The Breathtaker Read online

  “Where’s Bullette?” Danielle suddenly asked.

  “Shh, honey. Cats are smart. He’ll find himself a good hiding place,” Rob told her.

  As if on cue, above the rattling windowpanes, they could hear a plaintive meow.

  “Bullette!” Her eyes filled with hot, terrified tears. “Daddy, go save him!”

  “Shh, we have to stay put.”

  She began to weep convulsively, and Jenna stared at Rob over their daughter’s quaking shoulders, a sodium stain from the flashlight playing across her grim features. “Go get the cat,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Bullette!” Danielle screamed, her fist jerking to her mouth. “Daddy, go help him!”

  Oh great. Just by doing nothing, he’d drawn the full weight of his wife’s displeasure. Before she could get really vehement about it, he gripped the long-handled flashlight and crawled out from underneath their makeshift lean-to.

  Almost instantly, a bitter chill engulfed him. Goose bumps prickled his arms as he swung the flashlight in an arc across the thin-legged mahogany mail table his grandfather had built nearly fifty years ago; past the wooden coat stand choked with rain slickers and the old picture frames clattering against the faded wallpaper. All he could hear was the wind, thunderous and cascading.

  Get the cat. Ridiculous.

  He crawled along the hardwood floor on his hands and knees, moving like a poorly wired robot toward the kitchen. The thunder sounded strange—no rolling echo, just a thick-throated boom. Boom. Abrupt, like bombs dropping. The air was a swift current, hard to maneuver through. Jesus, help me. He crawled past the hallway chair with its stout oak legs and shone his light around the corner into the kitchen.

  The calico cat was crouched in the crevice between the stove and cabinet. Rob could see its glowing eyes.

  “Here, kitty…”

  The cat tensed and stared at him. Blink.

  “Here, kitty!”

  It shuddered.

  “C’mere, you mutt!”

  It arched its back and fled.

  “Fuck.” Rob craned his neck, nerves raw, then heard a crackling sound, distantly sinister, and a thunderous bang that made his whole body quake. He covered his head just as glass shattered above him and a violent wind came rushing in. Screaming in his ears. Swirling up into his face. The seconds ticked past heavily. When he finally raised his head again, he could see a massive tree limb sticking in through the kitchen window. “Jesus Christ,” he said, watching the tattered curtains dance. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner, the pressure building in his ears. The wind rocked the refrigerator ever so slightly back and forth, and he aimed his light into the four corners of the room, but the cat had vanished. Screw the cat. He turned and noticed a handful of nails embedded in the wall near his head, the sight of it tightening the springs of his tension.

  “Rob?” came Jenna’s distant cry.

  An unraveling roll of toilet paper skittered across the floor toward him and rose up like a cobra. A long, sinuous strand of it danced in midair above his head, gravity gone. His eyes grew wide as he watched the spectacle. His ears were ready to pop. He crawled back toward the open doorway that led back into the front hall, pressure building in his ears. If they ever got out of this thing alive, he’d put up a storm shelter. Buy one of those “safe rooms” he’d seen advertised. Donate blood. Feed the homeless. Say the Lord’s Prayer every single night. Quit swearing. Whatever it took.

  Please, God, have mercy on my family…

  Crawling back into the hallway on his hands and knees, Rob swept the flashlight beam across the mahogany legs of the mail table, the red and green area rug, a pair of sneakers by the front door… Wait a second. Back up. Sneakers?

  Brand-new jogging sneakers, white and champagne shelltops, the kind of blinding white that made you want to step all over them. He gaped at those neatly tied laces and the jeans-clad legs attached to them, then gave a watery squawk as dirt flew into his eyes.

  He couldn’t see. The front door was open, leaves and shredded debris whipping into the house. “Hello?” He squinted up in anxiety, blinking away the tears. Who was this person? A rescue worker? An intruder? The thought pulled at his stomach.

  Blind, he was fucking blind.

  He took a quick, sobbing breath as the owner of the sneakers stepped boldly into the house, crunching over broken glass. Then the door slammed shut with a thunk.

