Before Daddy could order us not to go, Reese and I had grabbed flashlights and were out the back door, dashing across the yard to his truck. Umbrellas were useless in this wind and neither of us bothered with one. The ground was soft and soggy and squished with each running step I took. Reese’s white truck has such oversized tires that I almost needed a stepladder to swing up into the cab. There was a time when he wouldn’t have let my wet clothes and muddy shoes into his truck. But that was before a deer tore the living bejeesus out of his beautiful leather seat covers and headliner last fall. Vinyl replacements were all he could afford and nowadays he’s not quite as particular about water and dirt.
* * *
“We better not try going through the woods,” Reese said, throwing the truck into four-wheel drive before we were even out of the yard.
Instead, he took the long way, through drag rows and lanes that bordered the fields. It was an exciting ride. Treetops were whipping in the wind, rain was coming down in buckets, and green leaves and pine needles were hurled so thickly against the windshield, the wipers almost couldn’t handle them.
“Aren’t you scared?” Reese asked, almost shouting to be heard above the rain pounding on the cab roof as we skidded through a cut in the woods that was almost blocked by a large pine limb.
I just laughed, feeling more alive than I had in ages. This was more exhilarating than a roller coaster.
As we turned out into the next field and followed the lane that runs alongside the pond, we saw car lights suddenly come on at the back of my house. We thought it might be one of the family, but instead of waiting for us or coming to meet us, it sped away down my driveway toward the road. By the time we got up to the house, the taillights were long gone, but the glare of Reese’s lights showed that the door of my house was standing wide open. The window beside it had been smashed so that someone could reach inside and unlock the door.
Wind and rain were howling through the rooms. We slammed the door, then Reese headed through the kitchen to the garage for a tarp to nail over the window. When he brought it back, it was like hanging on to a sail even though my porch is roofed and screened. I had to pull the tarp taut and hold the flashlight steady, too, so he could see to nail.
As soon as that was taken care of, Reese lit the kerosene lamp on my kitchen counter and we shone our flashlights through the rest of the house to see what had been taken. Wind funnelling through the open door had scattered stuff, but no real damage had been done and I couldn’t immediately see that the house had been seriously tossed. My few bits of real jewelry were untouched in the case on my dresser and all of Mother’s sterling silver seemed to be occupying their proper compartments in the flannel-lined drawers.
The cards, pictures and bills from Clara Freeman’s wallet had blown onto the floor, yet all were still there, including a five and two tens.
“We must’ve scared him off ’fore he could grab anything,” said Reese.
I finished laying Clara’s things back on fresh dry paper towels, then shone my light around the floor for items I might have missed.
“What you looking for?” asked my nephew.
“There were two envelopes,” I said. “Here’s the light bill, but the other one—”
I widened my search over every square inch of the area, to no avail. The damp envelope that had been sealed with Scotch tape was definitely gone.
At that instant, it was as if a flashbulb suddenly exploded in my head. This was why my car had been broken into? Looking for Clara Freeman’s purse and the envelope? What could have been in it? And more importantly, who knew I had it?
Millard King had been there with Jason Bullock and me when I fished it out of the car. And at the hospital this morning, Dr. Jeremy Potts was standing beside Ralph Freeman when I said I had Lashanda’s doll and Clara’s purse.
“But not Brandon Frazier,” whispered the preacher.
“And not Reid,” said his headmate.
Until that moment of giddy relief, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been subconsciously worrying about that dent in the right front fender of Reid’s black BMW.
I was uneasy about leaving my house unprotected, but Reese wasn’t about to let me stay.
“Granddaddy’ll have my hide if I come back without you,” he said.
I stuck the doll and its clothes into a plastic bag so it wouldn’t get wet and we drove down my long rutted driveway just to make sure the intruder was well and truly gone. Normally, our sandy soil slurps up water like a sponge. Tonight, the wheel ruts were overflowing channels. Just as we paused before pulling onto the hardtop, the big wisteria-covered pine tree beside my mailbox crashed down across the driveway behind us, rocking the truck as its lower limb swiped the tailgate. Two seconds earlier and we’d have been smashed beneath it.
