“No, child, you needed me. I cannot take your money.”
“Thank you,” I said automatically, because that’s what I was raised to say. Inside was different. Thank you for messing with my head. Thank you for making me crazier than I already am. Thanks but no thanks, lady.
I took two sedate steps to the door, entered the dark world outside, and ran like the devil himself was on my heels. My blue shift rode up my thighs, my ballet flats slapped the pavement. The alley was longer than I remembered. I ran past a couple feeling each other up against a wall, the woman gasping but her eyes following me, the man groaning against her, oblivious. I ran past an old man on a pile of newspapers and gagged at his stench, then shuddered with guilt. I ran until I reached the safety of the thrashing crowd, and I threw myself into it headlong.
The crowd swept me along this time, and I bodysurfed through it. I needed to get home to Annalise. I needed Nick. I needed everything to be all right.
Chapter Thirty-five
I woke at noon the next day wearing the blue linen dress from the night before, lying atop my covers. Birds chirped. The sun shone. A soft breeze wafted through my southeastern windows. It was perfect, and it was awful. I missed Nick so much the floor of my heart was caving in and falling through the roof of my stomach. I texted him and told him so.
I changed into drawstring-waist navy gym shorts and a tank top and Oso and I trudged toward the gate to water the cursed new bougainvillea. On the horizon, the sky looked black. By the time we reached the gate, a stiff wind was blowing. I looked at my iPhone hoping to see Nick’s name. I didn’t. But I did see a message from Ava, who I’d found in the crowds and driven home the night before.
“Batten down the hatches, Empress,” it read. “Big storm coming.”
I stared at the fast-approaching darkness. She wasn’t lying. “Oh, that’s great.” I said to Oso, who cocked his head and wagged his tail.
I shuffled back up to the sulking hulk of Annalise. When I’d first come back from Corpus Christi, I drove up the driveway in my big pickup and Annalise was sparkling. She’d radiated the energy of a child excited to see Daddy home from a business trip. Or maybe it was the sun in my eyes and the truck bouncing along the bumps, but whatever it was, the aura from Annalise was bright.
But quickly the mood in the house had fallen flat. When I pressed my face against her cool concrete walls and told her I was back to take care of her while Nick and Taylor were away, it grew quiet inside, the air heavy. I had yelled at her. “I’m the one you wanted, the one who saved you. What about me?” She had stayed in a funk ever since.
Now, I entered the somber house and checked the weather on my iPhone. Ava spoke true. Hurricane Ira was barreling toward St. Marcos and was expected to make landfall as a Category Four storm that very night. It was already nearly noon. “How could I have missed this?” I railed. But I knew the answer. I’d been in a self-absorbed stupor.
I checked the Saffir-Simpson storm rating system online and cringed. A Category Four meant sustained winds of 131–155 miles per hour, with wall and roof failures, signs blown down, and a high risk of damage from windblown debris. Alarm bells rang in my head.
I rifled through the stack of wedding cards and bills on the kitchen island for the hurricane checklist Nick and I made for his parents a few weeks before. I’d probably be without power and water for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but we’d stocked the house and Rashidi had coached us on this. Time to set to it.
Lightning flashed outside. It smelled like gunpowder laced with the heavy scent of rain. It was preternaturally still for a moment, and then the heavens exploded downward.
If the cisterns weren’t already full, the rain would soon top them off. I jammed on a rain hat and walked outside to check the diesel in the generator. The air was so heavy I almost needed to part it with my hands. The tank level read full. Good. I grabbed the clicker from my truck and walked to the end of the driveway to point it at the gate a football field away. I clicked it open so I could get out no matter what. Water was pouring off the sides of my hat. I shook it off and went back inside to verify my supply of candles and matches and fill the coolers with ice so the icemaker would make more.
Rashidi had stressed that the most important task was to protect the windows, because the only ones with hurricane glass were across the back of the great room and above the front door. So I jammed my rain hat back on and got out my ladders in the torrential downpour to survey the thirty-seven windows I’d have to barricade. I knew it would take several hours and require me to perch the ladder on the third-floor balconies to reach the highest windows.
