In the Midnight Rain (29 page)

Gently, he slid away from her, pausing to pull the sheet back over her shoulder so she wouldn't get a chill. Snagging his jeans from the floor where he'd dropped them, he went to the hall and put them on. The dogs followed him downstairs, nails clicking on the wood. He turned the television on to the weather channel, and while he waited for the local news, collected bourbon and one of the good crystal glasses from the sideboard in the dining room. He poured a drink, listening with half an ear to the rain, counting beats between flashes of lightning and the thunder that followed.

No warnings on the television, and the lightning was still pretty distant. Safe enough.

But now he was awake. He turned on the stereo, quiet as a whisper, so he could hear it through the window that opened on the porch, then carried the bottle and glass outside, holding the door for the dogs. Sasha dashed out, but April hesitated, looking over her shoulder toward the stairs, then at Blue, undecided. "She's safe, baby," Blue said. "You can come out with us.

Rain fell in steady sheets beyond the porch. A crack of lightning burst over the air, and on its heels came a boom. He raised his brows. That wasn't too far away. April whined softly, leaning against him. "Don't like storms, baby?"

Licking her lips, April lowered her head as if she felt guilty. Mist blew on him, cool and sweetly scented, as Blue poured himself a stiff drink. The grass shone pale gray in the cool light, and around the perimeter of the land, the forest crept right up to the fences. As a boy, he had imagined the trees tiptoed forward when no one was looking. It was well past midnight, and there were no sounds but the rain on the land.

There was only Blue and bourbon and the hole in his gut, that empty, empty hole that sometimes seemed it would suck him in a piece at a time if he weren't vigilant. It ached tonight, surprising him with fresh violence after a few weeks of quiet.

He tossed back the whiskey in one hard swallow and felt the burn all the way down his esophagus. It flowed right into that black hole in his belly, and blurred the edges. He poured another.

Sasha slumped with a sigh and went to sleep behind him. April lifted her nose to the night, scenting something Blue couldn't identify, then as if sensing Blue's mood, she wandered over, and settled with her full weight against his calf, looking out at the night with him.

"Damn, you're a good dog." Blue settled an arm around her, grateful for the company. Her fur was thick and soft under his hand, and he simply ran his hand through it, over and over. April lifted her head backward and planted a polite lick to his chin.

The music ribboned out behind him, a drifting blues song that brought his sorrows to the surface. He sipped his bourbon, and the laughing face of his wife was in his mind. He tried never to think of Annie. Ever. When he gave all her things away the day after the funeral, folks said it was healthy that he did that. That he accepted her death with such calm sorrow.

But the truth was, he just couldn't stand to run across something accidentally. A scarf left on a chair. A pillow with her smell on it. A pair of shoes kicked under a table. He'd lose his mind if he didn't get it all out of the house.

Her parents took care of the funeral and the autopsy—multiple head and chest trauma; a trucker short of sleep had run head-on into her car as she returned from a trip to Houston to see a cousin—pretty self-explanatory, in Blue's opinion, and the coroner agreed. And to avoid thinking of what that meant, from letting his mind give him pictures of that car and his wife, he scoured the house for her things and put them all in boxes and put them outside.

When that was done, he took all the pictures he could find, from childhood on, and put them in a box and carried it to the attic. It was nearly two years before he dated another woman, and that only out of pure physical need.

Which was how things had been till Ellie came, small and intense and smart, and stirred up his libido and his life, making him feel again, waking up the dead spots he'd thought safely buried. In the first giddy rush, there had been no room for the warning pinpricks he felt in him now, points of pressure where the dam might give way if he didn't stand guard.

He could name them by their colors. That red one there. Anger. Anger so hot and red he couldn't bear it. Anger that after everything that had been taken, God had had to take his wife, too. Anger that he could never seem to hang on to anything he cared about.

The blue-green pinpoint, piercing his appendix or thereabouts, that was sorrow and fear, that was the color of the light in the hallway of his dream, where no matter which door he opened, he found some dead loved one.

