“I’ll ride with her.” Coleman wasn’t asking, he was telling.
There was no argument. Coleman climbed into the ambulance beside me, his strong hand gripping mine.
The ambulance took off, and though I tried hard to stay awake, I couldn’t. I heard voices, soft and glowing with warmth, calling me into the safety of sleep. The pain was unbearable, and I yielded to the peace offered by unconsciousness.
When I came back to myself, I was some place quiet and cool. There was a tiny beeping noise, the shush of some pneumatic machine. In the distance I could hear people talking. Tinkie—I recognized her voice. And Cece. She was there, too. A masculine voice. Doc.
“Don’t tell her until she’s stronger,” Tinkie said.
“Sarah Booth is tough,” Doc said. “She’ll handle this.” There was a pause. “She was due to come in for tests tomorrow morning. I never suspected.”
“I called Graf,” Cece said. “He’s in the desert without phone reception. They promised to get word to him and get him on a flight.”
“Did you tell him she lost the baby?” Doc asked.
“I did. I wanted him to know, but it won’t matter,” Cece said. “His concern will be Sarah Booth. She was out in that field, with all that stuff. Someone hit her, took off her protective gear, and left her out there to inhale that mold and die.”
Tinkie lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for this when Coleman catches him.”
The conversation made no sense to me. I felt like I was disembodied, floating around a room where people spoke of me as if I were dead. But it couldn’t be me they were talking about. Someone had lost a baby, and I’d never been pregnant.
“Wait, she’s moaning,” Tinkie said.
Her cool hand, so small, stroked my forehead. “Sarah Booth,” she whispered, “you’re going to be okay.”
“Tinkie . . .” That one word cost me a lot. I tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn’t cooperate. “Paralyzed?” I had the sense that no part of my body would respond to any command.
“No, darling, you’re not paralyzed.” She kissed my forehead. “You’re hurt, but you’ll heal just fine.”
“Happened?” If I could formulate a sentence it would be nice. I sounded like a poorly trained parrot spitting out one nonsensical word after another.
“You were attacked in the Carlisle cotton fields. Luckily Dewayne knew where you were. Coleman found you and got an ambulance. Someone hit you very hard with something. You’re mighty bunged up, but you’re too tough to kill.”
She sounded so spritely and upbeat that I knew I was badly injured. I felt another pair of hands lift my wrist, and Doc leaned down.
“Gave us a scare there, Sarah Booth. You lost a lot of blood, but you’re going to be fine.”
There were more questions to ask, but I couldn’t hold on to one long enough to speak it. “Graf?” I asked.
Cece fielded that question. “He’s on his way.”
Doc fiddled with the drip hanging by my bed. “I’m going to give you something more for pain. Just sleep, Sarah Booth. That’s the best thing you can do for your body right now.”
There was no time to sleep. My mother was calling me. I was suddenly among the oak trees at Dahlia House, a place behind the family cemetery. When I was a child, I’d gone there to play with the fairies while my mother read books or entertained me with games only the two of us knew. It was our special place.
“Sarah Booth!” She sounded worried.
“I’m here.” I walked among the trees, uninjured, whole and complete. At last I saw her, sitting on her favorite limb, one that swooped to the ground and formed a perfect seat. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
And she was. As beautiful as I remembered. The sunlight caught in her dark brown hair, and her eyes danced with laughter. “You’ve grown into a fine woman,” she said. “But I never had a doubt you’d be a looker. You stole your daddy’s heart when you were born.”
“You came back to me.” I hardly dared to breathe for fear she’d evaporate. For twenty years I’d hoped for this moment, this time to be with her.
“Only for a short while,” she said. “Jitty surely has told you there are rules here. I had to break a few even for this brief time.”
“You know about Jitty?”
She laughed. “I know a lot of things.” Her hand linked with mine and we walked among the shadows cast by the beautiful trees and the dapples of sunshine. “I know the woman you’ve become, and I want to tell you I’m proud of you.”
“Why can’t you come home if Jitty can?”
