Storm Track dk-7

by Margaret Maron

  Bewildered, Stan remembered how the evening had started normally enough. After a heavy Sunday dinner, supper was always sandwiches and milk. Then Mama and Lashanda would neaten up the kitchen while he and Dad went on ahead in the van to get things set up.

  Ever since Balm of Gilead burned to the ground back in July, services had been held in an old-fashioned canvas gospel tent with folding chairs. In just the few short months Dad’d been here, the congregation had grown to over a hundred and it looked as if they could begin breaking ground for a new sanctuary next month. Meantime, everybody was sort of enjoying the outdoor preaching. There were inconveniences, of course. No Sunday school rooms, no choir stalls, no screens, no air-conditioning, not even overhead fans, only the handheld, cardboard-and-stick fans with a picture of Jesus knocking at the door on one side and an ad for a funeral home on the other.

  But tent revivals were a tradition that had almost fallen out of use and the older folks beamed when they sang,

  Gimme that ol’ time religion, that ol’ time religion,

  Gimme that ol’ time religion—It’s good enough for me.

  That evening, he’d helped Dad set up the simple sound system, then he’d taken rubber gloves and a bucket of soapy water out to the two portable toilets that stood modestly on opposite sides of a large holly tree at the back of the lot and wiped down the seats and floors so everything would be neat and fresh.

  When he came back to the tent, Sister Helen Garrett and her daughter Crystal were there, arranging a large bouquet of deep blue hydrangeas in front of the pulpit, the only piece of church furniture to survive the fire. At least Crystal was at work on the flowers, trying to keep the heavy flower heads from tipping over. Her mother was at the pulpit in deep talk with his father.

  “Hey, Stan,” Crystal said shyly. They were in the same class, but different homerooms at school, and he’d only started to know her a little when Sister Garrett joined their church last month. “Could I borrow your bucket to get some water for these?”

  “I’ll get that for you,” he said, glad for a chance to be alone with her a few minutes before his friends arrived and started clowning around, teasing them. He’d always had friends who were girls, but never a real girlfriend. Not that Crystal was, he thought confusedly as he fetched the water and poured it into the vase. But if he did have a girlfriend, Crystal Garrett sure would be fine. That smile. Those eyes. Smart, too. Her science project was on the life cycle of the black-and-yellow argiope.

  Only thing wrong was her mother, who embarrassed both of them the way she put herself forward at calls for rededication, clinging to Dad as she sobbed out her sins in his ear. Now that his own body was so aware of girls—and not just Crystal—it had only recently dawned on him precisely why Sister Garrett and one or two other of the church women took any opportunity to convert Dad’s “right hand of fellowship” into a warm hug. He hated the way those women pulled at him and touched him and brushed up against him like they wanted more from him than what a pastor was supposed to give.

  Crystal wasn’t responsible for her mother any more than he was for Dad, who couldn’t help reaching out and touching whoever he was speaking to at the moment. Like now, when one of the deacons approached and he drew Brother Lorton into the conversation with a handclasp and an arm around the older man’s shoulder.

  Predictably, once the conversation quit being one-on-one, Sister Garrett turned her attention back to the flowers and, to his dismay, to him. “You’re looking more like your daddy every day, Stanley. No wonder my little Crystal’s so sweet on you.”

  Crystal looked as if she wanted to go crawl under the pulpit and Stan escaped by suddenly remembering that he was supposed to distribute hymn books and fans along the chairs. More church folks arrived and he answered politely as they greeted him. He hadn’t noticed Mama and Lashanda’s arrival until his little sister edged up to him while he was plugging in the lights and whispered, “Mama’s real mad.”

  Guilt had instantly seized him. A dozen possible transgressions immediately tumbled through his mind.

  “What’s she mad about?” he asked cautiously.

  The seven-year-old shook her head, her brown eyes wide with unhappiness. “I don’t know. I think she found something in Daddy’s desk.”

