That Night on Thistle Lane (33 page)

Olivia laughed. “It did, too. We were just oblivious.”

They eased into the water, each finding a rock to stand on as they got used to the chilly temperature. Maggie shut her eyes, appreciating the contrast between the waist-down cold and the waist-up heat. She remembered sneaking out here on a moonlit night with Brandon, back in the days when it felt like anything was possible.

She opened her eyes and realized Olivia was looking at her with concern. “I’m okay.” She smiled before she could burst into tears. “It’s a perfect day to be out here, isn’t it?”

“Perfect.”

The pond was only five feet at its deepest. As she lowered herself into the water, getting wet up to her neck, Maggie listened to the flow of the brook over the stone dam. Olivia splashed her, and Maggie splashed her back. They shrieked with laughter as if they were twelve again.

Maggie ducked her head underwater but popped up almost immediately. “Whoa, that’s refreshing,” she said. “I think I have goose bumps.”

Olivia eased back up onto their sunny boulder. “Don’t get hypothermia,” she said.

Maggie splashed her. “Just like you to bring up hypothermia.”

Olivia pointed at her. “Purple lips, shivering, goose bumps. You tell me.”

“All right, all right.” Maggie climbed up onto another boulder and stretched out her legs. She had purple-blue knees, too. She reached for a towel on the stone wall—of course Olivia had remembered towels—and draped one over her legs. “It’s still hot as blazes.”

“It won’t be for long.” Olivia nodded up at dark clouds looming above the trees to the west. “Looks like a storm’s headed our way.”

“That does look nasty,” Maggie said. “I guess we’re done playing hooky for the afternoon.”

She dried off as best she could and slipped back into her shorts and T-shirt. Olivia did the same. Thunder rumbled in the distance, the kind of low, deep, rolling thunder that suggested a strong storm was bearing down on them.

They headed to the parking lot by the much newer Frost Millworks building. Dylan was there, getting out of his car. “We’re not going anywhere right now. Knights Bridge is under a severe thunderstorm warning.”

Maggie shook her head. “I have to pick up the boys at the library. I’ve driven in loads of storms—”

“Not like this one. I’ve seen the radar.”

“We can duck into the mill,” Olivia said. “Where’s Noah?”

“And Brandon,” Maggie added. “He’s not in that stupid tent, is he?”

“They’re at Carriage Hill,” Dylan said.

They hurried up to the mill. No one else was there late on a Sunday afternoon. Maggie used the phone in the small front office and tried calling the library but no one picked up. Her mother would have dropped off the boys by now but Maggie called her just to be sure.

“I dropped them off twenty minutes ago,” her mother said. “Phoebe’s there alone. We get thunderstorm warnings all the time, Maggie. It’ll be okay.”

But Maggie heard the note of worry in her mother’s voice. They promised to keep each other updated.

“Stay at the mill,” her mother said. “Promise me, Maggie.”

The phone went dead.

Maggie cradled the receiver and went into the outer room. She could see wind whipping through the trees on the other side of the pond. Small limbs fell into the water. The ground was quickly littered with leaves and twigs.

Then came the hail.

Olivia and Dylan held hands. Maggie wrapped her arms around her middle and watched the pebble-size hail hit the walk and the rock walls. It pelted into the brook and collected on the grass.

She jumped at a simultaneous flash of lightning and crack of thunder.

“It’s just the edge of the storm,” Dylan said.

Maggie insisted he hand her his iPhone. The local weather radar was still up on the screen. Reds, yellows, purples. It was a dangerous, severe thunderstorm, and if it stayed on course, Knights Bridge center was taking a direct hit.

Maggie’s stomach lurched. She bolted for the door but Dylan grabbed her. “I have to get to the library,” she said. “The boys—Phoebe.”

“Phoebe knows what to do in a storm,” Olivia said, white-faced.

“If she knows it’s this bad…”

“We wait this out,” Dylan said. “Then we go.”

*

“Aunt Phoebe! Aunt Phoebe!”

“I’m here,” she said, sitting up, wincing in pain. It was Aidan screaming her name. She tried to keep from moaning and further scaring her nephews. “It’s okay…”

“Listen,” Tyler told his younger brother, his tone reassuring. “You hear the sirens? Uncle Chris will get us out.”

