They started across the pavement to the airport’s small parking lot, the thick fog swirling around them. Rachel could feel her mother’s eyes on the back of her neck where her long red hair usually rested either in a braid or a loosely gathered knot. The money she’d taken from her Philadelphia trust fund was hers, and she didn’t really have to account to her mother for it. But her hair, Rachel thought with a very daughterly pang of apprehension, was something else.
“I haven’t seen fog like this in a long time, not since London,” her mother was saying to Jim Claxton in her bright, determinedly cheerful voice.
Since Elizabeth Goodbody had been in transit, including taxis and waits at the airport for several hours, and they knew she would be hungry, Jim had invited them out to dinner in Hazel Gardens before they drove on to Draytonville.
“I do hope the weather will cooperate.” Rachel could hear her mother’s voice behind her and Jim’s low assuring rumble in answer, “I’m looking forward to seeing all the work of the farmers’ cooperative, and the local people Rachel’s been telling me about.”
Jim opened the door of Rachel’s tiny station wagon and waited for her mother to slide into the front seat. “Ground fog burns off pretty quick around here,” he was telling her. “And it’s been warm the past few days—in the eighties. I hope you brought your swimsuit, Mrs. Goodbody. It’s been warm enough to take a dip, and Rachel’s got a nice little beach on the river right behind her house.”
Rachel closed her eyes as she slid down against the plastic surface of the backseat in the Toyota. It was a slip, mentioning the tidal pool behind her house, and Jim realized it, judging from the disconcerted look on his face as he and Rachel exchanged a quick glance. It didn’t matter; there would be no hiding anything from Elizabeth Goodbody. All Rachel could hope was that they could get through dinner without her having to unwind for her mother what was, after all, a tangled web of unbelievable events.
Rachel saw Jim’s apologetic look seeking her out in the rearview mirror, and she managed a smile. Jim had been a tower of strength the past few days, and there was no doubt he was more than a little fond of her. The present situation, she had to admit to herself reluctantly, seemed to make him very happy. Even his children liked her. She’d been to his house several times, once to take them on a picnic that had been enormously successful. Remembering her mother’s thoughtful look as Jim had bent his tall frame to pick up the luggage, Rachel could almost hear her say, “But Rachel, this young man seems very nice.”
Now, in the front seat, her mother was responding almost flirtatiously as Jim turned off the airport road and into Highway 17 southward and its glittering neon restaurant strip. “You must call me Elizabeth, not Mrs. Goodbody,” she was saying. “Friends do not use titles.”
Her mother launched into a cheerful account of Quaker customs—the early aversion to the English aristocracy and all forms of rank and pretense when the Religious Society of Friends was formed in the sixteenth century—and Rachel saw Jim Claxton lift his bright blue eyes to the rearview mirror, corners crinkling as he gave her a slow smile.
She was glad Jim thought her mother’s eagerness to enlighten him funny. She loved her mother dearly but this unexpected visit, the whole burden of having to explain what had happened here, depressed her. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
The Count DeRenne Inn was crowded with springtime tourists on the move from Savannah and Charleston, and the soggy interior, in spite of frigid air-conditioning, had little of the charm that Rachel remembered. Her mother, Rachel could see, was obviously tired and hungry but determined to be patiently enthusiastic about everything. When they were finally seated they were not able to get the window table they wanted, overlooking the large artificial waterfall, but as her mother pointed out, the fog obscured the view anyway.
“Tell me, dear,” Elizabeth Goodbody said after they had ordered steaks and salads, “are you still having trouble with the neighbor who owns the road and won’t let the good people of the cooperative plant their tomatoes?”
“Soybeans,” Rachel and Jim said at the same time.
Her mother smiled perceptively, lifting her eyebrows.
