You Bet Your Life (30 page)

“Come. There’s some room on this bench.” A woman slid over to make a space for me to sit.

The concrete walls muffled the blast of wind, but the iron door creaked and rattled on its hinges. A moment later, the lights went out. Only a red bulb above the door remained illuminated, casting a feeble light. The rest of the shelter was steeped in darkness.

“Talk about just in time,” yelled a voice I recognized as one of my students, Eli Hemminger. “Like to keep us in suspense, huh, Professor?”

“I prefer to save these kinds of hairbreadth escapes for my novels, Eli,” I said, shivering as I realized the danger I’d been in. “But this is more like a thriller than a mystery.”

 

It was raining lightly when we emerged from our shelter and stepped out onto the landing in front of the Hart Building. The wind had calmed and the thunder was rolling away in the distance. Off to the east, flashes of lightning could be seen against the sliver of horizon visible between structures still standing. I took a deep breath. The air was bitter with the tang of mud. The smell reminded me of wet dog.

The quadrangle was a vastly different sight than the one I’d seen earlier. The tall oaks that had been shedding their autumn leaves still stood in the square formed by Schoolman’s academic halls and administration houses, but were stripped bare of both leaves and small branches. What remained were skeleton trees, blackened as if they’d been victims of a fire, and draped with torn papers, shreds of fabric, and other fragments of rubble in a macabre decoration.

As we gazed out at the devastation the tornado had wrought, the square began slowly filling with students, faculty, and staff from other buildings.

Harriet Schoolman Bennett jogged over to where we stood and called up to the people still on the landing. “Everyone all right up there?” At the nods, she continued, “Some of the phone and electrical lines are down, but the cell tower was spared. If you’ve got a cell phone, please share it so people can notify relatives they’re okay. We’re setting up a triage station in the Sutherland Library. If you come across any walking wounded on your way to the Union, please bring them to the reading room.” Her cell phone rang and Harriet held it to her ear with one hand, extending her other to assist a woman coming down the steps.

“Harriet, is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“Sure, Jessica. Come with me. We can always use an extra pair of hands. Frank, I’d like to see you, too.”

Frank and I joined Harriet, walking rapidly to keep up with her pace as she turned back toward the building that housed the Student Union. She waited till we were out of earshot of the others.

“Frank, what happened to the alarm? I didn’t hear it till the storm was practically upon us.”

“I’m sorry, Dean Bennett. The wiring is just too old,” he said. “It’s been giving me fits for weeks now. I told President Needler, but he said there wasn’t any room in the budget for repairs, that I’d have to fix it myself. I’m a pretty good electrician, but this system is beyond what I can do. We need an electrical engineer to take a look at it, and that could cost big bucks.”

“Call in an expert as soon as you can,” Harriet told him. “I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs. We can’t afford to lose lives because our system fails.”

“Have there been any fatalities?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Harriet replied. “I had a telephone team call in to all the buildings when the tornado watch was upgraded to a warning. Hopefully, everyone got the message and took shelter in time.”

“I rounded up everyone who was still in the Hart Building and got them down to the shelter.” Frank said. “But I nearly missed Professor Fletcher here.”

“But he found me, as you can see,” I said. “Professor Newmark had warned me that there might be a tornado on the way.”

“Was he with your group in the basement?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “He was leaving for a meeting, but he recognized the signs of an impending storm and told me to take shelter.”

“We were lucky in one thing,” Harriet said, pulling open the door to the Student Union. “The basketball team was playing Wabash today, and a large contingent of the student body and faculty went over there to cheer them on. Thank goodness the tornado never made it that far.”

An hour later, Harriet and I walked outside. The air was now crisp and the sky had cleared, the sun starting its downward arc.

I took a deep breath. “You’d never believe a storm came through here, looking at that sky,” I said.

“That’s what it’s like in Indiana,” Harriet replied. “The weather is so changeable.”

On the quad in front of us, some of the staff, dragging green plastic garbage bags, were already starting to clean up. We walked slowly in the direction where the storm had done its worst. Others had preceded us, and there were groups of students strolling down the walk and lingering in front of the blown-out buildings like visitors to a tourist attraction. Campus security, at the direction of the police, was stringing yellow tape around the perimeter of three properties and hanging KEEP our signs every fifteen feet.

Kammerer House, where the English department had its offices, was badly damaged, only the front wall left on the second floor, and a hole in the ceiling of the first floor where debris had fallen through. Milton Hall next door, which housed the Office of Campus Services, was worse, the back of the building entirely gone and only part of the facade standing. Beyond them, the Bursar’s Office was minus a roof, and the front porch had disappeared.

A security guard left his post and hurried up to Harriet. “Doctor Bennett, may I see you for a moment.”

“What is it?”

“I need to show you something.”

“Can it wait?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”

We ducked under the yellow tape and followed the guard around to the back of Kammerer House. He picked up pieces of siding and roofing and threw them aside, clearing a path so that we could get closer to the remains of the building.

“It’s there,” he said, pointing under a mound of rubble, visible through a missing window.

“What’s there?” Harriet replied, leaning in to make out what he’d seen.

“There. Under the file cabinet,” he said, his finger trembling and his voice becoming agitated. “Can you see it now?”

“I can see it,” I said, moving closer, being careful to avoid the shards of glass that littered the ground. A dented file cabinet was overturned, one end covered by several feet of debris, the other end lay on an upended chair. Behind the chair, on a crumpled piece of carpet with a dark blotch, I made out the top of a head. Strands of sandy hair, stained red, dangled from the bare scalp on which a cleft an inch wide exposed the white bone of the skull. I didn’t need to see the gray tweed sleeve, nor the leather elbow patch, to know I was looking at the battered body of Professor Wesley Newmark....