Forcing her anxieties away, she tried to focus on the movie and realized that Jake had been watching her. Like Miri, he had caught her little snuggle and kiss with Niko, but Jake's face was unreadable. She smiled at him and he gave her the too-cool nod that had become his universal response of late and turned back to the TV.
Come on, woman, she thought. Breathe.
The boys hadn't balked at the idea of Niko and Miri staying over, and Miri seemed at ease. It was all going to be fine. The storm raged outside and they were all cozy and warm here in the house. In a little while, when the movie was over, she'd make hot chocolate and take out the cookies she'd baked earlier. Things were going perfectly.
That's what worries me, she thought.
But she nestled herself against Niko and he slipped his arm around her on one side and Miri on the other, and she let herself get lost in the movie again.
When Jake glanced back at them, Allie had a moment of unease, wondering if her cuddling with Niko was bothering him. After a moment, she realized that Jake wasn't even looking at her and Niko. He was sneaking glances at Miri. Lovely Miri, just a year behind him in school. The girl caught him looking and Jake smiled at her. Miri gave him a half shrug, raising her eyebrows as if to say, What are you looking at? Jake rolled his eyes and looked back at the television, and Allie saw a sly, shy little smile appear on Miri's lips for just an instant before vanishing as if it had never been there at all.
Oh, my, she thought. No wonder they don't mind hanging out together.
Jake and Miri were crushing on each other, and neither of them had any idea that the other felt the same. Allie smiled. It was adorable and complicated, all at the same time, but for now she would choose to focus on the adorable part.
The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames and snow pelted the glass. The lights flickered and the television screen dimmed for a moment.
"Oh, no," Miri said.
"We'd better not lose power," Isaac said.
Jake kept his chin in his hands, now. "I kind of like it, actually. Candles and blankets."
Miri shivered. "But it'll be so cold."
"We'll be all right, love," Niko assured her.
"Well," Isaac muttered, "I guess as long as it doesn't go out before the movie's over."
As if he'd given the storm a dare, another gust slammed the house and again the lights flickered. This time, they went out.
Joe Keenan took it slow across the bridge that spanned the Merrimack. The wind off the river whipped snow against his windshield and he gripped the wheel tightly. The snow fell so hard that his wipers could barely keep up with it. Where they didn't reach, a fresh inch had built up on the glass in just the past half hour of his shift. He wanted to turn on the light bar on top of his patrol car, but they weren't supposed to hit the blues without reason, and he didn't want to give anyone reason to bust his balls. Not with six days remaining until he completed his rookie year. The phrase made it sound like baseball, but in your first year on the Coventry PD you were fair game for everything from gentle hazing to practical jokes, and you took the fall for fuckups that weren't rightly yours.
A gust of wind buffeted the car so hard that the steering wheel jerked in his hands.
"Son of a bitch," he said under his breath, wishing he were home with his wife, Donna, watching a movie or even one of her bizarre reality shows.
Not a chance, though. On nights like this, a handful of more-established cops would call in sick-they'd even have a debate about whose turn it was-and every rookie would be out in the damn storm, responding to calls about power lines being down or elderly folks who'd slipped in their driveways, trying to keep up with the shoveling so the sixteen inches of ice and snow that had been predicted wouldn't freeze like concrete.
Bent over the wheel to peer out through his windshield, speedometer dropping under twenty miles per hour, he mentally corrected himself. He'd lived in Coventry his whole life, and in his experience there were no nights like this. His parents and aunt and uncles talked about the Blizzard of '78 with this weird combination of fear and reverence and even fondness, but this storm was starting to rage seriously. Apparently, back in 1978 the blizzard had stalled, the conditions just right to keep it spinning on top of the greater Boston area for days. Tonight's blizzard wasn't likely to hang around that long, but if the sexy, doe-eyed weather girl from channel 5 had been right this morning, it would be remembered with some fear and reverence of its own.
Keenan turned on the heater. He hated to run it because something had broken off or been jammed inside and the blowing air caused an annoying clicking sound, not to mention that some drunk kid had puked in the back the week before and the smell lingered no matter what efforts were made to clean the seat and floor. The heat only made it worse.
