Storm Track dk-7

by Margaret Maron

  He shook his head. “I think she’s a housekeeper somewhere in Dobbs. One of the motels?”

  Dwight gave me one of his do-you-mind? looks. “And all she said was that she had to speak to your mother? Those were her exact words? Nothing about why?”

  Stan nibbled thoughtfully on the drumstick he held, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Stan,” I said slowly. “There was an envelope in your mother’s purse and—”

  “Hey, right!” His face brightened. “I forgot. When Miss Rosa went in the house, she was carrying a white envelope. And when she came back out, she wasn’t. She must’ve given it to Mama. Did you open it? What was in it?”

  “I didn’t open it. Someone burgled my house tonight and took it.”

  “What?”

  Cyl and Stan were both looking at me in disbelief. “That’s why Reese and I were so long getting back with Lashanda’s doll,” I said and told them about the broken window and fleeing taillights.

  Cyl shook her head. “Girl, you do stay in the middle of things, don’t you?”

  “That’s why Miss Rosa got killed, wasn’t it?” asked Stan, making the same leap I’d made but not for the same reasons. If Lynn Bullock’s murder over in Dobbs had even registered on him, it was clear he didn’t connect it to Rosa Edwards. “She had something somebody wanted and she gave it to Mama to hold for her? And then when Mama disappeared, they must’ve thought Miss Rosa was lying about not being able to get it back?”

  He yawned again. “I wonder if she told Mama what it was?” Suddenly he looked very young. “I sure hope she wakes up tomorrow.”

  “Today,” said Cyl. “And you’d better get some sleep.”

  “You okay on that pallet?” I asked. “Or would you rather try one of the recliners?”

  “The floor’s fine,” he said with yet another wide yawn that made me yawn, too.

  Cyl and Dwight were smothering yawns of their own as Stan said goodnight and went to lie down in the den.

  I opened the back door to let in some fresh air. It was only marginally cooler than the air inside and heavy with moisture. Rain still pounded the tin roof and fell as if it meant to go on falling forever.

  Dwight’s face was grim as he joined me by the doorway.

  “It was her insurance policy, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “Probably.”

  “She told him she’d written it down and given it to someone to hold,” Cyl said softly from behind us. “That’s why he cut her so badly. And kept cutting till she told him who.”

  “Then killed her because he thought he’d already killed the who and sunk her purse,” I said. “I wonder if Millard King really was visiting his brother in Fuquay last night or was he hanging around Possum Creek waiting to see if he could get to Clara Freeman’s car before anyone else did?”

  “If he was, it must’ve scared the hell out of him when you grabbed her purse,” said Dwight with a wry smile.

  “Unless it was Dr. Jeremy Potts,” said Cyl. “Surgeons don’t mind blood, do they?”

  * * *

  After Dwight went off to bed in my old corner room upstairs, Cyl and I changed into gym shorts and baggy T-shirts for sleeping. I turned the lantern wick down real low, then went around blowing out all the candles.

  Stan had crawled under the sheet next to his little sister’s feet and both children were breathing deeply.

  I crawled onto my side of the couch. It felt wonderful to lie down.

  I watched as Cyl untangled the top of the sheet from Lashanda’s arm and moved Ladybelle away from her face, then came and stretched out beside me.

  “They’re really nice kids, aren’t they?” she sighed.

  “You’re going to make a terrific mother someday,” I told her.

  “But not their mother.” A great sadness was in her voice.

  “They have a mother, Cyl.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “But you can’t help wishing—?”

  “That they were mine?” She turned to me with a low moan. “Oh, God, Deborah, I’m such a horrible person!”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, trying to comfort her. “You didn’t mean to fall in love with Ralph. You didn’t set out to snare him or anything. It just happened.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What then?”

  She was silent for a long moment and when she finally did speak, her voice was so hushed I had to strain to hear her.

