North of Nowhere (15 page)

I think I stopped breathing. I was almost ready to say my good-byes to this world. Surely we weren’t going to survive this storm.

“Sal! Careful!” I yelled as we rose up high enough to see ahead. A huge rock had come into view not far in front of us. Sal turned the boat sharply to the left and narrowly avoided the rock.

Just as she turned, a blast of wind whistled toward us, grabbed the boat from the back, lifted us high on the waves, and —

And it stopped. All of it. Stopped. The storm, the huge waves, all of it.

One moment, we were driving through blinding rain, raging angry seas, enormous peaks and troughs. The next, the sea calmed, the rain stopped, the wind died. The sun even shone brightly on the water, making it sparkle and twinkle in the light.

We were surrounded by utter stillness and calm. The only movement was the arrow inside the compass, which was spinning furiously.

Sal and I looked at each other. “What on earth happened?” she asked me.

“I have no idea. Can the weather change that drastically, that quickly?” Surely it couldn’t. It
couldn’t.
So what had happened?

Sal shrugged. “I don’t know. But even if it’s calm at Luffsands, too, Peter and Dee are still stuck on the roof of a house that’s half full of water.”

“And Dee’s mom is still stuck under a beam.”

Sal cranked the engine up to full speed. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and get that lifeboat.”

She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear it. Something would have to give soon. What would it be? The beam? The roof? Her legs?

The house creaked all around her, every sound sending a crackle of fear through her body.

What was that?

She twisted her head to the right just in time to see another piece of ceiling sag and bend and finally break under the weight of water. It sloshed into the pool that was surrounding her. And then a thought hit her, the most terrifying she had had in all these hours. What if the water level rose above her head before she could tear herself free from the beam?

She didn’t want to drown. Not here, not in her own home. Not when her husband had left in anger, before she’d had one last chance to see his face.

I don’t want to die,
she thought. But a second thought came upon her as swiftly as the first.
But I would give my life if it would spare my daughter’s.

Diane, up there on the roof, with that boy, trying to get help. She thought she’d heard them shouting a moment ago, but perhaps it was just the screeching of the gulls and the whistling of the wind, and the waves booming through her battered home.

Where had the boy come from? He had arrived at just the wrong moment, hurled from his boat by the wave that had landed him literally at their door. Wrong for him, but right for them. When the bottom floor of the house had been flooded within moments, he was the one who had reached out for her and dragged her up the stairs. And when the beam had fallen, it was he who had grabbed hold of Diane and pulled her to safety. The beam had been heading for Diane’s head. If he hadn’t been there . . . well, it simply didn’t bear thinking about.

After that, everything had happened so fast. The three of them inside the house, the deep booming beats of the sea as it lashed and thrashed at their home. All of them enclosed in the dust and fog and plaster when the ceiling came down. They must all have been knocked unconscious — but for how long? And then, the silence that each of them woke up to as, one by one, they came around and saw what had happened. Those silent hours of unconsciousness — had they cost all three of them their lives?

Had the rescue workers come, and gone, during that time? And how long had it been, anyway? Moments? Hours? If that was when the rescue workers came and they had heard no sound, surely they would believe the house to be empty, all its inhabitants safe.

And then what? Would they come back?

How long could they last like this?

She had already lost all feeling in her legs. What would she lose next?

We tied the boat up on a mooring ring in the next bay around from the harbor. We could probably have brought it into the harbor, but we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves — or to the fact that we were in someone else’s boat that we hadn’t asked their permission to use.

As soon as the engine died, I hid the key under the bench seat and we scrambled off the boat and ran around to the lifeboat station.

We burst through the door to find a couple of men playing cards at a table. They looked so relaxed that it was as if they didn’t even know what was going on just two miles off the coast. Perhaps it was yesterday’s news to them and they thought everyone was safe now. But they were wrong!

One of the men turned to us and smiled. “Hello there, girls. Come to have a look around the boat, have you?” He was small and chubby, with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes that danced as he spoke.

Sal and I glanced at each other. A look around the boat? Didn’t they realize? Didn’t they know?

I recovered first. “It’s about Luffsands,” I said. “There are people still there; they got left behind.”

The man looked at his friend. The other man was thinner and bald with a ruddy red face. He leaned forward on the table and squinted at me. “Who got left behind?” he asked. “Left behind from what?”

“From yesterday!” Sal said.

The men exchanged another glance. “Yesterday?” the smaller one repeated. “What happened yesterday?”

“How can you not know?” I squealed. “Please — you have to help them. They’re stuck on the top of a house.”

“The one on the spit at the far end of the village,” Sal added.

The men stood up from their seats. “They must mean the old ruin, Stan,” the taller one said. “Kids messing around up there.”

“It’s not just children. There’s a boy and a girl on the roof, but the girl’s mom is trapped inside.”

“Trapped inside what?” the smaller man — Stan — asked.

“The house!” What was
wrong
with them? Was I talking in a foreign language without realizing it?

“Please,” Sal said. “You have to come quickly.”

