The Storm King: A Novel Read online

  The Storm King is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Brendan Duffy

  Map copyright © 2018 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780804178143

  Ebook ISBN 9780804178150

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Tal Gorestky

  Cover art by Tal Goretstky based on photographs by Tobias Haag (landscape) and Søren Ingemann Thuesen (road)

  v5.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Part I: Along the Shore

  The Boy Who Fell: I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  The Daybreaker

  Chapter Three

  Revenants: I

  Chapter Four

  Revenants: II

  Chapter Five

  Revenants: III

  Chapter Six

  The Boy Who Fell: II

  Revenants: IV

  Chapter Seven

  Part II: The Assembled Man

  Chapter Eight

  Graduation: I

  Chapter Nine

  Graduation: II

  Chapter Ten

  Graduation: III

  Chapter Eleven

  Graduation: IV

  Chapter Twelve

  Graduation: V

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part III: Thunder and Light

  Graduation: VI

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Night Ship Girls

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Boy Who Fell: III

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Graduation: VII

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Storm King

  Acknowledgments

  By Brendan Duffy

  About the Author

  FOR NATE, SATURDAYS in the spring mean baseball.

  His teammates think playing the outfield is ignominious, but he likes it. There’s a meditative appeal to a morning spent watching for hard-struck balls as they spin and slow at the height of their parabolas.

  He’s not the most attentive of fielders, but Nate does all right at the plate. He’s third on Greystone Lake’s junior varsity team in RBIs, and when he takes warm-up swings the shouts from the bleachers are authentic.

  His mother, father, and brother are among those cheering this last Saturday in April. It’s just a scrimmage against North Hampstead, so Mom’s attendance is unusual. She goes to the real games, but most weekends find her up with the sun and working in her vegetable garden. Nate’s little brother, Gabe, would play in the grass as Mom fussed over her plants. Neither of them are in the garden today, because Mom strained her back, and her seedlings can survive a few days without weeding. Gabe doesn’t mind, because he likes baseball. For some time, he’s been counting the days until he graduates from T-ball. Dad doesn’t make it to all of Nate’s games, either, but this is the kind of day that makes every cell in your body sing, and he can read the Times during lulls in the action as easily as he could at their kitchen table.

  Nate’s team wins thanks to a triple he hits in the final inning. Though the matchup isn’t an important one, there are whoops and smiles all around. His coach gives Nate the game ball, and Nate feels proud that his family was there to watch him play well and win.

  Mom calls him her baseball hero. What type of pie would her baseball hero like for dessert tonight? she wants to know. There’s an organic market at the Wharf, and she’ll make any kind he wants. She asks to see Nate’s game ball, and that makes him feel proud, too.

  His team plays on one of the high school’s fields, near the center of Greystone Lake, and it’s just a few minutes’ drive from there to the Wharf in Dad’s old black Passat. The Wharf itself is only a few minutes from the McHales’ home on Great Heron Drive. The town along the shore is not a large one.

  It’s early in the year for tourists, but there’s still a good crowd at the market. Visitors browse for honey, jams, and baked goods while the locals from the Lake and nearby towns buy produce trucked from afar and fish fresh from their home waters. The sky being bell clear and the breeze warm, Dad suggests they picnic in the headlands. This isn’t something they do often, but it’s an intoxicating day. The lake glitters in the sun, and from that height the town will look like a jewel set into the crown of mountains.

  They buy baguettes, cured meats, cheeses, and sun-brewed iced teas. Gabe wheedles himself a bottle of artisanal root beer. Vendors sell cherries from California and strawberries from Arizona, but Nate is drawn to the first of the season’s peaches from Florida. He touches them as carefully as he would an infant’s head. Mom buys a basket of the fruit.

  The Passat’s trunk is full of baseball equipment and a pile of uncorrected papers from Dad’s AP U.S. history class, so Dad places the bags of food in the back with Nate and Gabe while Mom rides up front with the peaches on her lap. Nate’s game ball is still where she left it on her seat. To avoid sitting on it, she gently places the grass-stained ball in the basket with the peaches.

  This is important.

  Nate realizes later that it had all been important.

  The headlands rise along Greystone Lake’s western shore. Hiking paths are carved throughout the protected woodlands, with parking lots marking the major trailheads. Among the nooks of interest that dot the headlands, Nate’s parents favor a particular meadow. In the deep of the old-growth forest, an open space slopes toward the water and offers an unmatched view of the lake and town.

  To reach it, they drive beyond the great houses of the Strand, where the boulevard branches from the shore to the headlands. The road there climbs the hills in switchbacks above the lake; it’s closed during the winter months when its blind turns are too treacherous to be passable.

  But this Saturday in April, winter is a distant memory. The wind carries ripe forest smells into the car, and waterfowl patrol the shore below them.

