Ain't She Sweet? (2 page)

And left Tallulah a valuable work of art that now belonged to her niece, Sugar Beth Carey Tharp Zagurski Hooper. A painting that Sugar Beth needed to find as quickly as possible.

She selected a key from the ones Tallulah’s lawyer had sent her, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. Immediately, the smells of her aunt’s world swept over her: Ben Gay, mildew, chicken salad, and disapproval. Gordon took one look, forgot that he didn’t like getting his paws wet, and turned back outside. Sugar Beth set down her packages and looked around.

The living area was stuffed with a cozy horror of family pieces: dusty Sheraton-style chairs, tables with scarred claw and ball feet, a Queen Anne writing desk, and a bentwood hat rack festooned with cobwebs. The mahogany sideboard held a Seth Thomas mantel clock, along with a pair of ugly china pugs and a silver chest emblazoned with a tarnished plaque honoring Tallulah Carey for her many years of dedicated service to the Daughters of the Confederacy.

There was no organized decorating scheme. The room’s threadbare Oriental rug competed with the faded floral chintz sofa. A coral and yellow flame stitch on an armchair peeked out from beneath an assortment of crocheted cushions. The ottoman was worn green leather, the curtains yellowed lace. Still, the colors and patterns, muted by age and wear, had achieved a tired sort of harmony.

Sugar Beth walked over to the sideboard and brushed away a cobweb to open the silver chest. Inside were twelve place settings of Gorham’s Chantilly sterling. Every other month for as long as Sugar Beth could remember, Tallulah had used the iced tea spoons for her Wednesday morning canasta group. Sugar Beth wondered how much twelve place settings of Chantilly sterling could bring on the open market.

Not nearly enough. She needed the painting.

She had to pee, and she was hungry, but she couldn’t wait any longer to see the studio.

The rain hadn’t let up, so she grabbed a funky old beige sweater Tallulah had left by the door, draped it around her shoulders, and ducked back outside. Rainwater seeped through the hole in her boot as she followed the paving stones that led around the house to the garage. The old-fashioned wooden doors sagged on their hinges. She used one of the padlock keys she’d been given and dragged them open.

The place looked exactly as Sugar Beth remembered. When the carriage house had been converted into a spinster’s home, Tallulah had refused to let the carpenters destroy this part of the old garage where Lincoln Ash had once set up his studio. Instead, she’d contented herself with a smaller living room and narrow kitchen, and left this as a shrine.

The rough wooden shelves still held crusty cans of the paint Ash had dripped and flung from his brushes fifty years earlier to create the works that had become his masterpieces.

Since the garage’s single pair of windows admitted only a minimum of light, he’d worked with the garage doors open, laying his canvases out on the floor. Years ago, her aunt had covered the paint-splattered tarp with thick sheets of protective plastic, now so opaque from grime, dead bugs, and dust that the colors beneath were barely visible. A paint-speckled ladder, also draped in plastic, sat at one end near a workbench laid out with a toolbox, a collection of Ash’s ancient brushes, knives, spatulas, all scattered about as though he’d stopped work to have a cigarette. Sugar Beth hadn’t expected her cantankerous aunt to leave the painting propped by the door waiting for her, but still, it would have been nice. She suppressed a sigh. First thing in the morning, she’d start her search for real.

Gordon followed her back inside the house. As she flicked on a floor lamp with a fringed shade, the despair that had been nibbling at her for weeks took a bigger bite. Fifteen years ago she’d left Parrish in perfect arrogance, a foolish, vindictive girl who couldn’t conceive of a universe that didn’t revolve around her. But the universe had gotten the last laugh.

She wandered over to the window and drew back the dusty curtain. Above the row of hedges, she saw the chimneys of Frenchman’s Bride. The name had come from the original homestead. Her grandmother had planned the house, her grandfather had built it, her father had modernized it, and Diddie had lavished it with love.
Someday
Frenchman’s Bride will be yours, Sugar Baby.

In the old days, she would have given in to tears at life’s unfairness. Now, she dropped the curtain and turned away to feed her disagreeable dog.

