The Scent of Lilacs (38 page)

She stayed in the middle of the creek. The clouds overhead were getting blacker by the second. The thunder boomed louder. She imagined a wall of water coming around the curve in the creek toward her, washing away her hiding place.

And her with it. She imagined herself bouncing in the flood water, being thrown against rocks and trees. The storm swept closer. Lightning lit up the sky. She counted one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand. The thunder sounded. The tree limbs began dipping down into the water and then up toward the sky as if they could shake free of the wind ripping through them.

Jocie stood up. Water dripped out of her shorts. She might want to keep hiding, but she didn’t want to just sit there and wash away downstream.

“Good-bye, little crawdad,” she said before sloshing out of the creek and back out to where her bike was hidden.

She pushed her bike up the hill. The whole sky was black now with a layer of gray clouds racing around under the heavy storm clouds as if trying to find a place to jump in and join the game. A streak of lightning popped down toward the ground in front of her.

If Jocie had been home, she’d have been out on the porch, watching the lightning and counting the seconds till the thunder sounded. She liked the way the wind threw raindrops under the porch roof into her face. She liked how the rain pounding down on the tin roof of their house shut out every other noise. If Aunt Love came to the door to yell at her to get in the house, she’d go inside and pretend to go up to her room before she sneaked back out the side door under the eave. But she’d never been totally out
in the open in the middle of a storm. And wasn’t there something about metal drawing lightning? She started to ditch her bicycle, but she was almost to the top of the hill. She’d make better time to shelter on her bike. There was nothing but trees here.

She couldn’t take shelter under a tree. Just last summer the
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had run a picture of Mr. Anderson’s cows after lightning had struck the tree they were under. Five big black-and-white cows in a circle around the tree. Five big dead cows.

All at once rain came down in a sheet. She wished a car would come by. Somebody who would give her a ride somewhere. But no car appeared out of the rain, so she kept pushing her bike on up the road against the wind. The lightning flashed so close she saw spots. She didn’t have time for even one one thousand before the thunder crashed. Surely there was a barn around here where she could wait out the storm.

That was something she could pray for. A barn.
Dear Lord, you know everything. You know I’m not usually afraid of storms, but this one’s different. I mean, I know I ran from the truth, but it just doesn’t seem right that lightning might strike me without me finding out. Anyway, I’m not asking for much. Just any kind of old barn, and I’ll try not to complain if it has snakes
.

She stood still a moment and waited for the Lord to answer some way she could see, like a fork of lightning pointing to the left or right, but nothing happened except more thunder and lightning and the rain pounding down harder. She was at the top of the hill now, and the road leveled out. So she got on her bike. She was riding straight into the rain and could hardly see five feet in front of her. She tried not to think of anything except pushing the pedals on her bike. There had to be a house or a barn somewhere.

She was about ready to just plop down in the ditch beside the road when a flash of light lit up a building up ahead. Not a barn. A church. The sign out front said Clay’s Creek Baptist Church.
Wasn’t her father always saying that the Lord sometimes answered your prayers better than you expected?

The front door was locked. Jocie was pushing on the side door when lightning flashed so close she could smell it. She screamed, but the sound was lost in the boom that shook the ground. With her eyes shut against the blinding light, she shoved hard against the door. It popped open. She slammed it shut behind her. The wind pushing against the building sounded even louder than it had while she was outside in the middle of it.

It was dark inside the church. Jocie flipped one of the switches in the narrow hallway, but nothing happened. The storm must have knocked out the electricity. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dim light between lightning flashes.

She’d been in a lot of churches but never all by herself. Her father had always been there with her. In spite of the storm still raging outside, it felt almost too quiet inside. Ghosts were watching her.

Church ghosts, she told herself firmly. They couldn’t be too mean. Just curious, maybe. Church people were always curious. Especially about the preacher’s family. How old are you? What’s your name? Are you your daddy’s little helper? Do you like Sunday school? Can you sing “Jesus Loves Me”? Where’s your mother? Do you make good grades in school? What do you want to be when you grow up? A preacher’s wife?

Right now she just wanted to be the preacher’s daughter.

D
ear Lord, help me know which way she went,” David prayed as he drove. He knew she’d gone north out of town. Jeffrey Wilkerson had waved him down on Court Street to tell him he’d almost hit Jocie when she’d swerved right out in front of him onto Bale Street. Jeffrey had been red in the face, and his hands had been shaking. “You need to tell your girl to pay attention when she’s on that bike. I could have killed her,” he’d said.

David hadn’t had time to appease him. He’d just hoped Jocie’s guardian angels were still keeping up with her as he headed toward Bale. A dozen other streets turned off it and wound around every direction, so he’d had no idea which way to go from there. The others were out searching too. Wes on his motorcycle. Leigh with Tabitha riding shotgun. Even Zella was helping. She’d taken Aunt Love home in case Jocie showed up there or called, and then she’d gone back to the office to call everybody she could think of to see if anybody else had spotted Jocie on her bike so they could narrow down the search area.

He hadn’t called the sheriff. He thought he’d find her and talk to her and everything would be okay. At least as okay as it could be after what the Martin boy had told her. Why had she believed it? Why hadn’t she asked him what the truth was?

She was his daughter. Had always been his daughter from the first day he knew she was growing in Adrienne’s womb. It didn’t
matter what Adrienne said. What she’d obviously told Tabitha. Jocie was his daughter.

