Murder in the Wind (23 page)

He saw movement and a flash of light behind him. Flagan came in with a flashlight. He turned it off as he neared the window. The sky was lighter in the west. A thrust of wind caught Flagan and he moved aside, away from the window, stood close to Maiden. Together they looked out at the water. The water had come high enough, and enough trees had gone down so that the water was getting an almost unimpeded path. With such an open sweep the wind had picked up the water into waves now big enough to crest had not the wind kept the crests flattened. The waves thudded against the west wall of the house with stubborn regularity.

Flagan put his mouth close to Maiden’s ear and yelled, “Last much longer?”

“Not with that going on.”

“Dorn is dead.”

Maiden looked at Flagan, saw the unexpected look of grief in the man’s eyes. Flagan no longer looked like the man who had taken charge. He looked incapable of the exercise of authority. Not so much disheartened as uninterested. Maiden wondered if the change in attitude had been due to the death of Himbermark. The two men had not given the impression of being very close.

“Let’s get everybody together,” Maiden yelled into his ear. “Get some kind of a tool to get the doors off. Tear boards loose and find something to tie them together with. Neckties. Anything.”

The house shuddered again. The two men staggered and looked at each other and waited a moment, then headed for the door, each of them walking with odd caution, as though too heavy a footfall might be the last impetus needed to send the house sprawling and rolling into the current.

The only room still completely roofed was the one assigned to the Hollises. The eight of them gathered there. Maiden closed the door. Though he still had to speak very loudly, it was relatively quiet. He turned the flashlight on the faces of the adults in turn.

“The house is going to go. I don’t know how soon. We’ve got to get hold of anything that will float. Bring it in here. Kick the shutters off that side window and be all ready for it. Mrs. Dorn will stay right here with the kids. The rest of us work. We have no tools. Do what you can.”

He looked at them again, at the frightened eyes. The Dorn woman looked dulled, apathetic. The Hollis man looked dazed. The smash of the water against the side of the house seemed stronger. But he could almost believe that the wind violence was less. If not less, at least it maintained the same steady raw-voiced note. He did not believe that it could have blown any harder than it was blowing ten minutes ago.

“Virginia, you and Mrs. Hollis gather up anything we can use as rope. Go through luggage. Anybody’s. The men gather boards and doors. Okay. Let’s move fast.”

He saw at once that Hollis was not going to be of much help. He seemed afraid to go into the exposed hall. Flagan went to work at once. Steve went to the room the Dorns had been in. He closed the door and then hurled himself at it until he had broken the hinges free of the old wood. He took the door back to the Hollis room. The wind, swirling down into the open hallway, made it difficult to handle. He found Flagan in the room with Himbermark’s body. Flagan was straining to rip up floor boards. Steve helped him, trying to keep the long boards from breaking as they pulled them up. It was too dark below to see where the water was, as it had covered the lower windows. Steve directed the flashlight beam down and saw the black surface of the water about eighteen inches below them. A palm tree rat swam there, eyes red in the beam.

He and Flagan carried the load of boards back. There were four flashlights. One of them was the type with a standard. It rested on the floor, the beam illuminating a corner. The three women knelt there with the two children, tying makeshift life belts to them. They were using belts and neckties from the luggage, and as floats they were using what watertight containers they had found among Jean Dora’s household goods—a pressure cooker, cannisters, jars with screw tops.

Steve looked at them. It was a tableau demonstrating the eternal resiliency of women. He could hear their voices faintly above the wind, the thin nervous gay cajoling tone with which they tried to still the children’s fears, tried to make a game of it. It was a timeless tableau, because there had always been women and children and flood water. He looked at the curve of Virginia’s cheek in the yellow light, looked at the shape of her mouth, and loved her.

He put the boards down and went to the window and kicked the shutters loose, reached through, wrenched them off, pulled them into the room. The small amount of daylight left paled the flashlights. Dark water raced by.

As he started to look about to find something to lash the boards together, the house lurched again. It tilted at a greater angle, then seemed to stop. But Maiden felt that it was still moving, very slowly, but moving. He knew it would go within moments.

He yelled at Flagan and took one of the doors and slid it through the window at an angle. He reached down over the sill and held it in the current. Flagan threw two boards onto it, but one of them was carried away.

Virginia came over quickly with the small girl, pushing Jean Dorn ahead of her. Jean hesitated. Steve thrust her through the window. She caught the door, held it as it tipped and nearly rolled her off. Virginia lowered the child to her and the woman managed to grasp the child. The buoyancy of the door would support no more. The strain on his hand was great. Jean screamed for the boy to be given to her. Steve released the door. It moved swiftly away on the current, the woman still staring at him, mouth open with her scream as the current turned the door, swirled it away, carried her off into the darkness.

The house tilted further, and Steve could feel the creaking and rending of the timbers of the frame. The new angle brought the water swirling into the room over the sill of the window. The small boy was yelling with terror. Flagan got the other door over to the window. Hollis thrust between Flagan and Maiden, two heavy floor boards in his arms. One of the boards swung in the wind and hit Steve across the side of the head. He made an angry grasp for Hollis but the man was gone, moving quickly away into the night.

“Please!” the Hollis girl was screaming at him. “Please!”

He let her go. She slid into the current, holding a single board, and as she disappeared he saw that she held her head high, looking ahead for her husband.

Virginia went on the door, quickly and without protest, supporting the small boy, giving Steve Maiden one long direct look just before he released the door, half smiling as she went, leaving him with the memory of that half smile, of her dark water-pasted hair, the small boy safely in the crook of her arm, her firm brown hand holding the edge of the door as she lay across it.