Colin Byrne stood at the window of the second-floor master bedroom of Frenchman’s Bride. His appearance conveyed the brooding elegance of a man from another time period, the English Regency perhaps, or any era in which quizzing glasses, snuffboxes, and drawing rooms figured prominently. He had deep-set jade-colored eyes and a long, narrow face broken by sharp cheekbones with comma-shaped hollows beneath. The tails of those commas curled toward a thin, unsmiling mouth. He had the face of a dandy, vaguely effete, or it would have been were it not for his nose, which was huge—long and bony, aristocratic, and vastly ugly, yet perfectly at home on his face.

He wore a purple velvet smoking jacket as casually as another man would have worn a sweatshirt. A pair of black silk drawstring pajama bottoms completed his outfit, along with slippers that had scarlet Chinese symbols across the toes. His clothing had been perfectly tailored to fit his exceptionally tall, wide-shouldered body, but his big workman’s hands—broad across the palm and thick fingered—served notice that everything about Colin Byrne might not be exactly as it seemed.

As he stood at the window watching the lights go on in the carriage house, the line of his already stern mouth grew even harder. So . . . The rumors were true. Sugar Beth Carey had returned.

Fifteen years had passed since he’d last seen her. He’d been little more than a boy then.

Twenty-two, full of himself, an exotic foreign bird who’d landed in a small Southern town to write his first novel and—ah, yes—teach school in his spare time. There was something satisfying about letting a grudge ferment for so long. Like a great French wine, it grew in complexity, developing subtleties and nuances that a speedier resolution wouldn’t have allowed.

The corner of his mouth lifted in anticipation. Fifteen years ago he’d been powerless against her. Now he wasn’t.

He’d arrived in Parrish from England to teach at the local high school, although he’d had no passion for the profession and even less talent for it. But Parrish, like other small Mississippi towns, had desperately needed teachers. With a view toward exposing their youth to a larger world, a committee of the state’s leading citizens had contacted universities in the U.K., offering jobs complete with work visas to exceptional graduates.

Colin, who’d long been fascinated with the writers of the American South, had jumped at the chance. What better place to write his own great novel than in the fertile literary landscape of Mississippi, home of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright? He’d dashed off an eloquent essay that vastly exaggerated his interest in teaching, gathered up glowing references from several of his professors, and attached the first twenty pages of the novel he’d barely started, figuring—rightly so, as it turned out—

that a state with such an impressive literary heritage would favor a writer. A month later he’d received word that he’d been accepted, and not long after that, he was on his way to Mississippi.

He’d fallen in love with the bloody place the first day—its hospitality and traditions, its small-town charm. Not so, however, with his teaching position, which had gone from being difficult to becoming impossible, thanks to Sugar Beth Carey.

Colin had no specific plan in place for his revenge. No Machiavellian scheme he’d spent a decade mulling over—he would never have given her that much power over him.

Which didn’t mean he intended to set aside his long-held grudge. Instead, he’d bide his time and see where his writer’s imagination would take him.

The telephone rang, and he left the window to pick it up, answering in the clipped British accent that his years in the American South hadn’t softened. “Byrne here.”

“Colin, it’s Winnie. I tried to get you earlier today.”

He’d been working on the third chapter of his new book. “Sorry, love. I haven’t gotten around to checking my voice mail. Anything important?” He carried the phone back to the window and gazed out. Another light had gone on in the carriage house, this time on the second floor.

“We’re all together for potluck. The guys are watching Daytona highlights right now, and no one’s seen you in forever. Why don’t you come over? We miss you, Mr. Byrne.”

Winnie enjoyed teasing him with reminders of their early relationship as teacher and student. She and her husband were his closest friends in Parrish, and for a moment he was tempted. But the Seawillows and their significant others would be with her. Generally the women amused him, but tonight he wasn’t in the mood for their chatter. “I need to work a bit longer. Invite me next time, will you?”

“Of course.”

He gazed across the lawn, wishing he weren’t the one who had to break the news.

“Winnie . . . The lights are on in the carriage house.”

Several beats of silence stretched between them before she replied in a voice that was soft, almost toneless. “She’s back.”

“It seems that way.”

Winnie wasn’t an insecure teenager any longer, and an edge of steel undercut her soft Southern vowels. “Well, then. Let the games begin.”

Winnie returned to her kitchen in time to see Leeann Perkins flip her cell phone closed, her eyes dancing with excitement. “Y’all aren’t going to believe this.”

Winnie suspected she’d believe it.

