by Bobby Akart
“The day after Christmas? Yes, the best day of all. That’s the day y’all get out of my house and go home so I can pass out.”
Beth was in tears as she giggled. “You’re so rude!”
“Aren’t I though? I love you, Bethie. Please drive safe and give Mrs. Chandler a kiss on the cheek for me.”
“No way! She’s got the cooties!”
“Bye, you silly sister.”
The two disconnected the call, and Jill allowed her smile to continue across her face. She loved her sister and she loved Christmas. It was a lot of fuss between the decorating and entertaining but worth every bit of effort.
This was gonna be the best family Christmas ever.
Chapter Seven
Thursday, December 20
Home of Tony and Beth Chandler
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
After Beth disconnected the call, she set about getting the car loaded. She’d purchased presents for everyone, including Tony. As she loaded them into oversized red velour Santa sacks, she couldn’t help but notice none of the packages were for her from Tony. This wasn’t out of the ordinary for him. He was one of those men who rushed out a day or two before Christmas and picked out whatever happened to grab his attention at the mall. She imagined as they grew older together, he’d just provide her the credit card and tell her to go buy whatever she wanted.
Beth had done her level best to reduce her expectations of what marriage should be like. Certainly, like many young girls growing up, she’d envisioned her prince charming. She’d hoped for a man who’d sweep her off her feet, then provide, protect, and dote over her until their dying days.
Tony did sweep Beth off her feet. They were popular in college and enjoyed the nightlife of downtown Baton Rouge with innumerable friends. So much so, they purchased a condominium overlooking the Mississippi River within walking distance of Tony’s office as well as their favorite evening haunts.
Beth rubbed her protruding belly, which held their unborn baby. She set one of the Santa sacks near the door and wandered over to the window overlooking the river. Flood warnings had been issued due to the days of heavy rain they’d experienced. The region had recorded fifteen inches so far, resulting in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working long hours to reinforce levees and place sandbags in front of vulnerable businesses.
News coverage of the flood event had dominated the airwaves. Many were comparing the current rain event to the August 2016 floods, which resulted in over thirty thousand people requiring rescue and over a hundred thousand seeking FEMA financial assistance.
“I’m gonna miss this view, Anthony,” she said to her son, who was sitting on the sofa, studying a toy. He didn’t always respond to Beth when she said his name. Oftentimes he avoided contact with her and preferred to sit alone in his own little world. She’d gotten over the feeling of rejection. Between advice from Anthony’s doctors and her own autism research, she’d come to accept his aloofness was just a part of who he was and not something she should take as rejection.
She glanced around their condo. After Anthony was born, she’d begun to press Tony about moving out of the downtown area to the suburbs east of Baton Rouge. They weren’t part of the nightlife scene anymore. Tony’s commute into town wouldn’t be that onerous, as Baton Rouge was a fairly small city despite being the Louisiana state capital and the home of LSU.
He’d argued they’d have plenty of time to find another place. As soon as Anthony turned five, they’d start looking. Then Beth became pregnant with their second child.
What a surprise?
No, not really. Not to Beth, anyway.
Her marriage to Tony had been rocky and cold of late. She remembered the attention he’d given her when she was pregnant with Anthony and thought she could rekindle that flame with him by having another baby.
She’d miscalculated.
After he got over the shock, he became concerned that a second child might have autism as well. It was a stressful first eight weeks as the couple debated whether an abortion, which they both vehemently opposed, would make sense for medical reasons. In the end, they agreed she should have their baby.
Tony did change in his attitude toward their marriage. He became even more distant. He found excuses to travel to other offices. He worked longer hours. Her insecurities caused her imagination to run wild. When he hesitated to advance their plans for finding a new home, she immediately wondered if he had a girlfriend in the city somewhere.
Finally, Tony relented and agreed they could purchase a home after Christmas. While Beth was thrilled with the decision, she would’ve preferred to move before she got so big in the belly that she threatened to topple over a lamp every time she turned around. Nonetheless, she was excited about the coming weeks, and Tony seemed to be more accepting of the direction their life was taking. Between the upcoming visit to Memphis, the house hunting, and the birth of their new daughter, the life of Mr. and Mrs. Chandler was looking up.
But first, she had to do her duty as a wife and daughter-in-law to visit Tony’s mother—Mrs. Inez Chandler.
Ugh.
“Well, she isn’t really that bad, I guess,” said Beth aloud, lying in case her son could hear her thoughts.
Mrs. Chandler was widowed and lived in the Chandler family home in Winterville, Mississippi, a small town near the river about three miles north of Greenville and four miles south of Lamont, not that any of that registered with anybody outside Washington County.
Over time, Tony gradually was saddled with far more important things to do, related to the business, that prevented him from visiting his elderly mother. Beth, on the other hand, he’d determined, had plenty of time to make the three-and-a-half-hour trip up the back roads to let his mom visit with Anthony.
When Beth objected to being alone with her for the better part of two days, Tony always had the perfect comeback. “Would you rather she come here to stay with us for a week? Or two?” Case closed. Tony should’ve been an attorney.
