“Stay away from the coast, folks” had been the last bit of coherence she had gotten from the car’s radio. All she heard now was squawks and dead air.
Her phone still worked because it started ringing the raucous tones she’d assigned to her younger sister, Savanna.
“Hello, Savanna, sorry, warning, the signal may break up.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Maine after Zachary Hale.” Addy peered through the wind-driven rain searching for her turnoff.
“That’s what I called about. Hey, what’s he doing in Maine?”
“He’s headed to ground and I hope to get to him before he’s in hiding.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
Addy harrumphed. “It doesn’t work that way in the world of high finance.”
“I end up with nothing and some fat cats get rich. And he gets off without any punishment?” Savanna almost squealed the last few words in indignation.
“Calm down. During the huge Ponzi scandal, it was early December when the FBI got involved and early March, fifteen months later, before any jail time began to be served, and that scandal involved over fifty billion dollars.”
“Not fair. Just not fair.”
“Savanna you must have called for something besides a rant about Hale and Blankenstock.”
“I guess you just answered my question. I wanted to know how you were doing at getting Hale to fess up.” Savanna sounded sad. Her life was a wreck and she was newly unemployed.
“And you need more money.”
“I do. I hate to ask but can you lend me another hundred? I want to—”
A sign, big and green, loomed off to the side of the road heralding her exit and then vanished into the downpour.
She could barely see the road she was driving on and her sister was a distraction on a good day. “Savanna, I gotta go. I’ll have some funds transferred as soon as I can.”
As soon as I see if I have enough, she thought.
“I need to take the girls shopping. They didn’t get any new clothes for school and now they’re on sale cheap and they really need them.”
“I get it. Yes, I’ll do it when I can. Bye.”
Addy thumbed off the phone and tossed it onto the seat beside her. She squeezed her already hunched shoulders tighter and concentrated hard on seeing through the rain.
The exit ramp popped into view and she braked hard, rocked in the wind and dove off the nearly deserted interstate onto a narrow two-lane road. She had known this drive wasn’t going to be easy in the remnants of a hurricane, but some things had to be done.
Moving closer to the coast, deeper into the fringes of a storm whipping up the Atlantic Ocean, made for bad driving, but maybe not a bad day. There was a pot of gold at the end of this rainstorm, maybe even a Pulitzer Prize. At the very least she’d get a stab at retrieving her pride.
A sudden blast of wind sliced down hard across the road trying to take her small car with it. Addy answered with a fierce jerk of the wheel.
“Please, let me get there.” The sound of her voice eerily muted in the din coming from the outside. “That guy needs to pay.”
As she moved slowly down the road, the windshield wipers beat wildly at the sheets of rain, giving her occasional glimpses of the wreck and ruin going on outside. A branch skittered across the road and a river ran where the shoulder of the road should have been.
This storm, a has-been hurricane, was to brush the coast as it headed north toward the good folk of Nova Scotia.
Well, it was “brushing” hard, Addy thought.
There had been a point when the weather forecasters wondered if Hurricane Harold would break records and head directly for the central coast of Maine. Luckily for the citizens of the rugged state, that was not going to happen.
Braving the storm, Addy felt a touch of the old Adriana Bonacorda. She had been tough and smart. She had needed to be in order to survive. Not every reporter would be daring enough to chase a story into the middle of Afghanistan, a rebel monk to his hideout in Nepal or a billionaire criminal into the fringes of a storm.
She jerked hard again on the wheel to avoid hitting a piece of siding or a door or whatever it was and then hissed out a breath as she brought the car back into her lane.
In addition to the radio warnings, a State Trooper had sternly advised her to stay away from the coast. She had the distinct feeling they would have arrested her for reckless something or other if she’d tried to drive in this weather in Massachusetts, but not here in Maine.
Desperation could make one nuts.
After her big disgrace, she had tried to get worthy stories under more sane circumstances. Instead of a scoop or a better angle, she had gotten scorn, and worse, derisive snickers from the other reporters at every news scene. When she had tried to defend herself online, the whole world was then alerted that she had put her heart and soul into one giant piece of fiction she had unwittingly called news.
She had been duped, an apt word for eager and stupid. Today she battled to recover eager, but stupid she’d left buried in the humiliation.
When the sign marking the turn off toward Bailey’s Cove flashed at her through a break in the rain she popped the wheel with the palm of her hand. “Yes.” She was going to make it. Maybe there were still lucky cards in her pile.
Just then a piece of debris plastered itself to her windshield and, for a terrifying moment of blindness, stuck to the wipers and refused to move away. When it finally flew off, she hunkered down with passion, renewed by luck, and after fifteen more minutes of concentration reached the town.
Bailey’s Cove, Maine, population fourteen-something-thousand, the wildly undulating sign read as she slowed the car to a crawl.
The low-slung buildings of small-town urban sprawl blinked in and out of view as she crept into the small fishing village in the late afternoon storm-filtered light. Some of the buildings had boarded-up windows. A few had sandbags. There were no lights anywhere.
A service station called O’Reilly’s had its large glass windows boarded up, but huge letters scrawled on the boards, OPEN and CALL. She supposed there was a phone number somewhere to be found, but she couldn’t see it for the rain.
These people had been preparing for a direct hit by the hurricane called Harold. Even though the storm was passing them by, they had not known until two days ago they were to be spared the brunt of it.
Addy peered out at the sealed-up buildings, wondering which ones had people inside. There had to be someone here who would refuse to leave and who could tell her where Zachary Hale would hide out. Nothing on the internet had narrowed it down to anything less than “somewhere near Bailey’s Cove, Maine.” In fact, Bailey’s Cove got no direct hits on the internet.
With this storm raging, Hale would think he was safe, sheltered from prying eyes.
Ha!
When a puddle nearly swallowed the compact car, Addy pulled onto the higher ground straddling the lanes. She stretched her beleaguered fingers and retrieved her mobile phone that had flown off the seat during one of her dodges.
She had a signal, but with the exception of her sister who needed money for school clothes, or makeup for herself if she found nothing she wanted to buy for the girls, she had no one to call.
Sad.
Silly.
Stupid.
Shut up, she