Читать книгу Leaving L.a. - Rexanne Becnel - Страница 9

I hung up my clothes, put the folded things into the pretty oak dresser, lined up my shoes in the bottom of the closet and stacked the boxes of records and books in the corner behind the bed.

“Now what?” I said to the world at large. I’d accomplished the first part of my plan. That had turned out to be the easy part. Now I needed a plan for Part Two.

My stomach gurgled and I rubbed one hand over it. “You stay here,” I told Tripod, who’d already stretched out on the faintly dusty pine floor. “Guard my stuff while I…”

Go somewhere. Do something. I wasn’t sure what.

All I knew was that I wasn’t sitting up here in the room my mother had called the Venus Trap. I’d once seen three women and two men doing stuff to each other here that no eleven-year-old should ever be exposed to. The room was painted pale blue now, with eyelet curtains framing the two windows and an old-fashioned chenille bedspread covering the pretty iron bed. But I could see the black and hot-pink walls beneath this pretty facade as clearly as if the paint was bleeding through.

“Ugh.” I shuddered and closed the door behind me. Directly across the hall Daniel’s solid door seemed to beckon me. I knocked, a short lilting rhythm. After a minute he cracked the door.

“Hey. Listen, I’m going out. You know, to drive around and check out the changes in town.” I made that decision barely a split second before the words spilled out of my mouth. “You need anything? A ride anywhere?”

He shook his head, not meeting my eyes. But he didn’t close the door in my face either.

“Look, Daniel. I didn’t come here to make trouble between you and your mother. She and I…well, let’s just say we weren’t raised in a real close family. I’m sure she has her reasons for not telling you about me.” Lousy reasons but reasons all the same.

“But she lied to me.” He lifted his eyes—Mom’s eyes—to me.

“Look, kid. Everybody lies. All the time.”

“That’s not true.” When I only shrugged, he said, “Well, they’re not supposed to.”

“But they do. The trick is to figure out their motive. Are they trying to hurt you with the lie or just trying to help themselves out of a bad situation?” Then for some stupid, maudlin reason I added, “Or maybe they’re lying because they think it will somehow help you.”

“Well, it didn’t help me.” He gave me this long, steady look. “Why’d you decide to come home now?”

I didn’t want to say. It was one thing to demand what I was owed from Alice. It was another thing to discuss it with her kid. “I figured twenty-four years away would have been too long. So,” I went on. “Do you need anything while I’m out?”

He hesitated only for a second. “Maybe I will take a ride with you. To my friend’s house.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Tripod started to howl. How he knew I was leaving the premises was beyond me. Daniel gave me a questioning look. Normally I’d take the dog, too. But I didn’t trust Carl Witter not to take my stuff and throw it outside. I knew Tripod wouldn’t let him get past the door.

We didn’t see anyone in the living room. “I’m going to Josh’s,” Daniel called toward the kitchen.

No answer.

“She’s not going to be happy when she finds out I drove you,” I pointed out as we climbed into Jenny.

“I’m fourteen, not four,” he muttered. “Almost fifteen. I can take care of myself.”

“Okay then.” I started up Jenny’s cranky engine. “Which way?”

Driving down the old roads of my childhood was like negotiating a foreign country. Like a Twilight Zone episode where everything was so strange and yet somehow familiar. The town square and St. Brunhilde’s church, and the Landry mansion were familiar. The P.J.’s Coffeehouse in the old Union Bank building, the Wendy’s on the corner of Barcelona Avenue and the Walgreens opposite it were all new. The park that meandered along the river was the same. Bigger trees and bigger parking lot but otherwise the same. That’s where that stupid Toups kid and his friends had chased me once, wanting to know if it was true that hippie kids didn’t wear underwear. I’d jumped into the river to escape them and nearly drowned.

Mother had laughed when I’d finally got home, shivering in my wet clothes. I’d shown them, she’d chortled.

Her boyfriend at the time, Snakie somebody or other, had stared at my fourteen-year-old breasts beneath my clinging knit top and promised to get even for me. And he had. The old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick. I heard Bonehead Toups had to go back to his bicycle. Sweet justice, literally.