Beth had everything sitting by the door, ready to go. She double-checked to confirm she had all of Anthony’s things and that he was mentally calm to hit the road. She stuffed several of his favorite toys into his Minions backpack and set it on the pile to be loaded into her crossover. Then she called the concierge desk of the condominium and requested assistance to load up.
Nobody used the building’s bellhop service except for the old ladies looking for attention and Beth because Anthony would sometimes lose it if he was left alone. It broke her heart the day she discovered that about him and vowed to never leave him alone again.
After she called, she wandered back to the ceiling-to-floor windows that overlooked the Mississippi. Her mind wandered as she observed the bustle of activity and the water lapping over the top of the levees.
She wondered aloud, “Just where does all that water go when it’s over?”
Chapter Eight
Friday, December 21
USGS
Golden, Colorado
Dr. Lansing had arrived at the NEIC just after dawn that morning. She’d been troubled by seismic readings in the Central U.S. as well as reports of unstable groundwater in the Southern Mississippi River Valley. She’d told Oliver, her number one guy as it related to the region, as well as the other geophysicists who routinely compiled the NMSZ data, to plan on arriving early that Friday.
There was a reason Dr. Lansing referred to the seemingly unrelated seismic activity prior to a major earthquake in a region like the NMSZ as the Devil’s Staircase. Like the devil, these types of faults issue warning signals, tantalizing hints, in the days and weeks before a larger earthquake.
The signals began as tiny shocks along the fault. After the tremors increased in strength ever so slightly, there would be a period in which they remained constant. Then they’d begin to increase in intensity again. Level off. And start increasing to tremors large enough to rattle houses. On a graph, the results would appear as a staircase rising upward until that final rip into the earth occurred—
the appearance of the devil.
Making a link between these precursors and the so-called Big One was often controversial in the arena of quake forecasting. Laboratory studies and real-world seismic activity didn’t always mesh. As Dr. Lansing tried to point out in her seismic modeling, not all earthquakes have foreshocks, as the preliminary shakers were known.
Besides, attempts to apply laboratory models that suggested an earthquake warning was appropriate didn’t necessarily translate to accurate real-world alerts. Faults in the Earth were filled with fluids, heated to extreme temperatures, that undergo complex stresses. Modelling couldn’t accurately take into account all the variables and their interaction with one another.
In recent decades, man had introduced hydraulic fracturing into this complicated relationship. Commonly known as fracking, the process of injecting liquid at high pressures into boreholes and subterranean rock had become popular to open existing fissures to extract fossil fuels.
Generally, the fracking process produces small earthquakes of magnitudes smaller than one. Dr. Lansing had created quite a stir years ago when she pointed to fracking as being directly related to a magnitude 4 earthquake in Texas. Subsequently, some geophysicists alleged an M5.8 earthquake may have been triggered by wastewater disposal in Oklahoma.
Late Thursday afternoon, Dr. Lansing began to notice a pattern in the seismic activity stretching from Corona, Tennessee, approximately thirty-five miles north of Memphis, to Keokuk, Iowa, on the Illinois border.
In addition, Keokuk was experiencing spring-like flooding from groundwater aquifers despite relatively modest levels of rainfall. The lower Mississippi River Valley was another matter. The earth from Greenville in Northern Mississippi down to New Orleans had been battered by heavy rains for nearly a week. The flooding had a profound impact on the groundwater levels.
The Mississippi River Valley aquifer was one of the largest in North America. It was located within a huge underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock. Some of these underground reservoirs lay just below the surface and provided water to vegetation and streams. Others were deeper underground, separated from Earth’s surface by a thin layer of rock that kept it contained.
Dr. Lansing had pored over hydrograph reports the night before. She found there was extraordinary water accumulation in Mississippi and abrupt draining of lakes on both sides of the river from Memphis to Northern Illinois. One of the geophysicists had just handed her the most recent data.
“I’m starting to suspect a correlation here,” she began. “These tremors could be part of a larger preseismic wave train that’s building. If, in fact, we’re witnessing step changes in groundwater levels, the question is, where is the most likely location of deformation? Arguably, the preseismic stresses could be anywhere along a thousand-plus-mile stretch of the Mississippi River Valley. This deformation is altering the fluid pressures within the aquifer system, both up and down, depending on location.”
“Mum, we’re expecting updated data within the next few hours from the NWIS,” said Oliver. The NWIS, also a department within the USGS, stood for National Water Information System. Real-time hydrographs were available to Dr. Lansing’s team, but the expert analysis from the Hydrogeophysics Branch lagged behind by several hours.
She stood from her round conference table and wandered through her office. Her job was frustrating in that most often she was forced to react to an earthquake after it was detected. The NEIC would compile the data in an attempt to locate the epicenter. Then they’d determine its size and intensity.
In recent months, back-to-back earthquakes south of Mexico City occurred where two subducting plates bent and then pulled apart. The first earthquake measured M8.1, and the one that followed nine days later in the same locale measured M7.1.
The purpose of pinpointing this information was to warn the public of possible aftershocks or the potential of soft sediment near the epicenter of the quake causing destruction in the days that followed.
