Tempting Faith (Indigo Love Spectrum) (22 page)

“Tick…tock…” Victor muttered as Belle slumped over dead.

Lottie rummaged through her handbag. She withdrew a small notepad and a pen, scribbled a few lines, tore off the sheet and thrust it at Victor. “Here! That’s everything.”

“Looks like Victor just hit the Lottie-ry!” the Narrator said, gleefully rubbing his hands together.

“Give me the antidote to the poison, Victor,” Lottie demanded.

“The antidote for the poison in your system would have been generosity,” Victor said. “But I’m afraid it’s too late now, Lottie.”

Shrieking, Lottie lunged at him with her fingers hooked into claws. “You son-of-a…
ACK
!”

Victor didn’t move a muscle as Lottie’s dead body landed right in front of him.

“I guess I’m the last to go, huh?” Desiree said, her voice quivering.

“It appears that the poison is taking its time with you.”

“There is no antidote, is there?”

The chemistry Zander and Kyla had in
Burn
translated to the stage as well. The two played off each other so well, Faith didn’t feel the slightest twinge of jealousy.

“I’m afraid not,” Victor said almost tenderly. “You see, prevention is the only cure for what afflicted the Sunnyside Beautification Association. Each of your gardens was a beautiful representation of the very ugliest in each of you. Lottie’s garden was packed with every flower she could get her hands on, including the hydrangeas I donated to the entire Association. There was no order, no design to her garden. It was merely a holding pen for what she acquired, whether she needed it or not. Lottie’s greed was more than I could weed out.”

“What about Sug? He was one of the nicest men I’ve ever known. He would give you the shirt off his back.”

“Only if you unbuttoned it and removed it for him,” the Narrator said derisively.

“Sug filled his garden with rocks and bamboo, and even then he was too lazy to tend it properly,” Victor said. “A simple sweep of a brush now and then, and an occasional trim would have been all it took to show that he cared enough about the world around him to get off his butt once in awhile. I couldn’t eradicate Sug’s sloth.”

“So you eradicated him. And Hugo?”

“His consumption was such that it threatened the livelihood of every living thing around him. Hugo was undone by his gluttony.”

“You spent more time on Belle’s garden than anyone else’s. If you hated her so much, why did you make her garden so beautiful?”

“Everything about Belle was beautiful,” Victor said. “She and I trimmed and pruned her roses perfectly; her topiaries were exquisite. Belle’s pride in her appearance, her possessions and in her garden almost seduced me. I actually considered sparing her, until I realized that there was no humility behind Belle’s pride. She wanted everything to be the best and most beautiful to inspire envy, not appreciation. I came close, but I didn’t fall into Belle’s trap.”

“I’m feeling a little light-headed, Victor.”

“I’m sorry about that. I was enjoying our conversation.”

“Quickly, tell me why you killed Billie.”

“Ms. Green spent so much time measuring her garden against everyone else’s that she was never able to devote herself properly to what she had right in front of her. Her garden had the best light and the best soil, yet she spent hours talking about how she’d like to have Ms. Dellarosa’s garden, and yours, and even Mrs. Graball’s. I don’t know which was more green—Billie or her garden.”

Desiree weakly slumped in her chair. “And me, Victor. Why…”

“Because I’m not a man who likes to be mindlessly pursued,” he said, a brittle edge to his tone. “If you’d shown half as much passion for your garden as you did toward me, perhaps…”

A sharp intake of breath followed by a long, slow exhalation signaled Desiree’s demise, and Victor very gently rested her head on the table. He sighed heavily. “In case you were wondering, Ms. Calor, your garden was my favorite. I think you loved it. Just not the right way.”

The lone spotlight remained on Victor as he moved about the table collecting bottles of water and juice, returning them to the cooler. He wiped down each chair he’d touched and the surface of the table. With a final caress of Ms. Calor’s cheek, he picked up the cooler and stepped over Sug and Billie to exit stage right as the Narrator closed the play.

“And so, the 182nd meeting of the Sunnyside Beautification Association comes to an end, in every possible way. Victor, our avenging gardener and self-proclaimed lost sheep departs for places unknown, places where he hopes to find the beauty and virtue he sought in the residents of Sunnyside. But Victor isn’t traveling alone, and his companion might again rear its ugly head. For Victor isn’t without sin himself, and he knows it. Unlike the dearly departed members of the Sunnyside Beautification Association, Victor McIlwrath’s sin is as much a part of him as his own name. And wrath has a way of taking over when you least expect it to.”

