Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  He closed his eyes and held onto her. He needed to know what she’d say next, but he was afraid to hear it.

  “Ronnie,” she finally said in a shaky voice. “Did you—”

  He wouldn’t let her say the words. He’d save her from that. “Please,” he said before she had to finish her question. “Baby, please don’t think that of me.”

  She let the minutes stretch on, willing to do that, wishing that she and Ronnie could stay where they were for a good long while. Just the two of them in the brightly lit house, his head on her stomach, her hand stroking his hair again. She’d feared when Laverne had gone and Missy and Pat had driven away with the girls that she’d turned a corner into a dark room and she’d never be able to see her way out of it. Then Ronnie came back. Here he was, holding onto her, and she’d asked the question she’d had to ask. Had he set that trailer on fire? He’d asked her to please not think that of him, and she was trying. She was doing her best to believe he was innocent. She let that belief build from the way his hands fit into the small of her back and cradled her, the way he lay against her now, his eyes closed as if there on his knees he was giving himself to her. Broken down as he was, he was still hers. She’d loved him long and hard and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him and then being alone when their baby came.

  “That knife,” she finally said, though really she didn’t want to say anything at all. She just wanted the closeness of him with no need for words. She wanted this story that they were in the midst of to stop and for there to only be the story of their love. But there were still questions that needed answers, and she forced herself forward. “Your pocketknife. When I was pushing you out the door last night, you looked like you wanted to hurt me with it.”

  “No, baby. Not for a minute.” He opened his eyes and raised his head. “Oh, baby. I’d never hurt you like that.”

  It was then that Brandi told him that Laverne Ott had gone to Sheriff Biggs and the sheriff was looking for him. She scooted to the edge of the couch and tried to get to her feet. He got up from his knees, and he took her hands and helped her.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  He did as she asked. He watched her go down the hall and turn left into their bedroom. He heard a dresser drawer open, the drawer that screeched on its runners every time he opened it. The bottom drawer, which was his.

  As soon as she came back into the hallway, he knew what she had: his Sun Records T-shirt. He didn’t know how she’d found it in his car, but she had, and now he knew she’d have another question and it wouldn’t be one he’d want to answer.

  “How’d your shirt get ripped?” She held it up and showed him where the cloth had been stripped away. “Ronnie, it smells like gas. Why? Did you spill some on you when you poured it into my car that morning?”

  “I can’t get that smell out of my nose.”

  “So you did? You spilled some?” When he didn’t answer, she remembered again that he’d called Della that night and she hadn’t answered. Brandi said, “Ronnie, why did you go out to the trailer that night if you thought no one was there?”

  He waited, barely able to look her in the eyes. “You’re not going to want to hear everything there is to say.”

  “Maybe not.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “But it’s too late for secrets now. Tell me.”

  So first there was the telling, and then before Brandi could decide what she believed and what she didn’t, she heard footsteps on the porch and a sharp knock on the front door.

  Ronnie squeezed her hand—he’d held it the whole time he told his story—and she had to tug hard to get free from it.

  She opened the door, and there was Biggs and two deputies. Biggs didn’t say a word, didn’t acknowledge her at all. He just stepped into her house and said to Ronnie, “I’ve got enough evidence to arrest you, and we’re going to search this property.”

  Ronnie said, “Then do it.”

  “Ma’am,” the tall deputy said to Brandi. He had a long neck, and there was static electricity in his thin hair, making it stand on end. “We’ve come with a warrant.”

  The shorter deputy handed it to her. He was red in the face from the cold. He moved his feet about on the front porch.

  “What’s this mean?” she said.

  “Means we’re here to search the premises,” said the tall deputy. “We’re here to remove any items that might serve as evidence in the matter of the arson at Della Black’s trailer on the night of January tenth.”

  She looked at them, still not quite understanding.

  “Ma’am,” said the shorter deputy, “you really don’t have any choice.”

  She understood that. She stepped aside and let them in.

  29

  By noon the next day word was running around town. Ronnie Black was in custody. Maybe all that gossip? That gossip about him having something to do with that trailer fire? Well, maybe it wasn’t gossip at all. Maybe it was gospel.

  “You wouldn’t think it’d be possible,” Roe Carl kept saying to folks who came through her checkout line at Read’s IGA. “But, lordy, these are strange times.”

  Certain facts had come to light, and now folks were passing them around tables at the Real McCoy. Anna Spillman listened in as she served lunch platters and refilled coffee cups and iced tea glasses. The investigators from the State Fire Marshal’s office had found footprints in the muddy ground where the fire had melted the snow cover and thawed the frozen earth. A man’s footprints. The ridged tread of work boots. Those prints were frozen into the ground now, just under the fresh snow. You could drive out the blacktop and see them if you took a notion. They’d be there until the thaw came in the spring. The investigators had made plaster casts of those prints, and Sheriff Biggs had them in his office now. That was as true as true could be.

  It was also true that Della’s furnace had been acting up, but her daddy had it running fine the day of the fire. Wayne Best had told the investigators as much, and sure enough, when they gave it a look-see, they could tell it hadn’t malfunctioned that night. Nor had the Franklin stove, which Wayne said Della was using, been to blame.

