Scandal in Copper Lake

by Marilyn Pappano

  But he didn’t know whether it was real instinct or if, as she’d said, he’d come expecting the worst of her. He was a lawyer. He’d seen the worst of a lot of people. He’d come by his distrust honestly.

  Truthfully, though, it didn’t matter whether he believed her. Distrust alone wasn’t going to keep him away from her. It wasn’t going to keep him out of her bed.

  She was leaning against the kitchen counter, hands resting on the chipped laminated top. She could go to church or appear in court in that outfit, but it still struck him as damn sexy. The skirt was neither tight nor short, but it made him focus all too much on the curves underneath it—the flat belly, the rounded hips, the long muscled thighs. The T-shirt was substantial enough to reveal only a hint of the bra underneath, and it fitted no more snugly than the skirt, but it was enticing all the same. Soft, but not as soft as the skin it covered. Concealing, on a body that should be revealed.

  He turned his chair to face her, then hooked his arms over the ladderback. “Why does it matter to Mama Odette?”

  Anamaria shrugged. “Mama wasn’t her only daughter, but she was her favorite. She wants to know about the last days of her baby’s life. According to the doctors, she’s in the last days of her life. It’s made her sentimental. Wistful.”

  He hadn’t been raised by his grandmother. He probably hadn’t seen her more than once a week throughout his life, and most of their visits had been brief conversations before or after a meal. She hadn’t been nearly as influential in his upbringing as Granddad Calloway, but when she was gone, he would miss her deeply. He couldn’t imagine the loss Anamaria would feel when her grandmother passed on. What had she called herself? Mama Odette’s girl, with a wealth of affection in the words.

  “Why doesn’t she ask Glory herself? You said they talk.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, at least, not for them. My mother is a facilitator. She delivers messages to Mama Odette, but not for herself. Not for us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s the way it is, chile.” Her accent was heavier, the sounds slower and more rounded. How many times had she asked her grandmother for explanations? How many times had Mama Odette given that answer?

  It wasn’t much of an answer, in Robbie’s opinion. Anamaria looked as if she found it acceptable. He liked proof. She took things on faith.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  Her eyes widened, and his jaw tightened a notch. He might be a skeptical, lazy bastard, but Sara had taught him and his brothers common courtesy. It had taken a long time, but the lessons had stuck.

  “Besides being almost seventy, her heart is giving out. The doctors thought she wouldn’t survive this last heart attack, but she’s holding on.”

  “Doctors don’t know everything.”

  Unexpectedly she smiled. “One thing we agree on. Where is your car? Were you afraid to be seen driving down my street after having lunch with me in town?”

  Something uncomfortable twitched at the back of his neck. Guilt, shame—emotions Calloways didn’t often deal with. Life was easier when you were better than everyone else and owed apologies to no one. Of course, they weren’t better than everyone else, but as long as they didn’t acknowledge it, they didn’t have to deal with it.

  At least he could truthfully say this time that being seen had had nothing to do with his decision to walk there. It was seeing that had mattered, and what he’d wanted to see couldn’t be seen from a car. “I wasn’t intending to come here. I went for a walk along the river.” No reason to tell her that he’d gone to the place where her mother’s body was found, or that he’d continued walking to see if it was conceivable that a five-year-old could have made her way from this house to that slope on the river and back again on her own.

  She could have. The path that had brought him from the river to Easy Street was a straight shot, a few hundred feet, with no wrong turns to take. It had been in use so long that the dirt was packed as solid as pavement, so it was likely Glory and Anamaria had taken it at some point. Anamaria had probably been familiar with it.

  Though Glory’s car had been found in the parking lot in town. How would her daughter have known to find her along the river path? And if she hadn’t known, why would she have set out that way alone in the night in the rain?

  Still, it was a more logical scenario than the alternative: that she really had seen a vision of her mother’s death.

  Without moving a muscle, she tensed. “It was in the police report, wasn’t it? The place where she was found.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve been meaning to walk out there.”

