Ain't She Sweet? Part 3

CHAPTER THREE.

Sugar Beth finished the potato chips that made up her breakfast and gazed across the kitchen at Gordon, who lurked in the door, looking hostile. "Get over it, will you? It's not my fault Emmett loved me more than you."

He experimented with his psychotic Christopher Walken expression, but ba.s.sets were at a disadvantage when it came to projecting menace. "Pathetic."

He looked offended.

"All right, punk." She rose from the table, crossed the living room, and opened the front door. As he trotted past, he tried to b.u.mp her, but she knew his tricks and she sidestepped, then followed him out into another chilly, drizzly February morning. Since this was Mississippi, it could be eighty by next week. She prayed she'd be long gone by then.

As Gordon began to sniff around, she gazed over at Frenchman's Bride. She'd been trying not to think about last night's encounter with Colin Byrne. At least she hadn't crumbled until she'd reached the carriage house. Old guilt clung to her like cobwebs. She should have tried harder to make amends, but apparently, she hadn't grown up as much as she wanted to think.

Why, of all people, did he have to be the one who bought Frenchman's Bride? If he'd ever spoken to the press about moving back to Parrish, she'd missed it. But then he seemed to shun publicity, and there hadn't been that many interviews. Even his jacket photo was distant and grainy, or she'd have been better prepared for the dangerous man she'd encountered.

She made her way toward the boxwood hedge that separated their properties and pushed aside the bottom branches. "Right through here, devil dog."

For once, he didn't give her trouble.

"Make Mommy proud," she called out.

He took a few moments sniffing around, then found a satisfactory spot in the middle of the lawn to do his business.

"Nice doggie."

Despite what she'd told Byrne, she'd read Last Whistle-stop on the Nowhere Line right along with the rest of the country. How could she have ignored the story of people she'd heard about all her life? The black and white families, rich and poor, who'd populated Parrish during the 1940s and 1950s, had included her own grandparents, Tallulah, Leeann's great-uncle, and, of course, Lincoln Ash.

The public's appet.i.te for atmospheric Southern nonfiction had been whetted by John Berendt's runaway best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But while Midnight had dealt with murder and scandal among the wealthy aristocracy of old Savannah, Last Whistle-stop had mined gold from small-town life. Colin Byrne's story of a Mississippi town recovering from a segregationist legacy had been filled with the eccentric characters and domestic dramas readers loved, along with a strong dose of Southern folklore. Other books had tried to do the same thing, but Byrne's fondness for the town, combined with his wry observations as an outsider, had put Last Whistle-stop in a league of its own.

She realized Gordon was trotting toward the house, not one bit intimidated by its grandeur. "Come back here."

Of course he ignored her.

"I mean it, Gordon. I have to go into town, and if you don't come here right now, I'm leaving without you."

She couldn't be sure, but she thought he blew her a raspberry.

"You know you'll try to nip me if I come after you." He never went so far as to actually hurt her, but he liked to keep her on her toes.

She watched him trot up the steps to the veranda. "Fine. Do me a favor, and don't bother to come home." Contrary to the habits of the rest of his breed, Gordon refused to roam. He liked torturing her too much to hit the open road. She stomped back toward the carriage house. What did it say about a person when even her dog hated her?

She grabbed her purse, stuck an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and set out to search the depot for the painting. But as she tramped down the drive to her car, she found a ticket for unlawful overnight parking tucked under her windshield wiper. Terrific. She shoved it beneath the visor and headed for town.

Purlie's Auto Shop was still doing business, but an office supply store sat in the s.p.a.ce once occupied by Spring Fancy Millinery. Diddie had taken her there every year to buy an Easter bonnet, right up until sixth grade, when Sugar Beth had rebelled.

Diddie's nostrils fluttered like b.u.t.terfly wings when she was displeased. "You ungrateful child. Exactly how is our Dear Lord supposed to know it's Resurrection Day if He sees you sittin' there in church bareheaded like some heathen? Answer me that, Miss Sugar Baby?"

Sugar Beth had fluttered her nostrils right back. "Do you really think Jesus Christ is goin' to stay in his grave just because I'm not wearin' a hat?"

