On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1)

on the edge

of

dangerous things

SNYDER-CARROLL

Copyright © 2013 Snyder-Carroll (revised edition: 2015)

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1484015665

ISBN-13: 9781484015667

Dedication

For Nicole, Seena, and especially, Joe T.
.

Author’s Note

Though some facts about some places in this novel are accurate, Pleasant Palms Trailer Park and Sourland High School are figments of the imagination.

Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, are coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my readers, Tim Dillon, Nicole Genna, Karen Morris, Seena Rich, and Mark Snyder. And sincere gratitude to my parents Julia and Russell.

printed by createspace an amazon.com company

on the

edge

of

dangerous

things

“Shame, Despair, Solitude!

These had been her teachers,- stern and wild ones, - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss…”

1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

One

Like the fist of an angry god, the hurricane jogged off course and slammed into Pleasant Palms Trailer Park.

Startled by a boom of thunder, Hester Randal Murphy stood stock-still. Lightening crackled. A current of air sucked open the shutters of the pool house, banging them against the outer walls. She hurried from the shower, closed the window, and turned toward the two naked women, who’d been drying off.

“What the hell?” Dee clasped her bra to her bosom.

“It wasn’t supposed to hit us!” shrieked Eve.

They looked out at the monstrous black clouds swallowing up what was left of morning, at the mighty palms bent in submission to the howling wind. Rain drummed on the fiberglass roof, the grommets of the marina flags clanged against the poles, dogs barked. They tried to talk, but their words were lost in the deafening clamor, so they gave up.

They were trapped where they were. That much was obvious.

Dee and Eve hurriedly dressed. Hester wrapped herself in her towel as panic rose in her chest,
what about Nina?

Young, lovely Nina Tattoni, obsessed with finding shells, had gone to the beach at dawn. She’d be looking down, her big, glistening eyes, as captivating as a water creature’s, riveted on the flotsam. She wouldn’t notice the wind shifting or the clouds hurling themselves into a sinister mountain over the Atlantic. What if a wave swelled and crashed over the sprite of a teenager? How easily she’d be knocked down and dragged out by the fomented sea. One good thing was, Nina didn’t scare easily, wouldn’t care much about any old storm even if she did see it coming.

After the hell she’s been through in her short life,
Hester thought
, this sort of wildness would be nothing to her.

Hester prayed Nina, who was staying temporarily with Hester and her husband Al, had the sense to get out of harm’s way. If anything happened to Nina, Hester would never forgive herself, and neither would Al.

Is this how it feels to have a child of your own?
Hester’s heart turned stone cold in her chest.
Nothing bad can happen to Nina, not now, not ever.
Nina had survived a tragedy that would’ve ruined a weaker child and had turned out to be a good kid, a really good kid.

Kid? Hester had to stop thinking about Nina like that. She was in college, had, in fact, turned eighteen last week.

“She’s legal now,” Al reminded Hester, “so for Christ’s sake would you stop trying to solve all her problems and let her learn to stand on her own two feet.”

Something hit the pool house door hard. Hester flinched. The sound of things being ripped apart and smashing about punctuated the constant, eerie wail of the wind. Their old double-wide was probably a pile of rubble by now. She swallowed hard. If Al hadn’t gotten his lazy butt out of bed…. She tried to nag him into getting up and doing something. Anything! But he fell back asleep even before she left.

Jesus, please,
Hester’s mind whirred
, don’t let anything….

Life with Al hadn’t always been easy, nevertheless, Hester worshipped the ground he walked on. All he had to do was touch her, kiss her, lead her into the bedroom, and her world of troubles went away. Losing him at this point, after years of holding on, after she agreed to retire early from teaching, and when they seemed, finally, to be starting out on a whole new right foot, would be a damn calamity.

A flash of lightning lit up the room. Hester saw terror in Dee’s eyes.

“We’ll be all right!” Hester shouted uselessly.

Dee lowered her head.

“Don’t cry, don’t start crying,” Hester screamed.

Eve put her arm around Dee, but Dee didn’t look up. The train wreck of a storm screamed on. The cacophony was ear-splitting, and escalating.

“A tornado!” Hester shouted. “It’s an effing tornado!”

The window rattled as though it were about to be torn loose from its frame. Hester squatted in the corner by the sink. Dee and Eve crouched next to the wall by the toilet.

Water began spouting up from the drain in the shower, coming in under the door. In no time it was up to their crotches. Hester’s head ached. She took a deep breath, slowly released it, and watched a stained tampon float out of the swamped trash basket and blossom into what looked like a translucent jellyfish. Soon it was joined by more bobbing debris.

