* * *
Bonnie Swift looked out one of the windows of what had been evasively retitled the Vermont State Hospital. Built in the 1890s in Waterbury as the Vermont Hospital for the Insane, and chartered to address “the care, custody, and treatment of insane criminals of the state,” it was now a kinder, gentler place, in both name and practice. Bonnie had been an RN here for twelve years, and despite the ribbing she got from her outsider friends, she enjoyed both patients and coworkers.
Not that there weren’t times-frequently-when the two contributed to a Kafkaesque nightmare. Still, she had always enjoyed the offbeat, and what better place for that than a now politically correct loony bin?
Today, however, the tensions were coming from the outside, and the entire facility had been injected with an unusual camaraderie, as if the certifiably sane and those aspiring to that status had come together against some ominous threat.
Bonnie Swift leaned in close to the windowpane, blocking out the light behind her to better see into the surrounding gloom. It was midmorning, and yet as dark as dusk, with the sky uniformly heavy. She didn’t need a forecaster’s warning to know a natural train wreck when she saw it coming.
It wasn’t just the wind and rain she was considering. The remnants of the hospital were located at the rear of a sprawling state-office complex that had slowly overtaken the old hospital buildings as the patient population retreated from its 1,700 heyday to about 50 now. The campus-housing dozens of agencies as diverse as hers and the Department of Public Safety, across the driveway-even bragged of the totally renovated State Emergency Operations Center-one of the few in the country to be located above ground level. The upper-floor placement struck her as propitious, since the SEOC not only acted as the go-to place for all of the EOCs across Vermont, but the entire campus was situated on a floodplain.
She wiped the pane free of the mist from her breath. She couldn’t actually see the Winooski River. An earthen berm had been built alongside the lowermost parking lot, in a mainly psychological effort to keep the water contained. To her mind, it served the same purpose as drawing a thin curtain against the sight of a raging fire.
Waterbury, being so close to the capital, Montpelier, had been an overflow parking place for state facilities for decades-dependent on the fact for its financial vigor. But it bordered Vermont’s second-longest river, and despite the Winooski’s having overflowed multiple times-drowning twenty people in 1927-the town, along with the building Bonnie Swift was in, had slowly expanded to the river’s edge.
One of the doctors stepped into the hallway from his office and noticed her by the window. He had arrived from Boston a year ago.
“How’s it looking?” he asked. “We going to float away?”
She glanced at his smiling face. “I can’t say we won’t,” she said seriously. “The river surrounds us on three sides. Where we are hangs down like the udder on a cow.”
He turned to study her, struck by her tone of voice. “You don’t make that sound good.”
“I just hope our evacuation plan works,” she concluded, breaking away to return to her rounds. “Or that we even know where we filed it.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Leo? It’s me.”
Leo heard the tension in his older brother’s voice, and immediately tried putting him at ease. “It’s all good up here, Joey. Just rain. No bullshit. You wanna talk to Ma?”
He handed the phone to his wheelchair-bound mother, who was already reaching for it, a slight frown on her face because of his language. Not just the one crude word, he knew. Funnily, she had less of a problem with that than with his use of poor grammar.
“Joe,” she said in place of a greeting. “Leo’s correct. We are absolutely fine, up here on our little hill. Even the electricity’s still on.”
“And I checked the generator.” Leo shouted. “A-OK.”
“How are you faring down there?” Joe’s mother asked him.
“Personally? Fine,” he reassured her. “The house is out of harm’s way, and I’ve been keeping myself busy and mostly dry. That may be about to change, though.”
“Flooding?” she asked.
“Yeah. It started with a few basements a couple of hours ago. Now we’re getting whole neighborhoods underwater that haven’t seen that in half a century. West Brattleboro is getting really creamed-all those low-lying housing developments. The Whetstone has turned into the Colorado, and quite a few residents have refused to move.”
“That’s terrible,” she said with feeling. “Will you be able to help?”
“I think so,” he told her honestly. “There are swiftwater rescue teams here from as far away as Colchester. They never even got to staging-just went straight to their first assignments. So far, no deaths have been reported. But it’s early yet,” he added grimly, “and we’re hearing that, closer to the Green Mountains, towards Wilmington, Wardsboro, and places like that, they’re getting hit much harder. Route 9 is cut in a couple of spots. Roads and bridges are going out all over. What are you hearing from around you?”
“Much the same,” she answered. “Mostly, it’s been just wait-and-see-or listen, in our case.”
“Leo’s store is okay?”
“As far as we know.”
She heard some noise on Joe’s end, in the distance, and he said in a slightly more rushed tone of voice, “Gotta go, Mom. Take care of each other and I’ll try to call later.”
“Don’t worry about us, Joe. Be careful out there.”
“Love you,” he said, a fraction of a second before the line went dead.
She merely smiled sadly and pushed the DISCONNECT button.
* * *
Caspar Luard looked glumly out the window of the cruiser’s backseat, uncaring of the watery sheets greatly limiting visibility. He was too lost in his own misery to give a damn about some rain. Rained too goddamn much in this state anyhow. That was one of the reasons he’d tried to rob that gas station-to get the hell out of Vermont. Assuming he’d had enough left over after buying himself a little peace of mind. That’s what he liked to call the various substances he put into his system to distract himself: peace of mind.
He glanced at his lap and squirmed a little, trying to get comfortable on the hard plastic seat. They could’ve put him in a regular car, or even the van they normally used for prisoner transports. It’s not like he was going to throw up. He’d never done that in a cop car yet. He adjusted the chain that ran around his waist and interconnected with his handcuffs. At least they hadn’t locked his hands behind his back. That hurt like hell.
In the front seat, beyond the plastic and metal mesh divider, the two transport deputies weren’t so distracted. Nor were they ignoring the weather.
“You wanna tell me why we’re out here?” said the passenger, a deputy sheriff for five months by now.
“Give it a rest, Al,” said the driver, not receptive to casual chatter. The windshield wipers were on their highest setting, and yet at split-second intervals, he lost sight of the end of the car’s hood, along with the road ahead. On average, it wasn’t as bad as that, but they had a good half hour to go before they reached the prison in Springfield-their customer’s home away from home. And then they’d have to go back out into this mess, probably to guard some washed-out bridge.
“I’d like to,” Al continued complaining, waving his hands around, “except here we are, right? Why couldn’t they’ve just put this jerk in holding overnight? Answer me that.”
“Don’t know, Al.”
“The PD just didn’t want to be bothered. That’s why. All hands on deck; can’t spare the manpower; special circumstances. Like the Sheriff’s Department’s not busy, too? We got guys all over the county, right in the middle of this shit storm, drowning right where they’re standing, and the great Bratt PD can’t house a single loser in their nice, dry basement? Please.”
The driver didn’t answer. The wheel between his hands was growing mushy, as the puddles they hydroplaned through grew in depth and number. He slowed down further. He was already taking back roads, instead of the interstate, from Brattleboro to Springfield, in the hopes that visibility would improve and the chances of skidding decline. Now he was beginning to doubt that any choice would have made a difference.