John D. MacDonald

Hurricane

Chapter 1

On the morning of Sunday, October fourth, the Caribbean Sea lay oily and still under a hot white sun. The water temperature was unusually high. The barometric pressure was low. There was an odd mistiness that merged sea and sky at the horizon line. This flat hot sea was the womb of hurricane.

The sun climbed higher. The heated air rose as a great column. Shortly after midday, in a fifty-square-mile area about two hundred nautical miles north of Barranquilla, the ascending heated air began an ominous spiraling movement, a counter-clockwise twisting. The sky in that area began to darken, and the first winds began.

Ships closest to the area made the first radio reports. Streamers of high cirrus clouds gave warning. Great, slow swells began to radiate from the area, moving with a surprising speed, traveling to the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, breaking on island shores in a cadence of five or six a minute as against the tropic norm of eight.

The Miami Weather Station collated the data from the ships at sea and from commercial airline flights. By Sunday evening it was labeled a tropical disturbance. On Monday morning it was termed an area of suspicion. A search aircraft emerged from the immature cone at 5:20 on Monday evening and radioed a report to Miami. And on the six o’clock news broadcasts the hemisphere was informed that the eighth hurricane of the season was gaining in strength and had been given the designation “Hilda.”

The hurricane gained in force and momentum. As it moved in the long curved path that would carry it in a northwesterly direction, it pushed hot moist air ahead of it, and the moisture of that air, cooled by great height, fell as heavy, drenching rains.

By Monday night, the wind velocities near the center were measured at eighty miles an hour. At fifteen to eighteen miles an hour the hurricane moved north-northwest toward the long island of Cuba. Miami began to prepare. Large windows were boarded up, and extra guy-wires were fastened to television aerials. Gasoline stoves were taken out of storage. Drinking water was stored. Radio batteries sold briskly. There was a flavor of excitement in the city.

On Tuesday, the sixth of October, Hilda changed direction, moving further west than had been predicted. Billions of tons of warm rain fell on Cuba, but the gusts which struck Havana reached a measured peak of only 55 miles an hour. The winds were stronger in Valladolid in Yucatan, as Hilda picked up her great gray skirts and edged through the hundred and fifty mile gap of the Yucatan Channel. Had she continued on that new line, she was a med at the Texas Gulf Coast, at Galveston and Corpus Christi. But the storm turned due north and then began to curve slightly east. In Key West there was heavy rain and not much wind. Precautions were relaxed in Miami. The cities of the Florida West Coast began to prepare as Miami had prepared.

By midnight the sky over Cuba was still and the stars were clear and bright. It was then that the sky over Key West began to clear. In Naples it was raining heavily, as in Fort Myers. The rain had just begun in Boca Grande. The rain did not begin in Clearwater until three in the morning...

Jean Dorn had been awakened by the rain at three o’clock. When the alarm awakened her again at seven, it was still raining. She turned off the alarm before it could awaken Hal. He should get as much sleep as possible; he would be driving all day. She pushed the single sheet back and got quietly out of bed, a tall blonde woman with a sturdy body which was just beginning to show the heaviness of pregnancy. Before she went into the bathroom she looked in at the children. Five-year-old Stevie slept on his back, arms outflung. Three-year-old Jan, still in a crib, stirred as she looked in, but Ker eyes were closed. In the gray light of the drab morning both children looked very brown from the long summer on the gulf beaches.

Yes, the children were brown and healthy and full of a vast surplus of energy, and the three days of keeping them cooped up in the car were going to be less than a joy.

In the morning stillness, while the others slept, she walked in and looked at the living room. There was nothing personal left in the room. They had shipped the few things they couldn’t bear to part with. The rest of the furniture would go with the house. Into the hands and the lives of strangers.

Jean Dorn tried to look at the room with complete impartiality, to see it as a stranger would see it. Yet she could not. Hopes had been too high. This room had become too much a part of her life, and a part of love. She tried to tell herself that she was too much obsessed with things, with possessions. A room and a house should not be this important.

She wished — and sensed the childishness of the wish — that even at this last bitter hour something would happen, something would change, and they could keep it. But there was no golden wand, no one to wield it. There had been other losses, other changes, but this was the first one that had about it the sour flavor of defeat.

She had not let Hal know how deep was her sense of loss at leaving this place. Yet she knew that he sensed it. No matter how she tried to conceal it, he would sense it because theirs was a marriage that was good and close. It had been close. And she thought of the effect this was having on him and she was frightened.

She wished that there could have been some way they could have known. Known way ahead, and with that knowledge they could have been wiser. They would have rented a smaller house rather than bought this one. They would have saved in many little ways and perhaps thus managed to hold on until the turning point came.

Yet neither of them, and particularly Hal, had anticipated defeat. They took for granted the permanence of fortune’s warm bright smile. She remembered before they had left the north the way Hal had grinned at Bob Darmon when Bob had said. “You know it could be rough down there. It might be tough to make a buck. You’re giving up a hell of a good job. Boy. You might take a real drop in your standard of living.”

Hal had grinned. “Don’t stress yourself, Robert. Dorn lands on his feet. It’s a survival instinct. It’s a substitute for the silver spoon I wasn’t born with.”

“If I were doing it,” Bob said gloomily, “I’d keep the job up here and send Stevie on down somehow for a year and see if the climate really helps him.”

“He’s too little to be away from home,” Jean had said indignantly. “I’d never send him away. Bob, we know Hal won’t make as much money. But we’re going to live more simply than we have here.”

And Hal had put his arm around her and looked down into her eyes and whispered, “We’ll make out, honey. Don’t let him get you down.”

“I’m not scared.”

Should have been scared, she thought. Should have had enough sense to be scared. Not on account of me. I can get over leaving the house. I can say good-by to this room right now and good-by to that chair I brought home that day in the station wagon and couldn’t wait for Hal to come home and help me, and I lugged it in and put it right there and stepped back, and it looked just the way I knew it would look.

For sale, furnished house. With a few bits and pieces of heart swept under the rug.

Not afraid for me. Afraid because of what it has done to him.

She turned resolutely away from the threatened sting of tears and left the room. They would have to put this place behind them. She hoped Bob Darmon would never learn how right he had been. Hal’s job in the north had been a good job — an intermediate consultant with Jason and Rawls, one of the larger industrial management firms in New York City. Though he had often complained that his work was a rat-race, Jean knew he enjoyed responding to the challenge of it. He objected to the prolonged out-of-town trips that kept him away from his family, but he took pride in the knowledge that the contracts they assigned him to were the tough ones.

He was an intense man, dark, lean-faced, quick-moving — with ready intelligence. He was impatient with inefficiency, and when he had a problem, he would work doggedly at it until he had it licked. She was, she knew, a good foil for that dark intensity. She was cairn and blonde and placid, with a sense of fun and a quick eye for the ridiculous. Their marriage was seven years old and she knew from observation of other couples that it was better than most.

Had it not been for Stevie, the pattern of their life would have been clear. Hal would have remained with Jason and Rawls. In time he would have become a senior consultant and perhaps later a junior partner. After Stevie had been born, they had moved from the tiny uptown apartment to a small house in Pleasantville. In time, there would have been a bigger house with wider lawns.

But it had all changed in the office of Doctor Gaylin a little over two years before. They had rushed Stevie there. It had been the worst asthma attack he had ever had. Jean had been in panic as she listened to the boy fighting for breath. The doctor had eased the struggle, with medication. They left Stevie with the nurse and went into Doctor Gaylin’s private office.

Jean remembered how pale and upset Hal had been. “Isn’t there anything you can do about this sort of thing, Doctor?” he had demanded.

“I want to talk to both of you. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do much with medication. He may eventually grow out of it. Or it may get worse. I’d like to recommend a different climate, a warmer place. Florida. Arizona. Southern California. These winters up here are more than he can take. But I know how difficult it is to pull up stakes. I was wondering if you have any relatives you can send him to.”

They had talked it over later. Doctor Gaylin had made it clear that the next few years were crucial.

Hal said, that night, “I don t see why we even have to talk it over very much. We’ve got to do it. There’s no one we can send him to even if we felt we could. We’ve got to go. Good Lord, Jean, this job I have is just that. A job. It isn’t a dedication. I’m thirty-one. Stevie’s health isn’t the sort of thing you can take a chance on: a job is.”

They had planned as carefully as they could. Hal had taken a quick exploratory trip, had seen the opportunities on the Florida west coast and had decided on Clearwater. They had received less for the Pleasantville house than they had hoped. The firm had been sorry to lose him, but Mr. Rawls had been very understanding when Hal told him about Stevie.

Once they had sold themselves on the idea of change they began the new life with optimism and excitement. Hal had been a specialist in accounting procedures, and so, in downtown Clearwater, he had opened a small office. Harold Dorn, Consultant. Jean had found the house, for a little more than they had expected to pay. A nice home in the Bellaire section where there were other small children.

It had all started out so perfectly. Hal was confident and full of tireless energy. He acquired some small accounts. Neighborhood stores, a gas station, a small boat company, a few bars. He told Jean it wouldn’t take too long to get over the hump. His reputation would spread. He was selling a service they could use. Sometimes fie was able to get to the beach with them, but not often. He spent the days soliciting new accounts, and the evenings working on the accounts he had acquired.

And then he told her that it was foolish to maintain an office and a secretary. It was delaying the break-even point. Better to rent desk space in an office. The phone would be answered. It would cut expenses. He’d found he could make a deal on the office lease. It was then that she had first detected something uncertain, perhaps even a bit frightened, behind his smile. And she began to worry.

Later he gave up the rented desk and used his home phone as his business phone. He told her they nearly had it made. Another month or two and income would be ahead of their living expenses and his business expenses. She had long since inaugurated stricter economy measures, studying the papers for bargains in food, repairing children’s clothing she would previously have discarded.

She watched Hal more carefully and was shocked at the change in him. He was leaner, and the lines bracketing his mouth had deepened, and his eyes seemed to be set more deeply in his head. The grin of confidence became a grimace. She knew their meager reserve was dwindling.

“I’ve lined up a job,” he told her. “It will start Monday. Not much of a job. Warehouse work. I’m sort of a stores clerk. The pay isn’t much, but it will help. And I can work on the accounts at night.”

But she learned it was more — or less — than a clerk’s job. He came home dulled by weariness. His hands became calloused. That was the worst part, watching him tear himself apart, watching him fight and use every reserve — often falling asleep at his desk at night as he worked on his clients’ accounts. He became thinner, more silent, and he was irritable with the children. She tried to find a job, but could find nothing that would leave her any surplus after paying a sitter.

Two weeks before, they had come to the end of the line. The children were in bed. Hal came out into the living room.

“Finished with the books?” she asked.

He sat on the couch, hands clenched between his knees, looking at the floor. “With our books,” he said in a dead voice. “We’re finished, baby. We’re licked. We can’t make it. We’ve got to go back while we can still afford to go back or I don’t know what’s going to become of us. We’ve got to get our money out of this house and go back. And hope the two years here have fixed Stevie up for good. I... I’m so damn sorry, Jean, I...”

And he had looked up at her for a long lost moment and then had looked down again and begun to cry. She knew they were tears of exhaustion, of defeat.

Today was the day of departure, when defeat would be certified by the act of leaving. She could see the loaded station wagon in the carport, the same car they had driven down. It was packed to the roof. The luggage carrier on top was full, the tarp roped tightly. There was a small nest for Stevie and Jan just behind the front seat. And room for the crib and the bedding and the final suitcase.

With all my worldly goods...

She wondered why she had thought of that phrase. There was no ceremony to this parting. Not like the parties and silly parting gifts when they had left Pleasantville — people saying. “Going to live in Florida? Wish I had it so good!”

When you’re licked, you sneak out. The Dorns? Oh, they couldn’t make it. Had to go back north. Too bad. Nice folks. But you know how it is. Too many people down, here trying to scratch out a living. If you got a retirement income, or a big wad of dough for a tourist trap, you can make it.

So you don’t say good-by. You write letters later, from the north. Full of ersatz confidence. See you again one of these years. The way Hal said we’d try again later. But you can see in his eyes the knowledge that we won’t. Because it has taken something out of him. Some essential spirit. He’ll never have that sure confidence again. And others will sense that lack of certainty, and so the bright and golden future is forever lost. It could not change her love. But she felt sick when she thought of what it was doing to him and to his pride in himself.

She woke Hal and then went in and got the kids up and dressed. Stevie woke in a sour mood. He did not want to leave. He could not understand why they had to leave. He liked it here. Jan sang her placid little morning song and ignored the querulousness of her brother.

When Jean went back to the bedroom, Hal was still sitting on the side of the bed, staring out at the morning. “Dandy day for a trip,” he said.

“It can’t keep on raining this hard,” she said. “Rise and shine, mister. I’ve got to fold those sheets you’re sitting on.”

He stood up slowly. “Very efficient this morning, aren’t you?” The way he said it made it sound unpleasant.

“I’m a demon packer,” she said lightly.

He looked at her and looked away. He rarely looked into her eyes of late. “At least the old bucket won’t overheat on us. It feels sticky though.”

“I guess it’s the tail end of the hurricane.”

“We’ll be out of it soon enough.”

“And be back into autumn in the north. Leaves burning. Football weather. All that. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

“How extremely obliging of you.”

“Please, darling. Don’t.”

“Then please stop being a Pollyanna and trying to make everything come out nice and cozy and perfect. It isn’t cozy and perfect, so why not admit it?”

She felt unexpected anger. “And go around wringing my hands and moaning?”

“Like I do? Is that what you mean?”

“I didn’t mean that, and you know it. We ought to try to be a little bit cheery. Even if it’s false.”

He clapped his hands and said sourly, “Oh, goody! We’re going on a trip, on a trip, on a trip.” He looked at her almost with contempt.

“Hal!”

His expression softened, changed. He took a half step toward her. “Damn it. I’m sorry. I know what it means to you, Jeanie. I know what it’s costing us.”

They put their arms around each other and stood quietly for a time. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“It’s all right. It isn’t your fault.”

He trudged to the bathroom, his shoulders listless, his pajamas baggy on his body.

She hoped it would be different in New York. He didn’t think Jason and Rawls would take him back. It wouldn’t be good policy. But Brainerd might take him on. Or Romason and Twill. Then maybe a measure of confidence would return.

She put on her dacron skirt and a light-weight blouse, folded the bedding and put it in the kitchen. She packed the last bag. They left the house at eight o’clock, dropped off the house keys at the real estate agent’s office and breakfasted at the diner. Jean kept remembering that, when they had driven away from the house, she had not looked back. Stevie had wept, but the hard sound of the rain had muffled it.

They turned north on Route 19. The heavy rain restricted visibility. All cars had their lights on. The wipers swept solid water from the windshield. She touched Hal’s arm lightly and was pleased when he gave her a quick absent-minded smile.

A few miles from Clearwater he turned on the car radio “...to give you the latest word on Hurricane Hilda. Hilda is now reported to be in the Gulf about a hundred miles west and a little north of the Tampa Bay area. The central west coast is experiencing heavy rains as far north as Cedar Keys. Though the experts predicted that Hilda would begin to lose force during the night, it is reported that wind velocities near the center have actually increased and are now as high as a hundred and fifteen miles an hour. After moving on a predictable course for many hours, the northward movement has slowed and it is less easy to predict the direction the storm will take. The Louisiana and Texas coasts have been alerted. We now return you to the program already in progress.” Hal clicked off the radio after two bars of hillbilly anguish.

“Could it come back in toward the land ahead of us?” Jean asked.

“Could what come?” Stevie demanded, leaning over the front seat. “Could what come, huh?”

“The hurricane, dear,” Jean said, knowing it might take his mind off the woes of leaving Clearwater.

“Wow!” Stevie said, awed.

“This rain, Stevie,” Hal said, “always comes ahead of a hurricane, but we’re sort of on the edge of it. It’s going up the Gulf and I don’t think it will cut back this way.”

“I hope it does,” Stevie said firmly.

“And I most fervently hope it doesn’t,” Jean said.

“It would be sort of improbable,” Hal said. Ahead of the car, in the gloom, he saw the running lights of a truck. He eased up behind it, moved out to check the road ahead, accelerated smoothly, dropped back into his lane ahead of the truck.

Here’s something I can do, he thought. I can drive just fine. I can boil right along in this old wagon without endangering my three... my four hostages to fortune. And I can shave neatly and tie my own shoes and make standard small talk. And I can, or at least I used to, make a living in a very narrow and highly specialized profession. A pleasant living in an area where my son could not exist.

We went down there with seven thousand dollars and now we have sixteen hundred and the car and what is in the car. So that is a fifty-four hundred dollar loss in twenty-six months which averages out to... just about fifty dollars a week.

It had taken him a long time to realize that he had failed. Harold Dorn had failed in something he wanted badly to accomplish. He had wanted it more than any other thing in his life. And it was the first failure.

He hadn’t failed the other times. Not the first time in that Pennsylvania coal-town which in all its history had known so few years of prosperity. His father, as a company clerk, had had none of the benefits the union had acquired for the miners. The old car had skidded on a wintry hill, a long skid into a post and it had rebounded from the post and tipped over onto the company clerk who had been thrown free at impact. And you saw how few of the kids went on to college and got away from the town. You saw there was only one way to do it, and two years left to do it in. So there were two years of straight A’s and the scholarship and that was the first victory.

The second victory happened on a hillside in a German forest in the snow. In a deep hole you shared with a dead man who had been your close friend for thirteen months. The barrage was over, and you could not control your trembling. You heard the lieutenant and the platoon sergeant, and you knew nothing could ever get you up out of that hole into the naked air where whining things sought your flesh. But you climbed out for the blundering run on half-frozen feet, running crouched, seeking cover and concealment, stiff hands clumsy on the trigger, running where you were told to run and doing what you had to do.

Then there was the victory of the girl. The blonde girl named Jean. Seeing her on campus, and knowing that she had no time for a student who had to work long hours.

But you won the scholarship and the degree, and you found your own courage, and you found the job you wanted with Jason and Rawls, and you won the tall, calm, blonde and lovely bride named Jean.

These were victories, and you were marked by victory. Marked with confidence and a sort of arrogance. You knew none of it had been luck. You went after things. And got what you wanted.

And so this defeat became, a shocking thing. He wondered how and why he had failed. If only they’d been more careful, at first. Then he wouldn’t have to be a jobless man heading north with an old car, a pregnant wife, two small kids. He wondered if he’d be able to get a job as easily as he hoped. It might be a long time. The money could run out. There wasn’t much of it. The trip would make a hole in it. The wagon needed a new set of tires. Maybe they would last.

He drove through the heavy rain and there was a grayness inside of him as bleak as the color of the day. And he felt ashamed.

A quick burst of rain and wind slapped hard against the side of the station wagon. The wagon swayed and he brought it back into the lane. Palm tops, dimmed by the rain curtain, swayed in the wind.

“It’s getting a lot windier,” Jean said, and he detected the slight tremor in her voice.

“Is it a real hurricane?” Stevie asked. He had a small and grimly logical mind. He wanted no substitutes.

Chapter 2

Bunny Hollis awoke before nine in a motel on Route 19 and lay there listening to the hard roar of the rain that seemed to be increasing in force from minute to minute. He wondered what morning it was. He counted back and decided that it had to be Wednesday, October seventh. He stretched until his shoulders creaked, knuckled his eyes and sat up. There was a faint pulse of liquor behind his eyes, a sleazy taste in his mouth. He sat naked on the edge of the bed and took his pulse. Seventy-six. And no suggestion of a premature beat. Lately when he smoked too much and drank too much the premature beat would start. He had been told by a very good man that it was nothing to worry about. Just ease off when it started.

He turned and looked at his bride in the other bed. She lay sprawled as if dropped from a height, a sheaf of brown hair across her eyes. She had kicked off the single sheet in her sleep. The narrow band of white across her buttocks was ludicrous against the dark tan of her.

Betty did look better with a tan, he decided. And he had chided her into losing ten pounds. But neither tan nor weight loss was going to do very much for pale eyes that were set a little too close together, for teeth too prominent or a chin too indistinct. She was young though, and she could be amusing... and at twenty-one she was worth close to three million dollars.

He went quietly into the bathroom, closed the door and turned on the light. He examined his face in the mirror with great care, as he did every morning. He thought the face looked about twenty-six, nine years younger than its actual age. And, as always, he wondered if he was kidding himself. It was a face in the almost traditional mold of the American athlete. Brown and blunt, with broad brow, square jaw, nose slightly flat at the bridge, gray wide-set eyes with weather wrinkles at the corner. A very short brush cut helped mask the encroaching baldness. It was a face made for grinning, for victory, for locker-room gags, for Olympic posters.