“Son of a bitch!” I screamed. I needed my inner warrior, not my inner nurturer. I cursed the fortune-teller. Then I got to work. I decided to attack the highest, scariest windows first.
“You are not a human lightning rod,” I lied aloud to myself. “You are grounded and safe.” But doing this without Nick had left me anything but grounded. I was a literal and emotional lightning rod.
The wooden shutters were permanently attached to the house. When open, they latched to the outside wall. To close them, I had to climb up and unlatch the first side, then climb down and move the ladder, then climb back up and unlatch the other side, then climb down and move the ladder. Finally, I would climb back up and place a thick wooden beam in the slots on the outside of the closed shutters.
F-word. F-word, f-word, f-word. I swallowed the lump in my throat and put my foot on the first rung.
Over the next three hours, I climbed and re-climbed the slippery ladder steps, constantly wiping water from my eyes. More than once, I found myself facing a creature I didn’t want to see: once a big centipede, another time a bat. I bit my lip and blinked back the tears. There would be time enough to cry later, and I promised myself one hell of a cry. I peered into the distance, hoping to see I don’t know what, but the sky was too dark with clouds and rain to see anything farther than a few feet away. I felt more alone than I ever had in my life.
Finally, I dropped the beam across the last set of shutters on the ground floor. I shivered. The rain had soaked through me, and I was cold. As I walked back around to the garage, I remembered for the first time that there were no shutters on the music room’s domed cathedral windows. And that there was still a big fat hole below one of them with exposed wiring. I stared at the windows and tried to process that. Finally I went into the garage and searched for extra shutters, although what I planned to do with them if I found any, I didn’t know, because I had no clue how to install them.
I didn’t find shutters, but I did find a piece of plywood. I ran to the laptop to get some information on how to use plywood to protect a window. There was no internet connection.
“Of course,” I muttered.
I went and found my iPhone, which glared its bright red low-battery bar at me.
“Double crap,” I said, and plugged it in. I started to go to the phone’s internet browser and then noticed: no bars. No internet, no phone. I was by myself. I had hurried so fast to prepare Annalise that I hadn’t let Nick know what was happening. The winds howled with me.
I looked for the biggest, toughest, thickest nails I could find and took them, a hammer, and the plywood outside to the window. I covered the windows and the hole below and sucked in the woody scent greedily, a smell I normally didn’t like. I slammed the hammer against the nail heads with all my strength to get them through the plywood into the concrete. The complete darkness of a stormy night descended before I had finished. I had done the best I could, and I was out of time.
Through the blowing rain, headlights swept across my driveway and came at me up the drive. It was a really big SUV with dark windows. I shielded my eyes from the rain with my tented hand and tried to look strong and confident. Had opportunistic thugs already started preying on the helpless while the storm had barely started heating up?
Jacoby jumped out of the car, which he left running. Giddy relief surged through me. Not a thug! He leaned
into the wind and made his way over to me, raising his deep voice over the gale. “I passing by from the West End station on the way back east to check out a tip on some funny business at Fortuna’s.”
“In this weather?” I yelled.
“Yah mon. The chief retiring soon, and Assistant Chief Tutein taking his place. I want to close a case up good for the old man.” He sounded like he didn’t want to do this. “You gonna be all right, Katie?”
I threw my arms around his solid body and he let me hug him. “Oh, Jacoby, I’m so glad to see a friendly face.”
He leaned back and peered down at me like I’d said I lived on Saturn and ate breakfast at midnight wearing silk taffeta. “Nobody ever accuse me of that before,” he said.
I let him go and laughed. “I’m going to be OK, but if you’d asked me an hour ago, I might have given you a different answer.” I looked at his car, expecting to see his partner watching him in abject worship. “Where’s Morris?”
“He got a wife and kids. Taking care of family dem.”
