Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He put the squad into reverse, carefully maneuvering it out of position. If he went too far, he’d get stuck in the ditch and he’d be of no use to anyone.

  The route through the housing development wasn’t finished yet, and only parts of it were paved. But Bay Hills was well named. It was on a hill, and the roads would be as clear as roads could be, if he could remember which ones were paved and which ones weren’t. He should have warned Lyssa that he was going to go very slowly, that he would be feeling his way through the detour by braille.

  Lyssa. He turned the wheel, got onto the highway, and waited for her to turn around as well. She maneuvered that little Bug with confidence, and he was glad. She was going to need all of her driving skills to get through the housing development and across the driveway to Cliffside House.

  Although he hadn’t asked her if that was where she was going. Maybe she hadn’t called ahead, which could be why Athena hadn’t said anything.

  Sometimes Cassandra Buckingham kept information from her mother—in fact, Cassandra kept information from everyone. Early in his tenure as sheriff, Gabriel had gone to her, asking if she would warn him when something awful was going to happen.

  She had given him a bleak look and refused. When he’d asked why, she’d said, After the first week, you would regret your request.

  He was never completely certain what she had meant by that—whether she thought she would visit him a lot, or whether her warnings would be too hard to understand.

  It didn’t matter. Every time he’d asked her, and he made a point of it once a quarter, she’d refused. And after that first time, she’d never offered an explanation.

  Although Athena had once told him that Cassandra was flattered by Gabriel’s attentions. No one outside the family has ever shown that much faith in her abilities, Athena had said.

  It seems warranted, Gabriel said.

  Athena had nodded. My daughter has always been a frightening person, she had said, then changed the subject.

  A frightening person and about as different from Lyssa as anyone could be.

  He checked the rearview mirror. Lyssa was creeping along behind him, her headlights as low as she could make them and still see. As he approached the turn into Bay Hills, he realized that Zeke had never come back from his reconnoiter into the forest. Perhaps he had gone farther than Gabriel had wanted him to. And if the road was clear as Lyssa said it had been, then Zeke wouldn’t have had any problem with water.

  Still, Gabriel thumbed on the radio unit in the car.

  “Dispatch.” Athena sounded exhausted.

  “I’m taking your granddaughter through Bay Hill,” he said.

  “Then pay attention to your driving.”

  “I will after this. Get Suzette. Remind her that Zeke went to check on road conditions half a mile up.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “Not if you want me to pay attention to the drive.”

  “A half mile up? You should have seen him,” Athena said.

  “Why do you think I want Suzette to check?”

  “All right.”

  Athena started to cough and shut off the mike, to spare his ears. Gabriel had almost signed off before she turned her unit back on.

  “Big slide half a mile west of Joe’s Tavern,” she said. “ODOT has decided to close 19. We’re alone out here, Gabe.”

  “That’s news. I always thought we were.”

  “Lyssa was lucky to make it through. I doubt we’ll see anyone else tonight.”

  “Or for days, if the slide is as big as you say.” He shivered once and glanced in the rearview. Lyssa was still behind him.

  She had made it at the very last moment. If she had been a half an hour later, she wouldn’t be here now, and he wouldn’t be leading her up a dark hill, near rows of half-finished houses.

  The houses looked like bombed skeletons in the dark. He’d seen bombed homes, dozens of them, in his travels. Some were old—World War II ruins that no one had bothered to clean up—and others were recent. He had been stunned at the levels of destruction he’d seen in the Middle East.

  His thoughts were taking a dark turn this night, and he wasn’t sure why. He still hadn’t lost that uneasy feeling he’d had earlier, the feeling that something was coming, something big.

  Had he been thinking about Lyssa?

  “Since ODOT’s shutting everything down,” Athena said, “I’m going to contact Suzette, and then head home. She’s obviously not coming in tonight for dispatch. You want me to turn this over to South County?”

  “Looks like you’ll have to. If I change my mind, I’ll take dispatch tonight.”

  “And sleep through all the calls. Better to let South County take it,” Athena said. “They’re not getting the brunt of this storm.”

  “We can argue about it later.” The road was veering slightly left. “I’ve got to pay attention to the road. Thanks for staying late, Athena.”

  “Happy to do it,” she said, and signed off.

  He followed the narrow lane past more skeletal houses. This side of the hill was easy; the roads were mostly in and had been paved for the construction equipment. It was the other side that had him worried.

  Maybe it was foolhardy to take Lyssa through here. He had been planning to make the drive anyway—it was the only way he would get home—but he hadn’t planned to lead anyone through this mess, especially someone as tired as Lyssa looked.

  He hadn’t recognized her at first. She had looked so exhausted through that car window, her hair hanging limply around her face, her eyes sunken into her skull. He had never seen her like that, not even in her early days at Seavy County Elementary, when she had been sad, and angrier than any other child he had ever met.

  There had been lines around Lyssa’s mouth, sorrow lines, and a hollowness to her cheeks that hadn’t seemed like her at all. But he would have known it was her instantly if he had first looked in the backseat.

