Wild Midnight (5 page)

She leaned toward him. “Jim, are you trying to tell me in a nice way that Beaumont Tillson is going to win?”
 

He turned to her, startled. “No, Lord, did you think that? What I was trying to say was that in some ways the co-op and Beau Tillson are in the same boat. He’s having to fight to keep his land too.”
 

Rachel bit her lip. There was truth in what Jim Claxton was telling her, only she hadn’t thought about it in this way. “Perhaps we can reason with him,” she said hopefully. “I mean, surely no one is one hundred percent uncooperative. As you say, we both have similar interests.”
 

The county agent gave a snort of laughter. “You go to it, Miz Rachel. I wish you luck. But don’t underestimate Tillson. He’s everything people around here say he is. Those Beaumonts were raised to think they were God on wheels. I grew up in Hazel Gardens, and they knew Beau Tillson even up there. He raised more hell as a teenager than many men do in a lifetime, and when he got back from ‘Nam he wasn’t any better. He was so crazy wild, he used to roam the woods over there at Belle Haven in the middle of the night like he was back in the war again. Scared the daylights out of hunters and fishermen many a time. Couldn’t sleep, the story goes.”
 

“If he couldn’t sleep,” Rachel said cautiously, “then that was one thing to do, wasn’t it? Take long walks?”
 

Jim Claxton laughed again. “What—in jungle fatigues and carrying an M-14 rifle? That’s some insomnia, Miz Rachel.”
 

The first thing Rachel wanted when she entered her house was a bath. Muddy, and with every muscle in her body aching from a long day’s work planting tomatoes, blissful heaven was a long soak in a bathtub full of hot water.
 

But she’d left that behind when she left Philadelphia. The house she rented on her meager salary from the farmers’ cooperative had only a jerry-built shower stall just off the kitchen. And the hot water heater, a rusty cylinder on the back porch, had never worked. There was an advantage to living at about the same economic level as the co-op’s tenant farmer members—at least they had shared experiences.
 

The first month Rachel had discovered that the tidal pool at the back of the house served almost as well as the cold-water shower, and at times was even a little warmer. Now she paused only long enough to snatch up a towel, a bar of soap, and a bottle of shampoo before she ran out the back door, hearing the screen slam shut behind her. The light was going fast. She had no more than a few minutes to wash off dirt and the pungent odor of tomato-plant sap and shampoo her hair.
 

The water in the small cove was molten silver as the last rays of the day’s sun struck it. In the thick woods that surrounded the pool wrens and martins were singing their twilight songs, along with the occasional croak of a marsh bird. Rachel sat at the water’s edge and slipped off her dirt-covered jogging shoes and then her wet socks, wearily noting that she was wet right down to her skin. Finally she stood up to slide off her jeans and nylon panties, then pulled the old chambray work shirt over her head. The dark red curtain of her hair, released from its long single braid, flowed over her shoulders and down her bare back. She lifted it with both hands, stood on her tiptoes and stretched. Her body responded with the ache of cramped muscles, but the sudden freedom made Rachel remember Jim Claxton’s blue-eyed stare as he stood beside her at the tractor. She let go of her hair abruptly.
 

She was only medium tall, at five feet six inches, but a kindly Providence had put Rachel together with an exquisite care. Rachel’s conservative upbringing minimized physical beauty, and she never thought of herself as more than normally attractive, but her long graceful legs, generously rounded hips, and tiny waist made for an hourglass figure that was voluptuous in spite of her slender build, and her skin had the opaque magnolia whiteness of the true redhead. Her face was more round than oval, her wide-set brown eyes interesting and expressive, but not classically lovely. Her usual serious expression was moderated by the curve of her full, generous mouth and the determined line of her rounded chin. Her hair had never been cut, and it reached to her hips. In college she’d desperately wanted to cut it, but Dan Brinton had been horrified at the thought, and so she had let it grow, hating its tendency to curl into an unmanageable bush when it rained and the fact that it demanded a shampoo every other day.
 

