by David Downie
“How did you know we were having a picnic?” James asked.
“Oh, we know lots of things, JP.”
As if in split-screen mode, James watched Maggie and Taz in the rearview mirror, while Harvey, his face contorted with deep pleasure, drove, leaning forward then suddenly frowning at the windshield and jerking the car to the right then the left.
“We’ll lodge a complaint later,” James said evenly, sensation slowly returning to his lips and limbs. Hanging on to the armrest with one hand and propping himself away from the dashboard with the other, he was about to ask Harvey to slow down when the sheriff started up again.
“Yeah, you all need to get home and have some hot cocoa or herbal tea.” Harvey laughed. “It’s the herbal stuff you and Sally slurp up, isn’t it, Maddie? See, JP, they play cards together with Bev and a bunch of other fine gals. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall. Must be some hellified conversations they have.” The radio crackled and Harvey snatched up the transceiver and spoke into it. “We’re approaching the highway, at the bottom of the hill by the beach, it’s good and flooded out here, I’d say a foot deep in some places, we’re going to have to run it and hope we don’t stall. I’m signing off.” Harvey went back to smiling maliciously and barked, “Hold on, we’re going for a swim.”
Flooring it, he let out a “Yee-hah” as the heavy-duty Interceptor SUV leaped across the knee-high deluge of water churning down the gravel road to the creek. Momentarily blinded by the wave of mud flying onto the windshield and side windows, they felt the vehicle’s tires biting into the gravel and dirt on the other side of the flood. “I don’t believe you would have made it out in your little old car,” Harvey said, glowing with satisfaction. “I don’t believe you would be alive if I hadn’t driven up to get you.”
“You sound like you regret it,” Maggie scoffed.
“Oh, I have no regrets, Maddie.” Harvey laughed. “The best is yet to come.”
James was too stunned to speak. The radio crackled again and Harvey talked into it, driving up the switchbacks with one hand like a rodeo champion on his bucking bronco. Speaking at James in a hectoring voice, he said, “Now, if you weren’t frozen like halibut you could come out and help us, like Pete and Gus are doing with the volunteer fire department. We got a trailer floating away and some other fine people stranded or lost in town, and half a dozen trees and poles down, but something tells me you’re going to have plenty to do at the old mansion. Not sure how anyone’s going to keep her up on the cliff much longer. I do hope you have a dinghy.” Chortling and coughing and choking on his own saliva, he let down the window to spit. “One way or another, she’s coming down, the whole district is about to be condemned and reconfigured, ask Maddie, she’s seen the plans at city hall.” He paused to wink at her, then went on. “We’ll have direct access for boating to Lake Five Mile and the condos and casino, a new viaduct, a new highway, and we might even put in a little steam train up to the Headlands, like once upon a time.”
While Harvey cackled, they hit the Old Coast Highway and bucked north through ankle-deep water, the storm showing no sign of abating. Crossing the pitted viaduct and following the slippery black asphalt west for another half mile, Harvey swerved to avoid a fallen telephone pole, its top sparking with broken live electricity cables. Then he yanked the SUV into the parking lot at the mansion next to the RV. The water was up to the axles. “You two wade on in and take hot baths while you still have some hot water and a bathtub,” he ordered. “It’s the best way to warm up. Now that he’s all thawed out, JP’s going to sit with me another minute, aren’t you, JP?”
After waiting a beat, James nodded and indicated that Maggie and Taz should go. “Get warm,” he said, “I’ll be right in.”
“Harvey,” Maggie growled, staring him down. Harvey stared back then flinched and glanced away. She slammed the door and, leaning on Taz, limped up the stairs.
The porch and staircase had become cascades, the water tumbling down them like a fish ladder. James watched the two disappear through the front door, momentarily thankful for the howling darkness. It kept him from seeing how deep the water was in the parking lot and on the lawn. He tried to imagine what must be happening to the foundations and the cliff. The gusts striking the SUV from the ocean made it rock.
“This is the big one,” Harvey said gleefully, “the one we’ve been expecting.”
“Can’t this wait?”
