One Summer (29 page)

Seconds later he slid in beside her, tossing his helmet and the spare into the back seat.

Rachel backed up, pulled out, and drove off toward town without a word. The knowledge that Johnny was fresh from the arms of Glenda Watkins ate at her. Jealous—that’s what she was, jealous. But what else had she expected from Johnny Harris? Catting around was in his blood.

Rachel caught herself up. She was as guilty of stereotyping as the rest of the town. He wouldn’t have turned to Glenda—or at least she didn’t think so, anyway, not so soon—if Rachel hadn’t sent him away herself. The thought rankled.

Johnny reached over and flipped the radio on. The Rolling Stones in a golden oldie revival were wailing about not getting any satisfaction. Johnny scowled and turned the dial, settling on a country station that at the moment featured the Judds.

“Have a good time at the picnic?” His remark out of the blue earned him an unfriendly sidelong glance.

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I apologize if I interrupted your evening.”

“You should. And you did.”

“Hope the boyfriend wasn’t inconvenienced.”

“No.”

“You still sleeping with him?”

At that Rachel cast him a furious glare. “I never said I was in the first place. You know why? Because it’s none of your business.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!”

Silence.

“You catch any flak at school about me coming around?”

“Do you care?”

“Yes.”

Rachel shot him a quick, surprised look. She had expected
some smart-alecky comeback, not that quiet affirmative.

“A little.”

“Sorry.”

The worst of her anger cooled. “It’s not your fault.”

They had reached the outskirts of town, and Rachel turned right on Main. The hardware store was three blocks down on the left.

“Do you have your key?” she asked as she pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car.

“Yeah.” Johnny dangled a jingling key ring from one finger to demonstrate.

“Then good night.”

He was looking at her, but in the darkness she could not read his expression. She had not even put the transmission into park, the engine was still running, and it was obvious that she was only waiting for him to get out before driving off.

“Rachel,” he said quietly, “come up?”

“No.”

“Still need space?”

Rachel’s lips compressed, her eyes flashed, and she turned on him.

“Yes, I do. Any woman with a grain of sense would! Look at you! You’re drunk, and this isn’t the first time either! You zoom around on that motorcycle like an overgrown adolescent bent on suicide! You sleep around, your hair’s too long, your manners are dreadful, and you’ve got a chip on your shoulder the size of Hong Kong! You say you’ve got a college degree. Are you using it? No! Do you have any plans to use it? Not as far as I can tell. You just spent this evening with your girlfriend, who at least cares enough about you not to let you drive home drunk. Then you have the nerve to ask me to come upstairs with you? What in the name of heaven do you suppose you have to offer me? Can you tell me that?”

There was a long, tense pause. Rachel felt as much as saw Johnny’s slow stiffening.

“Great sex?” he drawled.

The question hung in the air between them. Rachel felt anger build inside her, turning in just a matter of seconds into a hot, fierce fury of which she would never have suspected herself capable.

“Get out!” she said softly, so angry her voice trembled. Then, as red rage rolled over her in a boiling tide, her voice rose until she was shouting at him. “Get out! Get out of my car! Get out of my life! Get out, get out, get out!”

She slammed the car into park and shoved at his shoulder, doing her best to force him out the door, without making the least headway. She was so furious that she was sobbing with it, so furious that she wanted to kick and scream and yell like Katie in a tantrum. What she might have done if he hadn’t opened the door and climbed out at that moment, she couldn’t say.

“Anything to make you happy, baby,” he said with an insolent curl of his lip. He slammed the door and swaggered across the parking lot. He was climbing the stairs as Rachel, trembling from reaction, threw the transmission into reverse and careened out of the lot.

31

T
hey were getting ready for church when the telephone rang. Rachel, already dressed except for the pink linen suit she meant to wear, tied a perky blue ribbon in Loren’s hair while Becky wrestled Katie into her shoes. Lisa hogged the upstairs bathroom. Elisabeth was still in Stan’s bedroom, helping him dress and talking to J.D., who, with Tilda, had come in to watch over him while the rest of the family attended the Sunday morning worship service.

“Telephone, Rachel,” Tilda called up the stairs.

“Rob?” Becky inquired with a lift of her eyebrows.

Rachel shrugged and ran down the stairs to take the call. When she put down the receiver she was frowning.

“Who was that, honey?” Tilda asked, looking up from loading the breakfast dishes to catch Rachel’s expression.

“I have to go down to the police station.”

“What?” Becky, coming downstairs with Katie in her arms, overheard Rachel’s remark.

“They need me to come right away. They wouldn’t say why.” But she knew, she knew as well as she knew her name, that it had something to do with Johnny. Her lips tightened. He must be in some sort of trouble. Had he gone out again last night?

“On Sunday morning?” Becky was disbelieving. “What about church?”

“I should be able to make it.” Rachel glanced up at the clock. There was still a good hour before the service began.

“You can always go with J.D. and me this evening,” Tilda said, pouring detergent into the dishwasher and closing the door. Tilda went to a different church from the Grants, but Rachel and Becky had accompanied her on many occasions in the past. Though the congregation was mostly black, anyone was welcome, and everybody knew that the Grant girls were almost as much Tilda’s family as her own children. “Tanya’s singin’ lead in the choir now, you know.”

“Is she?” Tanya was Tilda’s youngest. “I’d like to hear her. But I hope to be able to meet Mother and Becky at church.”

“Do you think it’s something about the store—or that Harris man?” Becky, having set Katie on the floor, was looking at her with troubled eyes.

Rachel stared at her sister for a moment, then sighed. “Has Mother been talking to you?”

“Of course.”