  “When I heard that she was hurt—in a coma—I thought, What if she never wakes up? What if she just goes ahead and dies?” She looked at me and her eyes were dark pools of despair in the dim light. “What kind of a monster could wish for something like that?”

  “You’re no monster,” I said. “You’re only human.”

  “I thought that . . . in the end, he’d choose love,” she whispered. “Our love. But now she’s hurt so bad. It could take her months, years, to recover. He’ll never leave her like that. He couldn’t do it to his children.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “And neither could I.”

  “What will you do?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “All I know is that I can’t stay here. I can give him up, but not if I stay here.”

  She began to cry and her muffled sobs tore at my heart.

  I felt movement at the end of the couch, then Lashanda was there between us on the sofa bed. She patted Cyl’s cheek tenderly.

  “Don’t cry, Miss Cyl. It’ll soon be morning.”

  CHAPTER | 17

  Is it at all wonderful that, after the strain was over and all danger gone, reason should finally be unseated and men and women break into the unmeaning gayety of the maniac?

  We awoke on Friday morning to sunshine, dead still mugginess and the sound of chain saws and tractors. Trees were down all around the house. We’d had so much rain these last few weeks and the ground was so saturated that roots had pulled right out of the earth in Fran’s high sustained winds. The children were already outdoors and Cyl and I got a cup of coffee and went out to survey the damage more closely. Lashanda immediately ran to greet us.

  Mother’s magnolias still stood tall and proud, although one had been skinned the full length of its trunk when a neighboring pine fell over.

  “We’ll prune it up. See if we can save it,” said my brother Seth, giving me a sweaty morning hug.

  His mother, Daddy’s first wife, hadn’t found the time to worry about landscaping, so it was my mother who planted azaleas and dogwoods and magnolias with the help of her stepsons who came to love her as their own. Seth could remember the first year the magnolias bloomed and how their fragrance drifted through the bedroom windows at night, bewitching their dreams.

  He, Robert and Haywood were there to help Daddy clear the drive so we could get in and out. The tree across the porch looked awful, but the actual damage was minimal and would have to wait in line since there was worse to be taken care of on the farm.

  Reese’s place was the hardest hit. Two sixty-foot pines had crashed down on the trailer he was renting from Seth and everything he owned was either smashed or waterlogged. Seth had insurance on the trailer itself, but Reese had nothing on the contents. “First my truck, now my trailer,” he said gloomily.

  He’d already been over to the wreckage this morning and the back of his pickup was loaded with wet clothes, tapes and CDs, and other odds and ends that were salvageable. Daddy’d told him to come stay at the homeplace till he could figure out what he wanted to do.

  Andrew and April were hard hit, too. A huge oak had taken out the whole northwest side of their house, shearing off the kitchen and dining room wall.

  “You know April, though,” said Seth with a grin. “She’s already talking about how she’s been wanting to get more light into that part of the house and now the insurance money will help her do it.”

  (April moves walls in that house like other women move furniture.)

  In addition to
Reese’s trailer, Seth was mourning four mature pecans. Haywood said he had nineteen trees down in his yard, but none of them hit the house. Robert hadn’t counted his downed trees, “but the yard’s full of ’em,” and they said that the farm’s biggest potato house had lost three sheets of tin off the roof.

  (“I’ve heard of being three sheets in the wind,” Haywood chuckled, “but I didn’t know they was talking about tin sheets.”)

  Other than a little water damage, most of the other houses on the farm, including my own, were pretty much unscathed.

  The roads were blocked all around, they said, but neighbors were out, working on getting at least one lane cleared.

  Power was still off and phones were out over most of the county. Even cell phones were spotty, depending on which company you were with. Dwight had already used his car radio to send word to Ralph Freeman at the hospital that Stan and Lashanda were fine, and word had come back that Ralph would try to get home to Cotton Grove by mid-morning to meet them there.