“Holy shit!” Reese yelped and floored the accelerator.
“Watch out!” I shrieked and he almost put us in the ditch when he swerved to miss a limb lying in our lane. “Dammit, Reese, if you can’t handle the speed, slow down!”
He did, but he was still shaking his head at two close calls.
“Well, one thing about it,” he said sheepishly. “You don’t have to worry about that guy coming back tonight. Nobody’s gonna get through your lane without a chain saw or a bulldozer.”
It was a short wild ride back to the homeplace. Along the way, I cautioned him not to talk about the break-in to Lashanda. “She’s handling the storm and what’s happened to her mother pretty good, but too much more might set her off.”
“She knew the Edwards woman?” he asked.
“Her mother’s best friend,” I told him.
* * *
As we pulled up to the back porch, I was surprised to see Dwight’s patrol car.
“I was about to send Dwight looking for you,” Daddy said when Reese and I were back inside and I had handed Lashanda her doll.
“What’re you doing out in this weather?” I asked him curiously.
Dwight shrugged. “This and that. And by the time I was ready to head back to Dobbs, I realized I might better stay the night out here at Mother’s. Just thought I’d check on y’all since it’s on my way.”
I walked out to the shadowy kitchen with him and we paused at the doorway. In low tones, I told him about the intruder at my house, about the missing envelope and who knew I had Clara Freeman’s purse, ending with my theory that that’s why my trunk was popped.
“Dr. Jeremy Potts was standing right there when I told Ralph Freeman I’d forgotten to bring the purse in with me. I meant into Dobbs. If it is Potts, he might’ve thought I meant in from the car.”
“Potts?” Dwight asked blankly. “What’s he got to do with the price of eggs?”
I gave him a quick rundown on the Potts divorce and how Lynn Bullock found the argument that let Jason vacuum the good doctor’s assets. “And Amy said he was downright gloating when he contributed to her memorial fund yesterday.”
“Millard King did say he thought there was a doctor out on the running track with him,” Dwight mused. “Maybe I’d better have a talk with Potts. And I’ll definitely send someone out tomorrow to dust your kitchen and that purse.”
He glanced over my shoulder to the cozy candlelit scene in the den.
Cyl and Stan were lounging at opposite ends of the opened couch with his battery-powered radio turned low to catch the latest storm updates. Reese sat on the floor nearby, absently strumming soft chords on my guitar. Maidie was crocheting almost by touch alone in one of the wooden rockers. Candles threw exaggerated shadows on the wall and Daddy and Cletus were amusing Lashanda by making shadow birds and animals with their hands. Some of their creations took all four hands and were quite complicated.
“Almost wish I was staying,” Dwight said wistfully as he opened the door and stepped onto the porch.
The door was on the leeward side of the wind, and I walked out onto the porch with him. Between candles and kerosene lanterns, the house was starting to get too warm and stuffy a
nd I was so glad for the fresh air that I continued to stand there with rainwater cascading off the porch roof while Dwight dashed out to his cruiser and drove away.
And I was still standing there three minutes later when the cruiser returned.
“This should teach me to be careful what I ask for,” Dwight said wryly when he rejoined me on the porch. He dried his face on the shoulder of his wet sports shirt. “Two of Mr. Kezzie’s pecan trees are laying across the lane and I can’t get out. Use your phone?”
“If it’s still working.”
It was. First he called Miss Emily to say he wouldn’t be coming after all. Too late. She’d left a message for him on her answering machine that Rob and Kate had insisted she spend the night with them and that he should come, too. Rob is Dwight’s younger brother and lives just down the road from their mother in a big old farmhouse that Kate inherited from her first husband.
He dialed their number and had just explained about Daddy’s pecan trees when the phone went dead in his ear.
Which meant he had to struggle back out to his cruiser to radio the departmental dispatcher and let them know his location.
