Jezebel's Blues (11 page)

Celia uttered an earthy curse. Her heart plummeted. “I would rather he’d been a drifter,” she said harshly, then excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

She splashed cold water on her face. It was bad enough that he was physically the most compelling man she’d ever seen, that his eyes were so lonely they made her want to cry, that he was so much like one of her father’s heroes she wanted to kill him.

But he was a blues man, a
wandering
blues man. It would be hard to imagine a worse choice.

She tore a paper towel from the dispenser and blotted the moisture from her face, staring at herself in the mirror. Her eyes went hard.

Eric was right. She didn’t want to know him.

E
ric approached the high school with a feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. A handful of children shimmied up a cottonwood tree Eric remembering climbing himself as a child. He envied them for an instant. If only he were five and Laura eight, playing Robin Hood in the trees.

Inside, there were hand-lettered signs posted on the walls—tempera paint on butcher paper, the same kind of signs he remembered from his short term in these halls. But instead of asking support for glee club or announcing a bake sale, the signs pointed toward various Red Cross stations.

An arrow directed him toward the auditorium, a musty-smelling room with heavy velvet drapes. Eric paused at the doors. A woman passed him, her head down, her face running with tears she couldn’t control.

Dread seized him again.
Sweet Jesus
, he prayed.
Don’t let her be dead
.

He set his jaw and pushed through the doors. A knot of people on the old wooden stage gathered before a table staffed by several volunteers. One of them was Lynn Williams, a woman he’d known since sixth grade. He joined the line in front of her.

When his turn came, she looked up wearily, and seeing Eric, smiled. “Hello there, stranger. Sit down.”

Her friendliness eased the fear in his chest. “Hi, Lynn. How are you doing?”

“Can’t complain.” She folded her long fingers together. “Is this business or social?”

He took a breath. “Business,” he growled, and cleared his throat. “I can’t find Laura and—well,” he looked at Lynn. “I guess I figured you’d know who was dead.”

“Oh, honey.” She touched his hand over the table and squeezed his fingers. “Hang on. I’ll get the lists.”

It seemed to take forever for her to stand up and cross the slats to another small table piled with computer printouts. Eric watched her flip through one stack, then pick up another, her neat, dark head bent over the lists as she walked back. A pulse beat in his ears, thready with terror.

She sat back down and looked at him, shaking her head. “There are three counties affected by the flood. Twelve people are reported dead—four all from one farm down river. Nobody else fits Laura’s description.” She glanced up. “There’s a missing persons list about a page long. I can put her on that, but you may not hear anything for a while.”

Eric nodded. A weakness of relief and renewed worry skimmed his nerves for an instant, making it hard to speak. “Put her on the list.” He narrowed his eyes. “Is Jake Gaines on there?”

Lynn nodded without even having to check. “His mama and sisters were in here the day the Red Cross got here, screaming about their baby.” She rolled her eyes. “Never met such a useless bunch in my life.”

Eric grinned. “Thanks, Lynn.” He stood up, mindful of the others waiting their turns.

“Don’t be such a stranger, now, you hear?” Lynn said, sliding the stacks of paper to one side. “Stop in and have some coffee with me some evenin’.”

He tipped an imaginary hat. “I’ll do that.”

As he was about to turn, Celia came through the drapes at the back of the stage, her arms overflowing with rags and sprays and brushes, all kinds of cleaning supplies. Her hair was caught back under a splashy purple bandanna, and her jeans were filthy. He wondered what she’d been doing.

Then her eyes lifted and she caught sight of him, and a sharp, hard spark darkened the silvery irises to a gun-metal gray. Her chin rose.

Eric gave her a quick nod, then pivoted blindly, nearly missed a stair and bolted from the room. There was no other word for it. The damnable thing was, as he stood outside again, he realized that for an instant, he’d really felt a little better.

* * *

Cooking was not an art that had come easily to Celia. Her mother had never entered a kitchen in her life, and her father, being male and Texan, could hustle up pecan pie or biscuits, but nothing substantial. As a result, Celia had spent the past ten years slowly but surely educating herself on the finer points of putting a meal together. It was mathematical and orderly, and she enjoyed the meshing of ingredients that formed a new product. It soothed her.