“If you’re making this up . . .” the taller man said gravely.

“Of course we’re not!” I gasped.

“Look at their faces, Dave,” Stan said. “The poor things are terrified. They’re not making it up.” Then he looked closer at me. “Wait, I’ve seen you before. Your grandparents run the pub, don’t they?”

“Yes, I’m here on vacation.” Not exactly the whole truth, but they didn’t need to know about our family troubles on top of everything else.

“And you wouldn’t want to upset your family by making up stories, would you?” Dave asked.

“We’re not making anything up,” I insisted. “Please, you have to help.”

“These blasted kids playing on the walls. How many times have we warned them?” Dave grumbled as he grabbed a huge waterproof coat and a set of keys. “Come on, Stan, let’s take the inshore boat; it’s in the harbor already.”

The men were halfway to the door. I ran after them. “We need to come with you,” I said. “We have to show you where they are.”

Dave turned around. “No can do, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’re not allowed to take you out in any of the Porthaven boats without permission. One of the things the town council has gotten super firm on since we started advertising vacations here.”

“I’ve got permission!” Sal burst out. She scrabbled in her coat pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Look!”

Dave studied it. “So you have,” he said.

I stared at Sal.

“We all had to have one for the course,” she explained. “It’s been in my coat all week from going out on the boat.”

Which just left me.

“Hold on a minute,” Stan said, coming back inside the lifeboat station. “We’ve got all those permission slips for the lifeboat open house tomorrow. Maybe there’s one for you in there.” He grabbed a box from a shelf and started rifling through it.

I stood and watched him for a while. “There won’t be one in there,” I said miserably. “I haven’t asked anyone if I can go to the open house. I didn’t even realize that there
was
an open —”

“Got it!” Stan pulled a piece of paper out of the box. “You
have
got permission!”

“
What?
How come? Who from?”

Stan waved the paper at me. “Look,” he said. He pointed to the flowing signature:
P. Robinson.
My grandad! I looked at the date. A week ago. He’d signed it before he disappeared!

Stan laughed at me gaping at the paper. “I wouldn’t be too shocked,” he said. “We had something in the
Times & Echo
last week telling people about the open house. He must have done it on purpose, so you could go. Must have been planning to surprise you.”

The thing was, that was exactly the kind of thing Grandad
would
do — organize a special treat without telling me. The thought of him arranging for me to go out on a lifeboat trip as a surprise made me miss him twenty times more than I already was. Except I suddenly realized something — we were only here because he’d gone missing. Had he been planning to invite us to Porthaven at the last minute? To be honest, among all the other unanswered questions, this one wasn’t important enough to dwell on. All that mattered was that the lifeboat men could take us to Luffsands.

“So. Are you coming?” Stan asked.

I shook myself and tried to put all thoughts of Grandad out of my head. Peter and Dee were our most pressing concern right now.

“We’re coming,” Sal and I said in unison — even though my stomach did a slight backward flip as we followed the men out of the lifeboat station. Could I
really
face going out there again?

But then I thought of Peter and Dee, up on that roof, scared to death. They needed us. And anyway, the sea had calmed on the way back. Surely it wouldn’t get worse again now.

I glanced at Sal as we headed to the harbor. Her teeth were set tight and her fists clenched as she walked. She obviously relished the thought of going back out to sea as much as I did.

Halfway to the island, I wondered why the lifeboat’s engine was banging so loudly. Then I realized it wasn’t; it was my heart. We were in the area where the storm had broken out last time.

I held my breath and waited. Nothing happened. The sea stayed calm. I began to breathe again.

But as we came closer to the island and motored over to the other side, I saw something else. Something even worse than getting caught in a storm out at sea, if that was possible.

Sal looked as stunned as I felt when she turned to me. “The . . . the village . . .” she whispered.

“I know,” I whispered back.

The two men were chatting together as they drove. Neither of them seemed to have noticed that anything was wrong. How could they not have seen?

The village had disappeared.

“Where . . . where’s it gone?” Sal asked.

The men continued to chat and laugh together as Sal stared, ashen faced, at me.

“Sal, correct me if I’m wrong, OK?” I began. Sal nodded. “OK, so we were here an hour ago. There was a storm, and we couldn’t get into the harbor. But we got close enough, and we saw the village. There were a few houses at the front that had almost collapsed, and some of the others had lost windows or roofs. Most of them were flooded up to their second floors. That
is
what we saw, isn’t it?”

Sal nodded. “But the houses were
there,
” she added. She pointed across at a shoreline that was covered in moss, rubble, seagulls, and nests. A shoreline that looked exactly the same as it had earlier — with just one difference.

All the houses were gone.

I tried to remember something Mom had once told me, about slowing your breathing down when you can feel yourself start to panic. I tried it now.

It didn’t work. I gulped in air and tried to arrange my thoughts. What I knew was possible and what I was seeing with my eyes didn’t match. That was the simple truth of it.

“Are you girls all right?” Stan asked. “This is where you meant, isn’t it?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything sensible if I tried to speak.