Free Widow's Tears by Susan Wittig Albert Page B

send waves so high as their street. But his client was an important man and he had already made his plans. “Surely you’re not afraid of a little water, are you, my dear?” he teased. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll be at Ritter’s for the next hour or so. If the storm doesn’t let up by the time I’ve eaten, I’ll come straight home. The bank can manage without me for one afternoon. And tomorrow, when the storm is over, we will all go down to the beach and see what the tide has left for us. The children will enjoy that.” His voice softened. “And we’ll take a picnic, my dear. What do you say to that?”
    It was much more difficult to get to the restaurant than Augustus had thought, for the streets were running full to the gutters, the rain was coming down in sheets, and the gale-force wind turned his umbrella inside out and tore it from his hands before he was fairly out the door. By the time he and his client arrived at the restaurant, they were wet through.
    But Ritter’s was warm and bright and bustling and the two men arrived just in time to be shown to seats at a table near the front window of the large, high-ceilinged room. The restaurant, which occupied the ground floor of a brick building that housed a second-floor printing shop, was popular with the men who represented the city’s increasingly powerful financial interests.They came to discuss business over drinks and good food in congenial company. Today’s storm might have made them a little jumpy, but they enjoyed a lighthearted moment when someone pointed out that there were thirteen diners in the room and wondered if it was bad luck. Stanley Spencer, a steamship agent for the Elder-Dempster and North German Lloyd lines, replied loudly, “You can’t frighten me. I’m not superstitious.”
    Joining the general laughter, Augustus and his companion ordered cocktails from the bar, as well as a large platter of fresh oysters and fried shrimp, to be followed by the house specialty, steaks as big as a dinner plate with sides of fried onions.
    â€œRare,” Augustus said in a jocular tone to the white-jacketed waiter. “I want to hear it moo.”
    But the men did not get their steaks. Before the waiter could turn in the order, the gusting wind muscled off the building’s roof. The brick walls of the second-story print shop gave way. The floor joists, fastened to headers with twenty-penny nails, snapped loose with the gun-shot sounds of cracking wood. Only a few men had time to scramble for safety under the bar before the print shop collapsed and a torrent of bricks, desks, chairs, printing equipment, and two massive printing presses cascaded into the dining room.
    Five men died, including the unsuperstitious Stanley Spencer. Five others were badly injured. The café’s owner sent one of the waiters for a doctor, whose office was located in the nearby Strand. On his way, the waiter was swept off his feet by a surging wave from the bay. He was drowned.
    Augustus Blackwood was among the dead. By the time his body was pulled from the wreckage and someone thought to call his wife with the tragic news, the telephone exchange was flooded. The telephones were no longer working anywhere in the city.
    But there was worse to come. Much worse.

Chapter Four
    The genus name Vinca comes from the Latin vincire “to bind, fetter.” The plant is a fast-growing perennial groundcover with blue-violet flowers and evergreen or variegated foliage, native to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Interplanting with other plants is not a good idea, for this highly invasive plant produces stems that root along their length, so that the bed quickly becomes a hard-to-manage tangle of binding vines.
    In England, vinca is called periwinkle; in Italy, the Flower of Death. In the ancient world, the flowering vines were used to garland human sacrifices. The tradition persisted into the Middle Ages, when