Fantasy Life (17 page)

Fortunately, this was the off-season, and Lyssa had seen several vacancy signs on the beachside hotels they had passed. The trick was to discover whether she was welcome before the hotels shut their front desks down for the night.

She supposed she would know soon enough. Even if Cassie had kept her promise and hadn’t tapped into Lyssa’s every thought, she probably knew that Lyssa and Emily were coming. If she didn’t—if she had missed it somehow—well, then, Athena was bringing home the news because Gabriel had told her back there on the highway.

“Mommy?” Emily said.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Daddy said this place was evil.”

Damn Reginald and his illness. “Did he? When?”

Emily didn’t answer. She just looked out the window.

“Does what he said worry you?” Lyssa asked.

But Emily was done. She had imparted the wisdom—if that was what it had been; it seemed more like poison to Lyssa—that Reginald had given her and felt that the problem was now her mother’s.

The problem was that Lyssa would have agreed with Emily years ago. She felt that Anchor Bay was evil, not because of the magic that clearly coexisted with people here, but because of its narrow, small-town single-mindedness.

She had had a brain, and she had been determined to use it. Her mother had applauded that much, and her grandmother, usually her biggest supporter, had admonished her to bring her knowledge back to Anchor Bay.

Lyssa hadn’t. In fact, she had fought with Athena the night she’d made that comment. And then Athena had never come to see her, not once, speaking to her by phone only rarely and barely acknowledging the high points of Lyssa’s life, such as her wedding and Emily’s birth.

Did they even know about the divorce? Lyssa couldn’t
remember what she had told them. They knew about Reginald’s death—the whole country knew about that—but they probably had no idea of all the things that had preceded it.

That thought almost made her turn into the last row of beachside motels. She didn’t want to rehash her history, and she certainly didn’t want to justify it, not for the women who’d raised her, the women who hadn’t wanted her to leave Anchor Bay in the first place.

And then the road dipped and she saw it, towers rising off its corners like the art on a fantasy novel. Cliffside House’s lights were visible in the rain, making it seem like a beacon against the hideous night.

It seemed to be missing a tower—she remembered three—but she knew that Cliffside House was never the same.

She hadn’t explained that to Emily either. Maybe the problem wasn’t her daughter. Maybe the problem was her.

But how to tell a child of ten that the world she’d grown up in wasn’t the world she was facing now? Some differences had to be experienced to be understood.

The cliff the house was on, the Devil’s Goblet, was actually part of a longer group of mountains that came all the way toward the beach at this section. The highway went over the lava rock here and continued south. On the left side of the highway, the lava rock rose, black and foreboding. On the right, the ocean side, the cliff seemed far away.

That was because of the headland that led to it, a flat portion of rock too high for most (but not all) tides. On that rock, Lyssa’s grandfather had carved a road to Cliffside House—or so the story went—even though she had no idea how he had done it. Once she had examined it and thought the road too smooth to have been made by human hands and human machines.

But the water could have done that, running across the surface over all of the years.

The driveway, as everyone called the road, rose steadily,
until it wound around the center of the cliff and led to a carved parking lot on the harbor side. That parking lot provided the only access to Cliffside House.

“Is that a castle?” Emily asked, but she didn’t use the tone that Lyssa would have expected. Most children would have been excited and awed to go into a castle. Emily made it sound like the first day of school, a doctor’s visit, and an hour in the principal’s office combined.

“No, Em. That’s where we’re going.” Lyssa made sure her voice sounded calm. She didn’t want her daughter to pick up on her own nervousness.

“Is it a lighthouse?” Emily had seen more than her share of lighthouses in the Midwest. The Great Lakes were dotted with them, and Reginald, in healthier days, loved to visit them.

“It’s not a lighthouse either,” Lyssa said. “It’s Cliffside House. That’s where I grew up.”

“Is it a mansion?” Emily sounded interested in something for the first time in weeks.

“I don’t know what you’d call it.” Lyssa couldn’t remember ever having had those questions.

“But you lived there?”

