Tempting Faith (Indigo Love Spectrum) (23 page)

“Just…tired,” she said. The last word faded as she noticed a rush toward the gym’s double doors, where medics and townsfolk were surrounding the hunched figure of a bedraggled older woman, her thinning red hair a bright contrast to her wan complexion.

The students sitting with Faith turned to see what had captured her attention. The redhead’s broad smile vanished. “Grandma?” he chirped before standing and trotting to the older woman.

Faith and the other residents of Dorothy had seen the woman’s expression and posture too many times already since the sudden start of the flood, and Faith’s eyes teared as she looked away from the redheaded kid in his grandmother’s desperate embrace.

It didn’t take long for the specific details to reach her. Herman Voss, one of Dorothy’s oldest residents, had suffered a fatal myocardial infarction while trying to shore the Kayford Estates levee. His was the fourth life lost following two drownings and one death due to blunt-force trauma in the immediate aftermath of the initial flooding.

Mr. Voss had been a good neighbor, and Faith’s pain at his loss was acute. Of all the things she remembered about him, the first that came to mind was her fourth-grade Halloween. Mr. Voss had dressed up as Angry Santa, a character who, jealous of the attention Halloween received, had set up booby traps in his front yard to snare unsuspecting princesses, cowboys, fairies, Power Rangers, superheroes, firemen and witches.

Faith had been one of his unfortunate victims, and she’d never laughed so hard as she and her fellow captives had watched their parents, garbed as genies, cavemen, clowns and gangsters, battle Angry Santa for their freedom. In the end, a ransom of Trick or Treat sweets had been paid, but Faith had never forgotten the sight of her dad, dressed as a ninja, fighting to free her.

“Dad,” Faith gasped, sudden panic throbbing in her chest.

Tugging on her sodden overshirt and rain slicker as she ran, Faith tried to look past the grief-stricken huddle of the Voss family as she fled the gymnasium.

Hard raindrops hit her with the sting of BB pellets the second she raced through the outer doors of the gym. It didn’t take long before the heavy rain freshly saturated her hair and clothing, and seemed to seep right through her skin to weigh down her limbs.

“Miss, the roads are closed,” a waterlogged National Guardsman told Faith, catching her arm as she tried to move past his post at the double doors. “We’re advising residents to—”

“Let go!” Faith demanded, wrenching her arm free.

“Faith, it’s not safe, hon,” said a Dorothy Police officer. “You—”

“Is this town under martial law?” Faith asked.

“No,” the officer started, “but I don’t want to see anyone putting herself in harm’s way for no good reason.”

Without wasting time to explain her reason for heading out, Faith carefully picked her way down to Main Street.

The high ground upon which Lincoln stood leveled out all too quickly, and Faith had to borrow one of the boats moored to the parking meters. She chose Mayor Blair’s, confident that it probably had the best motor and a full tank of gas. The four life jackets strapped to the bench seats gave her added comfort as she ripped the cord and started away from the impromptu pier.

It had been a long time since Faith had last taken a boat out on open water, and her journey to Kayford Estates assured her that she never again would. Her weight did little to anchor the slight boat, and her muscles ached from the strain of steering it as wind and rain conspired to drive her into flooded businesses and homes, and run her aground atop submerged SUVs. Short of capsizing, nothing would drive her back to the school until after she had collected her parents.

Brown, roiling water filled with debris tossed her about like a toy while overhead, grey-black clouds violently emptied their contents onto a town that had already suffered far too much. Beneath the rush of the river now coursing down Main Street, the hiss of the rain and the cry of wind, Faith heard the raspy voice of the mountain as the rain slashed open a fresh vein, generating a new flood to give further strength to the existing one.

The water had no place to go other than Kayford Estates.

“Dad!” Faith shouted as her childhood home came into view.

Justus Wheeler, as stubborn as he was successful, was on the roof of the five-bedroom home he’d struggled so valiantly to save from the flood. A dutiful captain determined to sink or sail with his beloved vessel, Justus had set up a tent for two on the roof. Thinking to further protect them from the storm, he’d set it in a protected groove between two angles of the roof. Justus had underestimated the strength of the unpredictable winds and failed to secure the support ropes accordingly. Two of the tent walls angrily whipped at him and Faith’s mother as they huddled together. Too far from any of the upper windows that would have returned them to the flooded interior of their home, Justus and Emiline Wheeler were trapped on a precariously angled section of the roof.

