Hurricane House

by Sandy Semerad

  Lilah sipped hers. “Yum, tastes like hazelnut.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” I stirred cream and a teaspoon of honey into my cup.

  Lilah nodded and smiled. “Very good.” She pointed to the triangular rose quartz on the coffee table. “I love your rocks. You said you were a collector and...” she paused to reach inside her tote. She withdrew a white box, held the box in her left palm, opened it with her right; then pulled out a large, tear-shaped crystal, dangling from a black ribbon. “I wanted you to have this. Sorry I didn’t wrap it.” I studied the crystal and saw a multitude of colors, blue, lavender and gold, even pink. “Beautiful...but...why give this to me? It’s not even my birthday.”

  Lilah tied the necklace around my neck and laughed. Her breath smelled like mint, no hint of coffee breath. “A psychic in New Orleans, named Martha, loaned this necklace to me. I call it my Mardi Gravestone, because Martha gave it to me after a graveyard tour.”

  I couldn’t stop looking at this stone. “I seem to remember you telling me about that. Wow, it’s huge. Sparkles like a diamond.”

  “Martha said it’s an aurora crystal from Vienna. It’s the finest in the world, a universe unto itself. Anointed water frozen into stone. It’s supposed to protect the wearer with the sun’s power, warding off evil spirits.”

  “If anyone needs to ward off evil, I do.”

  Lilah chuckled, as if she thought I was kidding, and picked up the rose quartz from the coffee table. “Martha said to use my discretion in passing on the necklace.” Lilah cleared her throat. “When she first gave it to me, I had no idea a crystal could possess powers, and from what you’ve said about your stone collecting, I thought you would love this one.”

  “I do, I really do,” I said, staring at the crystal. The longer I glanced at the stone I began to see images in the prism, and I know this sounds crazy, but I saw Adam’s face. My heart raced and my eyes burned. In fact, I felt so dizzy; I had to clutch the edge of the sofa to keep from fainting.

  Lilah touched my arm. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I managed to say. “I love the necklace. I really do.” “For me, it became warm and changed colors, as if to warn me.”

  I picked up the crystal again and thought I heard Adam’s voice. “Tara’s death wasn’t an accident.” I gulped back the scream that nearly erupted and took deep breaths to calm myself. For a moment I couldn’t speak.

  Lilah said, “I hope my visit hasn’t upset you.”

  I focused on the pad she’d given me, flipping through it in an effort to gain control of my emotions. “Oh, no, I’m glad you’re here, Lilah.” I tried to smile. “And I’m thrilled about the necklace you brought me, and I look forward to the reading your notes.

  Lilah blotted her lipstick with a napkin. “I knew you’d be chomping at the bit to investigate this.” Her green eyes widened. “I know you investigate claims, but didn’t you once tell me you’re a certified private eye?”

  I laughed nervously, thinking some private eye. I’m now seeing my dead fiancé and hearing his voice. “I’ve done a couple of jobs for hire, but that’s all.”

  Chapter Ten

  Geneva VanSant

  Geneva VanSant opened the front door to her beach townhouse, not knowing what to expect. The man in the hooded slicker, who’d been banging on the door, wiped the rain from his face and flashed a badge.

  “We’re evacuating Paradise Isle.” He pointed to her blue Mustang. “Your vehicle?”

  Geneva gave him a tired nod. “Are you saying I have to leave?”

  The wind blew the man’s hood off, exposing a brown crew cut. “Yes, Ma’am, for your own safety.”

  Geneva felt disconnected from her emotions as she watched him bend into the wind and disappear into the stormy night. Not much to pack, but what about Roxanne? Was she planning to stay? Geneva decided to call and find out.

  Unfortunately, she got Roxanne’s voice message: “You know the drill. Name and number after the beep.”

  Geneva preferred Roxanne’s old message: “Please hold, one of our representatives will be with you shortly.” This was followed by a verse of Woolly, Bully, and Roxanne’s imitation of Marilyn Monroe: “I forgot. We don’t have any representatives. Please leave a message.”

  “It’s Geneva. We’ve been ordered to evacuate. Call me.”