He cupped cold water in his hands and drenched his face and rubbed it vigorously, massaging it with strong lingers, paying special attention to the area under the eyes, at the corner of the mouth and under the chin. He massaged his scalp and dried his face and head and then turned and studied his body in the full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door. Athlete body to match the face. Waist still reasonably lean, though not what it once had been. Deep chest and slanting shoulders. Brown body with the crisp body hair on the legs and arms burned white by the sun. Long slim legs with the slant of power. Muscle knots in the shoulders, square strong wrists.

At least the product she was getting was adequate, he thought. Cared for. Somewhat used, but not enough to show. Years of wear left in it; enough, at least, for him to be able to fake adequately the various intensities of a honeymoon.

Three zero zero zero zero zero zero.

And heah, ladies and gentlemen, we have a little girl who represents thu-ree million dollars. Who will be the lucky man?

Bunny Hollis, of course.

Bunny, who always ran out of luck every time but the last time. Like the good old Limeys. Never win a battle and never lose a war.

A long long way from the skinny, sullen kid out in southern California who practically lived at the public courts. The skinny kid had owned a second-hand racket and an amazingly powerful forehand stroke for a twelve-year-old.

Cutler, one of the great coaches, had spotted the skinny kid, made him work at the game, made him learn the fundamentals. Cutler had talked to his family about Bunny’s future in tennis. The family hadn’t cared much one way or the other. There were six other kids. They were glad to have somebody take the responsibility for Bunny. When he was fifteen, Cutler got him a job and moved him into a room at his own club, the Carranak Club. And Bunny started to win tournaments. He learned how to hide the sullenness behind a quick, artificial smile. He was skinny and brown, tough and tireless as leather. He knocked the other kids off, and the scrapbook grew. It was a good feeling, to be treated as though you were important. Those were the best years. Fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. That was when the will to win had not been weakened — when it was stronger than the will to live.

He learned how- to handle himself off the court. And he grew bigger and the smile grew more natural and the sun-bleacheu crew cut was pale against his tan skin. He went to the big tournaments and he began to climb higher in the national ratings. Cutler went along. Then Cutler was ill with that heart business and couldn’t go along. And something happened to the will to win. It became diluted. It was diluted by too many parties and too many young girls. And by the older women and their presents of bill clips and cameras, sports jackets and theatre tickets and plane rides. And once, just once, a convertible. A yellow one.

Some of the other boys kept the will to win. And kept climbing. And somewhere along the line the papers stopped talking about Bunny Hollis as “promising.” They called him an erratic contender, with flashes of brilliance. Cutler died and there was no one to chew him out any more. On his best days he could take some of the top ones. But long sets were poison. Liquor had undermined the tireless stamina.

During the war, he was in Special Services. He gave tennis instruction to field-grade officers in a big camp in the southwest. But there was the incident involving the wife of a full colonel, and then he was sent to Assam, in north India. There he went back into serious training at a small planters’ club. He took the All-India tournament and was sent on an exhibition tour, and then it all started all over again and the regained edge was lost.

During the next two years after the war, his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh years, his game sagged badly, his charm wore thin, and tournament invitations became more rare. He hunted around for the right slot and found it, through a friend of a female friend, and by handling himself properly during interviews, he became a pro, the tennis professional at the Oswando Club in Westchester. There were six fine indoor courts, so that it was a year-round job. He found that he liked working with kids.

His personal problems were solved when Betty Oldbern came to him to be “brushed up” on her tennis. She was nineteen and he was then thirty-three. She was heavy, shy and unattractive. She knew how to play tennis because she had been given lessons ever since she was very small. Lessons in tennis, swimming, golf, riding, dancing, fencing, conversational French, painting, sculpture, creative writing. She was the product of private schools in France and Switzerland, and Philadelphia. There had been many tutors. She did nearly everything competently, yet did nothing with either grace or style, nor pleasure. She had few friends and a great many relatives, most of them elderly. And the name was Oldbern, as in Oldbern Shipping Lines and Oldbern Chemicals and Oldbern Natural Gas.

She came to him shyly at nineteen for lessons. She was living on a generous allowance, and in two more years she would be twenty-one and on that birthday she would receive something like three millions. She had had the most sophisticated education available, yet she was almost entirely naive. She still wore her baby fat and blushed like a sunset. Within a month she was deeply and helplessly in love with him. It had not been hard to manage.

Four days after her twenty-first birthday, after two years of her devotion, Bunny made an appointment with Harrison Oldbern. Betty’s father. He did not state his business. Harrison Oldbern was on the Board of Governors of the Oswando Club — a thin, alert, tanned man — sportsman, deep water sailor, shrewd businessman.

“Sit down, Bunny. What’s on your mind? Drink? I’m afraid I can give you only about ten minutes. This is one of those days.”

“I’d like a scotch and water, thanks.”

As Oldbern mixed the drinks he said, “What’s on your mind, Bunny? Contract for next year? I think I can personally reassure you that the membership wants you to stay. You’re doing a marvelous job with the kids. In fact, we’re going to raise the ante a little. We don’t want to lose you.”

He handed Bunny his drink. Bunny looked up and smiled and said, “It isn’t anything like that. It’s just that Betty and I want to get married.”

Oldbern stared down at him incredulously. “What! Betty? She’s just a kid.”

“She’s over twenty-one, sir.”

“How old are you, Hollis?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

Oldbern went behind his desk and sat down slowly. “What kind of nonsense are you trying to pull? What the hell is going on?”

“The usual thing, I guess. Love.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Nearly two years. But we thought it was wiser to wait until we were both sure.”

“You mean to wait until she was twenty-one.”

“It happened to come out that way.”

“Yes, it happened to come out that way. Hollis, you’re a dirty, back-stabbing thief.”

Bunny looked down at his drink. “Sorry to have you take this attitude, sir. Betty and I have been hoping there wouldn’t be too much friction.”

“You’re a tennis bum. I knew your reputation back when we hired you. I was dubious about you. I had a hunch. I guess I should have blocked it. Well, I’ll never permit this marriage.”

Bunny took long calm swallows of his drink. He shrugged. “Betty says we’re going to get married no matter what. Being twenty-one, I guess she’s her own boss on that. You can certainly try to change her mind. But if she doesn’t change it, I don’t know how you’d go about stopping it, sir.”

Oldbern waited long moments. He leaned back in his chair. “Betty is not a pretty girl. She isn’t even close to being pretty. She happens to have three million dollars.”

“She knows I won’t marry her for her money. She knows I have ideals.”

“You have as many ideals as a mink.”

“We hoped there wouldn’t be friction.”

“How do you like this? I’m going to put a firm of investigators on you. I’ll get a report on you that’ll make Betty’s eyes stand out on stalks.”

“I guess you can do that. But it won’t surprise her any. I haven’t been near another woman in two years. And I haven’t touched Betty. I’ve told her everything I can remember. I guess you couldn’t shock her much. She knows why I’ve changed. And she’s helped me work with the kids out at the club.”

“You’ve had two years to work on her, haven’t you?”

“Love can change a man.”

“How much, Hollis? How big a check do I write?”

“That wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be a gift. It would be income. And it would all fall in this year, no matter how big a check. Then there wouldn’t be much left after taxes, and I’d be out of a job. Anyway, I’m not interested in money. I’m in love with your daughter. As they say, I’m asking for her hand. She knows I’m here. That’s putting it pretty straight.” Bunny finished his drink and stood up.

Oldbern had begun to look older. “Sit down, Hollis. I want to think.”

Bunny shrugged. “I’m not a bad guy. You got to know me.”

“There isn’t anything anybody can do, is there?”

Bunny permitted himself his likable grin. “If there is, sir, I haven’t been able to think of it, and neither has my lawyer.”

“She should have done a lot better.”

“Maybe you could think about this. Maybe she’s doing as well as she can do. We’d like a small quiet wedding. Just the family.”

“When do you want it?”

“One month from tomorrow, sir.”

The capitulation was easier than Bunny had expected. He stuck his hand across the desk. Oldbern looked at it. “You did a neat job, Hollis. But I don’t have to shake your hand. There’s nothing to make me do that.”

“Suit yourself, Mr. Oldbern.”

And it had been a quiet wedding, with even the gift of the Mercedes from the bride’s father as a concession to the normal courtesies. They had driven down to Miami, with stops at Nags Head and Myrtle Beach. They had taken a boat to Havana, had flown to Nassau and then back to Miami where they had left the car...

He walked back into the bedroom. She slept in the same position as before. He looked at her with fondness. He had expected to be bored by the honeymoon, by the constant aura of adoration, by her emotional vulnerability. And he had expected to feel somewhat apologetic about her appearance when they walked into strange hotel lobbies and restaurants.

But, ever since she had become assured of his love, months before the marriage, she had made strenuous efforts to reduce. Her skin was marvelously clear and unblemished and fragrant. She was tidy as a cat. In a dark room, her brown hair would crackle, and there would be faint bluish sparks when he ran his fingers through it. During the last week at odd moments he would happen to notice her with half his mind when she moved, when she turned away from him, when she walked toward him, when she pulled herself onto a swimming float or dived into a breaking wave — and he would find her desirable. And he learned that under the shyness was a perceptive sensitivity, intelligence and ardor.

He knew he did not love her. Yet he was becoming surprisingly fond of her, of her own special quiet sense of fun. She was sure in her conviction of being loved, and she had begun to blossom for him. He knew how easily he could change all that with an angry or contemptuous word. He enjoyed the quiet feeling of power that gave him. This was a structure he had built, and one he could collapse at will.

He sat on the bed and put his hand on her waist and shook her gently. “Come on, fat lamb.”

She came blurred and drowsy from sleep and found him with her eyes and smiled and said, “Not so daggone fat. And good morning.”

“Good morning.”

Her eyes were a pale gray. He had talked her into using dark pencil on her colorless brows, into touching up the eyelashes that were like fine gold wire. Now her washed face was defenseless and too vulnerable, yet after she used make-up she would look confident and all-of-a-piece.

“In exactly two months,” she said, “according to my master plan, I shall be down to one-fifteen and I shall be wondering why I wasted all this unearthly beauty on such a weary old type.”

“Not too weary,” he said...

They got into the car and headed north in the dusky gloom of the constant rain. The sports car was built like a low, fleet, expensive boat. It squatted low on the road, thrillingly responsive. The hard wind out of the west did not make it sway. But Bunny saw the tilt and dip of the pines and palms and wondered about the hurricane. They had felt disappointed in Miami when it had veered away to the west below Cuba.

When they stopped in a roadside restaurant for a late breakfast, the few customers were all talking about the storm. An old man with the long sallow knotted face and pale narrow deep-set eyes of the cracker was saying, “They say they know where it is. I ain’t fixin’ to listen too hard to them, with their planes and charts and all. You get this here rain, and it comes right at you like you had the bar’l of a gun aimed down your gullet. Nobody knows where it is. Where do you think all them birds went? I got me all boarded up and ready, by gosh. Try to breathe thishyeer air. There ain’t enough goodness to it. You got to keep a-fillin’ your chest. That’s one sure sign.”

When they were back in the car, Betty said, “He sounded awful certain, that old man in there.”

“So let’s add a few knots and get out of here. It would have been fun in Miami, but I wouldn’t want to have to sit it out in a car.”

The gray car, gray as the rain, sped through the moist heavy air. It threw up a great spume of spray behind it. It traveled fast on Route 19. When the winds became strong enough to make the car swerve, Bunny had to slow down.

Chapter 3

Johnny Flagan stood shaving in the light of cold fluorescence in his bathroom. He was a suety man in his fifties, with gingery gray hair surrounding a bald spot the size of a coaster. He had once been a strong man, but the years had run through the puffy body; the years of the cigars and the bourbon and the hotel room parties. There were brown blemishes on his lard-white shoulders and back, a matronly cast to his hips. But all the drive was still there, the hint of harshness.

He was an amiable looking man. Sun and whisky-kept his soft face red. He smiled easily and had the knack of kidding people. He wore round glasses with steel rims, and the glasses were always slipping a little way down his blunt nose, and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover, and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and blown and watchful.

If you walked down the street with him, you would soon come to believe that he knew more than half the people in Sarasota.

— But what does he do?

— You mean Johnny Flagan? What does he do? Well, he’s got a lot of interests, you might say. He was in on some pretty good land development stuff on the keys. He’s got a fellow runs a ranch for him down near Venice. Santa Gertrudis stock, it is. He’s got a piece of a juice plant over near Winter Haven. Then he’s director on this and that. And he’s got some kind of interest in savings and loan stuff. Hell, Old Johnny keeps humping.

— Successful and honest, I suppose.

— Successful, sure. You understand, I’m not a fellow to talk about anybody. Gossip. That kind of thing. But you go throwing around that word honest, and there’s a lot of people got different ideas of what it means. Johnny’s a sharp one. I don’t think he ever in his whole life done anything he could get hisself jailed for, but you get on the other end of a deal from him, and you got to play it close. Like that lime, it was seven, eight years ago, there was this old fellow down Nokomis way didn’t want to let loose of some land Johnny wanted to pick up. Both Johnny and the old man were pretty sure the State Road Department was going to put the new road right through his land. Well, sir, one day these young fellow’s come to the old man’s house, and they’re hot, and they want a drink of water. They got transits and so on, all that surveying stuff, and the old man gives them the water, and they get to talking, and it turns out they’re surveying for the road and it just doesn’t come nowheres near the old man’s land. Very next day the old man unloads his land on Johnny, trying to keep a straight face. Inside fourteen months the new road cuts right across the land and Johnny has himself a bunch of prime commercial lots. That old man just about drove them nuts up there in Tallahassee, but he never could find out just who those surveyors were. Sure, Johnny’s honest, but he’s, well — sharp.

— He lives right here, does he?

— Near all his life. Married one of the Leafer girls. They never had any kids. She stood him as long as she could, I guess about eleven years, and then they got divorced. He’s one to, like they say, play the field. He talked her into taking a settlement, and it wasn’t much of a one they say. Johnny is almost a native. His daddy, Stitch Flagan, come down here from Georgia forty years ago and went broke in celery and went into commercial fishing and got drownded out in the Gulf with Johnny’s two brothers way back thirty years ago. Johnny would have got the same medicine but he didn’t go along night-netting the macks that time on account of a girl down around Osprey he was chasing. Now he lives alone out there on St. Armands Key, has him a woman that comes in to clean up three, four times a week. Couple of times a year he gives a hell of a big party. Most nights you find him around town someplace. The Plaza or the Colony or Holiday House or the Hofbrau. Everybody knows him. And I guess he tips pretty good...

Johnny Flagan blew the sandy stubble out of the razor, coiled the cord, put the razor in the toilet-article case he used on trips. He padded out to the phone and called the airline office again to ask about flights. “Not a chance, eh?” he said disgustedly. He hung up and cursed with considerable feeling. He looked up Charlie Himbermark’s home phone number and called him.

“Charlie? Johnny Flagan.”

“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”

“They’ve grounded the flights. We got to drive up there. Pick you up in about forty-five minutes.”

“Isn’t it raining pretty hard to...”

“Charlie, I got to go up there. You be ready.”

“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”

He hung up. Charlie was going to be great company on this kind of a trip. Cold little fish. All he knew was accounting, but he certainly knew that.

Johnny wondered what Charlie would say and do if he knew the real reason for the trip. Charlie believed in following all the rules, cutting no corners. That was why he made such a good assistant. The books were always in apple-pie shape.

Johnny Flagan dressed quickly and finished packing. He went into the bedroom closet and opened the wall safe and took out the thick manila envelope. He took it out into the pale gray light and opened it and ran his thumb across the thick pad of currency.

He stood there for a moment and thought of all the things that could happen if for any reason he couldn’t get this cash up to Danboro, Georgia, before tomorrow noon. It made him feel weak and sick to think of the consequences. He and Stevenson and Ricardo would all be in the soup for sure.

It had been a calculated risk. Flagan knew he was worth somewhere around a half-million. But it wasn’t cash. It was tied up in land that was increasing in value day by day. He and Stevenson and Ricardo owned the majority shares in the little savings and loan company in Danboro, and they had been in on speculative land ventures together in the Sarasota area. Then a few weeks ago a new opportunity had opened up. Flagan couldn’t swing it alone. He couldn’t handle any part of it without selling off land he wanted to keep. So he’d flown up and explained the deal to Stevenson and Ricardo. They were in the same spot he was in. Temporarily overextended. So they had decided to take the calculated risk of taking the cash out of the cash reserves of the savings and loan company without making any ledger entry. Flagan had used the cash to buy in. Ricardo had a connection whereby he would learn in advance of any sneak audit. The deal didn’t move as fast as Flagan had expected. Yesterday Stevenson had called up, more upset than Flagan had ever heard him, and told him about the audit due tomorrow. Johnny couldn’t get the money back out of the new venture. Stevenson told him how much they would need to cover. So Johnny Flagan had spent a busy afternoon, and he had sold some choice land parcels he had meant to hold on to, and now had the money in cash.

There was no point in thinking of what might happen if the money didn’t get up there. It would get there, and it would go in the vault, and it would be counted, and the audit would give them a clean bill. There were some other things that had to be done up there sooner or later, and so it would kill two birds to take Charlie along this time.

But if Charlie learned what was going on, he would fall over in a dead faint. Charlie was a dry, pallid, emotionless little man in his early sixties. He was a wizard with figures. He had been with the trust department of a big New York City bank until his wife died, and Charlie’s health had broken, and he had come to Florida with too small a pension. He had worked for Johnny Flagan for twelve years. Johnny didn’t pay him generously, but every once in a while he had a chance to deal Charlie in on something, and it all added up.

Johnny drove cautiously across the rickety Ringling Bridges through the heavy rain in the big, dark-blue Cadillac. He had a quick breakfast in town and picked Charlie up at his rooming house over behind the Post Office. The envelope of money made a bulge in the inside pocket of Johnny’s rayon cord suit-jacket. It was comforting to feel it there. Little Charlie Himbermark scampered out through the rain and put his suitcase over in the back seat beside Johnny’s. They got out of town at seven, and Johnny Flagan pushed the big car hard as they headed north on 301 toward the Sunshine Skyway which would put them on Route 19.

About eleven miles north of the town of Crystal River on Route 19, on Florida’s West Coast, State Route 40 crosses 19 at a village called Inglis. Forty does not continue far to the west after it crosses; just three miles, to a place called Yankeetown on Withlacoochee Bay. The Gulf of Mexico is that close to 19 at that point.

As Route 19 continues north, it swings inland through Lebanon, Lebanon Station, Gulf Hammock. When it reaches Otter Creek, six miles north of Gulf Hammock, it is twenty-two miles from the Gulf. Cedar Key, on the Gulf, is twenty-two miles due west on Route 24 from Otter Creek.

In the relatively straight six miles of Route 19 between Gulf Hammock and Otter Creek, the highway crosses the Waccasassa River. Not much of a river. Not much of a bridge across it.

Ten miles west of the bridge the Waccasassa River empties into Waccasassa Bay, an almost triangular indentation of the Gulf of Mexico into the flank of the state. The shores of this bay are dreary and uninhabited. Thick mangrove grows down to the salt flats. Behind the mangrove the land is sodden, marshy, flat. High tides overflow into the flats, obscuring the slow curling course of the Waccasassa River. In the Gulf Hammock area Route 19 is barely six feet above the level of these tidal flats.

The bridge over the Waccasassa is a relatively modern concrete highway bridge, two lanes wide, not over a hundred feet long. It was built some years ago to replace a rickety wooden lane-and-a-half structure with timbers that flapped and rumbled under the wheels of the vehicles. At the time the bridge was being replaced, through traffic was detoured around it on an obscure road, four miles long, that roughly paralleled the highway and ran to the west of it. If headed north, you had to turn west off Route 19 about a mile before you came to the bridge. It was a narrow sand road, and it angled sharply away from Route 19 for over a mile. It turned north then and crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a vagrant loop of the sleepy Waccasassa, and about three hundred yards further, crossed a second bridge over the main river. Two and a half miles further on, after bearing almost imperceptibly east, the sand road rejoined Route 19.

