Red Rain: A Novel (7 page)

“Yes. Don’t worry about me.” Lea shook off another wave of dizziness. “You two are so kind. I’ll never forget this. I’ll be okay. Get some rest.”

“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. We have to finish it before it spoils. There won’t be any power for a long time.” Martha uttered a long sigh.

They disappeared down the hall to their room.

Lea watched streams of water run down the wall. Stretching her arms above her head, she stood up. Suddenly alert.

Beyond the glass doors in back, tall waves continued to battle, crashing against each other, tossing off islands of foam. The water’s roar seemed to be inside her head.

I have to go outside.

She had to see what the storm had left behind. She stepped unsteadily to the door, shoes sliding on the wet surface.

I’m a journalist. I have to document this for my blog. Maybe I can sell the photos to a news network.

But she wasn’t prepared for the horrors a few steps from the house. The fallen trees and flattened houses. Everything crumbled and broken and down.

The people covered in plaster dust and mud, scrambling over the wreckage, searching house to house for survivors to rescue, finding only bodies.

She wasn’t prepared for the howls and cries. The half-naked man who ran over the debris on the street, screaming as blood flowed down his back like a scarlet cape. The pale white baby feet poking out from under the collapsed wall of a house.

I’m a journalist.

She raised her phone to her eye. Steadied it. Focused on a man carrying two corpses over his shoulder. And . . .

Oh no
. She studied the phone. Out of power. Dead. She stared at it. Shook it. No way to charge it. No way.

So now she wasn’t a journalist covering the tragedy. Now she was just another victim.

Men were already piling bodies where the little white post office had stood.

Lea saw arms and legs dangling from beneath crushed, collapsed walls.

She shivered. Each breath she took burned her nostrils and made her throat ache. The air was choked with dust and dirt that hadn’t settled.

I’m alive.

The island had been flattened. She squinted into the billowing gray light. The houses and shops were piles of trash. Splintered boards strewn everywhere. Fallen walls fanned out on the rain-soaked ground like playing cards.

Fifty-two Pickup.

She thought of the cruel card game her brothers used to tease her with when she was little.

“Want to play a card game, Lea?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s play
Fifty-two Pickup
.” Then they’d raise the deck high and let all the cards tumble to the floor. “Okay. Go ahead, Lea. Pick them up.”

That’s what it looked like here. Playing cards tossed and scattered over the earth.

Is that how she would write it? Could that be the lead to her story?

I can’t write it
.

She slumped onto the trunk of a fallen palm tree and wrapped her arms around herself.
I can’t write it because I don’t believe it yet. And I don’t want to write about such nightmare and heartbreak. Where would I begin? How would I ever describe an entire island crushed and flattened as if stomped on by a fairy-tale giant?

Fairy tales and childhood card games were flashing through her mind. Obviously, because she wanted to escape. She wanted to go back to somewhere safe and clean and nice. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out.

She suddenly pictured her father sitting in his Barcalounger in the tiny living room back in Rockford, holding the newspaper in front of him, folded down the middle the way he always read it, and shaking his head. Reading and shaking his head, his face twisted in disapproval.

You’d be shaking your head today, Dad.

How could she write about the corpses they were pulling out from under the debris? Dead faces, locked in startled expressions. She watched the mud-covered workers stack the bodies like trash bags in the town dump.

The smell . . . Already. The sour smell of death.

And the sounds. Moans and shrieks and anguished cries rang out in the dust-choked morning air like a horror-movie soundtrack. The pleas of the injured waiting to be rescued. The survivors discovering their dead. The sweating, cursing men digging, pawing, shoveling into the rubbled houses. The groans of the men hoisting more corpses onto the pile.

It seemed to Lea that everyone left alive was howling in protest. Everyone who could move and make a sound was screaming or crying or wailing their disbelief and anger.

I should be helping.

She jumped to her feet and started to walk toward mountains of debris where the road had been. “Oh!” She stumbled over something soft.

A corpse!

No. Clothing. A tangled pile of soaked shirts and shorts strewn over the grass.

What about
my
clothing?