I had thought the rain was coming down as hard as it could possibly fall, but suddenly it was as if all the firehoses of heaven were pouring down on the backyard. Even in such utter darkness, the cruiser’s interior light was only a faint glow through the heavy sheets of water and Dwight was wetter than if he’d gone into the pond fully dressed.
“You people keep going in and out and Mr. Kezzie ain’t gonna have no clothes left,” Maidie grumbled as she fetched dry pants and shirt.
* * *
When I invited the Freeman kids to come to a hurricane party, I’d expected a mildly exciting storm. Fran would come ashore, I thought, and immediately collapse—lots of rain, a little wind, a brief power outage so we could have candles, maybe even a few dead twigs to clatter down across the old tin roof.
I did not expect the eye to come marching up I-40 straight through Colleton County, wreaking as much damage as Sherman’s march through Georgia. Yet, as Stan’s radio made clear, that was exactly what was happening.
The storm hit Wilmington around nine, packing winds of a hundred and five miles per hour, and barely faltered as it moved across land on a north-by-northwest heading. By midnight, rain seemed to be coming down horizontally. It kept us busy stuffing newspapers and towels around door and window sills on the northeast side of the house.
“Good thing your mama never wanted wall-to-wall carpet,” Daddy told me.
The house creaked like a ship at sea, then shuddered as a tree crashed onto the porch. We grabbed our flashlights, peered through the front windows and found the porch completely covered with the leaf-heavy top of an oak. At least two support posts had collapsed under the weight. Lashanda’s eyes were wide with apprehension and she attached herself firmly to Cyl’s side.
Dwight, Reese and Stan went up to the attic to check on the gable vents and Reese came back immediately for hammer, nails, and large plastic garbage bags.
“Rain’s coming in through that northeast vent like somebody’s standing outside with a hose aimed straight at it,” he said. “We’re going to try to plug it up.”
“How’s the roof?” asked Daddy.
“So far, it seems to be holding.”
There was no guitar or fiddle for us that night, though at one point, Reese did manage to distract Lashanda with train sounds on his harmonica.
Stranded at his microphone, WPTF’s Tom Kearney was tracking the storm the old-fashioned way as people along the route called in to the AM radio station with reports of trees down, possible tornadoes, wind and rain damage, and barometric pressure all the way down to 48.4 inches.
Around two, the wind finally slacked off enough to be noticeable. Lashanda had fallen asleep with one arm around Ladybelle and the other hugging her doll. Reese, too, was snoring on a pallet in the corner.
Daddy stood up stiffly and said, “Well, if that’s the worst it’s gonna do, I reckon I’ll go lay down and get a little rest.”
Maidie and Cletus followed him upstairs to real beds.
Stan lay on his pallet, fighting to stay awake enough to jot notes from the radio reports.
Cyl, Dwight and I went out to the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee. (With the power going off so often, a lot of us have our own LP tanks and cook with gas.) Dwight was hungry again, so I set out leftover fried chicken and the fixings for tomato sandwiches.
While he ate and Cyl and I drank coffee, we talked about the two killings—Lynn Bullock and Rosa Edwards—and whether Clara Freeman’s wreck had anything to do with either of them.
“Which happened first?” I asked, trying to make sense of it. “The wreck or the Edwards killing?”
“If she went into Possum Creek immediately after leaving Miz Thomas, then that was first,” said Dwight, “because Rosa Edwards worked her regular shift yesterday.”
I tried doing a timetable. “So say Clara Freeman crashed her car around noon. It probably wouldn’t take an hour to zoom out here from Dobbs at the precise moment and get back again, but how would anybody know where she was unless they’d spent the morning trailing her? Reid and Millard King were both roaming in and out of my courtroom all morning. Even Brandon Frazier came up during the lunch break to get me to sign a pleading, so unless Dr. Potts—”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Cyl protested. “Brandon Frazier? Millard King? Reid Stephenson? Your cousin? What do they have to do with the wreck or last night’s murder?”
We’d forgotten that she wasn’t up to speed on this.
