In the Midnight Rain (15 page)

She saved him. All he'd needed was tools, and Florence had given them to him.

These past four years, it hadn't been wonder that kept him awake. More often, he came here to escape the demons in his head, the ghosts that had chased him out of the house the night before. The ones that chased him up here now.

The ones that made him want to go down to the cottage and lie down next to that skinny woman with her wild hair and let that laugh roll all over him. What a great laugh she had.

Instead, he stayed where he was, head cocked back to the sky, a cat in his lap and a dog under his hand. He was an intelligent man; he knew the world was just sometimes harsh, but his luck with people had been pretty wretched by any measure. Marcus called him Job sometimes, as a joke that didn't really make either of them laugh. Blue sometimes thought he must have pissed God off in another life or been born under a bad star or something.

These days, he judged it safer to keep things loose and easy. As long as he didn't get too tangled up again with anybody, his life was pretty good. He had friends and a home and work and money enough to do pretty much anything he had a mind to do. When he got hungry enough, there were always willing women to warm his bed for a night or a week.

But now Ellie's words came back to him:
What's the wall keeping out?

He frowned. Lots of people had taken him to task for his drinking the past few years—a comment here and there that made him understand folks thought of him as a hard drinker. Lanie hid his bottle when she thought he'd been hitting it too hard. Even Marcus, who was no stranger to a Saturday afternoon six-pack and always liked a nice bourbon at the end of the day, had commented once or twice that maybe Blue drank a bit too much.

But he'd never paid any of them any mind at all. Why did it matter what Ellie thought? She was a stranger, just passing through.

Still. He rubbed his ribs idly, unable to deny that her comments bothered him. It had bothered him that she'd known by his posts on-line when he'd been drinking. It bothered him that she thought he was hiding behind it.

Even if he was. Losing Annie so suddenly had ripped him to pieces, shredded his faith, his hope, his ability to believe in anything. There was a craziness in that kind of pain he didn't wish on anyone, and he'd been desperate to escape it.

He'd turned to his experiments, to the eternal flowers, and poured himself into building the big greenhouse, where he could mimic the Central American rain forest conditions as exactly as possible. He'd worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, hiring Marcus to help him and bringing in crews to do the work they couldn't handle. At night, he opened a bottle of bourbon and anesthetized himself well enough to sleep.

A wall of work and bourbon. He'd erected it to let himself heal.

The answer surprised him, but it had the authentic ring of truth. He'd been flat-out unable to deal with his true reality, so he retreated into a world of flowers and bourbon until he could face it.

Was that such a bad thing? Wasn't there even something like that in the Bible? That wine should be given to the grieving, or saved for the poor to make them feel better about their lot in life? Maybe. He couldn't remember exactly.

Sitting in the dark night, he thought maybe it was only bad if he didn't let go of habits he no longer needed. Maybe it was safe now to let go of the wall and face real life.

Maybe he'd give it a try, just to see. It was time. Maybe he'd even open his heart, just a crack, and see how it felt to really be attracted to a woman, not just sexually, but all the way. Maybe he'd kiss her and see what happened.

As if she heard his thoughts, Piwacket bumped her head against his chin, purring softly. He smiled and rubbed a hand down her bony back. "You like her, don't you?" He looked at the cabin. "So do I."

Something very like hope moved in him, refreshing and soft as a long cold drink of water. "So do I," he repeated.

8

E
llie kept her distance for a couple of days, unwilling to test her resolve about Blue Reynard's charm. She'd taken the old woman from the beauty parlor to tea in Tyler, but the interview had been less than satisfactory. Mrs. Porter wandered a little, touching only lightly on her memories of Mabel Beauvais before wandering down another path in her girlhood. The time spent was hardly a loss; Ellie had gleaned a basketful of details about a black woman's life in the thirties and forties and fifties that she'd be able to use in reconstructing Mabel's world. Still, Ellie was anxious to find more sources, and looked forward to Gwen Laisser's return.

In the meantime, her days took on a comfortable routine. Evenings were spent writing. Early mornings were given to research in Rosemary's attic, deciphering letters and taking notes on the material they contained. There wasn't much yet that she hadn't discovered in other sources, but Ellie's hopes had not dimmed.

Afternoons she spent at the library. Some of that time she was taking notes on the material the librarian had collected for her, but Ellie spent more of it on her search for her father. Finding the picture of her mother had given new urgency to the quest, and as she combed through the photos from the small high school yearbooks from the years between 1966 and 1969, she felt a humming sense of excitement.

In the photos she'd seen in Rosemary's attic, there were only three possibilities that Ellie could see. Two dead and one living.

The dead veterans were Dennis Nicolson, a skinny boy with a crew cut, the one Blue said his mother had cried over, and Robert Makepeace, Connie's beau. Ellie smiled at the name, wondering if it might have appealed to her mother the flower child. The last, and still living, possibility was Todd Binkle, a swarthy boy with big teeth.

Saturday afternoon, she had the second floor of the library to herself since the librarian was leading a children's reading hour on the lower level. It was busy, too, with a steady stream of patrons in and out all day.

Ellie availed herself of the archives happily. To be safe, she only took one yearbook off the shelf at a time, and kept its cover hidden in a sprawl of papers and bound newspapers and various other research materials.

She had two barometers to use at first: her mother's attitude and lifestyle at the time, and her own coloring, which had almost certainly come from her father. Diane had been fair, blue-eyed and redheaded. Ellie was dark-haired and green-eyed, and her skin tone ran to what her grandmother called "olive," though Ellie privately thought of it as sallow. Ellie's grandparents had also been fair and blue-eyed, though Ellie knew she'd inherited her grandmother's curly hair and strong, skinny body.

