Virtue Falls Read online

  It didn’t make sense. She’d had no more in common with Garik than she had had with that firefighter, yet she had been irresistibly attracted to Garik.

  It was all chemistry … and she’d always been bad at chemistry.

  For the first time, the enormity of the day’s events struck her. People could die, had died, in the earthquake and tsunami that so enthralled her. This young firefighter, handsome and her age, risked his life to save the citizens and tourists in the town, and he risked his life again for her album. Because big and dumb-looking he might be, he had recognized her desperation and responded.

  An older firefighter stepped around the corner and barked orders at his men, and they hustled off to the next rescue.

  Rainbow grabbed Elizabeth from behind in a massive embrace. “You’re alive!”

  Elizabeth extricated herself.

  She looked down at the album in her hand. “I am.”

  Rainbow rattled Elizabeth’s arm. “You ran out of the diner so fast, the earthquake wasn’t even over. And they said the tsunami came in on the coast.”

  “Yes. It was huge.” An understatement. “Do you know—have they found any bodies?”

  “Police say no one, that all the tourists were off the beach or they fled up the cliffs in time. Personally, I have trouble believing people would all be so sensible, but maybe the Japanese tsunami scared ’em enough.”

  “Yes. I hope.” Elizabeth slid the album into her bag and hefted the bag over her shoulder.

  “I hear you helped find Mrs. Branyon.”

  “Yes. I’ve finally discovered a logical reason to wear too much perfume.”

  Rainbow laughed too hard, then stopped too fast. “Kateri is missing.”

  “No. Oh, no!” Kateri was one of the few people Elizabeth had connected with here in Virtue Falls. “It never occurred to me … did the tsunami hit the harbor hard?”

  “Almost wiped it out, but Kateri ordered the boats that were manned through the breakwater. They rode over the tsunami, and that saved them. She sent two of the Coast Guard cutters out, too, but the one she commanded was way understaffed and according to eye witnesses, the cutter Ginia was right in front of her. She backed her cutter off to the side, and before she could get turned back around, the wave came over the top of the breakwater. Right over the top. The other cutter almost foundered. Hers tipped over.” Rainbow wiped at her eyes.

  “The first wave capsized her?” Elizabeth had seen the waves. The second was the big one … “What happened to the cutter? What happened to her crew?”

  “Her cutter was the Iron Sullivan. It rolled into the waterfront, and it’s sitting on its side where Bob’s Shrimp Shack used to be. The crew was on deck … they are all half-drowned, but they knew what they were doing better than most people. They rode the wave into shore, jumped off at the right moment, and when the wave retreated they ran like hell up the hill. It’s Kateri that’s missing. She stayed inside the wheelhouse, trying to steer. When the tsunami hit, the force broke out the windows and she’s … gone.” Rainbow choked up.

  “I see.” Like Elizabeth, Kateri was out of place, half American Indian, half … something else. Caucasian, Elizabeth supposed. She was a woman in the Coast Guard, in command of the station, giving orders to a bunch of men and having to prove herself with every new Coastie who came in.

  And now she was missing and presumed dead.

  So much of this—the destruction in town, in the harbor, the cost in human injury, pain and life—made Elizabeth’s excitement about the earthquake and tsunami seem thoughtless and reckless. “I’ve been selfish,” she said.

  “What? About the earthquake? Oh, honey. No one expects any different from you. And you’re—” Rainbow paused awkwardly.

  Remembering Sheriff Foster, Elizabeth suggested, “The daughter of a whore and a murderer?”

  “Not that. You’re kind of a variety pack, born here but not raised here, one of the scientists and a strange bird at any time.” Rainbow hugged her again. “Heck, from what I heard about Mrs. Branyon, once they freed her even the old lady said nice things about you.”

  Elizabeth viewed Rainbow suspiciously.

  “Well. Nice, if you consider the source. I was a little pissed at you myself. I thought you must have been killed, rushing off like you did to your stupid site.” Rainbow sounded surprisingly bitter.

