Magnolia Wednesdays Part 1

Magnolia Wednesdays.

Wendy Wax.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

It would be nice if a book sprang completely out of the imagination fully formed with all the pertinent details in place. I keep waiting for this to happen, but each time there are countless things that need to be identified and understood to make characters and their environments feel real. The Internet is a great place to start, but for me there's nothing like a live person willing to talk about what they do and know.

This time out, I'd like to thank Phyllis DeNeve, owner of Atlanta Dance, and her instructors, especially Vonnie Marie Heard, for introducing me to ballroom dance and for allowing me to observe belly dance. It took me a while to realize I was better off watching than partic.i.p.ating. Eight years of ballet should have made me a lot more graceful than I am!

Thanks, too, to Marcia Kublanow and Rita Silverman for sharing their knowledge of New York City and for helping me find a place for Vivien to live. And to Trish Coughlin Higgins for bringing Stone Seymour, senior international correspondent, to life. I also want to thank Rebecca Ritchie, interior designer, who is not only talented but knows how almost everything works, for her input on the interiors of Magnolia Hall and Melanie's Magnolia Ballroom.

I owe a big thank-you to Chief J. C. Mosier, precinct one constables' office, Harris County, Texas, for giving me the information I needed in a way I could understand.

And as always I'm grateful to Karen White, unflagging critique partner and friend, for not allowing me to settle for "the things in the box." I'm glad we're on this road together.

1.

WELL-BRED GIRLS FROM good southern families are not supposed to get shot.

Vivien Armstrong Gray's mother had never come out and actually told her this, but Vivi had no doubt it belonged on the long list of unwritten, yet critically important, rules of conduct on which she'd been raised. Dictates like "Always address older women and men as ma'am and sir" and "Never ask directly for what you want if you can get it with charm, manners, or your family name." And one of Vivien's personal favorites, "Although it's perfectly fine to visit New York City on occasion in order to shop, see shows and ballets, or visit a museum, there's really no good reason to live there."

Vivien had managed to break all of those rules and quite a few others over the last forty-one years, the last fifteen of which she'd spent as an investigative reporter in that most Yankee of cities.

The night her life fell apart Vivi wasn't thinking about rules or decorum or anything much but getting the footage she needed to break a story on oil speculation and price manipulation that she'd been working on for months.

It was ten P.M. on a muggy September night when Vivien pressed herself into a doorway in a darkened corner of a Wall Street parking garage a few feet away from where a source had told her an FBI financial agent posing as a large inst.i.tutional investor was going to pay off a debt-ridden commodities trader.

Crouched beside her cameraman, Marty Phelps, in the heat-soaked semidarkness, Vivien tried to ignore the flu symptoms she'd been battling all week. Eager to finally doc.u.ment the first in a string of long awaited arrests, she'd just noted the time-ten fifteen P.M.-when a bullet sailed past her cheek with the force of a pointy-tipped locomotive. The part of her brain that didn't freeze up in shock realized that the bullet had come from the wrong direction.

Marty swore, but she couldn't tell if it was in pain or surprise, and his video camera clattered onto the concrete floor. Loudly. Too loudly.

Two pings followed, shattering one of the overhead lights that had illuminated the area.

Heart pounding, Vivien willed her eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, but she couldn't see Marty, or his camera, or who was shooting at them. Before she could think what to do, more bullets buzzed by like a swarm of mosquitoes after bare flesh at a barbecue. They ricocheted off concrete, pinged off steel and metal just like they do in the movies and on TV. Except that these bullets were real, and it occurred to her then that if one of them found her, she might actually die.

Afraid to move out of the doorway in which she cowered, Vivien turned and hugged the hard metal of the door. One hand reached down to test the locked k.n.o.b as she pressed her face against its pock-marked surface, sucking in everything that could be sucked, trying to become one with the door, trying to become too flat, too thin, too "not there" for a bullet to find her.

Her life did not pa.s.s before her eyes. There was no highlight reel-maybe when you were over forty a full viewing would take too long?-no snippets, no "best of Vivi," no "worst of," either, which would have taken more time.

What there was was a vague sense of regret that settled over her like a shroud, making Vivi wish deeply, urgently, that she'd done better, been more. Maybes and should-haves consumed her; little bursts of clarity that seized her and shook her up and down, back and forth like a pit bull with a rag doll clenched between its teeth.

