by that's me
Lianna finds herself stirring with an unfamiliar longing despite her resolve to get the heck out of here. She manages to squirm out of Kevin's grasp, only to have him grab her and kiss her again, this time on the mouth. She immediately kisses him back.
Later, she'll go over and over the moment, analyzing everything about it.
How his hand was slipping under her shirt again, and this time, she didn't bother to stop it…
How her own arms circled up around his neck almost against her will, like they belonged to somebody else…
How her heart must have been pounding too loudly for her to hear footsteps approaching on the gravel path…
How it must have looked to her mother when she came around the corner of the house and saw them.
Lianna will analyze the moment because she'll have little else to do, having been grounded-without her cell phone-for the rest of the summer.
"Mr. Remington?"
Gib stops short, halfway down the second-floor hall to his bedroom. He looks over his shoulder to see Great-Aunt Jeanne's nurse, Melanie.
"Yeah?" he asks, his gaze flicking with interest from her blond hair pulled back into a becoming ponytail to her ample breasts straining the floral fabric of her nurse's smock. Even in the frumpy uniform, she's hotter than the blazing Georgia sun.
"Your aunt asked me to come down and find one of you."
"One of me?" he asks, fixing her with a lazy grin, his troubles momentarily forgotten. "You can have all of me."
She smiles at the flirtatious comment "I mean, she asked me to find you, or your sister, or your cousin Charlotte."
"I'm the most interesting of the bunch… I promise you that."
He sees the pink flush coloring her cheeks before she ducks her head, charmingly flustered.
"All right, so let's go on up and I'll talk to the old gal. What's it about? Does she need me to move a piece of furniture? Or stop all those annoying devil voices in her head?"
He laughs at his own joke.
The lovely Melanie seems to lack a sense of humor. "Don't make fun of her… She's a sweet lady."
"I know she is. Sweet and," he can't resist leaning so close he can smell her fresh herbal scent-lotion, not perfume, "you have to admit, just a little bit…" He rotates an index finger alongside his ear.
To her discredit, Melanie again fails to crack a smile. She turns on the heel of her sensible white shoe and heads down the hall in the opposite direction of the third-floor stairway.
"Hey, where are you going? I thought we were going up to talk to Aunt Jeanne!"
"You are," she calls over her shoulder without a backward glance. "I'm going to get her some hot tea."
Your loss, Gib thinks with a shrug as he takes the stairs up two at a time.
And Aunt Jeanne's, he adds, as a wall of heat hits him.
Hot tea? Is Melanie trying to kill the old bat?
"Cripes, it's a sauna up here," he comments to the old woman, who's facing the opposite direction in her wheelchair. "You need to open some windows, Aunt Jeanne."
He strides toward the nearest dormer, deciding the lovely Melanie lacks a sense of humor and common sense.
'They are open," Aunt Jeanne tells him, and he realizes she's right. Several electric fans are whirring as well.
But with the late-afternoon sun beaming in through the glass and baking the roof overhead, there is little that can be done to sufficiently cool the large space.
Why central air was never installed in this old house, Gib will never understand.
Maybe these crazy Southerners are accustomed to the heat, but he personally can't wait to get back to Boston.
Literally "crazy Southerners" in Aunt Jeanne's case, he notes as she turns her wheelchair to face him, looking somewhat wild-eyed.
"I need to know, Gilbert."
For a moment, hearing the cryptic demand and the formal name nobody ever, ever calls him, he wonders if she thinks he's her dead brother.
Then, her gnarled old hands rolling the chair closer to him with surprising speed, she says, "I need to know what was in that will."
The will.
It comes crashing back with a vengeance; all the angst of the calamitous session in Tyler Hawthorne's office.
"Do you mean what was in it for you?" he asks the expectant Aunt Jeanne. "Because that would be the same thing that was in it for me. Nothing."
"Nothing?" Her voice is tremulous, yet there seems to be a curious lack of expression in her wrinkled face.
