The Breathtaker (9 page)

11

W
OULD YOU
like to buy a dog?” Sophie asked Rick, who sat there smiling at her.

“Not especially.” He grinned.

“Come on,” she said. “Only fifty bucks.”

“What dog?” Charlie said, noting that his daughter had lit candles in anticipation of her father’s “date,” which hadn’t materialized. “We don’t own any dogs.”

They were seated around the dining room table, where the flickering candlelight made their faces glow buttery yellow. Twilight had eroded; darkness had fallen. Charlie and Rick were splitting a bottle of wine between them, and now Charlie was feeling nice and buzzed, albeit a bit confused about all this dog business.

“I’m volunteering for the orphans, Dad.”

“Orphans? What orphans?” He didn’t have a clue what his lovely daughter was talking about.

“All the stray dogs from the storm,” she explained. “Nobody’s come forward to claim them yet, and there isn’t enough room in the kennels. So we have to find them new owners.” She turned to Rick. “A few have respiratory infections, but they’re getting better. And they’ve all been immunized. And they’re really, really cute.”

He shook his head. “Too much responsibility. You can’t drop everything and go chasing when you have a dog. But thanks for asking.”

“Lemme know if you change your mind, okay?”

He laughed. “You’re good. She’s good.”

“My daughter,” Charlie bragged, “could charm the wig off a drag queen.”

Sophie had swept her long chestnut-colored hair off her face and, in the candlelight, was the spitting image of her mother. It moved him deeply, her innocent beauty. So scrub-faced and sincere. It was half past seven, and they’d eaten most of the lasagna. The garlic bread was gone except for the heel, and even the grayish peas were gone.

“What’s in the locket?” Rick asked.

“This?” She beamed, her cheeks going rosy. She opened the silver locket at her throat and proudly displayed the picture of herself and Maddie, their smiling faces tipped together. “My mom. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Wow. A total babe.”

This seemed to please her. “People used to think we were sisters,” she said, then glanced at her father as she clasped the locket shut. “She died two years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Rick’s gaze was mellow behind his wire-rim glasses. His dark blue flannel shirt with its mother-of-pearl buttons was tucked into the waistband of his jeans, and his thick brown hair was pressed flat against his skull in the shape of the baseball cap he’d worn into the house.

Sophie yawned just then, and Charlie felt a sudden rush of love for her. She yawned whenever she got nervous or didn’t want to talk about something. Her other habits were nail-biting and staying up late to watch
Conan
on weeknights. She excelled in math, biology, English and ballet, and if Charlie believed in anything, he believed in the vast potential of his daughter. Sophie could’ve been a doctor, lawyer, teacher, ballet dancer, whatever she set her heart on. Funny, she’d been such a fat baby, such a pudge. He remembered the way Maddie used to stand her on her knees and watch as she staggered and swayed and tested her plump little legs, pockets of fat bulging above the kneecaps.

Now Sophie was staring at him. “Hello? Earth to Dad.”

He blinked away the memory. “Huh?”

“I said, what were you doing in Texas today?”

“Oh. Just checking on some stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“This town got hit by a tornado last year. I was checking out their rebuilding efforts,” he lied. She knew about the murders, but he wasn’t going to feed her every gory detail.

“I hope they rebuild everything stronger next time,” she said, “so it won’t come crashing down again.”

“You can design a building to withstand three-hundred-mile-per-hour winds if you want to,” Rick told them. “But the cost is prohibitive.”

“I don’t get it.” She displayed the wide-eyed earnestness of a Miss Universe desiring to eradicate world hunger. “Why aren’t all the schools in Oklahoma built to withstand tornadoes? How come every house doesn’t have a basement?”

Rick shrugged. “That’s just the way of the world, kiddo.”

She glanced at her father and frowned. Sweet. She was sweetness itself, like a fawn in the forest glade staring down the barrel of a hunter’s gun and not recognizing danger. Smiling invitingly at strangers, wishing for world peace, firm in her belief that her dear old dad had all the answers. Yeah, right. “Boone says most people don’t care about anything until it’s too late,” she said.

Charlie gave a start. “Boone?”

“Dad…”

“Boone Pritchett? Since when do you care what Boone Pritchett thinks?”

Ignoring him, she turned to Rick. “He’s a storm-chaser. Do you know him?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen him around.” Rick rolled his eyes. “Now, there’s a kid who watches too much NASCAR on TV.”