Jacoby only had his grandmother. His brother Michael had drowned a year before. I nodded.
He started to walk away, then stopped and turned back to me. “Remember you ask me to look into the holes in your walls?”
“Yes.” I held my wet hair back from my face with both hands.
“What I hear, the man that build your house die in prison. Before he die, he tell his cellmate that he put his treasures in the walls of Annalise. When he get free, the cellmate reach back to St. Marcos and he carry the story with him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. For true.” He grinned. “Seem Junior telling that story, anyway.”
I wiped water from my face. “Now I just have to figure out how to make it stop.”
“Good luck with that.” He walked to my plywood shutter on the front corner of the house. He shook it and nodded, then stepped back, almost bumping into the flamboyant tree. Water coursed around its base, digging trenches through the now-exposed roots. “This rain too much.” He chuptzed and shook his head. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too. Thanks for coming by.”
The black SUV drove off into the night.
It continued to rain for the next few hours, and then the wind showed me that it was playing to win, that its strength before was a mere warm-up. I gathered up the three flashlights I could find, checked their batteries, and stashed them carefully: one on the kitchen island, one in the great room, and one on my bedside table.
The power was still on, so although I didn’t have internet, I had light. I sat on the great room sofa and wrote a letter to Nick the old-fashioned way, on a legal pad half-filled with notes I had made during the construction of Annalise. Just as I finished writing, a picture of Nick, Taylor, and me toppled over and crashed to the tile floor from the sturdy wooden coffee table. The ceramic frame and the glass shattered.
I held my breath and tested my senses. Not a single puff of wind was moving in the room. No tremors were shaking the house. Annalise stood silent and still.
But I sensed the presence of something else, of someone else. That part of me that connected to Nick, the part that had been disconnected for the last few days, responded as if he were there in the room. I could feel him.
“I am right here, my love,” I whispered.
I folded my letter in thirds and stuck it in an envelope to address later. Off went the lights, and my heart lurched into my throat. The wind howled like a fiend. The clock on my laptop screen read straight-up midnight, the witching hour.
This is when the power has to go out?
The lights flickered back on as the generator powered up. I knew wind plus burning fuel is a dangerous mix. I needed to go outside and switch the automatic generator off, but when I opened the side door, the wind hit me with the force of a train, knocking me back into the house. I leaned forward, ready for it this time, and pushed my way out the door. The rain and wind pounded me and I started to shiver. It felt as if every light in the world had burned out.
Shit, I thought. I’d forgotten the flashlight. I thought about going back for it, but decided not to give up the ground I’d gained so far. Besides, I didn’t really think it would do much good in that endless dark. I pressed on, dragging my hand along the house to stay oriented.
I walked up the driveway to the end of the house. I knew the generator was three feet directly in front of me, but I couldn’t see it, and I couldn’t hear it above the roar of the wind and rain. I took two giant steps forward into mud and ran into it. I felt along the upper front panel until I felt the lid to the control box. I put my face down to it until I could make out the lighted kill switch, then opened the cover and pressed the button.
I turned around and pressed the back of my legs against the generator. I moved a half step to my right then leaned forward and took two giant steps back to the house with my arms stretched out in front of me. There was nothing there. Panic flickered up hot from my center.
“Easy,” I said out loud. “Annalise didn’t blow away.” Yet.
I took another side step, forward and to the right. My foot hit the house and as fast as I could, I walked hand over hand back to the metal door to the mudroom. I pulled it open and the wind flung it against the house. I stepped around the door and threw my weight into it, leaning and dragging it with me as I backed into the house until the door clicked shut.
The immediate break from the wind and noise was deafening. I could hear my teeth chattering as I threw the lock and crossed out of the mudroom. I closed that door behind me, too. I knew I would not leave the house again until the storm passed, whenever that was.
I walked carefully in the dark back into the great room from memory, toward the glow of my laptop. I lit the candelabra by its meager illumination and then shut the computer off to conserve the battery.
