Best be prepared, p.1
Best Be Prepared, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Gwen Florio
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Gwen Florio
About the Author
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Also by Gwen Florio
The Nora Best mysteries
BEST LAID PLANS *
BEST KEPT SECRETS *
BEST PRACTICES *
The Lola Wicks series
MONTANA
DAKOTA
DISGRACED
RESERVATIONS
UNDER THE SHADOWS
Julia Geary legal thrillers
THE TRUTH OF IT ALL
THE LEAST AMONG US
Novel
SILENT HEARTS
* available from Severn House
BEST BE PREPARED
Gwen Florio
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This eBook edition first published in 2023 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Gwen Florio, 2023
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Gwen Florio to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5078-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0688-6 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Praise for Gwen Florio
“A hypercontemporary look at long-standing social justice issues”
Kirkus Reviews on Best Kept Secrets
“Deftly weaving Nora’s efforts to reestablish relationships into her realization that she must face unhappy truths about her past and her former friends, Florio, a former journalist, uses storytelling to explore the persistence of racism and the far-reaching damage it inflicts”
Booklist on Best Kept Secrets
“A breathtaking page-turner”
Kirkus Reviews Starred Review of Best Laid Plans
“The first in a new series, told from the viewpoint of a woman over 50, on her own for the first time, introduces a complex story. Florio’s suspenseful mystery will have readers rooting for amateur sleuth Nora”
Library Journal Starred Review of Best Laid Plans
“Engrossing series launch. Fans of strong female leads will look forward to seeing more of plucky Nora”
Publishers Weekly on Best Laid Plans
About the author
Gwen Florio grew up in a farmhouse filled with books and a ban on television. After studying English at the University of Delaware, she began a decades-long career in journalism that has taken her around the country and to more than a dozen countries, including several conflict zones.
Her first novel in the Lola Wicks mystery series, Montana, won the Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction and the High Plains Book Award, and was a finalist for the Shamus Award, an International Thriller Award and a Silver Falchion Award. Four more books followed in the Lola Wicks series, as well as two Julia Geary legal thrillers and a stand-alone novel, Silent Hearts. Best Laid Plans was the first book in the Nora Best series and her first with Severn House.
www.gwenflorio.net
For my cousin Barbara.
As ever
ONE
The sirens went off on a day of record-breaking September heat, the air thick and syrupy, the kids sluggish, whiney, rolling their eyes and dragging their feet.
Nora Best caught her breath. She looked at her watch, fixing the time in her mind: 1:20 PM. They had fifteen minutes. ‘Emergency backpacks, now. Go, go, go!’
‘I hate these drills.’ Damien Austin, reliably zigging when she needed him to zag, stood still as a boulder in midstream, forcing the rushing current of seventh-graders to flow around him.
Nora took his upper arm and spun him toward the cloakroom where the packs, full of water bottles and power bars, wet wipes and space blankets, waited. She pinched the soft skin just above the inside of his elbow and twisted, impermissible for a teacher, excusable – or so she told herself – under the circumstances.
‘Owww. You’re not allowed to touch me! I’m gonna tell my mom and she’s gonna tell Principal Everhart and then you’re …’
Nora dropped his arm. ‘Not a drill,’ she hissed. ‘Look at the sky.’ She willed him to see a yellowish tinge to the clouds, hanging so low their watery tendrils reached toward the black-green Sitka spruce just beyond the dunes. A few raindrops left inkblot splatters on the just-poured concrete footings for the new tsunami evacuation tower beside the school, mockingly highlighting the tower’s lack.
Nora looked at her watch again then raised her voice. ‘We’ve got thirteen minutes to get to the top of Highview Hill. Go.’
The grimace slid from Damien’s face. His eyes widened and he lowered his voice to match hers. ‘For real?’
She looked at her watch again. ‘Twelve minutes.’
It worked. Damien shoved his way past the uneven line of Nora’s twenty social-studies students and assumed command, albeit with a crack in his voice. ‘Hey, everybody! Let’s race. Let’s our class beat all the others.’
