Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

just reached up by themselves and pushed him out of the broken window.
    The storm swallowed him up. I turned around and there sat the Missus, looking at me. She saw what I did. I know she did. But she never said nothing, because that’s when the big wave hit.

Chapter 26
    In 1975, Hurricane Eloise was headed for Mobile Bay and, by midday on the last day before landfall, all precautions for a hurricane of middling strength had been taken. Most residents of the Florida Panhandle went to bed that night and slept soundly, unaware that the storm was strengthening and veering sharply to the northeast. By dawn, they were awakened by rescuers roaming the streets with bullhorns, urging coastal dwellers to seek high ground. Later that day, Eloise leveled their deserted homes with winds gusting to one hundred fifty-six miles per hour.
    As recently as 1995, emergency personnel were caught flat-footed when Hurricane Opal, a mere Category 2 storm, blossomed over the brief course of an afternoon into a tremendous storm nearing the Category 5 mark. Its forward speed doubled during that time, bringing disaster closer, faster. The evacuation order came late, after most residents were in bed. As the warning spread, highway gridlock set in; the storm was moving faster than the traffic. Only a last-minute weakening of the storm—an act of God unattributable to science—averted great loss of life.
    Since 1960, satellites and computers have decreased the National Hurricane Center’s average twenty-four-hour forecast error only from one hundred twenty nautical miles to one hundred. Meanwhile, Florida’s population has metastasized. One day, a freak of nature will wipe a stretch of shoreline clean of its condominium fringe, and Nature will not deign to warn us.
    Faye, Joe, Douglass, Cyril—not one of them had been in earshot of a radio since early morning. It was near sundown and, on a whim, the hurricane had spent that time churning their way.

    The wind threw the first punch, slamming over the vulnerable Gulf islands and sweeping away anything that wasn’t fastened to the ground. It erased large chunks of the sand dunes that protected the luckier islands, using the sand to fill the mouths of random inlets, leaving their waters cut off from the sea.
    On a tiny piece of long-gone Last Isle, the wind scoured away the sand that had covered the foundation of the Turkey Foot Hotel for so long. The island under them held, for a little while, but the sea had its plans. Sooner or later, all the pieces of Last Isle would go under the waves, but for now the old hotel would have its time in the sun.

    Sheriff Mike’s late wife had dearly hated his job when hurricane season rolled around. He rode out every storm at his desk, because it was his job to be available in an emergency. She had known that, but it always griped her to think that if the house blew away, she’d have to call 911 to let him know. And she never let him forget it.
    The phone rang and he snatched it up. It was Dr. Magda Stockard. “You’ve got to help me save Faye.”
    The events of the past couple weeks had eroded Sheriff Mike’s people skills. He bellowed, “How’d you get through to this phone? Did you call 911?”
    “I did what I had to,” was the cryptic answer. “So listen to me. I know where Faye lives. She owns an island that hardly sticks up out of the Gulf, and she’s out there in the storm. She has to be. I’m at Wally’s looking for her right now. Neither of her boats is here, and one of them would be if she were ashore. I tried to get that bastard Wally to tell me where she was. He won’t talk, but he knows. She’s out there on her island. He’s easy to read, for a dishonest S.O.B. So hurry over here so we can take one of your big official boats out to get Faye before it gets dark.”
    “The department has one boat, a small one. We work with the Marine Patrol for search and rescue.”
    “So call them,” she said, and he would have been disappointed in her if she hadn’t.
    “You’re aware there’s a hurricane out there. Category 5.”
    “Yes, I know there’s a hurricane coming. That’s why we have to hurry.”
    Sheriff Mike’s people skills were slowly returning. He fed her the bad news gently.
    “This isn’t an ordinary hurricane, Magda. It wasn’t supposed to hit here, but the goddamn thing took a right turn at New Orleans and came up fast as blazes. And those extra few hours over warm water made it into a monster. I don’t know