Flock (6 page)

“How long has your family owned this land?” I asked, my voice taking on a breathy quality. This wooded area felt very different to me, as if thrumming with something ancestral. Plus, crazy as it was, I wanted the press of trees to know we were there, as if somehow conversation would quell other forces. Forces that had Midas now howling in some kind of doggy-distress signal.

“He’s really agitated,” Jack said. Ahead on the path, our lights illuminated the dog’s snout-lifted-to-the-heavens yowl. “Sorry, did you ask me something?”

“About the property.”

“Right,” Jack said, coaxing Midas to continue. “We’ve owned it since the late thirties.”

“And what was here before?”

“Prairie, mostly. These woods are probably just as they were. Other sections were cleared, of course.”

Above me, I heard a sudden snap of branches. Underfoot, I stumbled upon an arterial root contorting across the narrow path. As I shone my Maglite down on its tentacle-like spur, I had the creepiest, though fleeting, image of it throbbing.

I was relieved when, up ahead, the trees thinned and patches of moonlit clouds became visible. I allowed myself a full, lung-expanding inhale. Only then did I realize how sharp and ragged my breaths had been. With the express of air, my ribs rattled.

Weird.

Midas howled again.

Jack, pulled by the dog, increased his pace. They set out across a small open field to where a plot of trees loomed in the distance. I jogged to keep up. The prospect of being left behind made my legs quiver until they ached. It was the oddest response, until I realized that it wasn’t a reaction, that the reverberations weren’t being produced by my legs. They were, in point of fact, absorbing shock waves emanating from the ground.

I caught up with Jack. He, too, was feeling the vibrations and held his hands up to the sky as if they were something to be caught like raindrops. Midas had begun running in a circle, yapping at the air.

“What is that?” Jack asked.

You don’t grow up in California without feeling the earth shake a time or two, but there was something different about this tremor, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time. I took a step past Jack to where a row of apple trees began a neat sentrylike formation and shone my light on their trunks. It was curious the way the silvery limbs were rippling as if themselves in fear. As I touched the rough surface of one, it seemed to shrink away, until I realized it wasn’t shrinking, it was slipping.

“Jack!” I screamed, now holding on to the trunk and hopping from one foot to the other.

My light fell to the ground and provided a single swath of illumination into the area thick with apple trees. They were, dozens of them, dropping before my eyes.

As I clung to the tree in terror, I could hear Midas’s frantic barks as he bounded away and Jack’s urgent “Kat, oh, my God, Kat!”

Now the ground beneath my feet was rocking like a rowboat. I felt something grab at my jacket collar, and I looked up to see Jack’s hand tugging at me. I released the tree and clasped his arm just as everything beneath me went as liquid as pancake batter.

“Hold on!” Jack yelled.

Instantly I was swept down with the collapsing ground. I screamed, though the roar of the shifting earth had me beat by a landslide — a real landslide, in this case.

Self-respecting Californians know what the tug of the tide feels like, too. At least with a wave, you know it will break. I sensed with whatever it was at work here that it would be a one-way trip down.

My hands slipped from Jack’s forearm to his palm, and rocks and dirt sprayed my face and caked my mouth with soot. My legs flailed wildly until finally catching the trunk of the tree I had so recently been standing next to. It was — crazily enough — now at a right angle from where I dangled, clinging to the side of the chasm, and it offered me a momentary support. Because I was no longer a dead weight, Jack was able to readjust his hold on me, grasping me under my arms. He grunted with pain, a cry so visceral I feared for us both, until I was able to swing a most unladylike leg over the side of what had become an abyss.

We scrambled away from the hole and collapsed in a panting tangle of arms and legs.

“What the hell was that?” Jack asked, clutching at me like I might again be wrenched away.

“Did the earth just open up in front of us?” I asked, hacking up dirt and spilling tears.

Ever the precautionary type, Jack lifted me back farther away from the area. We took many more moments to recover, and he held me as rolls of shock left me shaking uncontrollably.

When I had recuperated enough to sit up, Jack, on all fours, crawled to where his flashlight lay emitting one forlorn shaft of light. He lifted it and swept it over the area, what was left of it, anyway. Midas returned, whimpering and ducking his head submissively.

“I think we just witnessed a sinkhole open up,” Jack said, standing.

“A sinkhole. Is that what it is?” I accepted Jack’s offer of assistance in getting up.

“It has to be,” Jack said. “We’ve studied them in geology.” Again, he trailed his light over the collapsed area. “But this one looks bigger than the slides we looked at.”

As his flashlight shone into the caved-in bowl of land, I noticed its edges were sheared off, as if carved away with a sharp instrument, and the depth was staggering. Especially considering how close I had come to plummeting into it. Seeing apple trees toppled like matchsticks upon its floor and others dotting the bowl’s sides like bent nails made me shiver.

“We should go,” Jack said.

Before we could start back toward the woods, headlights barreling down the interior road came into sight. Lars swung down from the pickup truck and walked briskly toward us.

“I heard a crack out here, and that dog’s howl was probably heard clear down to Iowa,” he said. “What’s going on? Are you kids all right?”

Jack raked his light over the hole. “This is what Midas was fussing about. A sinkhole. He must have sensed some early vibrations and dragged us out here. Crazy dog nearly got us sucked down into that thing. If I hadn’t grabbed Kat at the last moment . . .” He dropped his head, and it was his turn to shudder.

For many moments Lars walked back and forth, mumbling and shining his own light onto the damage. “Let’s get you two back,” he said finally. “Get you cleaned up, and maybe a hot cup of tea or something to settle your nerves. There’s nothing we can do until morning. In the daylight, we’ll get a better look. And I’ll get a geologist out here for an opinion.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s the darnedest thing,” he said.

