Wild Midnight

  Wild Midnight

  Maggie Davis

  Prologue

  A peach silk dressing gown folded loosely about her slender body, she sat before the mirror, the long mass of her hair unbound as Dan had liked it. Morning sun filled the room and caught golden glints in the slightly curling, dark auburn hair which reached almost to her waist.

  Beyond the light-filled window the oaks that surrounded the old mansion bent their branches in a brisk November wind. The scent of burning leaves drifted into the room, and she could hear dimly the distant growl of a lawn mower trimming the last remnants of green grass in sheltered places.

  Rachel moved a small copper coin with the tip of her fingernail across the dressing table, separating it from the other small tokens of Dan’s existence. The bright sunlight picked out the soft, worn etching of an oak tree on the coin’s face. The pre-Revolutionary penny, of Pennsylvania issue and virtually priceless to any collector, had been her present to Dan on their first anniversary.

  The Goodbody family’s grandfather clock on the first floor landing, its ancient brass pendulum swinging, counted off the minutes of this generation as it had for seven preceding ones; the rooms of the old house on Philadelphia’s Main Line echoed the clock’s litany of a calm and peaceful acceptance of life, and fleeting time.

  With an effort at a matching serenity that she couldn’t feel, Rachel bent her head to the other, tangible evidences of past happiness spread before her: Dan’s sensible, conservative wristwatch with gold link band from Cartier, his Swarthmore class ring, two dog-eared ticket stubs that she had found in his pockets for a Philadelphia Orchestra concert.

  She propped her arm on the dresser edge, chin in her hand as she studied these precious scraps of Dan’s possessions, feeling him so near and yet so far from her life. She knew she should put his things in the safe deposit box, but she lingered over them; his presence was all around her even now, like the pervasive sunshine flowing into the room from the bank of windows.

  The rest of Dan’s property, those mute symbols of great wealth held but never displayed, were in the wall safe in the library. The accountants and family tax lawyers had long ago reviewed the estate records: all the deeds to old Philadelphia city holdings; the elaborate old Brinton summer home at Lake Hope; the certificates of stocks, bonds, and other securities; even the inventories of Brinton family furniture, china, and silver that had been assigned as gifts to Philadelphia museums.

  How much easier it was, she thought sadly, to accept the documents of mere wealth, rather than the small, intimate things like the worn pasteboard ticket stubs Dan had kept to remember a rainy night and a sublime Mozart concert.

  Her hand closed over the rare old copper penny. He was still far too real. It had been a year, and in a year pain and loss were supposed to have dulled, fading in sweet memory. After all these months she had forced herself to face the outward signs of her loss. Not peacefully—not yet, because she’d been too young, and too happy with Dan. But she could bring herself now to do what she had never thought she could do—slip the plain gold band of her wedding ring from her finger and place it in the box on top of their marriage certificate.

  RACHEL STARBUCK GOODBODY, MARRIED TO DANIEL COFFIN BRINTON. She could be thankful that all the letters and notes of condolence no longer had to be answered; that, too, was long past.

  Taken so suddenly, and too soon, to the everlasting distress of his young and beautiful wife. And the endless correspondence that had confronted her like a punishment: notifications of his death to committees he had served on; contributions to organizations, which had to be terminated; even the change of their name on mailing lists—all long completed.

  In time, peace will come. If it came, it came slowly, she now knew. The material things of this world remained. Daniel Brinton did not.

  Rachel put her head in her hand and with the other blindly groped for the ring. She knew she should close the metal box, press the clasp to lock it, and in so doing seal the past forever. On the landing even the ancient Sheraton clock struck the hour as if acknowledging an end to all of it—to life, and young love, and the happiness she’d known.

  Unsteadily she lifted the gold ring and slipped it back on her finger. Willful Rachel Brinton. She could almost hear her mother’s murmured words; unyielding in grief, headstrong still in spite of gentle, lifelong constraints.

  Not yet, she thought, placing her fingers over the cool clasp of the ring on her flesh. She wouldn’t give up wearing the last symbol of what she had lost. At that moment, because there was no knowing the future, this was the way she wished it to be.