“Jump!”

Emiline was the first to hear her daughter’s shout. She didn’t hesitate. Pulling out of her husband’s arms, she eased onto her bum and gingerly scooted to the edge of the roof. She dangled there, buoyed by the water and her life vest until Faith navigated the boat near enough for her to let go of the expensive covered gutters the Wheelers had installed the previous spring.

“Em!” Justus cried, reaching for his wife when she landed roughly in the boat, her right shin making painful contact with the edge.

Justus had little time to react to his wife’s condition, not when his own footing had become so tenuous. He slipped, one of his galoshes flying into the night sky as he landed hard on his backside and ingloriously slid down the roof toward a certain dunking.

“Damn it, Dad,” trembled from Faith’s lips upon noting that, while her father had surely insisted that Emiline wrap herself snugly in a life jacket, he himself had neglected to wear one. The boat lurched Emiline onto its floor as Faith motored in a quick reverse to catch her father. Justus landed in a sodden heap close enough to Faith for her to hear the finale of the rant he’d started on the roof.

“—willful and stubborn, and I don’t know where you get it from! This water is toxic, or haven’t you been paying attention to the toxicology reports? I’ve been stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and even I know how stupid and dangerous it is for anyone to be out here in a boat made of tin and wishes!”

“Dad!” Faith yelled, struggling with both hands to turn the boat against a viciously strong wind. “I’m the captain of this ship, and if you don’t buckle on a life vest, strap yourself to a seat and shut the hell up, I swear to the sweet baby Jesus I will toss you into the drink myself! Do you understand me, Daddy?”

Faith was tempted to cut the engine and threaten to keep the boat exactly where it was until Justus agreed to every one of her conditions, just as he’d done to her on road trips a few times in her childhood. Faith imagined that her father was seeing a female replica of what she used to see in the rear view mirror: a pair of menacing brown eyes as dark and rich as freshly brewed espresso, a deep furrow between black eyebrows as fine as his had been thick. She hoped that her own furious gaze also reflected what his had: the love that had motivated the threat in the first place.

“Damn rainwater,” Justus grumbled, using the heels of his palms to grind at his eyes. “Emiline, honey, is this thing on the right way around?”

While her mother adjusted the straps at the back of his orange life vest, Faith took care of the ones in front, tightly bundling her father. “Does this feel okay?” she whispered near his ear.

Faith found herself wrapped in her father’s sodden embrace. “Thank you, baby girl,” he said, pressing a kiss to the curls plastered to her left temple. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Daddy,” Faith smiled.

For the first time ever, Justus Wheeler was first to break an embrace with his daughter. “Ahoy, captain,” he said, “let’s get underway before we get washed away!”

* * *

“What’s going on?” Emiline Wheeler asked, clutching at her daughter and husband. “Something’s not right.”

There were new boats moored at the heads of the parking meters lining the part of Main Street leading to the hill upon which sat Lincoln High. The dull gray boats had been used to motor in waterproof camera equipment and makeshift signal spires that bobbed along with the boats containing them.

“It’s Herman Voss,” Faith said. “He had a heart attack.”

In her concern for her parents, Faith had forgotten about Mr. Voss. But now that the media had gotten wind of the fourth death in tiny Booger Hollow, the reality of her neighbor’s loss weighed heavily on Faith.

Emiline’s tears mingled with rainwater as Justus helped her from the boat, which Faith had quickly secured. She helped her parents up the steep path to the gymnasium, dreading the spectacle surely unfolding within the dry warmth of the town’s sanctuary.

Local newsfolk were probably interviewing somber townspeople, who would regret being filmed in the unforgiving wash of overbright light from the newscameras.

Mayor Blair and his wife—who was lugging a frooty even bigger than the one Faith had first labeled—sidled into every shot they could, their grief as prefabricated as the overinsured double-wide trailer they had lost to the flood.

The excitement coloring the activity within the gym caught the Wheelers entirely by surprise. A huge crowd tightly surrounded someone centered beneath one of the idle basketball hoops. The voices of reporters overlapped and competed to be heard while camera technicians held their cameras high and strained to hold microphones on long booms over the center of the crowd.

