“It’s me,” said the woman.
The same woman who’d called this morning.
The woman he’d sent crashing into the creek at noon.
Wasn’t it?
“You got the ten thousand?”
“Who is this?” he croaked.
“You know who it is,” she answered impatiently. “You got the money or do I go to the police?”
“How do I know you won’t anyhow?”
“’Cause I’m giving you my word and I ain’t never broke my word yet.”
Like I’d trust you far as I could throw you, he thought angrily.
But he willed himself to calmness. He was an educated white man, he told himself, and she was a stupid black bitch. He’d already killed one nigger woman today. He could certainly kill another.
“I’ve got the money,” he lied. “Where do you want to meet?”
“We ain’t gonna meet.” Tersely, she named the Dobbs Public Library, told him to put the money inside a white plastic bag, and described where he was to leave the packet in precisely forty-five minutes. “I’ll be watching. You leave it and just walk on out the front door, ’cause I see your face I’m gonna start screaming the walls down.”
That didn’t give him much time to fashion a packet that looked like money, wrapped tightly in a plastic bag and wound around with duct tape. She might duck into the ladies’ room, but she’d never get into this packet without a knife or scissors. Satisfied, he put the packet into a white plastic bag as instructed, drove to the library, left it on the floor beside the specified chair, and walked out without looking back.
Once outside though, he raced around the corner, through the alley and back to his car that he’d left parked well down the block. A few minutes later, through his rain-streaked windshield, he saw a black woman emerge from the library with her large handbag clutched to her chest. From this distance, she looked only vaguely like the Freeman woman he’d been following all week. Not that he’d paid all that much attention. It wasn’t the woman he’d followed, so much as the car.
But who the hell was this woman?
Whoever she was, she hurried through the rain to a junker car that looked like it was on its last legs. This was the tricky part. Did she have something in the car to cut open the packet? And if she did, would she go straight to the police or would she try to call him again?
Neither, he realized as she headed out of town toward Cotton Grove. Dobbs’s rush hour was nothing compared to Raleigh’s, but he was able to keep one or two cars back as they drove westward.
Stupid bitch.
* * *
The weather station’s announcer was going crazy with excitement as Fran appeared to draw a bead on the Carolinas. Stan dutifully noted the huge storm’s position—it was something to do to pass the time—but his head wasn’t into his science project this evening.
Not with Mama missing.
It wasn’t unusual to come home and find her not there.
It was unusual to get a call from Lashanda’s Brownie leader asking if Mrs. Freeman had forgotten to pick her up.
If it hadn’t been raining so hard, he’d have ridden his bicycle over to get her himself. As it was, he’d called his dad.
“I’m on my way, son, but how about you phone over to Sister Edwards’s house and see if Mama’s there?”
“Sorry, honey,” Miss Rosa had said. “I haven’t talked to her since this morning.”
He remembered Mrs. Thomas’s grocery list and called there, but with no better results. By the time Dad’s car rolled into the yard with Lashanda, Stan was starting to get worried.
Now it was heading for dark and still no news of Mama.
As word spread through their church, the phone rang frequently, all with the same soft questions: “Sister Clara home yet? Well now, don’t you children fret. I’m sure she’ll turn up just fine.”
When Lashanda’s best friend, Angela Herbert, arrived with her mother shortly before seven, Stan had protested. “We don’t need a babysitter. I’m almost twelve years old, Dad. I can take care of Lashanda.”
“I know you can, son, but your sister’s only seven and having a friend here will make it easier on her.”
“Then let me come with you,” he’d pleaded.
“It would help me more to know you’re here answering the phone in case Mama calls,” his father said.
Unhappily, Stan watched his father leave through the rain. He sure hoped Mama was somewhere safe and dry.
* * *
When the junker car pulled into the yard of a shabby little house at the end of the road, he realized that this was where he’d seen the driver of the Honda Civic drop someone off yesterday morning.
