COVENANT

PROLOGUE

The cliff.

It called to him.

Touched him with . . . darkness.

Taunted him with a promise made long ago.

So long had he known, so long had he felt its pull that today, tonight, was an anticlimax.

A breath of the promise slid over the edge and tickled his nose. James inhaled, savoring its salty tang, its gravestone cold reminder.

The cliff would kill him.

The pressure was firm at his back. There was no return, no escape. Was there a presence just there, in the wash of black ahead? In the rush of wind that slid naked across the booming surf below and drove hard up the steel grey rock to kiss his own salty cheeks?

James cried aloud, his feeling caught, twisted and drained by the yawning night wind.

The vibration of the waves was palpable in the air here. It rippled through his body. Its touch was icy, its grip absolute. He’d been born for this, spent nineteen years in preparation, and yet, now that the moment was upon him, he wondered if he could go through with it.

He thought of Cindy.

Put off the present and hug the past close.

She’d been so right for him. So giving. He thought of her pert smile, upturned nose. Loved the way her hair had lolled slovenly across her shoulders. Loved the taste of her eager mouth. Loved the way she’d lectured him against falling for “the traps” his mother set for him.

“Can’t you see she needs a fall guy?” Cindy would complain, shaking him by the shoulders. She was so beautiful when she tried to throttle sense into his head. Her hands would grip their hardest—and he almost felt them.

“Wake up and walk out! Come with me to school in the fall.”

“I don’t have the money to go,” he’d answer. “And my grades probably wouldn’t get me in if I did.”

“You could get in,” she insisted. “And if you came with me and worked out on your own for a year, you could declare yourself independent and get financial aid. Please, Jamey. For me. Get away from her. Get out of this town.”

But he hadn’t left Terrel Heights.

Cindy had.

She wrote now and then, and sometimes he answered. But he couldn’t follow her. And he could never have told her why. He couldn’t have explained the grip of the cliff.

His destiny.

A shame he couldn’t meet it with the moon at his face. Instead, this night was blighted by cloud, shrouded by fog. He shivered at the touch of the night. His toes hung out in damp space. A hundred feet down. Or more.

Against his back the pressure built. It was time.

He thought of those many days in the caves below. Those days of promises, of preparation. The spirit of the cliff was alive, he knew. It needed him. It hungered for him. His sacrifice would keep it from sucking the life from everyone in Terrel Heights. His soul, in exchange for thousands.

This year.

He only hoped Cindy didn’t think too badly of him when she heard. She would never understand.

* * *

James surrendered. He felt the hands on his back, felt the electric surge of power pushing at him to fly from the edge, felt the hunger of the dark spirit that possessed the prominence. He only cried out once as he tumbled from the steep rock cliff to break his body on the worn stones below.

From high above, a keening voice moaned in reply.

The waves rushed hard against the cliff.

It tasted the offering in darkness.

And accepted the fruit of a covenant.

Part I: Questions

Chapter I

“ . . . Mobile Unit 3, this is Dispatch. Got a report of a jumper at the Peak. Looks like we got another one, Bob. Your turn to go out there, I think . . . ”

Joe Kieran looked up at the short static-filled squirt from the police band radio in the corner. As the new kid on staff, he had landed the unenviable job as night reporter—the guy who sits in the newsroom until the wee hours, pecking away at long-range, non-deadline stories while awaiting any breaking news that might come over on the police band. If something did happen in Terrel at 1 a.m., he was the Johnny-on-the-spot for the Times. He would grab his reporter’s notepad, hop in his car and speed across town to cover the story—phoning in the crucial details to Randy, his editor, if the paper was about to go to press. So far, he remained unconvinced that anything happened in Terrel after 6 p.m. In two months on the job, he’d gotten in the car once, and that had turned out to be a false alarm.

