CHAPTER 8

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CELESTE DESCRIBES HERSELF as an energy healer. Vivian releases a long, withering sigh. The 20-something year-old recently moved to Stapleton with her boyfriend, who took Rhonda’s husband’s job as the village maintenance manager. Had Vivian been younger and faster, she would have sped past Celeste’s Fall Fair poster board with its bizarre symbols and healing hands, but spritely Celeste cornered her easily.

“What I do is I channel energy to relieve emotional stress, which I see you carry a lot of.”

Celeste’s beads jangle as she opens her silver-ringed fingers, inviting Vivian to take her hands. Vivian takes a half step back while Todd quietly slips his hands into his cardigan pockets, a bemused expression on his face.

“A past trauma, or a family conflict?” Celeste asks gently, as though Vivian would willingly divulge such a thing in the middle of the Community Hall. “It is never too late in life to clear those energy channels.”

“At which fine medical establishment did you qualify?”

“I trained with a master energy healer. Those who open their minds to experience their life force flowing through them can achieve true happiness.”

“Do you have a business licence?”

That shuts her up.

Vivian wastes little time thinking about “higher powers” but sometimes it feels as if the forces that be, whatever they may be, are working against this town. “Perhaps you could use your special abilities to improve Stapleton’s fortunes,” she suggests to Celeste as she continues on through the decorated hall.

Last week, a mudslide swept across the highway and cut them off from the rest of the world for an entire day. Mudslides are a new problem, a consequence of the previous summer’s wildfire. The blackened vegetation does a poor job of holding back the earth beside the highway. The road has since reopened but with more heavy rain in the forecast, the handful of people who usually travel from Stony Creek to catch a glimpse of life in the ghost town have chosen not to attend the Stapleton Fall Fair this year.

The mood inside the Community Hall is subdued. Vivian recognizes the disappointment on the faces of the old-timers. There used to be enough people participating to add a bit of intrigue in every category, and there was a category for everything from quilting to braided garlic. Back when the schools were still open, a local ranching family would set up a miniature petting zoo in the empty lot beside the hall. Even Lloyd Bryant’s table-breaking pumpkin fails to cause much of a stir this year. Their hearts aren’t in it anymore.

They’d had a hot, dry spell when the plumes of smoke erupted from the hills. Then the plumes became the sky itself, dark and threatening by midday. Ash dropped on their heads; pieces of dead matter a warning that the fire was coming. The flames advanced with enough speed to risk cutting them off at the highway and there was only one way out of town. It was the first time since the Gold Rush that there had been a line of traffic moving in or out of Stapleton.

Todd drove. Vivian stared out of the passenger window, eyes and throat stinging. The flames were out of view but rushing towards them eating up leaves and blackening thick trunks. As they wound up the hill, more vehicles joined the highway from the reserve. Only the houses right beside the road were visible, the land behind them greyed out. The old mill site was completely shrouded in smoke, but she felt it, like an old scar. Land that had burned before.

Then the wind changed, and the threat was gone. As if someone had snapped their fingers and decided that the little town at the end of the highway deserved one more chance.

“Would you like to see an ancient knife blade?”

A middle-aged man, long black hair tied back beneath his baseball cap, points at a chiselled rock on the table in front of him. “That’s approximately two thousand years old.”

Vivian hums politely.

“We’ve found a lot of artefacts where the fires burned through the forest last year.”

The table is filled with small stone objects that could be a collection of pebbles for all Vivian cares. The man has dark brown eyes, thin wrinkles creeping in around them. She can’t make out the logo on his lanyard. She doesn’t recognize him from the reserve but she heard they’ve taken an interest in digging up bits of history. He could be from the university.

An unmistakable figure stares at her from the far side of the table. Mary Jones in a shapeless black sweater; flat white hair, thick lenses and wobbly pink lipstick.

“Mary told me there’s no council support for heritage funding,” the man who might be from the university bemoans. “That’s a real shame. There are so many stories that could be told about this area, enough to support a small visitor attraction ...”

“... I look to the future, not to the past,” Vivian says dismissively as she spots her neighbour, Liz, and waves. “We already have an economic plan for our town.”

She refuses to make eye contact with Mary or the archaeologist as she moves towards the safety of her sensible neighbour, whose conversation points rarely extend beyond the day’s weather. Mary can complain to whoever she wants. This is Vivian’s town.