  Four things were off-limits without permission: the refrigerator except for milk or carrots, the cookie jar, their parents’ bedroom unless Mama or Dad was there, and Dad’s desk in the living room.

  Doors and drawers were left unlocked. It was enough for Mama to say “Thou shalt not” to ensure that neither he nor Lashanda would open any of them unbidden. They knew that Dad kept his pastoral records in the desk and often sat there to counsel troubled church members.

  Maybe that’s what Mama’s found, he thought. Maybe there were some notes about a member of the congregation who’d done something so steeped in sin that the church needed to cast them out.

  There was that time in Warrenton when she’d urged Dad to take such a step, but Dad had brought the sinner back to Christ. “And if Jesus can forgive him, Clara, who are we to cast stones and cast him out?”

  But he couldn’t say all this to his sister. She was still too little to understand.

  “Don’t worry. Dad’ll take care of it,” he reassured her, and she’d skipped away to join her friends.

  Crystal had saved a place for him among their friends near the back but he kept a wary eye on his mother’s profile. She sat in her accustomed seat, the very last chair on the front row.

  As the pastor’s wife, Mama knew all eyes were always upon her and her children and she preached to them constantly.

  “It’s up to us to set good examples,” she said. “Think before you act. Weigh your words before you speak. The Bible tells us that the ungodly are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. The Devil is a mighty wind, children, and he’ll blow your bad words and bad deeds to where they’ll do the most hurt to your father if you’re not mindful of who you are.”

  So Mama had sat in her usual seat and kept her face turned to Dad’s with her usual expression of solemn attention. But when preaching was over and everything was stowed in the back of the van, Mama gave her keys to Miss Rosa, who was still without her own transportation to work, and she and Lashanda rode home with them. That’s when he realized that Dad was the focus of her anger.

  As his parents approached the van, he heard Dad say, “What were you doing in my desk, Clara?”

  “I was looking for a rubber band for my prayer cards.” Her words lashed out like a switch off a peach tree. “Instead, I found—”

  She hushed when she realized that the van windows were open and that Stan and Lashanda were sitting wide-eyed.

  There was utter silence as they drove home and he and Lashanda had immediately gone to their rooms without being told. It was like seeing bolts of lightning flash across a dark sky and scurrying for cover before the storm broke.

  He couldn’t imagine what Mama had found to set her off like that.

  * * *

  “Rubbers!” Clara Freeman’s face contorted with distaste as she voiced a word that raised images of filth and abomination in her mind. “An open pack. I had my tubes tied after Lashanda, so why do you have rubbers in your desk, Ralph? What whore you lying down on? I’m your true wife, the mother of your children. I yoked my life to yours, walked beside you in righteousness, sacrificed myself to your calling.”

  “Clara, don’t,” Ralph said. It was worse than he’d imagined when he let himself imagine.

  “Haven’t I done what I promised the day you asked me to marry you?” she raged in quiet fury. “Haven’t I been an upright and faithful helpmeet? Taught our children to walk in the ways of our Lord Jesus Christ and respect your position?”

  Battered by her anger, knowing he was responsible for her scalding humiliation, he mumured, “You have.”

  “What more could a man of God require of a wife?”

  He shook his head, suddenly deeply tired. “Sometimes, ev
en a man of God just wants to be treated like a man, Clara.”

  She drew herself up icily at this allusion to sex. “I’ve done my duty to you in this bed.”

  “Your duty,” he repeated, feeling numb.

  “So now it’s my fault? Because I won’t be your whore in bed, you’ve gone to a whore’s bed?”

  “I never meant to hurt you,” he said quietly.

  “Hurt me? It’s not just me that’s hurt, it’s you, it’s the children, but most of all, it’s God. When people see a preacher turn to adultery and fornication, they laugh with the Devil and it’s God who’s hurt.”

  “Clara—”

  “Did you think you could keep her a secret? When all the eyes of the church are on its shepherd? I’m your true wife, Ralph, and I call you back to the paths of righteousness. Like Sarah to Abraham. In the name of God, I tell you to cast out your concubine like Abraham cast out Hagar.”