  While waiting for Roxanne, Geneva gathered her clothes and stuffed them inside her travel case. After five minutes and still no response from Roxanne, she opened her laptop computer and wrote: “The wind sounds like a chorus of whistling ghosts and promises to get worse. An officer knocked at my door, giving me the evacuation news. What should I do? Hurricane Donald threatens to make landfall by early tomorrow. Regardless, the reporter in me wants to stay even though I’m only a block away from the Gulf of Mexico.

  “It’s the blackest night I’ve ever seen, and I almost can’t stand to hear the roaring waves competing with the wind. I hate being alone in this. The lights are flickering. Thank God for laptops.”

  Geneva stopped writing to pace the living room and think. She looked out the front window and saw a river flowing through her street, sure to ruin her Mustang if she didn’t move it, and fast.

  She grabbed her luggage then ran to her car, where palm leaves and gravel-size hail hammered her windshield. Whatever fool said a car was the safest place in a thunderstorm hasn’t seen the wind and rain pulling at this Mustang. A dull ache worked at the back of her neck as she searched in her tote for car keys. Oh, no. Don’t tell me. She dumped out the contents, but the keys were nowhere among her makeup bag, film cans, pens, reporter’s pads, headache pills, and mounds of receipts. She then realized she must have locked the keys inside the town house, meaning she’d have to climb the balcony and get in through the sliding-glass door with the broken latch. Years ago the climb would have been a breeze for her, balance beam queen and gymnastic scholarship to Florida State. Back then, she didn’t have to compete with the rain and hail pelting her, but why let a little storm stop her now?

  She ran around to the back patio and positioned the table under the balcony’s edge. A poor little water bug clung desperately to the table’s edge. She identified with that little bug as she leaped up and grabbed the balcony railing. Once she hoisted her leg over she felt a wave of relief and thought the worse was over when she found her Seminole key ring on the kitchen counter where she’d left it.

  Moments later, she hopped back inside the Mustang, dripping wet, but with a new surge of confidence. That is until she turned the key in the ignition. Instead of hearing the engine, Geneva heard a hollow clicking sound. She tried pumping the gas and turning the ignition, but once again she heard the pitiful click and with each click, her hopes of evacuating flew away like the palm leaf on her windshield.

  The lights worked. Couldn’t be the battery.

  Click.

  After several hollow clicks, Geneva decided to give up on the Mustang. She grabbed her luggage and ran back inside the townhouse to call Roxanne again. “Hey, it’s Geneva. You’re not going to believe this, but my car won’t start. So I need a ride. If you don’t call me in the next couple of minutes, I’m wading over to the Pink Palace to get you. Whatever you do, don’t leave without me, okay?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ellen Langley

  The ringing phone jarred Ellen Langley awake. She had fallen asleep in Geneva’s guest suite without bothering to bathe. She rubbed her eyes and felt helpless as she listened to Geneva’s voice over the answering Machine. “Ellen, if you’re there, pick up.”

  Ellen wanted with all of her heart to pick up the phone and talk. But her voice failed her, even though she had gargled with warm salt water and slept like the dead.

  “Sleep, nature’s gentle nurse,” she remembered the words Shakespeare had written somewhere. However, in her case, sleep had failed her.

  After Geneva hung up, the phone rang a second time. Ellen clenched and unclenched her fists in despair. Had she truly lost her voice
? That would mean she’d have to leave this lovely suite, beige and pink and blue, fluffy king-size bed with tufted headboard.

  Ellen adored her new quarters: a sitting area with couch and recliner, her own desk, a computer hooked up to the Internet, an oak cabinet with television and stereo system, her own bathroom with vanity, bathtub and shower.

  She could sit at the computer and admire the view through the French doors or walk out on the patio and sit in the beautifully landscaped backyard guarded by cedar trees. If the rain would ever stop.

  She couldn’t believe her good fortune. For the first time in her life, she felt secure. She had never slept more comfortably. Ellen was Goldie Locks in Baby Bear’s bed, not too hard, not too soft, like floating on Aladdin’s carpet, only one thing wrong, that infernal clanging coming from somewhere.

  Ellen followed the noise to the screened-in back porch. Weirdest wind chimes she’d ever heard. Might be okay in a gentle breeze, but this is no gentle breeze, more like a tempest from hell.

