The Blue Bottle Club (29 page)

Well, speculation wouldn't get her anywhere, and Ellie wasn't the type to just sit back and let things ride. If Tish had something on her mind, Ellie might as well know about it. Even though they seldom saw each other any more, they had a history of sharing each other's secrets. There was only one way to find out.

"Tish," Ellie began, feeling a nervous quiver in her stomach, "you've been acting odd ever since you walked in the door. Like you don't want to talk about Rome at all."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tish squeaked in a voice two octaves higher than her normal range.

"I'm not being ridiculous. I'm being honest, and I'd appreciate it if you did the same. Now, what's wrong? Aren't you happy about my engagement to Rome? You and your mother sent him here, if I recall correctly."

A visible shudder coursed through Tish, as if the reminder caused her pain. "Yes, we did. We thought he could be of help to you, but—"

"But what?"

Letitia averted her eyes. "But we didn't know then what we know now, or we never would have recommended him."

Ellie pushed her cake plate away and took a sip of coffee. "What are you talking about? Rome is the gentlest, tenderest, most compassionate man I've ever met."

"That's what we thought too. That's how he
seems—"

"Seems? That's how he is. Letitia, just come out with it. You obviously have reservations about me marrying this man, and I'd like to know why."

Suddenly Tish's face contorted, and tears began to stream down her cheeks. "Oh, Ellie, I didn't want to tell you. But I have to. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't."

Ellie waited, trying to untie the knot of apprehension that had formed in her stomach. At last she said, "Go on."

"It's just that, well, Rome was—was—" She gasped for air. "Did you know he's been married before?"

Ellie released a pent-up breath. So that was it. She smiled and patted Tish's hand. "Of course I know. He told me all about it. His wife died—he lost everything, including her, when their house caught on fire. They hadn't been married very long, and it was devastating to him. It took him a long time to get over it."

"That's not the whole story."

"What whole story?"

"Last week a man came to the church to talk with Reverend Potter. A detective. Seems they've been searching for Rome for years, but he never stayed in one place long enough for them to catch up with him. His wife
did
die in a fire, only the fire was suspected to be arson, and if it was, her death would be ruled"— Tish's voice caught on the word— "murder. She had no family, and her neighbors and acquaintances said that Rome was a drifter who just appeared in her life and swept her off her feet. Once she took up with him, she rarely saw her friends." Letitia's eyes strayed to Ellie's left hand. "But she did wear a diamond engagement ring with her wedding band. It was never recovered after the fire, and Rome was never seen again."

"Are you saying Rome murdered his first wife and plans to do the same to me?" Ellie tasted bile at the back of her tongue and thought she was going to be sick.

"I'm saying that he's still wanted for questioning." Tish reached out a hand and grasped Elbe's fingers. "I'm sorry, Ellie. I had to tell you. I didn't want to, believe me."

A movement arrested Elbe's attention, and she glanced aside as Pisgah dashed through the kitchen headed for her water bowl. Ellie turned her eyes upward to find Rome standing there, his face set like a granite mask. Her eyes flickered to Letitia, who wore an expression of absolute terror.

Ellie rose to her feet and stared at him. "How much did you hear?"

"Most of it," he said in a low, toneless voice. "Do you believe it?" He reached a hand toward her, then drew it back when she shrank from him. "I guess you do."

"Rome, I don't know what to believe." She felt the room beginning to sway, and she groped for a chair and sank into it. "Can you explain this?"

"Explanations will have to wait." He turned his eyes away. "You need to call the doctor."

"What's wrong? Is Mother sick?"

"I was reading to her, and of course she wasn't responding—she never does. I got pretty involved in the book, I guess, and kept on reading for a long time. After a while Pisgah became restless, and when I looked up, your mother was slumped over in bed." He cleared his throat. "She's gone, Ellie."

"Gone?"

"She's dead. Passed away without a sound. I thought she was just asleep, but—"

Ellie's head reeled, and she grabbed at the table for support. She looked down, and all she could see was Rome's engagement ring, winking at her, mocking her. It felt as if it were on fire, burning a hole in her hand, and she jerked it off and sent it flying across the kitchen.

"Call the doctor," she said to Tish. "I'm going upstairs."

"And the police," Rome added as Tish reached for the telephone. "It's time to end this once and for all."

28

LIGHTNING STRIKE

August 17, 1940

E
llie gazed with unfocused eyes at the dark hole in the ground. Somewhere, as if from a great distance, a man was speaking. "I lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help," the voice intoned in a numbing cadence. But when Ellie lifted
her
eyes toward the mountains, all she saw was the summer haze that turned the Blue Ridge a smoky white, as if the whole world around her were burning, burning.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the voice went on. Ellie looked again at the black hole. Ashes. Dust. Her ears registered the words about "a sure and certain hope of resurrection," but her mind rejected them. She might cling to the assurance of resurrection for her mother, but there would be no new life for her. All hope had gone up in flames, burned to ash.

Tish nudged her with one elbow, and Ellie jerked back to the present. Obediently, as if sleepwalking, she moved to the pile of raw earth next to her mother's grave, collected a handful of dirt, and dropped it onto the lowered coffin. Her eyes fixed on the tombstone that headed her fathers grave, to her mother's left.
Gone too soon,
the epitaph read. She had already decided on the words for Mother's stone:
Finally free.

