Wild Midnight (24 page)

The main street of Draytonville ended at the river and the partly collapsed old dock there. Rachel stopped the car and let the motor idle, watching the moonlight on the Ashepoo and its estuaries and the open glittering expanse of St. Helena Sound.
 

In time Jessie Bulloch had gone to Chicago. Til Coffee, her son, had gone to high school and college there, and Lee Tillson had paid for all of it.
 

“He did darned little for Beau, his other son,” Jim had added. “As far as anybody knows, they hated each other.”
 

Rachel put the car into gear and moved down the sandy alley that ran behind the backs of the Main Street stores and along the moonlighted river. There was not a soul anywhere. Even when she got to the intersection of Main Street and the state highway, the service station and the Polar Bear Drive-In had put out their lights.
 

It was only a matter of minutes to her house. As she crossed the yard she saw that the sandy earth was full of tire tracks, as though someone had driven in and then turned around. She turned the key in the lock and pushed the front door open with her hand, and as she did so something crunched underfoot. Rachel felt for the light switch, and when it came on she bent to see what it was.
 

The light over the front steps wasn’t adequate, she could only feel that whatever it was, it was small and prickly with straw. She carried it inside.
 

Rachel put the thing she still carried in her hand on the kitchen counter and turned on the light. Under the sudden fluorescent glare she could see that it was a small figure. It had feet and legs, it sat with its legs tucked under it to hold its body upright, and all of it was made with gray and white clay of the kind that could be found along the banks of the Ashepoo River. A wad of straw was tied around its middle with string, and rough arms, like flippers, were bent over its stomach. Attached to its head were a few strands of maroon yarn that might have been unraveled from someone’s old discarded sweater. Its two eyes were made of small white shells that gave it a disconcertingly blind look.
 

And it smiled.
 

Chapter Thirteen

“O
h, my God,” D’Arcy shrieked, “that’s a
mamua
, a little conjure doll! I haven’t seen one of them in years!”
 

“There are more of them,” Rachel said. She pulled D’Arcy into the kitchen and showed her the shelf over the sink. There were six, all alike in their red wool hair, their staring white shell eyes, their little dresses of straw, and their crescent smiles shaped into the surface of the clay while it was still wet. “Nearly every morning there’s a new one outside.”
 

D’Arcy groaned. “Well, of course, there is—if you’re going to keep moving them, they’re going to keep coming! You must be working some poor old root doctor half to death!”
 

“Am I going to die?” Rachel asked calmly.
 

“Oh, hush, be serious! You aren’t being serious, are you?” D’Arcy flung a handful of her pale hair back from her face and stared at her anxiously. “Honey, don’t make fun of me. I know you don’t believe any of this, but you have to be careful. You just don’t know about these things.”
 

“No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t make me very happy to think somebody hates me this much.”
 

D’Arcy couldn’t repress a small shudder. “Hate you? Oh, sugar—this is something different!” With long, hesitant fingers she reached up and took one of the little figures from the shelf. “Ugh, prickly little devils, aren’t they? I had an old nurse in Charleston once, she came from Edisto Island before they even had a ferry out there, much less a bridge, and she used to fill me to the ears with
gris-gris
.” Her fingers wriggled around the doll as though she could not bear to hold it. “Of course, Mama never knew, or she’d have thrown both of us clean out of the house!” D’Arcy put the doll down on the table quickly. “There,” she sighed. “That’s
mamua obeah
, isn’t she cute? She doesn’t have any color on her eyes because yours are brown, Rachel, but if they were blue—oh, my! Blue eyes are bad luck, and if
mamua obeah’s
going to look after you right, she has to have your eyes right.”
 

“This thing is going to look after me?” Rachel asked, amazed.
 

“Oh, now Rachel, honey, listen. Somebody’s setting
mamua obeahs
in front of your house to watch over the road and keep bad things away. If they were going to come from the river, they’d have put her in the back yard. Do you understand?” D’Arcy bit her gleaming underlip. “It’s kind of old fashioned, you don’t see the
obeahs
much anymore. But somebody’s looking after you. Why don’t you just put her out in front where you found her, and leave her there?”
 