Diddie had laughed and gone to find her cigarettes.

A longing for her loving, imperfect mother welled up inside her so strong that it hurt, but her feelings toward her father were all bitter. "He's not my real father, is he, Diddie? Somebody else got you pregnant, and then Daddy married you."

"Sugar Beth Carey, you hush your mouth. Just because your father is a reprobate doesn't mean I am, too. Now I don't ever want to hear you say anything like that again."

The fact that Sugar Beth's silver-blue eyes perfectly mirrored her father's made it impossible to hold on for long to the fantasy of Diddie having a secret lover.

She supposed her parents' marriage had been inevitable, but they couldn't have been more ill-suited. Diddie was the extravagantly beautiful, fun-loving daughter of a local storekeeper. Griffin was the heir to the Carey Window Factory. Short, homely, and intellectually brilliant, Griffin was smitten by Parrish's reigning belle, while Diddie was secretly contemptuous of the boy she considered an "ugly little toad." At the same time, she coveted everything a union with him would bring her.

Griffin must have known that Diddie was incapable of giving him the adoration he craved, but he'd married her anyway, then punished her for not loving him by openly living with another woman. Diddie retaliated by appearing not to care. Eventually, Griffin raised the stakes by turning his back on the person Diddie most loved...their daughter.

Despite their mutual hatred, they never considered divorce. Griffin was the town's economic leader, Diddie its social and political one. Each refused to give up what the other offered, and the marriage ground on, dragging a confused little girl in its destructive wake.

Sugar Beth pa.s.sed a McDonald's, spruced up since her high school days, and a travel agency sporting one of the downtown area's new maroon and green awnings. She turned on Valley. The one-block street, which was anch.o.r.ed at the end by the abandoned railroad depot, had escaped the town's revitalization efforts, and she parked her car on a crumbling patch of blacktop. As she gazed at the dilapidated redbrick building, she saw the place where Colin Byrne had stood for his fuzzy author photo.

Shingles had blown off the depot's roof, and ancient graffiti covered the splintered plywood boarding up the windows. Cans and broken bottles littered the weeds by the tracks. Why had Tallulah thought it was so important to preserve this old ruin? But her aunt had been obsessed with local history, the same as Sugar Beth's father, and apparently she hadn't seen the wisdom of bulldozing the place.

As Sugar Beth got out of the car, she thought of the letter lying crumpled in the bottom of her purse: Dear Sugar Beth, I'm leaving you the carriage house, the depot, and, of course, the painting because you're my only living relative and, regardless of your behavior, blood is thicker than water. The depot is a disgrace, but, by the time I purchased it, I lacked the energy and the funds for repairs. The fact that it was allowed to deteriorate so badly does not speak well of this town. I'm certain you'd like to sell it, but I doubt you'll have any luck finding a buyer. Even the Parrish Community Advancement a.s.sociation lacks proper respect for history.

The carriage house is a registered national landmark. Keep Lincoln's studio as it is. Otherwise, everything goes to the University. As for the painting...You'll either find it or you won't.

Cordially, Tallulah Shelborne Carey P.S. No matter what your mother told you, Lincoln Ash loved me.

Tallulah's insistence that she was the great love of Lincoln Ash's life had driven Diddie wild. Tallulah said Ash had promised to come back to Parrish for her as soon as his one-man show in Manhattan was over, but he'd been hit by a bus the day before it closed. Diddie told everyone the painting was a figment of Tallulah's imagination, but Griffin said it wasn't. "Tallulah has that painting, all right. I've seen it." But when Diddie pressed him for details, he'd just laughed.

Tallulah refused to display the painting, saying it was all she had left of him, and she wasn't going to share it with curiosity seekers or those pompous art critics Ash had despised during his lifetime. They'd only a.n.a.lyze the life right out of it. "The world can gawk all it wants after I'm dead," she'd said. "For now, I'm keeping what I have to myself."

Sugar Beth worked the key in the lock. The door was warped, so she had to use her shoulder to push it open. As she stepped inside, something flew at her head. She shrieked and ducked. When her heartbeat returned to normal, she pushed her cowboy hat more firmly down and went the rest of the way inside.

