In the Midnight Rain (33 page)

Ellie, with her life story nearly as sad as his own, and that bright strength running through her. He wished he could give her the name of her father, a gift, but it was easier said than done without betraying her secret. And whether he thought she ought to keep it or not was beside the point. She'd trusted him with it, and he'd keep it until she gave permission to do otherwise.

So he tried to puzzle it out on his own. Reaching up to pluck a dead blossom from a cattelya, he reached back to think of the hippie kids who had been in town that summer. He remembered it pretty well, considering he'd only been eight or nine at the time.

The bus had driven into town like something right off TV, as surprising and thrilling to a small boy as a movie star walking the streets. He and his buddy Delbert had taken the path by the river up to the spot where they had been stranded, there in Reed's west pasture, and spied on them through the trees. The bus itself was a marvel, painted with flowers and peace signs and butterflies, and Blue loved the look of the people who got off it, too. Loved the long strands of tiny beads they wore around their necks, and their long, wild hair, and the colors with which they adorned themselves. He liked their sandaled feet and bare torsos, and once—shocking and electrifying—Blue and Delbert had watched the two girls bathing in the river, purely naked right outside. With a faint smile, he wondered now if one of them had been Ellie's mother.

He'd loved them. And for years after, his main goal in life had been to grow up and "be a hippie," an ambition that made his father choke in disgust, and his brother turn red-faced. It didn't change Blue's mind any, but he did learn not to try and imitate those bird-of-paradise people around his family.

Standing now in his greenhouse in his bare feet, he supposed there were people who'd say he'd done just that. What grown man spent his time barefooted in a wild world of flowers, playing with lizards and bugs, trying to find ways to feed people who had trouble feeding themselves? He chuckled as one of those lizards scurried across the arch of his foot.

Sometimes he guessed things just worked out, in spite of everything.

And in a single moment, between taking a sample and standing to put it in the plastic rack, Blue was swept with a sense of such pure contentment, such expansive rightness, that it nearly made him dizzy. All the things that normally troubled him in that vague, sad way seemed to disappear all at once. He had no wish to be anywhere but here, in this day, with his work and his friends and his house.

And Ellie.

Ellie. Wanton and wise, funny and so deadly earnest, sane and secretive. Just the thought of her made his skin ripple, and he could close his eyes and feel her hair against his face.

In that light-struck state, it didn't even scare him to understand he'd fallen in love with her. Way in love. A having-babies-and-dentures-in-the-glass kind of love. It didn't scare him because that's what a man did, finally—or at least a lucky man, anyway—fell in love. Fell in love and took a mate and settled in and had some babies to cuddle who turned out nothing like you expected, but as long as they were happy, it was okay. The circle turned, and sometimes there were sad stretches, but then it turned again, and there was a green season once more. And usually, everything was all right in the end.

Oh, yeah.

He sort of swelled with all this, as if he were filled with helium, and without a second thought, he put down his samples and went to the house to change his clothes. Piwacket followed him hopefully up the stairs, and he remembered he hadn't given her pills this morning. "Oh, you hate me for this, don't you?" he said, and patiently gave her the tiny yellow pill, stroked her throat until she swallowed, then let her go. She blinked, purred for a second, and jumped down to run down the hall to his study. Silly cat. She'd sulk under the desk for an hour or two, and that was fine.

In the meantime, he had some shopping to do. Whistling, he splashed cologne on his jaw, combed his hair, and set off for town. He didn't want Miss Ellie Connor going anywhere. Nowhere at all.

Ellie found Hattie Gordon listed in the tiny Gideon phone book. Standing at a pay phone outside a convenience store in the sun, she dialed the number and remembered, wiping sweat off the back of her neck, why she didn't like Southern summers all that much. A woman answered curtly, as if the phone had called her from some pressing task.

"Mrs. Gordon," Ellie said, "my name is Ellie Connor, and Gwen Laisser told me to get in touch with you."

"Go on."

"She said if I wanted to learn more about Mabel Beauvais you'd be the one to ask."

" 'S that right." It wasn't a question.

