Tofino Storm Read online

The F3 tornado which struck the town of Peck just before noon on Monday has claimed a fourth life. Officials were made aware Tuesday morning by relatives of deceased motorists Elizabeth and Carl Macdonald that the couple was traveling with an infant when they left their home in Nashville, TN en route to Branson, MO. The infant is missing and presumed deceased. The bodies of the couple were found separately in a field adjacent to Highway 60, while their vehicle was thrown several hundred yards from the highway. Officials confirmed late yesterday that an empty child safety seat was present in the vehicle, which was severely crushed on impact.

  The fourth casualty of the storm was Chuck Weimer, a 76-year-old resident who suffered a heart attack while sheltering. Trixie Davis, previously reported missing after the tornado ripped off the garage roof from her home on Dale Street, was found safe early Tuesday morning. She had been visiting a friend in Dexter and was not at home when the damage occurred. Christi Miller and her young daughter Laney, who were injured when their mobile home tipped onto its side, were released from Lucy Lee Hospital in Poplar Bluff yesterday morning and are reportedly in good condition. All other injuries were reported to be minor and no one else was hospitalized.

  County officials estimate the total cost of damage from the storm to be…

  Jason skimmed the remainder of the article, but found nothing else specific about Laney or her family. He moved on. The next article Laney had saved was from several days later — a lengthy spread inside the Sunday edition. He sucked in a breath at the poignant, black-and-white picture of a younger, healthier version of Laney’s mother standing in front of an overturned mobile home. A gaping hole where a door had once been pointed toward the sky. One whole corner of the trailer had buckled and collapsed, revealing a framework of thin studs and loose insulation. The yard was littered with debris. At the woman’s feet, a small wiry-haired dog sniffed at what appeared to be an overturned highchair. In her hands, the woman held a toy plastic barn. She looked not at the camera, but off at a distant sky, her expression conveying bewilderment.

  “MIRACLE BABY” SURVIVES SPIN INSIDE PECK TORNADO

  Funnel Cloud Sets Toddler Down Alive Over a Half Mile From Home

  When twenty-five-year-old Christi Miller’s rental trailer was flipped on its side by Monday’s F3 tornado, she was in the process of shepherding both her 20-month-old daughter, Laney, and their dog, Teddy, toward shelter in the bathroom tub. The next thing the young mother knew, there was a hole above her head where the kitchen door used to be, and both her daughter and her dog were gone.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Christi relates five days later as, for the first time, she revisits the scene. “Honestly, it’s a blur. I just remember crawling out between the studs and looking around and screaming for Laney. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I couldn’t understand what was happening, where she had gone.”

  What happened, according to Poplar Bluff Fire Chief Leonard Rosen, is that both the dog and the toddler were likely sucked out of the trailer by the powerful tornado and lifted aloft. “These tornados can pick up bicycles, grills, cars,” states Rosen. “They can pick up people and animals too. The miracle here is that the girl wasn’t more injured.” Rosen noted that the child could easily have suffered fatal injury, either from being hit by other debris circling in the twister or from the fall when she was released.

  Dick and Terri Turner, the neighbors who found Laney on their farm just over half a mile away, reported that they did not notice the child until a full four and a half hours after the tornado touched down. Terri spotted the toddler moving slowly through the field behind their barn, appearing dazed. She was cold and shivering, and was bleeding from a few minor cuts, but was otherwise uninjured. She was wearing a shirt, but no pants or diaper, and her feet were bare. “The wind can tear the clothes right off of you,” Rosen explained. “Considering where they found her, I think there’s a good chance she landed on a hay bale. To have no broken bones… it’s just hard to see how else that could have happened.”

  Christi Miller doesn’t seem concerned with the particulars. “My baby girl is alive,” she states. “She’s back with me and she’s safe, praise God. That’s all I need to know.” When asked how the toddler is doing, Miller tears up. “She’s scared still. Whatever happened, it shook her up really bad. And me too. But we’re alive. And we’ll get through it.”

