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  “Whichever.”

  “Tonight was different, though,” she added, absent-mindedly coiling a thick strand of hair around her index finger. “I always thought I could be an actress, if I’d gotten the right breaks, you know. All those people getting so worked up over a book was a scream tonight.” She made a noise with her lips that sounded remarkably like it could have come from the mouth of a winded horse. “The food was good. Nothing to drink, though. No hard stuff, I mean, and I was dying for one. There was just some sort of Shirley Temple punch with lots of cherries and slices of lime floating around in it. It made me think of a children’s party.”

  “Yes, potluck,” he said, his tone completely disinterested now. “You can get the same thing on any Wednesday night at any Methodist church in the Deep South, punch and all. And the truth of the matter is, they could hold those book reviews in the fellowship hall of any church in Cherico. They really don’t need that library.”

  “Which reminds me. They discussed religion tonight, too. Well, sort of. It was insane. All this resentment built up between the husbands and the wives.” She had settled back down in her chair again, behaving herself for the time being. “That’s why I never got married, Durden. Although I would, if you would ever divorce Evie and ask me. How are things between the two of you these days, by the way? Still no children? Still no heir to the family fortune?”

  He had had enough. “That’s none of your business, Sylvie.” He checked his watch. “It’s getting late now, and I’ve got to get on home. I appreciate the report, and I’ll call you again if I need you for something. I trust your direct deposit was sufficient?”

  She nodded, her eyes now half-lidded. “More than generous, as usual.” She rose, giving him one last seductive glance. “It’s such a shame that you and I couldn’t have made it permanent, you know.”

  His smile was at once pronounced and insincere. “Hey, what could you expect of a horny Mississippi College law-school student? I was looking for a good time one night at the State Fair, and you took me for a wild ride that lasted until the day I graduated with honors.”

  She clasped her hands together and mockingly cast her eyes heavenward. “Ah, my ingenue days when I was just getting my . . . feet wet! But you have to admit, I still look pretty good.”

  “That you do. Don’t look your age by a mile.”

  “Sure you don’t want a little ride on the roller coaster for old time’s sake?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” He rose from his chair, indicating with a sweep of his hand that she should leave. “I really need to get on home to the wife, Sylvie.”

  She licked and then pouted her lips. “One little kiss, then?”

  He escorted her to the outer door and granted her wish, lingering longer than he really wanted to. Then he pulled away forcefully. “Have a safe trip tomorrow back down to Jackson.”

  He watched her walk away, some long-buried part of him wishing things had worked out for them. She might have been an inferno in bed in the days of their youth, but even then he was savvy enough to know that her profession was a liability she would never be able to escape. After all, he had political ambitions and no intention of being dragged down with her if her past ever came to light. Things were just fine the way they were. He knew she was still hopelessly in love with him and would never do anything to harm him or his career.

  Miss Voncille was an emotional wreck. Locke had driven them to his place on Perry Street after the meeting was over and was trying his best to soothe her with a glass of his best Madeira. “Here, sip on this a little, sweetheart,” he told her, handing it over as she settled in on his living room sofa. “It’ll help calm you.”

  But she downed the whole thing in one big swallow and handed the glass back immediately. “I think I’d like another one, if you don’t mind.”

  He complied, bringing back a glass for himself this time and taking a seat beside her. “You know I support you one hundred percent, Voncille. But who cares what some strange woman thinks about the Vietnam War? She means nothing to you—to either of us. You made an eloquent speech, and I’m sure everyone else at the library agreed with you.”

  This time she settled for sipping her little drink. “You’re probably right. But that awful, strident woman still triggered something in me I hadn’t thought of for a long, long time. I think I may have painted a false picture for you of what my fling with Frank was really like. Over the years, my memories have grown rosier and rosier. I know I’ve put him up on a pedestal, and I realize that’s been hard on you.”

  Locke inched closer to her, gently slipping his arm around her shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. I’m a big boy.”

  “You’re a kind, wonderful man is what you are,” she said, giving him her best smile. “And that’s far more important in the scheme of things. Anyway, the logistics of my relationship with Frank were a nightmare. If I hadn’t still been living with my parents at the time, it all might have been a lot easier. As it was, I was always sneaking out of the house, struggling to make up excuses to Mama and Poppa that sounded halfway plausible, and always feeling guilty about everything, no matter what. I look back on all that and—” But she broke off, tearing up again as she had during the drive over from the library.

  “What is it?” he asked, putting his sherry glass down beside the Oriental cat lamp on the end table and taking her hand. “You can tell me anything at this point in our relationship.”

  She alternated sniffling and sipping for a few seconds, then dabbing at her eyes with the Kleenex he’d given her earlier. Finally, she straightened up a bit and took a deep breath. “The word that came to me on the way over here tonight is payback. At the time of my involvement with Frank, I know I thought there would be no price to pay for what we were doing. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sometimes you can get away with these youthful indiscretions. But in my case, it hasn’t happened that way.”

  “Please tell me you don’t think you’re being punished for your affair with Frank,” he told her. “Because that would be the most wrongheaded thing you could possibly think.”