  But one fact stood out as a cruel irony. Overlooked at first by investigators, a cardboard box containing wood ash, surely from the Franklin stove, finally got noticed behind the trailer.

  When the fire erupted, the points of ignition had been along the back of the trailer, far from the front corner where the stove was—multiple points of ignition near the back door off the kitchen.

  Ronnie had filled up a five-gallon gas can at Casey’s the morning of the fire. Taylor Jack reminded everyone about that. He’d been the one to take Ronnie’s money. “You running something?” Taylor asked, and Ronnie said that Brandi had run out of gas on her way to work, and he was carrying some to her. That all made sense, Taylor said later, but how come Ronnie came back the night of the fire to buy five gallons more?

  The diner went quiet when Taylor Jack told that part of the story, and even Anna Spillman, who’d always felt sorry for Ronnie and even let him stay with her, had to admit that the unthinkable was possible: Ronnie Black might have burned that trailer, not caring a snap who was inside.

  Laverne Ott and the State of Illinois were moving forward. Missy and Pat passed their medical exams and their criminal background checks. Lois and Wayne confirmed that they weren’t in a position to care for the girls and that their wish was that Missy and Pat be granted custody.

  On the day of the sheltered care hearing, the judge considered the evidence: a father under investigation for the arson that had killed his wife and three of their children, the story of how that father had tried to run a van off the road knowing that his daughters were inside.

  Laverne was there to answer questions concerning her inquiry, and as much as it pained her to say so, she recommended that the girls be allowed to stay in the custody of Pat and Missy Wade.

  “I can personally vouch for their character,” she said. “I’ve known them since they were children i
n my class.”

  The judge said, “Everything considered then, I’m awarding custody of these girls to Mr. and Mrs. Wade.”

  And like that it was done.

  When Missy and Pat got home after the sheltered care hearing, they heard a chainsaw running out in Shooter Rowe’s woods.

  “I wonder what he’s up to now?” Pat said.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like that noise.” Missy felt the cold air on her neck. She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered. “It gets on my last nerve. Come on. Let’s get in the house.”

  Pat changed his clothes and got ready to drive out to the job site, a new house out on Highway 50, a few miles west of Goldengate near the Crest Haven cemetery. The framing crew was finishing today and he needed to get out there and see how things were going.

  “I might be late this evening,” he told Missy. “Can you handle getting the girls?”

  “Angel’s coming on the bus,” she said. “I’ll gather up Hannah and Sarah and Emma.”

  “All right.” Pat zipped up his Carhartt coveralls. “Call me if you need anything.”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, and she clung to him a little longer than she usually would, putting her arms around him and pressing her face into his chest. She loved the solid feel of him, and she understood that through all their trouble—through all the miscarriages and the numbing sense of loss—she’d depended on him to be there for her no matter how many times she’d disappointed him.

  “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?” she asked.

  He kissed the top of her head. “It’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it?”

  She pulled back from him and looked up into his eyes. They were hard-set as if he were squinting into a bright sun. “Haven’t you always wanted a family?” she said. “You love those girls.”

  “I do love them. There’s no doubt about that. I just hope we’re not leaving ourselves open to trouble. You saw how crazy Ronnie was when he tried to run us off the road.”

  She nodded. “It’ll be all right.” She took Pat’s hand and squeezed it. “I know it will.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  He was thinking of the night of the fire and how he’d run up the road to find Della trying to save everyone from the flames. He’d done what he could. He’d wanted to do more. Then the trailer caved in and he knew there was nothing that he or anyone else could do for Della or the kids who were still inside. All that he and Shooter and Captain and the girls who had made it out could do was watch that trailer burn, backing away from the heat, lifting their heads at the first sound of the sirens coming from Goldengate.

  Later, once Biggs had started to sort things out, Pat volunteered to drive into town to tell Ronnie what had happened. And like that, their long strange journey began.

  Now it was getting close to an end. Pat could sense that. Questions were going to be answered, and his life and Missy’s and the lives of those sweet girls, who deserved none of this upset, were going to move on.

  “I’ll be back when I can,” he told Missy.

  She grinned and gave a little shrug of her shoulders as if to say of course he would. Everything was going to be fine. It was going to be easy-breezy. “I’ll be here,” she said.

  _________

  At the courthouse, Biggs had Ronnie in an interrogation room. Biggs sat at a foldout table. He allowed Ronnie to wander over to the window, where he stood looking out at State Street. A fine snow, half rain, was falling. Ronnie watched a man come out of the J.C. Penney store, a blue scarf wrapped around his face.

  “You better start talking,” Biggs said.

  For a good while, Ronnie didn’t speak. He just stayed there at that window, his head bowed. Then he turned to face Biggs. He lifted his head, drew his shoulders back.

  “All right,” he said. “Now listen.” His voice started to quaver, then, and he had to bite his lip and look down at his feet to get control of himself. “I’m not what people say I am.”

