The Storm King(16)

They ran across another lawn and onto the shimmering expanse of the Strand.

Ahead was the barricade that cordoned the Night Ship from the rest of the town. Greystone Lake’s children had a tradition of leaving offerings of glow sticks at its base, and on Halloween this shrine burned more brightly than at any other time of the year. Green light bathed the battered wood in an otherworldly sheen, and beyond this the Night Ship’s towers stood sentinel against the purpling headlands.

Tom called for help. It was unseemly, though not insensible. But the grand homes here were set far back from the road. And it was Halloween, the best night of the year to ignore knocks at the door and screams in the dark.

There was only one place left to go. Nate didn’t utter its name, and neither did the others. But there it was, just ahead. Its barricade burned in a miasma of green light and its spires were etched against the boiling sky.





Four

The Colonnade’s lights wavered. A blast of thunder reverberated through the cushion of Nate’s seat.

“There’ve been a bunch of pranks around town. The ones Johnny’s talking about happened during a thunderstorm that hit about a week and a half ago,” Tom said. “But there’s no evidence they’re connected.”

Johnny snorted. “I have a seventy-five-thousand-dollar repair bill that tells me we have different definitions of ‘prank.’?”

Returning to the Lake, Nate knew he’d face uncomfortable alchemies of past and present. Waterlogged secrets and calcified lies risked being revealed. But he’d come here to confront these on his own terms. If what Johnny said was true, vandals once again roamed the Lake cloaked by rain and wind—a development as unexpected as it was unfathomable.

“Tell me about the thunderstorm,” he said. The three of them leaned toward one another across the table, their words low but clear. Nate could feel the sear of gazes from around the restaurant, and he could only imagine how he and his friends looked to them now. Still plotting, these boys. Still secretive and strange and up to no good.



“It brought some gray days, but there was hardly any punch to it,” Tom said. “Bit of wind, a little rain. Anyway, the vandals used chainsaws and bricks and tools. It’s not like they cared if anyone blamed the weather for the damages.”

Nate and his friends had started in much the same way. They’d singled out people who they felt had to be punished. Lucy had been the first of their victims, but not remotely the last.

“So they hit the Empire, and Owen, and—”

“Emma, Adam Decker, and Grams,” Johnny finished.

Grams had told Nate that the window at the Union broke during the last storm. Not a lie, but a deliberate omission. He understood why. Even the thought of someone hurting her made something dangerous stir inside him.

“All people from the old days.” A replay of their high school history, except this time Nate and his friends weren’t the perpetrators but the victims. “And whoever they are, they only started causing trouble after her body was found?”

Tom went back to studying the umber gradations of his drink, but Johnny smiled.

“See, Tom. Our Storm King was always smart. That’s what I’ve been saying. We’re being targeted.”

Johnny’s use of his old nickname grated Nate to the bone.

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Tom told Johnny. “The Lake’s always had more than its share of property damage. This time you’re on the receiving end of it, and you’re taking it personally.”

“Isn’t connecting the dots in your job description, Deputy?”

“You can’t believe it’s coincidence, Tom.” Nate couldn’t afford the luxury of denial. “Someone’s using the storms as cover. Five thousand people live in the Lake, but Johnny, Owen, Emma, Adam, and Grams are the ones they hit? What about the baseball through my bedroom window? How many people these days could know what that would mean to me?”



“Well, that circles around to the elephant in the room, doesn’t it?” Johnny pointed to Nate. “All of this started because of you. You might as well have taken a wrecking ball to my ceiling and cut Owen’s brake line yourself.”

The accusation was reductive, but for Nate it triggered a line of thought. The Thunder Runs, as they’d called their youthful hijinks, hadn’t been havoc for its own sake. Nate and his friends didn’t attack the innocent: Their targets deserved their punishment. So if the current vandals were truly retracing their old paths, it made Nate wonder what they believed him guilty of. He had so many sins. But if they only began destroying things after the discovery of the body in the headlands—

“You can’t blame Nate,” Tom said. “He hasn’t been back for years. He didn’t do anything.”

“We all did things,” Johnny said. “A lot of things, to a lot of people. But it started with him, and we all know it.”

Johnny was angry. That was something Nate understood.

“I’m sorry about the Greenhouse,” he said. “Really. But I’m more worried about what these vandals know. They’re obviously onto some of the shit we pulled, because how else could they be reenacting what we did back then? But if they know that much, they could know all kinds of things. The timing can’t be a coincidence. Her body is found and then—”