She could see just enough to make her cringe. A putrid crust of bird c.r.a.p and dirt covered the scarred old benches of what had once been the depot's small waiting room. Rusty streaks ran down one of the walls, a fetid puddle sat in the middle of the hardwood floor, and pieces of broken furniture lay scattered around like old bones. Beneath the ticket window, a pile of filthy blankets, old newspapers, and empty tin cans indicated that someone had once squatted here. Her dust allergies kicked up, and she started sneezing. When she recovered, she pulled out the flashlight she'd brought along and began to look for the painting.

In addition to the waiting area, the depot had storage rooms, closets, an office behind the ticket window, and public rest rooms that were unspeakably foul repositories of exposed pipes, stained and broken porcelain, and ominous piles of filth. For the next two hours, she unearthed splintered furniture, crates, battered file cabinets, mice droppings, and a dead bird that made her shudder. What she didn't find was any sign of the painting.

Filthy, sneezing, and grossed out, she finally sank down on a bench. If Tallulah hadn't hidden the painting in either the carriage house or the depot, where had she put it? Starting tomorrow, she'd have to begin searching out the surviving members of Tallulah's canasta club. They'd feel duty-bound to cluck their tongues over her, but they'd been her aunt's closest friends, and they were most likely to know her secrets. Just as dispiriting was the knowledge that she was down to her last fifty dollars. If she intended to keep eating, she had to find a job.

"Charming place you have here."

She sneezed, then turned to see Colin Byrne standing in the open doorway. He looked as though he might have come in from a stroll across the moors: boots, dark brown slacks, tweed jacket, fashionably rumpled hair. But the cold a.s.sessment in his eyes reminded her more of a frontier hunter than a civilized Brit. "If you're here to a.s.sault me again," she said, "you'd better have your jockstrap fastened up extra tight because I won't be so polite next time."

"My body only has a limited tolerance for venom." He slipped one stem of his designer sungla.s.ses into the open collar of his shirt and took a few steps inside. "Interesting that Tallulah left you the depot, although not surprising, I suppose, considering her feelings about family."

"I'll give you a great deal if you want to buy it."

"No, thank you."

"It made you a fortune. You could show a little grat.i.tude."

"Last Whistle-stop was about the town. The depot was a metaphor."

"I thought metaphor was a weight-loss drink? Do you always dress like a stiff?"

"As frequently as possible, yes."

"You look stupid."

"You, of course, being the ultimate fashion arbiter." He cast a disparaging eye toward her filthy jeans and dirty sweatshirt.

She slipped off her cowboy hat and wiped a cobweb from her cheek. "You were a terrible teacher."

"Abysmal." He nudged aside a piece of cable with the toe of his boot.

"Teachers are supposed to build their students' self-confidence. You called us toads."

"Only to your faces. Behind your backs, it was a bit worse, I'm afraid."

He had been a terrible teacher, sarcastic, critical, and impatient. But every once in a while, he'd been glorious, too. She remembered the way he used to read to them, words cascading like dusky music from his tongue. Sometimes the cla.s.sroom would get so quiet it felt like nighttime, and she'd pretend they were all sitting in the dark together around a campfire someplace. He had a way of inspiring the least likely students, so that the dumbest kids found themselves reading books, the athletes were writing poetry, and shyer students began to speak up, if only to protect themselves from one of his scathing put-downs. She belatedly remembered that he was also the teacher who'd finally shown her how to write a paragraph that made sense.

As she stuck her hat back on, he gazed with distaste at the pool of stagnant water on the floor. "Is it true you didn't go to your own father's funeral? That seems ignominious, even for you."

"He was dead. I'm figuring he didn't notice." She pushed herself up off the bench. "I saw you had your book photo taken in front of my property. I want royalties. A few thousand should do it."

"Sue me."

She pushed aside a section of pipe. "Exactly what are you doing here?"

"Gloating, of course. What did you think?"

She wanted to s.n.a.t.c.h up one of the broken chair legs and hit him with it, but he would undoubtedly have hit her back, and she forced herself to be practical instead. "How well did you know my aunt?"

