He was two miles inland, in the hills above El Sedero, California. He could see the lights of the shore road and the marina; beyond those, the ocean was a vast black nothing. Closer in, the town was buttoned down and quiet, a few minutes after midnight at the end of a Friday.
Dryden stood on the balcony of a cottage, its yard boxed in on the sides by hundred-year-old evergreens. The air was saturated with the smells of pine and cedar, the boughs wet from the rain shower that had come through an hour before. Now the stars were showing, sharp as pinpricks on the black sky.
The cottage wasn’t his home; he could see his home from here, way down on the waterfront. This cottage was a second place he’d bought to fix up and sell—the third such purchase in the past two years, each one a little bigger as he got more comfortable with the work. It was far from the skill set his background had given him, but that was fine. He never wanted to use any of those skills again.
The wind picked up. Droplets of water shook loose from the trees and pattered the ground. Dryden stood listening for a while, then turned and went back inside.
The cottage’s living room was gutted to the studs. When he’d bought the place, it had still had its original wiring from probably the 1930s: push-button switches, knob-and-tube wires sheathed with fabric, not a ground wire to be found in the house. It was a miracle it hadn’t burned down fifty years ago. Dryden had torn everything out and redone it to code. Same story for the plumbing.
He’d reshaped the cottage’s layout while he was at it. Opened the kitchen up to the living room. Made the doorways and the windows bigger. More light. More airflow.
Tonight he’d finished putting in fiberglass insulation throughout the place. He’d worn a respirator mask and goggles, but his hair and skin had been coated with the stuff by the time he was finished. Half an hour ago he’d showered—the bathroom was gutted, too, but the new clawfoot tub was in place, with a blue tarp hung around it for a makeshift curtain—and now he was clean again, walking the rooms of the cottage, taking in the day’s effort. This morning his footsteps had echoed through the house; now they were dampened and muted, the reverb all soaked up by the fiberglass. Difference. Progress.
He wondered sometimes why more people didn’t do this kind of work. It could be a pain in the ass, no doubt—you might tear the plaster off a wall and find the uprights inside rotted, and just like that you were looking at days and days of added labor—but even so, the job had everything going for it. It had tangibility. You could see your work take shape as you went. And when you got dirty, getting clean was a literal thing. Sawdust and insulation and drywall mud on your skin—all those things came off in shower spray and went down the drain, simple as that. Not every line of work offered that kind of clarity.
He came to the master bedroom. Some of the finish material for the closet had been delivered this week: shelving and a big framed wall mirror. It was all leaning in the corner for now. He caught his reflection from the doorway. He’d been in good shape even before taking up construction, but the physical work had done him some good all the same. He liked the way he looked. Not bad for thirty-eight.
He switched off the bedroom lights and returned to the balcony. He stared away at the town again, and the ocean. He could see the strobing lights of an airliner way out over the water, probably coming in toward LAX, an hour down the coast from El Sedero. He was still watching it when his phone rang in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the display: The number was unfamiliar. Dryden tapped the answer button, forgoing cleverness for a simple hello.
A woman responded. “Are you at your place?”
Dryden recognized the voice instantly—it belonged to a friend: Claire Dunham.
Something in her tone. Urgency and adrenaline.
“I’m close to it,” Dryden said. “Why?”
“You’re in El Sedero?”
“Yeah. Why?”
For the second time, Claire seemed not to hear the question. She said, “How fast can you get to Barstow? Two hours?”
Dryden thought about it. The straightest route came to mind easily enough, and this time of night there would be hardly any traffic.
“Something like that,” Dryden said.
“I need you to meet me near there. You have to go right now. Meet me south of Barstow on the Fifteen. There’s a town called Arrowhead, just an off-ramp with a gas station. Park there and wait.”
Over the call, Dryden heard a sound fade in: the drone of heavy tires on pavement. It swelled and then tailed off to nothing in the space of a few seconds. He got the impression of Claire in her car, passing a semi on a freeway at high speed. If she was coming from her own home, up in the Bay Area, and hoping to be in Barstow by two in the morning, then she must be halfway there already.
“What the hell is this about?” Dryden asked.
When Claire answered, Dryden realized there was more than just stress in her voice. There was fear—deep and real.