Creatures of the Storm (3 page)

The applause was louder than she expected.
She waved at them halfheartedly. “Yeah, yeah,” she said under her
breath. “Whatever.”

“All right,” Mr. Pratt said, “It’s
three-oh-five now, and your rides home have started to arrive.
Remember to tell your parents again about tonight’s Security
Meeting, 7:00 in the Martin Luther King Conference Center Main
Ballroom. Now, when I say so, you children can go out the back
doors…” There was a great clattering stir as the kids snagged
backpacks and lunchboxes –

“WHEN I SAY SO!” he bellowed into the
mike.

Everybody froze. The students stood suspended
for a long, long moment, while Pratt glared down at them.

Finally, slowly, he said: “Class…dismissed,”
and they all jumped back into action, surging for the doors as fast
as they could move.

In that instant, Lucy Armbruster put Douglas
Pratt on her long list of People Worth Hating, even as he put out a
large, flat-fingered hand to be shaken. “Thank you, Dr.
Armbruster,” he said. “Most informative.” He glanced distastefully
at the floor. “Although we’ll have to get Flaco out here to clean
up your mess, of course.”

Lucy let his hand hang there. “Then I guess
it’s good I didn’t let loose the scorpion and tarantula displays,”
she said innocently. “Imagine that mess.”

For one instant Douglas Pratt looked
absolutely appalled. Then his face folded into something like a
smile.

Okay,
Frannie
.
That’s
it. I have done my bit for humanity. Now where the hell did I park
my car?

Principal Pratt took a small walkie-talkie
from his belt and whispered into it.

“Well,” she said, feeling more awkward than
ever, “I’m glad I could help out, given the, um, circumstances. It
was good for the children to have some distraction during the
questioning. Frankly, I don’t think anyone, including the police,
was taking this very seriously until… you know, until now. I get
it,” Lucy said. “I mean, one missing girl is a runaway, but two? In
a town this size? In a week? That’s something else.”

Everyone had heard the stories. The rumors
about The Little Girls were the hottest topic in town. Little
Jennifer Toombs, age eleven, was the first to disappear, but by all
accounts she was a hateful little brat who many were glad to see
gone. No one knew very much about the second girl, and the local
cops…well, no one expected much of anything from them.

“We’ve cancelled regular classes,” Principal
Pratt said, “but we do need to do something while the, um,
interviews are taking place.”

In other
words
, Lucy translated,
we needed someone to keep the kids occupied while
the cops ask a lot of hard questions. And here I am, Straw Woman
Number One
.

“It would be nice if they could crack the
case,” she said, eying the exit with something like desperation. “I
guess it's not that easy, though.”

“Never is,” said a new voice. They both
looked up at Sheriff Donald Peck sidling onto the stage.

Peck really did look like a TV-movie version
of a smart cop: broad-shouldered, strong-jawed, steely-eyed. “Not
that I would mind cracking the case,” he said. “I always wanted to
solve one like that Columbo guy.”

They all chuckled politely. The cell phone
clipped to the Sheriff’s belt warbled. He held up an apologetic
finger and turned away, looking for a little privacy, as he said,
“Peck,” but there was something taut and hard in his voice that
made Lucy want to eavesdrop.

“When?” he asked. “Where are they taking
them? Okay, I’ll meet them at the Clinic, and – no, don’t let her
talk to anyone. No, god–”

He looked up and caught Lucy watching him…
and for one moment she saw something hard and dangerous in Donald
Peck’s eyes, something that scared the hell out of her. “Just do
what I told you to,” he said into the phone, his eyes still on her.
He clicked it shut and switched on his warm, comforting smile, only
for her.

“Sorry,” he said to her. “When it rains it
pours.”

Lucy made herself smile. “Sure does,” she
said. She swallowed hard.

It took a long, long moment for him to
release her, like a cat releasing its prey. “I’m afraid I’ll have
to excuse myself,” he said. “There’s been a fairly serious car
accident up–”

“Mrs. Greenaway?” Pratt said, talking past
Lucy's shoulder to a woman in the center of the Cafetorium. “What
is it?”

Sharon Greenaway was standing in the doorway
to the parking lot. Lucy knew her; Sharon and her husband Jeff
owned the only organic market in town, and Frannie had gotten her
addicted to decent cooking, so she was a regular customer
there.

Normally Sharon was a sunny, pleasantly plump
woman; now she looked as if someone had punched a hole in her. Her
eyes were three times their proper size. Her skin looked like warm
tallow, moist and yellowish as she crossed the multipurpose room to
the Sheriff and the knot of teachers.

“She didn’t come out,” Sharon said. Her voice
was trembling. “I’ve been waiting.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said.

Sharon was having trouble breathing. “All of
her friends–” gulp “—came out fifteen minutes ago.” Gulp.
“But…”

Sheriff Peck took charge in
an instant. He pulled out his phone again, barely took a pause, and
began to hiss into it. “Jimmy?” he said into the phone “Get up
here. Now. No, let Bo follow up at the Clinic; I’ll meet him there.
I need you–
no,
goddamn it, don’t argue,
get
here!”
Lucy could see the anger in him. If
he could have slammed the phone down or thrown it across the room
he would have.

He pointed to a group of teachers off to one
side and began to bark orders. Then he turned to the stricken,
trembling woman beside him who was staring wordlessly at him.
“We’re going to find her, Mrs. Greenaway. Hang tight.” He didn’t
wait for a reply; he went back to snapping into his cell phone and
his shoulder-mounted police-band radio at the same time.

No we
won’t
, Lucy said to herself. She knew it,
even as she heard the little girl’s name being called across the
campus.
We just...won't.

“I think I'll make myself scarce,” she
mumbled to no one in particular. She moved quickly across the room
and pushed open the double doors –

– to be hit in the face by a sheet of warm,
slimy water.

