by David Downie
“Roadkill,” Taz said in a burlesque baritone, his goofy nervous laugh welling up seemingly from nowhere. “Radioactive and riddled with parasites.”
James swiveled his head and stared at him menacingly. “What are you saying?”
“Everyone knows the hogs wallow in the radioactive pits and drink contaminated water and they’re full of parasites, too, otherwise people would, like, eat them.”
James’s face contorted into a pained grimace the shape of a question mark. He was unable to process this latest display of Taz’s strangeness. “Beverley’s is three miles from here,” he said, aware now of the cold seizing his hands, arms, and shoulders.
“I hope she’s okay,” Maggie said, removing the gun from the dashboard, wiping it clean of James’s blood, and slipping it back into her purse without a word.
“I hope the road hasn’t washed out,” Taz added, his face a sickly gray out of which a pair of bulging luminous blue eyes stared into the darkness. “What if the motel slid, too?”
Twice they were forced to get out and dislodge small fallen trees and mangled outdoor advertising panels, and once they used the RV to nudge a downed cypress to the side before rolling onward. Halfway to the Eden Resort, the right side of the highway had collapsed into a ditch. James detoured onto the soft, squishy inland shoulder of the road, the RV nearly tipping over. Seconds after they had rolled back onto the pavement, they braked and looked into the rearview mirrors. Slowly, ineluctably, the shoulder they had just used subsided, silently slipping into the surf with the rest of the highway.
Flashing his headlights as he pulled into the flooded lot fronting the motel, James honked several times then grabbed his backpack and duffel bag and watched as Maggie and Taz slid out into the rain. The lights were on inside Beverley’s office. The distant droning of an emergency generator explained the acrid diesel fumes whipping around them in the gusty wind.
Mummified in a purple raincoat with the collar flipped up, Beverley was wearing phosphorescent yellow rubber boots and standing at the threshold with an enormous pink umbrella at the ready. Pointing it toward them, she popped it open and watched as they dashed forward. “Armageddon,” she said with surprising relish, “the Deluge, at last.” She bustled in once they had gone past and continued, “Let me guess, you were so concerned about my safety that you risked your lives and drove down to check, seeing as the telephone and Internet are down, or maybe it’s just that you, too, enjoy schadenfreude.”
Before anyone could speak, Beverley held up a soft, pink-tipped hand and said, “I know you think this is no time to be facetious, but you’re wrong, if not now, when? Either you’re too scared to sleep in the house, or the house is no longer where it’s supposed to be and, judging by your accoutrements and shattered state, that’s the probable winner. One way or the other, Maddie’s car broke down or maybe you couldn’t get through with it on the highway, otherwise why drive the RV?”
Taz goggled at Beverley and bleated with astonishment, “How did you know?”
“Welcome back to Baker Street,” James said, relieved to feel the tension draining out of him. “We almost died coming down the mountainside after our picnic, then we got back and the house started to slip off the bluff—”
“Want me to tell you exactly what happened?” Taz interrupted, poking Beverley with his eerily long index finger. She seemed as taken aback by the sudden change in his tone as by his wet suit, snorkel, and goggles. “Because it’s a real cliff-hanger,” Taz added, then laughed his goofy, spastic Alfred E. Neuman laugh.
It was contagious. Guffawing and snorting, they roared until tears filled their eyes and their ribs ached. “We’re lucky to be alive,” Maggie said at last. “That’s what counts.”
“You said it,” Beverley chortled, “Just think, if the house was all right and you three were Dundee instead, that might be slightly worse.” They laughed again until she raised a finger at Taz. “Now, don’t just stand there dripping on the carpet,” she ordered, “take this key and get yourself into number eight, take a hot shower and put on some normal clothes or else you’ll get a rash from that rubber suit. You smell like an old tennis shoe.”
Still snickering, Taz glanced at Maggie and James then took the key and began to slink away. “But,” he said, “but where . . . ?”