When the new bridge was built, construction lasted well’ into the tourist season, despite State Road Department assurances that it would be done by Christmas. As a consequence, many southbound tourists went over the detour down the narrow sand road that wound through sparse stands of pine and then cut through the heavy brush near the river. Many of the tourists had cameras and a few of them, more aware of pictorial values than most, stopped on the stretch between the two wooden bridges to take a picture of a strange old deserted house quite near the sand road. It was a ponderous and ugly old house built of cypress, decorated with the crudest of scroll saw work. It was weathered to a pale silvery gray. The shuttered windows were like blinded eyes. The house sat solidly there and you thought that once upon a time someone had taken pride in it and had ornamented it with the scroll work.

Then the bridge was opened, and there was no one to take pictures of the house; no one even to see it except for the infrequent local fishermen who knew the times when snook came up the Waccasassa from the Gulf and could be caught from the larger of the two wooden bridges.

It was almost noon on- Wednesday, the seventh of October, when the concrete highway bridge became blocked.

Dix Marshall had picked up the load in New Orleans, and it was consigned to Tampa. He knew from the way the rig handled that they had loaded it as close to the limit as they dared. The inside rubber on the two rear duals was bald and it felt to him as though the whole frame of the tractor was a little sprung. It had an uneasy sideways motion on long curves to the left. But the diesel was a good one; new and with a rough sound, but with a lot of heart. That was a break. It was six hundred and sixty-five miles from New Orleans to Tampa, and he hadn’t got a very good start out of New Orleans. He’d felt so upset after the scrap with Grace that he’d almost asked the dispatcher if he could have a helper on the run. There was the usual bunk behind the cab seat. But the company didn’t like to pay double wages for a run this short if it could be helped.

He wanted this one to be a short trip because he wanted to get back and work out some kind of a better understanding with Grace.

Dix Marshall was a small man in his early thirties with thick shoulders and husky tatooed arms. He had been driving a rig since ’46 when he got out of the army, and he had been married to Grace for the past seven years.

He drove toward the dawn thinking about Grace, feeling sick about the whole mess and wondering what a guy was supposed to do. He felt that, if he could talk to her again, he could make her understand.

She was still cute. Heavier than when he’d married her, but dark and built real good. Everything had seemed to be going along fine until this last year when she had started to work on him to get off the rigs and get a steady job. She wanted him at home more. But she couldn’t get it through her head that he had some seniority, and the pay was good, and his record was good and, anyway, he liked the work. They’d started to fight. And kept it up. If he got off the trucks, what was there? An apprentice mechanic, maybe.

Then, just lately, he’d begun to hear things he didn’t like. She was hitting the neighborhood bars while he was on the road. Some of his friends gave him the word. They were apologetic about it, but they thought he ought to know. He’d seen it before. There was always somebody around to offer to buy the drinks and sooner or later she’d take on a reckless load and bring one of them home. He’d seen it happen.

So this last fight had been rugged. She, screaming about the life she had to live. “Why shouldn’t I go where I can talk to people?” she said. “You want me to sit in the house with the kids every night of my life?” And he had yelled back at her and they had hammered and jabbed words at each other for hours. He seemed unable to make her understand.

When he thought of how he hit her once, the first time he had ever hit her, he wanted to cut his right hand off. There was a tiny nick on his middle knuckle — she had tried to cry out just as he had struck her, and her tooth had nicked him. He wanted the trip to be over. He wanted to hurry back, and this time they’d talk quietly, and he would make her understand.

He ran into the rain south of Tallahassee. It was a hard rain. He started the wipers, turned on his running lights and cursed the rain. It would slow him down. But not as much as it would slow down a less experienced driver, or one with slower reflexes. He pushed the big rig along as fast as he dared — thundering south through the rain, throwing up spume from the big duals, staring ahead through the murkiness and worrying about Grace.

South of Otter Creek he came up on the car, came up on it too fast. It was a sedan of a gray color that blended too well with the rain. It did not have lights on.

The big blue and yellow rig was traveling at fifty-five miles an hour when Dix Marshall saw the faint bulk of the slow-moving sedan. Within a fractional part of a second, he had known that he could not hope to slow down in time. He had to make his choice instantaneously: Cut to the right and take his chances on the sloppy shoulder; cut to the left and risk a head-on with something coming the other way, or put on all the brakes he had and hope to hit the sedan lightly enough not to kill whoever was in it.

During the three quarters of a second it took, Marshall to make his decision, the big rig traveled nearly sixty feet. He jammed his foot down on the gas and gave a blast with the big air horns and swung left, risking the head-on. At the speed he was traveling he would not be in the left lane more than two long seconds.

He leaned forward and stared ahead, looking for the twin glow of oncoming dim lights. He plunged past the gray sedan. He saw something ahead of him and he snapped the big rig back into the right lane, cutting dangerously close to the sedan. As he cut back he saw that the object he had seen was the thick concrete railing of a bridge. It was the bridge over the Waccasassa, but he did not know that. He felt the skid of the two sets of duals on the rear of the trailer. He saw the thick rain-wet railing on the right side, saw the rain bouncing from it, haloing it. The trailer kept skidding, and he felt it slam against the concrete. It did not seem to be a hard impact. But in the next moment the cab was angled toward the concrete on the left side and he felt the dizzy sense of the whole rig tipping. As it went over he suddenly seemed to get the words right in his mind, the exact way he could tell Grace and make her understand.

The heavy cab smashed into the thick railing, burst through it, and pieces of reinforced concrete as big as bushel baskets fell into the river. By then cab and trailer lay on their right side, sliding with a raw noise of ripping metal, sliding, wedging the big trailer crosswise across the bridge, jamming it solidly between the two bridge railings. The tractor, having punched its hole through the east railing, was nipped off by the continuing motion of the trailer and fell into the shallow’ river, making one further quarter-turn as it fell, landing with the four heavy wheels in the air, then settling, sighing, suckling against the mud of the bottom, air bubbles bursting against the rain-lashed surface.

A few minutes later a car of the Florida State Highway Patrol, traveling north, braked sharply as the young driver saw the curious obstruction across the road. The driver put on the red flashing dome light and got out and inspected the barrier. It took him a moment to figure out that it was the roof of a big cargo trailer. He climbed onto the bridge railing and eased his way past, and he saw how forcibly the trailer had wedged itself into that position. It would be a long difficult job getting it free and out of the way.

Three cars were piled up on the other side. The elderly and indignant couple in the gray car that was the first in line said it had just happened. The patrolman went down onto the river bank, stripped down to his underwear and went into the river. On the second try he got the door open and brought the driver out of the cab and towed him ashore. The left temple area and the whole left frontal lobe was crushed, and the driver was dead.

He dressed, hurried back to his car and radioed in and told of the situation. After a short delay, he was told that he should check the old detour and see if it was still passable. Truck traffic would be rerouted at Otter Creek on the north and Inglis on the south. Other cars would be dispatched at once and, if he reported the detour passable, passenger cars should be routed over it. Wreckers were being dispatched to the scene.

The patrolman drove over the route and radioed in that it was okay for one way traffic. By then cars were beginning to pile up at both ends. The other trooper arrived. They set up their routing system, sending the cars through from each end in alternate batches, telling them not to straggle, but take it slow on the sand road, and on the wooden bridges.

And so passenger traffic rolled cautiously over the old detour, over the two wooden bridges, by the grim old house between the bridges, back out onto the highway. They felt their way through a half-world of gray driving rain. They inched across the old timbers of the bridges. The big pines swayed. The wind sound increased. The two patrolmen, parked four miles apart, blocked the highway and the red dome lights flashed in the murk. They were glad traffic was thin.

Virginia Sherrel drove north through the Wednesday rain in the blue-and-white Dodge convertible that she and her husband, David, had picked out together for the vacation they were to take — the vacation that David had finally taken alone. She drove north alone, the way David had driven south.

She had not liked the idea of an urn. The very word had the sound of a funeral bell. Bell? Fragment of an old pun: the New Hampshire farmhouse, on honeymoon. They had walked too far, and it had begun to rain, and they had run back. And David had knelt and taken the hem of her tweed skirt and twisted the water out of it and, smiling up at her, said, “Wring out wild belle.”

Not the sound of “urn.” And the urn itself had made a sound when the undertaker, with an almost grotesque callousness, had taken one down from a shelf and opened the screw top with a shrill grating sound and then held it out to her — and she, caught up in the wicked pantomime, had leaned forward a bit and stared inanely down into it and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Not for David.

So it was a box. A flat bronze box, not quite as long or as deep as a cigar box. With a discreet border design, a small catch. The undertaker had snapped the catch three times.

It was in the trunk compartment of the car, and she knew how it was wrapped. Back in the hotel in Sarasota she had closed the room door behind her and made certain it was locked, and then she had untied the cord, unwrapped the cardboard box.

Inside the cardboard box, the bronze box lay wrapped in tissue, resting on a nest of tissue. As she unwrapped it she thought of the presents they had given each other. David had once said, “I think I really like to see you unwrap presents. Such intense absorption! And all the sensuous little delays, such as untieing knots instead of cutting them.”

And this is your final present, David.

She lifted the bronze box and looked wonderingly at the fine grayish ash. She touched it lightly with her finger. It was soft and a few flakes adhered to the moisture of her finger tip, and she brushed them off. Here is all of you, my love. She closed the lid and it snapped as it had in the undertaker’s showroom. She wrapped it in the tissue, closed the cardboard box and wrapped it in the brown paper. She went over and stretched out on the bed. Gift from David. Gift of himself.

Chapter 4

Now, as she drove north through gray rain, the bronze box was in the luggage compartment of the car. His death was something she could not comprehend. She sensed that she would never understand why it happened. But she knew her grief was soiled by the manner of his death. As she drove cautiously, automatically, her mind turned back to that morning twenty days ago, that ten o’clock morning in the small east-side apartment when she learned how it had all ended.

She had gone down after breakfast to get the mail. No letter from David. Then she had gone back up to the apartment and poured her second cup of coffee. She sat and looked at the bills and the circulars and read one letter from an old dear friend who now lived in Burlington and who wrote, “I suppose it is a sort of modern wisdom to take a vacation from each other, but damned if I like the sound of it. To have you and David indulge in such a thing is to me like the teeter and fall of great idols. Forgive me if I am too blunt, Ginny, but I can’t help thinking David needs, more than anything else, a sound spanking.”

She was annoyed as she read the letter. In her attempt to be light when writing to Helen, she had given Helen a distorted picture. It was not a “marital vacation.” It was a sudden queerness in David, a hint of breakdown.

It was then that the phone rang.

“Mrs. David Sherrel, please.”

“This is she.”

“I have a long distance call for you from Sarasota, Florida. Go ahead, please.”

Dim male voice blurred by miles, distorted by a jangling hum. “David?” she said eagerly. “David, is that you?” And as she asked, she could remember the last few lines of the letter she had written him. Lines she had worked over very carefully: “Please know that I try to understand to the extent that it is within my capacity to understand. I know that you feel this is important to you. If it is important to you, it is also important to me, darling. But please write to me. I think I deserve that much. I think you owe me that much, David. You have always had imagination. Think of what it would be like to be me and to be here and not know.”

“David!” she cried to the blurred phone. “I can’t hear you!”

“Please hang up,” the operator said, “and I will try to get a better connection.”

She hung up and sat by the phone and waited. She wanted to hear him say he was coming home, that this frightening thing that had separated them was over.

When it rang again she snatched it quickly. “David?”

“No m’am. My name is... Police Department... phone number in his wallet.”

“Police? What’s wrong? Is my husband in trouble?”

“Sorry to have to tell you this, Miz Sherrel, but your husband is dead. We got to get a legal identification on him, and I guess you ought to come down here. Hello. Hello? Miz Sherrel? Operator! Operator! We’ve been cut...”

“I’m still here,” Virginia said in a voice that sounded not at all like her own. It sounded cool and formal and controlled. “I’ll fly down. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” The man started to say something but she heard only the first few words before she hung up.

In the first few moments there was the shock, and then there was the sense of inevitability, so strong and sure that she wondered that she had not known at once when the phone had rung — she wondered that she had been so naive as to expect to hear David’s voice.

She phoned the airline and made a reservation on a flight leaving at five minutes of two. She rinsed the breakfast things, packed, closed the apartment, cashed a check, picked up her ticket and, after a short wait at Tampa International, she was in Sarasota at a little after eight in the evening. It was a still night, very hot. People walked slowly in the heat.

The man she talked to was large, soft-voiced, gentle. He had her sit down, and he told her what happened. “Your husband had been staying at a place called the Taine Motor Lodge, out on the North Trail. He hadn’t been making any trouble or anything, but he was acting kind of peculiar and Mrs. Strickie, she’s the manager out there, she was sort of keeping an eye on him. She’s got efficiencies out there. She noticed his car was in front of his place yesterday, and he didn’t go out in the evening, and this morning she got thinking about it and knocked on his door about eight and, when she didn’t get any answer, she used her key and went in and backed right out again, the gas was so thick, and called us right away. We got it aired out and he was on the kitchen floor, and this note here was on the table.”

She took the note and read it: “Ginny— It just wasn’t any use. It just didn’t do any good. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t signed.

“Is that his handwriting?” The questioning voice came from far away, echoing through a long metal pipe. She swayed on the chair, didn’t answer. The man went away and came back with a paper cup. She took it, lifted it, smelled the raw whiskey, drank it down.

She gave the cup back to him. “That’s his writing.”

“It checks out that he did it about midnight. Was his health bad?”

“No. He was in good health.”

“Money trouble?”

“No. He had a good job. He was on a leave of absence.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

“He was in the radio and television department of a large advertising agency.”

“Any children?”

“No. No children.”

“You know of any reason why he did it, Miz Sherrel?”

“Not... exactly. I think it was some kind of a breakdown. His work was very demanding. He felt that he had to get away for a little while. He thought that would help.”

“If you feel up to it, we can go over and take a look at him now and get that part over with. If you don’t feel like it, it can wait until morning.”

“I’m all right. We can do it now.”

And so it was done. David was gone. The body seemed to be the body of a stranger. It was familiar to her in contour, in the shape of each feature, but no longer known to her. They went back, and the man gave her the keys to the car. David’s things were packed in the car. She found a place to stay. The next morning she made the arrangements about cremation. Then she placed a call to Jim Dillon in New York, their lawyer, a classmate of David.

“Jim? This is Ginny. I’m calling from Sarasota.”

“That’s what the operator said. What are you doing down there, girl? How’s Dave?”

“David killed himself, Jim. They found the body yesterday morning. I flew down.”

“He what? Ginny! My God, why? Why did he do that?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know. Jim, I need your help.” “Anything, Ginny. You know that. I think I could even come down there if...”

“No. No, thanks, Jim. I just don’t feel like coming right back and facing... everything. I suppose there are legal things that have to be taken care of. There’s the deposit box and things like that. There’s a will in it.”

“How big will the estate be?”

“Maybe thirty thousand. Somewhere around there. Then there’s the insurance. The policies are in the box.”

“Have you got money now? If you had a joint checking account, you won’t be able to write checks against it.”

“I have my own checking account. There’s enough in it for now, Jim. I just want to stay down here for a while. I don’t know how long.”

“How about the funeral?”

“I... I don’t think there’ll be any. He wanted to be cremated. I’m having that done. I’m going to phone his sister in Seattle and phone my parents. Maybe when I come back, I can arrange some sort of memorial service, but I don’t know about that yet. Can you do everything that has to be done?”

“Of course. Give me your address there. I’ll send stuff for your signature.”

She told him where she was staying. He told her how shocked and sorry he was, questioned her as to whether it was wise for her to be alone just at this time. He said he would inform the agency and let their friends know. She said she would write a note to some of the people. After they finished talking, she made the other two phone calls. They were both bad calls to make. When she talked to her parents, she was barely able to dissuade her mother from coming down.

“But what are you going to do. Virginia? Why are you staying there?”

“I have some thinking to do, Mother.”

“You can think anywhere. You can come here and stay with us and think here. This seems so insane.”

But in the end she won out, won reluctant acceptance. She drove around the city and decided she would rather live at the beach. She found a tiny apartment in a blue and white motel on Siesta Key. Her door opened onto the beach. It was September, and it was hot, and there were few tourists. In the mornings she would see the high white cloud banks against the blue sky, and on many days the hard rain would come down in the afternoon, dimpling and washing the sand and ending with the same abruptness that it had come.

She had wired Jim Dillon her new address. Legal papers came, and she signed them and sent them back. Sympathy notes arrived. The most careful and intricate one came from the advertising firm.

She spent her days in a quiet pattern. In the early morning, she walked on the beach. Later she lay under the sun, walking gingerly down to swim in the warm water when the heat became too great. The sun blunted her energies, softening the edges of her grief. She was a tall woman with a strong, well-made, youthful body, with black crisp hair, unplucked black brows, eyes of a clear light blue. The sun tanned her deeply and the continual swimming tightened the tissues of her body. She would come in from the dazzle of the beach and take off her suit in the relative gloom of the small apartment and, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, be startled by the vivid contrast of deep tan and the white protected bands of flesh.

The bronze box was in the back of her closet.

It was time to think, to wonder how she had failed. And to wonder what would become of her.

The marriage had lasted seven years. They had met in New York. She was from upstate New York, from Rochester. She was working in the fiction department of a fashion magazine when she met him. David had done two short pieces for them. Virginia had read them and thought them quite strange, but she had liked them. A third story, according to the judgment of the fiction editor, needed reworking. The fiction editor had made a luncheon date with David Sherrel and had been unable to keep it. Virginia was sent along to the midtown restaurant to meet him, armed with the manuscript, the fiction editor’s notes, and some money from the petty cash fund.

They had been awkward and earnest with each other during lunch. David turned out to be tall, slim, blond and — in spite of Madison Avenue manners and clothing — rather shy. He had curious moments of intensity, after which he would slip behind his façade.

She had been dating several men, but after lunch with David the others all seemed very predictable and tasteless. The second time she saw him, he was very drunk. The third time she saw him it became evident to both of them that they would be married.

It had seemed to be a good marriage. She felt needed and wanted. She learned to accept his moods of black, hopeless depression, accepting them as the evil to be balanced against a gift of gaiety, of high wild fun, of laughter that pinched your side and brought you to helplessness. There was the deep stripe of the erratic in him. He seemed to be always on the verge of losing his job, only to regain favor by some exercise of imagination that not only re-established him as a valuable man, but usually brought a pay raise. Though he sneered at his job and his work and could talk at length about the artificial wonderland of the advertising agencies, when he was in ill repute, he could not then keep food on his stomach, nor could he sleep without sedatives.

He had a gift for the savage phrase. He could use words that hurt her. But out of her strength and her understanding, she forgave him. His apologies were abject. His affection was as cyclical as his moods. There would be weeks when he would be warm, loving. Then would come the coolness, and he would withdraw physically to the point where, should she touch him inadvertently, she could feel the contraction of his muscles. And that hurt as badly as did the words.

David always bad very good friends, very dear and close friends who would adore him for two months or three before, out of some compulsion, he would drive them off. No friend remained loyal very long.

In spite of their private difficulties, they maintained a united front. He never spoke harshly to her when there was anyone around to hear him. She was grateful for that, as she knew her pride was very strong. She loved him with all her heart. She wanted his life to be wonderful. She did everything she could to make him happy.

It all began to go wrong right after the beginning of the current year. He slipped, day by day, further into a mood of depression. Yet this depression was not like the others. The others had been like the black clouds of brief violent storms. This was like a series of endless gray days, unmarked by any threat of violence. It seemed to her to be more apathy than depression. He went through his days like an automatic device designed to simulate a man. There seemed to be no restlessness in him — just a dulled acceptance. Although he had always been very fastidious, he began to shave and dress carelessly, and to keep himself not quite clean. She tried in all the ways she could think of to stir him out of it. She changed scenes, set stages, planned little plots, but none of them worked. When, in unguarded moments, she would wonder if he was getting tired of her, fright would pinch her heart.

One day, out of desperation, she set a scene so crude that in prior years it would have been unthinkable. While he was at the agency she went into the small study where he had used to work during the evening. She found and laid out the incomplete manuscript of the book. She laid out fresh paper and carbon and second sheets in the way he had liked to have them before he had given up work on the book.

That evening she had taken his wrist and smiled at him and tugged and said, “Come on.”

He came along without protest. She turned on the desk lamp and showed him what she had done. He stood and looked at the desk and then he turned and looked at her with an absolute emptiness in his eyes. An emptiness that shocked her. “God, Ginny!” he said tonelessly. “Good God, what are you trying to do to me?”

“I thought that if you...”

But he had walked out of the room. He walked out of the apartment. By the time she got her coat on and got down to the street, he was gone. He came back within an hour, and he was back down in the grayness of apathy, unreachable, untouchable. She apologized for what she had done. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter.

