AND WATCH FOR...

THE FIRST VOLUME IN THIS SERIES...

Devil’s Plague

Chapter One

Redbud Creek eddied around a curving alder branch that drooped low enough for the endmost leaves to spread fan-like across the water. Even though it was midsummer and the leaves were still vivid green, the water’s ceaseless flow tugged and worried and pulled until one leaf finally released its hold and floated lazily into the current.

Like a miniature boat, it dipped and swirled its way along the rock-strewn riverbed. For nearly a quarter of a mile, it followed its meandering course. At the top of Porcupine Falls, it caught momentarily against a rock. It caught and trembled, once almost submerged, then broke away, only to tumble down and down and down, into the froth below.

Somehow it avoided the black, ragged bones of dead branches and cutting edges of granite that threatened to rip its delicate surface. Somehow, it managed to remain afloat. Still whirling—but slower now, slower, with the July sun glinting off water trapped in its shallow cup—it spun through the whirlpool currents of the deep pool at the base of the falls and into the shallows beyond.

For a while, it rested against an algae-draped stone worn smooth and polished by the timeless flow of water. Then it pulled free again, once more slipping back into the current. It moved sluggishly now, weighed down by the moisture inside. It wallowed along the sedges and reeds that bordered the river until it stopped a final time. Half submerged, its cells began to blacken and to die where they lay wedged between the slightly curving, outstretched fingers of a bloodless hand.

* * * *

It sometimes takes me a while to get used to the absolute stillness of early morning here, high in the mountains.

In the city, especially in the LA basin where I’ve spent most of my twenty-nine years, it never really gets quiet. Trucks thunder down highways. Airplanes crisscross in landing patterns over airport approaches. Dogs cooped up in postage-stamp back yards howl all hours of the day and night. Ten-year-old kids rapping at full volume to mystic music spinning through thin wires from iPods to half-deafened ears boogie down sidewalks. Older, even less courteous kids equip low-slung cars with speakers so monstrous that you can feel the deep thrumming vibrations of the bass long before you hear the music, even with the car windows closed tight. Mothers yell, kids yell, everybody makes noise.

It’s not even quiet at night. There’s still the traffic, the ever present sounds of Southern California transience that seems to clog the freeways almost at much at two a.m. as at noon.

In the early morning, there is the angry whine and clatter of garbage trucks making rounds, the muted roar of cars revving up in preparation for hour-long commutes from distant suburbs to the noise-clogged business core downtown, the subtle intrusion of joggers’ hundred-dollar-a-pair Nike’s making soft slap-slap-slap sounds on asphalt or concrete.

But in Fox Creek—a four-hour’s flight from L.A. on a raucous turbo-jet, followed by another four hours by car, the last two twining along a narrow, often-rutted, two-lane road—it is quiet in the morning.

That day, I lay in bed, only half awake, consciously relaxing. Part of me clung sleepily to faint, rapidly fading, but sweet memories of a dream that had, for the moment at least, filled an emptiness I had carried inside for the past year. Another part of me reveled in a stillness broken only occasionally by a barely audible thump that might have been a pine cone dropping on the far side of the roof, or a distant crack that might have been a branch falling somewhere in the surrounding forest.

Without opening my eyes, I stretched my arms over my head, luxuriating in the sense of muscles loosening, of blood warming my body, of a dream that, while increasingly distant and hazy, lingered on, refusing to die away completely.

Then I froze.

A year ago today.

Lulled by the quiet and the dream, I had almost managed to forget.

A year ago today.

I threw back the hand-stitched quilt that a moment before had seemed a welcome cocoon. Naked feet pressing against the cold plank floor, I stumbled to the rustic bathroom, collapsed against the water-stained sink, and vomited.

Afterward, staring at sparkling water as it swirled the sink clean and flushed away the bitter bile that was all I had managed to bring up, I felt angry at myself. My reaction had been silly and stereotypically female and unconscionably weak. At least, those were all the things that Terry would have said, smiling all the while to let me know he was only joking. Imagining his smile hurt, but at the same time it seemed to help. I filled the glass next to the sink and rinsed my mouth to get rid of the aftertaste.

Still trembling inside, I took a long, hot shower that helped even more. As I stood beneath the spray, eyes closed, head tilted back to let the water finger through my hair, I mentally thanked Estelle and Edgar for their foresight in installing a new, larger water heater earlier that spring. Even so, the water was distinctly cooler when I finally roused myself enough to turn the faucets off, step out, and pat myself dry with one of the soft, monogrammed “E&E” towels hanging on the oak rack.

Wrapped in the worn folds of the quilted satin robe Terry and Shawn had given me on my birthday a year and a half before—six months before they died—I walked to the kitchen. My legs felt weak and my stomach hurt. I needed to eat something, even if I had to force it down.

Perhaps it was the crisp mountain air or the lingering effects of the hot showers, but the hot whole-wheat toast spread with fresh honey and the mug of hot chocolate made the chore of living through the day seem almost bearable.

Almost.

It had been a year ago. Today.

Somewhere, long before, in a half-forgotten class in high school, I had read a story by Hemingway called “Big Two-Heart River.” In it the hero, returning shell-shocked from the horrors of World War I, managed to cope with the impossible by reducing every act and motion to ritual. If he could act without thinking, without engaging more than the merely physical part of his being, the story implied, he might survive. He could be like the fish he saw in the Big Two-Heart River—forever swimming against the current, never ceasing to struggle with body and fins, never resting for an instant from their mindless toil...and managing, somehow, to stay in exactly the same spot beneath the bridge, never advancing perhaps, but, equally crucial, never falling behind.

By the time I finished my own rituals, mechanically washing and drying the dishes and storing them carefully in the pine cupboard, it was well past eight o’clock.

