Wild Midnight (40 page)

“Some of these people are just going to have to spend the night here,” Deenie Butler decided, viewing the still-crowded downstairs rooms of her house. The elaborate buffet had been replenished numberless times and now the caterers were leaving, out of food and anxious to get home. “There aren’t going to be any motel rooms left in Charleston in this weather—I wonder how many pallets we can put down after the bedrooms are filled?”
 

“Everybody can sleep on the floor,” D’Arcy crowed. The bride was still in her wedding dress, her billowing skirts balled up carelessly in one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. D’Arcy’s lovely face was flushed, and she looked impossibly happy.
 

“Honey,” her husband said, coming up with an anxious expression, “all the Claxtons are teetotal Baptist, and you’ve got to do something about that big bowl of Charleston artillery punch your daddy fixed. My relatives think they’re drinking fruit juice.”
 

“Oh, mah God.” D’Arcy giggled, “I’m having in-law trouble already!” She dissolved in gales of silvery laughter.
 

“It’s not so funny, D’Arcy,” he said grimly. “We’ve got my daddy laid out on the couch in the den, but it’s my mother I’m worried about. She’d never forgive herself if she knew she was high as a kite.”
 

Rachel had been picking up glasses and plates and other clutter in the wake of the departing wedding guests, and now she started for the library. D’Arcy was right behind her.
 

D’Arcy slumped in a chair and put her feet up. “Oh, Rachel, it was a beautiful wedding, wasn’t it? Cuss this storm anyway—you know where Jim and I are going to spend tonight, don’t you? Upstairs in my room with all my high school and college pictures and my stuffed animals, while wedding guests sleep all over the place on pallets.” She groaned. “There goes our honeymoon. Our New Orleans flight’s been cancelled because of the storm. And Daddy just told me the storm is so bad the governor’s expected to call out the National Guard before dark because of flooding.”
 

Rachel picked up some tiny Spode plates.
 

Everybody came except the Turner cousins,” D’Arcy went on tipsily. “I guess they’re too old to travel from Columbia in all this weather. And that crazy cousin of mine—you’d think Beau would show up, wouldn’t you?”
 

Rachel stopped what she was doing, but she didn’t dare look at D’Arcy. She said carefully, “D’Arcy, I thought I saw him standing in the back of the church.”
 

“Who, Beau? Oh, no, he
wasn’t
.” The blond woman’s voice was positive. “Mama or Daddy would have seen him-Mama’s got an eye like a hawk for those things. Besides, you know even Beau Tillson wouldn’t come all the way from Draytonville in this weather and then turn around and go back again without saying a word to anybody. He thinks the world of Mama, and he knows she’d just
kill
him for doing something like that.”
 

Rachel shut her eyes for a moment. Then he
hadn’t
been there. Her eyes, her nerves, had been playing tricks on her. But she couldn’t forget the urgency of that husky call to her.
Rachel.
It was though she could hear it again.
 

D’Arcy sat with her chin in her hands, her elbows propped on her knees as she watched a map of the South Carolina coastline being displayed on the t.v. “We would have to have a damned hurricane on my wedding day. I wonder if Mama is doing anything about the basements. Last time the Battery got flooded, it was because waves came right over the seawall outside. Look,” she cried, pointing a finger. “That’s the Ashepoo River and St. Helena Sound. It’s right where they’re making all those flood marks.”
 

A chill feeling had begun to flow into Rachel’s veins. It was possible, she argued with herself, for Beau to come all the way from Draytonville to watch Jim and D’Arcy marry, only to turn and leave without saying a word. Especially if he’d seen her there in the church, holding Jim’s baby. But why did she have such a strong, totally inexplicable message that he wanted her, needed her?
Now.
 

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “What did you say will happen if the river comes up at Draytonville?”
 

“It’s the spring tides and the way the wind is blowing from the storm,” D’Arcy said, frowning. “Oh, Rachel, I’ve had too much champagne and I’m a little fuzzy, but it looks bad, doesn’t it? The water never comes up the river as high as Hazel Gardens, but Draytonville gets flooded, I know. One time in the fifties all of downtown was underwater. Good lord—
Beau
!” she gasped. “Those old rice dikes are the only thing that keeps the water out at Belle Haven.”
 

Rachel was surprised to hear her own voice saying calmly, “D’Arcy, tell me what will happen if the river comes in and floods Belle Haven.”
 

D’Arcy looked up at her then, a stricken expression on her face. “Mah God. Oh, honey, those dikes
can’t
give way-they never have!”
 

“Just tell me what you think will happen.”
 

“Hell be lucky if he doesn’t lose everything, especially all that land he’s fenced in along the river. All that money and all that work,” she added in a small frightened voice. “Rachel, what are you thinking about?
Rachel
?” D’Arcy jumped out of her chair, skirts billowing, emptying her glass of champagne down her front. “Lord, there
was
something between you two,” she said. “I can see it all over your face! And you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”
 

As Rachel started for the door D’Arcy threw herself in front of her. “Oh, honey, wait,” she pleaded. “I don’t know what crazy idea you’ve got in your head, but you can’t drive down there now. Use the telephone! If you want to find out what’s happening, just call him!”
 

Rachel stepped around her. “He won’t take my telephone calls.”
 

“Rachel, what’s going on?” She was fairly jumping up and down in her billowing bridal dress. “Oh, Rachel, something’s been going on between you and Beau—Jim wouldn’t tell me but he knew, too, didn’t he? What did my cousin
do
to you? Oh, God, you didn’t fall in love with him, did you?” D’Arcy looked distraught. “I blame myself for this, I should have warned you! What has that maniac done to you? Is that why you’re so unhappy? Oh lordy, I can’t believe this!”
 