"As well as I wanted to." He wandered over to investigate the ticket window, not at all put off by the grime. "As a history buff, she was an invaluable source, but narrow-minded. I didn't like her all that much."

"I'm sure she lost sleep over that."

He ran a finger along one of the iron bars, gazed at the dirt he'd picked up, and pulled a snowy white handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it off. "Most people don't believe the painting exists."

She didn't bother asking how he knew she was looking for it. By now, everyone in town was familiar with the terms of Tallulah's will. "It exists."

"I think so, too. But how do you know?"

"None of your g.d. business." She pointed toward a stack of crates. "There's a dead bird behind there. Make yourself useful and get it out of here."

He peered around the crates but made no move to do anything with the corpus un-delicti. "Your aunt was barmy."

"It runs in the family. And don't expect me to be ashamed. Yankees lock away loony relatives, but down here, we prop 'em up on parade floats and march 'em through the middle of town. Are you married?"

"I used to be. I'm a widower."

If she hadn't become a better person, she'd have asked if he'd killed his wife with his keen sense of humor. At the same time, she was curious. What kind of woman would have bound herself to such a critical, impossible man? Then she remembered all the high school girls sighing over him even after he'd stung them with one of his scathing rebukes. Women and difficult men. She was thankful she'd finally broken the habit.

He abandoned his investigation of the ticket window. "Tell me about boycotting your father's funeral."

"Why do you care?"

"I'm a writer. I'm fascinated by the inner workings of the narcissistic mind."

"I swan, all these big words are makin' my lil ol' head spin."

"You were so intelligent." He inspected one of the joists. "You had a fine brain, but you refused to use it for anything worthwhile."

"There you go again, knocking the fashion magazines."

"Skipping the funeral took gall, even for you."

"I had a hair appointment that day."

He waited, but she had no intention of telling him about that horrible year.

It had started out so well. She'd been the most popular freshman girl at Ole Miss, so caught up in the whirl of campus life she'd forgotten all about the Seawillows, ignoring their phone calls and standing them up when they drove over for a visit. Then one January morning Griffin had called to tell her that Diddie had died in the middle of the night from a cerebral hemorrhage. Sugar Beth had been inconsolable. She'd thought nothing worse could ever happen to her until, six weeks later, when Griffin announced that he was marrying his longtime mistress. He expected Sugar Beth to be in the front row of the church for the wedding. She'd screamed that she hated him, that she'd never set foot in Parrish again, and even though he'd threatened to disinherit her, she'd kept her word.

She'd spent his wedding day in bed with Darren Tharp, trying to numb her grief with bad s.e.x. Not long after, when Griffin was disposing of Diddie's things, he'd found Sugar Beth's guilty confession. Within days, everyone had known what she'd done to Colin Byrne, and the people who'd merely disliked her before now hated her. The Seawillows, already hurt by the way she'd abandoned them, had never spoken to her again.

She'd had no chance to reconcile with her father. Right before her final exams, barely three months after his marriage, he'd suffered a fatal heart attack. Only then did she learn that he'd made good on his threat to disinherit her. In the s.p.a.ce of five months, she'd lost her mother, her father, her best friends, and Frenchman's Bride. She'd been too young to understand how many losses were yet to come.

"Is it true that you got married three days after they buried Griffin?" Byrne asked, with no particular display of interest in her answer.

"In my defense, I cried buckets through the ceremony."

"Touching."

She pulled the key from her pocket. "It's been hilarious talking to you, but I need to lock up and get on with my day."

"Manicure and ma.s.sage?"

"Later. I have to find a job first."

One bold, dark eyebrow angled upward. "A job? I'm incredulous."

"I get bored if I have too much time on my hands."

"The papers said Emmett Hooper died bankrupt, but I was certain you'd manage to come away with something."

She thought of Gordon. "Oh, I did."

He gazed around at the awful interior of the depot, then infuriated her by lifting one corner of his mouth in what she realized was a knife-thin smile. "You really are broke, aren't you?"

"Only until I find the painting."