Chapter 3
Knox
The grid went down on the ninth night of the heatwave, and it took the whole coast with it.
I was at The Anchor when it happened, sitting with Saint over a bottle of something cold while the bar's old fans pushed the thick air around without improving it.
One second the lights, the music, the hum of the cooler.
The next, nothing. The dark came down so complete that for a heartbeat you could hear the whole town stop — the air conditioners dying everywhere at once, a held breath across the entire cliffside.
Then the heat moved in like water filling a hull.
"Substation," Saint said, into the black. "Or the lines. This load, this heat — something cooked."
We went out to the harbor. The whole coast was dark as far as the eye could see, town after town gone black up the cliffs, only the stars and a low red moon over a sea you could hear but not see.
Candles started appearing in windows. Somewhere a generator coughed and caught — the pharmacy, keeping the insulin cold.
Then another. Then the night settled into its new shape, the shape of a town with no power in a heatwave that wouldn't quit.
There's a thing that happens to a town in a blackout that I've only ever seen happen here.
Other places, the power goes and people lock their doors and wait it out alone in the dark, each household its own dark island.
Cala Sirena did the opposite. Within the hour the harbor was full of people who'd carried their chairs and their candles and their bottles down to the water because the stone of the wall was cooler than their houses and because — and this is the part Mila would never have put in a report — because when the lights go out, the people who love a place go toward each other, not away.
The co-op opened its doors. Carla was handing out water.
Battista sat on his usual bollard telling the same three stories he always told, and the young ones who'd heard them a hundred times sat and listened anyway, because the stories weren't the point. The sitting was the point.
I stood at the edge of it and watched the town do the thing the town did, and I thought, not for the first time, that Calder could buy every meter of this coast and never once own the thing that made it worth having.
Reaper found me twenty minutes later, his face lit from below by a phone.
"Grid's down the whole region. They're saying three days minimum. Could be a week if the transformer's gone." He looked grim. "The convent on the hill's got no generator. Old wiring, no backup. It's a brick oven up there with the power out. They're moving guests where they can."
"And?"
"And the writer," Reaper said, "has nowhere to go. Hotels are full or dark. She's not driving the coast road in this, in the dark, with the lights out." He let it sit. "The guesthouse has the big generator. Spare room's empty since Hawk shipped out."
I knew where this was going before he finished.
"You want me to take her in."
"I want the club to take her in. You're the one she'll let.
" He held my eye. "It's the assignment, Knox.
Keep her close, keep her comfortable, keep her clear of the dark.
Three days of forced hospitality in the worst heat of the decade.
She'll either soften or she'll write us up as kidnappers. So don't let her write that."
I should have said no.
I'll be honest about why I didn't, because I've been honest about everything else.
I didn't say no because some part of me — the part I'd been arguing with for a week, the part Saint had warned me about — heard three days in the guesthouse with Mila and felt something I had no business feeling for a woman whose job was to bury everything I loved.
I told myself it was the assignment.
It is amazing how long a person can keep telling himself a thing he's stopped believing.
Saint watched me take the truck keys off the hook.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
He'd warned me once already, in the chapel, and a man like Saint doesn't waste a second warning on someone too far gone to use it.
He just looked at me with those flat tide-colored eyes and went back to his bottle, and I drove up the dark hill to collect the woman I'd been ordered to manage, telling myself the whole way that managing was all it was.
She didn't want to come.
I drove up to the convent in the club truck, headlights cutting through a darkness so total it felt like the road might end at any moment, and I found her on the courtyard steps with her suitcase and her laptop bag and an expression that could have stripped paint.
"No," she said, before I'd fully stopped.
"You don't know what I'm offering yet."
"You're offering the club guesthouse. I can see it on your face.
You drove up here looking pleased with yourself.
" She crossed her arms. "I'm not going to sleep in the headquarters of the local interest group I'm assessing, Rafael.
Do you understand how that looks? How it reads in a report?
The independent assessor accepted lodging from the very organization whose interests her report most directly affects. You've handed Calder a paragraph."
She was right. That was the maddening thing about her — she was almost always right about the surface, and almost always wrong about what was underneath it.
"The guesthouse is separate from the clubhouse," I said.
"Different building, locked door between, your own room with a lock you hold the key to.
It's got the only working generator with a spare bed in a town that's about to hit forty degrees in the dark.
The alternative is you bake in that convent or you drive the cliff road tonight with no lights and no streetlamps and a hundred-meter drop.
" I leaned on the truck. "Write the paragraph if you want.
I'd rather Calder gets his paragraph than the coast road gets you. "
She didn't move. The candlelight from the courtyard caught the side of her face.
"You'd rather," she repeated.
"Yeah."
It came out plainer than I meant it to. Plainer than charm. Charm dresses things up; that was just bare. And she heard the difference, I watched her hear it, and for a second the paint-stripping expression flickered.
"This isn't the assignment talking," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Some of it is," I said, because lying to her had never once worked and I'd stopped trying.
"I won't pretend the club doesn't want you close.
It does. I was sent." I picked up her suitcase before she could argue.
"But the coast road in the dark isn't the assignment, Mila.
That's just me, not wanting to scrape you off the rocks.
You can sort the two of us out in the report. Tonight you're not driving that road."
She let me take the suitcase.
It felt, absurdly, like a larger surrender than it was.
We drove down in silence, the headlights carving the only light for miles, the dark towns sliding past on the cliffs above us.
She held the laptop bag on her knees like something she might need to defend.
Twice she opened her mouth to say something and twice she closed it, and I let the silence be, because I'd learned that about her too — she'd talk when she'd decided to, and not a second sooner, and a man who rushed her got nothing.
The guesthouse sat behind The Anchor, a stone building two centuries old that the club had restored with its own hands — I'd hung half the doors myself.
Thick walls that held the cool. A kitchen, a common room, three bedrooms off a hall.
The generator out back kept the fans turning and the fridge cold and a single string of lights glowing low, and after the convent's oven it must have felt like stepping into a different season, because I watched her stop in the doorway and, just for a second, let her shoulders down.
"There's a fan in your room," I said. "Cold water in the fridge. The door between here and the clubhouse stays locked, and you keep this key." I put it in her hand. "Nobody comes through that I don't bring through. You've got the run of this side."
She turned the key over in her fingers. "Where do you sleep?"
"Here. Room at the end. Reaper's orders — somebody stays with the guest." I caught the look starting on her face and headed it off.
"Hall between us. Two locked doors if you want them.
I'm not here to watch you, Mila. I'm here so that if the generator quits at three in the morning, there's someone who knows how to start it again. "
She studied me a long moment in the low light.
"You really did hang these doors," she said, running a hand down the frame.
"How'd you —"
"You touched the jamb when you came in. People touch things they made." She almost smiled. "It's a tell. You've got a few."
"And here I thought I was the one reading people."
"You are. You're just used to people who don't read back."
She took her bag down the hall, and I heard the door of the spare room close, and the lock turn, and I stood in the common room of a guesthouse I'd helped build, in a heatwave, in the dark, listening to a fan push warm air around, and I thought about what Saint had said.
Don't drive her like a road.
I wasn't driving her anywhere. That was the problem.
Somewhere in the last nine days she'd taken the wheel of something in me and I'd let her, and there was a locked door down the hall with the one person on this coast I had no business wanting on the other side of it, and three days minimum before the lights came back.
I did not sleep well, and it had nothing to do with the heat.
You learn a person in close quarters in ways you can't from a harbor wall.