“But, but what? They’re staying in their own room, in a cottage, not Sea Breeze, not yet. Ocean View is just as nice, and you can create new memories there.” Beverley paused to enjoy the look of embarrassment spreading on Maggie’s tired face. “You all get warm and dry and then come back up in half an hour. I’ll thaw out another batch of minestrone and put the garlic bread in the oven. Now git!”
Handing James the umbrella and a flashlight, and Maggie a set of keys, she said, “I think you know where Ocean View is. We completely rebuilt it, so it’s guaranteed free of ghosts and goblins. Not likely that one’s going to slide tonight, and now it really does have an ocean view. Those pesky eucalyptus trees came down at two P.M. on the dot. It was uncanny, like dominoes from left to right, south to north. I’m glad they fell toward the beach and not on me. Maybe they’ll prop up the cliff some, but I think they may have taken out the staircase. Go on ahead. You must be more dead than alive by now. When you get back, I’ll uncork a good bottle. None of this screw-top plonk tonight. We’re going to celebrate. You’re safe and I’m safe, and that damn Harvey can’t spy on us because the mains are out and the telephones and Internet and surveillance cameras are out, too, hallelujah! Tonight, it’s a speakeasy. If only we could get the rest of the cell to come down.”
Pleased to see Beverley back to form, James peered at Maggie as they stepped toward the door. He asked, “The cell?”
“Don’t tell me he still doesn’t know,” Beverley said, her fingers going automatically to her pearl necklace.
“Well, he’s going to find out,” Maggie said, suppressing a yawn. “Sorry. I was going to lay it all out this afternoon, but the storm got in the way.”
“Storms will do that,” Beverley said, sliding the pearl worry beads back and forth. “Looks like it’s about to give up trying to wipe us off the map,” she added cheerfully.
“There’s no time like the present,” James said, not letting them off the hook.
“Well,” Beverley said, buying time and glancing at Maggie, waiting for a nod. “You see, Your Honor, in the beginning we were worried because you were the perfect plant . . .”
“A plant? Me?”
“Poison oak,” Taz blurted out, leaning back in through the doorjamb where he had been lurking.
James smiled despite himself. Beverley and Maggie laughed out loud, and Taz put on his goofiest face.
“Git!” Beverley shouted at him, watching this time until he really was gone. She crossed her thick upper arms and rocked from side to side. “How could we trust you?” she asked James when Taz was out of earshot. “Here we are, fighting it out in the sandy trenches, and along comes the mystery man, Mr. Perfect, Mr. Perry Mason, the old flame, the avenger, the sharpshooting lumberjack with a heart of gold and a brain of platinum, all wrapped in one tall, good-looking package. Wouldn’t it seem a little too good to you, Your Honor?” She paused to take a breath and James tried to speak, but she overruled him with a wave of a pudgy hand. “I showed you the eight and nine of clubs more than once and gave you a hundred hints about the number seventeen. I figured someone trustworthy might have sent you. But you never gave the countersigns. That letter I found in my parking lot was a little too good. Then I discovered you were Harvey’s best friend . . .”
James batted his eyes in exhausted incomprehension. “You thought I was one of them?” he asked incredulously.
“No, I didn’t,” Maggie protested, taking him by the hand. “I’m just too tired to do this right now, we’ve got to rest and regroup.”
“Hurry up your business, please,” Beverley said with wicked glee. “I’m thirsty and dying to talk this through.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It’s totally irrational, but as I lay half awake that night my thoughts were not focused on the life-changing revelations and dark mysteries of the last day. They kept flitting back instead to the old graveyard, the legal pads, and my wedding band buried in the garden among ancient bones, getting wet in their bags or being exposed to snooping eyes by the rushing water. Then I thought of the fires in the wood-burning stove and fireplace at the mansion, the snippet of razor wire in the attic, the stacks of LPs and shelves of books tumbling from the house onto the beach, and the discarded syringes and gray plastic bags up at the hatchery. They and the other refuse and toxic waste and sludge must have been swept into Five Mile Creek along with Jack’s torture cage, my overworked mind repeated ad nauseam, the images and words cascading and churning. What would the salmon do? How could we ever clean things up?
