July Thunder (9 page)

The wind would come later. Maybe it was already blowing in the valley across the pass, bringing the kiss of fire to countless other acres of trees. It was a depressing thought.

A movement caught her eye, and she looked across the street. A dark shadow was standing between the white curtains of Elijah Canfield's house. He was looking out, too. Maybe just to see if it was raining, as she was. Then she realized she was fully illuminated by her living-room lamps. And Sam's car was clearly parked out front.

Damn it! Dropping the curtain, she let it fall back into place, swinging around just as Sam returned with his coffee.

“Does your father
always
stare out his windows?”

Sam paused just before he sat, mug in hand. “Occasionally.”

“There's nothing occasional about this. I'm beginning to feel like an ant under the microscope.”

“Maybe he does it more since my mother died. I'm sorry.”

“No reason for
you
to be. You're not responsible.” She sighed. “I'm sorry. I guess I'm waspish tonight. Tired. It's just unnerving to feel as if I'm being watched all the time.”

“Just now?”

“Yes. But he was probably doing the same thing I was, looking out to see if it was raining at all.”

Sam hesitated. “I could go speak to him.”

“I wouldn't ask you to do that. He has a right to look out his window, and besides, I'm sure you'd rather not have to talk to him.”

“No, I'll go say something to him. He shouldn't make you uneasy. You don't want to feel as if your every move is being watched.”

“Well, I'm not sure it is. Besides…” She gave a little laugh. “Lucy Middleton across the way could probably give you a detailed history of my life since I moved here. She seems to know
everything.
”

“That's different. She's not a man. And besides, it's probably adding to your unease that he's my father.”

It was, though she was reluctant to admit it. But it might not have bothered her at all, except that Elijah had questioned her. “He asked me if we were dating.”

Sam's head snapped up. “When did he do that?”

“Tonight.”

“What did he do? Just come over here and ask?”

“No, nothing like that.” She shrugged, feeling embarrassed over her own part in this. “I kind of…well…I told you I was crabby tonight. I was making sandwiches for the firefighters when I suddenly got teed off at how few people were helping. So I went across the street and suggested that it
would be nice if he asked his church to help by making some food. Actually, I didn't exactly suggest it.”

Was she imagining it, or was the corner of Sam's mouth lifting, as if he were trying not to grin?

“Okay,” he said. “And that's when he asked?”

“Oh, no. I came back here, and a few minutes later he came over to help me. It was while we finished making the sandwiches that he asked.”

“I see.” The hint of a smile vanished. “It's none of his damn business. Not anymore.”

Mary was suddenly feeling very contrite. She
had
been irritable, and never should have said anything at all. Sam and his father already had enough bad blood between them, and she didn't want to make things worse. “I'm sorry, Sam, I shouldn't have said anything. It was nothing important. Anyway, he's your father. He's probably still curious about your life.”

“I doubt that. I seriously doubt that. I'll have a word with him.”

“Sam, no. If it bothers me again,
I'll
speak to him. It'll be better that way. After all, we might have to be neighbors for years.”

He appeared reluctant, as if he didn't want to let go of the problem. “As far as I know, he's exactly the righteous, puritanical demagogue he seems to be. I don't think you need to fear him.”

“I'm not
afraid
of him. Truly, I'm not. It doesn't
have anything to do with that. I'm just irritable. How many times have I said that tonight?”

“I wasn't keeping count.” That faint grin reappeared, just a hint around the corners of his mouth.

“Well, it gives you some idea how tired I must be. The point is, if I weren't exhausted, I probably wouldn't even notice that he seems to be in my face every time I turn around.”

The grin was no longer hidden. Sam even laughed. And Mary had to laugh, too, at herself. “Like I said…” She didn't finish the sentence, and he laughed again.

