When Night Falls

“D
o you ever wonder what happened to those Warren boys?” Uma Thornton asked her girlfriends. After their usual dinner-out, middle-of-the-week movie and visit to Peggy’s Ice Cream Parlor, the four women stood on the small town’s sidewalk. There they would lick their ice cream cones and chat before each went back to her home.

In Madrid, Oklahoma, Main Street stood just as it had around the 1930s, in the days of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Ma Barker gang. Red brick two-story buildings lined the street, and the beautification club’s flower boxes adorned the storefronts. High on the red bricks, between the apartment windows, faded advertisements recalled the vanished era of the “nickel-a-dip” ice cream cone. The only modern touches were the neon signs.

A distance from town was the rodeo ground, and the town’s population included a hefty percentage of Native Americans, many of whom were descendants of those who had traveled the “Trail of Tears.”

In the cafes—Ruby’s Home Cooking and the other, simply called “The Italian”—life moved along Madrid as it always did.

The four friends knew each other so well—teasing, giggling, and gossiping. They’d passed through life together, first as babies on their mother’s laps, then riding their bicycles down Madrid’s Main Street, catching fireflies on summer nights, and then during the flurry of teenage romances. They’d grieved over Uma’s divorce and before that, her three-month-old baby’s crib death. They’d comforted Shelly Craig, an unwed teenage mother and the town’s scandal, because Shelly wasn’t naming the father of her baby. They’d wanted to shake Lauren Howard for letting her unfaithful husband use her, Lauren working at their real estate business while he played. And Pearl Whiteford was just Pearl—beautiful, spoiled, sometimes vacant minded, completely selfish, and driven to be Mrs. USA-Perfect.

They accepted each other as they were, because the years had woven them together in a tolerant, caring fabric.

Uma looked forward to the weekly girls’ night out. After all, a thirty-six-year-old divorced woman living in her father’s home had little excitement. Life in Madrid, Oklahoma, purred along safely, predictably, comfortably. She had her odd moments, of course, ones that lazily stirred the quiet, safe life she wanted. Tonight, she had even fantasized that she was the blonde held in King Kong’s loving hand.

Why had the nineteen-year-old Mitchell Warren’s anguished face just danced across her mind? That was eighteen years ago, a lifetime away.

Maybe she’d thought of him because of the June heat rising up from the pavement, the same as when Mitchell had told Uma he was leaving Madrid for good, and never coming back.

“Do
I
ever wonder what happened to those Warren boys?” Pearl, the self-appointed social class judge, instantly soared in to express her dislike of the Warrens. “Madrid is glad to be rid of them. I say good riddance and don’t come back.”

“Now, Pearl, I doubt they’d want to. Madrid didn’t exactly make them welcome.”

While the other women talked, Uma settled in to enjoy her friends and the flavor of her weekly strawberry cone. At ten o’clock, the night was heavy with honeysuckle, and moths fluttered against the neon lights of Madrid’s closed stores. Inside Peggy’s Ice Cream Parlor, the jukebox was playing Peggy’s favorite housecleaning song, “La Bamba.”

What was that ominous quiet within herself? Uma wondered. That stillness as if everything had stopped turning, waiting…

She studied the insects that twirled in the shaft of a streetlight as though caught inside an imaginary cage. The light pooled onto Main Street’s pavement, gleaming on the few cars and farm pickups that passed beneath. Since the day Bonnie Parker had posed for a picture with Clyde Barrow on their “running car,” nothing had ever happened or changed in slow-moving, safe Madrid. Crops and cattle and sweet iced tea on a hot summer night ruled, punctuated by small town gossip and tips on growing roses. Excitement ran to the town dances, high school graduations, weddings, and Norman Evans’s old Holstein bull sashaying down Main Street. Every year, he ate the beautification club’s “city-pretty” flowers, and the club threatened to barbecue him on the next Fourth of July picnic.

Uma licked the tiny trail of melting strawberry ice cream from the waffle cone, then inhaled the scent of honeysuckle and roses and newly mowed lawns. The ordinary night in a rural town seemed too perfect, as if time were held on a sliver of glass, balancing back and forth, waiting to be shattered. She’d felt that unnerving stillness the early morning she’d gone to her baby’s room.
And then, her world had stopped…

“I just can’t make up my mind whether to keep this scarf or not,” Pearl said suddenly, always vain about her appearance. She held out the brightly colored floral scarf. “Here, Shelly, you try it on. I want to study how it looks.”

“Give me that.” Lauren grinned and grabbed the scarf, swirling it around her cotton dress. She danced away from Pearl, who tried fiercely to grab it away.

Smiling at Lauren’s teasing play, Uma barely noticed a car rumbling out of the night and passing under the streetlights. It was unfamiliar, but looked like any other car passing through Madrid on a quiet evening.

