Widow's Tears

by Susan Wittig Albert

  And then my moving flashlight beam picked up a gleam of something metallic, and I swung it back. It was the back bumper of a pickup truck, nose down, the cab roof flattened down as if it had been in a rollover. It was wedged beneath a fallen tree and almost fully submerged, the bed jacked up on a boulder, FORD clearly visible across the tailgate. It was thirty yards or so downstream of the bridge, about four or five yards from the bank, completely surrounded by rushing water, completely out of our reach.

  “There, China!” Claire yelled, seeing it at the same time I did. “That’s Sam’s pickup.” She started downstream toward it.

  “Can you see if he’s in there?” I called. A jagged streak of lightning crossed the sky, and in its blue-white light I saw that the hood of the truck was wedged under a huge bald cypress that had broken off ten feet above the ground and now lay across the creek. The truck’s windshield was entirely underwater, and it looked like the cab was completely filled with water, right up to the flattened, crumpled roof.

  As I scrambled through the rocks along the water’s edge, I could see that the driver’s-side window was broken and the door looked like it had been pretty well caved in, but that didn’t mean a lot, either way. The driver could have gotten out before the water swept the truck off the bridge and rolled it over downstream. His passenger had not only managed to scramble out of the truck, but she’d gotten out of the water and made her way to the house, where she still had enough presence of mind to break a window and get in. Whether she would survive until help got here was another question, of course. I had no way of knowing what kind of internal injuries she might have.

  “I can’t see whether he’s in there or not,” Claire said, in answer to my question. “But if he is, he’s a goner.” She turned and began shining her light along the creek bank, upstream and downstream. “Sam!” she shouted. “Sam Rawlings! Can you hear me?”

  I called, too, using my light to pick out possible places where somebody might have crawled out of the water, but it was a hopeless task. The water was still rising, and while the truck seemed to be pretty securely wedged under that tree, there was always the chance that a more powerful surge could come along and flip it over.

  We stood there helplessly, flashing our lights around. Then my light happened to shine on the rear window of the cab, and I saw something that made my heart stop. It was a square, official-looking sticker, about six by eight inches. Protected by AK-47, it read, with a drawing of the assault rifle.

  And a few inches from that sticker I could see a neat, round bullet hole.

  I was looking at the getaway vehicle for the robbers of the Ranchers State Bank in Pecan Springs, and Bonnie Roth’s killers.

  * * *

  THE rain had stopped and it was almost dawn by the time Star Flight was finally able to take off from the heliport atop University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin. Less than half an hour later, we heard the unmistakable whump-whump-whump of the helicopter rotor. McQuaid and I had exchanged a dozen text messages by that time, so I wasn’t surprised to see him jump out of the helicopter on the heels of the medevac crew, or to see a heavy-duty tow truck lumbering down the hill, followed by two Fayette County sheriff’s cars.

  It took the medevac team about ten minutes to strap Kitty Rawlings onto a gurney and load her into the helicopter. Then they headed back to Austin, where she would be met not only by doctors and nurses but by the police as well. McQuaid, having seen that the three of us—Ruby, Claire, and I—were perfectly okay and in no danger, had flown back to Austin. After all, he had to get the kids off to school in the morning and administer his final exam at the university in the afternoon. My car started easily when I tried it, but it would be a day or maybe two before the water went down far enough to cross the bridge and the road dried out enough for my Toyota to make it up the hill.

  The water was going down quickly, but the creek was still flowing fast and deep. It took several tries for the deputies to get a chain on the rear end of Sam Rawlings’ pickup truck. Once that was done, however, it took less than five minutes to winch the battered truck out of the creek and onto the far bank, where the deputies opened the passenger door and pulled out Rawlings’ body. It looked as though he had drowned when the cab had filled up and he could not escape.

  And if there was any doubt that this was the truck used in the robbery, it was laid to rest by the sodden, disintegrating paper bag the deputies found stuffed under the truck’s seat, the bag of bills that Bonnie had handed over before she was shot. The ten-dollar bills were banded in bundles of twenty, ten of them, and the bands were stamped with Ranchers State Bank.

