The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (28 page)

The explosion had flung Charlie forward and onto the floor in front of the teacher's platform. He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn't and crouched there, covering his head with his arms, stunned, his ears ringing, his heart pounding like a trip hammer. Dazed, he heard the crackle of flames and got to his knees, turning to look over his shoulder. The fire was spreading across the floor, ignited by the lightning strike and fueled by the kerosene that had spilled out of the can beside the stove. Tongues of flame licked hungrily at the walls and the wooden desks. If it weren't for the pelting rain that sought out the fire and doused it with a hiss and a sizzle, the old tinderbox would have gone up in an instant. As it was, it was likely to smolder for hours.

But the building no longer provided any shelter. Charlie scrambled to his feet. “Mata Hari?” he yelled, and sucked in a lungful of choking dust and smoke. He coughed. “Mata Hari?”

The only answer was the wail of the wind and the groan of the walls under the weight of the collapsed roof. The teacher's desk still stood on the platform in front of the blackboard, but part of the wall was gone. Charlie picked his way through broken boards and roof shingles toward the nearest cloakroom door, and stepped into a splintered chaos. The roof of the back part of the building had
collapsed, and most of the back wall. The rain was pouring down in a drenching torrent. The woman lay on the floor, pinned under a beam, her eyes closed, face ashen, head bleeding. Charlie recognized her immediately and bent over her, taking her hand. Her fingers were limp and cold.

“Lucy,” he said urgently. “Lucy, answer me. Are you all right?
Lucy?
”

There was no
answer.

In Which Several Important Things Happen at Once to Different People

As Ophelia drove home from the camp, the southwestern sky was dark and ominous, and she knew that the coming storm was likely to be a bad one. After she and Sarah got home and carried their purchases into the house, the first thing she did was turn on the parlor radio to try and catch a weather forecast. Ten minutes later, the announcer on WALA was reporting that the storm that had been hanging around out in the Gulf had finally crossed the coast and was picking up speed. It was moving inland west of Mobile on a curving path that took it in a northerly direction. The announcer warned of torrential rain, lightning, and winds of over a hundred miles an hour, higher in gusts.

Ophelia, who had weathered a great many storms, didn't need to look at a map to know that Darling was on the edges of the path and that they were about to be brushed by a hurricane. She telephoned Jed to alert him to the situation, then summoned Sam and put him to the task of telephoning the
boys on his baseball team to tell them that their picnic was postponed, since the whole town would be hunkering down until the storm had blown over. She called Sarah down from upstairs (where she had been trying on her new bathing suit) and put her to work collecting all the candles and oil lamps in the house so they could be easily located when the lights went out, which was sure to happen. Darling's power went off when the wind blew hard or when there was ice on the wires, and it was sometimes days before the electricity was restored. Ophelia filled gallon jugs with water from the faucet, since Darling's water pumps wouldn't work without power.

The big worry was the food in the icebox. The ice that had been delivered that morning and kept the food cold throughout the weekend would normally be replaced on Monday. But the Darling Ice Company depended on the Darling Power Company and the Darling Water Company. If the electricity went out, the ice company wouldn't be making ice over the weekend, which meant no Monday deliveries—or Tuesday or Wednesday, either, if the power was out for a long time. Ophelia tied a length of bright red yarn to the icebox handle to remind everybody not to leave it open when they took food out of it.

At two o'clock, Jed closed the Farm Supply and came home. He and Sam fastened wooden shutters over the windows while Ophelia went down the street and persuaded Mother and Dad Snow to come and ride out the storm with them. Their house was one of the sturdiest in the neighborhood and had weathered several bad blows over the years, with only minor damage. They would all be relatively safe there, and it was good for the family to be together.

But while she was tending to her storm preparations, Ophelia was thinking about the situation at the camp. The boys would likely be confined to barracks for the duration of
the storm, but the buildings were designed as temporary structures, and she wasn't sure that they would weather a big blow without a lot of damage. She hoped everyone would be safe.

