Lineage

by Hart, Joe

  When a pleasant voice answered in perfect unison with the rippling title of the company on the screen, Lance almost smiled and told himself he hadn’t heard the soft whisper again. He ignored the fact that this time he heard his name.

  Chapter 6

  “Do not mistake fate’s guise as coincidence.”

  —Unknown

  “I told you, I’m just doing a little sightseeing and some research for a future project,” Lance said into the phone. Andy’s irritated voice, punctuated with bouts of cussing, kept flowing out of the earpiece like a stream of aggravated white noise. Lance checked the Land Rover’s rearview mirror and changed lanes, although at ten o'clock on a Thursday there wasn’t much traffic on this section of I-35. “Listen, listen.” Lance paused and then tried again. “Will you listen for a minute?” Lance waited until the angry ranting in his ear tapered and finally fell silent. “I’m going on a short trip, just like you said I should do. I’m sorry that it’s concerning a new book, but right now, my friend, I’m taking what I can get.”

  Another string of sentences laced with several four-letter words peppered Lance, and he rolled his eyes in exasperation. Instead of riding out the storm of cursing, he decided to intervene and try to cut off the flow.

  “Andy, just calm down. I’ll finish Harbinger, don’t worry. I don’t know what’s happening right now. All I can say is that I finally wrote something and I saw this house. I have to go see it in person, okay? If it’s just a house, I’ll come home tomorrow and plop my ass right back down in front of the keyboard. If it’s something else, then we’ll see. I’m only asking you to keep Rashir off my back for a few days.” Lance listened to the mumbled reply on the other end. “That’s actually your job, you know.” Lance winced but smiled at the same time at the explosion of new expletives coming from the phone. He held the receiver away from his ear and began looking for a sign that would tell him how far he was from Duluth. When Andy’s outburst died down, Lance spoke as soothingly as he could without losing the smile.

  “You’re my best friend and I know you’ve got my back. There’s a story here, buddy, I know there is. Just give me some time and I’ll put out the best novel of my career.” There was a long pause of silence on the other end of the phone before a begrudging reply. “Thanks, Andy, I owe you. Next time we go to dinner at Fosa Rachel’s I’ll buy you that port you like. Love you, Andy.” Lance nodded and shut his phone off completely. He didn’t want distractions now, not when he was getting close to the house.

  His eyes roamed the edges of the highway and took in the healthy trees growing around the houses that lined the road. The day was bright, and without thinking, Lance reached to the dash and turned the radio on, letting the sounds of Green Day pour out of the surrounding speakers. A sign bearing the words Duluth 5, Stony Bay 47 approached and flew by the right side of the Land Rover. As he hummed along with the song, Lance went over the events of the day before yet again, as he tried to make sense of what had actually brought him to this point.

  When the phone was answered, he didn’t have to ask for Carrie. She was the one who picked up the line, and when he inquired about the house, there was a pause, as if she had no recollection of listing it. When the pause elongated into an uncomfortable silence, Lance began to describe the property and Carrie suddenly exclaimed and apologized. The house hadn’t been shown in a while, she explained, but she was happy to set up a time for him to tour it. He chose the earliest slot available that allowed for travel from Ardent Falls.

  By the time Billie Joe Armstrong quit telling everyone where he would be found when he came around, the city of Duluth rose up on his left and Lake Superior stretched out on the opposite side. Lance kept looking at the lake. The far side of the shoreline stretched out and around in a sweeping arc that gradually narrowed until it faded from view completely, as if it were the last edge of Atlantis slowly slipping below an ancient unnamed sea. He had seen the ocean several times but had never ventured this far north of the cities, and Superior reminded him of the Atlantic. It looked cold, even on a warm August day with the sun beating down. The city around him was smashed into the side of the steep hill that shot up to his left. It was as if an asteroid made of homes and businesses had fallen and dashed itself against the edge of the rise, leaving scattered pieces of itself mingled in with the winding roads and rocky landscape.

