Carolina Girl

by Patricia Rice

  “I don’t lie. I simply thought the amount was considerably smaller. I have an...unexpected windfall. I’d just about worked out how to best utilize it. Two hundred thousand will whack that plan to pieces.”

  The sound of a car door slamming interrupted any further questioning. Sniffing the beautifully fried egg with regret, Clay ambled to the front door, prepared to beat the wolves from the door if necessary. Not that it would be necessary if Aurora had her way. Fool woman thought she could hold off packs of wild animals with a spatula and a frown.

  He had experience with wild animals, the money-hungry sort. Once they smelled cash, they went for the jugular. Nothing short of AK-47s or a few billion dollars would stop them. The banker’s call proved the wolves were circling.

  Mandy burst through the door as he opened it. Behind him, Aurora shouted with joy and caught her niece up in a hug. Wishing she’d hug him like that when he entered the house, Clay turned back to watch his brother assisting Cissy up the walk. Behind them trailed Jake, his expression a black cloud as he surveyed the damage.

  Even the smiling gnomes had blistered with the heat. Instead of a colorful fairy-tale haven, the front yard had been transformed overnight into a blackened corner of hell, complete with demons.

  Clay reached out to help Cissy up the stairs. She didn’t look him in the eyes but limped toward the couch, defeat written in the curve of her spine.

  She’d wrecked Aurora’s pride and joy, apparently mortgaged their joint property to the hilt, and still Aurora raced up to hug her sister before she sat down. Clay had expected fireworks. Instead the water faucet turned on again. Both women clung to each other and wept.

  He looked to Jared and Jake for some explanation of this curious phenomenon, but both men seemed to shrug it off.

  “Is that eggs I smell?” Jake lumbered on his cast to the table where their meal sat untouched. “Nothing beats Rora’s fried eggs. I’ll eat these cold ones, and she’ll fix you up some hot ones.”

  “I’ll fry some bacon. Jared, can I fix you some?” Mandy danced into the kitchen, all long teenage legs and energy. “I played that new version of “Mysterious” some more last night, Clay. It’s awesome.”

  Clay winced at his brother’s inquiring look. The game’s distinctive mushrooms still floated across the computer screen. Jared helped himself to an apple from the fruit bowl, took a bite, and, leaning against the counter, crossed his arms and ankles in obvious expectation of a long reply.

  Maybe test-driving the new model on a couple of teenagers hadn’t been a wise idea, but Kismet and Mandy had enjoyed the game far more than the graphics software. Clay shrugged and pushed the bread into the four-slice toaster. “Find any kinks?” he asked Mandy.

  “I didn’t get far. I’m still trapped by Bubbles the Clown.”

  “Bubbles? The clown’s name is Bubbles?” Having helped her sister to the couch, Aurora returned to break more eggs into the skillet. “That’s why pink bubbles pop up when the elephant walks over him?”

  Clay grinned. “Yeah. Obnoxious, isn’t it?” Just being close to her made him feel better. He wanted the right to wrap his arm around Aurora’s waist, but with family looking on, he figured that was a no-no. He didn’t think Aurora would appreciate the proprietary gesture either.

  “Tell us more,” Jared prompted, chewing a bite of apple.

  “Don’t you have to get back to Cleo and the kids?” Smelling the toast burning, Clay popped the bread to inspect it. Deciding it wasn’t too dark, he opened the jar of honey Aurora had set out earlier and proceeded to slather a slice. The rest he set in front of Jake.

  “Nah. Kiz is looking after Meg and Matt. Cleo filled up the Jeep with buzz saws and stuff and is out with a crew down the road. Some of the places really took a hit. She’ll have me whacking trees if I join her.”

  Shivering at the idea of his creative but not very mechanical brother aiming a chain saw at anything, Clay turned the toaster over the kitchen sink to examine its innards rather than say more.

  “It’s all my fault,” Cissy said from the front room. “Rory, I’m so sorry.” She started to weep again.

  Momentarily giving up on the toaster, Clay leaned over to take the skillet handle out of Aurora’s hands. With a grateful look, she surrendered the pan and raced to her sister.