"Nothing. He left everything to dear cousin Charlotte."
Aunt Jeanne is nodding. For a moment, he isn't sure she even heard what he said.
Then she says, her jaw set in what seems to be resignation-or even, oddly, acceptance, "That's just as I expected."
* * *
People really shouldn't play favorites.
It isn't nice.
Who was it who once said a little healthy rivalry never hurt anyone?
Probably your mother… who else?
Well, she was wrong. About a lot of things.
But now isn't the time to worry about that.
Now is the time to make the final preparations of the cabin that continues to look for all the world like a vine-covered nursery rhyme cottage-or some lucky little girl's adorable playhouse.
Lucky little girl…
Pammy Sue.
Now there was a lucky little girl. With her blond ringlets and big green eyes, she was the apple of everybody's eye: Mama's, and Aunt Chessie's, and Pastor Brigham's…
Everybody's but mine.
But Pammy Sue never figured that out, not as a child, not even now, all grown up. It would simply never occur to her that one of her nearest and dearest could possibly dislike her.
Dislike?
Hah.
Even loathe is an understatement.
Yet nobody in all those years ever seemed to suspect the pure hatred expertly concealed by a mask of benevolent affection.
Pammy Sue might have won the lead in every school play, but her so-called acting talent didn 't hold a candle to mine.
It's ironic, even now, to recall that the spotlight and the applause always belonged to Pammy Sue when the truly masterful performance was unfolding right before everyone's eyes, undetected. Unappreciated.
Blind, smitten fools.
Yes, and you were right there in the front row every time, beaming, clapping for Pammy Sue along with those blind, smitten fools.
Ah, well, the perpetual deception was certainly good practice for all that lies ahead.
And it won't be long now before the ultimate curtain call is carried out in vengeful perfection.
The marsh after dark isn't a particularly appealing place to be… not even with a couple of kerosene lanterns. Their flames flicker eerily on the brick walls, casting the lone human shadow larger than life.
Which is as it s
hould be.
At least I'm the master of this domain.
Yes, but what good is that? taunts an inner voice. It's still empty.
Although not for long.
Just outside the door lies a brown carton, its sides damp and pungent with absorbed humidity.
Inside are the last few items necessary to turn this little house into a home.
First, a large flattened cardboard box must be lain across the mud floor like a fine carpet. The new door came inside it.
Next, the pieces of furniture are arranged one by one on the makeshift rug: a small wooden table and three small chairs.
Finally, the family materializes.
Three small dolls-a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead-perfectly scaled to occupy the furniture, their plastic lips frozen in garish smiles, unblinking eyes unable to witness what will unfold within these walls.
* * *
The lush, landscaped grounds at Oakgate might be inviting during the day, but at night, even with a three-quarter moon hovering above the oaks, it's the opposite.
Phyllida is glad she thought to stop in the kitchen and hunt down a flashlight-she found it in the utility drawer-before slipping out the back door; she wouldn't want to be alone out here in the dark.
She doesn't want to be alone out here at all, but she has to make this call. Brian and Wills are asleep in her room upstairs and she doesn't want to disturb them. Nor does she want to risk being overheard by anybody in the house.
So here she is, clad in a filmy summer nightgown, making her way through the shadowy back garden. The wet grass brushes against her bare feet in hastily donned flip-flops. She tries not to think about snakes, or anything else that might be slithering nearby, as she heads as far away from the house as she dares to go.
The night is still and moist; the live oaks form a canopy overhead, although it's anything but protective. Phyllida won't imagine what creatures might be tucked amid the foliage webbed in dry Spanish moss, poised to drop on her head at any moment.
She comes to a halt when she reaches the small cemetery surrounded by a low ironwork fence.
Gravestones of her ancestors loom eerily in the night. Some are thin, leaning slabs whose etching is all but worn away, glowing white beneath the moon. Others, like the large one belonging to Grandaddy and the grandmother Phyllida never knew, are elaborate monuments carved in polished black granite, rising from the earth like formidable warriors standing guard over fallen comrades.
