The River Widow(59)
He lightly took her in his arms again, his eyes now aglow, his gaze penetrating, his voice near desperate. He pulled her closer, his words an urgent plea. “Marry me. Stay here and marry me. You’ll be near the girl, and as she gets older . . . she’ll be able to seek you out on her own.”
His proposal rang in her ears like the echo from a shotgun. T hen finally landing in her heart, ripping a hole wide open. “That’s years away” was all she managed to say.
He whispered, “If something happened to you . . .” He blinked. “I’d never forgive myself.”
A thunderstorm was rolling in rapidly; the sky was hazy and low, like smudged glass. “You honor me, Jack. I wish it were simple and I could stay here and perhaps marry you. But I have to finish this. I have to get Daisy away from them . . . now.”
“You don’t.”
How could he not see how vital this was? How could he not understand? “I do. I’m sorry.” As if the sky had read her mind, it thundered a protest and then let loose a spray of rain pellets. She and Jack jumped up, grabbed their clothing, and took shelter under the canopy of a large spreading sycamore while they watched it pour. They stood side by side in silence.
The rain started to let up, the clouds burning off, the sky always in motion, never stagnant. Hopelessly and desperately she had let another month pass by, and absolutely nothing good had happened.
Through a long sigh she said, “Jack, rest assured, the next time I see you, I’ll have a plan.”
Chapter Twenty
As she toiled in the heat of July, days filled with backbreaking work, Adah’s mind was muddled with ideas and plans that had yet to come to fruition. There were many days of warm sunshine and afternoon thunderstorms that approached as a curtain of gray mists and slant rain, and often there were rainbows. Adah leaned against the doorjamb and watched the wind push the rain in whatever direction it willed. Kentucky farmlands were lovely, but Adah’s dream of keeping part of Lester’s farm or selling it for needed money was slipping away just as surely as summer would slide into fall. She had to give it up. And no matter how tired she was, she had to stay alert and attentive. She had to come up with an escape plan.
On a steaming afternoon, when heat rose like wavering spirits out of the fields and roads, the roar of a car engine made Adah freeze. The crunching of tires on the gravelly road and the heat of a motor assaulted her senses as dust enveloped her from behind. Adah had been going to deliver a basket of clean laundry to the redheaded family, and now the dirt from the road was settling on the top of the stack. She spun around. The front bumper of a sheriff’s department patrol car was only a foot or so away, and Manfred Drucker sat at the wheel.
He could’ve so easily mowed her down, and the devilish smile on his face, which she could see through the windshield, made it clear that was the exact message he meant to deliver.
He stepped out. “Get in,” he ordered. His face was red and his forehead greasy. Big half-moon-shaped sweat spots festered on his shirt underneath his armpits. Even on the still air, Adah could smell his skunklike body odor.
She set down the basket, rubbed dirt from her eyes, and fixed her gaze on him. “Am I being arrested?”
“In good time, sweetheart. In good time,” he said as he hoisted up his belted slacks, pistol in the holster. “For now, I just need a moment with you.” He swaggered over to the passenger door and opened it.
Adah held her ground. “Don’t you need a warrant?”
He grinned. “I’m not arresting you, doll face, not yet.” He pointed at her. “And let me give you a piece of advice: if you don’t cooperate, then I will arrest you. Disrespecting a sheriff’s officer is not taken lightly in this county.”
She did as Drucker said.
Inside the car, the smell was overwhelming. C old fear falling into the pit of her stomach, Adah sat still and faced forward.
“So,” he said after he slid in behind the wheel and turned his body in her direction, his right arm draped over the top of her seat. “I’ve been doing me some investigating on you, sweetheart, and you sure do have what people ’round here call a checkered past. I know all about it, about how you was orphaned and no one wanted you, how you was turned out on the streets of New York City. And I know you hopped trains for a while and set up camp with gypsies and hobos, tricking people into paying you for fortune-telling.”
Adah resisted the urge to say, So what?
Drucker breathed out, and his mouth odor was as bad as his body’s. “Any other tricks you turned out there?”
Adah glanced at him, finally, and he winked. A shiver ran up her arms. There was no one else on the road. She hadn’t missed the predatory innuendo of his comment or the vulturine look on his face. “No. Never.”
He smiled. “We’ll see about that.”
Then he seemed to be waiting for something. He clearly enjoyed every moment of making her squirm.
“Besides, the Branches know all about my past. I’ve never kept anything from them. Everything you’ve just said you could’ve learned from Buck or Mabel.”
“Yep,” Drucker said. “I did hear about it from Buck and Mabel, but now I’m finding some records, too. Some facts, not just hearsay.”
Adah doubted that but held her tongue.
“Records are much more convincing than people’s accounts of things that done transpired. They provide much more cause, if you know what I mean.”