Читать книгу Leaving L.a. - Rexanne Becnel - Страница 11

I slept like G.G. used to when he was mixing drugs and alcohol: comatose for twelve hours straight, and I felt groggy when I woke up. A little clock ticked on the small, round table next to me, but I felt like it was shaking the whole bed. Then I realized that it was Tripod’s whiplike tail whacking the mattress in rhythm with the clock.

“Okay, okay,” I mumbled, squinting at the brightly lit window. Nearly eleven? No wonder Tripod was getting antsy. I rolled out of bed, found my same jeans and T-shirt—I really needed to unpack—then on bare feet headed downstairs. The house was quiet, and I could tell I was alone.

I saw a sticky note on the office door: “Leave Angel inside.” Sure enough, fluff-ball’s shrill yapping started up. Tripod’s ears perked up. Once he sniffed and snorted at her, however, only silence came from the other side of the door.

“What the hell,” I muttered, and opened the door.

I’ll give Angel credit; she was fast. Through the door, across the foyer and halfway up the stairs before Tripod could even turn around. There she stood her ground, ceding the first floor to Tripod but daring him to try for the second.

Tripod, of course, leaped joyously into the dare. But I caught him by the collar and dragged him to a standstill. “Cool it, mutt. Let’s go outside.”

Once we were on the porch, Angel ventured down, resuming her yapping at the front door. I figured the two of them would eventually sort things out. The real question was how I was going to sort things out with Alice.

One hour, one shower and one cup of coffee later I was on my way. There were a couple of lawyers in the several towns around here, but I worried that some of them might know Alice and her recently deceased minister husband. So I picked the sleaziest, most likely to be godless one I could. According to his yellow pages ad, Dick Manglin was just what I needed. Personal injury, criminal defense, DWIs and bail bond reductions. Someone whose only goal was to win, win, win.

I didn’t call for an appointment. I figured my snug-fitting dress, stiletto sandals, red toenails and redder lipstick would get me in.

Sure enough, by the time I left Dick’s office he was dictating a demand letter for my sister that would give her one week to produce my portion of the property sale to the church, as well as one-half the value for the remaining acreage and house. It would be hand-delivered tomorrow. Otherwise, the letter concluded, we would take legal action to challenge the sale as fraudulent and to force the sale of the house. Copies to be sent to the Simmons Creek Victory Church.

Alice was going to shit a brick.

Oops. Alice was going to freak out, I amended. I’d given up cursing in deference to the baby, who all the books said would be able to hear long before she was born.

Anyway, Alice was going to freak out, which was the whole point. As for Daniel, I’d better interview him soon, before Alice turned him entirely against me. But he hadn’t been home when I left, and I didn’t want to go back there anyway.

I climbed into my Jeep. The whole day stretched ahead of me, but I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do.

As if in answer, my stomach growled.

“Food,” I muttered to Jenny Jeep. “Find me a restaurant, baby. Preferably one with oyster po’ boys and fried onion rings.” My ob-gyn in Los Angeles had given me permission to eat whatever I wanted to. No dieting at all, at least for the first few months. She probably hadn’t had fried onion rings in mind, but it wasn’t like I ate them everyday. Besides, most days I couldn’t eat much breakfast. It made sense, then, that I make up for it at lunch.

I found a place—Sara Mae’s—that looked like it had been serving lunch specials for the past fifty years. It was well past the lunch hour, but there were still enough cars there to reassure me that the food was good.

I slipped in without fanfare—I thought. Of course, every head in the place swiveled my way.

This is a small town, idiot. And you’re a stranger. The outfit didn’t help either. As I slid into the first empty booth, I reminded myself that from now on it would be jeans and T-shirt for me. Nothing flashy. And I needed to keep my always-rioting hair in a ponytail or bun.

I gave the waitress my order, then took out my cell phone. Three more messages from G.G. I slapped it closed. The hell with him. He probably just wanted to know where the file for the next tour was. And if I was really leaving him, could I please return all the jewelry he’d bought me?

Fat chance. I’d already sold most of it. I had a little nest egg started. Barely five figures, but if I was frugal, it would keep me going a few months until I received my inheritance. Then I’d settle in, just me, Tripod and my sweet baby.

The waitress returned with my lemonade and onion rings just as the door opened.