Ellie pressed on. "I was over at the juke joint this morning trying to get Doc to tell me—"

"Doc! Have mercy. That man always was so love blind he'd never tell you a damned thing." The swear word, mild as it was, shocked Ellie faintly, and she realized she hadn't heard women around here swearing at all.

"Exactly," she said, dryly. "So will you tell me?"

The silence went on so long Ellie said, "Mrs. Gordon?"

"You say Gwen told you, huh?"

"Yes."

"All right. C'mon then. You might not like what I got to say, but you can come hear it anyway."

Ellie carefully followed the directions Mrs. Gordon had given her, and was happily surprised to find herself exactly where she should be at the end of the notes.

The house was set back from the road, a couple of miles upriver from Hopkins', a small farmhouse made of weathered gray wood. Laundry flapped in the breeze, sheets and towels and the underwear of a large woman. Pigs in a spotless pen lazed in the afternoon sun, and when Ellie slammed her car door, a dusty black dog got up from a patch of shade to come over and nose her knee. Ellie patted his head, expecting someone to peer through the screen door, but no one did, and she climbed up a set of steps to a porch furnished with chairs and tables and pots of red geraniums, vividly bright against the uniformly worn colors around them. She knocked on the screen door, trying not to appear as if she was peering into the room within.

"It's open!" came a voice from the back.

"It's Ellie Connor, Mrs. Gordon."

"I said it's open, girl. C'mon back."

Gingerly, Ellie swung open the screen, and stepped into the cool, bright living room. It was furnished with overstuffed chairs, the backs covered with crocheted doilies in a raised-rose pattern. An antique floor lamp stood beside a chair, and one wall was entirely covered with pictures, generations of family photos.

Ellie paused in front of the photos, too curious to help herself, trying to pick out the infamous Peaches from the dozens of men on the walls. "You sure have a handsome family," she called out, and they were—a rather light-skinned lot, with large, soft-looking eyes. There were wedding and baby photos, school pictures and boys in uniform. Ellie halted in recognition at one of them, and made a soft sound of dismay.

"That's my grandbaby James," Mrs. Gordon said, wiping her hands on her apron. "Died in Vietnam."

"I've seen pictures of him," Ellie said, and turned. The woman was short and round as a dumpling, with deceptively unwrinkled, very dark skin, a darkness that made her pale brown eyes seem uncanny.

"That's his daddy, there. They called him Peaches." She pointed at a black-and-white of a man in a loose, forties-style suit, obviously at a party of some kind. He had a twenty-four-karat smile and the broad shouldered, loose-limbed height that was made for a suit like that. He had his arms around a woman on either side, and Ellie saw that he was everything Doc had hinted—and more. She didn't want to be drawn to him, didn't want to like the sensual face, the knowing eyes, but even in a photo, there was so much charisma he was hard to resist,

"Peaches?"

"That's what they called him. I named him Otis, after my daddy, since his own was a good-for-nothing gambler who ran out on me." She lowered her girth into a chair. "Got me a good man second time around." She pointed to a sober, kind-looking man. "Too late to save Otis."

Ellie took her cue, and settled opposite. "I've seen pictures of James before, him and Marcus."

"Marcus." She spat the word. "Wasn't for Marcus and his big dreams, James would never have joined no white man's army."

Ellie remembered Marcus telling her that he and James had joined the Army on the buddy system. Remembered, too, how his eyes clouded with grief when James was mentioned. "I'm sorry," she said. "He looks like a very nice young man."

"He was," she said, and even so many years later, there was still pain in the loss, a pain Ellie hadn't heard over Peaches. "Good as the day is long, I swear he was. Not like his daddy—nor his mama, either."

"Pea—er—Otis wasn't a good man?"

The tight mouth drew up even more into a grimace. "Lawsy, no. Cut from the same cloth as my good-for-nothing husband, was Otis. Couldn't do a thing with him from the time he was ten years old." She sighed. "I loved him, you know—you can't help but love your children—but that woman hadn't shot him that night, some husband would've had done it sooner or later."

"A woman shot him?"

The scowl deepened. "I thought you knew all this."

"Some of it. Not that."

She inclined her head, suddenly changing direction. "Child, you sure look familiar. You got any people around here?"

She'd heard the question so often, she said automatically, "Not that I know of." With a shrug, she added, "I just came here to do this book."

