Amber grinned and took a sip of soda. "Seriously? Dude, she's a registered guide. She goes off on hunting trips that last for weeks. In Alaska."
Cami laughed. "But I'm also always looking to learn. Mitchell, be my guest—make any notes you want. I'd love to see what you think."
A few minutes later, Cami stood on the front porch, the sounds of Amber and Mitch laughing in the kitchen muffled behind the front door. She looked up into the darkening, clear sky, and took a deep breath of warm summer air. The cicadas serenaded her from treetops all around her property, the crescendo of their desperate mating calls rising and falling in competition with each other. Crickets chirped from the aromatic flowerbeds around the front of the house, and in the distance, a lonely owl hooted.
Cami walked across the wide side yard and approached her neighbor’s house to the south. Like every other house in the neighborhood, Marty Price’s home was lit up with exterior floodlights. But that was where the similarities ended. As she approached the front door, she noticed on every exterior window hung heavy, metal hurricane shutters.
Most houses in the neighborhood—including Cami's—had a bay window in the front room facing the street. Not Marty Price. Rumor had it that when he’d purchased his house, he’d paid a contractor to rip out the bay and replace it with a large flat panoramic window. Above this he'd added an automatic hurricane shutter.
Cami saw them often enough at condos and hotels along the beach, but it still looked out of place in the neighborhood so far inland. The squat metal box ran the length of the window and on command would roll down a linked metal barricade not unlike armored Venetian blinds.
But Marty didn't stop with high wind protection for his windows. Beneath every window, all the way around the exterior of the house, he'd planted thorny bushes—mostly hollies and rosebushes. Anyone that wanted to break into his house would be in for a world of pain before they even got inside.
She knocked on the door. To her knowledge, no one she knew in the neighborhood had ever been inside Marty's house before.
Cami rang the doorbell, then waited another 10 seconds and was about to walk away when the door cracked open, stopped by a thick chain on the other side. A wisened, rheumy eye, part of a wrinkled, sallow-skinned face, appeared in the small opening. "What is it?"
“Hi, Marty," Cami said in a loud voice reserved for people hard of hearing. "It's Cami. From next-door? Cami Lavelle.”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
Cami cleared her throat. “Uh, with all the stuff going on, I just wanted to say hi—hi,” she said, with a slight wave, “and…uh, see how you’re doing. Everything okay?"
"Fine. This is what we prep for, isn’t it?" The door shut with a solid thump.
"I guess it is…” Cami muttered. Shaking her head, she walked back out to the street and down to the next house. No one was home, so she continued her loop of the neighborhood, stopping at every house with lights on.
A few houses proved unoccupied, but there were a handful of people at home in the others. On the far side of the street, at the entrance to the neighborhood, she found the Curtis family. They had just sat down to dinner when she’d arrived. A power couple, both had high-paying jobs requiring frequent travel. They hadn't heard much about the tsunami and cared even less. Cami tried to fill them in, but they were more anxious to get to their custom dinner. It was their one night of the week, Susan explained, where they both forgot about work, and instead prepared dinner together—one of the boxed gourmet dinners that shows up at the door full of food ready to cook. It was a ritual, one they enjoyed, and they were not happy to be disturbed.
Cami took the hint and left. She only found four other houses with people at home, all of them nervous about the power fluctuations, but only one had a flashlight at hand. She heard a range of opinions, from it'll all blow over by tomorrow, to it’s the end of the world as they knew it, or at least they hoped it was the end of the banks—evidently one of her neighbors was in danger of falling behind on mortgage payments.
By the time Cami made her way through the largely empty neighborhood back to her own house, she had worked off what nervous energy remained in her body and was ready to take a shower and go to bed. As she walked up her own driveway, headlights illuminated her and swept across the front yard. She turned to see her neighbor across the street, Harriet Spalding, pull down her long, manicured driveway toward her house, set back an acre from the road in a copse of artfully maintained birches.
Cami sighed. The Spalding's were an odd couple. Henry was a senior banker in Charleston, and high enough up in the corporate food chain to worry more about social events than profit margins. His wife, Harriet, was the neighborhood busybody, and relished nothing so much as finding out everyone's secrets, except maybe gossiping about them to everyone else. Cami honestly didn't know what the woman did with all of her spare time other than sit on the couch and eat bonbons, but Harriet did not have the body of a layabout.
On the surface, Harriet Spalding was busy with philanthropic pursuits and volunteer societies. Reluctantly, Cami walked the long, winding driveway. She marveled at the perfectly manicured lawn, dotted with expertly trimmed hedges