  Also alive, amazingly, is Miller’s dog, Teddy. “I remember that I was walking around shouting for Laney, and at some point he was just there,” Miller explains. “I didn’t see where he came from. I only remember picking him up and carrying him with me — I didn’t even think about it, then. How he’d survived it, too.”

  “Physically, to go through what those two did and just walk away afterwards… I’ve never seen anything like it,” Rosen states. He points out that there are other verified reports of people and animals having been lifted up into tornados and transported some distance. But most, like the Macdonald family who encountered the Peck tornado while driving north of town on Highway 60, do not survive the ordeal.

  Reporters and well-wishers have been steady at the door of the house in Peck where Christi and Laney Miller are now residing with family. But while Christi Miller appreciates the support, she asks that people refrain from personal visits for the time being. “Laney really needs her life to get back to normal,” Miller explains, her eyes tearing up again. “She just lost her daddy a month ago, and she’s moved twice since. I think we all just need a little peace and quiet.”

  Miller affirms that neither she nor her daughter suffered any significant physical injury. But the emotional scars from such an experience could take longer to heal. “Now psychologically, that’s something else altogether,” Chief Rosen adds. “What that little girl must have gone through… Well, I’d imagine she’d have nightmares for a long time to come.”

  Jason sat numbly for a moment before refolding the article. Tornados were rare in Canada, and he knew very little about them. The events described in the clippings were beyond his imagination. He also knew nothing about child psychology. Would Laney remember something that happened before she was two years old? Would such trauma have an effect on her psyche, even if she didn’t consciously remember it?

  He returned the article to the folder. Laney wouldn’t thank him for poking into her private history. He was here to find contact information for her great-grandmother, and that was it.

  He thumbed through the rest of the folder’s contents and was disappointed to find nothing else but photographs. Envisioning an irate Laney in his mind, he didn’t peruse them other than to check that none had relevant contact info on the back.

  He returned the folder to her suitcase, which he quickly confirmed held nothing else of use. Then he returned all of Laney’s belongings to where he had found them, relocked her room, and sank down onto the chair in his office.

  One more time, he pulled up the search engine on his phone, searching on every conceivable combination of names and initials for Laney, her mother, and her great-grandmother. Aside from a few hits for Laney in the byline of some academic papers, he found nothing. May Burgdorf’s current whereabouts remained a mystery.

  As did Laney herself. What had possessed this “miracle baby” to devote her professional career to the physical phenomenon that had so nearly killed her? Every professional paper she’d contributed to had something to do with tornados. Was it simple morbid fascination, or had she found her life’s purpose in trying to spare others from her fate?

  In his mind he saw her again, standing exposed and vulnerable on the rocky outcropping, her blue eyes wide open and her cute little chin held high. Whatever she might have felt as a toddler, Laney Miller wasn’t afraid anymore. She’d been standing up to the wind, meeting it, facing it down, freakin’ daring it.

  He felt his lips crack into a smile. A fellow adrenaline junkie, eh? She’d probably make a damn good surfer.

  He rose from his desk, locked up his office, and headed out toward his apa
rtment and his nearly forgotten houseguest. He would find Laney’s great-grandmother, somehow. In the meantime, he would make sure the hospital took good care of their patient. No way was this fierce fighter of a female going to survive a killer Midwestern tornado only to succumb to a slightly above-average British Columbian wave.

  Chapter 4

  Peck, Missouri, Two Weeks Ago

  Never in her life could Laney remember being more tired. Every muscle in her body ached, protesting at even the smallest of movements. Worse still, her brain was tired. She felt as if her gray matter had been removed, wrung out like a dishrag, and stuffed back in. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept soundly. Or digested a full meal. After the last of the guests had departed from the funeral reception yesterday, her aunt had sat her down at an actual table for her first real supper in a week. But it had all come back up again later.