  APRIL IS THE

  CRUELEST MONTH

  1

  POLICE CHIEF Charlie Grover was surprised to find Main Street’s stately granite buildings still standing, their dimpled windows and variegated roofs intact. Back at the station house, he’d thought the sky was falling, but now he could see with his own eyes that downtown had withstood nature’s fury. The air hung wet and still, and with his high beams on, he could make out the muck and debris the tornado had deposited everywhere like Christmas tinsel—long strands of videotape draped over tree limbs, black cables slithering across the road, insulation dust swirling through the air.

  He was shaken up pretty badly and wanted a drink. He hated himself for drinking. He’d promised Maddie on her deathbed that he wouldn’t touch the stuff ever again, but he had. Not with a vengeance. He wasn’t a full-tilt, fall-down drunk, but he needed a drink now and again. And really, now was as good a time as any. Less than thirty minutes ago, a harmless-looking milky white F-1 on the Fujita scale had dropped down out of the sky over Promise, Oklahoma, and quickly transformed itself into a quivering black F-3 that’d zigzagged over open country south of town, wreaking selective havoc. According to reports just coming in, the damage path was ten miles long and nearly a quarter of a mile wide. Charlie was on his way now to coordinate whatever rescue efforts might be necessary and assess the damage. Through the static and crackle of his police radio, he could hear Patrol Officer Tyler Drumright’s hoarse, urgent voice: “. . . the roof is gone… we’ve got a home with no interior walls left standing… Chief? Are you there, Chief?”

  He picked up the hand mike. “Go ahead, Tyler.”

  “I’m at the Black Kettle subdivision. We’ve got a fifty-eight-year-old with chest pains, and no ambulance in sight.”

  “If he stops breathing, start chest compressions. The paramedics are on their way.”

  “We’ve got lots of stunned and bewildered residents suffering only bumps and scrapes.”

  “Hang in there, buddy, you’re doing great. I’ll be there in five.” He dropped the mike back in its retainer and had a flash of his baby sister, for some reason. His baby sister in her crib. Little Clara Grover had died thirty years ago at the age of two. He remembered her lying in her crib and gazing up at him with those enormous green eyes of hers.

  Forget, forget…

  This tornado had him reeling. A million things to do, and he was the guy in charge. Under the uniform, he was afraid. He tried to reach his daughter again and got the busy signal. The phone lines were jammed. He took a deep breath, confident that sixteen-year-old Sophie was okay. The tornado hadn’t traveled that far north, but he needed to be sure. Just needed to hear her sweet voice, her smug indifference. “Oh Dad, I’m fine. What’s wrong?”

  He squeezed the wheel, drawing into himself. Life could take everything from you. So scared, dammit. That anxious fire in the pit of his stomach. Loved ones snatched away in the dead of night. Unfair. He rotated his shoulders, the pain shooting up the left side of his body like a trail of fire ants. It was the ancient miasma of burn scars and skin grafts that was causing all the discomfort. He’d felt that dull throbbing ache on the scarred left-hand side of his body ever since this morning, the cramps in his muscles and aches in his joints that usually portended foul weather. He should’ve known about the severity of this storm—his joints had never bothered him so bad.

  Thirty years ago, Charlie Grover had suffered second-and third-degree burns to the left side of his body—arm, chest, rib cage and leg—a crazy quilt of melted flesh extending from his earlobe down to his ankle,
where the scarring ended abruptly, like a tube sock with the foot cut off. Fortunately for him, his genitals and face had been spared (thank you, God), but some of the hypertrophic scars with their donor skin grafts had healed improperly, and the resultant lack of elasticity forced him as a matter of lifelong habit to turn around stiffly at the waist, as if his vertebrae were fused together. An odd handicap that’d made the top brass hesitant to promote him. Not that he blamed them, but Charlie Grover could fire a weapon, write a traffic ticket and solve a homicide with the best of them, yet he’d had to work extra hard to prove his worth to Mayor Whitmore and his cronies. He’d never filed a discrimination lawsuit, although he could have many times. It was only through sheer grit and determination on his part that those in charge had eventually come around. If Charlie knew one thing, it was that he was perfectly suited for the job. The bad guys of Promise had something to fear from him.