Were her belongings scattered with the wind? Was Starfish House still standing? Had Macaw and Pierre survived?

Lea shuddered. The rooming house was on the other side of Le Chat Noir, the eastern side, the exposed side where the ocean could show its storm fury. Starfish House felt fragile even in calm weather, she thought. The Swanns’ stone house had barely survived intact.

She felt a stab of dread in the pit of her stomach. Suddenly, it was a struggle to breathe. No way Starfish House could still be standing. But Macaw and Pierre?

She couldn’t phone, of course. She remembered she had been talking to Mark—or
trying
to—last night when the service crashed.

Mark. What was he thinking right now? What was he doing? What had he told the kids? He had to be in his own nightmare . . . not knowing . . .

And no way to tell him.

My poor Ira and Elena.

Ahead of her, she saw an upended SUV, windows all blown out, sitting on the flattened roof where a little food store had stood. The SUV looked like an animal on its hind legs, standing straight up on its back bumper. Lea shook her head. Hard to imagine a wind strong enough to lift an SUV off the road, onto its back end, and drop it onto a building.

She spun away from it. But there was nowhere to turn to escape the horror.

The man lumbering toward her caught her by surprise. He was tall and broad and drenched in sweat, thinning brown hair matted to his red forehead. His T-shirt was torn and stained with brown streaks. His shorts were rags.

His eyes were wild and his mouth was moving rapidly although Lea couldn’t hear his words. His arms were outstretched, his mud-smeared hands open to grab her.

He’s crazy. He’s out of his head.

Move!

But there wasn’t time.

With a menacing groan, he grabbed her by the shoulders. He pulled with surprising force, nearly dragging her off her feet. She inhaled the rank odor of his body and his mud-caked clothes.

He groaned again. She wasn’t strong enough to resist. He was pulling her away from the others, dragging her out of view, grunting and groaning like an animal.

“Let go! Let
go
of me! Please! What are you going to do? Please—let
go
!”

T
he radio squealed. Andy Pavano nearly lost his grip on the wheel.

“Vince, turn it down or something. Sounds like you stepped on a cat.”

“Hey, I’m always kind to animals. Can you hear me now?”

“The rain is messing with the radio.” Andy slowed the patrol car around a curve but still sent a tidal wave of rainwater washing over the narrow shoulder.

“It’s these old Motorolas, man. They’re not even digital.” Vince said something else but the signal broke up.

“Vince, what did you say?”

“I said maybe you could talk to your uncle about springing for a new radio system.”

“The chief isn’t my uncle,” Andy snapped. “He went to school with my cousin, that’s all.”

“Okay, okay. You’re both Pavano. So it’s an honest mistake, right?”

Headlights from an oncoming car blazed over the windshield. Andy tried to squint through it, but he couldn’t see a thing.
Turn off your brights, bastard.

He opened his mouth in a loud burp. The meatball hero from
that Italian place on Main Street . . . What was it called? Conca d’Oro? . . . it hadn’t gone down yet.

He swerved to avoid a lake of rainwater that glimmered darkly over the right half of the road. He could feel the wind push the car sideways. “Vince, this rain is killing me.”

“There’s a hurricane, Pavano. Down South. A big one. It pushed out into the ocean, but we’re getting the sloppy seconds.”

Andy snickered. “Vince, you’re a poet. Sloppy seconds? That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Hey, what makes sense?”

Andy joined the Sag Harbor Police Force three weeks before, but it was long enough to know that
what makes sense?
was the height of Vince’s philosophy.

“The wind is trying to blow this fucking Ford off the road.”

The radio squealed again. Then Vince’s distorted voice: “Language, dude. Remember? People listen in. Civilians. Shut-ins. Keep it clean.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You city guys don’t know how to drive. How long were you a New York City cop?”

“I was a Housing Authority cop.”

“Ooh, I’m wetting myself. I’m so impressed. How long?”

“None of your business, Vince. What’s up with the chitchat? You just lonely?”

“I’ve got a wife, an ex-wife, and four kids, man. How do you get to be lonely? Tell me.”

