The Swanns had lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, all their lives. James owned three pharmacies there, two of them inherited from his father. But he never really enjoyed running a business. When Walgreens made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, he sold them his stores and retired.
Martha, a photo researcher, freelanced for Reuters and other news agencies. The internet meant that she could work anywhere, so it was no problem for her to move. Ten years ago, the two of them had picked up and moved to Cape Le Chat Noir, just because it seemed the wildest, most unpredictable thing they could do.
A crash outside—shattering metal and glass—made the candlelight flicker.
“Whoa. That sounded like a car. Think this wind is strong enough to pick up cars?” James shook his head.
The oil lamp sent an orange glow over the Swanns’ front room. Long blue-black shadows crept over the floor and walls.
The room had an arching, dark wood cathedral ceiling. Two rows of track lights beamed down on the living room area, all wicker and blue and green aquatic colors, in the front facing the road. A long dining room table, covered in a flowery tablecloth, divided the living room from the kitchen.
Sliding glass doors and an enormous kitchen window revealed a panorama of the beach and ocean inlet out back. James had boarded up the window against the approaching storm. But the glass doors showed the tossing, battling waves, an eerie, unnatural green against the charcoal sky.
The shifting shadows on the walls made Lea think of Halloween. She realized she was still gripping the cell phone and tucked it into a pocket, surprised at how hard her hand was trembling.
She stared through the glass doors at the dark ocean waves raging high, foaming angrily.
“People are going to die,” she said.
The Swanns nodded but didn’t reply. James fiddled with the neck of his black turtleneck sweater. Martha carried a flickering oil lamp to the window ledge in the kitchen.
“Why are you taking that back there?” James called.
“It might light someone’s path,” Martha said.
“I’m worried about Macaw and Pierre at the rooming house,” Lea murmured. “It seems so rickety and frail.”
Martha nodded. “You’re much safer with us, on the west beach. The inlet is protected, Lea. And our house is solid. Not wood. It’s thick Virginia fieldstone. We had it shipped from Charlotte when we built the house. We knew it could withstand hurricanes.”
Lea shivered. “You’re both so nice to take me in tonight. I mean, a total stranger—”
Martha laughed. “I feel like we’re old friends. So many emails.”
“Well, you’re both very sweet,” Lea said. “I don’t know what I would have done. . . .” Her voice trailed off. She suddenly pictured Ira and Elena, so far away.
Earlier, Martha had prepared a magnificent dinner. Conch salad and salt oysters fresh from the ocean that morning, followed by a spicy-hot gumbo of rock shrimp, scallops, and lobster. A true feast. Along with a very dry Chardonnay from a winery on Hilton Head Island.
It should have been a delightful, relaxing time. But Lea kept glancing out the back doors at the flocks of birds flying frantically back and forth in the darkening sky, chattering and squawking in a panic, as if they didn’t know where to light.
James was talking about Carolina wineries and how they had to import their grapes from all over. Lea tried to concentrate. He spoke so softly, she had to struggle to hear.
After coffee, they watched the progress of the storm on the Weather Channel until the power went out with a startling pop. Then, in the candlelit darkness, they talked loudly over the roaring winds, straining to pretend all was normal.
“I’m worried about my kids,” Lea said. “And my husband, of course. They won’t know if I’m okay.”
“They’ll get things up and running soon after the storm,” James said. “You’ll be surprised. The army will be here. The national guard. Hurricanes on the Carolina coast . . . people have experience with them.”
“Do you have kids?” Lea realized she hardly knew a thing about her two hosts. Her emails with Martha had been all about life on Le Chat Noir.
“We have a son. In Phoenix,” Martha said. “He’s thirty. Not quite a kid.”
Lea squinted at her in the candlelight. “You don’t look old enough to have a thirty-year-old.”
Martha’s dark eyes flashed. “Flattery like that will get you a friend for life.”
