by Ann McMan
The Freemantles always bought Chevys.
Of course, there was some argument about whether or not the tornado actually was responsible for the demise of the ancient car. Roma Jean’s father insisted that the Vega was on borrowed time anyway, and that a bird strike or a direct hit in the right pothole would’ve been enough to total it. It already had a cracked engine block and leaked coolant like a sieve. It burned so much oil that Roma Jean had to drive around with a case of STP 10w-30 on its tiny backseat.
Still, when that steam table from the school cafeteria dropped from the sky and landed smack dab on the roof of her car, Roma Jean found it hard not to see the romance in it all. She said her beloved Vega was Gone With the Wind—and she failed to understand how her daddy could laugh and suggest that she ought to just drive the steam table.
“It’ll probably get better gas mileage, and it won’t leak oil all over the driveway,” he said.
But Uncle Cletus stepped up and lent her his prized Caprice. Roma Jean didn’t mind that one bit. It was a good ride—decked out with plush velour seats, opera windows, and a functioning eight-track deck mounted under the dashboard. She didn’t much care for his music selection, and she spent hours on the Internet, trying to find out if there were any Kenny Chesney recordings available on eight-track.
As soon as she could save half the money, her daddy was going to help her buy one of the reclaimed, storm-damaged cars parked over at Junior’s. She’d need it before the end of the summer, when she started classes at Wythe Community College.
Roma Jean wanted to be a librarian, like Miss Murphy. She still worked part time at the small Jericho Public Library, and she hoped that by the time she got her degree, the library might be able to reopen for five days a week. She saw that as a more desirable career—and one she truly enjoyed—than her other options for working in the small mountain town. The one thing Roma Jean was sure of was that she wanted to stay in Jericho. That meant a lot fewer options for gainful employment, unless she thought about working in the glass factory, or growing old, punching a cash register at Food Bonanza. That’s also why she was looking at colleges so close to home.
Once she finished the two-year associate’s program at Wythe, she could transfer to Radford University as a sophomore. And Radford was the perfect distance from home—far enough away to give her the space she needed to explore some parts of her life that she couldn’t really test out here in Jericho, but close enough that she could get back on weekends to see her family and keep her part-time job at the library.
Charlie had told her that there was a good “community” in Radford, but Roma Jean wasn’t really sure what that meant, and was too embarrassed to ask for an explanation. She had a hard enough time forming complete sentences when Charlie was around. It would be impossible for her to ask for an explanation of all those code language terms that people seemed to use when they talked around something.
Roma Jean stopped next to the dark blue Caprice. She already had its enormous key in her hand, and she nervously turned it over and over as she stood there, staring down at the tops of Charlie’s shoes.
“Thanks for walking me out,” she said. “You really didn’t have to.”
“It was my pleasure,” Charlie said. “Besides, I wanted to make sure you were okay after your fall inside.”
Roma Jean could feel her face growing hot. “I’m sorry that I keep doing that.”
“Don’t be,” Charlie replied. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I usually don’t.”
“Usually?” Charlie sounded amused.
Roma Jean forced herself to look up into Charlie’s sky blue eyes. They were nearly as hypnotic as Dr. Stevenson’s. No, she thought. They were exactly as hypnotic. She leaned against the car door to steady herself.
“I hate being such a dork.”
“You’re not a dork.”
Roma Jean was startled. She didn’t realize that she had said that aloud. This was going from bad to worse in a backpack.
“Then why do I always act like one?” she asked. It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Charlie seemed to consider it for a moment before she responded.
“I have a theory,” she said. “I think you get scared and trip over things when you’re . . . nervous.”
This was hardly breaking news. On the other hand, there was something about the way Charlie said the word “nervous” that worried her.
“What do you mean by ‘nervous?’ ” she asked.
Charlie gave her a lopsided smile, and Roma Jean felt like she might pass out.
“You know,” she said. “Nervous.”
Roma Jean suddenly felt like she was standing there in the middle of Odell’s parking lot buck naked. “Okay,” she said, looking down at Charlie’s feet again. “Maybe you’re right. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie said. “I think I have an idea.”
Roma Jean looked up. “You do?”
Charlie nodded. “I think that if you spent more time with me, you’d be less nervous. Less nervous equals less falling down. Make sense?”
Roma Jean shrugged.
“Oh, come on.” Charlie gave her a playful nudge. “Why not at least try it?”
“I don’t know what my parents would say.” Roma Jean didn’t know where her bravery was coming from. She didn’t even know if Charlie meant “spend time with me” the way Roma Jean hoped she meant it. She really felt like a dork now.
