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"… get her, get her, get, get, get …"

"… want, want, want it, want it …"

"… no, quick, now, quick, quick, quick …"

They were pulling at her sweat pants, trying to strip her, but she wasn’t sure if they wanted to rape or devour her; perhaps neither; what they wanted was, in fact, beyond her comprehension She just knew they were overcoe, for the chilly air was as thick with their need as with fog and darkness

One of them pushed her face deeper into the wet sand, and the water was all around her now, only inches deep but enough to drown her, and they wouldn’t let her breathe She knew she was going to die, she was pinned now and helpless, going to die, and all because she liked to run at night

2

On Monday, October 13, twenty-two days after the death of Janice Capshaw, Sam Booker drove his rental car froht Cove During the trip, he played a gri a h he was on the road for more than an hour and a half, he could think of only four things Guinness Stout, really good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death

That thick, dark, Irish brew never failed to please him and to provide a brief surcease fro first-rate Mexican food were more difficult to locate than Guinness; its solace was thereforebeen in love with Goldie Hawn--or the screen ie she projected--because she was beautiful and cute, earthy and intelligent, and see Goldie Haere about a reat Mexican restaurant in a northern California coastal town like Moonlight Cove, so he was glad that she was not the only reason he had for living

As he drew near his destination, tall pines and cypresses crowded Highway 1, for shadows in the late-afternoon light The day was cloudless yet strangely forbidding; the sky was pale blue, bleak in spite of its crystalline clarity, unlike the tropical blue to which he was accustoh the telare bouncing off a field of ice, seemed to freeze the colors of the landscape and dull them with a haze of imitation frost

Fear of death That was the best reason on his list Though he was just forty-two years old--five feet eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds, and currently healthy--Sae of death six times, had peered into the waters below, and had not found the plunge inviting

A road sign appeared on the right side of the highway: OCEAN AVENUE, MOONLIGHT COVE, 2 MILES

Sa, for that would pass in a flicker Neither was he afraid of leaving his life unfinished; for several years he had harbored no goals or hopes or drea But he was afraid of what lay beyond life

Five years ago, one a near-death experience While surgeons worked frantically to save hi, looked down on his carcass and theit Then suddenly he’d found hiht, toward the Other Side the entire near-death cliche that was a staple of sensationalistic supermarket tabloids At the penultimate moment, the skillful physicians had pulled hi, but not before he had been afforded a glimpse of what lay beyond the mouth of that tunnel What he’d seen had scared the crap out of hi what he now suspected lay beyond it

He reached the Ocean Avenue exit At the bottom of the rahway, another sign read MOONLIGHT COVE 1/2 MILE

A few houses were tucked in the purple gloo the trees on both sides of the two-lane blacktop; their s gloith soft yellow light even an hour before nightfall Some were of that half-timbered, deep-eaved, Bavarian architecture that a few builders, in the 1940s and ’50s, had mistakenly believed was in harmony with the northern California coast Others were Monterey-style bungalohite clapboard or shingle-covered walls, cedar-shingled roofs, and rich--if fairy-tale rococo--architectural details Since Moonlight Cove had enjoyed e number of houses were sleek, modern, many-ed structures that looked like ships tossed up on soh tide, stranded now on these hillsides above the sea

When Sa coness immediately overcame him Shops, restaurants, taverns, a market, two churches, the town library, a movie theater, and other unre, which sloped doard the ocean, but to Saeness about the coave him a chill

He could not identify the reasons for his instant negative reaction to the place, though perhaps it was related to the so end of the auturay stone Catholic church looked like an alien edifice of steel, erected for no huleamed as if built from time-bleached bones Many shop ere cataracted with ice-white reflections of the sun as it sought the horizon, as if painted to conceal the activities of those orked beyond thes, by the pines and cypress, were stark, spiky, razor-edged

Saht at the third intersection, halfway through the commercial district With no traffic behind him, he paused to study the people on the sidewalks Not ht or ten, and they also struck hi ill of them were less definable than those that fanned his impression of the town itself They walked briskly, purposefully, heads up, with a peculiar air of urgency that seemed unsuited to a lazy, seaside cohed and continued down Ocean Avenue, telling hiht Cove and the people in it probably would not have see trip and turned off the coast highway only to have dinner at a local restaurant Instead, he had arrived with the knowledge that sons in a perfectly innocent scene

At least that hat he told hiht Cove because people had died there, because the official explanations for their deaths were suspicious, and he had a hunch that the truth, once uncovered, would be unusually disturbing Over the years he had learned to trust his hunches; that trust had kept hiift shop

To the west, at the far end of a slate-gray sea, the ane an to rise off the choppy water

3

In the pantry off the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back against a shelf of canned goods, Chrissie Foster looked at her watch In the harsh light of the single bare bulb in the ceiling socket, she saw that she had been locked in that small, less chamber for nearly nine hours She had received the atch on her eleventh birthday, o, and she had been thrilled by it because it was not a kid’s watch with cartoon characters on the face; it was delicate, ladylike, goldplated, with roits, a real Ti it, Chrissie was overcome by sadness The watch represented a tietherness that was lost forever

Besides feeling sad, lonely, and a little restless from hours of captivity, she was scared Of course, she was not as scared as she had been that h the house and thrown her into the pantry Then, kicking and screa, she had been terrified because of what she had seen Because of what her parents had becoradually it subsided to a lowgrade fever of fear that made her feel flushed and chilled at the same ties of flu

She wondered what they were going to do to her when they finally let her out of the pantry Well, no, she didn’t worry about what they were going to do, for she was pretty sure she already knew the answer to that one They were going to change her into one of thee would be effected--and what, exactly, she would becoer ordinary people, that they were so else, but she had no words to describe what they had become