That part of the job was expected of the NEIC. Dr. Lansing wanted to take it a step further. If she couldn’t predict the initial quake, then she wanted to be able to predict the second one. Lives could be saved if she was accurate.
“Do we need to issue an earthquake forecast for the NMSZ?” asked Oliver.
She pointed at his white legal pad, indicating he should be ready to take notes. She began to wander through her office, periodically staring at a large relief map affixed to the wall to the side of her desk.
“Okay, any of you can answer as I go through the checklist. If someone disagrees with a response, speak up. We can’t mess around with this. Ready?”
They all nodded that they were.
“First of all, let’s deal with a magnitude 3 or greater. When was the first one?”
“Arnold, Missouri, Monday the seventeenth at 2:00 local time. There were several more in rapid succession in the St. Louis metropolitan area.”
She shook her head in disbelief. Her Frontier Air flight had left for Denver just an hour before that.
“Since Monday afternoon, how many M2s or greater have been recorded?”
“Forty-seven,” replied Oliver. “That’s if you include the NMSZ and its periphery.”
“When?” she asked.
One of the other geophysicists responded, “Thirty-three in the second burst of activity Wednesday afternoon the nineteenth. The remainder have taken place throughout the day yesterday and especially overnight into this morning.”
Dr. Lansing stopped pacing the floor. “Officially, let’s note the swarm began Monday afternoon. Now, when and where was the largest quake?”
“Last night, 11:17 local time, at Wright, Tennessee, which is on the north side of Reelfoot Lake.”
“What is the current water level of the lake?”
Nobody responded. Dr. Lansing looked them all in the eyes. She pointed at one of the geophysicists. “Please look it up.”
The young man furiously banged away on his keyboard. “Let’s see. Spillway elevation is two-eighty-three. Greatest depth is eighteen, approx. Um, current depth is … Hang on. Eight-point-four. Wow! That’s a full inch below its record low in 1953.”
“Drought conditions?” asked Dr. Lansing.
He made several keystroke entries to check rainfall totals over the last fourteen days. His response was simple, but it raised concerns for Dr. Lansing.
“No.”
She wandered back to the relief map and pointed to Reelfoot Lake in upper West Tennessee. “Here we have a lake that was literally created by the second and third New Madrid quakes in 1812. Now, during this current swarm, it’s lost its volume and depth to levels below its record almost eight decades ago. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
The group watched Oliver make his notes. He then looked up to Dr. Lansing. “Do you want us to calculate a probability forecast?”
“Absolutely. Who’s our statistician?”
A young woman waved her hand in the air for a brief second before she returned to her laptop. She was one step ahead of them. She grimaced and then looked up to Dr. Lansing.
“I’m showing a one-in-three-thousand chance of a magnitude 7-plus in the vicinity of the swarm. I would put the chances of a 5-plus outside the NMSZ as one in forty-five hundred.”
She turned her laptop around for Dr. Lansing to study the data. After nearly a minute, Dr. Lansing began to wander again as she spoke.
“Okay. Okay. I see three scenarios possible of what could happen in the next seven days. Scenario one, the least likely, would be a larger earthquake along the magnitude of 5 to 6.5 on the fringes of the NMSZ.
“Scenario two, the next less likely of the three, or our middle-ground position, is that a larger quake of M6.5 or higher could occur within the next seven days within the defined boundaries of the NMSZ.
“Scenario three, the most likely, is that these tremors will continue as part of a long-lasting swarm. If recent history is considered, this swarm will continue through Christmas, an
d then New Madrid will settle down.”
Oliver leaned back in his chair and raised his hand slightly. “Mum, what if we’re looking at the Devil’s Staircase playing out as the kind of pattern you’ve envisioned?”
Dr. Lansing never answered his question because she didn’t want to put it out into the universe. She still resented being referred to as the prophetess of doom by the local paper, but just in case, she didn’t want to say it aloud.
She dismissed the group to gather more data. She turned to the relief map and ran the tips of her fingers along the raised terrain that made up the Mississippi River Valley. She muttered to herself, “What’s going on with you?”
Chapter Nine
Friday, December 21
Winterville, Mississippi
That Friday morning, Beth woke up praying for a sunny day to travel. She even had designs on skipping out on Mrs. Chandler immediately after breakfast so she could catch her niece’s rehearsal for the Christmas presentation. When her eyes opened and were ready to focus, she saw the gray light seeping through the curtains and heard the steady patter of rainfall on the old home’s metal roof. Her early release from the custody of Tony’s mother was thwarted.
Then the aroma of sausage found its way under her door and into her nostrils. Beth swung her legs around, supported her baby with her left hand, and slid off the tall four-poster bed in the guest room. She fought her urge to pee and made her way to the door first. She cracked it open and heard Mrs. Chandler chatting away with Anthony, explaining the art of Southern cooking. For all of her social faults, Mrs. Chandler was one of the best at serving the delicacies of the Old South.
Beth quickly got ready and joined them in the kitchen. As was usually the case, she was forbidden from lifting a finger even when it came time to clear the table and wash the dishes. Her pregnancy was not the issue. This was Inez Chandler’s house, and her rules were expected to be followed.