“I don’t think so, JP, otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting my time and maybe letting some decent folks drown so I can talk to you in private. So, listen up, because I’m not saying it again.” His malicious smile reappeared as he fiddled with the heater and windshield wipers, toning down the decibels. “It’s like this, your DNA is a matter of public record,” he began, throwing James off guard, “and since this is a free country, any law enforcement agency has the right to access it.”
“Now wait a minute,” James objected, but Harvey cut him off.
“Just let me say my piece. We found scraps of skin and clothing on that razor wire around the trap and we analyzed them. Since the results seemed so strange and everything was so out of character and so unlikely, we decided to double check using the stuff the people at Carverville Hospital collected in a specimen bag, just in case the suspicious individuals who barged in and disrupted emergency relief there should be sought by the authorities.” Harvey held up his hand to keep James from interrupting. “We did not know those two hysterical persons were you and Alex, remember?” He paused again to squelch the radio. “Strange, strange, strange, JP, the match up was one hundred percent across the board. There you were—it’s undeniable who you are—making a perfect match with the samples from the trap, and from Beverley’s garden and the shack, too, and the motel kitchen and the bathroom and the RV and the hospital.
“Now listen to this, JP, because it’s the best yet and I guess at first, I couldn’t believe it myself, so that’s why I had the tests redone, and that’s why I’m telling you now, instead of rescuing people at the trailer park like I should be. The material from the cappuccino kid matches yours, not a hundred percent but high enough to prove in any court of law that you are the father or maybe the grandfather or uncle of that smart-ass mulatto.”
James began trembling, more from outrage than cold. “Beyond the offensive rhetoric,” he blurted out in his deepest, darkest voice, “the trouble with your theory is I don’t have children, and if I don’t have children how can I have grandchildren? I don’t have brothers or sisters, so how can I be an uncle? This is beyond ridiculous, Harvey, this is grotesque. Give it up and go out and rescue those people, will you?” He unbuckled his seat belt and tried to unlock his door. The latch would not respond.
“Oh, it’s ridiculous, is it? Just listen, JP, because I love this part. I say to myself, okay, we have all these half-baked stories about the kid and Maddie and her possibly fictitious son who up and disappeared, and here comes JP back to town all of a sudden. Maybe this is what really happened. Listen up. JP and Maddie have been in touch over the years, no one knows it. They’ve communicated in secret, JP being a judge and married has to keep it quiet. Like so many good men we all know, he has needs, and maybe he has a lady friend he keeps somewhere, and she’s from south of the border, an illegal immigrant or a black lady and he doesn’t want people to know she’s expecting. Out comes the cappuccino kid, and what do they do with him to hide him away? They bring him up to old Maddie and pretend it’s her grandson.”
“Ridiculous,” James scoffed, laughing out loud. “Absurd. The timing is all wrong. Taz is seventeen for chrissake. I never had an extramarital relationship first of all, and second I wasn’t in touch with Maggie, and third the theory is totally false and unfounded and frankly idiotic. Here’s what I think, there’s some simple mistake being made. Someone mixed up the DNA samples. It’s as simple as that, unless someone involved is acting maliciously for some cockeyed reason.”
“Yeah, you may be right about the cockeyed stuff, J
P,” Harvey said, enjoying himself. “You may just be right about that part of it. That’s the thing. You’re awful good at half-truths and fake news–type stuff, Your Honor. Thing is, we also have Maddie’s DNA on record for reasons you don’t need to know, and we got some fresh material to sample from her desk at city hall anyway, and guess what? I’ll be damned if that boy isn’t her son or grandson, just like she’s been saying. He’s at least part made up of you, and part of old Maddie, with some ethnic stuff tossed in.” Harvey let the shrapnel from this bombshell fly in silence. It struck, mangling James’s soul.
“It can’t be,” James muttered.
“Oh, it not only can be, JP, it is. Now listen here. One of you is going to have to fess up and straighten things out for that boy, and I think it better be you, because Maddie, she’s even more pigheaded than you, and she’s liable to be hysterical sometimes and tell all kinds of tall tales.”
