by Lisa Jackson
“Ask Cassandra,” Lillibeth implored.
“We’re not waking her up, too, unless we have to,” Isadora said.
“We have to!” Lillibeth cried.
“Cassandra doesn’t operate that way,” Isadora reminded her tersely. “You can’t just ask her. She has to tell you.”
Lillibeth was knotting her fingers. “But she might knooowww. She might knoowww.”
“Maybe Aunt Catherine took the car,” Ophelia suggested.
“No.” Ravinia shook her head. They were grasping at straws. Yes, Catherine would drive the car, an ancient Buick, from time to time, but not in this weather, not this late, not without telling them.
“Get Cassandra!” Lillibeth’s voice was rising, and it wouldn’t be long before Cassandra heard them, anyway, so Ophelia turned back to the stairs, pressing her lips together and lifting her skirts once more as she headed to the second level.
All this fret and worry was getting them nowhere fast. “I’m going to the gate,” Ravinia said, charging toward the front door.
“Where’s your cloak?” Isadora asked automatically.
Cloak. Jesus. Ravinia almost missed a step. Why couldn’t they just have coats like everyone else? “It’s by the back door.” Ravinia pulled open the heavy front door and swung it inward. A swirl of snow and wind and cold swept inside. She pulled the door shut behind her, and instantly realized she should have waited for the cloak.
Head down, she plunged into the frigid night, trudging along the buried flagstone path toward the gate. Six steps from the house she saw the large, irregular mound of snow. A body? Oh, Jesus! Catherine!
“No!” Heart racing, she ran forward, trampling awkwardly, shot with fear as her aunt’s body became more and more defined in her vision. Catherine lay on the ground, nearly covered with white powder, her eyes closed, her mouth half open, and only because her face was turned sideways did air enter her trachea. Ravinia scraped snow away frantically, pressed her ear to Catherine’s chest. Her aunt was breathing. Barely. Her heart beating.
“Help!” she screamed.
They needed 9-1-1.
“I found her! Isadora! Ophelia! Help!”
They needed a phone.
“This is the problem, you stubborn old woman!” Ravinia yelled at her aunt. She glanced over to the old shed that was used as a garage. The Buick was inside, but she knew it would be undrivable in these conditions. She didn’t know how to drive, anyway, and it was all such a clusterfuck.
The door to the lodge flew open. Yellow light spilled out, and Isadora stood in the aperture.
“She’s here!” Ravinia screamed at the top of her lungs. “We need help! Get blankets. Your goddamn cloak. For the love of God, get help!”
Hale was driving ten miles an hour, and the snow just kept building and building on the road. Ten miles an hour. Too damned slow. His forty-minute estimate was for shit. He was already an hour in, and he had a ways to go.
I’m coming, Savannah. His mind raced to images of her in her car, her Ford, laboring alone in the dark . . . in the freezing night. I’m coming.
He was counting the seconds, feeling precious time passing. He stepped on the accelerator, and his rig immediately slid a bit, so he eased off. He would be of no help if he didn’t make it to her side. God. Was it going to take forever?
His thoughts kept touching back on Kristina, too, but as soon as they did, they quickly jumped back to the situation at hand. He needed to get to Savvy. Soon. At least he could help her. There was nothing more he could do for his wife but pray.
Rounding a corner, he nearly ran into the back of a tow truck, which was winching up the rear end of a badly smashed Toyota wagon. Silhouetted in the truck’s headlights, a man was standing in five inches of snow, staring around himself blankly. Blood was dripping from the end of his hand to the frozen ground.
Hale rolled down his window and eased to a stop. “You need help?” he asked, when all he wanted to do was keep going.
“Nah.” The man lifted the arm. “I scraped it, s’all.”
“Looks like more than a scrape.”
“Isaac’ll take me where I need to go,” he answered, nodding toward the tow truck driver. Hale could just make out ISAAC’S TOWING stenciled on the side of the snow-crusted truck. “You’re going the wrong way, man,” the injured man added, pointing with his good arm in the direction Hale was heading. “There’s nothing there for miles but a ton of snow. I’m the last one through.”