“He’s still ‘finding himself,’” James added, making quote marks with his fingers. “A lot of thirty-year-olds are still teenagers these days. He—”
“We’re the teenagers,” Martha interrupted. “Running away from home to a tiny island?”
“I wanted more kids,” Lea said. “I come from a big family. Four brothers and two sisters. I really wanted a houseful of kids. But after Ira was born, the doctor said we couldn’t have any more. I was so disappointed. Heartbroken, really.”
Her words were greeted by silence. Martha and James stared at her, their faces appearing and disappearing in the flickering light.
Too much information.
Rain pounded the house, as loud as thunder. The wind howled like a wild animal. But the house was solid as promised. The ferocious winds tried but couldn’t collapse it. James praised the strength of Virginia fieldstone. Martha spoke calmly about going down to the beach after the last hurricane and watching the incredible waves.
Lea could hear things breaking outside. Cracks and heavy thuds. She fought to hold down a rising feeling of panic. She held her breath, as if she could will it away. Held her breath until her chest ached.
It will be over soon. I think the winds are already slowing.
She screamed at the cracking sound above her head. Plaster snowed down on the three of them from the high cathedral ceiling.
“It’s trying to take the roof,” James said. His eyes were wide behind his glasses. Even in the shadowy light, Lea could see his calm was broken.
Lea pressed herself against the living room wall, praying for the roof to hold, for the winds to stop raging. She shut her eyes tight and thought about Mark. And Ira. And Elena.
Were they thinking of her? Were they horribly scared?
She shuddered again. It could be days before I can reach them and tell them I’m okay. Will I be okay?
Another cracking sound above their heads. Another stream of powdery plaster came floating down. James staggered forward, eyes wide. His mouth dropped open. His knees folded. He started to fall.
Martha grabbed him by the shoulders, struggling to keep him on his feet.
“The roof . . .” he breathed. “It’s . . . coming down.”
A terrifying craaack. A rumble like approaching thunder. A shower of powdery plaster.
Everything shaking. Everything.
Lea screamed as the world came crashing down on her.
10
Lea struggled to pull herself up from the ringing darkness. Her head throbbed as if about to explode. Waves of pain rolled down her back, her arms and legs. Blinking in the gray light, still unable to focus, she gazed up.
“Oh my God!”
The sky appeared so close, glaring through the jagged hole in the ceiling. She raised her head, feeling dizzy. Underwater, her clothing soaked and the couch beneath her like a furry wet animal. She brushed shingles off the couch. Still struggling to focus, she saw jagged pieces of the ceiling strewn over the room.
Martha and James bent over her. Their faces were tight with concern, ghostly pale in the heavy gray light washing down from above.
“Lea? You’re coming to? Are you okay?” Martha looked twenty years older. Her hair hung in damp tangles over her forehead. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wet.
Lea pulled herself to a sitting position. The room spun around her. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.
She squinted at the shards of wood and broken shingles scattered crazily around the couch. Piles of wet plaster on the carpet. Like cake flour. A snowstorm blanketing
the furniture.
“The roof—”
Martha gripped her hand. “Take it slow, Lea. Just breathe. Don’t try to get up yet.”
“What happened?” Martha and James slid in and out of focus. Lea smoothed a hand over her hair, trying to rub away the pain.
“Part of the roof fell in,” James said, gazing up at the sky. “You got hit by some slate shingles. It knocked you out.”
“We were so worried.” Martha squeezed Lea’s hand. “It just came crashing down on you. We put you on the couch and—”
Lea shuddered. “I . . . think I’m okay. Just a headache. The dizziness is going away.”
“Oh, thank God,” Martha said.
“We all got soaked,” James said, his voice hoarse, croaky. “But we were lucky.” He glanced away, as if trying to force down some heavy emotion. Despite his attempt, a sob escaped his throat.
Martha held on to Lea’s hand. “So glad y’all are okay. We were scared. You were totally out. Look. You might have a bump on your head, but it didn’t even break the skin.”
