Ralph looked dubious. “I doubt that. She doesn’t know anybody else out this way and she wouldn’t walk up to a stranger’s house.”
A tactful way to put it. Knowing that Mrs. Freeman disliked whites almost as much as certain whites dislike blacks, I figured he was right. She probably wouldn’t want to chance it with any of us.
Nor was Ralph much comforted by Isabel’s suggestion that she could be waiting out the rain in the car somewhere. Not when we were due for a whole lot more if Fran kicked in as weathermen were predicting.
Haywood came back from the telephone shaking his head. “Everybody’s sticking close to home and ain’t seen no cars in the ditch or nothing. Sorry, Preacher. But we’ll surely keep our eyes peeled going home. Which ought to be about now, don’t you reckon, Bel?” he asked.
She nodded and came heavily to her feet. She’s only about half Haywood’s size, but since he’s just over six feet tall and just under three hundred pounds, that still makes her a hefty woman by anybody’s standards.
“Such a shame we couldn’t do any picking and singing tonight,” she lamented, reaching for her banjo case. “Maybe next week we’ll have more folks to come. You know, we might need to start us a phone tree to turn us out better.” As she passed Ralph, she said, “I sure hope Miz Freeman makes it home safe. This is real bad weather to get stuck off somewhere.”
We all said goodnight to Steve, who locked up behind us and turned off the lights on his way through the restaurant to the rear door that’s a shortcut to his house out back.
Haywood held an umbrella over Isabel as they splashed out to their car. Like the southern gentleman he aspires to become, Reid told me to stay under the porch while he brought the car over.
Ralph Freeman stood beside me staring out at the rain indecisively. His face held the same hopeless misery I’d seen on Cyl’s face last night, and to my horror, instead of some innocuous platitude about hoping everything turned out okay, I heard myself say, “Did y’all have a fight? Is she doing this deliberately? Punishing you for Cyl?”
“Cyl?” The worry lines between his eyes deepened. “You mean Ms. DeGraffenried?”
I touched his arm. “You don’t have to pretend, Ralph. I know about you two.”
“You do?” He looked at me warily. “How? She tell you?”
“Only after I guessed,” I said and told him how I’d put two and two together last night.
“How is she?” His need was so great that it was almost as if he didn’t care that I knew so long as I could tell him about Cyl.
“She’s really hurting.”
His broad shoulders slumped even more if that was possible.
Reid pulled in beside the single porch step. I held up two fingers and he cut his lights to show that he’d wait with his motor running till I finished talking.
Ralph said, “You must think I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”
“It’s not for me to judge,” I answered primly.
“No?” He gave me such an ironic lift of his eyebrow that I had to smile.
“You know what I mean. I’ve got too much glass in my own house for me to go around looking for stones in my neighbors’ eyes.”
That didn’t come out quite the way I intended, although Haywood would surely have understood my mangled metaphors.
“Where are your children?” I asked pointedly.
“Home. The wife of one of our deacons is with them. And to answer your first question, Clara might do something like this to me, but she’d never do it to them. She was supposed to pick Lashanda up from her Brownie meeting after school, but she didn’t. I can’t understand it.”
“Friends?” I said. “Family?”
“All back in Warrenton except for her prayer partner. Rosa’s the only one Clara’s really taken to since we moved here. Rosa Edwards. I called her right off, but she hasn’t seen Clara since first thing this morning. I don’t know where else to look, who else to call.”
“Maybe you just ought to go on home,” I said. “Be with the children. That’s where she’d call, wouldn’t she?”
He nodded. “She’ll know they’re worried and she’ll want them to know she’s all right, soon as possible.”
“Want me to speak to Dwight Bryant? He could probably put on a couple of extra patrol cars.”
“Would you? I’d appreciate that.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t have to tell him about Cyl and me, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks, Deborah.”
“No problem,” I said.
He took a deep breath and stepped out bareheaded into the rain. Reid pushed open the passenger door and I slid inside.
As we headed back down 48, Reid said, “What was that all about?”
“His wife. He’s really worried about her.”
With Ralph’s red taillights shining up ahead, we rode in a silence broken only by the windshield wipers on wet glass, till Reid turned off the highway onto the road that led to my house. I found myself automatically checking the ditches on both sides, half-expecting to see Clara Freeman’s car.
When we got to my house, I pushed the remote and once more the garage door swung up so that Reid could drive in.
“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I replied. “Just let me call Dwight first.”
* * *
I could have called from the kitchen, of course; instead, I went straight to the phone beside my bed. Sometimes Dwight’ll give me a hard time for meddling. Tonight he listened as I stated the case against Clara Freeman just taking off without a thought for her children.
“Ralph’s afraid she’s had a wreck or something and if she has, you know the quicker she gets help, the better it’ll be,” I urged. “Do you really have to wait twenty-four hours?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll shift all the patrols over to that sector till they’ve covered all the roads. If she’s out there, they’ll find her.”
* * *
Reid was aimlessly opening cabinet doors when I got back to the kitchen.
“Coffee’s in the refrigerator,” I told him.
“Of course. The one place I didn’t look.”
He put two filters in the basket—“Cuts the caffeine and acids”—scooped in the ground coffee and flicked the switch.
“Does that weather board I gave you work okay?”
“Sure,” I said, though truth to tell, I’d barely glanced at it since he hung it up.
“Let’s see how low the pressure is right now with all this rain.”
He headed for my bedroom and I trailed along at his heels. Did I mention that all good lawyers are actors? Reid was giving a charming performance at the moment—burbling about how his dad still checks the barometer every morning even though he can now look out the window overlooking the ninth green and see for himself whether it’s a good day for golf.
“’Course with Dad, any day it’s not sleeting is a good day for golf.”
Once inside my bedroom, he went right over to the dials and started reading them off. I just leaned against the doorjamb and watched him.
He turned around. “Aren’t you interested?”
“Oh, I’m interested all right,” I said wickedly. “Since you haven’t been able to get back here alone, what did you plan to do? Slide it under my bed as soon as I came over to look? Hope I’d think it rolled there by accident?”
“Huh?”
A textbook look of puzzled innocence spread across his face.
“Considering that it got you off the hook with Dwight, I really think you should have given me something nicer for my wall than a twenty-dollar weather center.”
He gave a sheepish grin, his first honest expression of the night. “Wal-Mart doesn’t offer a lot of choice. It was this or a sunburst clock or a bad knockoff of a Bob Timberlake painting.”
Overall, I had to agree with his decision. Nevertheless, I held out my hand and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sterling silver pen that he’d lifted from the pencil mug beside my phone on Monday.