My eyes popped open. Lying in an unfamiliar bed in total darkness, I realized I was hyperventilating like one of Harvey’s upside-down squirrels, taking shallow panicky breaths. Unable to force myself to relax and get back to sleep, at around four a.m., without waking Maggie, I got up, still unsure where I was. Putting on my clammy pants and a sweater, I stepped onto the small porch of the Ocean View cottage and immediately felt better. The rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing hard from the west. As Beverley had said, you could now see the ocean, a black, seething, foaming, thundering mass daubed with whitecaps above a jagged, waving horizon line of fallen eucalyptus trees.
I’d left my sodden boots on the porch hoping the wind would dry them. It hadn’t. Struggling into them, I squelched down into the garden on the wood chip trail. Most of the chips had been washed away or had piled up with a scalloping effect. Stumbling, I found my way to the rose garden and the hole where I had hidden the legal pads, but there was no hole to be seen; on the contrary mud and leaves were piled high. There were no bones or gravestones exposed, either, and it seemed there was little risk for the time being that anyone, including me, would find my buried treasure.
Backtracking and heading west to where the shack and potting shed had been, I discovered, to my dismay, that they were no longer upright. Many trees and shrubs in the thicket above them had fallen over, and here, too, the floodwaters had carried down mud and branches, burying everything—the shack, the shed, and the piles of crab pots and old traps. Squinting into the night, I could just make out one of the tattered old blue tarps caught and flapping in the upper branches of a bay tree standing near the bluff. Nearby were a number of sizable white plastic tankards I had never seen before. They looked like empty Clorox bottles. The McCulloch must be buried under there somewhere, I reasoned, saddened beyond all proportion that the chainsaw had been lost just when I had rebuilt it.
Picking up a long branch, I stripped the leaves off and snapped it to make a walking stick. Feeling and poking my way tentatively, I clambered over the heaped-up vegetation and detritus and reached the rickety stairway to the beach. One of the eucalyptus trees had fallen in front of it, and that’s probably what had kept the stairway from washing away, I guessed. The night was too dark for me to see the bottom treads, but it seemed as if it might still reach down to the sand.
Standing there looking out to sea, my mind began to clear and the practicalities to crowd back in. The video camera in my head rewound and reviewed the events of the last hours. The telephone system and Internet had still been down at dinnertime, but as we swallowed bowlfuls of Beverley’s delicious minestrone and garlicky homemade bread, she picked up on her cheap little AM radio the police and fire and weather reports. The highways into and out of Carverville were unpassable, the reports claimed. Flash flooding had wrecked bridges and culverts, shoulders had collapsed, people were stranded in cars and houses in low-lying areas, the trailer parks were underwater, three condo complexes had skated with the mud into the Yono River by the cannery, several first responders were missing, and so on and so forth. It sounded like a West Coast version of Hurricane Sandy—Hurricane Harvey, I corrected myself. Luckily, only a few people were reported dead, though in addition to the lost first responders, a dozen residents were still missing, and the toll was sure to rise. I thought of the emergency room staff at the hospital and wondered if any of them were among the dead.
Then the gravity of our own situation struck me. How could we get back to the house and salvage what was left, if anything? How could we help other survivors in town? Like everyone else, we were stranded. If the old dirt roads and footpaths were passable, we could walk from the Eden Resort into Carverville and volunteer our services. And I assumed, without any basis for my optimism, that my bike was still strapped to the roof of the RV and could be ridden almost anywhere.
Then I began replaying in my head the brief conversation Maggie and I had before dinner, and the second part of it we had lying in bed before we fell asleep. We were both too exhausted to make much sense of what either of us was saying, and the many glasses of Oregon Pinot Noir we consumed with our meal certainly helped relax us and enliven the conversation. But it also made us comatose by nine p.m.
“Tell me what Harvey said to you in the car,” Maggie had demanded in an unfamiliar, quarrelsome tone once we had unpacked our things in the cottage and collapsed onto a couch before dinner.
“Okay,” I said, “we definitely need to talk about that and his craziness, but I think it requires more time and energy than we have right now. So, how about you tell me about the cell instead?”
