“Eight years ago this town faced the worst natural disaster any of us could imagine.” Chase settled behind his desk with some difficulty. “Hurricane Sandy wasn’t supposed to be a hurricane at all, did you know that? It was a ‘tropical depression’ and was located so far out to sea that it hardly bore mention on weather reports. Storms like that spring up by the dozen as the weather changes in the fall. But when it began to gather strength, people in its path paid attention. The winds picked up and the sky darkened, even as weathermen reported that Sandy had indeed changed course, but still there was no need for concern—it was still miles from shore. They said that even if the edge of the storm grazed the coast, the most that shore towns could expect would be a few days of heavy rain, nothing more. And we believed them.”
Chase drew a ragged breath. When he continued, his tone had changed. He seemed detached, as if the only way he could tell this story was to remove himself from it. “As the storm gathered strength, it was upgraded twice. Even when meteorologists finally classified it as a hurricane and named it Sandy, they told us not to worry. They said it would continue up the coast, safely offshore. But they were wrong. When the storm made landfall, just above Atlantic City, no one was ready. By the time they issued the order to evacuate, it was too late. And the winds were relentless. Hurricane Sandy pounded the coast of New Jersey for almost four days, and when it was over, the landscape of the entire shore had changed.”
Chase paused. The silence was thick, broken only by the hallway clock chiming the hour.
After a moment, Mrs. Ivey picked up the thread, her voice soft. “We were in shock, many of us, watching live coverage on the news. We witnessed our town and landmarks that had been part of the fabric of our lives for decades destroyed in the time it takes to draw breath. For a long time, we weren’t allowed back, and only then for an hour at a time. Some people didn’t come back at all. The destruction was too much for them.”
“We can’t blame them,” Chase added, his expression grim. “The damage was unimaginable. The pictures on television were horrific but it was worse in person.” He paused to rub his face with his palms. “Houses that had been part of this town’s landscape for more than a hundred years were reduced to rubble. People lost homes and businesses in the most horrific way. Things they’d spent a lifetime on, they left one day and returned to nothing.”
“That was when Dianne came down,” Mrs. Ivey added.
“Dianne?” Jill asked. “Do you mean Marc’s first wife? Why would she come here?”
“She came to help of course.” Mrs. Ivey looked momentarily startled that Jill would ask. “Dianne had lived in Dewberry Beach her whole life. She was one of my favorite students, in fact. Loved reading. Loved to write. Her father, Peter Muscadine, had been elected to the planning commission just a few months before the storm.”
“Wait,” Jill interrupted. “Peter Muscadine is Dianne’s father? Isn’t the planning commissioner the one who would have issued Marc’s permits?”
In all the years she’d been married to Marc, Jill hadn’t known that his connection to Dewberry Beach had been through Dianne. He’d never mentioned it. Jill had assumed he’d selected this town by chance, because land was available and developing it made good business sense. It seemed there was quite a bit about Marc that she didn’t know.
“That’s right, he was.” Mrs. Ivey’s expression was fierce. “But it gets worse. After the hurricane, Dianne had lost contact with her father. She was frantic, but the State Patrol wouldn’t let her into town to look for him, wouldn’t allow her past the roadblock. She’d married by then, you see, and had moved away so the address on her driver’s license wasn’t local. She couldn’t get within forty miles of here, no matter how hard she tried.”
“What do you mean, ‘reach her father’?” Jill asked. “Even if he wasn’t evacuated right away, he must have reported to a shelter sometime later? Or at the very least had a cell phone? Couldn’t he have telephoned Dianne to let her know he was safe?”
“You can’t imagine what it was like.” Mrs. Ivey shook her head. “Cell towers were down. Electricity grids were blown. Even the water was off because the pumping stations were flooded with sea water. Nothing worked.”
Jill dropped her gaze. She’d heard about Hurricane Sandy of course; everyone on the East Coast had. But she hadn’t lived through it and couldn’t grasp how horrific it really was.
It occurred to her that a hurricane didn’t explain the town’s anger toward Marc, or their hatred of the house he’d built. He had nothing to do with the storm. She returned her attention to them and found Mrs. Ivey looking at her expectantly, as if she were waiting for Jill to draw some sort of conclusion. But Jill didn’t understand.
“What did Marc do?” she asked finally. “How is he a part of this?”
Chase went on, his expression hard. “When Dianne was finally allowed in, Marc drove in with her. I found that strange because he’d never expressed the slightest interest in Dewberry Beach before, but I was willing to give him a chance. At the time, Marc had just taken over his father’s company and he was eager to make a name for himself, show the world that he was just as good as Frank Goodman.”
Jill shifted uneasily in her chair.
“But while Dianne shoveled muck and sifted through debris left by the hurricane, Marc tracked down property owners,” Chase said. “He introduced himself as Dianne’s husband and told everyone how much he and Dianne had always loved Dewberry Beach—”
“A town he’d never been to before the
