At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.
It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.
“I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”
“Yeah, I’ve already got that.”
“You’ve got that? From where?” she said.
“A reference librarian at the Citadel.”
“A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”
“Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”
“Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”
“I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.
“Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”
When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.
“Let’s take a ride,” I said.
MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightning, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.
Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.
“Fine with me,” Molly said.
Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.
“I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.
“Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.
A gust of wind and rain blew across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.
She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.
“I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.
“I know. What is it you want?”
“It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”
“Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.
“Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.
“But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.
“I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”
“We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.
The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.
Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.
The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”
“Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.
But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.
Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a.25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.
“Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”
Molly hesitated.
“You want to see her brains on the dashboard, Miz Robicheaux?” Bledsoe said.
Molly pulled on the hood release, then leaned over the backseat and opened the rear door. Bledsoe slipped inside, closing the door as quickly as possible to turn off the interior light. Molly was still extended over the seat, and his face and eyes were only inches from hers. His silk shirt rippled like blue ice water. She could smell the dampness on his skin, the dried soap he had used in shaving his head, an odor like soiled kitty litter that rose from his armpits.
The man in the raincoat slammed down the hood.
“Start the car,” Bledsoe said, clicking the switch on the interior light to the “off” position.
“I don’t think I should do that,” Molly said.
The man in the raincoat pulled open the back door and got inside. He struggled a minute with his raincoat before getting the door shut. He would not look directly at either Molly or Alafair.
“Want to be the cause of this little girl’s death?” Bledsoe said. “Want to be the cause of your own, just because you decide to be stubborn? That doesn’t sound like a nun to me. That sounds like pride talking.”
Molly’s hand started to shake as she turned the ignition. “My husband is going to hang you out to dry, buddy boy,” she said.
“He’d like to. But so far, he hasn’t done such a good job of it, has he?” Bledsoe said. He teased the muzzle of the.25 under Alafair’s ear. “Pull onto the street, Miz Robicheaux.”
Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.
“Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might
