Fantasy Life (23 page)

“Mom?” Lyssa asked. “Are you all right?”

Cassie shook herself, opened her eyes, and made herself smile as she turned around. “Your grandmother was telling you about that night, and how we failed.”

The bite in her own voice startled her. Athena’s gaze met Cassie’s over Lyssa’s head, and Cassie thought she saw admiration in it.

“Touché,” Athena mouthed.

Cassie pretended she didn’t see it. She sat down at the table, her back to her mother.

“Cassie got one of her first—and only, from what I understand—incapacitating visions,” Athena said. “I believe something sent it to her. I think if Cassie had been able to join us that night, we would have diverted the ship. But the vision, as she told you, and my response to it, cost us precious minutes.”

Cassie swirled the tea in her mug. “I don’t think Mom’s
right about that. I never have. What I think is pretty simple. If you look at the history of the Buckinghams and the refuge, you figure out that we can protect against things we know about. If we don’t know about it, we’re not guarded against it.”

“You’re saying you didn’t know about oil leaks?” Lyssa asked.

“This wasn’t a leak,” Cassie said. “It was a disaster, one of the worst on the Oregon Coast. If it had been properly reported, it might have been considered one of the worst in North America.”

“Properly reported?” Lyssa asked.

“Cassie’s getting ahead of the story.” Athena grabbed a knife and expertly chopped an onion in a matter of seconds.

“Lys,” Cassie said, “the first big oil spill that got the attention of the world happened in 1967 off the Cornish coast in England. It was a horrible disaster, and not just for England, but for France and Guernsey. It’s not like now where people mobilize from all over the world and come to help with the cleanup. Thirty years ago, we were only guessing at what to do.”

“And we had other things to think about besides the gulls and the clam beds,” Athena said. “We had living, sentient beings we couldn’t talk to anyone about, and they were being threatened, particularly the ones who spent most of their time on the ocean’s surface.”

“But we didn’t know that that night,” Cassie said. “That night, Mom and the leaders of the various communities used their powers to trap a lot of the oil here. The slick did not follow the currents the way others have, and the barriers that Mom set up did protect most everything under the water.”

“So I don’t understand,” Lyssa said. “If you solved it, why is it even important to me being here now?”

Athena had chopped chives and green pepper and was now working on a tomato. The
thud-thud
of her knife was comforting.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” she said.

“Mom said it was because I married a Walters.” Lyssa pushed at the tar ball with her fingers. It rolled around on the napkin, leaving a little black trail. “That’s how this whole conversation got started. She never told me that she had known Reginald’s dad.”

Spoken as if she weren’t even in the room. Cassie got up and poured out her tea. Then she rinsed her mug, grabbed the caffeinated-coffee pot as if it were a whiskey bottle, and poured.

“I’m assuming,” Lyssa said, “that the
Walter Aggie
was a Walters Petroleum ship?”

“Yes,” Athena said before Cassie could speak. Then she nodded toward Cassie, as if she wanted Cassie to finish it.

“Yes,” Cassie repeated. “The
Walter Aggie
was a Walters Petroleum ship, and this was the first big Walters Petroleum disaster in years. Old Man Walters—your husband’s grandfather—was grooming his son to take over the company, and this was his first chance to handle something that could destroy the company’s reputation forever. Or at least, that was what he once told me....”

January 1970
Anchor Harbor Wayside

Cassie stood at the beach access, a rake in her left hand. She wore borrowed rubber waders with her blue jeans tucked into them, and a ratty sweatshirt that she had once used for house painting. The rubber work gloves she wore belonged to a local contractor and were too big for her hands. But the hardware store was sold out of work gloves, and no one had an extra pair in her size.

It was the middle of the morning two days after the disaster, and the sun was out. The sky was a cloudless blue, the kind of perfect that usually brought tourists to the beach, even in the middle of winter.

But no one thought there would be tourists in Anchor Bay ever again. The beach was coated in thick black sludge. Oil, as thick as mud, covered every surface and had turned the bay black.