James had lost his voice again. Swinging his head menacingly he summoned a growling scoff, “I don’t believe you,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t believe a thing you’ve said.”
Harvey sucked his teeth, let down his window and spat into the wind and rain. “It don’t matter, JP, whether you do or you don’t, it happens to be true and I mean true-true, this ain’t no fake news bullshit, but I figured you might react this way. I think you ought to go on in and have a little powwow with Mrs. Hansen, and we pick up our conversation down the road. I’ve got work to do. But I’ll be happy to help you all to pack when the time is right.”
The radio screamed and Harvey, gloating, lifted the handset and said, “Yeah, I’m heading up to the Headlands, see if I can pull that trailer out of the highway.” He clicked a switch unlocking the passenger door. “You better let them know down south we need help,” he continued, talking to the dispatcher, “this is the goddamn worst thing ever. Electricity is out most places, and there’s some live lines in the highway where it ain’t. I know it’s already a state of emergency, damn it, call it a natural catastrophe, or tell them it’s a hurricane or whatever. Call the National Guard. And send some body bags, too, sandbags and body bags.”
James got out and stood on the porch, shivering, watching the downpour, watching Harvey’s SUV kick up mud and gravel from the lot then fly north on a highway that had become a black river choked with fallen trees and utility poles. The phrase “sandbags and body bags” lodged in his mind as he walked to the end of the porch and leaned into the gusting wind, watching the floodwaters shoot off the bluff into Five Mile Creek. It had climbed a third of the way up the gully, meaning over ten feet. Its brown waters were fanning wide across the beach, then being pulverized into gray-green spray and mist by thunderous twenty-foot breakers.
Opening the front door and feeling the wind blow past him, whisking magazines and piano music to the floor, he shouted, “Maggie, I’m checking around the outside.” He slammed the door shut, cutting off the rush of horizontal rain, then stalked back down the porch. From it he could not see beneath the house, so he ventured farther, unlatching the gate and climbing down the rickety stairway to the first landing. Barely able to stand straight, he clung to the quaking railings and peered up. The visibility was only a few yards, but he could see and hear the rainwater gushing like a geyser down the storm drain and out a corrugated steel drainpipe suspended from heavy wires. If the drain gets blocked, he told himself, we’re going down.
Wading across the garden in shin-deep freezing water, James sloshed to the roadside culvert and began pulling branches and dirt away from it. With a sudden chill, he felt a hand on his shoulder and started upright, spinning around, catching his breath, prepared to fight.
“I brought the rake,” Taz shouted.
Catching his breath again, James couldn’t help laughing out loud, partly because Taz looked so ridiculous in a wet suit too short and too tight for him. His off-kilter goggles were bright yellow. A yellow snorkel dangled by his cheek.
Together they cleared the drain, then dragged over sandbags and an uprooted tree to channel the water away from the parking area. By the time they had finished, James was shaking and numb again. His limbs felt as if they had been sawed off and the stumps stuck full of pins. He stumbled and fell into the cascading water when climbing the front steps.
The house was dark except for the light projected by the roaring fires in the wood-burning stove and fireplace and two candles in lanterns on the piano. “You all right?” James asked Taz as they squelched into the living room.
“Sure, I’m nice and hot in here.” Seized by hilarity, Taz began hooting and piping through the snorkel, doing a rain dance. “I might keep this on,” he said.
Slogging into the bathroom, James found Maggie wrapped in a terry-cloth robe drying her hair with a towel by candlelight. Nodding at the bathtub she said, “It’s dirty but it’s hot.” Shivering he climbed into the claw-foot tub and sank down as far as his length would allow him.
“I hope it was you who took the first bath,” he said through chattering teeth.
“Oh yes,” Maggie said. “You two probably have poison oak oil on you somewhere, so scrub yourself clean and wash your hair twice, or I won’t be able to touch you. After you dry off, you can come out and tell me what that bastard said.”
But before James could finish rinsing he felt the house shake and heard a booming roar. Taz rushed in shouting, telling them both to get dressed. Either there had been an earthquake or the cliff had given way.
