Closed.
This was safe. Here in the dark she could tell herself she was retching for nothing. It was a dream-a nightmare-and soon she’d wake up.
But there was no line separating dream from reality.
The sun was still warm on her face. One of the island goats was nudging her arm in gentle enquiry. The world was just the same.
Only, of course, it wasn’t. When she finally found the courage to open her eyes, the tiny Petrel Island settlement was changed for ever.
The houses nearest the harbour were gone. The harbour itself was a tangle of timber and mud and uprooted trees.
Devastation…
Her first thought flew to Robbie.
She looked upward to Hubert’s place and the old man was staring down at her, her horror reflected in the stock-still stance of the old man. She was two hundred yards away but his yell echoed down the scree with the clarity of a man with twenty-year-old lungs.
‘I’ll take care of the lad. We’ll watch the sea for more. Robbie and I’ll stick with the bell and not leave it.’
She managed to listen. She managed to understand what he’d said.
Hubert and Robbie would watch to warn of another wave, she thought dully. And in offering to take care of Robbie, she knew what Hubert was saying she should do.
She was the island’s only doctor. The islanders looked to her for help. For leadership.
She had to go down.
CHAPTER THREE
‘NOTHING ever happens in this place.’
Dr Grady Reece played with his mug of coffee and stared at the pieces on his chessboard. He’d beaten Dr Jaqui Ford three times and she’d beaten him five.
He was going out of his mind.
The weather was perfect, and that was half the trouble. Enough rain meant no bushfires. No wind meant no dramas at sea. They were out of the holiday season so people weren’t doing damned fool holiday things. Which meant Air-Sea Rescue was having a very quiet time.
‘Aren’t you glad?’ Jaqui enquired.
‘Why should I be glad? I joined the service for excitement.’
‘So you like people killing themselves?’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ he growled. ‘You know very well that I try my damnedest to stop people killing themselves. And you live on adrenaline just as much as I do.’
‘Yes, but I have had a life,’ Jaqui said mildly. ‘Husband, kids, dogs. I come here for some peace. Yeah, I like the adrenaline rush of thinking we might be saving someone, but for the rest…work is my quiet time.’
Grady smiled at that. Jaqui was in her mid-fifties and was a very competent doctor. She’d only just undertaken the additional training to join Air-Sea Rescue, but already the tales of her tribe of hell-raising adult sons were legion. Everyone knew why Jaqui thought rescuing people in high drama was a quiet life.
‘No, but you,’ Jaqui said insistently. ‘You can’t depend on this for your excitement. Maybe you need kids of your own.’
‘To provide me with drama? I don’t think so.’
‘So you’re not into families?’ Jaqui was probing past the point of politeness, but Grady’s associate was no respecter of boundaries.
‘Not interested,’ Grady growled, hoping to shut her up.
It didn’t.
‘You’re not gay?’
That got a grin. ‘What do you think?’
‘You never know these days,’ Jaqui said, moving her bishop with a nonchalance that told Grady she was hoping he might not notice she was threatening his queen. ‘Someone once told me you can detect gayness if a man wears one earring, but my sons wear one, two or sixteen, depending on how the mood takes them. As they also seem to have one, two or sixteen girlfriends, depending on how the mood takes them, who would know anything at all? So…’ She sat back and subjected him to intense scrutiny. ‘Not gay. Not seriously involved. There’s never been a woman who looked like being long term?’
‘Cut it out.’
‘Max told me you were really smitten once. A lady called Morag.’
Max was their pilot. Max talked too much.
‘Morag and I went out for about a month. Four years ago.’
‘Was that all? I thought it was serious.’
Maybe it was, Grady thought ruefully. He’d hardly thought through the consequences at the time but after she’d gone…he’d missed her like hell. Not that there’d been any choice in the matter. She’d buried herself in some remote little settlement and that surely wasn’t the life for him.
So what? Why was he thinking of Morag now? he asked himself. He’d moved on. He’d dated. Morag had been a one-month relationship followed up by a letter of sympathy after her sister had died. It had been an intense letter that had taken him a long time to draft, but she’d never answered. So…
So one of these days a lady would come on the scene who’d make him smile as Morag had made him smile. But with no attachments.
‘You don’t want kids?’ Jaqui asked.
‘Why would I want kids?’
‘You want excitement. Kids equal excitement.’
‘I’ll get my excitement some other way,’ he growled. He moved his queen, removed his hand from the board and then saw the danger. ‘Whoops. Check.’
‘Checkmate,’ Jaqui said sweetly, and then looked up as Max came through the door. One look at their pilot’s face and they knew there were to be no more chess matches that afternoon.
‘What is it?’
‘Code One,’ Max said shortly. ‘Huge. We’re going in first, with back-up on the way. The army’ll be in on this, but, Grady, you’ve been put in charge first off. Tsunami.’
‘A tidal wave,’ Jaqui said incredulously. ‘Where?’
‘Petrel Island. Contact to the island’s completely cut. The first reports have come in from fishing boats that were out to sea when the wave hit. All we know is that there were five hundred inhabitants on the island when a wall of water twenty feet high swept through. God knows how many are left alive.’
It was ten minutes before Morag met anyone at all. She was climbing down as people were climbing up, but the shortest way to high ground wasn’t the track she was on. So her path was deserted. At every step she took her dread increased.
Finally she reached the town’s outskirts, and here she met Marcus. Marcus was the head of the town’s volunteer fire brigade, a brilliant fisherman and a man who normally could be absolutely depended on in a crisis. He looked…lost.
‘Marcus…’
He was at the top of the track she was taking into town, the road leading to the fire station. Or it was the track that
Marcus was staring unseeingly at the mess, and he didn’t turn as Morag touched his shoulder.
‘I don’t know where they are,’ he whispered, turning to gaze down at the ruined township.
He was soaked. He’d been caught by the wave, Morag thought, stunned, which meant the water must have