But of course, it had a downside. Snakie had wanted a sweet little reward for being so heroic. A reward from me, not my mom.

Unfortunately for him, after the river incident I’d checked out a library book on self-defense for women. That knee-to-the-groin business really works. He moved out the next week.

“Turn left up there, by the gas station,” Daniel said, bringing me back to the present. We went down an old blacktop to just past where it turned to gravel. “There.” He pointed to a pair of shotgun houses with a rusty trailer parked farther behind them.

“Do you need me to pick you up later?” I might as well ingratiate myself with him before his mother turned him completely against me.

“No. Josh’ll give me a ride home.”

“This Josh is old enough to drive?”

He grinned. “He has a four-wheeler. We’ll take the back route through the woods.”

I grinned back. “Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah. But don’t tell my mom that part.” His grin faded. “She says it’s too dangerous.”

“It is too dangerous. But that’s what makes it so fun.”

“Yeah.” He slammed the door, then gave me a head bobble that I guessed passed for “thanks.” “See ya.”

Then it was just me and Jenny Jeep and my old hometown.

On the surface, Oracle, Louisiana, is just like every other small town I’ve ever been in: an Andy of Mayberry downtown, a big, brick elementary school, a couple of churches. It had more trees than most. And more humidity. I’d been in a lot of little towns, especially when I toured with Dirk and his Dirt Bag Band. I’d done everything on those tours: arranged the shows, driven the bus, collected the money. Collected the band too when they were too stoned to find their way back to the bus.

I hadn’t collected very much money for myself, though. I was Dirk’s girlfriend. What did I need with money?

His words, not mine.

That’s when I’d started my T-shirt and jewelry sideline. Small-town wannabe rockers and wannabe groupies had snapped them up. Too bad I hadn’t saved more of that money. But Dirk had thought what was mine was his, and he would have blown my profits on booze and drugs and music equipment. So instead I blew them on becoming the best-dressed rock band manager you ever saw.

Anyway, you see one small town, you’ve seen them all.

I turned onto Main Street. Creative street name isn’t it? That’s when I saw the library. Except for the white crepe myrtles flanking the front doors, it hadn’t changed a bit. There weren’t many places in this town I had good associations with; the library was one of them.

I parked in front of the newspaper office next door to the library. Through the paper’s front window I saw an old woman staring at a computer screen. So the Northshore News had gone high tech. With only a few keystrokes they could more easily report on this weekend’s softball tournament or the Jones’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. Woo hoo. Big news.

At least there weren’t any parking meters to feed. I jumped down from Jenny, locked the door and slammed it.

“You must be from out of town.”

Startled, I looked up. “Why do you say that?” I replied to this guy who had stopped in front of the newspaper office, his hand on the doorknob.

“You locked your car. People around here don’t do that.”

His comment shouldn’t have made me feel so defensive, but I guess I was feeling extra touchy today. Added to that I wasn’t in the mood to be hit on, especially by a guy who had to know how good-looking he was. “They don’t? Well, I’ve been mugged in a small town like this.” A drunk coming out of one of the Dirt Bags’ concerts, who got frustrated when I wouldn’t go home with him. “And had my car broken into.” Amps stolen out of the band’s bus.

I hiked my purse onto my shoulder and tossed my hair back. “So you see, I’ve learned not to be too trusting. Even in a nice little town like this.”

He tilted his head to one side. “Sorry to hear that.” He stared at me. At me, not my chest, for one long, steady moment, the kind of look that forced me to really look at him in return. If I were looking for a guy, he would have fit the bill just fine. If I were looking. Several inches taller than me, even in my heels. Wide shoulders, trim build. Not cocaine skinny like too many of the men I’ve known. Not self-indulgent fat like too many others. Which left the equally unappealing other third of men: probably a narcissistic health nut trying to stave off middle age.

“I’m Joe Reeves.” He stuck out his hand.

I didn’t want to know his name or to know him. But I had no real reason to blow him off. So I took his hand—big, strong and warm—and shook it. “Zoe Vidrine.”

“You visiting here, Zoe? A tourist?” he asked, once I’d pulled my hand free of his.

“Oracle gets tourists?”

