“Sarah, help me haul the bottled water into the house,” Mom shouted when I pulled up in my state-issued burgundy Chevy Tahoe and parked next to her old blue Ford pickup, the paint bleached and pockmarked by Texas’s harsh summer sun. Her cap of loose white curls was flopping, and she was wearing jeans and a denim work shirt. Mom had a five-month-old silver F-150 in the garage but refused to use it, afraid she’d scratch the black vinyl bed liner. She also had a red silk shawl I gave her a decade ago, in its original box, in her dresser drawer, waiting for a special occasion that apparently had to be of the magnitude of a presidential inauguration.
“Are you ever going to start driving the new pickup?” I asked as I bent down and grabbed two cardboard cartons of plastic water bottles. With dusk minutes away, the sun rested on the horizon, and the sky shone orange with gold streaks through the pines, as vibrant as strokes from a wide brush thick with coats of oil paint.
“Sarah, I do. I drive it, sometimes. But this old girl’s got a lot of life left in her,” Mom said, gesturing proudly at a truck that had been around for a chunk of my adult life. “I’m going to see what I can get out of her before I pasture her.”
The water was heavier than I’d expected, so I put one case down and then carted the remaining one toward the back door. When I was halfway up the porch, my twelve-year-old, Maggie, less formally known as Magpie, swung open the screen door and held it for us. I trudged in with Mom, carrying two brown paper grocery bags, behind me. “Looks like you’re stocking up,” I said, stating the obvious. “We expecting company?”
“No, a hurricane,” Mom said, her well-lined face weary from what appeared to have been a hectic day. “I’ve got bottled water and fresh batteries. I found a battery-operated radio at Target. That old one we have picks up a lot of static, and I figured we might be out of power for a while, like last time.”
Last time was five years earlier. The thing about hurricanes is that the hurt comes in waves. First there’s the storm itself, fierce winds and torrential rains, like the worst possible thunderstorms, multiplied exponentially, sometimes enduring for twelve hours or more, spawning floods and spinning off tornadoes. Later there’s the aftermath: destroyed homes and businesses, fallen trees, and cleaning up the damage. One of the biggest problems is waiting for the crews to repair downed power lines. Last hurricane, we went without electricity for two weeks.
“What about bigger flashlights?” Maggie asked, wide-eyed, with kind of a nervous smile, one that showed off her new braces with the purple rubber bands. Her mop of thick dark hair framed hazel eyes. The kid had been excited about the storm for days, ever since it popped up on the weather reports. Seven when the last one hit, Maggie didn’t remember the danger and apparently saw the prospect only as a potential adventure.
Still, since the Rocking Horse was eighty-five miles from the Galveston coastline, more than thirty miles northwest of downtown Houston, we wouldn’t catch the brunt of it, not the storm surge or the flooding. Yet even so far from the Gulf, the possible damage from a category three or four wasn’t to be underestimated. We’d been lucky last time, just a minor leak in the stable roof and one shutter blown off a second-floor window. But if Hurricane Juanita turned in our direction, there were no guarantees we would fare as well this time.
“Sorry, dear,” Mom said to Maggie. “The flashlights were all sold out. We’ll use the four we have, but that’s okay. Bobby called, and he found a generator for us. So even if the electric’s out, we should have lights, a couple of ceiling fans, and the refrigerator and freezer working. The bad news is that I could only fill two gas cans. They’re rationing at all the stations. We’ve only got a couple of days’ worth of fuel.”
At that point, I looked up and realized Mom and Frieda, our ranch hand, had already duct-taped Xs across all the house windows, to keep them from shattering into the house if they broke from flying debris. Something bothered me. “While I believe in being prepared, I’m confused. Is the storm headed here? Do we know that?”
“Not for sure, but the weatherman said on the news this afternoon that it looks more like the storm will change direction. He thinks it could hit us!” Maggie said, her voice edged with exhilaration. “And Mom, the longer the hurricane stays out over the water, the stronger it will be when it hits land.”
“Perfect,” I said, sarcasm dripping.
“We just need to keep our fingers crossed that it’ll miss us, but make sure we have everything we need in case it doesn’t,” my level-headed mother advised.
We were back at the truck, and I hoisted the second case of bottled water while Mom grabbed two more grocery bags. “They’re looking at the storm making landfall in a few days, probably sometime late Saturday,” Mom continued, looking perplexed by the entire situation. “Who’d have thought we’d be talking about a hurricane in late October? Why, Saturday is trick-or-treat, Halloween. It’s too late in the season. Guess it’s just that we’ve had such hot weather.” Stating the obvious, since we’d been breaking records all fall, she added, “Doesn’t really feel much like summer has ended.”