“He doesn’t drive that fast,” she said defensively, glancing at her father over the rim of her water glass.

Charlie felt a twinge of apprehension. Boone Pritchett was the kind of troubled youth who gave troubled youths a bad name. His biker father worked in a sealant factory and his mother was a whippet-thin alcoholic, and Boone liked to define himself by his misdeeds—shoplifting, truancy, pot-smoking. He was headed for serious trouble, and Charlie didn’t want his daughter hanging out with a kid like that.

“He drives an old Ford pickup, right?” Rick said. “Casino pink. This thing is barely street legal… one of those ‘have title will sell’ type of vehicles. He likes to ride low, all the air let out of his air-ride seat, cowboy hat pulled down to his nose… how can he possibly see?”

“What’s this sudden interest in Boone Pritchett?” Charlie asked his daughter.

“Dad…,” she said, blushing. All elegance and self-possession. A modest smile about her lips. “It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal? That kid is destined to climb a tower one of these days and start gunning down strangers.”

“Cut it out,” she said, putting on the polite face of a doll. “Besides, nobody’s gonna mess with me. I’m the police chief’s daughter.”

“He’d better not.”

She cleared her throat and changed the subject. “So you’re a wind engineer?” she asked Rick. “What made you decide to study wind, of all things?”

He answered her question with a question. “You know about the Fujita scale, right?”

She nodded.

“Then you know that an F-1 means moderate, an F-2’s considerable, F-3’s severe and an F-4 is, well… devastating. Real
Wizard of Oz
–type stuff.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “You don’t want to know about an F-5,” he said ominously.

Her eyes lit up. “You’ve seen one?”

“When I was thirteen.” He wiped his mouth on a paper napkin, then folded it neatly across his knee. “This freak hailstorm came out of nowhere and flattened the wheat for miles around our house. It was just me and Dad back then. Mom was long gone, bless her heart. After the hail hit, we went outside to survey the damage, but there was nothing to see. Absolutely nothing. The devastation was that complete. And from the looks of the sky, you could tell it wasn’t over yet.” He flicked his glance ceilingward. “I remember the wind was roaring in my ears. I couldn’t hear a thing my dad was saying, but I could see this terrible force gathering in the sky behind him. I wanted to run away, but he wouldn’t listen. His crops were gone. That year’s harvest meant just about everything to him. He was heavily in debt. I remember the dogs were yelping, and there was this low, awful rumble, and all of a sudden the sky went black as night. You could see several baby tornadoes sprouting out of the base of this enormous rotating wall cloud… like lassos twirling over the ground. Then one of them dropped. First it was rope-sized. Then it was cone-shaped. Eventually it became the biggest wedge I’ve ever seen. I’m talking two-sixty, two-hundred-and-seventy-mile-per-hour screaming winds headed straight for us.” His voice grew hushed. “These storms can close gaps at frightening speeds. The vortex was rushing forward at roughly sixty miles an hour. Unbelievable. Lightning shooting out in all directions. Dad just stood there. I kept tugging on his arm, but he pushed me away and started to scream at the sky. I’ll never forget it. He was like a flea cursing out an elephant… ranting and raving, shaking his fists. Then he picked up his rifle and shot at the damn thing, as if he could bring it down like a deer.

“I dove for the ground and ate dirt. The wedge was right on top of us by then. I remember it kept making this weird sound… shrill… almost human. Next thing I knew, I was looking straight up into those screaming innards. She was all hollow and lit up inside, twisting around like a barber pole, first orange, then violet, then neon red, with jagged spikes of lightning ricocheting from side to side.” He stopped talking and just looked at them.

“What?” Sophie asked breathlessly.

“She sucked my father right out of his boots. Those old manure-caked shitkickers. Literally right out of his boots. I blinked, and he was gone.”

She raised her fingers to her face.

“Then she ripped right over me and slammed into the barn,” he continued. “The doors flew off their hinges. The roof peeled away like cardboard. The dogs got swept up yelping. Later on, I had to put three horses down. See this?” He held out his right hand so that they could see the bent tip of his pinkie finger. “A piece of debris nearly tore it off. It never quite healed properly.”

“What happened to your father?” Sophie asked with a hesitant politeness Rick seemed to find appealing.

“Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t exactly dinner conversation.”

Charlie cleared his throat. “I think it’s time we changed the subject.”

“Dad,” Sophie said softly, “I can handle it.”

“You see,” Rick explained, “these aren’t just storms to me. They’re miniature universes all to themselves. Walls of force sixty to seventy miles wide and over ten miles high. Air and moisture rushing in to build these roiling masses sixty thousand feet thick. They can darken half a state. I mean, think about it… Something larger than the Empire State Building should not be able to move like that.”

Sophie sat in rapt attention. “Sounds incredible.”

Charlie nudged his plate forward and cleared his throat. “The lasagna was a big hit, honey.”

“Mm, delicious,” Rick agreed.

“Thanks.” She smiled shyly at them, the skin of her forehead bunching delicately. “Maybe now you’ll stop eating meat, huh?”

“You mean there wasn’t any meat in that dish?” Rick said with mock surprise.

She laughed. “I used seitan instead.”

“Satan?”

“Sei-tan.”
She plopped her hands proudly in her lap. “It’s a soy product.”

Charlie remembered how scared she used to be of the dark, so small and terrified, convinced the bogeyman was lurking somewhere under her bed. He and Maddie would have to coax her through each night with countless bedtime stories and promises of being right next door. She’d been so tiny and afraid of the dark, and now here she was, defending Boone Pritchett, of all people. He longed for the days when she had freckles floating on the surface of her skin and a deep distrust of boys. Couldn’t she just stop growing up? The passage of time was like falling down a well—you could claw at the walls all you wanted to, but you couldn’t prevent yourself from falling.

“Don’t you have homework to do?” he said now.

“Dad…”

“Your old man’s the boss,” Rick said with a friendly, peacekeeping smile. “What he says goes.”

“Not when Mom was alive,” she muttered.

“Hey,” Charlie said.

“Hay is for horses.”

“Don’t be smart.”

“Okay, I’ll be dumb.” She stood up and started stacking the dinner plates.

“We’ll clean up later, honey. Go on upstairs.”

Reluctantly she put the plates down. “Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking Rick’s hand.

“The pleasure’s been all mine, Sophie.”

Her front teeth caught on her lower lip, then her eyes shifted to her father again. “Peg says to tell you the gutters are clogged, Dad.”

“Thanks, honey.”

“Well… good night.”

“G’night.” Rick gave her a little wave as she tripped up the stairs.

“C’mon. We can talk in my study.” Charlie escorted his guest through the living room, which Maddie had filled with Merimeko throw pillows and decorous rugs, an antique musket over the mantelpiece and lots of American primitive furniture. Since her death, all the exotic plants in the house had died—the African violets and wild indigo, the snow-white amaryllis. No, that wasn’t quite true. After her death, wild with grief, Charlie had smashed all the flowerpots in the house, every last one. It wasn’t fair that she was dead—why should her plants be allowed to bloom?

“You’ve got a great kid,” Rick said.

“She can be delicately morbid.”

Rick smiled as he circled the study, examining the pine shelves crowded with Charlie’s medals and commendations. There were photographs of Charlie’s great-grandparents standing proud and erect in front of their sod house; of his teenage grandmother selling tomatoes for five cents a bushel during the Great Depression; of distant relatives whose eyes were blurred shut due to double exposure, as if the passage of time had fogged their memories.

Squinting at the old daguerreotypes, Rick said, “My great-grandfather won the family homestead in a poker game. Imagine if you could do that now?”

“Where do you live?” Charlie asked.

“Pixley, embarrassing to report. I come from a long line of the wrong people. I could move anywhere I wanted to now, but I grew up in that house. Pixley’s just a church, a post office and a firehouse, but there’s still plenty of wide-open space.”

“I hear you.”

He pointed at a picture of Adelaide. “That your mother?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember mine. They say she was petite as a finch. I got a lot of sympathy dates growing up. Guess some women are drawn to motherless boys. Brings out their maternal instinct.” He picked up one of Charlie’s track-and-field trophies. “Two-hundred-meter, huh?”

“Back in the Mesozoic era, yeah. It was good therapy.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Rick acknowledged the burn scars with a glance. “My relationship to sports is confined to the living room sofa, I’m afraid.” He put the trophy back on its spot on the shelf. “You’ve got a lot of medals, Chief.”