But Charlie seemed unfazed. “I was thinking that maybe you could go to church with me tomorrow.” She smiled. “I don’t think they’d have a problem with that . . . do you?”
Roma Jean wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Church? Hey . . . wait a minute. “Tomorrow is Saturday.”
Charlie rolled her eyes. “I know. My grandma’s church is having revival, and she’ll never speak to me again if I don’t show up for at least one meeting. I thought the Saturday one would be the tamest, and the shortest. Then, maybe, we could go get ice cream or something.”
Roma Jean loved ice cream. But Charlie knew that. They had run into each other more than once at Foster’s Dairy Bar in town.
“I guess I could ask Mama.”
“Great.” Charlie reached around her to open the car door, and Roma Jean nearly passed out from the scent of her hair. It smelled like wild cherries.
“The afternoon service starts at one o’clock, so how about I pick you up at your parents’ house at a quarter of?”
Roma Jean just nodded. She climbed into the massive Chevy and plopped down with all the grace of a loon landing on a pile of wet reeds.
Charlie closed the car door. “Remember to wear your seatbelt.”
Roma Jean fumbled around to find it—its clip had broken loose, and the thing was always tangled up someplace behind the big bench seat.
“Here you go.” Charlie bent into the car and found it for her, then guided it over her shoulder and across her chest. The side of Charlie’s hand brushed against her sweater, and Roma Jean felt hot tingles race up her arms and settle someplace behind her eyeballs. She held her breath until Charlie had snapped the belt into place and ducked back out of the car.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” Charlie asked.
Roma Jean just nodded. She turned the key, and Uncle Cletus’s prize machine roared into life. It blew a cloud of thick gray smoke into the air, but once it settled down, it purred just like a house cat on a porch swing. She took hold of the thick stalk on the steering wheel and jogged the engine into reverse.
Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.
ASTRID YAWNED AND stretched. Her painted red nails looked like leftover bits of Henry’s fairy sprinkles.
Maddie shook her head. David had dropped the fat dog off about an hour ago, promising that he would retrieve her before the clinic closed for the day. He had errands to run, which likely meant that he was going by the inn to check in on the renovation. He’d had to stop taking Astrid out there be
cause she’d already peed on the carpenter’s compound miter saw twice. Maddie asked why he didn’t just leave her at home, and David looked at her with disbelief.
“You’re kidding me with this, right?”
Maddie looked at him impassively. “No, I don’t think I am.”
David sighed. “Well. I thought about it. But when I walked through the kitchen to leave, Syd was sitting at the table flipping through some international cookbook, looking at Korean cuisine.”
Maddie sighed. “And your point would be?”
“Hello? Ever heard of G-A-E-G-O-G-I?”
“What the hell are you spelling?”
“Shhhh.” David looked down at Astrid’s plush dog bed. This was her travel bed, and it was in nearly pristine condition—unlike her twenty or so other beds back at the farm—all of which had seen a lot of hard use.
Astrid spent a lot of time in bed.
“They eat D-O-G meat.”
“Who does?” Maddie was really confused now.
“South Koreans.” He rolled his eyes. “I really wish you would watch Nat Geo just once in a while.”
“You’re insane.”
He shrugged. “I just can’t take that chance. Syd hasn’t been herself lately.”
It was true. But Syd had a lot on her mind these days. They both did. There was the divorce, and their continuing uncertainty about what James Lawrence intended to do about Henry once he was released from rehab at Walter Reed.
“David, even if Syd does take leave of her senses and develops a ludicrous penchant for,” she glanced down at Astrid, “canine cuisine—your dog would be the very last one at risk.”
David looked offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
On cue, Astrid rolled onto her back, exposing the innumerable rolls of fat on her belly and the bottoms of her hairy toes.
David stared at her a moment, then he looked up at Maddie. “I see your point.”
“A breakthrough.”
David rolled his eyes. “Don’t let it go to your head, Cinderella.” He looked around the area behind the reception desk. “Where’s Lizzy? Doesn’t she usually get nailed with these graveyard shifts?”
“She’s up in Blacksburg today, hiking with Syd’s brother.”
“The extremely hot Mr. Murphy,” David mused. “What a waste of some seriously fine raw material that is.”
As usual, Maddie had no idea what he was talking about. “What is?”
“Duh. Tom dating a woman.”
“I thought you liked Lizzy.”
“I do like Lizzy.”
“Then help me understand how his dating Lizzy is a waste.”
David glanced at his watch. “I don’t have enough time to explain that concept to you, Cinderella. And it certainly would require a PowerPoint presentation, at the very least.”
