GABRIELLA SAT PROPPED UP WITH PILLOWS ON HER BED STARING at the empty screen of her new laptop. The curser mocked her—blink, blink, blinking on the blank Word document. What in the world had made her think she could still do it? Poetry came from a place in your soul that was pure, and nowhere inside her was pure anymore. The core of who she was lay slathered with filth and reeked of sulfur. She reached up and touched the scar on her cheek—her outside matched her inside.
Words appeared on the page and she wasn’t even conscious of typing them.
Insides and outsides, ugliness all.
No mirror reflects, no nostril detects
wretchedness reeking, forgiveness seeking
a glimmer of hope however small.
It was awful, of course. Totally lame. So were the other words that lined up behind the first ones, leaping unbidden from her fingers. Tortured structure, painfully awkward, forced and clumsy and … burn-it-when-I-die bad.
Gabriella kept typing anyway, on and on. Words filled the white expanse of screen, lined up like cadets for inspection, neat and tidy. She didn’t stop until she heard music. Then she sat still and listened.
She’d always thought it was beautiful, eerie, haunting and way too complex for her to understand. Oh, she grasped the incredible skill it took to produce it, was awed by the musicians’ ability to improvise something that complicated, make it up as they went along.
But unfortunately, when she added all her responses to jazz together, the total still came up just short of liking it.
Smokey loved jazz! Loved to hear his father play, told her that before his father had bailed out on him when he was a kid he would sit for hours as the old man made his tenor saxophone sing, wail, cry, laugh—created sounds on the instrument Gabriella suspected it was never designed to produce.
Slap Yo Mama Carmichael was never more at home, in his element, than when he was playing. And today, that home was St. Elmo’s Fire.
The Tony Lama boots she’d purchased from Pedro on her first solo trip down the mountain three days ago were not broken in yet so they felt stiff and uncomfortable, but she leapt down the stairs in them nonetheless. She’d driven into Buena Vista that day and returned with some of the belongings they’d left in the trunk of their getaway car. It would take several trips to ferry everything up to the cabin, but she’d prioritized—first things first: Ty’s Nintendo and video games, her laptop and Theo’s vintage Selmer saxophone. And now Theo was playing it!
She found Ty sitting with his legs crossed Indian style in front of Theo on the back porch with P.D. lying beside him, his chin resting on Theo’s fleece-lined leather moccasins. The old man wore a flannel shirt, a heavy sweater and a denim jacket. Ty was dressed in a western shirt and jeans. Even in the I Heart Oklahoma sweatshirt she’d bought in Tishomingo, Gabriella was cool. Little boys had different thermostats altogether, she thought, and remembered how Garrett and Grant spent the summer in short sleeves—their arms turned a lovely caramel brown in tacky trucker’s tans by the surprisingly hot, high-altitude sunshine.
Theo sat in his favorite rocker and cradled his new saxophone tenderly in his lap, his eyes closed, his mind transported to that place jazz musicians go, a country far distant from this Colorado mountainside.
She closed the back door softly behind her, didn’t want to break some kind of spell, though Smokey said that when his father got into a zone you could switch on a food processor full of quarters next to his ear and he wouldn’t drop a beat.
She also didn’t want to intrude on the endearing scene. The boy and his dog at the feet of the old black musician, absorbing every sound, every nuance. She wondered if Ty would become a musician someday and shuddered at the thought. The lives of almost every musician she’d ever met were marked by hairline cracks—in response to life or to art, she didn’t know which. And the cracks never healed, just got bigger and deeper until the artists could only hold their fragmented lives together by medicating. Drugs. Booze. She could write the names of those who had survived to see their thirty-fifth birthdays on the back of a gum wrapper—Dentyne at that. Sooner or later, most of the musicians she knew fell into the fissures in their own souls and died in the dark there, alone.
Except Theo, of course. A faith from his distant childhood had somehow sustained him, kept his head above water while most everyone he loved slipped below the surface and was gone.
Ty put his finger to his lips. Clearly, he didn’t want her to break the mood either. So she stopped, leaned against the porch railing and tried to go to the place jazz transported those who loved it.
She didn’t know how long Theo had been playing before she heard a jeep on the trail through the aspen forest. Even though she clearly recognized the rumble of Pedro’s muffler-free engine, the sound of an approaching vehicle instantly dried up all the spit in her mouth. She turned and watched the spot where the trail emerged from the trees until Pedro’s jeep bumped out into the open, dragging a thin plume of dust behind it.
