“What are you doing here?” Moose stared at them as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Never mind. Get in. Get in.”
Charlie and Quitz dashed into the house. Moose closed and bolted the door, as if a lock could keep the storm outside.
“I heard Quitz and thought my senses had left me completely.”
Perhaps they had. Charlie shook off the water that had soaked his clothes, and Quitz did the same. Moose handed him a towel from a stack he had placed on a bench near the front door.
“What gives, Moose? Why are you still here?”
“Come into the living room. Power’s out, so I’m using my battery lamp, but I have some hot coffee in a Thermos.”
Moose shuffled across the room. When had he started shuffling? And why was he wearing pajama bottoms and a camouflage coat? Moose was a small man, probably not more than five and a half feet tall. Charlie had always thought of him as strong, though. Having grown up in Montana, there seemed to be nothing Moose Davis couldn’t or wouldn’t do. He had a rancher’s attitude about life, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of hard work. He also believed in lending a hand to his neighbor—something he had done for Charlie on more than one occasion.
Stubborn—yes, but not crazy.
And yet Charlie had suspected the man would still be here. Why was that? What had nudged him to check on Moose? Regardless, he was grateful that he had. He’d lost enough to hurricanes in the past and would no doubt lose more to the one hammering at the door. He didn’t plan on losing one of his oldest friends.
Charlie realized as he accepted the coffee poured into the Thermos’s cup that something was wrong. Moose gazed around as if he were somewhat confused, and then he dropped onto his couch and motioned for Quitz to join him. The dog didn’t need to be asked twice.
“We have to go, Moose. You can’t ride out this storm here.”
Moose seemed not to hear him. Instead, he focused on Quitz, rubbing behind the dog’s ears and using another towel to dry the the excess water from the Lab’s coat.
“Do you know what it’s like out there? Have you been listening to the emergency reports?”
Moose waved Charlie’s concerns away.
“I’m not kidding. It’s worse than Celia.”
“That was a storm, wasn’t it?” Moose still didn’t look up.
“The ferries have stopped, and I’m beginning to doubt we can make it over the bridge in this wind.” A giant thunderous crash interrupted Charlie. Something had hit the plywood covering the windows.
Quitz whined, but Moose seemed unconcerned.
Charlie rubbed his hand up and over the top of his head. “Maybe the Coast Guard will be shuttling folks across—though I doubt there’s anyone left on the island but us. We need to go—now. We have to try to make it to one of the Coast Guard evacuation sites.”
“I can’t go.” Moose finally glanced up, and when he did Charlie’s heart dropped like a stone to the bottom of the bay. “I can’t leave Paula.”
Charlie had been pacing in front of the couch, but now he stopped and stared at his friend.
“She’ll be back soon. Don’t look so worried. It’s just a… just a storm.”
But it wasn’t just a storm, and Paula most certainly would not be back soon. She’d died a year earlier in a car crash—a driver in the oncoming lane had fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the line. The police had assured Moose she’d never felt a thing. She apparently didn’t see it coming because there were no brake marks. She was there one day and gone the next. When Charlie thought of that, he was thankful for the final days he’d had with Madelyn. Yes, she’d shrunk before his eyes, and the meds had caused her to sleep a lot. But they’d also shared precious moments, special memories, and promises—promises to see each other again on the other side.
Moose had taken Paula’s death like a mortal wound, but he’d accepted it. So what was going on? Why was he waiting for her to come home? Could Moose be suffering from dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s? He was only ten years older than Charlie—only seventy-five, which increasingly seemed not so old to Charlie.
As Moose stared at Quitz, once again completely focused on reassuring the dog, Charlie thought back over an online quiz he’d taken a few weeks before. He considered such things silly and a downright waste of time, and he’d almost passed it up. But then he’d remembered his mother’s struggle with dementia, and he’d clicked on the quiz. Fortunately, most of his own actions that had worried him were considered normal by the quiz makers—misplacing his keys, occasionally forgetting what day of the week it was, even having to look up the phone number for his pharmacy. He’d been on his home phone at the time. If he’d looked on his cell, it was plainly listed under Pharmacy. The quiz had reassured him that his forgetfulness fell in the “normal range.”
Studying Moose, he remembered some of the more serious symptoms of Alzheimer’s—confusion with time or place, poor judgment, even withdrawal from social activities. He had noticed that Moose attended church less, and he rarely agreed to a game of dominoes—something he and Paula had once loved. He had also given a fairly large sum of money to a telephone solicitor, something he’d been embarrassed to admit. Charlie had convinced him to file a complaint with the police. Scums who preyed on the elderly needed to be met with the full force of the law. The entire episode had been a costly mistake, though one that a good number of folks fell prey to.
But thinking that his wife was still alive? In Charlie’s mind, that pushed Moose from the maybe column to the probably column in the dementia quiz. The question was—how could Charlie convince him to leave?
“She’ll be home soon,” Moose mumbled. “Paula hates driving in the rain.”
