Chapter 4: Dreams and Portents

Two days later, with Christopher gone on yet another trip to the Landing, I invited my niece Margie Smith, Ren’s middle daughter, and her lifelong friend Lila Taylor round for tea. It was good to see the girls walking up the path together: Margie, dark-haired and tall, Lila, petite and blonde. To me these two beautiful young women were like a breath of exotic air, poised and graceful in summery cotton dresses that floated and hugged their slim figures.

Their youthful spirit and sweetness brought much needed lighter energy into our sad house and lifted my mood; I’d been despondent ever since our trip to the Landing on Thursday. They embraced me warmly, settled into chairs and asked after us with interest and concern. I told them a bit about our trip on Thursday, how awful and sad it had been to see the destruction. “It’s so ugly and alien up there. I could hardly recognize it as being the Landing.”

I offered my condolences on the loss of their best friend, Diana. Margie and Lila smiled sad smiles, but they seemed serene, peaceful and somehow accepting. Margie said, “We’re hoping they’ll start digging again. It would be wonderful if they could find Rachel too, in time for the memorial next Saturday.”

I brought a pot of Earl Grey tea from the kitchen, and some delicate bone china cups and saucers, mismatched but still pretty. The girls exclaimed over the china and teased me playfully for my insistence on traditional English teatime habits. We tucked into cake and cookies—store-bought, I was ashamed to admit, but I was not up to home baking yet.

Margie and Lila, along with other young friends, were busy organizing the memorial service. Lynn Migdal—Diana and Rachel’s mother—had been in Kaslo for a week since flying in from her home in Florida. Margie and Lila, like daughters to her, were assisting in every way they could. They’d stayed with her at the Kaslo Motel for her first few nights, and the three of them were now in a nearby rental cabin provided by the Red Cross.

“I’m so grateful you found time to pop by when you’ve got so much else going on,” I said. But I had other reasons for wanting to talk to them because I’d heard some mystifying reports from Renata about Margie and Lila, concerning strange things the girls had experienced. I was puzzled and intrigued, but felt suddenly shy now that they were sitting here beside me. I raised the subject, tentatively. “I wanted to ask if you’d be willing to tell me a bit more about those odd things that happened to you...?” They both nodded and Lila said they’d like very much to tell me their stories.

Margie had moved to Vancouver to work as a nanny. She and Diana, who lived in Los Angeles, kept in close contact, talked often on the phone and discussed everything. Cradling her teacup, Margie looked away into the distance and closed her eyes for a moment. She took a deep breath and plunged in. “One night at the end of May I had a dream in which I saw the landslide.” She paused and looked at me. “It was a crazy dream. I was watching from twenty feet above the Webbers’ garage, the one building that wasn’t covered. I saw the whole thing come down, just the way it is now. I watched it cover Diana’s house, knowing they were all inside. I knew the whole family had died.

“The detail was remarkable. I distinctly remember watching the landslide reach Harvey’s pottery house. You know, I loved that house because I’d lived there as a child. It was my first real home. The slide came right up to it, didn’t touch it, but continued onward in a ‘nose’ of material that hit the Webbers’ house instead. The roof and walls were ripped away and I saw the roof floating in a sea of mud.”

Margie sighed and leaned back.

I asked what happened next.

“I telephoned Diana and told her everything. I said, ‘I dreamed that your house was buried in mud and you were all inside.’ We discussed the dream but didn’t make too much of it. It wasn’t something we were going to worry about. She was in Los Angeles, Rachel was in Kaslo and Lynn was in Florida, so it seemed unlikely that the whole family could be about to die in the Johnson’s Landing house.”

Margie and Diana had wondered if thoughts of the snow avalanche in February might perhaps have prompted the dream. There was no way of telling.

Lila spoke up. “Six weeks later, just two days before the landslide, Diana told me about Margie’s dream. We were out in Val’s rowboat, having one of those silly conversations about how we thought we might die. Maybe in a forest fire? Maybe in a flood? Diana said, ‘Margie had a dream that my house was buried under mud.’ We laughed about it, but it was one of several things that afterwards felt very significant. Another was when we found Diana’s camera in the slide; the last photo she’d taken was a shot from out on the water, zoomed right in on the spot where the slide began.”

