Self-conscious, he hesitated, his finger an inch away from the doorbell. Yeah, tomorrow’s better. Except maybe no one will answer the door then, either. If only the phone was in service.
Retreating to the road, Coltrane scanned the front windows to see if anyone was peering out at him, and finally he decided to give up. I should have gone with Jennifer, he thought. But as he prepared to walk back the way he had come, he suddenly realized that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the presence of the car and the failure of anyone to come to the door when he rang the bell.
Whoever’s here is outside walking along the ocean.
He moved toward the left side of the house, intending to use the space between this house and the next to give him access to the shore. A wall blocked his way. On the right side, a similar wall stopped him. His excitement changing to frustration, he noticed that all the other homes had barriers, preventing outsiders from intruding on the beach.
When he walked past the remaining properties, he discovered a fence that went down to the waterline. The cree-cree-cree of the gulls became more pronounced. The crash of waves intensified as he stepped around the end of the fence, his shoes getting wet. It’s one thing to ring a doorbell and disturb someone on New Year’s Day, but it’s quite another if I come across someone taking a walk, he thought. It would be natural for us to say hello. It wouldn’t seem as intrusive for me to explain who I am and to ask a few questions.
Approaching the rear of the house, he saw a white deck perched over shelves of uneven gray rock that led down to the ocean. Stretching in both directions, the shelves of rock glistened as the spray from waves drifted over them.
But no one walked along those rocks. The shore was deserted.
Coltrane shook his head. Forced to admit that, for today at least, he truly had wasted his time, he began to turn to go back to the road, then stopped as movement among the rocks attracted his attention. Narrowing his eyes against the glare of the lowering sun (how could the sun be so bright and the air so shiveringly cool?), he thought he was hallucinating, for the movement wasn’t just among the rocks – it was the rocks. One of them was rising from the others.
His skin prickled. He shivered harder, but no longer from the cold. The gray hump of rock rose higher, emerging from the shelf. What am I seeing? Coltrane asked himself, compelled to step forward. At once, something equally startling happened, for as the hump of rock rose high enough to detach itself from the shelf, Coltrane saw that the rock had an oval of white within the gray – a face. Gray arms detached themselves, one of them reaching up toward what had become a head and neck. A gray hand pulled at the gray on the head and, to Coltrane’s amazement, peeled it off as if it were skin, revealing lush dark hair that clung wetly to the head of an amazingly beautiful woman. What he had been seeing, Coltrane realized, was a woman in a wet suit emerging from the ocean. The gray rubber of the suit was the same color as the shelves of rock. Rising from the waves, she had seemed to be born from them.
Immediately, he raised his camera, opened the aperture so that the waves would be indistinct behind her, and pressed the button as the woman emerged from the ocean. Her pose was so familiar that he felt he had to be hallucinating. He took another photograph, then another, each time stepping closer. Noticing him, the woman paused, one leg in front of the other, the knee slightly bent, about to transfer her weight from her back leg to her front. She wasn’t wearing a scuba tank or a mask. She hadn’t been diving, only swimming, using the insulation of the wet suit to keep her warm in the cold water. Her hands were covered with gray rubber gloves, one of which she had used to peel off the cowl of her suit. With the other gloved hand, she now brushed back her wet hair, and Coltrane had seen that pose before also. He pressed the shutter button again, catching her in midmotion. If it hadn’t been for the wet suit, Coltrane would have been shaken by the most powerful déjà vu he had ever experienced. Even with the wet suit, the parallels were so striking that Coltrane didn’t know if he could keep his hands steady as he continued taking photographs. The suit clung to the woman like skin. Its wet slickness enhanced the sinuous movement of her legs, the fluid motion of her body, the sensuous contours of her hips, her waist, her breasts, her…
He lowered the camera, his dazed mind demanding to know how it was possible that he could be looking at Rebecca Chance.
4
AS HE TOOK ANOTHER STEP, a look of fear crossed the woman’s face. She stumbled backward, lost her balance, and slipped to her knees in the waves.
“No!” he told her. “You don’t need to be afraid! I’m not here to hurt you!”
He raised his hands, causing her to raise her own gloved hands as if to protect herself.
“Please!” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you! All I want is to ask you some questions! I’m not going to hurt you!”
The slap of waves against the rocks wasn’t loud enough to mute the sudden noises behind him: doors banging open, shouting, shoes scrabbling over rocks. Pivoting to look behind him, Coltrane was astonished to see a half dozen men racing toward him, two from the house, two from hiding places under the deck, one from shrubs on each side of the house.
“Stop right there!” one of them yelled, his face twisted with anger. “Don’t move!”
As fast as he could, Coltrane turned and ran.
“You son of a bitch! Stay where you are, or I’ll-”
Coltrane didn’t hear the rest, the noise of the waves and his frenzied breathing blocking it out. His shoes slipped on the wet rocks, but he managed not to fall as he strained to increase speed, all the while hearing barked curses behind him. Without warning, ahead of him a man lunged from the side of another house, shoving out a hand, yelling at Coltrane to stop. Just when it seemed that he and the man would collide, Coltrane changed direction, veering around him, charging away from the shore, but two of the men racing behind him had anticipated that move and were running parallel to him, ready to grab him.
He changed direction yet again, hurrying back toward the shore. The man who had appeared from the side of the house had assumed that Coltrane would continue to rush inland. As a consequence, the man had left his strategic position and was racing inland, as well. Coltrane outmaneuvered him, continuing to charge along the shore.
“Damn it!” someone yelled.
Coltrane avoided a difficult shelf of rock and felt something twist in his stomach when he saw that the shore curved inward. To avoid the waves facing him, he would have to go inland again. His pursuers racing closer, he hurried around the half circle of the shore.
As one of the men darted at him from the side, Coltrane recalled how he had used his cameras to defend himself in Bosnia. He pulled the camera from around his neck, gripped its cord, and reached back to swing the camera toward the head of the attacking man.
“Hey!” The man lurched back.
Simultaneously, Coltrane lurched also, the backward motion of his arm causing him to lose his balance. His feet slipped out from under him. The next thing, all he saw was the sky as his body arched backward. The shock of cold water took the remainder of his breath away.
Not that it mattered. He couldn’t breathe anyhow. He was submerged in a hollow among the rocks, flailing to reach the surface. The current of a wave gripped him. Thrashing with cold-cramped arms, he heard a roaring in his ears. When he broke through the surface, the sun was almost blinding. Buffeted by another wave, he gasped and fought to inhale. Swallowing water, he coughed and tasted salt, then struggled against the weight of his water-filled shoes and soaked clothes and pawed toward a shelf of rock.