“I can’t put a thing like that on my front doorstep,” Rachel protested, “it’s downright silly. For goodness sake, why don’t I put the whole collection out there, line them up so they can have a dolls’ tea party? Do you think that would take care of it?”
 

D’Arcy threw a hand up to stop her. “Lordy, don’t make fun of it! Somebody’s really worried about you, Rachel. They don’t want anything bad to get you. You must mean a lot to the Gullah people around here, ordinarily they don’t bother with white folks. It’s some old root doctor looking after you. The young ones don’t care anymore.”
 

Rachel smiled. “D’Arcy, be sensible. You can’t believe in all this. Besides, the only people who come down this road are the mailman and I. And somebody in a pickup truck,” she added, “that races down to the end and back at night. Some of the local high school kids, I guess.”
 

D’Arcy looked startled. “What high school kids—tell me! Have you seen them, do you know that’s who they are? When did all this start?”
 

Rachel turned away from her, unconcerned, to put the kettle on to make tea. “I’m not going to add to this nonsense, D’Arcy, it isn’t fair. Just a pickup truck, I told you. It’s high school kids, or somebody looking for a lover’s lane.”
 

But D’Arcy only rolled her eyes heavenward. “Oh damn, sometimes I just don’t believe you, Rachel. Listen, please be careful—if you do anything against these little
mamuas
, like throw them in the trash, the very least you do is hurt somebody’s feelings an
awful lot
. Somebody who’s trying to help you. Did you ever think of it that way?”
 

Rachel shook her head. But this made more sense than the other things D’Arcy had said to her. She was the object of someone’s concern. If this was the Gullah way of showing it, she couldn’t help wishing they’d join the co-op instead.
 

D’Arcy looked disapproving. “I wish you’d be serious—somebody’s going to a lot of trouble for you. These are real
mamuas,
not just somebody trying to play a practical joke.” She added quickly. “Not that anybody around here would do such a dumb thing.”
 

“D’Arcy, I’m sorry—it’s not that I want to make anybody unhappy, but I just can’t have these things around.”
 

“Rachel, honey, you’re just being foolish. The Gullah people just
know
when something’s going to happen. I swear, it’s true!”
 

“That’s just rank superstition, and you know it.”
 

“Listen,” D’Arcy cried, “it may be superstition to you but these people came from
Africa
, honey—they’ve been believing in these things for a long time. It wasn’t so long ago we used to have a lot of things, night burials, around here. The Gullah people used to bury their dead at midnight, just like when they were slaves, and whole crowds of them, hundreds of them, carried pine torches through the woods down to the river to bury the corpse in the riverbank. I think that was to keep the dead from walking, to put them in a grave above the high water mark. Gullah people are awfully nervous about the walking dead. And they could still chant all those African songs—I know some people who used to go to night burials, and Rachel, believe me, they said it was enough to scare the pure
hell
out of you!”
 

“D’Arcy, you’re not going to convince me. Good heavens, don’t you realize you spent your summers here at an impressionable age?”
 

“Don’t be so stubborn, Rachel,” she cried. “I know these things are true, and you don’t!”
 

“Okay, D’Arcy,” Rachel sighed, not wanting to argue. The only thing she accepted was that someone thought they were trying to protect her.
 

Yes, but against what
?
 