“Gotta find somebody.”
“Let the sheriff’s department do it,” he advised, but Hale just sketched a good-bye with his hand. He couldn’t count on the sheriff’s department, because he didn’t have much faith that Savvy’s plight was, despite her connections, next up on the 9-1-1 rotation.
He squinted through the falling snow. If the injured man was the last one through, then his vehicle had crossed all lanes to land in the ditch on the far side of the road.
Clamping down hard on his fears, determined to find her, to help his newborn son, he touched a toe to the accelerator.
Ravinia was over the wall. One moment her gloved hand was scrambling for a handhold; the next she was hauling herself up the last couple of feet and throwing herself to the other side. Normally, this maneuver was a careful climb over the top and a controlled drop to the fir needle carpet outside the walls of Siren Song, but tonight she simply hurled herself into the snow.
Still, she landed with an ooof. The air escaped her lungs in a rush. She lay still for two heartbeats. Then, fairly certain she hadn’t injured herself, she struggled to her feet and began trudging down the hill through snow-laden trees and brush toward the highway, far below. Past that road and a rambling quarter-mile descent of land to the beach lay the endless blackness that marked the Pacific Ocean. She’d made this trek several dozen times, more and more frequently, as the ludicrousness of her “captivity” had made it impossible for her to stay, and she knew where she was going.
Even so, a ribbon of fear had wound itself around her heart. Catherine was an old biddy—far older than her years on earth—but she was their aunt, and even though she was completely screwed up, she did want only to keep her nieces safe and secure. Ravinia couldn’t imagine what would happen if she actually wasn’t around.
She kept us safe from Justice, she thought.
Ravinia’s jaw locked. It wasn’t all Catherine, she reminded herself. She and Ophelia had helped rid the earth of that whack job as well.
At the edge of Highway 101, Ravinia stepped onto the shoulder of the road and slipped right down to her knees. Snow wasn’t the norm around here, but she could remember how it was in ’08, when it buried everything and everybody lost power for days on end, well, except for Siren Song, with its generator.
Carefully, her nerves thrumming with urgency, she found her footing and started south down the road, toward Deception Bay. There wasn’t a car to be seen. Nobody wanted to trust the slickness of the roads, and Ravinia, with an eye toward the western edge of Highway 101, with its limited guardrails, could understand. No, she’d never driven a car, but she’d ridden with “friends” she met on her nightly vigils, and she sure as hell got a thrill when they went around some of these snakelike corners a little too fast. There was a slow decline in the road that wound into Deception Bay, but that descent was still a few miles ahead, and Ravinia was worried. How long was it going to take to find help? Would she be in time?
She and her sisters had carried Catherine into the lodge and stripped her of her clothes. Carefully, they’d wrapped her in blankets and laid her in front of the fire, but with Lillibeth’s wailing, and Isadora’s fretting thoughts of trying to find Earl, and Cassandra’s wide-eyed stares when she’d joined them, as if she were looking into the bowels of hell, well . . . nothing positive had happened. Ophelia’s sudden disappearance hadn’t helped, and then Cassandra had whispered, “It’s because Aunt Catherine knows . . . ,” and Ravinia had asked, “Knows what?” and when no one said anything, Ravinia
had had enough. They needed action. They needed emergency help. They didn’t need to huddle together like scared mice, shivering inside the lodge.
No more, she’d thought then, and now she thought it again. No more.
She was fifteen minutes into her hike when a car with chains chinging through the snow caught her in the beams of its headlights. The sedan slowed. Cautiously, Ravinia glanced at the driver as he rolled down his window.
“Need a lift?” he asked.
He was old. And there was a woman with him on the passenger side who looked about the same age, his wife, maybe. “We got caught in this mess, but we’re almost home,” she said.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Ravinia asked.
“Sorry, honey. We don’t own one. What are you doing out alone on a night like this?” she asked.