“Hey, Joe,” she called out. “You’re late today.”

“You got any pork chops left?” the man called to her. That man. That Joe.

Like radar, his eyes seemed to find me.

Shit. I mean, shoot.

He greeted a couple of old guys at the bar. The regulars. It reminded me of Cheers, a place where everyone knows your name, so it was no biggie to figure out who would be the big topic of conversation once I left the joint.

“Hey,” he said, stopping at my booth.

I’d done the mental calculations in the short time it had taken him to reach me. Six feet tall, maybe six-one. One-eighty or so. G.G.’s height but a good thirty pounds heavier. Probably never been strung out. A big plus in his favor. Too bad he was a reporter.

“Hello,” I responded, not smiling.

“You’re eating alone.”

“I am. Unless, pushy reporter that you are, you intend to invite yourself to join me.”

He grinned. Damn, he had a great smile. I meant darn.

“You don’t like reporters. Now why is that?”

“I don’t like lawyers either,” I said. “Or dog catchers, or tax collectors.”

His eyes glinted with humor. “Surely the fact that I’m not a lawyer, love dogs and pay taxes instead of collecting them should offset the fact that I’m a reporter.”

I’ve always been a sucker for charming men. Charming, smart or talented, preferably all three. G.G. had once been charming and talented. They hadn’t dubbed him “Guitar God” Givens for nothing. But fame and cocaine had eventually ruined him for anything but staring in the mirror.

This man, Joe Reeves, was charming and probably a talented writer—and smart, too. Unfortunately he could also be a threat to my need to lie low. But there were ways to deal with a man like him.

So I perched my chin on my hand, smiled up at him. “At least you like dogs.” I gestured to the bench seat opposite me. “Go ahead then, and sit. Have an onion ring.”

The waitress appeared with his iced tea and a house salad. “Thanks, Marie,” he said. “Have you met Zoe?”

We exchanged pleasantries as she sized me up. Thank God he hadn’t mentioned my last name. With all the old-timers in this place, someone was sure to remember me.

“Find what you needed at the library?” he asked.

“I was just browsing. How’s the newspaper business?” We’re not talking about me, buddy, so just forget that you’re a reporter. I leaned forward and smiled. “How did you get into writing for a living?”

“I don’t know. I was an oddball kid. Part nerd, part jock. I worked on my high school newspaper and yearbook staffs, and played baseball and basketball.”

“And had all the girls crazy about you, no doubt.”

He chuckled. “Not as many as I would have liked. And probably not as many as you had guys chasing after you.”

I wasn’t going to bite. But it was hard. He had this very observant way of looking at you, like whatever you said was really, really important to him. A good trait for a reporter, I reminded myself.

Marie showed up with my po’ boy and his pork chop and white beans.

“You eat here often?” I asked as we dug in.

“Couple of times a week. Mel advertises in the paper. I come in to keep them honest in the taste department.”

“Mel?” Inside I began to shake, but on the outside I kept it cool. “As in Melody or Melvin?”

“Melvin Toups. He owns this place.”

Melvin Toups. Oh, my God! That creep Melvin Toups who’d chased me into the river? I kept my breathing even. In through the nose, out through the mouth. “Why do they call it Sara Mae’s?” I asked, just to fill in the awful silence.

“This was his mother-in-law’s place before Mel took over.” That meant he had a wife? Poor woman. When Melvin and his thug friends had chased me to the river to escape them, I’d been so scared. Four teenaged boys; one teenaged girl. I’d been petrified that they’d meant to rape me.

I suppressed a shudder and bit into my po’ boy. I love oyster po’ boys, and no place makes them like the small mom-and-pop joints spread around southern Louisiana. But this one could have been cardboard for all I could taste. Melvin Toups had made this sandwich and these onion rings.

I felt the rise of bile in my throat. You will not be sick. You will not be sick. I chanted the words, breathing slowly, deeply, knowing I had to get out of here. I dropped the remains of the po’ boy on the plate and pushed it away. I wanted to throw it across the room.

“You okay?” Joe asked.

I shook my head. “Too much mayonnaise.” I snagged my purse, dug out my wallet and pulled out a twenty. “See you around.” Then I pushed out of the booth, shoved the money in Marie’s hand and fled. The last thing I heard was someone chortling. “Hey, Joe. What in the hell did you say to the little lady?”

