Two from the Heart
James Patterson
Prologue
IF THERE was one thing that could be said about me, one thing almost everyone in my life could agree on, it was this: Anne McWilliams does a lousy job of taking advice.
My mother, when I was eight: Annie, don’t ride your bike down that hill with your shoes untied.
My dad, when I was sixteen: Don’t waste your hard-earned money on that rust bucket—it won’t drive you to the A&P without blowing a gasket.
My best friend, when I was thirty: Don’t marry Patrick Quinn. Your courtship was way too short, and he’s way too hot.
What I have to say in retrospect (after a broken arm, a broken fuel line, and—you guessed it—a broken heart) is this: A girl should be free to make her own mistakes. That which doesn’t kill you, etc., etc.
For thirty-six years I thought I knew what was best, mistakes be damned. But then, all of a sudden, my life turned upside down, and it didn’t seem like I knew anything anymore.
Chapter 1
A STORM was coming. Even an island transplant like me could tell.
From the deck of my little cottage, thirty yards from the beach, I could see the gray Atlantic churning wildly, furiously, like something alive. The gusting wind whipped my hair into my coffee when I tried to take a sip.
My neighbor Bill was watching the ocean from his deck, too. He turned to me and yelled, “The tropical depression got upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane. Gonna make landfall tonight near Myrtle Beach.”
“Kind of exciting!” I called back.
Bill snorted. I could see what he was thinking: Fool Yankee—she’ll probably walk around with that dang camera of hers, trying to take pretty storm pictures. But I had no intention of doing that. I was going to sit on my couch with a glass of wine and a good book and wait the whole thing out.
“Well, it’s probably going to be fine,” he allowed, “but it’s not going to be fun.”
“But Myrtle Beach is over a hundred miles south of us,” I pointed out.
Bill glanced up at the sky, then back at me. “You don’t know what a hurricane’s going to do until it’s done it, Anne,” he warned. “You’d better cover your windows.”
“I’m about to.”
“You got supplies? Food, water?”
I nodded. I had bottled water, a well-stocked pantry, and a case of good pinot—I was ready for a siege. But I wasn’t afraid of the coming weather. I’d lived on this island for two years now with no storms to speak of. Everything was going to be okay.
The first drops of rain began to fall. Like an idiot, I welcomed them.
“Best get moving on them windows,” Bill said.
I hurried down below my cottage (like most houses on this North Carolina island, it was built on stilts), and, one by one, hauled up the six big pieces of plywood I needed.
An hour later, I was high on my rickety ladder, struggling with the last unwieldy piece, when the rain started really coming down. Then the wind suddenly got crazy, and it started raining sideways.
Bill came out again and shouted over the gusts. “You need help, Anne?”
“I’m okay—this is the last one,” I called.
“I hope Gimme Shellter gets blown out to sea,” he yelled.
Gimme Shellter belonged to my other neighbor, Topher, a software executive from Oklahoma City who’d just planted enormous, spot-lit palm trees all around his brand-new McMansion so it looked like a mini Las Vegas casino. The only good thing to say about Topher was that he was rarely home.
“Worse things could happen,” I called back.
The rain stung my face as I wrestled the last window covering into place, banging the wood into tension clips mounted to the window frame. Then I stumbled inside, exhausted and soaking wet.
Maybe I’d been wrong, thinking this was going to be exciting.
Through the tiny glass pane in the front door I could see green sheet lightning flashing over the Atlantic. The clouds had gotten lower, like they were trying to press down against the earth and squash it. The big fronds of Topher’s date palms were being ripped off and sent pinwheeling through the air.
Half an hour later, the water was white with foam and surging up the beach toward my house. Would it crest the small dune, the only thing between me and the open ocean?
The rain was torrential now, and debris flew high into the sky. A trash can someone had forgotten to tie down shot down the beach like a bullet.
It looked as if the wind were trying to tear the world to pieces.
I turned on the TV, but before I’d even found the right station, the power went out.
Like Bill said, things will be fine, they just won’t be fun, I reminded myself.
I didn’t have a battery-operated radio, so I didn’t know that the storm had changed course.
Or that it had gotten bigger and was headed right toward me.
Outside, the wind roared like a freight train. I crawled under the kitchen table, which was shaking right along with the house. How dumb I’d been: I’d thought I’d be drinking a glass of wine on my couch, and here I was, cowering on the rattling floor.
After what felt like forever I got up, my knees weak with fear. Wanting better shelter, I threw every pillow I owned into my bathtub and grabbed my laptop and phone. Something—a tree limb, another trash can, I don’t know—crashed into the side of my house. There was another bang as something smaller hit my deck.
I was too scared to look at the ocean again.
I was just about to climb into the bathtub and cover myself with the pillows when the sound of the wind grew quieter.
The rain stopped abruptly.
I stood up again. I crept toward the front door. I paused, and then I opened it.
Looking up at the sky, I could see huge walls of clouds on every side, brilliant white in the sunlight. The air was warm and wet. Only the ocean still surged, just a few feet from the dune.
For a minute, I thought it was over. That I was safe.
But as everyone knows, hurricanes have eyes. And the wind comes back—maybe even stronger.
And pretty soon, it came, flinging needles of sand into my face before I ran back inside.
If I said that hurricane had the same name as the woman my husband left me for—Claire—you might not believe me. But it’s true.
And if I thought that in losing him, I had lost enough—well, that wouldn’t turn out to be true at all.
An hour later, I watched Bill’s shed fly away like the farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz. Through the tiny window in my front door I watched as waves as big as my house crashed ashore only yards away.
My house creaked and shook, trying to stand its ground against the wind. The rain was relentless. Horizontal.
I ran back to my bathroom and shut the door. I crawled into the bathtub and pulled the pillows over me. The wind was screaming banshees. I swear I saw the walls moving, pushing in and out as if they were breathing.
Then something huge smashed into my house, and the whole world seemed to shake. The shrieking wind was even louder now. And was that the sound of rain falling right outside the bathroom door? Falling inside my house?
The door rattled but held. I burrowed down under pillows and prayed to anyone who would listen, Don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.
Water—waves or rain—slid under the bathroom door. The wind sounded like a thousand people screaming.
I screamed, too.
Chapter 2
I THOUGHT I’d be swept out to sea in the middle of the night. But I woke on dry land, curled up in my bathtub.
The walls around me still stood, and for a moment I was sure that I’d escaped the storm unscathed. But when I crawled from the tub and stepped into the hallway, I saw the extent of the destruction. My house wasn’t a house anymore—it looked like a pile of debris with a bathroom.
Topher’s biggest palm tree, the one that had cost him $15,000, had fallen onto the back half of my cottage and demolished it.