“Well,” Maddie shook her head, “it may end up being a good thing that her relationship with Tom Murphy is humming along.”
“Why?” Now it was David’s turn to look confused.
Maddie sighed. “Because Tom Greene is being irascible about continuing the funding for her position.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“No. Apparently, he has some other, more pressing, priorities.”
“Pressing, my ass. What is this about? Some new kind of shakedown? What’s he want this time? You to do a pole dance on his rec-room bar?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t be so naïve. You know he’s just using this as a way to yank your chain.”
“David, he’s chief of the hospital ER and head of our local United Way. He can pretty much do whatever he wants.”
David shook his head. “I so do not get you sometimes.” He glanced at his watch again. “Okay . . . we’ll talk more about this later.” He walked toward the door. “I’ll be back in a flash.”
MADDIE GLANCED AT the clock above the door. David’s flash had extended to nearly ninety minutes now. It is unusually warm today. Maybe the construction workers all have their shirts off. She looked around the empty room. That could also explain why it’s so slow in here today.
Typically, these weekend clinic hours were among her busiest times of the week.
Maddie’s nurse, Peggy, had to leave early to run an errand, so Maddie sat at her desk in the reception area. She heard the sound of a car roar into the front parking lot out front. It skidded to a halt, and she could hear gravel being slung in every direction. She stood up and started walking around Peggy’s desk.
The door was thrown open, and two men entered. She was pretty certain that the shorter one of them was Sonny Nicks. The other man was Bert Townsend, and he was more or less pulling Sonny into the clinic.
“Doc Stevenson,” he said, in a panicked voice. “This man just got bit by a rattlesnake.”
Rattlesnake? That was certainly uncommon—especially for this early in the season.
She hurried toward the pair. “Where is the bite, and when did this happen?”
“About twenty minutes ago,” Bert said.
She noticed that Sonny looked a bit pale, but otherwise, seemed to be holding his own. He appeared to be breathing normally, and his eyes were alert. He was walking without assistance, but he was supporting his left arm.
“Can you walk a little bit further?” she asked Sonny.
He nodded.
Maddie led them down a short hallway toward one of her examination rooms. “Where were you bitten?”
“On the left hand,” he replied. “I think it was a dry bite.”
“Sit up here, and I’ll help you lie back,” she said. “What makes you think it was a dry bite?”
He shrugged. “I been bit before, and it weren’t nothin’ like this. This one ain’t changin’ color or swelling up too bad.”
“Are you sure it was a rattler?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded. “Timber rattler.”
Maddie was sure he’d be right. Sonny was an exterminator, and he sometimes dealt with the removal of venomous snakes when they turned up in people’s back yards or inside their crawl spaces.
“How did this happen?” she asked.
“I was trying to catch it before it slid into an open cabinet. I didn’t have my hook with me, so I just had to grab it by the tail. Dern thing reared back and tagged me, so I had to stomp it.” He shook his head. “I hated to do that, but I pretty much had to ’cause of all the people around.”
“Where were you?”
“Church.”
“Church?” Maddie asked. She lifted Sonny’s left arm and examined the wound. Sure enough, there were two puncture marks visible on the backside of his hand. There was some localized discoloration and swelling, but it didn’t appear to have spread much beyond the site of the bite. She unclipped and removed his watch.
Bert nodded. “We was out to Bone Gap at the Full Gospel Tabernacle.”
She looked up at him with a raised eyebrow.
“They’re having revival services this week,” he explained.
Maddie didn’t like where this was headed.
“Care to tell me why there was a snake present?” She swabbed the bite area with Betadine, and then uncapped a black Sharpie to draw a circle around the leading edge of the swelling on Sonny’s hand. She checked her watch and wrote the time down next to the black line across his wrist.
“Well,” Bert said. “It was the damndest thing. Nobody knew that preacher had brung a snake with him. Did you know that, Sonny?”
Sonny shook his head. “Nope. They do get up to some craziness out there from time to time, but this is the first I ever heard of any serpent handling.”
“We all knew he was from someplace over in Tennessee,” Bert added. “But nobody’d ever heard him preach before—much less seen his little helper.”
Maddie had finished checking Sonny’s vital signs. They were all normal. “Who is this man?”
“An evangelist.” Bert shrugged. “Young feller. Name’s Terry LeFevre.”<
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“And he brought a timber rattlesnake into a building full of people?”
“No, ma’am,” Bert said. “He brought two of ’em.”
Maddie was now giving Sonny a basic neurologic exam. She lowered his leg back to the table. “Do I even want to ask what happened to the other one?”