Free Last Call For Caviar by Melissa Roen Page B

Blue Star blaze by, Arnaud, who owned the land and had built this small observatory twenty years before, had vanished. His phone and email went unanswered, and his cell phone was out of service. No one knew what happened or where he had gone. A crotchety old bachelor and a classic science nerd, no one had heard him speak of any family. The stars and the possibility of life flourishing on other worlds was all that mattered to him.
    Posters of The X-Files , featuring Agents Mulder and Scully, emblazoned with the legend “I believe,” hung over the sofa and attested to Arnaud’s interests and self-deprecating humor. Arnaud knew most people considered him odd, but he didn’t give a damn.
    At first, none of the members of the club were unduly concerned. We thought he’d gone to an astronomy convention for a few weeks, or was off on safari chasing UFOs. But when weeks stretched into months, it finally sank in that he wasn’t coming back. The group who met here disbanded near the end of last year.
    I checked the kitchen and the two small bedrooms and bath in the living quarters branching off the hall from the main room. The beds were made, sheets and towels folded on shelves. Clothes still hung in one of the closets.
    In the kitchen water ran from the taps. Stocks of bottled water, coffee, pasta, rice, tuna and whiskey filled the pantry. A set of keys to the Astrarama and Arnaud’s Land Rover lay in a tray with an unopened pack of Marlboro Reds. I grabbed the keys and Marlboros and went out the back door towards the garage and workshop.
    The battered dark green Land Rover started on the first try. I checked the oil and fuel gauges; there was almost a full tank. Cans of fuel for the car and diesel for the generators were stacked along the walls, and Arnaud’s array of tools appeared intact.
    Sitting on the edge of the Astrarama’s viewing deck, my feet dangling over the void, I lit up one of Arnaud’s Marlboro Reds and nursed a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black and thought.
    Nothing had been looted. But there was no sign Arnaud had been back, either. There were no new tire tracks since the last of the storms. Dominating the high ground, the building was protected by the rock face of the cliff at its back; there was only one access road, the entrance camouflaged by the hillside run-off and vegetation. There were lots of trails through these hills to escape down. All who had ever known about this place appeared to have forgotten its existence. It seemed I might have found the perfect hideout.
    I picked up my binoculars and scanned the surrounding terrain. I could see parts of all three of the Corniches. Traffic was flowing normally on the Basse Corniche by the coast, but diminished considerably on the higher roads. Because of the winding switchbacks of the road, I would be able to see anyone approaching from a long way off. I scanned the hillsides, and except for a hawk riding the thermal currents, nothing moved. No neighbors for miles around.
    I imagined how dark it would be here at night, alone, surrounded only by starlight, the moonlight a shining trail on the sea. Even if somewhere in this doomed world, Julian were watching the same night sky as me, how lonely it would be.

.
    CHAPTER 9
    B LIND M AN’S B LUFF
    The shadows were lengthening as I left the Astrarama. It was just a couple of days till June twenty-first, the summer solstice, and though the sun wouldn’t set till almost 9:30 p.m., I didn’t want to get caught out on these roads on foot. With twilight would come a stirring of the things that had stayed hidden all day. It was just going on 6:40 p.m., and it would take at least another hour and a half to get down the hill before I would be safe behind my walls for the night.
    Every couple hundred meters, I scanned the trail ahead of me and behind, sweeping my binoculars in a slow 360-degree search. I felt a prickle of unease, as though something was out there, shadowing my footsteps.
    Less than a kilometer away, I