Maybe she should have listened to her parents. Maybe she would have been happier, more fulfilled, if she hadn't rebelled so completely, hadn't done that expose on that Democratic senator who was her father's best friend and political ally, hadn't always put work before everything else. If she'd stayed home in Atlanta. Gotten married. Raised children like her younger sister, Melanie. Or gone into family politics like her older brother, Hamilton.

If regret and dismay had been bulletproof, Vivien might have walked away unscathed. But as it turned out, would'ves, should'ves, and could'ves were nowhere near as potent as Kevlar. The next thing Vivien knew, her regret was pierced by the sharp slap of a bullet entering her body, sucking the air straight out of her lungs and sending her crumpling to the ground.

Facedown on the concrete, grit filling her mouth, Vivien tried to absorb what had happened and what might happen next as a final hail of bullets flew above her head. Then something metal hit the ground followed by the thud of what she was afraid might be a body.

Her eyes squinched tightly shut, she tried to marshal her thoughts, but they skittered through her brain at random and of their own accord. At first she was aware only of a general ache. Then a sharper, clearer pain drew her attention. With what clarity her befuddled brain could cling to, she realized that the bullet had struck the only body part that hadn't fit all the way into the doorway. Modesty and good breeding should have prohibited her from naming that body part, but a decade and a half in New York City compelled her to acknowledge that the bullet was lodged in the part that she usually sat on. The part on which the sun does not shine. The part that irate cab drivers and construction workers, who can't understand why a woman is not flattered by their attentions, are always shouting for that woman to kiss.

Despite the pain and the darkness into which her brain seemed determined to retreat, Vivi almost smiled at the thought.

There were shouts and the pounding of feet. The concrete shook beneath her, but she didn't have the mental capacity or the energy to worry about it. The sound of approaching sirens pierced the darkness-and her own personal fog-briefly. And then there was nothing.

Which at least protected her from knowing that Marty's camera was rolling when it fell. That it had somehow captured everything that happened to her-from the moment she tried to become one with the door to the moment she shrieked and grabbed her b.u.t.t to the moment they found her and loaded her facedown onto the stretcher, her derriere pointing upward at the concrete roof above.

Vivien spent the night in the hospital apparently so that everyone in possession of a medical degree-or aspirations to one-could examine her rear end. The pain pills muted the pain in her posterior to a dull throb, but there didn't seem to be any medication that could eliminate her embarra.s.sment.

When she woke up the next morning, exhausted and irritated from trying to sleep on her side as well as round-the-clock b.u.t.t checks, she found a bouquet of b.u.t.t-shaped balloons from the network news division sitting on her nightstand. A bouquet of flowers arranged in a b.u.t.t-shaped vase sat beside it. No wonder there was a trade deficit. We seemed to be importing endless versions of b.u.t.tocks.

Making the mistake of flipping on the television, she was forced to watch a replay of last night's shooting-the only footage in what they called a sting gone awry was of her-and discovered that she was one of the last human beings on the face of the earth to see it. Everyone from the morning anchors at her own network to the hosts of the other networks' morning talk shows seemed to be having a big yuck over it.

If she'd been one for dictates and rules, she would have added, "If a well-bred girl from a good southern family slips up and does somehow get shot, she should make sure the wound is fatal and not just humiliating."

If she'd died in that parking garage, they would have been hailing Vivi as a hero and replaying some of her best investigative moments. Instead she was a laughingstock.

Vivien swallowed back her indignation along with the contents of her stomach, which kept threatening to escape. She desperately wanted to take her rear end and go home where both of them could get some privacy.

The phone rang. She ignored it.

It was almost noon when Marty strolled into the room. He was tall and lanky with straight brown hair he was always pushing out of his eyes and a long pale face dominated by a beak of a nose. She always pictured him rolling AV equipment into a high school cla.s.sroom or caressing computer keys with his long, surprisingly delicate fingers. He was a gifted photojournalist and over the last ten years had demonstrated that he would follow her anywhere to get a story and could shoot video under the most trying circ.u.mstances as he had, unfortunately, proven yet again last night.

Marty looked relaxed and well rested. But then, he hadn't taken a bullet in his b.u.t.t last night. Or had people prodding and laughing at him since.

"You don't look so good," he said by way of greeting.

"You're kidding?" Vivien feigned chagrin. "And here I thought I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for my close-up."

He dropped down onto the bedside chair, and she envied the fact that he could sit without discomfort or forethought. If he noted the jealousy that must have flared in her eyes, he didn't comment.