“I know she does.” Charlie sat down on the edge of the recliner. “Remember that night she stayed in Corpus because she didn’t want to drive over the bridge during the storm?”
Tension drained from Moose’s face as a smile replaced the worry lines around his mouth. “Spring of ’97. We fought about that hotel bill. She called me a miser… and could be she was right. I was terribly tight with money back then.”
Lightning flashed and wind continued to buffet the window coverings. Charlie felt an intense need to get out of the house, to get anywhere safer. “Say, Moose. I’m thinking that Paula’s fine, but we need to get out of here.”
The wind continued to pound the house. Though it was sturdily built, it wouldn’t withstand a Category 4 storm. There wasn’t much that would.
“Think she stayed over on the mainland?”
“Makes sense.” Charlie stared at his friend, willing him to agree to leave. He didn’t think he could force the old coot out of his house. No, his best option was to reason with him.
“Like in ’97.” Moose’s voice grew stronger, more sure, and then his face fell. “But she would have called. She always calls if she’s going to be late.”
“Phones are out, Moose. Landlines and cell service.”
“Oh.” Moose gave Quitz one last scratch behind the ears. “We should go then and get over to her.”
“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
Charlie stood and walked to the front door. A suitcase was waiting there. A part of Moose’s mind was still working on a functioning level. Then Charlie picked it up, and all of his doubts came rushing back.
“What’s in here, Moose? This weighs a ton.”
“Books. I packed Paula’s favorites when I first heard the storm warnings.”
“What about your legal papers, jewelry, photos… anything important that’s not in your safety deposit box?”
“Nah. I can come back for that stuff.”
“Well, you have to change clothes. You can’t go in that.” He pointed at Moose’s pajama bottoms.
“Right.” Moose hustled back into his bedroom and returned in old blue jeans and work boots.
Something crashed into the window near the front door. The panes rattled, but the plywood held. Lightning flashed and the higher window exploded, raining s
hards of glass down on them. The sound of the wind increased, and the roar of the rain made it nearly impossible to hear one another.
Charlie brushed glass off Moose’s shoulders. A small spot was bleeding on his left ear.
“Is Quitz okay?”
“I think so.”
“What about you?”
“Yeah. I am.” In truth his heart was racing so fast he could hear his pulse pounding in his eardrums. He pushed the glass over into a corner with his foot. Wouldn’t do for the dog to cut her feet before they got out of the house.
Was it smart to go back out into the truck? How would they ever get down the stairs?
But if they stayed… Charlie sensed that if they stayed they wouldn’t survive. He knew they needed to go, and they needed to do it right that minute.
“I parked directly in front of your porch,” he hollered over the storm’s roar. “My bumper is practically touching your railing.”
Moose nodded once. Quitz pushed herself against Charlie’s legs. He could feel the dog trembling, and then Moose unbolted the door. The fury of the storm tore it from his hands, but Moose never hesitated. He stepped out into Orion, with Charlie and Quitz close on his heels.
What he saw stopped him in his tracks. Water was sloshing midway up the staircase. How had it risen so quickly? Charlie had walked into Moose’s house no more then twenty minutes earlier. Logs and unidentifiable wreckage floated around the house or rammed into the porch. One of the seaside cabins that had been on the gulf side now sat in Moose’s front yard, snagged by a backlog of debris.
And Charlie’s truck?
It was gone.
CHAPTER 13
Joshua tried to sleep but succeeded only in tossing and turning. His bedcovers became a tangle of sheets, blankets, and quilt.
He finally surrendered, threw on the pair of pants and a shirt he had folded and placed across the chair near his bed, and crept downstairs—careful to avoid the squeaking step.
He needn’t have worried about waking someone up. His father had never gone to bed. He was sitting at the kitchen table, applying a glossy finish to three turkey calls.
“Kind of late to be working on that,” Joshua said as he opened the refrigerator and reached for the milk.
“Kind of late to be snacking.” His father cocked his head and studied him for a moment. When he turned his attention back to his woodwork, he said, “Grab me a glass too, and those cookies your mamm set back on the stove.”
They ate in silence—savoring the taste of oatmeal, molasses, and raisins. His dad continued rubbing the oil into the wood between bites. It had always amazed Joshua that his father—a man who deftly handled their team of large Percheron horses and could still toss fifty pound bags of feed into the barn—could also work on something so delicate.
“You’re a gut craftsman, Dat.”
“Well, thank you, son.” Daniel capped the bottle of oil and sat back. “But I suspect you didn’t get up at one in the morning to compliment my woodwork.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Joshua popped another cookie into his mouth. “What about you? Why are you up so late?”
“Same reason.”
Neither seemed to want to broach the subject of Alton. What was left to say? There were no easy answers, and the questions only continued to loom larger.
“Do you remember the time you ran away?”
“Nein.”
“I’m not surprised. You were a little thing—five going on twenty if I remember right.”
“Guess I didn’t get very far.”
