Walking After Midnight

by Karen Robards

  Their topic of conversation was Steve.

  “He seems very nice, I must admit. But, Summer, as far as I can ascertain he doesn’t have a job.” This was her mother.

  “You’ve only known him for a week.” This was Sandra. “Don’t you think you need a little longer to make up your mind?”

  “If you’re in love that quick, he must be awfully good in bed. Or wherever.” This was Shelly, with a giggle.

  “Shelly!” Both Margaret McAfee and Sandra rounded on Shelly with shocked faces. Shelly shrugged. Summer’s face burned. She hadn’t told them anything intimate that had passed between her and Steve—but then she hadn’t needed to. They had known everything, all three of them, just by looking at her.

  Families!

  “We’re all adult women here. And you have to admit, he is kind of sexy-looking. Of course, he’s not nearly as handsome as Lem,” Shelly persisted.

  “Lem was a total prick,” Sandra said with precision. Her mother and sisters looked at the pretty forty-year-old with surprise.

  “Well, he was,” Sandra defended herself. “We could all see what he was doing to Summer: He was turning her into a regular little Stepford wife.”

  Summer hadn’t realized that her family had known. She gave Sandra a grateful smile.

  “That’s true,” Margaret McAfee nodded. “I don’t think any of us have any real objection to your young man, Summer. Although he needs a job. How is he going to support …?”

  “I can support myself, Mother,” Summer said. “I have a business, remember?”

  “But …”

  “Good morning, ladies. Are you ready, Summer?” Steve appeared beside the table, and Summer’s cheeks pinkened as she wondered just how much, if anything, he’d overheard. Oh, well, he’d have to get used to her family, just as she’d have to get used to his.

  There would be plenty of time for that. They had all the time in the world.

  She smiled up at him. Clad in well-pressed khakis with a brown leather belt and a tucked-in navy blue knit shirt, with tan boat shoes on his feet and a watch on his wrist, he looked like a different man from the grubby bum with whom she had shared four days on the run. He was cleanshaven, his black hair brushed back from his forehead. With his strong football player’s body and his aggressively masculine face, he was a very striking-looking man. A man she could be proud of. Despite the fading twin shiners and the yellowish bruises along his jaw.

  “Won’t you join us for coffee, Steve?” Margaret McAfee smiled up at him. Like her daughters, she was an attractive brunette. The only difference was the passage of an additional twenty-five or so years—and the careful weekly application of a bottle of Loving Care in dark auburn to her head.

  Steve shook his head. “Thanks, but I promised Corey we’d take her to pick out the puppy before lunch and she thinks before lunch is around nine a.m. She’s already called me twice, to find out what’s taking me so long. I appreciate your giving me the name of the kennel where you got Muffy, by the way.”

  “I’m just glad they were still in business and that they had puppies available,” Margaret said.

  “Don’t think you’re doing your daughter any favor by buying her a Muffy clone,” Sandra warned him. “She is not my idea of a house pet.”

  “Muffy is a champion,” Margaret, accustomed to being teased about her beloved dog by her daughters, said with dignity. “And, like all true champions, she has her idiosyncrasies. I admit that. But never think for a minute that she is not an extremely intelligent animal. Why, she even saved Summer’s and Steve’s lives.”

  Margaret’s favorite part of Summer and Steve’s adventure was the part where Muffy peed on the bad guy’s foot.

  “Yeah, and how!” Sandra and Shelly dissolved into giggles. Summer took that as her cue to rise.

  “We’ll see you later.” She waved good-bye to her mother and sisters and walked out of the restaurant with Steve trailing behind.

  Outside, in the parking lot, he caught up with her.

  “I do have a job, you know,” he said, entwining his fingers with hers and casting her a sideways glance.

  So he had heard. “I don’t care whether you do or not,” she said with perfect truth, smiling at him.