Andy didn’t have an answer for that. He had an ex-wife, too. The lovely Susannah. One of the reasons he moved to Sag Harbor.

All My Exes Live in Texas.

Someone should write one like it about New York.

All of Andy’s philosophy could be found in country songs.

He thought about Sari. Her dark hair falling over her forehead. Those beautiful eyes, oval and green like cat eyes. He should turn around and maybe drop by her house.

That first visit was awkward. No. Worse than awkward.
She was ice. She tried to freeze me.
All that talk about how she was
in love, how she was going to get married. To a guy who owns the tennis shop in Southampton?

No. That’s crap. No way that was going to happen.

Now she’d had time to think about him, get warmed up to the idea of Andy being around again.

Sure, he blew it the first time with Sari. Maybe this time . . .

“Pavano, what’s your ten-twenty?”

“I’m east on Noyac. Am I going in the right direction?”

“Maybe you need a GPS. Like the summer people. You’re still a tourist, Pavano. Why don’t you talk to your uncle about getting a—”

“You’re going to keep calling him my uncle, aren’t you.”

“Yeah, probably. My sense of humor, you know. Riding this desk you need a sense of humor.”

“Riding this desk? You been watching
Cops
again?”

The car rumbled past the turn at Long Beach. The rain formed a heavy curtain. He couldn’t see the bay. No cars in either direction. Who would be out driving in this?

“So tell me again where this house is, Vince.”

“It’s a left on Brick Kiln, then a left on Jesse Halsey. Go to the end. Take a right on Bluff Point Road.”

Andy sighed and shifted his weight in the seat. “Got it. You know, I didn’t sign on for shit like this. I came out here for peace and quiet. Maybe a domestic or two. A deer down on the road, someone steals a stop sign or takes a leak in a supermarket parking lot.”

“That sounds a lot like whining, Pavano.”

“Left on Brick Kiln, right? Okay. I’m here. I’m not whining, Vince. But, look—you’re riding a desk, as you so colorfully put it. And I’m—”

“Got another call. I’m out. You’re not the only cop out tonight, Sergeant.”

“Just about.”

The Sag Harbor Police wasn’t exactly a big force. Vince on the desk nights, the chief, and how many patrol guys? Four? Andy ran through their names in his head. Three Italian, one Irish. He made the left, then the right.

“Vince? You still there? I can’t do this. It’s making me sick. Really. I’m going to lose my supper.”

“Not in the car, please. If you’re going to blow chunks, stick your head out the window.”

“I have a weak stomach. Really. It’s in my physical report. You can check it.”

“Please don’t make me cry. My mascara will run.”

“I can’t see a thing, Vince. It’s total darkness here, and the rain—”

“You can do it. Just follow the regulations. Go to the house. Show them your ID. Say what you have to say. Then go throw up.”

“Why did I get this, Vince? I don’t even know where I’m going.”

“No one else would do it, Andy. That’s a ten-four.”

The radio made a loud click. Silence.

Bluff Point Road curved around the south side of a part of the bay known as Upper Sag Harbor Cove. The houses were far back from the road, hidden behind trees and tall hedges. Ahead of the clicking wipers and the splashing currents of rain, they rose up in the windshield like dark walls, blacker than the sky.

How’d they expect him to find the house? Oh. There. On the right, near the end of the street.

He made a sharp right, and the tires spun over the wet gravel drive.
Slow down
.
You’re not in a hurry for this.

Behind a low brick wall, the house stretched across a wide lawn. A big modern house, gray shingles, with a terrace between the house and the garage. Small windows on this side. The side facing the bay was probably mostly glass. A single light cast a faint glow over the front door. Two well-trimmed evergreen bushes rose on both sides of the entrance.

Andy stopped the car near the front walk and cut the wipers and the headlights. He sat motionless for a while, staring at the rainwater rolling in waves down the windshield. Thunder crackled somewhere far in the distance.

He realized he had his hands balled into tight fists. The meatball hero weighed heavily in his stomach.
You’re forty, Pavano. Maybe you need a better diet.