Riptide Read Online Free PDF Page A

look in on her neighbors. But she didn’t know any of them.
    One thing she could do was call Richard. She was reaching for the phone when she remembered the cellar.
    Cellars were rare in southern California, except in older homes. In the early 1900s Venice had been populated largely by transplants from the Midwest, people who grew up with storm cellars and fruit cellars. They wanted the kind of houses they were used to.
    The entry to the cellar was a trapdoor in the floor of the pantry, next to the kitchen. Kneeling, she grasped the handle and pulled it open. On the underside of the trapdoor was a dead bolt that could secure the cellar from the inside. She had never understood why anyone would feel the need to do that.
    A stairway plunged into darkness. When she flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs, nothing happened. The bulb in the ceiling had burned out. She hadn’t known. The cellar was musty and claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been down there in years.
    From the kitchen she retrieved a flashlight, then returned to the trapdoor and angled the beam down the stairs. The cone of light picked out a brick wall wreathed in cobwebs and a concrete floor strewn with dead insects. No damage was visible from this vantage point.
    She descended the creaking stairs, inhaling the odor of mildew. At the bottom she let her eyesight adjust to the dimness, then stepped forward into the gloom. Dry beetles crackled under her shoes.
    Slowly she fanned the flashlight beam over the grimy walls and along a ceiling crisscrossed with exposed plumbing pipes. The room measured nine by thirteen feet, and the ceiling was uncomfortably low. It occurred to her that an aftershock could take place at any time, and underground would be the worst place to be.
    At the center of the cellar, she turned in a slow pivot, her flashlight coming to rest on the wall below the staircase.
    Part of the wall had crumbled, the old bricks tumbling out to expose a dark cavity three feet wide.
    Here was genuine damage, which she couldn’t afford. Like most Angelenos she had no earthquake insurance, trusting that the Big One would hold off for her lifetime.
    She played the beam along the underside of the staircase, wondering if she should be worried about the stairs collapsing under her when she went back up. But they looked secure enough. It was only the wall that had failed, and not much of the wall, at that. Possibly she wasn’t looking at more than a minor repair job.
    She moved closer to the wall. Something was inside. Something yellowish, whorled in cobwebs, a strangely complicated assemblage of shapes. Straight lines and curves and acute angles...
    Bones.
    That was what she saw. Not the small bones of vermin. These were human remains. A human skeleton, entombed in the wall.
    She didn’t react in any particular way. The reality of what she was seeing was too difficult to process.
    Her flashlight picked out a jawless skull, the eye sockets strangely white, not hollow, as if cloudy eyeballs still occupied the holes. There were no eyes, of course, only layers of gossamer spinnings from a succession of insects who had cocooned in the sockets.
    Eerie, though—how the eyes seemed to watch her. How the milky strands of webbing reflected the flashlight’s glow.
    She felt her first twitch of panic. She jerked the flashlight away from the skull, letting the beam fall elsewhere inside the cavity.
    Another pair of eyes.
    Two skeletons.
    Suddenly it seemed important to make no sudden moves. She was on the brink of a precipice. She must tread with care.
    She guided the flashlight to the left and came across a third skull and a fourth. Behind those, there were others. How many in all? She couldn’t tell. A half dozen, at least. Interred here, in the cellar under her house.
    Somebody had broken a hole in the wall and dug out an earthen cavity about two feet deep, then deposited the remains and sealed them inside. Probably the reconstructed portion hadn’t been as