Free Jezebel's Blues by Barbara Samuel, Ruth Wind Page B

the body looked sound. He lifted the hood and stared at the engine.
    Staring was about all he could do. Like mathematics, engine functions had always been just beyond his ken. He could change a spark plug if the need arose, fill the various reservoirs and identify problems by the sounds they made, but that was as far as it went.
    At least the car hadn’t been washed down river. He was attached to the Volvo. It was the best car he’d ever owned and had served him well for two years, since his old car…
    He shut off that line of thought with clenched teeth.
    One thing he did know was that the distributor cap had to be dry. He tugged it off and dried it, then tried to turn the engine over. Nothing. Which meant the carburetor might have gotten wet. He’d have to leave it until someone from a garage could tow the car in and check it out.
    The last thing he did was open the back door to get the guitar he’d left on the seat. Throughout the flood, he’d cursed his choice to leave it behind, in spite of the fact that it was essentially useless to him. Wild Willie Hormel had given him the ’57 Stratocaster when Eric was fifteen, and even if he never played it again, he wanted to keep it. He didn’t understand exactly what had made him leave it in the first place, except a certain panic—reminders of rainy nights he had done his best to forget.
    The black case was gone. He stared at the vacant place in the seat with a sense of terrible loss for an instant.
    Then he straightened, his jaw hard. No more illusions. The guitar, like Retta and his old car, was gone, along with everything else that had existed before that night.
    Except Laura.
    Stonily, he closed the door and the hood and headed back toward his sister’s place.
    As night crept in, he found himself drawn outside to the porch. The long day was catching up with him and he settled on a kitchen chair in the hot night, putting his feet up on the rail. In the dahlia bushes nestled around the small bungalow, crickets whirred and chirped, and the sounds of Jezebel came faintly, rushing through the night. Above the silhouettes of pine trees across the road rose the moon, round and pale, nearly full.
    Silver light shone over the road, the color of a woman’s hair, the color of her big eyes. Fey Celia.
    Eric plucked the harmonica from his shirt pocket. A shroud of clouds crossed the moon, giving it an ominous aspect, and Eric felt a ripple of foreboding shoot through his chest.
    Where was Laura?
    He knew with the certainty that stemmed from his own terrifying memories of the last flood that she would not have ventured out with the river on the rise. He’d been six, Laura nine, when Jezebel had swept them into her skirts. What he remembered in bits and pieces, Laura remembered in acute detail.
    She wouldn’t have gone out. Not voluntarily.
    Restlessly, he walked out to the road and stared down the long, dark ribbon of blacktop as if he could make her materialize. He swore and paced back to the porch, knowing he’d be unable to sleep.
    Every time he came back to Gideon, something happened. Bad things, most often. The last time, just after the accident, he’d come home to find Laura married, her husband so jealous, he didn’t even want Eric talking to her. Last time, in the hardware store, Etta’s cousin had called him a murderer.
    He paced, thinking it had only been last night he had sat with Celia in her attic, braiding her hair. It had been only this morning she had stood on her tiptoes to kiss him goodbye.
    Her kiss. Sweet as honeysuckle, rich as cream. He’d hardly known how to respond to a kiss given so freely, without demands or conditions attached. No expectations or wiles or hidden motives had marred that offering. So simple, as simple as her words, which echoed in memory no matter how he tried to push them away.
You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.
    Her generosity had slipped through his guard as nothing else could have. For the space of long moments,