When the last "Amen" was uttered, Ellie shook hands with each of the mourners and thanked them for coming. She spoke the words woodenly, like a meaningless ritual, and barely looked at the faces as they filed by murmuring their condolences. Reverend Potter, from the Methodist Church, had performed the simple ceremony Letitia and her mother, Maris, were there and a number of their friends from the church. Ellie knew that Pastor Archer and his wife had been notified—they had, after all, been close friends with Big Eleanor back in the days when she had money and social standing and influence at Downtown Presbyterian. But the Archers hadn't come. To them, Eleanor James had died years before she breathed her last breath.

The small knot of black-clad mourners dispersed, and Ellie walked away from them, alone, up to a rise where a cluster of oaks shaded the hilltop. In the shadow of the largest tree, two gravediggers leaned on their shovels, smoking. As she approached, they doffed their caps in a gesture of respect, crushed out their cigarettes, and ambled back down the hill to finish their job.

Ellie settled herself on a rock and stared down toward the river, a ribbon of molten gold reflecting the afternoon sun. Here and there the current ran over boulders in the riverbed, sending off glints of light like tiny diamonds blinding her with their brilliance.

Gold and diamonds.

Instinctively, her gaze dropped to her left hand, her ring finger. Rome's engagement ring was gone, of course—taken by the authorities as possible evidence. Her finger still bore the faint imprint of the filigreed band. The mark would fade in time, she knew. But what of the gaping wound in her heart? Would it heal as easily, closing up without so much as a scar, as if the promise of life and love had never found its way into her soul?

An image surfaced in her mind, a long-buried memory of standing with her father beside a tree that had been struck in a lightning storm. She couldn't have been more than five or six, and she couldn't recall her father's face, but she remembered as if it were yesterday the way he put his slender, manicured fingers into the blackened gash. "Will the tree die, Daddy?" she had asked.

"No, honey, it will be fine," he had assured her. "In time, new layers will grow over it, and the bark will come back so that you can barely tell where the lightning hit. But if somebody cuts this tree down someday, they'll find a spot, right here, that's harder than the rest of the wood, hard as iron."

Was
that the way the human heart worked too?
Ellie wondered. Did the wound heal up only to leave a knot as hard as iron below the surface?

With a start she realized that she had just buried her mother, and yet the pain that assailed her was not that loss, but the void left by the departure of Rome Tucker.

There had been no time for the explanations he promised her. He had gone with the police willingly, even eagerly, vowing that once things were cleared up, he would be back.

But when? And back from where? She didn't even know where he had come from—Arkansas, Iowa, someplace west of the Mississippi, she thought, but that didn't narrow down the field very much. Rome had been reticent to talk about his past, except to tell her about his first wife's death. How stupid of her, to open her home—and her heart—to a complete stranger, a man who had revealed to her only the barest essentials about his own life.

But he had seemed so honest, so candid. So genuinely in love with her. And he had cared about Mama too, helping lift from Ellie's shoulders the burden of her care. Rome, after all, was the one who had been with her when she . . .

Despite the August heat, a cold chill ran up Elbe's spine.

Rome had been alone with Mother when she died.

The physicians had confirmed, right on the signed death certificate, that Eleanor James had passed on from "Natural Causes." She just gave up, the doctor assured Ellie. Just decided that it was time to go. It wasn't unusual in cases like this for a patient simply to will to die.

But what if they had missed something? What if the suspicions about Rome had been true? If he had killed once, he would have nothing to lose in doing it again. And if they had gotten married, when he grew tired of her. . . ?

"Ellie."

The low voice came, close at her ear, and Ellie jumped up and whirled around. It was Tish, holding out a hand in her direction.

"Ellie, it's time to go home."

The sun was beginning to set behind the western mountains, tinting the summer haze with a glow the color of salmon flesh. Elbe's dark dress was soaked with perspiration, and her hands felt clammy. She removed her hat and ran a hand through her hair. A faint breeze stirred the damp tendrils at her temples, a momentary relief.

"Why don't you come home with us for a day or two?" Tish suggested. "The fall term doesn't start for another week, and it might be better if you didn't have to be alone."

Ellie shook her head. "I need to be home. And you don't have room. I'd just be underfoot." She sighed. "Besides, Pisgah will be wondering where everybody went. She's not used to being alone."

Tish helped Ellie to her feet, then linked arms with her as they started down the hill. "Then at least join us for dinner tonight. And let me come stay a few days with you."

Ellie hesitated. Part of her mind screamed that she just wanted to be left alone, to think about what had happened, to try to sort out in her mind how she felt about Rome, whether or not she trusted him enough to believe in his innocence. But another part dreaded going back to that vast empty house, filled now only with memories and recriminations.

"All right," she said at last. "But only for a couple of days."

August 20, 1940
Ellie sat at the kitchen table, staring with unseeing eyes as Tish put together chicken sandwiches and leftover green beans for the two of them. Pisgah had scratched at the screen door until Ellie got up and let her in and now lay in her lap, demanding attention and making a strange sound, rather like the cross between a purr and a whine.

Poor cat,
Ellie thought as she scratched behind Pisgah's left ear.
She doesn't understand why the house is suddenly empty, why Rome is gone.

To tell the truth, Ellie couldn't really understand it either. It all seemed like a bad dream—her mother's haggard, lifeless body being carried out of the house on a stretcher; the man she loved, or thought she loved, being led away by the authorities; the burly detective on his hands and knees retrieving her engagement ring from behind the kitchen door. She kept telling herself that if she could just wake up, the nightmare would vanish like mist on the mountains.

Tish set two plates on the table and took a seat opposite Ellie. "Go on, try it. I know I'm not as good in the kitchen as Mama, but I won't poison you. You need to eat."

Ellie stared at the sandwich, took a bit of chicken from the plate, and fed it to the cat. "I'm not hungry."