  The tide’s at full: the marsh with flooded streams Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams.

  The Marshes of Glynn

  Chapter One

  One moment Rachel Brinton was half asleep, her chin propped on her wrist in the sunlight that streamed through the open truck window. The very next moment the old Ford swerved and seemed to explode out from under her.

  She had just opened her mouth to yawn. As the truck dropped into a deep pot hole she fell forward, her chin hitting the truck’s dashboard, snapping shut on her tongue. She suddenly saw stars, spirals. Then the handle of one of Mr. Wesley Faligant’s shovels, carried between the truck’s seat and the rear window, hit her on the back of the head.

  Rachel didn’t hear the thud of the truck’s back axle hitting the sand, nor the quick, indrawn hiss of fright from the old black man beside her as he downshifted frantically, stepping on the gas pedal at the same time. The truck’s rear wheels caught, spun upward, then abruptly dropped back down again into the hole. She hit the dashboard once more, this time with her nose.

  “Uh-oh,” Mr. Wesley groaned under his breath. He kept downshifting as the truck rocked violently. “Him there,” the old black man whispered. “There he is—I sees him, that beau debbil under the trees!”

  Rachel lifted, the shovel handle from her neck and pushed it away. “What?” she managed. “Mr. Wes, what happened?” The old plantation road they’d been following was no more than a sandy track through a tunnel of wild sabal palms and massive live oaks, the latter draped with long streamers of gray Spanish moss typical of the beautiful but melancholy South Carolina low-country woodlands. The road’s surface was so pocked with holes and washouts that Mr. Wesley always kept a supply of pine slabs in the bed of the pickup in case they had to get the shovels, dig out the rear wheels, and put the boards under them so they could churn their way through.

  But this was no ordinary pothole, Rachel knew. It had to be something more to cause Mr. Wesley to almost wreck the truck. Holding her hand to her slightly bleeding lip, she tried to peer through the dust-encrusted glass in front of her.

  The ancient Ford pickup had come to a full stop, temporarily mired in the hole. The sound of its engine’s skip-a-beat roar faded as the black man took his foot off the gas pedal and let it idle.

  Rachel took her first deep breath since she’d shot from her seat and the long braid of her mahogany-colored hair flew back over her shoulder. Mr. Wesley was still muttering, glancing through the windshield at what he saw. Or thought he saw.

  The thick stillness of the woods had immediately enveloped them. Far away in the unseen river marshes the croak of a water bird came faintly. The light under the spreading live oak trees was green-gold, slivered with pale dusky shadows. Rachel couldn’t restrain a shiver. She wasn’t naturally fearful, but the part of her that was very much a transplanted city person couldn’t help but be shaken. She suddenly remembered rattlesnakes lying in the dust of the road—she’d already seen one in the two months she’d been there—and the glimpse she’d had of a cougar, the big cat the Gullah people called a panther.

  “What happened, Mr. Wes?” she repeated. She peered throug
h the dusty windshield, following his gaze.

  Now that they were no longer moving with a breeze flowing over the front of the truck, a strong marigoldlike odor wafted into the cab from several thousand paper-wrapped bundles of tomato plants in the back. No more than half a mile ahead of them in a freshly plowed field, the members of the Ashepoo River Farmers Cooperative and a group of high school volunteers were waiting for them so they could plant the tomato slips before nightfall. Every moment was precious; they had lost more time than they’d intended on the long journey to and from the farmers’ market in Savannah, where they’d bought the plants early that morning.

  Mr. Wesley had managed to get the truck at least partly out of the hole, its body slanting sidewise as one rear wheel freed itself. Now he gripped the steering wheel tensely, his proud old profile with its slightly beaky nose and full lips pointed at some spot in the light and shadow-dappled woodland. “That beau debbil, there he is,” Mr. Wesley muttered again with a strange note of foreboding. “He watchin’ there right now, yes he is.”