But mostly, she was thinking about those two voucher lists she had taken from the quartermaster's filing cabinet earlier that day—the people, with names, addresses, and amounts, who were due to receive contract payment checks from the government. For the life of her, she still couldn't figure out why the
second list
, the one Sergeant Webb had typed, contained so many more names than the list she herself had typed. It didn't make sense, she thought. It just didn't make sense.

So after she had settled Dad Snow for a game of checkers with Sarah and persuaded Mother Snow to lie down for a nap on the double bed in the bedroom she and Jed shared, Ophelia sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the two lists. She studied them carefully, then (since she couldn't mark the originals) made a list of the names—eighteen of them—that were on the sergeant's list but not on hers. She included the voucher amounts and totaled them, a little over $22,000. Then she picked up the thin telephone directory for Cypress County and began to look up the names. Fifteen minutes later, as the sky outside the kitchen window grew darker and thunder growled and grumbled in the distance, she gave it up as a bad job. None of the eighteen—not a single one!—was in the telephone directory.

She was still sitting there, thinking about this, when Jed came in from his last-minute outdoor preparations. “It's beginning to blow pretty hard out there,” he said, taking off his yellow storm slicker and hanging it, dripping, on the hook beside the back door. “Looks like we lost a limb off the peach tree. And who knows what else we'll lose in the next few hours. We may be lucky to hang on to the roof—and the chimney.”

Ophelia sighed as she got up to get the coffeepot. They'd had to rebuild their chimney a couple of times already. “Is everything taken care of in town?” she asked.

“I think so.” Jed pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, and Ophelia poured him a fresh cup of coffee. “After you called, I went over to the sheriff's office to let them know about the forecast. Buddy had gone out to the camp, but Springer was there. That new deputy has a lot on the ball. He'd heard the forecast and was already making plans. The sheriff's office will be storm headquarters, and the Exchange will relay emergency messages there.”

“Out to the camp?” Ophelia asked.

“Yeah. Springer wouldn't tell me why, but I'm guessing that it has something to do with the Hancock murder.” He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “After that, I went over to the courthouse and told Hezzy to ring the storm bell and take all the flags in, then stopped in at the Exchange to make sure that Myra May's diesel generator is ready to fire up if the power fails. She had already heard the WALA weather forecast and had brought in a couple of her extra girls to call the older people in town—the ones with no families or near neighbors—to see if they need any help getting over to the Methodist basement. And all the party lines are going full tilt, of course. Everybody should get the word.”

As mayor of Darling, it was Jed's responsibility to monitor emergency situations. Hezzy was Hezekiah, the colored man who managed the flags and wound the clock and rang the courthouse bell, which could be heard from one end of Darling to the other. The storm bell was a peal of five rings and a pause, then three and a pause, then five. By the time Hezzy finished pulling the bell rope thirteen times, everybody in town would know that a bad storm was on the way. If they missed that warning, Hezzy would ring it again thirty
minutes later. Those who weren't sure that their houses could stand a big blow were welcome to go to the Methodist church, where the deacons and their wives were organizing the basement as a storm shelter. If people needed a ride to the church, they could call the switchboard (which could be powered by a diesel generator if the electricity went out), and somebody would go and get them. In a difficult situation, Darling always took care of its own.

“I'm sure you've done everything you could do,” Ophelia said. She sat down and pushed her list of eighteen names across the table. “If you've got a minute, I wonder—would you mind taking a look at this, Jed?”

He glanced down at it, then picked up his coffee and drank. “What am I looking at?”

“It's supposed to be a list of people who are due to get government checks through our office at the camp. But I don't recognize a single name. Do you?” As the owner and manager of the Farm Supply, Jed had business dealings with every farm family in the county, while Ophelia knew everybody in town and most of the people in the county. If
he
didn't know them and
she
didn't know them, they didn't exist. It was as simple as that.

He frowned down at the list. “Can't say that I do, Opie. And the addresses—well, they're just plain crazy. Some of them are the right names—I mean, they're the names of county roads—but the numbers are all wrong. And some of the others, I've never heard of. Rider Road, for instance. Where the heck is that?” Frowning, he put his finger on the total she had written at the bottom. “These people are collecting twenty-two thousand dollars in government checks? But who the devil
are
they? Nobody I know.”