Just then Bobby Barker, Mom’s suitor, pulled up. We walked outside again, in time to see the white-haired oil exec with the thick laugh lines around his brown-green eyes brace a piece of plywood like a ramp on his pickup, then slide a red generator off the truck bed. The thing had thick black wheels, so he gripped it by the handles, like a wheelbarrow, and rolled it toward the garage. “Look what I’ve got,” he said, nodding back toward his pickup and a lineup of six fifteen-gallon gas containers. “All full.”
“Well, aren’t you the hero,” Mom said with a half smile. Then to Maggie and me as we walked in the house, low enough so her frequent companion couldn’t hear: “Sometimes there’s a comfort to having a man on the spread.”
An hour later, I’d showered, put on makeup, and dressed in a pair of black slacks, strappy black heels, and a white T-shirt with lace trim that dipped low at the neckline. I was even wearing jewelry, a pair of silver earrings and a chain necklace. I looked at myself in the mirror, long and hard. Up until the last few weeks, life had felt pretty good. Now I had the feeling I was waiting in the wings for someone else to decide my future. The situation with David made me uneasy. It’s not fair, I thought. Life was simpler when I was young. When Bill and I met, we fell in love and married, started a family. Now, with David, both of us came toting heavy baggage.
In the kitchen, stew simmered lazily on the stove, filling the house with a rich aroma. Mom held a long wooden spoon and was giving the thick brew a stir. Eyeing my getup, she asked, “Are you going out with David?”
“I’m not sure, still waiting to hear from him,” I replied. She didn’t say anything, just pursed her lips. We’d had the discussion before, and I knew what she was thinking. Mom has a way of getting her point across without a lot of words, and she’d made it clear that my current situation with David wasn’t to her liking. “Check the horses, will you, Sarah?”
Moments later, the outdoor lights clicked on, powering the strands of small white bulbs that line the corral elm tree’s branches and the top of the surrounding fence. The lights were Maggie’s idea, her way of feeling as if her dead father watched over us. They illuminated my path up the hill to the stable, where a dozen horses, four of ours and eight boarders, munched on oats and hay. I stopped at Emma Lou’s stall to say good night, but Maggie’s black-and-white pinto sized me up, suspicious. I wondered if the scent of bad weather had the mare jumpy. In the next stall, Emma Lou’s colt, Warrior, must not have developed his bad-weather sensors. Six months old, all black and growing quickly, he playfully nuzzled my chest with his long, velvety soft nose.
“Hey there,” I said, pushing him away and laughing. Although I wasn’t sure it would prove true, I added, “I’ve already got a date.”
After closing the stable doors, I walked back toward the garage and climbed the stairs to my combined office and workroom, drawn to what waited high on a shelf. Before long, I’d taken down two boxes. Carefully, one after the other, I removed two small skulls on pedestals. Each wore a mask sculpted from clay, work I’d done six months earlier, attempting to replicate the lost faces of the two unidentified children.
A chemical plant shift worker had found the skeletons while four-wheeling through a field far south of Houston. A macabre scene, the two sets of small remains lay side by side, arms crossed over their chests as if positioned in a coffin. No clothing, nothing to help identify them, had been recovered. After lining up the skulls on my workbench, I stared at my handiwork, memorizing, not for the first time, the faces of two young children. We had so little to go on. Just to determine their sexes, the M.E. had to bake samples of the bones and then add liquid nitrogen to pulverize the chunks. From the powder, he’d pulled the DNA of a boy and a girl.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “Who?”
We had two more bits of information from the M.E.: both children were Caucasian and, based on the development of their joints, between three and five years old. As I’d worked on them, I’d fashioned finely cut features in clay with the lightest of tints. But skin tone, along with nearly everything else, was at best a guess.
“Where are your parents?” I asked, looking into the blue-and-white unseeing plastic globes that were now their only eyes. “Why isn’t anyone looking for you?”
I wondered again if David’s missing boy could be connected. That he was four, about the estimated ages of the dead children who’d found what appeared to be a permanent home in my workroom, troubled me. Then I reconsidered the circumstances and had to conclude that David was right. With the two children in the boxes, no parents had come forward. We’d searched long and hard but found no reports of missing children that even remotely matched their descriptions. We’d run pictures in newspapers across the state and reported them to all the national Web sites, looking for someone to identify them, hoping it would spur memories and bring us names. But nothing. Not a single phone call.
At that moment, my phone rang, and David’s number flashed on the screen.
“Change of plans,” he said when I answered.
“Tell me you found the boy, or that there’s something I can do to help,” I said as I reached out for the first skull, the nameless little girl’s, to put it back in the box. For the time being, I needed to concentrate on cases where I had clues, ones I had a hope of solving. I needed to think about children I might be able to save.
“You must be reading my mind,” David answered.