  “Actually, I have my choice of several. Chief Rosencrans says he needs a chief of detectives. Les Carter offered me my old job back. And Larry Kendrick wants me to come on board at the DEA. Actually, I think he wants to keep an eye on me in case I suddenly start flashing wads of cash.” He grinned. The van had been found, submerged just beyond the ramp leading from the boat warehouse into Cedar Lake, and the bodies had been in it. But the money Mitch had stolen was still missing. A search was under way. And not just by the police, either. Word had leaked out, as word always did, that fifteen million dollars in unmarked bills was hidden somewhere in the vicinity of Cedar Lake. People were coming out of the woodwork to hunt for it. As Sammy had said, if that money was not found soon, Cedar Lake was liable to become another Sierra Madre. Treasure hunters would be pouring into the area for the next century, looking for the lost millions in cash.

  “Take whichever one you like,” Summer said as they reached Steve’s car. It was a red Mazda 626 parked in the middle of a sea of other cars, and he had to maneuver past a badly parked green ’88 Olds to open the passenger-side door for her.

  “I thought I’d stay here in Murfreesboro,” he said.

  “Oh?” Instead of getting into the car, Summer turned to face him. Her hair was washed and blown dry to curl softly around her face, she wore just the right amount of cosmetics for a hot summer’s day, and she was dressed in an airy yellow sundress and leather sandals. She was looking good and she knew it, and she basked under the appreciative glint in his eyes as they moved over her.

  “Yeah. Since you have a house and a business here and all.” His eyes were black and inscrutable as they focused once again on her face.

  “I don’t have a house here anymore. I refuse to live in that one. Come Monday, I’m going to put it on the market and start looking for another place to live. Although my mother wants me to come to Santee to live with her, and Sandra says I should move out to California, and Shelly—”

  “Wants you to come to Knoxville,” Steve finished for her dryly. “I’m going to be house-hunting myself come Monday. Maybe we could join forces. Two people, searching for one house.”

  Summer stared up at him. He was very close, with one arm draped over the top of the open car door and the other hand absentmindedly playing with her fingers.

  “Are you by any chance asking me to live with you?” she asked, striving for a light tone.

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “No?”

  “I thought we agreed that this is a forever kind of thing.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Well then—I’m asking you to marry me.”

  Summer was dumbstruck. She hadn’t expected that. “But—but,” she sputtered. “We’ve only known each other a week.”

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

  Summer looked up at him, up at the lantern jaw and hard, thin lips and blade of a nose, up into dark eyes that she had once considered soulless. Now she knew better.

  And she knew something else too: Steve was right.

  Sometimes a week is all it takes.

  “Yes,” she said, and went up on her toes to lock her arms around his neck and her lips to his.

  He kissed her breathless, right there in the full glare of the summer sunlight in the busy parking lot of the Murfreesboro Holiday Inn.

  46

  “God gives quietness at last.”

  —John Greenleaf Whittier

  Deedee was very weak. At any time now the summons would come, she knew—but the summons to where? To Heaven—or back to that netherworld where she had existed before?

  She had completed the mission that had kept her Earthbound: She had made things right for Steve.

  Soon it would be time to go. To join Mitch?
If she had gleaned any inkling into the way the universe worked, he was locked in a netherworld of his own.

  There were some things she needed to do before the summons came. But it was hard to make her atoms behave. Forget materializing—she didn’t have the strength for that. She just wanted to get where she needed to go.

  With a tremendous effort of will she concentrated on her mother’s house. It took a while—the maelstrom was weak, too—but eventually she arrived.

  Her mother was in the kitchen fixing a meal. Supper, she supposed, because it was growing dark outside. For a moment Deedee lovingly watched her as she cut up a chicken for frying. Her mother’s hair was iron-gray now. Her face was wrinkled. She was getting old.

  Aunt Dot was in the living room, watching the news. The Ouija board was on the coffee table, temporarily forgotten.

  Deedee concentrated hard. Slowly the pointer began to move, tracing aimless circles on the slick cardboard.

  It took a few minutes to get Aunt Dot’s attention, but once she had it it was absolute.

  “Sue!” Aunt Dot’s screech as she jumped to her feet would have awakened a log.

  “Goodness, Dot, what is it?” Her mother came rushing in, wiping her hands on a frayed kitchen towel.

