Storm Track dk-7

by Margaret Maron

  Lashanda was sitting on Ralph’s lap and her eyes lit up as we came through the door. Heaven help him, so did Ralph’s. His father-in-law gave a stately nod that acknowledged our acquaintance.

  “You sure you kids don’t want to come home with Crystal and me?” I heard one of the women coax as we joined them.

  Lashanda sank deeper into her father’s arms and Ralph said, “Thank you, Sister Garrett, but they’ll be fine here. I already spoke to one of the staff about some blankets and pillows. They can stretch out here on the couches.”

  Impulsively, I excused myself and went and found a telephone.

  Daddy doesn’t like talking on the phone and he answered with his usual abrupt, “Yeah?”

  I quickly explained the situation.

  “Bring ’em on here,” he said, before I could ask. “I’ll tell Maidie. And, Deb’rah?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t y’all dilly-dally around. They’s gonna be tree limbs down in the road ’fore long, so come on now, you hear?”

  I heard.

  * * *

  When I got back, Cyl was extending her own invitation to the children.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I told her brightly. “My daddy just invited you and Stan and Lashanda to his hurricane party.”

  “Hurricane party?” asked Lashanda. The bluebird barrettes on her braids brushed her cheeks as she uncurled a bit from Ralph’s protective arms. “What’s that?”

  “That’s where we have like a pajama party and while the wind’s blowing and the rain’s coming down, we’re snug inside with candles and lanterns. We’ll sit up half the night, make popcorn and sing and tell stories—”

  The Reverend Gaithers cleared his throat.

  “—but mostly we’ll just laugh at any old storm that tries to scare us,” I finished hastily. “And Stan can take notes for his science project and tell us what’s happening.”

  “Can we, Daddy?”

  For the first time since we’d come back, the little girl seemed animated instead of tired and apprehensive. Even Stan looked interested.

  “Please?” I appealed to Ralph. “You’ve been out to the farm. It’s not all that far from Cotton Grove so you could easily swing by if you should go home tomorrow morning.”

  “We-ell,” said Ralph. “You sure it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” I assured him. “There’s plenty of room for you, too, Reverend Gaithers, if you’d care to come,” I added.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely, “but I will keep the vigil for my daughter here.”

  The brightness faded from Stan’s face. “I guess I better stay, too.”

  “No,” said the older man, showing more compassion than I’d credited him with. “You go and look after your sister, Stanley. Your father and I will do the praying tonight.”

  “You’ll come, too, Miss Cyl?” Stan asked as Lashanda slid off Ralph’s lap and took Cyl’s hand.

  Confused, Cyl started to murmur about not having the right clothes, but I quickly scotched that. “I have everything you need, even an extra toothbrush. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  She might have hesitated longer, but one of Bo Poole’s deputies, Mayleen Richards, entered the waiting room and we both knew that she’d probably come to question Ralph about Rosa Edwards’s death. The children didn’t seem to know about it yet and Cyl and I were in instant silent agreement that this was no time to hit them with another shock.

  “Sure,” said Cyl. “Let’s go.”

  Downstairs, we agreed to split up. Cyl would drive Stan and Lashanda to Cotton Grove for their overnight things while I stopped by Jimmy White’s to see what he could do about my trunk lock, then we’d meet at the homeplace. Maidie was active in the same church as Cyl’s grandmother, so Cyl would see at least one familiar face if they got there before I did.

  Even though it wasn’t yet three o’clock, the road home was busier than usual. A lot of places must have let their employees go home early. Rain was falling quite heavily now and wind gusts buffeted my car, giving me pleasant little bursts of adrenaline each time I had to correct the steering. It was both scary and exhilarating. Like riding a horse you’re not too sure of.

  When I reached Jimmy’s garage and pulled into his drive, the county’s crime scene van blocked the entrance to the garage itself and Dwight’s car was there, too.

  They had pushed Clara Freeman’s Civic inside and found what we hadn’t noticed the night before: a small dent in her left rear fender and a smear of black paint ground into that dent. It might just be enough.