In June there was one day of gaiety. One day when he was like himself. Yet not like himself. There was an ersatz quality to his gaiety, as though it were the result of enormous effort — even as though this were a stranger, an actor, who tried expertly to become David Sherrel. That was the day they ordered the car and planned a vacation trip. By the time the car was delivered he had no interest in it, and she could not get him to talk about the trip again. She felt wasted. The empty days and the empty nights went by and she smothered her resentment and refused to admit to herself that she was thoroughly, miserably bored.

On an evening in late July he was quiet at dinner — it had been months since they had been out together or had anyone in — and finally, as though saying something he had memorized, he said, “I know that I’ve been a mess lately, Ginny. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. I feel as if, somewhere, I’ve lost all motivation. I want to try to get it back.”

“I want to help you.”

“I don’t want help. I talked to Lusker this morning. They’re giving me a six month’s leave of absence without pay. Lusker suggested psychiatry. I don’t think that’s the answer. I want to get away for a while.”

“I think it’s a wonderful idea, darling. We could go back up to...”

“I don’t think you understand. I have to get away by myself. I don’t know why. But that’s what I have to do.”

She looked at him, and her face felt stiff, tight, as though covered with a fine porcelain glaze. “You have to do that?”

“Yes.”

All the angry words were close to the surface. She suppressed them. She stood up slowly and began to clear the table.

“It’s all right, then?” he asked.

“It looks as though it will have to be, David.”

He left two days later. She packed for him. She kissed him and told him to write. She went down to the car with him. He stood and looked at her, and he looked shy and lost, and she thought it was like sending a child to camp, or to war. He opened his lips as though to say something, then turned abruptly and got into the car. It was a Sunday morning in Manhattan. The streets were empty. She stood and watched the blue and white car turn the corner. She went back upstairs. She prepared carefully for tears. She put on a robe, stretched out on her bed with a big box of tissues at hand. She lay and waited for the tears. They did not come. She thought of the sweet little things and the sad little things, and tried, through pathos, to force tears. But they did not come. She realized she was trying to pump up tears the way some women seek out sad movies. She got up quickly, and on that day she gave the apartment the most thorough cleaning it had ever had.

He sent a card from Augusta and one from Jacksonville and a third and final card from Sarasota saying that he would stay there for a time and let her know should he move on. There was an address she could write to. She wrote often, not knowing if he even bothered to read her letters.

Now the marriage was quite over. It had ended.

She lay on the still hot beach, plastic cups over her eyes, feeling the sun grind into her body. And she tried to understand.

There were two things that had happened to her, long before David, that seemed to point out the direction of understanding.

One had happened in high school, during the first week of a course in Natural History. She could not remember the name of the instructor. He had been a small, wide, balding man with a sharp penetrating voice and a sarcastic manner. He had pictures of prehistoric animals and lizards and birds, cleverly faked.

In essence he said, “These creatures no longer exist. They died out. Their own development brought them to a dead end. They had some fatal flaw which finally made it impossible for them to survive in a changing environment. They could not adapt. It is an oversimplification to call them nature’s mistakes. They were just dead ends in nature’s endless experimentation.”

And so it could be possible to say that David had within himself the flaw which made survival impossible. The flaw did not have to be isolated and described. It could be enough to know that it was there.

The second incident had happened when, in college, she had had a date with a young instructor, a man named Val Jerrenson. As he was not permitted to date students, they had to be secretive about it. It had been a warm Saturday in May and they had gone down to an amusement park on the shore. They had been standing talking near a shooting gallery, and Virginia, looking over Val’s shoulder, saw the head of Val’s department walking toward them, frowning slightly.

Virginia had put her hand out quickly, and Val had taken it instinctively. Raising her voice a little, she had said, “Well, I have to run along, Mr. Jerrenson. Nice to run into you like this. I’ll have to catch up with the other girls.” She then looked directly at the head of the department and said, “Oh, Hello, Dr. Thall! I didn’t know Mr. Jerrenson was with you. I really have to run.”

When Val finally came back to the car, she was sitting there waiting for him, giggling.

After they had driven far enough to be safe, Val had looked at her with an odd expression and said, “You know, Virginia, you frighten me a little. You have such a perfect instinct for survival. Such a gift for living. You are an organism designed to function perfectly in its environment. Such strength is a little disturbing.”

So add the two together. The flawed organism. And the survival organism. Living together, making a life together. She sensed that the marriage had made her stronger, because it had called on her strength; it had demanded it. Yet she had not wished to be strong. She had wanted a man who could dominate her. In the very beginning she had thought David such a man.

Thus, if it had added to her strength, had it not also added to his weakness? Would not David have been better with a silly girl, a gay careless erratic clinging little thing? Or was the flaw too deep?

There was one thing that she learned during the long days on the beach. She learned that her love was not as great as she had thought it. It made her ashamed to realize that. Yet in all honesty, it was an admission she had to make. And it was the final act which had cut love down to a manageable stature. It had been such a childish and insulting death. It was as though, out of petulance, he had flung something at her, had struck her in the face with sticky unpleasantness. She had cared for herself, keeping herself as handsome as she could, as fresh and alive and sweet-smelling, ready and waiting for him. Through marriage his need of her had been sporadic. His withdrawn periods seemed a denial of her. And now he had consummated the final denial.

She could feel grief, a sense of loss, a sense of inadequacy — yet it was not a sharpness that pierced her heart. It was more like thinking of a death that had happened long ago. David had died long ago, and he moved through the eternity of memory, blond, slim, tall, with soft sensitive mouth, dulled eyes, a look of rejection. The ashes were soft and gray in the bronze box. And ashes had no life, no history. They were always old.

She knew at last when it was time to go back. When she awakened on Tuesday morning, she knew that she had spent enough time in this place. A healing process had finished. She could go back and face friends and dispose of his personal possessions and give up the apartment and find something to do.

She looked at herself with utmost clarity and knew that any job she could find would not be enough. She knew that she would look for a man. A strong man. A man with courage and integrity and a sure sense of his own place. She knew that, at thirty, she had never been more attractive. With this man she would find herself. He would not need strength to lean on. He would exude strength, and that strength would make her feel like a woman, rather than a mother or a guardian. There would be children, as many as she could have. And all this would not be a rebound from David. It would, instead, be an acceptance of the years lost, and a desire to do, with those that were left, what she had been meant to do from the very beginning.

When she left in the rain on Wednesday morning, she was more than a little amused at her careful planning, at her incredible certainty that the future would be just as she desired it.

Steve Malden drove steadily north on Route 19 in a dark green Plymouth sedan. He was a big man, big in every dimension, big in hand and wrist and shoulder — slow-moving, with a look of competence and power. His hair was black and thick and cropped short, and black brows nearly met over the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were high and solid, his nose just enough hooked to give him an Indian look.

It was the first time in five years that Malden had driven anywhere without a specific mission, a clear idea of where he would go and whom he would see. This was supposed to be a vacation. That was what they had called it. But vacation was a word that was supposed to give you a lift, a feeling of anticipation and excitement — not this dulled restlessness. He had a vague idea of heading west, maybe swinging down into Mexico.

There had been no vacation in five years. He had not wanted a vacation, and he had not wanted this one. It had been forced on him. Bellinger, chairman of the committee had said, “Take a break, Steve. You can’t keep going on the way you are. You’re like a mechanical man. Take a break now or the job will break you.”

But time off was time in which to think and remember. And remembering was no good. It couldn’t bring her back.

In World War II. Malden had been a young sergeant assigned to the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He had liked the C.I.C. work and had done well at it. After his discharge he took police courses at Northwestern University, under the GI Bill. After he was graduated he spent a year on a big-city police force, then obtained a job with a national detective agency. Shortly after he went with them he married Dorothy Blackson, a stenographer in the home office. He did so well with the agency that, when the Florida Protection Committee asked for a fulltime operative, Malden was given an indefinite leave of absence to work for the Committee.

The Florida Protection Committee, even though financed and operated by private citizens, carried considerable weight in Tallahassee, and with the city governments of large cities in the state. It was formed by hotel owners, real estate operators and the owners and operators of legitimate tourist attractions. These men knew that too often the criminal element made deals with local enforcement agencies. Should that situation get out of control, Florida would be overrun by an element which could readily destroy the reputation the state was trying to establish and drive away the sound and respectable people who were contemplating retirement in Florida. Gambling, prostitution, dope peddling and the resultant theft and violence could never be completely eliminated. But, with proper investigative procedures and pressure applied at the right places, it could be held to a reasonable minimum.

Steve Maiden’s job was to establish sources of information, pay for information, protect informants, shadow suspects, observe illegal operations whenever possible and turn over thoroughly documented reports to the Committee for action on the state or municipal level.

The first year was a good year. Steve and Dorothy took a small house in Winter Haven. It was a central location for him. They were very much in love. She was a thin, blonde, luminous girl who gave an entirely erroneous impression of fragility. He knew she worried about him during his trips. He took her along whenever he could. The work was demanding and quite often exciting. The pay was good, and he knew the Committee was well satisfied with him. When he could steal a day, they would drive over to the beaches and swim and soak up the sunshine, then eat a dinner of the stone crabs she loved and find a motel. It often seemed to him that it was a honeymoon that would not end. They were suited to each other, enjoying the same things, laughing at the same things.

During that first year, he managed to obtain information on a new bolita ring operating in Tampa. Bolita is a variant of the numbers racket. The information Malden supplied was accurate; the ring was broken up and the court was unusually harsh with the offenders.

It was during his second year, five years before, that Steve Malden decided he could safely steal another day with Dorothy. They decided to drive over to Reddington Beach near St. Petersburg. It was a hot July day with thunderheads in the east. The rain held off until three in the afternoon. They stayed on the beach in the drenching rain, enjoying the coolness of it. Dorothy had taken on a lovely honey-tan in the hot months. After they ate, instead of finding a place to stay, Steve decided to check with an informant in Ybor City, a suburb of Tampa. He didn’t want to combine business with pleasure, but it was a very simple matter he wanted to check. The informant was a clerk in a cigar store, an elderly man with the thumb of his right hand missing. The man seemed very nervous. He refused to impart the information he had promised. Steve had left Dorothy in the car a block and a half away. It was a dark night, with thunder in the air and the threat of rain.

He walked back, puzzled and disappointed. Just as he reached the car he heard the scuff of a footstep close behind him. He had opened the car door. He whirled just as the shotgun blast tore a red hole in the night. The impact knocked him down and half stunned him. The pain in his arm was enormous. He tried to get up twice and fainted.

When he awakened in the hospital, he knew that he had been heavily drugged. His thoughts were blurred, his body heavy. When he thought of Dorothy there was a quick shrillness of panic, like a flash of light in a darkened room. But each time the light would fade because the drugged mind could not hold to any thought consistently.

Later, after he had slept and awakened again, they told him Dorothy had been hurt. They told him about his arm. The biceps had been torn, the bone splintered. On the operating table they had pinned the bone and sewn the muscle tissues. He would eventually regain full use of it.

There were police interviews, and they told him Dorothy had been seriously hurt, that she was on another floor of the hospital. He told the police that he had not seen the man behind the gun. He told them nothing else. On the third day, he got out of bed and refused to get back in until he had seen his wife. The doctor came and had him sit down and told him that the portion of the charge which had missed his arm had torn the throat of his wife, and she had died before the ambulance had reached the scene.

It was as though his life had stopped. The mechanics of living went on, but the essential substance was gone. His arm mended. The Committee offered him leave. He said he preferred to work. He disposed of Dorothy’s things. He moved heavily, stolidly, through the days that seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of him. He lost the gift of lightness, banter, casual conversation. For a time he drank heavily when he was off duty. He drank without pleasure, with a dogged desire to drug himself so that sleep without dreams would become possible. Then he found that he had somehow dulled his mind and his memories so that sleep could come, a dark animal sleep. He was without friends. For a time there were those who tried to bring him out of it, but they soon tired of thankless effort.

He ate and slept and worked. And he was able to accomplish a great deal. He moved through the state like a nemesis, always growing more crafty in blending with the background. His disguises were simple and effective. Tourist, sailor, fisherman, salesman. His reports were detailed, explicit, and the Committee translated them into action.

But the work was without joy. He spent uncounted hours in trying to find out who had fired the shot. The body of the informant was found in Tampa Bay a month after the shooting. And that was finally the end of the trail.

Five years had passed. Now you were thirty-two instead of twenty-seven. You would become forty-two and fifty-two, and she would stay back there in the past, still twenty-four, forever slim, clean-limbed, fragrant. Forever three months pregnant.

Malden knew that he would never have consented to this vacation had not something been slowly changing within him of late. It was as though some part of him was trying to lift the dark burdens he had carried so long. Some rebellious part that wanted to see the light again. This unexpressed yearning to come alive again was painful. It was like blood returning to a numbed limb. He preferred to move in the half-light of his chosen world. Her face was not clear to him any more. Time had begun to blur it. And it was less and less often that his heart gave its hard and sorrowful thrust when he saw a girl on a city street who moved like her, walked proudly as she had walked.

This then was the time of reassessment. This was vacation. He drove north on Route 19 through the hurricane rains, so accustomed to driving that it required but the slightest fraction of his attention. And because he was — or had been — a sensitive and perceptive man, he fought with a new demon on this day — one that he had at last faced squarely. The demon stated its case in the form of a question: Steven Malden, has this five years of darkness been the result of a legitimate grief, or has it been a time of self-indulgence? Have you been standing apart and admiring the dark and monstrous picture of your own heartbreak — indulging yourself in bathos and thinking it pathos? Have you fallen in love with the dreary picture of your own withdrawal from life, thinking it dramatic, a thing of splendor? Are you ready to raise your head a little and start to live again in any emotional dimension? Or are you so pleased with your own strength that for the rest of your life you shall refuse to share it with anyone?

The green Plymouth moved steadily north and the big silent man at the wheel remembered that he had not wept. Not once. He had felt something akin to pride: that his grief had been beyond tears. But pride seemed to be turning to shame. Had it been the other way about, she would have cried.

And, by now, she could have mended herself and could have been able to give of her own warmth to some second love.

Hilda moved up, through the Gulf of Mexico, ever more erratic, unpredictable. The rain soaked into the earth. It softened the black earth around the shallow root structure of tall Australian pines. Rain precedes the hurikan, and, when the wind comes, the tall pines topple readily. The runoff fattens the streams that run to the Gulf, raising the level, stretching the stem structure of the ubiquitous water hyacinth.

Hilda slowed and made a long gentle curve to the northeast, moving closer to the coast. She moved to within fifty miles of the mouth of the Suwanee River, and there all forward motion ceased. She remained in place, the whirling winds churning the Gulf. Once she had covered vast areas. Now the area was small. Even so she was large enough to flay the coast with hard gusts of wind.

The tide had been rising in the Gulf throughout the morning. High tide along the Cedar Key area was predicted for three in the afternoon. It was determined later that it must have been at about one o’clock when the hurricane, smaller and yet more violent than before, made a totally unexpected change of direction and began to move due east toward the Florida coast, moving at an estimated eighteen miles an hour, with the winds nearest the eye reaching a velocity that could not be measured. This was the dread combination of hurricane and tide that had long been anticipated by the pessimists of the low-lying coastland.

Chapter 5

Slow traffic bypassed the Waccasassa Bridge where technicians worked to free the jammed truck-trailer. Heavy rain and traffic had made the detour more difficult. There was a policeman at each end of the detour. The last car in each small group that went through carried a sodden red rag on a stick to be given to the officer at the far end. They were able to pass alternate batches of passenger cars through at approximately twenty-minute intervals. It was dull, unpleasant duty.

The policeman on the south end of the detour was named Stark. He was bored, yet apprehensive of the increasing force of the wind. The rain was ceasing. But the gusts of wind were so strong that he often had to fight for balance. The radio in his car was turned high and the car was parked where he could hear it. At one-thirty he sent a batch of seven cars through and began to accumulate another group. The group of seven was large. The smallest group had been two. The storm was emptying the highways.

He prepared himself for the same repetitious questions when the first car pulled up, a dark-blue Cadillac, a new one. He flagged it down and went over to it. The driver rolled the window down. He was a balding, ginger-headed man with a red-faced look of importance.

“What goes on?” he demanded, raising his voice to carry over the wind sound. Stark recognized a local accent.

Stark repeated what he had said so many times. Detour. Bridge blocked by an accident. Shouldn’t be too long a wait. The detour was four miles long, sand and shell. Two wooden bridges. Have to take it slow.

The second car was a heavily loaded station wagon with a youngish couple and two kids. They asked the expected questions, got the same answers. He noticed as he stood next to the car on the righthand side, talking across the blonde woman, talking to her tired-looking husband, that the wind was making the halted car sway.

The next car was a welcome break in the monotony. Stark recognized it as a Mercedes-Benz, but he had never had a chance to get close to one. There was a couple in it, a good-looking athletic sort of guy and a girl who was not so good-looking, but looked like money.

After Stark had explained the delay, they talked about the car and then about the hurricane. Stark said, “They keep telling me it’s headed for Texas, but it feels like it’s coming here.” The gusts were beginning to seem solid enough to lean on. Now that the rain had practically stopped, the sky was a peculiar yellowish color.

The fourth car was a dark-green Plymouth with a husky hard-faced man traveling alone. He had fewer questions than the others. He did not seem to resent the delay. But he looked as if he was the type who would. Stark was wondering whether it would be smart to get a look at the driver’s license when the fifth car came up, a blue-and-white Dodge convertible with one woman in it. She was the best-looking woman of the day. Stark had been keeping a mental box score. She was pleasant to him, and it was almost a pleasure to answer the same tired old questions.

The next time he glanced toward the detour he saw the first of the group of southbound cars come lumbering and laboring up out of it onto the highway, straighten out and begin to pick up speed. There were six cars and the last one had the flag. He could see nothing coming along the windswept highway, so he gave the good-looking woman the flag and told her to take it slow.

He watched the cars disappear cautiously down the detour. A truly massive gust of wind came along. It slammed against him and drove him back. He had to turn and take several running steps to catch his balance. He cursed, more in awe than anger. He heard the sound of his radio over the wind noise and pushed through the wind toward his car.

“Stark? The hurricane has changed direction. It’s moving in on the coast and pushing one hell of a high tide in front of it. Don’t send any more cars through. Head south slowly and stop anything you find coming at you and turn ’em back. Tell them to find shelter. This could be a bad one. Block the road at Lebanon Station and keep in touch. I think we’re all going to be kept busy.”

Stark headed slowly south, dome light flashing, wind swaying the sedan. On impulse he pushed the siren and kept it on. The sound seemed frail and lost in the new high wail of the great wind.

The Australian pine was a huge one, very near the end of its life span and beginning to die. It stood on the north bank of the Waccasassa River, thirty feet west of the wooden bridge over the main part of the river.

The same gust that had driven Stark across the road struck the old tree moments before reaching Stark. There was a faint ripping, crackling sound, and the flat root structure was pulled slowly up on the west side of the tree. The tree fell slowly at first and then more quickly. It brought up square yards of black, soaked soil with it. It fell thickly, heavily, onto the north end of the wooden bridge. The great weight of it in free fall smashed the tough old timbers. The bridge folded and sagged, supported the weight for a few seconds, and then with small harsh noises as old spikes were pulled from weathered wood, bridge and tree sank into the swollen Waccasassa.

The caravan of six cars came nosing cautiously down the detour. The caravan crossed the first bridge, the blue Cadillac leading. The cars jounced over limbs that had fallen into the road. They passed the ugly deserted old house. The road turned slightly. The lead car came to the bridge and stopped.

“Damn!” Johnny Flagan said explosively.

“That tree came down right across the bridge,” Charlie Himbermark said excitedly.

“You can sure figure things out, Charlie.”

“Don’t take it out on me.”

“We got to get out of here.” He pushed his door open and got out and looked back. The cars were piled up behind him. He looked at the soft deep ditches on either side of the road. Johnny was thankful that nobody started leaning on the horn. He made his decision quickly. He walked back to the last car in line. A pretty woman was at the wheel. She looked nervous.

“We got to get turned around,” he yelled. “The bridge is out up there. Can you back this to that house back there and get it turned around?”