He waved, almost like he knew she needed reassuring. Surely the man wasn’t really as tuned in to her feelings as her imagination led her to believe.
He pulled up beside the cabin and killed the engine but didn’t get out of the jeep, and Gabriella realized he was listening to Theo, too. When Theo’s music abruptly stopped a few minutes later, Pedro opened the door and stepped down to the ground.
“I did not mean to interrupt,” he said.
Ty leapt to his feet, barreled down the porch steps and skidded to a stop in front of Pedro.
“I found something in the creek. I’ll show you.” He turned and bounded off across the meadow with P.D. on his heels.
Theo stood, holding his saxophone, and fixed Pedro with a steely stare. “Don’t ask,” he said. “All I’ve done since I got here is drink water and make wee.”
“I was at Heartbreak Hotel talking to Steve,” Pedro said, “and we heard this sound. It was you. We could hear you playing all the way down the mountain.”
“Sound carries that far?”
“The wind distorted it, gave it an eerie wail that freaked out his grandchildren. They didn’t know what it was.”
“That Bigfoot plays a mountain goat’s horn when he ees hungry—and he ees not a vegetarian. Steve will not have to worry about the kids sneaking out after lights-out tonight.”
“A furball honking a goat horn, huh? I s’pect I do sound like that. Don’t have the wind up here to get it right. Think I’ll go lie down.”
He turned and shuffled across the porch. Gabriella watched him anxiously.
“It takes longer with some people,” Pedro said. “Getting used to the thin air is harder the older you get.”
“Did you come all the way up here to listen to Theo play?”
“No.” But he didn’t say why he did come. “You figured out how to make coffee yet with the jet engine?”
“As a matter of fact, I made a fresh pot for breakfast. Have a seat and I’ll get you a cup.”
“Just black, strong enough to trot a squirrel across.”
When she took his coffee out to him, she found him sitting on the top porch step, not in one of the two rockers. He had hung his hat on the post on the porch railing and she noticed what she hadn’t seen before. There were streaks of gray in his thick black hair. She sat down beside him, on his right side, so her scar would be facing away from him. Ty stood on the ground in front of him with a wiggling tiger salamander in his grubby hands.
“These things don’t live long in captivity,” he told Pedro knowingly, “or I’d keep it for a pet.”
“You don’t say.” Gabriella leaned back away from the creature and wrinkled her nose as if it reeked—which it didn’t. “Take it back to the creek and let it go.”
“I was going to, Mom. I just wanted to show Pedro.” To Pedro, he said, “You ever seen a green snake? There’s one that lives under a rock by the creek.”
“Not that I recall.”
“I’ll try to catch it and show you!” Ty turned back to his mother. “They’re harmless, you know. You’d like to see one, wouldn’t you Mom?”
“Sounds wonderful.”
She made a shooing gesture and the boy turned and bolted for the creek.
“Did you say ‘sound’s wonderful’ or ‘I just smashed my thumb in a car door,’ because it was hard to tell from my end?”
“And you’ve never seen a green snake?”
Pedro shrugged.
“I like animals that have fur on them and legs—no more than four. I don’t do creepy crawlies.”
“Neither does my sister.” He pronounced the word “see-ster.” “But that’s because her older brother, who shall remain nameless, put a wet frog down the back of her shirt when she was a kid. Something like that happen to you?”
“Goodness no! Grant would never do a thing like that. He was perfect.”
She was astonished to hear the word drop out of her mouth. How ridiculous. Of course, her older brother wasn’t per … Yes, he was. Grant was perfect. At least he was from the viewpoint of a little girl who tried to emulate his every move, every gesture, his lazy smile and that laugh of his that was so infectious everybody laughed with him when they heard it, even if they had no idea what was funny.
She never allowed herself to think about Grant. Never let the image of his face form in her head. But she did now, maybe because she couldn’t help it, being here, so close to where she last saw him. Or maybe just because it was time.
Her mind served up snapshot images, like black-and-white photos on the front page of a newspaper.
Snap-snap.
Grant punching Mikey Zambino in the nose for putting bubble gum in her hair on the school bus.
Snap-snap.