* * *

Zander posed for photos with Kyla Randall and the other cast members, and then he accepted kudos and thanks from the theater director and its members as he and the cast signed autographs. He wondered where Faith was, until he spotted her standing near the exit with her friend Daiyu, her cellphone pressed to her ear. Her head was down, and he couldn’t read her expression until she looked up and saw him.

Zander’s smile faded at the sight of her troubled expression, and when she clutched at her throat, he ran to her, flashbulbs popping around him.

“What is it?” he asked, stroking her arm. “What’s wrong?”

“My mother…”

“Is everything okay?” Zander asked, concerned.

“It’s storming in Dorothy,” Faith whimpered.

Chapter 12

“You’re leaving, just like that.”

Faith had stripped off her designer gown the instant she walked into Zander’s house, and he’d thought that she was thinking of doing the same thing he’d wanted to do every time he’d looked at her from the stage. When she quickly changed into blue jeans and a gauzy white peasant blouse, he knew that she had very different plans.

His accusation rubbed Faith the wrong way, and she visibly bristled when he gave her right shoulder what was meant to be a loving squeeze.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, glowering. “But I just don’t understand why you have to go.”

“I don’t
have
to, I
want
to.” Faith continued tossing her clothes into her travel bag. “There’s a difference.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

She spun to face him, a hesitant smile telegraphing her hope. “You would go back—”

“Hell no!” He said, giving the foot of his bed a savage kick. “You know damn well that I won’t go back there!”

“Then why would you even offer?” Faith shouted.

“It was a simple question,” he yelled, his volume matching hers. “I just wanted to know if you still had your crazy ideas about me ever going back to Booger Hollow.”

“There’s nothing crazy about a person going home when something bad is happening to her friends and family,” Faith growled through gritted teeth.

“What friends?” Zander snorted. “Are you counting cheerleaders and dance classmates as friends? And as for your parents, you acted like they kept you under house arrest.”

Her fur ruffled, Faith said, “I was a teenager, and as headstrong as my dad! Of course I butted heads with my folks. That doesn’t mean I don’t love them, that they don’t love me. Things change, if you give them a chance. No, I didn’t have a fan club back home when I was a kid, but there are a few people I grew close to over the years. Half the things I hated when I was a senior in high school are the things I love about Booger Hollow now.” Flustered and impatient, her explanations jumbled. “Red Irv still serves awesome coffee, and his spaghetti and potatoes are the best! Some of our old schoolmates married each other, and they’re my parents’ neighbors now. I get the star treatment when I go home, because of my job. Even Bethany Brewer manages to find me and ask me what celebrities I’ve interviewed or written about. I still can’t stand her, but just imagine what I could tell her this time!”

“When was the last time you were even there?” Zander asked.

“Christmas, damn it, only a few months ago! What difference does it make?”

“It just strikes me as crazy for you to fly off at a hair’s notice to—”

Faith cut him off with, “What’s crazy is someone who uses a natural disaster to sneak out—”

“There was nothing natural about that flood,” Zander broke in. “Your father’s company peeled that mountain like an overripe banana.”

“—and lets the people who love him think he’s dead for ten years!” Faith finished. “And don’t you dare try to accuse my father of creating that flood! He didn’t make it rain, you—!”

“What?” he snarled. “Say it.” He stepped up to her. “There’s nothing you can call me that I didn’t hear a million times back East.”

If he thought his height and breadth would intimidate her, Faith quickly disabused him of that idea. “I was going to call you a spoiled, egomaniacal, vindictive brat! Ever been called that?” Faith said nastily, pushing past him to sit on the foot of the bed.

She yanked on a pair of white socks and shoved her feet into her sneakers. She stood to furiously jam her hand into her low-slung jeans to tuck in her blouse, leaving it lopsided, one tail fully hidden, the other bunching at her hip.

His voice still at top volume, Zander railed at her. “You still refuse to see what it was like for me back—”

“Get over it!”

Faith’s arms and legs stiffened from the force of her voice, her fingers splayed, her eyes fairly popped from their sockets.

