Storm Track

“We didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late,” she said. “It was just friendship. Talking. A cup of coffee. He helped me through that rough time, the day I found out what happened to Isaac. He was so easy to talk to. Almost like talking to Isaac when I was a little girl. I felt as if there was nothing I couldn’t tell him, that he would just listen. Without judging or condemning.”

Isaac was Cyl’s uncle, a boy who’d been more like an older brother than an uncle, a brother she’d idolized. He disappeared when she was only eight or nine years old and everyone thought he’d fled to Boston without a backward look, which was probably why Cyl had grown up feeling betrayed and abandoned and wary of trusting again. I was there the day she learned how he died, a day of high emotions, another rainy day like this one, with Cyl so full of grief that—

“Ralph Freeman?” I exclaimed.

Cyl looked almost as shocked as I felt. “How did you guess?”

“Hell, I was standing right beside you when you asked him for a ride back into town. He shared his umbrella with you out to the parking lot. I remember asking about his wife and children and he said they were visiting her family back in Warrenton. Is that when it happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Cyl protested. “Not that day, anyhow. We just talked. Then, two weeks ago, he came by the office to ask about a man in his church that he was trying to help. A misdemeanor. It was a Friday afternoon. Everyone else was gone. I pulled the shuck to check the charges. He was reading it over my shoulder. I looked up to say something. Our lips were so close. And then they were touching, and then—”

She broke off but I couldn’t help wondering. Right there on Doug Woodall’s couch?

“We knew it was wrong. But it felt so right.” She sighed and shook her head sadly. “We knew we’d sinned, and we said we’d never do it again. But it was like not knowing how hungry you are till you see the food spread out before you and God help us, Deborah, we were both starving. Touching him. Being touched. It was a banquet. Afterwards, I guess we tried to pretend it was a one-time thing. An aberration. We stayed away from each other for a week and then, Saturday morning . . .”

She fell silent for a long moment and tears pooled again in her large brown eyes. “It was even more wonderful,” she whispered.

I didn’t know Ralph Freeman’s wife except by reputation: a God-fearing, commandment-keeping woman who didn’t trust white people. I did know his children though, an eleven-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter who was an engaging little gigglebox. Kids like Stan and Lashanda are one more reason I don’t mess with married men.

As if reading my mind, Cyl said, “He has children, a wife, a commitment to Jesus. And he’s right. It could jeopardize my job, too. He can’t—we can’t—That’s what he came to tell me Sunday night. We can’t ever see each other alone again. And he’s right. I know he’s right. But, oh Deborah, how can I stand it?”

And she began to cry again.

CHAPTER | 11

Never did a storm work more cruelly.

September 4 (Weds.)

—As of 6 a.m. Hurricane Fran 26°N by 73.9°W.

—Winds at 100 kts. (115 mph)—now a Category 3 hurricane.

—Predicted to hit land sometime tomorrow night.

—Hurricane watch posted last night from Sebastian Inlet, FL to Little River Inlet, SC.

—Evacuating coastal areas of NC, SC & GA.

—Trop. strm. winds 250+ mi. from eye & hurr. winds out 145 mi.—gale-force wind & rain if it hits NC.

Stan Freeman finished jotting his morning notes with a sense of growing excitement. Maybe they’d get a little action this far inland after all.

Certainly his parents seemed concerned when he joined them for breakfast. The kitchen radio was tuned to WPTF’s morning weather report. Rain today and more predicted for tomorrow with gusty winds. Unless Hurricane Fran took a sudden sharp turn soon, North Carolina was definitely in for it.

“It’s a biggie,” Stan told them happily. “Almost three hundred miles across. A lot bigger than Bertha and you saw what she did. They’re talking winds a hundred and thirty miles an hour! Storm surges twenty feet high! And if it comes in at Wilmington, we might even get tornadoes.”

“Stanley!” his mother protested.

“Tornadoes?” Lashanda’s eyes widened. “Like Dorothy? Our house will get blown away? Mama?”

“Your brother’s talking about ’way down at the coast,” Clara said with soothing tones for her daughter and a warning glare for her son. “That’s a long way away. And it seems to me, Stanley, that you should be praying the storm passes by instead of hoping it hits and causes so many people grief.”

“I’m not wishing them grief, Mama,” he protested as the phone rang and his father got up to answer. “I’m just telling you what the weather reports say. I have to keep up with it for my science project. You want me to get a good grade, don’t you?”

As he knew it would, citing school as a justification for his excitement somewhat mitigated her displeasure.

“Don’t worry, Shandy,” he told his little sister. “We’ll be safe this far inland.”

A drop of milk splashed on Lashanda’s skirt and she jumped up immediately for a wet cloth to sponge it off. She was wearing her Brownie uniform since they were meeting immediately after school.

His father hung up the phone and came back to the table. “That was Brother Todd. He and the other deacons think we ought to cancel prayer meeting tonight, and spend the evening taking down the tent. The canvas is so rain-soaked that it’s dripping through. One strong gust could send it halfway to Raleigh.”

“When will you start?” asked Stan. “After school? I can help, can’t I?”

“Me, too,” said Lashanda.

“You’re too little,” Clara told her. “Besides, that’s men’s work.”

“It’s not fair!” Lashanda’s big brown eyes started to puddle up. “Boys get to have all the fun.”

“I thought we agreed not to stereotype gender roles,” Ralph said mildly.

Clara’s tone was three shades colder. “Wrestling with a tent in the wind and rain is not appropriate for a little girl.”

“Or a little boy either,” he said with a smile for his daughter. “But I bet we can find something that is appropriate. Maybe you can gather up the tent pegs, honey. Would you like that?”

The child nodded vigorously.

“We’ll see,” said Clara as the phone rang again.

“For you,” Ralph told her, handing over the receiver.

“Sister Clara?” came a woman’s strong voice. “This is Grace Thomas and I sure do hate to bother you this early in the morning, but I wanted to catch you ’fore you got off.”

Grace Thomas was a fiercely independent old woman who lived a few miles out from Cotton Grove. She and her late husband were childless, her only niece lived in Washington, and there were no near black neighbors. Even the nearest white neighbor was a quarter-mile away. None of this had been a problem until she broke her leg last week.

“You’re not bothering me a bit,” said Clara. “How’s that leg of yours?”

“Well, it’s not hurting so bad, but I still can’t drive yet and with the hurricane coming and all, I was wondering if maybe you or one of the other sisters could fetch me some things from the store?”

“I’ll be happy to.” Clara signalled to Stan to hand her the notepad and pencil that lay on the counter.

She was in the habit of listing her plans for the day and the list already had four or five items on it.

Now she added Mrs. Thomas’s needs: bread, milk, eggs, cat food, lettuce, lamp oil and a half-dozen C batteries.

“Batteries might not be a bad idea for us,” said Ralph as he finished eating and carried his dishes to the sink. “I doubt we’ll lose power, but you never know. Best be prepared. Isn’t that the Scout motto, Shandy?”

The child wasn’t listening. Instead, she wiggled her finger around in her mouth and pulled out something small and white.

“My tooth fell out! Look, Daddy! I wasn’t biting down hard or anything and it just fell out. Am I bleeding?”

She bared her teeth and there was a gap in her lower incisors. Three of the upper ones had been shed so long that they were half-grown back in, but this was the first of the lower ones.

“Better hurry up and put it in a glass of water,” Stan teased. “You let it dry out and the Tooth Fairy won’t give you more than a nickel for it.”

The Tooth Fairy had been yet another of the many forbiddens in Clara’s childhood and she was eternally conscious of her father’s strictures concerning anything supernatural. Ralph, though, likened it to believing in Santa Claus, just another harmless metaphor for an aspect of God’s love. She suspected there was something faulty in his logic—Santa Claus might be an elf, yet he was modeled on a real saint, whereas the Tooth Fairy—? But Ralph had more book-learning and he was her husband, the head of their household, she told herself, and it was her wifely duty to submit to his judgment in these matters. Besides, they’d allowed Stanley to believe and it didn’t seem to have interfered with his faith in Jesus.

So her smile was just as indulgent as Ralph’s when Lashanda carefully deposited her tooth in a small glass of water and carried it back to her bedroom.

Their shared complicity made it the first time since Sunday that things had felt normal to Stan. His mother’s smile transformed her face. Forever after, whenever he remembered that moment, he was always glad that he’d reached out and touched her hand and said, “You look awful pretty today, Mama.”

She was usually too self-conscious to accept compliments easily, but today she gently patted his cheek. “Better go brush your teeth, son, or we’re going to be late.”

When they were alone in the kitchen, Clara lifted her eyes to Ralph in a look that was almost a challenge.

He picked up his umbrella and briefcase. “I’ll be home by four-thirty,” he said as he went out to the carport.

In the days to come, it would be his burden that there had been no love in his heart for her this morning.

That he hadn’t said, “Your mama does look pretty today.”

That he hadn’t even said goodbye.

* * *

“Hello? . . . Hello?” The man’s voice became impatient. “Is anybody there? Hello!”

The rain was coming down hard, drumming on her red umbrella like the racing of her heart. Rosa Edwards swallowed hard and tried to speak, but she was so nervous, she knew she’d botch it.

Instead, she abruptly hung up and moved away from the exposed public telephone outside the convenience store. She had thought out everything she meant to say, but the minute she heard his voice, knowing he was a murderer, she couldn’t speak.

Telephones were so fancy these days. Buttons you could push and it’d call the person you last called. Another button and it’d tell you what number last called you. Not that it’d get him anywhere if he did find out she was calling from this phone. Wasn’t in her neighborhood.

Her feet were soaking wet as she splashed back to her raggedy old car that just came out of the shop for $113.75. While rain beat against the piece of plastic she’d taped over the broken window on the passenger side, she rehearsed it in her mind all again, the way she’d just say it right out, no messing around. Then, when she was perfectly calm, she walked back to the phone, inserted her coins and dialed his number again.

As soon as he answered, she spoke his name and said, “This is the gal that saw you coming out of Room 130 at the Orchid Motel Saturday evening.”

First he tried to bluster, then he tried to intimidate her, but she plowed on with what she had to say.

“Now you just hush up and listen. What you done to her ain’t nothing to do with me. You give me ten thousand dollars cash money and I won’t never say nothing to nobody. You don’t and I’m going straight to the police. You get the money together and I’ll call you back at this number at six o’clock and tell you where to leave it.”

She hung up without giving him a chance to answer, and even though the concrete was wet and her tires were almost bald, she laid down rubber getting out of the parking lot just in case there were fancier, quicker ways to find out where she was calling from.

* * *

The rain was starting to get on Norwood Love’s nerves. The young man had worked his muscles raw these last few days, trying to get this underground chamber fitted out properly with running water, drainage pipes, air-conditioning, propane tanks, and ventilation ducts. His cousin Sherrill had helped some. Sherrill was the only one he trusted to help and keep his mouth closed. Most of it, he’d done alone though, keeping it secret even from his wife. Not many women want their husbands to mess with whiskey and JoAnn was no different. Fortunately, she worked regular hours in town, so it wasn’t all that hard to do things without her noticing.

