Cry for the Strangers Page 0,115

Rebecca’s death a hundred yards away also flooded the Randalls’ house with light. Reflexively, Glen snatched his hand away from the lantern, then chuckled. Brad Randall looked up from the chart he was poring over.

“Maybe we should give it up for today,” Brad said. “I don’t know about you but my eyes are getting tired. I’m not used to lantern light.”

They had been at it all afternoon, charting the various events that had occurred in Clark’s Harbor, from the deaths of Pete and Miriam Shelling all the way back to the frighteningly similar demise of Frank and Myrtle Baron years earlier. Over the years there had been several fatalities in the area, usually in the vicinity of Sod Beach, always on stormy nights when the coast was battered by high winds. And as far as they could tell, most of the victims, if not all, had been strangers to Clark’s Harbor. Strangers who had come to the Harbor for various reasons and intended to settle there.

“It’s like the Indian legends,” Glen commented as they stared at the charts. “It’s almost as if the beach itself doesn’t want strangers here—as if it waits, gathers its forces, then strikes out at people.”

“Which makes a nice story,” Brad said archly. “But I don’t believe it for a minute. There’s another explanation but I’m damned if I know how to go about finding it.”

Glen thought a moment. “What about Robby?” he asked.

“Robby?”

“You said that the beach affects him. If that’s true, couldn’t it affect someone else too?”

Brad smiled wryly. “Sure. But it doesn’t help the problem. Until I know how the beach affects Robby, how can I figure out who else might be affected? So far I don’t have the slightest idea what the common denominator might be.”

Elaine appeared in the doorway. “Getting anywhere?” She looked drawn and tired.

“I wish we were,” Brad said. “But so far it’s nothing but dead ends. Apparently the storms are killing people, which is, of course, ridiculous.”

“What about Missy? Hasn’t anybody talked to her?”

The two men stared blankly at Elaine, wondering what she was talking about. A memory suddenly flashed into Brad’s mind, a memory of Robby, talking to him on the beach.

“Missy thinks she sees things.”

Did Elaine know something about that too?

“What about Missy?” he asked quietly. The tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he asked the question, frightened Glen, but Elaine’s answer frightened him even more.

“I think Missy saw Jeff Horton get killed,” she said. There was a flatness to her voice that somehow emphasized her words. “I haven’t talked to her but she said something last night. I—I told her that her daddy had gone out on the beach, and she said, ‘He shouldn’t have done that. Bad things happen there.’ That’s all she said, but I got the strangest feeling that she’d seen what happened to Jeff, or at least had seen something.”

Glen sat in stunned silence, but Brad was nodding thoughtfully. “Robby told me awhile ago that Missy thinks she sees things on the beach,” he murmured.

Glen suddenly found his voice. “Things?” he asked, his word edged with hysteria. “What kind of things?”

“He didn’t say,” Brad replied quietly. “I was going to talk to her about it but then everything started happening, and …” his voice trailed off, his words sounding hollow.

Glen stood up and pulled on his coat.

“Then we’ll talk to her now. I’ll go get Rebecca and bring her and the kids back here.”

Brad glanced out into the blackness of the storm. “You want me to drive you? It’s getting pretty dark out there.”

“No thanks,” Glen replied. “I’ll walk along the beach. It doesn’t look so bad out there now.” He finished buttoning his coat and opened the door. The wind caught it and slammed it back against the kitchen wall.

“Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”

Glen grinned crookedly. “You mean because of last night? They say if you fall off a horse the best thing to do is get right back up and ride him again. If I don’t walk the beach tonight I never will.”

He pulled the door closed behind him and disappeared into the rain.

Glen leaned forward into the wind, his right hand clutching the collar of his coat in a useless attempt to keep the rain out. His left hand, plunged deep in his coat pocket, was balled into a fist, and he kept his eyes squinted tightly against the stinging rain.

He made his way slowly, keeping close to the surf line, keeping his