  I managed to get through to Aunt Zell on my cell phone, even though it was staticky and other voices kept fading in and out. She said most of Dobbs was without power but the phones were still working. She’d been worried since she hadn’t heard from any of us. I assured her that we were all physically fine.

  “What about y’all?” I asked. “Everything okay there?”

  “Not exactly,” she admitted. “Your Uncle Ash put our new Lincoln in the garage last night and left the old one sitting in the drive. You remember that big elm out by the edge of the yard? It totalled the garage and our new car both. Not a scratch on the old one. Ash is so provoked.”

  I could imagine.

  “And Portland called this morning. Remember how she and Avery fetched their boat home to get it out of harm’s way?”

  I had to laugh. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yep. A pine tree cut it right half in two.”

  * * *

  Lashanda followed us around the yard, chattering sixty to the dozen, but Stan stayed busy helping the menfolks till Maidie called us in for sausage and griddle cakes.

  There was no school, of course, and no court either, for that matter. Seth had brought over a battery-powered radio for Daddy and we listened open-mouthed to the reports coming in from around the area. Fran never made it beyond a category 3 storm, but it had moved across the state so slowly that it did much more damage than a stronger, faster-moving hurricane would have. Even more than legendary Hazel, they were saying. Most of the problems seemed to have been caused by trees falling on cars, houses and power lines. And there was quite a bit of flooding in low-lying areas.

  “You’ll probably have the most dramatic science project in your class,” Cyl told Stan.

  “Sounds like an A to me, too,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said, not meeting our eyes.

  Andrew and A.K arrived with news that at least one lane of Highway 48 was clear in either direction and that they’d also heard it was possible to drive to Cotton Grove on Old 48.

  “Reckon I’ll be going then,” said Dwight. “If Stan and Lashanda are ready to go, I can drop them off.”

  Stan immediately put down his fork and stood up, but I said, “That’s okay. Cyl and I’ll take them. Ralph’s probably not home yet and Stan needs to get all his notes and books together, so we won’t hold you up.”

  He and my brothers, Daddy and Cletus went back outside. Maidie was putting together the scraps of breakfast ham to take down to the caged hunting beagles.

  “Why don’t you let Lashanda help you?” I asked with a meaningful cut of my eyes that Maidie read like a book.

  As soon as Cyl and I were alone with Stan, I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he answered sullenly. At eleven, almost twelve, he might have a man’s height, but he was still a boy, a boy who wanted to play it cool, yet was still too inexperienced not to show his raw emotions. He pushed away from the table and walked into the den area to gather up his things.

  Cyl shot me an apprehensive glance as we followed him in and began folding up the bedclothes.

  “Did you hear us talking last night?” I asked him bluntly.

  “What if I did?” he said, his back to us.

  “Did you understand what you heard?”

  Angry and confused, he turned on Cyl. “I liked you! I thought you were our friend.”

  “I liked you too, Stan,” she said sadly. “I still do.”

  “But you—? With my dad? While Mama’s lying there hurt?”

  “What happened was before she was hurt,” Cyl said.

  “But you want her dead!”

  Cyl shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

  “If you heard us talking,” I said, “then you heard that it’s over. Almost before it began. Stan—?”

  He didn’t want to listen and when Cyl put her hand out to him, he backed away from her.

  “I know you’re upset about your mom,” she said. “Mad at me and mad at your dad, and I can’t blame you for that. I’m not even going to try and ask you to understand, but—”

  “Good!” he said hotly. “Because I don’t. And don’t try saying it’s because I’m too young either!”

  “I wasn’t.” She finished folding a quilt, laid it on the growing stack I’d begun, and took a deep breath. “What happened between your father and me happened. It can’t ever be undone, but it is over. Finished. It doesn’t have to affect you and your sister unless you let it fester. What I’m asking is that you keep it between your father and me. Talk to him if you need to talk about it, but don’t bring anybody else into it. Especially your mom.”

