“Peter!”
He stepped into the comforting glow of the hallway after nine hours of heavy labor, closing the front door of the Cliff Road house firmly behind him to shut out the gusting wind. For a second, he thought he was hearing things. “George?”
And there she was—his sister, with her shining cap of dark hair and her expressive hands, moving like a whirlwind from her perch on the sofa to throw her arms around him.
“You came early!” he crowed.
“I’m not stubborn, like our mother,” she retorted, stepping back to study his face. “I want to be here to see you get married—and by Thursday, planes and ferries could be canceled. I changed all our flights yesterday and pulled the kids out of school. They’re ecstatic. How are you? Nervous? Excited?”
“Exhausted,” he said. “It’s a bitch trying to secure a cranberry bog from a hurricane.” He and Rafe had managed to find the last stray sheep by two o’clock that afternoon, then spent the remaining hours of daylight flooding the bog so they could wet-harvest cranberries. A partially filled container truckload of fruit now sat securely in the main barn. If the weather allowed, they’d harvest some more tomorrow. Small victories, Peter thought.
“This storm’s timing is dreadful,” Georgiana murmured sympathetically. “You have help at the farm, yes?”
“I do.” There was no point in trying to explain how he’d spent the past few days; Georgiana managed four children’s complex lives and schedules. She was the master of her own multitasking and had no sympathy to spare for other people’s.
“Hey, Uncle Pete,” Trey Whitney called out from the kitchen. Trey was the eldest of George’s four kids, a freshman in high school, far too cool to hug Peter. He wore shorts and an Emirates soccer jersey and appeared not to have cut his hair since they’d last met in August. A fistful of chips and a container of salsa were clutched in Trey’s hands. “Merry’s ordered pizza for dinner!”
I’m sure she has, Peter thought with sudden amusement. Arriving home from work to find six more people in the Cliff Road house, Merry would have scrambled on the food front. George had clearly forgotten to telegraph the change in the Whitney travel plans before she landed on Nantucket. Peter wondered if there were any sheets on the guest beds yet. Never mind, he chided himself. George knew where everything was kept; she spent six weeks in the house every summer. Maybe she’d even get the kids to make their own beds, in exchange for the extra days off from school.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, throwing his arm around his sister. “It feels like a party. I take it Mother refused to change flights?”
“Of course.” George squeezed his waist and led him toward the kitchen. “I tried to persuade her. A full ten minutes on the phone. She’s balking at paying change fees, if you can believe. Sniffed about how tiresome it is to be forced to fly commercial. Come say hello to Hale. He’s opening a bottle of something red that goes with pizza.”
“I got the Radleigh boys to help us tomorrow after school,” Jack told Dionis as she joined him in the kitchen.
Ryan and Jake Radleigh, sixteen and eighteen, were native Nantucketers and the Mathers’ summer help.
“Tell them to skip school entirely,” she suggested, accepting a bowl of Jack’s beef stew. “They can board up windows while we transport people.”
Dionis had showered and changed and her hair was freshly washed; her tired muscles ached less now that she’d run gallons of scalding water over them. She sat down at the table, famished and grateful for the shared house and her father’s cooking.
“We’ve got sixteen folks, by my count, to ferry over here tomorrow.” Jack took his usual chair across the table. “If you handle one skiff and I take the other, we should be able to get everybody and their luggage off by early afternoon.”
Spoon in hand, Dionis did a mental headcount. Seven Tuckernuck houses still had people in them, and Jack was right—the total number to evacuate was about sixteen. The skiffs could each handle four or five passengers with all their luggage. Round trip between Madaket and Tuckernuck would take an hour, with rising surf.
“We can head back in the afternoon, if the weather holds, with another load of plywood,” her father persisted, “and finish the windows as long as the daylight lasts. Current landfall forecast is late tomorrow night, early hours of Thursday. But the location has shifted north. It’s headed straight for us, and it’ll be a Cat Three when it arrives.”
