Bombshell (2 page)

A tall, terrifying, steel-girder bridge loomed over the rushing waters of the Mississippi River. Annalee swallowed hard and said a prayer that she was certain would go unheard by the Almighty as she negotiated the narrowing roadway and approached the bridge to Illinois.

The child in her belly, barely four months formed, tickled her insides, as if he or she felt the same dread concerning bridges.

“It’s all right, Kiddo,” Annalee whispered. “We’ll stop soon and get something to eat. Maybe stay the night...”

Chicago could not come along soon enough. There were orchestras and ballrooms in Chicago that could use someone with her talent, at least until Kiddo started to show...and when that happened, she could simply disappear into the crowd. After all, nobody cared about anyone else in the big city. A lifetime in Hollywood had taught her that much.

She supposed she could have flown at least part of the way across the country, but the terror she felt concerning bridges extended to airplanes. A ten-hour flight from Los Angeles to Chicago became a ten-day trek along Route 66 in the Ford Roadster given to her as part of what she’d decided to call her “going-away present” from the man who had so enthusiastically helped create the new life inside her.

She thought of Glenn Dougherty and gave a quiet sigh. He was tall, handsome for a man in his forties, a flashy dresser and a smooth talker who led what had once been the finest orchestra on the West Coast. A married man who didn’t mind breaking his vows every now and then when it came to lovely young blondes.

A married man who didn’t mind parting with fifty thousand dollars and a fancy car to get rid of young blondes when they became a problem.

Annalee wished she could cry at her predicament, but the truth was she’d made her bed and now she had to lie in it. When it came to men like Glenn Dougherty, she was under no illusion she was loved. No, to men like Glenn, she was a diversion, a notch on the bedpost and nothing more. Men like Glenn abounded in Hollywood. She was simply relieved she’d happened to come across one who took care of his problems with such generosity.

Kiddo tickled her insides again, and Annalee thought she felt the baby cringe as she guided the Roadster onto the bridge.

The river rushed beneath them, its beauty lost to Annalee’s sheer terror as she slowed the car to a crawl lest the tires lose traction and they careen headlong into oblivion. She gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles threatened to burst through the skin, and she prayed once more that the structure would hold.

The bridge swayed beneath her. Annalee’s heart leaped into her throat. Kiddo gave her kidney a swift kick with his tiny leg—and the air was filled with a horrible choking sound that somehow managed to rise above the din of the rushing river below.

The Roadster lurched forward suddenly, gave a few throaty chugs, and finally sputtered to a halt halfway across the bridge.

The fuel gauge fell past empty.

She turned the ignition key once, then twice, but the engine did nothing but scream its disapproval.

Annalee gave a deep, quiet sigh and tried to mentally calculate the distance from the middle of the bridge to the nearest service station, but her mind would not conjure up an answer. Instead, she felt the bridge sway gently once more and listened with growing fear as the water roared beneath her and the golden eagles shrieked above...and tried to put out of her mind the vision of those hateful beasts pecking at her eyes.

Finally, mumbling fearful petitions to the Lord under her breath, she grabbed the satchel burdened with fifty thousand dollars and a few diamond trinkets, climbed out of the convertible, and started the long walk into town.

****

John Calaway sat in his squad car and watched as his deputies nailed an eviction notice to Earl Brown’s ramshackle front door. It wasn’t the first foreclosure of the day, and it wasn’t going to be the last, but something about Earl Brown made him uneasy. The farm had been in the Brown family for well nigh a hundred years, but Earl was a drunk and a gambler who had taken too many poker rides on the
Delta Queen
to stay solvent.

It wasn’t the gambler part of Earl’s personality that caused Sheriff Calaway to ease his shotgun out of its place under his seat. No, Earl was a feisty drunk who hated anyone who stepped onto his land without an engraved invitation. He especially hated the men who comprised the Pike County Sheriff’s Department.

To make matters worse, Earl Brown was a brute: a six-foot-five wall of brawn with an empty space where his brain should have been. And that beast was about to get rough with Deputy Calvin Stamp.

Calaway stepped from his vehicle, shotgun at his side, and approached the big man. “Come on, Earl, you don’t want to be givin’ us no problems. Not today.”

