Wild Midnight Page 4

  She stepped gingerly into the cold water and felt the chill of it clasp her ankles. She could see minnows darting ahead of her as she waded out into the icy pool. Rachel flopped down suddenly, taking all of it at once, and came up gasping. She swam a few strokes.

  The feel of the cold water set her body to tingling, and she was uncomfortably aware of it. Abruptly she pulled herself to her feet at the end of the tidal pool and grabbed her long rope of hair with both hands to wring it out.

  It had been several days since she had thought of Dan. The work of the co-op was at last keeping her so busy that she often didn’t have time to think about the past. “Thee will forget him in time,” her mother had tried to tell her. “What will remain will be a warm, loving memory only.”

  Rachel supposed her mother was right. But what remained of her memories of Dan were not something she’d been prepared for: a real, aching longing, a restless burning in her flesh that attacked her in the dark hours of the night when she couldn’t sleep. It was not, Rachel knew, her mother’s idea of what a young widow’s memories should be, but the physical yearning was very much alive and troublesome. And it kept her awake, confused, and wondering what to do about it.

  She had told herself over and over again that it was too soon to think of meeting other men, and certainly not just to do something about it physically. Dan had been her only lover; there were times when she wondered if she could ever think of another man in the same intimate way. Sex was something that seemed only to belong to Dan and herself.

  What she wanted, Rachel thought, surprised at the depths of her unhappiness, was that very thing she couldn’t have—her husband there in the bed beside her at night, making love to her, with the feel of his warm, hard, very alive and loving body against hers.

  She flung the curtain of her long hair out of her face with both hands and waded out info the chilly water. She was supposed to be thinking about the problems with the man who wanted to close off their road and not about her sex life, which no longer existed.

  She breaststroke a few yards unenthusiastically, and suddenly wanted to giggle. If Dan had been right there beside her at that moment, he’d have known exactly how she felt. Their lovemaking had been perfectly satisfactory, an affectionate and happy event. She could just hear herself blurting out that she needed him. There had been times, in their brief months together, when—

  The memory became a hard, hurting knot in Rachel’s body. Love with Dan had been too good, too real. Losing him had nearly destroyed her. She doubted if she would ever have something so precious again. There were still times when she simply could not realize that someone so young and vital was really gone.

  Rachel waded toward the shoreline to get her bottle of shampoo, but at the edge of the water she stopped, her skin prickling. It was crazy to think it, but it seemed there was something there in the dark woods.

  The evening light had faded fast. A few stray splinters of the sun’s afterglow still hung in the whispering gray festoons of Spanish moss, but most of the woods were in deep shadow. Something was there, she could almost feel it. It floated noiselessly on the faint wind. And it turned her flesh cold.

  She lifted her hand to cover her bare breasts. Her house was far from town, and no one came down the unpaved road but the mailman. But her skin still prickled.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  Only silence answered her.

  Then suddenly she remembered that Beaumont Tillson was known to roam the woods at night in jungle fatigues, carrying an army automatic rifle.

  She sprinted for her clothes lying on the sand, scooped them up in passing without breaking her stride. A shoe fell and she did not stop to pick it up. She ran as hard as she had ever run in her life, the naked white blur of her body against the deepening gloom of the woods, until he trees at last closed around her and she was in sight of her back door.

  Chapter Tree

  “Is Beaumont Tillson dangerous?” The lawyer, Pembroke Screven, stroked his chin with his thumb. There was a guarded note in his voice, the same tone Rachel was coming to expect when that name was mentioned. “Is that your question, Mrs. Brinton?” he asked again. “Is Beau Tillson a dangerous man?”

  Rachel looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. They were not exactly her words, but that’s what she’d meant, yes. Not for the first time that morning she wished one of the co-op members had come with her, but all of them had begged off, even Billy Yonge, the newly elected chairman of the board, who usually could be relied on. She was learning that poor tenant farmers expected little from Draytonville’s establishment, particularly its lawyers. And no one seemed to have much enthusiasm for tangling with Beaumont Tillson.