No, being a reporter wasn’t a glamorous job in the sleepy town of Terrel. Usually the police radio squawks consisted of neighbor noise complaints and domestic disturbances, neither subject worthy of reporting in the Terrel Daily Times. Then again, most of the articles he was assigned didn’t seem worth the cost of the ink used to print them. The Rotary Club was sponsoring a bake sale. The Taft Memorial Library planned to present a showing of 1800s farm ceramics. Three kids at Shane Grammar School had essays chosen by the county fire department in the “Be a Crier, Stop a Fire” contest.

But now, after two months of only catching police reports about fender benders, domestic plate-smashing episodes and the occasional high school beer bust, something was actually happening.

“Hey Randy,” Joe called out to the burly night editor across the room. “Did you hear that on the radio? What’s he mean about another one at Terrel’s Peak?”

Randy looked up from his typing, but didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he stared straight at Joe. “Somebody jumped off the cliff again. Don’t worry about it. We’ll cover it tomorrow when they’ve got all the details.”

“Shouldn’t I get out there? Sounds like Page One stuff to me!”

“No. Call the department tomorrow. They’ll give you everything we need then.”

Joe hadn’t covered a breaking story since leaving Chicago, and he wasn’t giving up that easily on the first interesting lead he’d had in weeks. “I’m not working on anything but this Library Club feature right now, anyway,” he said. “So how ‘bout I go take a ride?”

“Sit it out, Joe.”

There was a strange edge to Randy’s voice. Joe opened his mouth to argue, but then stopped. The night editor wasn’t going to budge on this one, he could tell. Why, he wasn’t clear on. But his reporter’s instinct didn’t let go of a mystery so easily. And he really did wish for a break in the tediously dull evening—even if it was a broken body break.

The count of green words on the video display terminal on his desk grew slowly as the rest of the night crawled by. he police band remained quiet after its brief 11 o’clock tease, and Joe silently cursed. There were times he really hated working at a small town paper. If he’d grown up here, he would know precisely why Randy didn’t want to talk about a jumper. And they’d said “another one.” As if it were a frequent occurrence. Maybe someone in the editor’s family had jumped. Hell, probably everybody in town but him knew the cliff’s apparently fatal history.

But he hadn’t grown up here. He’d grown up in Chicago, and, for a little while, had played with the big boys of journalism. He’d covered the twisted saga of the JonBenet Ramsey investigations for Northwestern University’s student paper, and the high profile stories had gotten him on as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune right out of college. He’d typed in his share of mundane suburban township meetings and school board crises before the full-time doors opened for him at the Trib. But open they had. And he’d luxuriated in his high-flying career. Briefly.

He’d written a series of stories about city council crime and exposed graft and corruption in the very ward where he ived. At the time, he’d felt like a superhero. He soaked up the accolades and continued to develop a network of contacts on the street to help him uncover the ever-deeper layers of white-collar crime that the city seemed to have been built upon. He was the voice of everyman.

Until one of the stories he uncovered hit a little too close to home. His stomach had turned to ice on the day he learned that lies and deceit were not limited to the wardrobes of aldermen and investment bankers.

It was one of the last stories he’d turned in to the city editor at the Chicago Tribune. It wasn’t many days later that he went home, pulled out a suitcase and began packing. He couldn’t stomach the undisputable truth his reporter’s instinct had forced him to bite down on. And so he’d thrown his wonder-kid career away to run to the coast and hide in this tiny backwater town near an ocean.

And a cliff.

Chapter II

The sunlight shifted like water, glinting with fiery brilliance and then hazy shadow through the heavy canopy of oaks, conifers and sugar maples. Moth-chewed leaves and splintered twigs obscured the blacktop pavement, pocked with an abundance of tire-chewing potholes. Brilliant violet heather poked out of the deep ditches on either side of the narrow asphalt trail. The air tasted sharp this morning, crisp with the promise of a sizzling afternoon to come. Joe drove with one arm crooked out the window, the tape deck chewing ethereally on a Cocteau Twins tape. There were some benefits to living here, he admitted. The Midwest just didn’t have mornings like this. Or landscape.