  Ellen stretched out on the hammock and tried to accustom her ears to the clanging. She watched the cedar trees battle the wind. Rain had transformed the earth into a pond, creating a rainbow in the overflowing birdbath.

  The more she listened to the wind chimes, the more she thought of blue jays trying to sing, but she wouldn’t dare complain. Geneva’s house was a trillion times better than the road. And how sweet of her to leave fresh flowers with a note. Geneva even went to the trouble of hanging a terry-cloth robe in the bathroom with matching slippers and a bottle of milk bath. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Ellen couldn’t wait to soak in the tub. First she’d fix herself a sliced-turkey sandwich. She was determined to lose fifty pounds, if it killed her. No more soft drinks and candy. No more eating paper to curb her hunger.

  Yes, those days were gone. If she could get her voice back, change her life, and maybe start performing again. It wasn’t beyond reason.

  Ellen turned on the computer, thinking the Internet might hold the answer. Andrea Bowers at the Pascagoula truck stop thought everything could be found on the Internet. She had patiently taught Ellen all about computers and how to go on-line and do e-mail. It was Andrea who helped Ellen set up her own “Yahoo” account. Now she knew how to send and receive e-mails at public libraries using those computers for free.

  Ellen adored e-mail. How sweet, beyond sweet of Geneva to provide her with her very own computer.

  Chapter Twelve

  Maeva, Gerry, Alabama

  Despite my worries about the IRS audit, I cleaned my Alabama house and tried to adopt the “attitude of gratitude” my sister recommended, but the old cliché, “when it rains it pours” seemed much more realistic.

  If I felt any gratitude, it vanished while going through Adam’s things. I buried my nose in his leather jacket. His scent still lingered.

  I had a pity party, rereading all the letters and cards Adam had given me during our steamy ten-year relationship. In fact, I cried through a box of tissues. Then stuffed the memorabilia, along with his leather jacket, old FBI hat and “Roll Tide” sweat shirt, inside the cedar chest where I found the .357 Magnum he had given me on my birthday. I had forgotten about the gun, but decided to put it inside my duffle and take it on the road with me. Maybe I was paranoid after finding Tara’s body and finding out about the other missing women. Besides, I have a license to carry, though I prefer other means of self-defense like jujitsu.

  I glanced at the radio clock on the bed stand: 8:00 p.m. The day had zipped by and left me drained. I didn’t have the energy for anything except climbing into bed under the patchwork quilt.

  I soon drifted off to sleep, but my eyes shot open when I saw Tara’s body, as if it had been tattooed on my eyelids. My heart started pounding in my throat, like I was having a full-fledged anxiety attack. The stone in the crystal necklace felt hot. Lilah had said the stone possessed protective powers. Hoping it did, I willed its warmth to erase the horrible image of death, and before long, I fell into a deep sleep.

  An hour later, my growling stomach awakened me. I pulled back the covers, walked to the kitchen and fixed myself a bowl of honey-almond ice cream. When the ice cream didn’t satisfy, I fried a hamburger the size of a sirloin. “You eat like a farm hand, but weigh ninety-five pounds soaking wet,” Adam used to say.

  At 9:30 p.m., I carried the hamburger to the pine-paneled den. Bookcases filled the left side of the large room and family photographs covered the right wall. The photos were uneven, but I couldn’t make myself re-hang them, because Mom had agonized over every picture before she put them up like that.

  Holding my hamburger, I sank into the twenty-year-old cushy sofa in front of the big-screen television. I’d slept there many a night when my king-size bed felt too big and lonely. The sofa needed reupholstering but the patchwork quilt worked wonders, comforting me like an old friend’s hug.

  Before I took the first bite of my burger, I picked up the remote and clicked on the Weather Channel. The crystal turned hot when the Doppler radar showed Hurricane Donald’s red eye beneath Dolphin, moving faster than expected, “equal to the explosion of 400 twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs,” a female reporter said.

  Wearing a hooded raincoat, the reporter stood knee-deep in water and talked to a rain-splattered camera lens: “Weather Channel higher-ups want us to be around to cover the next hurricane, so they moved us inland from Dolphin several miles. Our crew started out on Paradise Isle, a little peninsula surrounded by water where the waves reached fifteen to twenty feet when we left at six p.m.”

