in a heartbeat. But Damon would probably never see her again. There was nothing she could do about that. They had to leave. Pulling out her cell she intended to call Mason, the cop who was waiting for her outside in the squad car, to ask for his help in forcibly removing the children.
She had no service.
And when she went to the front door to signal him, she quickly closed it again, as though protecting Damon from seeing the uprooted tree, the smashed car, was of utmost importance. The door latched, but she couldn’t lock it. There was a gaping hole where the lock had been.
Officer Mason might still be alive. And if he was, he surely needed medical assistance.
The street had been strangely empty. Where were the emergency personnel? Neighbors? She couldn’t leave the kids. And she couldn’t pick up Damon and the baby and carry them out.
Besides, where would they go? To the street? The officer in the car hadn’t been safe there.
“I’ll be right back,” she said to the boy, even though it was completely clear that he didn’t intend to go anywhere. Slipping out into the eerie grayness, she pushed forward against the wind and made her way down to the car. The tree lay diagonally across it. She hauled open the front passenger door. Mason, slumped against the steering wheel, was unresponsive. His legs were pinned by the tree. But he was breathing. Grabbing the microphone from the police radio, she gave the dispatcher a hurried update as to their location and his condition and then, knowing there was no more she could do, took one last look at the mercifully unconscious Officer Mason. She hollered at him to hang on and pushed her way back up to the front door.
Did folks uptown know how badly they were being hit? No one had expected the storm to reach shore.
Another burst of wind struck the side of the termite-infested wooden building as she leaned against the front door, forcing it to close, hoping the rickety latch would hold. Heart pounding, she found enough calm to say, “You can’t stay here, Damon. It’s not safe.” She tried to reason with the small-boned, tough-skinned boy whose drug-addict mother had been arrested that morning at the end of a three-day binge in a seedy motel. The place was in a neighboring village, and she’d been with a dock worker who was new to town. “You have no money. No way to buy food and diapers for Kayla.”
After her briefing on the case that morning, she’d opted to come in alone to get the boy. She’d thought keeping the police out of the picture was in Damon’s best interests. That was before the storm hit.
“We been doin’ just fine.” The boy’s look was hard with only the merest hint of uncertainty in those vivid blue eyes. Mary wondered how long he’d been virtually alone with the baby girl who appeared to be healthy—in spite of having been born to a user.
Wind hurled and glass broke. The window in the bedroom? Was the one in this room next? She had to get the kids to safety.
“Is there a basement in this place?”
“Just in the buildin’ next door.”
“Then we have to go there. Now.”
“Uh-uh.”
Damon had softened earlier when she’d asked him about Kayla. He liked to talk about his baby sister. While her gaze searched for any safe harbor at all, her mind scrambled for conversation that might lure the boy into a sense of cooperation.
“Your mom said Kayla’s had her checkups. Is that right?” If they didn’t leave immediately, the baby’s health didn’t matter. And neither did Damon’s. Or hers.
“‘Course. At the free clinic. I took her myself.”
And the county clinic hadn’t notified child Protective Services that a newborn was in the care of a young boy?
Damon said something else, but she couldn’t hear him as the storm’s intensity increased.
“Damon, we have to get out of here!” Fighting the instincts that told her to run, Mary listened to her training—to her heart—and knew that she would not desert these children. No matter what.
Which meant she might only have a few minutes to get through to the boy. Or die with them.
A burst of wind slammed the building so hard, she felt it shake. Diving for the boy, shielding the baby with her body, Mary wrapped her arms around Damon and shoved them toward the tiny bathroom in the center of the apartment. Pushing them into the tub, she climbed in with them, lay down and cradled the children against her. Kayla was crying. She couldn’t worry about that at the moment.
“I lied to the doctor,” Damon yelled, but she could hardly hear him.
“It’s okay,” Mary yelled back, praying silently for their protection. For the children, at least, to be saved.
“I told him Mom was sick with the flu. And when he said he had to see her, I called a girl I know next door to come and pretend to be her. She’s been going with me to all Kayla’s checkups.”
The storm raged. The baby cried. The boy yelled. And Mary thought about Bill Mendholson. She’d never told him she loved him.
She wished she had.
“It’s clearly a storm-related accident.” Bill, standing with the coroner inside the marina store, stared out at the potential crime scene down by the docks, hoping that the older couple whose RV had rolled over had never known what hit them. So far, they were the only reported casualties.
Sam Pawloski, Comfort Cove’s coroner, nodded.
“Sorry to call you out in this weather, Detective,” Jack, the street cop who’d met Bill at the scene, muttered. Jack was a new cop. Maybe still a bit excitable. “At first glance, with the bodies in different places, it looked like we had a mess on our hands.”
Their voices were raised to be heard over the sound of wind raging outside. So far that was all there was to the storm. Dangerously high winds. No rain. No thunder or lightning.
Just a hell of a lot of debris. “You got the mess part right,” Sam said.
Pulling off his glasses, Bill wiped them and put them back on, but nothing looked better.
The parking lot was filled with branches, bark, a sail, a couple of life vests, a few shingles, pieces of metal and trash, rope, a cardboard box and an empty beer case. Candy wrappers and paper litter skated across the pavement.
“I’ve seen worse,” Manny, the weathered old marina owner and fish dealer, said from the counter behind them. “Good thing no one was out on the water.”
“I hate to think how much damage there’s going to be to the boats,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Though he’d grown up in Comfort Cove, Bill didn’t know any of the fishermen personally. He knew of one, though. Chris Talbot had been peripherally involved in one of Ramsey Miller’s missing child cold cases the previous month. Talbot was now engaged to Emma Sanderson, sister to the long-missing toddler, Claire Sanderson.
Claire had been ruled out as a victim
