Fantasy Life (11 page)

Lyssa wanted to ask her what had caused it, a release of power so strong that it had burned a hole through the person nearest to Emily, but Lyssa didn’t dare—not yet. Maybe not ever.

Lyssa held her daughter close and knew they couldn’t stay here. Lyssa had been wrong all these years. She would never get a normal life, and neither would her daughter.

They had to run to Anchor Bay so that her family could teach Emily how to be a Buckingham without ruining her life.

If it wasn’t already too late.

November

Highway 19. Mile Marker 3
Seavy County. Oregon

The rain was horizontal, pushed by the twenty-mile-an-hour winds. The gusts went as high as sixty, not out of the ordinary for the Oregon Coast in November, but damned uncomfortable all the same.

Gabriel tugged the hood of his rain slicker over his Detroit Tigers baseball cap. For once, the brim wasn’t keeping the water off his face. His cheeks were numb with the cold and wet, and his nose felt as if it were about to fall off.

He’d been out here since the rain got worse in the middle of the afternoon. The road half a mile west had become a lake too deep for even the most outrageous SUV to plow through. His town was becoming an island, and there wasn’t much he could do about it.

His two deputies flanked him on either side of the road. One held the industrial-strength flashlight, which was making no difference at all in the darkness. The other was holding one of the county’s few
Stop/Slow
signs—with the big red
Stop
side facing oncoming traffic.

Not that there was any. Everyone in the valley knew by now that this latest storm was washing away coastal roads. Highway 18 to the south, the only other route through the Van Duzer corridor, had already lost its outbound lane to a landslide. Highway 26, to the north, had been blocked by another
slide for days. No one knew when that highway would open, given the extent of the damage.

Highway 101 had been closed all day south of Yachats due to high winds. So had Newport’s Bay Bridge. Anchor Bay was shielded from some of the winds by the cliff faces on either side of the village, forming the bay, but both north and south of the village, the highway looked iffy.

Gabriel had seen it like that a handful of times before, and eventually the road would fall away. The entire coastal highway system was built on sand, and in rains as bad Oregon had seen this fall, sand simply crumbled.

His radio squawked. He picked it up with his gloved fingers, fumbling to press the talk button.

To get good reception, he had to turn his face toward the rain. He sputtered, just like the radio had.

“What?”

“Oregon State Patrol finally made it to Valley Junction.” Athena sounded calm and collected, but of course she would, considering she was inside the dry sheriff’s office. “They expect to send a squad or two to the corridor entrance on 19 in the next half hour.”

Gabriel wiped the water from his face. “That’s what they’ve been saying for the past two hours.”

“I know. But they’ll make it this time. They had to close the road past Spirit Mountain Casino first. Apparently, Highway 18 is really bad.”

“This isn’t a lot better,” Gabriel said. “I’ve been worried that we haven’t seen any traffic for a while. Have you gotten any reports of problems between here and Joe’s Tavern?”

Joe’s Tavern was at the last intersection on the east side of the corridor before 19 became the only road. No little town had grown around Joe’s, not like Valley Junction had grown in the nine years since Spirit Mountain Casino had opened its doors.

“Just talked to Joe,” Athena said. “No one’s turned around.
Said he saw a few cars. Might be locals heading home to the mountains, might be a few tourists who couldn’t buy a clue.”

“Don’t know why any tourist would be traveling in this weather,” Gabriel mumbled. But then, he was the guy who didn’t understand the tourists who poured over to the coast whenever big storms were forecast. Those folks complained more than anyone else about the weather, and then they sat in their hotel rooms, watching the rains lash the windows and drinking hot toddies.

Of course, they also died in record numbers, trying to walk on the beach, standing in the lookouts when big waves came crashing by, or sitting on logs that the water picked up and turned into matchsticks.

“I’m pretty sure you’re nearly done,” Athena said. “Then I’d just set up some barriers and head home. Hell, I’d do that now if I were you.”

Gabriel recognized her tone. “Did you want to go home, Athena?”

“I’m an old woman, Gabe. I’ve already been here for twelve hours.”