Phyllida takes a few more tentative steps forward, until some winged creature abruptly departs an overhead branch with a rustling flutter.
She stops short, her heart pounding.
That's it. Phyllida won't venture any closer to the graveyard, and she certainly has no desire to venture past it.
Night sounds reverberate from the thicket on the far side of the iron fence: crickets, frogs, owls, an ominous, occasional rustling in the undergrowth, a distant splashing sound from the marsh and tidal creeks.
The current property line extends a little ways in. Beyond that line, to tile north and east, are acres upon acres of woods and wetlands that were once a part of the Remingtons's plantation. Grandaddy sold the entire parcel years ago to some developer, who had planned to build a sprawling condo community, until a vocal environmental group successfully challenged the plan. Now it's a wildlife refuge, protected in its natural state from further development.
When Phyllida was a little girl and Daddy would bring them down to visit his family on the coastal island, she and her brother loved to explore the abandoned portion of the property, especially the remnants of slave cabins.
It's hard to believe nobody kept a closer eye on them. But then again, Mother wasn't here to do it because she rarely came South. She said she didn't like the heat and humidity, but Phyllida suspected that in reality, she didn't like Grandaddy any more than he liked her.
Back then, the undergrowth didn't seem this dense- or maybe it was, and Phyllida and her brother brazenly pushed their way through it anyway, not caring about things like mud, or rattlesnakes and gators.
Charlotte cared. She never came with them. She might have been older, but she was always squeamish, not to mention afraid of everything, even the dark.
Wanting to get this over with so she can go back to bed and maybe get some sleep at last, Phyllida flips open her cell phone, presses a speed dial button, and holds it against her ear, listening to it ring.
"Hello?"
Her throat clogged with emotion, she manages to say, "Mom? It's me."
"Phyllida?"
"Yes…" She's crying, then. She can't help it.
"What's wrong, Darling? What is it?"
"He cut us out of the will. Both me and Gib. He left everything to Charlotte."
On the other end of the phone, Susan Remington gasps. "Oh, no!"
"I'm afraid, Mommy," Phyllida sobs. "What are we going to do now? We were all counting on that money… all of us."
"I know, I know…" Her mother's voice is soothing. "Don't worry, sweetheart, we'll survive. We always have."
"I know, but…" She sniffles. "I don't know how."
"What does your brother say about this?"
"That we're going to contest the will." 'That's my brilliant attorney son. That's exacdy what you'll do."
Still sniffling, Phyllida wipes her eyes with the back of her hands, feeling better already. She knew she would, if she could just talk to her mother.
Mommy always makes her feel better.
"There, now, Darling, you just calm down and get some sleep. It's late."
"I know."
"Where's your brother? Is he there? Can I speak to him?"
"He went out someplace," Phyllida says truthfully, then adds, "please don't tell him I told you about the will, okay, Mom? He didn't want to worry you with it"
No, but I did. Because I'm a big baby, incapable of dealing with anything on my own.
Or so her brother liked to tell her, when they were younger.
'That's my son," her mother says with affection. "Always protective. I wish he wouldn't worry about me."
Phyllida bites back a comment.
If her mother hasn't figured out by now that Gib worries about nobody other than himself, she never will.
What on earth is she doing out here at this time of night?
The arc of her flashlight swings dangerously close to the nook beside the back steps. Any second now, it might expose this hiding spot.
And then what?
That won't happen. Don't even think about it.
Just hold your breath and don't move.
Yes, but it's nearly impossible to stay motionless when mosquitos hover about one's exposed skin, landing and stinging in a frenzied blood feast.
Giving in to the almost overwhelming desire to slap at an insect would cause quite a stir in the quiet evening, and un
doubtedly make it necessary to extinguish the human pest as well, with considerably more bloodshed.
That might be infinitely satisfying in the moment, but would pose an unnecessary risk, overall.
