The Lost Coast

by Jane Kindred

  “Liable?” I gaped at him. “What is it you think happened to Aravella?”

  “Tell me what she told you.” He stared down at me, inches away, and it seemed there was genuine fear in his eyes.

  I hugged my arms across my chest. “She told me why you think Konstantin isn’t your son.”

  “Jesus.” He wiped a hand across his mouth and turned away, the heels of his palms pressed against the ridge of his brow.

  “Lukas, you don’t think she would… Do you think she hurt herself?”

  “She made it sound like she was leaving me. Leaving Koste. But her car is still here, and there’s no record of the service coming to pick her up. She hasn’t taken the plane.” He turned back to face me. “Did she say anything about where she was going when she left here?”

  “No, she just took off. I was on my way upstairs to check out a broken window. The wind whipped a branch into it.”

  “What window?” Lukas headed for the stairs.

  “She never even went up there,” I said, following him. “Like I said, she took off.”

  Lukas threw open the closed door and stood motionless, and for a sickening instant I imagined Aravella must be lying there on the floor, but as I stepped up behind him, I saw nothing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Lukas turned his head. “Is that blood?”

  “What? Where?” I pushed past him, my heart thudding at the image I’d conjured up just seconds before. A trail of brownish splotches on the wood floor led from the window. I looked down at my palm. “I must have cut myself when I was up here last night.”

  Lukas took my hand and examined it, frowning, and then went to the window, glancing out at the tree whose branches were now docile, bobbing in a gentle breeze. “That glass isn’t from here,” he said, leaning out.

  I came to the window and looked where he was focused. A large shattered pool of glass lay at the base of the lighthouse tower to the left. “Must have been more wind damage. I never even heard it.” Lukas looked up at the tower and then pulled his head back in, staring at me. “What?”

  He turned with purpose and went back down the stairs, and I followed, a knot of anxiety forming in my stomach. Something had happened. Something I didn’t understand. Lukas crossed the living room and stepped up onto the lighthouse stairs, where he took out his keys to unlock the door but found it open. With a sickening dread, I followed him up the spiraling staircase to the top. One of the large panes was missing from the circular glass enclosure.

  Vertigo tugged at me as Lukas stepped up to it and looked out. He grasped the jagged frame on either side and made a strangled noise in his throat.

  I swallowed. “What is it?”

  “What did you do, Millie?” He turned, his face white, and grabbed me by the arms. “What the hell did you do?”

  “Lukas, what—?” I let out a shriek of surprise as he shoved me back against the wall, rattling the window with the impact of my head against it.

  “You realized the second floor wasn’t far enough, so you dragged her up here?”

  “What? I don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “My wife, Millie! She was my wife!”

  I jerked my shoulders away from him and slid out from beneath his arm, clutching the windowsill as I looked out. The drop below the tower on the coastal side was straight down to the rocks of the beach beneath it, almost the same spot where Konstantin and I might have ended up had the landing fully given way. Against the dark shadows of the rocks, Aravella’s white poet shirt made a stark contrast, her rich ebony hair snaking over it, mercifully covering her face, her body twisted at a wretched angle.

  “Oh my God. Lukas—”

  He spoke with deathly stillness behind me. “What else did she say to you?”

  I turned, shaking, feeling sick. “I never came up here. I swear to you. She left. She went out the front door, and she left.”

  “If she said something—awful; something about us—and you argued—”

  “Lukas! I didn’t do this to her! She must have jumped. I don’t know how she even got up here. I had dinner and fell asleep on the couch, and I woke up just now.”

  He shook his head as if he didn’t believe me and took out his phone, dialing carefully, just three numbers. “There’s been an accident,” he said. “My wife is dead.”

  * * * * *

  A team from the sheriff’s department recovered Aravella’s body. There was another path farther up the coast—the path Lukas had used to come back up to the house after his dive that first day—and for the rest of the afternoon, detectives and technicians came and went, taking pictures and measurements in a kind of macabre parade before Aravella was finally driven away by ambulance, as if something could be done for her.

