In the Midnight Rain (7 page)

She stretched hard and wondered if she dared look up the papers from 1968, the year her mother had supposedly spent the summer in Gideon. It made her feel guilty to have an ulterior motive in coming here, especially when Mrs. Nance had been so helpful, but she didn't want to broadcast her private history.

It suddenly seemed futile and foolish to sneak around. Rosemary and Connie—maybe even Mrs. Nance—were of an age to be able to answer Ellie's questions. It was quite possible one of them would remember Ellie's mother, Diane. All she'd have to do was ask.

But the truth was, Ellie wasn't entirely sure she wanted to claim her mother. She had no idea what kind of state her mother had been in while she lived in Gideon or who she'd been mixed up with. What if she'd been a crazed druggie, sleeping with a motorcycle gang or something? It was certainly possible.

Diane Connor had been beautiful, wild, and troubled from the moment of her birth. Her parents, in their early forties when she was born, were hard pressed to cope with such a rebellious personality. Nothing worked on Diana—she laughed at threats, ignored restrictions, even endured the rare whipping her father brought to bear in his old-fashioned, country way with stoic, unbreakable will. At sixteen, bored with school and her tiny western Louisiana town, she'd stuck out her thumb on the county highway and headed out of town.

The only thing Ellie had of her was the collection of postcards her mother had faithfully sent home once a week. There wasn't much on them in the way of news, nothing but the postmarks from various spots—Santa Fe and San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and an entire list of small towns all over the country—and a quick note, usually along the lines of "Hi. How are you. I'm fine. Traveling now with Luke, who has a motorcycle. Love, Diane."

At Christmas 1968, Diane abruptly came home, pregnant and broke. Her parents took her in, and she stayed just long enough to have her baby girl, to whom she gave the unlikely moniker Velvet Sunset. When Velvet, called Ellie by her grandmother after her favorite sister, was six months old, Diane's restlessness bloomed once more, and she was gone. Geraldine always had a faintly bewildered look on her face when she told her granddaughter about it. "One day she seemed to be turning into a normal young woman, sweet as she could be to her little daughter. The next"—a snap of her fingers—"poof, she was gone."

The second time she left home, Diane didn't bother with postcards. They didn't hear anything from her again until a Las Vegas police officer called with the bad news that Diane had been found dead of a drug overdose at a nearby campground.

It was hard, Ellie thought now, to imagine what kind of impact a hippie runaway, with flowing hair and gossamer clothes, had had on a small town like Gideon. What in the world had led her here, anyway? And what had made her stay for more than three months?

A man, obviously.

She glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Nance, who was on the phone. Perfect. Ellie stood up and whispered loudly, "Mrs. Nance." When the woman looked up, Ellie pointed to the stacks. She felt guilty when Mrs. Nance nodded enthusiastically.

It was easy to find the newspapers, and as she ran her fingers over the years, she concocted a lie to cover her tracks if she had to: she'd say she was born in '68 and one of her hobbies was looking up the events of that year. It was only a small lie.

The newspapers were bound a year at a time. She pulled out the one she wanted, then also selected one at random from the forties, and went back to the table. Mrs. Nance was still on the phone.

Ellie stuck her index finger into the 1968 book and opened near the middle. July.

For one moment, she felt a wild sense of warning. Maybe there were things better left unknown. Maybe her mother had been ashamed of the man who'd left her pregnant. Maybe it was as bad as Ellie's worst imaginings—that Diane had been the companion to some biker gang. Maybe Diane had never named a man because there'd been too many.

No. Ellie's gut said it was a single man who'd held the wild child in place for a whole summer. And if she didn't at least try to find out who that man was, she'd spend the rest of her life regretting it. Taking a deep breath, she began to read. If she'd learned anything at all about historical research, it was that a person never knew where that perfect nugget of information would appear.

The big news that summer seemed to focus on three things: an embezzlement scandal, the disappearance of a young woman, and the war in Vietnam. Each week, an entire page was devoted to news of the soldiers in service, some in Okinawa or Germany or other names she'd almost forgotten. Most of the news came from Vietnam itself. Peter Stroo was having trouble with his feet again. Jack Mackey had done some R & R in Saigon, and he'd sent his mother a beautiful scarf.

Sitting in the placid library, with dust in her nose and sunshine on her neck, Ellie felt a queer twist on her time/space senses. Vietnam was a faraway event, a sad, terrible mistake. In the clips of her memory, it came tangled up with streamers of paisley scarves and images of girls sticking flowers in the ends of guns.

But here were the names and pictures of boys who were younger than she by a decade, writing letters home from a jungle so far away, writing to their mamas or girlfriends, and the paper printed the news with a grand sense of bonhomie that seemed more suited to World War II.

On two of those pages from the summer of 1968 were the inevitable notices, boxed and respectful:
Mr. and Mrs. Larry Needham were informed this week that their son, Bret, was killed in action on June 24.
There was also news of injuries, more frequent.

Feeling vaguely unsettled, Ellie put the bound book in the stack with the others she had been using this afternoon, and stretched. Mrs. Nance, as if waiting for her, took a heavy ring of keys from the desk. "Finished for today?"

"I am, thank you. Is it all right if I leave these here overnight? I have to meet someone in the morning, but I can come in after lunch. Will they be in the way?"

"Heavens, no. You can leave them there for a week. Nobody much comes up here."

Ellie smiled and lifted a hand in farewell. As she went down the wrought iron steps, she couldn't help wondering what her hippie mother had been doing in a town that so obviously supported the war. What could she possibly have found appealing about it? Another puzzle.