She had to find Al, and Nina. Good God, she had to find the girl and make sure she was okay.

Hester’s drenched swimsuit hung like a thick black noose from a peg on the wall. She thought about putting it on, but her body was wet. It’d be a royal pain getting into it. She stood up and headed toward the door.

A coconut blasted through the window. Glass shards flew everywhere, pinging off the fixtures like flicked crystal. Some just missed Hester’s face. Undaunted, she trudged through the water.

Eve saw Hester put her hand on the knob of the door and yelled, but Hester couldn’t make out what the woman was trying to say. Hester looked down at Eve, and Eve mouthed, “Where are you going?”

Hester read her lips, but ignored her. She tightened the towel around herself and pushed against the door.

Eve jumped up, tried to pull her back. She shouted in Hester’s ear, “You’ll get killed!”

Hester shrugged, pushed harder. The wind and the water held the door closed. Hester pounded her thin body against it again and again until it moved enough for her to wedge herself into the gap. The aluminum scraped the skin on her arms; the frame dug into her buttocks.

“You’ll get killed!” Eve’s voice sounded like a whisper from the other side of the planet. Then Hester was out. The door slammed shut behind her.

The pool, the parking lot, the decks of the marina were under water. Boats, torn loose from their moorings, drifted about ramming into things. Trailers had been blown off their pads and onto their sides, their snapped tie-downs dangling from their rusty bellies like severed umbilical cords. All sorts of junk floated aimlessly on the fickle current.

In a powerful gust Hester, stunned by the spectacle of the damage, almost lost her balance. Her hair lashed her face. The flood was thigh-high. Cold rain pelted her. She pictured Al’s yellow slicker hanging in the closet in the trailer. If only she had it now. She tried to make her way along, but it was nearly impossible to move against such a force of nature as this. Cowering against the pool house wall, she dared to look up. Her eyes stung, she saw the clouds roiling above her like heavy smoke about to burst into flame.
The celestial has turned into the demonic
. She closed her eyes, tucked her face down, and gasped for air.

Eve was right
. The thought shook her to her core.
I could get killed out here
.

Two

The mass of clouds, like the lid of a burial vault, slowly slid across the sky leaving Hester bathed in sunlight. Half naked, her towel down around her waist, she opened her eyes.

God has taken pity on me…again.

She’d gotten farther than she thought, halfway around the pool, almost to the laundry room. Pulling the towel up over her breasts, she slogged east to A1A where the flood waters subsided and headed up Fish Tail Lane in the direction of their trailer. The narrow street was deserted, and up ahead she saw with great relief the double-wide still standing.

A couple of dead lizards and one of the tailless feral cats that populated the park floated in a large puddle next to their patio. Debris was everywhere. Their Odyssey was still in the driveway and seemed undamaged, but behind the trailer Hester noticed half of the old ficus tree was gone. She couldn’t determine from where she stood if it had fallen between their unit and the Buchanans’ or had crashed into the roof.

“The first thing I’m going to do is trim that old, overgrown tree,” Al said as they pulled into the driveway the first day they arrived at Pleasant Palms for the season. That was over two weeks ago. Hester stared at the weepy pulp and felt lousy about it. In China ficus were called Bo trees in honor of Buddha who meditated in the shade of one for six years. Buddhists, considering them to be sacred, planted them outside their temples. Hester liked the connection between her tree and the holy man, and she didn’t like it one bit that a raw, fatal-looking wound now ran up its length.

“Damn it, Al,” Hester muttered aloud, “if this tree doesn’t make it and we get bad karma….”

She angrily tossed some of the garbage away from the sliding door while cursing what a lazy bum her once-ambitious husband had turned into and wondering what she could do to save the ficus. She looked back at the tree.
It’s those leaves. The slightest breeze makes them beat like fragile, frantic, green hearts.

What was left of the leaves were doing it right now, and Hester regretted not trimming the tree her damn self. She slid the door open and stepped over the remaining trash into the living room. As she did, blood dripped onto the carpet from a cut on her calf.

“Son of a…” She took her towel off, blotted her leg, then knelt and swiped uselessly at the spots.

She knew she should be looking for Al and Nina.

“Al? Nina?” she shouted. “Anybody home? I’m cut and bleeding. Al? Where are you?”

She scanned the small interior. There wasn’t much space, even in a double-wide. From where she was, she surveyed the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Al’s putter and his Prince racket were propped against his recliner. Her half-empty coffee mug, cheaters, and copy of
O
were on the counter. Everything looked fine. Quiet as a morgue, but fine.