  Lance looked at the liquid-crystal display and relaxed. It was just past 10:00 a.m. and the showing of the house wasn’t until one in the afternoon. His stomach ached with hunger, and he resisted the urge to turn off on an exit promising dining at a local restaurant.

  The story had begun to pull at his mind the way most of his novels did, but for some reason his thoughts were limited. He could see the main character: a man his age, long blond hair and a sharp nose. A deep aura of sadness surrounding him, as if he had seen heaven and had been sent away. Lance could see him standing, facing the gray waters of the lake that expanded to his right, and waiting for something. But what was it?

  “What are you waiting for?” Lance said to himself as he tried attacking the story’s plot at different angles, but to no avail. The story was like a shape behind a gossamer curtain—there in form but without detail. Having a story stunted in his mind felt unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Perhaps the writer’s block had only loosened its grip and was still there, waiting to whisk away the idea at the slightest hint of creation.

  The city gradually gave way to a more rural landscape, and soon signs that informed him he would have to make a choice in the near future as to the route he would take to get to Stony Bay began to appear. To the right was the scenic way—a winding road that appeared to hug the edge of the great lake according to the SUV’s GPS. To the left, a narrow highway shot directly through the rocky, wooded countryside.

  Lance hesitated for only a moment before turning on his right blinker and angling the vehicle off the interstate, onto a two-lane blacktop so near to the edge of the cliff that Lance veered the SUV closer to the middle of the highway.

  “The road less traveled for sure,” he said to the empty car. Collective Soul now blasted through the speakers and Lance began to sing along with the chorus. Sunlight glared off a billion points in the water and made the lake look as if it were a shifting pool of jewels. Sets of long-forgotten train tracks began to appear on either side of the road. They stretched off in the distance, sometimes close to the road, and at others disappearing completely from his view. The twin steel rails crosshatched by many dark timbers supporting them were like constant reminders of a memory beginning to fade. Every so often a line of boxcars would appear, their sides tattooed by graffiti that was just slightly less faded than the paint it graced, the artists long having grown up and surely moved on to less juvenile practices.

  On a particularly sharp curve, a large white cross made from laminate or wood had been pressed into the soil a few yards off the road. As Lance drove past, he could see brightly colored yellow ribbons hanging from the cross, spinning and dancing in the breeze. Another, much smaller, cross came into view, next to its parent. Pink strings of color waved from its arms, and as the road straightened out, Lance pressed on the brake and guided the vehicle to a stop on the gravel shoulder.

  “It was a car crash,” he said breathlessly. “He was driving. His wife and daughter were with him.” Lance looked over to the passenger seat and could almost see a dark-haired woman smiling prettily back at him. Her eyes were a deep green, sea-foam green he would’ve called them. When he turned his gaze to the back seat, the kicking legs of a small girl in a pink sundress caught his attention. She was perhaps six, with black hair to match her mother’s. She was looking wistfully out of the window at the sunlight streaming in. There was a curve at each corner of her mouth, as if she knew something wonderful but couldn’t quite put it into words yet. She was beautiful. Lance looked forward at the highway ahead of him, then saw something in his rearview mirror. When he leaned closer, there was straight blond hair where hi
s should have been.

  A semi blasted by Lance’s window, close enough to rock the Land Rover on its springs, accompanied by a rude honk of its horn. Lance jerked back in his seat, his muscles straining and his stomach tightening into a hard ball. The imaginings in his car evaporated as though they had been made of steam and light. When he pushed his face closer to the mirror in the center of the windshield, his own face was there to meet him.

  He sat back and breathed deeply, trying to calm his heart rate and drain off the rush of adrenaline that pounded in his temples. When his hands no longer visibly shook, he put the gearshift into drive, checked his mirrors twice, and pulled onto the deserted road.

