In the Midnight Rain (3 page)

"Not one of your bimbos there, that's for sure," Marcus said.

"No, I don't think so."

"Hell of a mouth."

"Yep." Blue drank.

A dark, rolling laugh boomed into the quiet. "Oh, how the mighty do fall!"

"Not my type."

"Mmmm. I saw that." Marcus stood and put his glass on a wicker table. He pulled his keys out of his pocket. "I think I'll go curl up with my woman."

"Hell with you, Marcus."

Laughter was the only reply.

2

I
n the little cottage, Ellie irritably brushed hair off her face, feeling the long drive in her weary shoulders and the fine film of grit on her skin. April carefully sniffed the floor, following some invisible trail through the living area, into the kitchen, over to the corner. Then, obviously satisfied, she slumped down in front of the sink with a
whuff.

"First things first," Ellie said. She opened the plastic grocery bags that contained the heavy ceramic dog dishes, filled one with water from the sink and put it in the corner where it wouldn't get kicked. April wagged her white-tipped tail as Ellie opened the ten-pound bag of dry food and filled the other dish. She put it on the floor. "Been a while since breakfast, I guess."

The dog attended to, Ellie dug through the cabinets, finding the staples Blue had promised—nothing terribly appetizing, though, until she opened the fridge. "Beer," she breathed. "Thank you, God." She screwed off the top of a long-necked Pearl, and without bothering with a glass, took a long swallow. It was cold and crisp. Her dry throat sucked it deep, and she drank a third of the bottle without stopping.

Next to the beer was a promising container covered with foil, a sure clue that whatever was under it was home-cooked, likely by the unknown Lanie, who had probably also been responsible for the extravagant vase of blue asters and ivory roses on the counter. Ellie lifted an edge of the foil covering the bowl and saw piles of golden fried chicken, the batter dotted with specks of black pepper. Her stomach growled. Although she'd been intending to wait until she showered to eat, she grabbed a breast from the pile and dug in.

It was even better than it looked, and Ellie let go of a genuine moan of pleasure. Southern fried chicken, the real McCoy—so savory she suspected it might even have been fried in bacon grease. She leaned on the counter, beer in one hand, and devoured the breast with the other, barely stopping to breathe.

And as she stood there, barefooted and tired and aware on some low level of the sound of cicadas starting up their nightly song, a wave of almost violent gratitude overtook her. The past few years, she'd been in Minnesota and Montana and Washington and California, all over the country doing research for various biographical projects. She'd been lucky to discover a chatty, hip style that gave her a popularity not ordinarily found in her field, and though she wasn't rich, she made enough to get by. For six years, she'd been on the road, researching and writing and generally enjoying the process.

But Mabel had brought her back South. Standing in the sweet little cottage, with real fried chicken in one hand and a cold beer in the other, and the smell of river faint on the air, she felt both relieved and uneasy. She wasn't far from home.

Carefully, she wrapped the bone in a piece of plastic bag and threw it away under the sink where April wouldn't be tempted to dig it out again, then wandered over to the desk pushed up under the windows that faced the big house on the hill. On the desk were the piles of background material on Mabel, and she nipped open the file curiously.

The biography was due in seven months. No, she amended, looking at the Wilson's Garage calendar stuck to the wall with a blue thumbtack. Six months and twenty-four days. Most of the career documentation and music background was done—the easy stuff. What remained was much more difficult—and rewarding—part of Ellie's work: discovering the personal influences, the story of the life that had given the music its heart.

In this case, there was also a mystery to solve, because Mabel Beauvais had disappeared off the face of the earth in 1953. Most everyone assumed she was dead, and nearly all the indications pointed that way, but Ellie wanted to find out for sure, put the mystery to rest. The best place to find those clues was right here in Gideon, where Mabel had been born and raised.

Six months and twenty-four days. She let go of a sigh, and a curl over her forehead sailed up and landed back in her eyes. She wondered if she'd have to ask for an extension—and if she did, how she'd possibly stretch the advance money another couple of months. When she'd started the biography in a fit of enthusiasm nine months ago, she'd never dreamed Mabel's hometown would lie so close to her own—or that such a small fact would cause her to drag her feet like this.

Oh, get real, Connor.

Okay. Honesty. In some dark, secret place in her mind, Ellie had known Mabel Beauvais was from Gideon and that she'd be a great subject. Ellie had just been biding her time until she was ready to dig into her own life. Consciously, she'd chosen Mabel as her next subject because of a single photograph she'd glimpsed in the Ann Arbor library while finishing up her last project. Unconsciously, the choice had been prompted by Ellie's growing need to find out about her own father.

That was the thing about the brain, she thought, and drank some more of her beer, leafing through the material in the folder. You went along thinking you knew what you were doing, and all the time, you were doing something else entirely.

Two years ago, Ellie's grandmother—her only living relative—had had a heart attack. She appeared to be fully recovered. She walked four miles every morning, watched her fats, took care of herself just as she should. But Ellie had been forced to face the fact that the woman was past eighty. She wouldn't live forever. Once she was gone, Ellie would have no people left—unless she could find her father.

It embarrassed her a little, this sudden quest. It seemed needy and whiny, so much that she had barely admitted to herself that she was here to find him. It seemed so pitiful, somehow, to even want to track him down. Her mother had not been, after all, a woman of sterling character. She'd never let on to Ellie's grandmother who the father of her baby was. Maybe she hadn't known. Maybe she had good reasons for hiding the truth. Added to that, Ellie was uncomfortable with the idea of tracking down a man who'd probably made a home and a family by now and might not even remember a wild hippie child who landed in Gideon in 1968.