They were alone in the library attic. They’d lost power but that was the least of their troubles. Despite the heat, Tyler and Aidan had wanted to see the attic and Phoebe’s secret room. They didn’t care about sewing, but someone had mentioned there were ghosts in the attic. Phoebe told them about the antique marbles she’d found, and they’d charged up the stairs ahead of her.

What harm was there in a spooky little adventure on a hot summer afternoon?

She’d been right behind them on the back stairs when she noticed the threatening sky, the greenish light in the window on the second-floor landing. She’d grabbed the boys and started downstairs to get to an interior room, but the storm hit suddenly. A fierce wind gust uprooted a sugar maple and sent it into the library. Branches broke the window on the landing below them, just missing them and blocking their route back downstairs.

She all but threw the boys up to the attic. They took cover in Daphne Stewart’s windowless sewing room. Hail pounded on the roof. Wind howled and whistled. The tiny room seemed to rattle with the booming thunder.

Phoebe had held on to her nephews, shielding them in case part of the roof blew off.

The storm finally passed, and now it was quiet except for the sirens.

“I need to let someone know where we are,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “That we’re safe.”

“We’re not safe,” Tyler said, the pragmatic Sloan.

Aidan sucked in a breath and pointed at her. “Aunt Phoebe…you’re bleeding.”

She saw that she was, in fact, bleeding from a cut on her left arm. She didn’t remember being hurt, hadn’t felt any pain until now. She took in a shallow breath. “It’s not bad. Are you boys okay? Let me look at you.”

“We’re fine.” Tyler stood up. “I’m going to yell out a window.”

“You won’t be able to open any of the windows up here,” Phoebe said.

“We can throw a brick and break the glass,” Aidan said.

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Where are we going to get a brick?”

“Then use something else,” his brother said, impatient, scared.

Phoebe struggled to her feet. “I’ll do it,” she said. “You two stay right there where I can see you and don’t move. Understood? Don’t move.”

As she crept to the corner door, she heard a creaking sound in the tiny room. A ghost after all, maybe. She opened the door, felt blood drip into her eyes. A cut on her scalp, too? At least the blood hadn’t reached her face and the boys hadn’t seen it.

She saw Christopher Sloan down on South Main, yelling past two uprooted trees to someone out of view. Olivia was there with her father, a volunteer firefighter, and Dylan. No Noah. Then she saw Maggie, looking stricken as she approached her brother-in-law, picking her way through fallen limbs and scattered leaves.

Phoebe tried to open the window, but she couldn’t get it to budge. What was wrong with her? Her head was spinning, aching. Her arm stung from the cut.

She glanced back at her nephews with a quick smile. “Everything’s fine. We just have to give your Uncle Chris time to get up here.”

“Because of the broken glass,” Aidan said.

“And the tree in the way,” Tyler added sarcastically. Phoebe saw that his toughness was a pretense, his own eyes wide with fear.

“Aidan! Tyler!”

Brandon. Of course. He was close, probably by the freestanding closets.

“We’re in here,” Phoebe called. “We’re okay.”

“Aunt Phoebe’s not okay,” Tyler yelled.

Brandon burst into the sewing room. “Aunt Phoebe saved us,” Aidan said, sobbing as his father scooped him up.

Her brother-in-law looked straight at her. “Sit, Phoebe.”

“I’m fine—”

“You’re not fine. Sit.”

Then Noah swept in behind him. “Phoebe.” He seemed hardly able to speak. “I know a bit about cuts.”

“From your fencing,” Phoebe said, then clutched his arm, steadying herself. “Oh, hell, Noah. Damn. I think I’m going to faint.”

“Then you’re right where you need to be.”

And she knew she was, even as she passed out in his arms.

Twenty-Two

Noah stood on Thistle Lane thirty yards from an ambulance as Phoebe reassured the crew that she was just fine. He’d hated to leave her but all eyes were on her. She’d regained consciousness almost immediately after she’d passed out, probably as much from heat and dehydration as anything else. She’d refused to wait for a stretcher. After firefighters had cleared the tree out of the way, she’d walked down from the attic on her own, Noah at her side.

“Phoebe’s right,” Dylan said, approaching Noah. “She will be fine. Her cuts are superficial. She doesn’t even need stitches.”

“You should know. You got cut in hockey all the time.”

“Regularly. Not all the time.”

They both grinned, but Noah could still feel the after-effects of the adrenaline rush. He and Brandon Sloan had arrived in the village center minutes after high winds had blown down trees and wires, ripped off parts of roofs. Brandon managed to park his truck on South Main, and he and Noah jumped into action, charging into the damaged library.