I didn’t know where to go, what to do. I hated the farmhouse. I would have gone to the library, but it was right next to Joe Reeves’s office and I sure didn’t want to run into him again. If I could have, I would have loaded up Tripod and all my gear and just left, heading to Florida or the Carolina coast, anywhere warm and near the water. But I needed my money. My inheritance. Without it I would have to put my baby in a day-care center while I worked, and I was determined not to do that. Bad enough she wouldn’t have a father. The least I could do was give her a stay-at-home mother until she started school.

So I jumped in Jenny Jeep and just drove. Down two-lane blacktops, turning onto gravel roads, veering onto rutted, overgrown dirt trails. I had to switch into four-wheel drive as I careened down one muddy lane. It ended at a river, coffee-colored and moving fast. The water was high, but then that was typical in the spring. By August this same river would be way down, warm and moving slowly.

I turned off the car and got out, but open-toed sandals aren’t any good for tramping through underbrush. Between snakes, poison ivy and blackberry canes, I was bound to lose the fight.

But instead of frustrating me, that actually helped to calm me down. Some things were beyond my control: the woods, the river. My past. The cruel people in the world.

I climbed onto the roof of my Jeep and sat there cross-legged, staring through the pines and sweet gum and oaks toward the river. It wasn’t my fault Mel Toups had been a mean kid. Maybe he was nicer now, but I doubted it. The point was, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I wasn’t the scared little girl I used to be. I had power of my own. More important, I knew how to marshal other people’s power. In fact, I bet Mr. Joe Newspaper would just love a juicy story about how Mel and his buddies tried to grab a girl in the woods way back when. Joe might not want to write bad news about his neighbors, but he was a true newshound, and he wouldn’t be able to resist. I could see the headline: Former Oracle Resident Returns To Confront Attempted Rapist.

I smiled grimly at the relentless flow of the river. I might not be able to prove the allegations, but it would sure upset Mel’s wife. Maybe she’d be so repulsed that she’d divorce him. Then he’d lose his job at his mother-in-law’s diner, I speculated. He’d turn into a homeless bum, eating out of the Dumpster behind the place he used to run.

By the time the first drops of rain started to fall I was feeling much better. Nothing had changed and I wasn’t about to fill Joe Reeves in on the ugliness of my childhood. But the mental exercise of getting revenge on Mel Toups had helped.

It had begun to pour by the time I backed Jenny around and picked my way out of the maze of narrow lanes and back roads. Where in the hell was I anyway? It took an old man sitting on his porch with two ancient hound dogs beside him to steer me correctly.

“Thanks!” I waved to him and in ten minutes was back at the farm. Except that I really didn’t want to be in that house, especially not alone. So I ran in, changed into long jeans and tennis shoes and, with Tripod next to me, set off for a walk.

The rain had barely touched the farm, only dampened the fields a little and left the woods drippy. Tripod was in his glory. I couldn’t say the same about myself, but at least I hadn’t thrown up. Up to now morning sickness hadn’t been a serious problem. Instead I was periodically surprised by a sudden wave of nausea. Midday, midnight and anytime in-between.

I rubbed the rounded little mound beneath my belly button. “Temperamental and unpredictable. Is that what I should expect from you?” Given her mother’s temperament—and her father’s—what else could she be?

I followed a path I hadn’t thought about in years. It had hardly changed. A narrow woodland track that wound through the thickest part of our woodlot, down an incline, skirting a lush stand of wood ferns already thigh-high. Must have been a mild winter.

The ground grew soggy, but once past the Black Bog, as Alice and I had dubbed it, the ground rose again. But something was different. It was too bright up ahead.

Then I saw the short, square steeple, and I realized where I was. Alice’s church. The back acreage on the far side of the Black Bog. This was the land she’d sold without my consent.

I stopped at the edge of the trees and stared. The church wasn’t all that much to look at, a metal warehouse-type building with an awkward front tower and a plain cross above it. A clearing had been carved out of the woods in one big square. Trees rimmed the square, the ugly church squatted in the middle and a partially paved parking lot circled the whole thing.

A smaller building stood off to one side, probably some sort of activities center. Several cars were parked nose-in next to it, including Alice’s. I suppose traipsing through the woods was too messy for her little neat-freak, do-gooder soul. She had to get into her eight-cylinder gas-guzzler and drive the half mile around to the road that fronted the church.

