of the convent.
The wounded and dying lay sprawled on a few cots and stretchers while most were on the ground. The little girl with freckles smiled up at him from her cot.
Bret stroked the girl’s wet, red hair. “You’ll be all right, darling. The sisters will take care of you now.”
The little girl tugged at his scratched and bleeding arm. “Please stay, mister. I don’t know where my friends are.”
“I know but I have to try to find mine too. Do you understand?”
The little girl looked down at the ground. After a brief silence, she nodded. “I think so. Is it someone you love?”
Bret swallowed. “Yes. Very much.”
“Is she nice?”
“She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gabrielle.”
“Then she’s more than just your friend, isn’t she?” A mischievous, missing tooth grin brought a sudden flush to her pale face.
Bret chuckled. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
The little girl stared at Bret for a few moments as though searching for something she wanted to see in his tired eyes. “My name is Emily. What’s yours?”
“I’m Bret. Pleased to meet you Emily.” He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “So, after I find my friend, Gabrielle, we’ll come back later and see how you’re feeling. Would you like that?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Emily hugged Bret with her frail arms. “And if you see my friends, please tell them I’m here.”
Bret kissed Emily on the top of her head and guided her gently back down on the cot. He rose and gazed at the haggard, wild-eyed ghosts of men and women stumbling by, their faces shocked into contortions of terror and confusion.
He recognized several who had been quests at his party. Where a week ago it seemed he might be returned to the good graces of Galveston society, nothing remained of that life except barren stares unseeing of anything except the storm still raging in the aftermath of memory. Was the rig at Beaumont destroyed too?
Bret looked away. Strange, but that was the first time the thought had occurred to him. His only driving need, the only thing that could give meaning to his life now was to find Gabrielle safe and alive.
Nothing else mattered, not even the riches he promised her that could, for all he cared, remain hidden in the Godforsaken depths of hell.
A woman shuffled past him, her eyes, like two extinguished lights, reflected death’s gray face on her drowned baby cradled in her arms. Bret turned and wove his way through the walking dead toward the dormitory facing Rosenberg Avenue.
Near the outside wall, three Ursuline nuns attended a group of young women and children huddled around a small fire. Bret approached the oldest one, her back bent over a pregnant woman on a stretcher. “Sister?” He touched her shoulder. “You know the Caldwells, don’t you?”
The nun turned around, her creased face wearied and bewildered by exhaustion. “Yes, but as you can see I’m busy.” She turned back to the pregnant woman. “The Lord’s blessings always come when you least expect them.”
“Gabrielle? Have you seen her?”
“Yes, Miss Caldwell was here, sir,” she answered without turning around. “She was still unconscious when I saw her last lying there on one of those stretchers.”
The nun pointed to a row of canvas stretchers lined up against the wall. “Ask Sister Constance. I believe she attended to her.”
Bret hurried to the younger nun. She was giving a little girl a drink of water from a wooden ladle and pail. “Sister Constance?”
The nun’s girlish face was scratched and cut, the blood still wet on a fresh wound and flecked across the white of her soaked habit.
“Gabrielle Caldwell—the other Sister said she was here.”
“Yes.”
Bret glanced down the row of stretchers. The bandaged women all looked the same. “Which one is she?”
“She was with us, sir, but now she’s gone.” The nun moved on to the next cot. She dipped the ladle into the wood pail and offered a drink to a little boy lying down.
The child gulped at the water, letting it dribble down his bruised cheeks. “Careful, Evan,” she cautioned. “We can’t waste any. There are so many mouths—”
Bret gripped the nun’s arm. “What do you mean gone? Is she dead?” The very word on his lips froze his heart. He gasped for his next breath.
“Oh no, not as far as I know. Now please, sir.”
Bret rubbed his exhausted eyes. “She fell back out the window . . . then a big wave carried us. The convent wall . . . that’s the last thing I