Читать книгу Gathering Lies - Meg O'Brien - Страница 15

The morning after the quake, a blood-red sun rose over the Sound, tinting the snowy tops of the Cascade Range. We had spent a miserable and frightening night on the lawn outside the Thornberry farmhouse. Aside from the cold and damp, there were the aftershocks, some of them almost as large as the original quake.

We stirred and began to sit up.

“I thought daylight would never come,” Dana said, rubbing her arms vigorously for warmth. “This has been the longest night of my life.”

I was forced to agree. I had nodded off a few times, only to have nightmares of rolling ground beneath me—nightmares that turned out to be all too real each time I woke.

I stood and shook the blanket from me, running fingers through my hair in a feeble attempt to straighten it. Since I’d cut it, it had grown out a few inches, and a natural curl made it tangle at night.

I’d give my right arm for a shower, I thought. Or to wash my face. But even though the Thornberry kitchen sink stood miraculously untouched, the water line from the well’s reservoir had broken, and the pump no longer worked. Nor could we use the one toilet in the farmhouse that remained standing. Like soldiers on bivouac, we had dug holes in the ground fifty yards into the woods. Grace was responsible for this idea, as well as a large percentage of the work it took.

“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going back inside,” Jane said, “not in the farmhouse or anywhere.” She gripped her blanket around her as another aftershock hit. We held our breaths till it was over, time suspended.

Afterward, Jane continued, her voice noticeably shakier. “Aren’t these things supposed to get less and less strong as time goes on?”

“Yeah, and people are supposed to prepare better,” Grace said pointedly to Timmy. “Why the hell didn’t you put away water and emergency food rations somewhere safe? Not to mention more portable radios, batteries, light sticks, camp stoves, propane lamps—” She broke off, cussing. “Where the fucking hell was your head, anyway? One cell phone in the whole damn place? And it’s under rubble now?”

Timmy blanched, but didn’t answer. I thought I saw her lips tremble, but the light wasn’t good so I wasn’t sure. I was about to break into Grace’s diatribe when Amelia did that for me.

“Timmy did her best,” she said defensively. “She couldn’t—”

“Couldn’t what?”

“Hush, Amelia,” Timmy said. “She’s right. Besides, she wouldn’t understand.”

Amelia shot a contemptuous look at Grace and turned away.

Grace shook her head. “You bet your sweet ass I wouldn’t understand. Sure, there are cans of food in the kitchen, but we can’t cook it, now that the line’s broken to the fuel tank. The stove is electric, and the generator’s useless without fuel. Besides that, whatever was in the fridge is spoiled by now. Or soon will be.”

“Well, at least there are plenty of cans of food,” Dana said in a surprisingly irate voice. “We can damn well eat things cold! Besides, there’s plenty of oysters around here. They aren’t bad raw.”

Grace gave a shudder. “And what do we do about water?” She held up a 12-ounce bottle of Perrier. “If these were all we could find last night, I doubt there are many more. Good God, Amelia, if Timmy had spent less on frills—”

“I suppose you have all those things in your own home,” Amelia said angrily. “You’re prepared for anything, no matter what.”

“You’re damned right, I am. It’s not like we haven’t had enough warnings in the past few years, even in New York. Not just about earthquakes, but blizzards, tornadoes, floods. And if you were any kind of friend to Timothea—which it seems you happen to be—or if you were a responsible person at all, you’d have made sure she stocked emergency supplies—”

“Will you two please stop!” Jane cried. She stood and flung her blanket to the ground, doubling her fists. Tears ran down her face. “My children may be dead right now! Do you realize that? While you two are harping at each other, my kids could be dead!”

“All right, that’s it!” I said, standing. “First of all, I’ve just about had it with you, Grace. Maybe you’re right, maybe Timmy could have prepared better. But it doesn’t help to stand around and rant at each other.”

