Fantasy Life (6 page)

Water rose in a funnel around her, like a giant whirlpool, rising, rising, rising, but never touching her. The water spilled onto the dock, putting out the small fires that had started on it, then dripped back into the lake where it belonged.

Daddy was floating on his stomach. That wasn’t good.

Emily jumped in beside him and rolled him over. His eyes were still open, his face almost gone, and his chest—

She could see his bones.

She screamed and shoved him away from her. He moved like a boat heading toward rapids, faster, and faster, as if the water took him where it wanted him to go.

Emily didn’t reach for him anymore. She couldn’t. She knew it would do no good.

Instead, she climbed out of the water, sat on the dock, and turned her back to the lake. She was too smart to think that if she couldn’t see him, everything would be all right.

It wasn’t going to be all right. The sirens told her that. They were getting closer and closer, as if they were coming for her.

And why wouldn’t they?

She had shoved him into the water, and he had been unconscious, and he couldn’t hold his breath then like she had been able to do. He drowned, and she had drowned him, even though she had been trying to help him.

He had set himself on fire, but she had killed him.

She rested her chin on her knees and stared at the house where she used to live with her mommy and her daddy, back when they had been the perfect family.

Everything was gone now. Everything was ruined.

And it was all her fault.

The Village of Anchor Bay. Oregon

Cassandra Buckingham held the boy’s grubby hand in her own. With his other hand, the boy rubbed his nose. He was ten, reedy and windblown from being on the beach. His brown hair curled beneath his ears and he had dark brown eyes, alive with warmth.

His mother looked on fondly, her cheeks reddened by the wind. She didn’t look anything like her son. She seemed too young to have a ten-year-old, and too buxom—she had probably never been reedy in her life. But her blue eyes were kind and she seemed polite, even though she was as sand-covered as her child.

For the thousandth time, Cassie wished the sign on the window outside read
Fortune-Teller,
not
Palm Reader.
She should have thought the entire game through before she had set up her little shop.

She had tried to set up shops before, and had failed, usually because she had to borrow money from her mother. This time, she had saved from last summer’s waitressing job and decided to do this on her own.

Fifty-four was too old to be borrowing money from your mother. It was also too old to waitress, as her knees were telling her. She was still as thin as she had been when she was twenty, but she was getting tired of winding her long black hair on top of her head and sticking her hands in burning-hot water to scrub the dishes when the busboy failed to show.

Initially, she had gotten the waitressing job to prove to her mother that she could survive on her own. Twenty years into the work and Cassie was still trying to prove herself.

She traced the lines on the boy’s hand, even though she
didn’t have to. Her talents didn’t lie in palms. She had psychic powers that one police department had described as scary, back in her younger days when she’d thought she could use her powers for the common good.

When the boy had walked in the room, she had known that he was the one who wanted the reading. She also got his background—that he had lived in or near Anchor Bay his whole life, and that he was here on the beach this afternoon because his aunt, uncle, and cousins were in town, and they wanted to see the touristy sites.

The boy, his mother, and Cassie sat at the table in the center of the room. This table was covered with scarves as well as lit candles and a fake crystal ball she had picked up at a store in Seavy Village. The rest of the room was decorated with some plush chairs (for the waiting customers), smaller tables with scarves (because customers expected that), and some magical doodads she had picked up all over the coast.

The reading would be fairly simple. Cassie didn’t want to tell the boy’s secrets in front of his mother—the woman didn’t need to know that her son had manipulated her to get inside this building.

But talking about other things would be difficult as well, given the boy’s nature. He was sweet. He had a gentle goodness that went deeper than Cassie had ever seen. He was about a year away from middle school, where he’d learn to hide that goodness so that the other boys wouldn’t call him names. But he would use it.

Cassie’s trick was to talk to him about his nature without calling attention to his own gift. The last thing she wanted to do was stifle it by embarrassing him or shaming him or putting it into his mother’s head that the poor little boy always had to take the “right” way out of every circumstance.

