MOST MORNINGS STARTED EARLY FOR LAUREN Mitchell, well before six, and this one was no exception. Even though they’d had an ice storm the night before, the white bass were running in the main channel and there were some die-hard fishermen who put on insulated snowmobile suits and went out after them in bass boats. It didn’t matter how cold or wet it was. Someone was always out on the water.
Lauren was getting ready to check the fingerlings in the minnow tank when the first sharp jolt knocked her to the floor. Her feet came right out from under her and she went down hard, barely getting her hands up in time to break the fall.
Another hard shake was followed closely by two more, each more powerful than the other. The dock lurched up and down, straining the mooring cables until they creaked and vibrated. Fishing rods, reels, and other gear crashed down from their pegs and shelves. Lauren waited until the wild seesaw motion slowed before she went outside on the deck.
In a matter of seconds, the lake had changed dramatically. The water churned with whitecaps. Lauren hardly recognized it. She’d never seen the normally placid water so rough, not even during the recent spells when big waves were running. It was boiling out there.
Lauren had to grip the railing hard when the dock began rocking again. Water washed over the walkways. For a moment she wondered if the marina was going to pull apart or collapse. That was the first she realized what was happening: they were having an earthquake. And, by the feel of it, a damn good one.
Thank God her grandson, Bobby, had already left for school in Mayfield, she thought. The boy liked to hang out on the dock in all kinds of weather. If he’d been on one of the narrow walkways that separated the boat slips, he might have lost his balance and gone into the water.
It would have been a good time for that geologist to be here. When this was over, maybe she’d give him a call in Memphis. If they were looking for reasons why all those animals were going crazy, they had their answer now. She remembered the frozen frogs and snakes. Somehow they’d known what was coming.
She wished suddenly that her husband Bob were still alive. Maybe he could have made some sense of all this.
God, how she missed the man. She’d never gotten over his death.
Lauren had bought the boat dock nearly twenty years earlier using insurance money she’d received after her husband and fourteen other men were killed in a coal mine accident. They were working in the Golden Orient, the deepest, most deadly mine in Kentucky. A cave-in on level 15 had trapped Bob and the others fifteen hundred feet underground. It took six weeks to get the bodies out. They found all of them in a twenty-foot-long section of tunnel. The air had probably given out in about an hour. Everyone, her husband included, had suffocated, but not before many of them had scribbled notes to their wives and loved ones on scraps of paper and stuffed them in their pockets. She kept Bob’s note framed on her dresser. There were only seven words: I LOVE YOU GOD KEEP YOU SAFE.
A year after Bob’s death, Lauren bought the dock and marina. She and her grandson lived on a two-hundred-acre farm about two miles away. They had a stable and three horses. It was a good life. The dock was making a little money. Lauren couldn’t complain. Her parents had recently moved to Heath, near Paducah. She was living on their farm. Her dad had decided to move into the city when it got too hard to climb up on a tractor. Her mother hadn’t minded at all. She’d jumped at the chance to leave the country.
The dock was still bumping up and down in the rough water. Lauren got a pair of binoculars and focused on the big dam that loomed two miles in the distance. It stretched nearly a mile and a half across the north end of the lake. Kentucky Route 41, a two-lane blacktop, ran right along the top of it.
Lauren couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Huge waves were slamming up over the rim of the dam. It looked as though the water was washing right over the highway. She’d never seen anything like that before.