  Wordlessly Aunt Dot pointed to the Ouija board. Just for good measure, Deedee induced the pointer to perform an extra-fancy swirl.

  “Oh my God, it’s Deedee again! Dot, sit down here! Deedee, baby, talk to me!”

  She hastily pulled up a stool, Aunt Dot collapsed back on the couch, and both of them dove for the quivering pointer. Her mother’s thick, chapped fingers were shaking.

  “H-I-M-O-M,” she began.

  “Oh, God, it is Deedee,” her mother moaned.

  “Hush, Sue, what’s she trying to say?”

  “T-O-N-I-G-H-T-G-O-D-I-G-U-P-M-Y-G-R-A-V-E—”

  “Go dig up her grave!” Aunt Dot shrieked.

  “Hush, Dot, hush! Deedee, baby, I love you! Go on!”

  “T-H-E-R-E-S-M-O-N-E-Y-T-H-E-R-E-L-O-T-S-O-F-M-O-N-E-Y—”

  “Money? In your grave?” her mother whispered.

  “D-O-N-T-T-E-L-L-A-N-Y-B-O-D-Y-I-T-S-F-O-R-Y-O-U-”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “She said don’t tell! Now hush!”

  “M-I-T-C-H-H-I-D-I-T-T-H-E-R-E-I-T-S-F-O-R-Y-O-U-”

  “Mitch hid it?”

  “Hush, Dot! Deedee, you didn’t kill yourself, did you? Baby, I know better. I always knew better!”

  “M-I-T-C-H-K-I-L-L-E-D-M-E-”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” her mother screamed. “Didn’t I always tell you Mitch did it?”

  “T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y-B-E-L-O-N-G-S-T-O-N-O-O-N-E-T-A-K-E-I-T-”

  “I don’t care about the money! Deedee, I love you!”

  “I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-T-O-O-M-O-M-T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y-”

  “Where are you? Are you in Heaven? Are you with God’s angels, my baby?”

  “Don’t cry, Sue!”

  “T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y- A-G-I-f-t-f-r-o-m-m-e-t-o-y-ou-”

  “Are you with the angels, Deedee?”

  “Keep your fingers on the pointer, Sue!”

  “I-M-O-K-A- Y-M-OM-T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-ON-E-Y-I-L-OV-E-”

  “The pointer’s slowing down!”

  “Deedee, don’t go!”

  Deedee could feel herself weakening. By sheer strength of will, she finished: “Y-O-U.”

  And then she was sucked away into the deepening twilight.

  This time she surfaced, not through any will of her own but because the maelstrom spit her out, on a glaringly bright stage. TV cameras crowded the wings and were mounted on platforms in the middle of the audience. The crowd, clapping from the plush seats, was a faceless, eager blob. A man walked out on that stage, shook hands with another who had just finished singing and playing the guitar. As the guitar player exited, Deedee recognized him: Jerry Wood, up-and-coming country star.

  A sign in hot pink neon against the maroon velvet curtain at the back of the stage solved the riddle of where she was. It read: NASHVILLE LIVE.

  Deedee realized she was about to witness Hallie Ketchum’s live singing debut, before a national television audience yet. Immediately she took stock of her atoms. If only she could summon the strength she’d had before, she would help Hallie out.

  Where was Hallie? In the wings somewhere, no doubt. Deedee searched but couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Maybe in a dressing room …

  She found Hallie there, slumped over her dressing table, her face resting in a sea of cosmetics jars and brushes and cotton balls. Electric curlers were in her blond hair.

  She was dead. Deedee knew, with a deep, abiding sense of certainty, that her soul had left her body just moments before.

  Two lines of a white powder and a razor blade on the glass tabletop nearby told Deedee the story. Frightened by the prospect of singing before a live audience when she must have known she wasn’t the stuff of which stars are made, Hallie had turned to drugs to bolster her courage.

  Instead she had died.

  Just then Deedee felt it—the invisible tug that was drawing her back in.

  There was a knock on the door. “Three minutes, Miss Ketchum.”

  The tug was stronger. Deedee resisted, staring at the inert body. Was there nothing anyone could do?