Within Uma, that fragile sliver of glass quivered and she turned slowly to study the car. It bore Oklahoma dust, this two-door Chevrolet Impala, just like Ed Jones’s powerful ’71 model, dark navy blue body, white hardtop. But unlike Ed’s, this one’s windows were tinted the color of death. Once more the glass shattered within Uma and her heart stopped.

Then, in the open window, a man’s narrow face caught the light, and with a blaze of fire, the sound of gunshot split the quiet night. The tires squealed and the car shot out of sight.

Lauren immediately crumpled to the sidewalk, the rose sprigs of her bodice stained with a widening dark circle of blood.

Uma dropped to her knees. She prayed that her minicourse in emergency care would save her friend’s life. She placed her hand over the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood. “Call the clinic. Get the doctor.”

One glance at Pearl’s stunned pale face and rounded eyes, and Shelly sprang to her feet. “Never mind. I’ll do it. There’s a phone in Peggy’s.”

“There’s no pulse. She’s gone,” Uma stated grimly as she removed her hand from Lauren’s throat and began to stroke her hair. A selfless heart, Lauren had never failed to understand, comfort, and support.
Oh, Lauren, why you? We need you
.

In that moment, with her friend’s head upon her lap, and the police siren screaming in the hot, sultry night, Uma knew that all their lives had changed forever.

Then Uma heard a whisper, like the soft wind teasing the tendrils near her ear.
I’ll always be with you…

She lifted her hand and found Lauren’s blood staining it—she was gone. Like a treasured pioneer patchwork quilt ruined by a willful child’s scissors, their lives had been torn, and would never be quite the same.

ONE

ONE YEAR LATER

H
ome hadn’t been sweet
.

Mitchell Warren had grown up here, on this little forty-acre Oklahoma ranch, and he’d hated it.

Maybe back then, as a child and a teenager, he’d hated everything, including his parents. Or had he?

He’d come back home to put the puzzle pieces together, to make some sense of the emptiness inside him. He welcomed emotions, but his ran deep and remained locked inside him. In his sleepless nights, the past would haunt him. One look in his morning shaving mirror revealed hard, bitter lines. One look in the midnight black windows and his haunted reflection came back to him. The streamlined life he’d created seemed cold in comparison to those with families and warmth and love.

Once, he’d wanted only money, the security of it, and now—

Now he wasn’t even doing his best professionally—he didn’t know how to relax, and those sleepless nights were catching up with him.

It was the baby. Just a tiny, six-pound squalling baby he’d delivered in the back of a city taxicab. Holding that mewling scrap of
life in his hands, wrapping it in his dress shirt, and watching his secretary, Emily, beam though she was in pain, had poleaxed him
.

“I love you, Mitchell,” Emily had whispered. “You don’t know what a wonderful person you are. You should find that person, know him, and love him.” Later, her husband’s jubilation and the love shining between them, a contrast to his sterile life, had jarred Mitchell.

Emily’s six-pound baby had torn away his life and made him aware of what he did not have, what he did not feel.
He did not feel and he didn’t know how to stop the sleepless midnights, the restless quest, the nameless hunger that always moved within him…

He realized that other people moved through their lives while he stood still, like a statue in the park, with life churning all around him…

Mitchell had never backed off from brutal assessments, and looking at his life was no exception.

Home? An almost clinical chrome-and-glass apartment.

Holidays? Spent alone—as often as not, going over business reports.

Friends? Yes—but all to do with business.

Women? An ex-wife who he liked and respected, and a few previous relationships that had had more to do with sexual need than companionship.

Sex? Lately the call hadn’t been there. He hadn’t even missed it.

He hadn’t missed anything, and that was the problem. He wasn’t lonely. He preferred the single life—no commitments, no bonds
.

Mitchell slammed the door on his late-model Dodge pickup just as he had once slammed the door on the past and his dying father’s terrified screams.

Yet right here, eighteen years later, standing once more on this unforgiving Oklahoma earth, he had felt the past yawn open. It impaled him in a darkness he had to resolve—or at
least, try to ease. He didn’t understand himself, the bitterness inside. When he looked in the mirror, his father’s hard face stared back at him—there was that drop of Cherokee in the French-Irish-English mix.

As an adult, his brother, Roman, looked much the same as he—rawboned and big, with a slash of dark brown brows that matched his hair, unrelenting brown eyes, and skin stretched taut over sharp high cheekbones. But Mitchell’s nose had seen its share of youthful brawls. The lines across his brow and on his face said he often frowned. That uncompromising mouth and jaw said he yielded nothing.
Had his father’s bitterness become his own?

