Indiana Belle (American Journey Book 3) (11 page)

Cameron closed his eyes and pressed his temples as a dozen thoughts shot through his head. He had missed something. He had missed something big. He searched his mind for clues and answers until the truth hit him like a bolt from the blue.

"Oh, no," Cameron said.

"What's wrong?" Candice asked.

"Everything's wrong. Do you have a shelter?"

"Do I have a what?"

"Do you have a
storm
shelter? Do you have a basement or a cellar?"

"Why?"

"Because a tornado is coming," Cameron said. "We have to get below ground."

"It's just a thunderstorm," Marjorie said. "We'll be fine."

Cameron looked at the matron and shook his head.

"You're wrong."

Cameron rushed to the window, peered through the glass, and saw the sum of all his fears. A black, shifting, formless mass, the Tri-State Tornado, was just beyond the river and approaching fast. The most violent twister in recorded history was perhaps a minute away from sending three people to their maker. Cameron turned around and stared at Candice.

"We have to leave. We have to leave now. Do you have a shelter?"

Candice nodded nervously.

"It's out back."

"Then let's go. Let's go now!"

Cameron raced back to the coffee table, retrieved his satchel, and threw the strap over his shoulder. He joined Candice and her dumbstruck mother by the entry a second later.

"Grab hands and follow me!" Candice said.

She pulled Cameron and, through him, her mother out of the living room and farther into the dark residence. The three stumbled their way through a maze of hallways until they reached a utility room in the northwest corner of the home. Seconds later, they opened a door, stepped into the yard, and confronted a gale that almost pushed them back into the house.

"Where is it?" Cameron asked.

Candice looked back.

"What?"

Cameron raised his voice.

"Where is the cellar?"

"It's over there," Candice shouted. "Follow me!"

The society editor shielded her eyes from stinging rain and hail as she led Cameron and Marjorie through the yard to a stairwell that descended into the ground. Thirty seconds and twenty steps later, the three reached a heavy metal door that looked like the entrance to a crypt.

Candice placed her hands on the knob and tried twice to open the door. When she failed a third time, she turned around, stared at Cameron, and threw her hands up in desperation.

"I can't open it! It's stuck!"

"Let me try," Cameron said.

Cameron stepped to the east-facing door as Candice moved out of his way. He grabbed the knob and tried to turn it in each direction. He failed. When he pounded on the knob and tried again, he failed again. He could not move it even an inch.

"Please hurry!" Candice screamed.

Cameron began to panic as conditions went from bad to worse to hellish. Branches, boards, and other large debris flew over the stairwell. Trees snapped, windows imploded, and metal groaned. Hail and rocks struck the house like bullets from a machine gun.

"I can't get it!" Cameron shouted.

"Try harder!" Candice cried. "Just try—"

Cameron did not hear the rest. He could not hear much of anything over the deafening wind, which made more noise than a squadron of F-15s on an aircraft carrier.

Sensing one last chance to save the day, he tackled the door again. He pushed, pounded, and kicked the barrier as hard as he could. He threw everything he had at the stubborn slab of metal until he heard something snap. He tried again to turn the knob. This time he succeeded.

Cameron opened the door and held it open as the women rushed into the dark chamber. He followed them in, slammed the door, and secured it with a bolt lock. When he was reasonably certain the door would hold, he stepped away from the entrance, grabbed his chest, and collapsed against a wall. He closed his eyes as a thousand freight trains rolled over the Bell estate.

CHAPTER 14: CAMERON

Candice lit the match before Cameron even had a chance to think about the darkness, which had gone from partial to total in the blink of an eye. Somewhere in the underground chamber, she had found a match and a candle and put the two together to create a flicker of light.

She returned a few seconds later and joined the others on a plain wooden bench that ran the length of a wall in the shelter. At approximately fifteen feet long, eight feet high, and five feet wide, the chamber was similar in size to Geoffrey Bell's time tunnel but hardly as comforting. On the afternoon of March 18, 1925, it had become a place of sheer terror.

