Wild Midnight (41 page)

“Thank you,” she whispered. She’d gotten the information she wanted after all.
 

The state patrol roadblock at the intersection was on comparatively dry high ground now that it had stopped raining. But the river road coming out from town dipped immediately to follow the winding course of the Ashepoo almost at water level. Now the banks had overflowed and it was all gray—the river, the water, the early waning light in a sky ridden by storm clouds.
 

This stretch of road had always been a melancholy place, with its big overhanging live oak trees and their trailing Spanish moss, but now it was positively forbidding. The asphalt seemed to be covered with a film of water the entire way—hopefully shallow, Rachel told herself, staring at it.
 

She grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and shut her eyes briefly, gathering her courage. Then she let out the clutch. As she moved forward, each twisting turn seemed to present a view of solid flood. It was almost like driving straight across St. Helena Sound—now studded with half-drowned trees and occasional higher ridges of earth showing tufts of grass—and more terrifying than anything she could have pictured. In places she could only guess at the roadbed. She prayed the engine wouldn’t die.
 

It seemed an eternity before she got to the lakes. The light was fading; the clock hands on the dashboard told her it was a little past five o’clock. The muscles of her neck and shoulders were cramped tightly from fatigue and tension. And then when she got to the point where the road dipped between the lakes, she could have wept.
 

The road had disappeared. A swift-running current now swept through from the river where the asphalt went down and then up to the old Indian mound on the far side that made the foundation for the house at Belle Haven, hidden behind trees.
 

Rachel got out of the car, went around to the back, opened it, and pulled out one of her suitcases packed for Philadelphia. She had gone as far as she could in the clothes she’d worn for D’Arcy’s wedding. Now what she needed was something in which to wade—or swim, she thought, shivering—through the flood ahead of her, Quickly, the chill wind whipping at her exposed flesh, she pulled off her dress and shoes and nylons and got into jeans and an old sweatshirt she took out of the suitcase. She decided against shoes, then reconsidered and got out her old Adidas. Then she locked up the car. It was not until she started around the side toward the driver’s seat that she realized the water lapping around her ankles was slightly higher. She froze for a moment, not able to go on.
 

The night in the marshes.
If she didn’t fight it down—what it felt like to be like this again, assailed by oncoming dark and the horror of the rising waters—it would paralyze her, overwhelm her with panic.
 

And she had to walk into it. There was no escaping that. She had to walk, or swim, to the far side.
 

Rachel clamped her trembling lips shut and stood with her eyes closed.
Moment of silence
, she thought almost hysterically.
 

As she tried to concentrate, her mother’s story of how her father had spent the night in her bedroom long years ago, making love, flitted through her mind. She could almost hear her mother saying. “So the next morning we had a moment of silence together to examine our hearts and our resolve. And then I brought him down to breakfast.”
 

Somehow the wild desire to giggle at the absurdity of it helped Rachel more than her attempt at calming her thoughts. She opened her eyes and started toward the water. As she stepped into the flood the strong, almost invisible current draining from the river into the lake on the other side tugged at her calves, then her knees, and then up to her thighs. She couldn’t choke back a cry as the ground dipped and she was suddenly up to her neck.
 

Her mind was almost too numb with fear to try to visualize the road as it had been, it flattened out at the bottom, then started to rise to higher ground. But she could hardly stay on her feet. Branches, twigs, leaves, floated by her rapidly. The temptation to strike out and swim was strong, but she had a feeling that even though she was a strong swimmer, the moment her feet left the roadbed she wouldn’t be able to fight the current and would be swept far into the flooding lake.
 

“
Beau
.” She said the name aloud, through stiff lips, and it brought back her courage.
 

As she waded forward the water deepened only slightly and then began to recede, breast high, waist high, and finally down to her knees. She was sobbing as she walked out on higher ground. She was just taking a deep, hoarse breath when a huge gray shape loomed up at her in the twilight like a primeval monster.
 