For this day, I had carefully decided the night before to walk the mile and a quarter up the graveled road and introduce herself to Estelle’s nearest neighbor, old Mrs. Sears. I had put it off for the first three days of my stay at the cottage, thinking that what I needed most was to be alone for a while, to think, to mourn. But the prospect of spending hours by myself today was just too much.

A few minutes later, functioning like Hemingway’s hero, pretty much on automatic pilot, I was ready to head out. I had dressed in comfortably worn but still presentable jeans, a lightweight long-sleeved shirt, and a floppy straw hat that Estelle had assured me was de rigueur for midday walks in the high mountains.

“Don’t let it fool you. This time of year, it might start out almost nippy, but by noon, with the sun blistering straight down on your head, you’ll be more than thankful for a hat,” she had warned.

Personally, I felt more than a bit foolish about the hat, especially since it was only a few minutes past eight thirty and the air was still crisp, with a lingering coolness that brushed against my cheek when I opened the front door. That, plus I never wore hats in LA—nearly never, I thought, unavoidably remembering my solemn black of the day of the funeral.

But even in the three days I had been in Fox Creek, I had learned for myself that the July crispness could be replaced within hours by a flat, heavy heat made somehow worse by the redolence of pines and dust.

Later, I would be thankful for the hat’s shade.

I carefully locked the front door, pausing to reassure myself of the soft metallic click of the key, then started walking. The exercise would be good for me, I had decided. The scenery was indisputably gorgeous, with never-ending vistas of ridges topped with dark green, almost black pines and firs, and behind them the mountains themselves thrusting skyward, for the most part barren, grey, and shadowed, but with small pockets of snow gleaming here and there on their flanks. The air felt so clean and invigorating I could nearly taste the freshness, and it wasn’t really that far over the low ridge to Mrs. Sears’ place.

Old Mrs. Sears’ place.

Estelle had made me promise to visit old woman, and I had agreed.

“You’ll never believe that woman,” Estelle had said in her rushed, breathy voice, “she’s a marvel, and I think she’ll do you a world of good.”

Well, I said half-aloud, half to myself as I walked, my feet crunching loudly against grey gravel, we’ll see.

I was perhaps halfway from the cabin to the crest of the ridge when two thoughts abruptly surfaced. The first stopped me dead still in the middle of the road. Mere loss became an emptiness so real, so terrifying that I almost doubled over with the pain of it.

I didn’t care about the scenery or the fresh air or the cabin or the sounds of pine cones falling on the roof, or any of the rest of it. I only wanted to be alone, to close myself into a small, dark, silent room, and weep. And I didn’t want to visit any old woman, no matter how highly Estelle or anyone else regarded her.

Out of all the billions of human faces that had ever inhabited this planet, I only wanted to see two. But those two were forever locked away from me.

I swallowed and forced myself to start walking again, one step at a time, toward Mrs. Sears’ place, focusing on the second thought. It was eminently more practical and, once I fought back the flood of depression and self-pity, more immediate.

It wasn’t quite nine o’clock.

What if old Mrs. Sears slept late? What if I disturbed her. From Estelle’s few comments about her nearest neighbor in Fox Creek, the old woman had to be nearing eighty. That seemed a bit old to be living alone, especially this far out from the village, but Estelle assured me that Edgar’s family had owned the cabin closest to Mrs. Sears’ for years now and that the old woman was more than capable of handling anything the world threw at her, and that I would find old Mrs. Sears a...fascinating neighbor.

I shrugged.

Better ahead than backward. At least it beat swimming interminably against the stream, only to remain forever in the same place. The emptiness receded a little. I continued up the road.

From the top of the ridge, I could not see anything that looked like a cabin, although the thicker stands of pine could easily have blocked the view. It wasn’t until I was almost even with a dirt driveway that I discovered that the road I was on—coarse gravel, with more than its share of unfilled potholes—dead-ended at the edge of a small meadow.

Mrs. Sears’ place stood in the center of the meadow. The driveway (little used, if the height of weeds growing in it was any indication) curved around behind smooth log walls. A low picket fence bordered a ragged patch of wildflowers in front before disappearing around both sides. The pickets may once have been white, but they had long since weathered to a uniform and rather pleasant silver-grey.

The gate in the middle of the fence hung from two new hinges; at least, I assumed from their brightness that the hinges were new. At any rate, they didn’t squeak when I pushed the gate open and, careful to stay on the sandstone flags that dotted their way across the yard, approached Mrs. Sears’ porch.

I stopped on the porch. It ran the length of the cabin but seemed not quite deep enough to do more than provide marginal shade from the midday sun. This side of the house would still get the brunt of the late afternoon light. Already the outside air was warming considerably. Sweat beaded on my forehead and caught in the band of the floppy hat.

Silly hat?...not any more.

I took a deep breath. Three days had allowed for some acclimatizing, but obviously not enough. I was winded from the uphill walk. My heartbeat pounded in my ears. From somewhere behind the house, I heard a rhythmic but muted thunk, pause, thunk, pause, thunk that echoed the rhythm of my pulse. The sound was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it.

So, I thought, fanning myself with one hand, here I am. I don’t want to be here, but today this is as good a place as any....

I raised my other hand to knock on the doorjamb, absently glancing over my shoulder at the yard and fence and road.

The solid oak door behind the screen swung open so quickly and so silently that it startled me.

I must have recoiled unconsciously, because suddenly I was hurtling backward, off-balance, one heel half off the edge of the porch and the other fighting a losing battle against my center of gravity. I would have fallen, except for the small figure that burst through the doorway and grabbed my arm with an ease and a strength that surprised me, pulled me back onto the porch and, chattering softly in the sweetest voice I had ever heard, steered me into the coolness inside.

AVAILABLE FROM BORGO PRESS IN TRADE PAPERBACK AND EBOOK.