Their Child?: Lori's Little Secret / Which Child Is Mine? / Having The Best Man's Baby

The sound was louder than any train by then. It roared around them, engulfing them. Glass shattered, walls of it, a series of sharp explosions, seeming to come from everywhere at once—the windows busting inward—in the dining room, the ballroom, all over the clubhouse.

The roaring, impossibly, grew even louder.

Tate stood alone at the open door to the cellar, urging them forward. “Come on, hurry up!”

And the twister was on them.

The shut doors to the dining room flew outward and blew off their hinges into the other room. Simultaneously, the doors to the ballroom banged shut and then open—twice. Then they too ripped away and blew off.

Fury engulfed them. Pots and pans and any number of sharp objects rose and went flying. Tucker herded Lori and Brody ahead of him, fighting every inch of the way, as the whole world broke loose from its moorings and the roaring became a monster that swallowed them alive.

It was all so slow after that. A minute—two, maybe—stretched into an eternity of terror, of sudden hard blows and noise.

The wild monster of roaring wind lifted Brody straight up off the floor—and threw him directly at Tate. Tate, miraculously, caught him.

“Go!” Lori shouted. “Go down, now!”

Tate turned and descended, as Brody cried, “Mama!” his young hands reaching, grasping, over Tate’s broad shoulder, as if he could pull Lori to safety with him by sheer effort of his ten-year-old will.

Tucker had Lori hard by the waist. He pushed her forward. Things kept hitting him—a knife handle, a wooden bowl; a dish shattered against his shoulder. It didn’t hurt. None of it hurt. He felt each blow as if it had been delivered with intent. The wild monster fought him. He fought back. The monster wouldn’t—couldn’t—win.

The door to the cellar came off its hinges, lifted, flattened above their heads, spun like a plate, and flew out the hole where the ballroom doors had been.

Lori screamed.

He urged her onward. “Go, move, we can make it.”

She surged valiantly forward, her dress plastered hard to her legs, slowing her progress—until she grabbed it and hiked it up around her waist. The dress flapped back, wrapping around him, holding on tight like a clutching, desperate living thing.

From overhead, above the ceiling, on the second floor, there was an earsplitting ripping sound. One part of Tucker’s mind placed the noise: the roof must have blown off.

Tucker kept his focus, kept pushing Lori from behind, every inch toward that cellar door a triumph, a victory over the monster that roared and clattered and beat at them and threatened to tear them apart.

They made it to the door and she was just about to duck into the stairwell, when the walls started going. Within the roaring rose a groaning and a horrible, screaming, creaking sound.

Tucker staggered on the shifting floor.

Lori cried his name, “Tucker!” and turned, reaching back to grab for him. Before he could tell her to go on, to go forward, to get down the damn stairs, a white stoneware mixing bowl materialized out of the spinning chaos, flying straight at her. It struck her at the temple, breaking neatly in half, the pieces pausing in midair and then blowing off in opposite directions. Blood bloomed at her forehead, welled, spattered everywhere.

The walls were falling in on them. Platters and frying pans whizzed by them—and Lori wore the strangest, most tender, sad look.

“Sorry…” She formed the word, without sound, as the blood ran into her mouth, sprayed her pink dress and the front of his suit. “So sorry. Ruined everything…” Her eyes drooped shut beneath the curtain of blood. She fell toward him and he caught her.

Her limp body anchored him.

He was able to take that one more step, to gather her to him, lift her high against his chest, and surge for the stairs. He went down as the ceiling gave way and came crashing to the floor.

Chapter Eight

In the shadowed candle and lantern-lit recesses beneath the clubhouse, a deep hush descended.

From above, there was silence. Terrible. Total.

The monster had moved on.

Tucker sat on the bench that a few kind souls had vacated for him when he came down the stairs with Lori limp in his arms.

She lay stretched out beside him, too pale and very still. Her bright head, matted with blood, rested in his lap. Someone had handed him a clean white bar towel. He pressed it to the wound on her temple, watching it slowly soak crimson, the dark stain spreading, absorbing the white.

He told himself the flow was slowing. But he really wasn’t sure that was true.

Brody stood beside the bench holding Lori’s limp hand. His young face was set, his mouth a bleak line. Lori’s mother and father and Lena, Dirk at her side, hovered a few feet away, all of them silent as the quiet from above.

Someone nearby spoke into the hush. “It’s over…”

And then, from aboveground, came a slow, painful creaking sound. Something fell with a shuddering crash.

“Oh, sweet Lord,” a woman cried.

“What was that?” a man demanded.

No one answered him. Who the hell could say?

Tate pulled a cell phone from his inside jacket pocket. He flipped it open and gave it a try. “No go,” he said. “That big boy must have knocked out a tower or two.” Tate turned to the club manager. “You got a land line down here?”

Near the wall, where water had begun to trickle down from broken pipes above, one of the bridesmaids spoke up. “There’s one right here.” She took the receiver off the hook and put it to her ear. Then she shook her head. “Dead.”

All around them, people were trying their cells—and getting nothing.

Tate said, “Okay. Let’s check out our chances of digging out of here.”

He chose a couple of able-bodied men to go with him up the stairs. The club’s manager and two of the wait staff went the opposite direction, headed for the outside entrance, an in-ground steel door, mounted in concrete, reached by an underground corridor that ran out about ten yards from the clubhouse.

Tucker left them to it. Right then, all he cared about was the unmoving, blood-spattered woman in his arms. No way would he leave her side. He stared down at her still face and a word burst like a bright light into his stunned mind: doctor.

Damn. What was wrong with him? A doctor should have been the first thing he asked for once they made it down those stairs. He glanced up. “Doc Flannigan. Where’s Doc Flannigan?”

Lori’s dad, shell-shocked as the rest of them, visibly shook himself. “The doc. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” Heck raised his voice to his best booming roar. “Doc! We need Doc Flannigan over here, now!”

The word went out through the cellar’s warren of rooms.

“Doc Flannigan.”

“Anybody seen Dr. Flannigan?”

“Doc Flannigan. They need him up front.”

A couple of minutes later, the tall, white-haired gent eased his way through the crowd. When he reached the bench, his silver brows drew together. “Oh, my.” He handed his jacket to Brody. “I wonder, could you hold on to this for me, young man—and move back over there just a little?”