She squeezed my hand. “Sometimes love calls for sacrifice. I never want to encourage you to linger here, waiting and hoping for me. You have to live, Sarah Booth. Waiting for the dead isn’t living.”
“Tell me what to do.”
My very serious request was met with laughter. For one split second I was sitting in the kitchen in Dahlia House, home from school, explaining how I’d gotten a spanking for tossing ink on Homer Kilgore. My mother’s laugh was rich, warm, effortless. It was that same laugh, as if I’d told a funny story.
“Please, Mama, I need you.”
“No you don’t, Sarah Booth. You want me and your father. But you don’t need us. And that makes me very happy. This is a hard blow for you. The loss of a child . . .” She searched my face, her hand brushing a few of my stray hairs out of my eyes as she’d often done when I was young.
“What about the baby?” I asked her.
“You’ll grieve, but you’ll recover. You’re strong, Sarah Booth. And I’ll never be far.”
“Why did you have to die in that wreck?” I’d never understood how, out of the night, an accident had happened that changed everything I’d ever known. The Delta is flat. The roads run straight and mostly empty for miles. She and Daddy hadn’t been drinking. “Why did Daddy lose control on a road with perfect visibility?”
“The past is dangerous, Sarah Booth. Don’t linger there. No good will come of it. Live in the moment, and know that your father and I are close.”
“Will you come back?”
Instead of answering, she kissed my cheek, the sweet, sad fragrance of jasmine the last part of her to disappear.
25
When I opened my eyes, it took a moment to realign myself with reality. I was in the hospital. I’d been gravely injured, and I’d lost the baby that I hadn’t known I carried.
Listening to the sounds around me, I deduced I was in a private room with the door open. The oxygen mask had been removed. Someone sat beside the bed turning the pages of a magazine.
“Well, dahling, all I can say is that I’m so glad you avoided the draining pustule phase of the toxic mold business. In fact, you’re something of a medical miracle.” Cece’s voice was very nasal, as if she had a terrible cold. She rose into my line of sight, a copy of Cosmo in one hand and a chilled pink cosmopolitan in the other. Her face was heavily bandaged.
“You had the nose job?”
“And you’re lucid, too. How wonderful. Now you can explain your total stupidity in going to the Carlisle place alone.” She took the sting out of her words with air kisses to both my cheeks. “Dahling, I was dis-traught.”
“How long have I been out?”
She waved away my concern. “Long enough for Cole-man to send battalions of crop dusters over the Carlisle plantation. That’s all you’ve missed. I swear.”
“I need to talk to Coleman.” I remembered the key ring; he had to pursue that lead.
“Oh, there was something else. Bonnie Louise McRae has disappeared, and they finally found a witness in Jackson who saw Erin Carlisle arrive at her photography studio about fifteen minutes before I got there. She unlocked the front door and went inside. Coleman believes her abductors were already there, waiting to ambush her.”
“And then the woman posed as Erin and they attacked you.” My mind was a little fuzzy, but I’d put a few things together.
“Janks knew I mean
t to talk to Erin about the development deal.” Cece tried to hide her feelings with a breezy attitude. “I’ve gone over every single thing he told me, and I still can’t find anything that would provoke Erin’s abduction . . .”
“Or the severe beating you got.” I shifted so that I my head was raised. Obligingly, Cece stuffed a pillow behind me. “Cece, Lester Ballard is dead. They could have killed you.”
“And Tinkie would have thrown herself on the pyre as a martyr to guilt. You ladies do guilt like no one else.” Cece had recovered her droll tone and unflappable attitude. She was full of juicy tidbits—though she was doling them our like expensive caviar. The whole case would be solved and I would be lying in bed, whimpering whenever I had to get up to pee.
“Did Coleman find Erin?”
This time Cece wasn’t so pert. “Coleman is afraid she’s dead.”
My body ached and my head throbbed. Moving set off jolts of pain, but I struggled to sit up completely. “I have to speak with Coleman right now.”