Grant lifting up the covers in the midnight dark so she could get in bed with him when she had a bad dream.
Snap-snap.
Grant answering her questions about rocks or salamanders or why Pamela Wolenski didn’t want to be her best friend anymore. Or explaining how aspen trees grew close together because all their roots were connected. Or reassuring her that Mom and Dad were just busy; that’s why they told her to “hush and go play” all the time.
Snap-snap.
The silver box that held Grant’s body. Her father said he was in there and she knew her father was telling the truth because she’d seen … but she kept looking for Grant at the funeral home anyway, expected to see him leaning against the back wall or standing in the doorway with his grin warming up that awful cold room that smelled like her mother’s Jungle Gardenia perfume. The room where everybody cried and her parents didn’t even know she was there and she couldn’t take her patent leather shoes off even though they’d been too small for her since Christmas but Mom never got around to buying her new ones.
“My little sister could probably come up with a lot of words to describe me, but I do not think perfect would be on the list,” Pedro said.
Gabriella’s mind had one foot in today, the other in yesterday, and she hopped frantically back and forth, trying to make it across the bed of hot coals in between without getting burned.
Grant told her once that the aspen trees dropped leaves on the ground in the fall that looked like scales shed by a golden dragon. He said rubies and sapphires were the same stone. Sapphires were blue rubies; rubies were red sapphires. He said—
“You know, having a conversation with you is a little like being on hold without any music,” Pedro said. “After a while, it ees hard to tell if you are still connected.”
Gabriella returned to the porch, to the smell of fresh coffee, the murmur of the aspens and the feel of the hard porch slats on her butt.
“I’m sorry. I haven’t thought about Grant in … He died up here when he was fourteen. Struck by lightning.”
She never mentioned Grant’s death, not to anybody. Pedro said nothing, but somehow his silence didn’t feel awkward.
Then he said softly, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Nobody had ever asked her that! Not her parents, her grandparents, her friends or teachers. Not even Garrett. Not once in the twenty-eight years since Grant was killed had anybody ever wanted to know how she felt about it.
Gabriella had to use a crowbar to pry open the locked door in her mind and then walked tentatively into the bunker. The first sight she saw there plowed into her chest like a runaway train.
“I got to him first, to his body after it happened. I found him.”
“It was my eighth birthday.”
Pedro groaned like somebody’d punched him in the belly. Then he reached out wordlessly and placed his hand over hers. It felt warm. The warmth spread up her arm to her chest and neck, thawed the words frozen in her throat so she could speak.
“I remember it smelled like the time a sparkler singed my hair on the Fourth of July. Only a thousand times stronger. And I didn’t know at first what it … what he was.”
The ground is wet, the rocks slick, but she runs anyway, slips in a puddle, goes down hard in it and soaks the leg of her jeans, skins her knee. She gets back up and keeps running. The raindrops dangling off the needles of the bristlecone pines sparkle like Christmas tree lights in a shaft of sun beaming through the clouds. She stumbles and brushes up against a branch and the whole left side of her shirt is instantly wet, but she doesn’t care about that either, just keeps running.
Grant is looking for her! She’s certain of it. Maybe she even heard him call her name, but she’s not sure about that part. Sometimes she hears his voice in her head when he’s not even talking to her and maybe this was one of those times.
She has left Garrett behind; she can run faster than he can. And he’s not as scared as she is so maybe she did only hear Grant’s voice in her head and not out loud.
The storm that just passed didn’t wait until afternoon, had popped up out of nowhere from the other side of the mountain. She and Garrett didn’t even have time—
She races around a boulder so big she can’t see over it and finds something lying on the ground ahead of her on a bare spot encircled by stubby bristlecone pines. She has no idea what it might be. It is black and little trails of smoke rise off it into the damp air. But she doesn’t have time to gawk at weird things right now. She has to get back to the chalet. If Grant has been calling her, that means her parents have returned early from rock hunting! Which means she and Garrett are in big, big trouble.
As she gets closer, she catches a whiff of the black thing. It smells like burned hair. And it looks burned, too. Blackened like a hot dog. That’s what it looks like, a blackened hot—
The world slows as Gabriella slows. The black thing isn’t a hot dog. It’s a giant doll. A doll bigger than she is! A burned-up doll. Now she can see the form of legs and body and … the clothes are stretched tight on it, like the doll’s a balloon that’s been blown up too big.