  “Oh, Clara—”

  The sound of her name upon his lips fed her scornful rage like kerosene on an open flame. Suddenly, she whipped her dress over her head and flung it to the floor. Her slip followed, then her bra and panties. For the first time in years, she stood naked before him.

  Naked with all the lamps on.

  “Is this what you want from me, Ralph?” She cocked her hip at him and did an awkward parody of a bump and grind. “Is this what it takes to redeem your soul?”

  A sheen of perspiration covered her face and light gleamed on her full breasts and smooth belly. She was thirty-six years old and had borne two children, yet her body seemed as slim and firm as on their wedding night, the night he realized he had made a huge error that could never be rectified, when he understood that he’d mistaken her passion for God as a passion for him.

  She had given him her virginity as a burnt sacrifice to God, not as a celebration of God’s greatest gift between man and woman.

  Now she slowly turned around, displaying herself openly, front and back. “Am I not comely in your sight?”

  As she came back full circle, she saw the pity in his eyes and abruptly tried to cover herself with her arms and hands.

  “Oh, God!” she moaned and dropped to her knees at the foot of their bed, clasped her hands and began to pray, wordlessly, silently, with tears streaming from her closed eyes.

  Ralph opened their closet, took her white cotton robe from the door hook, and gently draped it around her shoulders. Without opening her eyes, she pulled the fabric across her naked breasts and continued to pray.

  As Ralph stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him, he saw that Stan’s door was slightly ajar and he pushed it open.

  The boy looked at him. “Is something wrong, Dad?”

  He had never lied to his children. “Yes, but it’s between your mother and me and we’ll work it out. Try not to let it trouble you any more than you can help, okay?”

  Wanting to be convinced, his son nodded.

  “Don’t stay up too late,” said Ralph.

  “I won’t. ’Night, Dad.”

  “’Night, Daddy,” echoed Lashanda’s little voice from next door.

  His daughter was already in bed with the lights out, but enough spilled in from the hall when Ralph opened her door to see that she was still wide awake. He adjusted the fan in her window and asked if she was cool enough.

  “Is Mama still mad?” the little girl whispered.

  “She’ll be fine in the morning,” Ralph said, knowing that Clara would be in firm control of her emotions by breakfast time. Even if she were still angry with him, she would try not to let the children see it.

  He kissed Lashanda goodnight and went down the hall to the living room. The telephone sat on the desk that had betrayed him and for a moment he was tempted to call.

  But what he had to say to Cyl couldn’t be said on a telephone, he decided. He pulled his keys from his pocket and walked out into the night.

  * * *

  The Bullocks lived in a small rental house at the edge of Cotton Grove.

  There was only a single streetlight at the far end of the quiet block, but a light was on by the front door, and as soon as Dwight pulled up to the curb in his Colleton County cruiser, he saw a man come to the front window and peer out at him.

  The door was opened before Dwight could cross the yard.

  “What’s happened?” he called from the porch. “Is it my wife? Is she all right?”

  “Evening, Mr. Bullock,” Dwight said.

  Even though both had played softball together the night before and eaten pizza at the same table afterwards, Dwight was now in full official mode and Jason Bullock stopped dead on the porch steps as he registered the deputy sheriff’s formality.

  “Was she in a wreck? She always drives too fast. Oh Jesus, I’ll kill her if she’s gone and hurt herself!”

  The contradiction of words would have been funny if Dwight didn’t know what was going on in the man’s head, that he was bracing himself to hear what a rumpled officer of the law had come to tell him at ten o’clock at night.

  “I’m sorry,” Dwight said. “There’s no easy way to say this—”

  “She’s dead?”

  All the air seemed to go out of Jason Bullock and Dwight put out his hand to steady him.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned. “I told her and told her, but she wouldn’t slow down. I swore I was going to buy a clunker that wouldn’t go over forty miles an hour and she just laughed. Oh, Jesus. What happened?”

