Authors: Sandra Chastain
“Thanks. The rain seems to be stopping,” Sam said as he caught up with her. “But this drive’s a swamp. Don’t you folks believe in asphalt out here in the country?”
Asphalt. Oh, dear. Sam’s appearance was going to be a big surprise to Ed Pinyon. He had his eye on buying Mamie’s property to use as storage space for his paving equipment. He’d even mentioned building new sand and gravel pits—if he could get the land for the price of the back taxes.
“Certainly. We have a fine paving and equipment company.” Andrea said, mentally defending a friend. Ed Pinyon was Arcadia’s only yuppie, Meredith County’s future representative to the state government, and Ed Pinyon was the man her father expected her to marry.
They reached the patrol car at the foot of the drive. Andrea opened the door and started to get in, using the door as a barrier between them. “But there are some of us who like our town old-fashioned and unsophisticated.”
The clouds seemed to part, and a sliver of moonlight cut a wedge across the road where they stood.
Sam rested his arms loosely across the upper edge of the car window and leaned across. “And muddy. What’s for dinner, Stormy lady?”
“Stormy?” She made the mistake of gazing directly into his eyes and found herself snared by
their intensity. She caught her breath and hoped he hadn’t heard her gasp. Then he touched her face. He drew a callused finger across her lips, and they parted involuntarily. Andrea realized suddenly that he was going to kiss her.
“Don’t,” she protested in a throaty whisper.
“Too late,” he said, feathering light kisses across her cheek and back to her lips.
“No!” She pulled away. “You’re an outsider, and I won’t let you come in here and …”
“And kiss you?” he finished almost inaudibly. “I know. You’re not the type to run wild with someone like me, but it’d sure be fun to teach you how.”
Andrea sat down in the patrol car and slammed the door shut. She backed down the drive and drove away. In her rearview mirror she could still see the silhouette of a man, a cowboy with a heart tattoo across his arm, a wicked smile, and eyes that seemed to see right though a person.
Then she realized what she’d done. She’d promised Sam Farley food, and it was still in the car. She applied the brakes and reversed her direction. He was still standing in the drive, his face drawn into a frown. She opened the window and handed him the thermos and the plate of cookies.
He didn’t speak, and neither did she.
When Andrea drove away this time, she pulled off her cap, lowered all the windows, and felt the hot night air whip her hair wildly behind her like the sail of a phantom ship. The storm was over, leaving her restless and confused. She pressed
down on the accelerator. Tonight she had a need to fly like the wind.
“You shouldn’t have gone over there by yourself, Andy,” her father grumbled as he crawled into the back of the patrol car and positioned his cast across the seat.
“Buck,” Andrea replied, more sharply than she’d intended, “I didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done. A call came in, and I investigated it. It’s that simple.”
“Yes,” Buck agreed reluctantly. “But suppose you’d found a burglar instead of some man who claims to be Mamie Hines’s grandson? A fact, I’ll remind you, that we’re still not certain of. I remember about five years ago, a convict broke out in Hancock County and robbed a woman—”
“Buck, please. It isn’t even eight
A.M
. Let it rest. Sam Farley might be a little wild-looking, but I think he’s okay. By the way, I gave him the homemade cookies that Louise Roberts
made especially for you
.”
“That woman, she ought not …” Buck said in exasperation. “Cookies? My daughter gave my chocolate-chip cookies, with nuts, to that stranger?”
Andrea was having a hard time holding back a smile at Buck’s overplayed reaction. “Yes, but somehow I expect that there’ll be more. Buck, did you know Miss Mamie’s daughter?”
“Everybody knew Millie. She was the prettiest girl in the county when she was sixteen, and the
apple of her daddy’s eye until she met that fellow over at the army base.”
“Sam’s father?”
“Who knows? The man she ran off with wasn’t named Farley. Don’t know what happened after she left here. Jed Hines was a hard man, Andy. When he said he no longer had a daughter, he meant it. Never let her name be mentioned again. I always thought Mamie would have found some way to keep in touch with her.”