It was instantly clear to him that he’d made a colossal mistake, but instead of remorse, he felt only anger at the woman who was now entering this house without a backward glance. How could he have known? Not his fault that two different women were both driving the same car.
The road curved behind a thick clump of sassafras and wild cherry trees and he pulled his car up close to them, trusting to twilight, the rain and the house’s isolation to help him.
Inside, he saw the woman sawing at his packet with a paring knife. The screen door was hooked, but he put his fist right through the rusted mesh and flipped up the hook.
Rosa Edwards turned with a start and screamed as he burst into the room. She held the puny little knife before her, but he backhanded her so hard that the knife went flying and she fell heavily against the table.
He hit her again and blood gushed from her split lips.
“You better not!” she whimpered, scrabbling across the floor as she tried to get away. “I wrote it down. Somebody’s got the paper, too!”
“Who?” he snarled and kicked her hard in the stomach.
“I don’t get it back, she’ll read it!” Her words came raggedly as she gasped for air. “She’ll know you the one done it.”
Enraged, he grabbed her by the hair and half-lifted her from the floor as he punched her in the face again. “Who, you bitch? Who you give it to?”
“I ain’t telling!” she sobbed.
“Oh yes, you will! Yes, you damn well will.”
Still holding her by the hair, he dragged her over to the kitchen counter and started opening drawers till he found a butcher knife.
“You tell me where that paper is or I’m gonna start cutting off fingers, one finger at a time, and then I’m gonna work on your tits. You hear me?”
Desperately, she struggled against him, but he grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her so viciously that she heard the bone snap.
CHAPTER | 12
The twisting tornado is confined to a narrow track and it has no long-drawn-out horrors. Its climax is reached in a moment. The hurricane, however, grows and grows.
It was nearly five before I adjourned court on Wednesday after hearing a silly case that took longer than any of the combatants (and I use the term advisedly) expected. Reid Stephenson was representing a young man who seemed to think he could race his motorcycle engine in front of his ex-girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night as long as he didn’t actually speak to her or threaten her or come onto her property or get within thirty feet of her as an earlier judgment had enjoined him from doing.
Reid tried to argue that it was only when the young woman came to her window to yell obscenities that the thirty-foot prohibition was violated. In other words, his client got there first and it was the girlfriend who chose to step outside her perimeter. Long-suffering neighbors who called the police wanted a larger perimeter around both of them. I decided they had a point and told the young man he might have obeyed the letter of the law, but I was going to let him sit in jail for three days and think about the spirit.
Despite my ruling, Reid came up to me as I was leaving the courtroom and said, “So how ’bout I pick you up around eight?”
“You’re really serious about going to Steve’s this evening?”
“Well, sur
e I am,” he said. “Good barbecue? A chance to see the boys, catch up with them?”
Reid was Mother’s first cousin, so he’s known my brothers all his life, but being a lot younger and growing up in town to boot, it’s not as if they were close or anything, although he used to trail along when his father came out to the farm to hunt or fish.
When Reid passed the bar, Brix Jr. cut him a piece of the firm and retired to fish and play golf full-time. That’s when Daddy switched over to John Claude for all his legal needs. Out of loyalty, most of the boys gave me their business while I was in practice there and they still use Lee and Stephenson. They’ll even turn to Reid in an emergency—when the kids get in trouble and John Claude’s out of town—but like Daddy, they feel safer with John Claude.
In short, Reid does not have a particularly warm and fuzzy ongoing relationship with my brothers, so why this sudden urge to (as Haywood would say) fellowship with them when rain was falling and a hurricane was heading toward our coastline?
Come eight o’clock though, there he was, rapping on my side door. I’d left my two-car garage open so he could drive in out of the rain. He still had on his gray suit but he held a hanger in one hand, slacks and knit shirt in the other.
“Didn’t have time to change,” he said. “Borrow your bedroom?”