TWENTY-FOUR
Only partly dressed, still wet from his bath, and crazed from cold and fear, with Maggie in a bathrobe and Taz in his wet suit rushing to and fro in the darkness, James raced through the house, trying to put out the fires in the fireplace and stove, turning off the propane valve in the kitchen, then grabbing essentials. He snatched up and struggled into clean clothes, stuffed underwear and a sweater into his duffel bag, stuffed the laptop into a backpack and, dragging his hooded windbreaker behind, caught up with Taz and Maggie already standing on the porch, bundled into mismatched everything and laden with suitcases, purses, and high-tech equipment.
“We’re getting faster,” Taz yelled in triumph, “last time we were slow like you.”
Seeing the perplexity on James’s features, Maggie shouted, “We’ve had to evacuate twice already.”
As they stood panting, frozen by fear, reluctance, and cold, the banister on the creek side of the porch gave way, the house started to lean, and the far edge of the garden tilted and slipped into a yawning brown crevice that tore open before their eyes, a ravenous gurgling mouth. Fumbling in his pockets and trying to stay calm, James suddenly knew he did not have the keys to the RV.
“Shit,” Maggie screamed, “I washed your pants . . . they’re in that bowl on the dresser upstairs . . .”
Glancing into the slanting, splintering house, James dumped his bags on the threshold then ran inside feeling drunk and dizzy. The staircase leaned crazily. Navigating the tilting hallway and forcing his way into the spare bedroom, he found the dresser no longer against the wall. Everything on it including the porcelain bowl with the keys had fallen to the floor, skittering, shattering, and sliding under the bed. On his hands and knees, crawling in the dark, he heard the window behind fly open, broken glass exploding in the wind. Feeling under the bed, he cut himself on the edge of the broken bowl but kept groping and finally found the key fob. Pocketing it, he raced back downstairs shouting as if momentarily insane, snagged his bags off the porch and rushed to the RV where Maggie and Taz waited, hopping from foot to foot in drenched, freezing terror.
The RV had not been started in days. The extreme damp had penetrated the ignition system and the engine would not start. Turning and turning but not catching, with a belch and a roar it finally bucked to life. Revving wildly James backed out blind, swinging the tail of the heavy vehicle onto the highway. He watched aghast through the fogged windshield as part of the side garden and the parking area fell away into the widening dark crevice, a scoop o
f pudding sliding off a plate. Slamming hard into something behind, James hit the brakes and checked his mirrors but could see nothing. He lurched forward into the shin-high water on the highway and began rolling south.
“What was it,” Maggie demanded. Crammed with Taz into the front passenger seat, she could not see out. She thrashed, trying to turn around. “What was that?”
James shook his head, hesitating, full of foreboding. “Probably a tree . . .” he blurted out. Hitting the brakes again, he stopped the RV, reversed, jumped out and ran back in time to see the rest of the side garden slide away, taking most of the porch with it over the melting cliff. On the road ahead, lying on its side writhing and squealing and sounding hauntingly like the howling gale, lay a wounded feral hog, its neck or back broken. It wriggled and squealed, beseeching with human eyes. “My god,” James shouted, unsure what to do. If only I had a gun, he thought, I could put it out of its misery. “My god, my god, my god, why are you doing this, goddamn it?” he cursed.
Sprinting back to the RV, he tore open the passenger-side door and barked at Maggie. “Give me that revolver, I know you have one, I saw it.”
“What’s going on?” she began to ask, but James grabbed her purse, flipped open the leather flap and found the small .32-caliber handgun. Before she could stop him, he disappeared again up the highway. A shot sounded, then another. Seconds later James jumped back into the RV muttering and cursing, tossed the gun onto the dashboard, and began driving south, his headlights picking out an obstacle course of fallen branches and utility poles, rocks wrenched down from the sloping shoulder of the road, and mud banks a foot high. He blurted out a single, gasping, airless word, “Hog,” caught his breath, and wiped his face, only then feeling the blood from his cut fingers in his eyes.