Wild Midnight (20 page)

The other woman took her outstretched hand but did not return the smile. The startlingly liquid black eyes surrounded by long mascara’d lashes were sharp, withholding judgment, yet not exactly unfriendly. Her own clothes—running shoes and one of Dan’s old white shirts with the tail hanging out over her jeans—contrasted poorly with the other’s crisp tailored outfit.
Dressed for success,
Rachel couldn’t help thinking. Loretha Bulloch looked as though she had just stepped out of the pages of
Mademoiselle
or
Harper’s
.
 

So this was Til Coffee’s estranged—or divorced-wife? D’Arcy hadn’t made it clear that they’d been married. But Loretha was certainly stunning. With two such magnificently handsome parents their little boy couldn’t help but be good-looking.
 

“It’s a mess, all right.” That low, throaty voice didn’t seem to convey much interest in the co-op’s loss. Instead the young black woman kept her eyes fixed on Rachel’s face.
 

“I always seem to get muddy,” Rachel murmured, brushing at her jeans with her hands. She was mildly uncomfortable under that unwavering gaze, and couldn’t help wondering what had brought Loretha Bulloch to the tomato field that morning.
 

As if in answer to her unspoken thoughts the other woman said, “I just came out here to see what you were doing, Miz Brinton. I didn’t expect all this”—the expressive dark eyes looked around with ill-concealed disdain—”washout you all had until I got here. It’s too bad.” A pause while that cool stare continued to observe her thoughtfully. “You worked so hard, right along with everybody else.”
 

Rachel flushed. She didn’t know why Loretha Bulloch would want to single her out as though it were her own setback rather than that of the whole co-op. Whatever this visit was about, it was rather curious. “Well, we have volunteers like you to thank for all the effort,” she said politely, “along with the co-op members. I guess we all share the disappointment, the way things turned out. I understand crops were washed out all over the county in that week of heavy rain.”
 

And I wasn’t here for most of it, she reminded herself guiltily, I was in Charleston. But why in the world, Rachel was wondering, had this elegant young black woman volunteered to help plant tomatoes in the first place? Had Loretha come only because Til Coffee was there? But D’Arcy Butler had said they hated each other. The secrets of this little town gave Rachel a feeling of cold foreboding. These mysteries were remote, a part of the town’s tangled history ... and yet they reached out to entangle her too.
 

“Well, you’re doing good work.” The conversation was definitely strained. Loretha continued to stare as though she couldn’t make up her mind about something. “People around here ought to help more than they do. I thought the AME church was going to support the project when you first came, but they never got around to voting on it.” There was another pause. “I heard you stood up to Beau Devil Tillson the other morning. About that gate.”
 

It was Rachel’s turn to stare. Was that what this visit was all about? She felt a cold shiver of caution at the mention of Beaumont Tillson, especially when he was referred to by that particular name. This awful vulnerability—her sense of sudden fearful suspicion—was new too. She’d never had anything to feel guilty about before.
 

“We ... we...” Rachel floundered. She was rattled enough to forget what the other woman had been saying. There was no way Loretha Bulloch could know about Beau Tillson’s visits, was there? “Yes, we had a little disagreement about getting into the tomato field. I hope we’re—he’s going to be reasonable.” There must be some way of getting off the subject; the black woman was regarding her intently. “N-now that our tomatoes are a loss,” she stammered nervously, “it doesn’t look as though the gate is all that important. Unless the co-op members vote to replant.”
 

“You won’t get many people to come back to help.”
 

Rachel knew she was right. She wished Loretha Bulloch would offer to help round up people to help the cooperative, but that was a faint hope. “We’ve always needed somebody to work with the black community for us and enlist their support.” She was thinking out loud. The black tenant farmers made up the largest percentage of the rural poor, needed the co-op the most and were the least represented. They hadn’t even begun to reach them.
 

The tall young black woman had not taken her eyes from Rachel’s face. “People around here don’t join in things much. But they do say you’re doing good work. That’s something. For somebody so young and pretty,” she added abruptly.
 

But Loretha was going back to the car. She put one slender foot inside. Then she paused. “You lost your husband, didn’t you?” Before Rachel could answer she went on, “You believe in all this, working with farmers down here and all that, you really do.”
 

Rachel was even more baffled. She was standing in the hot sun, her face slightly pink from the heat, and she knew she looked grubby, not at all reassuring in her role as the cooperative’s executive secretary. She knew suddenly that Loretha Bulloch had not come to the field to see ruined tomato plants, but to see
her.
Why?
 

The other woman suddenly smiled, red lipsticked lips widening over perfect white teeth. She pulled the graceful length of her legs inside the car and slammed the door. “Honey, I’m not interested in
farmers
,” she said in her smoky voice. “I just came out here to work with you all the other day planting tomatoes to help a friend.” She stuck the car key into the ignition and started the motor. “You need someone to work in the black community here for you? Yeah, well why don’t you get Til Coffee to do it? He ought to do something better than just teaching a bunch of kids to cut up chickens and frogs.”
 

It was a moment before Rachel could speak. “You mean Til Coffee, the science teacher at the high school?”
 

“Lordgodalmighty, is there more than one?” the other woman drawled. “Yeah, Til Coffee, that’s who I mean.”
 

Rachel was dumbfounded. Why was Loretha proposing Til Coffee as a co-op liaison person with the black community? Nothing Til had ever done or said indicated he was close to the local black community.
 

“Would he do it?” was all Rachel could ask.
 

“Honey, I don’t know—just go ask him. Tell him I said so.
 

Tell him I said to go talk to his people like he says he used to when he was in politics up in Chic-a-go.” She drawled out the word wickedly. “He might just do it.”
 

