“Errol, Skeet,” he barked, putting all the authority he could muster into his voice. “I need you two to grab the hatchet from the back and a saw from the wooden box and cut those struts—you see them? The ones that attach the porch to the house?”
“Skeet can do that,” Errol said. “I’ll use the saw and cut the big support post—see? It’s not pulling out like the others.”
“Shit,” Theo said, and he figured the kids should get a medal because not one of them mentioned the swear word, which was fine because he figured they were all about to say more of them.
“What do you need me to do?” Maisy asked anxiously.
“You know the ice chest with all our emergency supplies in it and the bungee cord?” he asked, thinking as quickly as he could.
“Yeah?”
“Move that and as many of the foil blankets and wool blankets as you can to the porch, then start knocking all the planters off it. It’s big enough for the five of us, but it might not float with all those damned planters.”
He felt a little sick inside, ordering these nice kids to massacre this poor lady’s house, but in the time it had taken him to take stock of the situation, the water had gotten to the second step.
Imelda had the right of it.
Theo reached inside the Tahoe and pulled Imelda up on the radio. Yeah, he had a phone in a Ziploc bag in the pocket of his windbreaker, but cell service out here wasn’t great on the best of days.
This was not the best of days.
“Imelda!” he barked. “Water’s coming fast. We’ve got ourselves a raft, and I’m getting Thelma out now. Get someone out here quick—we’ve got no idea how long this thing’s gonna hold together.”
“On the radio now,” Imelda said. “Hang tight, Theo. Go with God.”
The radio clicked off, and Theo slogged up the porch steps to pound on Thelma’s door, not wanting to talk about his relationship with God at the moment. Since his mother had passed away, he and the big sky daddy had been pretty damned distant, but that wasn’t anybody’s business but his own.
“Mrs. Andreas? Darlin’? How you doing in here?” He took a chance that the old girl had left her door unlocked and thrust it open—and then thanked all the gods at once. “Thelma Andreas, put that down! It’s me! Theo. Kim Wainscott’s boy!”
Thelma, who was in her eighties if she was a day, paused in the act of loading her ancient rifle and allowed the muzzle to droop to the floor.
“Theo? What in the hell are you doing here? There’s vandals attacking my porch! Can’t you hear them?”
“Yeah, Thelma. They’re the rec-center kids. They’re breaking the porch off from the house—”
“Why?” she wailed. “Why would they do that? I thought we were supposed to help each other! I needed your help getting Stupid to safety. Damned idiot cat took off through the hole in the roof last night!”
Theo followed her anxious gesture and saw that, sure enough, the hole in the roof, which was right near the chimney in the low ceiling, was over the fireplace mantel. If Stupid had wanted to go gunning for the hills through the hole in the damned sky, well, the enormous dark gray striped Maine coon cat would have had ample opportunity to have done so.
“Thelma,” Theo said helplessly, “you know those cats can swim. I’m sorry he’s gone, honey, but while you’ve been holed up in here, the dam broke. We’ve got maybe five minutes before your whole house is going to be underwater.”
Thelma stared at him. “Well, shit,” she said after a moment. “What do we do?”
“You got any supplies?” he asked. “Water? Soup? Warm blankets? We’ve got an ice chest with water, Gatorade, and first aid, but—”
“I got a box of those foil packet things,” she said, sounding lost. “Two cases of granola bars, some bleach tablets, and a five-gallon bottle of water. My son brought them out the last time he tried to convince me to move to town.”
Theo felt a bit of hope wash over him. “Well, that’s the first good news I’ve had all day. Sweetheart, you go get your photos in a trash bag to keep ’em dry and tell me where to get the supplies. If your porch is as buoyant as I think it’s gonna be, we may be stuck there a while.”
IT worked. God, he was surprised it worked.
By the time he’d hustled Thelma out of the house with a trash bag full of her dearest possessions, Maisy had loaded the food and water onto the porch and tied it with the bungee cords he’d packed in the ice chest. For the fifty-thousandth time in his life, he gave thanks to his father’s military training and all the contingency plans he’d been braced for. Those foil blankets didn’t just retain body heat, they were fireproof. The first aid kit had everything from sutures to antibiotics. There were wool blankets working as pads for the ice chest and a coil of rope to hold the boxes of food, and if he counted the garden hose that was wound up on one of those plastic frames with the handle, that made two coils of rope, and they were in business. Theo set Thelma down on the ice chest and double-checked the kids’ work to make sure the porch was completely unsecured. The water by this time was an inch or two under the struts that held the whole deck together, and Theo had all of thirty seconds to close his eyes, cross his fingers, and wish he believed enough to talk to God and ask him for the damned contraption to float.
He shouldn’t have closed his eyes. The porch gave a lurch and a groan and suddenly there was nothing sturdy or solid in the world.
The boys both said, “Whoa!” and Maisy screamed. Theo’s eyes shot open and he whipped his head in her direction.
“Girl, you make that sound again and we’re tying you to the garden hose and hauling you behind us, you understand? This is no time and no place to scream like that unless you are well and truly hurt.”
Maisy stared at him, eyes huge and hurt in her pinched, pale face, and he wanted to kick himself. “Sorry, Theo,” she said in a small voice, and he took a deep breath and tried to get his own fear under control.
“It’s okay, darlin’. I shouldn’t have yelled. You surprised me is all.”
He got a weak smile in return and felt like a first-class heel. He knew she’d been stoking a wee crush on him over the past year. He didn’t lose his temper often—and very rarely with kids. He’d been part of the Sticky community for his entire life. Big John hadn’t wanted to have a family in the city, so he’d come to the most remote and beautiful place he could possibly think of and brought his family with him.
Of course, Theo knew John and Kim had expected more children. His mother had almost died delivering him, though, a phenomenon many men denied still happened. Big John had gotten a vasectomy when Theo was only a month old, because for all his blustery, larger-than-life faults, Big John could not ever be accused of not loving his wife and his son for exactly who they were.
So Theo had grown up in this small community and knew many of the two thousand residents by name. He’d gone to college and gotten a degree in management, then come back to the mountains and asked Imelda if he could help her run the rec center. Imelda—in her sixties and damned ready to retire—had been helping him keep their community busy, clean, and healthy for the last two years. She’d claimed she only had one more year to go, and then she was going to leave Theo to it, and Theo had—at twenty-four—pretty much resigned himself to being the aging bachelor of Sticky.