  Rachel couldn’t see anything, and she wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to tell her. The Gullah dialect spoken by the black people was still fairly mysterious to her northern ears; she usually had to ask Mr. Wesley to repeat something at least twice before she could understand, often to their mutual embarrassment. Now she wondered as she peered into the magically deceptive light and shadows in the woods if there were anything out there at all. Or if Mr. Wesley, usually the soul of dignified reserve, had just been spooked by another one of his famous low-country “hants.” The old black man was a firm believer in low-country ghosts. But then, she thought quickly, so was everybody else in this part of the world, black or white. Most southern ghosts were predictable: ladies in white looking for their long-lost Civil War lovers, or the clink of phantom shovels that could be heard burying pirate gold out on the lonely beaches of the sea islands. But Mr. Wesley Faligant’s ghosts were transplanted from Africa and particularly terrifying—”hot steams” in the deep woods that paralyzed one with fear, three-legged black pigs and two-headed sheep that warned of catastrophe, and the walking dead that appeared on lonely country roads at night, their heads twisted completely around and running backward. In spite of herself, Rachel shivered again.

  “Mr. Wes,” she whispered, “what’s a beau—”

  Then she saw the gate.

  The road made an L at this point, the barely discernible track turning abruptly into an area of scrubby pines, meandering across a meadow enclosed by the earth dikes of long-abandoned rice fields bordering the Ashepoo River, and beyond that, the reaches of St. Helena Sound. At the forks of the road a steel and aluminum cattle gate had materialized overnight, its stanchions set in still-damp concrete.

  Rachel stared. It wasn’t a ghost that had alarmed Mr. Wesley, but a very strong, modern aluminum cattle gate blocking their way. And it meant trouble.

  Someone had closed off the right of way the farmers cooperative had been using for weeks. There was no other entrance to the co-op’s field except to go back to the town of Draytonville, detour around the state highway and through the south river road, a distance of at least fifteen miles. Now, without warning, they were shut out.

  Rachel settled back in the seat with a small groan of dismay. She was already tired and dirty, and the day wasn’t half over. There had been one aggravating delay after another since they started their journey, well before dawn. At about four A.M. and only halfway to Savannah the truck’s fuel line had broken, and it had taken almost an hour’s work, with Rachel holding the flashlight for Mr. Wesley in a darkened, deserted service station until he got it fixed. Later, when they’d bought the tomato plants from a Florida trucker in the farmers market, she’d had to trust the Floridian’s word that the hundreds of packages they’d loaded were as good as the samples he’d opened to show them. The transaction was all new to Rachel; she’d had to defer to Mr. Wesley’s superior knowledge and the trucker’s assurances that what they were buying was a wilt-resistant, early-bearing strain suited for the South Carolina coast. Since it also turned out they were thirteen dollars short of the sum needed, Rachel had made up the difference out of her own pocket. By the time they’d left Savannah they were already running two hours late.

  Now, on this Saturday morning, with people waiting for them in the cooperative’s fields just beyond, someone had put up a gate to keep them out.

  “It’s a mistake,” Rachel said, frowning. She couldn’t understand why the sudden appearance of the cattle gate in the shadowy woodlands had so alarmed Mr. Wesley, but it had, and it was there, blocking their way. “This is a public road, and whoever put up that gate can’t shut us out. We have every right in the world to use it.”

  Rachel put her hand on the door handle, opened it and jumped down to the ground. She was unpleasantly surprised to find that her legs were so cramped from long hours of traveling that she staggered the first few steps.

  A faint wind stirred the long festoons of gray moss hanging in the thick stand of live oaks on either side of the forest road, shifting, the beams of yellow spring sunlight and deep, deceptive shadows. She heard Mr. Wesley give another sudden, warning hiss under his breath.

  Then Rachel saw what the old man saw.

  For one startled second she considered that Mr. Wesley’s ghostly hants might really have materialized in, the woods in front of them. Then unexpectedly light shifted again, and whatever it was rolled white-rimmed eyes, moving restlessly, as if about to charge them.

