We all said goodnight to Steve, who locked up behind us and turned off the lights on his way through the restaurant to the rear door that’s a shortcut to his house out back.
Haywood held an umbrella over Isabel as they splashed out to their car. Like the southern gentleman he aspires to become, Reid told me to stay under the porch while he brought the car over.
Ralph Freeman stood beside me staring out at the rain indecisively. His face held the same hopeless misery I’d seen on Cyl’s face last night, and to my horror, instead of some innocuous platitude about hoping everything turned out okay, I heard myself say, “Did y’all have a fight? Is she doing this deliberately? Punishing you for Cyl?”
“Cyl?” The worry lines between his eyes deepened. “You mean Ms. DeGraffenried?”
I touched his arm. “You don’t have to pretend, Ralph. I know about you two.”
“You do?” He looked at me warily. “How? She tell you?”
“Only after I guessed,” I said and told him how I’d put two and two together last night.
“How is she?” His need was so great that it was almost as if he didn’t care that I knew so long as I could tell him about Cyl.
“She’s really hurting.”
His broad shoulders slumped even more if that was possible.
Reid pulled in beside the single porch step. I held up two fingers and he cut his lights to show that he’d wait with his motor running till I finished talking.
Ralph said, “You must think I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”
“It’s not for me to judge,” I answered primly.
“No?” He gave me such an ironic lift of his eyebrow that I had to smile.
“You know what I mean. I’ve got too much glass in my own house for me to go around looking for stones in my neighbors’ eyes.”
That didn’t come out quite the way I intended, although Haywood would surely have understood my mangled metaphors.
“Where are your children?” I asked pointedly.
“Home. The wife of one of our deacons is with them. And to answer your first question, Clara might do something like this to me, but she’d never do it to them. She was supposed to pick Lashanda up from her Brownie meeting after school, but she didn’t. I can’t understand it.”
“Friends?” I said. “Family?”
“All back in Warrenton except for her prayer partner. Rosa’s the only one Clara’s really taken to since we moved here. Rosa Edwards. I called her right off, but she hasn’t seen Clara since first thing this morning. I don’t know where else to look, who else to call.”
“Maybe you just ought to go on home,” I said. “Be with the children. That’s where she’d call, wouldn’t she?”
He nodded. “She’ll know they’re worried and she’ll want them to know she’s all right, soon as possible.”
“Want me to speak to Dwight Bryant? He could probably put on a couple of extra patrol cars.”
“Would you? I’d appreciate that.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t have to tell him about Cyl and me, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks, Deborah.”
“No problem,” I said.
He took a deep breath and stepped out bareheaded into the rain. Reid pushed open the passenger door and I slid inside.
As we headed back down 48, Reid said, “What was that all about?”
“His wife. He’s really worried about her.”
With Ralph’s red taillights shining up ahead, we rode in a silence broken only by the windshield wipers on wet glass, till Reid turned off the highway onto the road that led to my house. I found myself automatically checking the ditches on both sides, half-expecting to see Clara Freeman’s car.
When we got to my house, I pushed the remote and once more the garage door swung up so that Reid could drive in.
“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I replied. “Just let me call Dwight first.”
* * *
I could have called from the kitchen, of course; instead, I went straight to the phone beside my bed. Sometimes Dwight’ll give me a hard time for meddling. Tonight he listened as I stated the case against Clara Freeman just taking off without a thought for her children.
“Ralph’s afraid she’s had a wreck or something and if she has, you know the quicker she gets help, the better it’ll be,” I urged. “Do you really have to wait twenty-four hours?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll shift all the patrols over to that sector till they’ve covered all the roads. If she’s out there, they’ll find her.”
* * *