I gazed at the two girls and rubbed the goosebumps on my arms. What possible explanation could there be for something as incredible as this? Margie’s dream had been uncannily detailed and accurate. The slide had indeed passed alongside Harvey Armstrong’s pottery studio and his rental house next door, knocking them off-kilter and doing a lot of damage, but leaving them entirely visible.

I grappled for some kind of response. “If Time is a dimension, maybe it’s a bit like a helix. Maybe Time spirals round us, so that you, Margie, asleep in May, somehow caught a glimpse of the curl of Time six weeks ahead, and the future disaster it held.” I had no other explanation to offer.

Lila broke the silence as I refilled their cups. “That’s not the only weird thing that happened. On Friday, the day of the second landslide, I left the Landing and went to our house in Nelson to get away from everything. That evening I was sitting on the back porch. I was in a bad way. I felt terrible. Self-destructive. I didn’t want to eat or shower. I just wanted to hide in a hole and not see anyone.

“All of a sudden I had what I can only describe as a ‘connection’ with Diana. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. I heard Diana’s voice inside my head. She said: ‘Don’t be upset. When you are emotional I can’t come through to you. I need to warn you, because you are the one who will first get this news: my body is going to be in rough shape when they find it. It’s not a bad thing that’s happened. We are all fine now, but Rachel had a hard time because of how she died.’

“ ‘People need you to be strong. You and Margie are the face, out there in the community dealing with everyone. Make an effort to connect with others. Otherwise it will be harder for them. I am going to show up in different forms and signs, and you’ll have to guess!’ ”

Lila’s bright blue eyes shone as she turned to me and smiled. “I was so comforted, hearing her voice. I’m definitely not into psychic stuff, but this felt real. I’d lost Diana’s physical presence, yet in some ways she felt even more present—I could talk to her at any point. Knowing she wasn’t gone gave me the strength and courage I needed. I’d never thought about these kinds of things before.”

Lila’s blonde hair fell forward like a curtain as she looked down and moved crumbs around on her plate. I offered her more cake but she shook her head, flicked back her hair and went on. “In the car with Renata the next morning, on the way to Castlegar airport to meet Margie, I told Ren about my connection with Diana. I was in the process of repeating the exact words Diana had used—about showing up in different forms—when, at that precise moment, an enormous bald eagle swooped low, wings outstretched, and practically skimmed the top of the car. And there have been other moments since then when I’ve known, That was Diana! ”

“Wow!” Renata had already told me about the eagle, like a jumbo jet, heading straight for them, low over her car, and what a powerful moment it had been.

Further proof that Diana’s words had been prophetic came on Monday, July 16, while Lila, her mother, Susan, and Margie were with Lynn at the Kaslo Motel. Sergeant Tim Little of the RCMP came to the door and asked if he might speak to Lila outside. He told her they’d found Diana’s body, but it was dismembered. As Diana had forewarned, her physical body was “in rough shape,” and Lila was the one who received the news.

Now both girls talked at once. Signs in abundance had revealed themselves at the Webber house site. Heart-shaped rocks appeared everywhere. Lila laughed, and said, “I see hearts all the time now, in all forms of nature. There are so many! We put the heart rocks on a large boulder. Bob Stair found Diana’s body right beside that boulder—it’s her tombstone.”

Margie explained about the “mud-pages,” as she called them: fragments torn out of books, found lying in the gravelly soil nearby. Some contained eerily significant phrases. One tiny scrap of a page read: “and they sat down for breakfast. After breakfast…” There the fragment ended. Another page they picked up started with the words, “and they buried him in the mud.”

Lila said, “I feel she’s guiding us, giving us little messages along the way. I sense her presence; it’s a strong connection.”

We moved to the living room, made ourselves comfortable on the couches and Lila filled me in on Diana’s last days. She’d driven up from Los Angeles, arriving about a week before the landslide. Overjoyed to see one another, the two had made lots of plans for the summer. Diana also spent a couple of days in Kaslo with Rachel, who had a rental house there and a summer job at the Kaslo Motel.

