Virtue Falls Read online

  Perfect. The blood ran red onto the white plate, embracing the pile of potatoes.

  Elizabeth would have turned her head away. She seldom ate steak, and when she did, it was always well done. Blood made her squeamish. Once after he’d been shot, she had rushed to the ER to see him, taken one look, and had fainted so hard and so fast she’d needed medical attention for a concussion.

  So during the whole time of their marriage, Garik had eaten his steak medium. When she had told him she wanted a divorce, he’d pointed out his steakly sacrifice, but she had said, in that supremely reasonable tone which bugged the shit out of him, that if not for him and his carnivorous habits, she would be a vegetarian. And anyway, eating to please each other didn’t make for a happy marriage.

  Apparently not.

  Now he lifted a bite of tender, rare steak to his lips, chewed and swallowed, and smiled.

  Heaven.

  Piercing one of the green beans with his fork, he lifted it in a salute. “To you, Elizabeth,” he said, and ate it, too.

  His pleasure in the moment slipped … Damn, but he missed that woman. He hadn’t understood her. The stuff she cared about! Stuff like rocks and quakes and volcanoes. Stuff that bored him silly, and when he tried to get her interested in what was important, like crime and passion and violence, she’d pointed out that people change, come and go, but the earth was forever. She had always been so calm, so logical … so remote.

  Except in bed. My God, he’d never met a woman like that, who hid a fiery passion beneath a cool, inquiring, scientific mind. He wished … well, he wished a lot of things, most of them to do with Elizabeth, and all of them impossible now.

  He shrugged. Water over the dam, or under the bridge, or whatever it was. It had taken him more than a year to get himself to this point of Zen acceptance. He wasn’t going to screw it up now thinking about what might have been.

  Instead, he once again submerged himself in the meal, in the cheesy, salty potatoes, in the steak, in the beans and the bacon.

  He’d love to enjoy a glass of wine, but he had decided he didn’t want anyone to say alcohol had influenced his decision.

  As a last dinner went, this one was pretty fine. Any man on death row would be glad for this, and when he had finished—he ate every bite, even the green beans—he leaned back against the couch and sipped his espresso, laced with cinnamon and whipped cream.

  All he needed now was a woman. But since Elizabeth had left him, he hadn’t been much good at sex. He figured that was a big part of his problem. No sex, no pressure valve, and Garik the perfect-record FBI agent gets fed up with the bullshit regulations and loses his temper. And gets in big trouble. Yeah, man.

  So no, he wasn’t going to go looking for sex for dessert. Going out in a blaze of impotence would be too humiliating.

  Instead, he reached for the pistol.

  It wasn’t his service pistol. The FBI had taken that away from him, kind of like ripping the badge off an old-time Western sheriff. Garik had bought this piece at a pawn shop, though, and the Colt felt good in his hand. Solid. Cold. Uncaring. Unthinking …

  He felt at rest with his decision.

  Margaret would be angry, grieved and hurt, and he regretted that. He knew Elizabeth would mourn him, too. But Margaret wasn’t related to him, for all that she’d cared for him so diligently, and Elizabeth was no longer his wife. He’d gone over the logic a hundred times, and he couldn’t live with the knowledge he had started down the road in his father’s footsteps. That he was a killer. Inadvertently, but a killer.

  He unmuted the TV and turned up the sound. It wouldn’t muffle the shot, but it might make it sound like he was watching another version of The Punisher.

  Lifting the gun, he placed the barrel in his mouth.

  He lowered it, and grimaced. For all the many times he’d handled a gun, he’d never tasted one. Metal and gun oil had ruined the savory, lingering flavors of his meal.

  Tough shit, huh.

  He lifted the pistol again. That flavor wasn’t the worst part of this.

  The worst part was getting distracted by those phony newscasters.