  “Will you know it when you see it?”

  She shook her head. “But I’ll feel it.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “So you can gauge my reaction? So you can determine whether I’ve been there before?” Her tone was mild, the shake of her head chastising.

  “Who’s the skeptic now?” He paused. “I assumed you wouldn’t want to go alone, but if you’d prefer it…”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Thank you.”

  “You want to go now?”

  She glanced out the window over the sink, and he looked, too. The air had gone still while they talked, the breeze dying until not even a leaf stirred. Thin white clouds streaked across the sky, and the sun shone with an intensity that turned its rays white-gold and harshly illuminated everything in its path.

  “It’s going to rain,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I don’t think I could bear it in the rain.”

  He checked the weather every morning, just in case he could get out on the river, and today’s forecast was for sun, high clouds and temperatures in the midseventies. Not even a drop of rain was expected until the weekend. But if she was more comfortable with an excuse to avoid the river trail, that was her prerogative.

  Leaving the chair, he carried his glass to the sink. Closer to her, he could smell the cookies, the coconut and almond flavorings and that exotic fragrance, fainter now, that was her. He stood so close that she would have been justified in putting half the room between them, but she didn’t move. She simply looked at him.

  Reaching past her, he lifted the edge of the plastic wrap, took out a cookie, then nudged the wrap back in place. When he withdrew, his sleeve brushed along her bare arm. Not even real contact, but the closest they’d come, and it burned along his skin as if it were real.

  Her breath caught, a tiny gasp, but her gaze never flickered from his. He stepped back, then took another step, when all he really wanted was to press her against the counter, wrap his arms around her, crawl inside her.

  He forced himself to take a bite of the cookie, chocolate with oatmeal and pecans, forced himself to turn and follow the hall back to the living room doorway. The room looked fifty years old, as if Glory had bought the place already furnished and hadn’t changed a thing. The furniture was heavily worn, the sofa covered with a bright African-print throw, the chair with a faded quilt. Holes in the walls marked where drapery rods had been attached above the windows, but now only blinds covered the glass, the old-fashioned kind with wide metal slats.

  “Good cookie,” he murmured when she stepped into the doorway to watch him.

  “Thank you. When you work in a restaurant kitchen, you learn a few things.”

  He circled the room, gazing at an empty bookcase, a shelf designed to display knickknacks and a TV stand that held a bouquet of wildflowers. “Why did Glory move here?”

  “Mama Odette says she had wanderlust. Some of our people do. Duquesnes have wound up in Ireland, Japan, Cuba, Haiti and all across the U.S. Glory’s first love was in South Carolina. The second lived in Texas.”

  “What about your father? Where was he from?” Could he be from Copper Lake? Someone Robbie knew? Worse, someone he was related to? That was only half the damn county.

  She shook her head. “Mama was living in Atlanta when she got pregnant with me. I was a few months old when we moved here. Mama Ode
tte says she chose Copper Lake because it was close to her friends in Atlanta but close enough to go home when she needed.”

  Mama Odette says… Too bad that she remembered so little herself, that virtually everything she knew about her mother was filtered through someone else. He couldn’t imagine having only secondhand knowledge of his mother. To have missed out on all the years he was supposed to have with her, and to have forgotten what little time they did have together…

  Passing her, he crossed the hall, came to a closed door and opened it. Small room, faded pink walls, bare bulb above a single iron bed. “Your room?”

  “Yes.” She came no closer than the hall, and a shudder rippled through her. “If I go in there, I’m afraid I’ll hear her still crying.”

  “Her?” he echoed, then returned to the hall. “You. When you were five.”

  She nodded.

  Real image or psychic vision, whatever she’d seen that night had had a hell of an impact on her. He couldn’t blame her for staying away for twenty-three years. Couldn’t blame her if she’d refused to return now. But if Mama Odette was anything like Grandma Calloway, no one refused her anything. If she wanted every last detail leading up to her daughter’s death, she would get it. No matter the cost to her granddaughter.