I turned to Jane and put both hands on her shoulders. “Look, I know this is awful for you. But, Jane, we have to focus now on finding a way to communicate with the mainland. The sooner we do that, the sooner we may be able to reach your husband and children. At the very least, a portable radio might give us some up-to-date news. We could find out how things are going down there.”

Jane fell silent, and Dana asked, “What do you have in mind?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all night. There are three other houses on the island. Two, as I remember, are summer cabins. Right, Timmy?”

She nodded. “They’ve sold a couple of times over the years, but both have been vacant quite a while.”

“And the Ford house?”

“It’s still there, of course. The son owns it now, but he only comes out here in the summer.”

“Luke, you mean?”

She nodded again.

So he’s still around. “Any chance he’d be there now?” I asked. “It’s almost summer.”

“I’ve never known him to be here this early,” Timmy said. “And I’m pretty sure he would have let me know he was here, if he was.”

“So unless someone just happens to be visiting those two cabins, we’re the only people on the island, right? Then, what we need to do is check out those cabins, and Luke’s house, and see if they are indeed vacant, and if they survived the quake. If so, they might have some things we can use till help arrives.”

I turned to Timmy. “Two people should stay behind, just on the off chance a rescue party comes by. Do you mind? You and Amelia?”

“Leave the two old ladies behind, is that it?” Amelia said spiritedly. “Not on your life. Leave Jane. I’m as strong as she is.”

“I’m sure you are,” I said, though in truth I doubted it. It wasn’t Amelia’s age that was against her, as many women in their seventies were good hikers. But I’d seen her trembling when she thought no one was looking. It had been a difficult twelve hours, and Amelia needed rest, not the exertion of tramping through the woods. As for Timmy, she had suffered too much loss. To my eyes, she seemed close to breaking.

“I also thought maybe you and Timmy could check out the grounds here,” I said. “See what kinds of vegetables are left in the gardens, like maybe some carrots still in the ground from last fall? Do you mind?”

Amelia hesitated, but looked at Timmy, who seemed very frail, suddenly. “No,” she said, “of course not.”

“Okay, then, let’s get going,” Dana said. “I’m more than ready.”

We all looked at each other for signs of agreement. Kim, who hadn’t yet spoken, said, “Just one thing. Does anyone here have a gun?”

Jane laughed uncertainly. “My goodness, no. Who on earth would have thought we’d ever need one here?”

Dana shook her head, and Amelia raised her white brows and said, “That’s an odd thing to ask.”

“Not if you’ve ever been in an earthquake,” Kim said. “I have.”

“You mean in L.A.?”

She nodded. “The Northridge. People went nuts.”

“But that was entirely different,” I said. “L.A. is a big city. Here, there’s no one else on the island. Only us.”

Kim gave me a weighted look, then flicked her eyes to Grace.

We all followed her gaze.

Grace flushed, then said, “Oh, for God’s sake! I may not be the most patient person in the world, but it’s not like I’m going to kill anyone.”

No one said a word.

Kim Stratton and I made our way along the shoreline to the east, while Dana, Jane and Grace headed west to check out the two cabins. Our plan was to meet at the Ford house, which was in the approximate middle of the island, on the northern shore. The more direct, cross-island path Luke and I had created all those years ago had grown over, and I hadn’t been able to find it from Thornberry. Our trek would take us a bit longer than if the more direct three-mile route had been available, but we thought that if we kept a steady pace, we could be there in less than four hours.

The beach consisted of gray rock, not sand, and was lined with fir and cedar trees. At times we were forced to navigate huge logs that had washed up during storms, and in several places the shoreline came to a dead stop by boulders we had to climb to get where the beach began again.

I was grateful I’d worn my hiking boots, jeans, and a warm sweater and coat to dinner the night before. A quick check of my cottage this morning had revealed most of my belongings were buried beneath debris. There hadn’t been time to see what could be salvaged—nor had I wanted to. My nerves were shot, and I felt exhausted after so little sleep.