  It had finally been decided that she would be the one, as the co-op’s salaried executive secretary, to go to this meeting with their lawyer. Trying not to look any more inexperienced than she felt, Rachel sat stiffly upright in one of the lawyer’s priceless Adam chairs upholstered in exquisite crewel work. If she brought anything to this job, it was at least a familiarity with lawyers and property; Pembroke Screven reminded her more than a little of the urbane trustees in the old Philadelphia law firm that had managed her family’s business for generations.

  The Draytonville attorney was highly respected. His father had been a lawyer and a county judge and his grandfather before that, and his practice was not only large but virtually the only one in the area. His offices were located in a two-story former pre-Revolutionary courthouse of pink pastel stucco in the faintly West Indian style of so many of South Carolina’s low-country structures of that era.

  Pembroke Screven met clients in a museum-perfect office that featured a rich ruby and gold Karastam Persian rug brought to southern coasts by clipper ships in the last century, a delicately handcrafted eighteenth century walnut dining table piled high with papers that served as his desk, the wrought-brass chandelier above it fitted with electric lights. The lawyer seemed a natural part of his elegant surroundings in his charcoal gray suit and vest with old-fashioned watch chain and fob, his gold-rimmed half glasses on the end of his nose. Pembroke Screven’s name announced that he belonged to two of the low-country’s oldest families. He was a slender, not very tall middle-aged man with a slightly sallow complexion. Now he repeated, “Dangerous? Is Beau Tillson to those around him, Mrs. Brinton? Is that what you mean?” Rachel bit her lip. She had thought about saying “unstable” but it sounded too drastic. Did she really mean dangerous? She’d had only one meeting with the man; whatever else she’d heard was sheer gossip, after all.

  “I don’t mean dangerous,” she explained. “However, when I met Beaumont Tillson at the cattle gate last Saturday morning he was ... you could say he was...” She was remembering how he had spurred his black horse up in front of her, threatening to ride her down. “Unpleasant,” she said, clamping her lips together. “And he did turn away two pickup trucks full of our high school volunteers and made them go back the long way into the field. He told them the same thing, that the road was closed. This had come as a surprise because we’d had no notice from him about the road at all before he closed it.” When the lawyer didn’t comment she added, “The co-op needs Beaumont Tillson’s goodwill, we are very much aware of that, and we want to be reasonable. We know we won’t get much work done on our tomato project if we have an ongoing dispute with him.”

  “Hmm,” the lawyer said, “so you think it’s possible to reason with this, ah, dangerous man?”

  “Perhaps he isn’t dangerous,” Rachel conceeded. “I don’t know. But no one seems to regard him as an easy man to deal with.”

  “Ah, now we’re talking about something very different.” The lawyer didn’t look at her. He had turned almost completely around in his chair to watch the drizzle of rain falling on the asphalt expanse of the building’s parking lot. “Beau’s been back from Vietnam a long time now,” he observed. “Long enough to build up the local store of gossip considerably. Sometimes I feel downright sorry for him. I don’t know which c
auses the most trouble—the fact that he was born a Beaumont, or the way people have let their imaginations run wild. Or maybe it’s a combination of both.”

  “I only heard,” Rachel began, “that he carries a gun of some—”

  The lawyer interrupted her. “If he wanted to roam around the swamps over there at Belle Haven at night trying to get the jungle out of his system, that was the man’s own business, Mrs. Brinton, don’t you think? Besides, he’s not the same man he was when he got back from Vietnam, it’s been over a decade now that we’ve put that war behind us. Beau’s always been something of an enigma.” He swung his chair back to face her. “There are few men, my dear,” he said softly, “who really want to be that impossibly good-looking.”

  Rachel opened her mouth and then shut it. It was a moment before she could say, “I don’t know that this explains why he closed the road.”