  “If we can find a black car to match it with,” Dwight said with unwonted pessimism. “And you want to hear something cute? I stopped by the Orchid Motel on my way out of Dobbs and Marie O’Day said she was just about to call me. They’d heard about Edwards’s death and one of the maids finally thought to mention that she came back to the motel late Saturday afternoon. Guess what car she was driving?”

  “This one here?”

  “You got it,” he said glumly. “Rosa Edwards might still be alive if we’d talked to her.”

  “Or not,” I said, patting his shoulder as if he were Reese or A.K. “If she was the talking kind, she had four days to come to you.”

  It would have been interesting to bat around theories, but we all were getting antsy. Jimmy promised to get to my trunk lock by the first of the week, but right now he wanted to close down the garage. Dwight had a few loose ends of his own to see to before the storm got worse. The crime scene van was already on its way back to Dobbs.

  I hurried on home to change clothes and pick up some overnight things for Cyl and me. As I was hunting for the extra toothbrushes I’d stashed in my linen closet, Robert stopped by with a kerosene lantern, Lashanda’s doll and Clara Freeman’s purse, which were still soggy and starting to mildew after such a hot day in the airless cab of his tractor. I gave him a hug for the lantern and thanks for remembering the doll and purse.

  “I’m real glad you and Reese’re going to Daddy’s,” he said, hugging me back. “It’s not gonna be anything like Hazel, but it don’t pay to take risks.”

  I tried to stick up for my house’s steel framing, but he just laughed and drove on off toward his own place.

  I took the things inside and put them on my kitchen counter. The mildew wiped right off Lashanda’s rubber doll and Clara’s brown plastic purse. I rinsed out the doll’s dress and underpants and threw them in the dryer. Next, I unloaded the purse and propped it open, then spread the contents across the countertop so they’d dry and air out—keys, lipstick, comb, nail file, a damp notepad with a list of items crossed off, a couple of envelopes. One was plain and sealed with Scotch tape. The other looked like a bill from Carolina Power and Light. I threw away a couple of sodden tissues and a half-melted roll of breath mints.

  Along with the usual cards and paper money in the wallet, there were pictures of Stan and Lashanda and a studio picture of Clara and Ralph with the two kids. I looked at that one long and hard. In her neat blue dress with a chaste white collar, she was no-where near as beautiful as Cyl, but there was something wistful in her eyes and I wondered if Ralph had been unfaithful to her before or was Cyl an aberration waiting to happen? I tried to imagine Cyl into this picture if Clara didn’t make it. Cyl as a preacher’s wife? As stepmother to these two children? Cyl DeGraffenried of the sophisticated haircut, the elegant understated clothes, the competitive career woman?

  There’d be a lot of hard adjusting all around.

  I put down paper towels and spread the pictures and cards to dry as I switched on the radio. Bulletins were coming thick and fast on WPTF. Fran was definitely coming ashore around eight o’clock at Bald Head Island at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.

  Rain was falling hard in long windblown sheets that almost obscured the pond as it lashed at my windows. I went around making a final check and had just latched the last window when the phone rang.

  “Your people are here,” said Daddy. “Why ai
n’t you?”

  “On my way,” I told him and dashed out into the rain with my duffle bag crammed with enough clothes and toiletries to last a week.

  CHAPTER | 16

  Here are all the terrible phenomena of the West Indian hurricane—the tremendous wind, the thrashing sea, the lightning, the bellowing thunder, and the drowning rain that seems to be dashed from mighty tanks with the force of Titans.

  We spent the next hour settling in. Since the quickest way to get people past their initial awkwardness is to give them something to do, Maidie and I soon had Lashanda and Stan racing up and down the stairs, bringing down pillows, quilts and blankets. Here at the homeplace, kitchen and den flow into each other and Daddy and Cletus sat at the kitchen table to keep from getting run over.

  There were enough bedrooms in this old house for everyone to have a choice, but who ever heard of going off to separate rooms during a hurricane party?

