The Last Chance Ranch (27 page)

There was only an instant for her to absorb the lines of his body, for the lights flashed off as quickly as they’d come on.

She laughed a little breathlessly, not quite sure whether the sound stemmed from excitement or fear. “Well, that was fast. I wonder if we’re going to be treated to a light show.”

“Somebody at the plant better get smart quick and turn everything off,” he said, “or there’s likely to be fires all over the county.”

The man shivered and Celia hurriedly gave him the clothes. “I’ll wait in the kitchen.”

Standing there in the dark, nibbling popcorn from the bowl on the table, she wondered if she was completely insane. The world was not the same place her grandmother had lived in, although Celia supposed there had always been serial killers and rapists roaming the countryside. Computers had just made it simpler to track them down. The thought made her smile briefly.

The stranger’s voice, with its odd edge of roughness, sounded directly behind her. “Jezebel’s acting up tonight,” he said.

“Jezebel?” Celia echoed, turning.

He’d brought the candle with him, and the light cast eerie shadows over the hollows of his face. She saw a grizzling of dark beard on his chin and top lip. It added an even more rakish appearance to his rugged face. Celia frowned at the blood on his mouth. “You’re bleeding,” she said, and reached into a drawer for a dishcloth.

Distractedly, he pressed the cloth to the cut, then lifted it and licked the spot experimentally. “I didn’t even feel this,” he commented.

Celia lifted the candle closer to his face, and understanding her intention, he lowered the dishrag. “You probably need a stitch or two,” she said. “But it looks like you’ll have to live without them until morning.”

“I’ve lived through worse.”

There was no boast in the words, just a simple statement of fact. Celia realized she was still standing next to him, the candle held aloft, peering at his face for clues to his nature like the heroine in a Gothic novel. She put the candle on the table. “Who’s Jezebel?” she asked.

“The river. That’s what the old-timers call her.”

“Why?”

“Because,” the man said, cocking his head a bit ironically, “she’s as dangerous as a faithless and beautiful woman.” He spied the popcorn and pointed. “You mind?”

“Help yourself.” Celia ladled up a handful for herself. “Pretty sexist. Why isn’t she like a faithless man?”

A slow grin spread over his face. “Because no man alive can outsmart a wise and evil woman — and the old-timers knew it.”

His voice, low and husky, acted like moonshine on her spine, easing the muscles all the way down. She straightened. “What makes you think she’s acting up?”

“I’ve seen her do it.” He glanced toward the window, as though the river was a banshee about to scream through the night. “Unless it stops raining right now, she’s coming.”

Celia frowned and crossed to the window. It was dark — inky dark. The pond in the hollow had crept up another four or five inches, and she thought she could see a fine film of water all over the saturated ground. “It’s been flooding for weeks,” she said. “Everyone says that happens every year.”

“They like to forget about old Jezebel.” He shifted. “Legends aside, this is a flood plain, and the river runs in cycles. She’s gonna flood and you’d best be on high ground when she does.”

“There’s an attic here if I need it.”

He scooped up another big handful of popcorn. “Is it stocked?”

She shrugged. “Sort of.” She pursed her lips. “Do you think the river’s going to overflow tonight?”

He wandered to the window, and as he stood next to her, looking out at the rain, Celia realized he was much, much larger than she. What if all this talk of a flood was just a way to get her up into the attic to ravish her or something? She crossed her arms over her chest, smelling whiskey and something deeper, a scent of hot nights that she tried to ignore. There was no law that said serial killers were ugly and hard to get along with. In fact, how did any of them get close to their victims unless they possessed a certain — well, animal magnetism that promised erotic rewards in return for trust?

But his voice was so very grim when he spoke again that Celia had no doubt that he was telling the truth. “She’s coming,” he said, the dread in his voice unmistakable.

Suddenly, from the depths of childhood came a memory. Celia had awakened thirsty and padded into the bathroom for a drink of water. On her way back to her room, she heard her father in his office, shouting into the phone. Curious and alarmed, she had paused by the door.

