Thalo Blue (57 page)

And she wanted herself and Zeb to go with it.

Even through the grief, the downright sickening grief, she couldn’t let go of that hatred for Zeb.

It was palpable. Even after so much time, after such a long journey of twists and turns, she couldn’t get rid of it. And she followed Zeb out into the yard with it still in her mouth. Its taste made her swing the rocks against his windshield. He wouldn’t escape. Even through the clouds of pressure, the crush of the past on her windpipe, she just couldn’t let him away.

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When the gold and chrome Thunderbird bumper had finally slipped beneath the churning waters of the frigid and unforgiving river, David Langtree groped and sputtered in the water, trying in the darkness to find an edge to the stream. His panic, his overwhelming grief, both, gnawed at him. He felt like there was pure electricity flowing into his body from his extremes. His missing forearm was agony and his mind was lost in pictures of his little girls somewhere under the water, still belted in, trying to scream but only having their lungs fill with cold water, freezing them from the inside out.

His sloppy dogpaddle brought him to the edge of the water where the other driver, that damned fool who owned the road, was clinging to a dark tree root and calling out to him.

David’s sight, without his glasses, was a blurry gray with washed out blues. Only the snow, white, glowing white, was distinct. In his ears, the buzzing of his tinnitus was stark and loud, nearly drowning out the shouts from that only other living soul.

He made it to that driver and saw that same half-moon face as before. The water roiled and crashed. There were dark shards of mountain and the trees seemed to shiver. The sweet unmistakable scent came from that other driver’s breath and he heard his father’s voice against the buzz in his ears:
I have been grieving for you longer than you will be for me.

—
grieving for you
—

—
longer than you will be for me
—

With anger, shock and disillusion coursing through what was left of his body, he reached out for a long slender neck as he finally went under.

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The evening was mild and the stars were beginning to come out at the dull eastern panel of sky. In the west, the sheet above them was still a lighter blue, even pale at the edge of Eden’s twinkling presence.

Initially, Zeb’s fleeting image of his neighbor’s boat launch had seemed promising. If he couldn’t get through his own black-barred gates, a detour onto the surface of the lake using the tracks of the boat launch and then back onto the gravel lane using another launch somewhere down the road seemed like his only chance. The ice was surely strong enough to easily sustain the weight of the car at its shallow edge. But in the chilly dimming light, with the Druid’s wiry grip on him, he had taken the car well past the lake’s shallow rim, had, in fact, revved the engine uncontrollably in first gear and brought the Ci way out from the safety of the edge. Unable to grip the wheel while he battled her, the car had ambled from his original course. They were not yet approaching the middle, for Charlemagne had a deep and wide body, but were much farther than feasible if he wanted to start looking for a way back on to the pebbly shore.

Out here, in the emptiness, a mist had settled on the ice, looking deceptively ready to embrace. The offering was of a bigger picture view, unhindered by foliage and buildings. There where no skyscrapers here, just the orange, yellow and white dots of light from the other side of the lake and the dark shadowy company of the tree lines and the gentle rolling hills.

Even the far away movement and shimmer of orange—growing fire at the Redfield cottage—seemed like a pleasing and deliberate light show. Zeb’s Book of the Dead would be eaten, the paintings too. Everything his father had worked so hard in his life to purchase would be chewed up and turned to dust. And the BMW coupe in which Zeb was currently struggling to keep his life would be ruined.

Carving a slipshod trail away from the edge of the water, The Druid and Zeb were a tangled mess of arms and grunts inside and on top of the BMW 630Ci’s hood. It was desperation. From both of them. Both knew exactly what they were battling for.

His thoughts were sparse and runaway; revving the car like he was, only managing to get up a bit of speed with the wheels spinning on the ice like they were, didn’t leave him with faith that the car could take such abuse forever. That was just a snippet in his head. Another snippet was the madness of the Druid once again threatening to get her hands fully around his throat and squeeze him until he was dead.

Zeb yanked backward from the pawing of the Druid. His arms pushed at her, and she lost her hold on him. He managed to get his arms free and he cranked the steering wheel, simultaneously pressing down on the brake in one solid motion.