  “Yeah, I just bet you don’t want her to know!” he said angrily. “But she has a right to. She needs to!”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “But—”

  “You said you don’t want to be treated like a child, Stan.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then you’re going to have to think before you speak. And you’re going to have to realize that the hardest thing about being grown up is keeping hurtful things to yourself. You think you can get rid of a hurt like this by giving it to your mother?” She shook her head sadly. “It doesn’t work like that, Stan. You won’t divide the hurt you’re feeling, you’ll only double it. Do you really want to do that to her?”

  Anguish mingled with resentment in the boy’s eyes.

  “No, ma’am,” he said at last.

  * * *

  Cyl and I drove Stan and Lashanda back to Cotton Grove in mid-morning. Angry and confused as he was, he was still young enough to be as distracted as his little sister by all the devastation. And it truly was amazing. Andrew and A.K. had been told that it was possible to drive Old 48 into town, and it was. But only because we kept detouring and backtracking. We had heard reports of tornadoes in the night and now we could see where small ones might have touched down: swaths of woodlands where treetops had been twisted off still-standing trunks.

  Trunks and limbs were everywhere. Power poles were down. Every fifth house seemed to have a big leafy tree on it somewhere, mostly on the roof, but also through windows and across porches and cars. Yet, considering the number of trees that had fallen, it was amazing how many did not hit houses. I had to drive slowly because the roads were often single lanes and clogged with other drivers who were out to survey the damage before tackling their own.

  As we entered town, an almost festive air hung over the streets. Everyone seemed to be out sightseeing along the sidewalks and the mood was one of good-natured excitement. Children clambered on fallen tree trunks, chattering and pointing. Neighbors called out to other neighbors who drove past with rolled-down windows despite the hot and muggy day. Part of it was amazement at so much destruction, another part had to be relief that the destruction wasn’t worse. As we crept along at a snail’s pace, I did my own share of exchanging news.

  “Hey, there, Deb’rah,” folks would call. “Mr. Kezzie okay?”

  “He’s fine,” I’d
call back. “Y’all come through it all right? Anybody have power yet?”

  “Not on this side of town. Heared it’s back on from North Main to the town limits, though.”

  More detours through parts of Cotton Grove I hadn’t visited in ages, more waits for our turn to pass through the single open lanes.

  “Isn’t that Jason Bullock?” asked Cyl as we were routed down an unfamiliar street.

  I followed her pointing finger and there he was, coming along the driveway of a nondescript house and carrying a chain saw and gas can.

  He saw us at the same time and walked over to my open window. His blue T-shirt was drenched with perspiration, flecks of sawdust sprinkled his brown hair and I smelled the strong odor of gasoline from his chain saw.

  “Ms. DeGraffenried, Judge. This is really something, isn’t it?”

  “That your house?” I asked. “Doesn’t look like you had much damage.”

  He laughed. “Look a little closer. See that brush pile? I just finished cutting it off my car. You can’t see it from here, but the top’s got a dent the size of a fish pond and the side’s smashed in. Still, I was luckier than Mrs. Wesley down there.” He gestured to a house half a block further on, where an enormous oak had pulled out of the ground and crushed the front of a shabby old two-story frame house that had seen better days. “She’s eighty-three and her only relative’s the seventy-year-old niece who lives with her. Some of the neighbors and I are fixing to clear their yard for them.”

  By this time, Lashanda had slipped out of her seat belt and was kneeling on the backseat with her forearms on the back of my seat and her small face next to mine.

  “Hey, there,” she said.

  Jason smiled down at her, then said to Cyl, “These aren’t your children, are they?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Actually, though, you need to meet them,” I said. “Lashanda, Stan, this is Mr. Bullock. He’s one of the men from the rescue squad that pulled your mother out of the creek night before last.”

  Before he or Stan could respond, Lashanda said, “Do you have a little girl, too?”

  “Nope, I’m afraid not,” said Jason.

  As the cars ahead of me began to move, we said goodbye and he stood back, so we could drive on.