Since I’d sort of flung things around when I went from dress and pantyhose to jeans and sneakers, I pointed him to the guest room instead. While he changed, I neatened my bedroom, hung up clothes and straightened all the surfaces. Maidie’s promised to find me someone to do the heavy scrubbing and vacuuming one morning a week, but she hasn’t gotten to it yet.
When Reid came out, I handed him my guitar case and went around locking doors, something he watched with amusement.
“You don’t need to worry about burglars out here in the middle of Knott land, do you?”
“I’m not so worried about burglars as I am about Knotts,” I said lightly.
Half my brothers think nothing of opening an unlocked door and sometimes they’re just a little too curious about my personal business. Seth and Maidie are the only ones I trust with a key, which is why I’m trying to get in the habit of locking up every time I leave. I pulled the side door closed behind us and made sure it was securely latched.
“What happened to your fender?” I asked as I circled the front of Reid’s black BMW.
It had a serious dent just behind the right headlight.
“Damned if I know,” he said. “I found it like that after court yesterday. Two days out of the shop and somebody backs into me. Didn’t even have the courtesy to leave me his name.”
Considering a courthouse parking lot’s clientele, this did not exactly surprise me. What did surprise was that he wasn’t bitching about it louder. Reid’s as car proud as my nephews and with a five-hundred deductible, every little ding comes out of his pocket.
Rain was falling heavily again and my rutted drive had washed out in a couple of places so that we had to go slower than usual to ease over the humps. We didn’t get to Steve’s till almost eight-thirty.
Despite the pounds of barbecue I’d eaten in the last month, that tangy smell of vinegar and smoked pork did make me hungry. We sat down at a long wooden table where Haywood and Isabel were finishing up and we both ordered the usual: pig, cole slaw, spiced apples and hushpuppies. We even split a side order of fried chicken livers. (Yeah, yeah, we’ve both heard all the horror stories of cholesterol and mercury in organ meat, but Miss Ila, Steve’s seventy-year-old cook, knows how to make them crispy on the outside and melt-in-your-mouth-moist on the inside and neither of us can believe something that good can do lasting hurt if you don’t indulge too often.)
Except for Steve, Miss Ila and a dishwasher, we four were the only ones in the place till Andrew’s Ruth and Zach’s Lee and Emma came dripping in from choir practice a few minutes later and ordered a helping of banana pudding with three spoons.
“We just came by to tell y’all we can’t stay,” said Ruth, pushing back her damp hair. “Mom’s worried about the roads flooding.”
“The water was almost hubcap-deep at Pleasants Crossroads,” said Lee, “but that ol’ four-by-four’s better’n a duck. We won’t have any trouble getting home.”
All the usual customers had scattered earlier and it was clear that the rest of our families were staying home, battening down miscellaneous hatches in case we got any of Fran in the next twenty-four hours. Aunt Sister had already called to say that none of her crowd would be coming. When the kids left, Miss Ila and her helper were right in behind them. Steve put the CLOSED sign up, but we didn’t reach for our instruments. Instead, we talked about Fran and what more rain would do to our already-saturated area, amusing each other with worst-case scenarios in half-serious tones, the way you will when you’re fairly confident that any actual disaster will bypass you. Hurricanes do hit our coast with monotonous regularity, but this far inland, we seldom get much fallout beyond some heavy downpours.
Crabtree Valley Mall was built on a flood plain and it does indeed flood every three or four years. (The local TV stations love to film all the new cars bobbing around the sales lots like corks on a fish pond.)
Bottomland crops may drown when the creeks overflow, a few trees go down and mildew is a constant annoyance, but most storms blow out before they reach us.
“Don’t forget Hazel,” said Isabel.
As if.
Hazel slammed through here in the mid-fifties before Reid and I were born, but we’ve been hearing about it every hurricane season since we were old enough to know what a hurricane was. Each year, I have to listen to tales of porches torn off houses, doing without electricity for several days, and about the millions of dollars’ worth of damage it did. Down in the woods, there are still huge trees that blew over then but didn’t die. Now, all along the leaning trunks, limbs have grown up vertically to form trees on their own.