Rachel’s mouth was open to speak but the county agent plunged on, “Things have been settled enough to bring in tractors to get the field plowed and plant soybeans.” Under the table Jim’s big, warm hand came to rest on Rachel’s knee reassuringly. It was also a signal to let him handle this, and Rachel turned to stare at him. “The man who owns the road is Beaumont Tillson, one of the big landowners in the county and a hard man to get along with. Your daughter’s done a very good job, Mrs. Good—Elizabeth,” he amended. “It’s not easy to get Beau Tillson’s cooperation. But the loan the cooperative’s managed to swing has made all the difference. Even the local people are beginning to lend their support.”
Rachel sent her mother a stricken look. Jim’s helpfulness and his noticeably possessive air weren’t missed. Elizabeth Goodbody’s face assumed a smooth serenity that, her daughter knew, meant she was discerningly attuned to all sorts of things going on.
“We’re harvesting sweet corn right now,” Rachel put in too quickly. She moved her knee away from Jim Claxton’s hand. “And hoping to make some money. It was a small crop planted mostly as an experiment—to test the local markets in Savannah, and perhaps Charleston.”
Why are you distressed, Rachel? her mother’s eyes were asking her over the table. And why does this nice young man beside you look so tense, and obviously protective?
“But I want you to know, Mrs.—Elizabeth,” Jim went on determinedly, “that Rachel hasn’t had much to do with Tillson. Except for meeting him once or twice in the lawyer’s office.”
Inwardly Rachel shuddered. Jim was hedging against any gossip her mother might hear during her stay, but he was just making matters worse.
Good heavens, how was she going to explain? she wondered, biting her lip as she stared down at the tablecloth. First of all, Mother, a few weeks ago, somebody tried to kill me ... No, that wouldn’t do. Rachel couldn’t keep her hands from trembling as she moved the silverware back and forth in front of her plate restlessly, and she knew her mother was watching. I got involved with the difficult man who wouldn’t let us use his road, but it’s all more or less resolved now, because he has renounced me, turning me over to this big, kind man who looks at me so tenderly and worriedly....
She almost groaned aloud. It just got worse and worse.
How could she bring herself even to say: Mother, as you now know, I have given in to false pride and put a very large sum of money into the farmers’ cooperative treasury, deceiving them by telling them I was able to get a loan. And even now they don’t know the truth.
That was not the end of it either. How could she begin to answer the questions her mother was sure to ask—about what had become of the Murrells, Darla Jean, and her murderous brothers, Roy and Lonnie? No one had seen them since the night in the marshes; it was as though they had disappeared off the face of the earth. And no one, not even Jim Claxton, would talk to her about them, even though she suspected Jim had a good idea about what had happened to them. Did Beau Tillson have anything to do with their sudden disappearance?
Her mother was very interestedly quizzing Jim Claxton about the merits of planting soybeans when their salads arrived.
Rachel had little appetite. She was fighting the feeling that she was fourteen years old and trying to spare her mother her genuinely loving concern over something awful she had done. Because now she would have to tell of problems and mistakes of such enormity that her practical, very well-bred mother would never associate with her practical, very well-bred daughter.
She had a nervous desire to laugh. There were conjure dolls and Gullah people and the story of Clarissa and Lee Tillson and Jessie Coffee and her son Til and beautiful Loretha Bulloch, and unhappy D’Arcy Butler in love with her cousin, that impossibly sensuous golden man with his terrible secrets—the man who had come hunting for her in the ma
rshes that night, who had saved her life and loved her in a way she would never forget. A piece of her soul, her innermost being, was still there with him, locked in time and still loving him.
Her mother was saying, “Rachel, dear, eat your food before it gets cold.”
Jim bent to her. “What’s the matter, honey? Are you feeling all right?”
She stared at them. She wanted to stand up and scream that she wasn’t, that she never would be all right since she couldn’t love the man she wanted. Rachel managed a pale smile.
“She’s been working too hard,” the man beside her explained. “I keep telling her to take things a little easier, especially since the soybean field got planted and that work’s behind her. But then with the new money she opened the co-op’s office in a storefront downtown, something they’ve been needing pretty badly, and she’s been driving herself same as always. Painted the front and the back rooms inside before I could even give her a hand, moved all the furniture herself.” He turned to give Rachel a fond smile. “Things have come a long ways in two, three weeks, but I think she’s just worn herself out.”