“You’d be surprised. Oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Natural spring waters. We have our own winery now and a railroad museum. Not to mention all the water sports on Lake Pontchartain.”

“That cesspool?”

“It’s clean now. Regularly passes all state requirements for swimming.”

“Gee, it all sounds so exciting.” But I softened my sarcasm by laughing.

He grinned. “That’s the point. It’s quiet and relaxing here. The perfect escape from the rat race.”

“Yeah? Well, we’ll see.”

“So you’re not a tourist. That means you’re visiting someone.”

I glanced away from his lean, smiling face. He was too smooth, too easy to talk to. Then I realized he’d been going into the newspaper office, and all my senses went into red alert mode. “You work here?” I gestured to the office.

“Sure do. Editor-in-chief.”

Editor-in-chief? Shit!

“Plus beat reporter, features reporter, obituary writer and head of advertising. We’re a small outfit, Wednesday and Sunday editions only.”

“Cool,” I said. But I meant just the opposite. The last thing I needed was for some local-yokel reporter to figure out that Zoe Vidrine was actually G. G. Givens’s ex-girlfriend Red Vidrine and try to make a big deal about it.

I shifted my purse to my other shoulder. As I did so, his gaze fell to my body. Just one swift, all-encompassing glance. But it was enough to remind me that he was a man like every other man in the world. To them I was just a hot babe who looked as if all she wanted was his leering, drooling attention. “Well. See you around,” I said. Then I turned and made for the library, my sanctuary when I was a kid, and hopefully my sanctuary now. I willed myself not to look back at him, but I knew he was watching. I felt it.

Inside, the library was cool and dim and so much like when I was a kid that a wave of relief shuddered through me. Same big wide desk; same art deco hanging lamps; same oriel window where I used to sit for hours reading everything from Seventeen Magazine to Alexandre Dumas to Shere Hite. I learned a lot about sex from Shere Hite. Too bad more men hadn’t read her.

Anyway, my oriel was just like I remembered except for new, dark green upholstery on the cushions.

I looked around. Mr. Pinchon couldn’t still be the head librarian. I approached the woman at the front desk.

“Can I help you?” She smiled like she really meant it.

“I was wondering, does Mr. Pinchon still work here? When I was a kid he used to suggest a lot of books for me to read.”

“Mr. Pinchon? I don’t know him. Oh, wait. He retired a couple of years ago before I started working here.”

“Oh.” I looked away. I shouldn’t feel disappointed, but I did. The one person who’d understood me, who’d cared enough to make sure I read across the spectrum. He’d made me a lifelong reader—and a sometimes writer. But of course he was gone. He was old back then. By now he was probably dead.

“Can I help you with anything else?” the librarian asked. “Do you have a current library card?”

“No.”

“Well, we can easily remedy that.” She handed me a pen and a registration form, and I started to fill it out. Until I caught myself. I didn’t need to advertise that I was in town. I’d planned all along to keep a low profile, to just swoop down, collect my inheritance and split.

Then why’d you tell that newspaper guy your name?

I slid the pen and paper back across the desk. “I’m just in town for a week or two. Um…could you direct me to the microfilm records, the ones for the Northshore News?”

“Sure. You know, their office is right next door if you need to talk to Joe or Myra. She’s worked there forever.”

“Thanks.” I gave her a bland smile. “How long has he been there?”

“Joe? Let’s see now. I think three—no, four years. He used to be a big-time reporter in New Orleans. For the Times-Picayune. But when he and his son moved here, he decided celebrity news wasn’t as exciting as it used to be.”

I stiffened in alarm. Celebrity news? That’s what he’d written about? Great.

“Well, I can see why he left it behind,” I said. “Most of it’s a lot of PR hype. But what I’m looking for…” I went on, wanting to change the subject “…is local news from the mid-eighties on.” I’d left town in 1983, Mom had died in 1986 and Alice had obviously married sometime after that. I wanted to see what had been said about the Vidrine hippie commune, how it had petered out and how Alice had changed everything. Because like it or not—like her or not—I had to admit she’d done an amazing transformation of the place.

Some time later the librarian—Kenyatta was her name—startled me as I hunched over a microfilm screen. “Sorry to disturb you,” she said. “But the library closes in fifteen minutes.”

