Blue Moon Bay

by Lisa Wingate

  In the darkness, Roger barked, then clawed at something wooden—the outside door, I hoped. I made my way toward the sound until I reached the far wall and the door handle. A tangle of spider webs melted over my fingers, sticky and filmy, as I grabbed on and pulled, but the wood, swollen from so many years of disuse, wouldn’t budge.

  “Heather, move back,” Blaine was on the other side now. “Get out of the way.” He threw himself against the door as the fight continued overhead.

  A piece of furniture crashed near the cellar stairway, rolling and hitting the door hard, rattling it on its hinges as a series of gunshots exploded. Smoke seeped in from the ceiling, tinging the air with a combination of ashy scents and diesel fumes waiting to burn. Terror raced through me. A bullet splintered the floorboards and struck a joist. Roger clawed at the stones underneath the threshold, trying to dig his way through. Blaine’s weight collided with the door again, causing it to give a few inches. Wrapping my fingers around the weathered wood, I pulled. How long before the diesel fumes would catch the flame and draw the fire down here? How long? Another gunshot rang out. Something or someone hit the door at the top of the stairs. Another scream wrenched from me.

  “Move back.” Blaine’s words were ragged and urgent, commanding. “Get out of the way, Heather.” Through the gap in the door, I saw him move back a step and prepare to kick his way through. Dragging Roger with me, I pressed close to the wall, Clay’s backpack bunching against the stone.

  Overhead, the noise stopped suddenly. Blaine kicked the door, and it broke loose from the hinges, tumbling inward and landing on the floor with a thunderous crash. He reached through, grabbed my hand, pulled me against the stone wall of the cellar steps, wrapped me in his arms. “Are you all right? Heather, are you hurt?”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay, but it’s Clay. They’ve got Clay and Amy—in their car, I think. There was another man here. He was trying to stop them.”

  Pushing away, I bolted up the cellar stairs and into the yard. Roger scrambled past me as I coughed, wheezed, and gulped in air. Blaine caught me, grabbed my arm, and we cleared the corner of the house. Across the farmyard, a car barreled from the barn, crashing through the corner of an old wooden fence, then flinging gravel and going airborne as it sped over the earthen terraces, heading for the driveway.

  “They’ve got Clay and Amy!” I screamed. “Blaine, we can’t let them go!”

  A second engine revved to life in the orchard behind the house. The glow of headlights ping-ponged across the yard, and a dark sedan fishtailed from the orchard lane into the driveway, speeding after the first car. Inside the house, the fire roared, moaning like a giant beast awakening, hungry and powerful. Smoke billowed through the front door, heat flowing outward, causing us to shield ourselves with our arms. Glass buckled and shattered, the panes in the wooden windows exploding, one, then another, and another.

  Blaine ran for his truck, and I spun around and rushed after him, Roger on my heels. Moments later, we were racing down the driveway, but both vehicles had disappeared from view. When we reached the county road, darkness lay in either direction, curves and hills cloaking everything, making the cars vanish like props in a magician’s trick.

  “Which way? What now?” Blaine demanded.

  My mind spun in panic. I raked my hair out of my face, then coughed on the sooty cotton in my throat. “Harmony Shores,” I gasped out as I shed Clay’s backpack into the floorboard. “They did something to the gas meter there. We have to get everyone out of the house.” Please don’t let anything happen. I was wrong. I was wrong to act like I didn’t care. . . .

  The prayer cycled in my head, blanketing panic with hope, but also with the terrifying realization that the future wasn’t a given. At any moment—tonight, tomorrow, five minutes from now—my time with the people I loved could be gone.

  Blaine pressed something into my hand. A cell phone. “Start calling 9-1-1. Keep trying until you get reception. Send someone to Harmony Shores and get the fire department to the farm. Give them a description of the cars and tell them we don’t know which way they went or where they’re headed, for sure.”

  My hands shook as I dialed the phone, then pressed Send. No service. I tried a second time and a third, hoping and praying as Blaine’s truck squealed around curves and popped over hills, catching air, then landing again. No service, no service, no service. “Hurry, Blaine!” Tears cloaked the words, the phone blurring as I dialed again. “Please hurry.”

