Once outside though, he raced around the corner, through the alley and back to his car that he’d left parked well down the block. A few minutes later, through his rain-streaked windshield, he saw a black woman emerge from the library with her large handbag clutched to her chest. From this distance, she looked only vaguely like the Freeman woman he’d been following all week. Not that he’d paid all that much attention. It wasn’t the woman he’d followed, so much as the car.
But who the hell was this woman?
Whoever she was, she hurried through the rain to a junker car that looked like it was on its last legs. This was the tricky part. Did she have something in the car to cut open the packet? And if she did, would she go straight to the police or would she try to call him again?
Neither, he realized as she headed out of town toward Cotton Grove. Dobbs’s rush hour was nothing compared to Raleigh’s, but he was able to keep one or two cars back as they drove westward.
Stupid bitch.
* * *
The weather station’s announcer was going crazy with excitement as Fran appeared to draw a bead on the Carolinas. Stan dutifully noted the huge storm’s position—it was something to do to pass the time—but his head wasn’t into his science project this evening.
Not with Mama missing.
It wasn’t unusual to come home and find her not there.
It was unusual to get a call from Lashanda’s Brownie leader asking if Mrs. Freeman had forgotten to pick her up.
If it hadn’t been raining so hard, he’d have ridden his bicycle over to get her himself. As it was, he’d called his dad.
“I’m on my way, son, but how about you phone over to Sister Edwards’s house and see if Mama’s there?”
“Sorry, honey,” Miss Rosa had said. “I haven’t talked to her since this morning.”
He remembered Mrs. Thomas’s grocery list and called there, but with no better results. By the time Dad’s car rolled into the yard with Lashanda, Stan was starting to get worried.
Now it was heading for dark and still no news of Mama.
As word spread through their church, the phone rang frequently, all with the same soft questions: “Sister Clara home yet? Well now, don’t you children fret. I’m sure she’ll turn up just fine.”
When Lashanda’s best friend, Angela Herbert, arrived with her mother shortly before seven, Stan had protested. “We don’t need a babysitter. I’m almost twelve years old, Dad. I can take care of Lashanda.”
“I know you can, son, but your sister’s only seven and having a friend here will make it easier on her.”
“Then let me come with you,” he’d pleaded.
“It would help me more to know you’re here answering the phone in case Mama calls,” his father said.
Unhappily, Stan watched his father leave through the rain. He sure hoped Mama was somewhere safe and dry.
* * *
When the junker car pulled into the yard of a shabby little house at the end of the road, he realized that this was where he’d seen the driver of the Honda Civic drop someone off yesterday morning.
It was instantly clear to him that he’d made a colossal mistake, but instead of remorse, he felt only anger at the woman who was now entering this house without a backward glance. How could he have known? Not his fault that two different women were both driving the same car.
The road curved behind a thick clump of sassafras and wild cherry trees and he pulled his car up close to them, trusting to twilight, the rain and the house’s isolation to help him.
Inside, he saw the woman sawing at his packet with a paring knife. The screen door was hooked, but he put his fist right through the rusted mesh and flipped up the hook.
Rosa Edwards turned with a start and screamed as he burst into the room. She held the puny little knife before her, but he backhanded her so hard that the knife went flying and she fell heavily against the table.
He hit her again and blood gushed from her split lips.
“You better not!” she whimpered, scrabbling across the floor as she tried to get away. “I wrote it down. Somebody’s got the paper, too!”
“Who?” he snarled and kicked her hard in the stomach.
“I don’t get it back, she’ll read it!” Her words came raggedly as she gasped for air. “She’ll know you the one done it.”
Enraged, he grabbed her by the hair and half-lifted her from the floor as he punched her in the face again. “Who, you bitch? Who you give it to?”
“I ain’t telling!” she sobbed.
“Oh yes, you will! Yes, you damn well will.”
Still holding her by the hair, he dragged her over to the kitchen counter and started opening drawers till he found a butcher knife.
“You tell me where that paper is or I’m gonna start cutting off fingers, one finger at a time, and then I’m gonna work on your tits. You hear me?”
Desperately, she struggled against him, but he grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her so viciously that she heard the bone snap.
CHAPTER | 12
The twisting tornado is confined to a narrow track and it has no long-drawn-out horrors. Its climax is reached in a moment. The hurricane, however, grows and grows.
It was nearly five before I adjourned court on Wednesday after hearing a silly case that took longer than any of the combatants (and I use the term advisedly) expected. Reid Stephenson was representing a young man who seemed to think he could race his motorcycle engine in front of his ex-girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night as long as he didn’t actually speak to her or threaten her or come onto her property or get within thirty feet of her as an earlier judgment had enjoined him from doing.
Reid tried to argue that it was only when the young woman came to her window to yell obscenities that the thirty-foot prohibition was violated. In other words, his client got there first and it was the girlfriend who chose to step outside her perimeter. Long-suffering neighbors who called the police wanted a larger perimeter around both of them. I decided they had a point and told the young man he might have obeyed the letter of the law, but I was going to let him sit in jail for three days and think about the spirit.
Despite my ruling, Reid came up to me as I was leaving the courtroom and said, “So how ’bout I pick you up around eight?”
“You’re really serious about going to Steve’s this evening?”
“Well, sure I am,” he said. “Good barbecue? A chance to see the boys, catch up with them?”
Reid was Mother’s first cousin, so he’s known my brothers all his life, but being a lot younger and growing up in town to boot, it’s not as if they were close or anything, although he used to trail along when his father came out to the farm to hunt or fish.
When Reid passed the bar, Brix Jr. cut him a piece of the firm and retired to fish and play golf full-time. That’s when Daddy switched over to John Claude for all his legal needs. Out of loyalty, most of the boys gave me their business while I was in practice there and they still use Lee and Stephenson. They’ll even turn to Reid in an emergency—when the kids get in trouble and John Claude’s out of town—but like Daddy, they feel safer with John Claude.
In short, Reid does not have a particularly warm and fuzzy ongoing relationship with my brothers, so why this sudden urge to (as Haywood would say) fellowship with them when rain was falling and a hurricane was heading toward our coastline?
Come eight o’clock though, there he was, rapping on my side door. I’d left my two-car garage open so he could drive in out of the rain. He still had on his gray suit but he held a hanger in one hand, slacks and knit shirt in the other.