I saw plenty of people out with their own personal chain saws, getting to work on fallen trees before city crews even had a chance to assemble. I recognized many of them from the Mermaid. All of them waved and called out as I rode by, happy to see a familiar face.

“When are you guys opening back up?” a few wanted to know.

“Later this afternoon,” I called out.

This information was met with enormous smiles and cries of “Great, we’ll be there!”

Ed was going to get plenty of takers for the food he was hoping to give away before it spoiled.

My heart grew heavier the closer I got to the beach, however. I’d seen virtually no damage to any of the homes I’d passed traveling through town, aside from a few missing roof shingles or carports.

But the first home I saw upon turning down Sandy Point Drive—a beautiful, three-story modern structure that I happened to know belonged to a wealthy real estate developer who’d hosted several charity benefits catered by the Mermaid—had been ripped from its foundation by either the wind or storm surge or both. It lay several yards into the surf, collapsed onto itself.

It had the sad, vacant look of a home that had been deserted—I knew the owner was a “snowbird” who resided up north during the summer months—but I still offered up a silent prayer that no one had been in the house during the storm.

Beyond it the road was virtually unrecognizable as such, there was so much sand, seaweed, and other debris thrown across it. My tires skidded unsteadily on the uneven surface.

The house next door to the one that had collapsed had lost part of its roof. The back deck was completely missing from the next house, torn savagely away and tossed who-knows-where by the waves.

And then—boom!—there it was, right in front of me: the Atlantic Ocean. Normally, the sea around Little Bridge was an eye-achingly bright turquoise blue, with streaks of paler and darker blue within it.

Not today. Today, I could see that the storm had changed not only the ocean’s color—it was a dark, metallic gray-blue because of all the sand and sea grass that had been churned up from the bottom—but its surface as well. Instead of the smooth, almost glasslike body of water in which I could usually see the reflections of the puffy white clouds overhead, I found myself staring at raw, white-capped waves lapping at the hulls of overturned, half-sunken boats that had escaped their moorings, and pieces of floating jetty.

It would be impossible to navigate waters like this, not unless you were in a navy vessel. There were too many hidden underwater hazards that might damage or destroy a boat’s propellers or hull.

The sea wasn’t all that had been transformed by the storm. The landscape of the beach in front of me had been reshaped as well. The sand that had once been pure, powder white was now caked dark with seaweed and other flotsam, smashed stone crab traps and brightly colored fishing buoys. The gorgeous palm trees that had once loaned the beach such a tropical air had been completely stripped of their fronds by the high winds, and now resembled spindly toothpicks, pressing up out of the sand like misshapen candles on a mottled birthday cake.

The only consolation for the destruction that I could see was that the birds had returned in droves. There were seabirds everywhere, gulls, cormorants, herons, frigates, pelicans, and even osprey, picking through the debris on the beach for whatever tasty snacks they could find inside the rotting algae.

Halfway up the beach, however, was a piece of wreckage from the storm that the birds had no interest in: a large yacht, which had washed up and was resting on its side in the middle of the road, like a sixty-foot seal taking a quick nap in the baking sun.

The boat wasn’t the only thing on the road that shouldn’t have been there. I had to drive around a refrigerator, someone’s Jet Ski, a kid’s tricycle, and multiple pieces of deck furniture.

As I navigated my scooter closer to the address Mrs. Hartwell had given me as Drew’s—42 Sandy Point Drive—and around thicker and thicker piles of sand and seaweed, I tried taking deep breaths to control my wildly erratic thumping heart. He wouldn’t be here, I told myself. He couldn’t. He’d have found shelter somewhere else on the island—the high school, maybe. It wasn’t that far from here.

Because only a fool would have stayed on this side of the island. Sandy Point was all but destroyed, and any living thing that had remained here—where the eye of the storm had clearly passed over—would have been destroyed along with it.

Drew must have been able to see that, and had fled, along with his dogs, in advance of the worst of Marilyn’s winds.

And yet suddenly, there it was, looming up in front of me. Number 42, exactly as he’d described it: a single-story building of poured concrete, painted white, standing tall on forty-foot pilings, which kept the home atop them not only well out of the storm surge, but also steady against hurricane-force winds since the pilings were sunk deep into the sand.

Cement steps led up to a whitewashed deck that encircled the entire house, providing a 360-degree view of the island and beach. From my vantage point on the road, I could see that Drew had installed sliding glass doors to every room. He must have used impact-resistant glass, because none of these appeared to have been shattered.

Some of them, though, seemed to have been thrown open, possibly to let in the ocean breeze . . .

. . . unless they’d been sucked open by the hurricane-force winds. Long, filmy white curtains streamed out through the openings and fluttered in the strong ocean breeze.

There was no sign of Drew’s pickup truck, but when I switched off the scooter’s engine, I could hear—very faintly, over the rumble of the waves and the howl of the wind—the sound of dogs barking.

No. No way. Was I imagining this? I had to be.

Removing my helmet and setting it on the scooter’s seat, I picked my way across the seaweed-strewn beach, heading toward the house’s stairs, my heart hammering harder than ever. He couldn’t possibly be there, I told myself. Or if he was, I was going to find him dead. Probably the storm had sucked open those sliding doors, then hurled a piece of driftwood inside, knocking him in the head, killing him instantly.

And if that’s what had happened, how was I going to tell his aunt? I wondered as I began to climb the stairs, which were slippery from the muck and grime the storm surge had left behind. Drew being dead would break her heart.

The farther I climbed, the harder the wind from the sea whipped around me, and the louder and more insistent the barking seemed to become. Where was that barking even coming from? With the wind, it was hard to tell. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Then, just as I reached the top of the steps, the wind whipped my hair directly into my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing, but as I fought to scrape back the wayward strands, I heard a different sound. A man’s voice.

An all-too-familiar voice.

“Fresh Water!”

Chapter Twenty

Risks of electrocution, drowning, and other physical threats can accompany hurricanes.

As soon as I’d finally managed to scoop my hair from my eyes, I saw something I’d become sure I’d never see again: Drew Hartwell’s handsome, unshaven face smiling down at me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked—not accusingly, but curiously, as if I were a bird that had tumbled down from the sky and landed at his feet.