  Blaine’s hand caught mine, squeezing for a moment before he reached for the steering wheel again. “We’ll get there. Keep dialing. Any minute now, it’ll . . .”

  “I’ve got a signal!” I blurted and pressed the Send button. Static hummed, the signal zigzagged from tower to tower, trying to find a connection. The moment seemed impossibly long. I imagined Harmony House in flames. I imagined my family, trapped in that monstrous structure, the uncs moving in their labored shuffle-steps, too slow to get out.

  The call dropped, and my stomach plummeted with it. “No!” Frustration threw me back against the seat. “No, no, no!” I dialed again, pushed Send, listened to the tides of static, the endless clicking. . . .

  “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” The voice was faint, almost lost, but it was there.

  “We need help. We need help at Harmony Shores Funeral Home in Moses Lake. There’s a gas leak in the yard . . . the meter. Get everyone out of the house. Please get everyone out. . . .”

  “Ma’am, ma’am,” the operator interrupted. “I need you to slow down. I can barely hear you. Did you say a gas leak?”

  “Yes, please . . . at Harmony Shores Funeral Home. Moses Lake . . .” The call went dead, and the operator was gone.

  By the time I was able to connect another call, a sheriff’s deputy had already been sent to Harmony Shores. Blaine took the phone to report what had happened at the farm and to describe the cars we’d seen speeding away.

  Fists balled in my lap, I collapsed against the seat, tears flowing over my cheeks. “It’s okay. It has to be okay.” One miracle could lead to two. Clay and Amy could be found, alive and well. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe anything else.

  “It will be,” Blaine whispered, and I felt his hand on my hair, smoothing it away from my face. I leaned into his touch, took comfort from it, tried to let his assurance travel into my body, to become reality as we drove the final few miles, and the lights of Moses Lake appeared ahead.

  When we turned into Harmony Shores, my mother and the uncs, still drowsy and confused, were moving onto the lawn with a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy checked with dispatch to see if anything had been reported about the cars, but he seemed skeptical, as if my story of what had happened at the farm were too farfetched to be believed. He seemed to be of the opinion that I’d invented the whole thing about the two men breaking into the farmhouse and setting it on fire. The revelation about the strange man in the basement was completely beyond what he was willing to accept, and he forced me to repeat it several times before he could keep it straight.

  “Why don’t you do your job?” Blaine snapped. “I saw the cars leaving that place, too. I heard the gunfire.” He towered over the deputy, and for a minute, I thought he was going to lay the guy out on the lawn. “Get the call out to the highway patrol, the park rangers, and the game wardens. That car could be a long way from here by now. They might try to hide out up in the hills or in the state park.”

  My mother was frantic, and the uncs were trying to comfort her. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” she kept muttering. “This wasn’t supposed to . . . Oh, Clay. Where’s Clay? Why can’t they find him?”

  A van from the utility company arrived to shut off the flow of gas to the meter. We waited while they went through procedures, then checked the house and reported that there was evidence of tampering around the gas meter. “You breathe too hard on that thing, it’d go sky high,” the technician reported, wiping his forehead. “We’ll get out here in the mornin’ and fix it.
Till then, everybody should keep away from the house, even though the gas is off now. All the piping oughta be checked, too. Somebody’s been messin’ with things—that’s for sure.”

  The deputy looked embarrassed then. He got in his car to make some more calls and ramp up the alert level.

  Blaine threw his hands in the air and started toward his truck. “I’ll be back. I’m going to do some looking around. One more set of eyes can’t hurt.”

  “That’s just what I was thinkin’.” Uncle Charley shuffled toward the vehicle, pajama pants fluttering in the breeze as he moved across the gravel in his house shoes and bathrobe. “C’mon, Herb. No sense in us sittin’ here doing nothing.”

  “I’m going with you.” I started after Blaine, leaving my mother alone by the cruiser, shivering and staring off into space.

