Читать книгу The Plague Doctor - E. Joan Sims - Страница 11

Chapter Nine

The afternoon was beautiful—sunny and warm—with a soft breeze from the south which lifted my hair and kissed my cheeks. High above, little fluffy white clouds scooted across an intense cerulean sky like naughty chicks scurrying home to mama. It was perfect weather, and there were no bars between me and the great outdoors. One hour in a jail cell was more than enough for me. I had left feeling infinitely sorry for Ethan.

Too unsettled to go home just yet, I decided to walk around and sort out my feelings. Ethan’s request that I help him was not unexpected. I was already trying to help to some extent. But now that he was really counting on me to solve his problems, I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

I tried to explain to him that I was not really a detective—just a writer who seemed to get in the middle of murderous muddles and had to figure her way out. I could not guarantee any results at all. But like others before him, he simply ignored what he called my modesty. He’d brightened like a hundred-watt bulb when I said I would do the best I could.

Damn! Another muddle. Leonard had better put on his thinking cap for this one. It was a dilly.

Rowan Springs had two main streets—one went north and the other south. When they met at the courthouse square, they divided and went east and west as well. It had been a very nifty plan when the town was founded over a hundred years ago. Amazingly enough, it still worked today—with the addition of one or two traffic lights and a four-way stop sign here and there.

The jail, firehouse, and City Hall were on the north side of the square. The pharmacies and clothing stores were on the south side. A barber shop, a beauty shop, and one Tai Chi studio were on the west.

When I was a little girl, I used to shop for groceries with my grandmother at the A&P on the east side of the square. Rowan Springs was still a little country town back then. Farmers brought their wagons to town filled with fresh produce and live chickens and sold them off the tailgate. My grandmother always bought a nice fat hen for Sunday dinner. I usually made a pet of it before we got home and cried all night after she swung it by the neck until the body popped off and went flapping across the backyard. Somehow the violent demise of my new feathered friend never stopped me from devouring the juicy meat off the crispy fried pulley bone after church the next day.

The hitching racks were long gone and so were the grocery stores. They had moved out to the mini-mall on the road to the lakes where there was more parking space.

Once abandoned, the high-ceilinged old stores had been turned into offices for lawyers and accountants. Bruce Hawkins, Mother’s lawyer, had been the only one in town to rebel against having an office on “Lawyer’s Row.” Instead he had turned the old Capitol Theater into a wonderful art deco homage to the movies he used to love and made his offices there.

I walked around the square lost in reflection and memories. My mind was a hundred years in the past as I admired the wonderful old carvings on the fronts of the buildings.

I did not see the crowd gathering outside of the jail until I rounded the corner of the courthouse. Andy Joiner was standing on the steps in front of his office trying to disperse what appeared to be the beginnings of an unruly demonstration.

I crossed the street and stood behind an obese, middle-aged woman with stringy grey hair. She was waving a homemade placard with the word “feend” misspelled in bright orange letters. I watched in morbid fascination as the flabby fat under her arms swayed grotesquely with her every movement. She noticed me watching her and turned around.

“You got daughters?”

She thrust the placard under my nose and waved it dangerously close to my brand new Ralph Lauren sunglasses.

“That crazy doctor inside the jail is killing our babies. You’d better join us and make your voice heard. We don’t want his kind ‘round here—even in jail. He’s a monster!”

“How can he hurt you or your daughters if he’s in jail?”

“He’s a monster, I told you. Has them supernatural powers. Puts spells on people. Makes them do things they don’t want to do. That’s how he got poor little Brittany Hayes pregnant. Now she’s carrying that devil’s child.” She ran over to another newcomer to the scene where I heard her repeating the same vicious spiel.

I hurried back to Watson and took the back road out of town.

Mother and Cassie were out in the backyard raking leaves where Aggie was busy rolling around madly in the biggest pile. I shucked my linen jacket, grabbed a rake, and went to join them.

“How’s Ethan, dear? Holding up well, I hope?”

“Yes, Mother, and he said to tell you ‘hello.’”

“How nice. I must send him some blackberry cobbler with the next one of you who goes back to town.”

Cassie dragged her pile of leaves behind her to add to Mother’s cache.

“What did Ethan want to see you about?”

Cassie looked like a beautiful wood nymph. Her hair was loose and blowing in the wind, with one bright orange leaf caught in the long, dark strands.

I bucked up my flagging spirits and forced a smile.

“He wants me and Leonard—and you two, of course—to find out who killed Hayes and raped his daughter—and get him out of jail.”

“Oh, is that all.” She discovered the leaf and tugged at the stem to free it. “Didn’t he send me a message?”

I left the three of them raking, or in the case of Aggie, unraking leaves and headed back to my desk in the library. I could hear Cassie laughing at the antics of the puppy and considered for a moment going back to join them, but no matter how beautiful the afternoon, the truth was, I hated raking leaves. And relaxing on the patio watching them work would earn me no kudos. Besides, Cassie needed the distraction, and I needed her to quit crying herself to sleep. I hoped she would be too tired tonight to waste time on that nonsense.

And I had forgotten to tell them the choice bit of news I had learned: Brittany Hayes had claimed she was pregnant with Ethan’s baby when she had been a patient at the Morgantown abortion clinic, long before he’d even arrived on the scene. She had probably cried rape to explain her pregnancy to her family, but why had she put the blame on Ethan? Since I was not positive of all my facts, I decided to keep the information to myself for a while.

From my vantage point behind the big desk in the library, I could watch Cassie and Mother as they crisscrossed over the back yard. After a while, Cassie went down to the carriage house and brought up the John Deere tractor with the wagon attached to the back. Cassie drove the tractor around to each big pile of leaves in turn and stopped while Mother scooped up the debris and loaded it in the wagon. After only a half turn around the yard the wagon was full. Mother climbed in back and hitched a ride down to the dry pond bed where we built our bonfires. They stopped, emptied the wagonload of leaves, and started all over again, with Aggie running round and round the moving tractor and barking maniacally the whole time. I decided the puppy would sleep well tonight also. It looked like I’d be the only night crawler. I was restless and could not get back to work for the life of me.

I shivered and realized that the room had grown a little chilly. My father had grown tired of emptying out ashes and installed some wonderful gas logs in the big open fireplace the year before he died. I pushed the magic plunger and a big beautiful fire appeared.

It was the first fire of the season. Usually we all gathered together for such an occasion, but everybody else was already having too much fun. I had to enjoy something.

I sat on the wide brick hearth for a few moment to warm my rear end, then took up my position behind the desk again. Ethan’s computer was still on, and the screen saver—which I had not seen before—slowly moved across the monitor. Big red letters on a hideous purple background repeated over and over again, “ABORTION BUG.”

I shivered again, but not from the cold. For the first time, I realized that there was something really malevolent going on here—something that I did not have a clue about. It was some “thing” that even Ethan did not really understand, yet feared nonetheless. He had managed to transfer that uneasiness to me this afternoon. He had never spoken the words, but I knew he was afraid that I might find what he had been looking for when he came to town. He knew that I would not be prepared. I had never been in a cave in Kinshasa. I would not know a vector if it bit me. And it just might.