Storm Force

Unless it’s Bryce, she told herself. Her ex-husband was totally into playing sadistic little mind games with her. He’d proven that over the last few years.

Maybe the whole unexplained visit from the kids was some kind of test, designed solely so that she would fail somewhere along the way. Maybe he was even now plotting some way to take away the meager summer visitation she had with Steven and Hannah.

Panic tore through her and she leaned weakly against the side of the house. She hated feeling helpless, and that was all she was whenever Bryce started playing his games.

After a few minutes, she managed to force the crippling paranoia away and regulate her breathing, then she finished her inspection of the house. She was satisfied she was as prepared as she could be, but the best thing would be if the storm changed course and never came to Everglades City. Looking at the dark skies, she doubted that was an option. They’d just have to survive whatever it handed out.

Kate prepared spaghetti and garlic bread in the same tiny kitchen where her mother had prepared so many meals. They also had salad, which she pointed out to Steven, was a definite healthy choice.

Hannah had two servings of spaghetti.

“I guess you didn’t hurt your appetite today with the McFlurry, did you?” Kate asked.

“Nope,” Hannah agreed. “But you always make the best spaghetti. Not even Consuelo knows how to make spaghetti as good as you.”

Consuelo was the live-in cook.

“Well,” Kate said, “I take that as high praise indeed.” She took up her daughter’s plate as well as her own and put them in the two-compartment sink where she’d already washed, dried and put away the preparation dishes.

Steven added his own, then helped her quickly clear the table without being asked.

“Thank you,” Kate said.

“Sure,” Steven replied. “I knew I couldn’t play video games unless I helped.”

All right, Kate thought, go with it. At least that’s a step in the right direction. “Thank you anyway. It’s nice to have help cleaning up.”

“You should get a maid,” Steven said. “Like we have. Then there’s a lot of things you don’t have to do any more.”

Kate had to agree with that. When she’d been married to Bryce, she’d never had to lift a finger to do a household chore. Some days she missed that. “That may be true, but there’s a lot of things you need to learn to do for yourself.”

“Like clearing the table and washing the dishes?”

“Yeah.”

“Grandpa already knows how to do that. Why do you have him help you with the dishes when he eats with us?”

“Grandpa helps because he wants to help.” That was just one of the things Kate cherished about her dad.

“Why does he help? He already knows how to do all that.”

“Because there are some things you should never forget. Knowing how to take care of yourself is one of them.”

Steven shrugged. “I’d rather have a maid. Clearing the table and washing dishes is boring. Can I be excused?”

“Sure,” Kate said, and wondered again how wide the gulf was going to be between herself and her children as they grew.

Steven turned to go.

“Hey,” Kate said, “wait up.”

At the doorway, obviously in a hurry to get back to whatever game he was playing, Steven looked at her.

Kate turned the water on and let it fill the sink. Steam rose from the hot water. “I’ve got to go out later.”

“Why?”

“I have to make sure the camp sites are taken care of. With this storm coming, the people there are going to need plenty of water and food in case they get stuck out there for a few days. I’ve got Megan coming over.”

“Okay.”

With the storm coming on, Kate would have preferred to have her dad there, but he either wasn’t answering his phone or didn’t currently have service wherever he was. Megan was a seventeen-year-old who worked at one of the bait shops in town. During the summers when school was out, Kate hired her to help run supplies out to clients during heavy bookings.

“At least I can beat Megan,” Steven added, then drifted off back to the bedroom where he was playing.

Kate turned her attention to the dishes, shutting off the water and quickly washing them, putting them in the drainer to dry. Even though Steven looked down at the work, she took a certain sense of pride in it. Washing dishes was necessary and there was a lot of satisfaction in doing it right. With the storm closing in, simple tasks offered a safe emotional harbor.

Megan arrived a few minutes after seven, bundled up in a rain slicker that dripped water. “Wow,” she said. “It’s really getting bad out there. The meteorologists say we should expect some really bad wind, and maybe some flooding. There’s even talk that the storm is going to change directions and hit us now.”

“That’s what I’d heard.” Kate had been watching the news on the living-room television. The storm had already shut down the satellite hookups, but the local channels were still occasionally operational. When that failed, there was the radio. “They don’t know how bad it’s going to get.”

“They never do.”

Kate silently agreed. With the storm changing directions, leaving her clients out in the wilds hunkered down was no longer an option.

Storm season in Florida was always dangerous. Over the years, Everglades City had been flooded a number of times. The Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 had caused storm surges of twenty feet and more, and had killed twenty-five hundred people. Hurricane Andrew had struck in 1992 and devastated the Everglades area. In 1999, Hurricane Harvey flooded a lot of coastal Florida and storm surges of two and a half feet were reported at Fort Myers. The county airport in Everglades City was closed when a portion of the runway was flooded. In 2005, Hurricane Rita became the fourth most powerful Atlantic storm in history, with sustained winds reaching one hundred and eight miles an hour. A month later, Hurricane Wilma caused serious flooding in Everglades City, with wind gusts up to ninety-five miles an hour, and killed seventeen people in the Caribbean before finally exhausting itself.

“Where are the kids?” Megan peered around the house. She was young and slim. Her brown hair reached her waist in the back. She had a few tattoos that her dad didn’t know about yet—she’d confided in Kate—but she was a good person. And good with Steven and Hannah, able to be firm as well as giving.

“Video game and DVD,” Kate said.

“Ah,” Megan replied, smiling. “The ‘stuff that rots their brains.’”

“According to my ex-husband, yes.”

“What he doesn’t know—” Megan said.

The comment made Kate remember the black car that had cruised by the front of her house. There probably isn’t much Bryce doesn’t know, she realized. And she wondered again why her ex would send the kids down with a tropical storm about to hit the coast.

“What about bedtimes?” Megan asked.

“Whatever you think,” Kate said. “Though with the plane flight today, you may find they both go down pretty quickly.” She gathered her storm slicker.

After she’d finished in the kitchen, she’d gone back to her bedroom, taken a quick shower, then she’d dressed in jeans, a black sleeveless T-shirt and her hiking boots, and she’d pulled her hair back through her baseball cap. She didn’t bother with makeup. The storm would only have smeared it anyway.

“Until the storm blows itself out,” Kate added, “keep them in here if they go to sleep or you have to switch over to the generator.”

“Sure.”