Bracing himself against the vivid sunset he remembered only too well, Mitchell scanned the Oklahoma landscape—the lush rolling green hills in the distance and a well-tended patchwork of fields had once been a 640-acre homestead; it contrasted the Warrens’ present forty-acre flat, barren ranch. In the second week of June, sunset and memories washed over him.

In the distance, oil rigs seemed to peck slowly at the ground like giant birds.

The old corral where he and his brother had broken horses had been savaged, the good wood taken. Angled from the burned, overgrown rubble of the barn, the corral’s few remaining broken and rotten posts cast long, eerie shadows on the ground. Only the weathered small garage stood, in which the Warrens had once repaired their cars and machinery. No more than a weathered gray shack slanted with the weight of eighteen years, the building had a roof that was more rust than metal.

The windmill paddles—what was left of them—circled lazily above him, the soft whirring noise familiar. Crows roosted high against the sunset, claws gripping the weathered old boards. Someone had shot holes in the revolving rusted gray paddles. A rabbit bounded across a mound of over
grown brush that hid the charred remains of a barn…

That night
. In a rush, the fear and flames of that night consumed Mitchell, sucking away his breath. At two o’clock in the morning, the barn had been in full flame, the old sorrel and the other horses whinnying wildly. The board across the barn door had been nailed shut, and Mitchell and Roman had worked furiously to pry it free. The barn’s winter hay had ignited, the huge, airy space filled with smoke that curled and crackled into the lazy summer evening.

Mitchell kicked the tuft of grass near his shoe—an expensive, glossy city dress shoe that contrasted with the black T-shirt and jeans he now wore. As a boy, his shoes usually hadn’t fit, the soles were thin and worn with widening holes.

He crouched to study the dirt, hard packed and worn out. He’d been only eight when his mother had gone, and he’d hated her for leaving them.

Maybe his father hated his sons, or rather, that bit of his mother that remained in them. But it was hard work and “no sass” for Fred Warren’s two sons, and there was no mother to comfort them.

With palms up, Mitchell studied his hands, now broad and big, a workman’s hands, despite years as a businessman. On his left hand, one finger had webbed to another slightly, the mark of burned flesh. The scars from that fire ran smooth and gleaming, unlike the jarring nightmares that still tore him from sleep…

Mitchell inhaled deeply, the imagined stench of smoke strangling him once more, though the evening was laced with only the scent of a rambling honeysuckle vine. Now his tools weren’t a hoe and a rake, but computers and intercom buttons. As a top manager for a building supply chain, he wore suits tailored to match his powerful body instead of jeans. And now and then, just to remind himself where he came from and how much better he’d made his life, he worked in the stores, hefting lumber as if he weren’t a top executive.

Choices
, he thought, mulling them. Though he’d left Rogers Building and Supply, he could have his job back at a phone call. He could locate a builders’ supply and garden complex in Madrid to show off who he was now, to push back at the community that had hurt him. But he wouldn’t. He only wanted to steep himself in the town and see if the past was really as bitter as he remembered.

Mitchell wanted to know if his father’s bitterness toward his mother had marred his life. With a divorce behind him, he knew it had been his fault; he was incapable of giving, of tenderness, of caring for anything but his career.

He rubbed his chest. For years he had felt empty and cold, and he knew that Serene deserved better; she deserved all the things of which he was incapable.
Or was he?

He could rebuild the ranch, making it a showplace. But he wouldn’t.
He’d worked too hard on this land, and he wasn’t ever coming back to work it again
.

He shook his head. Buying the ranch back had been folly. He didn’t intend to work it. He just wanted to possess it as he worked through his problems; and the memory of that bank foreclosure and eviction notice long ago still rubbed raw. A savvy businessman wouldn’t have bought it, or the house in town. Even at bargain prices, there was no logical reason—

Why had he come back? He didn’t know, but here he was, held suspended by the past that lay right here
.

Reluctantly, Mitchell slowly turned to study a small mound of overgrowth. A patch of June’s daisies appeared like lace against a dark shaft of charred wood.

The smells of that night choked him once more. The teenage brothers had been too busy with the burning barn to notice that the house had caught fire. Passed out for the night, too drunk to care, their father hadn’t awakened until it was too late. His screams drew the brothers, and Mitchell ran to pry free the door that had been nailed shut, too.

Mitchell rubbed the burn scars on his thigh. He blinked,
his mind’s eye catching an image of flames on his father’s clothing as Mitchell had hauled him outside to the cold snow. Fred hadn’t survived the twenty-mile ride to town. A man who had lived in the tough old cowboy ways, who had bitterly mourned the wife who’d left him, Fred had died in that pickup bed. He’d left his sons nothing but a mortgaged ranch and a world of bitterness.

Mitchell turned in the direction of Madrid and wondered idly if the town still hated the Warrens.

