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 mo
tor 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?”
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