Old Chaos (9781564747136) (4 page)

Maybe it wasn’t going to be so terrible, Beth reflected as she dished up the entrée in the kitchen. Rob had apparently eased Jack Red-fern’s anger. Skip and Peggy were removing the soup plates—the tiny Willapa Bay oysters in a light cream stew had vanished with satisfying speed. The roulades smelled great—sage stuffing. She napped each slice with wine sauce and began to dollop garlic mashed potatoes onto the plates.

Peggy whisked in. “What’s with the old guy, Mom?”

“Mr. Bjork? I don’t know. He’s hardly spoken.”

“He didn’t touch the soup, either. He looks like he’s going to cry.”

A squawk came over the baby monitor. “Speaking of crying, is that Sophy?”

Peggy sighed. “I hope not. She should sleep for an hour. God knows she ate enough, little pig.” Peggy was breast-feeding. Since that gave her boobs worth mentioning for the first time in her life, she didn’t complain much about the inconvenience.

“Maybe you should bring Sophia into the kitchen.” Skip carried the last soup plates in. “She could snooze on the counter here while the dishwasher runs.” He began putting the shallow bowls into the machine without rinsing them.

Oh, well. “Dishwasher lullaby,” Beth said.

Peggy sprinted for the bedroom wing. “Back in a sec.”

Beth took a slotted spoon and doled out the fashionably crisp beans-with-blanched-almonds that looked better than they tasted. She preferred to cook the hell out of green beans, seasoning them with garlic, chopped bacon, and a dust of cayenne, but that was family food. Skip hoisted three plates and made for the dining room.

She and Skip were pouring another round of cabernet when Peggy slipped back and took her place between Fred Drinkwater and Maddie. As Beth poured, conversation rose like the buzz of bees drunk on fresh nectar. Mack and Fred had a three-way flirtation going with Kayla Graves, who was a subversive rogue. Beth wished her well. Rob, Maddie, Jack, and the commissioner were talking across the table with Maddie in full flow and Jack almost cheerful. Beth sat down and picked up her fork. Silverware clanked.

“There’s a crack,” Lars Bjork said. He looked at his plate. A wisp of steam rose from the beans.

Beth stared. She hoped the movers hadn’t damaged her china. Surely not. “A crack in the house?”

“The house. It’s a new house. Did I say that?”

“Uh, no, but you’re right. It’s new.”

He looked relieved and picked up his knife and fork.

“We just moved in,” Beth babbled. “Haven’t had time to buy much furniture. I really haven’t decided what to do with the living…the Great Room. It’s a large space.”

He chewed. “Tastes good.”

“Glad you like it.” Beth took a bite of the beef.

“There’s a crack,” he repeated. “Did I say that?”

Beth felt a chill.

“I can’t tell you how much I like the house,” Cate Bjork interjected, smooth. “I recognize the idiom.”

What did
that
mean? “Thank you.”

Lars was silent. Cate talked pleasantly of her own new house, which stood on a twelve-acre parcel with a view of Mount Hood. They were leaving the high meadow natural—no lawns or intrusive alien plants. The air was like champagne, she said.

The baby woke, and Skip took her off for a change while Beth and Peggy served dessert. Eventually he brought his daughter back for a round of admiration. Then there was coffee. Beth poured it in the Great Room. Lars Bjork was sitting on the love seat again, staring at the fireplace.

“There’s a crack.” He took the cup Beth handed him and gave her a smile that subtracted twenty years from his age.

Beth smiled back. She felt like crying, but she didn’t have time because somebody noticed it was snowing, and suddenly everyone wanted to leave. It wasn’t until after the last guests had driven off—Fred and Kayla in the Lexus —that Beth could think.

“He must have dementia.”

Mack gave her a bear hug. “Who, me? Not yet, old girl, but I’m glad the meal’s over. How about that Sophy? Great timing, the little minx. Come to bed, Betty Boop.”

Beth wandered back into the Great Room and sat down where Lars Bjork had spent a good part of the evening. Tears welled, and she wiped them away. “The poor soul. I wonder what he meant?”