  The next room down the hall was the bathroom and, beyond that, another bedroom. Big windows, lots of light. Inexpensive but sturdy furniture. Another iron bed, this one made up with white sheets, white blankets and a dozen white pillows. There was white eyelet lace on the sheets, pale pink flowers embroidered on some of the pillowcases, even paler cross-stitch and ribbon work on others. This was a bed for a woman who knew how amazing she looked in white—and how much more amazing it would be with someone there to appreciate it.

  A half-dozen candles sat on the dresser, another half-dozen on the night table. Even unlit, they gave off a fragrance sweet and mouth-watering. A few pieces of jewelry lay on a crocheted cloth on the dresser, alongside a bottle of perfume and a small silver filigree frame. He picked it up, studying the photograph it held. Mama Odette, nearly as round as she was tall, her broad face split by a smile of pure joy. In one arm, she held a little girl, maybe two years old, and the other was wrapped around Anamaria, probably ten years younger, who was smiling, too, a bright sunny look.

  “Mama Odette,” she explained unnecessarily, then tapped the little girl’s face. “Little chile and—” her neatly rounded nail moved to her own face “—big chile. We tease that she calls all of us that so she doesn’t have to remember our names.”

  It would be so easy to catch that finger, to slide his hand up to hers, to pull her against him or to lead her across the room to that white bed. But she’d touched Tommy and Ellie and God knows who else in Copper Lake. He wanted her—needed her—to touch him first.

  To take the responsibility for what followed from him? the cynic in him wondered. So he could say, “Yeah, I had sex with this totally inappropriate woman, but she started it”?

  By the time they finished, it wouldn’t matter who’d started what.

  It was a matter of ego. She’d touched the others voluntarily but refused him the same courtesy. He wanted it.

  He slid the frame free of her hand and returned it to the dresser. There was nothing else in the room to look at but her. He tried to imagine walking into the annual spring dance at the country club next month with her on his arm. Inviting her to dinner with his mother and grandmother and all the Calloways, the decent, the snobbish and the worthless. Taking her to meet his brothers and their wives, or to the clubs and parties where his friends hung out.

  The images wouldn’t form. Where did that put him among the decent, the snobbish and the worthless?

  “I should go.”

  “I can give you a ride to your car.”

  He was about to say no, thanks, when the breeze stirred, rattling the blinds, bringing with it the scent of rain. The sky had gone dark, and a sheet of rain was traveling across the woods and into the backyard, approaching with an increasing patter. He gave her a look before they both moved to the windows, closing them. “Is predicting weather one of your talents?” he asked drily.

  “No. I just had a…an idea.”

  A vision. Nah. It was Georgia. Rains came and went with great regularity. With a one in two chance of being right, it wasn’t a tough prediction to make.

  “I believe I’ll take you up on that ride.”

  She nodded, then went to close the kitchen windows. He secured the one in the bathroom and was locking the ones in the living room when she came to the door.

  The front porch was cool, mostly sheltered from the rain. At Beulah’s house, chimes swayed in the breeze, a pleasant tinkle that could grow annoying really fast. Anamaria remotely unlocked her car, took the steps two at a time and hustled inside the car. He followed a few seconds behind, getting wet enough to require a change of clothes when he got home but not nearly as wet as he would have liked for her to be.

  She didn’t need directions to Gullah Park, so the trip passed in silence, the air between them too close, too heavy. She parked beside the Vette, the only other vehicle in the lot, and waited.

  “Have you talked to Marguerite Wilson?”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s the neighbor who was babysitting you the night…I can find out where she’s living now, if she’s living, and we can see her tomorrow if you want.”

  “I do. But you don’t have to—” She broke off, then managed a faint smile. “Thank you.”