But it was one that would have to wait. All at once, Ellie was winded and tired, ready to lose herself in something else, something that wasn't a past filled with mystery. She wondered if there was a video store in town where she could rent a VCR and some tapes.

The idea held far more allure than it should have, considering how much work she had to do. She struck a deal with herself: if she worked every night this week, she could find out about a VCR rental this weekend, and take Saturday night off and pretend she was anywhere but a hundred miles from home, seeking answers she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to find. She knew what kind of movies she wanted, too—modern comedy, with no reference to wars or the past in any form. Movies lent forgetfulness. By Saturday, she thought she might need that.

The Lovers

The first time she ever saw him, he was laughing. Something about the sound rushed on her neck, like a breath of hope. It was a sound of unfettered happiness, pure pleasure, so fertile that she turned, urgently, to see who could laugh with such abandon.

And when she found him, the man who laughed like that, sitting in the dusk with his friends, he looked as golden as the sound. His hair caught the last of the evening sun, and it carried a red glimmer in the darkness that sparked like fire. And on his arms, the hair glinted in the same shade, making her think of Adonis. Wasn't it Adonis who ruled the sun?

She knew she was staring, but somehow, she couldn't make herself look away. He must have felt her gaze, because he turned his head and looked right at her, the smile lingering on his mouth, then fading. He looked away fast, but then looked back, and it was her turn to duck her head, glance away, ashamed that she should take even one minute of that perfect laughter from the world.

But when she looked back, unable to resist one last glance, she found him cutting the distance between them with a smile. As if he knew her. As if he'd been waiting.

For her.

4

B
lue was tired. Sweat and dust had formed a kind of glue that cracked on his neck when he moved, and his arms were coated with mud. The sprinkler system for one of the greenhouses had broken a main pipeline this morning, and they hadn't discovered it until well past noon. He and Marcus had traced the break to a swampy spot behind the greenhouse, but sure as dawn, plumbing never went smoothly.

Marcus swore as his wrench slipped and he slammed his fingers between the lead pipe and the heavy tool. He shook his hand and glanced at the lowering sun. "We've done about all we can today, man. Let's just rig something up for the plants tonight and get on it first thing in the morning."

Blue nodded in defeat. "Got any ideas? You're the mechanical wizard around here."

"Not at the moment. I reckon you're just gonna have to keep an eye on the babies for tonight." He wiped a wrist over his forehead, leaving a smear of pale brown mud across his dark skin. "I'll run by Shumake's in the morning, pick up those joints."

"Damn." The babies Marcus spoke of were tiny, orchids, part of the experimental work Blue was doing to find more efficient ways of germinating the plants. Conditions had to mimic the rain forest exactly for the research to be valid, and this might mean a setback of months. The thought of all the lost work depressed him. He propped his hands on his thighs. "It is what it is."

"Yep." With a groan, Marcus got to his feet and stretched. "I'm going to haul my ass home and take a shower. I got a meeting with the city council tonight about the memorial."

Blue nodded. "You on schedule for Fourth of July?"

"So far, so good." Marcus said. "I'll be glad when it's finally done."

"I bet."

"Yeah." Marcus stared off toward the horizon, his eyes far away, maybe on the faces that belonged to the names that would be carved into the memorial. One was Blue's brother, killed in Saigon in the last weeks of the war. "That woman just pulled up, if you're interested."

Blue looked over his shoulder to see Ellie getting out of her car, and a prickle moved over the base of his spine. He didn't get it. Four years and he'd only bothered with women when he got too horny to stand it anymore. Here came one so far from his type that she might have been a boy, and he'd been thinking about her, off and on, all day.

She didn't see them, and Blue did nothing to attract her attention.

"Let's get this done," Marcus said wearily.

"You go on. I'll take care of it." He'd be glad to have something to keep his mind away from... he rolled his head . . . things. Keep his mind off things.

"I'm not gonna argue. See you in the morning."

Blue didn't move for a long time, his body dead tired from shoveling wet earth out of the hole. The mud on his neck cracked when he shifted, and his wrists were thick with grime.

Only the thought of the plants withering got him moving. By the time he finished checking temperatures, adjusting the shades, and wetting down the inner walls of the greenhouse with a hose, he had no brain left. A good thing.

He deliberately did not look in the direction of the cabin, though he heard music playing, something soft and soulful, indistinct in the thickening evening.

As he came into the kitchen, his great-aunt Lanie rushed in from the other room. A tiny, thin woman with white hair, she wore a blue calico apron over her dress, and her long hands were knotted together. "I was just about to page you, honey," she said. "My cat needs to go to the vet."

"My cat, you mean." Piwacket had belonged to Blue's wife, and had been old even when they first married. Now she was seventeen and skinny as a wire. Like his aunt, who was just as skinny and just as old in human years. Both required a special diet and the odd trip to the emergency room but gave back a hundred times what they took. He couldn't really imagine his life without either one, though chances were good he'd have to part with one or the other before too much longer.

But maybe not. He'd been thinking the same thing for ten years, and neither showed signs of going anywhere yet.

Piwacket, in the universal language of sick cats, sulked under a coffee table. "Hey, darlin'," he said, and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck before she could run off. Her ears were hot, and when he pinched a fold of skin, it stayed stuck together. "Yeah, you've got to go in again."

Lanie had already dragged out the carrier and lined it with a bath towel that smelled of Blue. Piwacket had kidney disease—had had it for two years now, and routinely had to spend a night at the veterinarian's office, hooked up to an IV to rehydrate her.