“D’Arcy, I haven’t got time to explain,” Rachel said quickly. “It’s no one’s fault, for goodness sake don’t blame yourself, you had nothing to do with it.”
 

“I had everything to do with it,” the other woman wailed.
 

“I should have warned you he’s no good, he’s bad—
bad
and
crazy,
just like that whole tribe of Beaumonts down there. He’ll never love anybody, Rachel, he doesn’t know how!”
 

Rachel turned at the door. “I don’t believe that. I should have known better than to listen to that, D’Arcy, that’s exactly what he told me himself, and it’s wrong. I was raised to believe that we must learn to love, that we
can
love. I just haven’t been true to my convictions.” She set her rounded jaw stubbornly. “Besides, I was a fool to leave. I’m going to have his baby.”
 

She could hear D’Arcy’s excited shriek all the way out in the hall.
 

Chapter Twenty-Three

If Rachel hadn’t left at that moment, she would never have gotten away from the Butler house. As it was, Jim—alerted by D’Arcy’s screams—bolted from the front door to stop her just as she pulled the Toyota away from the curb. He stood for a moment watching her and then ran to find his car. But he was too late; she had quickly turned down Lenwood Street and was out of sight.
 

Once on Highway 17 going southward Rachel had to admit that all of the weather warnings were true. It was all she could do to keep the little station wagon, even weighed down with all her belongings, on the road. From the town of Ravenel just outside of Charleston to the little hamlet of Osborn, Rachel inched the Toyota along the highway, fighting the buffeting easterly gale that had swept in from the sea. She passed cars abandoned by the roadside at the height of the storm, but was thankful that the rain was slacking off.
 

She kept the radio turned on. There was little music, even on the FM band. Most stations were devoting their time to weather bulletins which now reported the storm had moved inland, turning northward through North Carolina and Virginia, dumping a record amount of rain as the strong winds and abnormally high tides were flooding the Carolina coasts.
 

It was several hours before Rachel finally reached the highway at Hazel Gardens, running east from Route 17 to Draytonville, and her stomach was burning with the cups of hot tea she’d stopped to get at drive-ins along the way to alleviate her tiredness. When a roadblock of state police stopped her on the eastbound highway to the coast, turning back tourists and those who didn’t live in the flooded coast area, Rachel was grateful for her South Carolina license plates and her driver’s license, which gave her home address as Draytonville.
 

“The waters up pretty bad down there,” the state patrolman told her as he returned her license. “They’re bedding down people in the high school gym and some of the churches. And there won’t be any drop in the flood until this wind changes.”
 

“I’ll be all right,” Rachel assured him.
 

But as she started ahead, Rachel had a sudden vivid memory of the narrow asphalt road that wound with the turnings of the river, especially that part of it that led between the fresh water lakes to the big house on the old Indian mound at Belle Haven. She would have to worry about that when she got there, she told herself with more courage than she felt. She was certain Beau Tillson would still be there. He would never leave, not if he thought he could save any part of his land.
 

She hardly recognized Draytonville. The intersection with the service station and the Polar Bear Drive-In was blocked with an assortment of cars and pickup trucks diverted by more state police. Even the school buses were parked there, and Rachel realized the high school, just east of Main Street, must be in danger of flooding.
 

It was worse than that. As she kept the motor of the Toyota running, waiting to be let through the checkpoint, a figure loomed out of the twilight and leaned toward her open window. “Miz Rachel, what you doing back here?” It was J.T. Young, in high rubber boots and a yellow raincoat with the hood thrown back. “We’re having a hard time down here,” he went on before she could answer. “Downtown’s underwater and the river’s still rising, it’s almost up to the second story in Screven’s building—they made Billy come back and leave the co-op offices, he took out what papers he could. They’re taking all these people”—he nodded toward the pickups and the waiting cars—”up to Hazel Gardens.”
 

“I’ve got to get through, J.T.” Her voice trembled. But she couldn’t lie about where she was going. “I have to get out to see if some ... friends are all right,” she finished lamely. “Miz Rachel, you be careful,” he warned her. “It’s dangerous down here right now. If them Beaumont dikes go, the flood will sweep this here town, you can bet on it. Tillson had to let the developers in that he hates so much with their heavy machinery to see if they could help reinforce those old levees. And he’s a damn fool to stay out there at that old house—he won’t come out alive if they go. Don’t go nowhere’s near the river, y’hear?”
 

The Draytonville chief of police was the one who examined her driver’s license this time. He was so tired, Rachel saw with guilty relief, he didn’t even question her.
 

“If you can’t get out to your house,” the chief warned her as he passed her through the white-painted barriers of the roadblock, “you come right back, y’hear? I don’t want to have to send somebody down to look for you.”
 

“J.T.” Rachel slowed the Toyota to call to the farmer, who was going back to his truck. “Tell me something quick. How’s Til Coffee and Loretha, and ... Til,” she faltered.
 

She wanted to ask him if Beau was really still at Belle Haven and to know more about the condition of the flood there, but she didn’t want to betray where she was headed.
 

“Coffee? He was out there working on the dikes most of the day,” he answered her, “with the rest of the people around here. Coffee may be still out there, to tell the truth, I just don’t know. I heard about an hour ago nearly everybody’s come back now since the water’s still rising, and they didn’t say if’n there was a few what stayed to keep an eye on things or not. There’s not much people can do now but pray, I guess, and stay on high ground. You couldn’t get me within ten miles of that riverbank, Miz Rachel,” he said fervently. “If those Beaumont levees do bust, that point at Belle Haven’ll be the first thing the river takes away. And the town down yonder’ll go after that.”
 

“W-what about Beaumont Tillson?” she had to ask.
 

He shrugged. “Still hanging on out there at his old house, I guess. I expect no hell nor high water’s going to move a Beaumont off of that land right now. And don’t nobody around here want to argue with him neither.”