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“Are you sure it’s okay for you to leave?” Tate asked Nola.
She shrugged. “My fever is gone, and my scratched hands and face are hardly worthy of a hospital bed.”
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“Where did the Red Cross set up?”
“The school gymnasium,” Beaudry said.
“Is that where the other displaced people are at?”
Tate frowned. “Yes, but—”
“Then that’s where I’ll ask you to leave me. If the water was gone tomorrow, I still wouldn’t have a place to live. The house was completely underwater, or maybe washed away. There’s nothing to salvage, but I want to go home. I need to be with my people.”
“Then you need to understand something first,” Tate said. “Cameron already told you this man is a serial killer, and we’ve been trailing him for over two months. The media has dubbed him the Stormchaser, because he shows up at the same time the Red Cross arrives after a disaster. We think he conceals himself within the contingent of volunteers. You could be putting yourself at risk just by coming back into that environment, especially when he finds out there’s a witness to what he’s done.”
The hair stood up on the back of her neck. “But I can’t identify him.”
“That won’t matter. You’re unfinished business,” Tate said.
She slumped against the pillows, her chin trembling. “Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse.”
“Do you still want to go back?” Beaudry asked.
She took a deep breath. “I have nowhere else to go but back.”
“Then do what you have to do to get yourself signed out,” he said.
“I’ll go find a nurse,” Cameron said.
“Ask her if I can please have a pair of scrubs. They threw away the clothes I came here in.”
“Yes, ma’am. Don’t worry. We’ll get you rigged out,” Cameron said, and headed out the door with Beaudry behind him.
Nola looked at Tate, refused to acknowledge the plea in his eyes and turned away.
* * *
Hershel had taken the morning off to sleep in and was still debating with himself about going to the gymnasium to work. He’d been there until after 3:00 a.m. last night unloading supplies. Being a good guy was tiring.
Hershel, you need to get up. You’ve done very bad things, and you need to atone.
He groaned. “Damn it, Louise, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so don’t be telling me what I have to do.”
Hershel, Hershel, you break my heart. I don’t want you to be like this. This isn’t the sweet man I married.
“That man died when you did, Louise, so let it be. What I’m doing, I’m doing for you.”
Don’t blame this on me. You do not kill in my name. I won’t have it.
Her anger was sharp, and he hated it when Louise was mad at him. His shoulders slumped as he leaned forward and buried his face in his hands.
“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “You went away and left me, and now you don’t understand.”
* * *
Nola was naked beneath the scrubs and very aware of that fact as she sat in the backseat between Tate and the chief. She had a running list going in her head as to what she was going to have to do when she got back. She had enough money in the bank to pick up some stuff at the Dollar Store in town, but where would she go after that? There was a trailer park, one small motel and a woman who took in boarders, but lot of people would have been displaced, so the chance of finding room in any of those places was slim. She knew things would eventually work out, but it was the not knowing that was so unsettling.
