Grits and Glory Read online

“You need a doctor,” she said.

  “Probably—but not as much as Carlo.”

  Ann guided him toward a chair in the small lobby. “You rest. I’ll radio the emergency command center.”

  “I don’t want to drip blood on your upholstery.”

  “That chair has survived a dozen Vacation Bible Schools. It’s seen far worse than a few drops of blood.”

  Sean sat down. He heard the radio crackle, heard Ann say something, but couldn’t make out what she said.

  He felt Ann shake his shoulder. “Huh?”

  “They told me to keep you awake,” she said.

  He pushed himself to his feet. “I’d better look after Carlo.”

  “You did that by walking from the parking lot to the church.” She pushed him back down. “When you rang the bell, I was already at the side door. I heard the steeple fall and I wanted to see what happened.”

  “What happened is that it hit our van, and some big pieces of wood plowed through our windshield.” Sean recalled the noise of glass breaking…

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Ann said. “Keep talking.”

  “Carlo and I were sitting up front, watching the storm. I’d lowered the outriggers, so the wind wouldn’t tip the van…”

  “And?”

  “There were two strong gusts. The first one knocked out the electricity. The second made a big ‘boom,’ glass and wood flying everywhere. Carlo got the worst of it. He was in the passenger seat.”

  Ann said something into her radio, but he only caught one word: paramedic.

  “You’re drifting,” Ann said. “Stay with me.”

  “I want apologize on behalf of the Storm Channel.”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “You won’t be on television tonight. Our satellite antenna is smashed. No more live broadcasts from Glory.”

  “And here I went to all the trouble of acquiring this soaking wet look.”

  Sean gazed at Ann. Her hair was drenched and makeup had run down her cheeks.

  “You’re pretty.”

  “Now I’m sure that you need medical attention.”

  Sean knew he had chuckled, but he couldn’t remember what was funny.

  He felt another shake. “Talk some more. Tell me about Gilda.”

  “There’s not much to tell. She zigged to the east.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sean couldn’t remember. He told himself to focus. His thoughts abruptly sharpened. “Gilda’s track shifted, so Glory’s out of the bull’s-eye. The storm’s weaker southwestern quadrant is blowing through town. The last time I checked, the wind speed was down to eighty-five miles per hour.”

  “Glory won’t be flattened?”

  “Nope. There’ll be less wind damage and a much smaller storm surge.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” Ann said.

  “We weather forecasters try to please.”

  He watched Ann step away from him when a man dressed in yellow magically appeared at his side.

  “This must be our patient,” the man said.

  Ann nodded. “Sean, meet Dave. He’s an emergency medical technician.”

  Sean tried to look at Dave, but all he could see was a bright light shining in his right eye.

  “He might have a concussion,” Dave said. “I’ll transport him to the hospital, too. Trouble is I can’t use a gurney right now because the rest of the team is working on Carlo Vaughn.” The light blinked off. “Sean, do you think you can walk to the ambulance?”

  “Absolutely!” Sean began to stand—and staggered into Ann.

  “Not so fast,” Dave said. “I’ll support your right side. Ann, you grab his left arm.” He continued, “Sean, take a step at a time. Tell us if you feel faint.”

  “How’s Carlo?” Ann asked.

  “Yeah,” Sean muttered. “How is Carlo?”

  “He’s conscious, but barely.”

  “Oh, my!” Ann said.

  “Oh, my,” Sean echoed, and then he said, “I feel dizzy.”

  “That’s what happens when you get whacked in the head.” Dave spoke to Ann. “I’ll handle the door, you prop up Sean.”

  “Yummy!” Sean said when he felt the rain against his face. He lifted his head. The light poles were dark but three powerful floodlights on the ambulance provided enough illumination to see most of the parking lot. The ambulance was positioned on the left side of the van—the side away from the fallen steeple. The wind was still roaring, but less loudly than before.

  “Sheesh!” Sean said to Ann. “Your steeple looks like a stack of firewood.” He tried to move toward the pile of rubble.