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to six.”

I’d been here three and a half hours?

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll finish up here in a minute. What time do you open tomorrow?”

Right after she left I went back to the article I’d been reading about the christening of Daniel Lester Collins at the Simmons Creek Victory Church. The picture was grainy, but it was obviously Alice holding her newborn son. Next to her stood a gaunt, older man. Surely that wasn’t her husband?

But it was. The Reverend Lester Collins had presided over the christening of his firstborn child. He had a huge grin on his face.

And why shouldn’t he? He had a young, pretty wife who—knowing Alice—had probably done his every bidding. And she’d given him a son. For him, life must have been pretty damn good.

Had it been good for my sister?

As I left the library and headed up Highway 1082 to the farm, everything I’d read rolled around in my head. Mom had died of AIDS.

About three months before her death, her illness became public knowledge. In 1986 rural Louisiana that had been a horror too huge to ignore, and all sorts of hell had broken loose. There had been letters to the editor. Demands that the farm be quarantined, that the house be burned down to kill the germs. The American Civil Liberties Union in New Orleans had actually become involved.

By the time Mom died, only she and Alice were left on the farm. All Mom’s freeloading friends had split. There was no official obituary notice, but afterward there had been a slew of articles and more letters to the editor about the wages of sin and the plague festering at Vidrine Farms.

I frowned and turned down the azalea-lined driveway. How had Alice stood it? Why on earth had she stayed? And why, when she called, hadn’t she told me it was AIDS?

Then again, that wouldn’t have changed my reaction.

I sighed. Despite my carefully cultivated disdain for my spineless, mealymouthed sister, I had to give it to her. She’d showed them all in her own, do-gooder way. I would probably have sponsored a rock festival on the farm and invited the most offensive acts I could find. Then I would have ended it by making a giant bonfire out of that house.

I pulled to a stop and stared at the house now, so pretty and neat and innocuous-looking. I would have lit the fire gladly but not for the reason ranted about in that stupid newspaper. I would have burned it down for my own satisfaction, to obliterate once and for all the miserable childhood I’d lived in it.

The sun was sinking behind the house, casting it in soothing shadows, a photo-op for This Old House. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. Burning it down wouldn’t have helped. I would have loved doing it, watching the destruction, feeling the heat, smelling that scorched wood stench. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. I was the product of my rotten childhood, pure and simple. And nothing symbolic would change that.

But collecting my half of its value in cold, hard cash would go a long way toward easing my pain.

I slammed out of the car, resolved in my goal to just collect my due and get started on a new, normal life. From upstairs I heard Tripod’s mournful howl, and I spied his ugly snout pressed against the window glass. He probably needed to visit the nearest tree.

I trotted up the steps, crossed the porch and walked into the house—only to be confronted by Carl.

“The least you could do is knock.”

I ignored him. “We need to talk,” I said to Alice, who stood farther down the hall, in the doorway to the kitchen. “By the way, better collect your toy dog. I’m about to let Tripod out.”

“And that’s another thing,” Carl hollered up after me. “That dog is too big to be allowed indoors—”

He broke off when Tripod charged down the stairs in one big hurry. The dog leaped up, planting his one front paw on the front door, barking his impatience.

“What’s the matter?” I cooed to him once I reached the door. “You’re acting like an old man with prostate trouble.” I turned pointedly to Carl and smiled. He looked a good fifteen years older than Alice and not particularly well preserved.

I opened the door, Tripod ran out, then I turned to Alice. “Where do you want to go to talk?”

“Can it please wait?” she asked, her voice soft, her hands a nervous knot at her waist.

My sister is really pretty. She takes after my mother with her sunny hair and vivid blue eyes. She was over forty now and still heavier than was considered healthy. But she was a lot thinner than I’d ever seen her. She looked good. Sweet and soft. Put her in a blue bonnet, and she’d be my image of Little Bo Peep.

I, meanwhile, apparently took after my unknown father. Red hair, pale skin. Thank God not too many freckles. I was taller than Alice and Mom, with bigger boobs—which I sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Let’s just say they have their uses and have got me past a lot of locked doors a lesser endowed woman couldn’t have entered.

