Foxfire Light (3 page)

A hundred yards ahead, there was an old service station built out of rock. A couple of old cars were parked beside the building, but it looked deserted when Joanna pulled in front of the gasoline pumps. She pushed on the horn and peered at the station, trying to see through the dusty windows. There wasn't any response to the honking of her horn but as she climbed out of the car, a man in greasy overalls ambled out of the building.

“Do ya' want reg'lar or unleaded?” he drawled and wiped his hands on an equally greasy rag.

“I don't need gas,” she declared with a curt shake of her head. “I think I missed my turn—”

“You're lost, huh?” He didn't sound surprised.

Joanna bristled. “I am not lost. I only missed my turn.” In her opinion, there was a definite distinction between the two.

He pushed the billed cap to the back of his head and propped his hands on his hips to shrug away the difference. “Lost or missed yore turn, you can call a cat anything you like, but it's still a cat. Where is it you are headed?”

“I was supposed to turn on Lake-road number—”

He interrupted her with a wave of his hand. “The number don't mean nothin' to me. I've been livin' here long before any of these roads had numbers on 'em. I wouldn't know one from the other. Just tell me who you want to see and I'll tell ya' how to get there.”

“I'm trying to find my uncle. You probably wouldn't know him,” she insisted tightly. “He owns a cabin here.”

“Yore uncle gotta name?”

“Yes, he has a name, Reece Morgan,” she retorted, no longer trying to contain her irritation. “If you would just tell me—”

“Is he that fella from California that bought the Wilder cabin?” His gaze narrowed as he interrupted her, studying her closely as if sizing her up. “The one I heard was sweet on the Parmelee widow?”

Joanna was taken back by his information. She didn't know who her uncle had bought the
cabin from and she'd never heard of any woman named Parmelee. “He is from California,” she admitted. “Los Angeles.”

“Go back the way ya' come and take the second gravel road on yore left. Every time the road branches, stay to the left. Ya'll run right into it,” he stated with a certainty she found difficult to question.

“How far is it?” she asked instead.

“As the crow flies, it's probably no more than four miles, but you'll have to go 'bout eleven mountain miles 'fore you get there.”

As far as she was concerned, he was talking in riddles. “What is the difference between mountain miles and regular miles?” she demanded, too hot and tired to be amused by his picturesque phrases.

“A mountain mile measures the same as a regular mile. It jest takes longer to travel over it 'cause it does a lot of snakin' and twistin'.” He grinned and bobbed his head. “Ya'll get the idea.”

Joanna turned back to her car, muttering under her breath. “I already have.”

The man had disappeared behind the building by the time Joanna drove away from the pumps and onto the road, going back the way she came. After she had made the turn onto the second gravel road on the left-hand side, she noticed the small signboard with the faded numbers of the lake road. It was no wonder she had missed it the first time.

Her car kicked up a fine, powdery dust that
drifted in through the opened windows. Joanna could feel it caking her sweat-dampened face. The only alternative was to roll up the windows. She decided she preferred the dust to the stifling heat of a closed car.

The graveled road had started out smooth enough, at least no rougher than she had expected. But within minutes after she had noticed the big ranch house sprawled on the knob of a hill, the condition of the road rapidly deteriorated. The little car bounced and bumped its way along the rough track, not wide enough to straddle the ruts.

She was forced to slow down to keep from having the teeth jolted out of her head. The trees crowded close to the road making it seem more narrow than it actually was. Their thick canopy of leaves gave shade from the sun but the thick growth also stopped the breeze and Joanna was going so slowly that the car generated little wind of its own. Her uncle had to be out of his mind to come here!

Old Jessie Bates was a wheelwright, among a handful of other things. Linc wasn't sure it was fair to call Jessie Bates “old” either. He doubted if the bony man was much past forty but everyone had called him “Old Jessie” for as long as Linc could remember. Maybe it was because the man was always spouting saws of Ozark wisdom, or maybe it was the way these Ozark hills had of aging a man before his time.

