Please God, please God.Savannah couldn’t form more of a prayer than the desperate plea for intervention. It seemed an eternity before two heads surfaced, and she managed to drag in a relieved lungful of air.
The swimmer towed Hez to the boat, and two other rescuers dragged him over the side. He was much too limp, and his face was way too white. A man and a woman knelt beside him, bending over his inert body. One of them breathed into his mouth while the other performed chest compressions.
For an instant she relived the sight of paramedics bent over her small daughter after Ella had been pulled from the pool. All their ministrations had failed to save their little girl. Unable to watch such a horrific scene again, she slammed her eyes shut for a moment. “God, no, no. Please no.”
She forced her lids open again. She wanted to be there holding Hez’s hand, but since she couldn’t be beside him, the least she could do was pray with all her might.
Her vision blurred as she watched the rescuers.Two breaths, thirty compressions.She counted them out as the man lunged down against Hez’s chest.Breathe, Hez, breathe.
Wait, was that his hand? She swallowed hard and spotted that movement again. Hez raised his arm feebly. Then his face appeared over the gunwale. He retched several times until only dry heaves remained.
After a few more minutes, he was sitting up and leaningforward against his bent knees. The engine on the boat roared, and the bow headed for shore and the small dock where Savannah stood. She drank in the sight of Simon and Hez sitting with a blanket around them. Both alive. She could hardly believe it.
The boat bumped the side of the dock, and a crew member leaped onto the weathered boards to tie up. Two of the crew helped Hez off the boat, but Simon rushed ahead and threw himself into Savannah’s arms.
“I was skipping rocks and my foot slipped,” he said in a choked voice. “I nearly killed Uncle Hez.” He turned and faced the boat as Hez stepped onto the dock with a wobbly stance. Simon left Savannah’s arms and went to his uncle. “Thanks for saving me, Uncle Hez.” Tears streamed down his face, and he put his arms around Hez’s waist.
Hez bent over and coughed up a little water. He coughed a few more times, but it was beginning to sound less wet. He straightened. “I’m still alive and kicking, buddy. I’m just glad you’re okay. I—I couldn’t bear to lose you t-t—”
He broke off, and Savannah heard the wordtooat the end of that sentence. She wasn’t the only one who had relived Ella’s death in the last half hour.
A crew member touched his arm. “Let’s sit you down on the bench until the ambulance gets here.”
Hez’s blue eyes narrowed and he shook his head. “I don’t need an ambulance.”
“I’m afraid we have to insist, sir.” The man led him to the bench. “You’ll need to be under observation for a few hours. The boy too.”
As soon as the man was out of the way, Savannah rushed to Hez’s side and knelt in front of him. The tight containment of her terror and horror dissolved, and she couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “When you went under that water, I was so afraid I’d l-lost you.”
He pulled her up and onto his lap where he wrapped his arms around her. He was still shivering, but his smile warmed her as she gazed down into his face. “I’ve got a wedding to attend, and it would take more than a riptide to stop me from putting that ring back on your finger.”
She buried her face in his neck and breathed in the scent of his sage soap under the salty tang of his skin.Thank you, God.
Chapter 2
Mama’s house always made Michael Willard angry. He loved her and enjoyed visiting over a glass of sweet tea fortified with old-school moonshine. But her home spiked his blood pressure every time he saw it. She deserved so much better than this.
From the outside Mama’s house appeared to be abandoned. She lived in a cracked-window, paint-peeling, ready-to-blow-over-in-a-strong-breeze old bungalow outside Nova Cambridge with a weedy garden in back. From the inside it looked like a hoarder house, but Mama was no hoarder. She was a keeper of memories.
The collapsing boxes stacked four high in every room held a priceless archive of documents chronicling the exploits of Joseph Willard, founder of both the town of Nova Cambridge and Universitates Nova Cambridge Willardius, the original name of Tupelo Grove University.
The magnificent Victorian furniture jammed into every free corner once graced the university president’s mansion. The faded pictures stacked in the closets recorded the finding of the fabled Willard Treasure, groundbreakings for the universityand town, and dozens of other key events, together with the proud, strong faces of Joseph Willard and the other men who made them possible.
Almost everything in the house was one of a kind. There were no other copies of the letters, pictures, journals, and so on that Mama watched over. The Legares and their cronies had seen to that. They had erased Joseph Willard’s legacy and even wiped his name from the university he’d founded. If a fire or hurricane ever hit Mama’s house, all proof of the Willard family’s deeds would vanish.
Michael made his way through a maze of boxes to find his mother sitting in front of a dinky old TV. “Mama, you really ought to let me move some of this stuff into a storage locker. It’ll be safer there and you’ll have a lot more space.”
She didn’t turn away from the grainy screen. “Hush, boy. I’m watching the news.”
Michael repressed a smile. He was sixty-four years old, president of a trucking company, and one of the most feared men in Southern Alabama’s criminal world. And she still hushed him and called him “boy.” “Anything interesting?”
She gasped and pointed at the TV. “My great-grandbaby—your grandson—almost died today!”
“What?” He turned to the screen. It showed pictures of Hezekiah Webster and Simon Legare. Simon’s resemblance to his mother was almost uncanny. He looked exactly like a male version of Michael’s daughter, Jess Legare, at that age. The anchor briefly described the incident and then handed off to a reporter interviewing a Coast Guard spokesman who warned viewers about the dangers of rip currents and letting childrenplay unattended by the water. Then the anchor started a new story about an accident that blocked two lanes of I-10 earlier in the day.
Mama scowled. “Our little boy isn’t safe with those two.”
Old regrets and new worry needled Michael. “No, he’s not.”