Cece pressed the nurse call button. “Doc wants to talk to you first. He told me to notify him as soon as you regained your faculties. Of course, I told him that would be the Twelfth of Never because you’d always been half a bubble off. Still, he insisted he had to speak with you on a matter of great urgency.” She worked hard to entertain and never let the conversation shift to the place where it eventually had to go.
“I’m not in a mood to be fussed at.” I couldn’t bear it if Doc confronted me about what had happened in that cotton field.
Cece’s sophisticated façade cracked—as did her voice. “No one is going to fuss at you, Sarah Booth. I’ll tear out their vocal chords. We’re all so very sorry.”
I held up a hand. “Do not go there.” I knew what had occurred, but somehow, I had to keep the full impact of it at bay. If one person offered sympathy or tenderness or compassion, I would be overwhelmed by emotion.
“I understand.” She tapped on a page of the magazine she held. “As soon as the swelling goes down in my new face, I’m going to buy this dress.”
Even beaten, bandaged, and bruised, Cece could shop. I, on the other hand, was feeling out the edges of a black, consuming fury. While I couldn’t begin to deal with the loss of my baby, I could relish the idea of revenge.
There was a rap on the door and Coleman entered. Something passed between him and Cece, and she picked up her magazine and empty cosmopolitan glass. “I need to call the photographer at the newspaper to bring another drink—I need more anesthesia. Rhinoplasty may be considered elective surgery, but, dahling, it hurts like hell.” She sashayed out the door.
Coleman seemed to fill the room, and I could find nothing to say that wouldn’t open a floodgate of emotion. I couldn’t even look at him.
His hand covered mine on the sheet. “When I saw you in the field, with all that blood, I thought you were dead. I’ve never felt such—I’m sorry about the baby.” He stopped to clear his throat.
“Thank you for finding me, Coleman, but please, let’s don’t talk about it.” I stared at the white sheet that covered my legs and stomach. Someone, I realized, had brought a beautiful green satin pajama set and dressed me. The 1940s Hollywood design was classic Cece. She did more than look at fashion magazines—she purchased from them.
Coleman pressed gently on my fingers. “If I could undo this, I would.”
I nodded my thanks and understanding, but I had to move us beyond this moment. “I found a clue, but then I lost it. I’m sorry. I can describe it and maybe you can find it again.”
He held up the key ring. “You had it clutched so tightly in your hand that I couldn’t get it until they knocked you out.”
“What does it go to?”
“A storage unit in Starkville, Mississippi.”
“Is there anything in it, anything useful?”
Coleman’s smile said it all. “Only enough to put Bonnie Louise McRae behind bars for the rest of her natural life.”
While I should have felt elation, there was only emptiness. So Bonnie Louise had been driven mad enough by the need for revenge that she’d damaged innocent people, endangered a county, and stolen something irreplaceable from me. “What was in the unit?”
“The special equipment she used to raise the mutated weevils, a computer disk with notes on the process, how the mold was a by-product of damaged feed. Her step-by-step enactment of the plan to release the weevils and injure Oscar was all documented.” His grin widened. “Also included was the name of the pesticide that’s one hundred percent effective in killing the weevils. There’s nothing left alive in those fields now.”
The land had effectively been raped; people endangered and used as lab rats for her experiments. “The whole thing makes me sick. What did she hope to gain, other than revenge?”
“A lot of money. Her work might have been worthy of a scientific award had it been put to good rather than evil. It’s a damn shame.”
“I’m sorry, Coleman.” On many levels.
“I can’t begin to understand it,” he admitted. “Bonnie had so much going for her. On the surface, she had everything.” He returned to the bedside. “Sarah Booth, we found footprints in the dirt by where you were attacked. I’ve matched them to a pair of Bonnie’s shoes she left in the Dumpster behind the health clinic. She’s the one who attacked you.”
“Where is she?” The numbness was fading. I wanted to see her behind bars—after I’d beaten her to a pulp.
“We haven’t captured her yet, but we will. There’s a national alert out. She won’t get far.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but Coleman wouldn’t rest until he had her in custody. “She didn’t achieve this alone.”