With the money from Kezzie Knott, he’d bought some stainless steel vats second-hand at a soup factory over in Harnett County. He’d fashioned the cooker to his own design, did the welding himself. The copper condensing coil was one his dad had made before he flipped out the last time—Only thing he ever give me that he didn’t take back soon as he sobered up, thought Norwood. The fifty-gallon plastic barrels from that pickle factory out near Goldsboro stood clean and ready to fill.

He knew how to buy sugar in bulk without getting reported and he had a couple of migrant crew bosses waiting to buy whenever he was ready to sell.

Best of all, he’d figured out a way to keep the smell of fermenting mash from giving him away. That’s how most ALE officers claimed they stumbled over a lot of stills, just following their noses. In his personal opinion, that was a bunch of bull. Oh, maybe once in a blue moon, it’d happen like that. Most times, though, it was somebody talking out of turn or talking for bounty money. All the same, for that one chance in a hundred, he meant not to be found by any smells.

But this rain! The dirt floor was turning into a mud-pie and water was seeping down the concrete block walls. And now the weatherman was saying hurricane? Be a hell of a note if he got flooded out before he even got started good.

* * *

To Rosa Edwards’s relief, she hadn’t left it too late. The Freeman children were just coming out to the carport when she got there. She pulled her car in beside Clara’s and hopped out, leaving the motor running. “Your mama inside?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Lashanda.

“We’re on our way to school,” Stan warned her.

“It’s okay,” said Rosa. “I won’t make y’all late.”

She darted on into the house just as Clara came down the hall with her purse in one hand and car keys in the other.

“Rosa! Good morning.” She tilted her head in concern. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no, and I know you’re in a hurry. I got one quick little favor to ask you though.”

“It’ll have to be real quick,” Clara said, glancing at the kitchen clock. “I forgot how rain slows everything down.”

Rosa handed her the white envelope she carried. Humidity made the paper limp, but it was sealed with Scotch tape.

“Would you keep this for me?”

The envelope wasn’t thick. No more than a single sheet of paper inside. Clara turned it in her hand and looked at Rosa inquiringly.

“I can’t tell you what it is,” said Rosa. “But would you just hold on to it for me till I ask for it back? Keep it somewhere safe?”

“Sure,” said Clara and tucked it in her purse as she shepherded Rosa toward the door. “I’ll keep it right here next to my billfold.”

“Thanks,” Rosa said, heading for her own shabby car which waited with the motor still running. “See you tonight.”

Then she was gone before Clara remembered to tell her that prayer meeting was going to be cancelled.

* * *

“Millard King? Yes, I know him,” said the librarian. “Well, not know him, but I know who he is. Why?”

Deputy Mayleen Richards smiled encouragingly. “He said you passed him out on the track at the Dobbs middle school Saturday afternoon.”

Peggy Lasater wrinkled her forehead in an effort to remember.

“He said you were wearing red shorts and a white shirt.”

“Did he happen to mention that I was also wearing a Walkman?”

Richards checked her notes. “No Walkman.”

“People think if you’re a librarian, you spend your days reading. They should see all the shelving and cataloging we do. When I run? That’s when I get to read.”

“Read?”

The librarian nodded. “Books on tape. I did run Saturday afternoon, but I was too absorbed in the last Charlotte MacLeod to notice anything except where I was putting my feet. Sorry.”

* * *

Clara Freeman left Cotton Grove and drove south on Old 48, a narrow winding road that follows the meanders of Possum Creek. With headlights and wipers both on high, she drove cautiously through the heavy rain. Where the road dipped, deep puddles had formed. They sent up broad wings of water on either side of her Civic as she plowed through.

Once beyond the city limits, there were few cars on the road and she was able to relax a bit and to open her window a tiny crack. Not enough to let the rain in, but enough to keep the windshield from fogging up so badly.

She had dropped the children off at school, taken Brother Wilkins to the eye clinic, picked up the dry cleaning, waited for Brother Wilkins to come out of the clinic, taken him to the Winn-Dixie with her while she shopped for Sister Grace, then helped him into the house with his few bags of groceries. (“Bless you, child,” he’d said. “I’m gonna pray God sends you help in your old age like He sent you to help us.”)

She would deliver Sister Grace’s things and then it would be time for lunch. After lunch—?

Her mind momentarily blanked on what came next on the list.

As Ralph’s wife—no, as the minister’s wife—she had cheerfully put her services at the beck and call of his congregation and she’d always made lists to organize her days. But since finding those condoms in his desk on Sunday, she tried to pack her days even fuller so she wouldn’t have time to brood on how his betrayal undermined the very foundation on which she’d built her life.

Her hands gripped the steering wheel so fiercely that her knuckles gleamed through the tight skin.

How? she asked herself for the thousandth time since she’d found those condoms. How could he have done this dreadful, stupid thing? Did every man, from the President of the United States of America right down to her own husband, put sex before honor? Make themselves slaves of their malehood, shackle their God-given free will to their gonads?

At least Ralph didn’t try to excuse himself by saying, “The woman tempted me so I sinned.” No, he’d rightfully taken the blame on himself. And when he came back home Sunday night and lay down beside her in the darkness, she’d asked two questions. “Does she go to our church?”

“No,” he’d answered.

“Is she white?”

“No, Clara.”

That was all she’d wanted to know, but he had a question of his own. “Do you want a divorce?”

Her heart leaped up and she’d let Satan tempt her for a moment.

To be free of him always wanting what she didn’t have in her to give? To go back to her father’s house? To sleep alone in a narrow bed?

Then she remembered being a daughter in her father’s house, a minister’s daughter, not a minister’s wife. Abiding by rules, not making them. Having to ask, not tell.

As a wife, she had the power to do God’s work.

As a daughter? A divorced woman with a failed marriage?

Her father would do his duty by her, however much he might disapprove of her decision. His congregation would be kind.

But respect? Position?

“No,” she’d said. “No, I don’t want a divorce. All I want is your promise that you’ll never go to her again.”

“As God is my strength,” he told her.

She had turned to him then, ready to give her body as a reward for his vow. He had not pushed her away, merely patted her shoulder as if she were Lashanda or Stanley. In that moment, she realized that he might never again reach for her in the night, and part of her was glad.

Another part felt suddenly bereft.

That sense of loss still clung to her this morning even though she knew that she’d acted as God would have her. She had been grievously wronged, yet she had risen above his sin. She had forgiven him. So why should she feel this inner need for forgiveness?

With relief, she reached the dead end of the unpaved road where Sister Thomas lived and hurried inside with the groceries and supplies.

She fed Sister Thomas’s cat, changed the sheets on the bed and straightened up the kitchen, but when the old woman invited her to stay for lunch, she excused herself and ran through the rain back to her car.

In just the hour that she’d been inside, the rutted clay roadbed had turned into a slippery, treacherous surface that scared her as the tires lost traction and kept skewing toward the deep ditches. She was perspiring freely by the time she’d driven the quarter-mile back to the hardtop.

Pulling out onto the paved road, she recklessly lowered her window and let the cool rain blow in her face. She took deep breaths of the humid air that did nothing to dislodge the weight that seemed to have settled on her heart since Sunday night.

That’s when she noticed the lights of a car behind her. Even though it was noon, the sky was black and the dazzle of lights on her rain-smeared rear window made it impossible for her to distinguish make or driver. Dark and late-model were all she could tell about the car as it rushed up behind her.

She moved over to the right as far as possible. If he was in that big a hurry, maybe he’d go ahead and pass even though there were double yellow lines on this twisty stretch.

A second later, her head jerked and she felt her car being bumped from behind.

What the—?

Another glance in the rearview mirror. He’d done it deliberately! And now he was so close that the headlights were blanked out by the rear of her own car.

She could clearly see the white man behind the steering wheel.

Fear grabbed her and she stepped on the accelerator.

He bumped her again.

It was her worst nightmare unfolding in daylight.

Her dress was getting soaked, but she was too terrified to think of raising the window. Instead, she floored the gas pedal and the Civic leaped forward.

Almost instantly, he caught up with her.

The road curved sharply and she nearly lost control as the car fishtailed on the wet pavement.

Then he pulled even with her and they raced through the rain, neck and neck along the deserted road and through another lazy S-curve that swept down to an old wooden bridge over Possum Creek. With so much rain, the creek had overflowed its banks and was almost level with the narrow bridge.

Again Clara pulled to the right to give him room to pass.

At that instant, he bumped her so hard from the side that her air bag inflated. She automatically braked, but it was too late. The Civic was airborne and momentum carried it straight into the creek. By the time it hit the water, the air bag had deflated and Clara’s head cracked hard against the windshield, sending her into darkness.

As the car sank deeper, muddy creek water flooded through the open window.

* * *

Just as he was thinking about lunch, Dwight Bryant looked up to see Deputy Richards hovering near his door and he motioned her in.

“I spoke to the librarian that Millard King said was jogging when he was. She was listening to a book on her Walkman and couldn’t say who else was out there.”

“Too bad. But King said he thought one of the men was a doctor. Try calling around to see if any of them were jogging.”

“Yes, sir. And remember that jewelry store manager who bought the other two silver pens?”

“New Orleans, right? You talked to her?”

“Yes, sir, but no help there. She gave those two pens to her granddaughters. They’re in high school in New Mexico and still have them so far as she knows.”

Dwight frowned. “I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.”

“No, sir,” said Mayleen Richards. “I’ll start calling the doctors.”

* * *

When his phone rang promptly at six p.m., he was momentarily startled, but he collected himself in the next instant and his voice was calm. “Hello?”

“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, sure 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 before 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.

“Such a shame we couldn’t do any picking and singing tonight,” she lamented, reaching for her banjo case. “Maybe next week we’ll have more folks to come. You know, we might need to start us a phone tree to turn us out better.” As she passed Ralph, she said, “I sure hope Miz Freeman makes it home safe. This is real bad weather to get stuck off somewhere.”

We all said goodnight to Steve, who locked up behind us and turned off the lights on his way through the restaurant to the rear door that’s a shortcut to his house out back.

Haywood held an umbrella over Isabel as they splashed out to their car. Like the southern gentleman he aspires to become, Reid told me to stay under the porch while he brought the car over.

Ralph Freeman stood beside me staring out at the rain indecisively. His face held the same hopeless misery I’d seen on Cyl’s face last night, and to my horror, instead of some innocuous platitude about hoping everything turned out okay, I heard myself say, “Did y’all have a fight? Is she doing this deliberately? Punishing you for Cyl?”

“Cyl?” The worry lines between his eyes deepened. “You mean Ms. DeGraffenried?”

I touched his arm. “You don’t have to pretend, Ralph. I know about you two.”

“You do?” He looked at me warily. “How? She tell you?”

“Only after I guessed,” I said and told him how I’d put two and two together last night.

“How is she?” His need was so great that it was almost as if he didn’t care that I knew so long as I could tell him about Cyl.

