“Are you doing all right over there? Had any flooding?”
“I’m fine, Sherm. The sump pump is working overtime, but I haven’t had any problems so far. What about you and Daisy?” she asked dutifully, even though she was biting at the bit to call the police now that she’d made the decision. Thomas was out driving around in these conditions.
“Daisy and the house are fine—had some flooding in the basement—but nothing major. I hit some pretty serious flooding on Route 2, and your friend Thomas pulled me out of a ditch.”
Sophie straightened and held the phone tighter to her ear when Sherm continued.
“Ran into a little lake covering the road . . . made it through without stalling out—knew enough to keep my foot on the accelerator—but there was a damn landslide of mud after the water. Slicker than an oil spill. I went into a ditch. Thomas found me on his way back from Effingham. He dug me out, but I had to leave my car. We took a roundabout way to get back to the house.”
“Are both of you all right?” she asked rapidly. Her mind buzzed with questions, perhaps the most glaring one concerned Sherm’s rambling reference to Thomas returning from Effingham. Had he been on his way back to her house when he encountered Sherm and pulled him out of a ditch? Or had Sherm been confused by his accident, and assumed that Thomas was coming when he’d really been leaving?
“We’re both fine. Just made it back. We look like we’ve been wrestling with pigs in the mud, but we’re healthy. Damn weathermen never gave us any indication the rain would be this bad. Country roads are flooded out from here to Charleston and—”
“Sherm, where is Thomas?” Sophie interrupted.
“Oh, he’s here. Right here with Daisy and me at the house.”
Sophie shut her eyes and inhaled slowly. Thank goodness he hadn’t left after dropping Sherm off at his house. “May I speak with him, please?”
“He’s in the shower. Both of us were covered in mud . . . well, I still am, come to think of it.”
“All right. I’m on my way to your place,” Sophie said.
“No . . . no, girl, you stay put. The lake road is flooded out in parts as well. I don’t know what the stretch is like between our house and yours, but I do know that our drive back in Thomas’s car was a chancy thing. You can tell that boy served in the military; never flinched flying through patches of three-foot-deep water and kept that car solid on the road the whole way. I couldn’t have done it, that’s for sure, and I’d cringe thinking of you trying. Daisy’ll never let up about the fact that I drove into town under these conditions, but I needed some tying silk for a hackle fish
fly—”
“But Thomas can’t stay there with you. I’m sure the road will be okay—”
But this time Sophie was interrupted by the sound of a deep, authoritative rumble in the background.
“Is that Thomas?” Sophie demanded.
“It is. And he agrees with me. He says for you to stay right where you are. It’s dangerous out there. I could feel undercurrents tugging on Thomas’s car when we went through some of those floodwaters. It was a miracle we didn’t lose contact with the road. As soon as the rain lets up, the flooding will go down, and then we’ll see about things.”
“Sherm, put Thomas on the phone,” she begged. She needed to know if he was still upset.
“Well, it looks like he headed back to the bathroom, Sophie. I’ll have him give you a call as soon as he’s finished cleaning up, how’d that be?”
“Make sure that you tell him to call me, Sherm.”
“I’ve made a note of it. Don’t you worry now. Give us a call if anything should happen over there.”
Sophie hung up the phone a few seconds later, feeling helpless and frustrated as she stared at the heavy downpour outside her window.
Obviously, Thomas had provided her with her answer as to whether or not he was still angry at her for knowing his secrets.
Sophie hated the rain. She’d never despised a force of nature so much as that steady, relentless downpour. It was only eight o’clock in the evening, but the sky was so overcast that it was pitch black outside.
She switched on the light in the kitchen, the cheery glow seeming unusually bright compared to the impenetrable darkness outside the windows. In the background, she heard the sump pump churning endlessly and wondered when the machine would finally give out from overuse.
At this rate, Thomas might have to spend the night at the Dolans’. The thought of him being a quarter mile away and not being able to see him, to try to explain things to him further, was driving her crazy. She felt like a caged animal.
The damn rain was her prison bars.
She put some hot water in the pot for tea and flipped on the burner, all the while listening to the weather report on the radio she kept on the kitchen counter. She scowled at the announcement that I-57 had been closed due to flooding. Multiple rural roads had been barricaded for hours, but the closing of a major interstate suggested that conditions were worsening, not improving.
Thomas hadn’t called, despite Sherm’s assurance that he’d ask him to do so once he was finished cleaning up. She was worried he’d take off come morning, and the gap that had opened between them when she told him what she’d known would slowly widen until it was an impassable crevice.