But that was neither here nor there. “Wait for what?”

“Daniel’s missing.”

“Missing? No, he’s not. He’s at his friend’s house. He asked me for a ride.”

“Without telling me?” All of sudden Alice’s soft side turned fierce.

“He told you he was going. I heard him.”

“Well, I didn’t. What friend?”

“Some kid. I don’t know. Josh,” I said as the name came back to me. “Yeah, Josh.” Of Voodoo Fest and four-wheeler fame.

Alice and Carl shared a look. “I’ll go get him,” Carl told her. “If you’ll be all right,” he added, shooting me an aggrieved look.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, patting his arm.

I slapped my hands, rubbed them together, and grinned. “Well, good. That’s settled. So, big sister. Shall we have that talk?”

I walked past them and into the kitchen. My stomach had started growling the moment I drove up. Since the house was half mine, I decided that everything in it was, too.

I stood in the open refrigerator checking out the healthy selection of white bread, bologna and processed cheese. Yuck. I strained to hear the muffled conversation in the hall. Though I couldn’t make out most of the words, I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know Carl was royally pissed.

Poor Daniel. I didn’t envy him the ride home.

Bending back to the refrigerator, I noticed some bacon and took it out, then found eggs. “Do you have any grits?” I asked when Alice came in. “I haven’t had any decent grits since—” since G.G.’s last Southern tour “—since forever.”

She handed me a Martha White bag and a pot, then sat down while I started the grits, put the bacon in the microwave and slapped a thin pat of butter into a cast-iron skillet. I was seriously hungry. “Want any?” I added as an afterthought.

“No.”

I worked in silence as the grits bubbled and thickened. Once I turned them off, I broke three eggs in the skillet. “So here’s the deal,” I began as I scrambled them. “Mom was Granddad’s and Nana’s only heir, and we’re her only heirs.” I turned off the skillet and scraped the eggs onto a plate. “This place is half yours and half mine. And I want my half.”

She frowned. “You want me to split the farm in half?”

“I don’t want any part of this godforsaken place,” I said. “What I want is half the value of the property. And I want it as fast as I can get it.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat, as if I was totally nonchalant and this conversation was not absolutely critical to my escape from my past—my pasts in both Louisiana and California.

She shook her head. “But I don’t have any money, Zoe. I can’t afford to buy you out. And this place is hardly god-forsaken. It might once have been but not anymore. Lester and I made it into a good home. A God-fearing home.”

“Well, good for you. But that doesn’t change anything. It’s still half mine and I’m willing to sell you my share. Surely your wonderful husband had life insurance.”

She stiffened. “He only had a burial policy.”

“You’ve got to be kidding! With a family and all—”

“He had health problems. A bad heart. Life insurance was too expensive, okay?”

I wanted to ask how old he’d been when they got married, fifty? Sixty? But I didn’t. “So he left you in the lurch. Isn’t that just like a man.” I fixed her with a sharp eye. “Is that why you’re hooking up with good ol’ Carl? Need another sugar daddy?”

Finally I got a real rise out of her. “Just because you’ve lived a debauched life doesn’t mean the rest of us have!”

I gave a sarcastic snort. “I was here for seventeen years, Alice. I know exactly what sort of debauched life we lived.”

“I was raised in it, yes. Just like you. But I never lived my own life that way.”

“What makes you think I did?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Come on. I saw that music video, Zoe.”

“Really? Which one?”

“There was more than one?” Her face was a study in horror.

I just smiled, folded my hands on the table and nodded. But inside I was raging. How dare she judge me?

“The one I saw was about ten years ago. You were dancing in this low-cut dress, rubbing up against some guitar while this man watched you.” She shuddered.

I, too, shuddered in disgust when I thought of Dirk and the Dirt Bags, but for an entirely different reason, though that wasn’t her business. “How did you ever come to see that video?”

“Sue Ellen Jenkins. She saw it and she thought it might be you. So she recorded it and showed it to me.”

“So, what did she think?”

Her chin started to tremble and it took me aback. Why was she getting so upset? “I told Sue Ellen it wasn’t you,” she said in a shaky voice. “I told her you’d died in a car wreck in Texas.”