In the late afternoon after seeing Eric at the school, she baked one of her grandmother’s specialties, turtle brownies. It was the first real baking she’d been able to do since the flood, and as the scent of chocolate and caramel and pecans wafted through the newly cleaned kitchen, a sense of ease crept through her. She hummed under her breath as she washed the bowls and spoons, then shook out a paper doily to decorate a plate.

When the brownies had cooled, she cut them into perfect squares and arranged them on the lacy paper, admiring the contrast of dark chocolate against snowy white. Pretty enough for an entry in the fair, she thought, then grinned—as if she’d dare compete with women who’d been cooking for thirty or forty years!

Her grandmother had won first-prize ribbons for watermelon-rind pickles and plum jam and peach chutney every year. Celia remembered sitting on a stool in this very kitchen, listening to injunctions about sterilizing jars and washing the lids with a hot wet cloth; about cutting plums just so and loading slices of fruit into the jars in an even way. She had yet to tackle canning. Maybe this fall.

When the brownies were finished, she showered and changed into a cool cotton sundress, then brushed her hair. It wasn’t until she found herself on the road toward town, the brownies in her hands, that she allowed herself to realize she was on her way to Eric.

But the truth was, he’d nearly tripped down the steps in his haste to get away this morning—tripped like a gangly fourteen-year-old who suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say. When he had first seen her, his eyes had filled with a hungry appreciation any woman who wasn’t a complete idiot would recognize. It had pained her a little, and she knew she’d given him what her daddy would have called a ‘a dirty look.’

And then Eric, flustered, had turned to flee, nearly tripping on the stairs. It made him seem so vulnerable that Celia had been thinking about him all day. As old-fashioned as it was, she was taking him brownies to make up for being mean.

Thick evening fell, turning the sky a purply silver above the cottonwoods and pines as she walked. Hidden just beyond her field of vision, Jezebel sang softly to the gathered birds drinking from her skirts. Aside from the chiming of crickets and the occasional call of a bird, the world along this narrow country road was still.

Celia found herself slowing, feeling every pore in her body open to the warm, cottony air, to the nectar of silence no city could ever hope to reproduce. As it had so many times since she’d finally accomplished her dream of coming here, a swell of joy overtook her. Never before had she felt as if a place embraced her, as if the land itself welcomed her into its bosom. Only in Gideon.

Home at last.

She had never been to Laura Putman’s house, but a discreet inquiry at the grocery store had narrowed it down to only three possibilities. She passed the first with a wave to an old man who smoked a pungent pipe. He nodded and puffed.

As she approached the second house, several hundred yards farther on, she heard the mournful notes of a harmonica floating in the air. Her nerves rustled. She knew the sound of a harmonica would now always remind her of Eric.

She slowed her steps even more, listening. The notes were poignantly sad. They conjured up slow marches through rainy graveyards and widows cloaked in black and something even deeper and wider and more sorrowful yet. It pierced her clear through.

The house was an older bungalow, in need of paint but otherwise sound. As Celia turned up the swept path, she saw Eric. He sat in a kitchen chair on the wooden porch, shirtless and barefoot in the warm evening. When he spied her, he played two or three more notes, watching her come up the path, then put the harmonica down.

She climbed the steps in his silence, and when it was clear he wouldn’t speak, she held out the brownies. “I brought you something.”

He eyed the plate, then took it from her carefully, a little shyly. “Thank you.”

His hair gleamed with a fresh washing, falling in casual disarray around his face and neck in glossy black waves. A single curl rested against the rise of a muscle in his shoulder and Celia resisted the urge to smooth it back into place.

“Have any luck finding your sister?” she asked.

“No.” The word was nearly a growl.

Celia saw his throat move as he swallowed his worry. All locked up tight behind the walls, she thought. Impulsively, she reached forward to touch his arm. “It’ll be okay, Eric.”

At her touch, he flinched, then yanked his arm away in an almost violent gesture. “Go home and leave me be, would you?”

