Mara Lantern: Broken Realms Part 4

From the landing outside, they saw Mark Bartkowski in the parking lot trying to coax his wife back inside. As the investigators descended the stairs, Debbie Bartkowski wailed, demanding the car keys.

"I'm not letting you drive like this. You'll kill yourself or someone else," he said, reaching for her arm.

"No!" she yelled, dodging him.

She sprinted toward the apartment building, cutting across the lawn, heading directly to the side of the building instead of taking the sidewalk toward the stairs leading to her home. Considering her size, Bohannon was amazed at her agility. He cringed and prepared to look away as the woman sped toward the wall, picking up enough speed that she blurred. He began to jog toward the inevitable crash, then stopped.

Debbie Bartkowski reached the wall and went up it. Without pausing, the portly woman, using both hands and feet, crab-walked up the side of the building, leaving a trail of scratches and gouges while kicking up a cloud of dust in her wake. Upon reaching the second-story windows, her toes pried loose a plank of siding. She kicked it aside, sending it flipping in the air toward the parking lot. Seconds later, she stopped above the third-story windows, below the eaves.

"Lord, have mercy," Bohannon said under his breath.

On the ground, her husband looked up wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open.

Debbie grabbed the edge of the roof with both hands and pushed off the side of the building with her feet, flipping her body onto the top of the apartment building. Her flowery housedress flapped in the wind as she straightened, holding her hands to her side like a gymnast completing a successful dismount.

Her husband cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Honey, please come down from there. We'll go get something to eat."

She turned and sprinted along the roofline.

"We need to call the Gresham P.D. and get some help out here," Bohannon said. He glanced at Suter. He had his gun drawn, tracking the woman on the roof.

"Are you insane?" Bohannon hissed. He reached over and pulled down Suter's arm. "You can't shoot an unarmed woman, no matter how crazy she is."

"She's going to hurt someone. Someone that strong and unstable should not be running around loose," he said. His neck twitched several times, jerking his head to the side. A bead of sweat ran along a vein that had popped out on his forehead.

"Put that away," Bohannon said.

"She's going to jump!" Mark pointed as his wife launched herself into the air.

Her trajectory took her toward a road that paralleled the building. Her husband turned away, covered his eyes. "Oh, my G.o.d. Oh, my G.o.d."

She held her arms up high, glided seemingly in slow motion, in a controlled and smooth arc.

"G.o.d almighty," Bohannon said.

Debbie's dress rippled and flapped in the turbulence. The hem caught on a bent knee preventing it from flying over her waist. Her hair waved in the wind, forming a contrail behind her head. In achingly slow motion, her momentum waned, and gravity rea.s.serted itself. She lowered her arms like a plane extending its flaps and pointed the toes of her right foot outward as she alighted on the roof of a parked service van.

It collapsed with a resounding crash, rocking onto its pa.s.senger-side tires, threatening to roll over the curb, but settled back down on the street with a second crash. The flattened vehicle swayed on its springs.

The men ran toward the van to help. Debbie, unfazed, vaulted out of the metal crater she had created and sprinted from the apartment complex.

CHAPTER 7.

DIANA AND MARA pulled into the cracked driveway in front of their slate-colored craftsman in a neighborhood on a bluff overlooking the Willamette River and Oregon City's Main Street. While most of the houses on the block looked tired and in need of a coat of paint, theirs was in better shape-not so much that it looked out of place but enough to be noticeable to a casual pa.s.serby. Diana parked in the front half of the drive that ran along the side of the house so they could enter via the front porch.

"Why don't you go on in and lay down on the couch? I'll grab your things and the groceries, and make you an early lunch," Diana said getting out of the driver's side.

"I'm not an invalid. I can carry a couple bags on my way in," Mara said walking to the back of the vehicle. "And I'm not taking a nap. I'm tired of lying around. If you aren't going to let me go into the shop, I'll work on the rototiller."

"You're not going to cooperate, are you?"

"I think we both know the answer to that."

As they walked up the front steps of the house, a silver Nissan Sentra skidded into the end of the driveway several feet behind Diana's blue RAV4. The Sentra stopped halfway into the drive with its back end hanging out into the street at a forty-five-degree angle. The driver's door swung open, and a blonde girl popped up next to the car, her head barely high enough to see over the roof.