"If you've brought anything shaped like a b.u.t.t or with a picture of a b.u.t.t on it, or are even remotely considering using the word *b.u.t.t' in this conversation, you might as well leave now," she said.

"My, my, you certainly are touchy this morning."

"Touchy?" She snorted. "You don't know the half of it."

They regarded each other for a moment while Vivien wondered if she could talk him into breaking her out of here.

"Your mother called me on my cell this morning," Marty said. "I heard from Stone, too."

About five years ago her mother, noting that Vivien had had a longer relationship with her cameraman than she'd ever had with anyone she dated and frustrated at the slowness of Vivien's responses, had started using Marty as a middleman. Stone Seymour, who actually was her boyfriend, or, as he liked to call himself, Vivien's main squeeze, used Marty to reach her, too, especially when he was on a.s.signment in some war-smudged part of the globe from which communication was difficult and sporadic and Vivien had forgotten to clear her voice-mail box or plug in her phone.

"How in the world did he hear about this already?" Stone was CIN's senior international correspondent and the network's terrorist expert, which meant he spent great blocks of time in places so remote that even the latest technology was rendered useless.

"He was doing live shots from outside Kabul early this morning and one of the New York producers told him. And, um, I think he might have seen the, um, video on . . ." There was a long drawn out bobbing of his Adam's apple. ". . . Um, YouTube."

Her gaze moved from Marty's throat to his face, which was strangely flushed. "Did you say YouTube?"

Marty shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his long frame clearly too large for the piece of furniture just like his Adam's apple seemed too large for his throat. He looked away.

"What does YouTube have to do with me?"

Marty met her gaze, swallowed slowly and painfully again. "I hit my head when I fell and missed most of what happened after that."

She waited. As an investigative reporter, silence had always been one of her best weapons.

"But apparently the target sensed something was up from the beginning. When the undercover guy approached him to complete the transaction, he got nervous and pulled out a gun. I never expected a commodities trader to show up armed. Isn't white-collar crime supposed to be nonviolent?

"Anyway, he must have been really nervous, because the agent said the guy's hand was shaking so badly they're not even sure whether the first shot was intentional. That was the bullet that came between us and made me drop my camera."

"So how'd I get shot? What were all the rest of those bullets?"

"It just got out of control. Somebody on the FBI's side fired back-some rookie, it looks like-and then it was the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. I don't think they even realized we were there. I sure would like to know why your contact kept that tidbit to himself."

It was Vivi's turn to look away and for her Adam's apple to feel too big for her throat. She hadn't actually notified her contact that they'd planned to be there. She'd thought they'd get better footage if no one was mugging for the camera. And she hadn't expected the commodities trader to have a gun, either.

"The target is dead," Marty continued. "And there's going to be an internal investigation. It was a real screwup. And, um, strangely enough when I dropped my camera it got wedged up against a tire, rolling. And, um, trained on you. I mean what are the odds of that happening? It's actually kind of funny, really." His voice trailed off when he saw her face. "In a bizarre sort of way."

"Yeah," Vivien said. "It's hysterical."

"So anyway, while I was out cold the FBI took my camera and watched the video to see if it would provide any clues as to what went down, who was at fault. But, um, unfortunately the only thing on the tape was . . . you."

"And?"

"And someone made a copy. And, um, posted it on YouTube."

Vivien stared at him in silence, not intentionally this time, but because she couldn't help it.

"It's been extremely popular. Phenomenally so. I think you've already had fifty thousand views in less than twenty-four hours. You've got four and a half stars."

Now Vivien's life flashed before her eyes. In Technicolor and 3-D. She watched it in painful slo-mo. Those first years in New York, alone and friendless, a southern-fried fish out of water in a sea of self-a.s.sured northern sharks.

Then came the long grueling years spent building credibility, honing her interview techniques, building her contact base, developing her research skills. Not to mention the endless hours spent smothering her southern accent, mercilessly shortening and clipping those lazy vowels and drawn-out syllables so that she could have been from anywhere, or nowhere, under the equally merciless tutelage of New York's most expensive voice coach.

The years of working twice as hard as any man around her. Of always putting the job, the story, the next break before anything else. Before family, before friends, before lovers. She had worked with single-minded determination until the name Vivien Gray became synonymous with "inside scoop."

All of it ground to dust by a ten-minute video of her b.u.t.t.

Scooting on her side, she managed to swing her legs off the bed and lower her feet to the floor and ultimately to stand. Marty jumped up from his chair, concerned. "What are you doing? Are you allowed to get out of bed?"