And the rosy yellow was the one that scared him most of all, the one he was out here drinking, trying to drown. Because that one was love, pushing through in a dozen places like some wild weed, taking everything over.

He swore and poured another, but the more he drank, the brighter the pinpricks grew, until he was winded and afraid. "Damn," he whispered, and bent his head to the soft fur of the dog standing sentinel beside him. "Damn," he repeated softly. Just damn.

He'd discovered what the walls were keeping out.

* * *

When Ellie awakened, Blue was not in bed. That was not unusual. It was true he didn't sleep much, and he often rose before she did. But the morning was rainy and dark, and she wished for his body next to hers. She rolled over and tucked her face into his pillow instead, smelling him in the fabric.

And with a shock, she realized this was what it would be like... in some not-too-distant future. Waking alone again, with only memories left of him, and not even a pillow smelling of his hair.

Slowly, she rolled on to her back and looked around the room. It was both simple and complex, both bright and filled with odd, very dark shadows, like the man himself. A tumble of discarded clothes were piled on a chair; in the mix she saw her favorite shirt, a dark blue cotton that pointed out the ruffian blond streaks in his hair and the devastating blue of his eyes. A flash of him in that shirt, his elbows braced on his knees, a wicked twinkle in his eyes, passed across her vision, sending a fierce wave of emotion through her.

She thought, too, of the way his face looked when he was in her, how it took on that strange, serious expression, haunted and hungry. And all she could do was touch his head, circle him more tightly, pull him closer, whisper his name.

And she thought of the lonely sound of music she heard sometimes late at night when she woke up and he wasn't in bed.

"Damn," she said aloud. She'd gone and done it. Fallen in love, hard, with a man who had lost so many pieces he would never be whole. And in this still, rainy morning, she could taste what it was going to be like to leave him behind.

As if he'd heard her stirring, he appeared suddenly at the door. For one moment, he simply stood there, his arms loose at his sides, and she saw a haggardness in his cheeks. She simply gazed back at him, letting him choose, one more time, what he would do.

Without saying a word, he stepped toward the bed, shedding his shirt and letting it drop on the floor. Then he climbed next to her and knelt over her, a knee on either side of her body, covered only by the sheet. She felt a catch in her throat at the strange aura coming off him, anger and heat and need, and she didn't move.

He stared down at her, then suddenly bent and kissed her with what she might have labeled violence in another man, his big hands tight on either side of her head, his tongue a claiming thrust—as close to a cry as she ever heard from him. There was bourbon on his lips. She thought of him sitting on his porch that first night she came here, the darkness on his cheeks, the danger in his eyes, and she'd known then that it would come to this.

She lifted strong arms to his wrists, not to pull him away, but to brace him as she sat up, the sheet coming off her body. She wrapped her arms around him, meeting his despair with love. Even as she did it, as she tasted the bourbon on his tongue, she knew they were acting in accordance to the script she'd told him they would act out—she was trying to save him from himself, and he was clinging to a woman because he didn't know how to get himself out of that place alone.

But even that couldn't change it, couldn't change the landscape where they went together, a world as green and blue as a Scottish tartan. He made a soft choking noise when she gripped a handful of his hair and held it tight while she kissed his beautiful throat and his eyelids and his rough-stubbled cheeks, pressing her small body into his large one. It was she who freed him, who invited him, wordless, to take her in whatever way he needed, and met his roughness with her own strength. She gripped his shoulders and hung on, one hand still tangled in his long hair, as he took her with rough cries, his hands hard on her shoulders, his mouth on her neck.

And when he was at last still and weak against her, she said nothing, only stroked his head, his shoulders, and he simply put his face into her hair and kissed her ear, once, fiercely.

Ellie held him and closed her eyes so she'd always remember, and hoped that some of her love was leaking from the pores of her skin, pressed in so many places against his own, and that it could seep back through his and mend the shredded heart that he protected so fiercely.

