Secrets in the Sand by Carolyn Brown

            “Wait a minute!” she called desperately. “What if I don’t want to ride all the way home with you?”

            He groaned and threw up his palms. “You can go with me, drive yourself, or we can ride out the storm on the beach. The motel is evacuating. I’ll be back in two minutes, Angela. You don’t have to get dressed. You look pretty cute in that nightshirt, and I’ll drive, so you can sleep.”

            “Oh, hush!” She slammed the door, shucked her Betty Boop nightshirt and threw on the shorts and T-shirt she had left out to wear home, then dialed the rental company number on the key chain she’d pitched on the night table yesterday.

            Was it really just yesterday that she had arrived at the hotel? A whole month’s worth of staggering events had happened in a scant twenty-four hours, and now a freak tropical storm had decided to pay a visit. Did she have her girlfriends to thank for that too? She tapped her fingers on the table and willed someone to answer the phone.

            Maybe the rental agency had been evacuated too!

            “Thank you for calling Hertz,” the rental clerk said. “How can I help you?”

            Was Florida full of crazy people who had no respect for storms? And what did they do with tourists who needed a place to stay when the beach motels were evacuated?

            “This is Angela Conrad. I need to return a rental,” she said. “Could you please pick it up here at the hotel?”

            “We’re here twenty-four hours a day,” the clerk said. “Leave the keys under the vehicle’s floor mat. We’ll bring a set of keys and drive it home. Angela Conrad, red Ford Taurus. Do you want us to credit the refund back to your credit card? Do you need the address of a shelter where you can stay for the next couple of days until the hurricane blows over?”

            “Thank you. And, yes, please do credit it back to my card.” Angela hopped on one foot while she put on a sneaker.

            “Better hurry if you’re planning on making a run for the border,” the woman said. “Most hotels north of us will be filling up fast. Be careful of floodwaters over streets.”

            “Will do.” Angela crammed everything from the vanity in the bathroom in her last bag, quickly scanned the room, and was on the landing by the time Clancy came back up.

            They were thirty minutes inland, headed due north, when the wind and rain surrounded the car on all sides. Clancy eased up on the gas pedal and inched along the highway behind dozens of other people trying to get away from the hurricane. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white. Angel had never seen such rain in her life. Visibility was two inches at most. Wind beat the powerful, driving sheet of water against the car in great waves.

            “Maybe we should’ve built an ark last night,” Angel whispered, awed by the force of the storm. “If this is just the forerunner of the hurricane, I don’t want to be around when the real storm arrives.”

            “Maybe we should have found a shelter and not tried to outrun this,” Clancy said. “The hotel manager said the hurricane wouldn’t actually make landfall until tomorrow.”

            “Shh,” she yelled above the noise of the wind. “I don’t want to spend time in a shelter full of strangers. We’ll outrun the storm soon enough. Too bad we can’t take part of this rain home, only without the wind. You know how much my gardener would like this amount of water in the middle of July?” she said nervously as she watched a tree on the side of the road bend and sway, then disappear in the grayness.

            They could easily die in this stupid Cadillac out here in the middle of gray rain, and no one would know for days. When rescue workers came to clean up the rubble, there would be an overturned car, looking like a casket, with two bodies in it. What in the hell would the Tishomingo newspaper do with that story? Angel could just imagine the lead: Well-known local resident dies in crash with rich oil company president, formerly a local member of the white-trash sector, and his former wife says she barely got out of the state before the storm hit!

            I bet the wrath of Melissa caused the hurricane to take an abrupt turn toward us, Angel thought. After all, the woman had been a first-class witch for years. Maybe she had taken a correspondence course and expanded her powers. Angel visualized her in a long, flowing black robe, stirring a boiling pot full of liquid somewhere down the beach. In the vision, Melissa would chant a while and then add a pile of frog toes and the powdered brain cells of a sea gull, along with a sprinkle of lizard liver, evoking the dark powers to bury Clancy and Angel together in a big automobile.