On the day before the landslide, Diana had driven Rachel back to the Landing so they could spend time together with their dad.

Lila had seen Diana for the last time that Wednesday evening, while she and Carol were canoeing. Diana, in Val’s green rowboat, pulled alongside and the three women talked for a few minutes. Lila then said Diana had phoned her on Thursday morning, only minutes before the landslide, and that had been very odd too. But before she could tell me why, Margie looked at her watch and quietly interrupted. “I’m so sorry, but we really need to get going.” They were already late for an appointment and still had lots to do to prepare for next Saturday’s memorial in Argenta. Margie gave me an advance copy of the card they’d designed.

I waved them off at the front door. “Thank you so much for coming over. We’ll see you next Saturday.”

I sat down at the table, the memorial card in my hand, with its colour photos of Petra, Val, Diana and Rachel on the front. A poem by Diana was printed on the back.

My head was spinning. Portents in dreams. Psychic connections. I knew for a fact that such things did happen. My brother, Andrew, had had an inexplicable connection with our dad just after he’d died. We’d been searching fruitlessly through Daddy’s papers for some important documents. In the night, Andrew was roused by a swirling, emotion-laden energy field of both anger and sadness, and his hands were guided to the place where the documents lay, well hidden in the middle of an ancient advertising brochure about double-glazing windows.

We haven’t the slightest idea how these deeper, intangible aspects of the universe work. Rational science will probably never explain life’s manifold mysteries.

I read Diana’s poem:

If you follow the highway

To where the highway ends

And then rough it for several miles on the dirt road

Until it ends

You might stumble upon a small,

Barely visible sign bearing the words

‘JOHNSON’S LANDING. Unincorporated’

A home at the end of the road…

If you love a place

In the way that you love a person,

I have surely known no love

Like I have known for Johnson’s Landing.

Kaslo and the other communities at the north end of Kootenay Lake were in limbo. They wanted the body of seventeen-year-old Rachel Webber found. But five days after Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe had put the recovery mission on hold, it was still suspended. Behind the scenes, Bob Stair, the local coroner and incident commander, was in close communication with Lapointe. They were long-time colleagues. Bob, a tall, energetic figure and keen mountain climber, urged Lapointe to allow him one or two more days to excavate. He was confident that he could find Rachel’s body. He had a clear idea where it must be.

Bob had led the team that recovered Val and Diana Webber’s bodies. He instructed the excavators to start at the side of the slide, at a point reasonably close to Val’s house. They dug from the edge and the material out-flowed behind them.

Although Bob had worked in many types of terrain, the Johnson’s Landing landslide was a first for him for several reasons. The material had been laid down only two days previously. It was saturated with water and contained enormous trees, and boulders too large for the excavators to move easily. The mud was gooey clay: it oozed and crept forward as they dug. They could not dig a vertical face or cliff, but had to bevel the top surface of the pile, to prevent it caving in on the exposed area underneath. The deeper they dug, the greater were the logistical complexities and dangers.

The site of Petra Frehse’s cabin presented enormous difficulties. The cabin lay under eight metres of unstable landslide material, in a location perilously close to Gar Creek. For four days, four excavators (including the biggest on site, a 330 Class), worked on the Frehse site, with a team of watchers for each machine. Enormous effort went into this complex excavation. And once they eventually reached ground level, it took dozens of bucketfuls from above to advance one bucketful forward.

They located Petra’s house site, but the cabin was nowhere to be seen—they found only splinters of the huge log walls. “It looked as though the house had been exploded,” Bob said later. They unearthed many artifacts but did not find Petra’s body. Bob estimates it would have taken weeks to excavate completely, and they did not have the luxury of weeks to complete the task.

But he could find Rachel. He knew it.

Bob Stair had his team ready on call and had drawn up a small budget to cover two days’ work. The site was becoming somewhat safer now that the rains had let up. All he needed now was permission from the chief coroner.