No one was working in Anchor Bay these days. Everyone was on the beach, picking up solid bits of oil and seaweed, rescuing seabirds that looked like someone had coated them in tar, and using pressure hoses to wash the stuff nearest the highway into traps someone had built to catch the runoff.

The cinder-block restroom building had become a way station where volunteers could change their clothes and wash some of the oil off their shoes. A group of local women had set up a coffee-and-snack station just outside the doors, so that the workers had something to eat when they took a break.

Athena had used her position in the sheriff’s office to make calls to places that had suffered similar disasters—places like Santa Barbara, California; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Land’s End, England—to talk to the locals about the methods they had used to clean their beaches.

Mostly, Athena had learned that it was long, arduous work, that nothing would really get that inky black stuff off the sand quickly or easily. But a few people had mentioned using straw to soak up the oil, then raking the straw into buckets, and that made sense to her.

She and Cassie tried it that very afternoon, and it had made it easier to collect the stuff. Now Cassie was leading a raking brigade, using younger people because the work was repetitive and incessant.

After the first day, Cassie’s back and shoulders had ached so badly she thought she wasn’t going to be able to move in the
morning. But she had managed. Even though she wished her magic abilities—or her mother’s—worked like Samantha’s on
Bewitched:
a little twitch of the nose, and the entire mess would be gone.

Instead, the oil covered everything, and the stench was abysmal. The smell had invaded Cassie’s nose during her vision and hadn’t left. The town stank of oil, and so did the sea.

The comforting briny smell was gone, and so was the sound. The pounding waves, which were so much a part of her life, had become muted, almost as if the oil were holding the sea in place.

Cassie knew that wasn’t so. She could see the waves moving inward and crashing on the other side of the bay. So far, the currents hadn’t moved the oil slick south. Just the bay and the northern part of the harbor were affected.

But the local fishermen said that would change. They believed that the currents would take the slick and slime the entire coastline. They believed the disaster would ruin the fishing and clamming industry for the next year, maybe more, kill hundreds—maybe thousands—of seabirds, and destroy the seal and sea otter populations.

And no one seemed to know what to do about it.

Cassie gripped the rake harder. The mayor, Ted Whitby, was dealing with the coast guard, trying to get someone to move the ruined ship away from the Devil’s Candlestick. The ship was still leaking oil, and it was caught on one of the underground rocks, so no one knew exactly how much oil was seeping under the surface.

The sheriff, Robert Lowery, was trying to figure out a way to pursue criminal charges against the captain of the
Walter Aggie.
He wasn’t having a lot of luck, at least so far. The only thing that worked in the sheriff’s favor was that the accident had happened in Oregon waters.

But the captain of the
Aggie
was blaming John Aluke, the
tugboat pilot, who had apparently not shown up for the rendezvous. Aluke, who had contacted the Coast Guard the moment he’d heard of the trouble, said that no one on the
Aggie
had responded to his radio messages. He claimed he had told the
Aggie
to anchor farther out, where it would be safe in a storm of that magnitude.

Cassie knew Aluke and believed him. She also knew that he was in a great deal of trouble. He had told her privately that it seemed as if his messages weren’t getting through to the
Walter Aggie,
even though theirs reached him.

Like something blocked my signal,
he said, as if there were some kind of master plan.

But she didn’t know what that plan would be, and neither did anyone else. Athena kept saying that someone had sent Cassie an incorrect vision—the fire, which hadn’t happened and hadn’t even been suggested—to distract her. With Cassie’s mind power, the barrier Athena set up would have kept the
Aggie
off the rocks.

Athena was arguing some kind of conspiracy, but Cassie wasn’t sure exactly who or what would want to destroy Anchor Bay. It seemed like great bad luck to her, with no intentional malice, although it would have been lovely to believe in malice.

But the accident benefited no one, not Anchor Bay, not the residents of the refuge, and certainly not Walters Petroleum, which was sending one of its representatives to Anchor Bay that afternoon.

The substitute dispatch, doing Athena’s job while she worked on the beach, had notified everyone that the Walters representative was arriving by helicopter.