If they did, it didn’t matter. He needed to settle the past, still brooding inside him, keeping him trapped. He needed peace.

He stood slowly, remembering the frustration of a nineteen-year old boy who’d lost everything and believed he was responsible for the fires—that his dismissal of a married older woman’s attentions had lit her husband’s murderous wrath. A powerful man, her husband had sent his henchman to the Warren farm.

Uma, a year younger, had come to tell him how sorry she was for his pain. She’d leaned forward, over his hospital bed, enfolding him with that fresh, untouched scent. It had taken only her tender kiss on his cheek to break his rigid control over the storms inside him
.

Embarrassed that she’d seen the burns on his thigh, ashamed that he was helpless and weak and needy, he’d tugged her over him, her wrist too fragile in his callused hand. In pain and darkness, he’d taken that innocent mouth roughly, driven by the urge to salve the nightmare of his life
.

Even then, he knew it was wrong to quell the wild rage inside him, to let his hand roam over those sweet uptilted breasts while pressing her hips against his hardness. The searing burns on his thigh meant little as he punished her for being good and sweet and knowing how badly he hurt.

He was striking out at the world, not Uma, and her slight whimper hauled him back to reality. He’d pushed her away,
disgusted at showing his need to destroy, to take something that wasn’t his, to ruin because his life was in shreds.

Mitchell inhaled grimly as the windmill’s paddles whirred in the silence.

There was only one way to find out what drove him so ruthlessly, why he couldn’t rest—he had to face the past before he could move on.

Uma wrapped her arms around herself and stood in her darkened office. In the night, the room was soft and quiet, whispers of her mother and grandmother stirring in the shadows. They had passed on years ago, leaving her a legacy to tend—the lives in Madrid. They had been called “keepers,” and now it was her turn—to hold and treasure the lives of Madrid.

By habit, she took a fortune cookie from a glass jar, turned blue with age, and cracked open the confection. She raised the tiny slip of paper inside to the light coming from the street. “One cannot always be safe, but one can be glad for change.”

Nothing ever changed in Madrid, where two-story flat-fronted buildings bordered Main Street, where Charley Blue Feather argued with Lars Swenson about the moles crossing between their well-groomed yards. These skirmishes had raged through the years, Lars claiming that Charley’s moles were destroying Swenson turf. Charley’s reply was standard: “What do you want me to do? Brand them?”

Then there was Edgar MacDougal, who believed it was his right to have his evening pee off his back porch and onto his wife’s roses. Myrtle Hawthorne, his next-door neighbor and a spinster with ten cats, had objected fiercely, complaining to the police. In retaliation, Edgar had broadcast throughout Madrid that Myrtle had spied on him using binoculars every evening.

There was, of course, Sissy O’Reilly, a “fine, prime widow”
who knew exactly what men wanted and how not to let them have it—without a cost. Kitty and Bernard’s pot-bellied pig, Rosy, was walked down Main Street every day, the big bow around her neck replaced by a sweater in the winter. Marcy Roper’s husband was having an affair with Janet O’Neil, only one of many discreet liaisons in town.

On the second floor of her father’s house, Uma’s office contained a drawing table, a large graphic computer screen, a high-tech computer, a smaller one she preferred when not doing graphics, and printers. The bookshelves lining the wall were filled with books, her CD music collection, and a player. This had once been her mother’s sewing room, and now Uma enjoyed that same mellow, peaceful quiet—that safe quiet. It was here, listening to her elderly grandmother, that she’d learned about the families of Madrid—she knew the darkness and the relations, the ugliness of greed and lust, and the sweetness of families mending and loving.

How many hours had she stood looking out this same window, watching people move through their lives?

With its sprawling porches and huge potted ferns, the house stood white and tall at the end of Lawrence Street, elegant yet comfortable and set amid her mother’s treasured gardens. Inside was a massive remodeled kitchen, a parlor, her father’s room, and a library. Her upstairs room was just down the hall, comfortably enlarged after her divorce from Everett.

From that room, she could see Lauren’s house next door. From a higher vantage point, Uma could see the leaf cluttered gutters, the moss on the shingles, the broken branches. Below were the untrimmed rose garden, the herbs and arbors and trellises aslant and weighed by ivy and weeds.

Uma tore herself away from the dream that she might see Lauren working there—

Lauren was gone, and nothing could bring her back
.

Images of seven-year-old Lauren riding her bicycle, laughing as they raced, stirred in Uma’s mind. Then that deathly kaleidoscope of images—of the night, the car, Lauren falling to the sidewalk—passed through Uma’s mind. One moment Lauren was standing, happy, teasing Pearl with the scarf. The next instant her eyes had widened in shock. The next she was sliding in slow motion to lie still, her new cotton summer dress red with blood.

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