  “Of course I’m alive. It would be counterproductive to put myself in danger, especially when I have been the only variety pack scientist who was lucky enough to be here today.” Thinking of the spectacle she had filmed, Elizabeth patted her bag.

  “I’m pretty sure the building contractors are going to decide they’re lucky, too. They’ll swarm like locusts all over town before the leaves fall.” Abruptly, Rainbow changed the subject. “How’s your father?”

  “What? Why? Fine, I suppose.”

  “I heard the ceiling fell at the home and an old man went to the hospital.”

  An odd dig of emotion startled Elizabeth.

  Charles … hurt? No. Her father could not be harmed. He was a murderer. He did harm.

  Yet she knew that was specious reasoning. Earthquakes were far more uncaring than any one man’s cruelties. She found herself saying, “I’m sure it wasn’t my father. There are a lot of elderly men there, so the odds are on his side.” Elizabeth reached into her bag. “I’ll call.”

  “Cell towers are down.”

  “Of course they are.”

  “The land lines are broken,” Rainbow said. “Communication is sketchy. You need to drive out there and check on him.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” Rainbow was right. Elizabeth could stay in town and help, but they might need help at the Honor Mountain Memory Care Facility, too, and as one patient’s family, Elizabeth was a likely candidate.

  She was also … curious wasn’t the word.

  She swallowed. She was anxious. About her father. Against her aunt’s shrilly expressed opinion, she had made the move to this place to be close to her father, to talk to him, to find out while she could why he had so brutally murdered her mother.

  But she had visited only once, and that one meeting had spooked her so much she had not gone back.

  Now … perhaps he was hurt? Perhaps he could die, and her one link to the past would be severed, and she would never discover the facts about the horror that had shaped her life and character. She would never understand how a man who seemed so gentle, kind, and caring could commit such an atrocity.

  Elizabeth nodded stiffly at Rainbow and started walking. “Thank you. I’ll go.”

  “Be careful,” Rainbow shouted after her. “There’s no telling what’s happened on the road!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Elizabeth’s apartment didn’t offer parking, so she kept her car in a lot at the edge of town.

  Good move. Out here, there were no buildings to fall apart, and her 1966 Ford Mustang was undamaged.

  The paving was not so lucky. On the way to the car, she tripped on an unseen chunk of asphalt and went down on one knee—and when she put her wounded hand down, she whimpered in pain. Reluctantly, she dug her cell phone out of her bag and used it as a flashlight—reluctantly because she knew the power company would not be out here to restore electricity very soon, and the phone’s battery would quickly die.

  She got in the driver’s seat. The car was stuffy, so she rolled down her window—the Mustang had cranks for the windows—and listened.

  She could hear human activity in town; a car alarm blaring, sounds of confusion and hurry.

  She started the car. The Mustang’s engine was almost silent; her college energy team had won the Southern California competition for redesigning the vehicle with a combination gas and electric engine. Normally she loved the quiet motor almost as much as she loved the way guys stared when she whipped past them on the freeway. Now she wished for the noise of an internal combustion engine, anything to break the silence that rode in the car like an unwanted passenger.

  As s
he drove through the cracks and upheavals of the parking lot to the cracks and upheavals of the road, her fingers tightened on the wheel.

  For the first time in her life, she was reluctant to go off on her own. She knew what awaited her on the trip to Honor Mountain Memory Care Facility—no houses, no people, only a primal forest pressing close to a dark strip of two-lane road, while above the cold, bleak stars spun in space. The stars, the forest, the land … if they could care, they would probably be glad to see the human race wiped off the earth.

  The earthquake must have affected Elizabeth more than she realized, to attribute emotions to the everlasting, unliving molecules of the universe.

  The drive was long, treacherous, nerve-wracking, a trek across broken chunks of asphalt and around fallen trees. More than once, she heard the rumble of the oncoming earthquake, then the groan of the trees as they shifted their roots through the ever-moving ground, before all returned to a brooding silence. And more than once she wondered if she would have to turn back … and whether the almost constant aftershocks had already rendered her return impossible.