So first she looked at all three men in their senior yearbook photos, those carefully posed, well-scrubbed shots. They looked exactly the same—neatly cut hair and dark suits with ties and almost identical phony smiles. FBI candidates, every one.

Because it was a small school, she was able to find several pictures each of Crew Cut Dennis and Still Living Binkle. Dennis had been a wrestler and a member of 4-H, and had scored a coup by selling his prize bull that year for the highest price any 4-H-er had ever gotten at the state fair. In the picture, he looked like a classic country boy—Wrangler jeans on his bowed legs, prominent Adam's apple in his skinny throat, a hunk of chew in his lip. Ellie narrowed her eyes. The coloring was almost impossible to decipher because of the black-and-white photography, but if Diane had wanted this kind of man, she would have found dozens just like him in her hometown.

Binkle was a little more promising. Even in the black-and-white photos, he was obviously swarthy. He showed up in the football and basketball team photos, and his physique showed his athleticism. He was good-looking, Ellie thought, but his class activities list also showed he was vice president, a member of the Young Republicans, Future Businessmen of America, dance committee, and chess club. A high achiever with a politician's smile.

Even if Diane had been captured by the admittedly sexy look of the boy, Ellie doubted he would have given her the time of day. She wrote a note to herself:
Is Binkle married? Does Blue know him? Look him up in the phone book; see what he does for a living.
Maybe if she could find out where he worked, Ellie could get a look at him in person.

That left Bobby Makepeace. Apart from the senior portrait, there was only one other photo of him, and there were no clubs or activities listed under his name. The additional photo showed him in a fringed jacket, grinning at the camera over a guitar. His hair was the slightly ridiculous Beatles style that had probably been very daring for this small town at this time period. He was piercingly handsome.

Ellie could see her mother liking a boy like this a lot. And she must have seemed like a fresh breeze to a rebellious small-town boy. She inclined her head, trying to see anything of herself in the face or the smile.

She took out the group picture again. There was Bobby Makepeace, between Connie and Rosemary, an arm around each one. His hair was a distinctly rusty shade of blond and red. If this was her father, Ellie was a definite genetic throwback.

Frustrated, she flipped back to his senior photo. Good bone structure, high cheekbones, a sensual looking mouth. Ellie had the same kind of cheekbones, and her mouth was her best feature.

He seemed a likely candidate, and if she'd not met Connie, Ellie might have been tempted to ask some more direct questions of the townsfolk. Now it felt like a betrayal in some small way. Better to wait a bit.

She turned the page once more to look at Binkle, and she had to admit there was a lot more resemblance there. His hair was dark and a little curly, and there was in his face a Latin kind of angularity. She grinned to herself when she realized that instead of looking for similarities she was picking out differences. She didn't want this one to be her father. Funny.

People changed, though. He might have gone off to war and become a real person.

Idly, she looked at the opposite page and immediately picked out Connie's senior picture. Her hair was teased into a massive cone, and she wore white lipstick, and a sweetheart necklace hung around her throat. Then again, some people didn't change all that much at all. It amazed her how much Connie still looked like this. She'd aged very well.

Next to her was a face that looked familiar, a light-skinned black man with a mischievous grin. Taking the group photo out, she found him with Marcus—the other vet who'd died, James Gordon. Three boys from one high school class seemed like a lot. No wonder Marcus wanted a memorial—these boys were all from his graduating class.

Curious, she looked up Marcus's name in the index and found a long list of photos. The space for his senior photo was missing, but there were several others: Marcus in a track uniform holding a discus, and another with a ribbon around his neck. The caption said he'd taken state in the mile.

He was also in the group shot of student government, which surprised her a little, maybe because of the picture Blue painted of him later, as a troublemaker. But that had been after his tour.

The last picture of Marcus was in a group on the last few pages with simple captions of the student names. The one of Marcus showed him with James, both of them laughing uproariously.

Right below it was the one of Makepeace on the guitar. Ellie felt a soft melancholy creep through her at the sight of those two boys, James and Bobby, at the threshold of their lives, who'd died so far away.

Again it struck her how unreal Vietnam had always seemed to her. Not only unreal, but boring beyond belief—old and dusty and ancient, riddled with conflicts and strangeness that made no sense to her.

But the other night, with Connie and Rosemary, she'd felt the first flicker of reality as the past came alive, and as she peered at the old photos of boys long dead, it seemed she could almost hear their voices, hear the music and the war itself.

As a biographer, she'd often experienced this emotion—when a moment of history stopped being a fact on a page and lifted up, like a hologram, to show itself as whole and real and connected to everything else. Recognizing the feeling now, she let it grow, let the faces of Marcus and James and Bobby burn themselves into her mind before she deliberately flipped back to the one of Dennis the country boy. Remembering Blue's brother had also died in Vietnam, she turned to the index and looked up Reynard. He was in the ninth grade. A baby.

Hearing a step on the stairs, Ellie slammed the annual closed and hid it under her notebook. The librarian breezed by, gave her a wave, but didn't stop. Obviously, she was hurrying to the ladies' room.

As soon as she'd disappeared, Ellie rushed to put the annual back in place. Enough for one day. She had to concentrate on her book for the rest of the afternoon or she'd never get it done.

Still, as she dutifully made notes about Mabel's hometown life, the slight sense of melancholy didn't leave her, and the faces of the boys were burned into her mind.

* * *

As she was tearing lettuce for her supper, Blue showed up on her doorstep. "Knock, knock," he said through the screen. "Can I come in?"