Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [102]
They opened the door and moved slowly out onto the porch. Paul had to pick up a rocking chair, which was partially blocking the front door. Tables and chairs were overturned and piled against the far railing. A tree limb rested against the front railing. The floor itself was not visible for the covering of green leaves, two or three inches deep in places.
“Good God,” Richard said softly. He set Lori, whom he had carried up the stairs, on her feet.
“Holy cow,” echoed Noah.
They directed their flashlight beams over the yard. A half moon chose that moment to appear from behind a tattered scrap of cloud, illuminating a lawn that looked as though it had been seeded with crystal, a glittering white carpet as far as the eye could see.
“Snow!” gasped Traci. “In June!”
“Hail,” Cici corrected, a little overwhelmed by the sight herself.
Lindsay’s flashlight beam slowly climbed up the trunk of the giant poplar nearest the house. “Good heavens,” she said. “Is that a chair in that tree?”
Bridget cried suddenly, “The cake!” and ran toward the pantry.
“It must have been a tornado,” Paul theorized, with a kind of dreadful wonder in his voice.
Traci’s voice started to tear up again. “We could have died!”
“Well, we didn’t,” Cici said briskly. She had to set her teeth to keep them from chattering, but she wasn’t sure whether that was because of the cool layer of air that rushed up from the hail-covered ground, or the leftover terror. “But we do have a lot of cleaning up to do. So let’s get to work.”
“I’ll check the animals,” said Noah, dashing off.
“I’ll start the coffee,” Ida Mae said.
Lindsay disappeared into the house and returned a moment later with a broom, which she thrust into Traci’s hands. “You can start,” she told her, “by sweeping the porch.”
They gathered in the kitchen an hour later for coffee. The hail was melted, the floors had been mopped, the glass swept up, and reconnaissance, as much as could be done in the dark, was complete. An oil lamp on the kitchen table provided a pale yellow light that did not come close to reaching the corners of the big room.
“At least the cake is safe,” Bridget reported glumly.
“And we have gas for cooking and hot water,” Lindsay offered helpfully.
“And the dishes were done before the power went out,” said Cici, who hated doing dishes by hand almost more than she hated cleaning the chicken coop.
“The animals are all okay,” Noah said. “Good thing they were locked in the barn. Except,” he added, “the goat ran away when I opened the door. Do you want me to go look for her?”
“No!” shouted all three women at once. Bridget patted his hand gratefully. “Maybe in the morning.”
“We lost two cases of wine,” Paul reported heavily, sinking into a chair. “And all the tents. Half the chairs are mangled. I can’t even find the tables.”
“There are tree branches down all over the driveway,” Richard said. “Some of them as big as a car. There’s no way traffic can make it to the house tomorrow.”
“All my pretty candles,” Lori mourned. “Covered in mud or blown away completely. And my bows!”
“I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get ahead of the game,” Paul said. “We should have waited until the morning to start the decorating and setup.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lindsay tried to comfort him. “There’s no way we could have gotten all that done in one day.”
Traci sat huddled at the table with her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. “We could have died,” she repeated brokenly.
Bridget reached across the table and patted her hand helplessly.
There was a muffled, distant, mechanical bleating coming from outside, which they managed to ignore for a time. Then Bridget