As Andrea drove Buck into town, she thought about Sam’s mother and what she must have gone through, having a parent disown her. Andrea rarely thought about it anymore, but her own mother had been an outsider, too, and she’d run away from Arcadia and her child. Buck had explained that her mother had felt closed-in and suppressed.
Andrea had learned long ago to stop wondering what had caused her mother to desert them. She had spent her childhood blaming herself—and Arcadia—for somehow not being good enough to hold her mother’s affection. She’d learned as she grew older that there was no blame. Just as there had been no blaming David.
David, the state patrolman with snapping black eyes and an air of wicked excitement, had come into her life when she was twenty. She’d fallen in love without a thought that he’d ever leave her. But he had. Like her mother, he’d marched to the beat of a different drummer. Neither had belonged in a small southern town. Maybe her mother, David, and Sam Farley had something in common. Sam would leave, too, sooner or later.
Andrea dropped Buck at the Arcadia Café for his usual breakfast with his cronies and continued to city hall. Even before they’d left home that morning, the phone had begun to ring. Otis Parker reported that a Sam Farley had hitchhiked into town with him. He didn’t know about any wallet, but he’d look and get back to Buck.
At city hall, Andrea turned on the office lights, switched on the ceiling fan, and checked in with Agnes at the local phone company. “I’m at the police station, Agnes, and Buck’s at the café if anybody needs either of us.”
“How about Mamie’s grandson? Is he really some dirty, wild-looking hippie?”
“No, Agnes. He is not some wild hippie.” Andrea retorted with a sigh. “He’s somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, and he seems nice. But he’s not here to stay. You might as well let everybody in town know that he’s just passing through. He wanted to see his grandmother’s house before it was sold.”
“Excuse me,” Agnes replied coolly. “I was just curious.” Agnes’s police-department service was unofficial and self-appointed, but if anyone needed help, she was always there—she or one of the other Varner sisters. The telephone company had belonged to her family for nearly fifty years. During the daytime hours she was a one-woman operator. Her younger sister took over at night, and the older one filled in on weekends. All anybody in town who wanted to know what was happening, where anybody was, or the time of day had to do was pick up the telephone, and one of the Varners had the answer.
Now Agnes was miffed with the new chief of police, and everybody would know it. Andrea sighed. Staying on the good side of the citizens in a small town was akin to walking on hot coals without getting burned. There were some things about her town she’d like to change.
Andrea deliberately forced any reference to their temporary guest from her mind. The less she dwelled on him, the better. But he was like the forbidden apple in her own private Garden of Eden, sliding into her thoughts like a snake. The sound of snoring in the back drew her attention, and she realized that the city’s handyman–meter reader, Brad Dixon, was sleeping off a binge in one of the cells, as was his habit.
Buck didn’t return. The phone rang constantly.
“Andy, what time is choir practice?”
“How’s Buck doing?”
Every question was followed by a casual reference to Sam Farley. By the time she’d answered the eight call, her mood hovered somewhere between exasperation and total frustration. Sam Farley didn’t deserve this much attention. He was just a man, a vagabond carpenter who told stories of faraway places she’d never seen and didn’t want to, a drifter who’d kissed her.
She didn’t mean anything to him, and neither had the kiss. She was just the next girl down the road on the way to all those places he hadn’t seen yet. He was simply passing through.
Andrea didn’t want to think about how he’d made her feel or the way his voice had sounded when he called her Stormy. She sprang to her feet
and marched back to Brad Dixon’s cell. It was long past time for him to be up and pretending to earn the salary the city paid him.
“Brad! Brad, wake up! You’ve got water meters to read.” Andrea rousted the half-asleep employee out of the cell and headed him toward the barber shop for a morning-after cold shower and black coffee.
Andrea glanced toward the café. Buck appeared to be taking the morning off. Well, she had city business to carry out. There was still the problem of Sam Farley’s identification to be settled. She climbed into the patrol car and cut down a side street that passed the old cotton gin and the post office. She was going out to the Hines place, and she was taking the back road.
In the daylight Mamie’s house no longer looked frightening. With its peeling paint and sagging porch it just seemed faded and tired.
The walk up the driveway was easier this time. Andrea didn’t know why she’d been so spooked the previous night. She loved this sprawling old house, and Mamie’s grandson was welcome in her town.