  I sat, numbly answering questions from the detectives assigned to take our statements. The text Aravella had sent to Lukas seemed to confirm that her death was a premeditated suicide, but my inability to account for how I’d managed to sleep through the fall, how Aravella had gotten into the tower without my assistance or awareness, was suspect. Somehow, the story had also reached the bureau that Aravella and I had fought in the Such Stuff Café in town that same day.

  But I wasn’t the only one whose story gave them pause. Aravella’s family in Thessaloniki, when they heard the news, informed the bureau that Aravella had been afraid of Lukas, and that he’d threatened to kill her on more than one occasion. He sat stonily as a pair of detectives questioned us in the living room of the cottage, and didn’t deny it.

  “I’m sure I did say that,” he agreed. “More than a few times. That doesn’t mean I had any intention of actually doing it.”

  “Can you account for your whereabouts yesterday evening?” The female detective made notes on an electronic tablet while she spoke. She’d said her name, but I’d forgotten it. I glanced at her nametag. L. Pettigrew.

  Lukas nodded. “I was at the winery. I slept there. And no, no one can corroborate that, unfortunately. I was alone.”

  And then came the worst question of all. “I understand you and Ms. Lang had a prior involvement.” Detective Pettigrew glanced at me as if to gauge my reaction. I must have looked guilty as hell.

  “We dated several years ago,” Lukas replied without looking in my direction. “Before Aravella and I were married.”

  “And was your wife aware of this?”

  “She was.”

  The detective glanced at me once more. “And did you resume this relationship recently?”

  “No!” I blushed as the word came out with too much vehemence.

  “Absolutely not,” Lukas said at the same time. “Ms. Lang is here as a physical therapist for my son.”

  The mention of Konstantin sent my heart plummeting into my stomach. In the shock of seeing Aravella’s body on the rocks and the numbness that had gripped me in the face of being a suspect in her death, I hadn’t even thought of what this would mean to Koste.

  “Who’s with him now?” I murmured to Lukas. “Who’s with Konstantin?”

  “Aunt Clara and Aunt Signe are at the house with him.”

  “Don’t you think we should…?”

  “He’s my son, Millie. I’ll decide how and when to tell him his mother is dead.”

  “That’s quite a shiner you have there, Ms. Lang.” The male detective, T. Harbinger—nothing ominous about that—nodded at my bruises. “How’d you come by that?”

  “I slid down the cliff trail in the rain the other night. Part of the hillside collapsed.”

  “What were you doing out on the cliff in the rain?”

  “My son sleepwalks,” said Lukas before I could answer. “He was staying here at the cottage with Ms. Lang, and he went outside in the middle of the night. She went after him and kept him from getting swept over the edge.”

  I cast a grateful look at Lukas, but
his face remained stoic. He hadn’t blamed me for what had happened to Konstantin, but he was blaming me for this. Could he really believe I had something to do with Aravella’s death?

  Detective Pettigrew tapped a note into her tablet and then slipped it into her pocket. “I think we’re done here for now, Mr. Strand, Ms. Lang. Though we’ll need to speak with the residents at the house.” Lukas nodded and rose to escort them. The detective glanced at me. “Will you be available if we have further questions?”

  “I…” My eyes darted to Lukas. “I was planning to return home to San Francisco.”

  Pettigrew frowned. “I’d advise you to postpone those plans, Ms. Lang. Just until we complete our investigation.” She gave me a sharp look, as if challenging me. “Think you can do that?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Yes.”

  She seemed satisfied, and the three of them filed out of the cottage, leaving me alone in the drafty little house with its ominously missing windows. Detectives had been tromping up and down both sets of stairs all afternoon, leaving the doors wide open, and I rose to lock the tower and close the upstairs bedroom. I still had no idea what to do about the broken glass. Was I allowed to clean it up? They’d taken a sample of the blood on the floor. I supposed I could clean that. With a damp cloth from the bathroom, I got down on my knees and scrubbed at the trail of dots, crawling slowly over the floor until I reached the window.