  “Slow down,” Dave said. “Take one step at a time.”

  “I must be seeing things in the dark,” Ann said. “Don’t those look like red boots sticking out from beneath the white boards?”

  “Yep,” Sean said. “They look exactly like fake boots.”

  “Except…” Ann began, then went silent.

  Dave took over. “Except those are real boots, attached to real legs. Someone else was hit by the falling steeple.”

  Sean felt uneasy when Ann left his side, ran toward the mound of shattered wood and began to yank the boards away.

  “Be careful!” Dave shouted. “Those boards are studded with nails.”

  “Shouldn’t you help her?” Sean said to Dave.

  “I will—after I get you to the ambulance.”

  They’d reached the back of the broadcast van when Ann screamed, loudly enough for Sean to hear her over the wind.

  “Dave! It’s Richard Squires!”

  Sean remembered. The man who fixes generators…

  And then everything went black.

  THREE

  Ann stood behind Dave as he kneeled down and felt for the artery in Richard Squires’s neck. She knew Dave wouldn’t find a pulse. The way Richard’s body lay under the shattered boards and the empty expression on his face declared he wasn’t alive.

  She sucked in two deep breaths to stop the churning in her stomach and glanced up at the clouds that were barely visible against the inky sky. She saw distant flashes of lightning and heard the rumble of faraway thunder.

  Both the wind and the rain had subsided considerably since her last sojourn outside, but Gilda was still roaring loudly enough to make conversation difficult without yelling.

  “Shift your flashlight a little to the right,” Dave shouted. Ann recalled with a shiver that this was the second occasion in less than three hours that she’d held a light for Richard Squires.

  Only this time he was dead. All because he had done a good deed for the church and repaired the generator.

  She moved her flashlight beam to the right of Richard’s head, revealing a glistening pink pool of blood mixed with rainwater. She felt like throwing up but managed to resist the urge. Instead she murmured a quiet prayer asking God to comfort the many people in Glory who knew and liked Richard.

  Dave aimed his penlight into Richard’s eyes. “No pulse, no pupil response. He’s gone.” Dave climbed to his feet and added, “Richard must have been walking toward his car over there.” Dave pointed toward a compact sedan near the back of the parking lot. Ann could hear the anguish in his voice. “A board smashed the back of his head when the steeple fell.”

  Ann switched her flashlight off. “Should we—” The question caught in her throat. She tried again. “Should we move him to the ambulance?”

  “We don’t have a second gurney. I’ll come back for Richard’s body after I transport Carlo and Sean to the hospital.”

  The ambulance’s rear door was open, the interior brightly lit. Ann could see Carlo, still unconscious, lying on a gurney. A thick white bandage covered his left eye. Sean, his face pale, sat near the door, leaning against another paramedic. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding, but a big bruise on his forehead was beginning to color.

  She watched Dave climb into the ambulance. “Do you want to ride with us to the hospital?” he shouted. “You
look more than a little shaky yourself.”

  Ann ached to say yes. She didn’t want to be alone inside a sealed-up church—not with Richard Squires lying dead outside, half-buried under a pile of rubble. There was plenty of room for her next to Carlo and Sean. Everyone would understand if she bugged out.

  Everyone except Ann Trask. The administrator of Glory Community Church had to stay at her post as long as Gilda threatened the town.

  Ann shook her head. “I can’t leave.”

  She expected Dave to argue with her, but he didn’t. “It’s a short run to the hospital. Expect us back in less than ten minutes.” He killed the three floodlights atop the ambulance and yanked the rear door shut. The vehicle’s white, red and amber warning signals spun to life, illuminating the jagged remains of the steeple piled next to the Storm Channel’s broadcast van and casting bizarre shadows in the parking lot.

  Then the ambulance drove away, leaving almost total darkness in its wake. Ann wished that she’d remembered to switch on the exterior light above the church’s side door.

  She tugged her rain hood forward and tightened the drawstrings. Not that the hood would make much difference. She was soaked to the skin inside her clothing—what were a few more drops of wind-driven rain dripping down her neck?

