Storm Season

by Charlotte Douglas

  “I love you,” I said.

  I realized then how foolish my jealousy had been. At that moment, I didn’t worry that Bill might fall in love with his ex-wife. I simply prayed that he and all of us survived the coming storm and that I would see him again.

  CHAPTER 10

  The sun wouldn’t set for two hours, but daylight had become a moot point. A thick pall of clouds rotated in a semicircular band from the southeast, forerunners of the storm. Sharon had turned on the inside lights an hour ago. Battery-operated fluorescent lanterns stood at the ready, scattered throughout the house. Seasoned storm veterans, Sharon and I knew that the use of candles merely added another level of danger to an already perilous situation.

  When I’d carried in the ax Bill had given me and placed it in the hall closet nearest the attic opening and out of Jessica’s reach, Sharon hadn’t commented, but I’d seen the shock in her eyes.

  “Dave called while you were putting up shutters,” she said. “They’ve made all traffic lanes off the Gulf beaches eastbound, but cars are still backed up all the way across the causeways. The police are working hard to get everyone off the roads and into shelters as soon as possible.”

  “Thank God I left when I did—” Kimberly turned a whiter shade of pale, and her eyes grew round behind her designer frames “—or I’d be stuck out there, too.”

  Exhausted by fussing and crying, Jessica, clutching her favorite stuffed lamb and sucking her thumb, had fallen asleep on the family-room rug. Sharon lifted her, took her into her bedroom and tucked her into her crib.

  Sharon returned to the family room, where the French doors remained uncovered, and the outside lights illuminated shrubs and tree branches, twisted and tossed by the gusting winds. Fallen clumps of Spanish moss and a growing mat of twigs and small branches dotted the lawn. From the entertainment center, the television broadcast continual local weather coverage and satellite photos showed the massive storm inching northeast across the Gulf.

  “All we can do now is wait,” Sharon said.

  According to the forecast, Harriet was hours away but maintaining her relentless advance toward Tampa Bay. The oven and refrigerator were filled with food, but none of us had an appetite, not even the usually ravenous Kimberly, whose anxiety had apparently passed a gastronomical tipping point.

  “Let’s tackle those boxes of letters,” I said.

  “Letters?” Sharon asked.

  We had all been so preoccupied with preparations, I hadn’t had a chance until now to explain anything to Sharon other than Kimberly’s being a client who was sheltering with me. When Sharon learned that her guest was Wynona Wisdom, her jaw dropped.

  “I read you every day. Your advice is awesome.”

  “And apparently deadly,” Kimberly said with a forced smile.

  But at Sharon’s words of praise, Kimberly stopped staring out the window at the whiplashed branches, and a bit of her color returned.

  Sharon pointed to the FedEx boxes I’d moved to the large farmhouse table in the eat-in kitchen. “Are those requests for advice?”

  I shook my head. “They’re mostly demands that Ms. Wisdom eat dirt and die.”

  I outlined briefly the facts of Sister Mary Theresa’s murder and the reasons Kimberly feared she’d been the target. “If Wynona Wisdom was the intended victim,” I concluded, “I’m hoping one of these letters will lead us to the shooter.”

  “Okay,” Sharon said, “judging from the newspaper column left by the shooter in the hotel, we should look for any letters from a man whose wife left him on Wynona’s advice?”

  “Specifically if that man’s writing from prison,” Kimberly added. “I’ve counseled hundreds of women to get out of bad marriages. Letters from angry ex-husbands may be a common theme among the threats.”

  We sat around the table and I dug into the first box for a handful of letters for each of us. For several long minutes, the only sounds inside were the rustlings of papers and from outdoors the keening of wind through the trees. At one point, we all jumped when a broken branch clattered against the shutter on the kitchen window.

  We shared nervous laughter and settled back to reading.

  “Ewwwww,” Sharon said with disgust after perusing the first few lines of a letter. She dangled it between her thumb and forefinger at arm’s length toward Kimberly. “This one’s a real sicko. A blow-by-blow description of your slow and painful death.”