  “I was trying so hard to be careful,” Cissy wailed. “I drove slow and had the lights on and braked every time I thought I saw something in the road. And then that car pulled out of nowhere! I’m a jinx, a total jinx. I should never get in a car again.”

  “Accidents happen,” Aurora murmured. “You can’t be blamed for what other idiots do. Did the other driver help you out? Who was it?”

  Clay listened with interest. If the other driver was a neighbor with a good insurance policy, maybe Cissy could recover some of her losses.

  “He didn’t stop.” Cissy lifted her head from her hands, and every face in the room turned to her at the tone of wonder in her voice. As if she were talking directly to him, she met Clay’s eyes. “He sped away when I hit the brakes and lost control. It was a fancy black car. No one in this neighborhood can afford anything like it.”

  Aurora turned to stare at him as well. Clay knew they wanted him to confirm their suspicions. He wanted to argue just to provide balance, but he could think of only one good reason for a fancy black car to pull out in front of Aurora’s very conspicuous BMW and speed away after it crashed—unless Cissy was lying. Aurora would cut his throat if he mentioned that.

  No slowtop, Jake muttered an expletive that pithily expressed what everyone was thinking, and reached for the phone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cissy duly made her report to the sheriff’s department. The young deputy seemed fascinated at the idea of investigating a deliberate hit-and-run, and even more so at the possibility that Aurora may have been the target rather than her sister. But in the end, Cissy couldn’t provide enough information for anything more than a shake of his head and a dubious promise to do the best he could. There might not be many fancy black cars in this neighborhood, but the rest of the county was littered with them.

  Mandy ran off to check on her friends. Jared drove off with Cleo in the Jeep, leaving the pickup behind so Clay would have transportation. The rest of them remained inside, an air of gloom blanketing their collective mood.

  In unspoken agreement, they didn’t discuss the accident once they’d reported what they knew to the authorities. Cissy was still too rattled.

  Rory didn’t want to believe their speculation that it hadn’t been an accident, or she’d start shaking all over again. Why would anyone think getting rid of her would resolve anything?

  She finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes rather than fret. Clay spread the inner workings of a broken chain saw across the table while Jake looked on, offering useless advice. Cissy appeared to be napping on the couch, but Rory figured she was just closing out their problems and escaping inside her head, as they all were.

  Cissy still hadn’t called the real estate man and declined his offer.

  Even Rory was starting to think twice about accepting it. It was a good offer, and they had Mandy’s future to consider. But if they sold the land to pay the mortgage, how would she invest her prize so Cissy and their father could earn a living? What if she hadn’t won? Monday couldn’t come soon enough. She had to live through today and the weekend.

  Mandy had turned off the video game and taken the CD with her, so Rory assumed she’d borrowed it from a friend. She kind of missed the purple mushrooms. Last night had been...elevating. Instead of the usual stiff dating conversation about careers and the latest Panthers game, followed by awkward kisses and rejection, they’d tussled like children over a silly game, and had sex with the passion and tenderness of lovers.

  She still couldn’t believe how good Clay had made her feel—not just in sex, but about herself. Her size had always made her self-conscious, but he didn’t even seem to notice she was...more woman than most. But then
, he was more man than most, in more ways than in size. That enormous brain of his never stopped ticking, and it seemed to operate from a fascinatingly broad perspective.

  She glanced in curiosity to the table, where he painstakingly cleaned and put together each indistinguishable part of a saw that hadn’t worked in years. Patience like that was a gift that provided many advantages for the receiver as well as the giver. When combined with intelligence, it created a formidable talent. Clay McCloud was no ordinary man.

  She wanted him to make love to her again, to prove last night hadn’t been a fluke.

  Craving his touch, or even a glance from him, was a sure sign of imminent disaster. Neither of them had anything permanent in mind, so she’d better find some other outlet for her thoughts.

  Remembering words exchanged earlier, Rory dried the last pan and put it away, poured a glass of lemonade, and set it on the table near Clay’s hand. “Tell me more about Bubbles the Clown.”