Cameron wrapped Candice in his left arm and Marjorie in his right and held them closely as the storm raged overhead. He didn't think the chamber door would succumb to the tornado, even with its wind speed of three hundred miles per hour, but he admitted he wasn't sure. He had never ridden out a tornado, a hurricane, or anything else like the tempest above.

The Rhode Islander tightened his hold on the women as the screeching wind rattled the thick door like a loose sheet of tin and forced cracks in the large, gray bricks that made up the walls. Dirt and debris fell from the ceiling at frightening, irregular, and unpredictable intervals.

Cameron berated himself for serious neglect. He had missed something obvious and missed it in a big way. Had he spent more time researching the twenties than admiring photographs, he would not have put himself or even the others in harm's way.

Each of the women reacted differently to the horror. Candice stared blankly into space and held the candle in a shaking hand. Marjorie closed her eyes and muttered the twenty-third Psalm. Both burrowed into the sides of a man they barely knew.

Cameron swallowed hard as the chamber, the
underground
chamber, shook like a London bunker during a Luftwaffe air raid. He tried to imagine the violence taking place just a few feet above his head, but he couldn't. He could only think about how badly he wanted to leave this place and perhaps start living life like each day was his last.

He lowered his eyes and stared at the floor as a spider raced toward the door. He watched it closely as it stopped near his foot and appeared to weigh two unpleasant options: death by tornado or death by shoe. Like a deer in the headlights, it stayed where it was.

Cameron turned away from the arachnid when Mrs. Bell, who had maintained her quiet conversation with God, suddenly shuddered and broke into sobs. He pulled her closer when she mumbled a question that only God – and perhaps a time traveler – could answer.

"When will it stop?" Marjorie asked. "
When
will it stop?"

"Soon," Cameron said. "Soon."

Cameron had reason to be confident. Unlike some tornadoes, such as the Cedar County, Nebraska, twisters of 2014, the Tri-State Tornado did not hover over a single location. It moved at freeway speeds as it leveled town after town between Annapolis, Missouri, and Princeton, Indiana. The tempest overhead would soon move on to its final destination and dissolve into the simple thunderstorm Marjorie Bell had expected.

Cameron took a deep breath, said a silent prayer, and repositioned his arms as the thousand freight trains above diminished to a hundred and then a dozen. He did his best to comfort two strangers who were now, in all likelihood, homeless, penniless, and perhaps even hopeless.

He thought about how he would proceed from this event and how he would interact with the woman at his left. Had something changed in the darkness of the bunker? Were his mission and his goals still the same? He didn't know.

All he knew was that the deafening winds and the sounds of destruction had finally subsided. At four fifteen on what should have been a quiet, lazy Indiana afternoon, the most terrifying experience of his relatively uneventful life was over.

CHAPTER 15: CAMERON

Cameron had to coax the women out of the shelter. Though they had every reason to believe that the danger had passed, they remained on the bench until Cameron left the cellar, took a look around, and returned with a promise that it was safe to leave.

He didn't tell them what awaited at the top of the stairwell. He didn't have the heart. There were some things, he thought, that people had to experience for themselves – fresh, raw, and without the warnings or the interpretations of a stranger who could not possibly relate.

Cameron took Candice's hand, gently pulled her from the bench, and then did the same with Marjorie. If the women were reluctant to leave their places, they were at least not stubborn or defiant. They had no doubt guessed what had happened to their home and did not want to complicate an already difficult moment with pointless drama.

Cameron looked at each of the women, waited for the green lights to appear in their eyes, and then led them slowly up the steps to the ground above. Bleak, cluttered, and unsightly, the lot was a veritable wasteland, a monument to the randomness and destructive power of nature.

Bricks, boards, and hailstones the size of tennis balls littered much of the property and shared space with assorted debris. The backs of chairs rose from the mud. Dishes, vases, and flatware covered a spot where a house once stood. The remnants of a chimney towered over them all.