“Luther Carlisle is in lockup right now. He was her partner, though I can’t say how deeply involved he was. At the moment he’s refusing to say anything except that he’s totally innocent. If he knows where Erin or Janks are, he isn’t talking.”
“Janks is in this up to his ears, isn’t he?”
“As yet, his role is undetermined.”
“Have Bonnie and Janks skipped out together, leaving Luther to hold the bag?”
“If that’s the case, once Luther realizes he’ll do the hard time for them as well as himself, that’ll grease his jaw hinges.”
“You really have a way with words, Coleman.”
The relief that touched his face told me how deeply he’d been worried about me.
“I’m going to be fine,” I told him. There was no room for argument in my tone.
He didn’t say anything, but a swallow worked down his throat. I remembered the stricken look on his face as he’d lifted me in the cotton field and carried me to the road for the ambulance.
I’d never doubted his love for me, but we’d been star-crossed from the get-go. Jitty was right. My life had gotten out of order with Coleman. Our attraction had grown before he was free to offer the anchor of his love that would have held us safe against the winds.
“Congratulations on your engagement, Sarah Booth.” He didn’t glance at the ring. “I wish you all happiness.” He stepped back from the bed. “Doc is waiting for me to finish. There’s something important he has to talk to you about.”
“Call me if you find Bonnie or Janks or Erin.” I felt the need to take action. “I’ll be on my feet soon.” The idea of lying in bed, tracking over and over events, was unbearable.
“Will do.” He gave me a sharp nod and made his exit before either of us could say or do anything that would cause further pain.
The door had barely closed when Doc came in. He checked the drip and the monitors that charted my vitals. When he finished, he put his hand on my forehead and felt my temperature the old-fashioned way.
“Sarah Booth, there’s something medical I need to discuss with you.”
“I can’t have another baby, can I?” There it was, the dark fear hidden in the corner of my mind. The one question I’d dreaded asking.
“Why would you say that?�
� he asked kindly. “I see no reason you shouldn’t be able to have a child.”
A mental image of Jitty wiping her brow flashed before my eyes. “Then what is it?”
“You haven’t even considered why you aren’t ill, like Oscar and Gordon, have you? No fever, sores, or coma.”
The truth was that I hadn’t. At all. I checked my arms and threw the covers back to reveal my feet. There weren’t any sores, as Cece had pointed out. And I was talking and moving—and not comatose. “Why not?” I asked.
“That’s what I need to find out. I’m onto something. Something that might make a world of difference for Oscar and Gordon.”
“And Luann and Regina?”
“Interestingly enough, they’re doing much better. In fact, they’ll make a full recovery with nothing to remind them of this except a few scars from the skin lesions.” He sat on the edge of my bed. “So what do you and the two realtors have in common?”
It took me a moment. “We’re all women?”
He nodded. “And you haven’t suffered the autoimmune symptoms, even though you were left in the cotton field longer than Oscar or Gordon. You had more exposure, plus a devastating attack on your body. Yet you are unscathed by the illness.”
I knew then what he was driving at. “Because I was pregnant.”
He nodded again. “I think there’s something here, something unique in the female system, that’s able to fight this. I want to take some blood and run some tests. Will you consent?
“You didn’t even have to ask, Doc. Just get busy.”
“I knew that’s what you’d say. That’s why the tech is standing in the hallway.” He kissed my cheek. “Come on in, John, she’s ready for you to draw the blood. Just be careful, she doesn’t have a lot to spare right now.”
When John was finished and I was left alone in my room, I tried to avoid facing what had happened, but the damning reality was upon me like the Harpies.
In the year and a half I’d been home, Jitty had deviled me relentlessly to get pregnant. I hadn’t considered such a thing, because my life wasn’t settled enough to have and raise a child. Without conscious effort, I’d managed to get pregnant. Had I not been viciously attacked, Graf’s and my baby would still be growing inside me.
Greedy Bones Page 22
