PROLOGUE
October
Long Island
Rosie would have been delighted with the Southampton house party, Tom mused, leaning against the twin bolsters of his seat belt and the cold windowpane. He had the romantic idea that drinking made him maudlin, and he seized that excuse to wallow in thoughts of her. Rosie loved corny shit like lawn games and Cards Against Humanity. She’d loved going with him to cast parties. She would have liked the big spread of imported cheeses and fancy pickles they’d eaten, and she would have been thrilled to be introduced to so many interesting theater people at the seated dinners, and she wouldn’t have told Tom to sit down and be quiet for the whole drive back, because she liked car games too.
More importantly, she would have made sure they left yesterday afternoon, before traffic got bad, and certainly before the hurricane arrived. But of course Rosie wasn’t there, which was why things were going to hell.
Three hours into their evacuation, with the road west jammed with cars and the first bands of torrential rain alreadytossing the branches of trees to the ground, Tom started getting worried. He’d sobered up into regrets, for both the delay in leaving and his own drinking. He was from Florida. He knew better. He would never have messed around with a Category 3 hurricane on purpose, but he hadn’t expected one on Long Island in late October, and neither had anyone else in the cast of the play whose run they’d just finished celebrating.
The car came to a sudden halt. The rain was falling so thick and heavy that Tom could barely see out the passenger window of the back seat, where he was crowded with two other members of the cast. The windshield was little better, even with the wipers on their maximum setting, so Tom saw only the brake lights of the car in front of them illuminating the gray dark.
“Shit,” said Ximena, the production’s female lead and the car’s driver. “Road’s flooded ahead.”
She rubbed her stomach nervously. Tom knew that Ximena was a couple months pregnant, a fact that had presumably not come as a surprise to her or her wife, but which she was not widely announcing. Even if her father-in-law was one of the producers, she had to wait like everyone else for her role to be secured in the forthcoming Broadway transfer.
Tom craned his head to look over the dashboard. The car in front of them, a plucky little Kia Sorento rented by the show’s marquee actor, was stopped just in front of a rapidly moving brown stream where runoff from an overpass was flowing across the street and down the embankment to their left.
As he watched, the brake lights faded when Boyd put thecar into park. There was no getting past the runoff, even for Boyd Kellagher.
Tom had been pleasantly surprised to land a big featured role in a well-funded Off Broadway debut even after he learned that the play was Boyd’s vanity project. At thirty-four, Tom’s stage credits were mostly regional, mostly supporting, and mostly undistinguished. Boyd Kellagher had only this single stage credit to his name, but hehadacted in several multi-bazillion-dollar superhero franchise spectacles since being plucked from obscurity on the basis of his extraordinary physique and darkly brooding good looks. Boyd’s decision to pick up some more traditional acting chops in the New York theater scene had catapulted this production into undeserved fame and success. Tom frequently reminded himself to be grateful; Rosie would have called his role a stepping stone. She would have been thinking about next steps already.
Tom peered out his window, squinting away from Boyd’s car. He could see some dim lights through the trees, suggesting there were businesses or at least houses a few hundred feet away up the hill. They would need to ditch the cars before the main storm really hit.
Tom wiggled to get his battered denim jacket off, nearly knocking the actor sleeping to his left in the nose.
“Here,” he said, offering the jacket to Ximena. “I’ll get Boyd. You head out and start walking up the hill.”
Boyd had sworn he was sober enough to drive, and Tom was sure two hundred pounds of muscle could efficiently metabolize a great deal of alcohol, but still, nobody had wanted to ridewith him. It wasn’t that theydislikedBoyd, but he was like a big exotic cat raised in captivity: though he looked majestic, he was barely housebroken, he needed a lot of attention, and he always smelled kind of funny. So Tom and the other actors had crowded in with Ximena rather than ride with Boyd.
Tom sighed, imagining several more days trapped with Boyd in some emergency shelter or shitty motel. Boyd had decided that Tom was areal actoron the basis of his many years of scraping together a stage career and kept trying to corner him on their breaks to talk about Euripides when Tom just wanted to mindlessly scroll on his phone in peace.
Tom unlocked the car door and prepared to duck out into the rain to fetch the lead actor just as the brake lights in front of them flared back to red. He heard the engine turn over. Tom frowned. There was no place for Boyd to go. Ximena’s car wasn’t far behind him, and there was very little shoulder. In front of Boyd’s car the road dipped; the water was at least a couple of feet deep and rising.
“Shit,” Ximena said again, leaning forward over the steering wheel. She laid on the horn. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it, motherfucker.”
Ximena was from Missouri, so she didn’t know from hurricanes, but she surely knew about floods. She knew better than to drive through flowing water of any depth. Did Boyd?
“The water’s too deep,” Tom said, now really concerned. He fumbled for his cell phone, intending to call the big putz driving the car in front of them to tell him to wait, but he wasn’t fast enough on the screen. Before he could connect, Boydrevved the engine and began to creep slowly through the water on the road.
“Boyd, stop!” Ximena yelled. Tom doubted Boyd could hear her through the storm though, and they all knew he didn’t take direction well.
Tom hesitated with the door open and watched with morbid fascination, knowing what was coming.
Boyd made it no more than a dozen feet before the water rose above the level of the undercarriage, where it was sucked into the air intake and flooded the engine. The brake lights flared again, quickly followed by the cabin lights. The engine fell silent. Boyd’s car was dead.
Rolling his eyes, Tom turned his attention back to his phone, thumbing through his contacts for Boyd’s number. Boyd needed to bail out and be careful about it as he went through the floodwaters, which could knock him over even at only ankle-deep. Tom didn’t want to have to carry the guy up the hill to shelter.
“Ohshit,” Ximena whispered again, with additional feeling.
Tom jerked his eyes up, not understanding how the situation could be getting worse already.
The Kia was beginning to drift laterally as the water rose and carried it aloft, dangerously close to an embankment that dropped off ten feet into what had once been an empty drainage canal but was now a rapidly flowing stream.
“Get out now!” Tom immediately yelled, waving his arm, but Boyd either couldn’t hear him or still wasn’t listening. The car slowly, almost gently, drifted across the road and thenbegan to slide down the hill. Ten feet over, it tipped sharply to the left, spun on one tire, and disappeared from view.
The other people in Tom’s car, drunk as they were, had finally cottoned on to what was happening and started to scream.