“Are you going to Deception Bay?” Ravinia cut through her concern. No time for explanations.
“We’re going through it,” the man said. “Heading to Tillamook.”
“If we make it,” his partner said with asperity.
“You can drop me in Deception Bay,” Ravinia decided and opened the back door when he gestured for her to help herself. She could find a phone once she was in the small seaside town, she decided, not realizing she’d crossed her fingers for good luck until she happened to look down at her gloved hands.
CHAPTER 18
Visibility had dropped to the square of snow directly in front of his headlights. Hale found he was saying the same thing over and over again in his head: Just a little bit farther. Not much more. Just a little bit farther. Not much more.
He wasn’t far from the summit. She’d said she was on this side of it. He couldn’t have missed her. Couldn’t have. Her lights would be on. Her battery would still be working, or maybe she still had the engine running. God, he hoped so. It was damn cold. Damn cold . . .
He had a blanket in the backseat. And in the cargo area he had the carpet he’d used to put on the chains, although some snow had clung to it and melted, so it was a bit wet. But if Savvy was cold, really cold, he could give her his coat and wrap her in the blanket and carpet, if need be.
Jesus.
His chest felt as if it were in a vise.
A sound came from behind him, and he looked in the rearview mirror to see a sheriff’s car following after him, light bar flashing red and blue, but no siren. At the same moment his peripheral vision caught sight of car tires, covered already with an inch of snow, but sticking out of the ditch and spinning slowly like rubber plates on two sticks. The rest of the Escape was in the ditch, on its side.
Savvy! Finally!
Hale yanked his steering wheel a little too energetically, and he immediately went into a slide, which he corrected with a slow turn into the slide as he yanked his foot from the accelerator. His TrailBlazer took a couple of 360s, but it finally stopped, facing west. The Clatsop County sheriff’s car that had been behind him tried to stop, couldn’t, then fishtailed on past him for a bit before the driver got it under control.
Hale didn’t have time to look. He was stopped about ten feet east of the Escape and climbed out of the TrailBlazer into sideways snow, only to immediately lose his footing. The road was like glass beneath the snow—a sheet of ice. He wished he had studs. Far better than chains, but the thought flew into his head and out. Scrambling to his feet, he half crab-walked, half slipped and slid through the blinding precipitation to Savvy’s car.
“Savannah!” he yelled. “Savannah!”
His gut clenched. What if she wasn’t alive? What if she was seriously injured? Having problems with the labor? The birth?
He was almost to the car when he saw the driver’s door jiggle and pop open a little bit, only to close again. His heart leapt. She was alive and aware. When he got to the ditch, he swiped snow off his face and took a step down into snow-covered weeds, grabbing the back wheel to steady himself before sliding sharply downward. Damn it all. Straining, he had to climb back up a bit to reach the car.
“Savannah!” he yelled.
The Escape was solidly wedged into the ditch, on its side. With an effort, he actually climbed onto the car and knelt on the back door, bending to open the driver’s door and yank it upward. It came with a wrench, its hinges torqued.
“Savannah!”
With snow now falling into the car, he looked inside. She was there, struggling to turn herself around so her head could pop out the door. “Thank God. Oh, thank God. . . . Are you okay?”
“Hale,” she whispered tremulously.
He reached in for her, wanting to scoop her into his arms and squeeze her hard.
“Hey!” The voice came from behind him.
He turned to see the sheriff’s deputy marching toward him through a veil of snow, wearing golf shoes, or a facsimile thereof. “The road’s closed,” he called, but his attention had turned to Savannah, who was half standing in the car, her head and shoulders outside the door. Her messenger bag was in one hand, and she flung it into the ditch.
“I’m in labor,” Savannah said quietly, for Hale’s ears only.
“I know. Are you . . . ?”
“Can you help me out?” she asked, her voice calm but slightly quavering. “I need to get out.”