Lea brushed back her dark hair with both hands. “Wow. Guess I’m lucky. I feel okay. Really.”
“It’s morning. The rain stopped a few hours ago,” Martha said. “The winds—”
James motioned toward the broken ceiling. “The rain. It soaked everything. The house will never dry out.”
“But it’s still standing.” Martha turned to her husband. “I think we may be the fortunate ones. I . . . I’m afraid to look outside.”
James shivered. “I need dry clothes.” He started toward the bedroom. His shoes squished on the carpet.
Martha followed him. She turned back to Lea, her face almost apologetic. “We’ve been up all night. Maybe James and I should catch a few hours sleep. Before . . . before we face what’s out there.”
“Yes. Don’t worry about me.” Lea shook off another wave of dizziness. “You two are so kind. I’ll never forget this. I’ll be okay. Get some rest.”
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. We have to finish it before it spoils. There won’t be any power for a long time.” Martha uttered a long sigh.
They disappeared down the hall to their room.
Lea watched streams of water run down the wall. Stretching her arms above her head, she stood up. Suddenly alert.
Beyond the glass doors in back, tall waves continued to battle, crashing against each other, tossing off islands of foam. The water’s roar seemed to be inside her head.
I have to go outside.
She had to see what the storm had left behind. She stepped unsteadily to the door, shoes sliding on the wet surface.
I’m a journalist. I have to document this for my blog. Maybe I can sell the photos to a news network.
But she wasn’t prepared for the horrors a few steps from the house. The fallen trees and flattened houses. Everything crumbled and broken and down.
The people covered in plaster dust and mud, scrambling over the wreckage, searching house to house for survivors to rescue, finding only bodies.
She wasn’t prepared for the howls and cries. The half-naked man who ran over the debris on the street, screaming as blood flowed down his back like a scarlet cape. The pale white baby feet poking out from under the collapsed wall of a house.
I’m a journalist.
She raised her phone to her eye. Steadied it. Focused on a man carrying two corpses over his shoulder. And . . .
Oh no. She studied the phone. Out of power. Dead. She stared at it. Shook it. No way to charge it. No way.
So now she wasn’t a journalist covering the tragedy. Now she was just another victim.
Men were already piling bodies where the little white post office had stood.
Lea saw arms and legs dangling from beneath crushed, collapsed walls.
She shivered. Each breath she took burned her nostrils and made her throat ache. The air was choked with dust and dirt that hadn’t settled.
I’m alive.
The island had been flattened. She squinted into the billowing gray light. The houses and shops were piles of trash. Splintered boards strewn everywhere. Fallen walls fanned out on the rain-soaked ground like playing cards.
Fifty-two Pickup.
She thought of the cruel card game her brothers used to tease her with when she was little.
“Want to play a card game, Lea?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s play Fifty-two Pickup.” Then they’d raise the deck high and let all the cards tumble to the floor. “Okay. Go ahead, Lea. Pick them up.”
That’s what it looked like here. Playing cards tossed and scattered over the earth.
Is that how she would write it? Could that be the lead to her story?
I can’t write it.
She slumped onto the trunk of a fallen palm tree and wrapped her arms around herself. I can’t write it because I don’t believe it yet. And I don’t want to write about such nightmare and heartbreak. Where would I begin? How would I ever describe an entire island crushed and flattened as if stomped on by a fairy-tale giant?
Fairy tales and childhood card games were flashing through her mind. Obviously, because she wanted to escape. She wanted to go back to somewhere safe and clean and nice. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out.
She suddenly pictured her father sitting in his Barcalounger in the tiny living room back in Rockford, holding the newspaper in front of him, folded down the middle the way he always read it, and shaking his head. Reading and shaking his head, his face twisted in disapproval.
You’d be shaking your head today, Dad.
How could she write about the corpses they were pulling out from under the debris? Dead faces, locked in startled expressions. She watched the mud-covered workers stack the bodies like trash bags in the town dump.
