“Have I done something to make you believe I’m a braggart?” I teased him as we removed our gear on the boat. It’d been a successful dive. We’d not only found the sunken sailboat, but also had swum past a huge, spooky submerged pine tree that had grown in some prehistoric drought, its trunk six feet in diameter, its branches coated in a white sediment that only added to its ghostly appearance.
Evan looked a little taken aback by my question. “Fair point. You’re always modest about your abilities. Maybe I just wanted to see your skill firsthand. Now, I don’t need to worry if you decide to dive while you’re at Les Jumeaux.”
“Good. You need to do less worrying, when it comes to me. And it’s not like I’d ever be alone diving. If you aren’t there, Valeria will be. And she’s a scuba instructor.”
He just nodded in an offhand way, but I wasn’t buying his nonchalance. I had the feeling that Valeria’s scuba diving credentials had factored into his decision to hire her.
I was so overwhelmed with love for him at that moment, even more so than usual because of the idyllic surprise weekend he’d given me. I found it easy to forget about his tendency to over-protect.
We couldn’t stop touching each other on the drive back to Les Jumeaux. I stared out of the car window onto the sparkling lake, holding Evan’s hand between mine and resting it in my lap. The usual feeling of being on a rollercoaster, given the twists and high elevations on the road, had vanished. I was secure and steady, not to mention ridiculously happy, with the sensation of his hand between mine.
My euphoria burst like a pricked bubble a minute after we passed the fork in the entrance road to Les Jumeaux. Evan braked abruptly. I was thrown against the restraint of the seat belt.
“What the—”
“I’m sorry,” Evan said as the world settled from the jarring halt. At the same moment he’d slammed on the brakes, he’d instinctively reached to brace his right hand against my left shoulder, holding me even more firmly in place in the seat.
I looked out the front window where he stared fixedly. Six to eight feet of soil, rock, and dislodged underbrush blocked the road directly in front of us. Evan’s quick reflexes had prevented us from driving directly into the wall of sediment, but only just.
“What happened?” I asked, shocked. “A landslide?”
Evan didn’t immediately respond, but removed his hand from my shoulder. He unfastened his seatbelt and opened the car door. I followed suit, still feeling rattled and disoriented by the near collision.
“Anna,” he called sharply. I paused in the action of stepping out of the car. “Stay inside. Please,” he added tersely. I sat back down in the seat, glancing anxiously up the slope of the ravine to my right. The trees, rocks, and underbrush seemed ordinary just next to me, but gravity had certainly pulled aggressively at the soil just feet away. Who knew how secure the earth really was? I closed my car door very carefully, afraid of sending off vibrations into loose soil. I had a brief, vivid vision of being buried beneath tons of earth, of blackness swallowing us whole. Evan was out there, without the benefit of the armor of the car to hold off the pile of dirt and rock. I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming at him to get back in the car.
He walked the width of the road, inspecting the pile of earth. He stared up in the direction from where the earth had fallen, and then in the opposite side of the ravine, toward the creek.
I exhaled in relief when he finally returned to the car and sat in the driver’s seat.
“Do you… do we get a lot of landslides around here?” I asked him.
“We do in Tahoe occasionally, yes. But not at Les Jumeaux. Never before, anyway,” he said, his mouth set in a straight line. “Feeling up for a walk? We’re going to have to get to the house by foot. We’ll go down to the creek and hike past the slide. I’ll call someone to come out later and clean this up, and reinforce the sides of the ravine, if need be.”
So we hiked down the creek bed past the landslide, and then made our way back to the road. “What do you think caused it?” I asked, staring over my shoulder at the pile of earth, now from the opposite direction. I came to a halt on the road. “Could there have been an earthquake while we were away?”
“We would have heard about it if there had been a quake,” Evan said, his hand coasting up my spine, and pausing to rub between my shoulder blades. He always seemed to know instinctively where tension tightened my muscles. “I’d say human beings were responsible.”
“Human beings? Like… someone caused it on purpose?”
“I’m not saying that, no. It was probably hikers. People could have wandered over from the public beach and accidently kicked it off. It only takes one tumbling rock in the wrong location to start a debris avalanche. I don’t want you hiking around here until we get a geologist to come out and inspect the road and the land around it. We’ll get a professional opinion on what caused it, and then we’ll know for certain. Don’t worry, we’ll make things safe again.” He patted me gently. “Come on. Let’s get back to the house so I can make some phone calls.”
But I saw the trace of worry on his face. The recollection of that grim, tense expression he wore as he we walked back to Les Jumeaux stayed with me the rest of the evening.
I hadn’t dreamed during our idyllic getaway. But that night, I had the nightma
re again. And this time, I didn’t wake up when the ghost woman opened the sickening black void of her mouth. Through the thick waves of my terror, I thought I heard her gurgling voice.
After I’d awakened, wet with sweat, I realized that maybe I’d misunderstood what I’d heard. It’d been like listening to a crow underwater. It didn’t make sense, what I thought she’d said.
Light in the darkness.
Chapter Nine
The next few days passed peacefully. Evan contacted both the construction crew that had been working on the viewing room and Valeria, informing them not to come to Les Jumeaux until the ravine could be inspected and the road cleared of the landslide. We were stranded at the house, but happily so. Evan swam with me at the beach several afternoons. We took out the kayaks one evening, gliding along the coast during a glorious sunset.
My mom called one afternoon during our isolation, while Evan and I were exercising in the workout facility. She was full of questions about my new life at Les Jumeaux, all of which I answered with genuine cheerfulness and excitement. The tentacles of the nightmare couldn’t reach me during the daylight hours.
We talked about my latest series of paintings, and how I’d be showing them to Evan’s friend in South Lake very soon. Then she put Jessica on the phone.