He’d known about the man in Grundy, but he’d never known his name. Hadn’t wanted to know his name. What good would it have done? He didn’t plan to ever confront the man, accuse him of destroying his marriage. It wouldn’t have been true anyway. His marriage had gone belly-up long before that. There were times when he doubted if he and Adrienne had ever had a marriage, just the illusion of one that he’d held in his mind through the end of the war before he came home and they tried to live together.

So he’d known but he hadn’t known. He’d thought it was better that way. He’d never wanted the other man to have a face in case someday the man was in a church where he was preaching. He’d never given the first thought to the other man’s family. The pain and betrayal they might have felt. He supposed now, when he thought about it, that he assumed the other man’s family wouldn’t know. Of course, he should have known better. Adrienne had probably found a way to tell the man’s wife herself just as she had told David the day he’d caught her concocting the poison she hoped would end the pregnancy. “What do you care?” she’d screamed at him after he’d knocked the stuff out of her hand. “It’s not even yours.”

She’d told him again the day she’d handed the baby to him to raise. “Now we’ll see if you can live what you preach. You wanted her, so you can have her. But she’s not yours. Some other seed made her.”

But Adrienne was wrong. Jocie was his in every way that mattered. Even if she wasn’t the seed of his loins, she was the seed of his heart. He’d never thought once that she was not his. Never once. Maybe he should have. Maybe if he had, he would have been able to prepare her. He should have known that nothing stayed secret in Hollyhill forever. Not if more than one person knew about it.

He was driving aimlessly, turning down one road and then another with not the least idea of whether he was going in the right direction or in circles. Of course, Jocie could be going in circles too. He knew her mind must be.

Why hadn’t it been Wes or him she’d seen first? Why did it have to be Tabitha?

Tabitha had been crying when he’d gone in the
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offices to see why Jocie had taken off on her bike like a swarm of bees was after her. Aunt Love had been patting Tabitha’s hand murmuring something that could have been Bible verses. He wasn’t sure. Zella had practically attacked him as soon as he’d come through the door.

“You should have already told the poor child. You had to know she’d find out sooner or later,” she’d said.

“Told who what?” David had asked.

“That you aren’t really her father,” Zella had said.

“Not really whose father?”

“Honestly, David, sometimes you keep your head too far up in the clouds.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He really hadn’t.

Zella had rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. “I really believe you don’t. Jocelyn! I’m talking about Jocelyn.”

“What about Jocie? What’s wrong with her? She took off on her bike like she’d heard the school was on fire or something.”

“She saw that horrid Martin boy up in town, and he called her a bastard. Told her you weren’t her father. I wouldn’t have even thought she knew what that meant, but she reads everything she can get her hands on. No telling where . . .”

Zella had kept talking, but David had stopped listening. He’d gone cold all over. “Jocie is my daughter,” he’d said quietly.

Zella had looked at him. “Well, I know she is in every way that really counts. She couldn’t have a better father, but everybody knows that Adrienne was messing around with Ogden
Martin’s sister’s husband over in Grundy before she was born. And Adrienne told me herself there was a good reason Jocelyn didn’t look like you. I remember the very day. Jocelyn was asleep in the playpen beside your desk, but you had gone up the street to the fiscal court meeting. I don’t know where Tabitha was. Anyway, Adrienne had come in to get some money. That’s the only reason she ever came in—to see if I had any money in the petty cash drawer. I always gave it to her to get rid of her. I figured I could buy a can of coffee out of my own pocket easier than I could put up with her.”

“I don’t care about coffee,” David had said.

Zella had mashed her lips together for a second before she nodded and said, “I suppose not. Anyway, Adrienne wanted me to know you’d been cuckolded. Said I could put it in the paper if I wanted to. Of course, I didn’t want to. I was glad when she left Hollyhill.”

“Jocie is my daughter,” David had repeated. “Adrienne may have never been my wife, but Tabitha and Jocie are my daughters.”

Tabitha had looked up. “I’m sorry, Dad. I should have lied, but she asked me, and I only knew what DeeDee told me.”

“Why would she tell you such a thing?” David had asked.

“I don’t know. We’d get a letter from you asking us to come home, and she’d go berserk. She’d tear it up into little pieces and throw the pieces up in the air like confetti and do her freedom dance. She’d say that she didn’t even want to think about Hollyhill or you ever again.” Tabitha had peeked up at him as though worried that her words would upset him.

He hadn’t been upset. Just impatient. She needed him to listen to her, but he needed to find Jocie, to put his words into her ears over top of the Martin boy’s words. “Go on.”

“She said nobody could live with a man who didn’t even care who fathered his children. The first time she said that, I thought maybe she was talking about me, and I started crying. That made
her even madder, but I couldn’t quit crying. I wanted you to be my daddy. Even if I had left with her. I wanted to know you were here in Hollyhill waiting to be my daddy if I ever found my way home.”

David had felt divided. He needed to be out looking for Jocie, but this child needed him too. He knelt down and put his arms around her. “I always wanted to come after you, but I didn’t think you would come home with me.”

“And I probably wouldn’t have.” Tabitha had wiped her eyes. “But anyway, it drove DeeDee crazy for me to cry, so after she smacked me and I still wouldn’t stop, she told me I didn’t have to worry. That she might have rushed you into marrying her thinking she could ride your soldier back out of Hollyhill when you went back to the war but that I was yours without the first doubt. An accident, but yours. That she’d been too stupid to know how to keep it from happening then. She said Jocie was an accident too. Something hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to. So she decided to use Jocie to get back at you for all those years you’d trapped her in Hollyhill. That it served you right having to raise some other man’s child for not letting her free.”

“But did you ever think she might be lying?” David had said. “She lied about everything else. Why not that?”