When he spoke, however, his tone was kind, if a bit amused. “You're allowed to be crabby, you're allowed to repeat yourself, and you're allowed to dislike feeling watched. But if you keep feeling bothered, let me know and I'll say something. This is a small town, and folks need to take care not to irritate each other too much.”

He paused, and his gaze grew distant. “He spends a lot of time at the window?”

“It seems like it. But it won't continue. I've never known a minister who didn't have his hands so full he had trouble finding time to sleep.”

“True.” He was seeing her again. “Well, I'd better skedaddle before I've been here so long he considers you to be a good subject for a sermon on the morals of schoolteachers.”

Aghast, she dropped her jaw. “He wouldn't do that!”

“There was a time when he would have. But I don't know how he is now. I don't know him at all anymore.”

And that, Mary thought, was one of the saddest things she'd ever heard a son say about his father.

 

Outside in the dark, Sam stood near his car and looked up at the flickering sky. The line of thunderheads approaching from the west grew impressively visible with each crackle of lightning, and the hollow boom of thunder that followed echoed all around. A bad one. Worse than they usually saw at this altitude. And at the wrong time of day. Hereabouts, thunderstorms were afternoon occurrences, not nighttime ones. The weather had been strange for months now, the winter bringing record snows in December, almost an entire year's expected snowfall in about four weeks. Since then, there had been little precipitation of any kind, leading to the current problems.

Most of the lightning seemed to be leaping from cloud to cloud, but then he saw a brilliant downward fork over the pass. Not good.

Worse, the air was still and dry, unsoftened even by a hint of moisture. He had the feeling that tomorrow was going to be a wretched day.

Then, unwillingly, his gaze strayed to the house where his father now lived. Elijah was nowhere in sight, so perhaps he wasn't trying to keep tabs on
his son's relationship with Mary. Not that Sam could imagine any reason he would want to.

But it was still a relief, until he realized that he had thought of himself as having a relationship with Mary. That was as chilling to his heart as the lightning that once again forked downward over the mountains, and as rattling as the thunder that boomed deafeningly.

He forced himself to climb into his car and drive home, but the memory of the minutes he'd just spent with Mary wouldn't leave him alone. He'd been a boor to tease her the way he had, but there had been that electric moment, when…when…

He didn't know how to describe it. It was as if the lightning outside had entered his body. And it had happened so suddenly, so instantly, that in retrospect he could hardly believe it. Yes, he'd noticed before what an attractive woman she was, but he hadn't reacted that way. Not with an urge so strong that it had virtually overwhelmed him, causing him to act in a completely uncharacteristic way. He could be
good? Very good?

God, he couldn't believe he'd said that. It was a wonder she hadn't slapped him silly. He knew in his heart that she hadn't meant those words the way he had taken them, and he'd seen the flicker of panic in her gaze when he'd responded like some over-sexed sixteen-year-old.

He deserved to be horsewhipped.

On the other hand… Well, he
was
a healthy male,
and apparently his needs hadn't died with his wife, although for a long time now he'd been happy to have them gone. Rediscovering them this way, so unexpectedly, didn't exactly thrill him.

He tried to put Mary out of his mind, but she was there as he drifted off to sleep at last, and she followed him into his dreams.

Dreams that were as charged as the raging storm outside.

I
n the morning, the smell of smoke was thicker than ever, and it dimmed the early-morning sun. The night's storm had barely wept, marking its passing only in rare rivulets in the dustiness on Elijah's car. He looked at it with a shake of his head, then looked to the west, where the sky was blackened with smoke. No help.

“You know, Lord,” he muttered as he climbed into his car, “a little flooding would be useful right now. Two or three inches of heavy rain, maybe.”

The Lord didn't answer. The Lord rarely did these days, and Elijah sometimes wondered if that was because he himself had become more alert to the distinction between his own thoughts and wishes, and those of the God he served.

There had been a time, he freely admitted, where he'd interpreted nearly every inclination as divine revelation. These days, revelations were thin on the ground.

