Rodney Lee gestures to the others to follow him past the porch, around to the back. The property is thick with sabal palmettos and low-hanging live oak boughs, the air with bugs and humidity. Inside, the dog is still barking like crazy. Rodney Lee looks at Buddy, then gives a meaningful nod toward the window.
“Take care of it,” he whispers, “the second we get inside.”
“Take care of what?”
“The damned dog!”
“You mean . . . feed it?”
“I mean, kill it,” Rodney Lee growls. “Better yet, don’t wait till we get inside. If we can get a shot at it through that there window, then—”
“Keep your voice down!” Clive growls, like he’s the one in charge of this wrecking crew.
Rodney Lee glares at him, wishing for the first time that he’d come alone tonight, as if this were a personal matter and not an official mission. But he doesn’t own a pistol; his old man hadn’t hung around long enough to teach him how to shoot one.
He’d taken off so long ago that Rodney Lee can’t even recall what he looked like. Nothing to his memory but stale cigarette smoke, a nightly drunken rage, and a wedding band he’d hurtled at his wife the night he’d stormed out for the last time—headed for his mistress’s bed, Ruth had told her son. A couple of times, she’d sent him to spy on the woman’s house over by the tracks. Rodney Lee never saw his daddy there. But Mama, she’d had a man in her own bed right after he left, and there’s been a parade of them ever since.
Two things that would come back to haunt Rodney Lee had occurred on his eighteenth birthday back in ’62: he’d registered for the draft, and his mother had given him his father’s gold wedding ring.
“You can use it when you get married,” she’d said, like it was a symbol of wedded bliss.
He keeps it on his key chain, a reminder of the kind of man he never wants to be.
That’s why he’s been so torn up about Melody. Ain’t right, what she’s been doing to Travis.
The dog’s barking is getting to him, every yap like a dull knife sawing at his frayed nerves. He creeps toward the window. It’s propped open with a holey, rickety-looking wooden screen that looks like it would topple inward with a slight tap. He doesn’t even have to get up on his tiptoes to look inside. The curtains are parted to let in humid night air, the room beyond shrouded in shadow. The dog is going crazy in there, and he wonders how the hell anyone can sleep through the commotion.
He turns back to tell Clive to take a shot in the dark, just for the hell of it.
There are no longer two men silhouetted behind him. There are three, and the third figure isn’t wearing a hood and robe.
Before he can react, a deep voice says, “Get the hell off this property.”
It can’t be LeBlanc. No Black man in his right mind would confront three cloaked intruders.
But then lightning illuminates the scene, and he sees that he was wrong about that, and right about something else. Cyril LeBlanc isn’t in his right mind. He’s gripping an enormous meat cleaver, raised and ready.
He wouldn’t dare use it, Rodney Lee assures himself. Black man kills a white man in these parts, in these times, and he might as well just slit his own damned throat.
“I said, get the hell off—”
“Yeah, we heard what you said,” Rodney Lee tells him, “and we ain’t goin’ nowhere. We got some business with you.”
The man snickers, shaking his head, not wavering one bit.
“What you got to say about Melody Hunter?”
Still LeBlanc holds the blade steady and utters not a word.
Thunder rumbles closer now, and something shifts in the sultry air, as if the temperature has just dropped a notch, and a storm might be rolling in after all.
“We know all about how you two been carrying on, and so does her husband. You’re in trouble, so you best lay down your weapon and face it like a man.”
LeBlanc doesn’t move, but the next flash of lightning reveals eyes that are twin cauldrons of rage. He’s not going to go down without a fight.
Jacksonville
“Mrs. Hunter?” Someone calls from far away, across a black void.
The hospital. She’s in the hospital, and there’s so much pain . . .
She starts to slip back.
“Come on, now, can you wake up for me?”
She doesn’t recognize the voice. It isn’t Cyril. No, it’s a woman, yet she sounds so very much like him.
“Open your eyes, honey. That’s it . . .”
Melody blinks up into bright light, bracing herself for the delivery room, and unbearable pain.
But the pain is gone, and she’s not in the hospital after all. No bright lights, no Doc Krebbs, no strangers in surgical masks. She sees pale yellow walls, and a framed painting of a white duck floating on a rippling pond with a row of ducklings trailing after her.
“Where . . .” Her throat is too dry to continue.
“In the nursery,” the voice tells her in that Creole dialect, and she turns her head to see sun streaming in a window.
“This . . .” she rasps. “This is the nursery?”
A laugh, and a middle-aged Black woman in a white cap and uniform comes into view. “This,” she says, turning a crank on Melody’s bed, “is your room for the next week, until it’s time for you two to go home.”
She raises the top half of the bed, and Melody can see now that she is, indeed, in a hospital room. She’s vaguely aware of other sounds—footsteps in the corridor, a cart rattling past, a crackly voice on an intercom, a baby wailing in the distance. But the nurse’s words are loud and clear.
You two . . .
She looks down at her midsection, tucked beneath a soft beige blanket. It’s not flat, but the enormous mound of stomach has disappeared.
“I’m Yvonne,” the nurse says. “I’ll be taking care of you today. How are you feeling?”
Groggy. Confused.
She thinks back.
She’d been at home, alone, frantic with pain. Had she been thinking clearly, she’d have summoned Dr. Stevens, but when you’re helpless and hurting, primal instinct takes over and you call the person who’s cared for you all your life.
Honeybee had materialized instantaneously, like Endora on Bewitched, and they’d met Doc Krebbs at the hospital. She remembers writhing in agony as they wheeled her into a delivery room, and hearing someone shrieking. Now, with a throat so sore she can barely swallow, she realizes the shrieks may have been her own.
Yvonne leans over the bed. Her eyes are warm and kind. “Mind giving me a wrist so that I can check your pulse?”
She extracts an arm from beneath the blankets, wincing at the effort, and wincing again when Yvonne gently presses her wrist. “T’engky.”
Cyril says it that way, too. The first time she’d asked him what it meant, he’d laughed. “It means ‘thank you,’ and if you think I have an accent, you should hear my mama.”
“All righty. Pulse is good.”
“Are you . . . your accent. It reminds me of . . . a friend. Where are you from?”
“Live here in Jacksonville now, but I grew up on a little island off the coast of Georgia.”
“Barrow?”