  Nate is watching one such flock when the Passat swerves and he’s knocked hard against the window glass. He looks up to see a green Jeep with flashing lights looming beyond the windshield. His mother gasps, and the basket of peaches overturns in her lap. There’s another car now, a shiny SUV straddling the center line like an elephant walking a tightrope. Dad accelerates to get the Passat out of its path. A curve is just ahead.

  Nate sees Dad stomp the brakes, but their speed does not change. He hears Mom scream his father’s name as she bends to pull at something at his feet. The peaches, Nate realizes. No, he thinks a moment later. The baseball. Dad cannot slow the car because it’s wedged under the brake. Mom tries to pull it away, but it will not budge while Dad presses all of his strength into the pedal.

  Gabe reaches across the space between them to grab Nate’s hand. In the flurry of the moment, this surprises Nate as much as the knock against the window, because Gabe
made it very clear on his last birthday, his sixth, that he expected everyone to stop treating him like a baby. Nate looks at his brother and sees that his mouth is wide open but no sound is coming from it.

  He wants to tell Gabe not to worry, but then they’re through the guardrail. The bright sky that had filled the windshield darkens into the empty slate of the lake. No more than a few seconds have passed since Nate had his head rapped against the glass, but that life is already over. He realizes this when Mom turns to look at him.

  He often tries to recall the look in her eyes. What does a mother try to convey to her child when they have moments to live? Fear or regret? Sadness or pity? When Nate summons her expression in that instant, he tries to find love. But the only thing on her face is horror. They fall too quickly for it to be anything else.

  In the movies Nate has seen, events like this are shown in slow-motion. This underscores the importance of the scene. In these fraught seconds, the slightest look and gesture is given momentous gravity. Consciousness extends as it senses the imminence of its conclusion.

  But these moments don’t stretch for Nate. The Passat falls like the ton and a half of metal that it is. One moment they are weightless and his mother is looking at him, and then the windshield explodes and the lake takes them.

  —

  NATE COMES BACK to himself on the rocks. There’s a tortured sound around him. A raw and gasping cry like a person torn in half. It echoes across the water and up the cliffs as if it cannot find a place to rest. His chest feels as if it’s crushed in the fist of a giant. To breathe is agony. He cannot feel his arm, and his baseball uniform is now more red than white. His first thought is that the lake’s glittering surface was a lie, because he is cold to his marrow. There’s a phantom memory of ice water locked in a vise around his throat.

  His body is wracked with pain and seizing with chills. He wipes blood from his eyes and searches the stony water for his family, but they are gone.

  Only then does he realize that the scream he hears is his own.

  One

  Nate had missed holidays and weddings and more birthdays than he could count. It took a funeral to bring him home.

  A Greyhound got him to Syracuse, where he transferred to a local line that made the long haul to the North Country. Eight hours after leaving Port Authority’s sticky fluorescence, he was again in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

  A medical journal sat open on his lap, though he hadn’t read a word for miles. Instead, he was on his phone, listening to one of his section’s residents detail this morning’s battles. White blood cell counts, biopsy data, and scan analyses. Numbers falling, rising, and static. Today, more skirmishes were being won than lost: the closest thing to victory anyone who fights cancer could hope for. But the failures ached.

  He’d called for the path results of a bulky lymph node resection he’d performed on Nia Kapur, a mischievous nine-year-old with huge amber eyes and the best, snortiest laugh Nate had ever heard. He’d worked with Nia and her parents since the beginning of his pediatric surgical oncology fellowship. But the results from her lymph node were not good. The data his resident delivered meant that his time with the Kapurs was drawing to its end.

  “Dr. McHale?”

  “Sorry, Gina, spotty reception up here.” He cleared his throat. “Can you give that last part to me again?”

  Nate listened to what he’d missed, thanked her for the update, and wished her luck in weathering the coming storm.

  Churning ever closer, a hurricane tore along the coast.

  Medea.

  Someone at the National Weather Service had been steadily replacing retired hurricane names with classically inspired monikers—Antigone, Brutus, Circe—giving each storm gravitas and a suggestion of animus. Nate thought the time might soon come when storms were named after forgotten gods, their energies stoked by millennia of human neglect.

  The timing of the storm was terrible. But in its own way, it was also perfect.

  The bus shuddered around a curve, and Nate watched as the lines between land and sky fell into familiar contours. It was September, but the window was ice under his fingertips, the luminescence of the summer mountains already fracturing into color. The wild forest began to lose ground to tidy colonials with manicured lawns and sculpted flower beds. Through the trees, he caught the first flash of light gleaming against dark water.

  It had been a long trip, but Nate was finally there.

  He was one of the last riders remaining on the bus, and the only one to disembark at the town green.