She stepped gingerly into the cold water and felt the chill of it clasp her ankles. She could see minnows darting ahead of her as she waded out into the icy pool. Rachel flopped down suddenly, taking all of it at once, and came up gasping. She swam a few strokes.
 

The feel of the cold water set her body to tingling, and she was uncomfortably aware of it. Abruptly she pulled herself to her feet at the end of the tidal pool and grabbed her long rope of hair with both hands to wring it out.
 

It had been several days since she had thought of Dan. The work of the co-op was at last keeping her so busy that she often didn’t have time to think about the past. “Thee will forget him in time,” her mother had tried to tell her. “What will remain will be a warm, loving memory only.”
 

Rachel supposed her mother was right. But what remained of her memories of Dan were not something she’d been prepared for: a real, aching longing, a restless burning in her flesh that attacked her in the dark hours of the night when she couldn’t sleep. It was not, Rachel knew, her mother’s idea of what a young widow’s memories should be, but the physical yearning was very much alive and troublesome. And it kept her awake, confused, and wondering what to do about it.
 

She had told herself over and over again that it was too soon to think of meeting other men, and certainly not just to do something about it physically. Dan had been her only lover; there were times when she wondered if she could ever think of another man in the same intimate way. Sex was something that seemed only to belong to Dan and herself.
 

What she wanted, Rachel thought, surprised at the depths of her unhappiness, was that very thing she couldn’t have—her husband there in the bed beside her at night, making love to her, with the feel of his warm, hard, very alive and loving body against hers.
 

She flung the curtain of her long hair out of her face with both hands and waded out info the chilly water. She was supposed to be thinking about the problems with the man who wanted to close off their road and not about her sex life, which no longer existed.
 

She breaststroke a few yards unenthusiastically, and suddenly wanted to giggle. If Dan had been right there beside her at that moment, he’d have known exactly how she felt. Their lovemaking had been perfectly satisfactory, an affectionate and happy event. She could just hear herself blurting out that she needed him. There had been times, in their brief months together, when—
 

The memory became a hard, hurting knot in Rachel’s body. Love with Dan had been too good, too real. Losing him had nearly destroyed her. She doubted if she would ever have something so precious again. There were still times when she simply could not realize that someone so young and vital was really gone.
 

Rachel waded toward the shoreline to get her bottle of shampoo, but at the edge of the water she stopped, her skin prickling. It was crazy to think it, but it seemed there was something there in the dark woods.
 

The evening light had faded fast. A few stray splinters of the sun’s afterglow still hung in the whispering gray festoons of Spanish moss, but most of the woods were in deep shadow. Something was there, she could almost feel it. It floated noiselessly on the faint wind. And it turned her flesh cold.
 

She lifted her hand to cover her bare breasts. Her house was far from town, and no one came down the unpaved road but the mailman. But her skin still prickled.
 

“Who is it?” she said.
 

Only silence answered her.
 

Then suddenly she remembered that Beaumont Tillson was known to roam the woods at night in jungle fatigues, carrying an army automatic rifle.
 

She sprinted for her clothes lying on the sand, scooped them up in passing without breaking her stride. A shoe fell and she did not stop to pick it up. She ran as hard as she had ever run in her life, the naked white blur of her body against the deepening gloom of the woods, until he trees at last closed around her and she was in sight of her back door.
 

Chapter Tree

“Is Beaumont Tillson dangerous?” The lawyer, Pembroke Screven, stroked his chin with his thumb. There was a guarded note in his voice, the same tone Rachel was coming to expect when that name was mentioned. “Is that your question, Mrs. Brinton?” he asked again. “Is Beau Tillson a dangerous man?”
 

