Washed Away by Geoff Williams

Author:Geoff Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2013-02-10T06:12:54+00:00

WEDNESDAY,

MARCH 26, 1913

Chapter Eleven

Fighting Back

March 26, Wednesday

Midnight, Indianapolis

Ben Hecht, the cub reporter out of Chicago, was still stuck in a hotel in Indianapolis. But at midnight, Hecht pretended to be tired and said he was going to retire to his room. Instead, he slipped out of the hotel and into bone-chilling temperatures. If it was still raining, it would soon be snow.

Shivering, Hecht walked along the White River, looking for a place to cross.

After midnight, Cleves, Ohio

Hecht wasn’t the only one going for a walk that night. Edward Woods, a 25-year-old machinist living outside of Cleves, a village outside of Cincinnati, went on one himself. The water, as it seemed to be doing everywhere, was rising, and so he and his wife, Katie, made the calculated decision that they couldn’t wait until sunrise. They needed to get out of their house, and fast. Corny, but it must be said: the Woods escaped through the woods.

Katie took the hand of her four-year-old son, Richard, and Edward carried Nellie in a container called a half-bushel chip basket, which was usually used for their produce.

The family trudged across swampy hills covered in forestland, and often were, without warning, walking and then wading through kneeand waist-deep water. If they had had a flashlight, lantern, or some sort of light source, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. They were blindly making their way across the land.

That’s how Edward came to stumble and fall into some stream of river water, dropping the basket containing Nellie, which moved away from him as if he had just placed it on one of Henry Ford’s conveyor belts. The current seized it. Terror-stricken, Edward scrambled through the water, chasing after Nellie, who was crying and drifting away, traveling off somewhere in the darkness. Edward kept racing after Nellie, undoubtedly tripping and stumbling in the darkness, all the while listening for her crying until eventually she was crying no more. Then Edward realized that he wasn’t sure where Katie and Richard were, either. What had seemed like a smart, preventative, and proactive decision had turned into a parent’s worst nightmare. Both of his children and wife were lost.

Distraught and thinking Nellie was dead, Edward hurriedly tried retracing his steps, searching for Katie and Edward. Rain-soaked, he wandered aimlessly through the forest and swamp for the next two hours, shouting for Katie and Richard, to no avail. And then he heard it. A baby crying.

He later realized he was half a mile away from where he had first dropped the basket. Following the baby’s wailing and poking through the bushes, Edward finally found his baby daughter in her basket, wedged in the lower branches of a willow tree. Nellie was wet and uncomfortable, probably hungry and certainly frightened, but she was alive, and she looked okay. Edward, holding his daughter in a tight embrace against his chest, started hiking again. When he reached the village of Cleves, he found Katie and Richard waiting for him.

After midnight, Dayton

For many people, there was no going to bed between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning.

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