Screaming echoed around Emily …
. . . horrifying and deep, screaming like she never heard before. She coughed the water out of her lungs and breathed, and then she turned around, reaching for the dock as she did.
The air was filled with black smoke and an awful rancid burning smell. She could recognize part of the smell—hair burning—but the rest was something she had never encountered before.
The inky blackness poured off the dock and across the lake, engulfing her. She grabbed the ancient wood, then saw through the slats what was burning.
It was Daddy.
She screamed for him, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He was slapping himself and dancing on the top of the dock, trying to put out the fire, which seemed to come from his chest and burn upwards. . . .
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2003 by White Mist Mountain, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0599-0
eISBN-13: 978-1-45166-440-9
First Pocket Books printing November 2003
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover design by John Vairo, Jr.; front cover illustration by Rowena Morrill
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Dean Wesley Smith with love.
Now you get to say I told you so.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1: The First Death July
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part 2: The Prodigal Daughter Returns November
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part 3: Digging into The Past
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part 4: Exodus
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part 5: Digging into The Past
Chapter Thirty-Four
Part 6: The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Part 7: Digging into The Past
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Part 8: And a Little Child Shall Lead Them
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Acknowledgments
I owe a great deal of gratitude to a lot of people on this project. Thanks go first and foremost to John Ordover, for pushing me and for tolerating the mystical writer’s talk. Thanks also to Dean, who held me up the whole way. And a great deal of thanks go to John Helfers, Larry Segriff, and Martin H. Greenberg, who got me to write the first stories set in Seavy County.
THE FIRST DEATH
July
One
Madison. Wisconsin
On the hottest day of the year, Emily Buckingham—who, until two months before, had been known as Emily Walters—took her bike out of the garage, filled two bottles of water, stuck them in the bottle cages, and dusted off her bike helmet. If she got caught, she would say she was just out for a ride, and she got lost.
Her mom might not believe that, but there’d be no proof. And proof, Emily knew from watching too many cop show reruns while Mommy was teaching summer school, was all that mattered. Mommy could guess all she wanted, but she’d never really know the truth.
Sophia, this week’s baby-sitter, had the radio on really loud in the kitchen. Emily could hear it on the porch of the old house the university rented cheap to needy professors. Emily hated the house. It’d been built by some famous Frank guy who seemed to like sloping windows and lots of stone and sixties crap that Mommy said was expensive but ugly.
Emily thought the whole house was ugly, even the living room, which was supposed to be the centerpiece. The house was so ancient that it didn’t have air-conditioning, and regular air didn’t flow right, so the porch was the only comfortable place in this heat spell.
At lunch—which Emily had to make because Sophia was too wrapped up in some phone conversation with a guy named Jimmy, who’d promised her he’d help with her green cards and her Visa and had somehow gone back on that promise—the guy on the radio news announced it was ninety-nine degrees with 95 percent humidity, and it was only going to get hotter. He recommended everybody hunker down and stay cool and drink a lot of fluids, which made Emily remember the water bottles, because she would have forgotten otherwise.
After she finished her peanut butter sandwich, she told Sophia she was going outside, but she didn’t say where. Sophia waved at her, probably thinking more about the Visa than about Emily. One thing about Emily, her mom always said, she was a good kid.
And this time, being a good kid was going to work in Emily’s favor.
When she went out into the heat, she almost changed her mind. It felt hotter than ninety-nine degrees with 95 percent humidity. It always felt hotter in this crummy neighborhood so far away from the lake.
Here the houses were crammed together like kids on a bus, and the trees, even though they gave shade, made everything seem even more crowded. The streets were hilly, and Camp Randall Stadium was nearby, which Mommy said would be a really big pain in the fall.
Emily didn’t want to be here in the fall. She didn’t want to be here now, but she didn’t have a lot of choice. Mommy let Daddy have the big house on Lake Mendota in the divorce, kinda like a consolation prize, Mommy said, although having a house didn’t seem like a real consolation to Emily for losing the whole family.
Mommy changed her last name and said Emily had to do the same thing, which Emily hadn’t liked but hadn’t known how to argue. The lawyer lady, who had lots of big teeth and even bigger hair and wore too much perfume, had put a hand on Emily’s shoulder and said, Trust me, honey, it’s for the best.
