by Ron Benrey
Sharon showed him a laminated menu. “Poached egg and some Jell-O for you?”
“Where’s the Carolinian charm in that?”
“All of our breakfasts come with grits and a biscuit,” she said.
“I stand corrected. Can I take a shower before breakfast?”
“Sure thing—and a stroll down the hallway if you feel up to it. There’s a bathrobe hanging behind the bathroom door and paper slippers in the closet. But don’t get dressed yet. The doc wants to give you a final check before we discharge you.”
Sean quickly got the hang of walking in paper slippers. Ten minutes later, he’d made it to the end of the corridor outside his room and reached a glassed-in balcony that overlooked downtown Glory. He tried to gauge the damage Gilda had caused. All of the windows he could see were intact, but roof shingles were missing here and there. Soon after Sean maneuvered past the heavy glass door and stepped onto the balcony, a tall, official-looking man introduced himself.
“I’m Rafe Neilson. I’m glad to see you up and about. You looked awfully shaky last night, and they wouldn’t let me speak to you.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“The fatal accident at the church.”
“The fellow who took care of the church’s generator?”
Rafe nodded. “Richard Squires. I sang in the church choir with him. We’d become good friends during the five years I’ve lived in Glory.”
“That’s the one thing I hate about hurricanes—they kill people. No one told me that he was dead, but I guessed as much when I heard Ann Trask shouting.”
“I understand that you tried to start the church’s generator.”
“Ann asked me to.”
“Why do you suppose she did that?”
Sean shrugged. “I’d told her that we have a generator in our broadcast van. I guess she assumed I’d know how to work the church’s backup system. I showed her where the manual start button was, and things were fine for a few seconds. I gave up as soon as I saw the fuel system warning light blinking red. I had a broadcast coming up and didn’t have time to work on the engine. That’s when I told Ann to call Richard Squires.”
“How did you know about Richard?”
“A note tacked to the wall said to contact him if the generator didn’t work.” Sean felt a twinge of concern. The surprisingly formal tone of Rafe’s questions had put him on edge. “You’re beginning to sound like a policeman, Rafe.”
“Can’t help it,” he said with a grin. “I’m Glory’s deputy police chief. We don’t have many fatal accidents in our little town. I’m trying to understand everything that happened in Glory Community’s parking lot last night.”
“A gust of wind at the height of the hurricane tore the steeple down—a gust with a velocity of upwards of ninety miles per hour. The wreckage fell on Richard Squires and our broadcast van. What more is there to understand?”
Rafe shook his head. “Probably nothing. Take care of yourself. Don’t overdo.”
Before Sean could reply, Rafe pivoted on his heels and began to walk away.
“Hey, Mr. Deputy Police Chief. I have a question for you. How badly did Glory get hit last night?”
“Not badly at all,” Rafe said over his shoulder. “A handful of large trees are down, a few windows broken here and there, several dozen roofs were damaged, and the streets nearest the Albemarle Sound were flooded, including part of Front Street. We got off lucky except for Richard’s death and the fallen steeple. Other than you and your colleague, there were no injuries requiring hospitalization.”
Rafe departed, leaving Sean to speculate what had prompted the string of odd questions. He returned to his room and sat down on the visitor’s chair in front of his bed. A short time later a nurse’s aide arrived with his breakfast tray and placed it on a wheeled table next to the chair.
“I’m not usually a grits person but these look good,” Sean said as he grabbed a spoon to dig in.
The door squeaked open and Sharon propelled Carlo, sitting regally in a wheelchair, into the room. Sean noted that Carlo’s forehead and left eye were both bandaged, the dressing on his eye smaller than the bandage Sean remembered from the night before.
“Here you go, Mr. Vaughn,” she said. “This is your room. Can you manage to climb into bed, or do you need me to help you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of saying no to anything you offer, Sharon,” Carlo said, punctuating his smarmy reply with an utterly sincere gaze. “Please, please, please call me Carlo.”
