Widow's Tears (35 page)

“Kitty?” Ruby whispered. “Kitty?”

“Who?” I asked. A neighbor, maybe? A friend?

“My caretaker's wife,” Claire said. “She and Sam left this afternoon to drive to Houston. I guess the weather must have been so bad that they decided they'd better drive back home. But where…where's Sam?” She bent lower and raised her voice. “Kitty? Can you hear me? Where's Sam?”

At the question, the woman's left eyelid fluttered. “Sam…” she muttered thickly. “Truck. In the…” She tried again, whispering. “In the creek.”

“In the
creek
?” Claire cried, aghast. “You mean, your truck went into the water?”

Ruby put a hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard with her fingers. I looked up. She was staring down at Kitty, her eyes wide and oddly blank. “
Crooked man,”
she whispered. “
Crooked cat.”
She paused, then said it again.
“Crooked cat.”

I frowned at her. “What? What are you saying?” It sounded like the words she and Claire had seen written on the menu board in the kitchen.

“Crooked sixpence,”
she muttered.
“Crooked sixpence!”

Kitty raised her one good hand and clamped bloody fingers on my wrist in a surprisingly tight grip. “Help…him,” Kitty wheezed. She coughed. “Help…Sam.” Her one good eye rolled up until only the white was visible, and her hand dropped. She was gone again, at least for the moment.

I thought of the steep hill, the road I had driven down—skidded down,
more accurately. The road was slippery then, hours ago, and the low concrete bridge at the foot of the hill had already been covered by eight inches of fast-moving water. It could be eight feet deep at the bridge by this time—and still rising, depending on how much rain had fallen in the creek's watershed. It was entirely possible that the bridge itself was gone. Even concrete bridges don't always stand up to our Texas flash floods.

I got to my feet. I don't mind telling you that I was scared. My palms were suddenly clammy and my knees were shaking. I am by nature a cautious person (translation: I don't have an ounce of bravado in my makeup kit) and I understand all too well the dangers involved in swift-water rescue. We had no equipment and not even a prayer of getting any professional help, and it was utterly foolhardy for me to even think about attempting anything.

But this woman's husband was out there somewhere, maybe in the water and out of reach of anybody's help—but maybe on the bank or somewhere else reachable. Somebody had to make an effort to find out what the situation was. And now that the electricity was back on—courtesy of Ruby's ghost, perhaps?—I wondered about the flashlights. Were they working, too?

Kitty was back again. “The truck,” she moaned. “The truck…washed off the bridge…downstream. Don't know how I got out. Crawled all the…” She began to cough, bloody spittle on her lips. Internal injuries, maybe. A punctured lung? Her face was pallid, her lips blue.

“Flashlights,” I said tersely. “Now that Rachel's turned the power back on, maybe we've got operational batteries again.” You'd better believe I felt dumb saying that, but what other explanation was there? “Where do you keep the flashlights? And maybe some rope? It's probably too late, but—”

Ruby's lapse into nursery rhymes seemed to have ended. “I'll stay with
Kitty,” she offered. “Claire knows her way around this place better than I do.”

Claire was already halfway to the door. “Come on, China,” she said over her shoulder.

Ten minutes later, clad in ponchos and armed with working flashlights and a coil of clothesline, we were out in the rain. I paused long enough to check my cell phone and—hooray!—discover that it was operating again. I had no idea whether the Fayette County's sheriff's office was set up to receive 911 text messages, but I could try to get a message through to McQuaid, who had the address of Claire's place.

I was even more fumble-fingered than usual, but I managed to send a text message that I hoped would prompt him to immediately call Star Flight in Austin and try to get a helicopter medic team out here for Kitty. Star Flight responds to emergency service requests in counties across Central Texas—I was hoping that Fayette County was one of them. But McQuaid would know what to do. He had worked with Star Flight when he was acting police chief of Pecan Springs, before Sheila Dawson got the job, and one of his buddies was a Star Flight crew member. The helicopter wouldn't be able to fly in the storm, but we'd be on the list when the weather cleared. And knowing McQuaid, I was sure he'd be in touch with the Fayette County emergency services, too.

We went out the back door, around the house, and down the slope, Claire leading the way. The rain was still coming down in buckets. The path was ankle deep in water and it was a struggle to keep my footing. My sneakers were immediately soaked and the hood of my poncho kept blowing off. I finally gave up trying to keep my hair dry and concentrated on the task in front of me: getting down to the creek safely. I could already hear it roaring, out of its banks, and my heart sank. If this storm had dumped as much rain across the region as it had here, we might have to
wait quite a while for Star Flight. On a night like this, their helicopter fleet and their emergency teams would likely be called out for several swift-water rescues. We might be at the bottom of a long list.

At the foot of the path, Claire turned and pointed. “The bridge is downstream about a hundred yards.” She had to yell to make herself heard above the rush of the water. She turned the beam of her flashlight onto the raging creek. “I've never seen the water this high. Most of the time, it's only a couple of feet deep right here, and so clear that you can see the bottom. This…this is incredible.”

It was. The creek was a churning torrent, a muddy maelstrom of rushing water that tumbled tree branches and rocks and chunks of debris in a foaming flood. Our flashlights weren't a lot of help, but I could see enough to convince me that if Kitty's husband was caught in that gushing, rushing water, he was a dead man.