“She’s really hurting.”

His broad shoulders slumped even more if that was possible.

Reid pulled in beside the single porch step. I held up two fingers and he cut his lights to show that he’d wait with his motor running till I finished talking.

Ralph said, “You must think I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”

“It’s not for me to judge,” I answered primly.

“No?” He gave me such an ironic lift of his eyebrow that I had to smile.

“You know what I mean. I’ve got too much glass in my own house for me to go around looking for stones in my neighbors’ eyes.”

That didn’t come out quite the way I intended, although Haywood would surely have understood my mangled metaphors.

“Where are your children?” I asked pointedly.

“Home. The wife of one of our deacons is with them. And to answer your first question, Clara might do something like this to me, but she’d never do it to them. She was supposed to pick Lashanda up from her Brownie meeting after school, but she didn’t. I can’t understand it.”

“Friends?” I said. “Family?”

“All back in Warrenton except for her prayer partner. Rosa’s the only one Clara’s really taken to since we moved here. Rosa Edwards. I called her right off, but she hasn’t seen Clara since first thing this morning. I don’t know where else to look, who else to call.”

“Maybe you just ought to go on home,” I said. “Be with the children. That’s where she’d call, wouldn’t she?”

He nodded. “She’ll know they’re worried and she’ll want them to know she’s all right, soon as possible.”

“Want me to speak to Dwight Bryant? He could probably put on a couple of extra patrol cars.”

“Would you? I’d appreciate that.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t have to tell him about Cyl and me, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“Thanks, Deborah.”

“No problem,” I said.

He took a deep breath and stepped out bareheaded into the rain. Reid pushed open the passenger door and I slid inside.

As we headed back down 48, Reid said, “What was that all about?”

“His wife. He’s really worried about her.”

With Ralph’s red taillights shining up ahead, we rode in a silence broken only by the windshield wipers on wet glass, till Reid turned off the highway onto the road that led to my house. I found myself automatically checking the ditches on both sides, half-expecting to see Clara Freeman’s car.

When we got to my house, I pushed the remote and once more the garage door swung up so that Reid could drive in.

“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied. “Just let me call Dwight first.”

* * *

I could have called from the kitchen, of course; instead, I went straight to the phone beside my bed. Sometimes Dwight’ll give me a hard time for meddling. Tonight he listened as I stated the case against Clara Freeman just taking off without a thought for her children.

“Ralph’s afraid she’s had a wreck or something and if she has, you know the quicker she gets help, the better it’ll be,” I urged. “Do you really have to wait twenty-four hours?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll shift all the patrols over to that sector till they’ve covered all the roads. If she’s out there, they’ll find her.”

* * *

Reid was aimlessly opening cabinet doors when I got back to the kitchen.

“Coffee’s in the refrigerator,” I told him.

“Of course. The one place I didn’t look.”

He put two filters in the basket—“Cuts the caffeine and acids”—scooped in the ground coffee and flicked the switch.

“Does that weather board I gave you work okay?”

“Sure,” I said, though truth to tell, I’d barely glanced at it since he hung it up.

“Let’s see how low the pressure is right now with all this rain.”

He headed for my bedroom and I trailed along at his heels. Did I mention that all good lawyers are actors? Reid was giving a charming performance at the moment—burbling about how his dad still checks the barometer every morning even though he can now look out the window overlooking the ninth green and see for himself whether it’s a good day for golf.

“’Course with Dad, any day it’s not sleeting is a good day for golf.”

Once inside my bedroom, he went right over to the dials and started reading them off. I just leaned against the doorjamb and watched him.

He turned around. “Aren’t you interested?”

“Oh, I’m interested all right,” I said wickedly. “Since you haven’t been able to get back here alone, what did you plan to do? Slide it under my bed as soon as I came over to look? Hope I’d think it rolled there by accident?”

“Huh?”

A textbook look of puzzled innocence spread across his face.

“Considering that it got you off the hook with Dwight, I really think you should have given me something nicer for my wall than a twenty-dollar weather center.”

He gave a sheepish grin, his first honest expression of the night. “Wal-Mart doesn’t offer a lot of choice. It was this or a sunburst clock or a bad knockoff of a Bob Timberlake painting.”

Overall, I had to agree with his decision. Nevertheless, I held out my hand and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sterling silver pen that he’d lifted from the pencil mug beside my phone on Monday.

“When did you miss it?” he asked, turning the gleaming shaft in his fingers.

“While you were changing clothes tonight, I tidied up in here.”

“Well, damn! You mean I was that close to getting away with it?”

“Not really. I knew you were up to something, I just hadn’t figured out what. You hate gospel music, remember?”

He shrugged. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

“No more games,” I said sternly. “How did your pen get under Lynn Bullock’s body?”

“I don’t know, Deborah, and that’s the God-honest truth. She borrowed it the last time we were together and didn’t give it back and, well, it seemed a little petty to make a big point about it since I didn’t want to see her again anyhow.”

“So why didn’t you just tell Dwight?”

“Oh, sure. My pen under the body of a woman whose neck I’d threatened to wring?”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily. “You know how you say things—‘I’ll kill him,’ ‘I’m going to clean his clock’? It’s just talk. But I was so mad when I saw what she’d done to my car. Hot as it’s been? And with the windows rolled up? I had to go buy a pair of rubber gloves just to drive it to the shop. I was so pissed, I kept saying that I was going to wring the little bitch’s neck. Everybody at the shop just laughed at me, they didn’t have a clue who I was talking about, but Will was there and I’m pretty sure he knew because he gave me a wink and said he’d swear it was justifiable homicide.”

If my brother had known Lynn Bullock was the woman who’d done something like that to Reid’s car, he certainly would have mentioned it Sunday night when we were talking about her death. Will’s a consummate con man though, and he can be incredibly sneaky when he puts his mind to it. He has a way of pretending he knows more about things than he does, hoping to bluff you into telling him what you assume he already knows.

“Don’t you see? If Dwight knew it was my pen, he’d go digging around and find out—”

“And find out what?” I asked. Then it hit me. “Wait a minute! You had two dates with her last Christmas and she only lately fouled your car? When?”

“Tuesday, a week ago,” he admitted.

“Why?” I asked, even though that mulish look on his face gave me the answer. “Oh for God’s sake, Reid! Tell me you didn’t. You said she wasn’t your type.”

“Well, she wasn’t,” he said sulkily. “All the same, for all her snob talk, there was something—I don’t know—vulnerable? Did I tell you what she said about Dad coming out to her grandfather’s place when she was a little girl?”

“No.”

“She was just a kid when it happened, but she never forgot. Dad had gone out to coach her grandfather for a court appearance. She talked about Dad’s fingernails. How clean and even they were.”

Reid looked down at his own neatly manicured nails and I had a sudden mental image of my daddy’s hands, the nails split and stained with country work.

“What was her grandfather charged with?”

“I looked it up in the files.” Reid gave me a lopsided grin. “Let’s put it this way. Your dad was paying my dad’s bill. And he paid her grandfather’s fine and court costs.”

“What?”

“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. Everybody knows Mr. Kezzie made his money in bootleg whiskey.”

“When he was younger, yes,” I agreed, “but he gave all that up before I was born and Lynn Bullock was younger than me.”

“Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about,” Mother once told me. “The only thing I know he lied about anyhow.”

I looked at Reid sharply. “Is he still mixed up in it?”

“Old as he is? I doubt it,” said Reid. “’Course, a lot of people still think he is, and it probably amuses him to let them. I’m sure you’d’ve heard about it, if he were.”

“True,” I said, relieved. Dwight or Terry or certainly Ed Gardner, who works ATF, would have put a bug in my ear if he were still active. One thing a judge doesn’t need is to have her daddy hauled in for making moonshine.

“Anyhow,” said Reid, “Lynn Bullock was a damn good lay. I’m not seeing anybody special these days, so I thought what the hell, why not give her another call?”

“Only her memory being better than yours, she was still ticked that you’d dumped her after the second night and it really steamed her when you called out of the blue with nothing on your mind but sex?”

“Something like that. Look, Deborah, you’ve got to help me. Don’t tell Dwight it was your pen I showed him. Okay?”

“You’re crazy. I’m a judge. An officer of the court. I can’t not tell him. So she smeared dog dirt inside your car. Big deal. And you vented at the garage. Hyperbole. You tell him who you were with before you got to the ball field, she confirms it and—”

There was that look again. “No who?”

“No who,” he said.

“You’re not being noble, are you?” I asked suspiciously. “Saving somebody’s reputation?”

“The only reputation I was saving was mine. Everybody thinks I get laid six days a week and twice on Sundays. Truth is, I’m damn near a virgin these days. I went to the office Saturday morning, got sleepy after lunch, flaked out upstairs and almost slept through the game.”

I looked at him. I may have eleven older brothers, but he’s the nearest thing to a kid brother I’d ever had. His handsome face was an open book.

Or was it?

“Oh come on, Deborah. I did not kill Lynn Bullock.”

“You know he couldn’t,” whispered my internal preacher.

“Irrelevant!” snapped the pragmatist from the other side of my head. “You withhold something like this from Dwight and you could find yourself facing an ethics review.”

Reid still held my pen in his hand.

“If I’d been a little smarter, I’d have found a way to put this back and you wouldn’t have known the difference. All you have to do is forget the last few minutes ever happened.”

He walked over to my telephone and dropped the pen into my pencil mug.

“See?”

“Reid—”

“Please, Deborah. All I’m asking is that you wait about talking to Dwight. Give him a chance to find Lynn’s real killer. Or—” He gave me a sharp, considering look. “Maybe we could find him first.”

“We?”

“Why not? We’re both professionals. Taking depositions is what we do. And people talk to civilians like us quicker than they’ll talk to Dwight. We just ask a few questions around town, listen hard to all the gossip and figure it out. What do you say?”

His eager, almost adolescent expression suddenly reminded me of Mickey Rooney in those old movies Dwight and I sometimes watch.

I didn’t feel one bit like Judy Garland though and I sure as hell didn’t want to try putting on a show in the barn.

“How hard can it be for us to figure out who was balling her?” Reid wheedled, as he followed me out to the kitchen. “She didn’t do it in the middle of Main Street or in her own house, even, but she sure wasn’t the most discreet woman I ever slept with.”

“Do you suppose Jason knew?” I asked, pouring us a cup of the freshly brewed coffee.

“Had to, you’d think.” Reid reached into my refrigerator for milk and kept dribbling it in until his coffee was more au lait than café. “Unless he’s one of those husbands who makes a point of not knowing? He’s such a grind though, maybe not.”

“Grind? He was playing ball Saturday.”

“Grind,” Reid said firmly. “He and Millard King. Birds of a feather. And not just because they humped the same woman.”

“How’s that?”

“Both of them are ambitious as hell and both of ’em have at least two reasons for everything they do. Like playing ball. That’s an appropriate ‘guy’ activity. Makes you seem human. Puts you right out there to bond with your peer group. Good social contacts. Like the way you moved your membership over to First Baptist in Dobbs,” he added shrewdly.