The trees thinned abruptly, and he swung down the visor. It didn’t help. Driving east at sunup generally rendered visors about as helpful as a garden spade in the ocean. But Terrel Dispatch had said Chief Swartzky would be out here looking over the scene of the jump and if he wanted answers, he’d have to talk to Harry.

Actually this was a bonus. He could get the full effect of the scene before writing his story, instead of relying on a police phone report, like he had at the city desk in Chicago. A jumper in Chicago didn’t often set the news trucks out in hot pursuit. Here, it was about the only newsworthy thing that could happen. Which was why Randy’s reaction the night before had bothered him so much. He could have gotten the story in this morning’s edition if he’d come out here when the police band had first sent an officer out to investigate the report of a jump. But Randy had vetoed.

It just didn’t feel right.

The breeze picked up as the car descended a steep decline in the road. The trees had turned to brush, and Joe could feel the weight of the ocean in the air. The water was so close, yet he couldn’t see it. One more hill in the way. He stepped on the gas and shot down the rough road, oblivious to the squeak of his shocks. Through his rear speakers, the Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser warbled something unintelligible but evocative, a mystery as rich and tantalizing as the landscape around him. As her voice crescendoed in unknown ecstasy, the car finally broke free from the leafy obstructions and turned with the road to climb the last rise out of the forest. At last he could not only smell and hear, but he could see the ocean.

Whitecaps broke lazily against the shore, a dangerously dark mess of black and green boulders and pebbles that stretched out before him a hundred feet below. The sound of the surf was intoxicating, a steady rush and swell of noise that crushed the airy music of his tape and left him yearning to pull hard on the wheel, turn off the road and abandon his car to dive into the waves.

But he resisted the impulse and the road began weaving its way down until he was driving just a little higher than the high tide debris mark. And then he saw it.

The cliff.

It stretched almost straight up from the beach, a jagged rocky prominence that, from the road, looked higher than a skyscraper. One thin prominence stretched out over the choppy inlet like a beckoning finger; a signal to the sky of unknown import. Far beneath the finger’s stretch, a police car and a Folter’s Ambulance van were parked just off the road, lights off.

At this point, emergency lights were probably unnecessary, he mused. The emergency was long past.

Joe pulled off the road next to the old squad, grabbed a notebook and walked down to the edge of the water where the uniforms were gathered. He’d seen three of the four before, but the only name that stuck was Chief Swartzky’s. The chief was the oldest of the bunch, his frost-white hair and thick belly stood out in stark contrast to the other men.

The chief nodded slowly at his approach.

“Hey, mornin’ Joe,” the portly cop said. His voice was iron hard, yet strangely soft-spoken. It was amazing that he could speak so low and yet be heard over the deafening rush of the ocean.

“You remember Alfie,” he gestured to a younger sandy-haired cop. “And this is Mack and Parent from Folter’s.” The two ambulance drivers looked uncomfortably pale beneath dark manes of hair that caught and twisted across their eyes in the wind. Joe guessed from their hawk noses and blue eyes that they were brothers. And neither on the job long enough to be inured to blood.

“Hi,” he nodded, and shook hands all around.

Looking past the group, he saw why the drivers might have been a bit upset. The body was still here. And it didn’t look good.

“What was the name?” he asked diplomatically, unsure of the sex of the body a few yards away.

“James Canady,” the chief said. “He was local, 19 years old. A good kid.”

Joe walked past the men, to the water’s edge. The boy’s body, from what he could see, was not going to be a pretty sight when they reeled it in.

Death must have been immediate, he thought. A rocky needle had stopped the boy’s fall, but it had been no life preserver. The rock had impaled the boy’s naked belly, releasing his guts to the ocean and spiking the body face down just below the waterline like a tack in a larval bug. Two feet of needle-thin, bony stone rose like a horn from the boy’s back. It had saved James Canady from being washed out to sea, but didn’t make for a pretty portrait. The boy had been nude when he’d jumped, and his skin was wrinkled and dead white after hours in the water. Something long and pale stretched from beneath the corpse to curl and twist in the shifting waves like an undulating cobra.