  Biggs said, “No one’s condemned you yet.”

  Ronnie let out a little puff of breath. He gave Biggs a weak grin. “If you ask me,” he said, “that’s exactly what this town’s done.”

  It was Willie Wheeler who finally came into the Real McCoy that afternoon and told Anna Spillman in a voice loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear that he’d seen a deputy carrying what looked to be a man’s T-shirt in a big ziplock plastic bag out of Brandi’s house. Another deputy had a bag that held Ronnie’s work boots. The deputies spent some time going through the storage shed in the backyard, and they carried out a five-gallon Marathon gas can, the kind with that logo of the nearly naked man running with his arm in the air and the red block letters that spelled out MARATHON.

  Willie didn’t know that at one point the taller deputy went back into Brandi’s house and told her, “We found a gas can in your shed.”

  Brandi said, “It’s the can Ronnie used the morning when I ran out of gas before I got to work. He carried five gallons to me in Phillipsport.”

  “Did he put it all in your car?”

  She nodded. “Every drop.”

  For a while, the deputy didn’t say anything. He took out a small pocket notebook and a pen, and he wrote something down. Then he said to Brandi, “That can in your shed? Ma’am, it still had about a gallon of gas in it.”

  Missy was making a shopping list—things she needed now that the girls were there—when she heard a racket outside. She got up from the kitchen table, went to the living room window, and peeked outside.

  Shooter Rowe was sitting on his Bobcat tractor in her driveway, looking toward the house. He lifted his arm and pointed a finger at her.

  What else could she do but go outside to see what he wanted.

  He had a scoop shovel on the front of the Bobcat, and she could see the chain saw riding inside. The scoop was stained with fresh mud, speckled with dead leaves and sticks.

  “You got those girls with you now.” He shouted over the idling tractor engine. “I saw you all leave this morning.”

  She was in no mood for chitchat. “What is it you want?”

  He sat on his tractor. “It’s a good thing you’re doing, taking those girls.”

  “You said that goat had hoof and mouth.” The words were out before she could even think about where they would lead. “Pat said we haven’t had hoof and mouth in this country for almost eighty years.”

  Shooter shut off the tractor and, after the noisy idling, the silence was unnerving. “That goat was sick.” His voice was low and pointed. Missy knew he was telling her to pay attention, warning her that she was going somewhere she really didn’t want to go. She felt certain that he’d been in the woods cutting trees and bulldozing them into the gully to cover the body of the goat. He’d been filling in that grave. “He was sick,” Shooter said, “and I had to put him down.”

  “But Pat said—” She heard the weakness in her own voice, and she stopped to gather herself.

  Then Shooter said this last thing: “You’ve got what you want, Missy. You’ve got those girls. You wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of your happy-ever-after, would you?”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  He held her eye a moment longer, and when she still didn’t say anything, he said, “That’s right. You keep to your business, and I’ll keep to mine.”

  With that, he put the Bobcat into gear and backed out of the driveway. She watched him go, and then she took out her cell phone and called Pat.

  “It’s Shooter,” she told him. “He’s up to something.” Then she related the story of what had just happened. “He threatened me, Pat.”

  “Threatened you? How?”

  “He told me to keep to my business and let him keep to his. Pat, I’ve got this feeling. This very bad feeling.”

  “Do you want me to come home? I’ll leave right now. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “No, I’m on my way into town. I’ve got to get some things fo
r the girls. I’ll stay and pick them up from school. They get out earlier than Angel. Maybe we’ll all drive over to Phillipsport to the high school and pick her up so she doesn’t have to ride the bus. I want to make sure everyone stays safe tonight.”

  “Try not to worry too much about Shooter. He’s mostly full of bluff.”

  “Still,” she said, “just to be on the safe side.”

  “All right, Missy. You know best. Call if you need me.”

  _________

  Missy moved through her day trying to convince herself that nothing was unusual. It was the first day of what was going to be her life for a good while to come, the life of a mother. She stopped at Read’s IGA and ticked off the items on her list: breakfast cereal, orange juice, bread, milk, apples, bananas, canned soups, lunch meat, ham salad, ground beef, frozen pizzas, pasta, and tomato sauce. It was so cold outside the perishables would be fine in the very back of the van. It wouldn’t take her long to gather up Hannah and Sarah and Emma and then drive over to Phillipsport for Angel. They’d all ride home together, a family, and she’d ask the girls to help her put the groceries away.

  By the time she got to the checkout line, Missy’s cart was heaped full.

  “Got a load there,” Roe Carl said.

  “Cooking for five now,” Missy said.

  “I heard you got Ronnie Black’s girls.”

  Missy nodded. “The sheltered care hearing was this morning.”

  “Good luck to you.”

  “Thank you,” said Missy, feeling her breath catch.

  She knew Roe didn’t mean to give her any alarm, but something about that wish for good luck made Missy afraid of everything she’d soon know about the night of the fire. Here she was dreaming about the future, all the good parts of it, not stopping to think what it would do to the girls if they found out that indeed Ronnie had set fire to the trailer.