  He got out, got into his own car, then watched through the rain-streaked glass as she drove away. Don’t thank me yet. His motives were selfish: Harrison was paying him to keep an eye on her, he still didn’t trust her, and he wanted to sleep with her. No reason for her to feel grateful to him.

  Not now, maybe not ever.

  By Thursday morning, all sign of the rain was gone. The sun had dried the ground, and the narrow ditches that lined Easy Street were empty, drained into the river. Anamaria left her house at ten to meet Robbie at the shopping mall a mile east of downtown, wearing a dress that had enough stretch in its pink-and-black cotton fibers to fit snugly from shoulders to knees. Her sandals were pink, too, like the band that held her hair back and the bangles that encircled her right wrist.

  She hadn’t taken any extra care with her appearance because she was seeing Robbie. It was a dress she wore often, both for its colors and for its comfort. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that men always looked twice at her when she wore it, or that Robbie, already looking twice, might be persuaded to do more than look.

  No, she hadn’t thought of that at all.

  When she’d returned home the afternoon before, she’d looked up Marguerite Wilson in the phone book and found plenty of Wilsons but no Marguerites. According to Mama Odette, the babysitter had been an old black woman who’d lived one street over. Anamaria had visited more than half of the houses in the neighborhood before Robbie had shown up yesterday—no Wilsons there, either. Not a single person, in fact, who remembered her mother.

  The mall fronted Carolina Avenue, and the Vette was parked alone on the row nearest the street. She pulled in beside it, got out and locked her car. Robbie had reached across the seat to open the passenger door by the time she’d turned.

  Two facts assailed her as she settled into the leather seat: Robbie’s vehicle was much smaller, and therefore occupants sat much closer than in her car, and his cologne in that small, confined space was amazing.

  “What do you say about a lawyer up to his neck in quicksand?” she asked, setting her straw bag on her lap after removing her sunglasses. “Not enough quicksand.” She didn’t wait for a response—or nonresponse—from him. “How much trouble was it finding Marguerite?”

  “Enough that you owe me at least a dozen cookies,” he replied as he backed out of the space. “Actually, as soon as I mentioned her name to Tommy, he knew. She lives across the hall from his grandfather at the old folks’ home.”

  “So
I owe Tommy a dozen cookies.” From the corner of her eye, she watched a muscle clench in Robbie’s jaw, the same territorial response she’d seen yesterday at the deli. “I don’t remember her. Logically, I know someone took care of me while Mama saw her clients and went on dates, but I don’t recall. Mama Odette met her only once, when she and Auntie Lueena came up from Savannah to pick me up, and she said she was old even twenty-three years ago.” She smiled faintly. “With Mama Odette, though, old is relative.”

  “Not in this case. Marguerite Wilson is ninety-six, so she was seventy-three when your mother died. Brave woman to be taking care of a five-year-old.”

  “I was a sweet five-year-old. Can you say the same?” When he opened his mouth, she interrupted. “Without lying?”

  He gave her a sour look before turning off Carolina. “Sweet gets boring after a while. My brothers and I were never boring.”

  Would he get bored with her after a while? He was such a product of his upbringing and environment that her differences appealed to him now, but how long before he lost interest? Before he started looking at the well-bred, blue-eyed blondes from the country club in a new light?

  She would survive. Duquesne women always did.

  “How is Mama Odette?”

  “She’s fine,” she replied absentmindedly, then pulled her gaze from the neat middle-class houses they were passing to look at him.

  “I bet you call her every day.”

  “Twice a day usually. Morning to say hello, night to say good-night.”

  “Morning to be sure she made it through the night, and night so you can always say goodbye.” He slowed and turned into the nursing home lot before responding to her look. “I used to call my granddad every morning and every night.”

  And when Granddad had passed, he’d had the comfort of having said I love you one more time.

  With a knot in her throat, she got out and looked around. Morningside Nursing Center was a low brick building with a parking lot across the front and a tall chain fence on three sides. Flowers grew in window boxes, and the grass was green, smelling sweet from a recent mowing.