  I took the letter. As a cop’s wife, Sharon had been exposed to more details of mayhem and murder than the average woman, but she didn’t need such graphic description, especially under the current harrowing circumstances. Neither did Kimberly.

  “Any more like these,” I said to both of them, “just place them in my stack and I’ll read them.”

  I finished scanning the sadistic account but found no clue to the writer’s background or what had set him off. The envelope was postmarked from a small town in Maine.

  “He’s probably not the gunman,” Kimberly said. “Mary Theresa’s death wasn’t gruesome enough for his taste. Also, if that letter is similar to other slasher threats I’ve received, an analysis will reveal that this guy’s too impotent to act on his fantasies.”

  The phone rang and Sharon picked up the portable handset beside her. “It’s for you.”

  She handed me the phone. I took it and moved into the living room out of earshot of the others.

  “Just checking in while the phone still works,” Bill said. “Everything okay over there?”

  “We’re catching up on our correspondence. How about you?”

  “Trish was climbing the walls, so I made a pitcher of margaritas. I can’t believe she drank the whole thing. She’s passed out on the sofa and should sleep through the storm. I only hope I don’t have to carry her into the attic if the water rises. She’s put on weight since the divorce.”

  “Which one? From you or Harvey?”

  “Probably both.”

  God would get me, maybe before the storm was over, but I silently celebrated Trish’s extra pounds. She’d been entirely too beautiful in her early years and, although we’d both grown older, I welcomed any defects in Bill’s ex-wife that leveled the current playing field.

  “You been watching the weather?” Bill asked.

  “Off and on.”

  “The latest report says the Bermuda High is starting to shift. If it slides south far enough and fast enough, it could steer the storm away from us.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Harriet will be a Cat Five with thirty-foot storm surge and one-hundred-and-eighty-mile-an-hour gusts when she hits.”

  I sighed. “Life in Pelican Bay didn’t used to be so scary.”

  “Yes, it did. You grew up with Priscilla, remember?”

  I laughed. Talking with Bill always made me feel better. “Speaking of Mother, she’s with Caroline and Hunt in New York City. As far as my mother and sister are concerned, whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop.”

  “I’ll keep checking in as long as the phones work,” Bill said. “Take care, Margaret. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  I took the phone, joined Sharon and Kimberly again at the table and pushed away thoughts of Bill and Trish alone in the intimacy of our house. I picked up the next letter from my stack and read through it.

  “We can put God on our list of suspects,” I said when I finished.

  “You’re kidding?” Sharon said.

  I shook my head. “According to this woman, he’s going to strike Wynona Wisdom dead because she advised the writer’s middle-aged son to get a life of his own and not be a doormat for his elderly mother. Apparently, Wynona incited the son to break the Honor Thy Father And Mother commandment, and God is pissed.”

  As if on cue, lightning struck nearby with a concurrent crash of thunder.

  “He sounds pissed,” Kimberly said with a shudder.

  Sharon took the next item from her stack. “Here’s a letter from Pe
lican Bay,” she said in surprise.

  “Let me see.” I took the letter, read it, then checked the return address on the envelope. “Wrong Pelican Bay. This is from the maximum security prison by the same name in California. This guy’s angry, but he’s also, if you can believe what he’s written, serving a life sentence without parole.”

  I put the letter in the stack we’d designated for suspects.

  Kimberly frowned. “Why save his letter? Didn’t you say he’s in prison for life? How could he be our shooter?”

  “He can’t,” I said. “But he could have called in a favor from one of his friends on the outside. I’ll check him out.”

  Another tree limb crashed into the house, this time against one of the French doors. Rain, driven sideways by the wind, sounded like scattershot when it hit the glass panes and the lights in the house flickered. At my feet beneath the table in his doggie lounger, Roger slept through it all. The only sounds my stalwart canine feared were vacuum cleaners and flying insects.

  Sharon rose from her chair. “I’d better lower the rest of the shutters before we lose power.”