She put an elegant arm at the open car window and looked up at Rachel with a smile curving her lovely red mouth. “And you, sugar,” she said, “you’re doing
all right.
You just keep it up—and don’t listen to what anybody says around here.”
 

Laughing softly, she put the car in gear and drove slowly out of the field.
 

The First National Bank of Draytonville, a small concrete building on Main Street, was only a block from Pembroke Screven’s magnificent offices, and next to a tiny drugstore. Rachel made her way back to the loan department with all the co-op’s records in her briefcase, not sure what she was going to say to the bank’s vice president in charge of loans.
 

“I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” she said a little breathlessly as she sat down in the chair to one side of the banker’s desk. “I hope I made it clear over the telephone that the cooperative’s membership has to vote on an application for a loan, and this is just a preliminary request for information. We lost our tomato crop during last week’s heavy rain, but our lease goes through December of this year and it seems a shame not to try to use the land we’ve rented.
 

The loan officer seemed more intent on studying Rachel’s legs in sheer nylons and neat calfskin pumps. His gaze wandered from time to time to the long lines in front of the tellers’ windows as though he shared some particularly amusing secret with the residents of Draytonville who were standing there. Rachel resisted the urge to look over her shoulder.
 

“Truck farming’s been dead around here for thirty years.” The bank’s loan vice president was a small, middle-aged man with a skeptical smile. “Chancy business, anyway, truck crops. There’s spoilage when you harvest, market always goes down in July and August around here because most people grow their own vegetables, things like that.” He paused and almost winked to his audience in the bank lobby. “Besides, most of those folks you got in your organization would rather stay on welfare, from what I hear. Old Wesley Faligant, all that whole crowd out in Alligator Bottom don’t want to work.” Every word was accompanied by a smirk. “Except when they think they’re going to hook on to some socialist organizers that promise them a free ride.”
 

That again, Rachel told herself, looking down at the briefcase in her lap. She didn’t look like a “socialist organizer” carrying an elegant accessory, a going away gift from her mother that came from one of Philadelphia’s most exclusive old saddlemakers in Walnut Street.
 

She sidestepped the obvious opening to defend the work of the farmers’ cooperative and said quietly, “But the bank
does
make loans to small farmers, doesn’t it? Isn’t most of the bank’s business mainly agricultural?”
 

“Corn. Cattle. Cash crops. Loans against collateral. Find anybody in your group what’s got collateral like machinery, unencumbered property, and we’ll talk to you.”
 

“This is just an inquiry,” Rachel said patiently. She thought of the Yonges, who owned a John Deere tractor and grain drills for their corn, the only equipment that could qualify as collateral. But Billy Yonge had told her it was encumbered by a loan from one of the banks in Hazel Gardens. Mr. Wesley and some of the other tenant farmers had only mules and pickup trucks, if that much.
 

“You could go up to Hazel Gardens to First Federal or DeRenne Farmers Bank, see what they say.” The loan officer’s attitude of dismissal was anything but courteous. “But farmer’s loans are scarce as hen’s teeth these days.”
 

Rachel did not feel like being dismissed. She had dressed in a silk tailored shirtwaist dress, with quietly understated handmade kidskin purse and matching gray pumps which cost more than the loan officer’s monthly wages, although she would never say so. Her dark red hair was neatly if severely done up in its long thick braid, knotted low at the back of her slim white neck. She set her chin stubbornly. The loan officer was not looking at her now, otherwise he would have seen a very determined glint in her soft brown eyes.
 

“Would it help if we had someone to back the co-op’s credit?” It had just occurred to her; she had no one in particular in mind, she just wanted to know.
 

The cold smile became an unpleasant grin. “Credit? You mean a co-signer? That is, somebody who can back your loan?” His eyes raked her slyly. “How about Mr. Beaumont Tillson?”
 

For the second time that morning Rachel felt a jolt of uneasiness. It couldn’t be happening. The loan officer couldn’t mean what he’d just said, but the expression on his face told her otherwise.
 

“Beaumont Tillson?” she repeated.
 

He leaned back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together, looking over them at her. “Can’t tell where you might get help these days. Providing, of course, you got something to offer. Never pays to leave a stone unturned, as the old saying goes.”
 

She heard him with the blood pounding in her ears. She was mistaken, Rachel told herself. She had to be.
 

Nevertheless she got up without a word and walked through the tiny loan department, through the teller’s section, and with quickening steps, out the bank’s front door.
 

Pembroke Screven called almost as soon as she got home. Rachel had barely time enough to put her briefcase and purse on the kitchen counter and take the telephone from its wall bracket.
 

“Beau Tillson tells me that you two have come to an agreement over his field road. That was something of a surprise,” the lawyer observed dryly.
 

Rachel sank into a kitchen chair and held the receiver to her ear. For me, too, she thought, shutting her eyes. What more could happen?
 

“I thought we’d agreed, Mrs. Brinton, that you’d let me handle negotiations. And not try to meet with Tillson yourself.
 

“I did speak to him,” Rachel said with an effort. The coils of deceit were winding around her tightly; she suddenly had great sympathy for people who were tempted, even forced to lie. “He ... ah, Mr. Tillson came to my house that night after we met in your office and wanted me to sign a paper. But I didn’t.” She hoped her voice didn’t betray her. But she was remembering the scene that had taken place in that very kitchen, in the early hours of the morning, and the cold look of fury on Beau Tillson’s face before he’d left. “He had a paper saying the co-op would not try to use the road in return for several hundred dollars.”
 

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then the lawyer said, “If Beau has that kind of money, he’d better pay some of his bills. I’m holding his creditors at bay with a pitchfork.”