Fantasy Life (12 page)

The Bug’s lights couldn’t penetrate that kind of darkness. All Lyssa could see were two beams of light, filled with water, illuminating a black surface without lines.

The highway through the Coastal Mountain Range hadn’t changed at all. It was still treacherous and isolating, things that had attracted her as a teenager and frightened her now.

Her back and shoulders ached. She’d been sitting in the same position for hours now. Her eyes burned from trying to see through the inky blackness.

It had been a mistake to press forward. She should have stopped in Portland. But a hotel would have used the last of her cash, and her credit cards were maxed out. She had a precious cashier’s check in her wallet. Two thousand dollars, all the money she had left in the world.

She should have left the funds in her Madison bank account and left that account open, but she hadn’t wanted to. She had had enough trouble with the press these last few months. She didn’t want them tracking her every move—and she didn’t trust the bank’s security systems enough to protect her.

Not that it would be hard to find her in Anchor Bay. She had grown up here, after all. But that wasn’t something the Walters family knew, nor was it something that had ever shown up in the cursory bios done of her when she’d married
Reginald. And fortunately, Buckingham, while not the most common last name, wasn’t that uncommon either.

Emily was asleep in the backseat, oblivious to this treacherous drive. She had always been good at shutting out the world, but she had gotten better at it these last few months.

Lyssa had hoped that this trip would interest Emily, that the sights of Western America, from the mountains to the raging rivers to the tacky tourist attractions like Wall Drug, would awaken some part of her, but Emily had barely seemed to notice. Most of the time she had read her books or listened to her CD player, head bobbing to sounds that Lyssa couldn’t hear.

There hadn’t been a lot of mother-daughter bonding. There hadn’t even been much mother-daughter talk. And Lyssa was beginning to get worried about that.

The road curved dangerously. Lyssa remembered this part of the highway. Suddenly the road hugged a cliff face, and on the passenger side, nothing protected the car from the sixty-foot drop to the river below. Lyssa used to dream about this curve, because as a teenager she would slide around it much too fast, always regretting the speed as she fought for control of whatever car she had been driving.

But the road was different now. Someone had installed guardrails with little yellow reflectors that caught her headlights. The guardrails were dented—probably from teenagers who hadn’t been as lucky going around this curve as she had—and one entire section had fallen away.

Lyssa slowed, remembering how hard it was to see anything coming from the west even in broad daylight. The muscles in her back spasmed. She was clutching the wheel so tight that her arms were rigid.

She didn’t want to come back here. She didn’t want to see this little town with all of its memories and its oddities and its strange beliefs in itself. She had survived this place once; she wasn’t sure she could do it again.

And she wasn’t sure it was the best for Emily. Maybe Lyssa should have packed them both up and gone somewhere very far away, where people didn’t care about the Walters family, someplace like England or Australia, someplace where they spoke English and watched American TV, but only reluctantly.

She probably could have found money for that. Her grandmother Athena might have loaned it to her. The problem was that Lyssa wasn’t sure how to survive in a foreign country, even one where the language was, in theory at least, the same.

And she still had to face all her legal troubles. Taking Emily out of the country would seem to most people like an admission of guilt. Leaving Madison seemed like one.

But Lyssa couldn’t stay, for Emily’s sake. Reginald’s death had made the national news—a one-day curiosity about the loser Walters son, the one who hadn’t joined the family business and didn’t live like a multimillionaire, who had died under mysterious circumstances. After that, the national press had moved on to other stories, all of them apparently more compelling than that of a mentally unbalanced man dying in his own backyard.

The regional press stayed on it, though, and it had become the nightly headline on local newscasts from Minneapolis to Chicago. Lyssa often came home from the university to find reporters camped on her yard. She changed her phone number three times, only to have the unlisted numbers “discovered” by the press. She couldn’t even have voice mail without someone hacking into it.

