Page 1 (1/2)

Part One

ALONG THE NIGHT COAST

Where eerie figures caper

to soht music

that only they can hear

--The Book of Counted Sorrows

1

Janice Capshaw liked to run at night

Nearly every evening between ten and eleven o’clock, Janice put on her gray sweats with the reflective blue stripes across the back and chest, tucked her hair under a headband, laced up her New Balance shoes, and ran six miles She was thirty-five but could have passed for twenty-five, and she attributed her glow of youth to her twenty-year-long coht, September 21, she left her house at ten o’clock and ran four blocks north to Ocean Avenue, the ht Cove, where she turned left and headed downhill toward the public beach The shops were closed and dark Aside frolow of the sodiuhts were in soe Tavern, and at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, which was open twenty-four hours a day No cars were on the street, and not another person was in sight Moonlight Cove always had been a quiet little town, shunning the tourist trade that other coastal communities so avidly pursued Janice liked the slow, h sometimes lately the town seemed not merely sleepy but dead

As she ran down the sloping ht shadows cast by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines, she saw no ish, serpentine advance of the thin fog through the windless air The only sounds were the soft slap-slap of her rubber-soled running shoes on the sidewalk and her labored breathing Froht have been the last person on earth, engaged upon a solitary post-Ar up at dawn to run before work, and in the summer it was more pleasant to put in her six h neither an abhorrence of early hours nor the heat was the real reason for her nocternal preference; she ran on the same schedule in the winter She exercised at that hour siht

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky, listening to frogs and crickets Darkness soothed It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors With the coht, the sky seeer than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities

Now she reached the Ocean Avenue loop at the foot of the hill, sprinted across the parking area and onto the beach Above the thin fog, the sky held only scattered clouds, and the full moon’s silver-yellow radiance penetrated thesufficient illuhts the fog was too thick and the sky too overcast to per on the shore But now the white foahostly phosphorescent ranks, and the wide crescent of sand glea tide and the coastal hills, and the loith reflections of the autuht

As she ran across the beach to the fire and turned south, intending to run a mile out to the point of the cove, Janice felt wonderfully alive

Richard--her late husband, who had succuo--had said that her circadian rhythht focused that she was ht person

"You’d probably love being a va between sunset and dawn," he’d said, and she’d said, "I vant to suck your blood" God, she had loved him Initially she worried that the life of a Lutheran , but it never was, not for a moment Three years after his death, she still ht He had been suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the hills and the waterline, Janice was sure that she was not alone in the night and fog She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound other than her own footsteps, raspy breathing, and thudding heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company

She was not alar the beach A few local fitness fanatics occasionally ran at night, not by choice, as was the case with her, but of necessity Two or three ti her route

But when she stopped and turned and looked back the way she had come, she saw only a deserted expanse ofsurf, and the dim but familiar shapes of rock formations and scattered trees that thrust up here and there along the strand The only sound was the low ru that her instinct was unreliable and that she was alone, she headed south again, along the beach, quickly finding her rhythm She went only fifty yards, however, before she saw movement from the corner of her eye, thirty feet to her left a swift shape, cloaked by night andfrom behind a sandbound cypress to a weather-polished rock forain

Janice halted and, squinting toward the rock, wondered what she had gli as aseen it only peripherally, she had absorbed no details The for, as low as four feet in soh as ten feet in others--had been shaped by wind and rain until it reseh to conceal whatever she had seen

"Someone there?" she asked

She expected no answer and got none

She was uneasy but not afraid If she had seen soht, it surely had been an aniht to her and would not have been so secretive As there were no natural predators along the coast worthy of her fear, she was curious rather than frightened

Standing still, sheathed in a filan to feel the chill in the air Tothe rocks, expecting to see an animal break fro the beach

Some people in the area kept horses, and the Fosters even ran a breeding and boarding facility near the sea about two and a half miles from there, beyond the northern flank of the cove Perhaps one of their charges had gotten loose The thing she’d seen froh it ht have been a pony On the other hand, wouldn’t she have heard a pony’s thudding hoofbeats even in the soft sand? Of course, if it was one of the Fosters’ horses--or soht to attempt to recover it or at least let them knohere it could be found