Half a mile from her place, Kenny had to pull to the curb as two fire trucks and an ambulance roared past with sirens and Klaxons as shrill as any passage in the ugliest of atonal modern symphonies.
Three minutes later when they turned the corner into the block where she lived, her house was on fire. In fact, the words on fire were an inadequate description. The structure burned furiously, seethed with flames, and the trees nearest to it were torches. The firefighters vigorously attacked the blaze, but the cause was already lost; there would be nothing left but ashes and rubble.
Although he knew less about Leigh Ann Bruce than he would have liked to know, Kenny knew enough that he wasn’t surprised when she neither wept nor cursed her bad fortune, nor paled with shock. Instead, she stared through the windshield, steely-eyed, and said, “This for damn sure isn’t a coincidence.”
“I wish it was,” Kenny said, for he felt somewhat responsible for this disaster.
“It’s the dirtbag who called us cockroaches.”
“When you went online with my backup computer, he must have gotten your ID.”
“And minutes later he somehow sets my house on fire? What kind of wacked-out genius is the bastard?”
“Evil,” Kenny said. “He’s an evil genius.”
“Get us out of here.”
“But your house is burning down.”
“I’m not a masochist. I don’t have to watch. As far as this evil-genius lunatic is concerned, if you’re his enemy, then so am I. Let’s get out of here before he causes a 747 to crash on top of us.”
“He can’t do that. Nobody can.”
“Just get us out of here.”
The breeze shifted, and the palisades of smoke rising from the house abruptly collapsed as the house itself had begun to collapse, gray clouds avalanching into the street.
As Kenny hung a U-turn and drove away, he began to realize that he had not yet grasped the fullness of the threat they faced. He was also beginning to comprehend that a one-night stand was never just a one-night stand, that there was always the possibility that a knot had been tied that bound two lives together inextricably. Call it fate or synchronicity.
40
In one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, drinking cold tea out of a bottle, Joanna Chase listened to the susurration of the willows and watched thousands of bright tongues of sunlight lapping the breeze-rippled water of Lake Sapphire. Her mother had been buried in a cemetery in Buckleton, the nearest town; but to Joanna, the lake would forever be a grave in which the sweet future that might have been was interred in its bottom silt.
The previous night, in Santa Fe, she had suffered a dream of her mother’s corpse animated by some malevolent power as it came out of the lake, a dream similar to those that she’d endured a few times in her childhood, mostly during the two weeks between her mother’s and her father’s deaths. Her dad had assured her there was nothing evil in those waters, that Emelia’s drowning had been accidental. Now, having heard Wyatt Rider’s story of the mysterious presence in the boathouse, she regarded the lake with renewed suspicion. Her dreams of having a strange fellowship with the animals on the ranch had, by the evidence of the elk, proved to be based on a forgotten truth; therefore, perhaps within the depths of the lake, something lived that had taken her mother’s life, another forgotten truth.
She felt unsteady, disoriented, as if the very foundations of the world were shifting under her. With Auntie Kat, she had found stability as a child. In the eleven years since she’d graduated from college, her life had been one of familiar patterns and routines, with much of her time spent in pleasant solitude, writing novels. The loveliest thing about fictional worlds was that she controlled them as if she were a Greek goddess, her office chair no less a seat of power than a high throne on Olympus; if a character or story line took a sudden turn that surprised her, she soon adapted and explored the new direction with enthusiasm, because the consequences were limited to her imagination, and the real world remained unaltered.
Now reality seemed to be in flux, the currents of change so strong that she expected the porch floor to roll under her chair like the deck of a ship on troubled seas.
As Joanna screwed the cap on the half-finished bottle of tea and set the refreshment aside, Wyatt Rider came out of the house, having used the landline to make a few phone calls. They had spent an hour sharing experiences of self-starting vehicles and organized fireflies, of possessed televisions, of pleas for help and threats of violence from disembodied voices. Joanna found him to be nimble-minded, with no tendency to superstition, analytical, and intent on dissecting this mystery with the sharp instrument of reason.