She stumbles over a shoe on the ground. Blackened and smoldering. It’s an Air Jordan like Grant’s.
She stops running there, at the shoe. And her eyes are dragged to the doll’s bare feet, so puffed up they’re round on the bottom and she thinks, “Why did they make a doll’s feet like that? You’d never be able to get it to stand up on round feet.” Her eyes travel from the round feet up the too-tight, burned jeans—split open they’re so tight. And so’s the shirt and jacket. A red jacket like—
The doll’s face is a ruin. The skin is charred black. Not skin! It’s just a doll. Dolls don’t have skin.
Gabriella starts to scream, to shriek. She puts her hands over her ears so she can’t hear. And screams and screams.
There’s the sudden smell of vomit. She didn’t hear it happen because her hands are over her ears and because she’s screaming, but she feels Garrett next to her and knows he’s throwing up.
Then she sees her mother come running down the trail on the other side of the burned doll. She stops so abruptly when she sees it that Gabriella’s father runs into her from behind. She stands totally still, staring, her eyes so huge you can see white all the way around. And then she shrieks, but it’s not a wail like Gabriella’s. It’s a word. It’s the word Gabriella doesn’t want to hear. That’s why she put her hands over her ears, so she couldn’t hear her own mind screaming it. But she can’t not hear her mother. Her mother’s voice is too loud and the word gets into Gabriella’s head in between her fingers.
“Grant!”
The rest of it was only fragments of memories. The world shattered into a million shiny pieces when she saw him lying there. Every time she tried to pick one up to remember it, the sharp edges cut her hands. So she stopped trying a long time ago.
Gabriella turned and looked at Pedro. Tears were welled in his chocolate-brown eyes and the sight of his response to her pain lessoned it somehow. She dropped her gaze again, stared at a spot on the ground where a lone Indian paintbrush grew, the petals blood red dangling from a green stem. Then she pushed ahead. For some reason, it had become terribly important that she finish it. That the first time she had ever spoken about what happened on this mountain almost three decades ago she would tell it all.
As Smokey used to say about playing football, she would leave nothing on the field.
She knew—without understanding how she knew—that her words would land in the same place in Pedro’s heart that they’d come from in hers.
“I screamed until my mother slapped me. It didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel it at all. It just knocked me sideways and bloodied my nose or my lip. I don’t remember which, just that the blood spots were bright red … the color of an Indian paintbrush on my clean white shirt. And I shut up.”
“And I remember Dad came over and tried to pull Mom away, but she wouldn’t let him, fought him. Clawed him with her fingernails.”
She gathered a breath and said it, out loud. It was the truth.
“Mostly, I remember that my mother wailed and my father didn’t make a sound. He didn’t say anything to Garrett or me, never even looked at us. It was like we didn’t exist.”
She waited for Pedro to offer some platitude about how upset her father must have been, both her parents must have been. How they’d just lost their son, they’d been in shock, didn’t know what they were doing. Those were the things she always said to herself. But she didn’t believe them. Apparently, neither did Pedro because he didn’t say them.
What he did say was, “Tell me the rest of it.”
How did he know there was a “rest of it”?
Gabriella couldn’t sit still. She stood abruptly, took two steps down the porch stairs, then stopped and leaned against the railing. Her eyes were pointed at the mountain beyond the meadow, but she saw no further than her own heart.
“There are holes in my memories about that day. I’ve told you all the actual memories I have of when Grant was killed—everything before I found him and after is gone, blocked out, I guess. Garrett remembered more than I did. But it wasn’t until we were older that we realized neither one of us remembered it all. We didn’t have the complete picture until each of us put our pieces out there and we fit them together.”
“My twin brother.” She almost said, “And he’s dead, too.” But she didn’t. If she went there …
“He remembered Dad didn’t speak to us, too, but he also remembered that Mom did. She shrieked at us. He said she didn’t slap me because I was hysterical. She slapped me because she was hysterical.”
They’d been twelve years old when Garrett told her about it, but by then he really didn’t have to. He was merely painting words on a reality they both understood intuitively.
