and slammed the door and marched up the stairs. He started to go into his bedroom and, sure enough, it was not where it had been before but rather a door down. There Maddy was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap. She looked up at him expectantly. What’s going on here anyway? he said.

Over the next week Llewellyn left the house every morning to drive past La Brea up to the hills and back down Franklin, looking for Catherine. He continued to take every side street and boulevard in between. Every day that he returned to the house, something about it had changed. Inside Maddy and Jane were always in their places but the places were different. The telephone was always ringing. Shaking his head and muttering with irritation at this turn of events, Llewellyn walked into his study only to find it was now Catherine’s room, with the bed in the corner and the bare walls and pink bits of glass in the sink. He walked out into the entryway of the house and, just as the phone stopped, announced, This has gone on long enough. Madeline? Jane? They didn’t answer, and after several minutes the phone began again.

He told himself he was inching closer to the poem of no return. If I can just find the study, he thought, I’m sure I can get it, it’s nearly in my grasp now. The telephone came to be an outright nuisance. Once he answered it and it was someone from the studio; he hung up. Once he answered it and it was Eileen; he hung up. Once he answered and it was Richard: Good news, old man, said Richard in that way of his. The hotel may not evict me after all. Guess assassination anniversaries don’t exactly pack them in; it appears, said Richard, that everything will go on being exactly as it has been . Beneath the affectation of triumph his voice rang with abject terror. Llewellyn hung up. Richard is mad, he said to himself.

The last straw came when Llewellyn returned home one afternoon to find the front door moved a good five or six feet from its proper place. The correct placement of the door, neatly centered between the two upstairs windows, was ingrained in a memory that rooted itself in childhood; now Llewellyn’s patience had run out. He came inside to find Maddy at the bottom of the stairs. She was shaking as she held the banister. She’s losing her grip, Llewellyn said to himself grimly. He was determined to put things right, to take command. You have to call Eileen, she said choking, it’s urgent, they want you to call tonight. Llewellyn looked high and low for the telephone, finally locating it in the fireplace. He dialed a local construction company.

Maddy went upstairs. She didn’t come down until several hours later, at which point she found part of the front wall of the house lying in a rubble on the lawn. Several carpenters were at work. What. . is happening? she asked her husband, who stood supervising the carpenters with his arms folded. I am having the door, he coolly replied, restored to its proper place. She looked at him, at the huge hole in the house and the carpenters at work, and then went back upstairs. She re moved a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed and filled it up. She went into Jane’s room and gathered the child in her arms along with a favored toy or two. She carried the suitcase, the child and the toy down the stairs, past her husband and the carpenters. She put the suitcase, the child and the toy in the car and left.

One April night the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department received a report from a city utilities commissioner who lived in Hancock Park that he had found a girl with wild black hair staring at him through his bedroom window. Had this incident not involved Hancock Park or a city utilities commissioner, the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department would have dismissed it. As it was, they sent out a single patrol car to circle the area ten minutes; the patrolling officers found everything quiet and in order. Two nights later the division received a similar report from someone else who lived in Hancock Park, and the very next night there were two such reports. In all cases a girl with black hair was staring through someone’s window. Subsequent calls reported she wore a plain dress and no shoes. She was seen only at night, never in the day. By early May the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department was receiving an average of eight reports a night, all in the same area. Half a dozen patrol cars were prowling the streets, with the residents of Hancock Park in a veritable snit that such a state of siege should be necessary at all.

The name of the lieutenant overseeing the Hancock Park investigation was R. O. Lowery, a towering black mountain of a man who’d been with the force twenty-two years. By the middle of May people in City Hall, most particularly those who either lived in Hancock Park or had Hancock Park constituencies, were complaining to Lieutenant Lowery about the progress of the case or, more precisely, the lack of it. Lowery regarded the whole matter with contempt. Some one’s assaulted or murdered every five minutes in this city, he thought to himself, and I have to baby-sit these assholes. His contempt intensified when he realized he’d have to involve himself in the case personally. This realization came on the evening the girl in question hurled a rock through the window where she was looking. When Lowery walked out of his office he found his men reading the city map as though it were the writing on pyramid walls. He sighed. “Check this out, gentlemen,” he said, drawing his fingers across the map, “you got her walking right up Fourth from Rossmore. Arden Boulevard, Lucerne Boulevard, Plymouth Boulevard: sweet Lord, she’s sending us satellite reports.” His men looked as disgusted as he did. Lowery lowered his frame on the edge of a desk. He said quietly, “Now I know you’re good cops. I know you all understand we have a duty to protect the citizens of Hancock Park who work very hard so they can stay in the upper brackets and avoid paying the taxes that provide your wages. I’m going to have eight damn units out there tonight. Next report that comes in on this girl I want full response — sirens, lights, screeching tires, everything short of a SWAT team. Wrap this up so we can get down to dealing with the serious criminal element in our society like fifty year-old whores and teenagers who wear their hair in cones.” The room cleared as he lumbered back to his office to get his gear and coat.