“Nope. Didn’t even make it to the road. Your mamm and I were following at a discreet distance, watching to be sure you didn’t get lost.”
His father wiggled his eyebrows, causing Joshua to laugh. It felt good to relax. To forget the burden of his brother if only for a little while.
“Turned around, did I?”
“Yup. You trudged down the lane and stopped right beside that old maple tree.”
“Where the lane curves.”
“You sat down and stared back the way you had come.”
“Can’t see the house from there.”
“And maybe that’s why you turned back.” His father ran his thumb across the grain of the table, another piece of his handiwork. “Your mamm and I, we beat a path back to the house and were sitting on the front porch when you climbed the steps and plopped down beside us.”
Joshua shook his head. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“Ya. You’d even packed a change of clothes and a baseball that you’d taken to carrying with you everywhere. Put it all in one of your mamm’s grocery sacks, asked for cookies to take with you, and started off down the lane.”
“I guess most kids run away at some point.”
“Maybe so.” His father finished off the glass of milk. “Know what you said after you sat down?”
Joshua shook his head, but something—perhaps a vague memory in the back of his mind—stirred.
“In a very matter-of-fact tone you said, ‘I see you still have Blaze and Milo.’ ” His father grinned at the memory. “The horses were grazing in the near pasture, and you seemed real tickled that they were still there—that things were as you had left them.”
“An hour before… ”
“Something like that.”
Joshua stood, picked up their dishes, and washed them off in the sink before placing them in the drainer.
Maybe he could sleep after all. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, starting out with a walk to the bus station in town.
“I suppose I should be off to bed.”
“Joshua… ” His father had returned to working the oil into the wood. He stared down at it as he spoke. “When I think of Alton, of how lost he is sometimes… I think of you, sitting down next to that old maple tree. That near about broke your mother’s heart. She couldn’t understand why her son would want to run away.”
“I was a child. Young and stupid.”
“We all have those days of questioning. For your brother, those days came a little later and lasted a bit longer. But to your mamm and me—it’s the same. We’re still watching and waiting for him to turn around and head back home.” He glanced up, and the look of hope and worry pierced Joshua’s heart through and through. “Bring Alton home to us.”
Joshua nodded and started out of the kitchen, but he turned back and asked, “Why have you never told me that story before?”
“You didn’t need to hear it before.”
Joshua waited for his father to say more. He didn’t, though, and finally Joshua turned and trudged back through the sitting room and up the stairs. When he’d burrowed down deep under the covers, his mind was filled with images—his father’s expression, raisin oatmeal cookies on a plate, fresh milk poured from a pitcher.
His brother, Alton, as they pulled the truck out of the ditch.
Becca Troyer, offering an apple to him for Blaze.
And then, just before sleep claimed him, an older memory rose. It was of their two horses, standing beside the pasture fence—and his joy in finding that nothing had changed, that everything was exactly the same as when he’d left.
CHAPTER 14
Charlie realized it had been a mistake to open the front door. He pushed Moose back into the house, nearly tripped over the dog, and then both men had to lean into the door to shut it against the wind.
Staying in the house was not a good decision, but leaving the house—at this point that wasn’t even a possibility.
The floor was now slick from the rain coming through the broken window. Charlie stepped back toward the corner and heard the glass crunch beneath his feet.
Moose calmed Quitz, who sat huddled and shivering. But Charlie was staring at the floor. The sheer volume of rain was causing water to push through under the door, and the pieces of glass were floating toward the back of the house.
“The door is not going to hold. We need to get up to your attic.”
“What if the whole thing go
es?”
“We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we have to get out of this room and up to someplace higher.”
Moose led the way to the hall, reached up, and pulled down a ladder.
“How are you going to get the dog up there?”
It was a good question.
“You go first, and I’ll hand her up to you.”
Quitz was a good sixty pounds, and it was all Charlie could do to climb the steep ladder with her in his arms.
Though he continued to question Moose’s mental clarity, there was no doubt that the man was still physically strong. Moose reached down and heaved Quitz into the attic. Charlie followed them.
They both stared down through the opening as the force of the water busted the front door off its hinges. The surge had reached more than nineteen feet. The water rushed in and through the house, snatching furniture and carrying debris through the rooms. The last thing Charlie saw was a bathtub wedged in the hallway beneath them. It wasn’t even Moose’s bathtub. It was part of some other house that had been swept away.
Fortunately, the attic had a wood floor all the way across it. On one side, storage boxes were neatly labeled and stacked. Charlie walked across the large room to a small window that overlooked the front of the house. At first he saw nothing, but then lightning flashed, and he was able to make out the scene below.
“See your truck?”
“No, but I think the big crash we heard earlier was a boat. It’s hung up on the corner of your property, stuck in those salt cedars.”
“What kind of a boat?”
Charlie shrugged, “Not too big. Looks like a shrimp boat.”
“How did it move from the gulf side of the marina to here?”
“I don’t know, Moose. There’s no telling what’s out there. You remember Celia… ”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
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