The woman nodded. Johnny went to each car in turn and got them started backing cautiously. It might be all right after all. Get out of here and go back south to the fork and cut over to 41 and head north again. Not too much delay. Not enough to be critical. He directed the traffic, keeping his heavy body braced against the wind, keeping the other cars from backing too close to the rudimentary driveway at the house until, one by one, they got turned around. He went back to his own car at a heavy-footed panting run. He backed up with fast reckless precision, spun the big car and headed south for not over thirty feet before he came upon the station wagon halted ahead of him.

“Now what?” he demanded and got out again. Some of the others had got out, too. They stood by the convertible and looked at the bridge they had just crossed.

Johnny Flagan saw the trouble and for the first time he felt a light brush of panic. He calmed himself with an effort. The lesser branch of the Waccasassa curved at the point where the bridge was placed. The water was very high and it was moving swiftly. Debris bumped against the bridge. On the far side the water had dug into the bank and the far end of the forty foot bridge had dropped nearly a foot and a half. It must have been ready to drop when they came over it. Flagan noted that, in spite of the heavy rain, the water was coming upriver rather than flowing toward the gulf. The tide must be coming in faster than the runoff.

He opened the car door and said to the woman, “Think you could make it? Get a little start and you maybe could plow up that little bitty hump over there.”

The woman’s face was white, her lips pressed tightly together. She shook her head.

Flagan made another decision. “Get out then and let me try. If it works you can come over in another car.”

Again she shook her head. He felt outraged. The fool woman would keep him from that life and death appointment in Georgia. He took her roughly by the arm and hauled her out of the car. He’d make the far side and holler back that he was going for help. He’d send help back and head for Georgia. It wasn’t like stealing. She could have the Cadillac if he messed up her car. There wasn’t time to explain that to her.

She pulled at him as he got into her car. He pushed her back and the combination of the push and the force of the wind knocked her down. A man was coming toward the car, a big husky man with a look of anger. Johnny Flagan pulled the door shut. The motor was running. He put the automatic transmission into low and headed across the bridge, picking up speed as he went. The far end was under water. Water sprayed up from the tires and was whipped away by the wind. He hit the far bank with an impact that drove him forward against the wheel. The front end bounced up high, came down with front wheels above the edge. He gunned it and felt the back wheels spin. He felt the bridge settle under the car. Now the hood was pointed up at such an angle he could not see the road. Still he raced the motor.

The bridge shuddered and dropped further. Water got a broader grip on the side of the car. The back end began to swing. Johnny Flagan yelled shrilly and got the door open as the car toppled off the bridge, breaking through the cracker-brittle railing. Something caught at him and pulled him under. He fought and ripped free as he sucked brackish water into his lungs. The great fear of his whole life was filling him like an unending scream. The other men of his family had drowned in the Gulf. He would have drowned had he been along. In his secret heart he knew that the fates had meant him to drown. He could not swim. He had never been in a boat since that drowning of long ago. He tried to scream under water. Then he broke through the surface. The current had spun him. He could not tell which bank he had tried to climb. He flapped at the water, coughing and choking. Something caught hold of him and he turned, reaching for it. There was an explosion against his chin. From then on it was like a gray dream. He was aware of being towed to the bank, of being dragged up onto the shore like some exhausted fish, but he could not move.

He was rolled over and hard hands pressed against his thick waist. He coughed the brackish water from his lungs. He twisted away from the punishing hands. After a time they left him alone. He lay with his cheek against the soaked ground, breathing heavily, recovering his strength.

And then he remembered. His right hand, half curled, was close to his eyes — a thick white hand with the curled reddish hair growing thickly on the back and between the knuckles of the fingers. He moved his hand cautiously. He moved it down and turned slightly onto his side so that he could reach into the left inside breast pocket of his suit coat. The envelope was there. It was sodden, but it was there. The ultimate disaster could yet be staved off.

He got laboriously to his feet, weaving under the impact of the wind. They had moved the cars close to the deserted house. The door was open: being in the front of the house, it was shielded from the wind. They were carrying things in from the cars, all of them working. A small boy appeared in the doorway of the house, staring out at the storm. He was quickly snatched back out of sight.

Flagan felt sick at his stomach. If he’d had any sense, he thought, he would have crossed the bridge on foot. He looked at the stream. Bridge and blue and white convertible were utterly gone. He plodded toward the house. He saw Charlie Himbermark come out and look toward him and then start walking toward him. Better come look out for me. Where has he been? He’d better remember who puts the butter on his bread.

Flagan decided to stand and wait for him. They’d go together. Go down the shoreline. Had to be a place to get across somewhere. When Himbermark got beyond the protection of the house, the wind caught at him, hastening him along in a ridiculous trot. Flagan saw some of the other people watching Himbermark, the couple from the foreign car, the big, dark sullen looking guy, the thin man from the station wagon.

And Flagan saw the tree that stood in the side yard of the house. He saw it start to fall. He knew in that moment where and how it would fall, and knew he could do nothing about it. He yelled, but the wind tore the words and flung them behind him. He saw Charlie Himbermark, warned in some unknown way, look back up over his shoulder and stare at the black wet trunk and try to turn and scramble out of the way. But his feet slid on the wet ground and the wind pushed against him and. in the slowest of motion, Flagan saw the black trunk touch the small frail man and, continuing, crush him down against the wet soil and then, shifting slightly, settle more inevitably, irrevocably against the earth.

Flagan turned and pressed his back against the wind and was ill. When he turned back a whirring palm frond struck his face, stem first, cutting him below the eye. He looked at the blood on his fingers and plodded toward the house. He had to clamber over the trunk of the tree. He did not look toward the place where it rested on the crushed body of Himbermark.

The highway patrolman at the north end of the detour had received the same orders as Stark. He was heading north, turning back traffic. The attempt to clear the bridge was suspended. The coastal power and phone lines had begun to go. Driven by hurricane winds, the tides began to hammer the beach resorts. There were last-minute evacuations of exposed keys. Radio stations switched to private generators.

Yet the main force of the hurricane had not yet reached the coast. The great property damage thus far was water damage. The huge tides smashed sea walls, sucking filled land out through the gaps in the shattered concrete, and the shore houses collapsed as fill was sucked out from under them.

Tidal water came up over beaches, across shore roads, moving into houses set hundreds of feet back from the normal high-tide mark. Thousands of sand bags were being filled as people fought to save their homes.

— Emergency Warning Service. All coastal facilities. 2:12 P.M. It now appears that the eye of the hurricane, Hilda, will intersect the coast line in the vicinity of Cedar Key and Waccasassa Bay. Unless there is a change in speed or direction, this intersection should take place at approximately 4:30. Evacuation of all exposed properties from Dead Man’s Bay to Tarpon Springs is recommended.

When Hal Dorn came back into the house. Jean looked up at him, half-smiling, hoping to show him by her expression that she could control her own fear. But when she saw the odd sick expression on his face, her half-smile faded and she got quickly to her feet and went to him.

“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?” She was afraid he was slipping back into resignation and defeat after showing such decisiveness when faced by this emergency.

Hal motioned for Mrs. Sherrel to join them. He sent Stevie back to the corner, to the blankets, out of earshot.

“It was the old fellow. Now I can’t even remember his name.”

“Himbermark,” Mrs. Sherrel said. “He told me it was Himbermark.”

“He was going to help his friend, Flagan. The one who took your car. Tree just came down on him. That big one at the side of the house. He didn’t have a chance.”

Jean gave a little cry of shock, and Virginia Sherrel closed her eyes for a long moment. Hal took his wife by the arm and said, “Stevie may ask about him. If he does, tell him that the old man went after help or something. Understand?”

“Yes, dear,” she said. She saw that the look of shock was gone from his face, saw that once again he seemed to be well in control of himself and the situation. It gave her a curious attitude toward this emergency, this entrapment — a feeling almost of gratitude.

When they had been driving north before it had happened, he had been so very different — remote, uncommunicative — driving along with his thin strong hands on the wheel, knuckles whitened by the strength of his grip. She had seen the odd color of the sky, gray, luminous, faintly yellowed. The look of the sky had made her sense how small they were and how very vulnerable.

All her life she had been vulnerable to the moods of the weather. A bright warm day meant holiday. Heavy winter snows made her feel hushed and secretive. On days of rain she wanted to weep. On this day she had been unable to keep her mind from returning constantly, gingerly, to the thought that they were moving swiftly toward some unimaginable catastrophe, some great disaster.

She remembered reading that, when the barometer was low, it induced an atavistic nervousness and tension in people. It seemed a primitive warning. And she told herself that, with a hurricane in the area, her sense of foreboding had its logical explanation — it was not strange she should feel alarm without any real basis for it. Also, there was another accountable factor. During the early months of pregnancy with both Stevie and Jan she had been moody, depressed. Only in the later months had she achieved a warm, deep sense of waiting and growing and flourishing.

Yet despite all rationalization she could not avoid the recurrent moments of something akin to panic. Once when the car had swayed with a new violence she had gasped. Then she had tried to tell Hal of her fears, but he had been curt with her, so curt and unpleasant she had turned away from him to look out the side window where the landscape was blurred by the warm sting of the tears in her eyes.

Then he had said, after a time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Yes, I suppose it’s all right. The magic forgiveness. The automatic forbearance. No, I don’t mean that either. Don’t pay any attention to me, Jeanie. I’m in foul mood. And now, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘That’s all right’ again.”

It had been easier to say nothing. He was too full of his own defeat. Too far into the blindness of self-pity. She wondered how and why he had lost his resilience, the core of his courage. Or had he been without it from the beginning — and she had simply not known it because this was the first time it had been tested?

She had felt shocked and ashamed of her own disloyalty. Hal had certainly not given up readily. He had maintained his spirits for a long time, even after he had undertaken the exhausting manual labor in the warehouse. Yet when he had given up, when he had wept, he had given up all the way, unlocking all the gates and surrendering all the turrets. She sensed that the collapse was related to his family, to his background. Defeat, to Hal, was the unthinkable thing — the thing that could not have happened.

As they had neared the blocked road, she had been wondering how much better it would have been for him had he not had the burden of wife, two children, and new child to come. Perhaps in his curtness and irritability there was a flavoring of resentment.

The policeman had explained about the detour when they had stopped behind the blue Cadillac. Stevie and Jan had begun to get a whining note in their voices during the boring wait, and she knew they were getting hungry. She had given them the box of fig newtons from the glove compartment with severe injunction to share fairly.

At last they were permitted to go ahead in cautious convoy. It was a primitive road that moved in aimless curves across scrub flats and then dipped toward heavier trees, crossed a precarious wooden bridge, passed a house set in a grove of big trees, a house that looked gloomy and brooding in the strange light. Hal had stopped when the Cadillac stopped, and they had looked ahead and seen the big tree down and the ruin of the second bridge.

During the next fifteen minutes, during the time they had backed and turned around, and found the other bridge impassable — during the episode of the car’s going into the river, the rescue, the moving of the remaining cars close to the house — Jean Dorn had lost her own fears as she had witnessed the transformation of Hal.

At first he had seemed annoyed, bleak, passive — as though he considered this as just another black weight added to the scales that had tilted so radically against him. And then the change had come. She had seen it come, and it had made her heart glad. She knew that he had forgotten himself and his own private problems. With forgetfulness had returned the habit of decision and command. His expression was changed. More alert, more intent. His posture was different. He moved and walked with a briskness. During that time he was not a defeated man.

It was Hal who moved quickly to help get the half-drowned man out of the river, beckoning to the husky blond man to help him. It was Hal who calmly surveyed the swollen river and turned and looked at the house and then, over the wind sound, called to all of them to get the cars close to the house. The others had accepted his decision without question, willing in emergency to respond to orders that made sense and were given in the proper tone by someone who worked hard along with them. Hal had organized the carrying-in of the luggage from the cars and had requested that all blankets, robes, heavy coats be brought into the house. And, somehow, while the work was going on, while they were settling in, he had not only managed to make them all known to each other, but he had created among them the feeling of being a group working wisely and well toward a common end.

It made Jean’s heart full to see this re-creation of the man he had been before he had learned about defeat. His was not an ersatz confidence, but rather the quiet control of a man used to accepting authority and responsibility. The group responded to him, and she was proud of him. Because of his efforts they had, in a short time, accepted the old house as refuge. Hal and the blond man, Bunny Hollis, had broken the lock of the old door. The inside floor was reasonably sound. All the windows were shuttered, but the shutters fit poorly and had cracked and spread in the weather so that pale light came into the rooms.

When Hal had introduced her to Virginia Sherrel, he had said, “Mrs. Sherrel lost all her luggage in that car, honey. Falling in the mud didn’t do her any good. Don’t you have something that would fit her?”

“This,” said Mrs. Sherrel, “seems to be dungaree weather, if you have some.”

Jean reached for a suitcase. “I have some, and a blue work shirt. They should fit, I think.”

Jean and Virginia and the kids were the only ones in the house when Jean had looked up and seen Hal come back in and had seen in the faint light the strange expression on his face. For several bad moments she thought he had reverted to his previous mood of passive resignation. Then he took the two of them aside from the kids and told them what had happened. Jean saw, with both relief and gratitude, that he had not changed back. He was still in charge, still able and alert. Virginia went back to find a place where she could change.

Hal Dorn turned and watched Flagan come into the room. Malden pulled the door shut. Flagan didn’t look at any of them. He walked over and sat down with his back against a wall. His wet clothes dripped water on the floor. He lowered his face against upraised knees. Hal ended the short, curious silence by saying to Malden, “Let’s take a look around and see what we’ve got here.”

Malden nodded. Hal realized how glad he felt about the interruption to the trip. This was better than driving and thinking the long bitter thoughts of discouragement. He knew that later it would be the same again, but for now it was good to have something to do, plans to make. With intelligence, and some luck, they should come out of this all right.

Chapter 6

Hal Dorn and Malden inspected the house. The main room, the room they were in, was a long room on the northeast corner of the house. It had a low ceiling and was paneled in a dark, rough wood. The room was completely bare and there was a smell of wet rot. The wooden floor had heaved and buckled, and, near one wall, there were holes where the floorboards had rotted away. There was a small brick fireplace set into the south wall and, to the right of the fireplace a stairway to the second floor. The walls of the stairway had been plastered, and the plaster had fallen away from the lath and lay like dirty snow on the stairs. There was a door to the left of the fireplace that led to another room, and another doorway in the west wall that led to what had been the kitchen.

The impression of relative silence disappeared quickly. Hal could hear all the tones of the wind. The wind pressed against the rear of the house. It found small cracks where it could enter. As it came in the small cracks and as it twisted around the cornices, it made small wild sounds, full of a supersonic shrillness. The shrill sounds ebbed and pulsed with the changes of the wind. Hal thought that, if he had to listen to that sound too long, he would begin to howl like a dog.

Thin gray bands of light, diffused by dust, shafted into the house through the cracks in the ancient shutters. He could feel the stir of the bones of the old house when the wind swerved and smote it. Over the wind-sound there were other sounds from the wild world outside — remote and inexplicable thuddings, rattlings, crashings. Heads lifted when something cracked sharply against the back of the house.

Hal and Malden went up the stairs. There was a narrow central hallway, four small square bedrooms, no bath. The wind sounded stronger up there. The two men stood and listened to it. “What do you think?” Hal asked.

Malden merely shrugged. Hal looked at him closely and had the strange impression that the man was bored. “Got any ideas?” Malden asked.

Hal forced himself to consider the eventualities. “We must be four or five feet lower than the level of the highway here. My car radio conked out. I don’t know if it’s going to get worse than this. That water was coming up fast.”

“The hurricane is headed this way. I heard that much.”

“Then it’s going to blow a hell of a lot harder. I don’t know if this place will take it.” He paused. “We ought to do two things. Put somebody on a car radio and get what dope we can. And have somebody go out and see if they can find a good way back to the highway. I’ve got two little kids to think about.”

“So you won’t go.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Hal said. “I meant it has to be a way out of here where we can take the kids. But we have to find out which is more important — higher ground or shelter. I don’t remember much of anything along the highway — a gas station way back, too far back.”

They went back down the stairs. Jean had made a blanket nest in the corner for the children. She sat with them. Virginia Sherrel, in one of Jean’s blue work shirts and a pair of her dungarees, sat near her, and the two women talked. Flagan sat alone, his head still resting on his knees. Bunny and Betty Hollis stood close together looking out a horizontal crack in one of the blinds. His arm was around her.

Hal gave Jean what he hoped was a reassuring smile and said, loudly, “A snug house. Not exactly split level.” As he said the last few words the wind-sound unaccountably ceased, and his voice was too loud and strong in the room. Flagan raised his head. They all listened to the momentary silence, and then the wind came down upon them again, stronger than before. They felt the uneasy shift and creak of the old house. Stevie began to cry. Jan, who had been almost asleep, stared at him for a moment and then, as was her habit, joined in. Jean began to comfort Stevie, and Virginia Sherrel picked up Jan and held her closely, rocking her.

The couple at the window had turned around. Hal beckoned to Bunny and nodded at Malden and went with the two of them into the adjoining room. They stood close together to make talking easier. Hal felt frail standing with the two of them and thought that it was fine that there were some muscles in this group. They could just as easily have been stranded with three or four middle-aged couples.

Bunny said in a tense voice, “Man, you ought to see that water coming up! It’s about halfway to the house right now.”

“Then we shouldn’t wait too long,” Hal said. “Somebody had better go find out if we can walk out of here.”

“Every once in a while those trees go over,” Bunny said nervously.

“Two of us would be better than one,” Malden said. “Hollis, let’s us go take a look. If we find a good way to higher ground, I can go on ahead and get help, and you can come back here and lead them on out to the highway.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense to wait it out right here?” Hollis asked.

“The water is coming up,” Hal said. “Suppose it gets to be six feet deep here, with a current from the Gulf. The sills under this place are rotten. If it shifts off the foundation it’s going to roll, and if it rolls, it’s going to collapse like a house of cards.”

“Okay, okay,” Hollis said without enthusiasm. “So we duck the trees.”

“I’ll get on a car radio and see what I can find out,” Hal said.

They went into the larger room and explained to the three women what they were going to do. Betty Hollis was alarmed. She objected to Bunny’s going. He quieted her.

When they went outside, Hal was awed by the new ferocity of the wind. The Cadillac was closer than the Plymouth. He saw it had a radio aerial. And he remembered leaving the keys in ft. He caught the door handle as the wind tried to push him away. He got in and shut the door. The water was coming up the road from both directions. It was no longer possible to tell where the bridges had been. He watched Malden and Hollis. They moved slowly with the wind, heading due east toward where the highway should be. They were soon out of sight in the brush. Hal turned on the radio and waited for it to warm up.

Betty Hollis stared at the closed door after Bunny had left with the other two men. She hurried to the window, but she could not see them. The direction was wrong.

She felt that somehow the magic was being taken away from her. If only there had been more time, just the two of them together. Then perhaps she could have learned all the ways to bind him to her so he would never leave.

She knew that she could never have or keep the things she most wanted. Even from the very beginning, when all of childhood and young girlhood seemed to be compressed into one unending scene — where she walked alone down a street while all the others watched from steps and porches, scornfully amused by the soft awkward body, the rhythmless stride. There goes the Oldbern girl.

She had known from as early as she could remember that she was not the sort of girl Daddy wanted. Not the kind of girl he had hoped for. The brown, sunny, laughing ones. The girls who could do things and talk to anyone in the bright, pert way she had never been able to manage. When she had tried to imitate those girls, people had looked at her so peculiarly that she had wanted to run and hide from all the world.

That was why Daddy had sent her away, of course. To all those far-away schools. It was something you had to accept. You weren’t what was wanted, what had been expected, and so you had to go away. And she had sent back the very best marks she could — and the medals she earned with those marks. It was a small gift, but the only one she could give.

Eating was a part of it, too. Only lately had she begun to understand how that was so much a part of it. Eating had been the only fun. Pastries and chocolate and fudge and starches, with the soft pounds adding higher and higher, and then you knew you didn’t have to worry about men or marriage because, in the intense pleasure of eating, you had made yourself so gross. And the slim girl you were in your heart was hidden and safe, underneath the wabbling pounds.

But you had never expected to fall in love. Certainly not in love with anyone as magical and unattainable as Bunny. And you could never understand how you acquired the courage to start taking the tennis lessons from him.

It had happened all of a sudden.

It was a still, hot day, and she was at the club under an umbrella eating a sundae and watching Bunny teach two brown boys of thirteen. She noticed absently that day that he seemed like a nice man. So patient and anxious to have the kids learn. She was aware of him, but not specifically aware. Then he sent both boys to the far court and volleyed with them. And she saw how he moved like a big blond cat, saw the line of his back and the shape of his shoulders and the way his head was set on the round strong column of his neck.