  The lawyer stared at her, eyebrows lifted. “Land means everything to the Beaumonts, young lady. They’re raised with that idea. It’s all that boy’s ever known. Clarissa Beaumont, God rest her soul, was obsessed with hanging on to that house and not letting it get sold for taxes. Her daddy raised her with one aim in life—to hold on to Belle Haven and pass it on to her heirs. To tell you the truth,” the lawyer said, smiling slightly, “I think it’s the only reason she had Beau. I don’t think anything else would have persuaded Clarissa to become a mother. A lot of people around here thought that boy would die of neglect before he could get to school. Clarissa didn’t seem to have much empathy with small animals of any kind, even her own.”

  Rachel digested all this in silence. It still did nothing to solve the co-op’s problem with Belle Haven’s’ owner. “But that is a public road,” Rachel said determinedly. “Surely even Beaumont Tillson knows the law.”

  The lawyer looked at her for a long moment. Then he frowned. “Property disputes cause a peck of trouble, Mrs. Brinton. I’ve seen people get more upset over a boundary line and more violent about it than they would being accused of, say, embezzling a bank.”

  He sat back in his chair and regarded her unblinkingly. “I expect you don’t remember much about the Vietnam war, do you? You were probably too young at the time. Beau Tillson was in a special branch called Lurps—LRRP, Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. They went behind enemy lines and lived there for weeks, months, giving reports of enemy troop movements deep within their—the enemy’s—territory. It wasn’t unusual for the Viet Cong to pass within touching distance of Lurps in the jungle without knowing they were there. My own boy,” he said, rearranging some papers on the desk, “grew up with Beau, and they both went to ‘Nam together. Poke wanted to go into the Lurps with him, but didn’t qualify. For a while there I thought it was going to break Poke’s heart, to have them separated like that, but he got over it.”

  He cleared his throat. “You may remember there was a lot in the newspapers and on TV at the time about what an advantage the Cong had in the jungle. But what most people didn’t know was that we had men who could go into the jungle and live cut off from their bases, existing just as covertly as the Asians. It was about as dangerous duty as you could get. When the Cong captured Lurps they didn’t die easy. Regular troops didn’t cotton to Lurps, they had a reputation for being strange and liking the jungle too much.”

  The lawyer leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head to stare up at the ceiling. “Beau Tillson was a Lurp for more than two years in Vietnam. He served two tours of duty and wanted a third, only he was wounded and put out of action. When he came back Beau had his problems settling down, but he wasn’t the only jungle vet who did, not by a long shot. If he drank a bit, it wasn’t anything to worry about.” He smiled wryly and took down his hands. “I’ve been drunk several times in my life when there was something I needed to forget pretty bad.”

  A buzzer sounded in the mass of papers on the desk and the lawyer reached for it. To the secretary’s indistinct voice on the intercom he merely said, “All right.”

  The next moment the door to the office opened and a lean, broad-shouldered man in an expensively tailored gray business suit strode in. His stunning good looks were as riveting as a flash of summer lightning. But the gold-flecked eyes in a hard, chiseled face reflected impatience and sulky bad temper.

  With a shock that brought her to her feet, Rachel recognized this startlingly well-dressed man as the horseman in the woods.

  “Hello, Beau,” the lawyer said calmly, getting to his feet. “Mrs. Brinton, I believe you’ve met Beau Tillson.”

  The tall man did not extend his hand. Instead his furious look swept over Rachel quickly. “I’ll offer you a cash settlement to stay off my property,” he grated. “Three hundred dollars. Non-negotiable.”

  “Now, Beau, sit down,” the lawyer said imperturbably. He reached for the buzzer on his desk. “Let Marsha bring you some coffee.”

  Rachel still stood with her hand outstretched, but Beaumont Tillson had turned away.

