April 2010
BAM BAM BAM!
Loose shutters banged against the house, pounding the clapboards like angry fists as the wind kicked up and howled around the eaves, drawing Gretchen Brink to the half-opened window above the kitchen sink.
A minute earlier, the sky had been a pristine blue, the April sun showering warmth upon the walnut farm while a gentle breeze ruffled the leaves of the just-bloomed peonies below the sill. Out of nowhere, fierce gusts forced their way through the window screen, batting at Gretchen’s hair and stirring up the scent of rain and the rumble of thunder. Beyond her pale reflection in the glass, the sky turned black as pitch and a startling crack rent the air. A great boom followed as a bolt of lightning hit, causing her to see stars and jarring the floor beneath her feet.
“Good heavens,” she said as goose bumps leaped across her flesh.
As quickly, the air turned an eerie shade that seemed a cross between gray and yellow. Some might call it green, but Gretchen could only describe it as menacing. Thunder crashed, rattling the glass. She jumped away as a downpour began to pelt the panes, blurring her line of sight; but not before she watched a gnarled branch ripped from a full-grown maple and hurled across the lawn as if made of feathers.
“Someone’s angry,” she said, rubbing the gooseflesh on her arms and wondering what had nature so riled up that it wrested branches from trees and tossed about everything that wasn’t fastened down.
“Gretchen! We must get to the cellar this instant,” the elder of her twin sisters, Bennie, declared as she came up from behind; hands outstretched as she felt her way into the room, the creaking floor announcing her every step. Bennie stopped before a high-backed chair and tightly grasped it, tilting her head ceiling-ward though her milky eyes stayed downcast. “Can’t you hear it?” Her round face grew grim. “It’s close, and it’s coming straight at us.”
“What’s coming toward us? I can’t hear anything above the wind,” Gretchen said, and tensed just the same, because what she could hear didn’t matter. Bennie might have been blind since birth but she had ears like a bat. She could sense impending disaster more accurately than a meteorologist’s Doppler radar.
“A twister,” Bennie said quite plainly, and her chin began to quiver. “It’s dropped right out of the sky very near, and it’s on its way. We’re dead in its path.”
“Where’s Trudy?” Gretchen asked, trying hard not to panic.
She knew good and well that tornadoes didn’t mess around, not when they plowed through tiny Missouri towns, and Walnut Ridge was about as tiny as they came. A twister’s only job was to make a mess of all it touched. They had been lucky these thirty-nine years since her Abby was born, the bumpiest weather seeming to miraculously bypass the farm; but maybe their luck had run out.
“Trudy!” Gretchen began to shout, heading for the dining room as the thunder and shrieking winds shook the house. “Trude, where are you?”
“I’m here,” the younger twin called back, appearing beneath the curve of the arch separating dining room from kitchen.
Trudy looked the mirror image of Bennie: round head fringed with faded brown stuck atop a thin neck and slight frame, with slender arms and legs far stronger than they appeared. She was forever clad in cotton smocks with ample pockets to carry odds and ends, like tissues, bits of string, and treats for her cat, Matilda. In fact, at that very moment, she clutched Matilda to her breasts, not about to let her go, despite how the hairless feline wiggled and squirmed.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Trudy said, scurrying toward Gretchen as another boom of thunder shook the tiny farmhouse. “I can smell the change in the air. It reeks of anguish and unfinished business.”
“Bennie says a twister’s headed straight for us, and she’s never been wrong.”
“No, she’s never wrong,” Trudy grimly agreed.
And Trudy’s nose had never been wrong, either.
Matilda mewed, her pale skin stretching over her skeletal body as she climbed toward Trudy’s shoulder. Gretchen took her sister’s arm and hurried her through the kitchen and to the stairs, descending behind Bennie, whose heavy clogs clip-clopped down the steps.
“It’s so dad-gummed dusty, like I’m breathing in the musty scent of every soul who’s ever lived here,” Trudy remarked, and sneezed, losing a startled Matilda from her shoulder in the process. The tiny feet padded lickety-split into the cellar and out of sight.
“It’s a hundred-year-old basement, Trude,” Bennie said, her voice made hollow by the stone walls surrounding them. “It’s practically made of dust.”
At the top of the stairs, Gretchen shut and latched the door for good measure before she trailed the twins below-ground, to where the dirt floors and rock walls were lit only by a single sixty-watt bulb. She found the flashlight she kept at the base of the steps, switching it on just as the electricity flickered and went out.
Though she paused in the darkness as she swung the beam of the flashlight to guide her, her sisters didn’t hesitate in the least. They had no need for light to lead them. They knew every inch of the old house tactilely. They hadn’t grown up inside its walls, but they’d been living within them for nearly as long as Gretchen. She’d moved them in with her four decades ago when she was barely eighteen and they were just thirteen, once she’d inherited the place from Lily and Cooper Winston, a year after she’d given birth to Abby. “Sam would want his daughter to grow up here, nowhere else,” Lily had insisted, and Gretchen had not disagreed. Just as the home had been a cozy nest for Sam Winston and two generations of his family before him, it had quickly become Abby’s and Gretchen’s home-sweet-home as well.
Dear Sam, God rest his soul.
The place still rightly belonged to him, as far as Gretchen was concerned; but she’d stopped feeling guilty for being there. She loved it as deeply as anyone could, and every inch of it was a constant reminder of him and how his selflessness had saved her.
She told herself that caring for the farm as much as she did was repayment enough for her betrayal, even if she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“It’s at the fence line already,” Bennie said, interrupting Gretchen’s thoughts.
“And it’s getting closer.”
The three of them settled into a tiny room with rounded walls where a trio of metal folding chairs awaited them.
Bennie reached for Trudy’s hand and clutched it. “Oh my, it’s barreling up the front drive. Can you feel it shake the ground?”
“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Trudy echoed.
Gretchen didn’t feel the ground move so much as she felt Matilda padding back and forth between her ankles. The noise of the wind was less fierce below-ground and still she heard a high-pitched keening, angry and insistent.
As she settled into the tight circle with her sisters, a large pop rent the air and then a crash that made the small house shudder. Gretchen dropped the flashlight from her hands, and it clattered somewhere near her feet.
Matilda hissed as if telling her, Watch where you put that thing!
“Please, Lord, protect us,” Trudy whispered, and Gretchen reached for her sisters’ hands, grabbing on when she connected; all of them trembling.
Please don’t let us die down here, and I swear I’ll never tell another lie, Gretchen squeezed her eyes closed and prayed, though she didn’t entirely mean it.