The wind screamed and the house creaked and groaned. Annalise had thick, strong walls, but what about the roof? What would I do if the wind found a weak spot in a corner and peeled it off like the pop-top of an old-fashioned Red Stripe can? What if I hadn’t latched the shutters properly? I cut myself short. I had done all I could.
All around the island, I knew, people were mixing Hurricanes and riding out the storm. I had no doubt at that moment that if I had passion fruit juice, grenadine, and rum, it would all be over except for the hangover.
I picked up the candelabra and gravitated toward my grandmother’s piano in the music room. The candlelight shone perfection against the aqua walls and bounced off the polished wood of the old upright piano. It was practically the only piece of furniture I’d moved from the states to St. Marcos, and I loved my memories of singing Christmas carols between my mom and her mother on the wooden bench. I turned toward the bookshelf and held the candles close to read the titles of my books of sheet music.
Thinking of my family led my thoughts to Nick and Taylor. A deep sadness started in my heart and slowly seeped all the way down to my toes. As I pulled down a book of famous tunes from musicals, a yellow sticky floated to the ground. I retrieved it and read the words, “Smile. You sing like an angel.” I placed a hand on my heat-flooded cheek and knew that Nick was there with me.
The book opened as if of its own accord to “That’s All I Ask of You.” I had never played it, but I remembered seeing Julie’s sheet music at the Kovacs’ house. I heard the song in my head, the haunting melody building into an emotional crescendo. I set the book on the music stand and picked out the notes. Maybe they could take me back to Texas, to Port Aransas, to my family.
Slowly, I began to play the song recognizably as the winds rose around me. After half an hour, my back ached. My fingers were out of shape, and the underused ring and pinky fingers grew tired, but I didn’t stop. I finally reached the point where my fingers were confident enough to allow my voice to join them. It cracked on the first words, so filled with longing, so fitting to this moment. I sang at the top of my lungs and played as loud as I could, and Oso joined
me, cocking his head. Kitty, who almost never graced me with her presence and was only inside because of the storm, wandered into the room. Caught up in the music, I felt strangely at peace.
Then—wham!
I jerked my hands back, knocking my knees into the piano and the book off the stand. The candelabra wobbled. Oso jumped up and barked.
Wham!
Kitty ran out of the room to her hiding place under Taylor’s bed.
Wham!
Wham!
Wham!
I ran into the kitchen in the dark. The noise had come from the hallway to the garage. I stepped closer and saw the mudroom door slamming repeatedly. What in the world would cause an interior door to come open? Oso crept in front of me, then stopped halfway between me and the mudroom, growling. I snatched my flashlight from the kitchen island and switched it on.
Wham!
Wham!
I had locked the outside dogs in the garage, and they were silent. So it wasn’t as if it were something human or alive thumping the door. I told myself I had no reason to be afraid.
But rounding the corner into the hallway, my beam struck the whites of someone’s eyes. I screamed and stopped within inches of my beautiful friend Annalise, her pupils stark against their whites and her black face almost hidden by the darkness. She didn’t shy away from the glaring light, just nodded at me and stepped out of my way. I put my hand to my throat and faced the errant door, grasped its knob, and pulled it shut. When I turned to thank her, she was not there. While I was wondering if I’d just imagined her, I heard another noise, and that one terrified me.
It was the sound of wood cracking and a window shattering as if it were being pounded with a battering ram. The roar of the storm leapt through the window after it. Oso yelped and ran to the master bedroom and I wanted to follow him, but that was not a choice I could make.
Again, I made the long journey across the kitchen, following the flashlight’s illumination back into the music room, which really wasn’t much of a music room anymore. The plywood had disappeared. The lovely windows were strewn in tiny fragments across the floor. The giant, smooth tree trunk and wind-stripped branches of the flamboyant outside the window were now resting on the vestiges of my grandmother’s piano. The book of sheet music lay soaked under the rubble. The candelabra topped the pile, its flames snuffed out.
Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) Page 19