“See?” said the preacher, who’s always been embarrassed by that cynical act.

The pragmatist shrugged.

“Before it’s over, you’re going to see King and Bullock both on a statewide ballot,” said Reid. “Just remember that you heard it here first.”

“Elective office?”

“Why else do you think King’s so hot to marry one of the homeliest gals that ever wore lipstick? Because she’s connected on both sides of her family to some political heavy hitters, that’s why. And in this state, you still need a ladywife to do the whole white-glove bit. If Lynn Bullock threatened to make a scandal, she could’ve scared the little debutante off. Soured things with her daddy the Justice.”

His venom surprised me. “What’s Millard King ever done to you?”

“Nothing really. Just sometimes I get a shade tired of the deserving poor.”

“Come again?”

“All these up-by-their-bootstrap people, who keep reminding you that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth while they had to work for everything they got,” he said scornfully. “As if you’re worth shit because your parents and your grandparents could read and write, while they’re the true yeoman nobility who really deserve it. And all the time they’re sneering, they’re out there busting their balls to have what they think you’re born to. As if money’s all it takes.”

“Why, Reid Stephenson! You really are a snob.”

“If not apologizing for who and what my parents are and what they gave me makes me a snob, then guilty as charged,” he said as his scowl dissolved into one of those roguish smiles. “But I’m not guilty of murder.”

“You’re the one without an alibi though.”

I drained the last of my coffee and as he took my mug to pour me another cup of the rich dark brew, we mulled over the other men known to be in Lynn Bullock’s life.

“She died between five-fifteen and eight, give or take a few minutes,” I said. “Dwight and I got to the ball field around four-thirty. Jason Bullock was right behind me when she called at five and after the game, he went straight from the field to the pizza place with us. We even followed him back to Cotton Grove.”

“He may be out of it,” said Reid, “but what about Millard King?”

“He told Dwight that he was there jogging for at least an hour, but I didn’t notice him till he was coming off the track around six o’clock. I suppose he could have cut through the trees and jogged over from the Orchid Motel. It’s on this side of the bypass and less than a quarter-mile as the crow flies.”

“Or the jogger jogs,” said Reid, brightening up a bit.

“Courthouse gossip says that she was with Brandon Frazier for a while.”

“Yeah, I heard that, too, but so what? Frazier doesn’t have a wife or anybody special and he doesn’t act like someone planning to run for political office.”

“Frazier and King. Not much of a pool,” I observed.

“And neither of them threatened to wring her neck,” Reid said glumly. “There has to be somebody else, somebody we haven’t heard about yet.”

“Maybe we’re going at this the wrong way,” I said. “Maybe it’s not who she slept with, but who she didn’t. Like Dr. Jeremy Potts.”

“Who?”

So I told him about young Dr. Potts, who would have walked away from his marriage with no strings attached to his income had it not been for Lynn Bullock’s shrewd advice to his wife and Jason Bullock’s equally shrewd representation.

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that. A professional degree as marital property. Good thing I made Dotty settle out of court.”

(Tough talk, but Dotty herself told me that Reid was voluntarily paying twenty percent of his income for young Tip’s support.

(“I’m socking it all away in mutual funds for his education,” she’d said complacently.

(Like most hotshot real estate agents in this part of the state, Dotty’s doing very well for herself these days.)

“Did you hear that she’s getting married again?” Reid asked abruptly.

“Who? Felicia Potts?”

“Dotty.”

Most of the time, Reid kept the torch he carried for his ex-wife well hidden under his Casanova cloak, but every once in a while, I caught a glimpse of it. She was the love of his life and he’d screwed it up by screwing around.

I reached out and squeezed his arm. “Maybe I’ll call Amy,” I said, offering what comfort I could. “See if she’s heard anything about Dr. Potts.”

* * *

Against my better judgment and only because it would be his word against mine if this ever came to Dwight’s attention, it seemed I had agreed to keep quiet about my pen for the time being.

And now, God help me, I was even volunteering to ask a few questions on my own. And yeah, part of it might be to help Reid, but part of my very nature is a basic need to find the truth and bring the facts to judgment.

My internal preacher was not fooled by such high-flown rationalizations.

“You’d risk your career for curiosity? Curiosity killed the cat.”

“But no cat ever caught a rat without it,” said the pragmatist.

CHAPTER | 13

The people of the North might differ radically from the people of the South in many ways, but in the presence of such a dreadful visitation of nature, involving suffering and death, the brotherhood of man asserts itself and all things else are forgotten.

After Reid left, I watched the late news. The situation in Iraq might be occupying the rest of the country’s TV screens, but here in central North Carolina, most of the newscast was given over to Hurricane Fran which seemed to be heading straight toward Wilmington. It was packing winds of 130 miles per hour and forecasters were saying it could push in a wall of water twenty feet high. The sheer size of the storm—more than five hundred miles across—guaranteed that we were going to feel its effects here in the Triangle.

All along the coast, people were nailing sheets of plywood over their windows and getting their boats out of the water. Portland and Avery were congratulating themselves for bringing their boat back to Dobbs.

Skycams showed us thick lines of headlights heading inland through the rainy night as coastal residents from Myrtle Beach to Manteo sought higher ground. Channel 11’s Miriam Thomas and Larry Stogner spoke of ordered evacuations in both South Carolina and Ocracoke, which is linked to the mainland only by ferries. New Hanover County had ordered a voluntary evacuation of all beach communities, including Wrightsville Beach where some of my Wilmington colleagues live; while Brunswick County was taking no chances. Evacuation was mandatory on all the barrier islands.

Reporter Greg Barnes showed motels filling up fast and shelters that were opening in schools and fire stations around Fayetteville to help handle the evacuees.

Even Don Ross, WTVD’s color man, was unusually serious as he reported on local grocery stores that were already experiencing a run on batteries and canned goods. Eric Curry’s camera panned over empty bread shelves and depleted milk cases.

I tried to call Kidd, but all I got was his answering machine.

It was nearly midnight but I wasn’t a bit sleepy. Instead, I switched off the television and roamed around the house restlessly. I had candles and a stash of batteries for my radio, a half a loaf of bread and a fresh quart of milk. I should be okay, but the dire predictions left me uneasy.

The rain had finally stopped and I went out to put all the porch and lawn chairs into my garage. The night should have been quiet except for frogs and crickets, yet male voices floated faintly on the soggy warm air and sirens seemed to be converging from different directions. I was about to get my car out and go see what was happening, when headlights appeared on the lane that runs from Andrew’s house to mine and connects with a homemade bridge across Possum Creek.

The truck slowed to a stop as it drew near me and I saw Andrew behind the wheel with his son, A.K. Just topping the rise a few yards behind was Robert on the farm’s biggest tractor.

I ran over to meet them. “What’s happening?” “Rescue squad’s been called out,” said Andrew. “A car’s gone in the creek and they want us to help get it out.”

“Oh, no!” Without being invited, I ran around to the passenger side, pulled open the door and shoved in next to A.K.

“You know who it is?” he asked as his dad put it in gear for the creek. The tractor lights behind us lit up the cab.

“I hope not,” I answered. “But you know Ralph Freeman, the preacher at Balm of Gilead? His wife was out this way today visiting one of their church members and she never came home.”

“That don’t sound good,” said Andrew. “No, sir, that don’t sound good at all.”

* * *

We came out onto the hardtop just south of the creek, where it bends at the bridge before the turn-in to the homeplace.

The curve was lit up like a carnival. Flashing lights of red, yellow, and blue bounced against the low-lying clouds and were reflected back in ghastly hues. Three patrol cars, a fire truck, and a rescue truck had their spotlights aimed down toward the muddy water that rushed under the bridge. The creek had flooded its channel and was as high as I’d ever seen it.

Men were out there in it up to their necks, working around the door of a white car whose top projected only a few inches above the turbulent waters. I recognized Donny Turner and Rudy Peacock from the West Colleton volunteer fire department—both were too big to miss—and skinny little Skeeter Collins from the Cotton Grove rescue squad. Five or six other dark and indistinguishable figures milled around in the water and I heard someone yell, “Damn! Is that a cottonmouth?”

“Fuck the cottonmouth and hand me the damn collar!” cried Skeeter.

By the glare of the spotlights, I saw the men relay a cervical collar to him without letting the water touch it. Skeeter’s head disappeared inside the car.

“That’s a good sign, ain’t—isn’t it?” asked A.K. “They don’t put collars on dead people, do they?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering how they could possibly remove Clara Freeman—if it was Clara Freeman—from the car without drowning her in the process.

“Watch it, boys!” Skeeter shouted. “I felt it start to shift.”

“Get that tractor in here,” said the fire chief. “We need to get a chain or something on this car.”

Robert backed his big John Deere down through the bushes at the water’s edge. There was a winch above the drawbar and someone grabbed the hook and waded into the water with it. Robert let the cable feed out slowly as the man hauled the hook over toward the car where other hands reached for it. There was a confused splashing around the end of the car and several strangled coughs as men came up gasping for air before the hook was securely attached to the back undercarriage.

There were also enough strangled curses to make me glad I was a woman on the shore instead of a man out there in the middle of a muddy, moccasin-infested creek. (We may be technically equal these days but that doesn’t mean we jump into every activity with equal enthusiasm.)

Finally, a vaguely familiar voice called, “Put some tension on it, but for God’s sake, go easy!”

That’s when I recognized that the man who’d carried the hook out to the car was Jason Bullock. I’d heard that he’d joined a lot of civic organizations like the volunteer fire department, but this was the first time I’d seen him since the night of our post-game pizza over in Dobbs.

With the tractor in its lowest gear and half a dozen men doing what they could to support the car upright, Robert kept the cable taut as he slowly pulled until the Honda was on solid ground. Water was still waist-high where the men now stood on what was normally the creekbank, but at least there was no immediate danger of losing the car and the person inside. A lightweight molded plastic stretcher board was passed from the rescue truck and soon they had a recumbent form strapped onto it.

When they came ashore, I saw that it was indeed Clara Freeman, unconscious and with all her vital signs erratic, but alive.

Dwight had arrived by then. As they loaded Mrs. Freeman into the ambulance, he turned to me with a lopsided smile. “Sometimes I’m glad I listen to you. If she’d spent the night out there . . .”

“Another two inches and her nose would have been in the water,” said a dripping Jason Bullock as we watched the ambulance speed away with lights flashing and siren wailing. “Anybody call her husband yet? He ought to be told.”

My heart went out to him in his empathy for Ralph Freeman and I knew he was probably remembering his own tense hours of worry before Dwight came and told him the worst a husband can hear.

“The dispatcher’s calling him right now,” Dwight said. “She’ll tell him to meet the ambulance at Dobbs Memorial.”

I put out my hand to Jason and told him how sorry I was for his own loss. He thanked me, then looked at Dwight. “I’ve tried not to bug you, Bryant, but do you have anything yet?”