As they joined the mob streaming from the doors of Peninsula Middle School, Nora mentally took back everything she’d thought about Damien, her reliable tormenter since her first day in the classroom, when he’d taken one look at the nameplate on her desk and dubbed her Ms Worst.
He was largely responsible for her last-period class being the day’s most challenging, telling his fellow students she wasn’t a real teacher, even though her on-the-job certification program qualified her as such. That her dog, the elderly and amiable Murph, a purebred Chesapeake Bay retriever, was part pit bull and had fleas, too. That she was trailer trash because she lived in her Airstream.
On her best days, she’d have cheerfully killed him. On her worst, she fantasized about precisely how.
Now the boy whose sole mission appeared to be making her life a living hell might be responsible for saving it.
Seventh-graders are a weird bunch.
They teeter on the knife-edge between child and teenager, some still soft of face and body, eyes trusting, easily enchanted. Others slouch into the classroom, shoulders bent against unaccustomed height, their only defense against their bodies’ sudden betrayal – the boys with their low, raspy voices, the
Her previous job involved working with teenage girls or, as she thought of them, Creatures from Hell, never mind that she herself had qualified for archfiend status during her own high-school years. She’d jumped at the chance to work with younger children. Surely they’d be more malleable, easier to win over.
They weren’t.
She tried to slough off the disdain of the bigger ones, hoarding the regard of the smaller the way a perennial dieter stashes pieces of chocolate to offset the pangs of hunger and yearning. Now those same little ones, their short legs achingly slow, could get her killed.
Hours earlier and nearly five thousand miles away, the Earth’s floor groaned and heaved beneath the Pacific’s churning expanse, its plates shuddering like boxers locked in a thrusting embrace until one finally prevailed, the other sinking beneath it in defeat.
Needles quivered and leapt on monitors and apps flashed alerts, the numbers initially reassuring to the blissfully inexpert, who shrugged at the quake’s distance from anything other than a few uninhabited atolls in the Pacific.
Except.
The Earth’s jolt traveled up and up, through churning miles of water, mounding six feet high in a wave that rolled inexorably eastward toward the peninsula where Nora now lived and worked, a peninsula so synonymous with sea level that brackish water sometimes bubbled up from the ground around the wheels of her Airstream.
A mere mile across at its base, the peninsula ran north for ten miles, gradually narrowing to just a few yards wide. To its west, the Pacific lunged and retreated in accordance with the pull of the Moon, constantly rearranging the configuration of its sandy beaches. Along its eastern flank, oyster flats – the remnants of an industry that once supported the entire peninsula – gridded a shallow bay.
Near the tapered tip, a hill stood like a callus on a finger, a mere bump, only sixty feet high. That sandy, rounded blip on the horizon became the difference between life and death for the peninsula’s northern residents, the pupils of Peninsula Middle School among them. Those at the southern end, blessed with wide, soaring bluffs, would give thanks to a multitude of deities for the dumb luck of geography.
But the hill was a quarter-mile from the school and already the smaller kids were faltering, unable to keep up with Damien and his scampering minions.
As their teacher, Nora was bound to stay with the slowest, urging them on, her feet pounding a hopeless rhythm, her gaze dragged toward her watch as though by magnetic force.
Six minutes. Five minutes.
Four.
Three.
Two.
That’s how long they had to get to the top of the hill before the water hit, chewing across the yards of beach, hopping the dunes, scooping up shops and houses and cars, and bounding merrily up the sides of the hill and the little ones, oh, the little ones.
She hefted poor Abby James, chubby and nearsighted and slow, exhorting the others on, panting now, no way to keep the panic from her voice. Her class was the last, the bigger kids far ahead, the eighth-graders already standing like sentries at the top. They shouted and waved, but the only sound that registered was the beeping of her watch, the alarm she’d set as soon as the sirens sounded, the one that meant they were too late.
They weren’t going to make it.
TWO
Principal Louann Everhart brandished a stopwatch and spoke through lips thinned with rage.