  “I’m not so sure. That Darwin woman was so glib about Vietnam the way she rattled off her opinions like a college professor or something. And I think most people have gone on to be glib about it nearly half a century later. Time always does that, and as a history teacher I know that only too well. Meanwhile, here I sit with my loss still feeling as fresh and painful as if it had happened yesterday. No matter how hard I try, I can’t really seem to move on. Tonight was just another example of that.”

  He thought for a while, taking a nip or two of his sherry in the interim. “Then tell me what I can do to help.”

  She looked down at the piece of Kleenex she had reduced to shreds and managed a little chuckle. “First, please get me a fresh one of these. I’m about to make a mess on your beautiful sofa, and I know Pamela and her portrait on the wall over there wouldn’t appreciate that one bit.” She put the traumatized tissue in his hand, and he headed for the bathroom.

  When he returned and resumed his seat, she had managed to compose herself considerably. “Thank you, Locke. I’m a little better now, I think. But there is something else I’ve never told you about me and Frank.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  She took an inordinate amount of time to speak, but she finally got it out. “There was a brief period there—it was right after Frank had been deployed to Vietnam—that I thought I might be pregnant. You can’t imagine how panicked I was for a while. What would I do if I was carrying his child and he never came back to us? All sorts of crazy schemes went through my head at the time. Would I run away somewhere, have the baby and give it up for adoption? I don’t even want to tell you what else I was thinking.”

  “But you weren’t pregnant, right?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was just good and late.” She was searching his face carefully for signs of disapproval but thankfully found none. “But imagine if I had been. Then I would really have
been up against it, seeing as how Frank really did never come back. That would have been a youthful indiscretion for all the world to see and judge. I don’t have any idea how my parents would have acted. They were pretty rigid in their opinions, and I was such a free spirit back then. Sometimes I didn’t even feel related to them.”

  “But it didn’t happen that way. Why torture yourself with the ‘almosts’ and the ‘what-ifs’ and such?”

  She looked him straight in the eye and spoke with intensity. “Because being an unmarried woman under any circumstances is not the way I want to go out, no matter how many years I have left.”

  He looked almost amused. “I think we’ve gotten pretty good at reading each other’s minds, Voncille. Why did I think you were going to go there again?”

  She dropped the Kleenex into her lap and inched closer to him. “Then it’s been on your mind, too.”

  “Yes, I can’t lie to you. I’ve been seriously considering everything you brought up a while back. Ceremony in the library, ceremony in a church, maybe a justice of the peace—all of it. I just haven’t made a decision yet.”

  She kept at it, sensing his lack of resistance. “Do you think you might anytime soon?”

  He looked more amused than anything else and gave her a sweet little peck on the cheek. “I promise to give you my decision soon.”

  “Maybe by the next Cherry Cola Book Club meeting?”

  He laughed in spite of himself. “Yes, Voncille. Maybe by then.”

  11

  Conqu’ring Heroes

  Jeremy came to.

  He was lying on his back looking up at the sky on this cloudless early spring evening. There were no stars yet, and he could not remember where he was or what he was doing sprawled on the ground. There was a light breeze swirling all around him, and he felt its chill on his face and hands. Then he sat up gingerly, crying out sharply as something caught in the vicinity of his rib cage. Whether muscle or bone was the culprit, it was uncomfortable to breathe. His head was also throbbing, and when he slowly reached up and ran his hand through his hair, he came away with something sticky clinging to his fingers. When he touched the tip of his index finger to his tongue, he tasted his own blood.

  Through the filmy dusk, he stared ahead and discerned the outline of what remained of his little Volvo. It had been reduced in size by half, squeezed like an accordion against the trunk of an enormous pine tree. The entire hood and front seat of the car no longer occupied any significant portion of space. They now consisted of a few inches of twisted metal and shattered glass that had fused into pine bark to create some entirely new and hideous substance. Off to the side, looking forlorn and out of place, was the door to the driver’s seat—essentially intact. Clearly, it had been shorn off at the moment of collision between car and tree, and violently cast aside, but how was that possible? Why hadn’t it been compressed like the rest? Why was he alive when his car was essentially dead?

  Jeremy tried his hardest to focus, but the pain filling up his skull would simply not allow him to do it. For a brief second or two, he had a flash of something—impulsively unbuckling his seat belt at the last possible second, flinging the door open and tumbling out before impact. Had he actually done that, or had something beyond his ken intervened on his behalf?

  Deprived of rational thought, he began to panic. Had he somehow died along with the car? Was he actually out of his body now? At first, he dismissed the idea as pure, unadulterated foolishness. But then, as if on cue to provide an answer, he could feel a light of some kind suddenly shining upon him from behind, brilliantly illuminating the forest and the wreck that had brought man-made horror to its very edges.

  It was not easy for Jeremy to twist himself around enough to face the light in the distance, but with great effort he managed to do so. He was blinded by its brilliance, and the cobwebs in his brain would allow him only one credible answer: He had indeed died, and this was what it was like during the transition. Never a drumbeater for the tidy organized religion his parents had bequeathed him, he had nonetheless always maintained a belief in something greater than himself. Perhaps he was now about to meet up with that something greater.