  Stony Bay appeared when Lance wasn’t expecting it. There had been no sign welcoming him to the small town just before the bend that hid it from view. It simply emerged from the land; the single road he had been following opened up into a thoroughfare lined with small shops and businesses. As Lance slowed the vehicle to abide by the speed limit, his head turned on a swivel, taking in each shop’s front and what it offered.

  There were two cafés nearly side by side, a store that proclaimed souvenirs of all kinds, an ice-cream parlor decked out in colorful blues and reds, and an ornate-looking business with the simple word Books over the wooden front door. Lance could see several bars and a contemporary restaurant made almost entirely of stone scattered closer to the slight rise on the lake side. A relatively new gas station sat forlornly at the far end of the long street, seemingly an outcast among the older stores. Lance took it all in—the wide sidewalks, the flags flying from every lamppost, the people strolling along the fronts of the businesses and every so often entering them for a look at their wares. It was a northern tourist town at its best, so quaint that it was memorable enough to return to year after year, not large enough to tempt visitors to put down roots permanently.

  Lance pulled into a parking spot directly in front of the twin cafés and glanced at the clock again before turning the Land Rover off. He had another hour to kill before he had to be at the house, and his hunger had become a living thing in the past ten minutes. The remainder of the drive to the town had been uneventful. No more visions or breakthroughs had come to him, but a part of his mind began to glow with a small flame. Despite how unsettling the drive had been, the story was starting to take on a shape and the fire burning in his brain was one of hope.

  The inside of the café on the left was narrow but long, lined with worn wooden booths and tables that rocked back and forth no matter how you turned them. Lance ordered a club sandwich and a bowl of chicken-and-wild-rice soup from the middle-aged waitress, who smiled at him with no recognition in her eyes. Being a best-selling author was a good thing, but being unable to enjoy a quiet lunch without being accosted by at least one person for an autograph was something else altogether.

  After appeasing his aching stomach with the sandwich and soup—which were surprisingly good—Lance stepped out of the café onto the sidewalk. Like the waves that beat on the shore of the great lake to his right, the sun’s rays pummeled his shoulders and back as he strolled down the sidewalk, and he began to regret wearing a black shirt in the heat. After checking his watch, he realized he still had time to kill before the showing. Lance ran his fingers through his hair and squinted at several of the signs on the buildings, silently cursing himself for not grabbing his sunglasses from the car. His eyes finally landed on the bookstore he had noticed, and without thinking, he made his way up the building’s short walk and opened the heavy oak door.

  A bell dinged once somewhere out of sight in the rear of the store as he shut the door behind him. Dark wood floors held row after row of chest-high shelves, which in turn housed the spines of thousands of books. Lance’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He hadn’t expected such a selection from the outward appearance of the small building. Glancing around, he found that he was the only customer within the quiet shop. As he made his way down the first aisle of books, he mused that there wasn’t another silence like that of an empty bookstore. It was as if hundreds of thousands of people were biting their tongues, waiting for the moment to release their voices with the opening of a cover.

  A particular book caught Lance’s eye as he strolled down the row, its dark cover emblazoned with sharp zigzags of lightning. Lance pulled Legends of the North Shore from the shelf and examined the inside flap. His attention was so drawn to the overview of the book that he didn’t hear the soft footsteps approaching from behind.

  “Hi, can I help you?”

  The voice was as bright as the light that filtered in through the high windows of the store, and when Lance turned, startled by the question, his breath caught in his throat. The woman who stood at the end of the row was a spitting image of the vision that had sat in the passenger seat of his car no more than an hour ago. Her hair held the same dark shade and her eyes—there was no mistaking them. They were the deep green of an oak leaf in midsummer. She was petite and wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt and khaki shorts. She leaned easily on the shelf nearest to her, her head tilted with inquiry.

