sneeze. From her second-floor bedroom the night hadn’t seemed so dark because of a scattering of stars, but out here it was inky. She started toward the oak grove, and the damn rooster went off again. Nearly made her jump a foot.
She moved through the grove, keeping to the path, wishing she’d thought to put on shoes.
The stones cut into her soles; a couple of times she had to hop on one foot. Finally the stables came into view. Dark, but the horses sounded restless.
So here she was-barefoot and unarmed. Unarmed because after all the violence she’d seen growing up on the streets of the Mission district, she hated guns and had opted out of getting firearms-qualified. And suddenly scared. What had she been thinking of, coming out here like this?
Movement by the stables-slow, stealthy. A bulky shape slipping off to the left. Unarmed or not, Julia took off running in pursuit.
The person-she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman-plunged into the vineyard that bordered the stables, heading toward the road. Feet pounded the dirt between the plants, branches snapped and rustled. Julia followed through the rows of gnarled old vines.
After a moment she stopped to get her bearings. The person she was following must’ve stopped too: there was no noise except for the distant cry of the rooster. Then another bird joined the chorus. No one moved among the vines.
Julia wiped beads of sweat from her forehead, looked around. Blackness, crouching shadows. Narrow paths stretching in all directions. Then, off to her left, a faint rustling. The intruder was on the move again.
She went toward the sound, took a path, and ran down it, kicking up clods of dirt. The intruder’s footsteps now sounded uneven, labored.
Julia was gaining, gaining-
Then in the darkness something slammed into her. An upright grape stake. Pain erupted on the bridge of her nose, and she fell to the ground, the gnarled vines scratching on her way down. She lay there stunned for a few seconds. By the time she regained her senses and her feet, a car’s engine had started up in the distance.
Lost them, whoever he-or she-was.
She put her hand to her nose, felt blood welling. Injury to insult. This was a great beginning to her day.
SHARON McCONE
I lay there, depression gathering again. After the nightmare flashback to when I’d been shot, I’d had a peculiar dream in which Hy was looking into my eyes, but he couldn’t speak any more than I could. Then others appeared- Mick, Rae, Ted, Ma-and they couldn’t speak either. And finally I realized it wasn’t that they couldn’t-they wouldn’t. Keeping something from me.
I thought back to Hy’s behavior the day before. At first he’d been elated to connect with me. Then they’d done a CT scan and some other tests, and he was a little subdued but still upbeat. But later he’d been quiet, wrapped up in his own thoughts, and his smile was slightly off.
Definitely holding something back. Something those tests had revealed.
Dammit, if that was the case, I deserved to know. When he came in today, I’d ask him-
Right. I couldn’t ask him anything. All I could do was respond to questions.
All I could do was lie here. Silent. Motionless. Afraid.
CRAIG MORLAND
The sky was glowing over the eastern hills when he awoke, cramped and cold, in his SUV at a pullout on Highway 1 near Big Sur. He’d driven almost to the Spindrift Lodge, where San Francisco’s president of the board of supervisors and the state representative had arranged their secret meeting, then parked about ten miles north. No reason to arrive in the middle of the night and roust the innkeeper from his or her bed; no need to attract attention to himself. Amanda Teller and Paul Janssen would probably check in in the afternoon, and by then he’d be tucked away, hopefully in an adjoining unit.
He ran his hands over his face and hair, then got out of the car and breathed in the crisp salt air. Fog misted the gray sea; its waves smacked onto the rocks some thousand feet below. But the pink light to the east indicated the day would clear. He turned that way and looked up: towering pine-covered slopes, through which a waterfall had cut a channel. Now, because of the dry summer conditions inland, its flow was barely a trickle. Come the rainy season, it would be a torrent.
All around there were reminders of the 2008 wildfire, sparked by lightning, that had burned more than 160,000 acres in the area: blackened sections, redwoods with charred branches, deadfalls. Many residents had lost their homes, even more had been evacuated, and the Pacific Coast Highway had been closed to traffic. People in the Big Sur area were strong and resilient, though; it had always been subject to floods, mudslides, and avalanches. Often in winter it was cut off from the surrounding territory, but no matter how bad the disaster the community clung together and regrouped quickly.
Craig loved Big Sur, but he and Adah had spent little time there. It was remote, down a very dicey part of the coast highway, and there really wasn’t much to do. Better to go to Carmel, with its interesting shops and good restaurants, for a getaway. Still, there was something magical about this long stretch of tall trees and rugged sea cliffs; if he were a believer, he’d say being here was akin to a religious experience.
But he wasn’t a believer. His exposure to religion had been limited to Christmas Eve and Easter services at the Methodist church in Alexandria, Virginia, where he’d been raised. He never contemplated the existence of a deity or eternal life; it simply wasn’t in his makeup. Adah was the same: she’d been reared in the religion of her parents- communism-but she hadn’t taken her radical parents’ beliefs too seriously. In fact, when they’d become disillusioned and begun labeling themselves as “wild-eyed liberals,” she’d been relieved.
He thought of Shar: what did she believe? She’d been raised Catholic, but he’d never known her to go to church. And the beliefs of her Indian ancestors hadn’t been passed on to her. He hoped if she had any faith at all she was leaning heavily on it now, during the toughest battle of her life.
Nature called. He went into a stand of pines clinging to the clifftop, out of eyeshot of early passing motorists. Returning, he looked at his watch. Six-thirty. He’d grab breakfast somewhere, even if it meant driving north, then play tourist till around ten, a respectable time to arrive at the Spindrift Lodge for a spontaneous weekend getaway.
RAE KELLEHER
She was starting her search for Bill Delaney, the name she’d found in the phone book in Callie O’Leary’s hotel room, when the fog showed signs of breaking over the Golden Gate. Delaney’s cellular had been out of service consistently when she’d called it last night during breaks in a family evening with Ricky and the girls.
She was surprised how much she enjoyed the times when Molly and Lisa, their older sister Jamie, and even their troubled brother Brian were in residence. The eldest girl, Chris, was a student at Berkeley and dropped in often. So did Mick.