  The den couch opens into a bed that I claimed for Cyl and me, and there were a couple of recliner chairs as well. We made thick pallets for the children right on the area rugs that dot the worn linoleum floor.

  Both Blue and Ladybelle had been turned in and Ladybelle immediately went over and started pushing at Lashanda’s hand with her head.

  “She wants you to scratch behind her ears,” Daddy told her.

  Half-apprehensively—the hound was almost as tall as she was—Lashanda reached out and scratched. Ladybelle gave a sigh of pure pleasure and sank down at the little girl’s feet.

  Daddy’s television was tuned to the weather channel and Stan sat on the floor in front of it, entranced by the colored graphics that covered the screen.

  “So that’s what he looks like,” he murmured when a black forecaster started explaining for the umpteenth time how the Saffir-Simpson scale rated hurricanes. “I wondered.”

  “You don’t have cable?” Cyl asked, stuffing pillows into cotton pillowcases that Maidie had ironed to crisp perfection.

  “We don’t have television at all,” said Lashanda, abandoning Ladybelle so that she could help Cyl.

  Stan looked embarrassed. “Mama doesn’t believe in it. But I can pick up this channel on my shortwave. That’s how I know that guy’s voice.”

  I wasn’t as shocked as some people might be. Like a lot of members in her fundamentalist church, my sister-in-law Nadine doesn’t, quote, believe in television either, but Herman’s overruled her on that from the beginning. And as soon as cable came to Dobbs, he signed up for it. Now that the population’s getting dense enough to make it economically feasible, cable’s finally reached our end of the county, too, but Daddy and the boys have had satellite dishes for years.

  All the same, even though I could understand where Clara Freeman was coming from—especially after meeting her father—it did make me wonder how much slack she cut her children.

  Or her husband.

  “They’s crayons in the children’s drawer,” Maidie reminded me on one of her trips through the den, when she realized Stan was trying to copy some of the color graphics of the storm.

  The television sat atop an enormous old turn-of-the-century sideboard. Mother had turned the bottom drawer into a catchall for games and toys as soon as the first grandchild was born. And yes, it was now being used for great-grandchildren, so it still held a big Tupperware bowl full of broken crayons of all colors. Some of them had probably been there since Reese was a baby. Stan seized upon them and one of his blank weather maps soon sported an amorphous gray storm with a dark red blotch in the center.

  All this time, the house had been filling with delicious aromas. For Maidie, picnics and parties always mean fried chicken and she had the meaty parts of at least four chickens bubbling away in three large black iron frying pans. There was a bowl of potato salad in the refrigerator, a big pot of newly picked butter beans on the spare burner, and Maidie set Cletus to slicing a half-dozen fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes while she got out her bread tray.

  “You’ve already cooked enough for an army,” I said as Cyl and Lashanda and I set the table. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make biscuits, too?”

  “Well, you know how Reese eats.” She was already mixing shortening into a mound of self-rising flour. “And that Stan looks like he could stand some fattening.”

  Lashanda giggled, her little blue barrettes jiggling with each movement. “And you know what? Mama says he eats like he’s got a tapeworm.”

  I had to smile, too. You don’t grow up in a houseful of adolescent boys without hearing that phrase a time or twenty.

  Following his nose, Reese blew in through the back door a few minutes later, carrying a full ice chest as if it weighed no more than a five-pound bag of sugar. Like his father Herman, Reese is also a twin, but he’s built like all the other Knott men: six feet tall, sandy brown hair, clear blue eyes. No movie stars in the whole lot, but no trouble getting women either.

  “Something sure smells fit to eat in this house,” he said, buttering Maidie before he was even through the door good.

  He spotted Cyl and Lashanda, did a double take and then squatted down so he’d be level with the child. “Well, well, well! Who’s this pretty little thing we got here?”

  His words were for Lashanda, but his eyes were all over Cyl, who had changed into the jeans and T-shirt I’d brought her. Both were a trifle snug on me, but she had room to spare in all the right places.

  “Behave yourself, Reese,” I scolded and introduced him to our guests.