  It was well after ten in the morning before Ruby, Claire, and I finally got some breakfast. And then, utterly exhausted from having been up all night dealing with ghosts, spear-wielding monsters, and submerged pickup trucks, we went to bed. Believe me, we slept the sleep of the dead. And if Rachel was out and about, haunting her house, we slept right through it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms…

  So doth the woodbine—the sweet honeysuckle

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  William Shakespeare

  Honeysuckle or woodbine (Lonicera sp.) was once used widely to soothe labor pains in women giving birth and to treat respiratory and urinary ailments. The ancient Roman writer Pliny suggested the use of honeysuckle for disorders of the spleen, and in the Chinese medical treatise, Tang Bencao (C.E. 659), it was recommended to eliminate heat and toxins from the human body.

  In the language of flowers, honeysuckle represented generous, selfless, devoted love.

  China Bayles

  “Herbs and Flowers That Tell a Story”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  As it turned out, Rawlings hadn’t drowned. The bank guard’s bullet had struck him in the neck, and he had bled to death.

  That much we learned from the autopsy. The rest of the story we learned from Kitty Rawlings, who spilled the ugly details—and then some—to the Pecan Springs detectives who questioned her in Brackenridge Hospital before charging her as an accessory to capital murder in the shooting of Bonnie Roth. When she recovers enough to leave Brackenridge, she will be arraigned and jailed until the grand jury meets. Under Texas’ law, someone can be held criminally responsible for aiding and abetting a felony in the course of which a murder is committed. That is, the law doesn’t distinguish between the person who pulls the trigger and his (or her) accomplice. The accomplice is equally guilty.

  The bond schedule in Adams County permits the judge to refuse bail for capital felonies, and since Kitty could face the death penalty, she’ll likely be held without bail while awaiting trial. My guess is that, at trial, her attorney will attempt to argue that her husband forced her to commit robbery by threat of death or serious bodily harm: the “duress defense,” described in Section 8.05 of the Texas Penal Code. The court is likely to reject that defense, however, because Kitty “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly placed herself in a situation in which it was probable that she would be subjected to compulsion”—the penal code’s way of saying that she could have chosen to walk out on her husband at any time. Or she could simply have got out of the truck, walked up to the bank guard, and given herself up.

  In fact, she could have done this at any time in the last year, because the Ranchers robbery was just one in a string of a half dozen Bonnie-and-Clyde robberies the pair had committed, hitting small-town banks where the security was likely to be lax. Then they’d head back to the Blackwood place, where they’d hang out quietly, under everyone’s radar, until they were ready to rob another bank. In some cases, Kitty drove the getaway vehicle while Sam committed the robbery; in other cases, Sam drove while Kitty went in for the money. But until the Pecan Springs robbery, they had never used their own vehicle—the Ford Ranger—as their getaway vehicle. Instead, they had always stolen a vehicle, one of them driving it, the other driving the Ford until they reached their target, parked the For
d and went on together in the stolen car. After the robbery, they abandoned the stolen vehicle and returned home in their truck.

  For the Ranchers robbery, they had stolen a Mazda in San Antonio, but it broke down en route to the bank. It was near the bank’s closing time, so they simply transferred the tags to their pickup and hoped for the best, which was not the way it turned out. One of the morals of this sad story: if you commit a robbery, don’t use a truck that advertises the fact that you possess an AK-47. Even in Texas, people are likely to find that sort of thing memorable.

  After all this unexpected excitement, it was good to get back to a normal life at the shop and at home, with the kids winding up their school year, McQuaid undertaking a new and interesting investigation, and the garden yielding its usual early crop of spring veggies and herbs. Ruby stayed with Claire for another ten days, while Dawn and Cass and I managed things at the shops and the tearoom. When she got back from her vacation, she brought more news with her. And after we had closed the shops that afternoon, we sat down together at a table in the tearoom. Our work was done for the day, the late afternoon was warm and quiet, and in the center of the table was a vase of sweet-smelling honeysuckle.