She looked at him and felt the rising of a strange warmth within her, a slow stirring that she had never felt before. She had had crushes, but they were not like this. And then she saw the absurdity of her position. Fat girl in the umbrella shade going all sticky over the tennis instructor at the club. He was so old. He must be nearly thirty.

Making the appointment for lessons later on was by far the bravest and boldest thing she had ever done. He had played a few games with her to find out how well she could play. And then he had called her, panting, up to the net. His smile took the sting out of his words. “I think I can help your game, but I have to be rude to you, Miss Oldbern. The first exercise I am going to give you is pushing yourself away from the table before dessert. That will help your game more than anything.”

He could have said anything to her without offending her. She was in the first stage of worship.

She took many lessons. She worked on her weight. Sometimes they talked. It was a long time before she overcame her painful shyness of him. Then she could talk almost naturally, telling him about herself and her nineteen years. He seemed gentle and thoughtful. He told her how he had lived for his thirty-three years. Fourteen years’ difference in age didn’t seem so much if you said it quickly. When she was fifty he would be only sixty-four; they would both be old, then.

When it turned cold, the lessons were given on the indoor courts. Her days were filled by him. There was nothing else worth flunking about. She adored him. She could not tell him of her love. It was too ridiculous. He would laugh. This was another of the things in life she would never have. But it was good to dream about for a little time.

On one gray November day after a lesson, he turned out the court lights, and they walked toward the door. The building was empty. She clumsily dropped her racket. They both bent to pick it up. They straightened up, close together. She was without breath or will when he put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her close and kissed her. From far away she heard the racket fall to the floor again.

Within the next month they began to talk cautiously of marriage. She was not a fool. There had been all the usual family warnings about fortune hunters. She knew the need of caution. She would not have the right of decision until she was twenty-one. She knew the world was full of men who would pretend love in order to win that much money. And she knew Bunny was one of those. But she did not care. If that was the price, it was a price she would gladly pay.

She appraised herself dispassionately. Lumpy figure, still too heavy after all the reducing. Nondescript face. A quick, clear intelligence that was somehow always defeated when it came to putting thoughts into words. Nothing there for Bunny. Except the money. And all the money could not buy a return of the love she felt for him. And even all the money did not add up to a fair exchange. She felt grateful to him for providing this oblique chance at life. And, of course, it was the only way the money would ever be of any use to her.

They waited until she had passed twenty-one. The family blunted all weapons against her passive determination. On her wedding day she was down to one hundred and thirty-seven pounds. The softness was gone, but the remaining excess was firm, durable, discouraging.

She had made her bargain and accepted a marriage where the love was only on one side. But she had not known about the magic. She had not known that the magic could transform her until she could almost believe herself worthy of love. And he seemed to be in love with her. She flowered in that warm light and could almost come to believe herself beautiful. She pushed the cool skepticism back into a remote corner of her mind. That skepticism which said Bunny was earning a great deal of money and was at least honorable enough to play the part of husband with as much sincerity as he could muster. As she came to believe that he could love her as a person, as the Betty he had married, there came a new confidence. She knew the confidence had an effect on her walk, her talk, the way she carried herself. And for the first time the quick mind grasped the awkward handles of speech, and she could be wry and funny and make him laugh.

She was becoming Betty Hollis, and Betty Oldbern was someone unpleasant who had existed in a faraway, unpleasant world, someone dead and not worthy of grief. A fat, stupid, awkward one, wolfing pastries, talking dully, winning tiny gold medals for excellence in French composition.

And she had forgotten what she had originally known: Bunny would stay with her for just so long and then there would be some sort of “arrangement” — some amicable separation and an allowance for him which, out of gratitude, she would make generous. And then she could settle back into the lethargy of the soft thickening flesh.

There should have been more time to be alone with him. More time to make him in some small way dependent on her. Now the closeness was fading. Her claim was losing its strength. He had no need of her, no real need. The money, yes. But not her. Ever since it had become clear to them that they were trapped here, he had been distracted from her, absent-minded with her. When they had seen the dreadful fall of the tree that had smashed the little man, she had cried out and drawn close to him and taken his hand. But there had been no answering pressure in his hand. And when he had looked at her, he had seemed a stranger to her. Later when they had stood by the window, she had drawn his arm around her waist, but it had merely rested there, weight without closeness or emotion.

She looked across the dim room at Virginia Sherrel. As the woman talked to the child called Jan, her face was tilted so that it caught the yellow-gray light, and her face was luminous and lovely. Betty looked at the woman without envy, with a feeling of hopelessness. Here was a woman who in body, face and poise was a far better match for Bunny. They were both of that alien race of the highly endowed. The other women Bunny had known had been like that, Betty imagined. And that was the sort of woman he would go back to, one day. The day after she inevitably lost him. And the long painful process of losing him seemed to have started on this day...

Flagan gathered himself and stood up slowly. He looked around dully, as though awakening from sleep. The three women and the children looked at him. He looked at the three women in turn and chose Virginia Sherrel to address himself to. “Where’d they go, honey?”

“The other men? They went to find a way back to the road.”

He pursed his lips, nodded judiciously. “Good idea. Sorry about your car, honey. What’s your name?”

“My name is Mrs. Sherrel. And being sorry isn’t going to be quite enough, Mr. Flagan.”

“Who told you my name?”

Virginia Sherrel stood up and took a step toward him. “Mr. Himbermark told us your name.”

Flagan looked at her appraisingly, approvingly. “Charlie zigged when he shoulda zagged. Don’t worry about your car, honey.”

“What do you plan to do about it? I lost my clothes, everything.”

He shrugged. “You got comprehensive, haven’t you? Let the insurance take care of the car. I’ll pay for the other stuff.”

Virginia Sherrel lifted her chin and spoke clearly above the wind whine. “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Flagan. You assaulted me physically in front of witnesses. You dragged me out of my car, knocked me down and drove my car into the river.”

He grinned at her. “And Johnny Flagan has to pay for that, too? You got a lot of spirit. I like that. Honey, I did what I had to do. And I got set back a little. Johnny Flagan always gets these little setbacks, and he always comes out of it. Now I’m going to be on my way because I’ve got places to go and things to do.”

Betty Hollis watched the man curiously. There was too much bluster. And his eyes didn’t match the smile and the confident voice. His eyes were afraid.

Virginia Sherrel said, “I want your address. I’ll want to give it to my lawyers.”

Johnny Flagan checked again on the money in his pocket. “Lady, you just copy down the license number on my Cad. Give that to your lawyers. They can trace me. It’s my car. That way they earn their money.”

Betty Hollis watched Virginia’s face, and she saw that the woman was furiously angry. It was as though emotions had been constrained for a long time and were now breaking free.

“How do I know that’s your car? Who do you think you are?”

“Just simple old Johnny Flagan,” he said and turned toward the door. Virginia Sherrel took quick long strides and caught at his arm. He wrenched free, his red face almost purple. As the door opened behind him, he flicked the back of his hand across her face. She staggered back, her eyes wide with shock.

Hal Dorn came in just as Flagan struck the woman. He grabbed the heavy man’s shoulder and wrenched him around. “What’s going on here?” he yelled.

Flagan in his youth had been a brawler, a squat bull of a man. The softened muscles were still heavy, and as quick as they needed to be. Quick enough to club Dorn solidly in the ribs and follow it up with a heavy fist against the side of the neck. Dorn fell and both children began to scream with fear. As Dorn struggled to get up, Flagan moved quickly around him to get out the door, but met Malden coming in, Bunny Hollis right behind him. Flagan tried to shove by him. Malden saw Dorn trying to get up. He thrust Flagan violently back into the room. Flagan made the mistake of trying to hit him.

Dorn got to his feet just in time to see Flagan swing a ponderous fist at Steve Malden. Hal Dorn felt dazed, slightly ill and enormously angry. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been as angry. His lean muscles had been toughened by the warehouse labor. His hands were hard, and he wanted to feel the impact of his fists against the red face of Flagan.

It seemed to him the final indignity that he should be knocked down so readily in front of Jean and the kids by a man twenty years older, a man with a big belly. The incident seemed to underline and italicize the final months of defeat. He stumbled forward, ignoring the great ache in his left side, intent on helping Malden sudue the man.

But Malden needed no help. Malden didn’t fight the man. It was not at all like a fight. Malden merely walked Flagan back against the wall, punishing the man deftly, coldly, mercilessly, as he moved him back, hurting him with hands, elbows, knees, roughing him up in a quiet and highly professional manner that ended when Flagan stood against the wall whimpering with each exhalation, the thin sound nearly lost in an increased roar of wind.

Malden looked at the others. “What’s it about?” Mrs. Dorn stood by her husband, talking to him in a low tone. Bunny Hollis was standing by his bride, holding her hand.

Virginia Sherrel told him.

Malden turned back to Flagan, patted his pockets lightly, deftly lifted a thick manila envelope out of the inside jacket pocket. Flagan made a wild grab for the envelope. Malden put a hand against his chest and pushed him forcibly back against the wall.

“Hold it!”

“That’s mine. You can’t take that.”

“Shut up, Flagan.” He opened the envelope, looked at the thick pad of soaked bills. He did not change expression. He folded the packet once, compressed it between his hands, put it in his hip pocket.

“You got to give that back! I got to have it back. I’ve got to go now, and I got to take that along.”

“You’re not going anyplace.”

Flagan gathered himself with an effort. His manner changed. He was no longer frantic. There was something almost pleasant about his smile. He spoke loudly enough to include all of them in the conversation. “Okay. I know I’ve got some explanations to make. I’ve been a damn fool. I guess this storm is getting me down. Here. Here’s my wallet. Open it and take a look at some of the identification, friend. Among other things, I’m a banker. I’m on my way to Georgia. There’s a... a deadline in getting that cash up there. It’s important to me and a lot of other people. I got off on the wrong foot. I didn’t mean to be so rough on the lady, but I thought I could get across before that bridge sagged any more, and there just wasn’t time to explain to her. You can see that, can’t you? When she grabbed me, I lost my head, I guess. I’ve always had a bad temper. It’s a terrible burden to me. I do things I’m ashamed of. Now give it back like a good fella, and I’ll be on my way. You can look at those cards. They’ll tell you who I am.”

Malden handed the wallet back. “They tell who John Flagan is. You’re not going anywhere.”

“You can’t take it. That’s theft!”

“I’ll keep it until we can get this straightened out. Listen, Flagan. We’re on an island. It’s getting smaller by the minute. This house is on the highest point of land. You can’t tell anymore where the old river channels were. Unless you can swim like an otter and duck trees and branches, you’re staying right here.”

Flagan’s voice became more shrill. “But I got to get out of here. I’m John Flagan.”

“A respectable banker. You try to steal cars and knock women down, and you carry all the bank’s funds in your pocket.”

“But just ask Charl...”

Flagan stopped abruptly and closed his eyes and seemed to dwindle. His mouth worked. He pushed himself away from the wall and walked to the doorway that opened into the next room. His face was set in an odd expression, the corners of his mouth pulled down. Hal Dorn suddenly realized he had seen the same expression on Stevie’s face when Stevie was trying with all his might not to cry.

The children had quieted down. Jean said to him, “Come on, darling. Come and sit down.”

“I’m all right,” he said irritably. But he let her lead him over to the comer. He sat on the blankets near the children. Jean sat beside him. The children stared at him.

“I bet, after you got up, you could have hit him maybe a hundred million times,” Stevie said. “I bet you were going to beat him to a pulp.”

Hal looked at the tear tracks on his son’s face and saw the tremor of the underlip. “To a bloody pulp,” he agreed wearily.

“Hush, honey,” Jean said to Stevie.

“I bet he was going to,” Stevie said loyally.

“That man hit your Daddy when your Daddy didn’t expect it, that’s all. He’s a bad man.”

Hal moved his head gingerly. His neck was beginning to stiffen. The time of command was over. It had been short. Now Malden was in charge. Hal was willing to accept that. His own brief moments of decision had been like the last touch of flame in a dying fire. Even Stevie had sensed the defeat, the resignation. And was trying to fight against it with loyalty and love. When the loss of faith came to a man, sharp and unexpected and bitter, it permeated to every part of him. And Hal sat gray and sour with self-loathing, knowing that he had deliberately taken longer than necessary to get back onto his feet. It had been self-doubt that had kept him down and a fear of the pain those heavy fists could inflict. Yet pride had insisted that he make the struggle to stand up.

Stevie said, “I bet you could have just hit that old...”

“Shut up!” Hal yelled at him. He saw the tears come and stand on the long lashes, and he looked away.

Malden and Virginia Sherrel came over. The Hollis couple moved closer. Malden squatted on his heels and said, “Get anything on the radio?”

Hal nodded. “It’s bad. Local stations are using emergency power. Long lists of places that should be evacuated. The hurricane is pushing flood tides ahead of it. It is going to hit this part of the coast about four o’clock they think.”

“Hollis and I didn’t get very far,” Malden said. “It’s rough out there. Water is spread all over the flats. No telling how far it is to the highway. Wind knocked us down I don’t know how many times. Big branches sailing by. Hollis nearly got one on the head.” He paused as though waiting for Hal to make a suggestion, then said, “I guess we ought to cart the stuff upstairs. And get any flashlights out of the cars. Put what food we got in a pool. Try to do something about drinking water. There’s some kind of a big tank out back.”

Hal nodded. Malden stood up.

Jean Dorn sat on the blankets with her husband and her children and listened to the sound of the wind. It was a rhythm that could not be predicted. There were moments when it seemed to die, only to return stronger than before. The hard gusts came more frequently, and now there were times when it blew steadily for long seconds. The bolted shutters on the rear of the house shuddered and banged.

She wanted to touch Hal, to give him some kind of comfort. During the first hour they had been trapped in this place he had come out of his apathy and had seemed to her to be more alive than at any time during the past year. As in the days when his had been the strength she had leaned upon. Now the demand was upon her strength, and yet she could not give of herself to him. She knew she had to wait and hope and love him.

Far back in the misty simple beginnings of mankind, man killed meat with lusty swing of stone axe. With club and spear he fed himself and his family, and he built the fire that filled the mouth of the cave and kept the night creatures away. The weak ones and the fearful ones could not and did not survive.

Jean sensed that Hal’s defeat was as elemental as though it had happened a million years ago. She traced the analogy. He had been a good hunter in his own country. Then he had trekked to another land and found the game more scarce. He had hunted tirelessly, with all possible concentration of cunning. They had brought food with them, but, overconfident of success, they had eaten their supplies too rapidly. So the new land had defeated him before he had had time to learn the game paths, the new hunter’s tricks essential in this new place. So now they must trek back to the land they knew.

But the hunter felt that hand and eye had lost their cunning. He could resent these other mouths he must feed. He would equate them with his own survival.

On the way back they ran into trouble. And the hunter forgot for a time his uncertainty about himself, and responded instinctively with manliness and decision. Until an older man felled him too easily. Then he related this defeat to the defeat in the new land. He felt small and unworthy and inept.

Unless he could regain his pride and his confidence, the return home would do them little good, because the animals in the familiar region were also dangerous.

She shook her head to clear it of the odd dream, half amused at herself, and half depressed to tears. She looked at Hal’s thin, strong hands and slumped shoulders and wanted to touch him, to impart some of her own useless strength. These were not the years of club and fang, but the basic desires and emotions were the same. He had been unable to conceal his defeat from her. She had watched it. So this, too, could be a part of his resentment, because he felt shame.

He looked at her, his expression wooden. He patted Stevie clumsily on the shoulder. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

“Okay,” Stevie said with rigid dignity.

Hal stood up. “I got to help with the stuff.”

She smiled at him and nodded. He went to help Malden and Hollis carry the luggage upstairs.

Chapter 7

Virginia Sherrel went over to the window while the three men were carrying the luggage upstairs. She looked out at the storm through a crack in the heavy old blind. She could not see much — a tumult of waving branches, a scud of low dark cloud. She looked out at the storm and thought about Steve Malden. So intently was she thinking of him that she was utterly unprepared for the sound of his voice close behind her. The storm sounds had smothered his footsteps.

“How does your face feel?” he asked.

She turned, startled. “I... He didn’t hit me very hard, really.”

“The corner of your mouth looks swollen.”

“I think there’s a little cut inside. But just a little one.”

“If he’s what he claims to be...” He glanced around and then moved closer to her in order to be able to speak more quietly. “...you’ll be paid for your car. I think he may be what he says he is, but I also think there’s something funny going on. Maybe he was taking off with bank money. If he was, he got a bad break.”

She frowned. “But that little man — Mr. Himbermark — he didn’t look like a partner in crime.”

“Sometimes they don’t.”

She tilted her head to one side and looked up at him. “You handled Mr. Flagan very easily. I suppose you’re a policeman.”

“I was once. I suppose I still am, in a way.”

“I didn’t guess that until I watched you with him. Usually I’m good at guessing about people. I suppose policemen have to have that knack too.”

She was handling the conversation as carefully as she could. She did not care to sound as inane as she had when she had talked to him previously.

She had been aware of him since the moment when, picking herself up from the mud of the road, she had seen him go without hesitation into the swollen river to rescue the man who had taken her car. At that time her awareness had been overshadowed by the numbing sense of loss she had felt when she had seen the convertible topple so slowly into the water. She had never felt very strongly about possessions. There was within her no need to have things and tightly hold them. It was not that she was careless with the things she owned. She merely felt that the attitude which places a high value on possessions is in itself a sort of trap.

And so she had not been prepared for her own reaction to the shock of seeing the car go. It was — surprisingly — like a second bereavement. After analyzing her own feelings she knew that she was not as healed of the loss of David as she had supposed. The car had been purchased on their last happy day together, and that was important even though David’s cheer had been forced, almost manic. He had touched it, had driven it down here. In a curious way it seemed an extension of him, more symbolically important than even his ashes in the box in the trunk compartment. By now the trunk would be filled with water, and the cardboard would be melted, the tissue paper sodden. Yet the bronze box itself was tightly made, close fitting. It would be dry inside the box.

After that shock came an anger stronger than any she had ever felt before. She had stood braced against the wind and had watched Malden — she had not known his name then — bring the man ashore. Anger made her legs weak and her hands tremble. She had clenched her teeth so tightly her ears rang. She had wanted to scream and kick. She knew that it was more than anger... It was the release from the withdrawn silence, the sick loneliness of the past few weeks, and the heartbreak of the past year. Tensions had built up a pressure that required all her strength of will to restrain.

As she had watched the near-drowning, the artificial respiration, she had become more aware of Malden. The other two men seemed excited. There had been no excitement on the still face of the big man who had performed the actual rescue, and she had stared at him intently, almost rudely, her anger fading as curiosity grew. She thought it might be the childish pose of a self-styled stoic, but there had been no revealing glint of excitement in the somber eyes. He had acted as though the incident were of little importance, yet in crisis he had been the one who had moved quickly and correctly.

It was not the same look of deadness David had worn before taking his lonely and inexplicable trip. David had withdrawn. This expression had a certain dignity about it. The body could comply while the mind was untouched, the emotions sealed away.

In his stillness she felt a challenge to her which heightened her own awareness of him, her curiosity about him. He was big and strong and dark and too self-composed. Her awareness was unfamiliar to her. She told herself wryly that this reaction was more suitable to a teen-ager.

Later, after she had changed, she had made a very clumsy attempt to talk to him. Usually she was poised and glib when she tried to talk to strangers. But his very somberness seemed to make her awkward.

They stood just inside the open door of the house. “I... I guess you must have seen the tree fall on that man.”

“Yes. I saw it.” He took a ruined pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his soaked sport shirt and threw them out the doorway.

“Have one of mine. They stayed dry for some reason.”

“Thanks.” He took a cigarette and her lighter, lit both their cigarettes and handed the lighter back. His voice was deep and as mechanical as his expression, barely audible above the wind.

“I’m Mrs. Sherrel. Virginia Sherrel.”

“Steve Malden.”

“That must have been a horrible thing to see. And you say you saw it.”

“Yes.”

She had not felt during the first conversation that he was being deliberately difficult. He just didn’t seem to care to make the effort to carry on a conversation with her. Few men had ever reacted to her that way.

She kept trying. “I thought at first this could be... well, sort of exciting. You know. Marooned here and waiting out the storm. Then that man took my car, and then that tree... It changes the whole thing. It makes it more... grim.”

She realized that she was babbling... babbling in a strained overanxious fashion and, what was worse, talking inanely. She stopped abruptly.