  “I … hi …” Lance fumbled, his tongue several steps behind his racing thoughts. Without looking, he tried to replace the book in the space he had pulled it from, but instead, lost his grip and watched as the book somersaulted to the floor, landing with a loud thud. “Jesus!” Lance exclaimed, and bent to pick the book up, dusting its cover off and checking to make sure the fall hadn’t bent any pages. When he looked back up at the woman’s face, he saw she wore a bemused look that he was sure she reserved for drunks and precocious children.

  “I’m sorry, lost my grip,” Lance said lamely, and tried to put on his best smile. The woman nodded, but her smirk remained in place.

  “No problem. Good thing you didn’t drop it on your foot, it’s a long book.” Lance barked laughter that was too loud in the empty bookstore. Christ, he thought. Get a grip, you idiot.

  “Were you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

  “No, not really. You have a really nice store here.”

  “Thanks. Well, if you need some help finding anything or dropping books, just let me know.” Lance felt an urge to let out the unfamiliar laughter again but staved it off. Instead, he smiled and nodded, feeling blood warm his face. He watched the woman walk up to the half-moon counter in the middle of the store and begin shuffling through a stack of papers. A runner of dark hair fell from behind one delicate ear, obscuring her face for a moment before her hand absently pushed it back into place. It was such a simple movement, but it was done with a grace and elegance that made him stare. Only when her green eyes shifted from the paperwork to Lance’s corner of the room did he tear his gaze away.

  In an effort to appear somewhat normal, he pulled the book he had dropped from the shelf and began paging through it. There were black-and-white pictures every few pages that depicted different views of Lake Superior’s shoreline, along with some shots of enormous ore-hauling ships chugging through the dark waters. Feeling the need to purchase something to offset his strange behavior, Lance walked to the desk and set the book on the counter. The woman looked up as she rose from her chair behind the desk and smiled. This time there was no doubt or mockery in her expression, only warmth.

  “Find everything okay?” she asked, as she scanned the book’s bar code and punched a key on the computer console to her right.

  “Yeah, I figured I should buy it after throwing it on the floor.” The woman’s smile widened and spread to her eyes.

  “On vacation?” she said as she drew out a small brown paper bag from beneath the counter.

  “Uh, not really. Just passing through. This is a really nice town,” he said, mentally slapping his own forehead with the lameness of his speech.

  “Thanks, it gets really busy this time of year. That’ll be twenty-two thirty-six.” Lance fished his wallet from the back of his jeans and handed her his credit card. As she ran the plastic in the machine behind the counter, she read his name out loud.
<
br />   “Lance Metzger. That sounds really familiar.”

  The indecision that arose with the opportunity was a mile-high wall that flew up in Lance’s mind. His tongue began to work in his mouth, and before he knew it, he was doing something he had vowed from the moment his first novel had hit the mainstream never to do.

  “I’m an author, you might have a few of my books here.” Lance’s insides cringed and he mentally began to whip himself for finally becoming something he had always abhorred. He had never used his semi-fame to open doors or gain favor with anyone, especially a woman whom he found attractive. But at the moment the urge to find out more about the woman before him was too tempting, and he shut out the chiding voice in the back of his mind that was calling him every degrading name under the sun.

  “Really, what do you write?”

  “Horror, mostly. I wrote one that bordered on thriller, but it wasn’t a great fit, and the critics agreed.” She laughed and he thought it was one of the most endearing sounds he had ever heard. It somehow felt right to him, as if he had been waiting to hear something like it for years and everything before had fallen short.

  “You know, I don’t think I have any of your stuff, but your name does sound familiar. I’ll have to keep an eye out for you.” She smiled again and slid the book and his card across the counter. The abruptness of the brushoff was palpable and Lance felt himself shrink. Don’t say anything else, just thank her and walk out of here, he thought as he tucked his card away and picked up the bag from the countertop.

  “Well, I’ll see you around,” he said, feeling like the biggest lump that had ever walked the earth.

  “Yes, thanks very much. Oh, and my name is Mary. You gave me yours, it’s only right I do the same.”