She screamed.
 

Almost immediately a familiar voice shouted, “Great Jesus, what are
you
doing here?” Before she could answer it added, “Watch out, that’s a prize Brahma bull, you don’t want to move real quick.”
 

Rachel was incapable of moving, rooted to the spot as she and the great gray monster stared at each other. Til Coffee emerged from a clump of live oaks carrying a two-by-four in both hands.
 

“Hold still, I’ll get it,” he said in a low voice. “Just don’t move.”
 

With wary respect the tall black man eyed the huge humpbacked animal the size of a boxcar. Beads of sweat were already breaking out on Til’s face in spite of the chill wind, but he advanced bravely, crooning with what he evidently thought was irresistible persuasiveness.
 

“Sweet thing, I love you,” he improvised in his deep baritone. The creature turned its massive head to view the figure with the two-by-four with vast disinterest. “I don’t know what to say to you, big hunk of ugliness, I’m just a city boy, but let me see if I can’t get you to boogie on out of here before you want to eat Miz Rachel.”
 

Rachel wrapped her arms around her body, still gasping after her journey through the water. She couldn’t do anything but stare as Til crouched lower, inching closer step by step, the board held before him like a samurai warrior brandishing his sword.
 

“Come on, lift up those mammoth tootsies.” Til’s monotone was almost desperately seductive. “I got a foxy lady cow what looks just like Mount Kilimanjaro waiting for you. Move your big gray self away from that lady or I’ll hit you with this.”
 

The bull’s ears twitched. Slowly its giant gray haunches undulated and it began to turn. Even more slowly it ambled away to a grove of trees on higher ground.
 

Til put down the board and let his breath out explosively. “You don’t know how much that took out of me,” he said, looking visibly relieved. “That monster was trying to sit on my Buick a while ago.” He wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand. “There are cows all over the place here, they came up to get out of the flood.”
 

“Oh, Til,” Rachel burst out. She was shivering with cold, and the bull had frightened her as much as it had him. She was so glad to see Til it was all she could do to keep from throwing herself on him. But she was oozing water, she saw, looking down at herself, and Til was mud covered and hardly dry himself in thoroughly soaked jeans, a sweater, and high boots. “I left my station wagon—” She couldn’t finish. She gestured back at the lakes and the Toyota abandoned on the far side. It, too, might be underwater shortly. The big house at Belle Haven, seen through the trees, was reassuring. “What are
you
doing here?”
 

She saw his amber eyes darken. “Helping Massa Beau save the old family plantation, what else?” he quipped. He looked her over, suddenly not very pleased with what he saw. “Why did you come back here, Rachel? Don’t you know a lost cause when you see one? You’re one persistent broad, you know that?
 

In spite of her bedraggled condition, Rachel lifted her chin and met his stare. “I was raised on lost causes, or I wouldn’t be here, Til.” She shivered again, aware of how much wading the road between the lakes had taken out of her.
 

He glowered at her. “Yeah, but this is dangerous, Rachel, don’t you have any sense, pulling a stunt like that? You’re just as crazy as my wife,” he growled. “She’s out here too.”
 

“Loretha?” Rachel cried. She couldn’t imagine elegant, beautiful Loretha floundering around in mud and cattle and an ever-rising flood. “What’s
she
doing here?”’
 

“I wish you’d stop asking that,” he said irritably. He propped the board against the trunk of a massive oak and brushed his muddy hands together. “The last thing I saw, my lady wife was rounding up cows. Frankly, she’s the only one around here that can scare hell out of them and make these monsters behave. The Dragon Lady says if I got to risk my life, she’s got to come, too, you know how she is. Come over here,” he told her abruptly, “and get out of this wind. You look like you’re turning into an icicle.”
 

Rachel did as he said, then looked up at his dark, tired features and said softly, “Til, I want to see Beau. Where is he?”
 

