In the Midnight Rain (6 page)

She shifted in the seat, crossing her arms. Figured. He wasn't just gorgeous. Not by a long shot.

They lapsed into silence as they drove down the badly paved road from town to his land. She stared out the window, trying not to imagine what a greenhouse full of orchids might look like.

Blue turned on the radio. A swing tune filled the gap between them with bright horns, and Ellie closed her eyes for a minute, seeing the desperate frenzy of dancers trying to forget a war swallowing up their loved ones half a world away. "Swing always makes me feel a little melancholy," she said.

"Sorry." He put a hand on the tuner. "I'll change it."

"Oh, no, that's not what I meant." She lifted a shoulder. "It was just a comment."

He nodded, settling his hand back on one thigh. Ellie thought about asking what made him choose a station with this kind of music over Top 40 or classical or whatever, but she kept her mouth closed on the words.

Pulling up in front of the cabin, he left the engine idling. "I'll drive you out to Rosemary's in the morning. It's kinda hard to find."

"You really don't have to do that, Blue. I didn't mean to come out here and eat up all your time."

"And I wouldn't let you. A little neighborly hand isn't such a bad thing, though. I'll be here at six-thirty."

Ellie nodded, deciding it wasn't worth an argument. "Thank you." She got out and watched him drive away, feeling a strange little knot in her chest. It was both lure and warning. Blue Reynard was a lot more than she'd bargained for.

But it wasn't in her nature to sit around brooding about such things. Instead, she let April out to run for a bit. While she waited, she poured a glass of tea and sat on the porch steps to keep an eye on her, bringing out one of the files of material Blue had left for her. Most of it was newspaper clippings from the thirties and forties, and Ellie felt a soft gust of gratitude that he'd gone to all this trouble.

She put the photocopied articles aside, anchored under a stone so the breeze wouldn't blow them away, and quickly glanced at the rest of the material: lists of blues clubs, possible contacts and where to reach them, the name of the local newspaper editor, a contact at the Church of God in Christ. The last one made her smile. From all Ellie knew of Mabel, church would not have been high on her list—but then, a lot of children first learned to sing in the local church choir.

The last item was a photograph, an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy of the sort taken by wandering photographers at the clubs. A party of seven or eight sat around a table, dressed to the nines, hair slicked and tamed, teeth flashing in dark faces. In the middle sat a very young Mabel Beauvais, her eyes the focal point of the shot, long, exotic eyes, smoky and somehow hinting of secret laughter. She was wearing a dark polka-dot dress, rayon by the shine, which did nothing to hide her siren curves.

Ellie stared at it for a long moment, feeling the same ache she'd felt the first time that she'd seen Mabel's picture. That secret laughter, that aloof amusement—there even when Mabel had been very young. How old was she in the picture? Eighteen, nineteen? Ellie turned it over to see if there was a label:
Hopkins' Juke Box, November 2, 1939
.

Not eighteen. Ellie turned it back to the front. Mabel was sixteen, and already had that look in her eye.

With a sigh, she got up and whistled for April, who came racing back through the tall grass of the field. It was time for the real story on Mabel Beauvais. Where had she gone? And why had she disappeared just when she was about to get all the fame and fortune every musician dreamed of?

* * *

Rosemary liked to take her lunch in Connie's shop. The two women had been knitted into a sometimes unwilling friendship by events neither of them had been able to control, beginning when the federal government had forced integration on the little town. They'd started high school together that year. Then, their boyfriends—Connie's Bobby and Rosemary's Marcus—had gone off to boot camp on the same bus. There had been a time in the early seventies when Connie was the only person in the world whom Rosemary felt she could share her terrors with, and vice versa.

But they'd drifted apart for a while after that, living parallel lives—getting married, having babies, and all that went along with that. Being well-raised, they'd taken their places in the community. They'd spoken, here and there, when they met in the street, but that was all.

Five years ago, the circle turned again, and they were widows within four months of each other, Connie first. When Rosemary's husband died, it had once again been Connie she could depend on to understand—not the grief, exactly, but the anger that came along with it.