  “Where was your wife this weekend, Mr. Bullock?”

  “She drove up toward Virginia—there were some antique stores near Danville. Look, are you absolutely sure? I mean, her sister was with her. Maybe they made a mistake?”

  Dwight shook his head. “No mistake.”

  “She called me just before our game. She said she’d bought me a surprise. She said she loved—”

  His face crumpled and he sank down on the wooden steps that led onto the porch.

  Awkwardly, Dwight patted his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” Bullock said. He fumbled at his pockets, stood up and went into the house.

  Dwight followed through the open door and into the kitchen where Bullock pulled a handful of paper towels from the dispenser by the sink and blew his nose.

  The kitchen table was set for two with a bowl of slightly wilted salad in the center. A couple of steaks had thawed on the drainboard and runnels of blood had dried on the white porcelain.

  “What about Lurleen?” asked Bullock when he had his emotions in check. “Her sister. Is she okay?”

  There was no way to mask the truth. Quietly but succinctly, Dwight explained that his wife had never left Colleton County. That she hadn’t died in a car crash, that she’d been murdered in the Orchid Motel out on the Dobbs bypass.

  “What?” Bullock was looking like someone had sucker-punched him. “Why?”

  As neutrally as possible, Dwight described how his wife had been found—the wine glasses, the black lingerie, her partial nudity, how the door showed no sign of being forced.

  Bullock listened numbly, his jaws clenching tighter and tighter with each new humiliating detail, till faint patches of white appeared along his chinline.

  “I’m sorry,” Dwight said again.

  “Where is she?” he asked abruptly. “What do I need to do?”

  “We sent her body to Chapel Hill for the autopsy,” said Dwight, “but they’re fast. If you have a funeral director call, they’ll probably be finished within twenty-four hours.”

  He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. Inside was a slim ballpoint pen. Sterling silver and expensive. Not an advertising gimme, although it looked elusively familiar to him for some reason. They had found it under Lynn Bullock’s body though he didn’t tell her husband this.

  “Is it hers?” Dwight asked.

  Jason Bullock took the bag and looked closely at the sleek design. “If it is, I never saw it before.”

  He looked at Dwight bleakly. “But I guess there’s a lot I didn�
��t see, huh?”

  CHAPTER | 7

  These storms, which are common to the southern and southeastern coasts of the United States, invariably originate in “the doldrums,” or that region in the ocean where calms abound.

  Monday morning—Labor Day—and I was surfing channels, trying to find more details about Lynn Bullock’s death while waiting for the coffee to perk. All I was getting were the bare facts voiced over uninformative shots of the Orchid Motel draped in yellow police tape from yesterday afternoon, although a helicopter view from above showed me that the motel was closer to the ball field than I’d realized. All the time Jason was talking to his wife, thinking she was a hundred miles away, she was right there less than half a mile from us.

  The TV reporters didn’t seem to know as much as Amy had. I felt sorry for Tom and Marie O’Day, who bought the motel six years ago and have worked hard to make it succeed. This wasn’t the kind of publicity they needed. Tom appeared on camera long enough to say they had nothing to say, and viewers got to see a draped gurney being wheeled from a ground-floor room at the back of the building.

  The radio was even less informative.

  What I really needed was a newspaper.

  When I lived with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, the News and Observer was lying on the breakfast table every morning when I came down. The Dobbs Ledger, too, if it were Monday, Wednesday or Friday. (With all the new people and new businesses coming into the county, the Ledger has also grown. Back in June, Linsey Thomas started publishing it three times a week instead of twice.)

  Now that I have my own house, I also have my own subscriptions and both papers are delivered right on schedule.

  The difference is that Aunt Zell has merely to open her front door and pick up the papers from her welcome mat. My mail and paper boxes are just over half a mile away from my front door, down a long and winding driveway, and this presents me with something of a moral problem.