  “Chief?” His police radio squawked again. “Pick up!”

  He scooped up the hand mike. “Yeah, Tyler?”

  “We have a casualty! An elderly woman got blown out of her house… Oh God, she was literally thrown across the street into a barbed-wire fence… She’s dead at the scene.”

  “I’m on Willow Road. Almost there.”

  “Where’s the ambulance? Where the hell is everybody?”

  “Paramedics are on their way, I promise you that.”

  “Looks like fifteen homes were destroyed, maybe twenty. There’s major damage. Everybody’s running around in a panic.”

  “I’m minutes away. Hang in there, buddy, you’re doin’ great.” Around the next corner, he found himself on the long approach to the Black Kettle subdivision, where he had a sweeping panorama of the plains. As far as the eye could see was an unbroken stretch of winter wheat and wild grass, so much motion in the landscape it dazzled the senses. All those lush green pastures, all those red and orange wildflowers and blooming dogwood trees. A wet spring was essential if the wildflowers were to reach their peak in April.

  Now Charlie stepped on the gas, his sense of urgency piqued. Road gravel struck the undercarriage of the police car as he sped past fields bounded by thin belts of trees, their gloves of new growth khaki-colored from the insulation dust. The road he was on crossed a steel bridge, then waved gently up and down the map. April was the month of rebirth, and all week long the grass had kept its promise, growing thick and green in the meadows and crowding out the tassel-headed weeds. The last few pockets of ice in the woods had finally thawed, giving way to a carpet of Indian paintbrush and bluebonnets. Funny how you could watch very carefully for spring and still miss it, he thought as he glanced at the departing storm clouds amassed along the horizon.

  He rolled to a stop at a beheaded stop sign, and from this angle he could see down into the path of obliteration. The tornado had swept through like a giant reaper, ripping a spotty but destructive swath across the grasslands and dissecting the subdivision almost in half. Many of the expensive two-story homes had been reduced to one-story homes; some had been swept completely off their slabs. The blue water tower was knocked over, and injured cows and pigs from nearby farms were wandering around aimlessly. Crumpled sheets of corrugated tin were strewn across the landscape like discarded pieces of paper.

  Charlie veered the rest of the way down the snaking road, then came to a screeching halt. Two EMT vehicles and a highway patrol car were parked in the middle of the road in front of a tangle of downed power lines.

  He got out of his patrol car. “Hello?” All the emergency personnel must’ve taken off on foot. He climbed onto the trunk of a fallen oak and surveyed the partially destroyed subdivision. The wind was so strong he had to hold on to his hat. Two or three entire blocks of homes had been decimated. It was an awesome sight—exterior walls were missing, garage doors had buckled, roofs had caved in. Front lawns were clogged with waist-deep debris, cars were accordioned into buildings and most of the ash trees that grew especially dense in the Black Kettle subdivision had been stripped of their leaves, their trunks twisted like wrung washcloths.

  Mike Rosengard lived on this block, Charlie recalled with a start. Third house down, south side of the street, in a spot that was now Toothpick City. “God,” he breathed. Nothing was left standing of Mike’s house but the central staircase rising out of the rubble and leading nowhere.

  His heart rate accelerated as he picked his way downhill, feet crunching over shattered glass and splintered twigs. The wind at his back made a debris trail in front of him, and Charlie could smell natural gas in the air—or rather, the chemical substance they put in the gas to make it recognizable. Alarmed, he activated his cell phone and dialed the station house.

  “Promise P.D.,” Hunter Byrd answered in that nasal drawl of his.

  “Hunter, I’m at the Black Kettle subdivision. Listen, we desperately need a gas company crew down here right away. And commission as many bulldozers and earth-movers as you can to clear a path for police and fire crews. And call up the National Guard. We’re gonna need some sort of heavy rescue extraction unit.”

  “Okay, boss.” A former linebacker gone to fat with curly red hair and a rectangular chin, Sergeant Hunter Byrd was the practical joker of the unit, always pulling crazy stunts, like ordering fifty pizzas at once or making choking sounds over the P.A. system. You never knew whether he was serious or not, but Charlie could tell he was dead serious now.