Sharon seemed to tolerate Carlo’s obvious flirtation, although Sean could barely avoid throwing a spoonful of grits at him.
“Good morning, amigo,” Sean said. “You look much better than you did last night. What did the doctors tell you?”
Carlo gestured toward his bandaged eye. “This is the worrisome injury. A glass splinter scratched my cornea and lifted a small flap of tissue. It should heal cleanly—but there’s always a risk of infection.” He touched his forehead. “I also have a concussion,” Carlo said. “Worse than yours, but I’ll probably survive. The MRI didn’t show any long-term damage.”
Sean bit back a snicker. They’d looked inside Carlo’s head and found nothing.
“Glad to hear it. So far so good.”
“The docs want me to stay in the hospital two or three more days.”
“The nursing staff requested a whole week,” Sharon said, winking at Sean, “but Carlo’s insurance company wouldn’t agree to cover more than three days.” She helped him climb into bed. “Would you like breakfast?”
“No thanks. My stomach feels too wonky to eat.” Carlo’s voice oozed angst and made known the enormity of his self-sacrifice. Sharon smiled as she left the room.
Carlo pointed at Sean’s tray. “I see that you’re able to eat breakfast.”
“Eagerly, in fact.”
“Good. I’d hate unnecessary guilt to put you off your feed.”
“Why would I feel the least bit guilty?”
“You chose the parking place last night, not me.”
Sean ate more grits. There was no point arguing with Carlo when he got hold of a loony idea.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Sean said.
The door opened, revealing Ann Trask. Sean realized that Ann was petite—five foot three and a hundred pounds, at the most. But the strength that radiated from her blue eyes made her seem a foot taller.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Ann said.
“It’s Mizz Ann Trask,” Carlo said, “come to visit the halt and the lame. A very churchy thing to do.”
It was rare for Carlo to offer a verbal joke, so Sean kept it going. “We’re both a tad halt today, Ann, but no more lame than usual.”
He expected Ann to react, but she didn’t even crack a smile. She probably didn’t feel like laughing so soon after Richard Squires’s death. But he saw another emotion in her somber expression. Something beyond grief that looked like worry.
Carlo must have also registered Ann’s mood. He offered a high-voltage smile and said, “I haven’t forgotten my promise to put you on the Storm Channel. What’s your schedule like during the next day or two?”
She responded with a small smile of her own. “Let’s wait until your bandages are off. If I’m going to debut on television with Carlo Vaughn, I insist on the unadorned original.”
“You shall have him, although a black eye patch can be an intriguing fashion accessory. I may adopt the buccaneer look. What do you think?”
Sean felt like retching, but Carlo’s cornball patter had amplified Ann’s smile and chased the worry—if that’s what he had seen—from her face.
“You’d make a great swashbuckling buccaneer,” she said, making Sean wish that he had the skill to say magic words that could alter a woman’s frame of mind.
Even more to the point, he wished that Ann smiled at him the way she smiled at Carlo.
FOUR
Ann felt the cool breeze play around her head as s
he walked from the hospital back to Glory Community Church. She felt bad that she hadn’t been an especially cheerful visitor, although Carlo had been cheerful enough for everyone. And how could she feel anything but gloomy? Phil Meade’s unfair accusations weighed on her. Worse yet, she suspected that Phil held another shoe, and she was waiting for it to drop. Perhaps he’d dug into her past and was prepared to confront her with it.
The more she thought about it, the more she concluded that Rafe had been wrong to tell her to wait before talking to Phil Meade. She should have confronted him immediately the previous night. Phil owed her an apology for disputing her need to call on Richard to fix the generator—and the quicker she told him that, the better. Dealing with Phil was like removing a Band-Aid. Getting it over in one painful yank was much better than a series of throbbing tugs.