  It was getting dark, and the tree branch sticking through the empty frame seemed like a menacing arm. I couldn’t leave it gaping like this for another night. I’d seen pushpins in a bulletin board downstairs that ought to hold a towel in place. I rinsed the bloodstained rag in the sink and took a towel from the hamper, retrieved a handful of pushpins from the kitchen and headed back to the bedroom to tack the towel over the window, stretching it taut. It wasn’t much of a barrier, but it made me feel better.

  Now that that was done, I had nothing to occupy my mind to blot out the image of Aravella’s twisted body. I sat abruptly on the floor and sobbed, grieving for a woman I’d barely known and had only glimpsed in her last few hours what she might have gone through in her life. But mostly I was grieving for Konstantin. It wasn’t fair. What was he going to do without her? I’d never known my mother, and the loss had been huge. What would it have been like to have had her for a short time—to have known and loved her, and to have been loved as only a mother could—only to have her taken away? Who was going to protect him and advocate for him against Lukas’s bitterness?

  I cried until I was tapped out and emotionally exhausted.

  Remembering that I hadn’t eaten anything today, I went down to the kitchen on autopilot, figuring I had to eat something, though I had no real desire to. When I looked in the fridge, I realized I’d taken Konstantin’s gluten-free meal last night instead of the one marked for me. And then Aravella’s words came back to me. Is it possible he’s being poisoned?

  I’d eaten Konstantin’s meal, prepared especially for him, and I’d fallen asleep immediately afterward with no memory of how I’d undressed or gotten into my bed—or how my hand had been cut. And it wasn’t the first time. I’d eaten the salmon Karolina had prepared for him the evening before, and I’d slept for half a day.

  I stared at the container, thinking of the times Konstantin had gone into a fugue. Each time, he’d just finished one of Karolina’s meals. The night he’d sleepwalked, he’d eaten and fallen straight into bed.

  There was something familiar about the way I’d felt the past two nights, the instant drowsiness, finding myself in bed without remembering going there… Before I’d gotten the prescription for my antianxiety meds, I’d tried one of the sleep aids that was always being advertised on TV. I had hated it, hated the feeling of not quite being in control of myself. It wasn’t worth the deep sleep.

  Could Karolina be dosing Konstantin with sleeping pills?

  Though it wasn’t foolproof, there was one way to test the theory. If I ate the same meal as last night, the one that hadn’t been intended for Konstantin, and I passed out again, it might simply mean that Karolina’s food was so fantastic it induced food coma. And if I didn’t have a similar experience? Well, it wouldn’t prove anything, but I’d have reason to suspect that perhaps Aravella had been onto something.

  I heated the ravioli and sat at the table to eat, just to remove any natural temptation to zonk out afterward. It tasted just as good as the night before. And three hours later, I was wide awake. I even had a cup of chamomile tea when the evening wore on and my jangled nerves from the morning’s tragedy prevented me from winding down. It had no effect, and after the fire had burned out and I’d gone to bed, I lay for several hours tossing and turning, trying to get the image of Aravella out of my head.

  When I finally slept, the vivid dreams I’d been having before I’d started eating Konstantin’s food returned. My mother once more appeared to me, this time in clear detail, her face a bit like mine with a square chin where mine was pointed, her eyes the same grayish blue. Her dark auburn hair was long with the feathery bangs of the ’80s, and she wore a pair of faded jeans with a bright aqua-blue peasant top.

  She was barefoot and standing in a sun-dappled grove of redwoods, holding her hand out to me. “Emmy, come quickly,” she beckoned.

  “Emmy?” I shook my head. “I’m Millie.”

  Beverly’s eyes grew sad. “Oh, Emmy, you’re all grown up already. There was so much I wanted for you. So much I needed to tell you. You’re not safe outside the Grove. You have to come with me so I can explain.”

  “Mamma,” I said plaintively, the only time I’d ever said that word and meant my own. “Mamma, I don’t know where the Grove is. I’m lost.”

