The Mercedes came up the shell drive at five minutes to four on Friday, the twenty-seventh of October, 1989, and Marguerite Toomer watched it through the front window of the Lowcountry Humane Society the way you watch weather coming in over the marsh: not because you can do anything about it, but because you would rather see it arrive than be surprised.
It was a 300SD, a diesel, the color the brochures probably called champagne and everybody in Charleston called old money. It had a cracked windshield on the passenger side, a long silver crack that ran from the corner like a river on a map, and there was a smear of dried pluff mud along both doors. That was the only thing about it Toomer liked. Five weeks after Hugo, every car in the county had something wrong with it, a dent from a limb or a window taped over with a Piggly Wiggly bag or a waterline on the doors where the flood had come up and stopped to think.
"They're here," said Cassius Magwood, from behind her. He was the kennel supervisor and had been since before Toomer took the job, sixty-one years old, built like a mailbox, and he said it in the voice he used for a dog that had come in with porcupine quills: flat, careful, no opinions yet.
"I see them."
"You want me to bring her up?"
"Him," Toomer said. "Sunny's a him. Give them a minute. Let them sign first."
"Yes ma'am." He did not move. He stood there with her and watched Pinckney Prioleau get out of the driver's side and come around the long hood to open his wife's door, and Toomer could feel him having the same thought she was having, which was that there were three hundred and eleven animals on the property that afternoon, in a building made to hold ninety, and every one of them but one was going to be here tomorrow.
Hugo had come ashore a little before midnight on the twenty-first of September. It had come in over Sullivan's Island and the Isle of Palms with a wall of water in front of it, and it had picked up the Ben Sawyer Bridge by one end and set it down crooked in the creek like a child getting bored with a toy. It had put a shrimp boat in the middle of Highway 17 at McClellanville. Toomer had seen that herself, on the Sunday after, when she drove up with Cassius in the shelter's van to see what could be done.