  He glanced up in surprise. Just the sight of his clear-eyed gaze gave her goose bumps, but she had her shield safely in place again.

  Apparently uncomfortable with the question, Clay shifted his attention to the glass of lemonade, sipping it while composing an answer. She’d noticed that about him. The things he said off the cuff tended to be irrelevant, aggravating, or humorous, and sometimes all three at once. But when he applied his mind to a question, she got straight answers, and not necessarily the ones she wanted to hear.

  “Jared made him up,” he confessed.

  Rory waited, and when he didn’t explain, she took the lemonade away from him. “Jared has connections with computer game makers?”

  Laughter danced in his eyes as he reached up and snatched the glass back. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Her father watched the byplay with more interest than anything else he’d done that morning, and even Cissy sat up. Rory didn’t mind distracting her family, but her focus now was on getting to the bottom of the puzzle that was Clay McCloud. A man with his patience and genius wasn’t the party-hearty bad boy he pretended to be.

  “I don’t know anything about gaming,” she said. “But I’m assuming the games are computer programs?”

  “Someone writes a script first,” he corrected. “Then there are visuals to put together and voices to plug in, and then the whole thing is processed into a program and film. It’s kind of complicated.” He returned to piecing the saw together. “Shouldn’t you be replanting flower gardens or something? Can the statues be repainted?”

  “Paint remover might take care of the worst blistering,” Jake mused. “But tourist season has started. We ain’t got time to repaint. We’ll have to sell them cheap and bare.”

  “Rory,” Cissy called from the couch, diverting Aurora’s attention from the aggravating man who wouldn’t tell her anything, “did your car have insurance?”

  She asked it so tremulously that Rory knew she’d been worrying over it since the accident and had just now gained the courage to ask. Guilt tweaked Rory’s conscience. She’d been wrapped up in herself again. That was what living alone did to her. “Yeah, it’s covered. We’ll get our cash out of it, sooner or later. But I want to hang whoever drove you off the road. You could have been killed.”

  Damn, so she’d been the one to say it aloud.

  “You’re going to need a car,” Clay interjected, apparently as anxious as she to evade discussion of hit-and-run drivers. “Want me to take you into town to look for something?”

  Accepting the more practical topic, Rory thought about it. They’d need ready cash to buy a car. She had no idea how long it would take for the insurance company to send a check. She had to get to the lawyer’s office before she could cash in the cap, and she didn’t have any transportation.

  She took a deep breath and tried to pin all her whirling thoughts into place. First things first. While she had Cissy’s attention, she gave up on Clay and faced her sister. “I had a call from the bank this morning.”

  Cissy turned even paler, if that was possible. “Why? I’m only a little behind.”

  “They say the fire destroyed the value of the land, and they’re calling in the loan. I offered to pay them off—until Jeff gave me the balance.”

  Closing her eyes, Cissy dropped her head back against the high cushion of the couch. Rory tried not to think about what she and Clay had done on that piece of furniture not too many hours ago. She couldn’t imagine it ever happening again, so it was better not to dwell on it.

  “Your prize will cover it, won’t it?” Cissy whispered.

  That caught everyone’s attention. Maybe there were a few too many unspoken topics clouding the air.

  Before her father could jump all over Cissy’s declaration, Rory spouted the question that had been killing her for hours. “Yeah, it will cover the mortgage, but then it won’t cover the future. We’ll be lucky to break even. What the dickens did you spend it on, Ciss?”

  And then, seeing her sister’s anguished expression, understanding dawned. With horror, Rory sank onto the nearest chair. “On us?” she whispered. Thoughts racing, she remembered the little surprises, the gifts at Christmas she and Mandy hadn’t dared hoped to receive, the unexpected pair of athletic shoes they needed for gym. “My prom dress, that’s how you did it! And the gift baskets during finals and...”

  Feeling guilty as hell now, Rory grabbed Clay’s glass of lemonade and took a deep drink, searching her spinning mind for the impossible. “But why do we owe the bank for things that old? We just opened the equity account.”