"I don't know and I don't care. They've poked and prodded me since I got here. And when they weren't poking or prodding they were laughing. Or trying not to. One of the doctors actually told me I should have *turned the other cheek.' "

A snort of amus.e.m.e.nt escaped Marty's lips, and she shot him a withering look. "Don't you dare laugh. Don't you dare!"

Wincing with each step, she carried her clothes into the bathroom and removed the hospital gown. Her body was bruised and battered. Her underwear and jeans had holes laced with blood where the bullet had pa.s.sed through. Vivien pushed back the nausea she felt at the remembered feel of steel slamming into her flesh. Gingerly she stepped into the jeans, careful not to dislodge the dressing on her wound as she pulled them up, then tossed the underwear into the trash can.

She was about to slip an arm into the shirt she'd been wearing the night before when she noticed that it, too, had a hole in the same spot. Holding it up in front of her, she opened the bathroom door and reached out a bare arm. "Give me the T-shirt you have on under your long sleeves." She held her hand out until she felt the cotton cross her palm, then pulled it on over her head and down over her rear end.

As she walked back into the hospital room ready to bully Marty into helping her slip out of the hospital and into a cab, it occurred to her that the well-bred southern girls' code of conduct might be in need of an addendum. Because surely if such a girl should have the bad taste to not only get shot but survive, she'd better make d.a.m.ned sure her abject humiliation wasn't captured on camera, aired on national television, or uploaded to YouTube.

2.

THE CAB DEPOSITED them in front of Vivien's apartment building on West 68th on New York's Upper West Side around two P.M. after a quick stop at Duane Reade for salve and bandages and a liter of ginger ale that she hoped would settle her stomach. Telling the cab driver to wait, Marty carried her b.u.t.t planter and the drugstore bag past the day doorman, Ralph, through the lobby, and up in the elevator to her apartment on the twenty-fifth floor. Inside, he set her things on the kitchen counter and turned to face her.

"Are you sure you'll be okay?"

"Well, you can stay and dress my wound for me, if you want."

"Oh, um, sure." Marty's Adam's apple did its thing. He pushed a hank of hair out of his eyes. "If you need me to, I can . . ."

"Just yanking your chain." She went up on tiptoe and gave him a kiss on his cheek. "Thanks for coming to get me. I'm going to take it easy today, but I'll probably be in the office tomorrow. I need to salvage something from this story, though I don't know what at this point."

He paused at the door. "What do you want me to tell your mother?"

"Nothing. She is not your responsibility."

He shrugged, unwilling to admit that he couldn't say no to Caroline Baxter Gray, former debutante and emotional steamroller, who'd pursued his cooperation as relentlessly as she'd ever campaigned for her husband's political career.

"Just tell her I'll call her later."

He gave her a look.

"And I will. I will call her in a little bit." When she had the strength. When she didn't feel quite so . . . vulnerable. When she didn't feel like she needed to throw up.

"Okay." It was clear he didn't believe her, but there was really nothing he could do about it. He'd never been able to refuse her, either. Not that she was like her mother, who believed the Gray political dynasty was similar to the Kennedys'-if, Vivien thought, the Kennedys had southern drawls and a penchant for pig pulls. "Call me if you need me."

"Thanks." She walked him to the door and locked it behind him, more relieved than she'd ever admit to be home. The apartment, a corner unit in a prewar brick building, was small even by New York standards. One bedroom, one bath, and a combination galley kitchen, dining room, and living room squeezed into six hundred fifty square feet. But the location just north of Lincoln Center was incredibly convenient, and her unit had large windows facing both north and east. She'd bought it ten years ago when her salary had taken its first big hike upward and in the ensuing years had refinished the original oak floors, gutted and redone the tiny bathroom, doing the same to the kitchen several years later. And in between she'd had built-ins built in everywhere humanly possible.

Vivi loved its compactness, felt safe in her hidey-hole when she pulled the door shut behind her at night. The windows made it light and airy but forced the central air to work overtime to try to combat the heat and humidity that smote the city during the summer's final hurrah.

Her mother had compared it unfavorably to a hamster's cage and declared it could fit inside their master bathroom back at Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. On her mother's subsequent visits, which generally coincided with the opening of the New York City Ballet or an especially splashy Broadway play, they met in the lounge of the St. Regis where her parents invariably stayed or at whatever new restaurant was in vogue at the time.