Either way, Jessie Bates was a colorful character
and, like Reece, Linc suspected that the man deliberately played the part of a hillbilly. If he needed further convincing, he found it when he pulled into the yard of Jessie's cabin, a chinked log cabin, and saw Jessie hitching his pair of mules to the buckboard.

Turning off the engine, Linc climbed out of the pickup cab and walked over to where the man was hooking up the trace chains. Jessie was wearing new overalls, only they were a size too large. They made his wiry frame look scrawny—more of his costume.

“'Lo, Jessie. What do you know?” Linc stopped beside the near mule and absently slid his hand over its sleek neck.

“I don't know nothin'.” The man straightened and paused for effect, a twinkle brightening his eye. “The heck of it is I didn't find that out 'til yesterday.”

As he was supposed to do, Linc chuckled briefly in his throat, then questioned the man's actions. “What are you planning to do with the mules?”

“Zeb and Zeke were needin' a little exercise so I thought I'd use them to take the buckboard up to yore place,” Jessie explained as if that was perfectly logical.

“There's no need. We can run it up the ramp onto the bed of my truck. It'll be quicker,” Linc reasoned.

“It's too much trouble to unhitch 'em now.” Jessie scratched his scraggly hair and shrugged
away that logic. “You can follow me in the truck if you've a mind to.”

“Then I suppose you'll want me to drive you back here.” Linc eyed the man with veiled amusement.

Jessie made an exaggerated show of looking down at his feet. “I still got two legs. Reckon I can walk. Besides it's mostly all downhill. Zeke might even give in and let me ride him. Never know.” He climbed into the seat of the buck-board and unwrapped the reins from around the brake handle.

Aware that he wasn't going to change Jessie's mind, Linc stepped out of the way as Jessie slapped the rumps of the mules with the flat of the reins and hollered to them. “Gee up there!”

There was the bunching of hindquarters and hooves digging in as the mules swung to the right. The buckboard groaned a brief protest before the wheels began turning. Linc waited until the team was past the pickup before he returned to it and climbed in to start the motor. It was quite a sight to travel behind the mule-drawn buckboard. If the truth were told, Linc was enjoying it just as much as Jessie.

His father had bought the old buckboard at an auction some years ago. He'd always intended to restore it but he'd always been too busy. Then he'd died and it had been left to Linc. He hadn't gotten around to it either, until this spring. There it was, rattling thirty feet ahead of him.

There was satisfaction in that, satisfaction
and just a trace of sadness. He had finished another job his father had started and not been allowed to complete. The same as he had raised his father's children; seen one of them marry and the second completing his education for a law degree—just as he'd seen to the burial of his father's wife, his mother.

The truck crept along behind the buckboard, the slow pace not requiring his undivided attention. His thoughts wandered. Linc didn't notice the buckboard had reached the fork in the road where it branched to Reece's log cabin and toward the main road. Since the intersection occurred on a relatively steep upgrade, Jessie didn't check the mules. Not expecting any traffic, he giddyuped them onto the main road.

The sudden blare of a car's horn snapped Linc out of his reverie. It was followed by a startled outcry and a thudding crunch. He braked the truck to an immediate stop and whipped out of the cab. He had enough of a view of the road to see the buckboard was halted and Jessie was setting the brake. The mules were fidgeting, on the edge of bolting, but obviously the oncoming car had taken the ditch to avoid hitting them.

P
erspiration beaded her face until Joanna felt like one big, wet dishrag. On this narrow, tree-shaded road, she didn't need the sunglasses any more so she took them off and laid them on the car seat near her purse. She opened it, looking for a tissue to wipe away some of this sticky moisture.

Her groping fingers found the usual clutter of things but didn't locate the travel box of tissues. She took her eyes off the road for only a second, locating the small container of Kleenex almost immediately.

Her glance swung back to the road as she took one out. There was an instant of disbelief. Mules hitched to a wagon! It had to be a mirage. The
car was almost on top of them before she accepted that it wasn't. A second after the flat of her palm hit the horn, she wrenched the wheel sharply to the right to avoid them, slamming on the brakes at the same time.

