Jacaranda by Cherie Priest Page A

state. But there’s been no mention of it in the papers, save a handful of obituaries, and there have been no complaints against the hotel or its owners.”
    “Ten people,” she corrected him glumly. “There was another last night.”
    He appeared surprised, but not particularly stunned. “A tenth? But who? I didn’t hear anyone nattering about it downstairs in the lobby.”
    The padre sighed. “No one ever natters. No one ever talks about the deaths, except for poor Sarah…and all she’ll do is cry to you about them.”
    “Sarah?”
    “The desk clerk,” the nun provided. “Or the manager, perhaps—for she wears many hats. She helped us last night, after poor Mrs. Fields breathed her last.”
    “Where is she now?”
    She looked to the padre. “I don’t know…in her quarters? Resting, I assume.”
    “It was a long night,” Juan Rios mumbled around a stifled yawn. “There was a lot to clean up.”
    “No one told the police? No one summoned the authorities?” the Ranger asked incredulously.
    Sister Eileen answered as squarely as she could. “Well, we summoned you . In the past, yes, Sarah called for help; and at first, the police did come. But after a while…they stopped bothering, unless we asked them to take away a body to dispose of it. It’s like there’s a spell on the place, you understand? What gossip finds its way around speaks only of accidents, and unlikely tragedies with ordinary explanations—when any fool could see that’s not the case.”
    “What about last night? Mrs. Fields, I think you called her.”
    The padre supplied the rest. “It was very late, very bloody, and the storm…” he winced as a tree branch slammed into the window beside him; but the glass did not break, and he did not stop there. “The storm was coming for us. Sister Eileen thought it might hold off, and we would have another day to ask questions…but six hours ago, I had my doubts.”
    They all kept silent for a long, uncertain moment—watching the gale whip the trees back and forth, throwing flowers and leaves, newspapers, laundry yanked from lines, and everything else that wasn’t nailed down…all of it boiling to a cauldron of mayhem, just on the other side of the glass.
    “The eye of this thing will overtake us soon, that much is certain,” she said quietly. “What you see out there—it’s barely a fraction of what the weather will bring us. Have either of you ever encountered a hurricane?”
    The Ranger said, “No, but I’ve heard stories,” and the padre shook his head. He’d heard stories too, but none of them reassured him. The stories he’d been told were all about destruction, death, and an uncaring swipe from the hand of God. They were stories of coastlines scrubbed clean by a surge of debris, of entire towns that vanished into the ocean in the span of an hour.
    “Stories never tell the half of it, or else they’re twice the truth,” she told them. “But it’s hard to exaggerate a thing like this. I hope that most of the island has evacuated. The official order finally went out before dawn, and anyone who can’t leave—or won’t—has been urged to seek shelter.”
    Horatio Korman said, “You should’ve seen it, as I was coming in yesterday: all the ferries full, coming out of Galveston. I was the only idiot headed in .”
    The padre gave a small, short laugh that sounded like a sigh. “That’s how it was for me, too. Now you’re stuck here, with us. And with whatever…” he paused.
    The Ranger spared him, and summed up quickly: “With whatever’s killing people, inside this hotel.”
    “You believe us? Really, you do?” asked Sister Eileen. Relief was written all over her face, but Juan Rios couldn’t imagine why . Believing wasn’t going to save any of them; she knew it as well as he did.
    “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t.” He pulled out a pouch of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette while he said the rest of his piece. “Look, I know the Jacaranda