“Find what you needed at the library?” he asked.
“I was just browsing. How’s the newspaper business?” We’re not talking about me, buddy, so just forget that you’re a reporter. I leaned forward and smiled. “How did you get into writing for a living?”
“I don’t know. I was an oddball kid. Part nerd, part jock. I worked on my high school newspaper and yearbook staffs, and played baseball and basketball.”
“And had all the girls crazy about you, no doubt.”
He chuckled. “Not as many as I would have liked. And probably not as many as you had guys chasing after you.”
I wasn’t going to bite. But it was hard. He had this very observant way of looking at you, like whatever you said was really, really important to him. A good trait for a reporter, I reminded myself.
Marie showed up with my po’ boy and his pork chop and white beans.
“You eat here often?” I asked as we dug in.
“Couple of times a week. Mel advertises in the paper. I come in to keep them honest in the taste department.”
“Mel?” Inside I began to shake, but on the outside I kept it cool. “As in Melody or Melvin?”
“Melvin Toups. He owns this place.”
Melvin Toups. Oh, my God! That creep Melvin Toups who’d chased me into the river? I kept my breathing even. In through the nose, out through the mouth. “Why do they call it Sara Mae’s?” I asked, just to fill in the awful silence.
“This was his mother-in-law’s place before Mel took over.” That meant he had a wife? Poor woman. When Melvin and his thug friends had chased me to the river to escape them, I’d been so scared. Four teenaged boys; one teenaged girl. I’d been petrified that they’d meant to rape me.
I suppressed a shudder and bit into my po’ boy. I love oyster po’ boys, and no place makes them like the small mom-and-pop joints spread around southern Louisiana. But this one could have been cardboard for all I could taste. Melvin Toups had made this sandwich and these onion rings.
I felt the rise of bile in my throat. You will not be sick. You will not be sick. I chanted the words, breathing slowly, deeply, knowing I had to get out of here. I dropped the remains of the po’ boy on the plate and pushed it away. I wanted to throw it across the room.
“You okay?” Joe asked.
I shook my head. “Too much mayonnaise.” I snagged my purse, dug out my wallet and pulled out a twenty. “See you around.” Then I pushed out of the booth, shoved the money in Marie’s hand and fled. The last thing I heard was someone chortling. “Hey, Joe. What in the hell did you say to the little lady?”
I didn’t know where to go, what to do. I hated the farmhouse. I would have gone to the library, but it was right next to Joe Reeves’s office and I sure didn’t want to run into him again. If I could have, I would have loaded up Tripod and all my gear and just left, heading to Florida or the Carolina coast, anywhere warm and near the water. But I needed my money. My inheritance. Without it I would have to put my baby in a day-care center while I worked, and I was determined not to do that. Bad enough she wouldn’t have a father. The least I could do was give her a stay-at-home mother until she started school.
So I jumped in Jenny Jeep and just drove. Down two-lane blacktops, turning onto gravel roads, veering onto rutted, overgrown dirt trails. I had to switch into four-wheel drive as I careened down one muddy lane. It ended at a river, coffee-colored and moving fast. The water was high, but then that was typical in the spring. By August this same river would be way down, warm and moving slowly.
I turned off the car and got out, but open-toed sandals aren’t any good for tramping through underbrush. Between snakes, poison ivy and blackberry canes, I was bound to lose the fight.
But instead of frustrating me, that actually helped to calm me down. Some things were beyond my control: the woods, the river. My past. The cruel people in the world.
I climbed onto the roof of my Jeep and sat there cross-legged, staring through the pines and sweet gum and oaks toward the river. It wasn’t my fault Mel Toups had been a mean kid. Maybe he was nicer now, but I doubted it. The point was, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I wasn’t the scared little girl I used to be. I had power of my own. More important, I knew how to marshal other people’s power. In fact, I bet Mr. Joe Newspaper would just love a juicy story about how Mel and his buddies tried to grab a girl in the woods way back when. Joe might not want to write bad news about his neighbors, but he was a true newshound, and he wouldn’t be able to resist. I could see the headline: Former Oracle Resident Returns To Confront Attempted Rapist.
I smiled grimly at the relentless flow of the river. I might not be able to prove the allegations, but it would sure upset Mel’s wife. Maybe she’d be so repulsed that she’d divorce him. Then he’d lose his job at his mother-in-law’s diner, I speculated. He’d turn into a homeless bum, eating out of the Dumpster behind the place he used to run.
By the time the first drops of rain started to fall I was feeling much better. Nothing had changed and I wasn’t about to fill Joe Reeves in on the ugliness of my childhood. But the mental exercise of getting revenge on Mel Toups had helped.
It had begun to pour by the time I backed Jenny around and picked my way out of the maze of narrow lanes and back roads. Where in the hell was I anyway? It took an old man sitting on his porch with two ancient hound dogs beside him to steer me correctly.
“Thanks!” I waved to him and in ten minutes was back at the farm. Except that I really didn’t want to be in that house, especially not alone. So I ran in, changed into long jeans and tennis shoes and, with Tripod next to me, set off for a walk.
The rain had barely touched the farm, only dampened the fields a little and left the woods drippy. Tripod was in his glory. I couldn’t say the same about myself, but at least I hadn’t thrown up. Up to now morning sickness hadn’t been a serious problem. Instead I was periodically surprised by a sudden wave of nausea. Midday, midnight and anytime in-between.
I rubbed the rounded little mound beneath my belly button. “Temperamental and unpredictable. Is that what I should expect from you?” Given her mother’s temperament—and her father’s—what else could she be?
I followed a path I hadn’t thought about in years. It had hardly changed. A narrow woodland track that wound through the thickest part of our woodlot, down an incline, skirting a lush stand of wood ferns already thigh-high. Must have been a mild winter.
The ground grew soggy, but once past the Black Bog, as Alice and I had dubbed it, the ground rose again. But something was different. It was too bright up ahead.
Then I saw the short, square steeple, and I realized where I was. Alice’s church. The back acreage on the far side of the Black Bog. This was the land she’d sold without my consent.
I stopped at the edge of the trees and stared. The church wasn’t all that much to look at, a metal warehouse-type building with an awkward front tower and a plain cross above it. A clearing had been carved out of the woods in one big square. Trees rimmed the square, the ugly church squatted in the middle and a partially paved parking lot circled the whole thing.
A smaller building stood off to one side, probably some sort of activities center. Several cars were parked nose-in next to it, including Alice’s. I suppose traipsing through the woods was too messy for her little neat-freak, do-gooder soul. She had to get into her eight-cylinder gas-guzzler and drive the half mile around to the road that fronted the church.
I turned away, furious at the ugly blight she’d inflicted on my land. The least they could have done was build a handsome church, something inspiring and comforting.
I turned back for the house, whistling for Tripod, then abruptly took another trail, the one that circled the northern edge of our land. Tripod followed behind me, nose down, pretending he was a hunting dog. He didn’t let me get too far ahead, though. Nervous, I