She glanced at her watch. A quarter to two. She’d planned to spend the remainder of the afternoon inventorying the damage to the church grounds. She’d also hoped to go see how the little house she shared with her mother had fared during the storm. Both chores left plenty of time for a brief detour to see Phil Meade at the command center. Why not visit him right now?
Ann had never been inside Glory’s emergency command center, but she remembered Rafe saying it was part of police headquarters.
She hadn’t slept a wink during the height of the storm, and although no one had sought shelter inside the church, she’d made sure that everything was ready for the aftermath. Ann had managed a nap between three and six in the morning. Then she’d spent more than an hour reshelving the cans of food and bottles of water she’d hauled out of the church’s pantry the day before. She also returned a dozen still-wrapped camp cots to the basement storeroom and restacked the accompanying blankets.
Two of the church’s elders had arrived at eight to evaluate the damage to the building, including Maury Collins, a licensed building inspector. “God watched over us,” he’d said. “The storm could have taken down the whole steeple and destroyed the roof, but it didn’t. The top three-quarters of the steeple is gone, but the base is still firmly attached to the roof. Most of the church’s heavy-duty shingles survived, leaving the interior of the roof dry. The bottom line is that the church building is perfectly safe to use and replacing the steeple will be a straightforward repair job. We’ll look like our old selves in a few months.”
Ann walked north on Broad Street. She sidestepped a few dozen broken branches strewn along the pavement and walked past several battered garbage cans that must have been propelled by Gilda’s peak winds. The sidewalks were littered with random pieces of wood wrenched from homes and buildings, dozens of unlucky roof shingles, and numerous slabs of torn-away siding.
Ann gazed east on Main Street as she walked through the intersection and saw three large trees toppled on their sides. One had smashed the front window of a fancy boutique. The street sign at the corner of Main and Broad had been bent in half like a paper clip, a testimony to the power of a hurricane. She reminded herself that Glory had escaped the worst of Gilda’s winds. What would the town look like this afternoon if the hurricane had made a direct hit? she wondered. It was awful to even think about.
The few vehicles on the street were trucks driven by repair personnel. The citizenry of Glory had wisely followed the police department’s advice to keep the streets clear of cars. The traffic lights were cycling green, yellow and red, which meant that the electricity had been restored to downtown. Ann heard the whine of power saws in the distance—a surprisingly reassuring noise signaling another step in the journey to restore normalcy to Glory.
Ann crossed to the western side of Broad Street and walked past Glory Baptist Church. Gilda had shattered the church’s illuminated sign, throwing plastic letters across the front lawn and driveway. The only intact part of the sign was the pastor’s name at the top. The sight of it made Ann wish that the pastor of Glory Community Church, Daniel Hartman, was home. He was a good listener, always supportive, and chock-full of practical wisdom. The very sort of person she needed to talk to right now.
Well, don’t expect to have your hand held for another day or two. Daniel is rushing home from his honeymoon so that he can comfort people who’ve suffered serious loss, not people who can’t seem to get along.
Daniel and Lori were scheduled to arrive in Norfolk at dinnertime, but they would still have the challenge of driving to Glory. Several of the roads from the airport had been directly under the storm, and they might be flooded out or closed by debris. But Ann knew Daniel—news of a dead choir member and a smashed steeple would encourage him to press on no matter what. Please, God, don’t let him take foolish risks.
She made a mental note: Open up and air out the church’s manse on Oliver Street. And if the supermarket on King Street is open, pick up eggs, milk, bread and a few other staples for the Hartman’s refrigerator.
Ann turned left on Campbell Street. Without thinking, she looked to the right, expecting to see the tip of Glory Community’s steeple in the distance, over the rooftops.
With God’s help, she thought, everything would soon be back to normal. But can we rely on God’s help? He’s been spotty when it comes to helping me.
A few more steps brought Ann to the front of Glory’s redbrick police headquarters. The building was alive with people coming and going. A sign outside told her the emergency command center in the back had its own entrance. She followed the paved path to a utilitarian cinder-block structure. She hesitated, then pushed the intercom button.