His hand covered hers on the tablecloth quite openly. Rachel didn’t have the will to pull it away.
“How long have you had no appetite, Rachel?” Elizabeth Goodbody said suddenly. “You do look a bit thin.”
“I keep pushing food into her.” Jim said, “but she’s just running it off, I guess. Your daughter’s one lady Mrs.—Elizabeth, who won’t slow down. Last night she was in the office until all hours, looking over applications for work in the fields. The co-op is offering three fifty an hour, that’s good wages down here, a lot of the black Gullah people have showed up. Most of them have come in to work harvesting the sweet corn crop.”
Rachel couldn’t move her hand, Jim was holding it too tightly. “People think a lot of your daughter hereabouts,” he was saying. “Rachel’s made a turnaround as far as the idea of a small farmers’ cooperative is concerned. There was some confusion over the original idea and what a cooperative like that was supposed to do, but she’s got solid support behind her now, I can tell you that.”
Rachel couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. It was ironic but true that since the night the Murrells had tried to kill her, doors had been opened to her that had been shut before. It would have taken years to have accomplished that in the low country; all she had to do was nearly die for it.
Draytonville, as if at some mysterious signal, had drawn its acceptance around her as would one of its own; no one ever referred, even in the most indirect way, to what had happened in the marshes. No one ever mentioned Beau Tillson or the part he’d played in rescuing her. No one volunteered an opinion as to what had become of Darla Jean and her brothers. What had happened to Rachel, and was still happening, was part of yet another of the town’s secrets safely buried and now past history. It was almost as if Draytonville were paying its debts.
“About the money, Mother,” Rachel said. It was better, probably, to start with what she had done with the trust money she’d withdrawn.
But she stopped. She seemed to have lost her mother’s attention. Elizabeth Goodbody’s eyes were focused suddenly at some spot over her daughter’s shoulder.
“Damn,” Jim Claxton said under his breath. He turned to follow the look, and his hand tightened over Rachel’s as if suddenly afraid she might try to leave.
The Count DeRenne Inn was filled to capacity this foggy night, with travelers coming off the road for dinner and a drink in the hopes the weather would clear. There were long lines waiting at the entrance to the dining rooms, and the crowd had overflowed even to the space around the picture windows. But even in the close-packed bodies it was not hard to find a tall, broad-shouldered man with sun-streaked hair who stood a few inches taller than most. He wore an expensively tailored business suit that fit his lithe, magnificent body perfectly. His head was bent, listening attentively to something a middle-aged woman and man were saying to him.
“Good heavens,” Elizabeth Goodbody was murmuring. “What an amazingly handsome man. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quite that good-looking.”
Rachel could not get her breath. She knew her face had gone suddenly pale. Beau Tillson, she tried to tell herself frantically, had every right to come to Hazel Gardens to dine in a restaurant. It was bound to happen sometime, somewhere. But she couldn’t control a rush of pain and shock, and the terrible, totally unexpected yearning that swept over her. Jim Claxton’s hand tightened around hers so tightly it made her fingers ache.
“That’s the man we were telling you about,” he was saying to her mother. “Beaumont Tillson, owns the land next to the co-op’s soybean field. The Beaumont place, Belle Haven, is old plantation property, something of a showplace, or at least it has been in the past.” The county agent’s voice was untypically rapid. “There’s a rumor now Tillson’s trying to sell part of it, the old house and a few acres of land, to keep afloat. It’s a historic place, even if it is considerably off the beaten track. He’s probably got his sights on up-country people or northerners, anybody with money who’ll keep it intact and not sellout to developers.”
Rachel’s frozen stare was fixed on the tall, glittering man across the restaurant who now said something to the couple with him before lifting his head, his gaze impatiently sweeping the crowded restaurant. She couldn’t hear Jim Claxton’s words for the roaring sound in her ears, only what he’d said about Beau Tillson wanting to sell the big house at Belle Haven to raise money. She could hardly believe it.