“Sorry. We have a few leads, but nothing solid. But maybe you could come by the office tomorrow and let’s talk again? Go over a few possibilities?”

“Sure.”

We stood there on the side of the road and watched as the excitement wound down and the volunteers packed it in. The fire truck trundled across the bridge, back toward Cotton Grove, the extra patrol cars headed off to their usual sectors, and the remaining deputy showed Dwight the sketch he’d made to explain how Clara Freeman wound up in Possum Creek.

“We’ll check again tomorrow in the daylight, but we couldn’t see skid marks. Looks like she came flying down the slope, misjudged the curve and drove straight off the road without touching the brakes, going so fast, she just sailed into the creek.”

I was craning over Dwight’s shoulder, but Jason stared back up the slope that was now washed in light by Robert’s tractor lights.

“You reckon she might’ve blacked out? Or the gas pedal stuck?”

“With a stuck accelerator, she’d have been standing on her brakes,” said Dwight.

“And if she was blacked out,” said the deputy, “she wouldn’t’ve been going fast enough to skip the bank.”

“Hey, Deb’rah,” Andrew called. “You ready to go?”

It was getting late and he had a couple of bulk barns loaded with curing tobacco to see to.

“Go on ahead,” I called back. “I’ll ride with Robert.”

All this time, local traffic had come and gone sporadically on this back road. When we first arrived, it was one-lane, directed by a trooper who kept the rubberneckers moving. This late, long past midnight, in a community that was still mostly farmers and early-rising blue-collar workers, the road was practically deserted. Nevertheless, an occasional car came by and slowed to ask whether everything was under control. If they knew Dwight or recognized Robert’s tractor, the driver would even get out of his vehicle and come over to gawk at Clara Freeman’s drowned car.

My brother Robert had finished pulling it up onto the shoulder of the road and water streamed from the open doors. I walked over to have a look myself while Dwight and his deputy finished conferring and Jason was right behind me when an oncoming car slowed, stopped, and a man came toward us.

“Evening, Judge,” said Millard King. “That’s not your car, is it? You all right?”

I sensed Jason Bullock stiffening behind me and I knew that King hadn’t immediately realized who was standing there with me. In the half-light cast by reflected headlights, I saw recognition spread across his face when he came closer.

“Bullock.” His voice was neutral as he nodded to Jason.

“King.” Jason’s voice was equally neutral, but I finally had an answer to whether or not he knew his wife had been sleeping around.

And with whom.

Like a nervous hostess smoothing over an awkward social lapse, I found myself chattering about the accident, about Jason’s part in helping to rescue Clara Freeman and how lucky she was to have been found before drowning.

“You live around here?” Jason Bullock asked bluntly.

Now that he mentioned it, what was Millard King doing on this back road at this hour?

“Just down in Makely,” he answered easily. “But my brother lives over in Fuquay, so I’m up and down this road a lot. You say she went in this afternoon sometime? I sure didn’t notice when I came through around eight. ’Course, it was still raining then.”

“Oh look!” I said. “There’s Lashanda’s baby doll.”

I went over and pulled a soggy brown rubber doll from the car. As I did, I saw something lumpy on the floor beneath the steering wheel. Clara Freeman’s pocketbook. I gathered it up, too, thinking that I’d carry it to the hospital with me tomorrow morning.

The two men circled the car.

“It’s amazing,” said King. “The car doesn’t seem to have a scratch on it.”

“Dry it out and it should be good as new,” agreed Bullock.

My brother Robert came over, put the car in neutral and closed the doors. “What you planning to do with the car, Dwight? Want me to tow it over to Jimmy White’s garage?”

“Would you mind?”

“Naw, but he ain’t gonna be up this time of night.”

“That’s okay. I’ll call him first thing tomorrow.”

As I climbed up to the glassed-in cab of the big tractor with Robert, I saw King and Bullock walk to their separate cars. I guess they didn’t have much to say to each other.

Not tonight anyhow.

* * *

Jimmy’s garage was only a couple of miles away and the car pulled easily, so we were there in ten minutes. Not surprisingly, the building was dark and silent, as was Jimmy’s house out back, behind a thick row of Leland cypresses.

I helped Robert unhitch the car. We left the key in the ignition switch, although I did detach it from Clara’s keyring. When we climbed back into the tractor cab, I stuck the keyring in Clara’s soggy handbag and tucked it back under the tractor seat so I could hold on.

Now that we weren’t towing the car, Robert put it in gear and soon we were jouncing briskly across rutted dirt lanes. The tractor is air-conditioned and has an AM/FM radio, but Robert keeps the tape deck loaded with Patsy, Hank and George.

“Ain’t no country music on the radio no more,” he said. “Hell of a note when country stations don’t play nothing but Garth Brooks and Dixie Chicks and think that’s country.”

We rode through the night harmonizing along with Ernest Tubbs and Loretta Lynn on “Sweet Thang,” a song that used to really crack me up when I was six.

CHAPTER | 14

“Prepare for the worst, which is yet to come,” were the only consoling words of the weather bureau officials.

The calls started at daybreak.

“You got you plenty of batteries laid in?” asked Robert.

“Batteries?” I asked groggily.

“They’re saying we’re definitely gonna get us some of that hurricane. You want to make sure your flashlight works when the lights go off.”

“We got an extra kerosene lantern,” said his wife Doris, who was on their extension phone. “How ’bout I send Robert over with it?”

Less than ninety seconds after they rang off, it was Haywood and Isabel.

“Don’t forget to bring in all your porch chairs,” said Haywood.

“And fill some milk jugs with clean water,” said Isabel.

“Water?” I yawned.

“If the power goes, so does your water pump.”

Seth and Minnie were also solicitous of my water supply.

“I’ve already got both bathtubs filled,” Minnie said. “This hot weather, you want to be able to flush if the electricity goes out.”

I hadn’t lost power since I moved into my new house the end of July, but it wasn’t unusual when I was growing up out here in the country. It seldom stayed off more than a couple of days and since we heated with woodstoves that could double as cookstoves, no electricity wasn’t much of a hardship in the winter. More like going camping in your house. Especially since it was usually caused by an ice storm that had closed school anyhow, so that you got to stay home and go sliding during the day, then come in to hot chocolate and a warm and cozy candlelit evening of talking or making music around the stove.

Summer was a little worse. We never had air-conditioning so we didn’t expect to stay cool even when the electricity was on, but running out of ice for our tea and soft drinks was a problem. And two days were about as long as you could trust food from the refrigerator in hot weather.

I emptied the ice bin into a plastic bag so that my icemaker would make a fresh batch. And I dutifully filled my tub, kettle, and a couple of pots with water since I had no empty plastic jugs on hand.

Daddy drove through the yard with my newspaper and said I ought to come over and stay at the homeplace till the hurricane had passed.

I pointed out that my new house had steel framing and was guaranteed to hold up under winds of a hundred and seventy miles an hour, “So maybe you should spend the night with me.”

“Mine’s stood solid through a hundred years of storms and Hazel, too, and it ain’t never even lost a piece of tin.” The mention of tin must have reminded him of the house trailer Herman’s son Reese was renting from Seth because he added, “Reese is gonna come. And Maidie and Cletus.”

Now a hurricane party was a tempting thought and I told him I’d let him know.

After he left and before someone else could tie up my line, I picked up the phone to call Kidd even though he was probably already gone. And then I put it back down again, more than a little annoyed. After all, shouldn’t he be worried about me? The way Fran was lining up, Colleton County was just as likely to get hit as New Bern. Couldn’t he find a spare minute to see if I was okay?

No?

Then he could damn well wonder.

With all the distractions, I was halfway to Dobbs before I remembered Clara Freeman’s purse and Lashanda’s doll. No time to go back for them if I wanted to check past the hospital before going to court.

* * *

At Dobbs Memorial, it was only a few minutes past eight but the intensive care unit’s waiting room was jammed with Balm of Gilead members. A couple of Ralph Freeman’s colleagues from the middle school where he taught were there, along with some ministers from nearby churches. I greeted those I recognized and learned that Clara Freeman was in critical but stable condition. They had operated on her early this morning to relieve the pressure on her brain but it was too soon to make predictions, although Ralph was with the surgeon now.

Mingled with the hospital smells of antiseptics and floor wax were the appetizing aromas of hot coffee and fast-food breakfast meals—sausage biscuits from Hardee’s, Egg McMuffins, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts—nourishment for people who’d evidently been here since Mrs. Freeman was brought in last night.

Stan and his little sister were seated against the far wall and I went over to them.

“Stan, Lashanda, I’m so sorry about your mother.”

“Thank you, Miss Deborah,” the boy said.

Before he could say anything else, the large elderly man who sat beside him said, “Stanley, will you introduce this lady to me?”

It may have been couched as a request, but the tone sounded awfully like an order to me.

“Yes, sir. This is Judge Deborah Knott,” he said with touching formality. “Miss Deborah, this is my grandfather, the Reverend James McElroy Gaithers.”

“Judge?” He looked faintly disapproving. Because I was a judge? (“I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man.”) Or because I was white? (“He shall separate them one from another.”)

“Yes, sir,” I said. “District Court. And you’re Mrs. Freeman’s father?”

“I am.”

There are many preachers who prefer the Old Testament to the New and the Reverend James McElroy Gaithers was clearly one of them. For him, I was pretty sure that the dominant element of the Trinity would be God the stern father of retribution, not Jesus the forgiving son.

“You’re from Warrenton, I believe?”

He nodded magisterially.

“It’s a sad thing that brings you down here,” I commiserated. “I’m really sorry.”

“My daughter is in the hands of the Lord,” he said. “His will shall be done.”

At the old man’s words, Stan looked stricken and little Lashanda simply looked miserable. Was there no one to rescue the children from this Jeremiah and give them true comfort? Where was Clara Freeman’s good friend that Ralph had mentioned last night? Rosa Somebody? Surely she was somewhere in this crowd and with a hint dropped into her ear, maybe she would—

Stan’s face suddenly brightened at the sight of someone behind me and I turned to see Cyl DeGraffenried.

I had to hand it to her. For a woman who was falling apart the last time I saw her, she was in complete control now, poised and professional in a crisp hunter green linen suit with soft white silk blouse and matching low-heeled pumps. Her hair fell in artful perfection around her lovely face and pearls gleamed coolly at her throat and earlobes.

She spoke to Stan and Lashanda, was introduced to their grandfather, immediately sized up the situation and said to him in solicitous female tones, “I know you’ll want to speak privately with the doctor when he comes, so why don’t the Judge and I take your grandchildren out for some fresh air and breakfast?”

Both children immediately stood up as Cyl looked at me brightly. “Deborah?”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to look as taken aback as I actually was.

My court session was technically due to start at nine, but by the time most ADAs finish working out their plea bargains and stipulations, things seldom get moving much before nine-thirty or a quarter till ten, so we had more than an hour to give the children.

Reverend Gaithers started to object but Cyl blithely chose to misunderstand him. “No, no, you do not have to thank us. It’s no trouble at all. We haven’t had breakfast yet either, have we, Deborah?”