She should check the bedrooms. After all, when she left that morning, her husband was curled up in bed snoring like a freaking chain saw. God knows, he might’ve slept through the whole catastrophe. But Hester couldn’t seem to stop rubbing at the blood. She desperately wanted to get the OxiClean, treat the stain right away, save the carpet from being permanently ruined. So there she was, naked as a jaybird, smearing her bodily fluid even more deeply into the fibers and into one hideous purple spot, while a new, larger, beet-colored one formed beneath her still-bleeding calf.

The longer she worked at the mess, the more irked she became with her husband. She warned him they should not to go down to Florida so early in the season, even begged him, “Al, please, I’ve got a bad feeling. Please, let’s wait till December, till hurricane season is completely over.”

No, he was adamant. “What the hell do you think I retired for, Hester? To sit in New Jersey and freeze? You can if you want to, but I’m going to the goddamn Sunshine State.”

What could she do, but give in.

She shouldn’t have, but she was trying to pick her battles, as always. At the moment, though, peeved as she was with Al, she could use his help before their whole carpet turned wine-dark, and before she lost any more blood.

“Al,” she hollered, “answer me?”

No answer.

Dust motes floated through the hot sunlight and settled into the hazy surface of the end table in front of her. Hester pulled the cord of the bamboo shade. The light dropped into a thin, white line. The room took on a burnished glow and appeared cooler, but the rising humidity was stifling. Sweat dripped from Hester’s body and mingled with the blood she’d rubbed irrevocably into the rug.

She relinquished her battle against the blots and went to flip the switch on the air-conditioner, nothing happened. The power was out. She threw the bloody towel in the hamper behind the sofa and went into the kitchen.

On the counter fruit flies orbited a half-rotten banana. Hester futilely shooed at them. They circled away from her hand, then veered back the minute she stopped. She grabbed the dish towel and mopped her face and armpits and under her breasts. She needed gauze and Band-Aids before she spoiled anything else. She headed down the hallway and checked the guest room.

No Nina.

Maybe she ran to the clubhouse. She wasn’t stupid. If she’d come to Hester with anything, it’d been an odd set of survival skills.

Hester turned to her bedroom. If Al was gone too, and if enough hot water was left in the heater, she’d take a shower, fix herself up, and then go find those two. They couldn’t be far away. Though the hurricane had caused tons of damage, it didn’t seem so bad now that Hester was back in her own little place.

The bedroom door was closed. She turned the knob and tried to push it open, but it went only an inch or two. She peeked in. Nothing but leaves.

“What the…?” She pushed again with her shoulder. It widened a bit more.
Wow, the effing Bo tree…
Half of the Bo tree was in their bedroom.

“Jesus Christ, Al, are you in there?”

Petrified he might be trapped, all Hester’s annoyances with Al vanished. She threw her body hard into the door. It hurt, but she didn’t give up until it budged enough for her to squeeze into the room.

It was a jungle of leaves and branches. The trunk jutted up into the air like a giant spear. Broken ceiling tile, plywood, Styrofoam, aluminum, some stuff she couldn’t identify, and the bed were under it all.

Hester pushed her way through the branches. She was getting pretty scratched up when she felt something touch her thigh. It was Al’s foot. She looked down and saw his hairy lump of an ankle and the high arch of his instep. He was trapped!

“Al, answer me, you son of a…God, just answer me!” She grabbed his foot and shook it.

No response. She broke off enough branches to open the door all the way and began flinging more of them behind her into the hallway. She worked feverishly, moving what was loose till she could squat beneath the trunk, lift it on her shoulder, and slide it off Al.

A large piece of the roof was still on top of him. She gripped the end of it and yanked with all her strength. Her breasts swung uncomfortably. She tried again, but it slipped out of her grip.
No time to go get a pair of gloves. No time to go for help.
She wiped her hands on the saturated carpet and took hold again of a corner and pulled with all her might. This time it moved, so she kept pulling. As she did, she worried it might be scraping off some of Al’s skin. She almost had it, but the room was small, and it got jammed against the wall.

Hester hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a hammer. Panting heavily, she ran back to the bedroom and began hacking at the piece of roof with the claw end. She was careful not to land any blows near Al. She persevered, made a hole, and pounded and pounded until she broke a big chunk off. Finally, she was able to tilt it on one end and push it upright against the wall.

Al was under a soaking wet comforter. Hester, exhausted, couldn’t lift it, so she knelt and gathered it to her like a fisherman would his net. She heard her own breathing, uneven and labored in the quiet. The soft hair on her arms bristled. She stood up slowly. The trauma of the hurricane, the weight of her worry over Nina, the fear that gripped her at the thought of losing her husband, all hurtled in on her.

Al Murphy was not alone.