  “Oh, yeah, Uncle Robert told me about Miz Freeman. I’m real sorry.” He straightened up and looked at Cyl and me. “If y’all’ll give me your keys, I’ll go move your cars.”

  “Why?” I asked. “We’re not blocking you, are we?”

  “No, but they’re right under those big oaks and the way this wind’s blowing, you might be better off out in the open.”

  We immediately handed them over. By the time he came back, soaked to the skin, we were putting the food on the table. He quickly changed into some of Daddy’s clothes and put his own in the dryer.

  Daddy likes to pray about as much as he likes talking on the telephone, but with Maidie and the children sitting there with bowed heads, the rest of us followed their example and he offered up his usual, “For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make us truly thankful. Amen.”

  “Amen,” we said and passed the bowls and platters.

  The biscuits were hot and flaky. The chicken was crisp on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside—ambrosia from the southern part of heaven.

  Stan was a little more polite about it than Reese, but both ate as if it was their first meal in three days.

  “Did you know that Edwards woman that got killed in Cotton Grove last night?” Reese asked Maidie as he spooned a third helping of potato salad onto his plate.

  I was sitting next to him and I gave his thigh a sharp nudge.

  “Let’s don’t talk about that right now,” I said warningly.

  Luckily, Lashanda had been distracted by Ladybelle, who knows better than to beg food from any of us, but couldn’t be prevented from sitting near any newcomer in the hope that she might not know the rules. Stan had heard though, and his eyes widened. He turned to Cyl, who sat on the other side of him, and she nodded gravely.

  Suddenly he didn’t seem to be hungry any more and when he asked to be excused so he could go check on what Fran was doing, Cyl went with him.

  Reese and Maidie picked up that something was going on and they kept Lashanda laughing and talking and plied with honey for her biscuit till Cyl came back to the table.

  * * *

  We were more than halfway through the dishes when the power went off, plunging us into darkness deeper than most of us had seen since the last power outage. What with security lights and even streetlights popping up all over the area, we don’t get much true darkness anymore. Daddy had a flashlight to hand and once the candles and lanterns had been lit, Maidie insisted we go ahead and finish washing up while the water syste
m still had enough pressure to do the job.

  Power failure rules immediately went into effect: boys in the upstairs bathroom, girls in the downstairs and no flushing unless absolutely necessary, using water dipped from the full tubs.

  Daddy and Cletus had moved into the den recliners and were regaling Stan with well-worn memories of Hurricane Hazel. Maidie’s only about fifteen years older than me, so her memories of Hazel are pretty vague, but Cletus has another six or eight years on her and can match Daddy tree for fallen tree.

  The candlelight soon took Daddy even further back, back before electricity came to this area.

  “We didn’t even have radio when I was a little fellow,” he reminisced. “I was near-bout grown ’fore I heared it the first time. Seventy-five years ago, they was no weather satellites and the weather bureau did a lot of its predicting by what ships out at sea telegraphed to shore about the weather where they was. Way back here in the woods, we didn’t know it was hurricanes stomping around out off the coast yonder. Old-timers used to call ’em August blows, ’cause most years, come late August, we’d get days and days of wind out of the northeast and sometimes we’d get a bunch of rain with it. A lot of times though, the sky’d be just as blue as you please, and that wind a-blowing.”

  As he spoke, the wind was blowing again, rattling the old wooden windows in their loose-fitting casements, and Lashanda tugged at my shirt. “Did you bring my baby doll, Miss Deborah?”

  It was the first time I’d thought of it since I put the damp doll dress in my dryer. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I went and left it at my house.”

  “Is that far away?” she asked plaintively.

  “Not too far,” I said brightly. “Why don’t I just run over and get it for you.”

  “Here now,” said Daddy. “I don’t think that’s a real smart idea. Wind catch hold of that little car of your’n and no telling where you’ll fetch up.”

  “I’ll carry her in my truck,” said Reese, who seemed to have taken a shine to the child. “It’s heavy enough. We won’t be more’n a minute.”