It felt wrong leaving Maurice’s corpse unattended, but there was nothing for it. The storm attacked her from all angles and almost floated her down the hill toward her vehicle. The lieutenant was right: the storm surge had reached the area, and the dirty seawater was halfway up the tires on her car. Laurie forced her way through the deluge, the blood on her trousers mixing with the mud-brown water as she forced the car door open.
Hurricane Heather had arrived, even if this was its outer limits. Billowy clouds hovered in the sky as rain hailed down on her. Her car was being buffeted from side to side, and she’d only moved a hundred yards before the car lost traction. As it momentarily drifted along the road, it reminded Laurie of driving on black ice. She steered as well as she could, fearing she was going to veer off at any second, before the wheels finally made contact with the tarmac beneath the water.
Filmore had been right about being stranded. The storm surge was building relentlessly, and had she stayed any longer she would have been stuck there with Maurice’s corpse for the duration. She’d just picked up her phone to call the lieutenant when the radio crackled to life with a call ordering all rescue personnel to return to their respective shelters and to prepare for the worst. Filmore’s phone didn’t even ring, and she hoped he’d managed to get to safety.
Making slow progress along the back streets, Laurie glanced at the letter on the passenger seat. She recalled the name Sadie Cornish from the initial investigation, but hadn’t realized her significance to Frank. The mention of David’s name still confused her. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Sadie to find out the name of Frank’s child, but it still felt a little odd that she had mentioned him by name. Other questions sprang to mind as the car trundled through the deserted streets. Had Frank left the note out on purpose for someone to find, and to what end? Was it somehow an admission of guilt, or a cry for help? Laurie wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, but she had to consider what role this Sadie had had in all the events that had plagued David’s family.
The water she was moving through must have been a foot deep now, obliterating any wayfinding assistance but stop signs and mailboxes, which kept popping up where she hadn’t expected them to. It was hardly a surprise, then, when her car ground to a halt as the front wheels caught on something beneath the murky water. Laurie looked around at the boarded-up houses, feeling at that moment as if she was the only person left on the island. She put the car in reverse, the front wheels spinning and churning up great, splattering boils of mud and water outside her side window, but the vehicle refused to budge.
“Damn,” she screamed. She’d just done the worst thing she could’ve done—gunned the engine like a panicked tourist as though her aim was to sink her as deeply into the mire as she could.
Water was now nearly level with the handle of the car door. Slamming her hands on the dash, she threw the transmission back into drive and willed herself to slowly advance, let off, then rock it forward again. She repeated this three times, until she had to concede she was fooling herself. The car was going nowhere, at least as a result of anything she could do. Further down the street, a line of three parked vehicles appeared to her to be bobbing in the water. She imagined using the car like a boat and navigating back to the shelter, before dismissing the absurd idea and reluctantly switching off the engine.
Abandoning ship was her only option.
Her heart caught in her mouth as she tried to open the door, only for the rushing water to push back against it. The last-resort idea of leaving through the windows was unappealing and she tried again, forcing the door open so the tepid water leaked into the car. It smelled like it had come directly from the sewage treatment plant, and she held her breath as she forced the door open wide and stepped into the brown liquid, which was now up to her thighs.
She forced herself to remain calm as she locked the car and waded away down the street, which was effectively a river. A trio of green recycling bins bobbed along past her like mini unmanned boats. Her radio buzzed, another group announcement ordering all personnel back to the nearest shelter. Laurie called in her position, if only to place herself on the record. She didn’t expect, or want, any sort of rescue effort. She was less than half a mile away now from the high school, and just needed to make steady progress and she would be back to relative safety.
Every step along the newly created river felt unreal. It was like being in a new town, a fantasy version of Galveston where the land was being swallowed up. Smells of ammonia and seaweed accompanied the howling pitch of the wind that ripped at her face, making it difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The warm, brackish water was getting so high now that she had the absurd notion to swim, or to float on her back, and might have done so if the murkiness hadn’t contained so many hidden unknowns. Down Bernardo de Galvez Avenue, the sky looked like an encroaching monster, its black tendrils reaching out in all directions as if attempting to snuff out the light.
Willing herself not to panic, she increased her speed through the deluge. If this was what the island was like this early in the storm, it didn’t bear thinking about what it would be like once that beast fully covered it. Dismissing her concerns over the chances of surviving the storm even once she’d reached the high school, she’d just ordered herself to put her back into the task of getting there first, then dealing with the next crisis, when a silver metal garbage can lid frisbeed, whistling, past her ear.
She took a staggering step forward, caught her balance and let loose a choked, hysterical laugh. She’d just begun to turn and check where the lid had gone when something else—maybe another lid—cracked her on the back of the head with a force that launched her face-first into the water.
Chapter Forty
Laurie could taste the saltwater in her mouth. It didn’t feel quite real, like those semi-lucid moments of dreaming before you fall fully to sleep. All she knew for sure was that her body was utterly devoid of energy, and she wanted to sleep. She’d felt the same way for months after Milly died. She’d barely left her bed in that time and had tried her best to sleep through every second of the day. It had been David who’d rescued her from that fate, insisting she get some fresh air for both their sakes. That had been when she’d started running. She’d walked to the beach and had been freaked out by the number of people there, so had jogged slowly to the shore. So out of shape had she been from the pregnancy and the weeks of inaction that those two hundred yards, at little more than a fast walk, had left her breathless. But it had made her feel something, so she’d repeated it the next day, this time jogging alongside the water for another few hundred yards. And that had been the start of her obsession. Every time she felt something, she would run, and drown out her thoughts by pushing her body to the limits.
David, she thought, opening her eyes and getting her feet under her in the current. She looked about her at the strange new world, the houses being swallowed by water, and tried to get her bearings. A warm wind attacked her after she fought her way to the surface and spluttered out rancid water. Taking in panicked gulps of air, she took a few steps forward on unsteady feet until a feeling of nausea overtook her and she bent over and vomited into the filthy, fast-moving stream. She closed her eyes to try and drown out the pain in her stomach and head, which was now pulsating in an agonizing rhythm, twice as painful as any migraine she could ever remember having. She winced as she touched the soft tissue where the garbage can lid, or whatever it was, had struck her and wondered how many seconds she’d been out.