Maggie sucked her lower lip then yawned, and I realized, with a pang of guilt, that she wasn’t being quarrelsome, she was simply too exhausted and traumatized to speak. “Same thing, there’s too much to explain, plus I’m famished,” she said. “I hardly ate any of the picnic food and that was a long time ago.” She yawned so wide that her jaw made a popping sound. I yawned, too, and felt a deep, irresistible weariness.
“If I close my eyes,” I started to say.
“Don’t. We have to go to dinner in five minutes or Beverley will kill us.” She yawned again and shook her head and started to settle into my arms, shivering. “I’ll talk, to stay awake,” she said. “I’ll tell you about the cell. . . . So, it started out as a joke. It was a card club, and since some of us read spy novels and thrillers we called it a cell. No men allowed, women’s secrets, our own uninterrupted conversations, you know.” She suppressed another yawn. “Beverley and I are the only unattached ones, but since we both have baggage, that didn’t matter when the others griped about a current husband or child, we were good at evoking fond memories.” She smiled up at me, then yawned again. “And, of course, there’s Taz, he’s a handful, and boy do I have colorful stories.”
“So, the cell is just a regular hen party?”
Maggie feigned disapproval. “They were hen parties until things changed and the roundups started, and then Harvey was appointed sheriff a couple years ago, and life became unpleasant for a lot of people in the county, including me. He and some of his men are deputized immigration agents. They don’t even need to deal with ICE. And then he went and created his own citizen posse of good white boys, like Gus and Pete and Clem, saying everyone was doing it, just look at Maricopa County and how it had worked great down there. That’s when the cell became a way for us to share our concerns and organize a local women’s resistance movement. We called it The Seventeen Club—that was Beverley’s idea.” She paused and watched me raise a skeptical eyebrow.
“Go on,” I said.
“The password phrase for members was ‘What’s your favorite number and your favorite suit of cards?’ and the right answer was ‘The nine and eight of clubs make seventeen.’ Since none of us is exactly a radical, we moved slowly and had the benefit of seeing what happened to other groups around the country that organized openly. I couldn’t afford to wind up in a chain gang—I had Taz to take care of. So, we decided to keep ours secret, a clandestine cell in what must be the dirtiest, most reactionary, dangerous county in the state and maybe the country, and that’s saying a lot, JP. When I moved back ten years ago, I ha
d no idea Harvey would create a reign of terror. And then you rolled in, disguised like a troll . . .”
“I have no regrets,” I said.
“You may yet live long enough to have them.” She stopped and yawned and I yawned back and looked at my watch. It was past time for dinner.
“To be continued,” I said. She nodded and we kissed, then crossed the windswept garden hand in hand.
Where is the pause button? This isn’t a memo I’m dictating to my assistant. I’m merely trying to keep things in order in my mind, and it is not easy. I mustn’t forget that during dinner we talked mostly about practical problems needing quick solutions, like getting a moving truck over to the cliff-hanger, as we’d all started to call the mansion, before the vandals and looters could get at it. Or fixing Beverley’s leaking roof and repairing the washed-out highway and bridge so we could escape, plus dealing with the Greenwood Gulch side of Beverley’s property where another section of cliff slid out. Has that mass grave of the obliterated Yono nation been exposed at last, I wonder, or are those animal bones jutting from the sandy loam? To be confirmed, as Harvey would say. The time has come to build a jetty where Egmont’s pier was or kiss the Eden Resort goodbye like the mansion on Five Mile Creek.
Then Beverley surprised us all by announcing that despite the storm, for the first time since the cage had washed up on the beach, she was feeling physically and psychologically well, and that the fear of Harvey eavesdropping on her and the voices she was hearing had been driving her crazy. Now they had stopped. That’s when Taz perked up and asked what she meant. He hadn’t heard about the voices. “There are plenty of things you haven’t heard about that you’re going to be hearing about now,” she quipped. Then she winked at Maggie and repeated to the two of them what she had already told me in the garden, about Number Three visiting her in the night and telling her to sell and move out of town.