She and Garrett had been loading up boxes for one of their many moves. After Grant’s death, they moved around like nomads. Moved out of the only home the two of them had ever known because her mother said she couldn’t live there, too many memories. They moved again because the second house they picked looked too much like the first. So it went. Eventually, her father lost his job. It was a family law firm; they understood. But after a few years, they had to fill his position. She was sure her father was glad to stay home where he didn’t have to put a pretty face on his shattered life.
Garrett bobbles a box full of books and the contents spill out on the floor. Something falls out of one of the books where it had been slipped between the pages. It is a faded snapshot of Grant. Their parents took hundreds of pictures of Grant—the first on the day he was born and the last two days before he died. She and Garrett have stared at all of them, looked longingly into the depths of them again and again over the years until they can see each one with their eyes closed. In fact, sometimes it seems that Gabriella can’t really remember Grant at all anymore, only the pictures of him, like his face has been erased from her memory and all that remains are the replicas of him—faded images she looks into, searches, looking for … something, but she doesn’t know what.
But this is a photo they’ve never seen. Nothing other than that is remarkable about the picture—just Grant, probably the summer he died, holding a rock and grinning into the camera. What’s unique is that it is a new image, so it’s like opening a tiny window into the past and there stands Grant. And in that first instant, he’s alive. Like you’ve looked up and he’s standing in the room. Gabriella hasn’t stared at this picture so often that repetition has scrubbed Grant’s soul out of the face.
In unspoken unison, she and Garrett sink down on the floor together. They sit silent for a while, taking it in.
“While you were screaming that day, did you hear what Mom said?” Garrett asks.
“Just to shut up. She yelled at me to shut up.”
“She yelled a lot more than that.” Garrett’s face fills with so much pain Gabriella is instantly frightened. She knows that whatever is eating away at his heart is about to be unleashed to attack her heart as well.
Over the years since their older brother died, she and Garrett have come to share an intimacy beyond that special bond only achieved by twins. Each is all the other has. Ships adrift in the sea of their parents’ indifference, the two of them are set apart from the world by their incredible gifts and knit to each other by their common pain. Whatever hurts Garrett will do the same damage to her, too.
“She screamed that she wished the two of us were dead instead of Grant.”
When the storm came up that day, their parents had been much higher on the mountain than Grant. They’d dodged into a protected crevice in the rocks and motioned for Grant to run back to the chalet. When he got there, his little brother and little sister were gone and he went looking for them.
If they hadn’t disobeyed, if they’d done what they were supposed to do and hadn’t gone off to play in the bristlecone pine forest, Grant would still be alive. They have never spoken of that until now.
But Garrett isn’t finished.
“She said she tried to get rid of us, that she would have, but she waited too long and when she went in they wouldn’t do it.” Garrett pauses. “At the time, I didn’t know what an abortion was.” He does now. They both do. And now they both also know that if their mother had gotten what she wanted, they would be dead now. And Grant would be alive.
By that point in the telling, Gabriella was crying, though she didn’t remember when she started to cry or when Pedro had come to her and put his hand gently on her shoulder.
“Our parents vanished after Grant was killed, were never a part of our lives, mine and Garrett’s.” Her voice was thick and tear-clotted, her throat tight. “They weren’t abusive … just absent. They ignored us. Without ever saying it out loud they let us know in a hundred different ways that they’d ended up with two kids they didn’t want and lost the one they did.”
The knot of barbed wire in her throat began to shrink.
“Nothing we ever did mattered.” She let out a sardonic humph sound. “We were prodigies, both of us, and that didn’t mean a thing. Everyone else in our lives was amazed by us, astonished—aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers … but our parents never cared. My mother and father died on this mountain with Grant. Garrett and I raised ourselves.”
It was done. She’d said it all. Tacked words onto thoughts and feelings she’d never given voice before. It was both freeing and heartbreaking.
As soon as she no longer had to keep them in check so she could speak, the tears ramped up into great, heaving sobs that wracked her whole body like small, rhythmic seizures.
Pedro turned her and took her into his arms and held her tight against his broad chest. He smelled clean—his neck like soap, his chambray shirt like starch. It felt good there in his arms. Safe. It seemed to take a long time to cry herself out. When the tears finally dissolved into something like the hitched breathing of a little kid after a tantrum, she pulled away from him, stepped back, instantly embarrassed. And for a moment, she felt empty and alone without his arms around her.
