When Highway 26 met the famous coastal 101, Allison turned south toward the cape. She’d spent the evening before online, reading everything she could about the Oregon coast and deciding where she would go and what she would see after she made her obligatory stop at The Dragon to pay her respects to Dr. Capello. It was a vacation, Allison told herself. No pressure. Just fun. If she were going to come all the way to the other side of the country, she might as well make an adventure of it.
Except, as her drive took her closer and closer to her old home, her sense of adventure left her and low-level panic took its place. Her heart beat rapidly and she had to stop at one of the highway’s scenic viewpoints simply to catch her breath. She leaned against the long stone wall and gazed down at the ocean. It had been a long time since she’d seen the Pacific Ocean. Panama City Beach it was not. The waves were white-capped and hitting the beach hard, and she knew those blue-silver waters were like the siren’s song—lovely, yes, but ice cold and deadly. The scenic marker warned that what she was looking at wasn’t simply a nice ocean landscape, but the notorious Graveyard of the Pacific. Ship after ship after ship had gone down in those waters. No wonder Dr. Capello had called his house The Dragon. Allison imagined all it would take was two steps forward, and she’d fall off the edge of the world into oblivion. To think she used to swim here. Well, if she’d been brave enough and stupid enough to swim in a graveyard, surely she could be brave enough and stupid enough to go home for an hour.
Calmer now, Allison got back into her car and headed south toward Cape Arrow. The whole place wasn’t much more than a collection of pretty beach houses on a hillside overlooking the ocean. It was an isolated, lonely sort of place, and Dr. Capello’s house was the most isolated of them all, a mile farther down from the cape and situated on a solitary spit of land amid deep tree cover. She didn’t know the street names and the GPS wasn’t helping. She turned it off and let memory alone guide her to the correct turn.
Then, at last, after thirteen years, there it was.
Allison pulled in, stopped and got out of her car at the end of the long winding drive that led from the highway down to the beach. The eight-foot-high wrought-iron gates that stretched across the entrance of the driveway were open, but then again, they always had been. Iron and seawater were a bad combination and the gates were so rusted she doubted they could ever be closed again. She stepped through the gates to where the trees parted. Long ago she’d stood right here with Dr. Capello as he showed her the house, her new home, for the very first time.
“See it?” he’d asked her. “You see the dragon?”
She’d rolled her eyes, too smart for her own good at that age.
“It’s a house,” she’d said. A big house, yes. A tall odd house with blue-green shingle siding and a sort of square turret on top, but still...a house.
“Don’t look at the house,” Dr. Capello had said as he knelt down next to her. He pointed to the ocean. “Look there. Look at the water. You’ll see the house out of the corner of your eye. And then tell me that doesn’t look like a dragon.”
She’d taken a heavy breath, the breath children took when adults insulted their intelligence. But she’d done it, anyway. She’d gazed far past the house onto the ocean. She saw the whitecaps of the waves, the water running up the beach and running away again. And there in the corner of her eye, she saw a dragon.
He was sitting up, this dragon, prim as a cat with four paws daintily placed together, a straight back and his head—the square sort of turret room on top—held high. The green rain-drenched shingles were his scales and the shimmering windows his wings and the gray deck his tail wrapped around his feet. Looking at the square turret, she could make out the back of its head, which meant the dragon, too, gazed out at the ocean, just like she did.
“I see it...” she had breathed. “I see the dragon.”
Dr. Capello had laughed softly. “In the winter, when we use the fireplace, smoke comes out of his nose.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Oh, very. It wouldn’t be a dragon if it wasn’t dangerous.”
“He’s lovely.” So lovely the dragon was, she couldn’t help but try to get a closer look. She turned her gaze from the water to the house and in the blink of an eye...
“He’s gone,” she had said.
“Well, that’s what happens when you look too close at magical creatures. You can only see them when you aren’t looking at them.”
“That’s silly.”
“That’s magic for you.” Dr. Capello lifted his hands as if to say he didn’t make the rules. “It’s wonderful but fragile. You have to be very gentle with it.”
Although she was twenty-five and knew better, Allison couldn’t help but look for the dragon where the house stood. As she’d done eighteen years earlier, she gazed out at the water, letting the house hover in her peripheral vision. At first nothing happened. She saw a house and nothing but a house. All the magic long gone. As she was about to give up, get into her car and finish her drive, she saw it. For a split second, she saw the shingles transform into shiny scales and the wraparound porch turn into a tail and the windows on the third floor shimmer like silvery wings.
Maybe there was a little bit of magic in the old house yet.
Allison’s heart ached looking at the house that had once been her home. She wanted to drive away right then and never look back. She’d told no one she was coming for that very reason. And yet she got back behind the steering wheel and drove down, down, down the winding road to the house. She parked the car where Dr. Capello had always parked his. No cars were there today. She got out and walked the flagstone path to the side door, which was the family’s entrance. She took a breath and rang the doorbell. When there was no answer, she knocked. When there was no answer again, she walked out onto the deck. The house was as close to the beach as it could be without being on the beach itself. The beach that day was deserted. It seemed no one was at home.
Allison didn’t know what to do. Roland had said someone was always at the house, but it seemed she’d come at the one time no one was there. Maybe she was too late. Maybe Dr. Capello was already gone. Regret tasted like copper in her mouth and she almost wept with disappointment. She’d tried so hard to tell herself she’d made this trip to clear her conscience, but the tear she shed was proof she’d come here wanting more than to do her duty to a nice man who’d taken care of her a long time ago.
She’d really wanted to hug her Dr. Capello one more time.
A sound echoed from the side of the house and Allison spun around, suddenly alert and afraid. It was a sharp loud sound followed by a soft sort of grunting noise. Then she heard it again. Then again.
She walked around the deck to an arched wooden door that, if she remembered correctly, led to Dr. Capello’s wildflower garden, something her aunt Frankie had always called an “oxymoron,” like “bad children.”
Quietly and carefully Allison unlatched the gate and pushed through the door. Ten yards away, a man stood with his back to her, chopping firewood. He wore a yellow-and-black-checkered shirt and he was tall and broad-shouldered with blond hair pulled into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. He lifted the ax with ease and brought it down with precision. Another log was sundered and the two pieces fell on each side of the tree stump.
The man went for another log to split but stopped. He stood up straight and turned around. He must have seen her out of the corner of his eye. He let the ax blade fall into the stump and it stayed there embedded in the wood even as he walked away from it and toward her.
He took one step forward into a shadow cast by the tree, and when he stepped out of it again, the man had turned into a twelve-year-old boy. Gone were the jeans and flannels, the big shoulders and strong forearms, and in their place stood a lanky boy of twelve wearing black basketball shorts and a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves.
Allison remembered...