Sometimes he thought he was losing his faith. Other times he reminded himself that everyone had dry periods in their spiritual lives. Hadn't he counseled hundreds through them?

Keep acting as if,
he quoted himself. If you keep acting as if the faith is there, it will return in good time.

So he kept acting as if, amidst a terrible drought of the soul.

Reaching the hardware store, he parallel-parked and locked up his car. He needed some washers for his faucets. Apparently his predecessor had let things go a bit, and both the kitchen and bathroom faucets dripped slowly. He wondered what other neglect was going to surface as time passed, then reminded himself that the day's troubles were sufficient unto the day. He would deal with problems as they arose.

Of course, a new problem arose the instant he entered the plumbing aisle of the store. Standing there, surveying some PVC pipe, were two men, one about thirty-five, the other in his late forties or early fifties. Joe and Louis. Good-looking men in shorts and T-shirts. And they had their arms around each other's waists.

The sight angered him, and he recalled the conversation he'd had recently with Silence and Bill. Even so, given where they were, he felt the best thing to do would be to turn away and busy himself somewhere else in the store. This was not the place
to approach two strangers and comment on their moral life. The years had taught him at least
some
restraint.

But as he turned, he discovered Mrs. Beemis behind him. Her lips were pursed in disapproval, and as plain as day her face questioned him: Wasn't he going to say something?

Not only was he feeling out of touch with his faith, but at that instant he wondered if the universe had it in for him. Bad enough he should come to the same town where his son lived, but worse that at this moment Mrs. Beemis should appear as if conjured by Satan himself.

He looked back at the men, feeling an uneasy twitch in his stomach. Then, taking Mrs. Beemis firmly by the arm, he ushered her two aisles away, to the tool section where, thank goodness, there wasn't another soul.

“You aren't going to let that pass!” she said disapprovingly.

“Keep your voice down, Mrs. Beemis. This isn't the place nor the time.”

“Since when is the place and time a hindrance to imparting moral teachings?”

Good question, he found himself thinking sourly. Once he would have agreed with her. But time had taught him lessons, some bitterly learned. “Time and place make a difference, Mrs. Beemis. If one wishes to be truly heard.”

In short, embarrassing those two men in public,
and thus angering them, would deafen them to any message.

“Well,” she said, “if you won't deal with it, I will. I wouldn't have believed you could be so spineless.”

“Spine has nothing to do with it.”

But she wasn't listening, any more than those two men were going to listen to her. She strode away, face twisted, toward the aisle where her intended victims were probably still discussing plumbing fixtures.

Elijah hesitated. He didn't want to embarrass his church by becoming involved in a public scene. Nor did he wish to waste his thunder in a setting where it would be useless. And frankly, he didn't think men of their age were going to be amenable to anyone's opinion of the way they were living. They'd faced a lot of Mrs. Beemises, he was sure. By now a rhino's hide probably had nothing on them.

Short of main force, he didn't see how he could keep the old biddy from doing what she wanted, either. He sighed heavily.

He heard her voice from two aisles over. Strident and critical. Then he heard one of the men say, “Mind your own business.”

“It
is
my business!” Mrs. Beemis squawked. “This is a hardware store, not a den of iniquity. Didn't anyone teach you right from wrong?”

“Didn't anyone teach you manners?” was the response.

Clearly the men weren't going to leave the store to avoid a confrontation, and clearly, from the strident sound of her next comment, Mrs. Beemis had no intention of giving ground. Elijah decided he'd better head that way and see if he could prevent things from getting out of hand.

Just as he rounded the corner of the aisle where the two men and the woman were facing off, the younger man said, “Look, you old hag, just get out of our faces.”

Concerned faces were now peering around the other end of the aisle, watching.

“Mrs. Beemis,” Elijah said in his most authoritative voice, “I think we'd better leave.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” she said flatly. “If they want to live their lives in unspeakable sin, they should at least have the decency to do it where the rest of us don't have to see it.”