Nor could I eat. Timmy and Amelia had put together a breakfast of fruit and found muffins. I had wrapped a muffin in a napkin and had stuck it into my coat pocket for later. Kim and I each carried a bottle of water.

Each of our two groups had an air horn that we’d found in the kitchen pantry, nearly buried by flour sacks. They were one of the few things Timmy had set aside for emergencies—not that she’d expected anything like this, I thought. More likely illness, or an invasion by bear.

Are there bears up here? I suddenly wondered, nervously scanning a thick stand of fir trees. Grizzlies could kill a person with one swat and eat the evidence before anyone was the wiser.

Stop it. Better to worry about these damned aftershocks. Will they never stop?

Unable to steady myself as another one hit, I let it take me to my knees, then flattened myself on the ground. Kim fell prone beside me.

“That one felt stronger than the others,” she said, gripping the ground with her fists. “God help us if the first one was only a foreshock.”

“Don’t even think it.”

If I felt like I’d been through hell in Seattle before coming here, that whole business seemed more like purgatory now—the place Catholics believe you can pray yourself out of, like buying tickets to a fair. This—this not knowing what was going to happen next—was hell.

Or so I thought then, not knowing how much worse things were going to get.

I stood, brushing sharp, gravel-like sand from my knees and palms. As I did so, I felt like screaming—like running into the woods and beating on the ground. The only thing that kept me from doing that was feeling I had to keep up my spirits. If not for my sake, then for Kim’s. Though she probably didn’t need me for that.

On first meeting, Kim had seemed spoiled and standoffish. The two times she did show up for after-dinner coffee, she asked endless gossipy questions about our personal lives. I supposed this was what passed for conversation in Hollywood.

Still, I had to admit that Kim had been proving her mettle, ever since we’d found her outside her cottage yesterday, looking more angry than anything else.

I said to her now, as we began to walk again, “I’m amazed at how you’re taking all this.”

Her tone registered amusement. “Because I’m a star you mean?”

“Well, no…”

But that was exactly what I’d meant. “I guess you don’t seem the type—” I broke off. “Sorry.”

“Oh, hell, it’s okay. You couldn’t be expected to know that in less than two years in L.A., I went through fires, floods, riots, and the worst earthquake disaster to hit California in decades. I was in the Valley filming when the Northridge quake struck. We were all cut off from our homes for days, and the worst part was that when we got home, some of us couldn’t even find our front yards beneath the rubble. Then the rains began.” She gave a low laugh. “God, it was awful. I lost the first house I ever bought with my own money, when it slid down a hill onto Pacific Coast Highway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It was rough. So I guess I’d have to say that so far, this little rocker is a piece of cake.”

I smiled. “I’m glad someone feels that way. But I jumped to conclusions about you, and I don’t usually do that.”

Kim rubbed a smear of dirt from her face. “If it’s any consolation, you’re not the first. C’mon, let’s go.”

This time I followed, watching the dark red ponytail bob ahead of me. After the rosy sunset the night before, the day had turned chilly, the sky spitting rain. Kim wore only the jeans, long-sleeved sweatshirt and Saucony sports shoes she’d had on when the quake struck the day before. They were soaked clear through.

I caught up to her. “Kim, listen. I wasn’t thinking when I asked you to come with me. We should have taken more time to find you warm clothes.”

She smiled. “Guess you’ve never been on location, have you?”

“No. Pretty tough?”

“Try swimming in a creek in Yellowstone when it’s thirty degrees out and starting to snow.”

“Ugh. You must like your work, though, to be so successful at it. They say we thrive the most in the kind of work we love.”

“I suppose that’s true, at least for some. For me, it’s been a long, hard road, getting to where I am now. Some of it I don’t even want to remember.” Her face clouded over. “What about you?”

I started to answer just as we rounded another curve on the beach—only to see another stretch of uninhabited shoreline.

“Damn,” I said. “Where is that house, anyway? I remembered it being closer.”