  Blaine caught my arm gently. “You need to stay with your mom.” Even though he didn’t say it, I could tell what was in his mind. You need to stay with your mom in case it’s bad news. He walked back to the cruiser and told the deputy to take us up to the church, where it was warm, then he returned to his truck, where the uncs and Roger were already waiting.

  A shiver coursed through me as they drove away, the taillights turning the corner at the end of the driveway and disappearing into the night. Finally, I rejoined my mother, slipped my arm around her shoulders, and guided her into the backseat of the cruiser, the action more muscle memory than anything else. For months after my father’s death, I’d moved her around the house as if she were a rag doll, relocating her from the bed to the sofa each day, misguidedly hoping that maintaining some sort of routine would make things normal.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she whispered as we waited for the officer to secure the scene.

  “Clay’s going to be all right.” I was torn between the urge to comfort and the need to be angry. Finally, I just held her hand. What good would it do to be angry now? What would it accomplish? What had it ever accomplished? “He’ll be all right, do you hear me? You know Clay. He always lands on his feet.”

  “He just . . . He needed to do this. For your dad.” Her head dropped forward, her hands wringing in her lap. In the uneven light, her hands looked old, the veins pronounced, her fingers thin. She seemed frail and vulnerable, not entirely prepared for the world outside her poems and her literary analyses of classic novels. In so many ways, she had always been this woman, and I’d always kept myself apart from her, waiting for her to become the mother I wanted her to be, waiting for her to fit my expectations. But I was asking for something she didn’t have to give. She hadn’t changed, I realized now. She wouldn’t change. She would always be flighty, artistic, introspective in a way that allowed her to shut out the world. I could either love her the way she was or not love her at all.

  The second choice was more painful than the first. There were connections in this life, a history that I would never have with anyone but her. “We’ll be all right,” I said quietly, holding her close for the first time in years. As we drove to the church, she let her head fall sideways until it rested on my shoulder. For a moment, there was just the two of us, clinging to each other as the world spun off-balance.

  When we reached the church, Reverend Hay was waiting at the fellowship hall door. There were people with him—two men, several of the church ladies, and Mama B. Even Blaine’s stepmother was there. They’d started a prayer chain to bring Clay and Amy home safely.

  “Callin’ circle’s underway,” Mama B said, sounding like a mission commander in the throes of a full frontal assault. “We’re gonna get our kids back safe. People are up prayin’ all over town.” Slipping one arm around me and one around my mother, she guided us toward a sagging sofa in the opposite corner of the room. “Y’all just come on in and sit down, now,” she urged, looking over her shoulder as we passed the kitchen, where Blaine’s stepmother was huddled with another woman, talking in hushed tones while surreptitiously watching our entrance. “Claire Anne,” Mama B barked, and Blaine’s stepmother stood at attention. “Get some coffee out here. We’re gonna need it. And somebody bring me a blanket. These gals are chilled to the bone.”

  As church members gathered around us, offering comfort and soft, faded quilts, I felt their presence, their kindness, settling over me and seeping deep inside, easing the wild pulse thrumming in my ears. Even Blaine’s stepmother seemed to be trying to help, moving around the fringes of the room in a ruffled apron, offering coffee cups and refills. She set one beside my mother without asking, then awkwardly touched my mother’s shoulder before whisking away. Mom didn’t respond, other than to pull in a tattered breath and clutch the quilt high around her neck.

  Leaning close, Mama B forced eye contact. “Hon, now I want you to drink some of this coffee, y’hear? You want cream and sugar in it? Hon, you want cream and sugar?” Somehow, the request brought my mother out of herself. She nodded, her watery eyes fixed on Mama B.

  “Claire Anne, get us some cream and sugar.” Mama B’s voice rattled the ceiling panels, and Blaine’s stepmother scurried off to the kitchen, where she received a sympathy eye-roll from one of her friends. “And a piece of that pound cake,” Mama B called after her, then returned attention to my mother. “Now, hon, you listen at this here. We’re not doing any more of this cryin’. We’re gonna have faith and keep praying, and believe on that prayer. That’s my little granddaughter out there with your boy, and she may be tiny, but I know for a fact she’s tough as a boot. She’ll figure a way to come out of this all right, and so will your boy. My family pioneered this land. Some lowbrow, two-bit criminal’s not gonna come in here and get the best of us. You hear me?”

