In the Midnight Rain (13 page)

Rosemary shook her head. "It wasn't like that. They were so sweet. Most of them didn't stay but a week or two. I guess it was about five or six that stayed, a couple of guys and the rest girls. They worked around town, doing all kinds of odd jobs, and they didn't cause any trouble." Her eyes held a distant point. "I guess we felt like they brought the world to us."

"Maybe we should have listened a little harder, too," Connie said. "Marcus and Binkle were the only ones who came back out of that whole little group. And even Marcus..."

Ellie said, "Blue said it took Alisha to heal Marcus."

Alisha glanced at Rosemary, then at her hands. "He healed himself. It was just time, I expect."

"No, girl," Rosemary said. "It was you."

"He needed somebody who didn't remember," Connie said, "so he could lay it all down."

Immediately, Ellie heard a snip of a song: "... find the cost of freedom.. .." She pushed it away. "It broke my heart to look at those faces this morning," she said quietly. "They were so young."

Silence fell, deep and fathomless. Into the stillness, Connie said, "I wish I'd listened to those girls a little more. They said we could all go to Canada. What would be different now, I wonder, if we had? All of us just run off in a group and stayed away?"

Rosemary shook her head. "Don't even go there, girl. I can't stand it." She sighed and stood up, looking at Ellie. "Sorry, honey. We seemed to have gone off track. You want to talk about Mabel?"

Ellie felt a pang of guilt. She had, after all, pushed them toward a discussion that pained them. "I'll wait."

Connie spoke suddenly. "I just got an idea! I think we should get all our pictures out, all of us, and put something together for that weekend." She paused, and spoke over a throat that was tight. "Not just remember the boys as soldiers, but as everything else they were? Like James was a musician and David was a rodeo star and Gary could dance like a wild man and Bobby—" She blinked tears back. "What do you think? I hate that all they are now is a name on a wall, dead soldiers."

"Connie, that's gonna—"

"I know. I know. I just think it would be good for us." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. Ellie found in the mingled emotion and impatience a strange poignancy. "Men think of the death. I think maybe it's up to us to think of the lives."

Rosemary nodded once, then again, more enthusiastically. "I'll talk to Mrs. Nance. Maybe we can figure out a way to do a retrospective. She knows all those fancy scanning techniques—I bet she'll have some great ideas."

Their hands met, fluttered, caught, Connie and Rosemary's, and Ellie saw the strength they drew from each other, a bond forged in loss. She glanced at Alisha and they both stood to take their leave, saying hasty good-nights to the others, distracted by their plan.

Outside, Alisha paused. "Whew. That was intense!"

Ellie only nodded, feeling vaguely winded. After the long morning in the attic, she'd spent the afternoon piecing together the notes from three letters, and made an outline of the book the way she thought it would go. Then, worn by the rising heat, she'd fallen asleep in the wind of the box fan in the window and slept till dinner. It had not been a refreshing nap. She'd awakened cranky and restless.

On the way home, she commented, "Rosemary doesn't much like you, does she?"

Alisha chuckled. "You noticed, huh?"

"We saw some pictures of her and Marcus when they were young. He had a gigantic Afro."

"He told me. Blue ribbed him all day about it." She turned smoothly down what Ellie had come to think of as Rose Road. "I don't think Rosemary wanted him for herself, particularly, but it irked her that I got him." She grinned. "You'd think I was white, the way she acts."

Ellie laughed.

I wish I could find some way to smooth it out," Alisha confessed. "I like the group and I don't have too many things to do—and somebody needs to be in there to keep them abreast of what's really going on in the world."

"Did those girls really send Blue's picture to a magazine?"

"Oh, Lord. He was furious when he found out—but it's true, what Nadine said. He's about twenty thousand times better looking than most of those cover models. He's too proud to do something as silly as a pageant, but I don't think they've given up."

Ellie tried to imagine him looking brooding and hungry on the cover of a novel, a beautiful woman in his arms. It wasn't much of a stretch. She said nothing.

"You like him, don't you?" Alisha pulled into the drive. "Blue."

"Not like that. We've been writing back and forth for almost a year. He's a lot more than the things those women were talking about." She paused, thinking of the sharpness of his mind, a sharpness he hid below that drawl and winks. "I don't think I've ever met anyone with quite that much brain, you know it? And man, he really loves the blues."

"You think?" She chuckled. "Where do you think that nickname came from?"

Ellie laughed. "Of course! I didn't think about it." She started to get out of the car. "Thanks."

"Listen, Ellie," she said quietly. "I don't mean to get in your business, but you should know that he's not—I mean. . . he's kind of. . . "

"Crazy?"

"Well, that too, but I mean a player."

A player. She hadn't heard that word in a long time. "Don't worry," she said with a grin, "I'm not looking for a man, and even if I was, he's really not my type."

"Good." She heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief. "One female to another, I thought you ought to know."

It had been a long day. Inside, Ellie took her shoes off and sank into the desk chair, automatically pushing the button to turn on her laptop. Rubbed her arches, then got up to feed April. The dog sprawled, practically comatose, against the wall, and opened one eye when Ellie came over to rub her favorite spots. "Sasha wore you out, didn't she?" April licked her muzzle twice, groaned softly, and fell back to sleep.

"I know how you feel," Ellie said, and yawned.

Taking a glass of tea back to the desk, she connected to her on-line service to make sure there were no E-mail messages from her agent or editor. While she was waiting for the files to download, she opened her notebook and carefully slid out the pictures she'd borrowed from Rosemary's trunk. Her mother was so young it was odd, but then, Ellie guessed she'd died young, too. Her mother had never even grown as old as Ellie was now.

It was an unsettling thought.

