What Stands in a Storm (33 page)

“It's against policy,” a nurse said. “Can you give me some specific markings on his body?”

“He has a scar on his chin and on his left elbow. He just had surgery.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think we have him.”

She left the room and came back with a folder in her hand. She sat down and handed it to him.

“Whenever you're ready, you flip that open and tell me if that's your son or not,” she said. “Just take your time.”

Darrell flipped it open. The three words that once had brought him joy now unleashed a torrent of pain.

“That's my boy.”

Will's body beat them home, arriving at the Priceville funeral home before the Stevens family rolled into town. The pastor phoned to tell them.

“Will's home.”

The owner was a family friend whose kids grew up playing baseball with Will. He faced death every day in this line of work, but this kind of death, like a rosebud cut and withered before it could bloom, was the saddest kind of all. When they met to discuss the funeral arrangements, he left the room three times to compose himself.

The soonest they could bury Will was Tuesday, but they could not bring themselves to put him in the ground on his grandfather's eighty-sixth birthday. Paw Paw's heart was already broken. The morning after the storm, Darrell, Jean, Taylor, and two of Will's aunts had walked over to his house to tell him.

Wayne Stevens was sitting in the den, reading the paper, when through the front window he spotted them walking slowly across his
front lawn. He opened the front door and they all filed in and sat down without a word. Darrell pulled up a chair right in front of his father, sat down, and looked into his eyes. It was a long five minutes before Darrell could choke out the words.

“Daddy,” he said, “we lost Will last night.”

The old man thought the top of his head would come off.

Paw Paw was hard of hearing and sometimes asked a question more than once, but he recalled with utter clarity the very last time he saw Will. It was just days ago, on Easter Sunday, when the family had come over for supper. After the meal, Will had stayed with Paw Paw a good long while. They had always been close, and that had not changed when Will went off to college. When he got ready to leave, Paw Paw drew from his wallet two crisp hundred-dollar bills and held them out to his grandson. Will thanked him but waved the bills away.

“I don't need 'em,” he said.

Paw Paw thought about that a lot. He kept those hundred-dollar bills in his wallet for a very long time and could not bring himself to spend them. He told the story more than once to family and friends.

“That was the kind of boy Will was,” he would say, walking that line between laughter and tears. “When I was that age, if somebody had held out two hundred-dollar bills, I'da grabbed 'em hand and all.”

Paw Paw had seen a lot of things in his life. He had seen Pearl Harbor engulfed in flames. He had seen a small town spring up around his rural farm. He had weathered many storms in his long life. But he never dreamed he would outlive his grandson. That was the hardest thing he had ever done.

When the Stevens family went to the funeral home to make arrangements, they discussed whether to open the casket. The director tried to look at his friend's son with an unbiased eye. Will's bones were shattered, and his body had swelled from the trauma so that he looked as if he'd gained a hundred pounds, which obscured his chiseled jaw.

“If it was my child,” he said, “I wouldn't.”

It was agreed.

The family stood to leave.

“Make sure Will's got his socks on,” Jean said softly. “He's got cold feet.”

The man went into the back and sat with Will, just sat there beside him, for a very long time. When it came time to prepare him, he noticed something curious. The palm of one hand was imprinted with four tiny half-moon marks.

The mothers were the ones to figure it out.

Loryn's nails had been broken off at the quick by whatever she was holding fiercely in the last moments of her life.

It must have been Will's hand.

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2011—CHARLESTON SQUARE, TUSCALOOSA

Tracy Sargent and her rescue dogs had been clearing neighborhoods on the west side of town when they were called to Charleston Square. The stump upon which Chelsea Thrash had been found, paralyzed with a broken back, sat in a sea of brokenness. Debris still lay in petrified waves as far as the eye could see. Clearing it away seemed as impossible as emptying the ocean with a spoon.

Teams of rescuers had been searching this spot over and over for the past five days. No bodies had been found since that of Nicole Mixon, who had been discovered within the first hour. But on the scene was a father who said his son was buried somewhere under all that hopelessness.

“I know he's here,” he told the rescuers.

Sargent went to the back of her Suburban, retrieving gear from a long, black box. While her dogs rested in the air-conditioned car, she donned her technical rescue gear in a routine that rarely deviated: helmet, headlamp, goggles, gloves, backpack. In the pockets of her thick, black work pants she placed bottled water and rubber balls for the dogs. Under sunglasses and the brim of a ball cap placed under her safety helmet, it was hard to see the beautiful woman underneath. The blonde ponytail that trailed down her back was the only thing that made it easy to spot her in the crowd.

As Sargent walked to the back door of the driver's side to get her
dogs, an officer caught her attention. He nodded at a man who had been sitting in a chair under an umbrella at the foot of a mountain of rubble that towered like a levee, two stories high. Clean-cut and muscular, with close-cropped hair, reading a book with composure that seemed out of place in this armageddon.

“We're going to do everything we can do to find your son for you,” the officer told the man. “We're going to keep searching until we find him.”

The man looked at Sargent, who nodded respectfully. She noticed his kind, sad eyes. What struck her most about him was the stoic patience that was so different from the response of all the bereaved parents she had met in her twenty-three years of search and rescue. She read his face and inferred that he had come to accept his loss, and in that acceptance was a glimmer of peace in a time of great chaos and horror. The man was sitting about sixty feet from the spot where his son's apartment had stood. All that was left of that apartment was an empty concrete slab.