‘Congratulations, Miss Best. Almost half your class made it. But a dozen children died on your watch. I want you to take a moment and think exactly how you’re going to tell their parents. We have a template for such notifications in our tsunami information packet. I hope you’ve memorized it.’
The principal’s tongue-lashing was nothing compared to what she faced from Damien, who hadn’t bothered to contain his own distress.
‘You said it wasn’t a drill. You let me think it was real.’ Tears stood in his eyes. His voice shook.
Nora had thought things were as bad as they could get. But Everhart overheard him, meaning they were about to get worse.
‘Is this true, Damien? Is it, Miss Best?’
Nora clung to the hope that Everhart’s question indicated a justifiable lack of trust in Damien’s account.
Everhart didn’t even wait for an answer. The principal took that hope and stomped the bejesus out of it.
‘You traumatized a student. You realize we have to send him to counseling.’ The manual about tsunami drills emphasized the importance of balancing the need for speed with not unduly frightening students. When it came to Damien, Nora had failed. Badly.
‘And because your … your … partner’ – Everhart spat the word – ‘is our new school counselor, we’ll have to contract with someone outside the district to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. I only wish we could take the cost out of your salary.’
Nora and Luke, their relationship still young, were nowhere near ready to commit to marriage. They didn’t even live together, Nora’s Airstream being far too small to accommodate two people for more than a few days. Luke rented a place nearby in Lane’s End, the northern peninsula hamlet so small it was impossible not to notice how often Nora’s truck sat overnight beside Luke’s house, or his Subaru snugged next to her trailer at its beachfront campsite. Most people seemed not to mind – or at least, were too polite to say so if they did – but Everhart had pointedly and blatantly illegally asked during their job interviews whether they intended to marry and had sniffed at their stammering responses.
Now, Everhart delivered her remarks just loud enough to be heard by some of the other teachers lounging nearby, keeping a desultory eye on their pupils. They’d deliberately turned the rest of the final period into school-wide free time, knowing from previous experience the necessity of giving the kids time to settle down before they went home after the excitement of a drill.
But first, they’d had to chase away a man who sprawled either asleep or drunk or maybe both in the clearing atop the hill. In her short time in Lane’s End, Nora had already come to know Harold Wallace. He limped up and down the hamlet’s few streets, leaning heavily on his stick and muttering just loud enough to be overheard about the perceived injustice of a years-ago ruinous injury on an oyster boat. He’d sued the company for negligence, only to see himself countersued for showing up to work drunk. There’d been a settlement, a small one, quickly exhausted. Disability payments. The occasional handout. None of it enough.
Stories about Harold usually ended with, ‘but he’s harmless.’
Nora, whenever she encountered him – peering wild-eyed beneath the shade of his ball cap, hair hanging nearly to his shoulders in greasy strings, his stick waving and spittle flying as he ranted against the perceived injustice done him – remained unconvinced.
On this day, though, perhaps because of a gentle shake and soft admonition from one of the teachers, he roused himself and limped off without complaint. The bigger kids promptly took over the space he’d just vacated, digging through their emergency packs and swapping power bars and juice boxes. They were supposed to save the supplies for a real emergency. Everhart had probably already taken note. Nora would have to fund replacements out of her salary.
A glowering Damien sat in the middle of their circle as befitted his alpha-male status, which Nora attributed to a combination of swagger and looks. He’d probably always been a beautiful boy, all golden ringlets and big brown eyes and ready smile. Only twelve, but already the babyish prettiness was transforming into full-on handsome, his shoulders widening, the smile turned sardonic, his dark eyes even more striking in contrast to the blond curls that nearly obscured them.
He and the other seventh-graders crouched in wary groups, as though rehearsing for the savage judgment of high school, while sixth-graders –still too young to be alert to the hovering threat of their teen years – ran back and forth atop Highview Hill.
Eventually they’d all move on to the high school at the south end of the peninsula, where the craggy two-hundred-foot bluff offered reasonable protection should a tsunami ever hit. But the middle school was miles to the north, so silly little Highview Hill was their only hope, as long as an earthquake wasn’t too strong, the waves weren’t too high.