  Her daughter looked just like Lyssa had at that age, right down to the sad little mouth and sorrowful droop to her shoulders. Something had happened to the two of them, something he didn’t know about.

  The road crested at the top of Bay Hill. The developers had logged most of the trees, and now this area had a view of the ocean. Gabriel hadn’t been able to do anything about the deforestation, even though a number of people had asked him to. The land was private, and in Oregon, private landowners could log even when the government could not.

  He checked his rearview mirror. Lyssa had managed to keep pace with him. He was glad for that, because this was where the road got tricky.

  From now on, it wasn’t accurate to call this a road. He was going to take her on a series of unfinished blocks, and not a minuscule number of driveways, all of which were paved. He had mapped this route out at the beginning of the rainy season, knowing he might need it this year. The weather forecasters had predicted a difficult winter—and they had been right.

  He used his blinker before turning west and starting down the steep incline. The road was slick and mud-covered. His tires slid once, then caught. He had no idea what kind of steering system the Bug had, but he hoped it was good.

  He drove with one eye on the road, and the other on his rearview mirror. If Lyssa got into trouble, he wanted to see it the moment it happened.

  Gabriel doubted he would have brought any other nonresident along this route. He remembered the Lyssa of their teen years. She had been hell behind the wheel of a car, trying things that had terrified him then and made him smile now.

  Lyssa had been the adventurous one, perhaps because she’d felt she had nothing to lose. He had always held back, at times even refusing to get into a car with her, despite his crush on her.

  He turned south again, heading toward a finished Georgian that looked terribly out of place. It had been the only house on this crest two years ago. Then the owner had died, the family—who had apparently never been here—sold the land and the house, and developers bought everything. Now the solid b
rick house would be the gatekeeper’s cottage once this development became the gated community the developers had promised. The house, once a mansion on a hill, would be the smallest building in a series of cookie-cutter homes.

  He turned west again, toward the ocean. He couldn’t see it, not with the rain and the darkness and the wind, but he didn’t need to. Its familiar salty odor filtered its way into the car.

  What must Lyssa be thinking about all of this? And why was she coming back here? She had left the place so adamantly all those years ago.

  He remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. The last time he had seen her had been graduation night, the night everything changed.

  The graduation ceremony had been held in the old high school (which was now the middle school) on one of Anchor Bay’s rare hot days. The wind had blown in from the east, bringing the hot temperatures off the Columbia River gorge onto the coast. The temperature swelled to ninety degrees, and the high school gym, which doubled as the auditorium, had no airconditioning.

  Gabriel had sat near the last row, wearing a suit beneath that ridiculous graduation gown, clutching his diploma in its fake-sheepskin case in his left hand, ridiculously proud that he had moved his red-and-gold tassel from one side of his flat cap to the other.

  The band was playing “Pomp and Circumstance” badly because all the good players were graduating and so couldn’t sit in on the performance, as the graduates filed out row by row. They hadn’t cheered, they hadn’t thrown their caps in the air, because Principal Barger had told them if there was misbehavior, none of them would get their diplomas, and they all waited patiently, in the growing heat, to get out into the first free summer of their lives.

  Gabriel had known of a party to be held on Pelz Beach, just outside the village, and his stomach was in a knot because he had finally worked up enough courage to ask Lyssa Buckingham to join him. He figured they had the entire summer ahead of them, no matter what their future plans were, and he hoped to make that summer one neither of them would forget.

  He watched her file out with the rest of the B’s. She looked beautiful, even in her cap and gown. Her black hair was up, her pale skin flushed, and her eyes sparkling. She seemed to be lit from within.

  Gabriel waited, somewhat impatiently, for his row to be called. By the time he got through the double doors into the parking lot, Lyssa was standing stoically beside her mother while her grandmother took pictures.

  Gabriel had thought he was in luck. He hurried over to them, ignoring his own parents, who were shouting his name, and asked Lyssa if he could talk to her.

  She looked at him as if she hadn’t given him any thought since their chemistry lab sophomore year, then smiled and said sure. He led her to a row of parked cars before he told her, almost in a whisper, that there was a party at Pelz Beach.

  Before he could ask her to join him at it, she interrupted, telling him that she couldn’t go to any party. She had bought a car, she said, and it was packed with her belongings. She wasn’t even going home that night. She was driving east and south, taking her time. She figured that by the time she got to Austin, she would know a large part of America.

  She sounded so happy and excited. He had never seen this side of Lyssa.

  Anchor Bay thinks it’s the center of the universe, she had said to him that night, and that’s just wrong. If these people ever escaped this little dump, they’d know they don’t matter at all. They’d see what the universe is really like.

  He had always known that his conversation with her on graduation night was the catalyst for his own travels. At first, part of him wanted to be as erudite as she was—a world traveler, someone with a lot of experiences, so that when Lyssa came home to visit her family, he could impress her with all that he’d done.

  Only she never came home. Then she got married to a man from a famous family and had a child.

  That had been years and two serious relationships ago for Gabriel. He had thought he was long past Lyssa Buckingham, but he should have known better. He had simply shoved her memory aside, trying not to think of her, even as he worked with her grandmother and walked the same sidewalks he had walked when he had tried to hang out in the same crowd Lyssa had.