"Dude! You're alive," she said.

"Abby, stop calling me dude. We're not eight anymore," Mara said, juggling two grocery bags waiting for her mother to unlock the front door.

"I'm going to call you dude when you're a grandma, a.s.suming you live that long." Abby slammed her car door shut and jogged up to the porch. "So what's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"You know, cras.h.i.+ng in an airplane. Did you tuck your head between your knees? Did you use your seat cus.h.i.+on as a flotation device? Did the flight attendant have to slap a freaked-out pa.s.senger? I would have completely peed myself."

"Abby, that's not very sensitive," Diana said as she opened the door and stepped into the living room.

"How do you ask someone what it's like to crash an airplane into the river, sensitively?"

"I don't know. Why don't you start out by asking Mara if she's okay?"

Abby shrugged and turned to Mara. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

Abby tilted her head up slightly and leaned toward Mara. "Looks like you landed on your head."

Mara rolled her eyes, followed her mother into the house, pa.s.sed by the back of the couch facing away from the front door toward the stone fireplace and walked into the small hallway at the foot of the stairs that led to the kitchen. "I'll be right back," she called over her shoulder. She set the bags on the dinette table in the kitchen and returned to the living room.

Abby had flopped into one of the two armchairs that flanked the stone hearth. Mara crossed the round Persian rug in the center of the room and sat down on the couch.

"What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be in school?" Mara hugged a cus.h.i.+on and leaned back, looking up the ceiling.

"I decided to follow your example and bail."

"I didn't bail. I graduated early."

"Yeah, it sucks. If you hadn't spent all your summers taking community college cla.s.ses in vacuum cleaner repair, I'd have someone to hang out with. Who bails on their senior year and goes to work full-time? Don't you understand that this is supposed to be the best time of your life? You know, dating, parties, all that carefree stuff. Instead, you're working in that dusty old gadget shop."

"Right, I'm going to take a year of high school I don't need so I can entertain you and watch Ann Margoles puke at the prom. I like working at the shop. Mr. Mason needs me. The poor guy's almost eighty years old and just had surgery. You want me to call him up and say, 'Sorry, I've got a party to attend'?"

"Of course not. You certainly can't be out having fun knowing there's a broken toaster oven loose in the world burning English m.u.f.fins." Abby rolled her eyes. "Anyway, your mom said you were getting out of the hospital this morning, so I skipped to come see how you're doing. Dad said it was okay, but I had to agree to run out to Canby to get his fis.h.i.+ng stuff from my uncle."

"Fis.h.i.+ng stuff?"

"You know, rods, reels, tackle box, cooler, stuff like that. Before I go, I was hoping you could take a look at my car. The steering is really stiff. I need you to do your voodoo on it. The guys at the garage tried three times, and they can't seem to fix it."

"That explains the fine parking job you did when you drove up. I guess those guys at the garage didn't go to community college."

"You feel up to it? Can you take a look?"

"Only if you take me with you."

"No problem. You afraid your mom is going to whip out the healing crystals and start chanting?"

"No more than usual, but she is being a little clingy. I could use a break from her. I think the whole plane-crash thing and me being in the hospital freaked her out a little."

"Well, yeah. So does that mean we aren't going to be able to go biking with Bruce tomorrow?"

"That's tomorrow?"

"Yeah, tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day. You were supposed to fly back from San Francisco this morning, and Bruce said he'd take us for a spin on the Springwater Trail, and then show us the trail between Portland and here. It's a lot of riding. Maybe we should put it off."

"Maybe."

"What's so interesting up there on the ceiling? You haven't looked at me since I drove up. Are you okay?" Abby said.

"I'm just a little out of sorts I guess."

"Yeah, right. You've got that look on your face like when you rejiggered the PA system in sixth grade and almost deafened the entire school. You look stressed."

"Shut up. I just survived a major airline disaster. It's not like I just chipped a nail or something. Cut me some slack."

"Maybe the ride out to Canby will relax you a little."

Diana stepped into the living room and leaned against the wood molding running along the entrance. "Canby? Who's going to Canby?"

"We're going to run an errand for Abby's dad," Mara said.

"Mara-"

Mara raised her hands, palms facing her mother. "It's just a short drive out to Canby, no big deal. I really need to do something other than lay around."