“Gah!” She staggered back a step, thinking
some adolescent prankster had planted a full bucket over the
entrance. When her eyes cleared she looked outside for the first
time in hours.

It was pouring rain.

Pouring
.

Lucy stared at the sky, at the ground, then
at the water already choking the gutters. The hand-painted signs
about the Security Meeting were running and unreadable, like badly
applied mascara.

Oh,
Jesus
, she thought as she stared into the
iron sky.
Oh, jumping Jesus in a
handcart.

Lucy Armbruster had made herself into the
country’s single greatest authority on this particular desert’s
microclimate. She had almost singlehandedly built a research
station on the crater’s north ridge to study it up close. She knew
the origin and meaning of every breeze, every flower bloom, every
cloud in the sky. And all she could do was stare at the swelling
rain rushing across the schoolyard and try to not scream.

“This is bad,” she said aloud. “This is very
bad.”

Rose Mackie sat
by her mother's bed and tried not to scream.

They had been fighting, as usual, when the
accident happened. Neither one of them seemed to able to stop
themselves.

“Look,” her mother had
said. “It's not my fault you're here.” Rose
hated
it when she started the
conversation with “Look,” that way. It was bitchy and hard and
said,
I know more than you do about
whatever it is we're talking about.
“
Look,
I
didn’t make
you take that
shit
into your body.
I
didn’t force you to break your probation and go
to that party and get arrested
again
. That wasn’t
me
.”

Rose had smiled bitterly.
“You’re right, Mom,” she said very quietly. “You’re right. I’m all
alone
in this. I know that. I figured that
out a long fucking time ago.”

The rain was rattling and sizzling all around
the car, turning everything distant and soggy and gray as they
forced their way into Dos Hermanos. Of course they got completely
lost. They even had to stop and ask directions from a total
stranger so they could get pointed the right way. It felt like
hours before they finally came to a set of twin pedestals made from
river stone that supported a wrought-iron archway.

With the car paused in front of the gate, her
Mom turned in her seat and said, “We’re here.”

“No kidding,” Rose muttered.

Her mom steered through a
deep dip in the road, the water thundering around them, and started
talking again, as if the gate gave her some kind of permission.
God,
why
did she
have to
talk
all
the time?

“You be good to your father,” she said as she
drove up a second hill and into a new wave of rain.

“Oh,
sure,
” Rose had snorted.

“Rose, you need to give him a chance.” They
surged downhill again and splashed into a rushing puddle.

“Why?” Rose said.
“
You
didn’t.”

The BMW roared up the third rise and there it
was: the huge dark hulk of his ridiculous mini-mansion, hunched on
the ridge line like a fat, sleepy snake. “It’s not about me,” Lisa
told her.

“Of course it is,” her daughter said.

“It’s not–”

“
Don’t!
”

“Rose,
please listen to
–”

“
Stop it!”

A streak of red flew in
from the left, a motorcycle or golf-cart or
something,
and slammed into the road
right in front of her. Lisa jerked the wheel to the side, flinching
away from the collision without thinking. Mud sprayed across the
windshield.

Rose had screamed. She
remembered
that
much, at least. Then there was nothing under the front tires,
and they were tipping, plunging,
roaring
down the hillside, sliding
to the side, falling faster and faster. Lisa screamed and threw her
arm in front of Rose and an instant later they rammed
into a solid block of stone.

Stop
, Rose had been screaming.
Stop stop
stop
…

And now she wasn't even
moving. She wasn't even
moving.
Rose leaned forward, forcing the tears back,
sorry about what she said, sorry about being here, sorry about
everything…

And Lisa Corman Mackie opened her eyes.

Rose knew she looked awful. Her makeup had
washed away long ago; her hair had dried into a mad black tangle.
She didn’t care.

Her mother had opened her
eyes
. She didn’t look sleepy or confused
at all. She looked right at her daughter,
into
her daughter, tears sliding
down her temples from the corner of her eyes.

“I am so sorry,” her mother
said, and Rose knew she wasn’t apologizing for the car accident, or
the argument, or the stupid decision to come to Dos Hermanos in the
first place. She was saying she was sorry for
everything
, from the minute it had
started to go bad, and maybe even more.

Her mom’s arms came up and Rose bent down.
They hugged, awkwardly and not without pain. Rose’s back was
sprung, though she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell the doctors
that, and Lisa had needles in her arm and a bandage wrapped around
one wrist. Still, they embraced as they hadn’t in years.

“You’re okay,” Lisa said, and they both knew
what that meant, too.

“I am. I am. It will be different now.”

“I know. I mean it,
I
know
.”

They stopped talking for a while and cried
together.

Ken let it go on for as long as it needed to.
He didn’t interrupt. He wasn’t sure he could have if he’d wanted
to. Finally the two of them disentangled, laughing at the confusion
of tubes and twisted sheets. Lisa rubbed the heel of her hand
across her cheeks to wipe the tears away before she looked at him
directly.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m okay, really.”

“I know you are,” he said
thickly. “I mean, the doctors said… I talked…” Ken put his hands
over his eyes to hide his own tears, but he couldn’t stop them.
“
Christ
,
Lisa.
Christ
…”

Rose, standing close beside him, put a hand
on his chest and made small circles, an oddly intimate, comforting
gesture, like rubbing a baby’s back. “It’s okay, Daddy,” she said
quietly. “She’s alive, and so am I, in spite of my best
efforts.”

He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “In spite of
your best efforts,” he repeated, almost laughing. “How old are you
again?”

“I’m a hundred and twelve in dog years,” she
said, “and you made me that way. Come on. Sit down here.” She
pulled a second chair close to the bed, and Ken hovered over it,
unsure what to do.