With a sort of horror she saw that gilded head turn and those strange, tawny eyes find the table and Jim Claxton and her mother. There was the barest flicker of recognition, then they settled on Rachel.
The polite smile faded from his mouth.
Was it true, Rachel wondered in some stunned, dim recess of her mind, that thoughts, feelings, electric messages of hurt and desire and longing could be transmitted between two people who had once known each other intimately? The look that passed between them now seemed like lightning in the air, searing her with fire, making her whole body shake, before it was shut down as quickly as though someone had thrown a switch; shutting it off, severing everything, leaving only ashes. The man she loved turned away abruptly, distant, unforgivably handsome, unapproachable. And no longer a part of her.
He had let her love him, had shown her his body—his feelings—which he would not let the rest of the world see, and having done that, had sent her away. The pain that ripped through Rachel was physical, real, through the shield of her breastbone and into her beating heart.
This time Rachel hadn’t waited out his rejection. She had telephoned him, left desperate messages with Eulie at the big house, agonized over writing him, even considered getting in the station wagon and appearing at his doorstep, screaming “Why?” in an agony of despair. But if he wouldn’t answer her telephone calls, she knew it would be useless to do any more.
And hadn’t he told her why that night? “I should have left you alone,” he’d said, with all the reluctance, the half-hidden remorse that had been there from the very first time they’d made love, though she hadn’t allowed herself to see it.
He had simply called Jim Claxton to come and take her home. Beau Tillson had known in some way, as everyone knew about everyone else in this ingrown corner of the low country, that she had seen Jim a few times—perhaps even that they had been together for dinner that night in Hazel Gardens—and to him the solution had been simple: turn her over, as some would see it, to a better man.
She wrenched her fingers away from Jim’s grip as though they were on fire. Nothing had happened. He’d looked at her and then it was gone. He was talking to his companions, and the profile of that rigid, dangerously beautiful face didn’t know her.
She heard her mother say quickly, “Rachel, dear, sit down and eat your dinner.”
But it was too late. She was on her feet, struggling for breath, wanting to scream, not able to remain in the damp, noisy room
one moment longer.
Rachel lurched away from the table. She wanted to run; she stumbled through the press of bodies like someone suddenly taken ill, and the crowd opened up to make way for her.
She didn’t stop until she had pushed her way through the lobby and into the fog of the parking lot.
Three weeks ago Rachel had seen that very same face, the hard planes of brow and cheekbones, the chiseled nose with slightly flaring nostrils, and the wide straight line of an incomparably sensuous mouth, all so altered by time that it was as though the present had dissolved into the past, leaving only a distorted echo—D’Arcy’s biblical words, that the sins of the fathers visited unto the sons. To look at him, one could tell why.
She had opened her door to find the well-dressed man standing in the hot glare of afternoon sunshine, holding an expensive if somewhat old-fashioned panama hat in his hands, his tall, erect figure vaguely familiar. Even more familiar was that he had the air of an extraordinarily handsome man who had always been accustomed to female attention. His hair was thick, almost waving, snow white with a few streaks of yellowish gray where it lay in tendrils at the back of his neck. He smelled of elegant barbering and bay rum, and his eyes were neither gold nor gray nor green but a mix that was brilliant and feline, defined by distinctive black-rimmed irises.
“Young lady,” he had said in a low, husky voice, “I understand you’re interested in some financing for your farmers’ group.”
If he had been an itinerant salesman selling bibles or plastic dinnerware, Rachel wouldn’t have been surprised. And it would have been better if someone had thought to tell her Lee Tillson was still alive. It had been her own fault to assume that he was a ghost, like all the other ghosts of Draytonville’s past. Not quite believing who he was nor the reason for his being there on her doorstep, Rachel had allowed him to come in. She watched him sit down on the sofa in her shabby living room and look around cautiously with that oddly evocative turn of his head that couldn’t help but send shivers through her.
Wild Midnight Page 22