When Ellie had seen her mother's pretty, distinctive face and long red hair in the picture this morning, a strange arrow of grief had stabbed her. All these years, and she'd never missed this woman, who stared up out of the photo with an enigmatic expression. Why now?

Pushing the odd emotion away, she scribbled down the bits of information she'd gleaned from Rosemary and Connie and Blue, and tried to match the faces to the names. Since she'd only taken the photos in which her mother appeared, she didn't have all the boys' pictures, but it was easy to pick out Bobby Makepeace with his goatee, and Marcus and James. There were two other white boys, one very swarthy with a big smile, and a very skinny youth with the bandy-legged stance of a rodeo rider.

Ellie pursed her lips and picked up the photo of her mother smiling at someone—either Bobby or someone just outside the frame, and she heard herself sending up a little prayer.
Not Bobby, God. Please.

And in truth, although she liked the look of the boy, liked his sunny smile and a certain brash sensuality she found appealing, his coloring was very close to Ellie's mother's—reddish hair, that milk white Irish skin, very blue eyes. If he was her father, Ellie was a genetic throwback.

The swarthy guy was a better bet. She wondered which one he was—Binkle or the rodeo guy.

She leaned back, chewing her lip. How would she piece this together without outside help? She didn't want it known that she was looking for her father. What if he was a family man whose wife didn't know about his liaison with a transient hippie girl? What if it was Bobby Makepeace, and Connie's heart was broken by a betrayal thirty years in the past? No, for now, she'd do what she could on her own.

Her computer beeped, indicating waiting E-mail. Ellie punched the button without much interest, and went back to staring at the pictures. It beeped again almost immediately to let her know the mail was now downloaded.

Only one letter was in the box, from Laurence Reynard, Ph.D. With a smile, she clicked to open it.
Hey, darlin',
he'd written,
why'd you have to have that picture so bad?

Busted. Ellie tried to think of some lie, but couldn't come up with anything plausible. In sudden decision, she typed her reply.
It's personal, all right? I'll tell you about it when I can.
She hit a button to send it off, and put her feet up on the desk, memorizing the faces in the picture so she could spot them in the yearbooks at the library.

The machine beeped again, surprising her. Mall had come in from Blue. Grinning, she clicked it.
Why don't you come on up and have a beer with me? I was going to sign on and raise hell in the newsgroups, but I'd rather talk to a real person.

Ellie hesitated. She didn't want to talk about the picture, and she wasn't completely certain she could trust herself to stay aloof from that charismatic sex appeal.
Are you properly dressed?
she finally typed.

The reply came back immediately.
Yes, ma'am. Buttoned all the way to the neck.

She chuckled.
Okay. I'll be right there. Don't ask me again about the picture.

7

T
urning off the computer and the lamp, Ellie slipped on a pair of thongs and headed up the hill. The house glowed with lights, and as she started out, Blue turned on an outside light that made it easier, but it was still very dark, a kind of dark she'd forgotten existed. Crickets whirred in the grass, and cicadas answered from the trees, the only sounds for miles and miles, and the air was thick and soft against her face, smelling of earth and river and sky. She inhaled it deeply, pausing to catch the moment close to herself.

Peaceful. Life was so peaceful in the country. Not the actual lives—emotions ruled people no matter where they lived, so there was always some drama or another waiting to make things chaotic—but the details were easier. She could think better without cars racing and roaring and people shouting in the apartment overhead, and even little things like televisions and radios in an unceasing undertone of constant sound. She liked smelling air, not fuel, and loved the sight of the sky overhead.

A shadow startled her, and she made a sound of surprise before Blue caught her hand. "It's just me," he said.

For that brief second, she let herself feel his big, strong hand, rough from his work. Impulsively, she curled her fingers around his, and said, "You have one sexy voice, Dr. Reynard."

"Are you flirting with me, Miz Connor?"

She laughed softly. "Maybe so."

"Good. I like that." He walked up the path, hanging on to her. Ellie let it be. At the porch, he let her go, and gestured for her to take a chair. "I'm having bourbon, myself. What'll be your pleasure? Other than me, of course."

"I wouldn't mind a bourbon, if you'll walk me back down the hill."

"Careful now. I might take that as an invitation."

"You are amazingly arrogant, you know that?"

"Yes, I do. " She heard ice clinking in a glass and the quiet flow of liquid, and he gave her a glass.

"Thank you."

He settled on the step. "Not too many women drink straight bourbon these days."

"I don't very often."

"But you got a little off balance today, didn't you?"

She gave him a look. "So did you."

Quietly, he said, "Yes, ma'am, that I did. Guess we both have our closets full of skeletons."

"Most people do."

"You think so? I don't know. It seems like a lot of folks just get it right out of the gate. I see them in town, you know? Guys who've been making the right call since the day they were born, live quiet lives without a lot of turmoil, and just . . . keep it together. Never screw up their credit or forget to mow the lawn or leave a project half-done."

Ellie sipped cold fire from her glass and listened.

"You ever notice," he said, "that those people don't ever seem to have big traumas, either? Like their kids never have wrecks and their houses don't burn down. It's like they're protected with some big cloud of serenity"

"That's seeing it from the outside, Blue. Nobody gets through life without sorrow and loss. It's just part of the game."

He turned his face toward her, and in the darkness, Ellie could see no details, but she sensed his attention. "You really believe that?"

"My grandma always says there are green seasons." She tucked a foot up under her. "Times when everything goes on just right. Got money enough to pay the bills, and nobody dies and things are just the way they're supposed to be, most all the time." She paused to take another tiny sip. "But there are also gray times, when nothing seems to go right. You lose pets and people and have trouble with money."