The car, wheels locked and sliding on the ice surface of the lake, veered left and tilted. It was enough to allow the Druid to tumble forward, out of the empty windshield casing, and roll helplessly to rest on the ice.

In the driver’s seat of the Ci, as it came to a rest, Zeb let the clutch pedal out again, trying to have the car gain a footing on the ice. But he didn’t realize he had placed the stick in third gear instead of first. The car stalled and he placed his foot down on the clutch again and readied to turn the key. As he looked out the window at the Druid getting to her feet, he heard something: cracking ice. At least it
sounded
like cracking ice.

Zeb pulled the latch and pushed open the door. He fell from the car in his hurry to escape it—imagining a descent into the water while still
inside
the metal and plastic coupe.

The Druid was on top of him, and the cracking turned to a roar. There was a pause in their struggle as a loud snap came. There was a crunching sound in their ears. Both looked at the car, only a dozen feet away, and it slipped below the surface, sending giant crashing pieces of ice-glass up into the air.

Cracks spider-crawled out like a web and some of them approached the Druid and Zeb. They widened like little canyons of frosty white, evolving in just a few seconds instead of millions of years.

The two figures pawed with frozen hands and bleeding fingernails on the surface but couldn’t get away. Desperation was caught in Zeb’s throat and he saw the eyes of the Druid, focused but empty. The ground beneath them split like an eggshell. Knotted together, they were both swallowed whole.

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The Druid felt the same thing as before when he was pulled under the surface of the water.

Then, it was a bitterness. It was hatred.

His girls were dead. His second chance with them was snuffed out. And pulling the other driver down with him, was just an impulse, something that wouldn’t solve anything, but felt like it could make amends.

Now, it was identical, but amplified. It was the same with Zeb, a transferred weight of so many deeds. When they both fell into the cold water, it seemed right. It seemed like time to collect his dues.

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Oliver once told a room of dinner party guests that the main difference between a man and a woman is how each handles a crisis. He told the room of business associates that, facing any crisis, small, large, indifferent, a woman will always panic, she will react by doing the most unreasonable thing a man in the same situation could possibly imagine. Of course the room of guests, all holding glasses of wine and tiny hors d’oeuvres prepared by Sadie herself, had all laughed. But Sadie hadn’t laughed.

The thought of that dinner party was a dank cloud in her brain, muddled by a coming headache. Sadie had driven for hours, stopping only for a restroom break and a bag of potato chips, and now she was starting to realize the insanity of her drive. The booze was trying to come out of her by then, and she was tired. Was this little jaunt
unreasonable
, Oliver? No doubt about it, no need to take bets. He’d have seen this as a complete over reaction, as nothing
but
unreasonable. Why couldn’t she have just waited for the morning flight out of Vancouver International, he might have asked—if he had been here. Why did she need to throw the pedal to the metal and come all this way? In the middle of the night, no less.

She just needed to. That’s all she knew. She needed to get as far away from Darren Knoll as she could, as far away from everything that wasn’t home, and that was final.
Call
that
unreasonable, Oliver
, she thought as she rounded a blind corner on the icy roadway. Thoughts of Sebastion William were smeared across the corroded insides of her alcohol-tainted brain and all she needed was to get a hair-width closer to her little boy, to just
feel
a little closer to him.

She was wearing her maroon blouse, the one Oliver had gotten her for a birthday. Her coat had been thrown into the backseat along with her suit case, her purse, and her briefing case. Greasy chip crumbs were sitting in the seams of the rental’s gray passenger seat and the snow was coming down heavy across the windshield and the road in front of her. But it wasn’t a torrent. It didn’t
feel
like a blizzard, didn’t feel threatening at all. Still, she had decided that, unreasonable or not, this drive had done what she had needed it to. She felt better now, with some distance. Calmer, closer to home. She would pull into the next town and get a room for the rest of the night.

