Hurricane

Chapter 7

Virginia Sherrel went over to the window while the three men were carrying the luggage upstairs. She looked out at the storm through a crack in the heavy old blind. She could not see much — a tumult of waving branches, a scud of low dark cloud. She looked out at the storm and thought about Steve Malden. So intently was she thinking of him that she was utterly unprepared for the sound of his voice close behind her. The storm sounds had smothered his footsteps.

“How does your face feel?” he asked.

She turned, startled. “I... He didn’t hit me very hard, really.”

“The corner of your mouth looks swollen.”

“I think there’s a little cut inside. But just a little one.”

“If he’s what he claims to be...” He glanced around and then moved closer to her in order to be able to speak more quietly. “...you’ll be paid for your car. I think he may be what he says he is, but I also think there’s something funny going on. Maybe he was taking off with bank money. If he was, he got a bad break.”

She frowned. “But that little man — Mr. Himbermark — he didn’t look like a partner in crime.”

“Sometimes they don’t.”

She tilted her head to one side and looked up at him. “You handled Mr. Flagan very easily. I suppose you’re a policeman.”

“I was once. I suppose I still am, in a way.”

“I didn’t guess that until I watched you with him. Usually I’m good at guessing about people. I suppose policemen have to have that knack too.”

She was handling the conversation as carefully as she could. She did not care to sound as inane as she had when she had talked to him previously.

She had been aware of him since the moment when, picking herself up from the mud of the road, she had seen him go without hesitation into the swollen river to rescue the man who had taken her car. At that time her awareness had been overshadowed by the numbing sense of loss she had felt when she had seen the convertible topple so slowly into the water. She had never felt very strongly about possessions. There was within her no need to have things and tightly hold them. It was not that she was careless with the things she owned. She merely felt that the attitude which places a high value on possessions is in itself a sort of trap.

And so she had not been prepared for her own reaction to the shock of seeing the car go. It was — surprisingly — like a second bereavement. After analyzing her own feelings she knew that she was not as healed of the loss of David as she had supposed. The car had been purchased on their last happy day together, and that was important even though David’s cheer had been forced, almost manic. He had touched it, had driven it down here. In a curious way it seemed an extension of him, more symbolically important than even his ashes in the box in the trunk compartment. By now the trunk would be filled with water, and the cardboard would be melted, the tissue paper sodden. Yet the bronze box itself was tightly made, close fitting. It would be dry inside the box.

After that shock came an anger stronger than any she had ever felt before. She had stood braced against the wind and had watched Malden — she had not known his name then — bring the man ashore. Anger made her legs weak and her hands tremble. She had clenched her teeth so tightly her ears rang. She had wanted to scream and kick. She knew that it was more than anger... It was the release from the withdrawn silence, the sick loneliness of the past few weeks, and the heartbreak of the past year. Tensions had built up a pressure that required all her strength of will to restrain.

As she had watched the near-drowning, the artificial respiration, she had become more aware of Malden. The other two men seemed excited. There had been no excitement on the still face of the big man who had performed the actual rescue, and she had stared at him intently, almost rudely, her anger fading as curiosity grew. She thought it might be the childish pose of a self-styled stoic, but there had been no revealing glint of excitement in the somber eyes. He had acted as though the incident were of little importance, yet in crisis he had been the one who had moved quickly and correctly.

It was not the same look of deadness David had worn before taking his lonely and inexplicable trip. David had withdrawn. This expression had a certain dignity about it. The body could comply while the mind was untouched, the emotions sealed away.

In his stillness she felt a challenge to her which heightened her own awareness of him, her curiosity about him. He was big and strong and dark and too self-composed. Her awareness was unfamiliar to her. She told herself wryly that this reaction was more suitable to a teen-ager.

Later, after she had changed, she had made a very clumsy attempt to talk to him. Usually she was poised and glib when she tried to talk to strangers. But his very somberness seemed to make her awkward.

They stood just inside the open door of the house. “I... I guess you must have seen the tree fall on that man.”

“Yes. I saw it.” He took a ruined pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his soaked sport shirt and threw them out the doorway.

“Have one of mine. They stayed dry for some reason.”

“Thanks.” He took a cigarette and her lighter, lit both their cigarettes and handed the lighter back. His voice was deep and as mechanical as his expression, barely audible above the wind.

“I’m Mrs. Sherrel. Virginia Sherrel.”

“Steve Malden.”

“That must have been a horrible thing to see. And you say you saw it.”

“Yes.”

She had not felt during the first conversation that he was being deliberately difficult. He just didn’t seem to care to make the effort to carry on a conversation with her. Few men had ever reacted to her that way.

She kept trying. “I thought at first this could be... well, sort of exciting. You know. Marooned here and waiting out the storm. Then that man took my car, and then that tree... It changes the whole thing. It makes it more... grim.”

She realized that she was babbling... babbling in a strained overanxious fashion and, what was worse, talking inanely. She stopped abruptly.