  “I didn’t know about equity loans until you took that one out for Mandy’s braces.” A note of defiance entered Cissy’s voice, and her fists clenched against the green upholstery. “The bank said we could pay off the finance company and the credit cards, and keep the loan payment lower and the interest could be deducted from taxes. I thought it was a good thing.”

  “It was my loan at the finance company,” Jake said gruffly. “I borrowed against the bike a ways back, and then again for the pickup. And every time you said I owed on the taxes, I had to borrow for that. The interest ate me up, and I never could get the balance paid.”

  “I got the credit cards back when Mandy was born,” Cissy murmured tiredly. “Even her baby food cost a fortune. And there was that time I was laid off and had no insurance and she got sick. You were too young to pay attention to bills back then.”

  A huge lump formed in Rory’s throat. “You mean you’ve been paying the minimum payment on credit cards for fifteen years? While continuing to charge on them?”

  “Stupid, huh? But Mandy needed all kinds of things my paycheck wouldn’t cover, so I kept at it. And when I reached the card limit, they’d raise it for me. Or I’d get a new card. Once I borrowed from the finance company to pay them all off and swore never to use them again, but I did. It all kind of snowballed after a while.”

  Fifteen years of “miscellaneous” expenses, doubled and tripled by exorbitant credit card interest. The Girl Scout uniforms and the “special” birthday gifts that Rory had longed for with all her girlish heart and never expected to receive. The same for Mandy. Cissy had spent fifteen years lugging that burden, knowing the money would never be there, but determined to give her sister and daughter the things she’d never had.

  Tears rose in her eyes again, but Rory choked them back. It was useless to tell Cissy that they were better off not buying prom dresses and gym shoes than to mire themselves in debt. As a teenager, she probably wouldn’t have agreed. And Cissy had been a teenager, too, one who had taken great pride in providing the things their mother used to provide.

  Cissy wouldn’t care that each item charged ended up costing double or triple the bargain prices she’d scrupulously hunted down. She’d done it out of love, and Rory couldn’t argue with that.

  Fighting tears, she sat down beside her sister and hugged her. “I can’t believe you never told me. You let me buy a stupid car when you were covered up in bills. I ought to shake you until your te
eth rattle.”

  “Oh, I charged those, too,” Cissy added with a watery half giggle. “Root canals and caps.”

  It wasn’t funny, but Rory laughed out loud. “Let’s tell the bank to repossess them!”

  That struck Cissy as so hilarious that she began to laugh until tears streamed down her face. Rory joined in, and nearly doubled up with mirth when her father and Clay stared at them as if they’d gone berserk.

  “Here, Jeff, take my teeth,” Cissy howled. “They should be worth a few thousand. And the prom dresses! You can have them, too.”

  “The shoes! Let’s give him the shoes. And if it’s timber he wants from our yard, we can deliver firewood to his door.” Rory rolled on the cushions with glee imagining the impeccable Jeff Spencer faced with a semi load of burned, stinking pine trunks on the bank’s pristine marble steps.

  “We could hose down the two of them,” Clay said thoughtfully in the other room. “Maybe we should haul them outside first.”

  “Nah, they get like this every once in a while. Beats tears all to pieces. Get used to it. They cook something fierce when they get done.”

  Fascinated, Clay accepted that. He and his brothers probably would have pummeled each other to death over subjects only half as explosive as years of unpaid debts. Diane had thought only of herself and had grabbed the money and run when she’d seen the company going down in the market crash.

  Aurora and her sister thought of each other first. Clay guessed it was their upbringing, and he glanced at their father drinking coffee, a bit of egg still stuck in his beard. The old man didn’t seem involved, but it had been his support that had kept the girls together and at home. He’d provided the example of unselfishness they’d needed to shape their lives.

  Clay wondered how he would stack up in the father role. And then he wondered why he wondered.

  Luckily Aurora recovered some of her senses and returned to the kitchen before he had to work that one out. As promised, she headed straight for the refrigerator. He hadn’t bought groceries yet, and he’d better get on it. Their garden had been wiped out.