Chapter 83
The Outer Banks acted like a pinball bumper for the northern half of the East Coast, often knocking hurricanes and tropical storms out to sea and limiting most of the damage to the shorelines. The eastern seaboard usually only had to eat the full force of a hurricane once every half dozen years or so. But it was looking like this was going to be one of those times. Franklin’s outer edge wasn’t slowing at all as it made landfall two hundred miles south of Sandbridge.
Which had Scooter a little paranoid. He wasn’t scaredexactly, but he’d told Andy about living through Isabelle as a child and Irene as an adult, and those hurricanes had done so very much damage. He was glued to the weather reports, checking his phone at least once an hour, tracking the storm.
“Broke hundred and sixty miles an hour winds,” Scooter reported. The strain was starting to show as he gathered everyone in the kitchen. “Best estimate right now is that it’ll hit tomorrow evening, around eight. We need to close down as soon as lunch is done—start turning people away now—and break for storm prep. Strongly recommended that we evacuate off the oceanfront, at least. Governor will decide if it’s a mandatory evac tomorrow morning, but get your stuff prepped to go.”
Outside, it was already cloudy, the winds high, and occasionally they got a spray of hard rain for about ten minutes before it would stop again.
Andy had helped to prepare for smaller storms before—little squalls that bumbled up the coast from time to time, high in wind and quick to pass. That preparation mainly consisted of making sure all the doors were fastened so they couldn’t blow open, and bringing in some of the lighter furniture from the patio and deck so they couldn’t get thrown around.
Hurricane prep was an entirely different animal. Andy had witnessed a couple of mostly blown-out hurricanes in New York, but the beach residents took it far more seriously. The windows all had to be crisscrossed with tape to prevent shards of glass from spraying the floors in case of breaks and plywood nailed into place over them to attempt to prevent those breaks in the first place. (Dockside had a lotof windows. Just a ridiculous number of them, Andy felt by the time they were done.) Everythingcame in from outside, even the tables. All the appliances in the kitchen had to be pulled away from the wall and unplugged so they couldn’t short out if the water made it inside. The big freezer where they kept meat and some of the desserts was hooked up to a generator, so they wouldn’t have to throw out thousands of dollars’ worth of food if the power went out.
It was a lot of work to do in a short amount of time, and Scooter fretted all the way through it, like a mother hen with a clutch of chicks. Andy hadn’t seen him so stressed out since the fire incident. He staunchly resisted all of Andy’s efforts to calm him down, and in fact wound up even tighter as each new weather report came in.
“I have storm boxes for you,” Kat said. A storm box, apparently, was a banker’s cardboard box lined with black trash bags, and another bag to store the box in when it was full. “You will want to take anything irreplaceable with you when we evacuate but the rest can stay here. Just in case the window breaks or the roof comes off, we will protect it, however.”
Andy didn’t really have anything irreplaceable—or rather, he couldn’t afford to lose anyof his few things—but most of what he owned still fit in his backpack and could travel with him. He tucked the rest in a box, and then went back in to help Scooter pack.
Scooter tossed stuff in the boxes, not bothering to do it neatly, keeping the boxes near the drawers or shelves where the stuff would return, post-storm. He paused when he pulled a photo album out of the bedside table and brushed his fingers over the cover. “This goes with us,” he said.
Scooter flipped through a few of the pages instead of handing it to Andy to put in the “to go” pile; Andy only caught a glimpse of Dockside under construction, a wedding photo of a woman who was probably Scooter’s mother. A few snapshots of middle-school Scooter and Jason together, along with a much older girl who had the suffering, put-upon face of a babysitter. But Scooter didn’t seem to be inclined to talk about the pictures much, and Andy didn’t know how to ask.
Scooter put a few other things in the must-go pile. A stack of letters in yellowed envelopes tied together with a silver ribbon. Some other photos in frames. A jewelry box that contained his parents’ wedding rings, among other less emotionally precious pieces. The insurance paperwork and deed for Dockside, in case of a total loss.