He saw then that she might be holding it together, but she was quietly panicking inside. “Don’t worry. We’ll—”
“You the one who called nine-one-one?” the deputy yelled from behind him.
“Yes,” Hale answered tersely. “We need to get her out of the car. ASAP.”
“She’s pregnant?”
“Yes,” he repeated.
“Maybe we should wait for the EMTs.”
“No,” Savannah said firmly. “No time.”
The deputy yelled, “Ma’am, you’re probably better off staying inside the vehicle and letting the experts—”
For an answer she placed her arms on the side of the car and started pulling herself upward. Hale didn’t like it. He was in too precarious a position to offer much support.
The deputy finally got that he wasn’t being listened to and slid down the embankment next to the car. “Lady, listen—”
“I’m a goddamn detective, Deputy!” she spit out furiously and practically pulled herself out with her anger. Hale grabbed her hands as she struggled upward. With all his strength he hauled her up and onto the car so that she was lying on her side.
“If you’d just wait a minute,” the deputy sniped.
“She’s not going to,” Hale said, stating the obvious.
“Help her off the car.”
While Hale held her arms and slowly inched Savannah over the side, the deputy grabbed her from his position in the ditch and eased her down until her feet touched the ground. Hale released her only when he was certain she was safe, and then he slid off the back of the car to help Savannah climb up from the ditch to the road.
“You’re really pregnant, ma’am . . . Detective,” the deputy observed, a master of grasping the situation.
As Savannah crawled up to the edge of the road, she suddenly folded herself forward and into a squat.
“Oh . . . God . . .” The deputy’s eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open.
“Hale . . . Hale . . . ,” she huffed.
“I’m here.” He scrambled up to be beside her.
“I need to get to . . . your . . . car and lie down. I need to . . . lie down.”
“She gonna have that baby now?” the deputy asked, aghast.
Hale turned on him. “Call somebody. Find out where they are.” Do something!
The deputy headed for his car as if he’d been released from the gate, staggering and slipping, half falling and fighting his way back up, just generally getting away.
Savannah had moved onto her side and was lying on the ground, panting.
“Give me your arm,” Hale said.
She lifted one arm limply. “Can you get my bag? My messenger bag?”
“My car’s over there. You see it?” he asked as the
wind whistled through the gorge. “I don’t want you to walk and fall,” he said, thinking hard.
“I can crawl.”
“Are you sure?”
She started laughing, a hitching sound that said she was fighting tears. “Yes. Remember . . . my bag? In the ditch?”
“I’m getting it.”
He leaned into the ditch and hooked the strap of the bag on the third try. Straightening, squinting through the falling snow, he saw she was on her hands and knees and was edging her way to the TrailBlazer. Hale struggled to his feet, looking around. The deputy was at his vehicle and was trying to make contact; Hale could see the walkie at his lips. Beyond his car and Hale’s, there wasn’t another vehicle on the road.
Slipping and sliding, as quickly as he could, he made his way to her and helped her reach his TrailBlazer. “Can you get in the passenger seat?”
“I—I need to get in the backseat,” she panted.
“The backseat?” he repeated.
“Yes!” She suddenly stopped moving and pulled herself into a ball on her side, breathing loudly in and out as another contraction overtook her.
“How close are you?” Hale asked carefully, knowing the baby was coming soon and wishing to high heaven that he could do something, anything, to help.
She didn’t answer immediately, not until she began to relax from the grip of the contraction. Then she took several deep breaths and said shakily, “The contractions are about two minutes apart. I’ve been counting in my head.”
“That’s . . . close.” Real close.
“Yes, it is. That’s why I need to get in the backseat,” she said determinedly, rolling to her hands and knees and moving forward again. “Kristina?” she asked after a moment, stopping to glance back at him.
“She was still in surgery when I left.”
“It’s bad?”
“I don’t know.” Hale watched her helplessly. Frustrated by the fact that he could do so little to help her, or his wife, for that matter, he glanced toward the deputy once more. The man seemed to be even more boondoggled than he was.