The older man snorted. “I was made this way, lady. Just like you were made to be a shrew.”

Someone down the aisle gasped, and someone else muttered a sound of annoyance. Judging by the gathering crowd, this confrontation could become serious.

“Mrs. Beemis,” Elijah said again, even more sternly, “this is not the time nor the place.”

“There's never a wrong time nor place to save souls.”

The men shrugged, looked at each other and
turned back to the plumbing display, visibly dismissing the irate woman.

“Don't you turn your backs on me!”

Oh, Lord, Elijah thought. The men ignored her, and Mrs. Beemis put out a hand toward one of them. Instantly Elijah reached out and stopped her.

“Get your hands off me!” she screeched at him.

“Not if you mean to touch anyone else. Do you want to be arrested?”

“What's going on here?”

Sam's voice, as familiar to Elijah as his own, cut across the growing murmurs. Elijah turned and saw his son, in uniform, marching down the aisle toward them. Sam's gaze raked the two men, then Elijah.

“I should have guessed,” his son said. Pointing at Elijah, he said, “Out of here. Now.”

“I haven't done anything.” Although he was sure Sam wouldn't believe that. In the distant past, he
would
have been at the center of this.

“He laid his hand on me,” Mrs. Beemis insisted, pointing at Elijah. “He doesn't have the right to touch me.”

Elijah turned on her. “Nor do
you
have the right to touch anyone else, madam.”

“What the hell is going on?” Sam demanded.

The older man spoke. “This woman came up and started haranguing us about our…behavior. This man got involved.”

Sam scowled at his father and Mrs. Beemis, then
jerked his head toward the door. “Outside. Now. Or I'll arrest you both.”

Thank the good Lord Mrs. Beemis heeded that warning and marched toward the door. As he followed, Elijah noted that Sam stayed to talk with the two men. Sympathetically, it seemed to him. Sam had always been inclined to sympathize with social outcasts. That hadn't changed.

Mrs. Beemis marched out onto the street, Elijah in her wake…although, were he to be honest about it, he didn't want to be within ten blocks of this woman. He had a sneaking suspicion he wasn't going to last long in Whisper Creek. Either Mrs. Beemis would get him fired or he would get so fed up with her that he would resign. At the moment, the two possibilities appeared equally inevitable.

But the woman wasn't done with him. On the sidewalk, she turned to face him, her finger wagging. “I'm disappointed in you, Brother Elijah. Seriously disappointed. How you could ignore sin happening under your very nose is beyond me.”

“Sister…what
is
your first name?”

“Alma.” She sniffed, as if he were beneath contempt for not knowing that, never mind that he had a whole congregation of names to learn, and never mind that he was fairly certain no one had mentioned her first name to him.

“Sister Alma, I am not spineless. Neither am I a fool. Creating a scene such as you did won't teach anyone anything except that the members of The
Little Church in the Woods are interfering, intolerant, unloving busybodies.”

“I am not a busybody! It was plain as day what those two were doing, and right in front of me. That makes it my business. As for tolerance, we are not supposed to tolerate sin.”

“But we are also called to love our brothers and sisters, and treat them with the same dignity and respect we want for ourselves. Furthermore, Sister Alma, you might consider rereading your Bible. When you are without sin, when you have plucked the beam from your own eye, then you can cast the first stone, or pluck the mote from your brother's eye.”

“Well, I never!”

“And while you're at it, may I suggest you reread the Beatitudes? You may wish to recall that we are sternly warned against judging others.”

Elijah was now on a roll, and it was his finger pointing at the woman, who was beginning to gape like a fish gasping for air. His voice held the thunderous sound that made him such a popular, memorable preacher. “Remember, Sister, the admonition when our Lord was asked which was the greatest commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.'”

He was silenced by the sound of slow clapping behind him. Turning, he saw Sam standing there, applauding. Several other people had gathered, but at a look from Sam they hurried on.