But, sometimes lately, when Ellie was hip-deep in the life of another person, she'd find herself wondering about the details of her father's life. Wondering who he was. What he dreamed about. How he laughed. Biographies started with parents. Who had hers been? Had they loved one another? Had they just been two lost souls meeting in the dark?

Mabel and her mama. Lost women. She looked out the door, in the direction of the town she couldn't see. Somewhere out there were the answers to both her quests. Mabel's story had been written here. Someone would know something.

And somewhere, someone would also know who Ellie's father was. Unlike her other research projects, this one was a little trickier. She had no name, not even a photograph, only the postcards her mother had sent to her grandmother in the summer of 1968, all postmarked Gideon.

Not much to go on. As she made her way to the shower, she thought that might not be so bad. What would she do with a father, after all these years, anyway?

* * *

Blue showered and made some roast beef sandwiches, but he was still restless as night tightened around the house. His body was tired from the long day, but his mind circled and paced, without any sense of real direction. From the apartment his aunt Lanie lived in, he heard the hollow laugh track of a comedy on television.

He washed up his dishes and put them in the drainer and looked out the window at the small house nestled beneath tall, fragile pines. A light was on, and he wondered what the woman was doing. What music she was listening to.

Music. He rubbed a hand across the flat of his ribs, thinking of that CD collection. His experience with women and music had been that they fell into a couple of categories. There were bubble gum lovers, who never really got past the style they loved in high school, the ones who ended up keeping the radio tuned to the country station, or the oldies, or Pure Rockin' Soul on 92.

Then there were the serious ones. Serious women and serious music, the fans of classical, the ones who allowed movie themes and maybe some Celtic stuff into the mix, a little New Age, but didn't tend to dip into anything as plebeian as country or Southern rock.

Ellie's collection had looked like his own. All over the place. He wasn't sure why it bugged him, but as he'd been looking through that case, he'd felt a warning.

He turned away from the window and, determined to avoid the temptation of bourbon and the Internet, wandered outside, Sasha trailing him hopefully to the door. "Stay," he said, closing the door behind him, and ambled in the cool night down a well-worn path through the meadow to the greenhouses.

There were three of them. The smallest and oldest was a work space, mainly, where new starts for baby plants of various kinds could be tended carefully. The second, quite a bit larger, was the most experimental, and the one that had generated a lot of attention in botanical circles. A man from Stanford was coming out tomorrow to see it, and both Blue and Marcus had been working their asses off this week to make a good showing.

But his favorite was the big one. Even as he approached, a lot of tension he'd been holding in his shoulders slid away. Against the dark canopy of sky, the roof arched palely. From within the glass walls glowed pockets of pinkish grow lights, tucked away in various corners where the ecosystem would not be bothered.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, then paused for a moment, closing his eyes to stand, hands loose at his sides, his senses opening to the feel and smell and sound of it. A rich fragrance bloomed here. Moist earth provided the grounding note, primal and fecund, evoking pictures of an abundant harvest. Below that was another elemental—water, softly metallic. Blue could see it in his mind's eye—condensation on the panes of the greenhouse and the leaves, and collecting in silver droplets that dripped from the roof and coalesced into pools.

And over those base notes floated the airy elegance of the flowers themselves, their varied trademarks unique and not always harmonious. Tonight, a newly bloomed cymbidium overpowered the rest, like the tuba in a band. Unmistakable, overt, beautiful.

He listened and felt—the thick, humid overlay he found so comforting, and the scrabbling, tiny sounds of lizards, the fluttering of birds awakened to an intruder, the squeaking little cries of tiny mammals. He even imagined he could hear the bugs who thrived in such a fertile world—the spiders and the predators, the beetles and the dragonflies. An entire host of insects.

Only then did he let himself open his eyes. By day, it was a splendor almost too great for the eye, and sight blotted out the less vigorous but no less enchanting sensory pleasures of smell and hearing and touch. By night, the flowers and leaves formed a haunting backdrop, mysterious and colorless and a little dangerous.

Better than bourbon, though sometimes he forgot that lately. Sometimes a way of living just got to be a habit. As he moved in his bare feet through the world he'd created, headed for a the potting bench, he decided maybe he'd been a little too dependent on the bourbon at night.

Or not. He scowled and stuck his hands into the cool, sweet-smelling black earth in a barrel, pulling up fistfuls of it to admire the glitter in the low light. The whole damned country was drinking-impaired in his opinion—scared to death to let themselves go. Gotta run, gotta compete, gotta be at peak form ninety-seven hours a day.

Not for him. A few bourbons at night did not a drunk make, and he'd be damned if he'd let some skinny little thing with her blurred country voice make him feel ashamed of a perfectly civilized habit.

* * *

In the morning, Ellie called her grandmother. Geraldine Connor answered a cellular phone she kept in her apron pocket—a phone Ellie paid for and insisted that Geraldine keep on her person at all times—from the garden. Ellie could hear birdsong in the background. "Hey, Grandma," Ellie said. "What are you doing?"

"Hi, darlin'! I'm pulling weeds. How was the trip?"

"Fine. Lost a gasket in some little town in Arkansas, but they fixed it and I got here safe and sound."

"And your host? He all right?"

Ellie hesitated for a split second. "He's fine. Very nice. The cottage is pretty, and there's a lot of room for April to run." To forestall any comment, she added quickly, "Do you have something to write with? I have the numbers for you."

But Geraldine smelled a rat. "Hold on, child," she said with an edge of irritation. "I have to go inside and get me a pencil. So, is he a young man, this Dr. Reynard?"

"Not that young. Mid-thirties, I guess." Ellie moved to the desk, looked out the window toward the house, realized what she was doing and paced back to the sink. "He has greenhouses."