I turned away, furious at the ugly blight she’d inflicted on my land. The least they could have done was build a handsome church, something inspiring and comforting.

I turned back for the house, whistling for Tripod, then abruptly took another trail, the one that circled the northern edge of our land. Tripod followed behind me, nose down, pretending he was a hunting dog. He didn’t let me get too far ahead, though. Nervous, I guess.

But I wasn’t. I was remembering so much. Like the half-hearted tree house Alice and I had discovered in a big oak tree. Some other long-ago kids must have started it, but we had finished it, making it our own, dragging up wood, rope and pieces of tin, fixing it up, thinking we could make it impregnable, our own little respite from the madness back at home.

It had been our secret, hers and mine, until Mother had followed us one day. She and her man-of-the-moment had laughed with glee when they’d discovered our hideaway. Then they’d climbed up there and christened it—her term for screwing in a new place. Or in an old place with a new man.

Whatever. The magic had been ruined.

But I’d got even. I’d broken a dozen glass bottles on the tree house floor, and when that hadn’t stopped her from going back, I’d set it on fire.

I don’t know why the whole woods didn’t go up in flames that day. Maybe because it had been raining so much that summer. But the floor of the tree house had burned away, and so had the rope ladder. Most important, Mother never went up in our tree house again. I ruined it for her, just like she’d ruined it for Alice and me.

Is it any wonder I equate sex with power? Every bit of my mother’s power came from sex, but she’d used it indiscriminately. In the end it had ruined her life and probably that of several men. Certainly it had ruined my life and Alice’s.

But I learned from her mistakes. She who commands men with her sex rules the world—if she can keep her cool about her. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Elizabeth I.

One thing I certainly didn’t associate sex with was making love. And I don’t much equate it with pleasure either. I’ve had one or two considerate lovers. But the other boyfriends have always been about themselves and their pleasure.

Not that I really cared. I’ve always thought sex was highly overrated.

Tripod started barking, drawing me back from my sour thoughts. Sex had given me this baby, and that’s all that mattered anymore. So I changed directions to where Tripod stood barking for all he was worth at a big, curled-up water moccasin.

I grabbed my idiot dog by the collar. “I suggest you stick to poodles, if you want to stay alive,” I muttered. For once he listened and followed me down another path that took us to the edge of our property.

Beyond the woods I saw an old white house, plain and ordinary except for the incredible display of flowers that surrounded it. Wow! When I was really young, an old man had lived here. Then he’d done what seemed like the oddest thing. As old as he was, he’d married this really nice, really old woman.

At that precise moment my eyes picked her out. It was her, sitting under a sweet gum tree on a wide, wooden bench painted cardinal-red. Twenty years ago her hair had been turning gray. Now it was completely white.

She was the one who’d taught me how to jitterbug and how to waltz. She’d showed me the samba and the rumba. And the tango.

I started forward with the first genuine smile on my face since I’d arrived in Oracle. She didn’t notice me right away, not until a huge yellow cat spied Tripod and leaped up onto her lap.

I don’t know much about Tripod’s early years, but I know he’s as terrified of cats as he is of big trucks and SUVs. No doubt he’d come up on the short end of a confrontation with a cat or two. At least he hadn’t lost a leg to a cat. But that didn’t change anything. He saw the cat, stopped dead in his tracks, and started to bark furiously—from a safe distance of at least a hundred feet or so.

“Will you please shut up?” I muttered to him. To the old woman—Harriet was her name—I waved. “Hello there.”

“Why, hello.” She smiled and gestured me over.

I went. Tripod remained behind, howling like I’d abandoned him on the side of the road. As if.

“You’re Harriet, aren’t you?” I began. “I don’t know if you’ll remember me but—”

“Zoe.” Her eyes lit with recognition, and the loveliest smile brightened her sweet, old face. “Zoe Vidrine. I’d recognize that flame-red hair anywhere.” She reached out a hand to me and squeezed tightly. “Even prettier than I remembered. But I could swear someone told me you were…” She trailed off, too polite to finish the thought.

“Dead?” I grimaced. “That seems to be the story Alice spread around. But it’s not true.”

“But why did she think you were dead?”

Because she’s a lying thief, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. “We lost touch for a while. But now I’m back.”