  The guy with the carefully applied blond streaks in his hair and dutiful concern announced, “An eight-point-one earthquake struck off the west coast of Washington State, shaking an area extending from Alaska to San Francisco and wreaking havoc in Seattle where it knocked bricks off of buildings and killed sixteen people in a bank collapse.” Photos and videos took over the screen. “A massive tsunami struck the coast, tearing into the beaches.” The feed switched to helicopter shots of the incoming waves battering the low-lying beaches. “The town of Forks was hard hit, and there we begin our coverage—”

  Garik put down the pistol. He sat forward. “What about Virtue Falls?” he asked aloud.

  The picture switched to a wide-eyed female, standing in front of a collapsed building illuminated by floodlights. “As you can see, in this small rural community made famous by the Twilight books and movies, the earthquake damage has been substantial—”

  “How much truth are you telling, and how much is news hype?” Standing, Garik headed for his jacket, pulled his cell phone, and called the Virtue Falls Resort.

  No connection.

  He called the Virtue Falls sheriff’s office.

  No connection.

  The news babbled on, abandoning the earthquake in Washington State and moving to the story of a local woman who had inherited a guitar once played by Bob Dylan. Because, you know, that was important.

  Garik hit the Internet to get the earthquake details.

  The news was right about one thing. Helicopter footage showed a huge tsunami striking the coast, rushing up rivers and swamping low-lying areas.

  Elizabeth.

  He’d been married to Elizabeth. He knew the theory about Virtue Falls Canyon. He knew Elizabeth was working down there on her father’s project.

  Had she been in the canyon when the earthquake hit?

  Surely not. It had struck late in the day.

  But he knew her. When she was obsessed with her rocks, time passed and she never noticed.

  What about Margaret? The resort hung precariously over the Pacific. Margaret had paid for the resort’s refitting, but could it withstand the assault of the ocean?

  He called the airlines.

  They weren’t flying into Seattle right now. Not until the aftershocks stopped. They weren’t flying into Portland, either. Damage at the airport.

  Going into the bedroom, he pulled out his duffel bag; he had always kept it packed for unexpected trips for the FBI, and old habits died hard.

  He pulled on socks and his running shoes.

  He’d take his truck, a white Ford F-250, powerful as hell. After all, Nevada had a top speed limit of seventy-five miles per hour, and he still held an FBI ID.

  He had claimed he lost it in the fight.

  His supervisor had claimed he believed him.

  So even figuring he’d get pulled over at least four times, when he flashed that ID, the cops would mostly let him go.

  On a good day, he could make it back home to Virtue Falls in twenty hours.

  He hoped to hell this was a good day.

  Grabbing his keys and his knife, he walked out the door, leaving his pistol behind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As the darkness fell, Elizabeth walked into the outskirts of Virtue Falls. And stopped. And stared.

  People were firing up generators on the streets, using spotlights to illuminate collapsed buildings and crushed cars. Men and women shouted, or silently wept, or stood about with their arms crossed over their chests. Children rubbed their sleepy eyes and whined, or stared, their eyes wide in shock and terror, too scared to even cry.

  Of course. Elizabeth knew the earthquake had done damage. She’d seen some of it on the way out of town, and Sheriff Foster had made clear the damage had been extensive. But she hadn’t realized that the disaster would wear such a human face.

  She looked down at
the bandage on her hand. Compared to the devastation here, her cut was minor.

  She wandered along, unsure of what to do until she got to Branyon’s Bakery.

  The two-story building had pancaked in on itself. Bricks were scattered across the street like a child’s LEGO set. In a froth of frantic motion, a team of men and women were throwing bricks aside. She heard someone say, “We need a dog. Mrs. Branyon’s down here somewhere, but God, I can’t find her.”

  Mrs. Branyon was one of the elderly women who wore red lipstick that bled into the wrinkles of her upper lip, pink blush she never blended, and enough perfume to make Elizabeth sneeze. She was bent, stout, and refused to wear her hearing aids, so she was very, very loud. Elizabeth knew exactly what Mrs. Branyon thought about her, because although Mrs. Branyon’s daughter had tried to hush her, Mrs. Branyon had stated her opinion clearly enough for Elizabeth to hear. “The acorn never falls far from the oak, and that Elizabeth girl will either become a whore like her mother or a killer like her father, and maybe both.”