"A
book?"
The scowl came back. "Gwen know you're doing a book?"

"Yes."

The pale eyes measured her, unblinking. Ellie tried very hard to appear earnest and honest. "You gonna write all of it—the bad and the good?"

Ellie quelled her impatience. "I just want to figure her out, first. If you have anything you don't want me to write, say so, and I'll leave it out."

"No, child, you don't understand. I
want
it all in there. She killed my son."

Even though she'd been expecting this, Ellie felt a ripple of sorrow or dread or something go through her. "She did?"

"She sure did. Right in front of a dozen folks on the front steps at Hopkins'. Bold as you please." Mrs. Gordon warmed to her subject, using her hands to spin out the drama. "Dressed herself up in a red dress, with red shoes, and had her hair done perfect that afternoon—Luerelean Williams did it herself and told me about it, said Mabel had the
works
done that day, fingernails and toenails, and course they were glad to have her there—she spent more money in one day than most folks in those days had in a year. Mabel brought in a hat she'd bought in Memphis, a red hat, and she matched her nails to that color, and then went over to the drugstore and got herself a lipstick to match, too."

Ellie let herself be drawn into the story. She could see Mabel doing something like that. "She dressed herself up to go kill him?"

"She was a vain one, Mabel Beauvais. Folks always talk about how she could sing, but it was the way she looked that drove the menfolk wild. That's what made her so mad about Peaches taking up with Marcia Talbert. She had to have everybody's attention on her, all the time, and she made damned sure she got it, hell or high water."

"I got the impression, from several people, that Mabel was deeply in love with Peaches."

Mrs. Gordon lowered her eyes to her hands, contemplating them for a moment. "I reckon she was." She looked at the picture of her son. "But that don't change the facts. She dressed herself all in red, and went there to find him. She waited out there in the parking lot until he came out, then took that gun from her purse and shot him, close up—I imagine he was trying to sweet-talk his way out of it, and with Otis, that meant putting his hands on a woman—right through the heart." Staring sightlessly to that night long ago, she said, quietly. "Dead before he hit the ground, the doctors say."

Ellie thought of a dozen things to say, but opted instead to remain silent and let the story roll out in its own way.

"Mabel put the gun back in her purse, got in her fancy car, and drove away. And nobody ever saw her again after that. Just—gone. Left her child, left her mama, left everybody, and just disappeared." She
humphed
. "Typical."

"Left her child?" Ellie asked, careful not to put too much excitement into the question.

"Can you imagine? And we never heard a word from her, either. Till the day he died, James asked about his mama, and what could I tell him?"

Half-dizzy with this last revelation, Ellie took a deep breath. She took out her notebook and started scribbling as fast as she could. "Tell me about that, about Mabel having the baby," she said.

And Mrs. Gordon talked. The sun moved, making the room dark, and Mrs. Gordon led Ellie to the kitchen, where she dished up plates of spaghetti thick with fresh sweet peppers and chunks of tomato, and from a simmering pot on the back of the stove, greens—"You ever had greens, child?" "Yes, ma'am"—and all the while, the woman talked. She told a riveting tale, moving back and forth in time, full of side trips and asides and rambling descriptions. Ellie scribbled notes as fast as she could, exuberant, giddy, and thankful.

Finally.
Finally.

By the time she left, with a bag full of leftovers—she really did love greens and ate them with her usual appetite, which delighted the old woman—it was nearly sundown. She still didn't know where Mabel had gone, but at long last, she knew the whys, and the details. She urgently wanted to get home to her notes and her computer. In this mood, she would work all night—and it was about time.

She didn't see Blue's truck, and was about to write him a note when she caught sight of the hood coming up the road. She settled on the back porch steps to wait, and grinned when he pulled up. "Hey, good-lookin,'" she called.

He jumped down, trailing dogs from the cab, both of whom rushed up the hill to greet Ellie, tongues hobbling. Blue grinned, ambling in his usual way behind them.

Sitting there, with her arms crossed on her knees, Ellie was struck with him. Just
him,
all rolling, sexy grace and leanness, his hair shot with gold. It was still hard to believe that smile was for her.