  After two long hours—normally the drive took thirty minutes—she saw a glow; the massive generator at the care facility was working. Thank God. The silent forest, the restless earth, the interminable drive had spooked her. She wanted lights. She wanted people.

  She turned into the parking lot and into the first empty space that wasn’t crumpled and torn. Taking her bag, she hurried toward the door as if it was the gate to heaven.

  Even here, the world was eerily silent, strangely empty.

  She pushed the button by the metal door and when it buzzed loudly and obnoxiously, she collapsed in relief against the wall. Then she peered through the metal-reinforced window down the long, dimly lit corridor and saw one of the female nurses, a middle-aged woman dressed in a flowered smock top, scrub pants of hideous green, and sensible shoes, hurrying toward her.

  The nurse pressed her face to the window. Her eyes lit up, she smiled, and she opened the door. “Miss Banner, how did you get here? Come in!”

  “I drove.” Had they met before? Elizabeth didn’t remember. “It was not a pleasant—”

  “I’m Yvonne Rudda, head nurse for the evening shift.” Yvonne ushered Elizabeth inside, and shut the door after her. “I called for assistance from town, but they told me the roads were blocked.”

  “In places they are almost—”

  “I suppose there are other priorities, but really.” Yvonne herded Elizabeth down the hall with the expertise and exasperation of an overworked medical professional. “Do you know how much an earthquake like that upsets our patients? Not to mention we had to load Mr. Cook into a car and send him to the hospital for x-rays and observation. I don’t even know if he got there or what his status is.”

  “I heard—”

  “Here I am chattering away, when you drove all the way out here for one thing—to check on your father.”

  Elizabeth most definitely had not met this woman before. She would have remembered the frustration of trying to finish a sentence. “Yes.” She nodded at another flower-smock-clad medical professional who hurried by, looking worn and worried. “Is he okay?”

  “Your father is fine.” They paused in the doorway of a patient’s room, and Yvonne gestured toward the fragile-looking man sleeping in the dim illumination of a hospital nightlight. “As you can see.”

  It took Elizabeth several seconds to realize the head on the pillow was her father’s. Funny—she hadn’t recognized him when he was asleep. Of course, except for that one visit she’d made when she first moved here, it had been twenty-three years since she’d seen him in any way except in photos. During her visit, she had been made so uncomfortable by that creepy old guy shouting about her mother’s murder, her father calling her Misty, and the general paranoia that came from visiting an entire hospital full of patients who had lost their pasts … maybe she had never really looked at Charles.

  She advanced slowly into the room and stared down at him as he slept on his side, his hand tucked under his cheek.

  Her earliest memories were of a tall man, with broad shoulders where she rested her head, kind blue eyes, and a thinning head of brown, curly hair. Now he looked … small. His shoulders were scrunched, but Elizabeth guessed they had never been broad. His few remaining hairs were wispy, and his eyes … she didn’t know about his eyes, but the wrinkled skin of his eyelids showed veins under pale skin.

  The monster who had haunted her childhood, who had made her a pariah wherever she went … was old. Ancient. “He’s only sixty-five,” she murmured.

  “We’ve seen it before. Prison ages a man,” Yvonne said.

  “I presume that’s true.” Elizabeth supposed he deserved whatever misery had worn him down, but right now, he looked pitiful.

  In that ever-chipper voice of hers, Yvonne said, “Today it was weird to watch. Mr. Banner was eating at his place at the table. Mr. Cook was ranting behind him.”

  Mr. Cook had been the creepy old guy. “Does he always rant?”

  “On some men, the dementia peels off the civilization and allows the rage to come out. Mr. Cook is an unpleasant man and his wife is glad to be rid of him. She doesn’t visit much. Sort of tells you a lot, doesn’t it?” Yvonne pushed the thinning hair off Charles’s head with an affectionate hand.

  “Yes.” It took more nerve than Elizabeth could imagine, but she had to ask. “What about my father? Does he ever show signs of rage?”

