“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.