  Elizabeth had pretended not to hear. It was easier that way.

  It was always easier that way.

  She watched the would-be rescuers unscientifically try to find Mrs. Branyon, that mean old biddy … who didn’t deserve to die in the dark, of dehydration, in pain and slowly suffocating.

  With a deep, resigned sigh, Elizabeth climbed into the rubble, got on her hands and knees, and started sniffing. It didn’t take long before the assault of flowery perfume made her sneeze, and guided her to a spot where none of the others were working. With her uninjured hand, Elizabeth plucked a few bricks off the top. “Mrs. Branyon?” she called. “It’s Elizabeth Banner. Are you there?” She heard a faint moan. “Mrs. Branyon?” she called louder.

  The other rescuers looked up.

  From deep inside the piles of broken wooden studs and broken plaster board, Mrs. Branyon croaked, “Oh, God, it’s that awful Elizabeth Banner. Are you going to kill me while I’m helpless?”

  Elizabeth sat back on her heels. Took a breath. Sneezed again.

  Well. How good to know Mrs. Branyon was fine.

  Raising her voice, Elizabeth called to the other searchers, “I heard her. She’s under here.” She moved away and let the others go to work.

  After all, she didn’t mind figuring out where the old harridan was located, but performing the actual salvage work stretched the bounds of her loving kindness.

  Elizabeth dusted at her knees, then started toward her apartment, moving grimly through and around and over the wreckage scattered on the road.

  So many buildings damaged. So many terrified faces shining in the blaring lights. Here and there, someone sat on the curb and rocked and cried, and Elizabeth felt the nervous flutter of fear she had not experienced before.

  And why? Her apartment here was not a home. None of her possessions were precious to her. So many years ago, she had learned not to trust what appeared to be permanent—not her friends, not her toys, not her parents, and for sure, not Garik.

  Yet she’d grown fond of Virtue Falls, probably because she’d found her life’s work here, possibly because on some subconscious level, she remembered it from her childhood.

  The closer she got to her apartment, the more her heart raced, until at last she stood before the two-story building, built in the nineteen thirties. Exterior walls had peeled away like soft frosting from a layer cake. Rooms gaped open wide. In the blare of floodlights, she could see into her second-story apartment. The bed she hadn’t made, the refrigerator door hanging open revealing a pathetic quart of milk and a container of cheese curds, her chest of drawers that had spat her underwear across the floor. And the fake leather, lime-green, painstakingly assembled photo album of her early years in Washington.

  From her aunt, she had stolen family photos and drawings. From newspaper archives, she had copied articles about her mother’s acting and her father’s scientific work. She had used prints of famed local artist Bradley Hoff’s beautiful paintings to fill in the life she couldn’t remember.

  Now the album dangled over the street, half on and half off the floor.

  She had thought she owned nothing that she treasured. Yet if the building collapsed, she would lose her memories. Like her father, she would be lost and alone in a world without love …

  Oh, God. She was being so dramatic. If her cousins were here, they would mercilessly mock her. By merely glancing around, she could see how much more loss everyone else in Virtue Falls had suffered.

  Yet still her bag slid off her shoulder and thumped to the ground, and she stared up at the album as if it was the holy grail.

  One of the town’s firefighters stopped. He was young, handsome, brawny, and covered with the dust of a man who had been in and out of collapsed buildings in search of victims. She had no idea who he was. He’d never spoken to her. But he apparently knew her, and knew where she lived. “You can’t stay here tonight, Miss Banner,” he told her. “You’ll have to go to a shelter.”

  “I can’t leave my book hanging there.” She pointed. “It’s all I’ve got of—” Her breath caught, quavered, steadied. “It’s all I’ve got of my parents. Please, I need it.”

  He barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “Don’t you have the pictures in digital?”

  “Yes on the photographs. But my mother … my mother took some of those photos. There are some letters she wrote to my aunt. I never copied those. There’s a drawing she did of me when I was three or four. They hold a little of her essence.” Which was stupid. She knew it was stupid, and highly unscientific, and … just stupid. But she couldn’t help it. It was what she felt.