She knocked lightly at the back-porch door, listening for some indication of movement inside. When there was no response, she pushed against the screen. It was locked, and the rip in the screen had been covered with a block of wood.
“Hello? Sam? Mr. Farley? Are you there?” She shaded her eyes from the bright glare of morning sun, peered into the screened-in porch, and knocked again.
“And what can I do for the chief of police this morning?”
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she saw him, rumpled from sleep, wearing nothing but jeans that rode low on his hips. He was leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the porch, drinking coffee from one of Louise Roberts’s orange mugs.
“You’ve locked the door,” she said. “Are you afraid?”
“No, ma’am. I’m hiding from your welcome wagon. It started with some little woman you-hooing at my door before I was up. Why are you here, Chief?”
Andrea stiffened. Sam Farley was angry. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it hadn’t been anger. Where was the fun-loving rogue who’d wanted pizza and beer the night before? She couldn’t decide what it was about the man that irritated her so. Maybe she wasn’t the only one having second thoughts about what had happened between them. When she walked up the drive, she’d expected more teasing, more tales of adventure maybe. But not antagonism.
She made her voice light and friendly. “People are just curious about you. You’ve never lived in a small town before, have you, Sam?”
“Once,” he said wryly. “I won’t be so stupid a second time. Besides, I don’t know what your caring town did to my mother, and I’m not taking any chances on finding out. So let’s just get to the point.”
Sam knew that he was being deliberately cruel to someone who didn’t deserve it. He didn’t understand his actions. But spending the night in the house had had a curious effect on him. He’d
uncovered a bed in the front room that overlooked the slope down to the road. Somehow he’d known it had been his mother’s room, and the questions had whirled round and round in his mind. Why had she run away from a town where people cared about each other? Why had she been so unhappy here?
Finally he’d given up and returned to the parlor. He’d stretched out on the couch and dreamed of Andrea’s stormy blue eyes half closed in passion as he made love to her under the plum tree in the field beyond.
Desire—that was an emotion he could understand. But this little side trip into his past had taken a wrong turn somewhere and had kept on going. He wasn’t sure where it was leading him.
People like Andrea and Louise Roberts confused him. He didn’t mean anything to them, and he didn’t trust them. Why were they so hell-bent on making him feel as though they cared?
“Look, I’m sorry, Sam. Outsiders always accuse us of being nosy, bossy, and even a little prideful. Here in Arcadia we do feel a responsibility for each other. I just came by to offer you a ride to the grocery store, if you still need food.”
“So now you’re making me a neighbor, are you? Look, I know you mean well, but I’m not staying here. And I’ll manage by myself.”
“Fine,” Andrea said, calling on every ounce of dignity she could muster. She didn’t even know why she’d offered. A drifter like Sam Farley couldn’t appreciate small-town caring anyway. “But there are a couple of official questions I have to ask you. Look, couldn’t you open the door? It’s hot out here in this sun.”
“I don’t think so,” he said stiffly. “I don’t want soup, cookies, homemade preserves, or companionship.” He glanced down at the orange mug and sat it on the floor with a clatter. “And I don’t want to end up jailed by your vigilante committee.”
“Vigilante committee? Has something happened out here this morning, Sam?” she asked in confusion.
“Your friends expressed the opinion that I’d best not take advantage of a—” he looked at the ceiling, “how did they put it? A ‘sweet woman who’s taken on her daddy’s job.’ So call off your watchdogs.”
“Who were these watchdogs?” Andrea’s look of bewilderment seemed genuine.
“That character spitting fire on my doorstep awhile ago, the one with crutches.”
“Buck? My father? How’d he get here?”
“He came with Otis to protect your honor and make sure that I knew you were off-limits.”
Andrea felt herself growing furious. So
that
was why Buck had taken the morning off. She should have known.
“Don’t worry, cowboy, I’ll take care of it,” she promised grimly, rubbing her forehead. “I’m sorry. Sometimes … people here are too protective.”
“Well, you can just tell them that they don’t have a thing to worry about. I’m not going to play footsie with the future governor’s wife.”