The smell . . . Already. The sour smell of death.
And the sounds. Moans and shrieks and anguished cries rang out in the dust-choked morning air like a horror-movie soundtrack. The pleas of the injured waiting to be rescued. The survivors discovering their dead. The sweating, cursing men digging, pawing, shoveling into the rubbled houses. The groans of the men hoisting more corpses onto the pile.
It seemed to Lea that everyone left alive was howling in protest. Everyone who could move and make a sound was screaming or crying or wailing their disbelief and anger.
I should be helping.
She jumped to her feet and started to walk toward mountains of debris where the road had been. “Oh!” She stumbled over something soft.
A corpse!
No. Clothing. A tangled pile of soaked shirts and shorts strewn over the grass.
What about my clothing?
Were her belongings scattered with the wind? Was Starfish House still standing? Had Macaw and Pierre survived?
Lea shuddered. The rooming house was on the other side of Le Chat Noir, the eastern side, the exposed side where the ocean could show its storm fury. Starfish House felt fragile even in calm weather, she thought. The Swanns’ stone house had barely survived intact.
She felt a stab of dread in the pit of her stomach. Suddenly, it was a struggle to breathe. No way Starfish House could still be standing. But Macaw and Pierre?
She couldn’t phone, of course. She remembered she had been talking to Mark—or trying to—last night when the service crashed.
Mark. What was he thinking right now? What was he doing? What had he told the kids? He had to be in his own nightmare . . . not knowing . . .
And no way to tell him.
My poor Ira and Elena.
Ahead of her, she saw an upended SUV, windows all blown out, sitting on the flattened roof where a little food store had stood. The SUV looked like an animal on its hind legs, standing straight up on its back bumper. Lea shook her head. Hard to imagine a wind strong enough to lift an SUV off the road, onto its back end, and drop it onto a building.
She spun away from it. But there was nowhere to turn to escape the horror.
The man lumbering toward her caught her by surprise. He was tall and broad and drenched in sweat, thinning brown hair matted to his red forehead. His T-shirt was torn and stained with brown streaks. His shorts were rags.
His eyes were wild and his mouth was moving rapidly although Lea couldn’t hear his words. His arms were outstretched, his mud-smeared hands open to grab her.
He’s crazy. He’s out of his head.
Move!
But there wasn’t time.
With a menacing groan, he grabbed her by the shoulders. He pulled with surprising force, nearly dragging her off her feet. She inhaled the rank odor of his body and his mud-caked clothes.
He groaned again. She wasn’t strong enough to resist. He was pulling her away from the others, dragging her out of view, grunting and groaning like an animal.
“Let go! Let go of me! Please! What are you going to do? Please—let go!”
11
The radio squealed. Andy Pavano nearly lost his grip on the wheel.
“Vince, turn it down or something. Sounds like you stepped on a cat.”
“Hey, I’m always kind to animals. Can you hear me now?”
“The rain is messing with the radio.” Andy slowed the patrol car around a curve but still sent a tidal wave of rainwater washing over the narrow shoulder.
“It’s these old Motorolas, man. They’re not even digital.” Vince said something else but the signal broke up.
“Vince, what did you say?”
“I said maybe you could talk to your uncle about springing for a new radio system.”
“The chief isn’t my uncle,” Andy snapped. “He went to school with my cousin, that’s all.”
“Okay, okay. You’re both Pavano. So it’s an honest mistake, right?”
Headlights from an oncoming car blazed over the windshield. Andy tried to squint through it, but he couldn’t see a thing. Turn off your brights, bastard.
He opened his mouth in a loud burp. The meatball hero from that Italian place on Main Street . . . What was it called? Conca d’Oro? . . . it hadn’t gone down yet.
He swerved to avoid a lake of rainwater that glimmered darkly over the right half of the road. He could feel the wind push the car sideways. “Vince, this rain is killing me.”