  Mom nodded.

  “You drink some of that coffee now.” Mama B pointed at the cup insistently, and my mother released the quilt, letting it slide from her shoulders. Peering around me, Mama B noted that there was no coffee on my end table. “Claire Anne! Bring another cup for Heather. She looks like she’s about froze to death.” In the kitchen, Blaine’s stepmother was gathering things on a tray, her back stiffening every time her mother-in-law called her name.

  Watching Mama B comfort my mother now, I couldn’t help wondering if things might have been different all those years ago, when tragedy first touched our family. If we had reached out instead of retreating into ourselves, would these people have received us this way? If I had allowed myself to fall into this community that had so loved my father, would they have caught me? Was my stubbornness, my pride, my resentment, and my guilt more the cause of my suffering than these people were?

  Maybe I’d been wrong about Moses Lake. Maybe I’d been wrong about so many things in my life. It shouldn’t have taken something like this—the prospect of losing my brother—to make me assess myself, to lift the veil from my eyes. In keeping my defenses high, in striving to maintain a self-sufficient, ordered, controlled life that contained minimal risk, I was missing everything that mattered most. A well-lived life, an authentic life, involved risks—and faith allowed you to take those risks. That was what Ruth had been trying to tell me, the very thing she’d understood as she balanced on that fire escape. The great leaps in life are not made in the absence of fear, but in the presence of faith.

  Mama B rested a hand on my knee and patted gently. “Blaine’s out there, too. He’s out there looking for them, and there’s nothing that boy can’t do. He was the first one to hold Amy when she was born. Bet you didn’t know that. It was a snowy night, and Amy’s daddy was out of town, so Blaine stayed over at his auntie’s house to watch after her. Lands if she didn’t have the baby right there on the kitchen floor with Blaine helping her. He’ll find Amy. You watch. Good gravy, where is that coffee?”

  Mama B left to check on things in the kitchen. I reached across the space between my mother and me and held her hand. Twenty minutes passed, thirty, then forty-five as the prayer chain grew and took on a life of its own, cell phone calls coming in, information going out. I tried not to imagine where Clay was now.

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nbsp; The clock in the church office chimed once, a solitary note weaving from the quiet shadows of the hallway. One in the morning.

  One fifteen.

  One twenty.

  The old hardwired phone on the wall rang. Reverend Hay snapped upright, sending his folding chair skittering sideways. Every eye in the room followed him as he answered the call, pacing back and forth at the end of the coiled cord. The room grew silent, other than the faint sound of a voice on the other end of the phone, and Reverend Hay’s answers. “Mmm-hmm . . . mmm-hmm. That’s good news, Mart.” Pumping a fist in the air, he gave us the thumbs-up sign. “That’s the best news. Praise the Lord!”

  A smile split his thin face, causing his eyes to crinkle around the edges as he slapped the receiver into the cradle. “They’ve been found, praise be! The sheriff’s office received an anonymous call to send an ambulance to a car in the ditch on a county road, and when they got there, they found Clay and Amy in the trunk. No sign of the driver or anybody else, and they don’t know who made the call. The paramedics think Clay and Amy might’ve taken in some carbon monoxide. They’re in an ambulance, on their way to the hospital in Gnadenfeld.”

  Love is the mystery of water and a star.

  –Pablo Neruda

  (Left by an anonymous tourist who visited unnoticed)

  Chapter 21

  Clay’s visitors came and went as night faded into morning, while next door Amy’s parents, Blaine’s family, and Mama B sat vigil around her room. Ruth arrived with the morning light, leaning on the elbow of her favorite nephew. In the doorway, she held Uncle Herb’s hand, patted it between hers, smiled at him, and nodded. “We’ve done it,” she said, and then crossed the room to stand over my brother’s bed and point the no-no finger at him. “Never, never again, anything like that. To live peacefully is to live well. You remember that from now on.”