“Ann Trask to see Phil Meade.”
Moments later, the door swung open. Phil had come to get her. Without greeting her, he stepped backward from the door and waved her in.
Ann followed him into a large, brightly lit room full of computer monitors. The screens were blank; the command center didn’t seem to be commanding anything.
“We’re getting ready to shut down the command center,” Phil said, as if reading her mind. “Another ten minutes and you would have missed me. I’d have gone back to my day job.”
Ann nodded. She knew that Phil ran a successful consulting business helping small cities enhance their emergency preparedness.
He continued, “What can I do for you?”
“We need to talk,” Ann said.
He led her to an especially large desk in the back of the room. “Okay. Let’s talk.”
Ann hoped her expression communicated geniality. “Let me begin by saying that you upset me last night. There’s no way that I can defend myself against that kind of attack. All I can say is that Richard Squires was my friend, too. I certainly didn’t intend to put him in harm’s way. Neither did I mean to shift any blame to Richard—I know he worked hard to keep the generator running. I spoke in anger last night, and that was wrong of me. Please forgive me.”
He gestured toward a chair next to his desk. “I should have offered you a seat when you came in. I seem to have forgotten my manners, and for that I apologize. Let’s both sit down.”
“Thank you.” She dropped into the seat, watching Phil’s face as he settled into the swivel chair behind his desk. He seemed much less belligerent than the night before. Perhaps the worst was over?
He made a small grimace and said, “I also want to apologize if anything I said suggested that you purposely hurt Richard Squires. I know that isn’t true.”
She offered a tentative smile to signal her acceptance of his apology.
“But,” Phil went on, “I completely reject your argument that a quirk of fate put Richard in the church parking lot at the exact instant that the steeple came tumbling down. He was there for one reason—you called him.”
Ann tried to read the expression on Phil’s face but couldn’t decipher his mood. Nonetheless, despite his harsh words, she and Phil seemed to be engaged in a civil conversation, with each participant listening patiently to the other. So far, so good.
“I’ve thought long and hard about last night, and I feel certain about one thing,” Ann said. “If I cou
ld do it all over again, I would still call Richard. My decision to ask him for help was the right thing to do. In the hours before Gilda struck Glory, everyone I spoke to anticipated a disaster, saying that the power would fail within hours. For that reason, it was absolutely necessary that our backup generator work reliably. It would be our sole source of lighting and ventilation. Without it, the church couldn’t have accommodated anyone seeking refuge from the storm. Last night, you accused me of being afraid of the dark. To some extent, you’re right. I was afraid that a dark and powerless church would be a useless emergency shelter.”
Phil frowned deeply. Ann thought about stopping but decided to keep going. She might as well say all that she’d come to say. “As you know, the power in Glory was off all night. In fact, it was still off early this morning when I left the church. But our backup generator worked perfectly all night, thanks to Richard.”
“Are you finished?” Phil asked. “Or do you have additional self-serving claptrap to present to me?” He held up both hands, his palms facing Ann. “Please go without saying anything more. I don’t enjoy proving that you are a liar.”
“Nothing I’ve said to you has been a lie,” Ann said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice.
“Oh, but it has, Ann. The worst kind of lie—a lie to yourself.” Phil stood and perched on the edge of his desk, leaning toward her. “All of us concerned with public safety occasionally make poor decisions. That goes with the territory, because emergency situations force us to stick our necks out.
“I wouldn’t fault you if you’d made a simple mistake last night. But that’s not what happened. You didn’t arrive at a thoughtful decision to bring Richard to the church for the benefit of people who might have to stay in the shelter. You called him because you were frightened.”
Ann wanted to argue, but the curiously confident look on Phil’s face made her hesitate.
“I want you to hear something,” Phil said. He lifted a compact tape recorder from a drawer and placed it on his desk. “We record all of the telephone calls coming in to the emergency command center.”