Lyssa almost answered with
And you will too,
but stopped herself in time. She didn’t know if Emily would live there, and Lyssa couldn’t bear to disappoint her daughter. Not when Emily was so fragile.

“I did,” Lyssa said. “And your grandmother Cassie and great-grandmother Athena live there now.”

“Gramma Cassie lives there? She never said.” Emily leaned even closer to the window.

“How many people did you tell when you lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house?” As soon as the question came out of Lyssa’s mouth, she knew she had said the wrong thing.

Emily leaned back in the car seat, and her arms tightened around Yeller. “Nobody.”

“See?” Lyssa said. “It’s the same thing.”

But they both knew it wasn’t. Cliffside House had an aura. The Frank Lloyd Wright house had a reputation. And for all its oddities, Cliffside House had been comfortable. The Frank Lloyd Wright house never was. Both Lyssa and Emily had been happy to leave it.

Then the turn for the driveway appeared—not as suddenly as it used to, though. Someone had installed two lights that looked like gateposts. They were faint, but visible in the rain. A sign next to them read
Private Drive;
another read
Enter at Own Risk;
and a third read
Do Not Enter in a Plus Tide.

As if the people who would enter a private drive that had an
Enter at Own Risk
sign would know what a plus tide was. Lyssa shook her head. At least someone had tried.

She turned the car sharply and waited for the bump that she remembered, the moment she would know she had left the paved road and was on lava rock, but the bump never came. Her hands tightened on the wheel, and she sent a little prayer to whatever god would take it to protect her and Emily.

The lava rock was slippery in the best of times. Now it was wet and covered with a layer of water from the heavy rains. Her car had good traction, but it wasn’t designed for something like this. It would take all of her driving skills to get to the house.

She had entered the driveway too fast, but she pulled her foot away from the brake anyway. The antilock brakes helped, but they wouldn’t be a solution. The best thing to do was drive as if she knew what she was doing.

Confidence, a driving instructor had once told her, saved a driver’s ass more than fear ever could.

“This a weird road, Mommy,” Emily said.

“It’s a driveway.” Lyssa sounded more dismissive than she would have liked, but she couldn’t pay attention to Emily at the moment. The blackness of the rock devoured the beams from
her headlights, and no one had thought to put lights—or guardrails—on either side of the drive.

The ocean boomed and rose twenty feet below, threatening to send waves toward her. One wave would knock the car off the driveway and into the sea. If the Bug fell to the north side, the harbor might provide an escape. But if she fell to the south, there would be no surviving.

Lyssa felt a surge of anger rise. She had forgotten about this part of the drive, and it was stupid really, with all the modern conveniences. What were Athena and Cassie thinking? The house might be secure from large waves and tsunamis, but the driveway definitely was not.

She finally reached the curvy section and realized it was just barely wide enough for her chubby little car. Still, she managed to get all the way up to the parking area without scratching either side of the Bug.

Lyssa parked near the main sidewalk, also lit now with two formal-looking light posts, and shut off the ignition. Then she rested her arms on top of the steering wheel and buried her face. Her heart was pounding heavily, and her breathing was short. She had sweated through her shirt.

She couldn’t remember a more challenging night of driving, not even from her teenage years.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” The fear in Emily’s voice gave Lyssa the energy to sit up.

“Tired, baby doll,” Lyssa said. More than tired. Exhausted and shaky and scared. But the rest of it was a burden that Emily didn’t need. “Want to see your grandma?”

Emily didn’t answer, and Lyssa forced herself to turn around in her seat. Emily had brought her knees up to her chest, like they had been on that damn dock in July. Only then, she hadn’t had Yeller clutched in her arms.

“What if she don’t wanna see me?” Emily asked, her voice small.

“She will,” Lyssa said, hoping she was right. Predicting Cassie’s moods was always difficult.

“I’ll wait,” Emily said.

The car shook slightly with the wind.

“It’s going to get cold in here,” Lyssa said, “and I can’t leave the ignition on. It’s too dangerous. Come with me. I want to see my mother.”

That almost sounded true. It sounded true enough, anyway, to get a solemn nod out of Emily. Apparently she understood the place where fear and desire crossed.