  Music soon followed, but it caused him to frown immediately. This was no hymn, no heavenly choir of angelic voices accompanied by golden harps. There was singing, to be sure, but it hardly sounded like it belonged in a church. He strained to catch the boisterous lyrics, and a sickening feeling spread throughout his body. Could it possibly be? His much-despised game of college football was played to rouse team spirit in the afterlife, too? Whatever the case, he was undeniably listening to the last verse of the University of Michigan fight song while sitting on the cold ground smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

  “Hail! to the victors valiant

  Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes

  Hail! Hail! to Michigan,

  The champions of the West!”

  As if that were not enough, the fight song started over from the beginning; then he heard a booming voice shouting, “Hello, out there! Anyone alive out there?!”

  Was that what God sounded like? Was he a Wolverine to boot? Did he sometimes specialize in search-and-rescue missions in today’s complex world?

  Momentarily, Jeremy was able to discern a dark, bipedal shape, and he wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be angel, demon, or something—any thing—in human form. But it was fast approaching him with a flashlight that augmented the stronger, wider beam streaming out from behind. A few feet more and Jeremy could clearly make out a man—an ordinary, older man in a windbreaker and dark baseball cap with the letter M emblazoned on it in a lighter color. He breathed a sigh of relief, realizing at that instant he was simply not ready for a supernatural encounter of any kind.

  “Here!” Jeremy managed, waving just once, but it hurt too much to stretch those particular muscles, and he quickly brought his hand down. Fiery pain raced the length of his arm. “I’m alive. At least I think I am! Are you alive, too?”

  The man covered the last few feet quickly and came to a halt, looking down on Jeremy at last. “Of course I’m alive. But Mother and I were worried to death when we saw somebody had gone off the road that they might not be.” The man took a cell phone out of his pocket and quickly punched up a number. “Ah, good deal. Cell works down here, too!” Then, “Good news, Mother. There’s a youngster alive out here. Injuries don’t seem too awful bad from what I can see. Bring down a blanket and the first-aid kit right away.”

  Jeremy completely ignored what the man was saying as something broke through the pain in his head. “That M stands for Michigan, right?”

  “It does for a fact. Go Blue!” There was a brief pause and then came the recognition. “Oh, and you probably heard Mother playing the fight song CD up in the Winnebago. She’s got it on a loop. She gets in the mood every now and then while we’re traveling around, don’tcha know? She doesn’t hear as well as she used to, either, so she turns it up real loud. First thing when we get back home after this trip down to New Orleens, I’m getting her an appointment with Dr. Brady. Oh, I believe I see her heading over to us right now.”

  For some reason, Jeremy just had to criticize the man’s pronunciation. “It’s New OR-lyuns, not New Orleens.”

  “Is it?” the man said, cocking his head. “Mother and I have never been there. We can’t wait to tour the French Quarters.”

  Jeremy continued in his correcting mode. “Just one Quarter down there.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Never mind.” Jeremy’s brain told him to switch subjects. “What do you call people from Michigan?”

  “Michiganders,” came the reply. “It’s a lulu of a name, I’ll be the first one to admit.”

  “I thought I was right about that. So those are your headlights that had me so mesmerized and thinking of other dimensions up there on the road? That’s not the white light everybody’s on the lookout for there at the end? You’re just that couple I got behind somewhere back in Tennessee?”
r />   “Afraid Mother and I don’t hold the secrets to the universe,” the man said, breaking into subdued laughter. “Yep, those are just our high beams up there. They’re quite powerful, though, and we wanted to be sure we got a good look around. We’re partially blocking traffic the way we’ve got our big Winnebago angled up there, but who cares about that? Someone’s bound to be here soon to direct traffic around us. Mother’s punched up the park ranger’s number, too. But never mind all that. Thank God, you survived.”

  Jeremy made a feeble attempt to get to his feet, but the man quickly nixed it, pushing him back down as gently as possible. “No, no, son, don’t move. You’re to lie back and lie still. Mother’s already got an ambulance on the way. You best stay put until the paramedics arrive. They say you can do some severe damage to yourself by shifting around like that. Something may very well be broken, and you don’t want to make it worse.”

  “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I have a broken rib. I hope not more than one, though,” Jeremy told him. “Can you shine your flashlight on my head and tell me what it looks like?”

  The man complied and made an unpleasant face, shaking his head. “Doesn’t look pretty up there right now, son. Matted hair and blood mostly, don’tcha know. It’s pretty much clotted, though. I’d know how to stop you from bleeding if it hadn’t, though. Does your head hurt?”

  “It did a little while ago. Seems a little better now.”

  “You just sit tight now. Oh, here’s Mother to the rescue now.”

  Jeremy peered up at the woman, her gray hair pulled back severely in a bun. But the crow’s feet around her eyes trumpeted her kind, always-smiling nature, and Jeremy began to feel he just might get out of this mess alive after all.

  “Here’s a blanket to keep you warm, young man,” she told him, draping it over him. “It’s a Michigan Wolverine blanket. Father and I here are big fans, as I guess you know by now.”