Cameron expected to see some things, like the sheets, blankets, and garments that hung from leafless trees. He did not expect to see fish and frogs near the carcass of a horse or the remains of a sheep near the drawers of a dresser. The Bells had no horses or sheep. According to a recent entry in Candice's diary, they had only five chickens and a cow.

Cameron winced when the Bells stepped into the yard, covered their mouths, and dissolved into tears. When they moved forward to investigate a debris field that was once their home, he stepped back, gathered his thoughts, and tried to make sense of a senseless scene.

The New Englander did not even try to reach out to them. He had no words to offer and knew that anything he said now might be misinterpreted. So he turned his back on them, walked away, and tried to find his own peace in the field between the ruins and the river.

Once again, he berated himself. How could he have been so blind to the obvious? He turned around, watched Candice hug her mother, and answered his own question. He had let his personal interest in a woman he had not even met distract him and cloud his judgment.

Cameron also wondered whether he had needlessly jeopardized two lives. He knew that Candice and Marjorie had survived the tornado the first time around. Perhaps they had paid more attention to the weather or had not been home in the first place. In the first playing of 1925, a student from Rhode Island had not asked to meet them on a Wednesday afternoon.

Cameron decided not to dwell on the matter. What was done was done. He was now part of a new time stream, a story whose ending had not yet been written. If he acted responsibly during the remainder of his stay in 1925, it would be because it was the right thing to do and not because he had an obligation to the past or to the physics professor who had sent him here.

As he continued toward the river, Cameron noticed that the tornado had done more than destroy a farmhouse. It had ripped up fields, uprooted trees, and defoliated plants. Once cloaked in a lovely robe of green, the Wabash now lay exposed – a naked lady on an empty stage.

Cameron paused to look at the sky and saw patches of blue among the swaths of black and gray. He had no doubt that the sun would show up in force on Thursday, if only to remind mere mortals that nothing in nature was permanent.

When Cameron reached the river, a quarter mile from the house, he picked up a stick, threw it in the water, and watched it drift away. It was a pointless exercise, he thought, but it was somewhat therapeutic. It gave him a sense of control on a day he felt helpless.

He turned around, gazed at the women, and saw they had not moved. For the first time since coming to Griffin, he wondered if it might be wise to abandon his mission, forget his adventure, and return to Los Angeles. He wasn't sure he wanted to jump into a grieving family's affairs. He would give the matter more thought. In the meantime, he would do what he could to get Candice and Marjorie to a place where they could find food, shelter, and perhaps a measure of peace.

Cameron walked back toward the house – or what was once a house – and inventoried the debris along the way. He saw, among other things, an iron, a toilet, a whitewall tire, and more dishes than he could count. Then he saw something he had not seen earlier. Gray, thin, and pointed, it protruded from the muddy soil like the fin of a shark.

He walked to the object, pulled it from the ground, and saw that it was not a fin at all. It was a book, a text without a title, a volume that seemed slightly out of place.

Cameron opened the book, flipped to a page in the middle, and examined the contents. He saw charts, formulas, and diagrams but nothing that made sense to him. Then he went to the front of the work, read a narrative written in ink, and froze as the truth of his discovery set in.

He had found more than a professional notebook or the diary of a prolific writer. He had found the missing journal of Henry Wainwright Bell.

CHAPTER 16: CAMERON

Evansville, Indiana – Saturday, March 21, 1925

Three days after a deadly twister had rearranged the deck chairs in three states, Cameron sat at his hotel room desk, gazed at a copy of the
Evansville Post
, and tried to make sense of the staggering numbers and supersized headlines. He could not.

Though he knew the casualty counts were not as high as reported, he found little comfort in the truth. The Tri-State Tornado, one of ten that tore up parts of the Midwest and the South on Wednesday, had killed seven hundred people, injured two thousand, and left countless more homeless, unemployed, and hopeless.

Two hundred thirty-four people had died in Murphysboro, Illinois, alone, including thirty-five workers in a railroad shop and seventeen children in a school. Some of those lucky enough to survive the wind had succumbed to fires that swept through acres of wooden rubble.