Diana pursed her lips and paused for a few beats. "All right, just to Canby and back, but I want you to eat lunch before you go. Abby, you want something to eat?"

"Thanks, Mrs. Lantern. You got anything Paleo?"

"Paleo? What happened to the raw food diet? Too ga.s.sy?" Mara asked.

Mara folded down the prop on Abby's car and let the hood drop closed with a loud clap. She wiped her hands on her jeans and handed a socket to Abby, who sat on the curb next to a rusty tool box.

"The serpentine belt just needed to be tightened. I'm not sure why the guys at the garage would have had any trouble doing it, especially since they switched it out last week. Kind of obvious," Mara said.

"Great. We ready to head out?" Abby closed the lid of the tool box, tried to lift it, rolled her eyes and sat it back down.

"Yes, we're ready to go. Pop the trunk. We'll take the tools in case we need to make another adjustment on the way." Mara grabbed the toolbox and walked to the back of the car. "I get to drive."

"Maybe I should. You might have brain damage or something." Abby pointed to the abrasion near Mara's temple.

"I'll be fine. I just want to check out the steering for myself."

"Okay, but go down Singer Hill. I want to grab a cup of coffee at that drive-through place at the bottom of the hill."

"There's a drive-through coffee place at the bottom of the hill?"

"Sheesh, it's been there for years. When is the last time you were down on Main Street? You live like a quarter of a mile from there."

"I always go out the back way. I never go down to Main. What's the point? Nothing down there but bars, paper mills and furniture stores."

Mara pulled away from the curb and drove north on Center Street until they came to Seventh Street, where she took a left. The street curved to the right and sloped to the left at the same time as Seventh became Singer Hill. The narrow road, flanked by cement road barriers and the bluff to the right and a railing on the left, funneled them down to a set of railroad tracks. After crossing the tracks, the road straightened and dipped once more before Mara turned into the coffee shop drive-through, a tiny freestanding building wrapped by a driveway.

"I had no idea this was here," Mara said as they pulled up to place their order.

"Americano, black," Abby shouted when the barista opened the window on the side of the building. "You want anything?"

"No thanks." Mara shuffled the payment to the barista and the coffee to her friend, put the car in gear and exited left onto Main. "Looks like they have been trying to gentrify a bit down here. There's a wine bar? And look, a Vietnamese restaurant?"

"You really need to get out more."

"I get out plenty. I just never come down here. They've even installed little payment kiosks for parking."

As they approached the brick, column-flanked courthouse on the right, Mara pointed to the small plaza next to it. "That's new. What was there before?"

"I don't remember, maybe dirt. A parking lot?"

They stopped for pedestrians to cross at the next block. Across the street, Mara noticed a gray fifteen-foot monument standing at the end of the sidewalk on the left. "What's with the obelisk? The city redevelopment people going for an Egyptian theme? They planning on tearing down the paper mill and replacing it with a pyramid?"

"They installed that when they refurbished the Oregon City Bridge. Some kind of historical marker about that, I think."

At the next intersection, they stopped for a red light while cars crossed in front of them on Seventh, entering and exiting the Oregon City Bridge to their right. Abby leaned over the dashboard and pointed to the left. "I bet you remember that." She pointed down the cross street to a pale blue pillar cut into the side of the bluff, capped by a window-lined horseshoe-shaped observation deck looming over downtown.

"I always thought that looked like a giant alien thumbtack stuck into the side of the hill. It's been years since I rode the elevator. Remember when we used to ride it up and down? Drove the operator nuts 'cause he knew we'd just turn around and go back to the top. I bet they don't have elevator operators anymore."

"Yes they do. They sit in the elevator, pressing the b.u.t.tons and counting how many people go up and down," Abby said. "They've remodeled the deck at the top too."

The light turned green, and they continued on Main for two blocks and took a left on Fifth Street directly in front of the paper mill. The road curved to the right as they pa.s.sed through a short dark tunnel beneath the railroad tracks. They emerged from the dark in seconds on the road to Canby. The street began to climb the side of the bluff, and, as the brush thinned out to the right, Mara caught glimpses of the river that coursed alongside them. She snapped her head forward to concentrate on the road.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."