Even at the slow pace she was traveling because of the rough road, there was still enough momentum to bounce the light car out of the narrow ditch and onto the opposite bank. The spreading, gnarled branches of a cedar tree cushioned the impact before the front bumper hit its sturdy trunk.

For several seconds after the car came to a stop and the motor died, Joanna was too shocked to move. Both hands were clenching the steering wheel. As she became aware that she was unscathed, without a bump or a bruise, the blood began to rush through her system at the absolute stupidity of the man driving that team of mules onto the road without checking for oncoming traffic. She was out of the car in a flash—hot, tired, and irritable—her patience exhausted and her temper boiling.

The slamming of the car door was a small sample of her anger. Indifferent to the rattle of harness and chains, she advanced on the skinny man in baggy overalls now standing at the head of the mule team, trying to calm them. She was too blinded with anger to notice the second man on foot approaching the scene.

“You crazy old coot!” Joanna stormed at him, her hands clenched into fists at her side as she came to a stiff-legged stop in the middle of the
road. “Don't you ever look where you're going?”

“Pipe down. You're scarin' ma' mules.” The bony-cheeked man flashed her a hushing look and began mumbling to the edgy animals.

“I'm
scaring
your
mules!” She couldn't believe the gall of the scrawny man. “What about the fright they gave me?”

“Are you all right, Miss?”

Joanna whirled in the direction of the second voice and glared at the tall, broad-shouldered man in the western hat. “Do I look all right?!!”

She felt the swift assessment of the tawny pair of eyes. The sensation was followed by an instant awareness of the georgette blouse sticking damply to her skin and her travel-wrinkled skirt clinging to her sticky legs. She had perspired away all her makeup and her hair looked like a rag mop, the style blown apart by the wind and plastered to her forehead and temples by perspiration. She caught a fleeting glimpse of humor in his look, then it was gone. But it was like a red flag to an already angry bull.

“I wasn't hurt but it's certainly no thanks to him!” Joanna turned again on the driver of the buckboard. “You could have got somebody killed! You could have got
me
killed! You must be crazy to pull out on the road like that! Those mules are a menace! They shouldn't be allowed on public roads!”

“Now, hold on thare.” The driver turned a baleful eye on her. “Don't you go blamin' my mules. They only did what they was told. It was
me at the reins and it was my fault for pullin' out. I jest didn't figure anybody'd be comin”

Joanna wasn't mollified by his confession of guilt. “You should have looked! That's common sense! If I had been going any faster, I couldn't have avoided hitting you! You're just lucky I was going slow on this road—which doesn't even deserve to be called a road!” she added on an angry breath of contempt and was further irritated by the way the man kept soothing the mules. “In case you hadn't noticed, it happens to be my car that's damaged, not your damned mules!”

“And I'm right sorry about that, too,” the man assured her curtly. “I'll pay to fix whatever damage's been done.”

She looked at the man with the baggy overalls, faded shirt, and straggly dark hair. He didn't appear to have enough to keep body and soul together. Her uncle had mentioned that this area was the heart of the Ozarks and she'd heard about the poor people of these hills, barely able to scratch a living out of a soil that grew only rocks. However, at this point, her concern wasn't for his plight, but her own.

Uppermost in her mind was the fact that she was driving a rented car. If he didn't pay, she was liable, and he didn't appear to have two dollars to rub together.

“With what?” Without thinking, Joanna scoffed at the driver's offer to pay. “Some scrawny chickens?”

His head jerked as if she had slapped him. Joanna bit at the inside of her lips as she realized her thoughtless remark had hurt his pride. He shifted to face her more squarely and stood very tall and erect, his expression shuttered and cold.

“I'll pay in hard cash if it takes every cent I got,” he retorted stiffly. “Ain't no one ever said yet that Jessie Bates don't pay his debts.”

He made her feel like a complete ass, which didn't improve her disposition. “Just keep your money and forget it!” she muttered in angry self-disgust.