The four other women in the kitchen stopped what they were doing. Leeann’s voice had a tendency to squeak when she was excited, making her sound like a Southern Minnie Mouse. “That was Renee. Remember how she’s related to Larry Carter, who’s been working at the Quik Mart since he got out of rehab? You’ll never guess who stepped up to the register a couple of hours ago.”

As Leeann paused for dramatic effect, Winnie picked up a knife and forced herself to concentrate on cutting Heidi Pettibone’s Coca-Cola cake. Her hand barely trembled.

Leeann shoved her cell in her purse without taking her eyes off them. “Sugar Beth’s back!”

The slotted spoon Merylinn Jasper had been rinsing off dropped in the sink. “I don’t believe it.”

“We knew she was coming back.” Heidi’s forehead puckered in indignation. “But, still, how could she have the nerve?”

“Sugar Beth always had plenty of nerve,” Leeann reminded them.

“This is going to cause all kinds of trouble.” Amy Graham fingered the gold cross at her neck. In high school, she’d been the biggest Christian in the senior class and president of the Bible Club. She still had a tendency to proselytize, but she was so decent the rest of them overlooked it. Now she set her hand on Winnie’s arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Leeann was immediately contrite. “I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m being insensitive again, aren’t I?”

“Always,” Amy said. “But we love you anyway.”

“And so does Jesus,” Merylinn interjected, before Amy could get around to it.

Heidi tugged on one of the tiny silver teddy bear earrings she was wearing with her red and blue teddy bear sweater. She collected bears, and sometimes she got a little carried away. “How long do you think she’ll stay?”

Leeann slipped her hand inside her dipping neckline to tug at her bra strap. Of all the Seawillows, she had the best breasts, and she liked to show them off. “Not for long, I’ll bet. God, we were such little bitches.”

Silence fell over the kitchen. Amy broke it by saying what all of them were thinking.

“Winnie wasn’t.”

Because Winnie hadn’t been one of them. She alone hadn’t been a Seawillow. Ironic, since she was now their leader.

Sugar Beth had come up with the idea for the Seawillows when she was eleven. She’d chosen the name from a dream she’d had, although none of them could remember what it was about. The Seawillows would be a private club, she’d announced, the funnest club ever, for the most popular girls in school, all chosen by her, of course. For the most part, she’d done a good job, and more than twenty years later, the Seawillows were still the funnest club in town.

At its peak, there’d been twelve members, but some had moved away, and Dreama Shephard had died. Now, only the four women standing with Winnie in the kitchen were left. They’d become her dearest friends.

Heidi’s husband, Phil, poked his head in the kitchen. He handed over the empty Crock-Pot that held the Rotel dip the men insisted on having at every gathering, a spicy tomato and Velveeta concoction for dunking their Tostitos. “Clint’s making us watch golf. When are we eating?”

“Soon. And you’ll never guess what we just heard.” Heidi’s teddy bear earrings bobbled.

“Sugar Beth’s back.”

“No kidding. When?”

“This afternoon. Leeann just got the news.”

Phil stared at them for a moment, then shook his head and disappeared to pass the word to the other men.

The women set to work, and for a few minutes silence reigned as each fell victim to her own thoughts. Winnie’s were bitter. When they were growing up, Sugar Beth Carey had possessed everything Winnie wanted: beauty, popularity, self-confidence, and Ryan Galantine. Winnie, on the other hand, had only one thing Sugar Beth wanted. Still, it was a big thing, and in the end, it had been all that mattered.

Amy pulled a ham from one oven, along with a dish of her mother’s famous Drambuie yams. From the other oven, Leeann removed garlic cheese grits and a spinach-artichoke casserole. Winnie’s roomy kitchen, with its warm cherry cabinets and vast center island, made her house the most convenient place to gather for their potlucks. Tonight they’d parked the kids with Amy’s niece. Winnie had asked her own daughter to baby-sit, but she’d turned difficult lately and refused.

As born and bred Southerners, the Seawillows dressed up for one another, which meant they spent the first part of every get-together discussing what they were wearing. This was the heritage passed on to them by mothers who’d donned nylons and high heels to walk to the mailbox. But Winnie wasn’t a Seawillow, and despite her mother’s nagging, it had taken her longer than the rest to figure out how to pull herself together.