“You want to rest?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I do need something to eat, though.” Pulling out the poppyseed muffin, I broke it in two and offered one half to Kim.

“Thanks. Listen, let’s sit down a minute so I can take my socks off. There’s so much sand lumped inside them, they’re making my toes sore.”

Holding the piece of muffin in her teeth, she untied her shoes and removed her socks, stuffing them into a pocket. We both sat for a moment, eating silently.

“You’re a lawyer, right?” Kim said, as the final bite of muffin disappeared. She brushed crumbs off her jeans. “A public defender?”

“I was.”

“You were? What happened? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

I gave a shrug. “It looks like we’re going to be on this blasted island together for a while, so sure, you can ask. I was a public defender in Seattle. I lost my job.”

“Cutbacks?”

“No. I was fired.”

She looked at me sharply. “I can’t imagine you doing something bad enough to get fired over.”

“Really? But we hardly know each other.”

“Well, it’s true I haven’t gotten to know you very well,” Kim admitted. “And that’s my fault. Believe it or not, even though I can hang loose in front of a camera, I don’t feel comfortable in groups of women. I don’t seem to have much in common with them, and I never know what to say. But the way you took over yesterday when the quake happened—not getting freaked out or anything—I guess I saw you as being in some sort of responsible job and never doing anything wrong.”

I almost laughed. “Well, you’ve got some of that right. I was in a responsible job, and I didn’t do anything wrong. Somebody set me up for drug possession with intent to sell, and now I’ve got a trial pending.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish.”

“But, Sarah, doesn’t being an attorney allow you more of a chance of clearing yourself? You can convince a jury you’re innocent, right? Then you can go back to work?”

“Aye, and there’s the rub…convincing a jury of my innocence.”

Kim nodded and sighed. “I was offered a role like that—an innocent woman, behind bars. I turned it down because my agent didn’t want me to play a prisoner.” She rolled her eyes. “Like people don’t know the difference between real life and acting these days. Laura West, who did take the part—Do you know her?”

“I know of her, of course,” I said. “Julia Roberts’s latest competition, right? Or so it’s said. Personally, I don’t think she can hold a candle to Roberts.”

“I agree. Even so, she won an Oscar for the part of that inmate. I was left to look at it as the road not taken.”

“Frost,” I said. “‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—’”

“‘I took the one less traveled by,’” Kim finished for me, smiling. “High school. And don’t look so surprised. I’ve got a memory like an elephant.”

“I guess that comes in handy when you have to study a script.”

She nodded. “It put me in demand when I was first starting out and working in low-budget flicks. Public defenders, though—they don’t make much money, do they?”

“No. But I didn’t go into it for that.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I had a role in a film once as the president of a perfume company. Sylvie, her name was. She quit when she was forty to become a missionary.” Kim laughed, a loud, free sound that surprised me, coming from her, and under these circumstances. “A really bad movie. Did you see it? ‘Heavenly Scent’?”

I smiled at the title. “‘Heavenly Scent’? I’m sorry, no. I haven’t found much time over the years for movies. I usually go over briefs at night and on weekends.”

“Me, too. When I’m not filming, I mean, I stay home, crash and watch TV. Of course, I usually watch movies on TV. I guess we tend to relax with the same kind of work we do.”

“How true.”

“So, this charge you’ve got against you. Is there some way you can prove your innocence? I mean, as a lawyer, you must know how to do that, right?”

I hesitated. The quake had loosened my tongue, yet I didn’t feel entirely comfortable telling Kim how I planned to prove my innocence.

“Hopefully, I’ll remember how to be a lawyer when we get out of this,” I settled for. “Why don’t we keep walking? It’s beginning to look like a long day.”

She wiggled into her damp shoes, and as we walked, a mist moved in over the island. I was reminded of the tsunami warning we’d heard over the radio, the possibility of a wave several stories high striking the shore here and engulfing us all. The one from Alaska in 1964 had reached a height of 250 feet—the approximate height of a twenty-five-story building—and had landed as far south as Crescent City, California, destroying large portions of that town. Would a tsunami, if it originated from a Seattle epicenter, move this way, as the newscaster on the radio had suggested? Or would it travel south?