Connie, who spent way too much time reading astrology magazines, claimed that their stars were aligned. Rosemary figured they were just unlucky enough to be victims of interesting times.

Today, Rosemary was more eager than usual to settle into the lunchtime gossip session. "Quiet here this afternoon," she said, closing the glass-fronted door firmly behind her to hold in the cool of the air conditioner attempting to lower temperatures generated by hair dryers and hot running water.

Connie was rolling a perm on Mrs. Jenkins, school board president, and the acrid odor of the solution mixed with nail polish the manicurist was applying in careful stripes to the tips of Alisha's very long nails. "I don't know how you do hair with those fingernails," Rosemary said with a shake of her head. "Or garden anything at all."

Alisha smiled her little cat smile, the one that was so annoying, and looked at her finished left hand. The one with the thick gold band Marcus had put on her finger. "I've had these nails all my life. They're like stone. I don't know how I'd function without them, to tell you the truth."

"So," Connie said from across the room. "What'd you think of that writer Blue brought around?"

"Seems real nice." Usually one of the younger girls would run out with their money to buy sub sandwiches or tacos from a stand near the highway, and today the job fell to Connie's daughter Shauna. Rosemary opened her purse and counted out four dollar bills to give to the girl, who was writing their orders down on an old envelope. "Get me the burrito today. And if you happen to see my son, tell him I'm going to be late for dinner."

"Will do," Shauna said, scribbling. She pocketed Rosemary's money and headed for the door. "He told me he was working till seven. We're supposed to go over our calculus tonight." She waved. "Be back in a little while."

Thinking of Ellie, Rosemary said, "I hate to see such a nice young woman fall to Blue's spell, though. You could already see it there in her eyes." She shook her head. "And she's just not his type at all, is she?"

"Not a bit," Connie agreed, "but I'm betting he'll have her in his bed inside a week anyway."

"Oh, I hope not," Alisha said. "He's such a dog."

Connie fitted a plastic bag over her customer's head. "That's not fair, Alisha. He's just had some hard knocks. His wife hasn't been gone that long. A man's bound to sow a few wild oats after something like that."

"It's been at least five years." Alisha put her hands side by side in front of her, narrowing her eyes to examine them. "Because I've been in town that long. Five years seems pretty long to still be wild out of grief."

"You know I'm very fond of him," Rosemary put in, trying to think of a way she didn't have to agree with Alisha. It pained her. Still. . . "Sometimes a way of living gets to be a habit."

Alisha snorted.

"I hate to see that sweet little thing get her heart broken." Rosemary paused. "She's not the least bit pretty, is she?"

"And skinny, " Connie added. She pursed her lips. "Maybe he won't even be interested."

"I thought she was cute," Alisha said. "She's got some color to her. I never do understand why men like those pale, pale girls."

Rosemary laughed. "Not all of them, sweetie."

Alisha tossed her braids. "Not mine, anyway." She grinned. "Oh, let's leave the poor girl alone. She didn't strike me as anywhere close to stupid, and it's not like you can't see Blue coming sixty miles away. A man like that. . ."She shrugged. "He was just born to be a dog."

"Dog is not the word I'd use." Connie said. She patted Mrs. Jenkins on the shoulder to direct her to a new chair.

"What then? What else can you call a man who runs through women like they're beer?"

Connie smiled. "He's a ladies' man, that's all. He likes women. They like him back. Nothing wrong with that."

Rosemary leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest. There had been a moment in the bookstore, when Blue had stood there with his hands at his side, looking at Ellie with a kind of winded look on his face. It made Rosemary think of Marcus, back in the days when he'd come back from war, torn up so bad he didn't sleep for months. "Maybe she'll just be a good friend to him," she said. "The man could use a friend." They all fell silent, thinking of that. "Yes," Connie said. "That he could."

* * *

Ellie consulted her map and drove to the Stonewall County library. It was housed in an old brick building set in the midst of a small park. Long windows gazed blankly over the lush green lawn and tall trees that cast an agreeable depth of shade. It looked to Ellie just the way a library should, right down to the stone lions guarding the steps. A fountain chuckled to one side, and she glimpsed the shiny body of a goldfish in the pool beneath it.