She was old—seventy-something (he had never checked, mostly out of fear of Athena)—but she had more energy than all the rest of them combined.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been out here in the rain for six. You get to go when I do.”

And then, like a coward, he shut the radio off.

He was probably going to pay for that. Athena pretty much got her own way around the sheriff’s department. She’d worked as the dispatch longer than Gabriel had been alive. She had told him the story of his birth so many times that he had gotten sick of it. It had been a stormy night like this one, and at that time, Anchor Bay hadn’t had its own hospital. His father needed an escort to get him to the nearest hospital, which was in Whale Rock.

In the end, the sheriff at the time had just driven the frightened family at high speeds across dangerous roads. Athena swore that was why Gabriel had come back from his wanderings. He was destined to be Seavy County’s sheriff from that moment on.

Gabriel didn’t believe in destiny, although he wasn’t sure why. He seemed to believe in everything else. He just knew that, even on nights like this, he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

So a few more cars had gone into the corridor. If they weren’t going home to Pelican Creek or some of those mountain hideaways deep in the corridor, the ones that scared even him, then they’d get to Mile Marker 3 in twenty minutes, assuming good road conditions.

And that wasn’t a good assumption on this night. He had another hour, maybe more, before he could go home, light a fire, and thaw himself out.

“News?” Zeke Chan, Gabriel’s main deputy, yelled from his position near the squad.

Gabriel shook his head. The wind seemed to have come up, making the rain lash even harder.

They were standing in an open space on a bit of an incline. They had to be away from the trees, just in case one of the larger gusts knocked down a limb.

Gabriel was already worried enough about falling power lines. He kept trying to talk the power company into putting in underground cables, and they kept threatening to make the residents of Anchor Bay pay the costs.

Gabriel knew it would take someone dying from a downed cable, electrocuted out here in the middle of nowhere, before the power companies took some initiative themselves.

Zeke dashed across the road. The water was getting deep here too. The sheer volume of rain falling in the last few weeks guaranteed local flooding and landslides. The ground had been
saturated at the beginning of October. This was the wettest fall that Gabriel remembered, and that included the famous fall of 1999. Usually, there were sun breaks and often days without rain, but not this time. When the weather had turned in September, the rains had come with a vengeance. It had felt like deepest, darkest winter.

If this was fall, Gabriel didn’t want to see what winter would be like.

Zeke reached him. The flashlight’s beam showed the waves Zeke had made in the puddles with his boots.

Zeke’s rainslicker was yellow, just like Gabriel’s. They had bought yellow after a police officer from Seavy Village was killed stopping traffic on a night like this. He had been wearing the regulation green.

Water dripped off the hood of Zeke’s slicker. His heart-shaped face looked red and chapped. He’d been here even longer than Gabriel. Zeke had been the first one to notice that the ditches on either side of the highway had converged to form Seavy County’s newest lake.

“We haven’t seen anybody for half an hour or more,” Zeke said. “What say you we call this one? Set up a few barricades, let the motorists take their chances?”

Gabriel would have loved nothing better, but that wasn’t his mandate. Someone had to stay here until the highway patrol showed up. Once they arrived, they took control of the area and decided how to protect the average citizen from the roadside hazard.

“The highway patrol’s not going to get here tonight,” Zeke said, “and I’ll bet they’re not going to make it through the corridor anyway. If the roads here are falling away, imagine that sinking section around Mile Post 25. It’s got to be gone by now.”

“I hope not,” Gabriel said. “It’s got a curve on either side. Only locals would know that it’s even there, and they always drive too fast.”

Zeke sighed. He apparently knew Gabriel well enough to understand that little statement as a refusal to leave. “Well, at least one of us can go. I’m sure there’ll be another emergency elsewhere soon.”

“Got a hot date?” Gabriel asked.

“With my shower.” Zeke laughed.

“Let’s give it another half an hour. Athena tells me a few cars left Joe’s Tavern a while ago.”

“Storm watchers?”

“Locals, I’m hoping.”

Zeke shot him an exasperated look. They both knew that anyone driving through the corridor tonight was either a tourist or someone who couldn’t get away from his job, even for one bad night.