I couldn’t remember, from the earthquake preparedness sessions. We could only hope we would find a portable radio at the Ford house. Maybe even a cell phone. Though how much good that would do, if its batteries were dead, I didn’t know. For that matter, would there even be service? Were nearby towers intact, or had they gone down, too?

I couldn’t think about it. The worry alone was sapping my strength.

“To answer your question,” I continued, as we dodged incoming ripples on the shore, “I was helping out a working woman—a prostitute. She’d been raped by cops, and they killed her to keep her from testifying. Then they came after me. Two murders would have been too much, I suppose, so they set me up with a phony drug charge to discredit me. They also hoped to scare me into shutting up about what they’d done. Well, with the victim dead, that’s the way it might have gone. The story was in all the papers, as well as on the evening news, that Sarah Lansing—who’d defended criminals so ‘brilliantly’ over the years—was now one of them herself.”

I paused to scan the line of trees, saw nothing resembling a roofline, and continued. “I already had a record as a public defender for getting the worst kinds of criminals off. That was my job, to provide a defense for anyone—guilty or not—however uncomfortable it might sometimes be. Of course, the cops hated me for it.”

“They were afraid of you,” Kim said firmly.

For a brief moment I felt a start, as if she somehow already knew what had happened.

But then she explained, “If this were a movie, and you were to go after them—which it sounds like you were about to do—you’d be a powerful foe. They’d have to silence you. Right?”

I paused and bent to pick up a long piece of drift-wood, which I used as a staff to lean on for a moment. This talk, as well as the walk, was taking more out of me than I’d imagined it would. My knees were shaky.

“So,” Kim continued, “what you would need, Sarah, is some sort of evidence the cops couldn’t get to. Something to hold over their heads.”

I searched her face. “What gave you that idea?”

She grinned. “I saw it in a movie. I think Brian Dennehy was the good cop, and maybe James Woods was the bad one—but I could be confusing this with another film entirely.”

Her tone became serious. “All I can say, Sarah, is that you probably want to look out for yourself. These cops don’t sound like they’re going to be satisfied with your just being on trial. Too many things might come out, don’t you think? Things that could incriminate them? Sarah, putting myself in their place, I think I’d be trying to shut you up before that time comes—and I’d do it in a way that fit the drug possession charge. Have you take an overdose, or something. In fact, I’d guess their setting you up on that charge was only a first step in a larger plan.”

I stared at her. Moments passed. Finally, she laughed, awkwardly. “Sorry. My imagination runs wild sometimes.”

“That’s a bit of an understatement,” I said.

My eyes met Kim’s, and she didn’t look away, or even blink. “You’re not going to let them get away with this—are you, Sarah?”

“I…no,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

“You have a plan?”

I realized, now, that I’d said far too much. I had allowed myself to get caught up in that syndrome of bonding with someone I’d been going through a disaster with. But who knew what Kim Stratton’s motives were?

“Sarah?”

“Hmm? Sorry.”

“I was asking, have you been able to get the evidence you need to prove you were set up?”

I made a wide arc with my walking stick and threw it far out over the water, watching as the swift tide carried it away. I imagined my troubles being carried off with it, disappearing round the bend—like putting all your woes into a big brown bag by your bed at night, so you could go to sleep without worrying about them.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m so tired of thinking about all this. And I’m almost sure I can see the Ford house chimney up there, through those trees.”

“You’re right,” Kim said, looking that way. The moment of tension passed. “Thank God!” she said. “I’m getting tired of tramping around this damned island. Besides, if this were a movie, there would at least be a happy ending. I’m not so sure we’re going to get one of those.”

“I’m afraid you could be right,” I said, as Luke’s house appeared before us. Things did not look good.