  Suddenly Deedee saw the light.

  It was like nothing she had ever seen before, a beam of pure white light, radiating warmth, drawing her toward it. It shimmered down through the ceiling, healing, beatific, promising an eternity of joy.

  The stairway to Heaven. She had made it.

  Deedee glanced back at Hallie Ketchum’s slumped body, and suddenly she understood that she was being offered a choice: Heaven or Nashville.

  Deedee hesitated. She glanced at the light. It drew her like metal shavings to a magnet.

  “One minute, Miss Ketchum.”

  As suddenly as that, Deedee knew she couldn’t go. The only heaven she wanted was right here.

  Honky-tonk heaven for a honky-tonk angel.

  Deedee felt a surge of heat and had the unsettling sensation that her atoms dissolved.

  Then, suddenly, she was inside Hallie Ketchum’s body, trying it on for size, so to speak, lifting her head and staring with interest at an unfamiliar face that was now her own.

  Not bad, she thought, and with fingers that were surprisingly steady began to pull the curlers from her hair.

  47

  It was Saturday night. Hallie Ketchum was onstage at Nashville Live, wowing the audience with her powerful rendition of her hit song “Agony.”

  Meanwhile, in a country cemetery not far away, two old women, one occasionally wiping tears from her eyes, knelt beside a grave. Clad in dark sweatsuits with black scarves tied around their heads, they used gardening trowels to turn back the sod and a few inches of dirt from one side of the grave.

  Finally a trowel uncovered a small plastic garbage bag tightly bound with tape. The women looked at each other, and pulled it out of the earth.

  One woman tore at it with shaking hands and looked inside.

  “Dot, it’s just like Deedee said! There’s money in here!”

  “Keep your voice down, Sue! And keep digging!”

  An hour later, they had unearthed a small mountain of identical bags and were busily engaged in patting the sod back down over the grave.

  “Dot, there must be millions here!” There was awe in the shaky voice.

  “Shhh! Don’t tell anybody!”

  “Should we keep it?”

  “Deedee said it was all right to. Deedee said it was for us.…”

  The two women looked at each other and simultaneously nodded. Then they began the task of hauling their loot to the ancient Plymouth parked on the dark country lane not too far from the grave.

  On another road in Nashville, Steve drove through the darkness toward the house he had once shared with his ex-wife. Things were looking up. Of course, there was the small matter of a threa
tened lawsuit from the kid whose ’55 Chevy had ended up in a thousand pieces at the bottom of a smoky mountain gorge. Then there was the van driver, who’d been unconscious and bloody but not dead in the Harmon Brothers’ parking lot, who woke up insisting that he was just an innocent bystander, not involved at all, and yelling about filing assault charges against the man who broke his nose. And there were a few cynical law enforcement types who were convinced that he was hiding the missing fifteen million in cash. Until the money was recovered, he expected to be kept under careful scrutiny.

  But none of that was important. His daughter was sound asleep in the backseat, curled around her new Pekingese puppy, which fortunately was sleeping too. Beside him, head resting contentedly back against the seat, face turned away so that she could look out at the stars shining far above, sat the love of his life.

  Summer must have felt the weight of his gaze on her, because she turned her head and smiled at him.

  Steve was suddenly very conscious of being surrounded by the warm glow of happiness, so unaccustomed an emotion to him that it was as tangible as the heat of an electric blanket.

  Unbidden, he thought of Mitch. Did I ever know you at all, old friend? he wondered. And wondered too why, of the three of them, childhood pals Steve and Deedee and Mitch, he was the only one who’d been granted the gift of continued life.

  Then he glanced again at the two people who meant all the world to him, felt the weight of happiness in the car, and had his answer.

  He could almost hear Mitch saying it: Winner take all, babe.

  This book is dedicated, as always, with much love to the men in my life: Doug, Peter, and Christopher.

  It also commemorates two family weddings: my sister Lee Ann Johnson to Sammy Spicer on February 8, 1993, and my brother Bruce Hodges Johnson to Susan Wearren on June 12, 1993.