  Over cups of hot tea and a couple of pieces of Cass’ rose-geranium pound cake, Ruby told me what had happened after I’d left her and Claire at the Blackwood house the day after the storm.

  As soon as the Fayette County sheriff figured out that the Rawlingses were the notorious bank robbers that everybody had been looking for, he sent a team of deputies to search their house and outbuildings. It didn’t take them long to find the ill-gotten gains from their bank robberies. Most of the loot was stashed in the metal garbage can where Kitty stored the feed for her chickens, and the rest of it was tucked behind the nests in the chicken coop. It wasn’t chicken feed, either. When the deputies were finished counting, it amounted to more than a quarter of a million dollars.

  “There was a crooked man,” Ruby said, leaning her elbows on the table. “Crooked sixpence.” She looked slantwise at me. “Crooked cat.”

  I frowned. “Okay, Ruby. I get the crooked man. That’s Sam Rawlings. I even get the crooked sixpence—the take from the bank robberies, although it’s a good bit more than sixpence. But I don’t get the crooked cat.”

  Ruby licked her fork. “Oh, come on, China. Crooked cat? That’s an easy one.”

  “Easy for you. You’re psychic. But I didn’t see a single cat—straight or crooked—while I was at Claire’s.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. You saw Kitty. Kitty Rawlings.”

  I groaned. “Oh, come on. You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” Ruby giggled. “Crooked man, crooked cat, crooked sixpence. A perfect description.” She put her fork on her empty plate.

  “You’d have to be psychic to figure that one out,” I grumbled.

  “Maybe so.” Ruby picked up her teacup. “Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the best thing that’s come out of these past few days. Being psychic. And being okay with being psychic.”

  I opened my mouth to remark that I thought this was a very good thing, then closed it because Ruby had more to say—and she was saying it with an affectionate pride.

  “It’s a gift that came down from my great-grandmother, Colleen, to my grandmother, and now to me. It’s who I am.” She took something out of the pocket of her denim jumper and pushed it across the table. “You see?”

  I leaned forward. I was looking at a photograph of two smiling women in turn-of-the-century clothes. One was dark-haired and elegant-looking, dressed in a ruffled white long-sleeve shirtwaist and dark skirt, her hair piled up in a Gibson-Girl style. In her arms, she held a pretty little girl with light-colored curls. The other—tall and slender, with a dusting of freckles and hair that frizzed around her face just like Ruby’s—wore a plain white apron over a work dress with the sleeves rolled up. Against one hip she held a wicker basket of laundry. In the background was a large bush, heavy with white roses.

  “Who?” I asked. But I could guess.

  “This is Rachel Blackstone,” Ruby said, pointing to the elegant woman holding the child. “With her daughter Angela. And this is Colleen O’Reilly. My great-grandmother.” She turned the photo over. “See the date? September first, 1900.”

  “Oh my gosh,” I said quietly. “The week before the hurricane.” In another week, two of the three people pictured here would be dead, the third doomed to a long life drowned in grief.

  Ruby nodded. “Claire and I found this in Rachel’s stash of scrapbooks and letters, along with several pages that Rachel had written about Colleen. She said that Colleen had what she called ‘second sight.’ Colleen once saw a neighbor disappear right in front of her eyes. Two days later, the neighbor was struck down in the street by a runaway horse. She died on the very spot where Colleen had seen her vanish.” Ruby paused, and her voice became softly sad. “Colleen left the house the morning of the hurricane, Rachel wrote, to take her mother and her little girl, Annie—who grew up to be my grandmother—to the Ursuline convent. But instead of staying with them in a place she knew was safe, she came back to be with the children, even though she knew that they were going to die—that she was going to die.”

  We were silent for a long moment. I turned the photo over and studied it. “Tall, with freckles and frizzy hair,” I said quietly. “Colleen looks just like you.”

