Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

THREE

Todd stirred from a state closer to a stupor than a sleep. He was lying on the immense bed of the master bedroom in the house in Coldheart Canyon. Katya was lying beside him, her little body gathered into a tight knot, pressed close to him. One arm was beneath him, the other on top, as though she'd never let go of him again. She was snoring in her sleep, as she had been that day he'd found her in her bedroom at the guest-house. The human touch. It was more eloquent now than ever, given what they'd gone through together.

There had been some terrifying moments for them both in the last few hours; fragments of them played in Todd's head as he slowly extricated himself from her embrace, and slid slowly out of the bed. First, there'd been that breath-snatching moment when he'd turned his back on the Malibu house and headed out into the dark waters of the Pacific with Katya. He'd never been so frightened in his life. But then she'd squeezed his hand, and looked around at him, her hair blowing back from her face, showing off the glory of her bones, and he'd thought: even if I die now, I will have been the luckiest man in creation. I will have had this woman by my side at the end. Who could ask for more than that?

It hadn't been quite so easy to hold on to those feelings of gratitude in the chaotic minutes that followed. Once they were out of their depth, and in the grip of the great Pacific, the bitter-sweet joy of what they were doing became a shared, instinctive attempt to survive in the dark, bruising waters. Fifty yards out, and the big waves, the surfers' waves, started to pick them up and drop them down again into their lightless troughs. It was so dark he could barely see Katya's face, but he heard her choking on seawater, coughing like a frightened little girl.

And suddenly the idea of just dying out here, beaten to death by the waves, didn't seem so attractive. Why not try to live? he found himself thinking. Not the kind of life he'd had before (he wouldn't want that again, ever) but some other kind of life. Traveling around the world, perhaps, incognito; just the two of them. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? And when they were bored with travel they could find some sunny beach down in Costa Rica and spend every day there drunk among the parrots. There they could wait out the years until the big, glossy world he'd once given a shit for had forgotten he even existed.

All these thoughts came in flashes, none of them really coherent. The only thought that took any real shape was the means by which they could escape this dark water alive.

"We're going to dive!" he yelled to Katya. "Take a deep breath."

He heard her do so; then, before another pulverizing wave could come along and knock them out, he drove them both into a teetering wall of water, diving deep into the placid heart of the wave. They must have done this half a hundred times; diving down, rising up again gasping, then watching for the next monstrous wall to be almost upon them before diving again. It was a desperate trick, but it worked.

It was clearly preventing them from getting a terrible beating, but it was steadily taking its toll on their energies. He knew they couldn't continue to defy the violence of the water for very much longer. Their muscles were aching, their senses were becoming unreliable. It would only be a matter of time before the force of the water got the better of them, and they sank together, defeated by sheer fatigue.

But they had counted without the benign collusion of the tide, which all this time had been slowly bearing them south, and—as it did so—had also been ushering them back toward the shore. The tumult of waters around them began to die down, and after a few minutes their toes began to brush some of the taller coral towers. A few minutes later they had solid ground beneath their feet, and shortly after that they were stumbling ashore at Venice.

For five minutes or so they lay on the dark sand together, spitting up water and coughing, and then eventually finding it in them to laugh, and catch each other's hands.

Against all the odds, they'd survived.

"I guess we . . . we weren't ready ... to die," Todd gasped.

"I suppose so," Katya said. She dragged her head over the sand, to put her lips in reach of his. It wasn't a kiss, so much as a sharing of breath. They lay there, mouth to mouth, until Katya's teeth began to chatter.

"We have to get you back to the Canyon," he said, hauling himself to his knees. The lights of the Venice boardwalk seemed impossibly remote.

"I can't," she said.

"Yes you can. We're going home. We're going back to the Canyon. You'll feel stronger and warmer once we're walking. I promise."

He helped her get to her knees and then practically lifted her to her feet. Arms around one another they stumbled toward the boardwalk, where the usual tourist-trap entertainments were still going on, despite the lateness of the hour. They wove between the people, unrecognized, and in a back street Todd found a kid with a beaten-up Pinto to whom he offered three hundred waterlogged bucks if he'd take them back home, and another three hundred, dry, if he promised not to mention what he'd done and where he'd been, to anyone.

"I know who you are," the kid said.

"No you don't," Todd said, snatching the three hundred back from the kid's hand.

"Okay, okay. I don't," the kid replied, gently reclaiming the money. "You gotta deal."

Todd knew that there wasn't much chance that the driver's promise would last very long, but they had no choice in the matter. They made their makeshift chauffeur close all the windows and turn up the heating, and they clung together in the back of the car trying to get some warmth back into their blood. Todd got him to drive as fast as the vehicle was capable of going, and twenty minutes later he was directing the kid up the winding road into Coldheart Canyon.

"I've never been up here before," the kid said when they were outside the house.

Katya leaned in and stared at him.

"No," she said. "And you never will again."

Something about the way she said it made the kid feel very nervous.

