The Storm King(64)

“Come on. I’m not trying to start a fight. You’re the last person I want to fight with.” He put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. He waited for his friend’s frame to relax. He waited for the conciliatory smile that heralded an apology. I’m sorry, Nate, Tom would say. Today’s been insane. Fighting with you is the last thing I want, too.

But this didn’t happen. Nate saw that he needed to escalate.

So he withdrew his hand, turned back to the window, and sighed. This exhalation wasn’t calibrated to convey the frustration of the put-upon, but to communicate the despair of the defeated.

“I don’t think Grams is going to make it, Tommy.” He stared through the streaming glass at the unlit house. He allowed a silence to burgeon between them. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He waited until the quiet rang in his ears. As loud as it was, he knew it would be ten times more deafening for Tom. Then he pulled the handle and left the car. He shut the door behind him and sank his feet into the saturated lawn.



He was nearly to the front door when the cruiser peeled away from the curb like the flag had dropped on a drag race. Nate watched Tom scorch down the street, running over broken branches and leaving a mist of water in his wake. Guilt, pity, obligation—whatever mash of buttons Nate had pressed, at least one of them had done the trick. In their youth, time and pressure had proven the trick to getting Tom to do anything. This was how Nate would discover whatever his friend was keeping from him.

Nate had his grandmother’s house keys, but the front door was unlocked. Grams must have neglected to secure it in her rush to get him to the hospital, but the Lake had become a battleground and her home had been left open for hours. When he stepped into the house Nate was both wary and ready.

Once inside, he bolted the front door behind him, then walked the perimeter of each room on the main floor. The house still had electricity, so he flicked each light switch he came upon, establishing some semblance of the daylight that should have filled the place at this hour. He verified that every window was intact and locked, and that the back door was as secured as the front.

Nate got a flashlight from the kitchen, then traipsed down the narrow stairs to the basement. The air was damp and faintly redolent of laundry. It was an old house, and the cellar was pocked with strange nooks and odd crawl spaces. He illuminated every cranny and opened every closed cabinet.

He was looking for anything: unsecured entrances, cracked windows, loosened pipes, ticking bombs, lurking intruders. These kids weren’t going to take anything else from Grams. They weren’t going to catch Nate unprepared ever again.

When he was satisfied with the state of the basement, he repeated the process on the main floor, second floor, and attic. The handyman Tom had called must have taken advantage of the unlocked front door, because the broken window in Nate’s room had been replaced. When he decided that everything else looked in order, Nate took a shower.



The hot water felt good on his muscles. He was sore all over, as if he’d pushed himself far too hard in the gym after many months of indolence. Rage was power, but it came with costs. Missing hours and scarred hands. Aching joints and ground teeth. Broken trust and splintered friendships.

But this morning’s blackout was the first one he’d had in over a decade. Tom was right: This town was a dangerous place for Nate. Maybe he should have stayed away. But now blood had again been spilled. Another girl was dead, and Grams might soon join her. Nate hadn’t hurt either of them, but that didn’t mean he was innocent. He’d returned to the Lake with debts to pay, and these had mounted in the short time he’d been back. He could flee this place as he had so many years ago, but he owed it to Lucy and Grams to do more than that. The Jeffers girl, too, even if he didn’t yet understand how she fit with everything else. He had the sense, too, that abandoning the Lake fourteen years ago hadn’t solved any problems so much as it had delayed them. Today’s troubles were connected to the tempest of his youth. Accounts had to be settled, equations balanced. He had to unwind the secrets of the Lake once and for all. Like a visit to hell itself, the way out was the way through.

Particulates of dried blood collected around his feet while he tenderly cleaned the area around his stitched scalp. An ache resonated from below the scarred portion of his arm. The pain sang of a storm.

Before shaving, he wiped the condensation from the mirror and was surprised by how normal he looked. He searched his eyes for traces of the other, but the only person he saw was himself.

He was dressed and ready with time to spare before Tom returned.

Cold drafts from the chaos outside brought a sense of movement to the rooms of the empty house. The scrape of branches against the siding and creaks from the old roof filled the place with sounds. The windows groaned in the onslaught.

Nate had quickly examined Grams’s room, as he had the rest of the house, but he returned there now. The bedroom was Spartan. A simple wooden bed frame and a chest of drawers. A narrow desk with a chair.



There was a black chest under one of the windows. Gram called this her memory chest. She stored ancient photo albums and other artifacts of the past within it. When he was young, Grams would sit with Nate and Gabe atop its stained wood and show them photos of their father as a boy, their grandfather when he was in the army, even their great-grandparents on vacation. They’d stopped looking at these after the accident, or at least they’d stopped looking at them together.