  Rachel blinked. In the next moment she wanted to laugh. It was a horse! Imagination and moving light and shadows had turned the thing into a monster. It was only somebody’s stray horse!

  She yanked down the tail of her chambray work shirt over her muddy jeans and turned to the old man in the front seat of the truck. “It’s only a horse, Mr. Wes, nothing to be alarmed about.” Rachel tried to shake off her own tiredness and the spell of the silent forest that enveloped them. No wonder her eyes and Mr. Wesley’s were playing tricks. “Just get the truck out of that hole and I’ll see what I can do about the gate.”

  “The road’s closed.”

  Rachel jumped. That rasping, ghostly sounding voice instantly sent a prickle of goose bumps along her bare arms.

  “Get the, hell out of here.”

  She leaned into the sunshine, putting her hand up to shade her eyes. She still couldn’t see anything. The man—and it was a man her rational mind told her, and not a ghost—was hidden. But he was there watching, just as Mr. Wesley had said.

  “Who is it?” she whispered. “Who’s there?”

  In the thick green-gray trees the horse threw up its head and the shadows lifted again. Rachel saw it carried a rider. As she peered against the sun she could see the horseman sat crosswise with one leg drawn over the pommel of the saddle, his other booted foot in the opposite stirrup. The big black horse moved restlessly again and tossed its head. Without shifting his lounging seat, the rider nudged the animal back under control with his knee. He held the reins to the big mount loosely and carelessly in the brown, callused palm open on his thigh.

  “Who the hell are you?” the voice demanded.

  Rachel squinted. The horseman was dressed in a T-shirt of a faded dark gray color, the knitted cotton clinging to an expanse of muscled chest and broad shoulders. He wore ancient patched jodhpurs and battered western-style cowboy boots. Where the sunlight hit his thick brown hair, it illuminated sun-bleached streaks that looked almost gilded. But it was his face that riveted one’s eyes.

  Without moving from his slouching sidewise seat, the horseman nudged the big black out from under the trees.

  Rachel found herself gaping. At the same moment she knew with a quick, perceptive rush that the man who faced her, eyes glittering, was accustomed to the effect he produced. The hard, cynical quirk of his mouth confirmed it.

  This was no ghost, she thought for a wild moment, but it might as well have been. The man on horseback was just as unreal.


  Somewhere Rachel had seen pictures that stuck in her memory—the handsome, idealized cowboys of a Frederick Remington painting, even the hard-faced purity of the young heroes of military recruiting posters—and they had been brought to life in this man’s mask of near-perfect virile beauty. The short, straight nose, strongly carved high cheekbones, and wide, graceful mouth might have been put together with an artist’s unerring eye for quicksilver strength and a particularly masculine sensitivity. But the chiseled features were flawed by a mouth that had hardened from youthful recklessness into something resembling indifferent cruelty. And the eyes—

  They were, Rachel saw, stunned, a shade usually described as hazel, with flecks of gold in their gray-green depths, the irises startlingly marked by clear black rims. Fascinating eyes, quietly murderous.

  They were staring at her just as intently. “I know who you are,” the voice said, “you’re Mrs. Whatsername.” The horseman rested the reins against his mount’s neck and leaned forward. The strange gaze traveled from the top of Rachel’s dark red hair and her flushed face, to the open neck of her work shirt and the full thrust of her breasts. The look dropped, and lingered at the front of her jeans where they strained into wrinkles over her crotch and thighs. “The woman with the tenant farmers.”

  Rachel scarcely heard him. The phrase “being undressed by someone’s eyes,” suddenly had new meaning. The gaze that raked here with such practiced detachment was openly speculating what it would be like to have her. In the crudest of sexual terms. In bed. And didn’t care if she knew it. The jeweled look held a flicker of interest as she stiffened.

  “Brinton,” Rachel managed between rigid lips as she went red to the roots of her dark auburn hair, “Mrs. Brinton.” She resisted the need to pull down her shirttail but she was painfully aware of her bedraggled appearance. “Someone has closed off our road so that we can’t get in.”