If it was against Beau Tillson, she thought with a slight shudder, they might be right. But she hadn’t seen him in over a week—not, in fact, since he’d come to her house demanding that she fix lunch for him. Since then there’d been no explanation for his absence, no messages left with the lawyer, no telephone calls, nothing. It was as though his need for her, his need to taunt her and be cruel to her, to make love to her—everything, had disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
 

At first Rachel suspected that Beau Tillson had heard of her date with Jim Claxton in Hazel Gardens, since she’d made no effort to hide it. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. But she’d lain awake each and every night waiting for some sound that told her he’d returned, expecting him to reach out for her in the darkness and demand her surrender, her body, her love—while giving little or nothing of himself. And in the darkness waiting, examining her own hurt, her own folly, and finally the return of humiliation, Rachel debated whether to try to telephone him, if only to find out what had happened. But she couldn’t imagine herself calling Belle Haven. She didn’t know if she believed him when he said Darla Jean was no longer there.
 

When the pickup truck began racing up and down the road she wondered if it was he, patrolling the road to see if she really were in her house alone at night. But Beau Tillson drove a jeep, not a pickup. What roared down the road most nights, churning up the bitter dust, was a dark blue or green truck, from what she could glimpse from the front windows.
 

Someone or something else delivered the conjure dolls, she was sure. They were never there when she went to bed, no matter how late. But they were always there at dawn.
 

Rachel didn’t really want to talk to D’Arcy about any of this. D’Arcy was full of her own problems. The blond woman’s restless journeys from Charleston to Draytonville and back, sometimes three times a week, indicated that poor D’Arcy was obsessed with her particular troubles. Rachel found what was happening to this beautiful, frivolous Charleston society girl just as inexplicable as all the other things taking place. But her sudden sympathy made her ask, “Are things getting any better, D’Arcy?”
 

The corners of D’Arcy’s lovely mouth turned down. “You mean me? Oh, hell, I just come and go, come and go, sugar, but nobody pays any damned attention. I put so many miles on that Lincoln, I’m just going to wear it out, I’ll never get a trade-in to amount to anything next year. I’m just plain throwing my life away on that man.”
 

It had to be her cousin, Rachel thought with a pang. Suddenly impatient, she said, “For goodness sake, D’Arcy, if you love him, why don’t you come right out and tell him. Maybe he doesn’t know.”
 

D’Arcy shook her golden head. ‘I did, honey, I
did
, and it didn’t make one bit of difference. He just thinks I’m an empty-headed rich girl, he practically told me so. Oh, he was sweet when he said it,” she said, her voice cracking with despair. “He’s always so wonderful, so damned
kind
, but that doesn’t get me anywhere at all! I can’t prove anything to him—that I’m not the way he thinks I am, because he treats me like I don’t even exist!”
 

Rachel stared. D’Arcy’s words didn’t match what Beau Tillson had told her at all. Had he lied when he said that D’Arcy had never told him she loved him? Certainly D’Arcy seemed to know a different Beau Tillson, to describe him as “sweet” and “kind.”
 

She couldn’t resist asking, “Did your cousin know about his half brother? I mean, before Til Coffee came here to live?”
 

D’Arcy looked startled. “He, who? Oh—
that
. You mean Beau. Oh lordy, somebody’s gotten around to telling you that old story.”
 

“Is it true?” she asked quietly.
 

“Oh,
yeah, I guess so. I don’t pay much attention, there’s just so many skeletons in closets down here. But mah God, yes, everybody knew how Lee Tillson was about women. And Jessie Coffee was just stunning, from what they say. And probably smarter than old Lee was.” D’Arcy looked unhappy. “Jessie should never have come back to this little old town after Atlanta and going to nursing school. Draytonville’s such a backwater, even for white people. Her family had a
fit
when they found out—the Bullochs always held their black noses so high, Gullah people are proud, Rachel. Lee Tillson was just up-country trash as far as they were concerned, even if he was Clarissa Beaumont’s husband. I guess it was a relief to damned near everybody when Jessie finally packed her bags and took her baby off to Chicago. But Draytonville never did exactly roll out the red carpet for her boy—when Til came down here on college vacations they must have made him feel like the sins of the father visited on the sons and all that. They say Til was halfway through his sophomore year before he even found out Loretha was pregnant. The Bulloch women were so mad, I don’t think they were even going to tell him. She was only sixteen.”