“And you don’t want to be nailin’ no foreclosure notices on my door,” the big man snarled.

“Ain’t Calvin’s fault you got yourself in deep water with the bank men. This Depression they got going on makes ’em mean, you know that. You just let my deputy go now.” Calaway gripped the shotgun with both hands now, but that empty space where Earl Brown’s brain should have been precluded him from taking the warning. The big man gripped Deputy Stamp’s collar and gave it a twist.

Calvin Stamp gave a choke and tried to gasp. “No problem, Boss. I got him right where I want him.”

Calaway aimed the shotgun in the air and fired off a round that sent a thunderous BOOM echoing across the heartland. Earl Brown didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, didn’t do much more than let his snarl grow into a demonic growl.

“I said ain’t nobody foreclosin’ here!”

Calvin glanced over his shoulder with bugging eyes and half-nodded to the sheriff. With one lightning-quick move, he broke free of Brown’s vise-grip and whirled him around. Calaway adjusted his grip on the shotgun, and in a flash slammed the butt of the weapon straight into the big man’s forehead.

Earl Brown’s eyes rolled back into his head. A furious knot, already purple-red and pulsing madly, sprouted on his forehead. He collapsed to his knees.

John Calaway bent down to inspect his handiwork. “I hated to do it, Earl, but you have to understand we all have our jobs to do. Calvin, if you would be so kind as to cuff this man, I think we can be on our way.”

While Calvin Stamp and the other deputies finagled the big man’s wrists into a set of handcuffs, Sheriff Calaway licked the tip of his pencil and paused for a moment to compose a note.

Dear Mrs. Brown,

My sincerest apologies. I trust your Pa will take you and the children into his care. Earl decided to get feisty, so he’ll be with us for a while.

Sheriff John Calaway

He tacked his note next to the foreclosure notice and silently wished damnation on the banks and the men who ran them.

****

Annalee guessed she’d gained ten pounds or so since her body became home to the little surprise visitor. At least five of those extra pounds pressed against the waistline of her dress, but the remainder chose gravity’s course and ended up in her feet, which now throbbed in swollen agony. It wasn’t so long ago she’d danced a marathon on a lark. Now she was forced to stop and rest every hundred feet or so, simply to calm the pain in her legs.

“I’m in big trouble when you really start to grow, Kiddo.”

The smell of the river hung heavy in the warm, early summer air. Not an entirely unpleasant smell, but Annalee could not remember a time when her sense of smell was so sharp.

Nor could she remember a time when she’d come across so many dying towns. Life among the rich and famous had sheltered her from the ravages of the Depression. She’d heard stories and had seen pictures in the national news magazines, but until she began her trek eastward and saw the farms and livestock devastated by dust storms and drought, saw the starving people waiting in long lines for soup and a hunk of bread, she hadn’t a clue what poverty actually meant.

So many people going without, so many children going hungry, while folks in Hollywood got paid enormous sums of money to sing and dance and read lines other people wrote for them.

It was depressing.

Walking around with fifty thousand dollars in her suitcase and a belly full of good food when she stopped for the night had a tendency to make her feel guilty. She prayed that this little town called Summer Hill would have fared better, that somehow the guilt of her good fortune would somehow be assuaged.

But as Annalee drew closer to the town proper, a sick feeling started to gnaw at her. Along Great River Road, businesses were shuttered, abandoned by their destitute owners. A feed store, situated across from the sporting houses and saloons that catered to the river men, stood empty. A sign on the door read “Gone Fishing.”

Across from the feed store, along the riverbank, stood what appeared to be a diner of some sort, a two-story structure with a wraparound porch and what might have been an outdoor dining deck. The windows were covered with plywood and a thick blanket of weeds covered the surrounding grounds, but Annalee guessed it must have been quite a lovely place at one time.

A half-rotted wooden signpost jutted from the weeds at a half-cocked angle:

The Blue Lantern Café

Est. 1890

Open for over forty years, and now it’s gone.

Depressing.

The low rumble of a car engine grew louder in her ears and snapped her out of her disappointment. Annalee turned and was startled to realize the engine belonged to a police car. Two men in uniform took up the front seats and an angry monster dressed like a farmer filled the back of the car.