We made our getaway through the swinging doors and came face-to-face with Ralph Freeman and a doctor in surgical scrubs.

Ralph looked at us in confusion and Cyl seemed suddenly out of words herself.

“Daddy!” cried Lashanda and bounded into his arms.

“Is Mama going to be all right?” asked Stan.

“Dr. Potts thinks so,” Ralph said, swinging his daughter up to hug her as he nodded toward his companion.

Having only seen a man in a suit and tie when I was deciding on his divorce settlement, I hadn’t immediately recognized Dr. Jeremy Potts. He knew me though, and gave a sour tilt of the head.

“We were just coming in so Dr. Potts can explain to Clara’s father.” He kissed Lashanda and stood her back on her own feet. “Thanks, Deborah, for getting extra patrol cars out to look for her. Somebody said you helped pull her out?”

The children stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Not me, my brother Robert. His tractor. With a lot of help from the fire and rescue squads. I just did the heavy looking on.” I smiled down at Lashanda. “I saved your doll though. Oh, and your wife’s purse and keys,” I told Ralph. “I forgot to bring them in with me, but I’ll get them to you as soon as I can.”

“No hurry,” he said. “I’m afraid she’s not going to be driving any time soon.”

He was now under control enough to speak directly to Cyl. “Where are y’all off to?”

Stan spoke up. “Miss Cyl and Miss Deborah’s taking us out to breakfast.”

“If that’s okay with you?” Cyl managed to add. “We thought they could use a break from the waiting room.”

“That’s very kind of y’all.”

He looked at her as if he didn’t want to stop looking and my heart broke for them, but Dr. Potts cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Freeman?”

“Sorry, Doctor. I guess I’m holding you up.”

The two men went on into the waiting room and we drove over to the north end of Main Street in Cyl’s car. The air was thick with humidity and the sky was full of low gray clouds. There wasn’t much wind here on the ground, but overhead, those clouds scudded eerily past like frantic dirty sheep scattering before wolves we couldn’t yet see.

* * *

The Coffee Pot has a long counter where hungry folks in a hurry perch, a big round table with ashtrays for retirees who are more interested in gossip than food, and four non-smoking booths in back for those who want a little privacy.

We took a booth and Ava Dupree came straight over with a menu, her pale blue eyes bright with curiosity. My brother Herman’s electrical shop is right next door and we often meet here for coffee. Ava greeted Cyl by name, too, but she didn’t recognize the children and she’s not shy about asking personal questions.

“Freeman? Oh, yeah, your mama’s the one that went and run off the road into Possum Creek last night, ain’t she? I heard ’em talking about it first thing this morning. She’s gonna be okay, ain’t she?”

“We sure could use some orange juice here, Ava,” I said pointedly.

“And how about some blueberry pancakes, bacon, milk and coffee?” said Cyl. “That okay with y’all?”

Next to me, Stan nodded agreement and Lashanda, seated beside Cyl, smiled shyly. Blue barrettes in the shape of little bluebirds were clipped to the ends of all her braids.

Stan knew Cyl because she’d given him a lift home from my Fourth of July pig-picking last month and from seeing her at the ball field, but she was a stranger to the little girl.

Not for long though.

“Somebody just lost a tooth,” Cyl said. “Was the Tooth Fairy good to you?”

“I thought she wasn’t,” the child replied, “’cause guess what? My tooth was still in the glass this morning when I woke up! But Stan said it was because too many people were in the house awake last night and maybe she got afraid.”

“Shandy!” An awkward, bony preadolescent, eleven-year-old Stan looked so exceedingly self-conscious that I could almost swear he was blushing, but his little sister was oblivious.

“And guess what? When I came back from brushing my teeth, my tooth was gone and guess what was in the water?”

She drew her hand out of her pocket and proudly showed us two shiny quarters.

“Hey, that’s really cool,” Cyl said, smiling at Stan. “She never left me more than a dime.”

“Inflation.” Stan grinned.

By the time our pancakes arrived, she had charmed them both. Stan told us about a school science project he was working on—how he’d been documenting Fran’s path from the time she was nothing more than a tropical depression off the coast of Africa till whatever happened in the next twenty-four hours. I learned things about hurricanes I’d never given much thought to before.

“They’re saying it’s going to be one of the really big ones!” He gestured so excitedly as he described the spiraling bands of storms around the eye that the plastic syrup dispenser went flying and he had to get up and chase it down.

Lashanda looked less than thrilled by the approaching storm and moved closer to Cyl till she was tucked up almost under Cyl’s arm. “I wish we could spend the night at your house.”

Cyl put her arm around the child and gave a little squeeze. “I wish you could, too, baby.”

“Shandy!” said her brother.

“Grandfather scares me.” A tear slid down her cheek. “And Mama’s not coming home tonight and if Daddy stays with her and we get tornadoes—”

Her lip quivered.

“What about your mother’s friend?” I asked. “Someone named Rosa?”

“Miss Rosa hasn’t come yet,” said Stan. “She must’ve worked last night ’cause we couldn’t get her on the phone either.”

Not much of a best friend, I thought, thinking how I’d react if something like this happened to Portland or Morgan or Dixie or two or three other close friends.

“And you just might have just a little more freedom to come and go when you like,” the preacher reminded me. “You don’t know what obstacles of job or children might be keeping her away.”

“Don’t worry,” Cyl told Lashanda. “Things will work out.”

She wet a napkin in a glass of water and gently wiped the little girl’s sticky lips.

* * *

When we delivered the children back to the ICU waiting room, Ralph immediately came over and thanked us again.

“How is Mrs. Freeman really?” Cyl asked when Stan and Lashanda spotted friends of their own age and moved away from us.

“Really?” Ralph shook his head, clearly weary from lack of sleep and a deep sadness. “Dr. Potts can’t say. She should have regained consciousness by now, but she hasn’t. There are broken ribs, bruised windpipe from the seat belt—thank God she was wearing it! Those things are relatively superficial. But the concussion . . . and of course, the longer she’s in a coma, the worse the prospects. Maybe by lunchtime we’ll know better.”

The mention of lunchtime made me look at my watch. Ten after nine.

I squeezed Ralph’s hand. “We have to go now, but we’ll be praying for her.”

“You’ll come back?”

“Yes,” said Cyl.

* * *

She was silent in the elevator down and as we walked out through the parking lot, I said, “You okay?”

“I’m holding it together.” She gave me an unhappy smile. “For the moment anyhow.”

“See you at the courthouse, then.” I headed for my car a few spaces past hers, then stopped short. “Oh, damn!”

“What?” asked Cyl.

“Somebody’s popped the lock on my trunk again.” I was totally exasperated. This was the second time in a year. “What the hell do they think I carry?”

“They take anything?” she asked, peering over my shoulder.

My briefcase was still there. So were my robe and the heavy locked toolbox where I stash wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, extra windshield wipers and the registered .38 Daddy gave me when I told him I was going to keep on driving deserted roads at night and that I didn’t need a man to protect me. Things had been stirred and the roll of paper towels was tangled in my robe, but I couldn’t see that anything was missing.

I transferred robe and briefcase to the front seat and wired the trunk lid down. It irked me that I was going to have to spend my morning break filing another police complaint so I could prove to the insurance company that the damage really happened.

Court was disjointed that morning, complicated by a bunch of no-shows and motions to recalendar due to the weather. With Fran expected to come ashore tonight somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Wilmington, everyone seemed to have trouble concentrating and by the time I gave up and adjourned for the day at one p.m., the wind had picked up and it was raining hard again.

Frankly, I was getting more than a little tired of both the anticipation and the rain, too.

“Enough already!” I grumbled to Luther Parker, with whom I share a connecting bathroom. “Let’s just have a good blow and get it over with and get back to sunshine.”

“Hope it’s that easy,” he said.

Everything smelled musty and felt damp. I almost slipped off my shoes and wiggled my stockinged toes just to make sure they weren’t starting to grow little webs.

At the midmorning break, when I reported my jimmied trunk to the Dobbs town police, I’d cut through the Sheriff’s Department to gripe about it to Dwight, but his office was empty.

He was there at one-fifteen, though, munching a hamburger at his desk. I started through the door of his office singing my song of woe, then stopped when I saw Terry Wilson sitting at the other end of the desk with his own hamburger and drink can.

“What’s happened, Terry?” There’s only a short list of things to bring an SBI agent out during working hours. “Dwight? Somebody get killed?”

“Yeah. One of the maids out at the Orchid Motel,” Dwight said. “Lived in Cotton Grove. A neighbor found her around five this morning. Somebody sliced her up pretty bad last night. Knocked her around first, then cut off one of her fingers slick as a surgeon would. While she was still alive. Blood everywhere.”

I watched as Terry squirted a tinfoil packet of ketchup on his french fries. I guess you get anesthetized after a while.

“Is her death related to Lynn Bullock’s?”

“Be a right big coincidence if it isn’t,” said Terry, who’s as tolerant of my questions as Dwight.

“You get any hint of it when you interviewed her?” I asked Dwight.

“The thing is, we never did,” he admitted with a huge sigh of regret. “She got off work before the Bullock woman checked in and didn’t come back on duty till the next day, long after the killing took place. Didn’t seem to be any urgency about talking with her. Sloppy.”

“Don’t beat up on yourself,” said Terry, as I opened Dwight’s little refrigerator and helped myself to one of the cold drinks inside. “You and your people were all over that motel. If Rosa Edwards knew something about the murder, she should’ve—”

“Rosa Edwards?” I asked, popping the top of a Diet Pepsi. “That’s who got killed?”

“Yeah,” said Dwight. “You know her?”

I shook my head. “No, but Ralph Freeman said she was his wife’s closest friend here.” I stared at them, struck by a sudden thought. “What if it’s nothing to do with Lynn Bullock? What if it’s about how Clara Freeman wound up in Possum Creek without leaving any skid marks on the pavement?”

Dwight reached for his Rolodex and started dialing. “Jimmy? You done anything yet with that Honda Civic Robert Knott pulled out of the creek last night? . . . Good. Don’t touch it. I’m sending a crew out to examine it.”

CHAPTER | 15

But when their hearts are really touched they drop everything and rush to the rescue of the afflicted.

Cyl stuck her head in my office as I was sliding my feet into a pair of sandals so old that it wouldn’t matter if they got soaked. I saw that she, too, had changed from those expensive dark green heels to scuffed black flats that had seen better days. Fran was still out in the Atlantic, just off the coast of Wilmington, but so huge that her leading edge was already spilling into the Triangle area. We were in for a night of high wind and heavy rain whether or not the hurricane actually came inland.

Cyl had heard about Rosa Edwards’s murder, but she hadn’t connected it to Clara Freeman until I told her of their friendship. Instantly, her thoughts flew to Stan and Lashanda. Their mother was in a coma, her closest friend had been brutally butchered and a big storm was on the way. Anything that touched Ralph Freeman was going to touch her but she did seem genuinely distressed for the children, who might have to stay alone with their stern-faced grandfather.