“You're still good,” Sam said to him.

Elijah didn't know how to respond. For the first time in his life, the sight of his son tongue-tied him.

But Sam didn't wait for a response. “Mrs. Beemis,” he said, “the Constitution protects your right of free speech. I can't arrest you for what you said in there. But there's a fine line between exercising your right to express an opinion and disturbing the peace.”

“They had their arms around each other!”

“But that's not illegal. They have as much right to shop in that store as you do. So leave them alone. Save your sermonizing for more appropriate venues.”

She glared at Sam. “A public place is appropriate.”

Sam shook his head. “Not if it leads to trouble. And that was heading toward trouble. Don't incite your neighbors, ma'am. And don't harass them, either.”

“I'm obeying a higher law.”

“Fine. As long as you're willing to go to jail for breaking human laws, go ahead.”

The woman huffed, then turned on her heel and marched away.

Elijah felt a sweeping sense of relief. For a little
while, the Beemis thorn was out of his side. But then he looked again at Sam and felt an uncomfortable pang. For a man who made his living by speaking, he was pathetically speechless right now.

Sam broke the silence. “When did you start preaching tolerance?”

“I always did.”

Sam lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “That's not how I remember it.”

Once again Elijah was at a loss. He was too aware of his own failings these days to argue that Sam had misunderstood him. Finally he said simply, “I feared for you, boy.”

“I'm not a boy.” Sam turned and strode away, a good-looking man in his prime. A man any father should be proud of. A son Elijah couldn't seem to forgive.

 

“We're shorthanded,” Sheriff Earl Sanders had said to Sam that morning. “Jeff Bauer is laid up again with asthma from all the smoke, Brad Gomez's wife is in labor, Chas Elgin got a severe burn on his arm last night, fighting the fire, and Irena Figueroa is going to Denver for her grandmother's funeral. Plus Teal is still on vacation, Luci Landro has to go to her son's swim meet, and Phil Potter ate something bad last night and is tied to the porcelain god. That pretty much guts us. Anyway, the pros have pretty much taken over the fire fighting. I need you on patrol.”

Sam didn't mind. Over the past days, as firefighters had arrived from all over the country, he'd begun to feel more and more like a fifth wheel. What the hell did he know about fighting a fire, anyway?

On his way in, he stopped by the hospital to see Chas and learned that he was being shipped off to a burn unit for treatment and grafting of the burn on his left forearm.

“It was stupid,” Chas said, groggy with morphine. “Stupid. I just wasn't paying close enough attention.”

“You were too tired. We get sloppy when we get exhausted.”

“Yeah. But we gotta put that fire out.”

After that he signed in at a rather quiet, empty roll call, got his assignment and checked over the reports from the night before. It was all the usual stuff: a couple of domestics, a drunk who couldn't find his own house, a DUI, and a half-dozen under-age kids who had been found drinking around a campfire near an abandoned mine. He hoped somebody had given them a stern lecture about the danger of building a fire in the woods just now.

His first call had been to the hardware store. Just what he needed to start his day: Mrs. Beemis and his father.

The Beemis woman was a well-known pain-in-the-ass around town. Six months ago she'd raised Cain in a city council meeting by ranting that Bob Hinderhoff ought to resign from the council because
his eight-year-old son had been caught stealing a package of candy from the drugstore. As if nearly every kid didn't try that at least once. But Mrs. Beemis had insisted it was a sign of Bob's moral weakness and it made him unfit to be a councilman. She'd raised enough of a ruckus that the police finally had to remove her. That hadn't stopped her. She'd spent the next week on the front page of the small local paper, picketing city hall with a couple of her cronies. The whole town was as used to her hijinks as they were to the strangeness of the schizophrenic novelist who had painted every inch of his house, inside and out, shocking pink, and occasionally paid for half-page ads in the paper claiming that the government was beaming messages into his mind.