The surface of the little desk was empty except for the things she needed most: her pills, divided into one of those seven-day containers, a wicker basket for mail that was generally empty (nobody wrote Anne much these days), and one of her weather radios. This one wasn’t but a scanner; the ham radio was down in the basement. There were times that she wished to have it upstairs, close at hand, but she wouldn’t ever allow herself to seriously entertain such a notion. The shortwave needed to be in the most stormproof room of the house, and that was the basement. Concrete block walls and only two small windows up at the top of the western wall, right at ground level. When a big one blew in, the basement was the place to be, which meant that was where the radio needed to be.
Anne had been a weather spotter for decades now, and it was a job she took seriously. All the gauges in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if you couldn’t make contact, and in bad storms the phone lines went down. The radio in the cellar was nearly thirty years old, but it still worked just fine. It was an R. L. Drake TR-7, built by the first—and best—company that ever dealt with ham radio. Harold had bought it for her and set up a powerful antenna and showed her how to use it. He’d never been one who thought things like machinery and electronics were beyond the grasp of women, a trait that made him rare for a man of his time. It hadn’t been long until she understood the Drake better than he did.
Her legs felt steady beneath her now, tingling with circulating blood, and she took her hand from the desk and moved for the door. The moonlight left a white streak across the floorboards, almost like a path in the darkness, and she followed it out of the bedroom and into the living room, crossed that, and opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, still wondering what in the world had her up and wandering. Then she heard the chimes jingling, louder and faster than they had that evening, and she knew what had stirred her from sleep—the wind.
It had risen while she slept, was still blowing out of the southwest but was firmer now, really pushing. Had itself some confidence again.
Shuffling out to the end of the porch and taking the rail in her hands, she breathed the air in and shivered a little in its grasp. There was a barometer on the porch—there was a barometer in every room of the house—and it told her the pressure was 30.16. A rise from this afternoon.
The shift didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. Yesterday the gauges told her it would be another hot, peaceful day with steady pressure. But what her mind told her, a mind seasoned by eighty-six years of study and experience, was that it had been too hot and still, and for too long.
So maybe this made plenty of sense. She just didn’t know what was coming next. The wind had blown up unexpectedly, and that was fine, but what was chasing on its heels?
13
THE SUN CAME INTO his room early, and it came in hot. Eric woke squinting against it, feeling the warmth on his face, and almost before he was fully coherent he knew the headache was back.
Back like a bastard, too, a motorcycle gang passing through town and revving engines. He groaned and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands, pressed hard into his temples with his fingertips. This was as bad as any hangover headache he’d ever had, and it wasn’t from a hangover.
When he was on his feet, he took three Excedrin with a glass of water, not feeling overly optimistic—the Excedrin hadn’t been effective yesterday—and then showered in the dark. Light seemed to be a problem. When he was out of the bathroom, he kept the lights off and the curtains pulled, then put on a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved button-down made from some sort of khaki-style material. It was a good-luck shirt. He’d worn it one afternoon in Mexico, where they were shooting a Western that flopped at the box office despite a terrific script and strong cast, and he’d gotten some of his all-time favorite film that day. The director on that one had been an absolute joy, one of the guys who was more focused on supervising the whole production than on telling his cinematographer how to do his job. Those were the directors of Eric’s dreams, guys who trusted you and let you shoot, and he’d found far too few of them in Hollywood. Particularly after he’d broken Davis Vassar’s nose.
Vassar was the biggest name Eric had ever worked with—and a man who’d made certain that he was also the last big name that Eric ever worked with. They’d hit it off well enough at the start, the project something Eric truly liked, an on-the-road thriller involving a hitchhiker who witnessed the execution-style killing of a journalist. It was a great story, gripping as hell, and the day Eric was hired, he bought four bottles of champagne and drove with Claire up to a beautiful inn near Napa and they had sex five times in the first twelve hours. Wild, playful, laughing, gasping sex. Victory sex.