Rachel looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. They were not exactly her words, but that’s what she’d meant, yes. Not for the first time that morning she wished one of the co-op members had come with her, but all of them had begged off, even Billy Yonge, the newly elected chairman of the board, who usually could be relied on. She was learning that poor tenant farmers expected little from Draytonville’s establishment, particularly its lawyers. And no one seemed to have much enthusiasm for tangling with Beaumont Tillson.
 

It had finally been decided that she would be the one, as the co-op’s salaried executive secretary, to go to this meeting with their lawyer. Trying not to look any more inexperienced than she felt, Rachel sat stiffly upright in one of the lawyer’s priceless Adam chairs upholstered in exquisite crewel work. If she brought anything to this job, it was at least a familiarity with lawyers and property; Pembroke Screven reminded her more than a little of the urbane trustees in the old Philadelphia law firm that had managed her family’s business for generations.
 

The Draytonville attorney was highly respected. His father had been a lawyer and a county judge and his grandfather before that, and his practice was not only large but virtually the only one in the area. His offices were located in a two-story former pre-Revolutionary courthouse of pink pastel stucco in the faintly West Indian style of so many of South Carolina’s low-country structures of that era.
 

Pembroke Screven met clients in a museum-perfect office that featured a rich ruby and gold Karastam Persian rug brought to southern coasts by clipper ships in the last century, a delicately handcrafted eighteenth century walnut dining table piled high with papers that served as his desk, the wrought-brass chandelier above it fitted with electric lights. The lawyer seemed a natural part of his elegant surroundings in his charcoal gray suit and vest with old-fashioned watch chain and fob, his gold-rimmed half glasses on the end of his nose. Pembroke Screven’s name announced that he belonged to two of the low-country’s oldest families. He was a slender, not very tall middle-aged man with a slightly sallow complexion. Now he repeated, “Dangerous? Is Beau Tillson to those around him, Mrs. Brinton? Is that what you mean?” Rachel bit her lip. She had thought about saying “unstable” but it sounded too drastic. Did she really mean dangerous? She’d had only one meeting with the man; whatever else she’d heard was sheer gossip, after all.
 

“I don’t mean dangerous,” she explained. “However, when I met Beaumont Tillson at the cattle gate last Saturday morning he was ... you could say he was...” She was remembering how he had spurred his black horse up in front of her, threatening to ride her down. “Unpleasant,” she said, clamping her lips together. “And he did turn away two pickup trucks full of our high school volunteers and made them go back the long way into the field. He told them the same thing, that the road was closed. This had come as a surprise because we’d had no notice from him about the road at all before he closed it.” When the lawyer didn’t comment she added, “The co-op needs Beaumont Tillson’s goodwill, we are very much aware of that, and we want to be reasonable. We know we won’t get much work done on our tomato project if we have an ongoing dispute with him.”
 

“Hmm,” the lawyer said, “so you think it’s possible to reason with this, ah, dangerous man?”
 

“Perhaps he isn’t dangerous,” Rachel conceeded. “I don’t know. But no one seems to regard him as an easy man to deal with.”
 

“Ah, now we’re talking about something very different.” The lawyer didn’t look at her. He had turned almost completely around in his chair to watch the drizzle of rain falling on the asphalt expanse of the building’s parking lot. “Beau’s been back from Vietnam a long time now,” he observed. “Long enough to build up the local store of gossip considerably. Sometimes I feel downright sorry for him. I don’t know which causes the most trouble—the fact that he was born a Beaumont, or the way people have let their imaginations run wild. Or maybe it’s a combination of both.”
 

“I only heard,” Rachel began, “that he carries a gun of some—”
 

The lawyer interrupted her. “If he wanted to roam around the swamps over there at Belle Haven at night trying to get the jungle out of his system, that was the man’s own business, Mrs. Brinton, don’t you think? Besides, he’s not the same man he was when he got back from Vietnam, it’s been over a decade now that we’ve put that war behind us. Beau’s always been something of an enigma.” He swung his chair back to face her. “There are few men, my dear,” he said softly, “who really want to be that impossibly good-looking.”