The Storm King(93)

The worst kind of stranger was the one who used to be a friend, and this town was full of them.

Something in his side twitched. The dumb wedge of his phone gave a cadaveric spasm. He stood and tore open his coat. When he examined it, the device looked utterly lifeless, but Nate tapped its screen and put it to his ear.



“Hello?”

“Nate?”

“Meg.” Hearing her voice was like the flash of the sun after a day spent deep underwater. “My phone got wet. I thought it was dead.”

“I can barely hear you. It sounds like you’re on Mars.”

On Mars only the air and cold will kill you, he thought. She and Livvy were his tethers to the person he was supposed to be. By her voice, he marked how far from that path he’d drifted.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “What’d the doctor say? Did the funeral go all right?”

“Nothing’s all right here. I shouldn’t have come back. Or maybe I shouldn’t have left. I don’t know what to do.”

“I can’t hear you, honey. Can you hear me? I wanted to check on you and tell you Livvy’s much better. The storm surge isn’t as bad as they expected. We lost electricity for a couple hours, but it’s back for the moment.”

“The power here’s gone. Barely after lunch and it’s already dark. The sky’s gray, and the town looks like it’s been abandoned for a thousand years.”

“I can’t understand you, love, but your voice sounds strange.”

“Grams is going to die, Meg. I can feel it. And it’ll be my fault. I never told you why I didn’t want to come back here. I think I even made myself forget some of it. I made mistakes, Meg. Bad ones. And now I’m paying for them. Everyone’s paying for them.”

“Love, I can’t hear you.”

“Tom thought—he thought he killed Lucy. But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. Not Tom. But that’s why he left NYU. He’s been punishing himself about it for fourteen years. The secret’s been eating him alive, and it isn’t even true. How could Tom think he was a murderer? And how could he keep it a secret for so long? He didn’t tell anyone, not even me. If he had, I’d have told him it was impossible.”



“Honey—”

“But then I think, is it really impossible, Meg? How many things are impossible?” He thought of the things he’d done and the people he’d hurt. He saw the webs of red string lancing the basement wall plastered with his victims. “We’re capable of anything, you know. We’re liars and thieves and arsonists and murderers waiting for that moment when the universe compounds chance upon chance so that the only choices we have left are bad ones. I used to know this. I don’t know how I ever forgot.”

“What’d the doctor say about your head? Dammit, there’s so much static I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. It must be your phone. Or the hurricane. I’ll try the landline at Bea’s house. I love you, Nate. We both do.”

The connection terminated in a flush of noise that shuddered into silence.

“Meg? Meg?”

Nate pulled the phone from his ear, swiped it, pressed it, shook it, and stared at its black screen until he was sure she was gone.

Time passed. He wasn’t sure how much.

He was cold and wet, and knew that he should get out of the storm. He forced himself from the splayed roots and into motion, walking along the shoulder of the Strand as it curved back to town.

Maybe the landline at Grams’s house still worked. If it did, he’d call Meg back. He’d tell her everything. Even the worst things. He’d confess how he broke into a stranger’s house and got into a fight with teens and almost strangled his best friend’s father. He’d beg forgiveness for the way he’d let Grams get hurt and the Union destroyed and Johnny’s leg shattered and Tommy’s dog murdered. He didn’t know how Maura and Pete fit into all this, but it was somehow part of the same thing. Meg would listen to him and be kind, because that’s how you deal with a hysterical person over the phone.

Nate wouldn’t really know how she took it until he saw her in person. If her eyes slid away from his, if her embrace shuddered with the slightest hint of hesitation, he wouldn’t survive it.



Greystone Lake’s roads were deserted, its houses dark. He wondered if this was what the end of the world would be like. Not devoured by fires or floods, but endless gray clouds a hundred miles thick swaddling the earth like a shroud. Shutting out the sun and cowing the besieged with unceasing volleys of thunder.

He broke inland before he needed to. He didn’t want to walk past the barricade. He’d had enough of the Night Ship and the things it conjured.

There was a police barrier toppled at the base of the street, and Nate stepped right over it. Trees had fallen, power and telephone lines had collapsed, and debris was scattered across the road and lawns.

Storm damage was everywhere. Shingles fluttered from one house, and a tarp had been hastily draped over the windows of another. Shutters were torn loose, and retaining walls had crumbled.

One home situated on a corner stood out to Nate from the others. As he approached the intersection, he saw that a large side window was shattered. Not just the glass, but the grids as well. Sopping curtains flickered in the onslaught of the wind. This might not have troubled Nate but for the fact that this was Owen’s house.