Rance dug deeper into the mound, making a new pile beside the old one. Maggie was so mesmerized by Rance’s rhythmic movement and the rippling play of the muscles in his back that the sharp scrape of the metal shovel blade against something hard snapped her to attention as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers. A shiver painted her arms with gooseflesh.
Rance dropped the shovel, hunkered down and began to scrape at the dirt in the hole with his bare hands. In spite of her curiosity, Maggie held back, afraid to find out what was beneath the surface. Rance seemed to dig forever.
Finally, he stopped his fevered scrabbling in the dirt and tugged at something. Something flat that didn’t give as Rance pulled. He yanked again. The object came free.
Rance scrambled to his feet, holding the flat object in his hand. Wearing triumph on his face, he spent no time celebrating his victory, but sank back on his haunches and brushed at the dirt-encrusted relic.
“What is it?” Maggie made herself ask. Visions of coffin lids and treasure chests had flown out of her mind. What Rance held was too small to be either of those things.
Rance shoved himself to his feet again. “Come on.” He crossed the dirt floor and went back through the hole in the wall.
Maggie followed, sensing that it wasn’t the time to ask questions. And Rance wouldn’t take the time to answer them. He strode up the cellar stairs two at a time and across the hall to the kitchen. He was already running water in the sink by the time she caught up with him.
“I knew it!” Rance swished the object under the water and rubbed it with his hand. He rinsed it again. “I knew she didn’t mean to leave me.” He held up the rectangular scrap. “See?”
It was a license plate, Maggie realized as a chill traveled down the short length of her spine. Considering that the date was thirty years old, it was in remarkably good condition and easy to read. The personalized car tag announced its owner’s name: ROSIE H.
“I knew she always meant to come back for me,” Rance murmured, his voice cracking. He hugged the muddy plate to his chest.
“Rance?”
Rance looked up at Maggie. He had forgotten that she was there. “This is the license plate that was on my mother’s car the day she left me. I knew she never meant to stay away.”
Maggie’s face was too pale, Rance realized. Had he frightened her? He had been gathering bits and pieces of this mystery for weeks, and had almost been prepared for what he’d just found, but this must have come as quite a shock to Maggie.
He finally had incontrovertible proof that Rose Montoya Hightower had been to Hightower’s Haven after she left him in San Antonio. He finally had some concrete evidence to give to Sheriff Potts. Though Maggie needed him at this moment, the contents of the earthen grave demanded his attention first.
“I’ve got to go down and finish digging.” Rance laid the license tag on the table and wiped his muddy hands on his jeans. He turned toward the door and made it halfway down the hall.
“I think you’d better leave the rest of this to Sheriff Potts,” Maggie told him, softly and calmly, as she followed him into the hall and placed a hand on his arm. “There’s probably proper police protocol that has to be followed in this type of case.”
Rance tried to shake free and reached for the door to the cellar stairs. He knew Maggie was probably right about procedure, but right now he wasn’t sure he cared about regulations. “I have to find her. Don’t you see? She’s been waiting all this time....”
Maggie’s hand was surprisingly strong on his arm. “You have found her. You’ve done your part. Let Sheriff Potts do his job now.” She grabbed him again and pulled him back from the stairs, wrapping him in her arms. Maggie’s arms felt so right around him, even as she restrained him from what he wanted to do. She held him securely in her arms, murmuring soft nothings to him, as if he were a child. The crooning sounds calmed him.
“Come on. Sit down.” Maggie led him by the arm to a kitchen chair and pushed him gently into the seat. Rance was too drained to resist; he sat and waited while Maggie rummaged through cabinets and found the bottle of bourbon he kept. She poured three fingers of the amber-colored liquid into a water glass and handed it to him.
“Drink this. It’ll calm you down. I’m going to call the sheriff.”
The bourbon burned his tongue and warmed his blood as it went down. Rance needed the fiery, sweet liquid now as much as he had needed his mother thirty years ago. He drained the glass and set it down.