But it wasn’t for the best.
People didn’t lose their daddies because “his personality has changed, sweetheart” and b
ecause some judge thought that was a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal. Daddy was still Daddy, he just couldn’t be home as much, and when he was home, he couldn’t spend as much time with her and Mommy.
Then Daddy said that thing no one would say what it was and everything went bad and he got to keep all his family money, which somehow paid for the house, and Mommy got to keep her job and Emily got to keep her clothes and her books and her toys and nothing else, not even her daddy.
And no one asked her what she wanted, not then, and not now. They just figured she’d live with it, because they were.
They figured her wrong.
But then, they always figured her wrong. Emily might have been a good girl, but that was mostly because she was interested in good-girl things. She thought kids who broke the rules at school were stupid because school was interesting and a whole lot better than staying at home by yourself all summer, watching reruns on TV and Jerry Springer and this really bad soap opera in Spanish that her other baby-sitter, Inez, liked. Emily was learning Spanish from the show and from Inez, whose English wasn’t too good, but that wasn’t like sitting in class.
Nothing was.
This fall, Emily’d have to go to a whole new school because they lived in this crummy neighborhood now, where there wasn’t a lot of kids and where what kids who lived here were pretty stuck up. Emily had been alone all summer, and reading when she wasn’t watching TV, and thinking a lot about Daddy being alone all summer.
So she came up with the plan.
She had to pick the right day because it would take a long time to ride from Camp Randall to Shorewood. She’d have to stay away from University Avenue because, when it merged with Campus Drive, it got lots of lanes and stoplights and people not caring who they hit when they went too fast around corners.
Emily figured Old Middleton Road was her best bet, and one afternoon, she got Inez to drive it for her so that she could see it. That worked kinda, although Inez kept telling Mommy that Emily was being weird, wanting to see her old house and everything, even though the house was on the opposite side of University from Old Middleton Road.
Inez wasn’t dumb, which was why Emily had to pick a Sophia day to take the bike.
There weren’t going to be a lot more Sophia days because Mommy didn’t like the mess she left the house in, so on days without Inez, Emily might have to do something lame like day care on campus. The University of Wisconsin sponsored day care for kids all summer long, but the kids who were usually there were little kids, not ten-year-olds. Ten-year-olds were supposed to be at camp or summer school or on vacation, not trying to read while some baby screamed his lungs out.
Emily was going to ask Daddy if he could take her on non-Inez days, even if the judge didn’t like it. Daddy could afford somebody to come in and watch both of them to make sure nothing bad happened, although Emily wasn’t sure what bad stuff could happen around Daddy.
Of course, she hadn’t seen him a lot since his personality changed, but in court, his lawyer said he’d be better if he took drugs. Mommy said the problem was there was no guarantee he’d take the drugs, but Emily thought there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t either.
So when she called this morning and listened to the phone ring, her stomach twisting so much she wasn’t sure her breakfast bar would stay down, and heard Daddy’s familiar deep voice saying, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” she just knew he was taking the drugs and he’d be fine, he’d be the Daddy who told her stories and rode her around on his shoulder and taught her how to ride this very bike.
It took all of Emily’s patience to get through lunch, which would be the last time Sophia would notice where she was. Even so, Emily was real quiet when she took out the bike, and she was real responsible too, because even though it was hot, she strapped her helmet on first thing.
She coasted down the hill to the intersection, where she took a right. She knew if she kept going west, she’d hit Old Middleton, and from there it was pretty much a straight shot to Whitney Way. Somewhere near there—she hadn’t scoped this part out—she’d have to cross at the lights and ride for a treacherous block or two on University.
Then she’d go into her old neighborhood and maybe ride around it a bit because she hadn’t done that since last summer, which was a really long time ago. When she got to her old house, which Daddy had built just before she was born on his family’s property near Lake Mendota, she’d go around to the back to the cabana, lock her bike inside, and put on her swimming suit.
It would be an easy visit, her and Daddy, not talking a lot (unless he wanted to), and just enjoying being together, because, after all, he had to miss her as much as she missed him.
Because that last day in the court, where she had to go talk to the judge all by herself, and the judge asked her weird questions about Daddy, none of which seemed to make any sense, and then asked her who she’d rather live with, Mommy or Daddy, and Emily said both. On that day, Daddy had put his arms around her and told her she was just great and everything would be fine, she would see, and he never meant any of that bad stuff anyway, that was just the illness talking.