“See what you mean,” he had said and nodded and gone over to talk to Dorn, leaving her with heated cheeks and a feeling of inadequacy. She had told herself then that the man was not worth talking to. He probably had an I.Q. of seventy to go with those muscles. It would be better to stop being so ridiculously girlish and go help Mrs. Dorn with the kids.

Now, after the violent episode with Flagan, here was a chance to talk to him again, and it was a conversation that he had started. That, in itself, was a minor advantage, and she intended to maintain it and definitely refrain from babbling. She did not want him to think her a fool.

He considered her question about whether the police had to be good at making correct guesses about people.

“It isn’t essential. But it’s a help. The best help is to have a very good memory for faces and then spend a lot of time with the mug shots.”

She looked at his shirt. It was still soaked. Nothing would dry in this humid, ominous air. She said, “Aren’t you going to change? You must be uncomfortable.”

“I’m going back out in a few minutes.”

“Why?”

For the first time he looked slightly vulnerable, a very little bit uncomfortable. “I’ve never seen one of these before. It used to be... a hobby. That was a long time ago. Meteorology. Usual gadgets. Wind velocity, rainfall, aneroid barometer.”

“Could I come with you?” she heard herself say. She flushed. She thought, how can I be so ridiculous? Such a forward, obnoxious female!

He shrugged again. “Come along.”

When he opened the door, so much wind was moving through the house that it almost pulled the knob out of his hand. Outside, the force of the wind was more violent than before. When they passed the corner of the house, the wind staggered her. He caught her strongly by the upper arm and hurried her over to the protection of the Cadillac. They stood beside it, looking west through a wide gap in the trees. All the sky was a strange, dark, coppery color. Long cloud banks moved swiftly toward them. Her eyelashes were pushed back against her eyelids, and her black hair snapped against the nape of her neck. When she parted her lips, the wind blew into her mouth, puffing her cheeks. The very violence of it was somehow exhilarating. She wanted to laugh aloud.

He bent a trifle and put his mouth close to her ear and half shouted: “See the highest clouds? Alto-stratus and alto-cumulus, with clear spaces between. Moving east. They radiate out from the eye. Now see the low stuff? It’s moving northeast. That puts us in the bad quadrant, where you get the worst turbulence. This is a small one. But rough. The eye won’t be more than four or five miles wide and it ought to be off about that direction.” He pointed slightly northwest. “And not too far off the coast. Those cloud ridges will go up seven or eight miles. And here comes another rain squall. Better get in the car.”

The first wind-driven drops stung her face. They got in, and she slid over under the wheel. The rain struck so violently it sounded like hail against the side of the car. The car rocked with the push of the wind. With the windows rolled up, they did not have to shout so loudly.

“Is this the worst?” she asked.

He half smiled. It was the first smile she had seen. It changed the rugged face and made him, for a moment, look almost boyish.

“You’ll know when the worst comes.”

“Don’t scare me. I didn’t know wind could blow this hard.”

“These gusts are around sixty miles an hour. Some of them go up to seventy. We can get them over a hundred. And we probably will.”

“How about the house? Will it...”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I checked it a little. The beams are big and they’re cypress. That stuff never rots. The frame looks okay. I don’t know how well the roof is tied down. We might lose part of it or all of it.”

It suddenly became much darker. A blue-white flash startled her. The crack of thunder was loud.

She forced a smile. “Is it... supposed to do that too?”

“Sure. It has everything. Electrical disturbances, tornadoes. I wish we were going to see the eye. In the eye it’s flat calm with a blue sky overhead. There’ll probably be a lot of birds trapped in the eye. Terns, gulls, ospreys — the good fliers.”

The windows began to steam and Malden opened a rear window a crack on the windward side, turning the key and using the control buttons. The wind whistled into the car and the mistiness faded away. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the damp shirt, gave her one.

“Could you have got out of here when you went off with Hollis?” she asked.

“I guess so. Maybe a little swimming.”

“Why didn’t you? And send help back.”

“No help is going to try to get in here until after this thing is over.”

“But you could have got to higher ground.”

“I guess so. But I had to stay with Hollis.”

“Why?”

“He was all right for a while. Then a big limb nearly got him. It threw water twenty feet in the air before the wind blew the water away. He tried to move off to the side and went into a hole. Then a tree went over, not anywhere near as close as the limb was, and then a granddaddy rattler came swimming along and... well, he blew up. You can’t blame people for that. Some can take one kind of thing, and some can take another. He’s okay. It just wasn’t his day. I had to slap him some, and he came out of it and was so damned ashamed of himself he wouldn’t even look at me. He was okay from then on, but I didn’t want to send him back alone, just in case. To make up for blowing up the way he did, he was starting to get crazy reckless.”

“He looked odd when he came back.”

“It makes you stop and think about yourself.”

“Did you ever... blow up at anything?”

He stared at her. “Sure. Who hasn’t? When I was a rookie cop. I had to check a warehouse. We were on patrol, and we thought we saw a light. My partner took one door. I went in the other. Black as pitch in there. I kept hearing things. No matter where I’d put the light I kept hearing them behind me. I tightened up. When I heard a sort of a click, I took off. Went back down the stairs in the dark at a full run. Fell and got up running. Lost my gun, banged my nose up. They rode me for a month or so and then eased up. Everybody has a bad day.”

He turned on the car radio. The voices of the eager professional newscasters were gone from the air; these were different, the slow, strained tones of quiet men doing a civic job, with faulty diction and plenty of mispronunciations: “...says for the cars not to go any farther than Citrus Avenue. We got a report it’s deep down there below Citrus. Anybody that’s willing, we want a house-to-house check along Peru and Lychee. Get those folks out of there, any that’s still left, and herd them on up to the cars at Davis Square above Citrus. Anybody that’s hurt, we’re getting a setup working at the high-school gym. Any doctors and nurses and first-aid people not already busy, go on over there, too. If you can, take along any drugs and bandages and stuff you figure you’ll need. Now I got a report on Shelter Key...”

Malden turned from station to station. There was no news, only the tired, quiet voices of men working to save lives in their own communities. The small violent electrical disturbances in the area blocked out the more distant stations.

Malden turned off the radio.

“It makes it... too real,” Virginia said.

“It’s real,” he said. “They’re catching hell along the coast. This was the one they didn’t want.”

“My mother is going to be absolutely frantic,” she said. “Is somebody going to be worrying about you?”

He shook his head and looked uncomfortable. She wished the question hadn’t sounded so obvious. She hadn’t meant it that way. It seemed to be impossible to talk to this man without putting her foot in her mouth. To cover up the error, she began to talk quickly, changing the subject, and realized to her chagrin that she was babbling again. “I was so dull about guessing about you, being a police officer and all, I wonder what you’d guess about me. I mean just to sort of see how you go about adding people up. Professionally.”

He looked directly at her. The animation with which he had told her about the storm was gone. He looked at her without friendliness and without interest.

“All right. You’ve got enough money. You don’t work. You’ve been lying on a beach, working on your tan. You introduced yourself as Mrs. Sherrel. You talked about your mother worrying, not your husband. Your car had New York plates. You don’t wear a wedding ring. So I add it up. You came down here to shuck a husband. Get a nice tan and a divorce and some fun, all in one package.”

She looked down at her hands locked in her lap. “I asked for that.”

“What? I didn’t hear you.”

“I asked for that.”

“I... I guess I’m sorry I made it so blunt, Mrs. Sherrel. I was rude.”

She looked at him and tried to smile. “You were rude. And you were wrong. But I’ve been acting like the sort of article that would fit your snappy little word-picture.”

“Wrong?”

“I have been working. On a marriage. It needed work, but I guess I wasn’t skilled enough. I’m going back and get a job. He came down here alone, in that car. Now I can’t say this without sounding too terribly dramatic, and I don’t even know if I can say it without crying. He came down here and killed himself, for no reason that anybody will ever be able to find out. I had him cremated. The ashes are in that car. The rings are in that car, in my purse. A very nice diamond engagement ring and a plain platinum band. See how dramatic it sounds? Everything I try to say to you comes out all wrong.”

He seemed to look at her, look at her directly and see her for the first time. “I guess I was a damn’ fool, Mrs. Sherrel. I see so many...”

“Of those women? I was giving a good imitation. So I can’t blame you. I think I’ll go back in the house.”

She turned and worked the latch and tried to open the car door. She thought at first it was locked. Then she realized it was held closed by the force of the wind. She tried again and gave up and turned quickly back to him and said, “I can’t even work up a good exit line. Darn it, Steve, I’m not really this stupid. I’m not!”

He looked at her, and she looked so angry that it amused him. He grinned and then he laughed. She joined him. The storm gave their laughter a thin edge of nervousness, but it felt good to laugh. He could not remember the last time he had laughed this way.

“I guess we’d both better go back in, Virginia. Ginny?”

“It used to be Ginny, long ago. I used to despise the name. Now it sounds sort of good. But probably too young for me. Oh, there I go again. That sounds like I was fishing, I wasn’t.”

He opened the car door and stepped out into water that came over his shoe tops. He looked and saw that the water, unnoticed, had crept to the bottom of the three steps to the door of the house.

He leaned close and shouted, “Better take off your sandals and roll up those dungarees. Water’s coming up faster. I’d carry you, but I couldn’t be sure of my balance in the wind.”

She slipped off her sandals and rolled up the dungarees. He held her by the arm and hurried her to the shelter of the house. She stepped heavily on a sharp stone and winced. In the relative shelter of the house, he put his lips close to her ear and said, “It’s going to get a lot rougher. When it does, I’ll be near. Stay close to those kids. I’m going to stay out here a minute and see if I can measure how fast this water is coming in.” He dipped some up and tasted it, spat it out. “Brine. This is coming right up from the Gulf.”

She turned to go in, and he caught her arm. “Can you swim well?” She hesitated, nodded. “Good. See that stand of trees there? If... if the house should go, and the water was six feet deep, think you could swim over to there with one of the kids? The little girl? Those trees won’t go over and they look easy to climb.”

He watched her closely. She moistened her lips and looked carefully at the distance. She didn’t panic. “I could do that.”

“You probably won’t have to.”

“I can do it if I have to.”

She went in. The water had reached the piling at the corner of the house. He estimated and made three marks with a stone, about an inch apart. He leaned his back against the house and waited. He could feel the trembling of the house as the wind pawed it. He thought about the Sherrel woman. Damned bad guess. Thought her as empty as all the others. Good-looking woman. Strong shoulders and good hips and legs. Carries herself well. Dorothy used to walk with that look of proudness. Looks right at you. So did Dorothy. Thought it was an affectation, but maybe that’s the way she really is. It’s a good look. It closes out the rest of the world.

He waited and thought about her, and he knew it had been a very long time since he had thought about a woman in that way. He wondered how bad the storm would get and wondered how she would react. He worried about her. He hoped she’d come through it okay.

And then a slow expression of wonder spread itself across his face. In some odd way in the last few minutes they had talked, she had become important to him. He wanted to see her after this was all over. He wanted to be in some quiet place with her where they could talk of many things and not have to shout over the wind — a quiet place with a soft light on her face.

He applied the test he had used on others. Would Dorothy have had her for a friend? This one — yes.

Virginia Sherrel passed that test quickly and easily.

The marks were obscured. He checked the time on his waterproof watch and was shocked to see how quickly it had happened. One and a half steps were under water.

Chapter 8

A half hour later the water was two feet deep in the first floor of the house and rising rapidly. They had all moved upstairs. It was much darker. And noisier. Only three of the four small bedrooms could be used. The wind had ripped the shutters away from the single window in one bedroom. An instant later, the dusty glass had been exploded into the room. Malden had shut the door to the hall against the thrust of the wind. It creaked and protested, and the latch chattered.

The Dorns, Virginia and Malden were in one tiny room. The Hollis couple were in another. Flagan sat alone in the third.

Jean Dorn listened to the wind. It had changed in character. It was steadier, less intermittent and the sound had moved up the scale another half-octave. Within the constant screaming, she could hear various soft, lost sounds — thumpings and crashings and flappings, as though there was some great sad tethered animal outside which fought dully for release. The tumult of the hurricane had quieted the children. They stayed very close to her. Stevie’s eyes were wide and round, and his body was tense within her encircling arm. Conversation was impossible.

Jean watched Hal. He sat with lowered head, a silhouette against the faint light that came through the window. He had not spoken since they had come upstairs. He waited with a dull patience that was not at all like him. She watched him and was sick at heart.

Malden got up and left the room. Jean guessed that he was going down the stairway to check the water level. Hal did not seem to notice his departure. Jean felt a twinge of exasperation. In that moment Hal’s withdrawal seemed not so much dramatic and understandable as childish. He seemed to her to be sulking. And she found that she resented the unfairness of it. She was left to comfort the children alone, and his strange manner added to the children’s fear and complicated her own task. She felt for the first time that Hal was indulging himself in this passive mood of defeat.

Bunny and Betty Hollis sat closely, side by side in the small bedroom. It was becoming incredibly noisy. A puff of wind inside the house had blown their door shut, and it had not seemed necessary to open it again. The shutters were a better fit in this room, and it was so dark that Betty could barely make out the paler area of his face when she turned inside his arm to look up at him.

Ever since Bunny had come back in from the exploratory hike with Malden, he had acted strangely. Betty could not adjust to his new mood. She could not decide whether she liked it or not. It did not make her more insecure, but it puzzled her. There was a solemnity about him. He did not want to talk. At first she thought her heart would break, because it seemed this was the first step she had anticipated, the first move toward his inevitable denial of her. But he seemed to want to be close to her, to touch her, to hold her hand, to have his arm around her.

The solemnity baffled her. He had never been like this. He had been gay, bantering, never completely serious. Sometimes she had resented his lightness of mood because it seemed to place a lower value on her love. But she had learned to play their game on his terms, and when she needed the indulgence of tears, she turned them away with a joke in his pattern.

The next prolonged push of the wind was so strong that the house seemed to move, to shift slightly and to take on a barely perceptible but ominous tilt. She felt his arm tighten around her and then slowly, cautiously, relax.

He put his lips close to her ear.

“...tell you something.”

“What?”

“...fair not to. And it’s hard to tell you. I don’t know what will happen. Stay close to me. I want to help if things get bad. I... might not be able to.”

“What’s wrong?” she cried. “What’s wrong, darling?”

His lips touched her ear when he spoke. “Never been very good about storms. Scared when I was a kid. Ashamed of it. Used to hide it. Figured I was over it. All over it. Then when I went out with him... Malden... I went all to pieces. Scared out of my wits. He had to cuff me out of it. No damn good to him or anybody. Glad it’s dark here, or I couldn’t even tell you. I want you to think I’m the greatest guy in the world. But I guess I’m not. You married a stinker, honey.” In his last words there was a quavering attempt to regain the tone of banter.

She turned her face up and kissed the corner of his mouth and did not answer him.

“...have to tell you a lot of things. Maybe to start cleaner. It was the money. You know that.”

She nodded, knowing that if he could not see in the gloom, he could feel the motion of her head. She could not trust herself to speak.

“It was the money. Now it isn’t the money. That’s why I’m so scared. Nothing must happen to you.”

Again the breathless nod, trying to tell him that she understood. She felt tremulous, poised on the very edge of happiness. And the great fury of the storm had no meaning to her.

She waited as long as she could and then, as he still tried to talk, to explain, she turned her whole body into his arms, her own arms lifting to hold him, hold him tightly, and she heard the single broken word... love... as she did so. She held him, and the tears ran unchecked, and she knew that in some miraculous way she had been permitted to find her place. At last she was important to one other human being. Important and needed, for herself alone. They were locked together in that embrace and in that awareness when the storm wrenched the roof off.

Steve Malden turned and looked up the stairs as the flashlight beam illuminated him, casting his shadow on the dark water in front of him. He sat halfway up the staircase, the water reaching the stair below where his feet rested, and nearly five feet deep in the downstairs room.

When he saw that it was Virginia, he moved over, and she picked her way down and sat on the stair beside him. In the narrow stairway they were partially sealed away from the storm sound and conversation was easier than in the upstairs rooms.

“How is it now?” she asked.

“Not coming up as fast. It has more land to spread over. But listen to something. Listen for a kind of deep regular beat, like a pulse, under the other sounds.”

“I heard that. What is it?”

“It’s getting stronger. It’s beginning to shake the house. It’s the waves. The wind builds them up in that clear space behind the house, and they are breaking against it.”

“Can they get very big?”

“The wind keeps them flat. But if they get too big, they’re going to nudge this place right off the foundations.”

“You’re such a cheerful man. What then?”

“I don’t know.” He reached over and took her hand. She turned off the flashlight. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “What we want now is the heart of it. The bar cloud. Then we’ll get a wind shift.”

“The bar cloud? That sounds... scary.”

“That’s when we get peak wind velocity.”

“It feels good to have my hand held, Steve. I have had my hand held in a hurricane, and I can assure everyone that it was very comforting. Now I had better get back up there.”

“I’ll come up when either the house starts to shift or the peak winds hit. Well stick to the Dorn family. And get the Hollis couple in there. We’ll do better if we stay close, I think. How is Dorn acting?”

“As if he were doped. I’ve tried to figure him out. Before it got too noisy to talk up there, I found out a few things from Jean Dorn. They moved to Florida because the little boy had asthma. They couldn’t make out. So they have to go back. I guess it took the spirit out of Mr. Dorn. He had a pretty good job in the north.”

“He was okay in the beginning. He seemed like a good one to have around.”

“He acts stunned.”

“Maybe Flagan tagged him harder than it looked.”

She touched him lightly on the shoulder as she went up the stairs. Malden sat in the darkness. Every half minute he turned on his own light and looked at the water level. It seemed to be remaining almost constant. He thought of the drowned cars outside. All would be under water, with just the radio aerials showing, the dark water swirling around them.

He tilted his head and listened. He thought he could hear a distant screaming, hissing, rumbling that was drawing closer. The implication of force froze him for a moment. He got up hurriedly and went up the stairs, to the lesser gloom of the hallway. As he turned toward the room where the Dorns and Virginia were, something exploded against the back of his head, made a great white flash behind his eyes, and plummeted him into darkness.

Johnny Flagan knew that something had gone wrong inside his head. All his life, except during the bursts of crazy rage, there had been a compact machine in there, with oiled bearings, clever gears. He had once seen a picture of an electronic brain, and from that time on he had liked to believe that he had a smaller and more acute version hidden behind the bland façade of his reddened face. It was reliable and lightning-quick, weighing all of the factors involved in any problem and translating them into action so quickly that the decision in each case seemed to be the result of instinct.

The marvelous little machine made him a great deal of money, and he had grown to depend upon it, accepting instinctive judgments as the result of an instantaneous but judicious weighing of all factors.

Yet on this day something had happened to the clever machine. Some cog or gear had slipped out of alignment, and the machine had made bad decisions. He had acted on those decisions and, unlike all the other times, his position had been made worse rather than improved.

Take that business with the car. He ached to be able to go back in time and change his action. Better to have run across the sagging bridge, reached the far shore, plodded back to the highway and found the cop — and then bought a little co-operation from him. That was where the marvelous machine had started to go wrong. That was its first failure.

Then, after his recovery, with the help of the bourbon, from the shock of nearly drowning, and the lesser shock of seeing Charlie crushed to death, the machine had told him it was time to leave. Get out and find something to cling to and float across that water and get to high land.

But that time the decision had been blocked. It couldn’t be blamed on the machine. It was his own temper that had spoiled things, letting the woman get him mad, and then hitting that lean man who had spun him around. The big one had really roughed him up. There were dull aches all over his body where the muscles had been bruised. That wasn’t important. It was important that the big one had taken the money, and thus destroyed the importance of getting out of this storm trap. The big man was going to make a fuss about the money, if they could get out of here. And he had held onto the money until the water became too high to make escape possible.

Faced with this problem, the clever machine, after the two bad decisions, became absolutely dead, inoperable. Johnny Flagan had moved in dulled obedience when he was told to go upstairs when the water began to come up through the holes in the rotted floor and spread across the downstairs rooms.

He could not face what would happen if the money was not replaced in time. It would be something too big to cover. He wouldn’t be able to buy his way out; this would lead to investigation, disgrace and, almost certainly, a jail term. He could not permit himself to think of a jail term. That could not happen to Johnny Flagan.

The machine had died. It could give him no answers. So he sat alone and tried not to be afraid of the storm sounds and tried to use logic on the situation. He found it hard to keep his mind on the problem. It kept wandering off into faraway memories. He did not feel like himself. His confidence had gone.

