the car swerving as it roared back into the street.
There was more traffic up ahead. The street widened to four lanes. The vapor lights were working. A major intersection. Police cars were clustered on the parking lot of a convenience store. She pulled up next to them and turned off the engine. She sat there breathing deeply. Her hands were shaking.
She smelled smoke from the fire. She was very close to it.
A cop came around to her window.
“You all right?” he asked, stepping back to stare at the car. “Where did that happen?”
“Back there,” Holleran said as she got out and explained.
Looking surprised, the cop said, “That’s Melrose Gardens. You were lucky you got out of there in one piece tonight. Everybody’s out on the streets since the quake. We’re getting a lot of calls.”
“I didn’t see any police,” Holleran said.
“You got that right,” the cop said. “No way are we gonna go in there without lights and a lot of backup.”
Holleran looked at him more closely. He was young, maybe early twenties. He looked scared, and she realized what was frightening him. They’d come close to the collapse of law and order, the prospect of mobs roaming the streets.
“What’s on fire?” she asked, putting those troubling thoughts out of her mind. The wind had changed. The smell of smoke was very strong.
“An old meat-packing plant,” he said. “A couple blocks that way.” He pointed with a long-handled flashlight. “Gas line broke or something. It’s been running at five alarms all afternoon. They’re letting it burn itself out.”
Holleran looked at the convenience store. The plate-glass windows were shattered. She saw two cops with radios walking around to the back and headed that way without thinking much about it. She needed to walk, get control of her nerves.
She could imagine sitting in front of the fire with her dad and older sister back in Chicago. Her mom in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. “Let me tell you about Memphis. You won’t believe what it was like to drive there.” She’d describe her arrival in the city. Her father would shake his head and sip his Manhattan. He’d tell her she needed to get a handgun and learn how to use it. It had become gospel with him. He’d even offered to buy guns for Elizabeth and her sister, Mary. And pay for the shooting lessons. Before the day ended, he’d wind up raking over the Democrats and President Nathan Ross, all liberals, and the news media until her mom told him to calm down. Her father was Irish and weepy emotional. He’d cried openly the day she’d scored her first soccer goal. She was in first grade, and it was the last game of the season. Mary was a lawyer, who’d sailed through Duke law and was working for a small but good firm in L.A.
Elizabeth pictured telling them what had just happened and almost smiled at the prospect. It was so unreal.
“I wouldn’t go back there, miss,” the cop said, hurrying after her. “Couple kids were looting the place after the earthquake. When a cruiser pulled up, they bolted. One of ‘em didn’t make it out.”
Elizabeth went just far enough to look around the side of the building. Five or six cops were back there with flashlights pointed at a window. A heavyset teenager in a white wind-breaker was lying spread-eagled across the broken sash. He wasn’t moving.
“Where were you trying to get to?” the cop said, still trying to be helpful.
“The University of Memphis,” Elizabeth said.
“That’s way across town,” the cop said. “You really got yourself lost.”
Elizabeth nodded, half listening. The sight of the dead looter didn’t bother her nearly as much as something else. She’d noticed the cracks in the foundation of the store. Some of them were more than six inches wide. They were huge. Bigger than anything she’d seen in Los Angeles after the Northridge quake.
KENTUCKY LAKE
JANUARY 10
10:50 P.M.
THAT EVENING LAUREN AND BOBBY MITCHELL HAD a late supper—cornbread, baked ham, fruit salad. Bobby’s favorite meal. He’d been working so hard lately around the boat dock, never complaining, that she wanted to reward him.
They lived in a two-bedroom ranch house with cedar siding set back on a hill a couple miles from Kentucky Lake. Bobby took care of their two quarter horses, Sam and Rob Roy. He did most of the work in the stable, cleaning out the stalls twice a day and laying down fresh hay before he left for school and, again, after he finished his homework in the afternoon.
As she set out the dinner plates, Lauren had the radio tuned to a station in Memphis. It was a call-in show, and they had a man on from the University of Memphis, a geologist. They were talking about the earthquake.
Memphis still wasn’t anywhere near back to normal. Parts of the city remained without electricity and water. It looked like the final death count stood at thirty-nine, including seven bricklayers who died when a wall fell on them. A section of the I-240 freeway had collapsed at Union Avenue, crushing a beer truck and its driver. An old warehouse filled with paint was still burning on Cotton Row on Front Street near the river.
The geologist mentioned that the quake’s epicenter was near Mayfield, Kentucky.
“Grandma, we’ve played them in basketball,” Bobby said. The small town was only thirty miles to the west.
“Shush. I’m trying to listen, son.” The man was talking about aftershocks.
There’d been a couple of them, nothing severe, but definitely noticeable. Strong enough to keep her on edge.
“The biggest we’ve had so far was a magnitude 3.2,” the geologist said in his slow, soothing Southern accent. “The activity appears to be subsiding—at least as far as the bigger aftershocks are concerned. But we could feel minor shakes for weeks, maybe months.”
Lauren figured they’d been lucky. Their dock and home had only minor damage. A couple of broken windows. Some cracked plaster and maybe a chimney that would need tuck-pointing. Some neighbors hadn’t been so lucky. There were a lot of damaged foundations and broken sewer and water pipes. A farmer over in Campbell, the county seat, had his whole barn collapse. It fell down like a cardboard box.
The damage had been far more severe across the state line in northeastern Tennessee. There’d been reports that people had actually seen the ground moving like the waves of the ocean. She still had trouble believing that.
Lauren went to bed about an hour later. As she did every night, she lay there thinking about her husband. There were moments, especially as she waited in the dark for sleep to come, when she had to fight back her anger at him for getting himself killed. He’d promised he was going to quit the mines, promised it again at breakfast the morning of the cave-in. He’d said he’d had enough. And then he left for work at 5:00 in the morning carrying a thermos of hot coffee and a lunch pail and never came back.
She couldn’t help the way she felt, blaming him for leaving her without a husband. She needed him.
Later, when she tried to remember what happened, piece it all together in the right sequence, she couldn’t recall exactly what had awakened her. She didn’t think it was the aftershock. Not at first anyway. For some reason she woke up and glanced at the clock on her nightstand; it was just after two in the morning. She heard the furnace kick on. It was cold, below freezing.
She’d started to drift off again when the ground began to shake. Her four-poster bed jostled on the hardwood floor, rocking sideways. She sat bolt upright. A framed photograph of her husband fell over on the dresser. Dishes and coffee cups fell from open shelves in the kitchen, shattering onto the floor.
Lauren slipped into a sweatshirt and pulled on a pair of jeans and boots.
She thought the big aftershocks were supposed to be over. This was definitely one of the stronger ones.
Bobby hurried into the hallway with a flashlight. It was the first Lauren realized that their power was out.
“Grandma, my Michael Jordan poster fell down,” he said excitedly. The poster over the bed was his most prized possession. He wasn’t frightened in the least. This was fun.
