The River Widow(60)
“I think you’re going to have to explain. I’m not used to being threatened.”
He laughed. “You think this is being threatened? Oh, darling, you have no idea.” His face grew serious again. “Once a judge done seen how you lived before you caught yourself a land-owning husband, it sure does give credence to motive for killing him. You must’ve been thinking you’d come out like the poor widow, only with a lot more money than you ever had in your life.”
“How does a person’s past provide motive? Seems to me the past is just that—the past.”
“That ain’t the way most people ’round here think. No, sweetheart, the good people here think it speaks of character. Why, pray tell, did no one take you in when you was just a youngster?”
“Everyone died.”
“Not likely. Must be there was something wrong with you from day one, and everybody knew it, and nobody saw fit to help.”
His words burned, but she had to remain composed. “That’s not true.”
He leaned back. “Well, I just wanted you to know I’ll be presenting my case for exhumation to a judge pretty soon, and I wondered if you might wanna save us all the trouble and just go ahead and tell me now what you done. You could save yourself a lot of sleepless nights, and confession now might make for a lighter sentence once you’re convicted of murder.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Adah said and then added, “since I’m innocent.”
“Suit yourself,” Drucker said. “You want to do this the hard way, then that’s just peachy keen with me.”
Adah put her hand on the door handle. She couldn’t remain in control much longer. “Are we done here?”
He smiled. “We’re done when I say we’re done.” Adah held still for a few more tortured moments; then Drucker said, “Go on now. We’ll be seeing each other again real soon. You can mark my word on that.”
After opening the door, she walked away back toward the laundry basket, in complete awareness that all Drucker had to do was run her down, and the Branches’ revenge would be enacted. He could say anything, that she’d resisted arrest, that she’d mouthed off, anything. So when he whipped the car around her and left her in the dust again, she was surprised to find herself still standing, still alive.
But now she was vulnerable in another, newer, and more vicious way.
From then on, she started picking up and delivering laundry at different hours of the day, sometimes early, sometimes late, in order to avoid another confrontation with Drucker. And she rarely stuck around to talk with her customers, instead returning as soon as she could and making herself helpful on the farm. But even though she managed to evade Drucker on the road, he ran around unbidden in her mind. She felt him closing in, running a spherical course that was getting smaller, tighter. She had no idea if he was doing what he told her he was doing—still working toward exhuming Lester’s body—or if he was doing something else.
One thing was certain, however—he was doing something. And she had to come up with an escape plan before he pounced. Every day she concocted scenarios that she then had to discard because there was too much risk, too high a chance of failure. Soon it became clear that there was no easy solution, and whatever she came up with could end in disaster. She was being watched closely; she had no easy way out.
At night, she dreamed of finding herself in the morgue with Lester’s body, now more decomposed, on the table in front of her. Then Manfred Drucker, dressed in surgeon’s attire, grinned at her from beneath his mask and, holding a scalpel, cut into Lester’s body, straight down the center of his right temple. Blood and brains. Cold metal handcuffs clamping down on her wrists, feeling herself shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller as Daisy’s voice was becoming fainter and fainter as it called “Mama” until it faded away altogether. She awakened, bolting upright in bed, clenching her hand against her sternum, barely stifling a scream.
Her time was limited; this she knew even as she foundered helplessly with no clear plan. But she had to go on feigning innocence and acting as though there was nothing to fear. She had to go on living and breathing and keeping her head for Daisy’s sake. Time, her enemy now, seemed to be racing forward. The summer was heating up, the crops were growing, and each day felt like a lost opportunity.
Late in July, the tobacco plants were shoulder height, and the flowers had to be broken off by hand in order to focus the plant’s energy on its leaves and produce a better crop. Adah had been taking Daisy into the fields when she could manage a break from her laundry work, and there she showed the girl how to snap the flowers.
Daisy wanted to collect the flowers, and Adah fashioned together something of a bouquet for her, tucking a few blossoms into her hair. There was time for a few moments to play hide-and-seek among the rows, but otherwise it was endless work under the relentless summer sun. Over exhausting suppers, Adah’s mind drifted in strange directions. Any road sound outside reminded her of Manfred Drucker’s engine and that he could come out in his patrol car at any moment to arrest her. And when Buck cut into his pork chop one night with a steak knife, Adah saw a scalpel in his hands and heard a jail-cell door slamming shut, the freezing metal sound of her future confinement.
One night, after a particularly grueling day, Buck and Jesse brought out the bourbon from a cabinet in the living room and poured themselves shots before dinner. Adah watched as Buck drank and drank without showing any change, while Jesse became a sloppy drunk. His eyes were ribboned with tiny red veins, and he was unsteady on his feet.