  Now it was daybreak again. Lying in her childhood bed staring at a fresh water stain on the ceiling, she steeled herself to face another day. She was alert, as she had been all night, for the sound of her great-grandmother stirring in the room next to her. For weeks now, Gran had risen at all hours, always looking for someone or something. She would wander the house opening drawers and cabinets, and if not intercepted, she would eventually put on her coat — or not — and head outside into the cold. Laney had lost count of how often Gran had been up last night, but she was certain it marked a new record. Most alarmingly, the eighty-seven-year-old had once made it all the way out into the street before Laney caught up with her. She felt terrible about that — she should have woken up long before the front door slammed. She had obviously been less alert than she’d thought she was.

  Laney knew that she had to get Gran to a doctor. She also knew, without anyone speaking of it specifically, that there wasn’t going to be much a doctor could do. The dementia had been coming on gradually for years, but Christi’s illness and death seemed to have accelerated the process. Whether the instability Laney was seeing now was a temporary exacerbation or a new normal, she didn’t know. All she knew was that without Christi here, Gran couldn’t continue living in the big brick house where she’d spent most of her adult life. The thought of Gran having to move somewhere else was dreadfully sad. As was pretty much every other thought torturing Laney’s sleep-deprived brain.

  “Christi?” Gran’s hoarse voice croaked from the other side of the wall. “Do you have my medicine?”

  Laney forced her limbs into motion. “Coming, Gran,” she called back, glancing at her phone as she swung her legs over the edge of the bed. It was nearly nine. How had that happened? She could swear it was only six-thirty the last time she looked! Gran should have had her morning meds at eight.

  Fail. Laney shrugged on the plush robe her mother had insisted she buy herself as an early Christmas present and hurried down to the kitchen. She noted that the house looked cleaner and less chaotic than usual, even after the reception yesterday, and she mouthed a silent prayer of thanks to her aunt and cousin for pitching in. She truly didn’t know what she would have done without them. Handling Gran was a full-time job, never mind everything that had to be done for the funeral. Friends and neighbors had pitched in too, but… some things would always be left to family. Such as putting Gran in the shower in the middle of the reception because she had inexplicably soaked her slacks with floor cleaner.

  Laney grabbed the morning meds from the carefully labeled pill minder she’d been trying to convince Gran to use — Why, I’ve put my meds in the candy dish for years and I know exactly what’s there and when to take them! — and jogged back up the stairs.

  “Here, Gran,” she said as cheerfully as she could fake. “I have your medicine.” She poured a cup of water from the pitcher she’d set out on a special table, along with an assortment of snacks. She’d hoped the handy food would forestall extra trips to the kitchen in the middle of the night, but Gran wasn’t used to the table being there and never seemed to notice it.

  May, who was sitting up in bed, stared at Laney uncertainly but took the pills and the cup and swallowed the medicine without complaint. Her eyes were red and puffy; she had obviously been crying again. “I’m so worried about my baby,” she said morosely.

  Laney wasn’t sure which baby she was talking about. More than once she had forgotten that Christi had died, only to become upset all over again when reality dawned. But lately, her daughter Carol, Christi’s mother, had also been on May’s mind.

  Carol had been August and May Burgdorf’s only child, born in the early fifties and ready to raise all hell by the end of the sixties. Throughout Laney’s childhood, Gran had never mentioned her daughter in anything more than passing, but of course Laney knew the story. Carol had been the prototypical wild child chafing at the constraints of life with a conservative family in a small midwestern town. As the daughter of a respected funeral home proprietor, she led a life of relative privilege. But Carol’s discontent — or perhaps, Laney suspected, something more organic — led her into substance abuse at an early age. Pregnant at fourteen, she gave birth to Christi at fifteen, then promptly disappeared. She returned occasionally over the next few years, usually in need of funding, and then would leave again. The circumstances surrounding her drug-related death, at age twenty, were never clear. Her body was found alone in a St. Louis motel; she was buried in the cemetery of her parents’ church.

  “What’s bothering you, Gran?” Laney said gently, sitting down on the edge of the stout four-poster antique bed.

