was as beautiful as ever, though time had blessed her, at twenty-five, with a more womanly shape and a leaner, more mature face than she’d possessed at twenty-one. Her dark hair was twisted into a careless braid down her back, humidity giving it a hint of curl in the tendrils around her face. She smiled as she handed a volunteer a bottle, and Victor saw she’d fixed the upper left bicuspid she’d broken as a child.
The man he’d seen her with on TV was nowhere around.
Victor slipped from the tent, not yet ready to be seen. He needed to know why she was here. Was she still living in the Buckley area? Surely not. He’d looked for her in vain as soon as he got out of jail.
Who was the man she’d been with, who’d put his arm around her and led her away from the reporter? Her new lover?
Victor wasn’t jealous—he’d never consider sullying himself with her. She’d been an intellectual passion, not an object of sexual desire.
But he hadn’t plucked her out of filth to watch her whore her way around Mississippi, either. He hadn’t schooled her in the classics, filled her formerly dull mind with the precisions of science and the exquisite mysteries of mathematics to watch her throw her knowledge away on frivolous, romantic dreams of marriage and maternity.
She was supposed to be a different sort of creature, dedicated to knowledge and beauty, not a slave to her baser drives and emotions.
Marisol Mendez had been a great disappointment to him.
JAKE COOPER DRAGGED A large piece of aluminum siding away from the remains of what once had been a split-level home. The tornado had ripped it off its foundation and set it back down sideways, what was left of its front door now facing the house next door, which had barely lost a shingle from its roof.
“Tornadoes.” Don, the man helping Jake dig through the rubble, shook his head. “Fickle sons of bitches.”
The warning siren had forewarned residents to go to their places of safety. But little could survive the power of an F5 tornado. Somewhere in the twisted bowels of this split-level house, a family of four had been trapped when the tornado hit. Neighbors thought they’d heard shouts for help earlier, but as morning crept toward noon, whoever lay inside had fallen silent.
There was little heavy-moving equipment available in Buckley, Mississippi, to begin with, and all were in use a few blocks over, where the tornado had flattened three full blocks of homes. Here, the tornado had danced along, touching down with random violence, toppling a house here, sparing one there.
“There’s a bathroom right around here,” Don said as they neared the heart of the house. He grabbed one end of a broken fireplace mantel and tugged. “They’d hunker down there.”
Jake grabbed the other side of the heavy mantel and helped Don haul it aside.
“Need some help?”
At the sound of a new voice, Jake looked up. A few feet away, a stocky man with black hair and weather-beaten features watched them, drenched by the steady falling drizzle.
“You bet.” Don waved the man in. “I’m Don, this is Jake.”
“Cooper,” Jake supplied. “Jake Cooper.”
“Victor Logan,” the stocky man said with a nod.
“We think there are folks trapped in here,” Jake explained as they reached the part of the house still standing. The walls here sagged but held.
“This should be the bathroom.” Don gestured toward a closed door blocked by the remains of a heavy oak wardrobe.
“We need some sort of leverage,” Victor suggested. “Something to wrap around it to haul it out of the way.”
“I have rope in my garage.” Don lived next door in the house that had sustained no real damage. He headed out.
“We need as much as possible,” Victor called after him.
“I don’t know how we can set up a pulley.” Jake gazed at the cracked remains of the ceiling. The exposed beams overhead didn’t look as if they’d hold up if a bird alighted on them, much less take the weight of the wardrobe.
“If the rope’s long enough, we can wrap it around that tree there and get enough torque to move the armoire out from in front of the door,” Victor said.
Jake gave the man a grateful smile. “You an engineer?”
Victor gave him an odd look. “Sort of. How about you?”
“I’m a fishing guide, here for a tournament at Flint Creek Reservoir this weekend. Guess that’s not going to happen now.”
Don came back carrying an enormous coil of sturdy nylon rope. “Think this will be enough?”
Victor looked at Jake through slightly narrowed eyes before taking the rope. “Tie this end to the armoire, while I wrap the other end around the tree.”
Jake helped Don secure the rope around the heavy wardrobe. “You should stay up here and make sure the armoire doesn’t swing into the wall,” he suggested when the rope was secured. “I’ll help Vic out there pull the rope.”
Don nodded his agreement, looking a little sheepish. He was in his late forties and a little on the heavy side; he was already breathing hard and looking worn out from their exertions. Jake was young and fit, and though Victor was at least ten years older, he looked trim and strong, as if he worked out every day.
Jake joined him at the tree, where he was looping the rope around the oak’s sturdy trunk. “We ready?”
Victor gave a nod. “Don’t let the rope snag on the bark.”
“Here.” Jake took off his windbreaker and wrapped it around the trunk of the oak, tying the arms together to hold it in place and provide a flat, snag-free surface for the rope.
Victor gave him an approving nod and drew the rope across the windbreaker. “On the count of three.”
On three, Jake started pulling his end of the rope, digging his feet into the ground. Two days of rain had softened the lawn, making it hard to stay planted without slipping, but Jake fought for balance and held on. A couple of feet in front of him, Victor grabbed the rope and added his strength.
The rope began moving, slowly but steadily. Within a minute, Jake heard Don call out for them to stop. “It’s out of the way! We’re in!”
Jake ran back into the house. Don had the door open and was staring into what was left of the bathroom. A gaping hole above let in rain and light to illuminate the debris scattered all around the bathroom, including an enormous jagged slab of mirrored wall that had come to rest against the tub.
“Bill, are you in there?” Don called from the doorway.
“We’re okay, I think,” came a man’s voice. “A few broken bones, some cuts and scrapes, but we’re all still kickin’. Just help us get out of here!”
Grinning with relief, Jake looked at Don. “I think the paramedics are all down the road, but the teams at the staging area can reach them by radio—you could go down there and let them know