  She pushed a switch beside the wall of French doors and the panels slid down with a rumble, closing off our last outside view.

  I wasn’t usually claustrophobic. In my years with the Tampa PD, I’d worked in a windowless office. But this confinement was different. Not having visual access to the outside where the storm raged was nerve-racking. The weather maps on television, the concussion of thunder, the impact of debris hitting the house and, most horrifying, the unrelenting howl of the wind were our only clues to what was happening around us. As the storm grew in ferocity, stepping outside to check would no longer be an option. Many people would dare, either to satisfy their curiosity, videotape the catastrophe or face the storm’s wrath rather than endure the suffocating claustrophobia. But those foolish enough to leave shelter would run the risk of being impaled by wind-driven debris, electrocuted by downed power lines or bitten by snakes or rats, driven from their burrows by rising water.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Sharon came back into the kitchen from lowering the shutters in the family room. “We should get something to eat before—”

  The explosion of a nearby transformer blasted over the roar of the wind; Kimberly uttered a high-pitched shriek, and the lights and television went off, plunging the house into total darkness without ambient light from outside to alleviate the pitch-black.

  I fumbled for the fluorescent lantern on the tabletop beside me and turned it on. Sharon flicked on a similar light in the kitchen and carried it down the hall to check on Jessica. She returned a few seconds later.

  “She must have worn herself out fussing. Not even the transformer blowing woke her.”

  In the sickly blue glow of the lantern, Kimberly looked anxious and ill.

  “Maybe we should get something to eat,” I said, “and take a break from these letters.”

  “Need some help?” Kimberly asked Sharon.

  I caught Sharon’s eye and nodded. Kimberly would fare better staying busy.

  “Sure,” Sharon said. “You can slice the roast for sandwiches while I toss a salad.”

  Kimberly went to the sink, washed her hands and started carving thin slices of beef off the roast Sharon had removed earlier from the oven. Sharon had turned on the battery-operated radio, where the television channels were broadcasting the latest storm coordinates for those who’d lost power. Harriet had moved up the coast, parallel to Naples, but was still offshore, still strengthening and still bearing toward Tampa Bay.

  We were all scared. Fear hung in the room like a noxious cloud. Sharon switched off the radio. We’d all go crazy if we concentrated on every detail of Harriet’s forward progress.

  I fed Roger, clipped on his lead and took him through the attached garage to the side door. We stepped out under the eaves, protected from the wind that blew against the far side of the house, while Roger did his business. When we returned inside, Sharon and Kimberly had shoved aside the piles of letters to set supper on the table.

  With a nod toward Kimberly, Sharon said to me, “Maybe you should tell us some of your stupid criminal stories from your patrol days in Tampa.”

  Sharon had never been much of a talker, but she recognized the need to keep our minds off the storm. We took our seats again and I searched my memory for tales from my early days as Bill’s partner, stories that would lighten the heavy atmosphere in the room.

  “The stupidest criminals were the convenience store robbers,” I said. “My first year on the force, a nineteen-year-old drug addict went into a store on Dale Mabry, plopped a twenty on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the robber pulled a gun and demanded all the money in the register. The clerk complied, the robber took the money and fled.”

  Kimberly looked at me, waiting for the punch line.

  “He left his twenty on the counter,” I said. “But there was less than twelve dollars in the cash drawer. Prosecutors were scratching their heads over that one. If a guy pulls a gun on you and gives you money, is it robbery?”

  “You’re making this up,” Kimberly said, but at least she was smiling and had lost her deer-in-the-headlights look.

  I shook my head. “It’s on the record. As is the case of the beer thief. He stole two six-packs at knifepoint. When the clerk accused him of not being old enough to drink, the guy was insulted. He pulled out his wallet and shoved his driver’s license in the clerk’s face to prove his age. The clerk memorized the name and address and we arrested the jerk at his house twenty minutes later.”

