Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The plan was simple. Be seen together. Hold hands. Let the town gossip do what it would which would free Dalene from pity. Let Gemma Lark find the narrative she was looking for, already written, already gift-wrapped, and show Eliot in a positive light.
Simple.
Dalene's hand was warm. Soft, and small in his. The weight of it was grounding. Eliot felt the press of her palm against his. He liked it.
That was the problem.
He caught himself twice on the way down Main Street circling his thumb over her knuckles. Twice he'd felt the pull to shift his grip. To turn his hand and slide his fingers through hers, interlocking them as though they were actually two love birds on an early morning stroll.
He didn't. Laced fingers were a sign of permanence. This was temporary.
Eliot kept his grip easy. Exactly as agreed. They strolled down Main Street at ten in the morning… and absolutely no one looked at them.
The bookshop had a line wrapped around the block. Residents craned their necks to see inside the door. Someone had set up a folding chair and surrounded themselves with hardbacks. A woman near the back was reading a well-worn paperback while she waited.
"What's happening?" Eliot asked.
Dalene looked at the sign taped to the bookshop window. "Luke Jackson is signing. He must be doing one of his drop-ins."
"Luke Jackson." Eliot looked at the line. "The military science fiction writer."
"The very same." She said it with the casual pride of a town claiming its own. "He lives here. Has for years. Married to one of the librarians. He does these unannounced signings a couple times a year. The line goes around the block every time."
Outside the farm to table restaurant Boots not fingers. She steered them to the farmer's market.
"You could smile," she said.
"I am smiling. No one is paying any attention to us at all."
"Yeah, I see that. Everyone's in my face when I'm upset, but when I look happy they're not paying attention."
Eliot looked down at her. She didn't look happy, she looked annoyed.
Which he found kind of adorable. When he'd insulted her scones, she'd had a similar expression.
There had been a slight color to her cheek, almost like a backlight for the freckles.
It was there now, and Eliot was having trouble taking his eyes off the shining constellation.
They came through the entrance gate. Betty Ann spotted them from twenty feet away. She pressed both hands to her chest. She looked at their joined hands. She looked at Dalene's face. She looked at his face. She looked back at their hands.
"Oh," Betty Ann said, with the entire weight of eighty-one years of romantic conviction behind it.
"Morning, Betty Ann," Dalene said pleasantly.
"Oh," Betty Ann said again, slightly differently.
Next was Mrs. Patel. She watched them pass with the quiet, satisfied expression of a woman who had predicted this outcome and was waiting for the rest of the town to catch up.
She nodded once at Dalene. Then the whispers started.
Eyes darted to them, away, and back again.
Eliot felt like he was on constant camera with a boom mic over his head, even though neither he nor Dalene were saying a word.
A pregnant couple stepped in front of them.
"Reed Cannon. Computer science at Valor Middle. Dalene's colleague." The man extended his right hand, a prosthetic arm at his side.
Eliot knew better than to stare or remark on it. His time in the military had shown him that the men and women who served deserved nothing but respect. "Eliot Brooks."
"I know who you are."
Great. Here came the reference to the cloud meltdown incident.
"I've been following your work on upper-level wind shear forecasting. The paper you co-authored in 2019 — the one on mesoscale convective systems. I thought the methodology was interesting."
Eliot went still. "You read that."
"I find weather modeling applicable to network systems. The pattern recognition principles transfer. I'd be interested in what you've been doing with the Cloud Registry data. Betty Ann mentioned you've been in the archives."
Eliot looked at Reed. Reed looked back with the calm, direct attention of someone who had nothing to prove. "I'll take you up on that."
He meant it. It was rare he met anyone outside of a weather station this interested in meteorology.
"This is my wife, Sarai."
Sarai Cannon was in a word beautiful; brown-skinned and luminous, with the kind of bone structure that cameras loved. Eliot registered that she was pregnant. But he'd been raised better than to say so before she mentioned it herself.
"How are you feeling?" Dalene asked.
Sarai's hand moved to her stomach. "We're getting close."
"Congratulations," Eliot decided it was safe to say.
Reed put an arm around Sarai. She leaned into him, offering her temple for a kiss. Eliot's thumb rubbed over soft ridges. He was still holding Dalene's hand. He wasn't sure he started it, but their fingers shifted, like a locking mechanism preparing to open and let their fingers —
"You're the weather fella."
Eliot turned, to find a man in honest to goodness overalls behind him.
He was weathered in the way of men who had spent decades outdoors; deep-lined face, hands that looked like they'd been worked hard and often, a hat that had seen better decades.
He looked at Eliot the way most of Valor had looked at him when he first arrived.
Assessing. Not unfriendly. Not yet friendly either.
"Earl," Dalene said warmly. "This is Eliot Brooks. Eliot, Earl Mackie. He runs the Mackie Farm out on Route 9."
Earl didn't extend his hand. "I've got winter wheat that needs to come in. I'm trying to decide between this weekend and next. Getting it wrong costs me."
"Um? Sorry, I'm not a farmer." Eliot looked at Dalene for help.
Earl made an annoyed sound. "You know the weather. I need to know if there's going to be frost soon."
"Oh. Right." Eliot went through his mental Rolodex.
He didn't have to flip far. He'd been studying the regional system in preparation for his broadcasts.
"There's a northwest pressure system. It's been tracking faster than the regional models are showing.
The dew point is going to drop Thursday night.
Friday morning you'll see the temperature fall earlier than forecast. Possibly by four hours. "
Earl was watching him carefully. "How early are we talking?"
"If the system moves the way it's been moving, you're looking at frost conditions by Saturday pre-dawn. Earlier than anyone's currently predicting. The regional forecast will catch up by Thursday. But by Thursday you'll have lost your window to get the crew organized."
"So this weekend?"
"This weekend. Friday at the latest. I wouldn't wait past Saturday morning."
Earl looked at the sky, then back at Eliot. "How sure are you?"
"Eighty-five percent." Eliot said it the way he said everything weather-related. Flat. Certain. "The other fifteen percent is the system stalling over the Divide, which would give you until Tuesday. But I wouldn't bet a harvest on fifteen percent."
Earl looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded. Once. Looked at Dalene, and nodded again.
Eliot got the sense that more than the weather and crop rotations had been decided in that nod.
"What just happened?" Eliot said.
"Earl Mackie hasn't trusted a forecast since 2019 when the regional service told him he had a clear week and lost half his crop to an early frost," she said.
Eliot looked at the sky again. The altocumulus was still moving in its neat rows, patient and indifferent, doing exactly what it had been doing all morning regardless of whether anyone was watching.
"The system is moving at eleven knots," he said. "It wasn't complicated."
Dalene smiled up at him. Eliot's thumb found her knuckle. The circle again. He still hadn't stopped doing that.