She sniffled and reached up to wipe the tears off her cheeks. As soon as her hand touched the scar, she turned it away from him. But Pedro reached out and gently took her chin, turned her face back toward him and wiped the tears off her cheeks with a handkerchief that had appeared in his hand out of nowhere.
That kind of tenderness from such a strong, rugged man left Gabriella breathless.
Gratefully, Ty skidded to a stop in the dirt in front of the porch, panting, before the moment could turn really awkward. But he saw the tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“I would tell you,” Pedro said, his accent thick, “but theen I would have to shoot choo.”
Gabriella burst out laughing. Incipient hysteria.
Ty grinned while she laughed, a little confused, but didn’t join in.
“One of Mom’s brothers could laugh and it’d make other people laugh, too, even if they didn’t know what was funny,” he told Pedro. “I don’t know which one. But it was Uncle Garrett who caught a green snake down at the creek.”
How did Ty know that?
The boy sighed, disappointed. “I tried, but couldn’t find it.”
“Have you seen the trout in that creek?” Pedro asked. “They are easier to catch than a green snake. They taste better, too. Jim keeps his fishing gear in the closet in the mud room. I could show you how to use it.”
“Really!”
The boy started up the steps toward the back door.
“I do not have time to go fishing today,” Pedro said.
Gabriella watched Ty’s face fall. Smokey was always telling Ty he’d do something with him as soon as he “had time.” Pedro picked up on Ty’s reaction, too.
“And I do not have my gear with me. I did not come up here today prepared to go fishing. I came to invite your family to a party.”
“A party—where?” Ty asked.
“How about I deal with our social calendar and you go inside and wash the creature slime off your hands,” Gabriella said. Ty started up the steps and only paused at her final shot. “And no salamanders-under-the-bed-inshoeboxes, okay? When they die they stink so bad you need a Hazmat suit and a blowtorch to clean the room.”
“Ty,” Pedro said. Ty turned around.
“I will teach you how to fish.” Ty smiled, but it was lifeless. Either he didn’t believe Pedro, or the promise sparked unpleasant memories.
“I think a body surfaced,” she told Pedro when Ty was inside.
Then she explained that Garrett had rented a houseboat on Lake Tionesta one weekend when they were in college. A water patrol boat came by the first night and an officer told them to be on the lookout—that a man had drowned in the lake earlier in the week and his body had not been recovered. The officer explained that it took time for a dead body to bloat and float to the surface.
“Then the officer said, ‘he’s due up today.’”
Pedro wrinkled his nose.
“The phrase ‘a body surfaced’ became code between Garrett and me to describe when something caused one of the rotting memories in our storehouse of dead bodies to float up into our minds.”
Pedro looked at her with such compassion she quickly looked away and changed the subject. “About that party …”
“It is a birthday party at my house, which is in the back of the store. All three of you are invited, and Puppy Dog, of course. The whole town will be there—which is only slightly more people than you can comfortably shove into a Volkswagen bus.”
She couldn’t go, of course. The whole point of coming here was isolation. Making friends wasn’t part of the game plan. Although the people she’d seen in St. Elmo appeared to be of the Louis L’Amour, Larry McMurtry and Farmer’s Almanac persuasion—not horror fiction fans. But people surprised you sometimes. If even one of the Tony Lama boot, Stetson hat–wearing citizens of St. Elmo had ever seen her picture on a book jacket …
But she was surprised to discover how badly she wanted to go, how much she wanted to spend time with Pedro. And how she ached to be in the company of normal people—not wacked-out musicians, money-hungry publicists, or weird groupies.
“When’s the party?”
“Next Saturday night, 7:30.”
Saturday. June 26. A full moon.
That night, Gabriella woke from a sound sleep as if an alarm had gone off in her head. She lay in the dark, stared out the window at stars the size of hockey pucks on the black satin sky and tried to puzzle it out. A fragment of memory, a detail from the horror she’d shared with Pedro that afternoon now itched in her mind like a mosquito bite.
When she told him about finding Grant, she’d described how she slid in a puddle, skinned her knee and soaked the leg of her jeans, how she brushed against a tree limb and drenched the left side of her shirt.
But how could she have been dry?
There had been a monstrous storm. Grant had been out in the pouring rain looking for her and Garrett when lightning struck him.
If she and Garrett had been out in the storm, why wasn’t she soaked? And if they hadn’t been out in the storm … where had they been?