  “It’s the other way around,” Ruby said. “I look just like her, I’m proud to say.” She glanced down at the photo again. “And the Rachel of this photograph looks just like the Rachel who showed herself to me and Claire. We think she chose that form because it was the way she looked just before the hurricane—the last happy time of her life.”

  “I see,” I said as Ruby pocketed her precious photograph. I picked up my teacup. “Did Rachel leave you in peace for the rest of your visit with Claire? And has Claire resigned herself to the task of ghostwriting Rachel’s story?”

  “Claire is more than resigned,” Ruby said. “The longer we looked at those scrapbooks, the more excited she got about the possibilities. She’s thinking about writing a novel about the storm, with Rachel’s story as the central focus. And as far as Rachel herself is concerned, she seems to be content to stay in the background, at least for now.”

  “No more encore appearances? No pan banging or bell ringing or harp playing?”

  Ruby shook her head. “Not so far, anyway. Of course, she might be waiting to see if Claire keeps her part of the bargain. But I hope she’ll be patient. Claire has a lot of work to do right now. For one thing, she’s got to find a live-in caretaker to replace Sam Rawlings. And she’s got to get phone and Internet service out to that house—although that might not be as hard as she thought. It turns out that the church camp has leased part of its land for fracking, and the oil company is building a communications tower about three miles away. That will likely make it possible to get cell phone coverage out there.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Fracking in the neighborhood. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Probably. But there’s nothing she can do about it. And the oil company is promising to upgrade the road, so at least she’ll get something out of the deal. She definitely needs a better road if she’s going to get people to stay at her B and B. Of course, it’s not perfect, but nothing is. I think she’s resigned to that, too. Anyway, she’s getting a satellite installation out there for television and the Internet. She especially needs the Internet to build her business.”

  “Sounds like a big job,” I said. It was the opening I’d been waiting for, and I changed the subject. “How about you, Ruby? Any more second thoughts about our business? The partnership, I mean?”

  “I talked to Ramona this morning,” Ruby said. “I’ve told her that I appreciate her offer, but I can’t take her up on it. She’s not right for the Crystal Cave.” She grinned ruefully. “And she’s definitely not the right partner for you and
Cass. I couldn’t live with myself if I foisted my sister on my two best friends. I’ll find a way to do more teaching. And I want to spend some time developing my gift—Colleen’s gift. And not just with parlor games, either. But I want to keep on doing what we’re doing, together.” She paused and repeated the word. “Together.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.” I was more than glad, I was hugely relieved. “I’m not sure I’d want to stay in business without my best friend.”

  “Really?” Ruby asked, looking pleased.

  “Really,” I said emphatically. “But we’ve been letting ourselves get stuck in our work. We need to be able to get away every now and then. Let’s give some thought to bringing in more people to help us out every now and then. I don’t want any of us—you, me, Cass—to suffer from burnout.”

  Ruby nodded, but her gaze was distant, and I could tell that she was thinking of something else.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking of what we found in the graveyard,” Ruby said. “And something I read in Rachel’s notes. Remember that Claire uncovered a couple of words on the pedestal of the statue in the graveyard? The stone angel?”

  I nodded. “‘My angels,’ wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Ruby said. “When we pulled the honeysuckle aside and cleaned off the lichen and the moss, we could see all of it. It read ‘Sleep well, my angels. ’Twon’t be long now.’”

  “That’s lovely,” I said. “But I don’t think I—”

  “It was explained in Rachel’s notes,” Ruby said. “In the hurricane, Rachel and Colleen took the kids upstairs to the third floor, where they fell asleep on the bed. Rachel thought the storm was just about over and they would all be safe, but Colleen knew what was coming. Just before the house went over, Rachel said, Colleen kissed the children. Those were her last words to them. ‘Sleep well, my angels. ’Twon’t be long now.’ I think,” she added, “that as time went on, Rachel began to picture Colleen herself as an angel—for coming back to the house to help with the children, I mean.”