A moment later, I felt the car rock as Pete stepped on the running board and ran the light over every inch of the Hornet’s interior. His breathing was ragged from exertion.
I myself had quit breathing and had no intention of starting again any time soon.
There was a thin crack where I hadn’t quite pushed the board into the backrest as far as it was meant to go and so much light after such darkness terrified me. Any second now I would hear his triumphant cry and feel the explosion as he fired down through the board.
Then the car rocked violently as Pete jumped from the running board. I heard his feet pounding across the lane as a wash of headlights played across the shed and I came up out of my hidey-hole just in time to see Pete’s car roar across the yard and turn out onto Old Forty-Eight on two wheels. At the same moment, car doors opened and slammed over at the shop.
Two male figures circled my car and called my name through the open shop door.
The adrenaline high that had kept me at fever pitch for the last half-hour abruptly evaporated and I was almost too weak to wrest open the rusty hinges and totter down to the shop.
I must have looked like the devil’s playmate, torn, scratched, filthy dirty, but my appearance sent Adam and Allen into gales of raucous laughter.
Both of them clutched beer cans and both were drunk as skunks, but I couldn’t see what was so damn funny.
“Reckon we showed you, darlin’,” said Allen.
“Take the wind out of
I hadn’t seen my uptight, upright brother this wrecked since the night of his bachelor party.
“Where’ve you been?” I demanded. “You scared the hell out of us, disappearing like that.”
He gave me a foolish grin. I spotted my car keys on the floor, grabbed them and headed outside. I didn’t get three steps toward my car though when I saw my smashed cell phone. Damn that Pete Grimes!
Allen and Adam followed me, still strutting and bragging.
“Thought you’d sic the law on me ’cause of that phony blood test Diana did?” asked Allen. “Ha-ha on you, darlin’. She called me yesterday, told me all about what you done to her.”
He was slurring his S sounds and that struck Adam as even runnier than the look on my face.
“Me and Adam, we drove up to Greensboro last evening and Katie and me got married today in Fort Mill, South Carolina.”
Adam beamed at me. “Bes’ man,” he said happily. “Chauffeur, too.”
“I’m just here to get my truck, pick up my stuff and head on back to Greensboro tomorrow.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” I said as I loaded my sodden brother into my car and dumped my smashed phone in his lap.
Five minutes later, Seth was putting Adam to bed on the couch in the den and I was phoning Dwight.
30
« ^
The phone kept ringing Saturday morning as half my family called to exclaim or condole about my close brush with danger, Pete’s arrest, Adam’s safe return. If I’d planned to sleep in, I could just forget it.
I had a bruise the size of Rhode Island on my hip and it was tender, but I seemed to be able to walk okay.
By ten o’clock, I had stuck the blue paper plates and napkins and the ten pounds of roasted peanuts in the trunk of my car and was driving over to Andrew’s house. Dinner was to be at the homeplace at two o’clock, but Daddy had suggested that my brothers and I might want to come out early and watch some of his new puppies go through their paces in the training pen at Andrew’s.
The temperature had dropped thirty degrees during the night and was barely expected to hit forty. Despite the sun, there was a stiff wind out of the north. Not a good day to stand around outside, but something in Seth’s tone when he called to relay Daddy’s message made me think I ought to be there. So I put on wool socks, boots, and a white turtle-neck sweater under a sapphire blue warm-up suit that looked like crushed silk. My silver earrings were set with small blue topazes. I felt festive, yet I was still casual enough for the jeans and flannel shirts and sweaters my brothers would be wearing. For safe measure, I took along gloves and a blue-gray wool car coat that had a hood in case I got chilly.
Andrew’s land is next to Seth’s. The house is a comfortable old white clapboard built in the twenties by one of April’s uncles over in Makely. When a new supermarket bought the lot, her cousin said April and Andrew could have it as a wedding present if they wanted to move it. It’s been much remodeled since then—April rearranges walls the way some women rearrange furniture—and the kitchen is huge and modern now.
And smelled like Thanksgiving when I stuck my head in the back door. Isabel was bringing a ham and Nadine and Minnie were each roasting a turkey, but April always makes her succulent smoked oyster dressing and she was just putting the big pans in the oven, enough for fifty people.
April is Andrew’s second wife and considerably younger than he, closer to my age, in fact, than his. She got her BA. after A.K. was born and teaches sixth grade at Cotton Grove’s middle school.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“Oh, Deborah!” She rushed over to hug me. “You could have been killed. Pete Grimes.” She shook her head.