The house moved quickly. The board floated within the room, moving toward the window. The house had tipped until water filled almost the whole frame, leaving only the top right corner clear. Flagan held a clump of boards with panic grip. Maiden thrust him through the window and as he turned to grasp the two remaining boards, the house went over. He took a deep breath and felt the wallowing, elephantine roll of the house. He thrust for the window, but in the turn of the house he had lost his sense of direction. His fingers touched rough solid wall. He felt along it. The house was moving, grinding, bumping. He felt in increasing panic for the window.

Then the house lost, all at once, the form and structure of a house. It was crushed and became broken flotsam. He was caught for a moment between unseen things that pressed against him from either side. Then he was free and he came to the surface. When he tried to swim something thudded against his shoulder from behind, threatening to push him under. He rolled and caught the edge of a huge section of roof, and pulled himself onto it. It was more than buoyant enough to support him. He crouched at the leading edge, staring forward, saw the dim shapes of tree tops coming toward him. The roof caught against the trees, swung slowly around and moved on.

It was now obvious that the wind was less violent. It was thinner, without the deep resonant notes. He moved to the center of the piece of roof and cautiously stood erect. He looked back toward the west. There was a low line of dark red fire across the horizon, the last glow of a moody sunset. In the slight path it made across the water he saw a struggling figure. He dived without hesitation, swam to the child, and by using all the power of his free arm managed to regain the section of roof.

He saw that it was the boy child, the one called Stevie, the one who had been with Virginia. He looked at the water. He could see nothing. He sat in the center of the piece of roof and held the trembling sobbing child. His raft wedged against something, moved, wedged itself more tightly. He did not investigate to see what had halted the raft. He sat and held the child. The roof piece shivered as the current touched it. The boy stopped sobbing. The red glow faded and it was night and he waited.

By dawn on the eighth of October, Thursday morning, Hurricane Hilda was blowing herself out in south central Georgia.

She had pushed great tides against the west coast of Florida. Never in the recorded history of the state had the sea come so far inland. The record was set in Hernando and Citrus counties where, due to the low level of the land, salt water came as far as seventeen miles inland.

It was estimated that the farthest highest point of the water was reached at approximately eleven o’clock on Wednesday night. By then the winds were gone. The water stood placid on the land for a time, and then began to move back toward the Gulf, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed and violence. It was augmented by the heavy runoff of hurricane rainfall. The night skies cleared and the stars came out, and the black water ran off the land into the Gulf.

Hurricane Hilda was gone, but it seemed as though the runoff was the final instance of her madness. Weakened structures collapsed into the current. Debris was swept far into the Gulf.

By eight o’clock in the morning a warm sun shone down on the steaming coast, on silted ruined buildings, on bodies half buried in sand, on bright automobiles tumbled together like forgotten toys. The earliest estimates were ninety to a hundred dead, two thousand homeless, damage in the hundred millions. The governor appealed immediately to have the area classified as a disaster area.

Weary people walked down streets no longer familiar to them, and looked at the places where they had lived. They reacted in many ways. With tears, with curses, with heavy silent dejection. And there were many who began at once to put things back together again, attacking the sand in the living room with a scoop shovel, tossing it out through the holes where windows had been.

Disaster teams moved into the area, searching for the bodies, making identification where possible, listing survivors, co-ordinating their efforts with jeep radios. Water trucks were brought in. Medical teams were flown in. Helicopters flapped slowly over the area, reporting their findings by radio.

This was morning after. This was hangover after debauch. As with the lesser variety of hangover, time was the only cure. And it would be a long time before the coast looked as it had before, with the white houses smiling in the sun above the blue Gulf, with the cool drinks on the terraces, the children playing in the sand.

The six cars marooned on the temporary detour were reported by a helicopter pilot at eight-thirty on Thursday morning. He said they were between two ruined bridges, and near the foundations where a house had been.

Two men in khakis walked in to the cars just before noon, a tall one and a short one, neither of them young. They had been at work since dawn, and they had lost, through fatigue, the capacity to be sickened at what they saw.

They stood and looked at the cars. The short one took out a sweat-damp pocket notebook and began copying the license numbers. “Be hell getting those cars out of here,” the tall one said. “Have to fix one of the bridges first, and bring in a chain saw and get the timber out of the way.”

The short one put the notebook away. A station wagon and a panel delivery truck were tilted on their sides. The other cars were erect, mud silted high against the wheels. “High water mark is about six feet over the car roofs. We better look around,” he said.

They found the first body quickly. It was at the base of a tree, the body half curled around the trunk where the water had left it. The tall one turned her over with his foot. He examined the body.

“No identification.”

The fat one wrote in his book. “Female, about sixteen,” he said aloud. “Maybe five three. Heavy set. What color hair would you say, Andy?”

“I’d say brown.”

“Let’s put her over by the bridge. Get ’em out by boat will be the easiest way.”

“If anybody can find a boat left,” the tall one said.

A hundred yards downstream from where the house had been they found two more, quite close together. A young one with a crushed leg. An old man with white hair.

“Look at here, Will! This old boy got himself knifed, I think.”

They examined the wounds, talked it over, wrote down the description of the young man, the name and address of the old man. They carried the two bodies back and put them beside the body of the young girl. They ranged the area in widening circles and found one more body. The tall one turned it over, patted the sodden hip pocket, felt the wallet and took it out, read off the name on the smeared identification card.

“How do you spell that last name?”

“F-L-A-G-A-N. Flagan.”

“Okay, I got it. Jesus, he looks heavy.”

They each took an ankle and dragged the body. It was a long distance. They looked down at the four of them.

“That isn’t enough for six cars,” the short one said.

“They could have been washed a long way from here, Will. We better go back and report and tell them about these four and the cars and all. We can come back with more people and cover a bigger area. Come on.”

Andy looked back one time when they started out. He was too far away to see the bodies clearly. They could have been almost anything. Logs. Old bundles.