  I shuddered, hoping I’d given Victor enough time to save my units and himself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Geneva VanSant, Paradise Isle

  Geneva wore blue jeans and a cotton sweater for her dreaded walk to the Pink Palace, a football field away. She had searched everywhere for rain gear and found Loughton’s trench coat and umbrella in the foyer closet. No rubber boots anywhere.

  Before leaving, she switched on the radio and heard the weatherman’s report: “The strongest hurricane on record to hit the Cayman Islands and western Cuba, Hurricane Donald threatens millions in Northwest Florida’s Panhandle,” the male broadcaster said. “An estimated sixty-five people across the Caribbean have died in this storm, which is projected to make landfall in the Panhandle sometime early tomorrow morning with twenty-five-foot flood surges along the Gulf.” Geneva turned off the radio, slipped on Loughton’s trench coat and grabbed his umbrella. She didn’t know what to expect this time when she opened the door to leave.

  A wind gust banged the door against the wall. No way. Wait a few more minutes. Roxanne may call.

  While Geneva waited, she sat at the dining table, turned on the laptop again and wrote her own weather report: “The foamy flood surge from the Gulf roars through Blue Heron Way, the street in front of this townhouse. My Mustang won’t start. It sits cockeyed in the driveway, soon to float away.”

  Geneva grabbed her digital camera and took several shots of the storm, including her beleaguered Mustang. She studied the pictures, loaded the best ones into her computer and continued to write:

  “While my neighbors taped and boarded their houses and sandbagged their doors today, I used ear plugs to drown out the noises. But nothing can muffle the screaming wind I’m hearing now. In the last two days I’ve seen Homeland Security trucks drive in and out of here. I’m beginning to understand why: This storm is indescribable terror. I hope to God this isn’t another Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, Louisiana and the Mississippi’s Gulf coast.

  “I’m worried about my friend and neighbor Roxanne Trawler. Her home is close to the Gulf, and I can only imagine what’s happening at her place when I see the waves covering my street. I called Roxanne but she isn’t answering her phone.

  “I’m sick from fear, listening to the howling wind. My worst nightmare haunts me. The crashing waves sound like thunder. No calm before the hurricane here.”

  Geneva saved her notes in a file called �
�Hurricane Horrors” then attached them with photos in an e-mail to her employer, the Tallahassee Reaper. She sent the same e-mail to Ellen, asking her to save it in a file on the home computer in case her laptop crashed. As a postscript, Geneva typed, “Don’t know when I’ll make it home. Say a prayer.”

  That done, she shut down the computer and decided to take the attic passageway to Roxanne’s. Why not? She and Loughton had used it last Christmas to avoid the rain.

  Geneva grabbed the flashlight and climbed the steep stairs to the attic. It looked like the inside of a ship’s hull up there, and smelled musty like damp cabins, filled with dust mites.

  The floor creaked as she walked to the first set of double doors, leading to the causeway, which reminded her of an enclosed slide at a water park, only this thing was ten-feet high and had a flat, marble floor. She knew she’d have to go through three sets of attic doors before she reached the walkway, which led to the second floor of Roxanne’s beach house.

  The doorknob facing her turned easily, but the door behind it wouldn’t budge. Obviously this neighbor had disobeyed one of the association’s rules: “Third floor attic must be kept open at all times. Attic space is community property.”

  Now what? The pounding on the roof, sounded like tennis-ball hail, and Geneva had no desire to risk life and limb, but she saw no other option.

  With a loud sigh, she ran downstairs and stepped outside. The fierce wind, rain and hail ripped Loughton’s umbrella backwards. So much for pricey umbrellas.

  Lightning flashed, followed by a loud pop of thunder that put Paradise Isle in total darkness. Her flashlight and the lightning offered the only streams of light to lead the way.

  Geneva remembered a story she wrote on how umbrellas aren’t safe in a thunderstorm. They are a conductor of lightning. Regardless, she didn’t want to discard the umbrella, because it provided leverage when she used it as a cane to move forward against the wind and rushing water.