She stared at the mantel and the flagstone chimney. Running down the wall beside it, from the high cathedral ceiling to the ledge at its base, was a hairline crack.

January 2005, the following Friday

T
HE WEATHER CHANNEL was promising an ice storm. It had better deliver, Meg reflected, snug in her warm kitchen (propane furnace) with a pot of soup simmering on the range (also propane). She had just closed the county-wide library system. She was going to look like a dumb Californicator if the storm turned out to be a flash in the pan.

Tales from her staff that chronicled weeks without electricity had convinced her the locals enjoyed scaring new arrivals. After she’d shut down the library, Meg had driven to Safeway to stock up on candles. Half the town got there first. Meg took the last of the regular candles. Latecomers would have to be content with perfumed votive objects in Christmas colors. And it
was
slick out. She almost fell twice bringing her loot in from the garage.

When the phone rang, Meg answered on her cordless. Her cell phone sat charging on the counter, calls forwarded. She was saving it to use when the lines went down. Everyone said they would.

“You’re home.” Rob’s voice crackled with atmospherics. In the background she heard clanging and a siren’s whoop.

“I closed the library. What’s happening?” She poured herself a scotch and settled in for a cozy chat.

“Fender bender.” He sounded irritated rather than gloomy. If he had been investigating an injury accident, his tone of voice would have told her. Still, there he was, out in the storm, doing a job the uniforms usually handled. It was a small department. In emergencies, everybody took a hand at everything, and ice storms rated as emergencies.

“Are you coming here tonight?”

“Are you making soup?”

“Chicken with rice. It’s already on the stove.”

“I’ll be there.” Amusement warmed his voice. Rob thought feeding people was her ingrained response to disaster and was apt to tease her about it.

“Good.” At least she hadn’t had to make soup from scratch— she’d thawed it.

“Don’t stay up for me. God knows when I’ll get in. Oops. Gotta go. Jeff just fell on his ass.” Jeff Fong was Rob’s new sergeant, replacing Earl Minetti. Must be a big fender bender if both of them were sorting it out.

She clicked the phone off and went to look out the side door, which led onto the wraparound porch.

Ice had formed a delicate coat on every twig, weed stalk, and blade of grass. In the dim light of afternoon, the effect was magical. Icicles drooped from the garage roof. Branches of the huge old-growth cedar tree near Rob’s garage bent almost to the ground. Under the spell of the ice, telephone wires looked like fairy chains, and everything shone silver. “Silver thaw” was the local term for ice storm. Meg shivered with alarm and delight.

As she watched, an old pickup with a camper edged around the cedar. Freezing rain slashed the beams of its headlights. Moments later a blue Civic started to pass, slid, overcorrected, and headed like a demented billiard ball toward the left rear end of the pickup. Neither vehicle was going fast, but the result was inevitable.

“My garage!” Meg shrieked.

The car hit and slid slowly around, stopping in the middle of the street. The heavier pickup, with the driver hunched in a futile effort to maneuver, oozed sideways up Meg’s short new concrete drive. Rear-end first, the truck smacked into the door of her garage. The new door buckled. Plumes of exhaust from both vehicles streamed in the icy rain.

Meg stuffed her feet into her boots, yanked her coat on, and dashed out. That was a mistake. She skated across the porch and saved herself at the last moment on the rail. Icicles tinkled and fell. She clung to the post and watched as the driver of the pickup opened his door and jumped down. He took two long strides, then both feet went out from under him, and he fell flat on his back on the slick asphalt of the street.

Kayla Graves got out of the Civic and walked toward her victim, flat-footed. She was shouting something. The pickup driver didn’t move.

Still clutching the rail, Meg let herself down the steps and onto her flower-bed, which was covered with two inches of snow and a scum of ice. Her boots crunched through to solid dirt. “Is he all right?” she called.

By the time she had picked her way to the street, Kayla was on her haunches examining the man’s head. Kayla was an RN, head night nurse at a large care facility on the River Road. Her patients were elderly, and many of them died, which went some way toward explaining her hot pursuit of life on her nights off. Meg wondered why Kayla was up and driving around when she ought to be asleep.

