Standalone

Rockaway

Chapter One: Painter’s Tape

Later, when the sheriff asked where it had started, Anne would say the fog. It hadn’t. It started with a four-year-old and a stone bowl and a coin nobody had touched in ninety years, and before any of that it started as most of their trips did, with Art running late.

Ten hours before any of it, the fog wasn’t even a rumor yet. Just an ordinary Friday morning four hundred miles north, Art on the driveway with a roll of blue tape in one fist, running forty minutes over what he’d quoted the Halversons, because carpet that’s been wet under a couch for six weeks doesn’t care what time your family needs to leave town.

“I’m coming, Mrs. Halverson. Yes, ma’am. Have a good one.” He hung up, tore off a strip of tape, and pressed it over the crack in the driver’s window, not because it would hold past the coast range, but because it would hold long enough. Fix what’s broken. Tape what’s merely annoying. He still hadn’t learned to say no to a job the week of a trip.

“Enough,” he said, too sharp, coming through the door to find Ace and Cat mid-argument about chargers: seven of them, Cat insisted; redundancy, Ace corrected, and caught himself a half-second after the word left his mouth. “Sorry. Bad client. Pack your seven chargers, buddy.”

He found Anne at the counter a few minutes later, stood close without saying anything at first.

“I keep doing that,” he said. “The sharp thing.”

“I noticed.”

“I’m going to try, this weekend.”

“I just want three days, Art. Three days where nobody’s phone is the reason we’re not looking at each other.”

“Three days,” he agreed, and his hand found the back of her neck, the same gesture he’d been making since before either of them owned a house together, and went to go referee whatever Ace and Cat were fighting about now.

“Bucket,” Nami announced from the front hall, holding hers up for inspection. It already held, before a single beach had entered the picture, a blue marble, a plastic dinosaur, and one of Art’s business cards folded into quarters.

“That’s not treasure yet, bug. That’s just stuff from the house.”

“It’s going to be treasure later,” Nami said, with total confidence, and climbed into her booster seat to wait for everyone else to catch up.

They pulled out eleven minutes late and merged onto the highway with five people, one overpacked van, and a strip of blue tape already starting, almost imperceptibly, to peel back up at one corner.

The first two hours were nothing worth remembering. Somewhere past the summit, the air through the vents changed, cooler, saltier, and Cat read out loud from her tablet about the earthquake of 1906, half a mile of coastal railroad dumped straight into the ocean in one morning, rails and ties and some of the actual train cars, gone. “There’s a piece of one of the cars still around somewhere,” she said. “Preserved. Like a museum thing.”

“So the most interesting part of the train,” Ace said, “is the part where it stopped being a train.”

Nobody thought about it again for the rest of the drive.

The quarry came up on the right before the town proper did: a long dark shoulder of hillside with a scarred face cut clean out of it. “The hotel’s named after the oven they used to burn the limestone in,” Cat said. “It’s not random.”

“So it’s named after an oven,” Ace said, delighted, and got the last word, which was, for Ace, its own reward.

By the time the fog found them, it was 6:47 p.m.