“Hazel knocked that ’un down,” a brother will tell me as he launches into stream-of-consciousness memories of that storm.
“It hit here in the middle of the day while we was still in school,” said Haywood, warming to his tale like the Ancient Mariner.
“Back then, they didn’t close school for every little raindrop nor snowflake neither,” said Isabel, singing backup.
“They should’ve that day though. Remember how the sky got black and the wind come up?”
“And little children were crying?”
“Blew past in a hurry, but even the principal was worried and he called the county superintendent and they turned us out soon as it was past.”
“Trees and light poles down across the road,” said Isabel. “Our school bus had to go way outten the way to get us all home and we younguns had to walk in from the hardtop almost half a mile on that muddy road.”
“Daddy and Mama Sue—”
Haywood was interrupted by a sharp rap on the restaurant’s front door.
We looked over to see a tall dark figure standing in the rain.
Steve signalled that he was closed, but the man rapped again.
The glass was fogged up too much to see exactly who it was. I was nearest the door and as much to end Haywood’s remembrances of Hazel as anything else, I went and opened it to find Ralph Freeman.
He was soaking wet and obviously worried, although he managed one of those bone-warming smiles the instant he recognized me.
“Come on in,” I said. “Steve, Haywood, Reid—y’all know Reverend Freeman, don’t you? Preaches at Balm of Gilead?”
They made welcoming sounds, but Ralph didn’t advance past the entryway.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, dripping on the welcome mat, “but it’s my wife. She was out this way today, visiting Mrs. Grace Thomas, and I was wondering if any of y’all saw her? White Honda Civic? Sister Thomas says my wife left her house a little after twelve and nobody’s seen her since.”
“Grace Thomas,” said Haywood. “She live on that road off Old Forty-eight, right b
efore Jones Chapel?”
“That’s right,” Ralph said, turning to him eagerly. “Did you see her?”
Haywood shook his head. “Naw. Sorry.”
The others were shaking their heads, too.
“I just don’t know where she could be,” said Ralph. “I thought maybe she’d had a flat tire. Or with all this rain, these deep puddles, she might’ve drowned out the engine. But I’ve been up and down almost every road between here and Cotton Grove.”
“I’ll call around,” said Haywood, heading for the phone. “See if any of the family’s seen her car.”
“Did you call the sheriff’s department?” I asked.
“They said she’s not been gone long enough for them to do anything official, but they did say they’d keep an eye out for the car.”
“Highway patrol?” Reid suggested.
“Same thing,” he answered dispiritedly. “And I’ve called all the hospitals.”
“Now don’t you go thinking the worst,” Isabel comforted. “She could’ve slid into a ditch and she’s either waiting for someone to find her or she’s holed up in somebody’s house that doesn’t have a telephone.”
Ralph looked dubious. “I doubt that. She doesn’t know anybody else out this way and she wouldn’t walk up to a stranger’s house.”
A tactful way to put it. Knowing that Mrs. Freeman disliked whites almost as much as certain whites dislike blacks, I figured he was right. She probably wouldn’t want to chance it with any of us.
Nor was Ralph much comforted by Isabel’s suggestion that she could be waiting out the rain in the car somewhere. Not when we were due for a whole lot more if Fran kicked in as weathermen were predicting.
Haywood came back from the telephone shaking his head. “Everybody’s sticking close to home and ain’t seen no cars in the ditch or nothing. Sorry, Preacher. But we’ll surely keep our eyes peeled going home. Which ought to be about now, don’t you reckon, Bel?” he asked.
She nodded and came heavily to her feet. She’s only about half Haywood’s size, but since he’s just over six feet tall and just under three hundred pounds, that still makes her a hefty woman by anybody’s standards.
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