  At first, Greystone Lake looked much as he’d left it. The town hall’s neoclassical dome was still painted the red of the autumn maples. The limestone façade of the Empire Hotel still shone like a great pearl through the dogwoods that lined the green. To the north were the headlands, to the east was the Wharf, and to the south were the foothills. This was Greystone Lake. This was home. And Nate knew its every corner as if it were part of his own body.

  He extended the handle of his bag and made his way down to the Wharf. It had been fourteen years since he’d walked these streets, and he had to remind himself with each step that this wasn’t a dream. The outline of each building, the arc of every curb and lamppost. Everything was familiar, but everything had changed. Nate had changed, too.

  As he picked his way down Kingfisher Boulevard he understood why there were so many adages about this kind of homecoming. Each step was a new round of Spot the Difference. Fresh signage on familiar storefronts, obsolete pay phones replaced by sleek bike racks. Renovations, restorations, and new construction. Returning home after a long absence was a unique mélange of recognition and discovery.

  A cluster of children, too young to be in school, were herded gently by their keepers along the edge of the town green. A gust kicked a drift of dried leaves at them, sending them into high-pitched squeals of mock terror. They were closer in age to Livvy, but right now Nia Kapur was the child at the forefront of Nate’s mind. He’d have to call her parents. It was the kind of news he’d rather give in person, but it’d be days before he’d be back in the city, and little Nia might not have many days left.

  He tried to think of exactly what he’d say, but they’d not yet invented the right words for this.

  Nate got his first unfettered view of the lake once he neared the base of the hill. It glittered in the sunlight, though its serenity didn’t fool Nate. There was a well-known saying in the little town along the shore: The lake returns what it takes. This applied to fishing nets as well as drowned bodies, jetsam as well as secrets.

  While here, Nate planned to push this gem of lore to its limit.

  In his pocket, his phone vibrated with a text message.

  MEG: YOU HOME SWEET HOME?

  A host of adjectives could describe the town along the shore, but “sweet” wasn’t among them. Just got here, Nate typed back. You in NJ yet?

  The bus was an atrocious way to travel here, but with a Category 3 edging past the Carolinas, stranding Meg without the car hadn’t been an option. Two days ago, it had looked like the hurricane would pinwheel into the Atlantic, but high pressure had kinked the jet stream from its usual course. Medea would strike inland, and when it did it would be the worst storm the Northeast had seen in years.

  He’d been updating Meg regularly with the notifications pinged to him by his weather apps: wind-speed stats, pics from obliterated beach towns, the inevitable comparisons to Katrina and Sandy. When it came to such things, he had an abundance of caution that his wife rarely shared. Nate believed he’d successfully convinced Meg to take Livvy out of the city to weather Medea at her parents’ home in the suburbs, but he wouldn’t relax until he got confirmation that they’d arrived safely. According to Google Earth, his in-laws’ house was 134 feet above sea level and two miles from any river likely to flood.

  Even without Medea, this trek to the northern hinterlands was poorly timed. Meg felt she was on the brink of making partner at her law firm. Livvy had another ear i
nfection. Things were busier than usual at the hospital. The schedule of their lives was like a chess match in three dimensions, but right now the Lake was where Nate had to be.

  He could have rented a car for the trip north, but there was something in the monotony of the bus that appealed to him. The jolt of its acceleration, the lurch of its brakes, and its faithful pauses at each waypoint of its rambling route. More than a drive, taking the bus felt like a journey. A necessary transit between the world he’d made and the world that had made him. He’d worked more than he’d meant to during the ride, but Nate knew those long hours had helped him adjust to the idea of returning home. Even under the best circumstances it would be jarring to see the lake’s silver skin lap the shore, hear the wash of traffic along the wet asphalt of the Strand, and smell this tree-spiced wind.

  His grandmother had called him three weeks ago, as soon as they’d found the body in the headlands. This was before any official identification had been made, but Nate hadn’t needed to wait for dental records or DNA.

  Grams’s pub, Union Points, was across a cobblestone street from the Wharf. The establishment and the tidy brick building that housed it had been in Nate’s family for more than a century. Generations of McHales had manned its taps and swept its floors. Nate no longer knew where he fit into his family’s legacy in this town, but he still felt a swell of warmth at the sight of the place.

  Other than a plastic tarp fixed where a plate glass window should have been, the old pub looked good. Inside, its black wood surfaces had been polished, and its exposed brick walls hung with stylish photographs of the town and the lake. The place was empty except for a trio of college guys at the counter and a boat crew occupying a booth in the back. A girl with shoulder-length black hair pressed at a flat-screen register behind the bar.

  The bartender had a smile on her face, but when she turned to Nate, her body went rigid. Her open expression closed like a flower on the brink of night.

  “She’s in the back,” the bartender finally said after an uncomfortable pause. She barely looked old enough to tend the bar. “Want me to get her?”