Her father had been a big man, as big as a grizzly, he liked to tell her. That night he hunched in the swivel chair by his desk, with his hair wild and his face buried in his hands. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Celia asked.

He turned in his chair and gestured for her to come sit in his lap. Then, because it had been his policy to tell Celia the truth, he said, “There’s a flood back in Texas and I can’t get through to make sure Grandma’s all right.”

Celia didn’t really understand anything else about the incident, but obviously, Grandma had been fine. She’d only died last year — in her sleep.

Thinking of it now, though, she realized the river had probably flooded then. “Okay,” she said, taking a breath. “Jezebel’s going to flood. Since you’re here, you can help me lug things up to the attic.” She crossed the room, taking the candle with her, and opened the oak cupboard by the sink.

“What happened to the old woman, Mrs. Moon, who used to live here?” the stranger asked as Celia took cans and boxes from the shelf.

“She died last year.” Celia flashed him a grin out of proportion to his statement. Relief made her sigh. If he had known her grandmother, he wasn’t likely to be a serial killer.

“Are you kin ?”

“I’m her granddaughter. She left me the house.”

He nodded, chewing popcorn. “What’s your name, granddaughter?”

“Celia.” She glanced at the nearly empty bowl. “You made short work of that popcorn. Are you hungry?”

“Celia Moon.” His drawl and the ragged edge of his voice made her name sound beautiful. “I’m Eric Putman and I’m starving.”

She tossed him a box of crackers and found the peanut butter. “That’ll have to do for a little while.” His name sounded vaguely familiar, but when she couldn’t place it, she let it go. There weren’t many names she hadn’t heard on her grandmother’s lips at one time or another. For a nice old woman, she’d been the world’s champion gossip — not mean, for there was always an undercurrent of understanding in the way she told her stories, even when the preacher of the Methodist church fell in love with the choir director, who was then only seventeen, and ran off to Louisiana with her. “You must be from around here,” Celia commented.

“Born and raised.”

A harsh undernote told her he’d been glad to escape. A common attitude. She was the only one who’d run to Gideon instead of away. And the funny thing was, they were running to the very places she had left behind, places whose very names promised glamour. “You’ve been gone awhile,” she said.

“Yep.” He dropped the peanut butter and crackers into the box with the other food. “You have any other candles? I can get some blankets and stuff if you’ll tell me where to look.”

She dug in a drawer, and just as she was about to light the candle, a massive flash of lightning shimmered over the sky, a pale electric blue that seemed to hang for minutes in the darkness. On its heels came a crack of thunder so loud, it rattled the dishes.

As if a hole had been cut in the sky by the violent thunder, the noise of the rain suddenly doubled, then tripled. Celia gasped. “I didn’t think it could rain any harder!” She went to the window and looked out, laughing lightly. “It looks like there’s a thousand garden hoses going at once.”

Eric grabbed the candle. “Where are those blankets?” His voice was gruff.

“Under the stairs.” She pointed vaguely. Her attention was focused on the deluge. It excited her. A part of her wanted to run outside into that beating, pounding rain, just to feel it and taste it. Nature run amok, she thought. Humans were helpless in the face of it. A savage kind of joy raced through her at the thought.

“Come on, woman,” Eric growled. “Won’t take Jezebel long to flash her eyes now.”

Of course, she probably wanted to
live
through whatever was coming. Time enough to observe the drama when everything was safely prepared.

Celia tried to ignore the ripple of excitement that passed through her at the thought of observing the drama with Eric Putman nearby.

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(Excerpt)

by
Barbara Samuel

1

T
he sky was overcast and threatening rain by the time Ellie Connor made it to Gideon at seven o'clock on a Thursday evening.

She was tired. Tired of driving. Tired of spinning the radio dial every forty miles—why did the preaching stations always seem to have the longest signal?—tired of the sight of white lines swooping under her tires.

She'd started out this morning at seven planning to arrive in Gideon by midafternoon in her unfashionable but generally reliable Buick. She'd had a cute little Toyota for a while, but her work often took her to small towns across America, and if there were problems on the road, she had discovered it was far better to drive American. Since she'd lost a gasket in the wilds of deepest Arkansas, this was the trip that proved the rule.