  “Never. When he first came here, we were scared of him. We were careful to make sure he wasn’t alone with the other patients. We restrained him before he went to sleep. But your father’s a sweetie. Never any trouble, kind to everyone, mostly keeps to himself. Except for the thing with your mother.” She laughed awkwardly. “The … killing. No one here believes he did it.”

  Elizabeth turned on her. “You don’t?”

  Yvonne leaned back and gazed curiously at Elizabeth. “Surely you don’t, do you?”

  Elizabeth stared at her, and thought of all the times her cousins had taunted her that her father had murdered her mother. They had been like Mr. Cook, only younger, and meaner, and they had taught her caution in her relationships.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Yvonne patted her arm. “Charles Banner is a sweetheart through and through.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “You’re too trusting.”

  “Really? Do you think your mother would continue to hang around him if he had killed her?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Had working here in this place of ephemeral minds and memories robbed this nurse of her sanity? “My mother’s dead,” Elizabeth explained carefully.

  “He talks to her sometimes, and looks at this empty space beside him like she’s there.” Yvonne nodded her head as if that explained everything.

  “Well. He does have Alzheimer’s.”

  “I know.” Yvonne looked at her, her brown eyes wide and not at all crazy. “Today, right before the quake, Mr. Banner was sitting in the dining room eating his meal with Mr. Cook carrying on behind him, and all of a sudden your father did that thing where he was talking to the air.”

  Elizabeth needed to clarify. “You mean, he thought he was talking to my mother?”

  “I’d say so, because he nodded, like he was agreeing, got up, and moved close to the wall. Cocky as a bantam rooster, Mr. Cook sat down in Charles’s seat like he was proud of chasing him away. And the earthquake hit. Boom!” Yvonne clapped her hands. “Everybody staggered or fell over. But the only place the ceiling came down was onto your father’s chair. Ceiling tiles, steel support—slam!—knocked Mr. Cook out cold. We sent him to the hospital with a concussion and a broken collarbone for sure, and heaven knows what other injuries. If Charles had stayed at the table, if he would have been the one injured … He’s a slighter man, more frail than Mr. Cook. I think the ceiling collapse would have killed your father.”

  “So you’re saying you believe my mother warned him to move?�
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  “How else can you explain it?”

  “Coincidence. Or luck.” Yvonne’s conviction made Elizabeth uncomfortable.

  “Or your mother is with him. If I loved a man, and he had suffered for a crime he didn’t commit, I wouldn’t leave him to die alone. I’d come back for a visit, too.”

  It had been a very long, odd day, and in this silent nursing home filled with empty corridors and snoring patients, Elizabeth began to feel as if she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “Perhaps he deserves to suffer. Perhaps he thinks she’s here because he’s guilty and he knows it.”

  “Perhaps.” Yvonne seemed none-too-worried about Elizabeth’s skepticism. “You’re stuck here tonight, I think.”

  Elizabeth thought of the treacherous road back to town, and what was left of her apartment. She looked at her hand, still wrapped in a stiff, dried blood bandage. “I … yes, I think so. If you have extra blankets, I can sleep anywhere.”

  “We’ve got the staff bathroom where you can shower, and sack out in the room behind the nurses’ station. We all use it when we pull a double shift and have to catch a few hours of shut-eye. The cot isn’t any too comfortable, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “But if I sleep there, you won’t be able to lie down.”

  Yvonne sighed. “I can’t lie down anyway. There’s no staff to replace me. What did you do to your hand?”

  “Glass. During the earthquake.”

  “Come on. I’ll look at it.” Yvonne led her to the nurses’ station at the junction of three long corridors, and peeled off the bandage. While Elizabeth steadfastly stared over Yvonne’s head, she examined the cut. “It’s deep,” Yvonne said. “You really need a doctor, but you’re stuck with the medical staff we have here.” She glanced at Elizabeth’s stiff face. “Don’t worry, we’re good. Here, I’ll page Sheila. Even after all these hours on duty, she’s got a steady hand. Of course, she’s younger than me.”