“Rosa Edwards worked at the Orchid Motel. We think she saw Lynn Bullock’s killer, and each of those three men slept with Lynn Bullock in the last few months,” I said bluntly.
“Really?” Despite her own situation, Cyl frowned in distaste. All the men were familiar courthouse regulars, but she hadn’t known Jason Bullock’s wife. “Was she such a fox?” Cyl asked curiously. “Or such a slut?”
Dwight and I both shrugged. “Some of both probably,” I said.
Interrupting each other, he and I almost did a probable cause on each man and how none of them had a watertight alibi for the time of death—between five and eight on Saturday evening. As rain pounded against the window glass, we discussed Millard King’s desire for future elective office, Reid’s late arrival and early departure from the field, Brandon Frazier’s frank admissions, and the tie tack that probably belonged to Millard King. (I busied myself tidying the table while Dwight told her about the silver pen.)
“What about her husband—Jason Bullock? Did you eliminate him?”
I explained how I was there when Lynn Bullock called, pretending to be a hundred miles away and how he’d been at the field during the relevant times.
“She was registered under her maiden name, and some man called the motel switchboard before she checked in and again just a few minutes after she talked to Jason. Asked for her by the name she was using, too.”
“Might as well tell her about Jeremy Potts, too,” said Dwight. “Deborah thinks—”
At that moment, we were startled when the back door opened with a loud squeak and something dark and shiny walked in from the storm. In the flickering candlelight, it gave the three of us a start till we realized it was Cletus, wearing a large black plastic garbage bag for a rain poncho.
“I thought you went up to bed,” I said.
“Naw, I got to worrying about how the house was faring down there. Went out the side door. They’s a tree down across the path now, so I had to come back in this way.” He pulled off the bag and left it to drip in the sink before heading back upstairs. “You young folks oughta get a little rest. Be morning soon.”
Physically, we were all tired but were too keyed up to call it a night just yet. And Cyl wanted to know about Jeremy Potts. Once again, I found myself describing that acrimonious divorce and Lynn Bullock’s part in it.
I finished up by reminding her that she was there at t
he hospital when I told Ralph that I had his wife’s handbag. “And less than forty-five minutes later, somebody popped the lock on my car trunk.”
“Looking for her purse? But why?” Cyl asked. “And why would anybody hurt Ralph’s wife if this Rosa Edwards was the one who could put him at the motel?”
“Maybe he was afraid Rosa had talked to her good friend Clara,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“We do know that she was driving Mrs. Freeman’s car last Saturday,” Dwight reminded me.
“So maybe he thought she was the one who’d seen him.”
“If anyone saw him,” Cyl said, sounding like a skeptical prosecutor. “Coincidences do happen and—”
Yawning widely, Stan came out to the kitchen. “They say the eye just collapsed over Garner a few minutes ago. I guess it’s pretty much over.”
His own eyes were looking at the chicken with such interest that I got him a paper plate, napkins, and a big glass of milk to go with it. He wasn’t interested in a tomato sandwich, “but if there’s any of that potato salad left?”
There was.
When his plate was full, Stan looked around the table. “Miss Cyl told me about Miss Rosa getting killed. Is that what y’all were talking about?”
We admitted we were.
“When did you last see her?” I asked.
“Deborah!” Cyl protested. “He’s a minor.”
“And if Ralph were here, do you think he’d object to Stan telling us that?”
“It’s okay, Miss Cyl,” said Stan, using his paper napkin to wipe milk from his upper lip. “She came over to the house yesterday morning just as Mama was fixing to drive us to school. Shandy and I were already in the car, but Mama was still in the house and Miss Rosa just went on in. Said she had to speak to Mama about something.”
“Did she say what about?” asked Dwight.
“No, sir. And Mama didn’t say, either. They both came out together and Miss Rosa drove off and then Mama took us to school. That’s the last time we saw her. I tried to call her when Mama went missing, but she never answered her phone. I guess she was working then?”
“Do you know where she works?” I interjected curiously.
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