Then he went to find Maggie. He needed her, too.
Rance paced and prowled around the parlor like a caged animal. He stalked to the top of the cellar stairs and stared down into the darkness below. It had taken Maggie several long minutes to convince him that the situation would best be served if he let the authorities finish the job the right way. It hadn’t been easy, and only Maggie’s presence was keeping Rance upstairs.
Rance had seemed to accept her logic and submitted docilely as she set him down and doctored his wounds and insisted that he dress. That done, he had sprung to his feet and begun to pace again.
“You know, it’s probably going to be a while before anybody gets here. Lyle Potts’ll probably have to roust half the department from their beds,” Maggie said, feeling she needed to explain to Rance why the wheels of justice moved so slowly in the middle of the night in Alabama.
He stopped pacing, turned and stared. But he said nothing.
“It’s a long way out here from Pittsville. You might as well sit down before you’re a nervous wreck,” she continued, trying to ease the high tension in the room. Before I am, she should have said. Rance already was.
It was much too late to calm him down, Maggie realized. Maybe thirty years too late. Rance had been heading for this moment for decades. He was already a wreck, and nothing she could say would change it now.
If only this had happened earlier. In the daytime.
Rance continued pacing, and Maggie helplessly watched him. The clock ticked, and Rance paced. The clock ticked, and Maggie watched.
A shrill summons interrupted the tense monotony. When the phone rang, everything stopped. Rance stopped pacing. Maggie stopped breathing. Even the clock seemed to skip a beat as time stood still. The phone rang again, its voice shrill and insistent.
Maggie reached it first and grabbed it off the cradle. Sheriff Potts’s voice boomed out of the receiver before Maggie had a chance to pronounce a greeting. “Any of my boys make it there yet?”
“No sir. We’re still waiting,” Maggie told him.
She held the receiver away from her ear as the sheriff uttered a curse. Then he instructed Maggie to tell whoever arrived before he did not to touch anything.
“I’ll tell ’em,” Maggie said, not at all sure she would be able to get the deputy on duty to do her bidding. She listened as Sheriff Potts finished his instructions. Then she hung up.
“The sheriff’s on his way. The deputy on patrol has already been dispatched and should be here pretty soon.” I hope, Maggie didn’t add.
“Good,” Rance muttered, and resumed pacing, obviously at the end of his tether.
A light blinked outside the window. Maggie hurried over to the screen door and looked out. More lights winked through the trees as a patrol car pulled up to the house.
Maggie stepped out onto the porch to greet the deputy, only to remember that she was standing there in her nightgown and robe. She pulled the lapels closer together and tightened the sash around her middle. It was too late to change now. Let him think what he wanted.
Truman Higgins climbed out of the car. He would have been easier to face if he wasn’t someone Maggie had known forever.
He waved a greeting and climbed up the steps. “You still trying to collect on that bet we made twenty years ago?”
Maggie looked at him blankly. Of course. Truman Higgins and his then girlfriend, Nancy Nelson, had been in cahoots with Tess and Tom all those years ago. Maggie blushed and smiled sheepishly. “It’s not what you think, Truman
.”
“Hell, Margaret Rose, it ought to be. You been alone more’n two years now. I wouldn’t begrudge you, even if you did pick him over me.” Truman jerked his head in Rance’s direction.
Blushing furiously, Maggie countered, “I’m sure Emmalyn would object to that Didn’t I hear there was a fourth little Higgins on the way?”
Truman chuckled. “Yes, ma’am. We aim to get us a girl this time and then quit.”
“Well, good luck.” Maggie glanced at Rance, grateful that he’d taken the time to put on a T-shirt, and reminded herself why Truman had been summoned. It wasn’t to hash over old times with her. With an apologetic smile pasted on her face, she turned to Rance.
Maggie introduced the good ol’ boy in the gray uniform. Did the woman know everybody in Pitt County, or just the men? Rance wondered irrationally.
This was not the time to be jealous. There was a concealed grave in his cellar. A grave that held answers to questions that had plagued him for thirty years.