  “Sweetheart, I can’t reach you from here. You have to come take my hand. Before it’s too late.”

  I stepped forward, but the distance between us seemed to double. “Mamma!”

  She was still holding out her hand, but she turned her head at a sound behind her in the trees. Her hand fell to her side, and the woods around us went still, so that I heard her voice quite clearly, though she almost whispered the words. “Emmy—Millie—run!”

  “Mamma!” I tried to run toward her, but a sudden heat flared from the center of the grove as if it came from her. Something roared, like a ravenous monster. It was a sound I knew. It was the sound of fire.

  My mother screamed as flame billowed around her like a violent cloud, and I couldn’t get close, couldn’t see her anymore. I dashed frantically back and forth at the perimeter of the grove, unable to find a way in, unable to save her. And then I heard her cry out, “Please, not the baby! Not Emmy! Please save my baby!” Her voice dissolved into a horrific sound of pain and fear, and it was both of ours, and I was sobbing, “Mamma! Mamma!” when a sudden crash jarred me from the dream.

  Chapter Twelve

  I lay with my heart pounding for a moment, disoriented by the swift awakening, trying to separate myself from the vivid realism of the dream and understand what had woken me. The noise had come from directly above me in the room with the broken window. I eased myself out of bed, moving with careful steps, gripped by the idea that someone had broken in, though there was no one out here this close to the coast but the Strands, and anyone who tried to approach the grounds would have been seen.

  Pulling on my robe and my Sherpa socks, I tiptoed out into the kitchen to grab the fire extinguisher off the wall of the pantry—the only object I could think of through the stuttering beat of anxiety that I might be able to wield against an intruder. I crept upstairs and threw the door of the master bedroom open, shoving the extinguisher against it in case someone hid behind it. The door banged hollowly against the wall. The room was empty, but the towel I’d tacked up over the missing pane had been torn free, and the intrusive branch had snapped and fallen to the floor.

  I went closer, feeling unreasonably spooked, and bent to pick up the branch. The bark was scarred
with a dark, jagged line like the stroke of lightning, and the smell of smoke hung sharp in the air as distinctly as if the long-ago fire that had ravaged this room had just happened. When I set the branch down, dust scattered across the floor in the breeze from the empty window frame, but it was unusual—dark flakes and bits of gray powder—and seemed to be coming from the floor beneath the unfinished wall. I rubbed some between my fingers. Ash. What the hell was going on here?

  I wiped my fingers on my robe as I rose and backed out of the room, pulling the door firmly shut. Beneath my sleeve, my arm was throbbing, and when I went down to the bathroom and slipped off the robe to examine it, my scars were raised and inflamed like a recent burn. I shook my head. It wasn’t a burn. I hadn’t burned myself. But it felt like one. I turned on the cold water and leaned down to the faucet, letting it run over the heated flesh.

  My mother’s desperate cries came back to me from the dream, and I stood at the sink weeping while the water rolled over my skin. In the mirror, even with tears running down my face, I saw Beverly in me. Of course, she was the Beverly I’d invented in a dream. But she’d felt real. Her love for me felt real. I needed to talk to Lumi.

  After I’d showered and found a gauze bandage to cover my scar, I dressed in a loose, white cotton blouse with the skirt and tights I’d worn the first night here. Damn, it felt like ages ago, but I’d only been here a week. The little suede boots were actually quite comfortable for walking, with a thick rubber heel, and I felt I ought to be able to handle the thirty-minute walk into Jerusalem. It looked cold today, so I took my coat and hat again, added a scarf and headed out.

  It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway to Jerusalem that I should have let someone at the house know where I was going. I took out my phone to text Lukas, but I’d forgotten to charge it. I’d probably be back before they even noticed I was gone, anyway. Lukas had far more important things to worry about at the moment. My heart ached again at the thought of Konstantin and what he must be going through. I wouldn’t stay long in town. I needed to get back and see if there was anything I could do to help him, to help Lukas.