Chapter 1
At San Diego’s Channel Seven Doppler Weather Center, a small command-room style chamber with no windows to glare off of the sixteen monitors and computer screens, Primetime Weather anchor Mason Grier sat hunched over his chair, staring at a small array of LCD screens, poring over statistics from the twelve-county area, measuring them against chronological graphs from the past forty-eight hours.
Clear weather patterns stretched across the digital maps in all directions, far out into the Pacific even; but then, sudden red concentric circles flared up, localized over the suburb of Sunset Hills, exploding like fire-bursts, then disappearing just as fast.
Mason reversed the time and played the sequence again from several angles on the different screens.
He leaned back, shaking his head. “Impossible.”
The door opened behind him, letting in a shaft of bright afternoon sunlight. His producer, Pamela Brock, stood there beaming. “Mason, time to go. Unless you want to be late for your own award ceremony.” She was fifty-six, and despite two divorces and six kids and fifty extra pounds, still full of frenzied energy. High-strung, her office across the hall was littered with empty cans of Red Bull, which happened to be her nickname among the news team.
“I’ve got a killer intro for you, Mace, got all the press there already. Even imported some special fans of yours.”
“Who?” He had no fans. Mason (“Mace” to his producer, and only to her) was a meteorologist, and if you looked up his class description in a role-playing game, his ilk would be described as reclusive, hermetic even. They hid from the limelight, preferring the damp recesses under rocks and in the shadows while people like Emory Jiles the sportscaster and Diana Newman the lead anchor sought all the attention. Meteorologists, weathermen like Mason, studied almanacs, pored over statistics and averages, and culled all sorts of data together to attempt the challenging feat of predicting the unpredictable.
At forty-five, Mason was and always had been, a weather fanatic. However, it was a love-hate relationship, spawned in a Petrie dish and fermenting over the years until it outpaced its confines, exhausted its food and went out seeking fresh fodder, thriving off of Mason’s tragedy and taking impersonal glee in shattering his life at every turn.
His first memories were of the tornado in Indiana, the one that tore through half his childhood home—the half with his parents’ bedroom. With a force of such malevolent fury, it scattered their broken bodies across a field nearly a mile away and left young Mason standing on a shattered ledge that used to be a hallway, gaping at the missing half of his room. After a series of foster homes where he slept very little, and never during storms, he worked his way to a scholarship and a free ride at UCLA. For most of those intervening years, nature had left Mason to his own devices. For a time, he had almost dared to feel safe again. Not the safety children feel nestled in their beds knowing their parents are right there across the hall, but a certain similar complacency nonetheless.
Nature had left him alone. Left him to study his enemy, to grow and to learn everything he could about the force that had orphaned him and shaped his life.
Then, just when Mason had come to a comfortable acceptance and the memories had faded, it came again in the guise of a snowstorm that ran his wife, Lauren off the road—and caused a thirty-two car pileup on the Colorado Interstate. Lauren—poor Lauren was left in a wheelchair with a collapsed lung and a shattered hip.
Of course, even that wasn’t the worst part.
The eight-year-old twins were in the car with her. Gabriel escaped unscathed somehow, but had been in such shock he couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened. Shelby, however, had found some part of herself way older than her years, and she had acted. Ventured out into the blustery expanse of white, into the merciless cold. So young, with all that responsibility, she made the noble attempt to get help—and with such repercussions.
Realizing Mom was in serious trouble and her brother wasn’t going to be of any use, seeing a look in his eyes she just couldn’t fathom, Shelby had run from the car into the blinding snowstorm, headlong into and through four-foot drifts; trying to find help. Close to the road, in sight of approaching headlights, she slipped on the ice, fell further down into a ditch and hit her head on a rocky ledge. No one saw her in the blinding snow, not for almost an hour. The snow had even concealed the tracks and obscured the sight of the car on its hood in the ditch.
A month battling pneumonia and finally Shelby came out of it, but the infections and fluid built up in her ear canals had left her permanently deaf.
Mason still remembered the call from the highway department, the madcap race to the hospital, then running between the rooms, having to choose who to see first.
For all those debts and more, Mason Grier had devoted his life to the study of this implacable, unreasonable foe. Finally, he believed that while he could never tame such a force, at the very least he could develop the skills to predict its behavior. Its nuances, its fickle genius, its horrific temper and its subtle wiles.
Today, for all that, for all his accomplishments, his thirty years of meteorological knowledge and service, he was being honored. California Weatherman of the Year. Something about his near-flawless predictive abilities had led him to be nominated, and then to win this thing—a gold-plated statue of a guy looking like Oscar’s bedraggled second cousin holding up a shiny umbrella.
