Months earlier, watching a television newscast, Joanna had seen the image of a dazed woman pawing through the splintered remains of her tornado-shattered home. Now, as her own pulse accelerated and as she fought back a rising sense of panic, she remembered the disbelief written on that woman’s face and knew exactly what she had been going through in those awful moments—knew exactly what she had been thinking and doing. That unknown woman—that stranger—had been searching through the shattered wreckage of her home for some sign or shred or crumb of her former life. Now Joanna Brady was doing the same thing.
Standing in the doorway of her own destroyed kitchen, it seemed impossible to Joanna that any such particle existed. The devastation, beyond anything she could have imagined, was almost complete. Cupboard doors had been wrenched off their hinges and the contents of the faceless, broken shelves swept out onto the floor. Broken jars and bottles of food mingled with the remains of shattered glassware, of broken plates and dishes and serving bowls. Plastic bottles that hadn’t shattered on impact—the brand-new bottle of Log Cabin pancake syrup, a half-used gallon of Wesson Oil, a partially full container of Palmolive dishwashing detergent—had all been opened and poured over the mess, with the empty bottles allowed to fall in place.
All the kitchen drawers had been pulled out, emptied, and then used as sledgehammers on the counter and the breakfast nook, smashing to pieces Andy’s carefully routered Formica and demolishing the drawers themselves in the process. And all around—on the walls, the ceiling, the light fixtures—were zany fingerpaint patterns of squirted colored matter—mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, hot sauce—crusted with crumbs of thrown cereal and flour and sugar.
The refrigerator lay on its side, with the hacked-off end of an electrical cord dangling from the back of it like an amputated appendage. On the counter was a line of broken appliances also devoid of cords. The kitchen sink had evidently been plugged up and filled to brimming, which accounted for the soup of inch-deep soapy, greasy water that covered the floor.
Stunned beyond speech, Joanna simply looked at Butch. He shook his head. “You’d better come see the rest,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
If anything, the dining room was worse. The buffet had been turned over on its side, spilling out and smashing all of Joanna’s good china and crystal. Someone had taken her good flatware—the monogrammed silver Eva Lou had given her—and had used that to gouge long scars in the smooth surface of the oak dining room table and in the upholstery of every chair.
The top of the buffet was where Joanna had kept her treasure trove of framed family pictures—casual and professional photos of Joanna and Andy; and of Joanna, Andy, and Jenny together. There were pictures of Jenny with Santa Claus and a set of ever-changing school pictures. All of those were gone. Not only had the glass been broken and the frames been bent beyond recognition, the pictures themselves had been torn out and pulled to pieces.
Unable to move, Joanna braced herself by holding on to the scarred surface of the dining room table. From that vantage point she looked as far as the living room. There, every piece of upholstered furniture had been sliced with short, jagged cuts. Handfuls of stuffing had been pulled out through the holes in great white globs of cotton. The drapes on the windows had all been cut off halfway up the walls. The blinds behind the drapes had been wrenched from their moorings.
Shaking her head, still speechless, Joanna started toward the bathroom. “You can’t go in there at all,” Butch said.
“Why not?”
“All the fixtures were broken off,” he said. “I’ve turned off the water, but the drywall is soaked. It’s so full of water, the walls and the ceiling may come down at any minute.”
Shaking her head in astonishment, Joanna headed for her own bedroom. There it was the same story all over again. Drawers had been torn out, upended, and then smashed to smithereens. The bedding and the bed itself had been sliced to pieces, as had most, if not all, of her clothing. Joanna had left the gifts from her Sunday-afternoon bridal shower neatly stacked in one corner of the room. The boxes had all been torn open and the contents ripped to shreds. What remained had been piled into a heap in the middle of the room, where the better part of a gallon of bleach had been poured over it.
In fact, nothing seemed to have escaped the destructive frenzy, not even the creamy silk dress—still in its distinctive Nordstrom bag—that Joanna had planned to wear for her wedding ceremony on Saturday afternoon. Seeing the ruined dress, a single involuntary sob escaped her lips.
“It’ll be okay,” Butch whispered. “Don’t worry.”
Joanna took a deep breath. Standing in the middle of her wrecked bedroom, she finally regained the power of speech. “This had to take hours,” she managed.
Butch nodded grimly. “Whoever it was must have turned up this morning right after you and Jenny left and made a day of it. That’s why Dr. Ross is so worried about Sadie and Tigger. It may be touch and go for them because the poison was in their systems for such a long time.”
Stunned, Joanna looked at him. “You mean they could die?”