  For the next hour, I told stories while we ate and the wind and rain grew stronger. With supper finished, we returned to the letters. Another hour and our pile of suspect letters had barely grown. Most of the other written threats against Wynona Wisdom had been too vague or untraceable to be helpful.

  The weather was deteriorating quickly. The breaks of calm between feeder bands lessened, the rain poured harder and the wind grew fiercer. We’d adjusted to the lack of light, but the hours without air-conditioning were taking a toll. The house was hot, stuffy and humid, making breathing more difficult and life in general miserable.

  And it was going to get worse before it got better.

  A blast of wind shook the house. Outside, a horrendous snap, like a giant stepping on a mammoth twig, sounded above the gale. A second later, a crash rocked the building. Roger leaped from his bed in a frenzy of barking, tangling in my legs as I pushed from the table.

  With the sound of splintering wood and the house’s shudder came a scream from Jessica’s room.

  Sharon grabbed a lantern and raced down the hallway. I took another lantern and followed.

  We both stopped short in the doorway, unable to enter. The branches of a gigantic pine filled the baby’s room, blocking our access to the crib.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Mommy, Mommy, want out!”

  Rain poured through the yawning gap in the roof, and intruding wind shook the fallen branches of the pine.

  “Mommy’s coming, sweetie,” Sharon called. She was trying without luck to climb through the tangle of tree limbs.

  In the hall behind me, Kimberly was talking to the 9-1-1 operator on her cell phone. “Yes, I know there’s a hurricane coming, but we have a toddler trapped in her bedroom by a fallen tree. We need help.” She turned to me. “What’s the address here?”

  I gave her the street and number, then reached into the hall closet and grabbed the ax Bill had left. At the door of Jessica’s room, I pulled Sharon by the arm. “Get out of my way. I’ll try to cut through to her.”

  I hacked at a limb the size of my arm. Sweat and rain poured into my eyes, and the concussion from the ax caused the tree’s needles to lash my face. The pungent odor of pine sap mixed with the smell of wet insulation and drywall had filled the room. With every blow of the ax, Jessica cried harder. I prayed her tears came from fright, not injuries. Sharon
kept up a flow of reassurances in a futile effort to calm the child.

  “Fire and rescue’s on the way,” Kimberly called out.

  My muscles burned from their unaccustomed exertion, but Jessica’s pitiful cries kept me going. When I’d cleaved the heavy limb, Kimberly, Sharon and I grabbed it to pull it aside, but its movement shifted the entire tree, dropping it a few inches farther into the room.

  “Stop!” I yelled, afraid the trunk would crush the crib and Jessica with it. “We’ll have to wait for the firefighters.”

  Sharon whimpered. She would have chewed through the branches with her teeth if she’d thought the action would get her closer to Jessica, but all she could do was talk to the little girl.

  “Mommy’s here,” Sharon called in a calm voice at odds with the panic on her face. “As soon as the nice men come to take the tree out of your room, Mommy will come get you, sweetie.”

  Jessica screamed louder. So did the wind.

  Then, above the strident duet of child and weather came the blessed sound of sirens.

  “Thank God,” Sharon murmured.

  Kimberly, still connected to 9-1-1 on her cell, told the operator, “I can hear them coming.”

  “Tell the operator to alert the crews that the tree is shifting and might crush the child if it isn’t braced,” I told her.

  Kimberly relayed the information. Sharon kept up her patter of words, and Jessica continued to cry. I looked around for Roger and found him huddled in his bed beneath the kitchen table.

  Now the sound of engines and grinding gears joined the sirens as the rescue trucks approached. I ordered Roger to stay and went onto the porch as a line of vehicles pulled to a halt at the curb. A ladder truck, a paramedics van and another engine, lights flashing, killed their sirens, and men in turnout gear poured from the vehicles, their neon-yellow slickers shiny with rain in the pulsing emergency lights.

  Joe Fenton, a paramedic I knew well from my days on PBPD, bounded onto the porch. I explained the life-threatening situation in Jessica’s room.

  “Is the kid injured?” he shouted above the wind.