Her first instinct was to whirl around and do exactly that. Let him brood alone. But that was pride speaking. Another part of her, one she didn’t dare put a name to, saw how frightened he was.

She knelt next to his chair. He kept his head bent, as if refusing to look at her would make her disappear. Celia simply waited, absorbing some of the terror that seeped from behind the walls.

After a few minutes, a little of the fight left him. His shoulders eased, and he touched the brownies on the plate with one finger.

Celia lifted her head to the crook of his elbow. His jaw tightened, and he didn’t move. His gaze was fixed firmly on the brownies. He needed conversation, the ordinary give and take. It didn’t matter what she said, only that she gave him a chance to let go of some of that worry.

“You know,” she began, “when you showed upon my doorstep in that storm, I was really afraid you were a serial killer or something.”

He glanced at her quickly, a smile flickering momentarily over his lips before he could wipe it away.

Encouraged, Celia settled next to him more comfortably. “On my way here, I was thinking that I love this place. I wish more than anything that I could have grown up here.”

“If you had, you wouldn’t be here now,” he said. All at once, he leaned back in his chair and flipped the thin plastic film covering the brownies. “How’d you know I have a weakness for caramel and pecans?”

Celia shrugged. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “Tell me what it was like when you were a child.”

He mulled the question, chewing with obvious enjoyment. “Wasn’t a whole lot different, I guess. The people are a little bit better educated now, maybe, but not much.”

Darkness had fallen. Eric said, “Why don’t you hop up and turn on the porch light? Switch is just inside the door.”

Celia did as he asked, but nothing happened. He gave her a rueful smile. “I forgot.”

“Me, too.” With a shrug, she settled back onto the porch railing. Their knees were inches apart. “How much longer before they get the electricity back on?”

“Won’t be long now.” He licked caramel from his thumb and extended the plate. “Have one. You’re a good cook, Celia.”

“Thanks.” She leaned forward to take a brownie. “Where are your parents, Eric? You talk about your sister, but never them.”

He took his time choosing another brownie from the plate and picked a pecan half from the top before he spoke. “I never knew my daddy,” he said at last. “Don’t even know who he was. Laura tried to find out a few years ago, but nobody would talk. Mama never married him.”

Celia didn’t know exactly how old he was, but she’d guess his age to be thirty or a little more. Back in the days of his early childhood, women did not bear children out of wedlock, especially not in small towns. “That must have been hard for her.”

A soft smile touched his mouth. “No, she didn’t care what they thought. I think she really loved my father, whoever he was, and figured if she couldn’t have him, at least she’d have us.”

“So where is she now?”

“Last time Jezebel threw a temper tantrum, she took my mother with her.” He set the plate of brownies aside. “I was six years old, and the house we lived in was down there on the other side of the river. It always flooded a little every spring, but that year, it just didn’t stop raining.”

Celia remembered the expression of dread that had crossed his face sometimes as he viewed the destruction wrought by the flood. “You were only six?”

“Mama pushed me and Laura up on the roof and we hung on for hours and hours and hours. She was with us for a long time, singing and telling us to pray. And then, all of sudden, she was gone.”

“Oh, Eric. I’m sorry.”

“Seems silly when I think about it with my head, but you know, I never really have stopped missing her. With this flood and Laura gone, I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”

A part of Celia was surprised at the tumble of words spilling from him, and yet it was exactly what she’d hoped for. “What was she like?”

Eric shifted, picked up his harmonica and fiddled with it. “She was pretty,” he said. “And she liked singing. A long time ago, she sang sometimes at the Five O’Nine, at a time when white women didn’t do that much.”

“She must have been brave.”

“Stubborn, more like.” He grinned and gave Celia a rueful lift of the eyebrows. “Runs in the family.”

She smiled in return. “That should give you some faith in finding your sister.”

He took a breath and blew it out, then touched the bridge of his nose for an instant. “Well, it does and it doesn’t. I don’t know why the hell she’d leave this house when she knew the river was rising. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you have other family here?”

“An uncle. We lived with him after Mama died, but he’s an old drunk—Laura wouldn’t have bothered with him. He’s a mean old son of a—” He inclined his head. “Sorry.”