  “I haven’t got the time for this, I’ve got to go to the bank to see about a pump.” He abruptly leaned over the lawyer’s desk, putting one long, callused hand down flat on the papers. “Get these people off my back, Poke. This woman’s egging them on. I can’t have a public road into Belle Haven—it’ll ruin me. It’s just what these damned developers are waiting for.” He straightened and ran his hand through sun-streaked hair in a harried gesture. “Hell, Poke, I had a bellyful of peaceniks and Quakers during the war. While I was out in the DMZ sleeping in mud and hiding my ass from the Cong, they were visiting Ho Chi Minh up in Hanoi, helping to put a bullet in my back.”

  “Sit down, Beau,” the lawyer repeated mildly. “We want to talk, that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it?”

  Rachel looked from one man to the other. “Shouldn’t we wait for Mr. Tillson’s lawyer?” This man unnerved her; there was a violent energy in him that the lawyer seemed oblivious to, but she felt that at any moment he might explode.

  Beau Tillson whirled on her. “Poke Screven’s my lawyer,” he snarled. “Just what the hell do you think’s going on?”

  She stepped back a step. “But Pembroke Screven is our lawyer.

  The man behind the desk said quickly, “Now just settle down, both of you. I can represent you both as long as we keep calm. Beau,” he said, ignoring the tall man’s scowl. “I’m representing the farmers’ cooperative pro bono, at least for the time being. I’m making my contribution to what I see as a worthy cause. I want you to approach this in the same way. Now, if you’ll—”

  Beaumont Tillson advanced a few steps toward Rachel with his lithe leopard’s grace and glowered down at her. “Three hundred dollars, that’s my offer. From what I hear, your crowd can use it. It’ll pay your gas and oil going the long way around.”

  Rachel backed into her chair, feeling the seat hard against her knees as she looked up. “The co-op doesn’t want your money, Mr. Tillson,” she told him in a fairly steady voice. She was determined not to be bullied; he was much too good at it. “It is a public road. I think you know that, even if you will not admit it. As I told you before, we are willing to negotiate. The co-op will agree to use the road at certain times if you wish, but frankly, since it is pub—”

  “It’s closed, dammit!” He shot her a look of pure frustration. “The road’s on my property, it belongs to me.” He prodded with a tanned, forceful index finger at the middle of his chest. “Mine—private property, get the idea? Not peacenik communes, no Jesus freaks—just private ... capitalist ... property!” he shouted. “So you can stop whining at me about how the public can use it!”

  In spite of herself Rachel glared back at him. “I am not whining at you, friend. But you have not kept the road private according to the law, and I do not like to have people yelling at me. There is no matter that cannot be worked out,” she added primly, “in harmony and cooperation.”

  Her words only seemed to infuriate him. She saw his big hands clench in fists.

  “Hell!” he gro
und out, abruptly turning on his heel.

  The lawyer had been watching them both. “Now, Beau, you’re doing all the shouting here. The young lady’s right. Why don’t you listen to what she’s got to say? Leave the issue of public or private alone for a moment and think about letting her group come through there at specified—”

  “Three hundred dollars, dammit,” the other man snarled. He stood with his broad shoulders hunched, the fabric of the suit drawn tightly across his back, fighting his rage. “They’re not going to get more money because I haven’t got it.” He started for the door. “I’ve got to go to the bank. I’ve got other things to worry about besides tenant farmer trash. And”—he threw Rachel a violent look—”goddamned Quakers.”

  The door slammed thunderously behind him.

  In the ensuing silence the lawyer sat back down again and regarded Rachel with his eyebrows lifted quizzically. Finally he said, “My apologies. He seems to feel rather strongly about this.”

  “He wouldn’t even listen.” She was still trying to cope with Beau Tillson’s noisy exit. “He didn’t even sit down. He is a violent man,” Rachel said, almost vengefully glad to make a judgment. “He wouldn’t even listen to our offer.”

  The lawyer sighed. “I think from now on it would be better if you let me handle Beau, see what I can do.” When Rachel looked up he continued, “I don’t know what got him started, but Beau’s got a full head of steam up. And he has got a point about not wanting to give away public access to the land he owns along the river. But he’ll simmer down.”