Williams glanced at his watch. It was 4:47 P.M.

The entire railroad bed had given way now, and the lake flowed freely over it. The railroad tracks, snapped in half by the surging water, the ground washed away beneath them, now seemed to hang in midair.

The secretary began to cry quietly. Williams thought he should say something, but he didn’t know what. Floyd coughed. No one spoke. The three of them stood together at the window, wordless, as the water continued to swell. The binoculars sat on the sill. Williams didn’t want to look.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER

1

Present day

Technically, the park was closed.

But Laura knew a place where the wire fence was split, and she had let the Aussies through and then climbed over behind them. It looked like a pond. There was, in fact, no place muddier in the winter in Portland, Oregon, than West Delta Dog Park, and that was saying something.

The dogs ran ahead of her in the standing water, splashing it behind them, already matted with wet dirt and dead grass. Occasionally they turned to look back at her, their warm breath condensing in the January air.

Laura wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It was a terrible day to be out. Her rain pants were slick with rain, her trail runners were soaked. She’d spent the early morning sandbagging downtown and her back ached. The stress fracture in her foot stung. Stay off it for six weeks, the doctors had said. As if.

The cloud cover hung so low that the tops of the trees seemed to brush it.

She loved this.

The worst weather, body aching. Nothing could keep her inside. Biking. Running. Walking the dogs. She was out there every day, no matter what. Not like all those poseurs who came out in the summer in their REI sun shirts and ran along the esplanade with their iPods and swinging elbows. Where were they in the dead of winter? At the gym, that’s where.

God, Laura hated those people.

Franklin glanced back at her, wagged his stubby tail, barked once, flattened his ears, and took off across the old road to the slough. It was their usual route. Penny, the puppy, stuck closer to Laura, zipping ahead ten feet and then circling back.

Laura heard it then. She had heard it all along, but it had faded to white noise, an ambient sound, like a jet passing overhead.

The Columbia Slough.

She knew it would be high. They’d had a ton of snow in December. Then it had warmed up and started to rain. That meant snowmelt from the mountains. Lots of it. The storm drains were backed up. The Willamette was near flood stage. The local news was live with it day and night; they were considering evacuating downtown. But that was the Willamette. Miles away.