  It hardly made sense to seek a few minutes of shelter inside the church, but she decided to check if anyone had telephoned in her absence. A quick glance at the answering machine in her office told her that no one had called. She made it back to the parking lot in less than five minutes, a moment before one of the police department’s four-wheel-drive SUVs, a boxy truck decked out with red and blue strobe lights, entered from King Street. Dave must have notified the emergency command center that Richard had been killed. She cringed. Why hadn’t she thought to call Rafe Neilson first?

  Probably because you’re more shocked by Richard’s death than you’re willing to admit.

  The SUV stopped next to the crippled broadcast van, inches away from Ann. Its headlights lit up the wreckage of the crushed steeple, making Richard’s red boots look especially garish compared to the mostly white chunks of smashed wood.

  Rafe slipped out of the driver-side door and Phil Meade exited the passenger side. Their faces, alternately lit by blue and red flashes, seemed surreal, but Ann could see anger glowing in Phil’s eyes as he strode toward Richard’s body.

  “Are you okay?” Rafe asked, approaching Ann. Ann took comfort in his strong, caring voice.

  “I don’t think what’s happened has sunk in yet,” she said. “It doesn’t compute that Richard is dead. He was killed in such a weird way.”

  “Weird happens,” Rafe said, “both for the bad and the good. The broadcast van was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So was Richard Squires. But as far as we know, no one else in town, or the county for that matter, has been seriously injured. One dead and two wounded is a lot better than we hoped for a few hours ago.”

  “Praise God for that.”

  Phil’s booming voice overpowered the wind. “Praise God indeed for good news, Miss Trask, but not for the way that you deal with crises.” He brought his face inches from Ann’s, close enough for her to see raindrops dribble off his nose. “Your foolish stubbornness killed a wonderful man. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Ann flinched as the impact of his words hit home. Phil Meade blamed her for Richard’s death.

  She pressed her lips together to control the fury she felt. No way would she give Phil a close-up view of her anger. She would behave like a professional manager, no matter what he said to provoke her.

  Rafe stepped between Ann and Phil. “For the tenth time, Phil, you can’t blame Ann for Richard’s death. She didn’t bring down the steeple—that was Gilda’s doing. Hurricanes are dangerous. Everyone who stayed in Glory understood the risk. Including Richard Squires.”

  “For the eleventh time,” Phil shouted, “there’s only one reason that Richard is dead. Ann Trask panicked when she couldn’t start the generator, because she’s too young and too inexperienced to handle routine problems.” He clasped his hands to his temples and shook his head, an extravagantly complex gesture that Ann read as a signal of his bewilderment.

  “I don’t understand the leaders of Glory Community Church,” he said. “Why would you guys put someone in charge of your building during a storm if she can’t prime a simple diesel fuel pump?”

  Ann felt her anger surge again when Phil spoke about her in the third person, as if she weren’t there. She leveled her index finger at him. “Richard kept the generator in good running order. We were supposed to call him immediately if anything went wrong.”

  “If anything major went wrong,” Phil replied, with a generous wave of his hands, “or if circumstances truly required the generator to be operational. The very last thing Richard wanted to do this evening was leave his job at the emergency command center and deal with a trivial generator glitch. He did it because you don’t know diddly about diesel engines, and because you seemed scared stiff of the dark. That’s what he told all of us before he left.” He glanced at Rafe. “You were there—you heard Richard moaning and groaning about going to the church. Tell her I’m right.”

  Ann’s anger quickly turned to concern. Rafe’s unhappy expression told her that everything Phil had said was true, which meant that Richard’s gracious “I should have tested the generator this morning” had been nothing but a polite fib, spoken to cover how he really felt.

  That doesn’t change my reason for calling him.

  Words came rushing out of her mouth.

  “I called Richard this evening because I had to. A major hurricane was about to hit Glory. A backup generator is an essential piece of equipment at an emergency shelter. It has to work reliably. The generator was Richard’s responsibility, not mine. If he’d maintained it properly, I wouldn’t have needed his last-minute help.”