“Well?” the mother asked, and she sounded a little nervous, as if Cassie’s silence had frightened her. The mother’s tone
frightened Cassie a little. She didn’t want to have a true believer here. That would cause the boy even more problems.

Cassie gave the mother a warm smile. “It’ll take just a moment.”

Then she traced the lines on the boy’s palm, what she could see of them through the sand and accumulated dirt. That had been another flaw in her plan—being this close to the beach meant she always had to deal with sand and dirty children. Next year, if she decided to do this again, she would find a different location, one that—

Funnels, funnels, funnels of water mixed with flames and screams and—sirens, a lot of sirens, from every direction, more and more sirens—she couldn’t hear because of the sirens pounding, pounding, pounding . . . and then she got the sense of someone else, two someones—Lyssa, overwhelmed, terrified, lost—and someone else—Emily? She’s so big now, and so powerful—

Cassie opened her eyes. The mother was staring at her, her face pale. The sirens were real. They were outside, blaring down Highway 101, the sounds of summer on the Oregon Coast. Some tourist probably got himself in trouble—

“What was that?” the mother asked.

Oh, damn. Cassie hoped she hadn’t spoken out loud. She did that sometimes when she got nailed by an outside vision. Her heart was pounding, and she loosened her grip on the poor little boy’s hand. Sweet thing that he was, he hadn’t said a word.

Cassie made herself smile. “It was a flash,” she said. “Your son here is a wonderful child. He has a strong sense of ethics. You won’t ever have to worry about him.”

“That was your flash?” the woman asked, as if she couldn’t believe it.

“Yes,” Cassie lied. “I saw pieces of his future. Once he gets beyond the usual pains of adolescence—”

Usual for someone a shade too kind, without a ruthless edge.

“—he’ll go on to do some very good things for the people around him.”

That was more than she intended to say, but she had no time for subtle language. The mother and her son would have to work out the expectations side of this.

Cassie gave a few more platitudes, a review of the boy’s history as she had seen it—and she watched the mother pale even further as it all turned out to be correct—and then she closed the boy’s hand and gently set it on the table.

He looked at her for the first time, and she realized that he wasn’t afraid of her. If anything, he seemed a bit in awe.

“That’s it?” the mother said.

Cassandra nodded. The sirens had grown quite loud, and she was getting a serious headache. She had to make a phone call before the post-vision migraine hit.

“Wow,” the mother said. “That’s amazing for ten dollars. What do you do for forty-five?”

Cassie made herself smile again. “Usually a bit more, but I rarely get a flash, like I did with your son. I had to share it.”

“Without charging us for it?” The mother seemed stunned.

“He is a special child,” Cassie said without lying. More people should have children as nice as this one.

The mother stood and slipped her hand into the pocket of her jeans. She took out some crumpled bills and pried one out of the mess. She peered at it for a moment, then set it beside the crystal ball.

“Thanks ever so much,” she said, and took her son’s hand. They headed out of the shop.

Cassie rested one hand on the table. She had to pull herself together, pull her defenses back in place. They felt as if they had shattered.

Through the gauze-covered window, she saw the mother put an arm around her son. The boy grinned up at her, and Cassie got the sense that he was pleased with the afternoon.

She staggered to the door, flipped the lock, and put out the
Closed
sign. Then she wandered into the small back room where she kept her microwave, her mugs, and her teas, as well as the herbal remedies she mixed herself for ailments caused by what her mother called her powers.

Cassie took a small headache draft, hoping it wasn’t too late. She might have to go home, take some real medicine, and climb into bed.

But first she had things to do.

She picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s dispatch. Athena Buckingham answered with a curt “Sheriff’s office.”

“Mother?” Cassie said. “Dial home. Find out if we have a message from Lyssa.”

“Lyssa? Why would she call?”

“I got a flash. Something’s wrong with Emily. Something horrible.”

“I’m on it,” Athena said, and hung up.

Cassie hung up too, then grabbed herself a glass of water. The headache was receding just a little. She sank into a chair and dialed Lyssa’s home number in Wisconsin from memory.