The car stopped beside her and the driver, whose brass nameplate read “Calaway,” tilted his head in her direction. His eyes were like sapphire, the kind of eyes that knew her inside and out in an instant, and his lips were so handsomely shaped she could have kissed him if his presence hadn’t startled her so badly.

Those lips curved into a crooked, slightly amused grin. “Don’t see very many platinum blondes out this way. Where you headed?”

The deputy in the passenger seat peered around Calaway’s head to take a gander, and that was enough to raise Annalee’s growing consternation. Particularly when the deputy began to slap the sheriff’s arm with excitement. “Boss, do you know who that is?”

Annalee leaned against the squad car’s door and gave the sheriff a flirtatious little smile. Though her temper had grown short in the summer heat, she knew it was always better to charm a man than to strong-arm him. “ ’Bout time you fellas showed up. I was starting to think you’d let me walk home all by my lonesome.”

“Where’s home?”

“Where’s the nearest hotel?”

Calvin Stamp slapped at Sheriff Calaway’s arm again and leaned forward to holler out the window. “You were in that picture with Wheeler and Woolsey, weren’t you? Annalee Harrison! Lord almighty, Boss, she’s a bona fide movie star!”

“Oh, I don’t know about all that,” she said with a chuckle. “I was always more of a singer. You know, nightclubs and orchestras and all that.”

Earl Brown leaned forward from the back seat, the fresh lump on his forehead aglow, and gave an evil laugh. “You can come back here and sing to me all you want, baby!”

Calvin whipped around, eyes aflame, like a man possessed. “You just sit back in your seat and shut that dirty mouth of yours, Earl. This don’t concern you!”

Sheriff Calaway gave half a grin and shook his head. He was near thirty-five or so, she guessed, a handsome stranger with eyes so deeply blue they made her knees turn to rubber.

She smiled, brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and half-wished she would have at least worn some lipstick for the occasion—after all, a lady must always strive to look her best—until Kiddo gave her another swift kick to the kidney. “My car ran out of gas back on the bridge. I was hoping someone could show me the way to a service station.”

“There ain’t but one left in town,” Calaway said.

“Well, I would be awful grateful if you could point me in the right direction,” she said, a little surprised by the flirtatious tone in her voice. Tired and gloomy as she felt coming into yet another dying town, something in the sheriff’s eyes brought a glimmer of hope and, she forced herself to admit, cupidity, to her soul.

Calaway glanced at the low-cut neckline of her flower-print dress and gave a nervous cough. “May I exit the vehicle, Miz Harrison, or have you attached yourself permanently?”

“Annalee,” she said in a sweet voice and stepped back from the squad car. “And you may do anything you like, Sheriff.”

Calaway emerged from the vehicle, and Annalee could swear the air temperature shot thirty degrees higher. He was tall, broad across the shoulders and trim at the waist, the fine physique of an athlete, and when he took off his hat to wipe the sweat off his brow, his tousled black hair glimmered in the sunlight like fine onyx. The sight of him left her breathless. Time was it took at least three flutes of champagne and a diamond bracelet to get her so worked up. And there wasn’t a sheriff in the world who could afford that kind of luxury.

Must be you, Kiddo. Having you aboard did something to my chemistry.

The sheriff beckoned her to the passenger side and waved Calvin out of the car and into the back seat. “Have a seat, Miz Harrison. We’ll get you sorted out.”

Earl Brown gave a perverted laugh as Annalee settled into the passenger seat. Calvin shut him up with a sharp elbow to the ribs. “Boss, you’d best take me and this ornery sumbitch back to the station. A lady like Miss Annalee’s got no business being around this kind of rabble.”

****

Four deputies were required to haul Earl Brown to a cell. Having never seen the inside of a police station, Annalee kept herself close to Sheriff Calaway and tried to ignore the hoots and catcalls that came from the other side of the bars.

Another prisoner, passed out drunk and covered in vomit, was carried into the cell adjoining Earl’s. Annalee glanced his way, caught a whiff of the stink that emanated from his body, and felt ill. Though her regular bouts with morning sickness had begun to subside a bit, her heightened sense of smell meant she was at the mercy of her surroundings. She grabbed the sheriff’s hard, muscular arm to steady herself and was heartened when he did not pull away.