Free Widow's Tears by Susan Wittig Albert

O’Reilly, but Mr. Blackwood will be home for lunch. I shouldn’t like him to find an empty house.”
    Pulling on her waterproof, Mrs. O’Reilly had nodded gravely. “Mayhap ye’ll change yer mind. If ye do, come. The sisters will give ye shelter.” There was something in her eyes that frightened Rachel. She added, with an emphasis she had never used, “
Please come
.”
    When she had gone, Rachel’s courage began to fade. Mrs. O’Reilly had known of Mrs. Neville’s accidental death, which could not have been foreseen. What if she was right about the storm, too? Rachel went to the telephone, rang the operator, and asked for 214, the number of the Weather Bureau. Mr. Cline was the bureau chief and her neighbor—he would be honest with her. There was a lengthy wait, but when at last he came on the line, he assured her that there was no need for worry.
    â€œYour house and mine,” he said confidently, “are built well above any possible overflow. People in low-lying areas should go to higher ground,yes. But you need not trouble yourself, Mrs. Blackwood. You’ll be fine.” She was not quite reassured, but she thanked him before she hung up.
    The other mothers in the neighborhood did not seem to share Rachel’s concern. The children were out in force, splashing joyfully through the water that was surging up from the beach. The heavy brown waves were laden with fascinating flotsam and jetsam—shells and seaweed, jagged scraps of signboards, a bundle of rags, a broken beach chair. A salvaged wooden pallet made a fine raft for Matthew with a broom handle for a mast and a handkerchief for a pennant. There was even a curiously woven basket that Ida rescued and took to her mother, to be used in the garden.
    And the toads, oh those toads! The tiny, brown freshwater creatures were everywhere by the thousands, the millions, hopping frantically for higher ground, away from the salty sea water. Ida and the twins caught a bucketful and then got bored with the effort and let them all go free, turning instead to collect the hermit crabs that were being tossed up by the waves. When the storm was over, they promised their mother, they would return the little creatures to their homes on the beach.
    For other observers, there were even more interesting sights to be seen at the Midway, a ten-block stretch of souvenir peddlers, grimy shacks, boardwalk shops, and food stands selling boiled shrimp and beer, all just a few yards from the sandy beach. A large crowd of onlookers had gathered, muttering at the sight of the giant swells as they thundered like great brown dragons, mounting higher and higher on the shore. The watchers had come mostly by the electric streetcar, although the conductor had stopped the car several blocks away. He’d had to, for the street railway trestle that ran along the beach was being battered by the waves. It might have been demolished at any moment.
    Some of the watchers had come to be amazed, for word of the mammoth waves, greater than any that had ever been seen, was spreadingaround the city. Others had come for fun and were dressed in bathing costumes to enjoy the surf. But no one now dared venture into the water, for the waves had become too powerful. The rain was coming harder, like shotgun pellets flung by the wind, and the dragon-breakers were beginning to swallow the Midway shops and splinter the flimsy bathhouses. As the spectators gawked, the waves destroyed even the giant Pagoda Company Bath House with its twin octagonal, pagoda-roofed pavilions, built at the end of a nearly four-hundred-foot boardwalk that rose sixteen feet above the beach. Hastily retreating to safer ground, the spectators found themselves wading through surging water up to their knees.
    On Strand Street at Ninth, in the narrow upper part of the island, stood John Sealy Hospital, an imposing stone-and-brick edifice only ten years old, studded with picturesque