“Mighty brave,” one said. He was big and wrinkled but with a light in his blue eyes.
“Just a little rain,” Mercer replied.
“Talking ’bout the hat.” He pointed a finger to his own black-and-gold baseball cap. “Folks in these parts are Hawkeyes. You’re wearing Iowa State.”
Despite his gruff tone, the man was obviously teasing. Mercer acted as if he were having a sudden epiphany. “I knew there was something wrong with it. It only keeps a little of the rain off my face.”
The big farmer laughed. “That got you a pass. Head on down this hallway and take a left. That’s the gym. There are towels, doughnuts, and coffee.”
“Thanks.”
A moment later, Mercer had a tepid coffee in hand and was explaining to an overworked volunteer coordinator that he was looking for Veronica Butler. The din in the echoing gymnasium was a beehivelike buzz, punctuated by children’s shouts and infants’ wails. He would have much rather listened to Harry singing falsetto than endure this cacophony for a moment longer than necessary. The air was heavy and smelled of wet dog.
“I’m sorry, she isn’t here,” the woman said without needing to consult the binders she and the others had compiled of the storm’s temporary refugees.
“She’s in the middle school gym, then?” he asked hopefully.
“Obviously you don’t know Roni too well. She won’t leave her home no matter how hard the police try to get her to evacuate. She’s as stubborn as a mule, and ten times as tough.” There was a trace of civic pride in her voice at how the old woman defied the authorities despite the danger.
“So I’ll find her on Water Street?”
“She’ll be there all right, but I wouldn’t go looking for her just yet or she might mistake you for a deputy and fire off a few potshots.”
“Is she…” Mercer tried to find words that wouldn’t insult the old woman. “All there?”
“Oh yes. She’s as sane as they come, just ornery. Her grandfather built the original house where her place is now, and she claims in over a hundred and twenty years that spot has never flooded, no matter what the Mississippi does.”
“And she knows that since then there have been hundreds of miles of levees built that change the game entirely?”
“Don’t matter to her none. She’s sticking by her place come hell or high water.” She chuckled at her own unintended pun. Just then some more people came in, a young couple with two children and an infant in the woman’s arms. The baby was thankfully quiet but the younger boy sniveled with his face buried in his mother’s jeans. “Crystal, Johnnie, how you two holdin’ up?” The volunteer produced a lollipop from a bag at her feet, and the crying boy’s tears suddenly dried when he reached for it.
Mercer nodded his thanks to the woman, who was already too busy to notice and made his way back to the door he’d entered a few minutes earlier.
“They’re chasing you out, eh?” the comedian-farmer asked. “Should have pocketed that cap, boy.”
“At least I didn’t wear one from my real alma mater,” Mercer replied, paused for effect, and told the Hawkeye, “I’m a Nittany Lion.”
He was back out into the storm before the older man computed that Mercer had gone to one of the University of Iowa’s Big Ten rivals, Penn State.
The cops at the roadblock were busy helping guide a semitruck with a trailer-load of new farm equipment through a tight U-turn so the driver could head back to wait out the storm in a hotel someplace. Mercer ran back to his rental and drove along the verge to get past the preoccupied cops. If they noticed him, they didn’t bother to give chase.
The rain continued to pound the earth and rattle off the truck’s bodywork like it was taking small-arms fire. The wipers could only keep the windshield clear for half a cycle, leaving Mercer to drive on faith as much as his vision. Fortunately, the GPS was still pinging off the satellites even if his cell showed zero bars.
He passed through a deserted town with roads awash like flat black streams. The power was off, either by accident or design, and it gave the place a haunted feel. There was no one around, no motion other than the downward streak of rain and the froth of water boiling down from the hills. It was barely noon, but the storm cast the buildings in twilight gray that shrouded them like a layer of decay.
He spotted two men with a trailered Zodiac boat standing under a gas station canopy next to their pickup. They were dressed in waders and rain jackets and appeared to be part of a volunteer rescue team. The truck had a modified suspension so it could be jacked up on massive tires and had a magnetic red strobe attached to his roof. The pair pointed at his truck and made waving gestures with their arms as if to warn him off. Mercer tooted his horn in acknowledgment but kept on going.
Beyond the town and through some trees he could see a long grass-covered levee that stretched from north to south in an unending wall of compacted dirt. He knew on the other side raged the Mississippi River, one of the world’s greats, and one that hated to be contained the way a wild animal fought its captivity. Give it just a chance to escape and the waters would run until the whole miles-long system of earthworks collapsed into so much mud and sludge and this little town was wiped off the map.
Mercer turned right, tracking south out of town. He crossed a spindly steel through-truss bridge whose surfaces were more rust than green paint. Eight feet below the road deck, a once lazy stream coming from a valley ahead of him was now a brown seething mass that raced past like a locomotive. Swirling on the raging water were tree trunks and other unidentifiable flotsam caught in its inexorable grip.
The road to Veronica Butler’s home paralleled the stream. It was like a river in its own right and was well over its banks and at various points sluicing across the road itself. Driving in conditions like this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done. Despite the SUV’s size and the shallowness of the water careening across the road, the torrent could easily lift his truck and hurl it into the main channel so fast he’d never have time to react.
The wipers now barely made a dent in the rain slamming into the windscreen.
On his left were houses every couple hundred yards with barns in the back, and occasional silos. He couldn’t see through the storm past them, but Mercer figured their backyards were fields stretching to the horizon. To the right was the river lapping at the road. Movement in the channel caught his eye, and he saw a large white box shoot past. It took him a second to realize the box was actually the back of a large moving van, and its cab and engine were completely submerged.
“You will reach your destination in five hundred feet,” the female voice of his GPS informed him.
Veronica Butler lived in a white single-story clapboard house on a bluff directly above the tributary. When the weather was clear, there would be a long gentle slope down to the water’s edge, but today the current was rushing by no more than thirty feet from the back door. She had no garage, so her late-model American sedan sat in the driveway and was being lashed by the storm. Next to the house was a tractor shed just big enough for a riding mower and maybe some gardening tools.
Mercer pulled in behind her Ford four-door and killed the engine. Without the motor noise and the whipsaw action of the wipers, he could hear the stream’s passage even over the rain. Roni Butler’s grandfather might have picked a great spot for his homestead and it might never have flooded before, but there was always a first time and Mercer feared this might be it.