Mason shook his head. Up until last night, he believed he had earned such an award. But after what had happened from seven-thirty-seven to seven-forty-nine last night, he now doubted everything, once again humbled by his nemesis after growing overconfident.
The freak storm had made all the headlines, and it all had to happen right here, practically in his own backyard. And worse—the freak storm that killed Senator Aickerman, burying the man who was a potential shoe-in to be the next president—happened on his watch.
“How can I accept an award after what happened?”
Pamela stepped inside, closed the door. The lines around her dark-circled eyes smoothed. “Come on, this is what, your first miss in over twenty years?”
“But Christ, what a miss! It’s not like I bounced one off the rim and it just rolled out. I threw up an air ball that cracked the back windows.” He turned to the screens. “I can’t understand it. This storm, out of nowhere. No Doppler prediction, no rise in barometric pressure prior to the event, no precipitation indicators …”
“Mace.”
“Not even a goddamned cloud, not even—”
“Mace!”
“Nothing! It’s impossible!” He slammed his fist against the table, knocking over one of the screens. “Shit!”
“Hey, take it easy. Deep breaths. Do I need to get HR in here and recommend you for anger management classes? At this late stage in the game, I’d think it kind of pointless.”
“Sorry. Okay, so, who’s coming to this damn thing?”
“Your wife’s already en route, and before you freak out, I had a medical van sent for her, the hotel is wheelchair friendly and she’ll be fine.”
“She shouldn’t be moved like that.”
“She’ll be fine, Mace, and she wanted to come, practically begged me. And guess what, Shelby’s coming too.”
Mason’s heart leapt. Shelby was nineteen now; she had been in a USC exchange program in London for the past three months, working on a particularly exciting thesis involving early Saxon folklore. Shelby was the one he was most proud of, the one he was closest to, and to have accomplished so much despite her condition.… But his son?
“No word from Gabriel,” Pamela said, as if reading his mind. “Sorry, we tried. I know, deep down you’d like to see him again.”
“You shouldn’t have wasted your breath.” Mason stood up. His head felt like dead weight, so heavy. He looked ruefully at the weather patterns from 7:38 last night, still frozen on the screens, and he shook his head.
“Don’t bother with Gabriel. I’ve gotten used to his absence. It’s refreshing, actually.” He sighed, thinking back again to that accident on the interstate, in the whiteout. Was that the turning point for the boy? It seemed that up until that day Gabriel had been a normal kid, interested in the usual assortment of young boy things—baseball, cartoons, comic books, movies with things that exploded. After the accident, however, it was like a dark streak had been run through Gabriel; he became bitter and rueful about some perceived hurt, or as if angry that he had been spared, ignored more like it, by the storm. He withdrew from his family, and within a few years he was holed up in his room with an array of odd books and odder music coming from his headphones at all hours. Up until Berkeley, then it all came gushing out of him, all the hatred and bitterness he had been repressing since the car crash.
“All right,” Mason muttered, “let’s get this farce over with. But I’ve got no speech, and I’m not saying anything except thanks to the Academy and thanks for my wife’s undying support.”
“Yeah,” Pamela said, “all that shit, but if you forget to thank your brilliant and beautiful producer, without whom you’d be nothing more than a hack psychic in circus tent, I’ll slip arsenic in your next cup of coffee.”
Mason let a smile slip, then made an exaggerated bow. “I’ll shower you with praise.”
“That’s the spirit, spoken like a man who knows his place.”
“Really? And where is that?”
“In front of a vastly more successful woman.”
Rolling his eyes, Mason started moving. “Let’s go already, before I change my mind. Or lose my lunch.”
It would be good to see Shelby again, see how much she’d changed in the four months since he’d seen her off to the airport. So much like her mother before the accident. Tall and thin, deep blue eyes brimming with empathy. A smile to warm up any room. He couldn’t keep up with her friends, with her sports: lacrosse, sand volleyball, tennis. But she understood her father’s responsibilities; primarily to care for Lauren. Fortunately, they could afford a live-in nurse, and Lauren wasn’t exactly bedridden; she had good upper body strength and an indomitable sense of optimism, more than countering Mason’s inner grimness, his lingering anger at nature, at the weather and simple fate. All the things beyond his control.
At least at first, but that’s what meteorology was all about—exerting some degree of control over something that was inherently uncontrollable. If you could predict the behavior of a thing, you could have some control over it. You could sidestep its assaults, dodge its moods.
And just perhaps, you could save yourself or someone you cared about.
On the way out the door, Mason stopped and glanced back at the current weather screens showing nothing but clear skies.
Shaking his head, he reached to the hook behind the door to grab his umbrella.