For a terrifying minute, they’d thought Phoebe and the Sloan boys were under the debris on the stairs.

Noah shook off the memory. Olivia was with Phoebe. Police and firefighters had cordoned off the library’s side yard where two trees had come down in what they believed was a microburst.

Maggie paced on the narrow lane as Tyler and Aidan told their story to their firefighter uncle.

“She’s blazing,” Dylan said.

She certainly was, Noah thought. “She’s had a fright.”

“She needs to vent,” Brandon said as he joined them. “She can cater a dinner for seventy-five people without breaking a sweat, but this is different. It’s her kids. The boys are good, though. All’s well that ends well.”

Noah had entered the library with Brandon and knew how terrified he’d been for his sons, and for his sister-in-law.

Maggie stalked over to him, hands on her hips, some color returning to her cheeks. “Why didn’t you wait for the firefighters?” she asked as if in midthought.

“Noah and I were right there, Maggie,” Brandon said. “What were we supposed to do, twiddle our thumbs?”

She ignored him and glared at Noah. “You, too. You both had to go tearing into the library on your own.” She didn’t give him a chance to respond and spun back to her husband. “What if that tree had dislodged and fallen on you? Phoebe and the boys were safe.”

“We wouldn’t have gone up if it wasn’t safe,” Brandon said.

“You would have.”

“I’ve worked construction since I could pick up a hammer. I knew it was safe. I didn’t know Phoebe and the boys were okay.” His tone was patient, unwavering. “We had a good angle. We got through. Coming back down with Phoebe and the boys was risky, so we waited for the firefighters.”

“Phoebe had everything under control.” Maggie blinked back tears. “But if she and Tyler and Aidan had gone up those stairs thirty seconds later, and that tree, the window…”

“They’d have been in a world of hurt,” Brandon said bluntly. “Lucky that didn’t happen. Don’t think about what could have happened, Maggie. Think about what did happen.”

She nodded, calmer. Her sons edged toward their parents. Brandon slung an arm over Aidan’s small shoulders. “Aunt Phoebe protected us,” the boy said.

Tyler nodded. “It was a scary storm.”

“We don’t get many storms like that,” Maggie said, reassuring them despite her own lingering fear.

Tyler kicked a small stone in the lane, then looked up at the adults, his eyes still wide. “Aunt Phoebe said we just had to wait for someone to come get us. We were trapped, weren’t we?”

Brandon pointed at the fallen tree. “The storm took down that tree. It was blocking the stairs. It wasn’t even close to you guys in the attic. You can see that from here, can’t you, Tyler?”

“Yeah,” the boy said.

Next to him, his younger brother took his father’s hand. “I wasn’t scared, Dad.”

“It’s okay to be scared. We all get scared.” Brandon looked straight at his wife. “It’s what we do when we’re scared that matters.”

“Aunt Phoebe is brave,” Aidan said.

Brandon nodded. “She did the right thing today.”

Maggie looked at Noah. “That’s Phoebe. It’s who she is. She always tries to do the right thing, for all of us.”

It would be like that, Noah knew. The O’Dunn sisters would stick together. An attack on one—even a perceived attack—was an attack on all four. Most of the time, their solidarity was probably a positive for all of them. He glanced at the ambulance. Phoebe was back on her feet, her arm bandaged as she stood next to Olivia. She looked steady, her hair shining in what was now a clear, cool afternoon. He wondered how much freedom she had to do what she wanted and not just what her family wanted, or what she thought they wanted.

Elly O’Dunn arrived with Ava and Ruby, and Brandon and Maggie and their sons joined them at the ambulance. Phoebe smiled at her family. Noah knew that it’d be her instinct to reassure them.

Dylan sighed. “Damn. That was too close for comfort.”

“As Brandon says, all’s well that ends well,” Noah said. “Phoebe and the Sloan boys are in good shape. The damage to the library is repairable.”

“What about you, Noah?” his friend asked him. “You got to be a swashbuckler without having to stab anyone. Feeling pretty good?”

“You were annoying in kindergarten, too, Dylan,” Noah said with a grin. “I don’t know how we’ve stayed friends.”

“We didn’t do the same things. You’re a swordfighter and I’m a hockey player. You’re good at math and I’m not.” Dylan paused, his gaze on Phoebe and Olivia. “You and Phoebe do different things, too.”