Faith caught a single strand of words, and they drew her forward. Like an All-American linebacker, she shouldered her way through the townspeople and media, fighting her way to the man holding everyone’s attention.

“Would you repeat that please, Mr. Baron?” a female reporter was asking as Faith burst into the center of the group.

“I said,” Zander started, “that nothing is ever as bad or as frightening as it seems. All you need is…Faith.”

His eyes found her, and for a moment, Zander thought his legs would give out. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been over the past twenty-four hours until he found himself snatching Faith’s weary, bedraggled form into his arms. Holding her as tightly as he could, he cupped the back of her head, mashing down the drenched mass of spiraling curls he found there.

“I love your hair like this,” he murmured, his face partially hidden in her hair.

“You smell like pond water,” Faith teased.

“All of Booger Hollow smells like pond water,” Zander said.

“Mr. Baron?” came a female voice. “Mr. Baron, are—”

“Zander Baron is my stage name,” he announced after reluctantly pulling his face free of Faith’s hair. “A few of the people in this room know me by my real name.” Perhaps subconsciously drawing on her for strength, his arms tightened around Faith. “It’s Alexander Brannon. I was born and raised right here, in Booger Hollow, West Virginia.”

* * *

“Okay, I knew that your big announcement would cause a reaction, but I didn’t know that it would be frickin’ pandemonium,” Brent chuckled.

Looking as though his floodwear had come straight from an Abercrombie & Fitch Disaster Chic catalog, Brent pulled Alex and Faith in closer as they stood in a huddle atop an empty section of the bleachers.

“Lookit Harry, Hermione and Weasley up there!” Red Irv shouted as he strolled by, fresh smears of pasta sauce on his white apron making it look as though he’d recently slaughtered half the lunch ladies. “You kids make sure you come down and get some grub. It’s psghetti and patabas!”

“What the—?” Brent asked.

“Spaghetti with red sauce and boiled new potatoes with olive oil and rosemary,” Alex translated. “That was my favorite Saturday night dinner at the diner.” Moved, Alex stared at the aluminum floor of the bleachers to hide his eyes.

“Sounds good to me,” Brent said. “Will you guys be okay while I go for some grub?”

Alex chuckled at Brent’s ease in Booger Hollow. For all his affinity for the finer, and to Alex, most ridiculous, things in life, Brent had adjusted to Booger Hollow instantly. He’d arrived in champion-protector mode, determined to keep Alex safe from the snaggle-toothed, inbred Appalachians who’d dared make the first nineteen years of Alex’s life a misery.

Upon seeing his former schoolmates and neighbors, Alex saw rather plainly what Faith had promised: time and gravity had wrought their own revenge upon his antagonists.

Leland Birch, who had run his father’s used car dealership into bankruptcy, had put on fifty pounds all between his neck and hips, and appeared to be using some sort of clear adhesive to make sure that his last five strands of hair remained affixed to his dome.

Ritchie Platt never finished college and returned to Dorothy, where he worked odd jobs, when he worked at all. Until the flood, he’d lived alone in a trailer very close to the one the Brannons had formerly occupied.

Tina Blair’s frooty had grown to the point where if she were standing in profile and had her head turned to one side, one couldn’t clearly discern if she was turned forward or backward.

Not everyone had fallen into such disrepair. Travis Gates was tall, strapping and handsome, though he had a way of shrinking somewhat when his shrill wife Bethany appeared. And Red Irv, but for a little extra gray at his temples, had the same humor, good cheer and common sense that Alex had known and from which he had benefited.

After the thirty seconds of complete silence that had followed his announcement, Red Irv had been the first person Alex had approached and apologized to for his disappearance. In his inimitable and unfailing acceptance of any act committed by someone he loved, Red Irv, openly weeping, had attempted to murder Alex by gathering him into a hug so tight that Alex nearly lost consciousness from lack of oxygen.

The town’s general humility and shame at its memory of how it had treated Alex softened Brent’s heart, and he came to view Booger Hollow for what it was—a small town with the attendant problems and promise of any other town in the world. In mistreating one of its own who had gone on to forge his own incredible path far outside their watch and with none of their assistance, Alex had proved what might have inspired their resentment and dislike from the get-go—that he had been the best and brightest star among them all along.