Athena had cursed that, saying the downdraft from the helicopter blades would make everything worse. But no one listened to her. The Walters representative had made his choice. He wanted to get to Anchor Bay as quickly as possible, and that made a helicopter the logical choice.

The helicopter would have to land on the highway near the beach access. It was the flattest area in Anchor Bay. Sheriff Lowery had to shut down the highway on either side so that there would be room for the helicopter.

As he did, more and more volunteers left the beach, and Cassie got the uneasy sense that if this Walters representative handled his arrival wrong, he would be facing an angry mob. The accident had destroyed countless livelihoods, and no one in Anchor Bay made a more than a marginal living. Even the shops and restaurants would be affected once the initial surge of volunteers left. No tourists would come here; the tourism industry would die off, just like the fish and the oyster beds and the animals.

Anchor Bay could become a ghost town, because of the carelessness of one ship’s captain.

Athena was even angrier than most people. She said that so far, few creatures in the refuge were affected, but she was worried that the barrier wouldn’t hold.

That would make the captain of the
Walter Aggie,
and the people from Walters Petroleum, guilty of mass murder—at least in her eyes. And there was little she could do to prevent it.

Cassie was here to guard her mother, as much as the bay. Which was ironic. Usually Athena guarded her. Athena was the prudent one, the one who believed the modern era mostly benefited the people who lived in it. Cassie was the one who knew that corporations didn’t have the little people in mind when they made their policies.

She heard the mechanical
whoosh-whoosh
of the helicopter in the distance. It was a familiar sound, and usually one that made her a bit nervous. The Coast Guard patrolled the beach with helicopters, going north in the morning and heading south in the afternoon. She could set her watch by them; 11:20
A.M
. on the northern route and 2:20
P.M.
on the southern.

Any other time, the
whoosh-whoosh
of helicopter blades combined with the roar of the engine meant trouble.

Everyone looked up, even the people still working on the beach. It was unusual to see a helicopter come from the valley. They usually came from the Coast Guard station in Newport. Helicopters flew north and south, not east and west. It disturbed the natural order of things.

Sunlight reflected off the helicopter’s metal frame, blindingly bright. Most people turned away, but Cassie didn’t, and neither did Athena. She stood rigidly beside Cassie, her mouth set in a thin line.

Cassie never really had a sense of all her mother’s powers—she wasn’t sure exactly what Athena was capable of—but she could feel them now, revving up like that helicopter’s engine, preparing for some kind of battle.

Cassie put a gloved hand on her mother’s arm. “Let the mayor handle this,” she said.

“That fool has no idea what Anchor Bay is.”

“Mother, the representative from the oil company isn’t going to want to deal with you.”

“He isn’t going to be able to avoid me,” Athena said.

“It’s not his fault.”

Athena looked away from the helicopter to glare at Cassie. “You’re the one who says anyone who even eats food made by a particular corporation is complicit in their crimes. When did you become a defender of the corporate mentality?”

Athena had a point. But Cassie couldn’t express exactly what she was feeling. Something had gone wrong here, but it had happened for a combination of reasons, things that no one entirely understood.

“All I meant was he’s probably not the guy who can make changes. He’s just here to make us all feel better and not be angry at Walters Petroleum.”

A small smile crossed Athena’s face. “Now that sounds like my daughter.”

“They’ve got minions, Mom, and we’ve got the press. If you can talk Mayor Whitby and the sheriff into letting the Portland TV crews here instead of trying to hide this disaster, we can shame Walters Petroleum into sending people to help with the cleanup.”

“They wouldn’t know how to clean up,” Athena said.

“As if we do,” Cassie said, but her words were lost in the roar of the helicopter.

A wind rose around them, coming from above, like a downdraft, and the side, blowing in the wrong direction. Wind usually came from the ocean, not blowing toward it.

Cassie’s rake moved in her hand, and she didn’t look behind her; she didn’t want to see what the wind was doing to the beach, the oil, the oil slick. At least, for a brief instant, the smell faded, replaced by the warm smell of a machine running at top capacity.