Seven
Ella May closed up the grocery at eight each
evening. The day following the excitement in the woods, Abe walked to the
store just before she locked the doors. He entered through the back way
so as not to be seen by the townspeople and serve as fodder for gossip.
Gossip always seemed to work against him, never to his advantage. His
campaign of ridicule against the lights in the woods had failed. All eyes
would be on the mansion by now.
Abe locked the door behind him as Ella May was
turning off the lights up front. She retreated into the back and gave a
start of fright before recognizing the tall figure standing in the
shadows.
“Why did you lock the door?” She drew closer with a
nervous smile. “I told you no more fooling around in here.”
His voice was an unhappy growl. “I wanted to talk
with you, is all.”
She sighed, tossed her purse to a nearby table, then
perched herself on a corner of it as an afterthought. “Talk about what?”
“About those men who got stung last night. I talked
to old Doc Parkinson. He says Lazarus and the others got welts to back up
their claim. He’s not saying what caused them. There’s lights in the
Trevor mansion. Evie’s upset. Lazarus is behaving worse than a stirred
hornet’s nest. They spell trouble for me, Ella May. I can’t afford
trouble.”
“Not from what I hear, Abraham Darker.” Ella May’s
voice was gentle, but chastising, reminding him of his tenth grade school
teacher. She, too, had spoken curtly to him, but with that light in her
eye warning of animal passions lurking beneath the surface. “I hear
rumors of business dealings with men from down south. They don’t sound
like honest business dealings to me.”
“Don’t pass rumors about, Ella May.”
She tilted her chin defiantly. “I keep my mouth shut
about things that don’t concern me.”
“Nobody in Silver Ridge is in harm’s way, Ella May.
If we got business with southerners, it’s just stuff passing through on
its way elsewhere. If it didn’t come through here, it would go through
somewhere else.”
“It’s evil money, Abraham.”
“Every bit as evil as poverty, Ella May. This town
can hardly feed itself.” He gestured to the boxes lining the room in the
shadows. “There’s stuff here you can’t sell because people don’t have
money for even a little luxury.”
“Poverty can have its dignity.”
“Well, we’ve argued about dignity before, I reckon.
I never completely lost the argument, now did I, about what’s dignified
and what’s not?”
She looked down at the floor in embarrassment. “We
all have to scratch our itches from time to time. Maybe I’m far from a
pure woman in the eyes of the Lord, being intimate with a man that’s not
my husband, but we’re talking about different things, and you know it.”
Abe smiled, amused by her stubbornness. Their
feelings for one another would never be undermined by differences of
opinion.
His smile faded as other thoughts intruded. “What do
I do about Evie? She’s been a nervous filly ever since Ellen got her
throat cut, and I don’t rightly blame her. You already know about her and
Billy Trevor and what Lazarus done to them. What if Billy’s back like
everyone’s saying?”
Ella May gestured with a nod in the general direction
of the mansion. “Go up and check for yourself. If they don’t like it,
Sheriff Krueger isn’t going to arrest you for knocking at a door and
asking polite questions. If the Trevors are really up at the house like
everyone says, maybe they’d be pleased to meet you. You’ve never had the
opportunity to apologize for what Lazarus did to that boy. You said you
wanted to do that eventually.”
Abe pursed his lips and nodded. It was nerve-racking
wondering if the Trevors would come after the Darkers some unexpected day
for what Lazarus had done to Billy the night Lazarus had found Billy and
Evie together at the old mill. Or had their revenge already begun? Maybe
the evil little machines were Billy’s doing after all. Maybe before it
was all over, they’d close the die-cast plant in retaliation as well.
“Regardless,” Ella May said. “Let Evie go.”
She said it softly. Abe looked at her in surprise.
“Let her go before Lazarus hurts her. Let her go
before she tries to kill herself. She’s going to have a nervous breakdown
sooner or later, Abraham. You and Lazarus and Noah put her under too much
pressure.”
“It’s not that bad with us, Ella May. We’re family.
We’re all that’s left of the Darker name.”
Ella May’s eyes widened with anger. “Lazarus raped
her, committed incest, and somebody in this town murdered her best
friend!”
“I told her I should find her someone to marry her
proper.”
“That’s not the way it’s done! Let her choose her
own husband! If it’s Billy Trevor, let her go to him!”
Abe radiated cold anger. It was hard to take
disagreement for something so personal.
“You can’t keep her caged like some little bird,”
Ella May said. “Even mothers have been known to smother their own
children trying to hold them too tight.”
Abe shrugged, willing to concede the point for the
sake of avoiding an argument. “If I let Evie go, what about Lazarus?”
Ella May stared at him with fire in her eyes.
“You know how dangerous he is,” he said. “I don’t
want to have to hurt him.”
“You’d better be more concerned about Evie.”
There was so much to think about. Everything was all
tangled up like a mass of intertwining vines. He could never hope to
separate one from the others and deal with them one at a time. He
sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Ella May was silent for a time. When he glanced up
at her, there were tears in her eyes. “What?” he said. “What’d I do
now?”
“Let Evie go. And let Lazarus and Noah go. Abraham,
if they can’t live without you, they’re younger than you are, and they’re
going to outlive you. They have to learn to stand on their own feet
sooner or later. Wean your family before it’s too late for us!”
Abe moaned in renewed misery. All too often of late
she was bringing up the same subject to bicker over. “It’s just not a
good time for me right now,” he said.
“I’m thirty-three years old!” she cried. “In another
few years, we can’t even count on having a healthy baby! What are you
going to do then, dump me for some younger girl to have your sons, or risk
an end to the Darker name altogether?”
Abe stared at the floor again, alarmed by the weight
of Ella May’s logic. “You know I’d like nothing better,” he pleaded.
“You know that!”
When she began weeping, Abe opened his arms to
comfort her. Ella May grabbed her purse and scurried back into the
shadows. “Don’t you dare get mushy with me! We’ll just start messing
around and you won’t let me go until morning, and we’ll both stink like
pigs, and I’ll have to work all day without any sleep. I told you we
weren’t going to do that anymore, not until we’re married proper.”
Abe stood staring at the outline of her body in the
shadows. She was what he wanted most in the world. Her every argument
was like a hammer smacking away at the head of a nail and never once
missing. Aside from Evie, Ella May was the only person on the face of the
earth who could make him feel warm and loving.
“Don’t look at me like that! Abe, I said no!”
With Ella May, he could be himself, a brute and a
tyrant, and it never seemed to matter to her. He reached for her and she
dodged half-heartedly, When his hand brushed against her breasts, he
hooked four fingers between the buttons of her blouse and pulled her into
the light.
She whimpered protest, but perspiration beaded her
forehead. He had to smile at the way her uncombed hair framed her pretty
face like a dark hood. Eyes like jewels caught glimmers of light from
overhead. The astonishment on her face was for her own uncontrollable
passion, not for his uncouth behavior. It had pleased him to no end when
she had told him once that no other man had ever aroused her so. “Please
don’t tear my clothes,” she said without emotion even as Abe proceeded to
rip her blouse open and reach for the warm body inside.
“I will,” was the last thing he said for the balance
of the evening. It was a promise she extracted from him each time they
made love. He would be a proper father to any children he fathered, and
proudly so.
And then Ella May proceeded with quiet desperation to
try to make it happen.