“I could take them to my grandmother’s, but she’s already gone to my uncle’s house in Durham.”

“I’m sure some kind family from the church will take them in,” I soothed.

I was anxious to head back to the farm, but Cyl asked if I’d go with her to the hospital and I couldn’t turn her down since it was only the second time she’d ever asked me for a favor.

* * *

The sky was dark as we drove in tandem to the hospital on the northwest side of Dobbs and the ICU waiting room was nearly empty except for the children, the Reverend James McElroy Gaithers, and a couple of church people who were clearly torn between a wish to comfort and an even more sincere wish to get home under shelter before the wind got too heavy.

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 ain’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 system 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.”

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 and 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 the 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.

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.

From the backseat, I heard Stan say, “You know him?”

“Not really. Can you do my seat belt? I can’t click it.”

“Then how come you thought he had a daughter?”

“’Cause when Mama comes to pick me up at school, he’s there, too.”

Despite the heat, a chill went down my spine at the child’s words. Making my voice as casual as I could, I said, “You’ve seen him at your school, honey?”

“Yes’m, and guess what? When we stop for groceries and stuff, he goes to the same places.”

Cyl glanced at me curiously and then her eyes widened as she picked up on what I was thinking.

Goes to the same places? Childless, white Jason Bullock “goes to the same places” as Clara Freeman, a black mother?

My mind raced across the events of the last week, fitting one fact with another as everything spun like the wheels of a slot machine planning to come up cherries straight across. Unfortunately, it was another four minutes to the Freeman house and I couldn’t say a word to Cyl.

Ralph and his father-in-law were getting out of the car when we drove up. A chinaball tree had blown down near the carport, just missing one of the support posts, but that seemed to be the only damage here.

By the set of his chin, I saw that Stan meant to step between Cyl and his father so I quickly loaded him down with his and Lashanda’s overnight backpacks and asked where he wanted his radio as I carried it up to the side door. Too well-mannered to dig in his heels, he reluctantly followed Lashanda and me up the drive. I greeted a weary Reverend Gaithers with burbling cheerfulness, asked about Clara, and said how much we’d enjoyed having the two kids. All this so that Cyl could have one very quick, if very public, moment with Ralph.

“She’s doing better,” said the old man. “I really do believe the good Lord’s going to spare her. She opened her eyes this morning for a few minutes. I don’t know if she knew me, but when I squeezed her hand, she squeezed mine back.”

As we stood talking, the kids went on into the house and began opening all the windows, not that there was any breeze to mitigate the smothering, humidity-drenched heat. A chain saw three doors down made it difficult to understand each other and when it paused, I heard the siren of a rescue vehicle rushing somewhere several streets over. Ralph came up the drive and it was hard to meet his eyes as I told him I was glad to hear that his wife seemed to be coming out of her coma.

“Did you tell him Stan knows?” I asked Cyl as we drove away.

She nodded. “I’d give anything to take that knowledge away from him.”

“Ralph? Or Stan?”

“Stan.”

I started to speak, but she said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

“Okay.” I paused at the stop sign, trying to remember precisely how we’d come. “Jason Bullock’s car is black,” I said.

“I noticed.”

“Want to bet he’s already lined up a body shop to get the dents banged out and repainted?”

“No bets.” She sighed and I wondered if that sigh was for Ralph or Jason.

Either way, I reached over and squeezed her hand.

“I guess I don’t have all the facts straight,” Cyl said gamely, trying to match my interest in Lynn Bullock’s murder. “How could Jason be at the motel killing his wife at the very same time he’s at the ball field playing ball?”

I’d already figured it out.

“Remember last night?” I told her. “How we thought Cletus was upstairs asleep? If anybody’d asked me to alibi him, I’d have taken my oath he was there all the time, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Well, it’s the same with Jason Bullock. I heard him get a call from his wife around five and he was there for pregame pictures around six-thirty. He wandered down for a Coke, and I saw him talking to people on his way to the rest area, but he could have slipped away for a half-hour and who would notice? I wonder if he got a little too cute, though?”

“How do you mean?”

“The switchboard says a man called the motel twice—right before she checked in and again after she called Jason. If he got cocky and made those calls from his cell phone, there’ll be a record of it on his bill. Reid, Millard King, and Brandon Frazier all say she wouldn’t give them the time of day anymore. Maybe she really had quit messing around with other men.”

Cyl nodded thoughtfully. “So she went to that motel expecting Jason to join her for a romantic tryst after his ball game, perhaps trying to put the spark back into their marriage?”

Our line of work made us familiar with the sexual games some couples play.

“And Jason used it to set up her death. Reid says he’s ambitious, and he’s certainly bright enough to see how a woman like Lynn could hold him back. The way she dressed, the way she’d slept with half the bar in Colleton County? He could divorce her, but then he’d be in the same spot as Dr. Jeremy Potts. Everybody knows Lynn put him through law school. He wouldn’t want to pay alimony the rest of his life based on his enhanced income potential, now would he?”

“But Rosa Edwards saw him and he came after her,” said Cyl.

“Only first, he came after an African-American woman driving a white Honda Civic,” I said.

Cyl’s lovely mobile face froze as the implications of my words sank in.

“Of course,” she said bitterly. “He didn’t run Clara Freeman into the creek, it was the car and whatever black woman happened to be driving that car. We probably all look alike to him.”

The street ahead led straight out of town and seemed to be clear as far as I could see. Nevertheless, I turned left, retracing our trek through town.

“Why are we going this way?” asked Cyl.

“Because I want another look at Jason Bullock’s car. It seems to me that that was an awfully small tree to have done that much damage. Maybe he helped it along with a sledgehammer or something.”

“And you want to play detective? No. Call the Sheriff’s Department. Let Dwight Bryant handle it. I mean it, Deborah. I want to go home.”

“It won’t take but a minute,” I soothed.

But as we turned into Jason’s street, we immediately ran into a solid wall of cars and people, all focused on the rescue truck halfway down the block.

“Oh, Lord,” said Cyl. “That’s where they were going to cut up a tree. Did that old woman have a heart attack or somebody get hurt?”

With the crowd watching whatever fresh disaster was unfolding, it seemed like a good time to slip over and take a closer look at Jason’s car. Accordingly, I copied several other vehicles and parked diagonally with two wheels on the pavement and the other two on someone’s front lawn.

“Be right back,” I told Cyl, who grabbed at a nearby woman’s arm, to ask what was going on. I saw men running with shovels from all over and I hesitated, finally registering the naked horror that hung palpably in the air.

A man I recognized by face though not by name was backing out of the crowd. He was built like a bear with thick neck and brawny arms and he was covered with sawdust and a cold sweat. His eyes were glazed, his face was greenish white. I couldn’t tell if he was in shock or about to throw up.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, God! I didn’t know he was down there. I didn’t know!”

“Know what?” I asked again.

“The stump just stood back up.”

I couldn’t make sense of his words, but someone who knew him hurried out of the crowd and put his arm around the man and told me to leave him alone. “Come away, Fred. It’s not your fault. The damn fool shouldn’t have been down there.”

If Fred couldn’t talk, there were others almost hysterical at witnessing such a ghastly accident. A hundred-year-old oak had pulled halfway out of the ground, they said, leaving behind a huge root hole, several feet across and three or four feet deep. A neighbor had gone into the hole and was bending down to cut through the roots that were still in the ground just as another neighbor—the man they called Fred—finished cutting through the trunk’s three-foot diameter.

Released from the weight of those heavy, leaf-laden branches, the thick stump and enormous root ball suddenly flipped back into the hole, completely burying the man who was there. A dozen men were digging with shovels and picks, others were trying to hitch ropes and chains from the stump to a team of pickup trucks. They had sent for a bulldozer that was even now lumbering down the street, but everyone knew it was too late the instant the stump righted itself.

“That poor bastard!” said one of the men. “First his wife and now him.”

“Such a good man,” said an elderly white woman with tears running down her face. “He was always looking to help others.”

Before I could ask the final question, Cyl pulled me away.

“It’s Jason Bullock,” she said.

CHAPTER | 18

Most of these storms describe a parabola, with the westward arch touching the Atlantic Coast, after which the track is northeastward, finally disappearing with the storm itself in the north Atlantic.

With Jason Bullock dead, there was no way to know whether Cyl and I were right about his reasons for killing his wife—anger over Lynn’s affairs, political aspirations, or a simple wish to be free of her without paying the price of divorce. The important thing was that once Dwight’s people concentrated on him, there was plenty of proof that he had indeed done it.

I was right about his cell phone bills. He’d called the Orchid Motel from the ball field twice, trying to make it look as if another man knew she was there. We still don’t know if he jogged over to the motel or drove. No witness has come forward to say they saw him do either, but there’s at least a half-hour gap when none of us can say positively that he was at the field.

They haven’t found the envelope Rosa Edwards gave Clara Freeman, but the bloody clothes he’d worn when he butchered her were in a garbage bag at the bottom of his trash barrel, so we’re pretty sure he’s the one who stole the envelope from my house. And as soon as Clara Freeman was well enough for Dwight to interview her, she described Jason’s car and identified his picture as the white man who ran her off the road.

When Reid eventually heard that Millard King’s tie tack had also been found in Lynn’s motel room, he theorized that she must have had a cache of souvenirs and that Jason had planted them to implicate the men who had slept with his wife. He was real proud of his theory and ready to run tell it to Dwight until I reminded him why this would not be a good idea.

“But I could get my pen back,” he argued.

“Forget it,” I snarled.

Dwight beat up on himself when all the other facts were in. “Last time I believe a lawyer about anything,” he said bitterly. “That night I went to tell him about his wife? If you could’ve seen it—table set for two, salad wilting in the bowl, steaks drying up on the drainboard—and just the right mixture of shock and anger. He played me like a goddamned violin.”

“Or a jury,” I said cynically.

* * *

Five hot and sweaty days later, power was still out over the rural parts of Colleton County, although phone service had been restored in less than forty-eight hours. Eighteen states had sent crews to help restore North Carolina’s electricity but over five thousand poles were down and at least three thousand miles of wires and cables needed to be replaced.

Every day reminded us all over again just how much we relied on electricity in ways we didn’t even realize. My family could be smug about cooking with propane gas but in this heat, we were having trouble keeping food fresh in our picnic coolers without a ready supply of ice. Robert, Andrew and Haywood had portable gas-run generators and were sharing them with Daddy and Seth every eight hours so that nobody lost a freezer chest full of meat and vegetables, but all the gasoline pumps at the local crossroads stations worked by electricity and for the first couple of days, lines were long at the few in-town stations that hadn’t lost power.

We had to recharge our portable phones at work, tell time by wristwatches, prise open windows that had been painted shut after the advent of year-round “climate control,” and swelter through long smothery nights without even a ceiling fan to stir a breeze. We had to think before flushing toilets and forget about showers. Candlelight lost its romantic novelty after two days and there was a lot of grumbling about spending the evenings without any electronic entertainments.