I didn’t stay long enough for a hot cup of anything. Once I’d cleaned up enough not to frighten my mom, I asked Jack to drive me home. Thoughts were spiraling through my head faster than the earth had shifted below my feet, and I needed some alone time to sort a few things out.

On the ride, Jack apologized for not taking Midas’s warnings seriously. For dragging me out into the dark. I did my best to reassure him that I didn’t hold him responsible and that it was just one of those things. The first part was true, the latter, not quite.

“I don’t think we should share that we were at risk,” I said after a long pause.

“What? Why?”

“Even you have to admit, we have enough I-shouldn’t-be-alive stories to start our own TV show. To say we were there will invite gossip and speculation.”

“I see what you mean,” he said, ten-and-two-o’clocking the wheel.

“Your dad wouldn’t say anything, would he?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jack said. “He won’t want too much attention over the whole thing, anyway.”

For once, Lars’s taciturn nature came in handy.

While saying good night, Jack had to pause before choking out the words, and his eyes were haunted. He also had a hard time letting go of me. As always, I enjoyed the ferocity of his affection, but I could do without it coming on the heels of a life-threatening situation. We’d had our share of those.

The next morning, Saturday, after receiving a
Busy. Will call later
text from Jack, I shambled down to breakfast, with a fitful night’s sleep having earned me the crazy bedhead that had my hair looking like dandelion fluff. Besides reliving my near fall into a muddy abyss, I had heard Leira crying off and on through the long night, so I understood the desperate slurps and full nasal inhalation with which my mom was ingesting her coffee.

“Oh, hon, did Leira keep you up, too?” she asked. “I know your room gets the worst of it, which brings me to this morning’s plans: we want to show you a house.”

Even if the lease on our rented property wasn’t about to expire, a move was overdue. My bedroom shared a razor-thin wall with Leira’s; last night was a good example of why that wasn’t such a perfect floor plan. And what had been an already cozy space for my mom and me had become a shoe box with the addition of Stanley, his gazillion books, rowing machine, and more sports equipment than I’d have figured for a pocket-protector type. With Leira finally home from the hospital and the pile-on effect of her carrier, high chair, rocker, and bazillion toys, the current situation possibly qualified us for a feature on A&E’s
Hoarders.

“You found a place?” I asked. I had left the house-hunting trips to my mom and Stanley, opting, instead, to watch Leira and give them some alone time. Besides, I would be graduating in nine months and had always planned on an away-from-home college experience. My opinion wouldn’t matter for long.

“Maybe,” my mom said. “We’re going back for another walk-through today. It’s our favorite so far, and we both got . . . I don’t know . . . really good vibes, or something, from the place.”

As much as I wanted the 411 on the earth opening up over at Snjosson Farms, Jack’s text had delayed any news on that front for a while. I was not scheduled to work at the store, nor did I have any pressing schoolwork. And, heck, when my mathematics-minded mom threw around words like
good vibes,
I was in.

“When are you going?” I asked.

“How soon can you be ready?”

En route, I briefly explained the previous night’s scene at Jack’s farm, downplaying the danger we had been in. My mom simply thought it was odd. Stanley, on the other hand, was intrigued.

“How big did you say it was?” he asked.

“It was dark, but maybe a hundred feet. That’s what Lars estimated, anyway.”

“It’s unusual to have one so large.”

I was starting to hate words like
unusual.

“I’ll make a few calls later today, see if there are any theories as to cause. Sinks are often due to human interference.”

I noticed we were just a few blocks away from Afi’s house, Penny’s, too, for that matter. “What street are we on?” I asked as Stanley’s car rounded a corner.

“Spruce,” he said, pulling to the curb in front of a large Victorian.

The name tinkled some familiar key, but my brain was too busy taking in a first impression. The house was big: two floors plus a third-story attic with dormer windows. As for the downside, it was painted a brazen shade of pink with scalloped white trim. I knew the painted ladies in San Francisco could get away with such girly colors, but in this neighborhood — this town — it stood out like a ball gown at a hoedown. And make that a frayed, tattered, and seen-better-days gown. Peeling paint gave the home an abandoned look, compounded by the weedy and overgrown lawn.

I stood on the small strip of grass between the curb and sidewalk, bug-eyeing the place.

“Now, don’t prejudge,” my mom said, taking my arm. “We know it’s a fixer-upper. And it would not remain pink.”

Stanley, who had Baby-Bjorned Leira to his chest, waited for us on the cracked and sagging driveway. “Wait till you see inside, Kat. She’s a beauty.”

A suit-clad woman, the real estate agent, met us on the front porch. “You’ve brought your daughters today, I see,” she said, extending her hand to me. “Margaret Simmons. Pleased to meet you.”

After gushing over Leira, Margaret ushered us into the wood-paneled foyer, where she figured I could do with a history lesson as well as a house tour.

“Built in 1904 in the Queen Anne style — though, of course, the original Queen Anne of England had died in the early 1700s.” I followed my private docent into the first room to our left. “This would have been called the parlor and was the formal space in which the family would have entertained visitors.”

It was a high-ceilinged, bay-front-windowed room that we’d call a living room but probably have very little use for. Next, I followed Margaret and her sensible heels into the room behind the
parlor.

“The dining room,” she said. “Notice the lovely built-in corner cabinets and the separate butler’s pantry.”

They were nice, I supposed, if you had a bunch of patterned china to display. Or, say, a
butler.
Margaret’s all-business walk-through continued into the next room to the right of the dining room.

“The sitting room,” she said, “an informal space where the family would have spent the majority of their time. And, finally, the kitchen.”

I struggled to keep up as she stepped into the rearmost area, a separate and small-by-today’s-standards space.