Jezebel's Blues by Barbara Samuel, Ruth Wind

as a child, when townspeople snubbed his mother so that it was obvious enough for even a six-year-old to understand. He’d hated it when his sister had cried over the names school children called her. He’d hated it when…
    Always. In Gideon, his walls crumbled and he became as vulnerable as a naked baby bird fallen from its nest. Out there on the road, playing blues or just roaming, at least he had some feathers.
    He had to find his sister. And once he found her, he would take her out of Gideon, too, so he never had to come back here again.
    * * *
    As Eric rigidly walked out of the club, Celia stood on the dance floor feeling as oddly deprived as she had the morning he’d rolled away from her, leaving her cold after the heat they’d shared in the middle of her bed.
    Remembering the loneliness in his eyes that morning, she frowned. Then forgetting everything else, she followed him out the open door of the Five O’Nine.
    In spite of the steaminess of the club, there had been at least a few overhead fans beating the air, moving it around. As she stepped into the night, there was no such luxury. The air struck her like a soft, wet net, clinging to her hair and sticking her dress to her body and making her legs crawl beneath the stockings. For a minute, she couldn’t catch her breath and stood just outside the door, looking for Eric.
    His figure was shrouded by the shadows of a great, old pine. He was bent over, his hands on his knees, like a man who wanted to rid himself of an evil in his belly. Sorrow rose from him in waves.
    She approached quietly and stopped a foot or two away from him. “Who are you?” she asked.
    Eric straightened. For a long moment, he stared at her, his jaw hard, his eyes shuttered. “No one you’d want to know, sugar,” he said in his rough voice. “Trust me.”
    Then he turned and strode off into the forest. The darkness swallowed him in an instant. Celia crossed her arms, struck suddenly by two facts.
    The night and everything about it was once again reminiscent of one of her father’s novels. She and Eric had taken their places and acted them out perfectly—he was the tortured and magnetic drifter; she was the woman drawn irrevocably to his fire, a fire kindled in hell. Even the music now was right, and the air. She felt as though she were trapped in some strange dream from which she couldn’t escape.
    As disturbing as that was, the second fact was even more so. Even knowing her father would write the scene in just this way, knowing that Eric was obviously a man with a grim past and no future, she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
    It disgusted her. She’d never liked her father’s heroines. They were always passive creatures, at the mercy of storms and men and their own emotions. Victims, every last one of them.
    She raised her chin and headed back into the club. She was no victim—and she’d thwart this story line if it was the last thing she did. For a moment, on the threshold of the club, she paused and looked toward the river, toward Jezebel, hearing the seductively calm sound of her waters singing over the rocks in her path.
    Jezebel. Celia smiled, feeling a sudden kinship with the river. There might be lessons that a river named Jezebel could teach a woman if she were willing to learn.
    She took her seat next to Lynn, strangely fortified.
    “How do you know Eric?” Lynn asked.
    Celia shook her head, still reluctant to share the story of the flood. “I don’t, not really.”
    Lynn inclined her head. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary, Celia. Come on. You must have met him before.”
    “I don’t really want to talk about it, okay?”
    “Okay.” Lynn took a long swallow of her gin and tonic, eyes shining secretively. “Do you know who he is?”
    Celia sighed, seeing she would have to listen if she wanted to be finished with the subject. “Should I?”
    “I’d say so. He’s as much a local hero as your daddy.”
    Frowning, Celia looked at