And there was nothing to do with Emily. Sophia had had to quit when the press discovered that her visa had expired, and Inez couldn’t handle the pressure. Emily had gone to the university’s day care for one whole hour before the head of the day care had found Lyssa, complaining that Emily and her reporters were too disruptive.

So Lyssa had kept Emily at her side, taking her from class
to class, making the poor girl sit through office hours. Emily read more books than Lyssa had realized existed, working her way through every mainstream children’s classic that didn’t have magic in it.

Emily had a newfound aversion to anything paranormal, including her formerly favorite television programs such as
Charmed
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Emily wouldn’t say why; she would only tell her mother, in a tone that brooked no disagreement, to shut the television off.

Then there was the investigation into Reginald’s death. Lyssa finally had to have the attorney she had hired for her divorce help her find a good criminal defense attorney. The detective on the scene, Volker, who had seemed so understanding, now had an idea that either Lyssa or Emily had killed Reginald. The fire was of mysterious origin, and the coroner believed that Reginald’s torso blew open, which started the fire. Somehow, the coroner said, he had swallowed something explosive, and it had killed him. Apparently no one believed in spontaneous human combustion anymore.

They would believe even less in what had really happened. All Lyssa had been able to get out of her daughter was that Reginald had put Emily into the lake, fully clothed, and held her underwater.
He was playing, Mom,
Emily had said only once, and even she didn’t sound all that convinced. But she wouldn’t admit that he tried to drown her.

That night, Lyssa had stayed awake thinking about the circumstances. She knew, somehow, that her daughter had taken a power from inside herself and turned it against Reginald, making him let her go. But Lyssa wasn’t sure what that power was or how it worked.

For that, she was going to see her grandmother. Athena was an authority on all things magical in the world.

Even if Lyssa and Emily went on to England or Australia or even Canada from here, they needed time in Anchor Bay.
Lyssa needed to know what her daughter’s powers were, and how to control them.

The rain seemed even heavier now, the drops pounding on the roof of the car like small fists. Lyssa had lowered her speed to twenty around the curves; it felt as if she were crawling. But her visibility was down to only a few feet. She needed to be able to stop.

At this rate, she would never get into town.

She rounded the last curve and hit the straight stretch that ran for four miles until it collided with U.S. Highway 101. Highway 101 covered the entire Oregon Coast, and was the main road in Anchor Bay.

The forest continued for a few more yards, but once she was out of the mountains, she was out of the trees. She didn’t remember it that way; she remembered nearly two miles of forest before reaching town.

Hair rose on the back of her neck. Even here, things had changed.

As the Bug zoomed out of the trees, it passed a figure beside the road. Lyssa jerked in surprise. She hadn’t seen the person at all, even though the figure was wearing a yellow rainslicker and carrying a flashlight.

The night was very dark. Very dark, and very dangerous.

She hoped she didn’t get the person she’d passed even wetter.

For a brief moment, she toyed with stopping to see if the person was all right, then ruled it out. Stopping for solitary people wasn’t a good idea, not even near small coastal towns, and it was a worse idea when she had her daughter and most of their possessions in the car.

Lyssa sighed. She had shipped all of their books, their summer clothing, and their linens the day before she’d left. UPS would deliver them after she arrived.

She hadn’t called ahead to let her mother and grandmother
know that she and Emily were coming, but if Cassie’s talents were running true to form, Cassie and Athena already knew. If they didn’t want Lyssa and Emily to show up, they would have called by now.

Athena had called the day after Reginald died, claiming she’d seen the story on CNN. She might have, but Lyssa knew that Cassie had put Athena up to it. Cassie had promised she wouldn’t use her telepathic powers to spy on her daughter any longer, but Lyssa hadn’t believed the promise.

And why should she, with all the times that Cassie had broken that very promise? Her mother was probably spying, even now.

Ahead, Lyssa saw lights from two cars parked across the highway. Other lights—the big lights used at construction sites—blared on either side of the road, revealing foundations and half-built walls of houses.