  “We’re gonna need a massive emergency response to restore electrical power. And where the hell is the fire department?”

  “On their way, Chief.”

  “Well, light a fire under them. Metaphorically speaking.”

  As if on cue, the sound of screaming sirens reached his ears, and he turned to see two fire trucks and a squad car careening up the road toward him, their red and blue beacons strobing in the hazy air.

  Clutching his portable unit, Charlie waded through the muck and debris toward Mike’s house—now just a pile of lumber on a concrete foundation. A huge tree was horizontal on the front yard, as if a bulldozer had knocked it over, and a slender woman suddenly appeared from behind it. Jill Rosengard was almost unrecognizable, covered in mud from head to foot.

  “Jill?” Charlie called out, but she didn’t respond. She was busy filling a trash bag with debris from the yard. “Jill, is that you?”

  Now a man popped his head out of the basement. “Chief?”

  Charlie recognized the timbre of Mike Rosengard’s voice, deep and melodic as the tones of a cello. He was holding two small children in his arms—two little boys so covered in mud they could’ve been carved out of chocolate.

  “Holy shit. D’you believe this?” Mike crossed the debris field of broken glass and downed electrical wires, stumbling shoeless and sockless through the mud. Mud ran down his face and plastered his hair thickly to his skull.

  Charlie grabbed him by the arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, things are fine. Considering.”

  Mike’s two boys, Sammy and Jerry, stared at Charlie with surreally wide eyes.

  “We made it, guys,” their father said, jostling them affectionately on his hips. “Thank God we made it, huh?” He laughed with relief as the boys nodded their heads in unison.

  Detective Sergeant Mike Rosengard was a close friend and a seasoned cop with an unassertive chin who had over eleven years on the force—six as a patrol officer, five as a detective handling everything from shoplifting to suicide. He liked to introduce himself as the only Jew in Oklahoma and was the kind of cop who would work a case until it was solved. Of average height and build beneath neatly pressed suits, Mike had a calm confidence that didn’t come off as cocky, and Charlie had all kinds of faith in him.

  “Hey, my family’s fine,” he said, jockeying the boys in his arms. “That’s the important thing, right?” He pointed at the muddy Bronco parked in the driveway. “Now, isn’t that a lovely shade of crap?”

  “How’s Jill doing?” Charlie asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Tryin
g to retrieve pieces of her life,” Mike whispered. “You watch. Half of our stuff is in Helena by now.”

  “She all right?”

  “I think so, why?” He seemed suddenly worried.

  “Let’s get somebody down here to look at her.” He got on his portable and directed one of the EMTs over to Mike’s residence, then stood staring at the remains of the house, stray plumes of dust wafting up from the ruins. It was a miracle they weren’t all dead.

  “I heard this high-pitched whistle, really piercing,” Mike said. “Then our garbage cans started to blow around. Then the wind slammed the door in my face, and suddenly it grew utterly quiet. Fuckin’ eerie, Chief. We ran down to the basement, and I held on to my babies. The house was twisting and heaving, you could hear it creaking at the seams. I kept thinking about my babies getting sucked out of my arms, and I didn’t want that to happen, so I hung on extra tight. So tight they could barely breathe. Right, guys?” Tears trembled in the corners of his eyes. “I can honestly say that I have never been so scared in all my life, Chief. There was this irrational movement of the walls and ceiling, then I heard a loud screech… as if a hundred cars were rounding a corner too fast. Then everything exploded. I looked up, and there was just a gaping hole where the roof had been. Gone! It was gone. In the blink of an eye, we lost everything. Half our neighborhood’s gone,” he said with a dumbfounded shake of his head. “It was here this morning. Now it’s gone.”

  To the right of Mike’s property, a neighboring house had been pushed forward some twenty-five feet off its foundation; now it slouched like an old man on a long Sunday.

  “Are the neighbors okay?” Charlie asked.

  “Yeah, everyone in the immediate vicinity.”