* * *

Unsettled by the morning and the sense that somehow, everything was suddenly going to come undone, Ellie could not sit in the cottage and work. Heading out in the heavy rain, she went to the library, and found it deserted except for a plump, white-haired volunteer who said Mrs. Nance had gone to visit her niece for a few days in Austin.

Ellie thanked her and made her way upstairs, shaking rain from her hair. A good many of the bound books still sat on the back table Mrs. Nance had set aside for her, and the sight made her feel guilty.

This morning, she'd resolved to give the mystery of Mabel's disappearance another week. If she couldn't find out by then what had happened, she'd write the book without the information, leaving it the poignant mystery it was. It was a way to focus and set goals.

But first she took out the yearbook to look up Connie's husband. Ewing. She didn't know his first name or how old he was, or if he had a dozen brothers, but she started with the yearbook she'd been using, the one with Marcus and Connie and Rosemary in the senior class.

No Ewing at all. Not in the senior class, not in the junior. But on the freshman list, she found a photo of an awkward girl with truly awful, insanely curly hair listed as Tina Ewing. She wore cat's-eye glasses that obscured the shape of her face, but Ellie felt a little thrill of excitement looking at that hair.

Leaving the book on the table, she went to the stacks and took out the yearbooks for the years just preceding the one she'd been using. She found him in the graduating class of 1966, member of the last class at Washington High School that was segregated.

She carried the book back to the table. His hair was in a crew cut, so it was impossible to tell if he had the same curly hair as the girl Ellie assumed was his sister. But he had the kind of high, broad cheekbones and straight aggressive nose that spoke of Native American blood, and a certain intensity of expression that made her think he might have been the sort of dangerous guy her mother tended to like.

He was a genuine possibility. She looked up activities and other activities and found that he'd been an athlete of some talent—one photo showed him in a football uniform, helmet under his arm, still glaring at the camera. Another showed him in a skimpy basketball uniform. The uniform cracked her up—in comparison to the baggy long shorts that were worn today, these looked positively scandalous. But it showed the shape of his body, long and lean and strong. Almost too thin.

She made black-and-white copies of all the pages, then put the yearbooks all back on the shelf, tucked the loose copies into her notebook, wondering how to handle finding out more. She could come clean and just ask, of course, but that led back to Connie—and her daughter Shauna. How would they feel about it? At least Ellie knew for sure that Connie was otherwise involved at the time, with Bobby Makepeace. And George was dead, so it couldn't hurt him if Ellie was his daughter.

No, she still didn't want to go public. Not just yet. There was another meeting of the book group in a couple of days. She'd ask Connie about her husband then, see if she could glean some more information first.

"Get to work, Connor," she said to herself.

Mabel.

Thinking about it yesterday, Ellie had come back again to the six-week gap in Mabel's life. She had begun to think that Mabel had despaired through that period and had somehow gone somewhere to lick her wounds. What would have caused that? The collapse of the love affair with Peaches McCall.

But she was here today on a hunch that had come to her between sleep and wakefulness, holding Blue's body close to her own. She wanted to read the accounts of Peaches's shooting.

There were only a few paragraphs. He'd been a criminal, and a black one at that. In the fifties, the paper would not have felt compelled to say much about his passing. It was described as a drunken argument that turned fatal.

Ellie frowned. Hadn't Doc told her that Peaches had been shot outside the bar? Noting the names in the article, she closed the book and went back out in the rain to the small police headquarters. A sergeant on duty, tall and trim, with steel gray hair and dark eyes, listened to her request with the skepticism of an officer of the court toward a civilian, but in the end, he let himself be persuaded, and led her to a file cabinet. "We don't have too many homicides around here," he commented, tugging the drawer open. "And ninety percent of those are some jealous lover killing a rival or whatnot."

Ellie nodded. "I suspect this was in the same vein."

"Likely was, ma'am." He flicked through the files and pulled out a very thin one. He opened it. "Yeah," he said, glancing over the report. "Not a lot here. Got ambushed outside Hopkins' on July eleventh, 1952. A Saturday night. Shot clean through the heart. Dead before he hit the ground, probably."