We picked our way downstream, moving cautiously among the scrub willows, roughleaf dogwood, and buttonbush that grew along the bank. We had to stay well above the water, because stream banks are often deeply undercut by floods, and the last thing either of us wanted was to feel the ground under our feet give way and pitch us into that roaring water. Lightning played along the low ridge behind the house and thunder banged like a chorus of kettledrums. Ahead of us, a cottonwood tree had dropped a couple of thick limbs, and we had to clamber over and through the obstruction. A hundred yards to the bridge? It was beginning to seem like ten miles.

But at last we reached it—or reached the spot where the bridge was supposed to be. At that point, the creek was maybe thirty yards wide, and our flashlights could scarcely illuminate the other side. But dimly, through the sheeting rain, I could see where the road came down the hill. And on this side of the creek, I could see where it curved around behind the house.
The bridge itself was under six or seven feet of rushing water. I shone my light downstream, searching the muddy water for the truck. Where was it? If it had gone off the road here, at the bridge, it couldn't be far.

And then my moving flashlight beam picked up a gleam of something metallic, and I swung it back. It was the back bumper of a pickup truck, nose down, the cab roof flattened down as if it had been in a rollover. It was wedged beneath a fallen tree and almost fully submerged, the bed jacked up on a boulder,
FORD
clearly visible across the tailgate. It was thirty yards or so downstream of the bridge, about four or five yards from the bank, completely surrounded by rushing water, completely out of our reach.

“There, China!” Claire yelled, seeing it at the same time I did. “That's Sam's pickup.” She started downstream toward it.

“Can you see if he's in there?” I called. A jagged streak of lightning crossed the sky, and in its blue-white light I saw that the hood of the truck was wedged under a huge bald cypress that had broken off ten feet above the ground and now lay across the creek. The truck's windshield was entirely underwater, and it looked like the cab was completely filled with water, right up to the flattened, crumpled roof.

As I scrambled through the rocks along the water's edge, I could see that the driver's-side window was broken and the door looked like it had been pretty well caved in, but that didn't mean a lot, either way. The driver could have gotten out before the water swept the truck off the bridge and rolled it over downstream. His passenger had not only managed to scramble out of the truck, but she'd gotten out of the water and made her way to the house, where she still had enough presence of mind to break a window and get in. Whether she would survive until help got here was another question, of course. I had no way of knowing what kind of internal injuries she might have.

“I can't see whether he's in there or not,” Claire said, in answer to my
question. “But if he is, he's a goner.” She turned and began shining her light along the creek bank, upstream and downstream. “Sam!” she shouted. “Sam Rawlings! Can you hear me?”

I called, too, using my light to pick out possible places where somebody might have crawled out of the water, but it was a hopeless task. The water was still rising, and while the truck seemed to be pretty securely wedged under that tree, there was always the chance that a more powerful surge could come along and flip it over.

We stood there helplessly, flashing our lights around. Then my light happened to shine on the rear window of the cab, and I saw something that made my heart stop. It was a square, official-looking sticker, about six by eight inches.
Protected by AK-47
, it read, with a drawing of the assault rifle.

And a few inches from that sticker I could see a neat, round bullet hole.

I was looking at the getaway vehicle for the robbers of the Ranchers State Bank in Pecan Springs, and Bonnie Roth's killers.

*   *   *

T
HE
rain had stopped and it was almost dawn by the time Star Flight was finally able to take off from the heliport atop University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin. Less than half an hour later, we heard the unmistakable
whump-whump-whump
of the helicopter rotor. McQuaid and I had exchanged a dozen text messages by that time, so I wasn't surprised to see him jump out of the helicopter on the heels of the medevac crew, or to see a heavy-duty tow truck lumbering down the hill, followed by two Fayette County sheriff's cars.

It took the medevac team about ten minutes to strap Kitty Rawlings onto a gurney and load her into the helicopter. Then they headed back to Austin, where she would be met not only by doctors and nurses but by the police as well. McQuaid, having seen that the three of us—Ruby, Claire,
and I—were perfectly okay and in no danger, had flown back to Austin. After all, he had to get the kids off to school in the morning and administer his final exam at the university in the afternoon. My car started easily when I tried it, but it would be a day or maybe two before the water went down far enough to cross the bridge and the road dried out enough for my Toyota to make it up the hill.

The water was going down quickly, but the creek was still flowing fast and deep. It took several tries for the deputies to get a chain on the rear end of Sam Rawlings' pickup truck. Once that was done, however, it took less than five minutes to winch the battered truck out of the creek and onto the far bank, where the deputies opened the passenger door and pulled out Rawlings' body. It looked as though he had drowned when the cab had filled up and he could not escape.

And if there was any doubt that this was the truck used in the robbery, it was laid to rest by the sodden, disintegrating paper bag the deputies found stuffed under the truck's seat, the bag of bills that Bonnie had handed over before she was shot. The ten-dollar bills were banded in bundles of twenty, ten of them, and the bands were stamped with
Ranchers State Bank.

It was well after ten in the morning before Ruby, Claire, and I finally got some breakfast. And then, utterly exhausted from having been up all night dealing with ghosts, spear-wielding monsters, and submerged pickup trucks, we went to bed. Believe me, we slept the sleep of the dead. And if Rachel was out and about, haunting her house, we slept right through it.

As it turned out, Rawlings hadn't drowned. The bank guard's bullet had struck him in the neck, and he had bled to death.