“Is he okay?” Meg repeated as she reached Kayla’s side. It was raining hard now, and the rain froze on everything it struck, including Meg, Kayla, and the man on the street.

“Out cold.”

More ways than one, Meg thought. Kayla brushed ice from the man’s face.

“I don’t think his skull is fractured. Big bump, though. He’s probably concussed.”

“He’ll freeze!”

Kayla was taking her coat off. “Go to my car and bring my purse. I need the phone.” She made a tent of the coat, shielding the man’s face. “Open the back, too. My medical bag’s there and one of those aluminum emergency blankets.”

“Right.” Meg made for Kayla’s Civic with her feet flat and her arms out for balance. The engine was still running. Very gingerly, she drove the car to the curb in front of Kayla’s house, popped the hatchback, grabbed the purse, and turned off the lights. She found the medical bag and the blanket as well as a plaid stadium rug, all of which she carried back without falling down or dropping anything.

Kayla whipped the phone from her purse, and the number she dialed was not 911. While she waited for an answer, she retrieved her coat. Meg substituted the plaid rug.

For the first time, she got a look at the man who had fallen. He was about Kayla’s age, early thirties, and had red hair, tousled and in need of a trim. He had strong bones that were a little too prominent and a nice mouth. It looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The bristles were orange. He seemed oddly familiar, as if she ought to recognize him, but she didn’t.

Kayla was mumbling medicalese to the cell phone. Meg had long ago given up translating doctor-speak, so she whisked ice from the man’s body. He wore jeans and a jacket over a faded flannel shirt. His heavy boots pointed at the sky. They had a coating of ice, too. Meg brushed them off and stuck her hands into her coat pockets. Move him? How?

Kayla handed her the phone and took a stethoscope and a blood-pressure cuff from her bag.

“Hello, er,” Meg said. “She’s taking his vital signs.”

“Who is speaking, please?” A foreign voice.

“A neighbor.”

“Huh.” The doctor, if he was a doctor, sounded cross.

Kayla beckoned imperiously, and Meg handed the phone back. Kayla recited the kind of statistics Meg forgot as soon as she left a doctor’s office, listened for a considerable while, chewed on her lower lip, and said, “Yeah,” several times. “But he’s still unconscious.”

Meg cleared ice from the man’s hands. He groaned.

“An hour… okay. Thanks.” Kayla shut the phone off and slipped it into her handbag. “Dr. Singh says all the ambulances are in use. We’ll have to move him.”

“How?”

“The emergency blanket. Lay it out beside him and we’ll slide him onto it. I can cradle his head.”

“You’re sure?”

“Nope. I’m setting myself up for a lawsuit, but what the heck. I’m supposed to be a care-giver, right?”

“Right.” I, on the other hand, am a librarian. Meg didn’t say that. She stood up. Her knees creaked. “You’ll have to tell me what to do.”

“Take this into your house—it’s closer.” Kayla handed her the purse. “Light some candles while you’re at it. The power’s going to go out.”

Sure enough, it did, just as Meg was pumping the Coleman lantern on her kitchen table. She managed to ignite the intimidating thing. The light it shed was bright and blue. When she got back to Kayla’s side in icy darkness lit only by the pickup’s headlights, the man was stirring.

“Can we wait for him to wake up?”

“No. Hypothermia.”

Well, duh. Meg’s teeth were chattering.

They contrived to slide the victim—or most of him—onto the aluminum blanket. His legs stuck over the end of the blanket. Kayla shielded his head.

“Now what?”

“Now we scoot him to your porch and lift him onto it. Then into your kitchen.”

Meg spared a thought for her back, which was middle-aged. “I’m going to do the pulling?”

“I’ll keep his head from banging on things. You pull.”

It took some doing. The blanket slid readily enough, and the man didn’t roll off it. Clutching his ankles, Meg duck-walked, low to the ground, to avoid slipping. So did Kayla. Halfway up the sidewalk to the porch, the man moaned and threw up. Kayla had turned his head, so he didn’t choke on his own vomit, but it was a close call.