“What say we go take a look at this here grave you think you found?” Higgins said after the introductions were done.
Well, that was more like business, Rance thought, clenching his teeth. He wasn’t sure he liked this yokel, or the way he’d leered at Maggie. But he was here to do a job, and Rance guessed he’d better help him. He turned to lead the way.
“Wait,” Maggie called after them. “I forgot to tell Truman. Sheriff Potts said not to touch anything. He was going to call in investigators from Montgomery.”
“I reckon I know that, Margaret Rose. I just want to take a look,” Higgins drawled.
Rance led the way, vaguely irritated at the way Higgins seemed to be taking it all so lightly. Hell, he was more than just irritated; he was damned mad. He yanked on the light string at the top of the stairs with an angry swipe.
Higgins let out a long, low whistle as he followed Rance down the stairs. “How’d this happen? Looks like you had an earthquake!”
Maggie touched Higgins’s arm. “It’s a long story, Truman.”
“Okay. I reckon it’ll wait.” Higgins ducked through the hole.
The lantern still flickered inside—Rance had forgotten to retrieve it and turn it off—and the mound of dirt and the fresh hole were plain to see.
Truman stood, looking over the area, and scratched his head. “Well, you sure found something, all right.” He walked over to the lip of the hole. “What made you go looking down here?”
Maggie touched him again. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
Higgins turned away from his inspection of the grave. “Old Lather’s ghost tell you to look here?”
“Something like that,” Maggie responded dryly.
If Maggie hadn’t stepped between them, Rance would have wiped the smirk off Deputy Higgins’s face. Higgins had leered at Maggie one time too many. And that remark about Luther was the last straw.
“Truman,” Maggie said softly. “Have some respect.” A short burst from a siren outside kept her from continuing.
Higgins looked contrite. “Sorry, man. I forgot he was your father.”
Rance uttered a curse. Damn! Had his life story been told in every living room in Pitt County?
Higgins stepped out through the hole in the wall. “I reckon the sheriffs here.”
By the time Maggie, Rance and Truman made it back up the stairs, Lyle Potts was hoisting himself out from behind the wheel of his car.
He mounted the porch steps, then looked at Truman. “Tell me what you got.”
Truman turned all efficiency and business. “Well, sir, we have what looks to be an old grave in a concealed room in the cellar of this house.”
“You find a body?”
“No. Not yet,” Truman admitted.
“I’d bet my life she’s there, though,” Rance said as he held the screen door open for everyone to file in.
“You mean you got us all up at zero-dark-thirty a.m., and you don’t have a body? What the hell makes you think there is one?”
Maggie held her breath as she watched Rance struggle to control his emotions. How long would he be able to keep them in check? She placed her hand gently on his arm. It seemed to calm him, at least for the time being. “Go get it,” she urged.
While Rance was out of the room, Maggie tried to explain how she and Rance had been drawn to the cellar. “I know you probably don’t have any more faith in psychic phenomena than I did before tonight, but I truly believe that whoever is buried down there has been calling for help. I sensed it twenty years ago, when I took a dare to spend the night here. All the previous owners of this house must have felt it, too, and run scared. Rance was the only one who understood what the message was.
“It wasn’t Luther Hightower trying to scare people off,” she continued, “but someone else, calling for help. Rance thinks it’s his mother, who’s been missing for all of those thirty years.” Maggie stopped her explanation as Rance returned.
“I never personally took advice from psychics, but I’m not gonna rule ’em out right yet. A police force can use all the help it can get.” Potts turned to look at Rance. “What you got to show me?”
Rance handed the license plate to the sheriff. “That’s the personalized tag that was on my mother’s car when she left San Antonio. I don’t know for sure, but I have reason to think she was headed here. That license plate was buried in that hole, and I believe it came off the car that we found in the pool.”