She choked on a lump of beef and stared at him, struggling to clear her throat. Cat Three. Insane winds and huge storm surge and damage to every bit of housing all over the island—nobody would escape, nobody would be safe. There were only degrees of danger now. Anxiety washed from the back of her neck to her groin in a warm wave.
“The rain will start by morning.” Jack shoved his bowl away distractedly, his mind elsewhere. Then he rubbed his left bicep again. He had been up on three different roofs with power tools and a hammer that afternoon.
“Do you want some ice for your arm?” Dionis asked.
“Nah. I’m just out of ibuprofen.”
“I’ll run to The Rotary and get you some.”
“It’ll pass,” he said irritably. He hated her fussing. “Relax. You’ve done enough today.”
God knows that was true. But a Cat Three? Dionis carried their bowls to the sink and ran some water into them. We’re responsible. For all of it. “What about Northern Light? Is anyone still out there?”
“How would we know?” he joked. “Not like they’re paying us to keep tabs on them. We’re too low-rent, Di.”
Northern Light was Tuckernuck’s showplace, shockingly new. It commanded twenty acres and eleven thousand square feet. Seven bathrooms, a wine cellar, and personal gym. A media room and restaurant-grade kitchen; three terraces for entertaining; a swimming pool fed with saltwater, piped up from the ocean. A three-bedroom guest cottage. A helipad, and a horse barn tucked up against the solar array that powered the place.
Nothing like it had ever been seen on Tuckernuck, and the owners didn’t mix with anybody else on the island. Todd Benson was a star NFL quarterback. He and his supermodel wife, Bianca, flew in their friends and staff on helicopters when they wanted to party.
Northern Light had an electronic gate across its quahog shell drive—the only graded driveway on Tuckernuck. Dionis hadn’t been able to get near the door with her flyer yesterday. She and Jack weren’t the estate’s caretakers; the Bensons hired their own people for maintenance. They owned their own powerboat, too, and ran it back and forth to Nantucket’s restaurants and clubs at will. But it was Jack who’d brought the Bensons’ two palominos, Honeybear and Afterglow, across Madaket Sound on his barge the previous June. Bianca Benson liked to ride bareback along the sand in a bikini. Todd liked to photograph her while she rode. Jack and Dionis had met the horse trailer and groom at Jackson Point and delivered them safely to the electronic gate.
Dionis hadn’t seen any of them since.
“I hate those dicks,” she said now.
“Di.” Jack’s voice disapproved.
“They have no sense of history. No idea where Tuckernuck comes from, or why it’s precious. They just want to gut the place for their own pleasure.”
“I left a message about the hurricane with Todd Benson’s personal assistant in New York.” Jack lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It’s the only contact number I’ve got.”
“And?”
“She texted me back. Said it was all good—the Bensons have no plans to fly in this weekend.”
“What about the horses?” Dionis demanded. “And that woman who takes care of them?” What was the groom’s name—Mandy? Maddie?
“Must’ve hired some other barge to float them off,” Jack said carelessly. “Certainly didn’t hire mine.”
“Dicks.” Dionis paused. “So—not our circus, not our monkeys?”
“Exactly,” her father replied.
Howie Seitz changed into jeans and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt before heading to Stop & Shop that evening. Over the past two days he’d felt the hurricane turn its head slowly and bear down on Nantucket as unswervingly as a heat-seeking missile, sweeping everything from its path. He had gone from door to door through half-deserted neighborhoods, ordering the holdouts to evacuate as soon as possible, and directed traffic for hours in front of the Town Pier, where boat owners were still hauling vessels out of the harbor. He’d stacked walls of sandbags around the diesel substation that would probably be inundated within hours. Taken last-minute first-aid training at the fire station, with an emphasis on CPR. Set up cots in the high school gymnasium, and blocked off all the parking areas that were sure to flood on New Whale and Water Streets.