Joe turned away with a shiver. He’d seen plenty of ripped up bodies after gang shootings. He’d seen the results of domestic fights that got out of hand, leaving dismembered corpses instead of purpling bruises. But unleashed intestines always gave him the willies.

“Why is he still out here?” he asked the chief.

“We got the call that there was a jumper last night, anonymous tip. Came out here to search, but it was high tide and we couldn’t get close to these rocks, and couldn’t see anything from the road. Didn’t know if it was a prank call or not, so we came back to search again a little while ago. Didn’t take much searching this morning, as you can see. Low tide just hit.”

“Have his relatives been notified yet?”

“He’s just got a mother, Rhonda Canady. And yeah, I called her a few minutes ago. She’ll be at the morgue to ID him at 9.”

The chief turned to the ambulance drivers, who didn’t look any happier with the idea of going in after the body.

“Get on it, guys. It won’t get any easier the longer he floats.”

Mack and Parent traded unhappy looks, and then shrugs. At last they trudged their way to the water’s edge and waded in.

“Mack went to school with the boy,” the chief offered, shaking his head.

“Did he have family problems?”

“Who, Mack?” The chief grinned sourly but Joe didn’t laugh. “No. No more so than anyone else, I’d guess. Kind of a quiet kid. Lived with his ma in the old section of town, on the other side of this bay here. Never heard of him causing any trouble in school or town.”

“Are you sure it was suicide?”

The chief didn’t answer for a beat. Instead he looked up to the top of the cliff overhanging the small bay. When he turned back to Joe, his eyes were grey with weariness.

“No evidence to suggest it wasn’t.”

* * *

Mack and Parent waded into the water, moving to stand on either side of the corpse. Together, they grabbed the body at the shoulders and thighs and thrust skywards. It slid up the spike easily, a dark stain dissipating in its wake. They hefted Canady up and off the rock and quickly carried his body to the gravel at the water’s edge. Mack ran to get a stretcher from the van; his face looked green as he passed Joe. Scooping someone’s guts out of the water is never an easy task. Especially if they’re a friend’s.

Joe turned back to the chief. Randy had gotten him thinking. There was some kind of history to this spot, and who better to know it than Swartzky?

“Do you get a lot of jumpers out here?”

The chief’s steel-grey eyes never blinked.

“What makes you think that?”

“Seems like a good spot for suicides, is all.”

“There’s been some over the years,” the chief nodded. He looked up at the rocky finger overhead as he spoke. “But we don’t publicize ‘em much. You don’t know how kids’ll take this stuff. Some’ll romanticize it, and we’ll have a whole class jumping the rocks. Kind of like when one of those rock stars kills themselves, some of their fans’ll go do the same damn thing.”

Swartzky looked back at him pointedly. “So we keep it low-key.”

Joe ignored the hint, smelling a perfect three-part series on the subject of suicide, the cliff’s history and how to deal with the topic.

“How could I find out about the others?” Joe asked.

“Let ‘em lie quiet,” Swartzky said in his quietest rumble and abruptly walked to the van.

“Mack!” he yelled, and the ambulance driver poked his head out of the driver’s side window. The two exchanged words that Joe couldn’t hear, and then Swartzky stepped back as the van pulled away.

“Joe!”

The chief was standing half-in, half-out of his squad.

“Yeah?” Joe answered, yelling to be heard across the beach above the wash of the surf.

“People don’t want to be reminded about friends and loved ones who killed themselves. Don’t go digging that stuff up. Just let ‘em know Canady’s gone and be done with the business, you hear?”

Joe nodded and began retracing his steps to his own car.

But now he was more curious than ever.

There was stuff to “dig up.”