Mom and dad had brought Sadie and Sissy out this way on a summer trip one year—one year when life with Pop Sammy at the Redfield hog farm was still serviceable. They had piled into the extended cab of dad’s farm truck and towed a borrowed camper behind them through the mountains, heaving it up the inclines with a motor that sounded ill and then letting it glide down the slopes while the girls threw their arms out the window and mom fretted about the closeness of the road’s edge. Sadie had never seen anything more majestic, more awe-towering than those mountain peaks, decorated in skiffs of white. On that vacation they had stopped in a town nestled in the dagger-surround of the mountains, way down inside them like the tonsils inside an open mouth that faced the sky. The town had been Revelstoke and, on this night, in the snow-blinding haze, she was sure she had seen a road sign for it back there somewhere. But her head was muggy, still befuddled by the wine, and memories of Darren Knoll’s not-quite-right lips. It was like they were still touching hers—

In the vanishing moments between thoughts of Darren Knoll and those mountains impeding on Revelstoke’s mouth there was the screech of metal against metal—her car hit the other and spun madly out of her control. She was absolutely certain that none of it was really happening. Then the overwhelming spark of thought was that her life was over, that her car was grating against the other one in a painfully slow recreation just to torment her for the rest of eternity. This was hell, she thought, this endless spinning, payment in full for leaving her little boy...and a part of her accepted that in a flash as the cars, torn, twisted, and tied together, descended into the murky shaken foam of the river.

Was this what Sicily had seen at her end? This kind of endless whirling? Was this what mom saw? At
her
end, when all she could do was down pills to escape?

But somewhere under the flood of the surging current a loud pop in her ears focused her sight upwards and drowned out all thought of her distant family remembrances. The passenger window burst in its crumpled doorframe, and like an angel rising from dark ash, Sadie was pulled up and out of the car in the tiny dot-storm of glass particles, greasy chip crumbs, and the cello-foil bag they had been in. She managed to climb free of the car, the skin of her legs and hips torn and bloodied on the now jagged window frame of the blue rental. With water in her ears and pushing on her from all sides, she rose to the surface and, miraculously, was saved.

At the edge, bracing against the frigid water that clung to her, she reached out a hand for the other driver who had also managed to climb free of the wreck. In that second, when she saw his wet face in the darkness, her guilt eased, despite the gnawing temperature. But then she saw his arm raised out of the water. It was a messy stump. His hand was gone.

And then she was pulled violently under the water.

She never learned of the two little daughters in the back seat of the gold Thunderbird.

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John Merridew did not have a chance to use his information to its fullest extent, to the extent that he was
itching
to use it. It ruined a marriage and sent Sadie out the front door of the Redfield family home in the city of Vaughan. But Oliver’s trysts with the underage imports, even the accusations that he might have hit them in a drunken rage, never amounted to the same kinds of indictments that had followed Big Teddy Redfield to his grave a few years earlier.

The idea that Oliver might go down in history the same way his own dad had might have scared him enough to back down from Ol’ Johnny. Or it might have been that he truly did worry for his only son—suddenly alone at the age of nine, all parents absent, all bets off. Foster care, as Caeli might contend, can’t provide the kinds of opportunities that Zeb might have otherwise been accustomed to.

Either way, Merridew had sewn the whole deal’s lips to its ass-end when he didn’t lay down and falter under whatever insider trading or skimming allegations Oliver had hovering over his head. He let Oliver know how it was going to be when he brought Daniela to Charlemagne Lake. And things fell apart. As things do.

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Days after she left, craning a disbelieving ear into the basement den’s tan telephone receiver, Oliver had heard from the authorities at Eagle River that his wife’s rental car had been found near the scene of an accident. Despite storm warnings in the area, she had been out on the narrow mountain roads as the wind had lifted and the snow had begun to make driving dangerous. While nearly all logging truck drivers had decided against trying that mountain pass, she had not. And her blue car had collided with an oncoming vehicle in the early morning hours. Both went over the guard rail. Not to worry, though, Mr. Redfield, a passer-by called for help and your wife was found at the edge of Crazy Creek, with only bruises and cuts. And a bout of shock from the cold.