Logic led him to the only possible course of action. He had to assume he would survive. And he also had to assume that he would reach some place where he could get a plane that would get him to the place where he had to be by noon tomorrow. Thus any action had to be taken on the basis of those two assumptions. The necessary action was to recover the money and, in so doing, take the big man out of the picture. And he did not quite see how the big man could be stopped this side of death. Murder was a frightening word. Yet if nobody survived, the murder would be meaningless. Even if they all survived, murder might be difficult to prove if murder could be made to look like the result of the storm. And if any small percentage of the group survived, proof would be increasingly more difficult.

He went over it again and again. The first step, the only possible step, was to regain the money that had been taken from him. Stolen from him, if you wanted to look at it that way.

The next problem was a weapon. The big man was too hard to handle without an effective weapon. Flagan began a slow and thoughtful search, and in the end he found a weapon far better than he had expected to find. There was a very tiny closet in the room. It had a clothes bar made of one-inch pipe. The pipe fitted into slots and lifted out easily. It was three feet long, too unwieldy if held at the end, but by holding it near the middle he found he could swing it quickly and powerfully.

After he had the weapon, he thought about the problem of survival. The closet door was sturdy. It looked as if it would float well. It would not, of course, support his weight, but he decided that by clinging to it, he could keep his head above water. His single window was on the south side of the house. He broke the hinge pins loose with the length of pipe and took the door off and put it near the window. He poked the glass out of the window and pried the shutters open just enough so that he could look down and see the surface of the water. It was about a nine-foot drop to the water. The current seemed to be moving very swiftly. He shuddered as he looked at it. He knew that when the moment came, if he hesitated, he would be unable to drop. It would have to be done quickly.

He opened the room door and went in search of Malden, the length of pipe held behind him in concealment, moving cautiously and on tiptoe like a fat greedy child playing an intricate game, oblivious to the storm sounds that would have covered his footsteps even had he walked heavily.

The stairway was directly ahead of him. He stopped as Malden came up out of the stairway, moving quickly. Malden turned in the other direction, not noticing him. Flagan took two quick steps and brought the pipe down on the back of the man’s skull, striking heavily so that the pipe seemed to ring in his hands. Malden took a heavy step forward and pitched onto his face. Flagan knelt and dropped the pipe and worked the folded envelope out of Maiden’s hip pocket. He put it back in his own pocket and stood up, picking up the pipe. This time he grasped it by the end. He straddled the unconscious man. He raised the pipe.

Virginia Sherrel heard the new sound far off, an incredible sound half masked by the tumult of the winds. She had known that the air pressure had dropped. Now she felt the physical change as it dropped even further. She could not breathe deeply enough. The far-off sound grew in strength. It was a noise she could not have imagined. It sounded like a hundred low-flying jet planes, coming toward the house in formation. She could not believe that mere wind could make that sound. She saw Hal Dorn slowly lift his head and the glint of Jean Dorn’s wide eyes in the fading light. She knew that when that horrid noise struck, she had to be with Steve Malden, close to the strength and bulk of him. She hurried to the door and turned toward the stairway. And she saw in the bright beam of her flashlight Malden stretched out on the floor, Flagan standing over him, club lifting to strike again.

Virginia screamed, but in that moment the scream was utterly lost as the violence of the winds of the bar cloud struck the house. The roof was wrenched away as though by an explosion, and in truth it had the characteristics of an explosion. The air inside the house exerted sudden pressure on the roof and the walls as the outside pressure dropped almost to tornado level. The roof was wrenched away, and the winds drove in upon them. Virginia and Flagan were thrown against the hallway wall. Shutters on the west side were blown inward as those on the east were exploded outward. She was forced against the wall, half kneeling, and the wind was a hand that held her there. She felt the house turn and shift, move and tilt dangerously and hold steady.

She slid down the wall until she lay near Steve. Then she worked her way over to him and half lay across him as if to shield him from the storm. She put her arm around him, and her fingertips touched his throat. She felt, under her fingertips, the slow, strong beat of his pulse.

She turned her head and saw Flagan moving down the hallway on his hands and knees, moving slowly. A part of the west wall was torn away as she watched, and the thick timber slammed into the plaster wall directly above Flagan and wedged there. He continued to crawl slowly, laboriously, back toward the room he had been in, across the hall from the Hollises.

Hal Dorn was on his feet when the roof was torn away. He was lifted by the wind and slammed against the wall two feet from the shuttered window. It blew out, shutters and all, in almost the same moment, and he knew that if he had been standing in a slightly different spot, he would have been carried through the window. He fell to the floor, stunned both by the shock of hitting the wall and by the very violence of the wind. The wind held his eyes shut, and when he opened his mouth, it was as though the wind would force his throat open. He sensed that he would have to reach the shelter of the opposite wall and wormed his way over to Jean. He knew that, no matter how loudly he yelled at her, she could not hear him. He pushed at her, motioning toward the far corner and catching Jan in the curve of his arm. Her mouth was wide open, eyes squeezed shut. She was screaming in terror, but he could not hear her. Slowly, laboriously, in the odd saffron light, they worked their way across the small room to the single sheltering wall, and he tried not to think of what would happen if that wall, now unbraced by the roof, should be blown over. One of the blankets moved straight up, caught by a trick of the wind, made a slow uncanny loop, and then was flung out of sight over the east wall so quickly he could not follow it with his eye.

He pushed at Jean until he saw that she and the two children were in the safest part of the room. He crawled then to the doorway and wormed his way out into the hall. Malden was there, face down, the Sherrel woman shielding him. He pushed at her shoulder, caught hold of Maiden’s thick wrist, motioned to her. With great difficulty they rolled him onto his back. Virginia took one wrist and he took the other and, bit by bit, they tugged him along the five feet of hall to the doorway and through it, and placed him along the wall, his head near Jean and the children. Virginia crawled by Malden, sat near Jean, took Maiden’s head in her lap.

Hal looked at them and saw that he could do no more for them. Nothing could be done while the insane screaming of the peak winds lasted. He went back to the hallway. He realized he was getting very tired. Each movement required great effort. When he rested and looked up, he saw that the air over the house was not empty. Solid objects whirled by, too rapidly for him to make out what they were. At the far end of the hallway the west wall leaned inward, almost touching the east wall, making a sort of crude tent of the hallway. He crawled into the tent and felt the wind’s strength lessen. The door of the Hollises’ room was blown away. He worked his way through. And he saw that it was no longer a room. The roof was gone and the entire east wall of the room had been blown away. From the center of the room the floor sagged toward the drop. He saw the couple. They lay together, arms around each other, in the northwest corner of the room, the same relative place that, in the room Dorn had left, provided the greatest protection. They were huddled back in the corner and Hal could see the grim set of Hollis’s jaw, the bloodless lips, the tautness of his arm around the girl. When Hollis turned his head slightly and saw Hal, his eyes widened. It was impossible to make them hear in the fury of the wind. Hal beckoned to them and pointed down the hall, trying to convey the idea to them that the other room was safer.

Bunny Hollis’ young wife had turned so that Hal could see her face too, her expression. She looked calm, incongruously at peace, almost happy.

Hollis shook his head. The sagging floor looked dangerous. Even as Hall looked at it, it sagged further. The couple could not stay there. Yet Hal felt he did not want the responsibility of trying to help them. He was so wearied by the efforts he had already made that he wanted to close his eyes. And he wanted to go back, to be with Jean and the children.

In the very beginning, he had felt resolute, decisive. The blows from the fists of Flagan had thrown him back into an apathy greater than before. Now, stung into reluctant action by the appalling climax of the hurricane, he had crawled about like some slow disabled insect, thinking only of gathering all the others together so that each of them might have a greater chance. It had not been a calculated decision. It had been almost as instinctive as the way the frenzied ants gather the eggs from the shattered hill.

Yet now there was time to stop and time to think. He moved cautiously, trusting his weight to the sagging floor. He had no desire to move toward the trapped couple, yet he knew he would. He would move toward them, help them, get them out of this room.

Hollis made frantic motions for him to stay back, but Dorn ignored him. And as he moved so carefully, he felt within himself the rebirth of pride. Perhaps it was both trite and egocentric to think of it as manhood. Yet now he was doing a difficult and dangerous thing with no feeling of gratification of self. And it pleased him. It showed him that even defeat had its limitations. It could not destroy a man utterly.

By stretching as far as he could, and keeping his left hand on the door frame, he was able to reach the girl’s ankle with his right hand. He tugged hard. Hollis resisted for a moment, and then began to help him. The girl turned carefully. They stopped as the floor sagged another foot.

She held his arm, and he worked his way back until she could reach the relative safety of the hallway. Dorn wormed his way back into the room to help Hollis. Still holding the door frame, he reached his right hand out. Hollis caught it. Just as Hal Dorn began to believe that they had made it, the floor sagged suddenly. It sagged to the level of the black moving water. Hollis slid down the incline, still holding Hal’s hand and wrist in his two hands. The full strain came on Hal and he felt the creak of shoulder muscles, felt the strain in his left hand. He could see Hollis’ strained face, see the flavor of panic in the man’s eyes.

Hollis would not let go. He would take both of them. Then, as Hal’s fingers began to slip, he felt the girl take his left wrist with surprising strength and he knew, without looking back, that she had somehow braced herself in the hallway. It gave Hollis enough time to get his toes against the slant of the wet flooring. With some of the strain taken off, and with Hollis helping as much as he could, they slowly brought him up to the doorway.

The three of them crawled back down the hallway. In the open space the wind buffeted them. The situation in the first room was unchanged. The children were all right. Malden was still unconscious. Virginia Sherrel seemed unaware of anyone else, unaware of the storm, aware only of the unconscious man. The Hollis couple sat side by side near Jean Dorn. Hal, sitting near Maiden’s legs looked at the small group and thought of how, under this direct and almost unbelievable onslaught of the elements, mankind reacted with something of the patient passiveness of cattle in a windswept field — finding what meager shelter there was and enduring as best they could.

It was at that moment that Hal remembered Flagan. He had not seemed to be a part of the group at any time. Yet Hal could not understand how he could have gone down that hallway after the Hollises and forgotten that Flagan was alone in the small room across from theirs.

Hal knew that, should he stay where he was and wait out the peak winds, no one would blame him. He could not be accused of anything. Yet there was a debt to be paid. The debt had been incurred when he had not got up from the floor as quickly as he was able, when he had felt the fear of more punishment from Flagan’s heavy fists.

If this was to be rebirth, it could not be partial. If this was to be a reaffirmation of self, there could be no half-measures, no self-deceit. The responsibility could not be passed on to Malden. He moved quickly while the urge was fresh, and once again he fought against the dangerous strength of the wind until he reached the place where the half-collapsed wall gave partial protection. His progress was slower than before because he was nearing the limit of his physical endurance.

The door of Flagan’s room was in the slanted section of hallway wall. He could not force it open until he lay on his back and braced his feet against the door and pushed with all the strength of his legs. The door broke free suddenly, was caught by the wind, vibrated, and then was torn from the hinges and whirled away, like a leaf torn from a tree. He turned and looked into the ceilingless room, his eyes squinted against the hammering of the big winds. He looked and saw Flagan, just inside the door and slightly to his left. He could have reached out and touched Flagan’s hand. He looked until he was certain, and then he turned away and began the laborious, torturous crawl back to the others. When the house moved slightly, he paused, as though listening. He tried not to think about Flagan. The two-by-four could have come from this house, but more probably it had come from afar, from some shack much nearer the water, much nearer the unimpeded sweep of the winds. It had been moving fast. It would have had to be traveling at high speed to drive the splintered end entirely through a man so heavy.

He crawled on. And as he crawled he tried to think of the next thing to do. Should the house go over, it would break up. If it broke up there would be pieces, maybe whole walls. Those would float. With enough strength, enough determination, he might make certain that his family stayed together, that his family survived.

He knew he was near the end of his strength, yet he was miraculously certain that, if more strength, if more endurance should be required, he would find some reserve. He would be able to do what had to be done.

His life in the past year had made him feel limited, inadequate, unable to compete. His life in the past forty minutes had taught him that there was more left than he had ever believed. In a crisis he could survive. In a crisis he could do more than survive. He hoped that there would be some way he could tell Jean of this so-important thing he had learned.

Chapter 9

“This is Station WAKJ transmitting on stand-by power. The time is now 6:18. Hurricane Hilda intersected the West Coast of Florida at six o’clock at the mouth of the Suwanee River, moving in an east-northeast direction at approximately eight miles per hour...

“Up around Stephensville, Steinhatchee, Horseshoe, Cedar Key and Yankeetown the water is coming far inland. That is flat land up there. The water is many feet deep over Route 19 in places. As soon as the wind dies in that area, planes will be going in there to drop emergency supplies and effect helicopter rescues. The Red Cross will be standing by to go in there as soon as possible...

“And here’s a new report. A navy plane has bucked the heavy winds and followed the coastline all the way up. Visibility is good in the wake of the storm. The pilot reports that the water is so high and has come so far inland that he can’t pick up the familiar landmarks. The whole coastline looks altered to him. Soon the tide will drop and we will start getting a runoff of all that water...”

The great roaring, screaming winds faltered, changed. The scream dropped one octave, another. A sudden driving rain came. It came at first at a slant, but in the moments of heaviest rain, the wind died, and the rain came solidly down. It did not last long. Not over ten minutes. But it seemed to be the final unspeakable indignity as it drenched the occupants of the roofless bedroom. Then the rain left them, hurrying eastward, northward.

The silence was somehow as shocking to them as the noise of the storm. They sat huddled, drenched, miserable, exhausted by the buffeting of the winds, the great screaming sounds, the nervous strain and the emotional tensions. In the sudden incredible silence, they lifted their heads. The evening was growing brighter. They looked up. The last clouds scurried by and the sky changed to an evening blue. The placidity of the sky was like a taunt. They could hear nothing but the sound of the water that moved around the house, bubbling as cozily as the bow wave of a placid boat. Hal Dorn got to his feet as carefully, as tentatively as though he were convalescent from a long illness. He felt that when he spoke he should whisper. He looked at the children and at his wife. In the sudden release of tension the children’s eyes were quite suddenly heavy with sleep.

Jean spoke and her voice sounded rusty and strange. “Maybe some of their things stayed dry in the bags. If I can find dry things, they can sleep.”

Hal nodded and looked down at Virginia Sherrel’s upturned face. “How is he?”

“He seems to be... stirring a little. But I think he’s badly hurt. Flagan hit him with something. I saw him.”

“Flagan?”

“I saw him do it. He should be arrested.”

Hal looked down at her and shook his head. “He won’t be. He’s dead. I saw him.”

Virginia closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly shut, and then opened them. “I... I tried to feel glad, but I can’t. I certainly have no reason to wish him well... but... it’s a horrible thing, no matter who it is, no matter what they’ve done. I...”

“Who’s dead, Dad?” Stevie demanded.

“Never mind, son. Don’t think about it.”

“The thing to think about,” Bunny said, “is how soon we can get out of here. I think we’re lucky.” He stood up and looked squarely at Hal. “And I think Betty and I owe you for some of the luck. That was something, Mr. Dorn. Getting us out of there. I want to...”

“He’s waking up!” Virginia said.

They looked at Malden. He opened unfocused eyes. He tried to sit up, and Virginia tried to restrain him. He looked at her and gave her a self-conscious grin and sat up. He fingered the back of his head and winced. He felt for the thick pad of money and found it gone.

Malden looked up at Dorn and Hollis. “Flagan?”

“Yes. She saw him.”

“I came up the stairs when I heard the worst of it coming. The lights went out. It was a good one. My vision doesn’t track right.” He suddenly seemed to be listening. “Where did it all go?”

“It went fast,” Hal said.

Malden got laboriously to his feet, put one hand against the wall in a moment of apparent dizziness. “And I miss the best part of it,” he said.

“The best part?” Jean Dorn said. She had found dry clothing and was changing the almost-asleep Jan.

“Let me help,” Betty Hollis said.

“Where is Flagan?” Malden demanded.

Hal told him, taking him aside, lowering his voice so that Stevie, who was still fighting sleep, could not hear. Malden pursed his lips, nodded and said he’d better go and try to get the money back anyway. Virginia remonstrated with him, telling Malden he was too badly hurt to be walking around. Hal saw the smile Malden gave her. It was an expression of affection, of reassurance.

Hal and Bunny Hollis walked into the hallway and across to the opposite room. They looked out where the window had been. Far to the west, through the trees still standing, they could see the deep evening blue of the Gulf. The lazy sun, smug as a pumpkin, slid down the western sky.

Hal looked down at the water. It moved placidly toward the Gulf. Twigs were carried westward. Current boiled behind the trees.

“Running off,” Bunny said. “It had better not run too fast. This house is on quite a tilt — what’s left of it.”

“It should stay put now.”

“What do we do next?”

Hal glanced at him and realized that Bunny was asking for orders, asking for the reassurance of being put to work. Hal waited for the familiar reluctance in his own mind, for the desire to avoid responsibility. It did not come. He felt both glad and humble.

“We don’t know how badly hurt Malden is. We’ll have to think of some way to signal to any search planes that may come by. I don’t know how long the runoff will take to bring it down to where we can walk out. With some timbers from this house we may be able to figure a way to get us across the smaller branch of the river.”

They talked together, and plans were devised. They went back to talk to the others.

It was almost noon on the following day when the truck dropped the weary, muddy and bedraggled group off at the emergency Red Cross installation at the main corners at Otter Creek. They had reached the highway at about eleven. The blocked bridge had been cleared. Work crews with chain saws had removed fallen trees from the highway. The group had walked out, with Hal carrying Jan, and Bunny carrying Stevie despite the small boy’s indignant protests.

They were drugged by weariness. Hal had watched Jean in the truck that picked them up, had seen her eyes close and her head nod time after time. Each time she would awaken with a start and give him a tired apologetic smile. Malden sat stonily during the short trip, his forehead furrowed with the marks of pain from his blinding headache. And Hal saw that he held Virginia Sherrel’s hand. They had not been far apart ever since the storm had ended.

Bunny and Betty Hollis sat closely together, and when the truck had stopped, and they had climbed down, and the driver had pointed out the tent where they should go and check in, Hal saw that Bunny and Betty walked hand-in-hand toward the tent.

The emergency area was crowded. There were people who walked endlessly back and forth across the area, their faces pale and strained as they searched endlessly, hopelessly for the lost ones. Hal detected the delicious scent of fresh coffee. There were nurses in gleaming white and doctors with a look of chronic exhaustion.

They were efficiently checked in. Hal spoke for the group and explained where they had been, where the cars were, and told of the two fatalities. Malden was taken away for medical attention.

Later, after the children had been fed and had gone willingly to sleep on army cots in the small tent assigned to the Dorns, Hal and Jean sat side by side on one of the other cots. The sun shining through the canvas filled the tent with soft golden light.

“I’m almost too tired to sleep,” Jean said.

“You’ll sleep, honey. You’ll go off like falling down a well.” They kept their voices low.

“We were so lucky. Hal. So terribly lucky. It... it makes all the other things seem so small.”

He looked at her quickly, looked down again at his hands. “Maybe I’m too tired to say this right, Jeanie. But I think this is the time to say it. I... I acted like a whipped kid. And then I got myself into perspective. And something mended. Something healed.”

She touched his hand almost shyly. “I know.”

“The wrong things had got too important to me. You know, honey, it’s a funny thing. I know right now, with perfect confidence, that I can go back up there and handle the job, whatever it may be. This shambles down here was just the result of a bad guess and some bad planning.”

“Yes?” she said.

He looked at her and grinned. “You say that like a question. You always know when there’s something else coming, don’t you?”

“Long practice.”

“Then here it is.” He turned toward her with a quick, vibrant, boyish enthusiasm that touched her heart. “Let’s dig in right here, in this area. There’s no reason why we can’t live in a trailer, is there, if it’s big enough? There’s going to be a lot of work down here. I felt too important for that warehouse deal. Now I don’t feel that way any more. There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding down here, a lot of people starting from scratch, and we can start right with them. I know it will work out. But I have to have you say that you think it’s the right thing to do. If you think it would be better for us to go on back up...”

“Hal! Please, darling. It will be a lovely trailer. And all that... that other is over. As though you were just sick for a little while.”

“And cured by a hurricane? There’s a tired old expression about an ill wind...” He stopped as she surrendered to a truly massive yawn. Long after she was asleep he stayed awake, thinking and planning. And reveling in the feeling of confidence that had been lost for so long.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Hurricane

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9