The phone rang and rang, but the ringing sounded off. And then, just as Cassie was about to hang up, an automated voice said,
The number you have reached has been disconnected. If you have dialed this number in error, please hang up and try again.

Cassie shut off her phone. She hadn’t reached the number in error. There was no reason for Lyssa to shut off her phone. But then, they hadn’t talked in nearly a year.

Lyssa hated having Cassie in her life. Mostly it was because of the psychic connection. Lyssa had felt as if she had no privacy as a child. Even after she’d learned how to block most of Cassie’s mental probes, she still wanted nothing to do with her mother.

It had gotten worse a year ago, or perhaps Lyssa had become blunt for the first time in her life.

I know you can raise a barrier against me and my emotions, Mother. Please do it. I don’t want you to call every time I cut my finger.

There was more to that request than cut fingers and prying mothers. Something was going drastically wrong with Lyssa’s life, and she didn’t want Cassie to know about it.

Cassie had made the mistake of flying out to see Lyssa when Emily was born. Lyssa hadn’t told her that she was pregnant, so all Cassie had felt was the sudden extreme pain. She had booked a flight and arrived at the University Hospitals and Clinic in Madison just as the baby did.

Instead of joy at the birth, Lyssa had felt angry and violated, as if the experience she had had was tainted somehow by Cassie’s presence.

Cassie had tried to ignore that, for Emily was a little miracle. Not just the ten fingers and toes and the perfect little face, but the shape of her face, the deep black of her hair and eyes, proved to Cassie that her husband, Daray, lived on in the granddaughter he would never ever meet.

It was because of Emily that Lyssa kept Cassie in her life. Or, more precisely, because of Emily’s paternal grandparents. The Walters family wanted to deny that they were related in any way to Lyssa.

Lyssa had always thought it was because on the social scale she was a nobody, and Cassie had never disabused her of that notion. But the truth of it was that with the Walters family unavailable, Daray dead, and Lyssa an only child, Emily’s extended family became her maternal grandmother, Cassie, and her great-grandmother Athena. And because of Lyssa’s refusal to return to Anchor Bay, their visits were limited to trips to Wisconsin or family vacations in specific spots.

Always, those trips were without Athena.

Can’t leave Anchor Bay without a Buckingham,
she would say. And even though Cassie wanted to disagree, she couldn’t.

Athena was right.

Cassie tried dialing again, assuming that she might have scrambled the numbers because of her headache. She hadn’t. She got the same message—the phone had been disconnected. And recently enough for that message to remain. Phone companies changed messages like that after three months.

What was going on?

Cassie felt like she was going to betray her daughter if she brought the barrier down—she had promised after all—but that flash had been so strong, so filled with terror.

Cassie held the phone, willing it to ring. And, to her surprise, it did.

She answered, a bit tentatively.

“No message,” Athena said without a preamble. “What kind of flash?”

Cassie tried to explain, but as always, words failed her. Then she told her mother that the phone had been disconnected.

“I can find them,” Cassie said, “but it means breaking my promise to Lyssa. In an emergency, I’m thinking that maybe that’s okay.”

“It won’t be to Lys,” Athena said. “Let me try first. If the phone’s disconnected, then maybe she has a new number. I can find that through the office.”

“What if it’s worse than that, Mom? What if—”

“Cassandra, phones are disconnected for two reasons: nonpayment and moving. Since she’s married to a Walters, I’m going to assume that payment wasn’t the issue. So they’ve moved.”

“From their dream house?”

Athena sighed, and Cassie got a whisper of something else, a sadness perhaps. But Cassie didn’t pursue it. When Cassie was a baby, Athena had gotten a protection spell against Cassie’s
mental abilities. The spell had long since worn away, but not before Cassie was old enough to understand what it was and why it existed.

Cassie had honored her mother’s privacy ever since.

“Cass, you’ve gotta start reading the gossip rags. You learn things.”

Cassandra felt cold. She brushed her hair out of her face. “Like what?”