  Gran’s face was ashen, her expression bleak. “They’re in hell now,” she pronounced. “Both of them.”

  Laney allowed herself a tired sigh. May’s talk of sin and hell had increased dramatically in the last few weeks. Her religious views had never been secret; she believed in hell and the devil and everything they implied. But prior to Christi’s illness, May had never spoken in such blunt terms about the fate of people she knew. “Nobody’s in hell,” Laney soothed, perhaps too glibly.

  May’s piercing dark eyes fixed on her great-granddaughter with disapproval. “If you sin and don’t repent, you go to hell,” she said more clearly. “Lying’s a sin, and so is stealing. She did both, and she was never sorry, and even my good sweet Jesus can’t forgive her for that now.”

  Laney was at a loss. Should she probe May’s feelings more deeply? Bag it and go with distraction? She couldn’t talk May into feeling better unless she understood where the angst was coming from. But even if she did understand, there might be nothing helpful she could say. Worse yet, there could be nothing coherent to understand in the first place. “Are you hungry?” Laney asked brightly. “You want me to scramble you an egg?”

  May’s sharp gaze didn’t waver. Her voice was unusually clear. “There’s nothing any of us can do, now. My Christi’s gone to meet Jesus, and that sin is on her soul.” She reached out and took Laney’s hands in hers. “We can only pray he’ll understand why she did it and take pity. Lord knows that’s what I did. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t stop her. I could have, but I didn’t. And that sin is on my soul, too!”

  May appeared so earnest, so guilty, and so horribly fearful. “You are not going to hell, Gran,” Laney insisted. “And neither is my mother. She was a wonderful, warm-hearted, and good person, through and through. And so are you!”

  May closed her eyes and shook her head. Her bony fingers clenched tight around Laney’s. “You don’t know, child. You don’t know! I wanted her to tell you. I tried to save her, I swear to you. I told her to tell you the truth before she died. I warned her she’d go to hell—”

  “Gran, please,” Laney begged as blue veins began to bulge in May’s neck and forehead. She was confusing Laney with Christi, and Christi with Carol. It would not be the first time. “Please don’t talk this way!”

  A rapping on the door below startled them both. Laney rose and looked out the bay window. A familiar green Corolla was parked in the street out front. “It’s Aunt June,” she announced. “I’ll just
go let her in, okay?”

  “June’s a good girl,” May replied. The angst on her face receded. She seemed thoughtful now, almost dreamy.

  Laney would take it. She hurried down the stairs and opened the door to June, who was actually May’s niece by marriage, the daughter of Laney’s great-grandfather’s brother. What that made her to Laney she had no idea, but “aunt” had always worked fine. “Hi,” she greeted, noting that she sounded every bit as flustered as she felt. She looked over June’s shoulder to see her “cousin” Amy, June’s daughter, waiting outside also. “Come in. Please.” Laney opened the door wide and stepped back. “Gran’s had a bad night… and morning. And I… I don’t know what to do for her.”

  June Burgdorf, who was somewhere in her mid-sixties, was the sort of woman for whom the term “motherly hug” was invented. She drew Laney into her arms and held her in a tender, pleasantly padded embrace, complete with a deep, rumbled murmur of empathy and understanding. “Oh, honey, of course you don’t,” she soothed. “It’s a big old problem, but you know you don’t have to handle this alone.”

  Unbidden tears flooded Laney’s eyes. Embarrassed, she drew back and blotted them with the collar of the plush robe.

  “Aunt May has something called delirium,” Amy said in a hushed tone. “It’s not uncommon when someone with dementia goes through a major life upset like this. She’s been declining slowly for years and been able to hold it together, but since Christi got sick she’s been in a tailspin.” Amy spoke with authority, which was typical. In her early forties with two teenagers, she was a no-nonsense woman who worked as a nurse at the veterans’ center in Sikeston, not quite an hour away.

  Laney nodded vigorously. “That makes sense,” she agreed with a gulp. “I… I guess I didn’t know how bad she was before.”