“Damn it, already, Alex, just get the hell over it! People were mean to you back then, so what? SO WHAT? People are mean to other people all over the world. You’ve got your revenge, and it’s the best kind of revenge. You’re handsome, you’re rich, you’re successful and you didn’t have to demean other people to achieve your success. If you really want to punish all those dumbasses back in Booger Hollow who made you feel like you didn’t matter, come back with me now and show them what they missed out on. Show them how stupid they were for not seeing what I saw all along!”

With no place to go, Zander’s anger fled inward. His blood turned acid and seemed to burn all good sense right out of his brain. If for no other reason than to passively wound her, he very calmly said, “I hope the storms wash away Booger Hollow and Dorothy, West Virginia, for good this time.”

Faith recoiled as if he’d struck her with more than words. She had nothing to say to him, couldn’t even look at him, as she gathered her bag and left the house. Only after he heard the rattling clang of metal against metal of Faith’s old Camry racing down his driveway did Zander sink onto the foot of his bed, his face in his hands.

* * *

Motionless but for the movement of his right thumb on the
channel up
button of his remote control, Zander stared unblinking at the massive flat-screen television built into the wall of his great room. Brent, masquerading as the poster boy for L.L. Bean, sat in a nearby theater-style armchair, his feet in worn topsiders—no socks—wearing layered Polos in baby pink and Kelly green with matching patchwork Bermuda shorts.

“It’s pretty bad out there,” Brent said, his matter-of-fact tone contradicting the weight of his statement.

“Out where?” Zander responded flatly.

“You know where.”

Zander flipped through all the pay-per-view and adult channels, worked his way through his HBO, Showtime and Starz movie channels, and blipped past MSNBC and the CNN family.

“Leave it there, please,” Brent said, stopping him at The Weather Channel.

“You goin’ somewhere?” Zander asked, noting that Brent had wanted to eye the Traveler’s Advisory.

“Just leave it there.”

Zander’s mind wandered while Brent sat riveted to what Zander had decided was the most boring channel on his satellite system. He thought about getting up, showering and changing clothes after three days—or four—in the same jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing when he last saw Faith. It occurred to him to get something to eat, as he’d already finished off the bowls of nuts that had adorned his tables.

Nothing tasted as it should have since he’d used his tongue to wound Faith, and quite frankly, he’d had no appetite. Not for food, anyway.

“Have you heard from her?” Brent asked, pulling Zander from his reverie.

“No.”

“You haven’t called her?”

“Why should I?”

“I thought you’d outgrown the sullen, son-of-a-bitch phase you were in when my mother discovered you.”

“I’m not sullen,” Zander said dispassionately. “I’m not going to chase a—”

Brent shushed him. The unsmiling anchors chairing the weather news had begun a report on the early April storms causing the floods that continued to bedevil West Virginia and Maryland.

Zander tried to ignore the report, but words like “severe,” “disaster,” “crisis” and “casualties” kept his eyes riveted to the screen. He had assiduously avoided anything that had to do with West Virginia in the years since he’d left. If anyone had asked him how many states were in the Union, he would have said forty-nine with a straight face.

As evidenced by the grim images provided by The Weather Channel, Zander saw that he might not be too far from wrong in the very near future.

He sat up, suddenly alert. Swallowing hard, he watched brown flood waters crash against trailer homes, snatching them clean off their moorings, using one to batter the next until walls collapsed to be pulled under the water. The Main Street that had existed only in his most troubled nightmares was half underwater. The plate-glass window of Red Irv’s had been shattered by a car the raging water had hurled through it. Miss Lorraine’s second floor dance studio was easily accessible by boat now that McGill’s pharmacy was underwater.

An on-the-scene correspondent in a yellow slicker and dark green waders interviewed Duncan Blair, who had been mayor of Dorothy for as long as Zander could remember. He paid no attention to the interview; his interest was focused on the activity in the background. He recognized several residents of Dorothy despite the ten years they had on them: Travis Gates, one of many men and women soaked to the bone on a sandbag line, shoveled sand into a nylon bag held open by Art Brody Jr., the son of the man who owned the town body shop; Marjo Skipkey, the Lincoln High girls’ athletic director, who had left her husband for another woman, slowly pulled a dinghy filled with cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, Busch beer and potato chips down Main Street; Tina Blair, the mayor’s stout wife, still wore the bright red lipstick that, to Zander’s eye, always made her mouth look like an open wound.

Zander had never known Mayor and Mrs. Blair personally, but he recalled the way Faith had made fun of Tina’s “frooty” after she’d called Zander a “waste of space, like your father” after berating him for failing to clear her breakfast dishes fast enough after her Sunday morning feeding at the diner.

