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.