He pulled her farther into the shelter of the trees. “Now you’re here, I guess I can’t make you go back, Rachel,” he said grimly, “but what do you think you’re going to accomplish? The man wants people to let him alone.”
 

“But do you?” she wanted to know. “You’re out here.”
 

He looked away, the sudden bleakness of his handsome face wrenchingly familiar. “I did, for a long time, there was no reason for us to get along. But you might say the more I got to know him, the more I figured I had a ... an obligation.” He hesitated. “Did he tell you what happened to him in ‘Nam?”
 

“I
saw
what happened to him,” she said quietly.
 

He looked at her, surprised. “You must have gotten close to him lady, closer than I thought.” He studied her for a long moment. “I never have. All I know is, it was bad. Real bad.
 

“He was sent to war, Til.” She wrapped her arms around her tightly against the chill of her wet clothes, searching the lawn near the house for some sight of the man she was looking for. “It wasn’t even his own choice, like so many others who went. And when they came back, people didn’t face their guilt but blamed those who fought for them. He wasn’t the only one—we did it to all of them. Til,” she pleaded, “tell me where he is. I want to go to him.”
 

“Rachel...” His eyes slid away from her. “I don’t know what to tell you. He’s been a damned wreck since you left. It wasn’t hard to get what’s been happening out of him, all it took was a bottle of Jack Daniels between us for him to spill his guts, and frankly, Rachel, I wish now I hadn’t heard it.” He grimaced. “What I’m trying to say is, that’s a pretty sensitive part of a man’s body—a woman couldn’t understand the psychology of it, not completely. And Beau ... well, hell, just look at him. He’s a beautiful man. It’s made him a little crazy.”
 

“He is
not
crazy,” Rachel cried. Her teeth were chattering now and it made it difficult for her to talk. “Don’t say that about him—it’s not true and you know it. He is good and strong and brave!”
 

Til had started at the forcefulness of her words. Now he glanced at her quickly. “Rachel, don’t you understand? He can’t have kids. It’s tearing him apart, that he can’t even offer that to a woman. Is ... isn’t that important to somebody like you?”
 

“What is ‘somebody like me’?” She drew herself up, soaking wet and exhausted, the dark velvet of her eyes flashing. “I don’t know what you—and he—think of me, Til, but it must be something strange. Besides, the whole thing’s ridiculous,” she said impatiently. “I’m pregnant.”
 

She saw his eyes widen. For a moment Til stood absolutely still, then he said, “You’re kidding.”
 

“I certainly am not,” she shouted. The last of her reserves were wearing thin. “And the child is his. And if you’re going to tell me it couldn’t be, I will—I will—” She looked in the direction of the board resting against the tree. “I will pick up that thing and do something very violent to you. I swear to you Til, right now I’d probably
hit
you!”
 

He kept staring. Then, his voice quivering with something like laughter, he said, “Have you told him you’re pregnant?”
 

“Of course I have,” she said indignantly. “But I haven’t convinced him, obviously, or I wouldn’t be standing here freezing to death. Now tell me where I can find him.”
 

“Lady, you mean you came back?” he marveled. “You mean you waded through all that water and you’re
pregnant
with his kid? You’re pregnant with Beau Devil’s baby? You mean you’re sure?”
 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, yes, of course I’m sure. He is still here, isn’t he?” she cried, suddenly anxious. She looked around at the slight rise of the mound with the beautiful old house crowning it and the hordes of cattle under the trees. “He didn’t go down to the pastures, or the fields or someplace? Oh, Til, I don’t think I’ve got the strength left to go look for him.”
 

“No, he’s here,” he told her quickly. He couldn’t seem to stop staring at her. “Rachel, if you’re sure...” He shook his head. “Oh, lady, the Force be with you, because you’re going to need it.” Chuckling, he bent down to pick up the two-by-four. “But take this with you, just in case. He’s out behind the house, shoveling mud to make up sandbags.”