Upon asking for an explanation, Zander had learned that a frooty was Faith’s name for the way Mayor Blair’s wife’s gut bulged against the center front seam of her elasticized pants. A frooty was a front booty.

“What’s so damn funny?” Brent suddenly demanded.

Zander hadn’t realized that he’d laughed aloud, but he quickly sobered when the scene on screen changed, and he caught a flash of an older African-American man directing sandbagging efforts at the rear of a big house that was all too familiar to him. Only then did Zander pay attention to the reporter’s words.

“While local business owner Justus Wheeler coordinates efforts to protect his home and property from nature’s next onslaught, locals fear that this may spell the end for the quaint mining community of Booger Hollow, West Virginia. Reporting live from Dorothy, West Virginia, this is—”

Zander hit the mute button. Resting his elbows on his knees, he sat forward, his head hanging between his shoulders.

“You can’t run from your past forever,” Brent told him. “I know it, my mother knows it and deep down inside you know it. As your agent, you know I have your best professional interests in mind. I know you don’t want to hear it, but as your friend, I have to tell you that if you don’t get off your ass and go to—”

“You’re my agent,” Zander said darkly. “That means you work for me. Get on the phone yourself, or get your mom’s hired help to do it, but you’d better get me on the soonest possible flight east. Commercial, charter, corporate—I don’t care. I gotta get home. To Faith.”

* * *

The Lincoln High School gym was filled to capacity with most of Booger Hollow’s five hundred residents taking shelter there. Army issue cots with thin mattresses and scratchy, grey wool blankets had been arranged in close, orderly rows on the floor where the Lincoln Black Bears had last won a state basketball tournament around the time Homer Hickam shot his last rocket off in Coalwood.

The Red Cross had set up relief stations for First Aid, but Red Irv, commanding the school’s devoted phalanx of lunch ladies, had assumed control of the school kitchen. Their combined efforts and expertise had kept the town fed surprisingly well through the eight days of rain and resultant flooding, but supplies were dwindling fast.

Flood fatigue was the most damaging to the morale of the town, with everyone hoping for the best but expecting the worst from the latest storm, which had begun shortly after noon.

Exhausted, Faith had returned to the gym after a Saturday spent with her former schoolmates and neighbors building a sandbag levee along the mountainside border of Kayford Estates. Confident that the levee would hold, Justus Wheeler had decided that he and his wife would spend the night at home rather than join his daughter in the gymnasium.

Local authorities, his friends, even the Red Cross had pleaded with him to evacuate, but stubborn and certain of his ability to have things his way even against nature, Mr. Wheeler had refused.

Faith’s confidence in her father’s obstinacy was such that she believed he would be okay simply because he believed it. But she herself retired to the gym, if for no other reason than to show her solidarity with the town.

Sleep was hours away, if she would sleep at all. The sound of the rain, a lullaby in Fawnskin, sent frissons of terror through her as she sat crosslegged on her narrow cot in Dorothy.

She thought about going to the school library, the only place she had Internet access now that her smartphone had lost its charge, to see what flood news had made the online magazines. But Lincoln’s current crop of students surrounded Faith, barraging her with questions about her job and the celebrities with whom she’d worked or had run-ins. Though she patiently entertained their questions, even telling them about the play she’d attended in Fawnskin a week ago, they did little to distract her from the worries weighing on her.

“Who’s the biggest actor you’ve ever met?” asked a freckle-speckled redhead who grinned at her with a mouthful of corrective steel.

“Rick Fox,” Faith answered. “He’s six feet, seven inches tall.”

“He’s not an actor,” the redhead groaned. “He’s a retired Laker.”

“Who’s been in movies, so he’s now an actor,” Faith argued. “He’s a very gracious interview, so don’t knock my man Rick.”

“Who’s the meanest person you ever interviewed?” asked a young girl whose lank, dishwater blonde hair, still damp from her recent entry from outside, molded to the shape of her skull.

“Marjo Skipkey,” Faith whispered. “She’s a serious head case.”

The students laughed, some even clapped.

“Who’s your favorite actor?” cut a voice through the merriment.

Alexander Brannon
, was the name on Faith’s tongue, but she couldn’t drive it forward.

“Are you okay, Miss Wheeler?” a middle-school student asked, sensitive to the change in Faith’s posture and expression.