"Okay, okay," he said. "Just give me the rest of the money."

Todd went inside for another three hundred dollars in dry bills, and a few minutes later the guy drove off, six hundred bucks the richer and none the wiser, while Todd and Katya dragged themselves up the turret stairs to the master bedroom, sloughing off their cold damp clothes as they crept toward the bed they'd thought they'd never see again.

It took Todd a long time to get across the bedroom to the closet: his body ached to his marrow, and his thoughts were as sluggish as his body. Only as he was pulling on a clean pair of jeans did he realize there were voices in the house.

"Shit . . ." he murmured to himself.

He decided not to wake Katya. Instead he would try to get rid of these people himself, without unleashing her righteous fury on them.

He went back into the bedroom. Despite the hullabaloo from below Katya showed no sign of waking. This was all to the good. She was obviously healing the hurts of recent days. He lingered at the bed-side, studying her peaceful features. The seawater had washed every trace of rouge or mascara from her face; she could have been a fifteen-year-old, lying there, dreaming innocent dreams.

Of course that innocence was an illusion. He knew what she was capable of; and there was a corner of his brain that never completely ceased warning him of that fact. But then hadn't she come to the beach to save him? Who else would have done that, except perhaps for Tammy? All anybody had ever done for him was use him, and as soon as they'd got what they'd needed, they'd moved on. But Katya had proved she was made of more loyal stuff. She'd been ready to go all the way with him; to death if necessary.

So what if she was cruel? What if she had committed crimes that would have her behind bars if anybody knew about them? Her sins mattered very little to him right now. What mattered was how she'd taken his hand as they'd turned their back on the lights of the beach and faced the dark waters of the Pacific; and how hard she'd struggled to keep holding on to it, however much the tide had conspired to divorce them.

The voices below had quieted.

He pulled on a white T-shirt, and went to the door. As he did so there was a small earthquake. The door rattled in its frame. It was a short jolt, and he guessed it was probably an aftershock. If so, then perhaps what had woken him in the first place was the big shaker. Why else would he have woken? He was still very much in need of sleep, God knows. Nothing would have given him more pleasure than to strip off his jeans and T-shirt and crawl back into bed beside Katya for another three or four hours of blissful slumber.

But he could scarcely do that with a search party in the house. He heard Eppstadt's voice among the exchanges. Fuck him! It was typical that the little prick would get his nose in their business sooner or later. Todd had hoped that he and Katya would get some quiet time together to plan their next move: to search the house (and of course the Pool House) for incriminating evidence of scandal, and destroy it; then to hide in the depths of the Canyon until the investigators were satisfied that there was nothing here worth investigating, and left, taking Eppstadt and whoever the hell else was here (Maxine, no doubt) back with them. But Eppstadt had ruined that hope. Before these interlopers left they were going to search every damn room, no doubt of that: the master bedroom included. He was going to need to find a way to spirit Katya and himself out of the house and away before they came looking.

He listened at the door and then very gingerly unlocked it and opened it an inch. He could hear an exchange from below, which seemed to be led by Eppstadt. Jesus, of all people to be up here among Katya's mysteries: Mister Bottom-line himself, Gary Eppstadt. There was no sign of an opinion from

Maxine, which was unusual. She was normally vocal in any debate, however little she knew about the subject. Then Todd remembered her phobia about quakes. She always fled for the open air at the first sign of a trembler, and no doubt she'd done exactly that. He was tempted to go onto the balcony and see if he could spot her in the back yard—just to see the bitch in a state of agitation—but there wasn't time. There was too much going on downstairs. He ventured out of the bedroom a step, and peered over the rail, in time to see somebody—it was a young man, either a waiter brought from the party, or one of Maxine's new boys (or both), heading down the spiral into the darkness there, where a door was banging.

Next he heard footsteps, and felt certain that Eppstadt was about to appear from the kitchen door. Before he was spotted, Todd slid back into the bedroom, and gently closed the door. It made a barely perceptible click; certainly nothing audible with so much else going on in the vicinity.

He knew what that banging door was all about. The earthquake had thrown open the door to the Devil's Country, and it looked as though Eppstadt had convinced some dope to go down and close it. Idiots! Didn't they have any instincts? Didn't something whisper at the back of their heads that when a door slammed in this house, you let it slam, you let it slam till it chose to stop. What you didn't do was head on down the stairs to close it. That was suicide, or the next best thing.

He put his head around the corner and peered into the bedroom. Katya was still fast asleep. He briefly contemplated waking her, then thought better of it. All her life she'd had men following her around asking what they should do next. He wasn't going to be numbered among them.

No, he would deal with this on his own. After all, the house was going to be his home as much as it was hers. His word should be law here. He just had to work out how best to proceed, and without a shot of espresso to quicken his sluggish thoughts, it might take a while. No matter, the answer would come to him, in time.

He sat with his back against the wall, and tried to put out of his head the image of the innocent stranger heading down the spiral staircase to close the door to the Devil's Country.