“See what you mean,” he had said and nodded and gone over to talk to Dorn, leaving her with heated cheeks and a feeling of inadequacy. She had told herself then that the man was not worth talking to. He probably had an I.Q. of seventy to go with those muscles. It would be better to stop being so ridiculously girlish and go help Mrs. Dorn with the kids.

Now, after the violent episode with Flagan, here was a chance to talk to him again, and it was a conversation that he had started. That, in itself, was a minor advantage, and she intended to maintain it and definitely refrain from babbling. She did not want him to think her a fool.

He considered her question about whether the police had to be good at making correct guesses about people.

“It isn’t essential. But it’s a help. The best help is to have a very good memory for faces and then spend a lot of time with the mug shots.”

She looked at his shirt. It was still soaked. Nothing would dry in this humid, ominous air. She said, “Aren’t you going to change? You must be uncomfortable.”

“I’m going back out in a few minutes.”

“Why?”

For the first time he looked slightly vulnerable, a very little bit uncomfortable. “I’ve never seen one of these before. It used to be... a hobby. That was a long time ago. Meteorology. Usual gadgets. Wind velocity, rainfall, aneroid barometer.”

“Could I come with you?” she heard herself say. She flushed. She thought, how can I be so ridiculous? Such a forward, obnoxious female!

He shrugged again. “Come along.”

When he opened the door, so much wind was moving through the house that it almost pulled the knob out of his hand. Outside, the force of the wind was more violent than before. When they passed the corner of the house, the wind staggered her. He caught her strongly by the upper arm and hurried her over to the protection of the Cadillac. They stood beside it, looking west through a wide gap in the trees. All the sky was a strange, dark, coppery color. Long cloud banks moved swiftly toward them. Her eyelashes were pushed back against her eyelids, and her black hair snapped against the nape of her neck. When she parted her lips, the wind blew into her mouth, puffing her cheeks. The very violence of it was somehow exhilarating. She wanted to laugh aloud.

He bent a trifle and put his mouth close to her ear and half shouted: “See the highest clouds? Alto-stratus and alto-cumulus, with clear spaces between. Moving east. They radiate out from the eye. Now see the low stuff? It’s moving northeast. That puts us in the bad quadrant, where you get the worst turbulence. This is a small one. But rough. The eye won’t be more than four or five miles wide and it ought to be off about that direction.” He pointed slightly northwest. “And not too far off the coast. Those cloud ridges will go up seven or eight miles. And here comes another rain squall. Better get in the car.”

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.

“I guess we’d both better go back in, Virginia. Ginny?”

“It used to be Ginny, long ago. I used to despise the name. Now it sounds sort of good. But probably too young for me. Oh, there I go again. That sounds like I was fishing, I wasn’t.”

He opened the car door and stepped out into water that came over his shoe tops. He looked and saw that the water, unnoticed, had crept to the bottom of the three steps to the door of the house.

He leaned close and shouted, “Better take off your sandals and roll up those dungarees. Water’s coming up faster. I’d carry you, but I couldn’t be sure of my balance in the wind.”

She slipped off her sandals and rolled up the dungarees. He held her by the arm and hurried her to the shelter of the house. She stepped heavily on a sharp stone and winced. In the relative shelter of the house, he put his lips close to her ear and said, “It’s going to get a lot rougher. When it does, I’ll be near. Stay close to those kids. I’m going to stay out here a minute and see if I can measure how fast this water is coming in.” He dipped some up and tasted it, spat it out. “Brine. This is coming right up from the Gulf.”

She turned to go in, and he caught her arm. “Can you swim well?” She hesitated, nodded. “Good. See that stand of trees there? If... if the house should go, and the water was six feet deep, think you could swim over to there with one of the kids? The little girl? Those trees won’t go over and they look easy to climb.”

He watched her closely. She moistened her lips and looked carefully at the distance. She didn’t panic. “I could do that.”

“You probably won’t have to.”

“I can do it if I have to.”

She went in. The water had reached the piling at the corner of the house. He estimated and made three marks with a stone, about an inch apart. He leaned his back against the house and waited. He could feel the trembling of the house as the wind pawed it. He thought about the Sherrel woman. Damned bad guess. Thought her as empty as all the others. Good-looking woman. Strong shoulders and good hips and legs. Carries herself well. Dorothy used to walk with that look of proudness. Looks right at you. So did Dorothy. Thought it was an affectation, but maybe that’s the way she really is. It’s a good look. It closes out the rest of the world.

He waited and thought about her, and he knew it had been a very long time since he had thought about a woman in that way. He wondered how bad the storm would get and wondered how she would react. He worried about her. He hoped she’d come through it okay.

And then a slow expression of wonder spread itself across his face. In some odd way in the last few minutes they had talked, she had become important to him. He wanted to see her after this was all over. He wanted to be in some quiet place with her where they could talk of many things and not have to shout over the wind — a quiet place with a soft light on her face.

He applied the test he had used on others. Would Dorothy have had her for a friend? This one — yes.

Virginia Sherrel passed that test quickly and easily.

The marks were obscured. He checked the time on his waterproof watch and was shocked to see how quickly it had happened. One and a half steps were under water.