She pulled open the long, heavy doors and was pleased to find the old library feel remained. In the smell, old glue and dust and bindings; in the waxed black-and-white floor; in the oak tables and chairs occupying a central aisle between the stacks. It even had a balcony, with a twisted iron railing, reached by a set of iron steps. A sign above the stairs said, "Reference."

There were few patrons about on a spring weekday—a mother and her toddler, an old man wheezing over the newspaper, and a skinny, bedraggled man slumped over a magazine. Ellie wound around up the circular stairs, then approached the trim woman behind the desk. She wore her glasses on a neon green rope around her neck, a color that did not go at all with the tailored shirtwaist dress or the soft blond wave. "May I help you?" she asked, her tone friendly.

"I hope so." Ellie took a list out of her satchel. "My name is Ellie Connor. I wrote you about doing some in-depth research here on Mabel Beauvais."

"Oh, of course!" The woman stood up and stuck out her hand. "I'm Mrs. Nance, the head librarian." Briskly, she pushed in her chair and gestured for Ellie to follow her. "I took the liberty of getting some material out for you—we're not computerized yet, so it can be a long job finding some of these things, and I thought you'd want to spend your time reading, rather than searching up and down all these dusty stacks."

Ellie blinked. "Thank you."

Mrs. Nance stopped in front of a long table where several kinds of books were sorted in piles according to size. She put her hand on a stack of enormous dark-bound books. "These are the newspapers. I got out some of the years I thought might be most helpful. These"—she pointed to a stack of soft-bound papers Ellie recognized as dissertations—"are a couple of doctoral papers I thought you might find interesting. I got one through interlibrary loan, but it doesn't have to go back for several weeks, and if you find it helpful, we can hang on to it a little longer."

Ellie, touched and pleased, smiled. "I suspect you have a teaching degree back there in your history somewhere."

The woman chuckled. "No, I can't say that I do. But I have read your work—the one you did on Laura Redding was especially wonderful—and I haven't ever had the opportunity to assist a writer before." She waved a hand. "Anyway, I'm very pleased that you're examining poor Mabel's life. She's the most famous person to ever come out of Gideon, and we're proud of her. It's a sad story, and needs telling."

Intrigued, Ellie asked, "What do you find sad about it, Mrs. Nance?"

The lively brown eyes settled a little, and she looked off toward the long window. "Just that it was a hard time to be a woman, and even harder to be a black woman, especially a beautiful and talented black woman." With a small, puzzled smile, she added, "I guess it's the timing that's so sad. She didn't have a chance, not really."

Ellie nodded, oddly touched. "I agree with you."

"Well, listen to me talk! I'll let you get to your work. If there's anything at all you need, you just holler."

"I will." Inspired, Ellie sat down, took out her pile of blank index cards, her favorite rolling ball pen—black ink, never blue, which didn't look serious enough to suit her—and opened the first book of bound newspapers. Halfway through, a pale blue Post-it was stuck to a page, and Ellie turned the yellowed newsprint gently until she reached it. The tag was blank, but it was stuck to a story at the bottom of the front page:

LOCAL GIRL WINS PRIZE

Mabel Beauvais, daughter of Jacob and Marlene Beauvais, won first place and a $100 cash prize in a state gospel competition last Thursday. The fourteen-year-old, who has been a member of the Church of God in Christ choir since the age of five, sang "The Old Rugged Cross," which she said was her father's favorite. Mabel, who attends Carver School, said she plans to put the money away for college. "I'd love to study opera," she said.

Ellie noted the date of the paper and recorded the information, then took a second card and made a note to herself to check the possibility of a black girl studying opera in the late thirties—anywhere. Juilliard, maybe. She also noted the name of the grammar school. She liked being able to see the actual buildings that figured into a person's life. Seeing the way the neighborhood went together sometimes gave her insight she could never have attained another way.

By four o'clock, the light in the room had grown dim as the sun moved west, and Ellie's shoulders were tight with being hunched over her notes. Still, she had amassed two large stacks of cards—one with actual facts and dates, the other with reminders and questions she need to follow up on. She'd only managed to get through four years of primary newspaper material.