  She had been so popular then, the kind of popular that some people were with no effort at all—and without knowing it. Lyssa put no premium on Anchor Bay. She had made it clear from the first moment Gabriel had met her that she wanted out.

  He finally found the last turn that led out of the development. His tires bounced over ruts in the road, created out of mud by all the construction vehicles that had been driving in and out of this place for the past several months.

  He waited at the exit for Lyssa and she bounced out much as he had, her back tires sliding slightly. Then, in case she didn’t remember this part of Anchor Bay, he led her down a side street to Highway 101.

  The highway was empty, as it often was in the winter at this time of night. The halogen streetlamps made the rain glow yellow and gave the highway’s black surface golden highlights. All of the tourist shops were boarded up. Only the local strip bar, Mona’s Oasis, was open, and it appeared to be doing its usual winter business—a handful of drunk local men playing pool. No cars were parked outside, which meant that the men had walked, which also meant that they wouldn’t be Gabriel’s problem later on.

  He stopped the squad in the cable-company parking lot and waited. Lyssa’s Bug tooled down the hill and stopped beside his. He rolled his window down.

  She rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned toward him.

  “You gonna be okay from here on out?” he asked. “The highway hasn’t changed too much.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She looked even more tired than she had before.

  Her daughter was sitting up in the backseat, fists rubbing her eyes. She didn’t seem to have any interest in Gabriel at all.

  “You going to your mom’s?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately.” Lyssa’s tone was dry, and in it, he heard the old Lyssa, the one who had told him that Anchor Bay was not the center of the universe.

  “Remember that driveway is vicious on nights like this,” he said, suddenly glad he wasn’t going to accompany her to the house. He didn’t need to get entangled in all the family drama between Lyssa, Cassie, and Athena. Especially now that Athena worked for him.

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Lyssa hesitated, as if she were going to say something else.

  His breath caught, and he found himself wondering what hold she had on him. Was it memory or was it something more?

  “Thanks,” she said after that brief pause. “I would never have gotten through there if it weren’t for you.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “Maybe not for you, but I’m not sure I could have made it back through the corridor. It’s been a long trip.”

  “Well,” he said, feeling awkward, “I’m glad I could be of help.”

  Then he rolled his window back up before he could embarrass himself.

  Lyssa smiled at him and waggled her fingers, the kind of wave that grown-ups gave children. He wasn’t even sure she was aware she had done that.

  Then she backed the car out of the lot and turned south on 101.

  The daughter turned around then, her face pressed against the back window, surrounded by a legion of stuffed animals. He had been wrong to compare her to the childhood Lyssa. This girl’s look was cold and empty.

  A shiver ran down his back, and a memory tickled at the back of his brain, something his father used to say about Cliffside House and the women who lived there.

  They hold the destiny of Anchor Bay in their hands.

  Eleven

  Cliffside House

  The house was too big.

  Cassandra stood in the entry hall—which Athena more accurately called the Great Hall—and wrung her hands. When she was a child, Cassie never knew what wringing hands were, but over the years, as she threaded her fingers together and twisted them, rubbing her t
humbs against the side of her palm or her wrists, she realized she was wringing her hands as if they were a wash towel.

  She had developed a lot of nervous ticks in the last three decades, but the hand-wringing bothered her the most.

  She stopped, wiped her hands against her jeans, and then stuck her thumbs in her back pockets. Her feet were bare, and the stone beneath them was cold, but she didn’t go get shoes. For one thing, her bedroom was too far away—three stories and half a wing from the entry—and for another, she wanted to seem casual when Lyssa arrived.

  Lyssa, who should have been here by now. Cassie had sensed her hours ago. Lyssa and Emily were exhausted, pushed beyond their limits, and heading here because it was the end of the earth.

  At least, that’s what Emily thought. Then Cassie shut her granddaughter out of her mind. People didn’t like it when Cassie knew what they were thinking, and the last thing she wanted to do was alienate her granddaughter.

  Grandmothers and granddaughters were supposed to have better relationships than mothers and daughters. Of course, considering the relationship that Cassie and Lyssa had, any relationship would be better.

  Cassie looked at the black stone walls, glistening in bright overhead lights. Cliffside House was made of basalt, black lava rock that shined as if it had hardened wet.

  The legend was that Cliffside House had risen from the cliff it was built on, in the middle of a thunderstorm, appearing like a castle in the fog. The legend first came from the local tribes that wandered up and down the coast. There were reports of Cliffside House as far back as 1800, before anyone had settled here, but Cassie always believed that what people saw was just the basis for the mansion that some crazy person had built.

  Or she would like to believe it, if it weren’t for one thing.

  Cliffside House always changed.

  The county had stopped trying to list how many rooms Cliffside House had or how many stories it rose from the side of the cliff face. On the 1920 tax records, the first that listed Cliffside House as Buckingham property, the house was recorded as two stories high with twelve rooms along with an indoor bath. By the 1940 records, the house had five stories and forty rooms, with five indoor baths.