“Of course.” Rachel should have known that Elisabeth would confide all to Becky. “It’s probably the store. Maybe a kid threw a rock through a window or something.”

“Maybe.”

Rachel could tell from Becky’s tone that she was skeptical. What had Elisabeth told her about Johnny and Rachel’s relationship with him? Rachel hated to speculate.

“I’d better get down there and see what they want.”

Becky and Tilda were exchanging significant looks even as Rachel fled the room.

Minutes later, fully dressed and with her car keys in her hand, Rachel poked her head into the kitchen on her way out the door. Elisabeth was still upstairs, for which small mercy Rachel was thankful. Becky and Tilda, who’d had
their heads together near the dishwasher, immediately stopped talking when they saw Rachel.

“Beck, tell Mother where I’ve gone, would you? Tell her I’ll try to make church, but if it’s not possible, I’ll be home as soon as I can. And try to keep her from coming down to the police station if this takes a while, please?”

“I’ll do my best.” Becky shook her head sympathetically at her sister. “But you know how she is.”

“I know.” The two exchanged rueful, affectionate smiles, and then Rachel left.

The police station was a small brick building located on Madison Street, about half a mile south of the hardware store on the very edge of downtown. Rachel had been inside only a few times, usually to sell or buy tickets for some school or civic function. The parking lot was unusually full for Sunday, and as she entered the front reception area with its linoleum floors and hard plastic chairs, she noticed that there seemed to be a lot of officers on duty. She didn’t really think about such details, just noticed them and tucked them away somewhere in her mind to be recalled later.

“Hello, did you need to see me?” she said to the young officer at the desk a moment later. His face wasn’t familiar, and she assumed he was a newcomer to the town.

“Miss Grant?”

“Yes.”

“Just a minute.” He picked up the receiver of the telephone on one side of the metal desk, punched a button, and said, “Miss Grant is here.”

“Can you tell me what this is about?” she asked as he put the receiver back in its cradle.

He shook his head. “You’ll have to ask the chief.”

Surprised, Rachel was about to ask what Chief Wheatley was doing working on Sunday—he was a member of her church, and he and his wife never missed a service—when the chief himself came through a door that led to the rear offices and prisoner holding area.

“Rachel.” He smiled as he greeted her, but Rachel, her perceptions sharpened by a growing alarm, thought he looked tired and a little grim. There were bags under his eyes that weren’t usually there, and his skin, normally ruddy, had taken on a tinge of gray.

“What’s happened?” she asked sharply.

“Come into the back, Rachel. We can talk there.”

He held the door for her. Rachel, increasingly nervous as she considered and discarded various hideous possibilities, walked through the door and along the short corridor, then allowed him to seat her in a hard gray chair before the desk in his small office.

Chief Wheatley closed the door, then walked around the desk to sit down. The only window was tiny, permitting very little natural light to enter. The bright glow from the fluorescent fixture overhead was unflattering to everything—the dingy linoleum floor, the brownish metal of the desk, the tired, drawn face of the chief. Rachel could only imagine what she must look like under its unrelenting glare.

“What’s happened?” she asked again, her hands clasping in her lap.

“I need to ask you a few questions first,” he said. “Mind if I tape-record this?”

“Why, no.”

“I appreciate it. Helps prevent confusion later.” Opening the bottom left drawer of his desk, Chief Wheatley pulled out a small portable tape recorder and clicked it on. Then he leaned back in his chair and peered at her through half-lowered lids. His hands were folded over his belly. Rachel noticed that he was beginning to develop a slight paunch. He must be sixty or near it, as his grayish, thinning hair and slack jaw muscles attested.

“You went to the Labor Day picnic yesterday, right?” he asked.

Rachel nodded. Then, remembering the tape recorder, she said, “Yes.”

“Afterward, what did you do?”

“I went home. Why?”

“Is that all?”

“No. I went out later. To pick up—a friend who’d had too much to drink and had no business driving.”

“What friend?”

Rachel wasn’t going to be able to keep Johnny’s name out of it.

“Johnny Harris.”

“You went to pick up Johnny Harris because he’d had too much to drink and had no business driving. Is that right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Where did you pick him up?”

“At that trailer park out by the river—I forget its name.”

“Appleby Estates?”

Rachel nodded, then remembering the tape recorder again, said, “Yes.”

“Did Harris call you to come and get him?”

“No. Glenda Watkins did.”

“Ah.” The fingers that had been resting on his stomach steepled. “What time was that?”

“About eleven, I guess. Maybe a little after. Why?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. First I need to know a few more details. Did she seem upset, or in any way—uh, emotional, when she called?”

“No.”

“Did you actually pick Harris up?”

“Yes.”

“What time would you say that was?”

Rachel thought a minute. “It probably took me half an hour to get over there, because I had to get dressed. Around eleven thirty, I guess.”

“Tell me exactly what happened, Rachel. This is important, so be as accurate as you can. Start from when Mrs. Watkins called you. What exactly did she say?”

Rachel told him, then went on to describe getting
dressed, driving to the trailer park, and then, rather reluctantly, her encounter with Johnny. If this was about drunken driving, as she half-suspected, she did not want to get him into more trouble than he was already in, richly though the wretch deserved it.

“So he wrecked his motorcycle.”

“Yes.”

“Was he drunk?”

Rachel pursed her lips. “He had been drinking, yes.”

“But was he out-of-his-head drunk? Did he know what he was doing? Did he seem—normal?”

Rachel’s brows rose. “Entirely normal. Just a little tipsy.”

“What was he wearing?”

Rachel looked her surprise. “Blue jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes.”

“Were they—did you notice any stains or discolorations on them, or anything like that?”

“No. I suppose there were probably grass stains on his jeans from the wreck, but I didn’t notice them.”