The gasket had delayed her arrival by three hours, but at last she took a right off the highway and drove through a small East Texas town that was closing itself down for the evening. She had to stop at a gas station to get directions to the house, but finally she turned onto a narrow road made almost claustrophobic by the thick trees that crept right up to its edge. It hadn't been paved in a lot of years, and Ellie counted her blessings—at least she didn't have to look at dotted lines anymore.

Something interfered with the radio, and she turned it off with a snap. "Almost there, darlin'," she said to her dog April, who sat in the seat next to her.

April lifted her nose to the opening in the window, blinking against the wind, or maybe in anticipation of finally escaping the car. Half husky and half border collie, the dog was good-natured, eternally patient, and very smart. Ellie reached over to rub her ears and came away with a handful of molting dog fur.

As the car rounded a bend in the road, the land opened up to show sky and fields. A break in the fast moving clouds overhead suddenly freed a single flame of sunlight, bright gold against the purpling canvas of sky. Treetops showed black against the gold, intricately lacy and detailed, and for a minute, Ellie forgot her weariness. She leaned over the steering wheel, feeling a stretch along her shoulders, and admired the sight. "Beautiful," she said aloud.

Ellie's grandmother would have said it was a finger of God. Of course, Geraldine Connor saw the finger of God in just about everything, but Ellie hoped it was a good omen.

April whined, pushing her nose hard against the crack in the window, and Ellie took pity and pushed the button to lower the passenger-side glass. April stuck her head out gleefully, letting her tongue loll in the wind, scenting only heaven-knew-what dog pleasures on that soft air. Handicapped by human olfactory senses, Ellie smelled only the first weeds of summer and the coppery hints of the Sabine River that ran somewhere beyond the dense trees.

The road bent, leaning into a wide, long curve that ended abruptly in an expanse of cleared land. And there, perched atop a rise, was the house, an imposing and boxy structure painted white. Around it spread wide, verdant grass, and beyond the lawn, a collection of long, serious-looking greenhouses. Trees met the property in a protective circle, giving it the feeling of a walled estate. Roses in a gypsy profusion of color lined the porch and drive.

Ellie smiled. It was a house with a name, naturally: Fox River, which she supposed was a play on the name of the owner, Laurence Reynard.

Dr.
Reynard, in fact, though she didn't know what the doctorate was in. She knew little of him at all, apart from the E-mail letters she'd received and the notes he'd posted in a blues newsgroup. In those writings, he was by turns eccentric and brilliant. She suspected he drank.

She'd been corresponding with him for months about Gideon and Mabel Beauvais, a blues singer native to the town, a mysterious and romantic figure who was the subject of Ellie's latest biography. Ellie had had some reservations about accepting Reynard's offer to stay in his guest house while she completed her research, but the truth was, she did not travel without her dog, and it was sometimes more than a little difficult to find a rental that didn't charge an arm and a leg extra for her.

As she pulled into the half-circle drive, however, Ellie's reservations seeped back in. E-mail removed every gauge of character a body relied upon: you couldn't see the shifty eyes or the poor handwriting or restless gestures that warned of instability. And arriving in the soft gray twilight put her at a disadvantage. She'd deliberately planned to get here in daylight in case the situation didn't feel right, but that blown gasket had set her back too many hours. At the moment, she was too tired to care where she slept as long as her dog was in her room.

* * *

Pulling the emergency brake, she peered through the windshield at the wide veranda. Two men sat there, one white, one black. It hadn't occurred to her that Reynard might be black, though thinking of it now, she realized it was perfectly possible. She gave the horn a soft toot—something she hadn't done in years but that suddenly seemed right—and the white guy dipped his chin in greeting.

Ellie stepped out of the car and simply stood there a minute, relieved to change postures. The air smelled heavily of sweet magnolia and rose, thick and dizzying, a scent so blatantly sensual that she felt it in her lungs, on her skin. She breathed it in with pleasure as she approached the porch, brushing her hands down the front of her khaki shorts, trying to smooth the wrinkles out. "How you doing?" she said in greeting.