Whirlwind

20

Balch Springs, Texas

The morning after her night shift, Kate was in a southeast suburb of Dallas.

She’d halted her Chevy Cobalt in front of a redbrick bungalow, glanced at the trimmed grass and neat low-standing hedges bordering the sidewalk. Well kept, she thought, flipping through her notes to confirm the address.

Bolstered by Chuck Laneer’s support the night before, she’d been going full tilt on the baby story since 6:00 a.m. When she woke, she’d texted Jenna Cooper for any news in the search for Caleb.

Nothing. Praying, Jenna texted back.

Kate then called Frank Rivera for any developments on the case. Had the baby, any baby, been recovered? What about anyone bearing resemblance to the helpful strangers?

“Nothing new to report, Kate, sorry,” Rivera said.

“Hey, Frank, is it possible the baby was taken by this couple?”

A moment passed.

“You’re not going to quote me. We’re just talking, right?”

“Right, just talking.”

“Okay, well, anything’s possible, but I doubt it’s the case here.”

“Why?”

“People try to help people in times of chaos, and the storm has given us many stories like that. I think this one is just a very tragic one, and while I pray for a different outcome, I fear the baby and the Good Samaritans may be found miles from the flea market.”

“Thanks, Frank.”

Kate pondered Rivera’s comments then reasoned that her best bet for learning more about what had happened to Caleb, and the strangers, was to get an account from anyone who was there at the time.

She drove to the flea market.

Search-and-recovery work was ongoing. Access remained restricted. Kate was permitted to enter and returned to the wreckage of the Saddle Up Center, where she located Captain Vern Hamby and search-and-rescue team leader Steve Pawson. She pressed them for any information on the Cooper case.

No babies had been recovered so far from the center’s debris, and they’d found no one fitting the descriptions of the strangers, they said.

“I understand that you have maps,” Kate said, “floor plans that pinpoint where people were situated when the tornado hit, to help identify people.”

“That’s correct,” Hamby said.

“Can you help me locate a spot on the floor plan?” Kate unfolded a page of her notebook with a sketch she’d made based on Jenna Cooper telling her how she’d taken shelter with the strangers by four large concrete planters near a wall.

Hamby and Pawson checked the sketch against the center’s floor plan, which covered a worktable. Pawson touched a dirty, scraped finger to a corner of the plan.

“That would be here,” he said.

Kate looked at the plan.

“Which vendor was closest to that spot when the storm hit?”

Hamby scratched his chin.

“Big Rail World. They would’ve had the clearest view of that area.”

“Who’s the operator for Big Rail?”

“According to the public directory, Burl Heaton,” Pawson said.

“Did Burl Heaton survive?”

Pawson consulted his phone and Hamby opened a three-ring binder.

“Yes, he did,” Hamby said. “Got banged up a bit, but he’s okay.”

“Any idea where he is right now-hospital, shelter, home?”

“I think he went home with his son,” Pawson said.

Kate confirmed the spelling of Heaton’s name and looked up his address.

Now she was parked in front of his house in Balch Springs. She closed her notebook. The address was correct. This was the place.

She gathered her bag, walked up to his door and rang the bell, hoping against hope that Burl Heaton might get her closer to learning what happened to Caleb Cooper.

A white-haired woman in her sixties opened the door.

“Yes?”

“Hello. I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead. I called earlier.”

“Oh yes, come in. Burl! She’s here! Don’t worry about your shoes. This way.”

Thick outdated carpet covered the living room floor. Dark paneling covered the walls, which displayed family photos and a large painting of a freight train in the mountains. The coffee table was covered with paperwork, lists, photos, inventories and forms. Burl Heaton, aged seventy, was a retired brakeman who’d run a model railroad business at the flea market. He was assessing his losses and the toll, he told Kate.

His face was a net of abrasions. “I lost everything. About fifty thousand in product,” he said. “I got my arms skinned to the bone, got some bruised ribs, but I’m alive. Not like some of my friends. Not like- Sorry…”

He turned away and cried as his wife comforted him. In the quiet, Kate heard a man’s voice in the kitchen, talking about insurance on the phone.

Heaton brushed away his tears.

“In forty-nine years of railroading, I thought I’d seen a lot. I was in two derailments and one collision. But I cannot comprehend what I saw at the market. The building was torn apart, bodies flying like rag dolls, like the door to hell had been kicked open.”

Kate’s heart twisted as Heaton shook his head slowly until he found his composure and his way back from the horror to his living room.

“On the phone you said you needed help looking for someone?”

“Yes. I’m following the story of Jenna Cooper, whose baby was lost in the storm.”

Heaton glanced to his wife and said, “We heard a little bit about that on the news. She was at the Saddle Up. Terrible, just terrible.”

Kate cued up the photos she’d taken of Jenna on her phone and showed them to Heaton, to aid his memory.

“We think she passed by Big Rail to take shelter by the planters near your booth. I’m interested in knowing if you saw what happened there, especially with the two people who were helping her, a man and woman in their twenties.”

Kate described the mystery pair as Heaton looked at the pictures for several moments.

“No, she doesn’t look familiar. I don’t recall seeing her or these other people you’re talking about,” he said. “It was so crazy and everything happened so fast. A lot of people just stood there in shock, not believing what was happening. There was no place to go, nothing you could do.”

“What about Lance?” his wife asked and cocked an ear to the kitchen. “He was there with you. I think he’s done on the phone. Lance!”

A slender, unsmiling man in his thirties with bandages on his cheeks stood at the hallway entrance, listening to his mother explain Kate’s request. Without speaking, he took Kate’s phone and looked at the images intensely before shaking his head and passing the phone back to her.

Disappointed that her avenue of searching had dead-ended, she thanked the Heatons and stood to leave.

“Hang on.” Lance was busy with his phone. “I got something else. It came this morning. It may help you. Dolores Valdez runs the booth across from Dad’s, called These Boots. Her teenage son Tony sent me a recording he did of the center when the tornado hit. He wants to sell it to the TV people. Here it is. Watch.” Lance passed his phone to Kate.

She saw shaky video of people crowding inside the center amid the sounds of cracking, creaking and hammering. There, Kate glimpsed Big Rail, the forest of people, a flash of a baby stroller, Jenna’s profile, a fleeting image of Cassie’s head, and two adults with them, barely visible, navigating their way through the pack. The camera’s point of view shifted; some people crouched on the floor, shouting to others to get down. Some cried out as explosion after explosion sounded along with the shredding of metal by unbelievable winds. Debris swirled, a car landed inside, people were pulled into the air and tossed into darkness.

Then the footage went black.

Kate caught her breath and willed her heart to calm.

She asked Lance to replay the video, which ran for nearly five minutes. As she watched the second time, she realized there was no way of telling what had happened to Caleb and the strangers. The video cut away before it offered up any clues.

“Lance, can you give me Tony’s number? I’ll check with my desk, but Newslead might buy this from him and put it up on its website.”