  “Do I look like the kind of guy who’s dumb enough to risk my life for a book?” The firefighter was clearly exasperated.

  Yet when Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears, not manipulative tears, but tears that rose from the depths of her wretched soul, he sighed. “Right, Miss Banner. I’ll go in and get it. You’re going to owe me a drink.”

  “Any time,” she said. Feeling like the wide-eyed, traumatized child who had landed on her aunt’s doorstep, Elizabeth watched him climb through the rubble, up the stairs displayed with such shocking openness, and into her apartment.

  Onlookers joined her, and Elizabeth heard their murmurs.

  “What’s he doing?” “He shouldn’t be up there.” “Is he rescuing a cat?” “We’ll be lucky if we don’t lose one of our firefighters today.”

  Elizabeth glanced at the lady who spoke, who stood with her hands clasped at her throat, who stared into Elizabeth’s apartment with the fear and dread of a person who had seen too much pain and destruction this day.

  Elizabeth looked at the building, not with her feelings, but with her usual logical good sense.

  The floor was tilted, and at the edges where the outer wall had once stood, pieces had crumbled away into the street. If—no, when—another aftershock shook the town, the whole building could go down.

  She shouldn’t have sent him up there.

  The firefighter got down on his hands and knees and crawled toward the album.

  Elizabeth could see him muttering as he crept forward, inch by inch, testing the floor like a cat on a narrow branch. She held her breath; she should call him off. She couldn’t stand it if he was hurt in pursuit of some old pictures. “Halt,” she whispered. Then, louder, “Halt! Don’t! It’s not worth it!”

  The firefighter stopped and looked right at her. He shook his head in disgust, as if he couldn’t believe she was chickening out at the last minute. Dropping to his belly, he inched forward and with the very tips of his fingers, he nudged the album, grasped it, dragged it up over the edge and toward him. She held her breath as he tucked the album under his arm.

  And the earth trembled.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The edges of the second floor crumbled like overdone toast.

  Without the caution he’d shown before, the firefighter scooted back. He disappeared behind the door, and reappeared almost a
t once on the ground floor. He bounded through the rubble, escaping from under the fragile, failing ceiling. He stepped out on the street, and the aftershock diminished.

  The onlookers let out their held breaths.

  The firefighter handed Elizabeth the photo album. “You owe me a drink,” he said, “and maybe a kiss?”

  She stared at him, working through his reasoning. “You think that because we have all faced mortality today, and you’re a handsome man and I’m an attractive woman, a kiss, being a prelude to sex, will ease our tension. Also, because you risked your life for my album.”

  He sighed and hooked his fingers into his suspenders. “Wow, Miss Banner, you really know how to take the wind out of a man’s sails.”

  Surprised, she asked, “Why? I’m quite willing to kiss you. It’s not as if you’re unfit or from the wrong age demographic.”

  He wrinkled up his face.

  Uncertain, now, she asked, “Do you not want your kiss?”

  “Hell, yes, I want it.” He didn’t wait for her to put down her album. He swept her into his arms, bent her backward, and kissed her with vast enthusiasm and way too much tongue.

  She was overwhelmed, breathless for all the wrong reasons, and her back hurt from the backward arch.

  But when he stood her on her feet again, the onlookers clapped.

  “After that, you don’t even have to buy me a drink,” he said. “But I sure look forward to buying you one.” Which apparently meant he had enjoyed the kiss. “By the way, my name is Peyton Bailey. Make sure you remember that.”

  “Peyton Bailey,” she repeated. “Thank you.”

  He swaggered down the street toward the other firefighters.

  She watched him. He was handsome, with wavy blond hair and bright green eyes, the sort of weary firefighter who would make the cover of USA Today as the face of the Washington earthquake. And from the way the women were viewing her, she supposed she was now the object of envy. But she, who had been celibate for longer than she cared to remember, wasn’t attracted to him at all.