Arena of Risk by Rachel Miller

Author:Rachel Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rachel Miller
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Angeline Foster sat motionless on the bed. It wasn’t her bed. Her bed had gone to a watery grave at the bottom of the basement under more water than she could fathom. Her eyes searched the darkness for some beacon of light, but there was none. And the moonless night beyond the dark windowpanes lent no aid. She reached for her cellphone, but that had been on her bed in the basement. Who knew where she’d find it. She was pretty sure a bag of rice wasn’t going to help in this situation.

“Lord,” she whispered, “I know you’re here, even in the darkness. Even in the silence.”

Her thoughts drifted back to the previous afternoon. She’d had tea with Brenda from the Crisis Center and such an encouraging chat. Then Brenda had taken the grocery list and gone. Angeline had leisurely made a snack and retreated to her room to study for the HISET exam she’d be taking in a few days. About a half-hour into her study, she’d heard the thunder begin. Then the hail came.

At that sound, she’d run up the stairs to watch the storm. She loved watching storms. Her uncle used to take her out on the upper porch of his ranch house, and together they’d watch the thunderstorms wend their way across the wide valley. Sometimes the storms came straight for the house. Other times the wind pushed them to the south. She and Uncle Tobin always tried to guess which way it would go before it happened. Some summers, they kept score to see who guessed right the most times. As she’d stood at the window in awe the previous afternoon, watching hail blanket the yard and pummel the trees, she’d been sure Uncle Tobin would have burst with excitement at this storm.

Then the rain came. Angeline had never seen rain like that, never. The front yard was little more than twelve feet from the street, but at times, the road disappeared. The rain had gone on for nearly three hours. She watched as the carpet of hail began to float in deep puddles in the yard and ran off the sidewalks into the gutters.

The gutters. They were filling! At that realization, Angeline had run out onto the porch, pulling her zip-up hoodie tight to ward off the chill of the storm. She’d stared at the water running down her street. A moment before, it had been little more than the steady stream that always ran down the road in a storm, but now...now it was an inch deep...no, two inches.

Angeline ran to the curb and looked back up Park Street toward the hill descending from Washington Park. At first, she hadn’t understood what she was looking at. She could see a massive amount of movement about a quarter of the way from the top of the hill near the bridge that crossed Shallow Brook. Then, twenty feet down the road and closer to her, something brown and white and, by her best estimation, about two feet tall stretched across the entire width of the road.

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