Free Sudden Sea by R.A. Scotti Page A

— noisy, boisterous, so different from his own children. The
Governor Carr
pitched and yawed in the heavy sea, but the teenagers were too busy raising their own ruckus to notice the one on the bay. The girls were laughing, trying to hold down their skirts without dropping their books, and the boys were cheering with each gust that thwarted their efforts.
    If Matoes was thinking that his daughter Mary should have been one of those girls with an armful of books, dark ponytail flying in the stiffening wind, he kept it to himself. Joe ran the farm. His wife, Lily, ran the house, and she didn’t think a girl needed more schooling. He couldn’t argue that, and he needed an extra pair of hands on the farm. The work never ended, and there was so much of it, not just the heavy pasture work but the day-to-day chores: shoveling the coal, pumping the well water, chopping ice from the huge block with a pick.
    Mary had loved school, though. She was at the top of her class every year. Maybe it would be different with Theresa and Dorothy, because Dotty was Lily’s girl. They were both good students like Mary, always on the honor roll. Not much chance Joseph would go to Rogers, or want to. Matoes couldn’t work the farm without his son — a good boy, gentle with his sisters, a hard worker, so tall now that Joe had to look up at him. Rose would be proud, he thought, if she could see their boy today.
    Matoes was a simple man. His nature was practical, not poetic, and it was pure happenstance that he had married two women who were named for flowers. That was about all Rose and Lily had in common. Matoes turned into the wind. So many years had passed since Rose had died. Months would go by without a thought of her, then all at once, when he wasn’t watching, she would come back so clearly, she could be standing beside him. Now there was Lily. She wasn’t an easy woman, but she had never had an easy time, widowed when Dotty was a baby, then taking on somebody else’s children, three of them. Eunice had been good for them, good for all of them, made them more of a family. Still, there was a divide — Lily’s girls, Dotty and Eunice, and Rose’s kids, Mary and Joseph and Theresa. At least the three of them had one another.

Chapter 7
    A Bright Young Man
    T he twenty-first of September was a gorgeous day in D.C., so gorgeous that it was hard to imagine foul weather could be lurking anywhere nearby. At the Washington Weather Bureau, bright young men, perched on tall stools at high wooden desks with slanted tops like architect’s tables, charted the day’s outlook. Two rows of identical desks faced each other, and at a glance, the men sitting behind them appeared identical, too. They were dressed in dark three-piece suits, white shirts with starched collars and cuffs, and sober ties knotted firmly. None of them rolled up their sleeves or loosened their ties, or even took off their jackets while they worked.
    Charles Pierce was one of those bright young men. On this Wednesday morning he was plucked from their ranks to present the day’s weather maps at the noon forecast meeting. Pierce was filling in for a vacationing senior forecaster, and he was eager to make a good impression. He studied the morning charts closely. Conditions over the Northeast appeared strangely incoherent. Thunderstorms over New York. Long Island was a steam bath. There was danger of serious flooding in central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. But Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut were as sunny as Washington. A low-pressure system that stretched from New England to the Carolinas bore watching, and to the south the remains of the hurricane that had been threatening Florida for four days was prowling North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Jacksonville had sent a couple of overnight advisories, all pertaining to the aborted hurricane. As advisories went, they were fairly mild, indicating no cause for alarm. Still, Pierce read them closely:
    10:30 P.M. : Northeast