The boy's mother and older brother were sitting nearby in chairs that strangers had brought to them, along with small kindnesses—water and food—to bring them some small comfort.

This family embodied every reason that Sargent had devoted her life to this. It wasn't what she did. It was who she was. She had spent decades proving her strength and capability to male colleagues who would have liked to see her fail. But underneath the callus on her psyche that protected her from this reality, her heart was not jaded. No matter how many grieving families she encountered, she asked herself how she could help each family through their vortex of hell. She believed that if she did her job with skill and compassion, this nightmarish moment of awful discovery would inevitably change their lives, but not necessarily come to define them. If she ever stopped believing that, she would find another job.

Sargent turned toward the levee of debris. As she scanned the terrain, she mapped out in her mind the downstream areas, where the
wind had shoved the building and everything in it. That was where she always started, at what she called the high-probability areas.

First she called Cinco, a German shepherd as black as a moonless night. Nearly six years old, Cinco was all she could ever want in a K-9 partner, a combination of unwavering loyalty and uncanny intelligence. Slow and methodical in every search, extremely consistent, he was born with a work ethic most humans could not match. Cinco had come into her life shortly after the death of Logan, who had been killed in the line of duty as he had searched for the remains of a little girl in Georgia. The dog had slid down an embankment and under the wheels of a passing car. He died in Sargent's arms. The only good thing that had come out of it was Cinco, a pick-of-the-litter puppy whose name she had chosen before the birth of his litter on Cinco de Mayo, 2005. As she trained him, Cinco showed a precocious talent and love for his job. When he turned twelve months old, he passed certification tests for tracking, search and rescue, and cadaver search in a single week. He had since been on hundreds of searches, on live national TV, and in movies.

Now Sargent took Cinco to a neutral zone, a place in the grass free of any debris, with no likelihood of remains. This was the first step of the search.

“Tracy, what do you need help with?” said Brian Phillips, the lieutenant with whom she and her boyfriend, Shannon Corbell, had been paired on a search team.

“You and Shannon's sole job is to protect these dogs from vehicles,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“When we're searching an area, you stand by the road. You need to make sure there's no traffic coming. And if there is, you stop it.”

The two-story hill of debris towered above them, a twisted amalgamation of trees and boards, walls and roofs. Men in green jumpsuits and red hard hats were crawling all over it, searching for the body that had evaded them, as it had other rescuers, for days. From a distance
they looked like fire ants swarming over a kicked-over anthill. A yellow track hoe was parked on top, plucking and digging with the metal spork angled from the wrist of its long, jointed arm.

Sargent asked the men to come down from the debris mountain and the track-hoe operator to stop. The scene grew silent, except for the dog's footsteps and her breathing. All eyes were trained on Cinco.

“Hunt!” Sargent said.

Cinco raised his nose to the wind and his black ears perked up as he searched the atmosphere for a scent that he had been trained for years to distinguish from the scent of rotting food or animal remains. He trotted past a shredded wall to a concrete slab and sat. This was his “alert,” his signal to Tracy that this was the place where he smelled death. It was the precise location where Nicole Mixon had been found five days ago, a responder said. Sargent tossed Cinco a ball, his reward for the job. After he played with it for a minute, she took it away.

“Hunt!” she said again.

This time, the jet-black German shepherd tiptoed up the mountain of debris with deliberation and restraint. Sargent followed him, walking along the foot of the mountain. About two-thirds of the way to the top, he stopped and stuck his head in a hole. Then he raised it, looked at Sargent, and sat.

The whole process took about twelve seconds.

It felt to Sargent as if the air had been sucked out of the area, as if everyone present had been holding their breath and suddenly inhaled. Most of the observers did not know what it meant. But they knew it meant something.

Cinco got his ball. His game was over.

Now it was Chance's turn.

A honey-colored mix between a yellow Labrador and a golden retriever, Chance was younger, faster, and eager to please. He had come to Sargent as a puppy, after a family rejected him for chewing on things and left him at a shelter. Someone at the shelter noticed something
special about this dog and asked Sargent to evaluate him. He was just four months old, but they were right. This dog was fearless, agile, and smart.

Chance worked faster than Cinco. Where the serious German shepherd was calculating and methodical, the Lab-retriever was a bundle of instinct and athleticism. Chance fared better in debris piles because of his long legs, sure-footed confidence, and fearless sensibility. He was born to do this.

“Hunt!”

The small crowd of responders watched in total silence as Chance went to work. He had been kept around the corner and out of sight, and had not observed Cinco doing his search. Chance bounded up the debris with the agility and speed of an antelope. Without hesitation, he ran to the very spot where Cinco had alerted, and sat.

The silence was palpable as everyone strained to hear what Sargent whispered to Phillips.

“The dogs are telling me there's something there,” she said quietly. “The track-hoe operator needs to remove debris exactly where the dogs sat.”

The great machine rumbled to life through the eerie silence and removed two or three scoops of debris with great caution. The crowd murmured, and the energy focused on that one spot was so thick you could have poured it in buckets.

Phillips raised his hand.

The track-hoe operator stopped.

The investigator leaned forward, straining to see what might be hidden there. When bodies are swept into the debris ball of a twister, they become part of it. Coated with dirt, they are hard to distinguish from their brown surroundings. Phillips stared deep into the puzzle and saw what few people would be able to see. A face, smeared with mud like a camouflaged soldier, emerged from the rubble, as if surfacing from deep water.