I cleaned out my refrigerator before it started smelling and put trays of baking soda on the shelves so that stale odors wouldn’t build up. Some of my perishables went to Aunt Zell’s refrigerator over in Dobbs. I started a compost pile with the rest.

Dobbs had gone without power a mere thirty-six hours, but our courts were still on half-session.

On Thursday morning, I heard a probable cause against a Norwood Love from down near Makely, who was represented by my cousin John Claude Lee. During the storm, the back of young Mr. Love’s hog pen collapsed, revealing an underground chamber beneath the barn it abutted—a chamber full of large plastic barrels and a stainless steel cooker, all set to start making bootleg whiskey.

According to the agent who testified that morning, it did not appear that the still had ever been in operation, but mere possession of such equipment is against the law. I agreed that there was indeed probable cause and set a trial date. Since Mr. Love had no record, though, I released him without bail.

Afterwards, I visited with Aunt Zell to pick up a couple of loads of laundry that she’d done for Daddy and Maidie and me.

“If Kidd wants to come up this weekend, he can stay here,” she offered, knowing how long it’d been.

I thanked her, but said I doubted he could get away.

Truth is, I wasn’t sure if he wanted to get away.

We’d spoken a couple of times. I called him that first day to say I was all right, in case he was worried, and to hear how he was. What he was, was . . . shall we say, occupied?

The storm surge at New Bern was more than nine feet and it had flooded his daughter Amber and his ex-wife out of their house. Last time I phoned, they were both staying with Kidd, whose cabin was on higher ground. So maybe that was the reason he didn’t sound anxious to come to me, and it was certainly the reason I couldn’t go to him.

When I stopped past the homeplace to give Maidie the folded laundry, I was surprised to see Daddy standing by an unfamiliar pickup.

It was an awkward moment as Norwood Love and I recognized each other from morning court. He murmured a soft, “Sorry, ma’am,” then cranked his truck and drove off.

“How do you know him?” I asked Daddy.

“I know a lot of people, shug,” he said.

“Did he tell you he’s waiting trial for owning moonshining equipment?”

“Yeah, he told me.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “Reckon that’s why he come to me. Thought maybe I’d understand quicker than most folks how come he needs extra work. I said I’d hire him to clear out some of them trees blocking the lanes. Your brothers got so much on their plates, we can use another pair of hands.”

Daddy doesn’t often touch on his own past history of moonshining and he’s certainly never discussed it with me even though I’ve heard a lot of the stories from my brothers and a few others from SBI and ATF agents. As I’ve gotten older and heard more, I have to say that not all of the stories have been warm and funny. Some have a violent edge that makes me uneasy to think about.

* * *

There wasn’t a breath of wind blowing when I got back to my house and the air was so steamy that I planned to jump into the pond as soon as I arrived.

Cyl was waiting for me on the porch. It was the first time I’d seen her looking halfway like herself since the storm, but then she lived in Garner where there was hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and hair dryers.

“Want to go skinny-dipping?” I said as soon as I got out of the car.

“Not really.”

There was something different about her.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I just came from my grandmother’s and I wanted you to be the second to know.”

“Know what?” I asked with apprehension.

“That I gave Doug Woodall my notice at noon today. I flew up to Washington yesterday to interview with McLean, Applebee and Shaw and they made me a very generous offer.”

The name was vaguely familiar.

“They’re one of the most effective black lobbyist firms in Washington,” she said. “I’ll be going back up this weekend to look for an apartment.”

“Oh, Cyl,” I said, “are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said firmly. “I just wanted to thank you for being there when I really needed a friend.”

My eyes filled with tears. It’s in the genes. Half my family can’t watch a Hallmark commercial without crying.

She was crisp and cool, I was hot and sweaty, but I hugged her anyhow. “I’m really going to miss you, girl.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll be back to visit Grandma and you can come visit me. I’m hoping to find a place in Georgetown. Think of us in all those great shops and restaurants.”

“Yeah,” I said glumly.

“It’s the only way I can deal with it,” she said quietly and this time, she hugged me.

* * *

After Cyl left, I changed clothes, then got out the pane of glass and glazing putty I’d bought a couple of days ago and began repairing my broken window. Different brothers had offered to do it, but they’re still working on bigger repairs. At least I don’t have tall trees around my house to fall on anything. And maybe I ought to reconsider where I want to plant them. Dwight’s right: it’ll take twenty years to grow them tall enough to do any damage, but I’ll probably still be here—alone—twenty years from now. Certainly doesn’t look as if I’ll be setting up housekeeping in New Bern any time soon.

I’m probably not cut out to be anybody’s stepmom.

Unlike Cyl, who would have been terrific under different circumstances.

I hadn’t seen Ralph Freeman since the day after the storm, but I heard that Clara was making a pretty good recovery, all things considered, and would probably be home before the weekend although Amy says she’s going to need a lot of physical therapy in the next few months.

Reese came by for a swim just as I was ready to jump in myself. He said that a power crew from Virginia was working its way out from Cotton Grove.

“The way they’re moving, we might get our lights back by midnight.”

“And not a minute too soon,” I said fervently as I floated on my back and let the warm water relax me.

“I’ll tell you one good thing about Fran, though,” he said, drifting along beside me.

“Yeah?”

“We’re not gonna have to listen to any more Hazel stories any time soon, are we?”

I laughed. “And fifty years from now, if I catch you telling Fran stories to your grandbabies, I’ll punch you hard.”

* * *

Darkness fell much as it did a hundred years ago, quietly and utterly. The night sky was radiant with stars undimmed by electric yard lights or the streetlights going in across the creek where a new housing development’s being built. Fireflies glowed with flicks of soft golden yellow while crickets sang to the stars.

It was the dark of the moon, yet the countryside seemed luminous to me. I blew out my candles and walked out to the pond, then skirted the edge and followed the rutted lane that was a double line of white sand against the darker grass.

Near the end of the pond, I smelled smoke and followed my nose till I saw fire reflected off bushes beyond the cut in the undergrowth. As I passed through the cut into the open field, I saw Daddy burning a brush pile and I couldn’t help but smile. Other men burn brush in the daytime but Daddy’s always done his burning at night. I watched him stir the flaming branches with his pitchfork. Sparks jetted thirty feet upwards like a fiery fountain against the velvet darkness.

Blue and Ladybelle came out to greet me, and as I walked into the circle of light, Daddy said, “Looks like roman candles, don’t it?”

For the next half hour, we circled the fire, pushing the longer branches in as their twiggy tops burned away. It was hot, sweaty work, but the flames kept our clothes dry. The smell of green leaves burning was unbearably nostalgic. Most of the time, I’m an adult, able to bear what has to be borne with an adult’s stoicism. But there are times when I miss Mother so much it’s like a physical hurt that’s never healed. She used to love bonfires, too.

Eventually, as the fire settled down, we sat on a nearby fallen log, talking of nothing important, watching the fire burn lower.

Without really thinking, I said, “You paying John Claude to represent the Love boy?”

He didn’t answer.

“You’re still messing with whiskey, aren’t you?”

There was such a long silence that I was almost afraid that I’d made him really mad. On the other hand, if he is still bootlegging, it threatens my professional reputation.

At last he said, “Your mama never understood why I couldn’t leave it alone. She thought it was the whiskey itself, but it won’t. You never seen me drunk, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“No, it won’t the whiskey. And after a while, it won’t even the money.”

Another silence.

“What, then?” I asked.

“I guess you might say it was the excitement. Running the risks. Knowing what I could lose if I got caught. That’s something your mama never rightly understood.”

He turned and looked at me a long level moment by the dying fire. “You understand though, don’t you, shug?”

Now it was my turn to sit silently.

He nodded and poked the fire again. Another burst of bright sparks gushed upward in swirls of red and gold against the night sky.

Through the ravaged trees to the north, an answering glow suddenly appeared, a brilliant whiteness against the treetops.

It was the floodlights of a power crew working its way into the dark countryside.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I am indebted to many for their help and technical advice, in particular: District Court Judges Shelly S. Holt, John W. Smith, and Rebecca W. Blackmore of the 5th Judicial District Court (New Hanover and Pender Counties, NC).

Belated thanks to Gail Harrell, Regional Library Supervisor of the Southeast Regional Library, who let me plug my laptop into her office socket when Hurricane Fran took away my electricity for a week.

Thanks also to Irv Coats, the generous and knowledgeable proprietor of The Reader’s Corner, who always hands me the perfect source book.

AN OUTPOURING OF PRAISE FOR STORM TRACK

“An enchanting regional series. . . . Deborah is the voice of sanity and the soul of wit.”

—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

“Down-home setting and racy plot combine to make it a very tasty whodunit . . . in this entertaining regional mystery series.”

—USA Today

“This series is like sweet iced tea on an August day in North Carolina—near impossible to resist.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Maron turns in an entertaining and perfectly creditable performance. . . . It works.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Her characters spring to life. . . . [This book is] a very nice surprise.”

—Boston Globe

“Stellar . . . the best of a good series.”

—Toronto Globe and Mail“Compelling . . . Maron has an unfailing ear for dialogue.”

—Tennessean

“An absorbing, fast-paced tale. . . . The plot is devious, with both the true motive and means concealed until the end.”

—Greensboro News & Record (NC)

“Engrossing. . . . Maron is a mistress of the mood—setting a tone that captures readers like a lure on a hook.”

—Salisbury Post

“Seventh in a series, STORM TRACK is yet another look at how the Old South is changing into a sometimes unrecognizable New South. Maron’s light touch creates vivid characters, and she never forgets the puzzle.”

—Dallas Morning News

“A rousing combination of natural disaster and narrative creativity . . . is highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“Maron’s finely crafted novels about an ever-urbanizing North Carolina are like gathering around one of those legendary storytellers of the South as they spin story after story. . . . In Maron’s case, she lets her heroine, Judge Deborah Knott, weave tales about her expansive family in novels that are as personal as they are engrossing.”

—Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“I know of no writer who is better at conveying a sense of place than Maron. North Carolina has never been more vibrant than in STORM TRACK. . . . Maron won an Edgar for her first Deborah Knott novel; this one is even better.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Maron can be counted on to deliver a nicely wrapped story full of people you love and love to hate.”

—Southern Pines Pilot (NC)

“Wonderfully drawn, full human beings who may be eccentric, and occasionally dangerous, but never clichés.”

—London Free Press

“Maron has another triumphant relationship mystery that will send new fans seeking other Judge Knott novels.”

—Midwest Book Review

“A human drama of the highest sort, guaranteed to keep you riveted. Maron does a masterful job of plotting her mystery against the growing storm, keeping the tension running at high octane.”

—Romantic Times

“As always, Maron gets her North Carolina rhythms and speech just right. She also keeps the suspense going right into Hurricane Fran’s winds and rain and falling ancient oaks. . . . The only complaint to make about STORM TRACK is that it has to end and we have to wait another year to again enjoy Judge Knott and her family and neighbors, in all their charm and lethal behavior.”

—Winston-Salem Journal