He was yawning his head off now and wanted nothing more than to sack out in front of his TV. But tonight, along with the rest of the island, Howie needed to buy bottled water, batteries, beer, and sandwich meat. That and a few bags of chips should get him through the duration. He circled the Stop & Shop parking lot for ten minutes before finding a parking space for his battered Nissan. Everyone was hunting groceries before Nantucket’s roads were too flooded to navigate.
Howie lived in a one-bedroom apartment over a garage off New Mill Street, not far from the Quaker cemetery—a caretaker’s quarters, behind a summer home that was currently empty. The owners figured an off duty cop made a great tenant. He had only three windows, but hadn’t had enough time or daylight to board them up yet. Maybe tomorrow, he thought. If there was any plywood left at Marine Home.
He’d parked his shopping cart in front of the market’s deli counter and was checking his cell phone, one hand in the pocket of his jeans, when somebody touched his shoulder. He turned and stared straight into Dionis Mather’s dark blue eyes.
“Nice haircut,” she said lightly. “I wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Hey, Di.” He tucked his phone away, feeling heat rise suddenly to his chest and linger there. You look tired, he wanted to blurt out. Are you sleeping okay? But he said only, “How you doing?”
“Fine. You?”
“Fine, I guess.” He shrugged. Lonely, actually. Pissed as hell, to be frank. Still wondering why you ghosted me. Overhead, the supermarket lights swayed, and acoustic ceiling tiles lifted in a sudden gust of wind. Howie and Dionis both looked up.
“Man. Weather’s crazy, right?” he said.
“Yeah.” She met his eyes. “This is, like, the twelfth time I’ve been here for supplies in the past thirty-six hours—when I’m not out in the middle of Madaket. Wind’s already hitting thirty knots on the water. Skiff’s getting harder to control.”
Howie understood, suddenly. “You and Jack tying down Tuck’s loose ends?”
“We’ve gone through a lot of hammers and nails. Boarding up windows and sliding glass doors. Tomorrow, we have to get the last few clients off. And cross our fingers.” She held up her palms, which were swollen and red. “Mine are shot from lifting plywood.”
Howie took her right hand in his and gently smoothed the palm. “Wish I could help you.”
Dionis drew her hand away. “I’m sure you’re just as slammed.”
He laughed, harshly. “I spent the day being ordered around by a buddy. Scott Tredlow. He’s the PD’s emergency management coordinator—and man, does he like to coordinate.”
“I know Scott.” Dionis mustered a smile. “He called my dad to ask who was left out on Tuckernuck. We told him we had it handled.”
“Remember his name, in case you don’t.”
“I will—if things go to hell, and I need help.”
Howie was about to tell her that the only name and help she would ever really need is his, if only she’d see it, but said instead, “Get those last folks off as soon as possible. This storm’s path is looking pretty unpredictable. First, they were saying landfall would be Rhode Island, now they’re saying they’ve got no idea, but it could hit here and by then it’ll be a Cat Three. The Coast Guard issued a small-craft warning this afternoon—”
“You think I don’t know that?” Dionis interrupted. “I listen to the NOAA weather band and Channel Twelve all day, Howie.” Channel 12 was the Coast Guard’s VHF frequency for marine broadcasts. A wave of irritation and weariness swept over Dionis’s face. She rubbed her forehead, her gaze dropping. “Sorry. I’m just tired. And to think I wasted years getting a master’s in history. I could be teaching AP European at Exeter right now.”
Howie bit back a few words. He knew all about Dionis’s dreams. And how much it cost her to postpone them.
“Anyway, I just ran in for ibuprofen,” she added lamely. “Jack’s pulled a muscle or something. His left arm hurts so bad he’s having trouble lifting it.”
“That can’t be good. If he can’t hold onto you, how’s he going to keep you in line?”
Dionis smiled faintly. “I seem to be the only one who’s worried. Jack’s a stoic, you know that.”
Howie hesitated, then thought, Fuck it. He had nothing more to lose.
“I’m done here, Di. But I was going to stop by Lola’s.” He brushed her shoulder tentatively. “Come with me. You look like you could use a drink.”