Although he was not a churchgoer, Quinn went to church on Christmas morning and lit a candle for her. He did it mostly because he knew it would have meant something to her, and she would have been pleased. She had lit thousands of candles for Doug over the years. And whenever anything worried her, or she had some special concern, she went to church and lit candles. He had teased her about it, and now he was surprised to find a strange sense of peace steal over him as he did it for her. As though the warmth and bright glow of the tiny candle would somehow make a difference in some unseen way. And then he went home, feeling slightly relieved. The things he was donating were in boxes by then. Those he was keeping were in sealed cartons piled up in the garage. He was going to put them in storage at some point before he left, along with whatever furniture he was keeping. They had had some fine antique pieces, and if nothing else, he thought he should keep them for Alex. He doubted that he would ever have a home where he would use them again. If all went according to plan, he had every intention of living on his new boat for the rest of his days, once it was ready.
On Christmas night, he finally indulged himself. It had been a hard month since his return. He drank most of a bottle of fine old red wine he had found in the wine cellar, polished it off with two brandies, and went to bed. And he felt better for it, despite the hangover he had the next day. He was glad that the holidays were almost over. He spent New Year's Eve at his desk, going over papers that his attorney was going to file in probate court after the first of the year. He worked for hours, as he listened to a driving rain battering his windows, and he could hear the wind whistling through the trees. It was midnight when he finally got up and glanced outside, and saw that the slimmer trees were being pressed almost level to the ground with the gale force of the wind. He didn't bother to turn the television on, but if he had, he would have discovered that it was the fiercest storm to hit northern California in more than a century, and there were power lines down all over Marin County and the East and South Bay.
He was in bed and sound asleep in the dark house, when he heard a tremendous crash outside, followed almost as quickly by two more. He got up and glanced out the window again, and saw that the biggest tree in his garden had fallen over. He went outside in his pajamas and a slicker to look at it in amazement, and saw instantly that it had sheared off a corner of the roof when it fell. And when he walked back into the house and stood in his living room, there was a gaping hole open to the sky, as the rain poured in. He needed a tarp to cover it, but didn't have one. All he could do for the moment was move the furniture out of the way so it wouldn't be ruined by the rain. He had been unable to determine what the other two crashes had been. The rest of the trees around the house were swaying violently in the wind, but none of the others had fallen, and the rest of the house appeared to be undamaged, until morning.
He had been unable to sleep for the rest of the night, as he listened to the storm raging around him, and it was still raining the next morning, when he got up at first light, he put on boots and his slicker again, and took a walk around the house to survey the damage. The hole in the roof was ugly, several of the shutters had been torn off, and two big windows were broken. There was glass and debris everywhere, and the garage had been severely damaged and was flooding. By sheer luck, he had put all the boxes to store on long wooden tables, so none of their papers and mementos had been destroyed. But he spent the rest of the morning moving them into his kitchen. The living room looked like a disaster area. He had moved the rugs and furniture in the middle of the night, and set down tubs and towels to catch the rainwater coming in through the hole in the ceiling. It was a part of the living room that protruded beyond the rest of the frame of the house, and there was a branch coming through it, and some of the fine old paneling had splintered from the impact. He learned from the newspaper that morning that at least a dozen people had been killed, mostly by fallen power lines, or trees, and hundreds had been injured around the state. Thousands were temporarily homeless and huddled in school gymnasiums as lowlands flooded. It was a storm of mammoth proportions.
And as he made one more trip from the garage to the kitchen, carrying a large box, he saw what must have caused the second and third crashes the night before. Two trees had fallen in his neighbor's garden. They were smaller than the one he had lost, but had nonetheless done considerable damage when they fell. There was a small woman with dark hair, looking mournful and dismayed as she assessed the destruction, and she happened to glance up at Quinn as he walked past her.
“Mine came right through the roof at four o'clock this morning,” he said cautiously. “I heard two more crashes, it must have been your trees going down,” he observed, and the woman nodded. And none of them were small trees, it was very impressive. “How bad is the damage?”