  Ann watched a vein begin to throb in Phil Meade’s temple.

  “You’re plainly inexperienced,” he said angrily, “but I didn’t expect you to also be mean-spirited. How dare you blame Richard for your own ineptitude?” He stretched to his full height and went on. “Shame on you! Richard deserves better than that.”

  Phil spun around and made his way back to Richard’s body.

  “I give up,” Ann said to Rafe. “Phil is determined to blame me.”

  “Phil’s upset about Richard and not in a mood to listen to reason.”

  She stood still as Rafe gently brushed away a little puddle of rainwater that had collected on the brim of her hood.

  “Richard was in charge of the generator,” Rafe went on. “He often told people that keeping it running was part of his ministry at Glory Community Church.”

  “Even so, I’d better smooth things over with Phil.”

  “Good idea,” Rafe said, “but give him a chance to calm down before you try. He’ll come around after he’s had some time to cool off.”

  Ann knew better. Phil might never “come around.” She had embarrassed him earlier by forcing him to back down. He was the sort of person who didn’t forgive and forget. Especially not now that he’d discovered her Achilles’ heel—her so-called fear of the dark.

  “I started my new job at the church just a few months ago,” she murmured to herself. “The last thing I need right now is an influential enemy questioning my competence.”

  God, why do You keep putting me in this position?

  Sean felt something squeezing his arm. He opened his eyes and found a smiling nurse standing next to him, pumping a blood pressure cuff. A name tag clipped to her blouse identified her as “Sharon R.N.”

  “How long have I been out, Sharon?” he asked with a yawn he couldn’t suppress.

  “Six or seven hours, on and off. The doc stitched the cut on your scalp, ordered an MRI, and then decided you’d suffered nothing worse than a simple concussion and a painful bruise on your forehead. And in case you’re wondering why you’re yawning, we woke you up repeatedly throughout th
e night.”

  Sean glanced at the window behind Sharon. He saw sunlight streaming through the panes and blue, cloudless skies. Gilda had moved on during the night, gifting Glory with a beautiful morning.

  Her smile widened. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Blame the concussion. Your stomach might be touchy for a few days. But I do suggest you eat a light breakfast. This could become a busy morning for you. Rafe Neilson wants to talk to you and a woman named Cathy McCabe at the Storm Channel began to call for you an hour ago.”

  Sean had no idea who Rafe Neilson might be and didn’t really care. But Cathy McCabe, his producer, was another matter. “What did you tell her?”

  “That I wasn’t your secretary and she should leave messages for you on your cell phone. She countered that she didn’t much like my attitude and that only an overzealous bureaucrat would refuse to give her any specific information about Carlo’s medical status.”

  Sean chuckled. Like most executive producers, Cathy had a low tolerance for being rebuffed. He imagined the increasingly annoyed tone of her voice. There were a dozen different things she’d want to know—starting with Carlo’s health and moving on to the condition of the broadcast van and the pricey camera and control room equipment they carried. He decided not to call her until he had more information.

  “What would you say to me if I asked about Carlo’s condition?”

  “I’d ask you not to give me a hard time. You’re not Mr. Vaughn’s next of kin, are you?”

  “Thankfully no.”

  “In that case, all I can tell you is what we’ve told the forty or fifty reporters who’ve already inquired. We’re treating his injuries, which are not life threatening.”

  She gestured toward an empty bed in the room. “He’ll be coming up from the ophthalmological treatment center in a few minutes, and then you can ask him yourself how he’s doing. I’m confident that he’ll be willing and eager to share.”

  Sean laughed. “Ah. You discovered that Carlo can be a trifle full of himself.”

  “A trifle?” She rolled her eyes. “You’re a master of understatement this morning. Fortunately, Glory is a gracious town, known for its Carolinian charm and civility. We strive to uphold our reputation even when challenged by an over-inflated northern ego.”