“You’re disgusting!” Laurie looked nauseated herself.

Bailey and Bobby hauled him away from the booth.

“Did he hit you?” Belle asked, breathless with shock.

Chase slid back into the booth beside Laurie and put a hand on her shoulder.

Looking half scared and half excited now that Billy was gone, Laurie shook her head no. Chase didn’t move his hand, and she didn’t brush it off.

“My God,” Meryl said, looking stunned. “I can’t believe he’d do that.”

“Hit a woman?” Chase turned to stare after the other men while they made their way to the front door. “Why not? He doesn’t mind hitting his wife. Why would he mind hitting somebody else’s wife?”

Belle muttered something.

“What, Belle?” her brother asked her.

“I said, at least he didn’t hit on someone else’s wife.”

Chase took his hand off his sister-in-law’s shoulder.

The whole restaurant and bar had gone quiet, all other conversations ceasing as diners and drinkers watched Billy Crosby being thrown out.

“You going to put him out in this weather?” a man at a front table asked.

At that moment lightning flashed, and the electricity in the bar flickered again, causing a murmur of disquiet to go around the restaurant and bar.

“He’s not staying in here to bother anybody else tonight,” Bailey informed everybody who was listening. “Maybe some nice cool rain on his face will cool him off.”

“I don’t think you ought to put anything out there tonight,” a woman said.

“Not even a drunk,” somebody else called out.

“Not even Billy!” a man said, and a few people laughed.

Bailey ordered, “Open the door, Bobby.”

They threw him outside into the pouring rain.

The storm, already loud enough to cover conversations, sounded like kettle drums when Bailey opened the door, and when he shut it again, the interior of the grill seemed silent by comparison until a few people broke into applause.

Bailey turned around, his hands on his hips, and looked at some of his customers who weren’t clapping. “Don’t be mad at me,” he advised them. “Billy started it, like he starts any trouble he gets into. I’m just ending it. Everything bad that ever happens to Billy Crosby? You can bet he caused it, and it’s about time he suffered some consequences for it.”

A LITTLE LATER, after Bobby had returned to the booth and the restaurant settled down, Chase turned to his sister-in-law. “Did you drive over? I didn’t see your car outside.”

“I walked.” Laurie raised her right hand and put it palm up to the ceiling as if to catch some of the raindrops thundering on the tin roof. The din was now so loud that she had to raise her voice so they could hear her even just across their table. “So who’s taking me home?”

“We can’t,” Meryl said, glancing at Belle. “I’ve got my backseat full of files.”

“I’m too drunk,” Bobby said. He was too young to drink legally, but that hadn’t stopped him from guzzling what his brother provided when Bailey wasn’t looking.

“Oh, all right, I will,” Chase volunteered, with a feigned sigh of resignation.

On the way out, Laurie noticed they hadn’t tossed Billy Crosby’s cowboy hat out with him. It still lay where it had fallen on the floor, where it had been trampled in the melee. Serves him right, she thought, remembering the nasty way he had looked at her chest, to say nothing of the swing he had taken at her. Serves him right if it was ruined and he never got it back. She grabbed it from the floor and carried it with her outside to make sure it got soaked in the rain.

IT WAS 10:00 P.M. when they ran through the rain to their vehicles.

Meryl let Belle off at the bank and then left to check on the power situation at his office.

Chase chauffeured his sister-in-law to the big stone house.

When they were inside, dripping all over the kitchen floor, he went upstairs, after saying he would gather up a change of clothing to take over to the motel with him. Laurie stood in the kitchen for a few moments, listening to the thunder and lightning and the powerful downpour that sounded as if it might batter down the walls and wash them all away. She was chilled and shivering and longed to strip off her wet clothes and get warm. Hot shower or bare warm arms-either sounded delicious to her at that moment. Both at the same time would be even better. When she realized she still held Billy’s ruined hat, she contemptuously tossed it aside. She followed her brother-in-law up the stairs, trembling from cold and desire, trailing her wet fingers along the banister.

A LITTLE LATER young Red Bosch drove by Bailey’s Bar & Grill and thought he saw somebody lying flat on the pavement in the parking lot in the pouring rain. He turned in to take a look, shone the headlights of his pickup truck on the object of his concern and saw it was Billy Crosby lying there. Red put his truck in park, threw open his driver’s side door and ran through the rain to see if Billy was dead. He wasn’t. He was just dead drunk, from what the teenager could tell. Red managed to prod Billy to his feet, more or less, and guide him to the truck with the heavens nearly drowning both of them before they got there.

He drove Billy home to Valentine and their little boy.

14

ALONE AT THE RANCH with Jody, Annabelle scurried around to get things done before the power went out, as it often did during electrical storms. Her granddaughter trailed her everywhere, chatting up her own storm and “helping” in ways that caused more work, but for which Annabelle had endless patience. It was more patience than she’d ever had with her own children, she knew, but then that was the way of grandkids and grandparents. Boom! went the thunder, which didn’t scare little Jody at all, but only caused her to clap her hands and yell “Boom!” right back at it. Whenever the lightning flashed and cracked very close, the child flinched, but then giggled, which made Annabelle laugh, too. “Storms are exciting, aren’t they?” she said to Jody, who threw her arms up in the air and yelled “Boom!” again.

It pleased Annabelle that this child was so open and fearless.

At the same age, Belle had been a nervous girl, terrified of electrical storms, of horses, of barking dogs, of anything that startled her sensitive nervous system. Annabelle had dreaded storms of all kinds then, and knew that a long night was ahead of her as she tried to calm and comfort Belle.

Eventually Belle got over most of those fears, if not the hypersensitivity.

Annabelle thought the thunderstorm was carrying on as if it might wash the ranch into another state. When it rained like this, she pictured everything sliding east until it landed in one massive mud pile in Kansas City. She could only imagine how it was beating up on the poor little town of Rose.

When Hugh called from the Rose Motel to tell her he couldn’t make it home, he told her that the smaller trees in town were bending half over and there was hail the size of ball bearings.

“The highway is already flooded?” she asked in wonder.

“Yes, it is, and I’ll bet you’ve never seen whitecaps in Kansas.”

“Whitecaps! You’re pulling my leg.”

“I’m not. Right there on the highway. It looked like a river.”

“Have you talked to the kids-”

Annabelle lost her connection to Hugh just when she was about to ask if he had seen Belle, Bobby, Chase, or Laurie. Surely they’d have enough sense to get in out of the rain without their father telling them to do so. She also wanted to tell him their granddaughter was at the ranch. On the other hand, she was relieved when the phone went out, because it meant she didn’t have to tell him why he might have to finance a trip to Colorado Springs for his spoiled-rotten daughter-in-law.

“That was Grandpa,” she told Jody.

“I talk to him?”