"This is bullshit," he whispered, as if someone might overhear, and he glanced at his own blue eyes in the rearview mirror for reassurance. His mirror image agreed with him.
He flicked on his right-turn signal, though nobody was on the road to notice. Coming off the bridge, he saw the gleam of the Heavenly Donuts sign and felt a little spark of happiness in his chest. He desperately needed a coffee. He'd park and sip it for a few minutes and drain away the tension that had built up from all the time he'd spent with a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. He hated driving in storms.
So maybe you don't. Tuck away in a parking lot for an hour. Who'll notice, out in this? And it was true. If he got a call and had to respond, he could do that. But an hour of rest with a big hot cup of Heavenly's coffee would make him more alert and better able to do his job-at least that was what he told himself. Trying to peer through the clear parts of the windshield and the hypnotic swipe of the wipers had him halfway to falling asleep as it was.
The lure of coffee drew him into the parking lot and almost immediately he started having second thoughts. There hadn't been a plow by in a while; there had to be three inches of snow in the lot and more was falling by the minute. What if he fell asleep and got snowed in to the lot? Better to keep moving.
Still … a café mocha would be bliss.
He ran one big hand over his bristly blond buzz cut, hesitating only a second before he slid the cruiser into the drive-through lane, frowning as he spotted a single truck parked in the lot, more than half a foot of snow already accumulated on top of it. Rolling down his window, he waited at the big menu board. A terrible feeling washed over him. Something was wrong, here.
"Hello?" he called.
No answer. Not even static. Troubled, he took his foot off the brake and let the patrol car roll around the corner of the building, tapping the accelerator. But it was only as he rolled up to the window and saw the gloomy shadows inside that he understood the crisis at hand: Heavenly Donuts had closed up early because of the storm. There would be no coffee.
Bummed, Keenan started mentally mapping out his distance to other coffee shops. Coventry had a Starbucks and three Dunkin' Donuts, but the nearest of the four was miles away and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't all have shut down as well. Not that he could blame them: there weren't many customers braving the streets tonight.
With a sigh, he pulled out of the lot, figuring he might as well drive over to the nearest Dunkin', especially considering how quiet his radio had become. During the evening commute he'd responded to five different accidents. It was a part of living in New England he had never understood. These people saw snow every winter, but somehow every summer they seemed to forget how to drive in it.
Now, though, going on ten P.M., pretty much everyone was home safe and sound except for an unfortunate handful, like plow drivers and rookie cops.
Driving along South Main Street, Keenan realized he'd screwed up, so distracted by the unfulfilled desire for coffee that he'd forgotten to clean off the windshield. The wipers were starting to stick, so he hit the lights and started to pull over to the curb, the swirling blue making strange ghosts in the storm and tinting the flakes on the glass.
With a loud crump, the car struck something that rocked it violently to the left. He slammed on the brakes, arms rigid on the wheel, so tense that he was unable to muster a single profanity. His heart thundered in his chest and he felt it in his eardrums and temples-worried for a moment that he might be having a heart attack and thinking about cutting back his Oreo intake-and then the car skidded to a shuddering halt and he exhaled.
He slammed the patrol car into Park.
"Motherfucker," he said, just to assure himself that his capacity for profanity had not suffered any injury.
Popping the door, he climbed out and took in the strange, silent landscape of Coventry under siege by winter. Power lines hung low and heavy. Shop windows were caked with blowing snow. Drifts had begun to form. The blue glow from his light bar spun all around, painting it all in ghostly shapes that waxed and waned without a whisper.
Boots crunching in the snow, Keenan stepped back and scanned the driver's side for damage. Finding nothing amiss, he made his way around the front and was happy to see both headlights in working order. Since the moment of impact he'd been running through a catalog of things he might have hit-parked car, dog, deer, person-but he didn't think it had been any of those. The wet snow had crusted thickly on his windshield, but the wipers were still clearing enough of a span that he would have seen anything as large as that. His headlights and the streetlamps might not cut very deeply into the storm, but they were still working.