The Storm Is My Witness

How it begins

The thunder used my brother's voice at eleven minutes past three. I had been recording the storm for forty-seven minutes, long enough to stop hearing my own fear beneath the wind. Then he said my name.

Not the name my family used. The shortened one he had invented because, at six, he could not pronounce Mara Rowan without making it sound like a warning.

I took the headphones off. The house shook. Rain ran down the windows in bright crooked lines. Beyond them, the coast was the same hard gray it had been the night he disappeared. Twenty years had changed the wallpaper and almost nothing else.

I played the last minute back. Wind. Water. A loose gutter. Then a second voice, lower than his, saying, You promised you wouldn't tell her.

Someone knocked at the side door.

Owen Saye stood beneath an umbrella that had lost an argument with the weather. He had been the coastal observer when my brother vanished. Now he wore civilian shoes and carried a folder thick enough to suggest retirement had not improved his filing habits.

'Your microphone is on the old mast,' he said.

'Yes.'

'It shouldn't be.'

'Because of lightning?'

He looked at the recorder on the kitchen table. 'Did you get anything?'

Outside, another roll of thunder moved along the cliffs. Owen flinched before the windows did. That was when I understood he had not come to warn me about my equipment.

I pressed play. My brother said my name. The lower voice answered. Owen put the folder down very carefully, as though a sudden movement might let something out.

'We heard weather,' he said.

'When?'

He did not look at me.

'All of us,' he said, and the storm struck the roof hard enough to make the old house seem to draw a breath.