Gray turned off the engine and leaped out of his car at almost the same instant. The moment he had realized that the noise he heard was thunder, he had run out of the bar and gotten into his car. Now he took the steps to the beach house two at a time. “Julie Ann!” He stopped just inside the door, trying to figure out where she could be hiding.
His stomach was tied in a knot around the three beers he’d drunk in Pass Christian. As he’d gotten closer to Granger Inlet he’d realized that the storm had beaten him and was already beginning to pass over. Julie Ann had endured the worst of it alone. He hated himself for leaving her.
“Julie Ann!” He strode through the house, looking in the bedroom they had shared the night before, but she wasn’t there. Then he remembered the night they had waited out a storm together in the back bedroom. He hurried through the hallway and stepped inside the room. Immediately he knew she had been there. The bedside lamp was on, and the covers were turned back. Stepping closer, he peered at the bed, wishing it could give him the answers he needed.
Then he saw the blood.
“Julie Ann!” Another tour of the house revealed nothing. Frantically he tried to piece together what he knew. She had been here at breakfast time. There had been a storm, the one thing she feared. There was blood on the sheets of the room where she had probably gone to wait it out. She was no longer here.
Gray forced himself to be calm. Julie Ann would not go into the storm alone, no matter the incentive. She would call someone, but who? He went to the telephone to see if there was a number scrawled on the pad beside it. Instead he found the telephone book opened to the emergency directory. He picked up the receiver to dial the police and met with silence.
Fear gripped him. When had the telephone stopped working? After she had gone? Before?
He had to do something. It wasn’t uncommon for one phone line in the area to be knocked out while others continued to operate. He tore down the steps and leaped into his car. At the nearest neighbor’s he pulled into the driveway and left the car engine running. His banging was futile, and he was back in the car again in seconds, racing to the next house.
Dense shrubbery screened the wide front porch, and at first Gray saw nothing unusual. It wasn’t until he got to the top step that he saw Julie Ann and the baby.