“Shandy!” said her brother.
“Grandfather scares me.” A tear slid down her cheek. “And Mama’s not coming home tonight and if Daddy stays with her and we get tornadoes—”
Her lip quivered.
“What about your mother’s friend?” I asked. “Someone named Rosa?”
“Miss Rosa hasn’t come yet,” said Stan. “She must’ve worked last night ’cause we couldn’t get her on the phone either.”
Not much of a best friend, I thought, thinking how I’d react if something like this happened to Portland or Morgan or Dixie or two or three other close friends.
“And you just might have just a little more freedom to come and go when you like,” the preacher reminded me. “You don’t know what obstacles of job or children might be keeping her away.”
“Don’t worry,” Cyl told Lashanda. “Things will work out.”
She wet a napkin in a glass of water and gently wiped the little girl’s sticky lips.
* * *
When we delivered the children back to the ICU waiting room, Ralph immediately came over and thanked us again.
“How is Mrs. Freeman really?” Cyl asked when Stan and Lashanda spotted friends of their own age and moved away from us.
“Really?” Ralph shook his head, clearly weary from lack of sleep and a deep sadness. “Dr. Potts can’t say. She should have regained consciousness by now, but she hasn’t. There are broken ribs, bruised windpipe from the seat belt—thank God she was wearing it! Those things are relatively superficial. But the concussion . . . and of course, the longer she’s in a coma, the worse the prospects. Maybe by lunchtime we’ll know better.”
The mention of lunchtime made me look at my watch. Ten after nine.
I squeezed Ralph’s hand. “We have to go now, but we’ll be praying for her.”
“You’ll come back?”
“Yes,” said Cyl.
* * *
She was silent in the elevator down and as we walked out through the parking lot, I said, “You okay?”
“I’m holding it together.” She gave me an unhappy smile. “For the moment anyhow.”
“See you at the courthouse, then.” I headed for my car a few spaces past hers, then stopped short. “Oh, damn!”
“What?” asked Cyl.
“Somebody’s popped the lock on my trunk again.” I was totally exasperated. This was the second time in a year. “What the hell do they think I carry?”
“They take anything?” she asked, peering over my shoulder.
My briefcase was still there. So were my robe and the heavy locked toolbox where I stash wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, extra windshield wipers and the registered .38 Daddy gave me when I told him I was going to keep on driving deserted roads at night and that I didn’t need a man to protect me. Things had been stirred and the roll of paper towels was tangled in my robe, but I couldn’t see that anything was missing.
I transferred robe and briefcase to the front seat and wired the trunk lid down. It irked me that I was going to have to spend my morning break filing another police complaint so I could prove to the insurance company that the damage really happened.
Court was disjointed that morning, complicated by a bunch of no-shows and motions to recalendar due to the weather. With Fran expected to come ashore tonight somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Wilmington, everyone seemed to have trouble concentrating and by the time I gave up and adjourned for the day at one p.m., the wind had picked up and it was raining hard again.
Frankly, I was getting more than a little tired of both the anticipation and the rain, too.
“Enough already!” I grumbled to Luther Parker, with whom I share a connecting bathroom. “Let’s just have a good blow and get it over with and get back to sunshine.”
“Hope it’s that easy,” he said.
Everything smelled musty and felt damp. I almost slipped off my shoes and wiggled my stockinged toes just to make sure they weren’t starting to grow little webs.
At the midmorning break, when I reported my jimmied trunk to the Dobbs town police, I’d cut through the Sheriff’s Department to gripe about it to Dwight, but his office was empty.
He was there at one-fifteen, though, munching a hamburger at his desk. I started through the door of his office singing my song of woe, then stopped when I saw Terry Wilson sitting at the other end of the desk with his own hamburger and drink can.
“What’s happened, Terry?” There’s only a short list of things to bring an SBI agent out during working hours. “Dwight? Somebody get killed?”
“Yeah. One of the maids out at the Orchid Motel,” Dwight said. “Lived in Cotton Grove. A neighbor found her around five this morning. Somebody sliced her up pretty bad last night. Knocked her around first, then cut off one of her fingers slick as a surgeon would. While she was still alive. Blood everywhere.”
I watched as Terry squirted a tinfoil packet of ketchup on his french fries. I guess you get anesthetized after a while.
“Is her death related to Lynn Bullock’s?”
“Be a right big coincidence if it isn’t,” said Terry, who’s as tolerant of my questions as Dwight.
“You get any hint of it when you interviewed her?” I asked Dwight.
“The thing is, we never did,” he admitted with a huge sigh of regret. “She got off work before the Bullock woman checked in and didn’t come back on duty till the next day, long after the killing took place. Didn’t seem to be any urgency about talking with her. Sloppy.”
“Don’t beat up on yourself,” said Terry, as I opened Dwight’s little refrigerator and helped myself to one of the cold drinks inside. “You and your people were all over that motel. If Rosa Edwards knew something about the murder, she should’ve—”
“Rosa Edwards?” I asked, popping the top of a Diet Pepsi. “That’s who got killed?”
“Yeah,” said Dwight. “You know her?”
I shook my head. “No, but Ralph Freeman said she was his wife’s closest friend here.” I stared at them, struck by a sudden thought. “What if it’s nothing to do with Lynn Bullock? What if it’s about how Clara Freeman wound up in Possum Creek without leaving any skid marks on the pavement?”
Dwight reached for his Rolodex and started dialing. “Jimmy? You done anything yet with that Honda Civic Robert Knott pulled out of the creek last night? . . . Good. Don’t touch it. I’m sending a crew out to examine it.”
CHAPTER | 15
But when their hearts are really touched they drop everything and rush to the rescue of the afflicted.
Cyl stuck her head in my office as I was sliding my feet into a pair of sandals so old that it wouldn’t matter if they got soaked. I saw that she, too, had changed from those expensive dark green heels to scuffed black flats that had seen better days. Fran was still out in the Atlantic, just off the coast of Wilmington, but so huge that her leading edge was already spilling into the Triangle area. We were in for a night of high wind and heavy rain whether or not the hurricane actually came inland.
Cyl had heard about Rosa Edwards’s murder, but she hadn’t connected it to Clara Freeman until I told her of their friendship. Instantly, her thoughts flew to Stan and Lashanda. Their mother was in a coma, her closest friend had been brutally butchered and a big storm was on the way. Anything that touched Ralph Freeman was going to touch her but she did seem genuinely distressed for the children, who might have to stay alone with their stern-faced grandfather.
“I could take them to my grandmother’s, but she’s already gone to my uncle’s house in Durham.”
“I’m sure some kind family from the church will take them in,” I soothed.
I was anxious to head back to the farm, but Cyl asked if I’d go with her to the hospital and I couldn’t turn her down since it was only the second time she’d ever asked me for a favor.
* * *
The sky was dark as we drove in tandem to the hospital on the northwest side of Dobbs and the ICU waiting room was nearly empty except for the children, the Reverend James McElroy Gaithers, and a couple of church people who were clearly torn between a wish to comfort and an even more sincere wish to get home under shelter before the wind got too heavy.