And why wouldn’t she? Those two emotions had, ultimately, warred inside her the day she had ridden her bike to Reginald’s.

“Come on,” Lyssa said, not wanting to lose her advantage. “Grab your coat.”

“Are we gonna live here?”

The moment of truth. How was it that children always managed to find it?

“I don’t know,” Lyssa said. “Let’s go find out, shall we?”

Emily gave her a grave look, then grabbed her raincoat. It was red with a little hood that made her look like a character from a children’s novel. Emily had loved it when they’d bought it last year. All she had done since they’d arrived in Oregon was complain about it.

But she didn’t complain now. Instead, she slipped on the coat, tugged Yeller underneath, and grabbed the door handle. “You coming, Mommy?”

Nope,
Lyssa wished.
You go ahead. They’ll want to see you. It’s me that’ll cause the problem.

Instead she smiled wearily, grabbed her London Fog raincoat—which had inconveniently come without a hood—and her purse.

“We have to make a dash for it,” she said.

They got out together, and Lyssa took Emily’s hand. It was
warm and comfortingly small. The rain had turned colder, feeling like hard, little ice pellets pounding their faces.

“Let’s go!” Lyssa said, and they ran toward the twin lights, and up the long curving, sidewalk. Emily didn’t even try to look at the landscaping that someone had finally successfully managed or even at the cliffside, not fifteen feet away.

She stared straight ahead, at the massive oak door and the arched entrance that did look like part of a medieval castle. All it needed was a moat, a drawbridge, and an iron gate to complete the illusion.

“The house missed me,” Emily said as she jumped up the two steps leading to the entrance.

Lyssa put a hand on her daughter’s back and held her in place. Any other parent would have taken that statement as fanciful and wrong—Emily had never been here before, so if the house had the ability to miss anyone, it couldn’t have missed her—but Lyssa knew, with a certainty she rarely had, that Emily’s statement was true.

The house had missed Emily.

And stranger still, the house had missed Lyssa too.

Highway 101
The Village of Anchor Bay

Gabriel sat in the parking lot, his car running, until Lyssa’s car disappeared around the curve at the top of Leland Hill. He felt shell-shocked, but he wasn’t sure if that was because of Lyssa’s arrival, the long day he’d had, or the look Lyssa’s daughter had given him as the car drove away.

Finally, he chalked it up to exhaustion and reached for the
radio. Athena had gone home, so he would have to patch himself through to Zeke.

As he did, Gabriel settled back in the squad car. The rain seemed lighter—or perhaps that was because he wasn’t in it any longer. His pant legs were wet, but the rest of him was remarkably dry given the afternoon he’d had.

The empty road looked benign—the yellow light giving it an otherworldly cast—and it seemed as if nothing had gone wrong this day. But Gabriel knew that when morning came, he’d have mess after mess to clean up, not just on the beach but at various homes and businesses.

The problems simply weren’t visible at the moment.

It took a bit of work, but he finally got through to Zeke.

“Where are you?” Gabriel asked.

“Mile Post Three.” Zeke almost seemed to be shouting. Behind him, Gabriel could hear the whistling wind. There didn’t seem to be as much wind downtown, but that could be a false impression. The cable building was probably shielding his car from the worst of it.

“Problem?” Gabriel asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Gabriel wished he could see Zeke’s face. Sometimes Zeke had a dry sense of humor, and it almost always sounded like this. But Zeke never joked about trouble.

Gabriel’s hand tightened around the microphone. He shouldn’t have left them alone out there.

He had let himself get sucked in by his old crush on Lyssa Buckingham and hadn’t followed guidelines that he had set up himself.

“Stop toying with me, Zeke,” Gabriel said.

“Okay. I found something in one of the ditches.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind that disturbs most people. I’ll show it to you in the morning, if we can still get into town.”

The conversation was frustrating Gabriel. They were talking in code, partly because they had to—too many people in town owned police-band radios and listened to them for entertainment.

“It’s something you can carry with you?” Gabriel asked, letting his confusion out.

“Yeah. It’s small, and it’s a good thing we found it, not some tourist.”