Lyssa slowed to a near crawl. She wondered how she was going to get across the highway, with an accident in front of her. Maybe there were side roads now, near all the construction. She was surprised to see it. When she had moved away, the population of Anchor Bay was stable, and there was no point in building beach cottages this far away from the beach.

Her headlights caught two more yellow rainslickers, one near a car, and the other near the side of the road. The one near the side of the road seemed to be moving, and it took her a moment to see through the darkness that still shadowed everything.

The rainslicker beside the road was holding a construction worker’s stop sign.

No one would be working in this weather. There had to be some kind of problem on the road ahead.

She slowed the Bug to a near stop, then checked over her shoulder. Emily lay across the backseat, a book under her right arm, and her stuffed dog Yeller under her left.

Yeller had become her constant companion since her father’s death. He had given her the dog—an overstuffed cocker spaniel—the last summer he had been well. Emily hadn’t treated it differently from any of her other stuffed animals then; the dog hadn’t even had a name until August.

She had started carting it around the night of her dad’s death and named it when she’d finished the weepy
Old Yeller,
which Lyssa hadn’t wanted her to read. But Emily had read it, then reread it, and reread it again. Obviously the book spoke to her, and whenever Lyssa asked what Emily liked about it, Emily couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

Lyssa finally eased to a complete stop. She could hear water slurping beneath her tires. Her headlight beams revealed water pouring over the road, the rain dotting it as if landing on a lake.

The man sloshed his way toward the driver’s side of the car and, with a swirl of his hand, indicated that she should roll down her window.

She did, letting in cold air and drops of rain.

He bent over. Beneath his slicker, he wore a baseball cap. She could see the Detroit Tigers logo just above the brim. His face was ruddy with the cold and dotted with moisture.

“How was the road through the corridor, ma’am?” he asked without so much as a hello. His voice was deep and official.

“Tricky.” She didn’t want to add that she hadn’t driven mountain roads in weather conditions like that in nearly fifteen years.

“But clear?”

“No branches on the highway, if that’s what you mean.”

“And the road’s still secure?”

Mountain roads fell away, something Midwesterners never believed. Once, when she was sixteen and crazy, she had driven through the corridor with a boyfriend. Fortunately, she had
been at the wheel and something—maybe even a sending from her mother—had warned her that danger was ahead.

She had stopped just in time to avoid a massive landslide that took the road with it.

“It was secure when I went over it,” she said. She didn’t like how this conversation was heading. It was nearly ten o’clock at night. She was exhausted, and she wasn’t sure she could drive back to Portland.

He nodded and turned his head in profile, looking at the squad cars parked across the road. The wind blew hard, shaking the Bug, but the man in the slicker looked like the gust hadn’t even bothered him.

He turned back to her, his face in shadow. She couldn’t see his expression at all.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to turn around, then, ma’am,” he said.

Lyssa knew he would ask that. Rain blew in the window, spattering the side of her face. So close. She was so close, and like everything else, she couldn’t seem to cross that final distance.

Emily moaned in the back and then stirred. “Mommy?”

Lyssa glanced over her shoulder. Emily’s eyes were barely open. “Go back to sleep, hon. We’re almost there.”

Emily’s eyes closed.

The man waited until Lyssa looked at him. Her left arm was getting wet from the rain blowing in the window.

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

“All this rain we’ve had this fall,” he said. “It’s flooding everything. The ditches are overflowing, and the ground is saturated. We’ve had more than two inches today alone, and it’s created a puddle on the other side of this barricade that’s deep enough to drown in.”

His words made her shudder. She didn’t want to think about drowning. She hoped Emily hadn’t heard him.

Lyssa looked through the windshield. The wipers were beating a pattern against the rain, but not holding it off. The water in front of her looked even deeper than it had a moment ago.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m just the lucky guy who happened to be on this side of the flood when they decided to close the road.” His eyes were blue and filled with compassion.