At least she was still free to move. He’d carried a roll of duct tape inside with him and she’d expected from the start that he’d use it to bind her hands and, God forbid, seal her mouth. She had enough trouble taking calm breaths right now. Close off her mouth and she shuddered to think what it would be like. He never used it, though, never even tied her hands, as if he’d taken stock and determined her too old and feeble to do harm.
A crazy man pacing the living room should have held her attention, but after a time she found it drifting from Josiah Bradford to the big picture window and the tumultuous clouds blowing in from the west.
Today was going to be special. And not just because of the man with the gun who’d taken up residence in her home. No, today would have been special even without that. The air mass headed this way was unstable, and the ground wet and warm. That meant that as the day built and the heat rose with it, there’d be something called differential heating. A boring term, unless you understood what it did. Differential heating provided lift, allowing that moist, unstable air mass to take on an updraft. And once that started? Storms followed. Yes, they did.
All the basics were in play already today, but the clouds were showing Anne that another variable looked ready to join: wind shear. Specifically, the vertical sort. The stronger that was, the longer the storm front had access to the updraft, and that meant trouble. The banks of dark clouds to the west had an obvious tilt to them, seemed to be leaning forward from the top, a look that indicated high wind shear. Most anyone would notice that tilt, but few would see the secondary motion—a mild, almost undetectable clockwise shifting of the cloud layers. At first she hadn’t been sure because she was distracted by Josiah’s carrying-on, but then she squinted and focused and saw that she was right. The clouds in the lowest level of the atmosphere were turning with those at the bottom of the upper level, and the direction was clockwise. That was called veering. That was not good.
Veering was a form of rotation, and rotation was a hallmark of the supercell storm, the sort Anne had been watching for years. She wished she had the TV or the weather radio on. Ordinarily, she’d have not only reports from the surrounding area but readings on pressure and humidity. Now she was left with only the clouds. That was fine, though—they’d tell her plenty. They’d show her the storm’s development, and the trees in the yard would tell her the wind speed, and through those things alone she’d have a better sense of what was about to happen than most. Right now there were large limbs in motion on the trees and a clear whistling sound as the wind went through the branches and the power lines, which meant the speed was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, up a bit from early morning. The way that cloud front looked, it wasn’t going to end there.
They passed cattle farms and a group of Amish men working beside a barn. The countryside here was rolling as if tossed by an unseen ocean, no flat fields as there were in Illinois and the northern half of Indiana. The terrain here was closer to what you’d find on the south side of the Ohio River, where Kentucky’s rolling bluegrass fields edged into foothills and then became mountains.
Kellen was doing about seventy down the county road, and he jerked his head to the left and said, “That’s where your buddy was killed.”
“This road?”
“Next one down, I think. That’s where his van was set on fire. I drove past it yesterday on my way back into town. I was… curious.”
Something about this knowledge made Eric uncomfortable. Not just considering the man’s death, but that it had occurred so close to where they were headed now. They were driving past low-lying fields and scattered homes and trailers, but in the distance the hills rose blanketed with centuries-old forests. They came into view of an old white church with a graveyard beside it, and Kellen hit the brakes hard. The Porsche skidded on the barely wet surface and they slid past the turn, so Kellen had to throw it in reverse.
“You always drive like this, then it’s a good thing your girlfriend is going to be a doctor,” Eric said. “You’re going to need one.”
Kellen smiled, backing up to the church and then making a left turn. They’d gone just far enough for him to build up his speed again when a sign and a gravel drive appeared to their left and he had to hammer the brakes again. This time he made the turn on one try, bounced them along the gravel until it ended in a circular turnaround.
“Now we got to walk.”
“Where in the hell are we?”
“Orangeville. Population around eleven, but double that if you count the cows. This spot is Wesley Chapel Gulf. We have to hike to get to it.”