body, waiting for something to happen, contemplating the sorry mess I’d made of my life, wondering if it would be the same in my death.
I’d just driven a man to kill himself, and even if he’d been driven by his own guilt more than anything else, that did not erase my participation in it.
Yet, had Danny deserved to keep on living? It wasn’t as if he treated life with any respect, most especially not his own. It was better for him to have died moments after saving Maggie’s life. He had taken my life, but he had saved hers. I’d be willing to trade my life for Maggie’s in the great karmic stock exchange of the universe. I’d gladly pay that price. The world was better off without me, and it was most certainly better with her in it. If Danny had been an instrument of that balance, so be it. Redemption never came cheap.
I was still sitting on the boulder, staring at Danny’s broken body, contemplating the great mysteries of life and death, when a small black nose appeared in my line of vision. The little terrier had made his way down the hill. Ever the tracker, ever the troublemaker, he now sat, staring enthusiastically at me, his tongue lolling from his mouth after his run, tail thumping the ground happily in goodwill.
“Now you want to be friends?” I asked the dog. “Now?”
I wanted to laugh. It was all too perfect: Terror. Joy. Sadness. Happiness. Luck. Happenstance. Rivalries. Friendship. Love. Hate. All wrapped together in one big crazy set of coincidences people called “life.”
And, somehow, it all made sense.
Above me, around me, moving toward me, came loud voices followed by men and women in uniform, people shouting orders, people hurrying up the old road that snaked through the abandoned quarry, bodies crashing through the bushes toward where I sat, calling out to each other.
All evidence of life, this life, all evidence I had been left behind again.
I was not of the living and I was not of the dead. I was alone.
Even the little dog had left me, his attention captured by something in the darkness, just beyond my reach. He was barking furiously.
“Oh, my god,” an officer cried out, her tone catching the attention of everyone who had gathered around Danny. “Oh, my god. Look over there.”
Her flashlight illuminated the little dog against a grotesque tableau, the little beast overcome by the smell of an open graveyard created by Alan Hayes—the heaped remains of bodies thrown from the cliff overhead, tossed over the edge to spiral down and smash against the rocks below, joining the victims who had preceded them in death, hidden by rocks from the eyes of the living to decay unnoticed, to dry and be stripped away to bone by the sun and the wind and the passing of time and the gnawings of the creatures that moved in the darkness around me.
As if in slow motion, the assembled response team moved as one toward the scattered heap of skeletons that had tumbled to the bottom of the quarry a few yards from where Danny lay, shining their flashlights on what was little more than piles of bones and scraps of flesh, now dried and desiccated.
“How many?” a deep voice demanded.
“At least four,” the first officer guessed, her voice quavering. “Maybe more. It’s hard to tell in this light.”
“Someone better call Gonzales,” a colleague mumbled. “And it’s not going to be me.”
I stared at the pile of human bones, discarded by Hayes, and thought of Vicky Meeks and what might have happened had she ended up with the others. No one would have known. No one would ever have suspected. Hayes would still be out there, still taking them, still torturing them, then throwing them out like garbage—if not for an old man and his dog taking a walk along the hill, surprising him one night before he could dump Vicky Meeks, forcing him to leave her in a meadow and run.
Life was like that, I realized, it could change direction in the touch of an instant. It could fail or succeed, meander or stay the course, all depending on the most mundane of consequences, the most casual of meetings, a shrug, a look, a misunderstood comment.
“Is that Bonaventura?” a newcomer asked the others, his flashlight playing over what was left of Danny.
“Yeah,” someone said. “He jumped.”
“Why?” the newcomer asked.
“Who knows?” someone answered. “Knowing him, the question is more like ‘why not?’ He was a