The chance of those cars belonging to locals was pretty slim.

“Crap.” Gabriel grabbed his radio and flicked it back on. He had meant to turn it on a few seconds after he’d spoken to Athena, so that when she called back in irritation, she couldn’t reach him. But he’d left it off a good ten minutes now.

“What?” Zeke asked.

“Accidentally shut the radio off.”

Zeke grinned. “Accidentally my ass. Athena wanted to go home too, didn’t she?”

Gabriel shrugged.

“You should let her. That precipice she calls a driveway has got to be nasty in storms like this.”

Gabriel hadn’t even thought of that. “She’s a big girl. If she needs to stay in town, she will.”

“If there’s room at any of the inns.”

“It’s the first of November,” Gabriel said. “The season was over long ago.”

Although the tourist season had been changing lately, lasting longer and longer. With fewer people flying, and money
tight, destination travel turned out to be somewhere close to home, like the coast, rather than Maui.

Not that Gabriel wanted to be in Maui. He wasn’t fond of the islands.

“The first of November,” Zeke said reflectively. “All Souls’ Day.”

“All Saints’ Day.” Gabriel adjusted the bill of his very wet cap. He’d never given the day after Halloween much attention until he’d gone to France. There, in the Loire Valley, he had awakened on November 1 to the sound of church bells.

Church bells, and sunshine, and closed restaurants. He had to wander the streets until he found an open
boulangerie,
where he bought a croissant, took a bottle of water from his room, and went down to the center of town. There was one of France’s more famous castles. He sat on the grounds, near the algae-covered moat, watching two teenage boys practice their juggling, with the bells still ringing, and felt as if he had gone to heaven.

France was a long way from here.

“Gabe?” Zeke said. “Lost you somewhere.”

“All Saints’ Day. Just remembering a trip I took.”

“Yeah, like which one? You’ve taken more trips than anyone I know.”

Gabriel nodded, but didn’t share the memory. “I think you should check the east side of the highway. We’ve had two inches of rain since we’ve been out here, and I’m getting a bad feeling about this. I’m not sure we set up in the right place.”

Zeke glanced over at Suzette Hackleberry, the other deputy. She was holding up the
Stop/Slow
sign. Usually she worked backup dispatch for Athena, but on nights like this, Gabriel needed more people on the road.

“Okay to leave her?” Zeke asked.

“She’ll be all right for a little while,” Gabriel said.

Zeke nodded. “If the road’s bad up ahead, what do I do?”

“Radio the State Patrol and have them shut down 19 through the corridor,” Gabriel said.

He remembered that happening when he was a boy, but he doubted it had happened since. There would be a lot of fuss, particularly from locals who worked on the other side of the Coastal Mountain range. With 19, 26, and 20 closed, they would only have 18 to make it over the mountains—and that was if that highway didn’t slide away either.

Water slithered down his back, somehow finding its way in from the front of his rainslicker. The chill made him even colder.

Zeke jogged off toward the trees and the darkness. The flashlight clutched in his right hand sent ripples of light along the soggy highway.

Gabriel watched him go. Maybe Gabriel would have to contact Athena, have her insist the State Patrol guys show up sooner rather than later, and talk them into driving the corridor.

Gabriel was a good driver, but he didn’t have the equipment the state guys did. He would rather they take the risks on the saturated roads.

He couldn’t see Zeke anymore. Just the flashlight, making its odd reflections in the road.

The light gave Gabriel the oddest sensation, an unease that made him as cold as the rain.

Something was coming from that direction, something important blowing in with the storm.

Then he tried to shake the feeling off. He wasn’t Cassandra Buckingham. He didn’t pretend to have precognitive powers.

But the feeling wouldn’t shake.

Something was coming. Something that would change not only him and his little town, but everything.

Forever.

Highway 19. Van Duzer Corridor
Oregon Coastal Mountain Range

Rain slashed across the highway, pelting the car with thick, heavy drops. The clouds hid the moon. Trees, towering over the narrow two-lane highway, added to the blackness, their limbs waving and dancing in the wind.