Sheriff Potts looked thoughtful. He slapped the metal tag against his hand. “You got you a bunch of evidence that sure places Miz Hightower, or at least the car, here. But we ain’t got no body. Hell, she mighta run off and done hid this stuff here to cover her getaway.”
Maggie shook her head and sighed as she watched the impact of Potts’s statement hit its target. Rance sagged as if he had been punched. It was probably the worst thing that anybody could have told him in his present state. Maggie held her breath as she waited for Rance’s response.
He drew a deep, shuddering breath before he answered. “I can’t believe that, Potts,” he said with measured tones. “I don’t know how I know, I just do. Mrs. Larson said somebody came to town and put flowers on my father’s grave after we left. I think that person was my mother.” He closed his eyes and drew in a deep, calming breath. “My mother is in that hole in the basement, and she’s been waiting for thirty years for someone to set her free. And if you won’t do it, I will.” Rance spun around and headed for the hallway and the cellar door.
“Now hold on. I didn’t say I don’t believe you. I was just presenting another possibility. I didn’t mean any disrespect. I got forensics experts coming in from Montgomery. Let’s let them do the looking. They know how to do this a whole bunch better than my little country police department.”
Rance stopped at the end of the hallway. He hesitated, then put his hand on the knob of the cellar door.
Maggie hurried after him. She reached him as he turned the knob. “You don’t want to do this yourself, Rance,” she told him softly, trying to soothe him. “Let them do it, so you can remember her as she was.”
Rance looked at Maggie uncertainly. He looked at the cellar door, then back again. “I don’t know what to do,” he said weakly.
“Come with me.” Maggie held out her hand, hoping he would take it; he didn’t. “Come to my house and wait. You don’t have to be here. You’ve done your part. You found her grave. Let the experts do their job. Sheriff Potts can call my house when they’ve found her. Or anything that might tell us where she is.”
Maggie turned to the sheriff. “Is that all right? Can he go to my place?”
“Sure, Margaret Rose. It’d prob’ly be the best thing he could do right now.”
Maggie recited her number for the sheriff, then took a deep, calming breath. She closed her eyes and took a moment to collect her thoughts. What did one do in a situation like this? She could hardly browbeat the man into coming with her, but neither could she leave him here when he
needed her. When he needed to be out of the investigators’ way.
She looked to Rance and held out her hand to him once more. “You can’t do anything to help right now. You’re exhausted. Let Sheriff Potts and Truman do their work. We’ll only be in their way.”
Rance looked puzzled. His dark eyes clouded, and a confused frown marred his handsome face. For a moment, it looked as if he would dig in his heels and insist on seeing the excavation through. But then the uncertain look eased, and the stubborn lines on his face smoothed. He looked at Maggie as if he were waiting for her to tell him what to do.
But she knew she couldn’t tell him. Maggie sighed and opened her hand. Rance had to make that final decision himself. “Those cuts on your chest need more attention. They’re still bleeding. I have everything we’ll need at my place. Will you come with me?”
Maggie held her breath.
Chapter 14
He had never felt so tired and helpless in his entire life, and he hurt all over. Not just his body, but his mind. Rance sucked in a lungful of air and winced as his chest muscles and ribs reminded him of the abuse he’d given them. It had only been a few weeks since he was hurt, and though he had recently felt sound, he must not have healed completely. He closed his eyes and tried to think.
Going with Maggie was a tempting thought. But didn’t he owe it to Mama to stay here? Somebody tell me what to do.
“You can’t do anything here that the rest of us can’t. Go with Margaret Rose. If we do find your mother, believe me, you’ll be the first to know. Go on. You don’t need to be here,” Sheriff Potts urged. “You told us where to look. You did your part.”
Rance forced his eyes open. He looked at Maggie’s outstretched hand. Then he looked at Potts and Higgins. The oafish grin was gone from Higgins’s face, replaced with concern. He looked at Maggie again.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’ll go to Maggie’s.” Rance reached for her hand, and she squeezed her fingers around his. He closed his eyes and breathed a long, broken breath. Then he dropped Maggie’s hand.
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