Ophelia sat back in her chair. There was only one way to answer Jed's question, but she almost didn't believe it, and
she didn't trust herself to give it voice. She was still trying to think of what to say when Sarah came skipping into the kitchen. She was wearing one of her brother's shirts over her new red wool bathing suit. The loose shirt covered her neck and arms, but her legs were long and lovely—and bare.

Jed blinked. “What in the . . . ?” he barked. “What's that you're wearing, Sarah?”

Ophelia thought of Lucy and her slacks and everything she had said. She took a deep breath and replied, with the greatest calmness, “It's Sarah's birthday present, Jed. Isn't it just the most
practical
bathing suit you ever saw? It's designed so that a girl can go swimming without worrying about skirts getting all bunched up and twisted. It really didn't cost that much, and there was enough left over from my last paycheck to take care of it.” To Sarah, she said, “Sarah, honey, thank your father for the present.”

Sarah bent over the back of her father's chair and put her arms around him. “Thank you, Daddy,” she whispered, with her cheek against his. “It's exactly what I wanted—and the very best birthday present ever.”

To the end of her life, Ophelia would be grateful to Jed for swallowing down his objections. She could see what an effort it took, but he managed it. Patting Sarah's hands against his chest, he said, “I'm glad you got what you wanted, honey. As long as your mother thinks it's okay, it's fine with me.” With a crooked grin, he looked across the table at Ophelia. “Remind me, wife. How old is this one? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Thirty? I always lose track.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Sarah scoffed, cuffing him playfully. “You are such a tease. I'm still just a
girl
, not a grown-up! I just turned
fifteen.
”

Jed held out his fingers and pretended to count on them.
“Well, by golly, you're right,” he said, as if he was marveling at the fact. “You're still just fifteen.”

He got up from his chair and put his arms around his daughter. “And see that you remember it,” he added with mock sternness against her hair, and with a wink at Ophelia.

*   *   *

The rain was coming down hard when Buddy drove into Camp Briarwood and stopped at the main camp signpost to look for directions to the motor pool. He saw what he was looking for, then turned left and followed the gravel road until he reached a graveled lot on which were parked a couple of trucks, a tractor, and three staff cars. One Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a smaller Indian Ace were parked in a wood-frame shed, where they were out of the rain. Next to the shed was a shack with a sign that said MOTOR POOL over the door.

Before Buddy got out of his patrol car, he checked the gun in his holster, then took the handcuffs out of the box on the floor and clipped them to his belt. Wishful thinking, he told himself. He probably wouldn't need them. But just in case—

A uniformed young man in his late teens, his blond hair clipped so close to his scalp that he looked almost bald, was sitting on a stool in the motor pool shack, reading. When Buddy opened the door, the man looked up from his comic book—
Famous Funnies—
and frowned.

“The vehicles in this lot are for—” He saw the badge and blinked.

“Sheriff Norris,” Buddy said, and took out his official wallet ID. Sheriff Burns had never bothered with identification, since everybody in Cypress County knew him. But it had
come in handy for Buddy a time or two, as it did now. The young man put the comic book aside and straightened his shoulders.

“Yessir,” he said. “Lookin' for something in particular?”

“A log of the vehicles that are checked out. You got one?”

“Yessir.” The young man hesitated. “But maybe you should ask Captain Campbell.”

“I can do that,” Buddy said. “Or I can get a warrant. But all I really want right now is just to take a quick look. That okay with you?”

The young man considered. “You're the law,” he said after a moment. He reached behind him, took a canvas-covered ledger off a shelf, and handed it over.

“Thanks,” Buddy said. He raised an eyebrow. “You got a name?”

“Homer,” the young man said. “Homer Kennedy. Sir.”

“Thanks, Homer.” Buddy opened the ledger to the most recent entries and ran his finger down the ruled columns. Yes, there it was, he saw, with mounting excitement. On Thursday night, one of the motorcycles—the Harley—had been checked out at seven thirty p.m. and checked in at eleven forty p.m. Next to that entry was the pencil signature
R. Andrews.
Last night, the Harley had gone out at eight fifteen. There was no name next to the Harley checkout time, though, and it hadn't been checked back in.