And she couldn’t ask what he meant about the bad stuff and being sick because Mommy’s lawyer with the big teeth and the big hair whisked her away and made her sit outside with some guy in a uniform while they waited for the judge to ask some more questions to both Mommy and Daddy.
Good thing Emily had brought a book.
But then, she always brought a book. She even had one in the bike pack Mommy had given her for her birthday. A book and her swimming suit and a towel and a candy bar and an apple in case she got hungry and Daddy didn’t have any kid food.
So Emily rode and followed the plan, even though it was really hot and her T-shirt stuck to her back, and icky sweat ran down her neck from her helmet. She drank most of the water by the time she got to Whitney Way and stared at all the cars zooming from one place to the next, making that whooshing sound as they went by.
And part of her, the good-girl part, understood why her Mommy and Daddy never wanted her to ride on this side of University Avenue, why when she lived in her old house she had to stay in the neighborhood and ride the windy streets that usually ended in a dead end.
She almost turned around, with all the cars and being by herself and no one knowing who she was, and what if one hit her? Who would tell Mommy? And then Emily decided she just had to be real careful. It was up to her to be vigilant, Mommy always said, because other people rarely were.
Emily didn’t know how long she waited at the light on Whitney Way, so that she could merge with the traffic on University, but when she finally got enough guts to go, she rode really fast. Her bike wobbled under her legs, and she was afraid it would slip sideways like it did sometimes on gravel, but she was as careful as she could be, and vigilant too, even though some of the cars passed so close they almost touched her, and the wind from them going by made her bike wobble all the more.
She peddled just a little ways on University, but it was enough, with the guardrail on one side and the trees not giving any shade and the cars on the other, whooshing like they had no idea there was a kid nearby struggling to stay on a bike.
Then she saw a familiar street, all narrow near the little bridge, and she turned on it, even though that street wasn’t part of the plan. She coasted down the incline toward the cross streets and looked at houses she hadn’t seen for almost a year.
Real houses. They were mostly big, like houses were supposed to be, and people who lived there had real cars like SUVs. They had yards and flowers and trees all their own and the other houses weren’t all crammed next to them so that you could hear the neighbors shouting at each other, even if it was in Indonesian.
Emily was kinda relieved that everything looked as familiar as it did. At one point on the ride when she was beginning to wonder if she had gone right past Old Middleton and hadn’t even noticed, she also got scared thinking she might not recognize anything when she got to her old neighbo
rhood.
But everything looked the same, right down to the cars, and it didn’t take her long at all to find her old house.
It was still at the bottom of an incline, which Daddy used to complain about in the spring because the snow would melt and the water would run down the driveway, mix with the rain, and flood the garage. He used to say it was the only flaw in the design and Mommy would laugh because they couldn’t move the garage anywhere better without losing their view of the lake.
Emily took the old bike path around the side of the garage where no one could see her. Everything had grown up weedy and tall, even the dandelions, whose fluff floated in the humid air.
Some things had changed—Mommy would never have let the garden grow over like this, and she would have made Daddy or someone (even Emily, maybe) mow the lawn.
The house didn’t look as good as she remembered either. The more she compared it to the Frank house, the bigger this house got, kind of like her mind made it grow. If she’d thought about it, really thought about it, she would have known it wasn’t that big—what rooms would fill all that extra space?—but she hadn’t thought about it.
All she’d thought about was the garden, with its roses and peony shrubs and bleeding hearts, and all those other plants whose names she didn’t know but grew taller than she was, with big green leaves that reached for the sky. The garden was like a fence, even more so now that it was overgrown, but in her memory, in her imagination, the garden was what separated her house from all the neighbors’.
In reality, the yard was so big, no neighbor house was even nearby. Emily had to squint through the trees to see the nearest house, a big red thing that had a pitched roof and a covered porch.
Her daddy’s house seemed smaller than that. The second story was narrower and the windows weren’t as big, and the porch was smaller than the one in the back of the Frank house. In fact, her daddy’s house didn’t look a lot bigger than the Frank house, although it was prettier with its light blue paint and the big modern windows and its stained-glass front door.
Fantasy Life Page 1