Anne walked slowly between metal shelves of the Spectator’s archives studying labels on ancient cardboard boxes. She paused, suddenly spotting the year of Buck’s high school graduation high up beyond her reach. She went to get a rickety ladder she’d noticed earlier.
A minute later, she was balanced on the topmost rung of the ladder. Upon opening the box, she found no microfiche, only old issues of the Spectator. She hadn’t yet figured out why there was microfiche for some years and not for others. “1986 must have been a good year,” she muttered, struggling with the weight of the box. Now the problem was how to get down without a mishap.
She had almost decided to give it up when she heard footsteps on the stairs. “Dad, is that you? Could you give me a hand with this box, please?”
With both hands occupied, she didn’t turn to look at Franklin, but when strong fingers gripped her waist, she knew they didn’t belong to her father.
“Leave the box,” Buck told her. “I’ll get it.”
In a heartbeat, he was lifting her, letting her slide the length of his torso slowly. A part of her welcomed the rush of heat that was ever ready between them, but when she felt the brush of his lips on her neck, she resisted. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” Reaching above her, he lifted the box and turned with it in his hands. “I found your office empty and guessed this is where you’d be.” He shook his head looking at the dusty shelves. “Although it beats me why. Where do you want this?”
She noticed his cane propped on the shelf. “You aren’t supposed to put any weight on that knee.”
“So tell me where to get rid of this box and I won’t.”
“On that table over there.” She headed for the space she’d cleared and waited while he set the box on it. “Careful that the bottom doesn’t give way. Some of the boxes are overloaded. I spilled 1969 all over the floor a few minutes ago when the bottom split.” He was frowning when she glanced up. “What?”
“You aren’t supposed to be lifting anything either.”
“I wouldn’t get anything done if I kept running upstairs for help.”
“What’s to get done? Your real job is upstairs. Which reminds me. How’s it going?”
“Well, Dad hasn’t fired me yet. Even though a few subscribers may have suggested it. I seem to have hit a nerve with my twin profiles of Pearce and Jack Breedlove.”
He looked alert. “Folks coming down on you?”
She smiled. “A few. Depending on their political persuasions.”
“If anybody crosses a line, let me know.”
She dusted off the top of the box. “I can handle it, Buck.”
He glanced at the date on the label. “Why 1986?”
“Why not?” she replied, unwilling to let him know he had anything to do with her choice. With the flaps open, she lifted out several old newspapers.
“Take my advice and go to the sports section,” he said, wagging his eyebrows.
“If you’re suggesting I might find your name mentioned,” she said, “here it is and it’s not in the sports section. You’re on the front page.” She held up an issue with the headline, TIGERS WIN. WHITAKER SHINES.
Buck shrugged, managing to look modest. “What can I say?”
She had to laugh. “Surely there was something more important in the town news-wise than a victory for a high school baseball team. This is dated April thirteenth, so it was too early in the season for a playoff game.”
He gave her a look of mock incredulity. “We’re talking a defeat of Spring Valley, population ten thousand and some, woman. They were an awesome team. Beating them was an event.”
“But news, it wasn’t,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Speaking of boredom, how’s your physical therapy going?”
“Good. Ty’s a real pro. Best choice I could’ve made.” He took a cursory look at another of the old papers, tossed it aside and picked up his cane. Moving restlessly to the nearest shelf, he used the hook of the cane to pull out a box, seemingly at random, but with just a brief glance inside, shoved it back in place. Dusting his hands, he drifted back to the table where Anne was sorting the newspapers by date. “His daddy was working as a greeter at Wal-Mart until a couple days ago.”
She tucked a newspaper into its proper date sequence and reached for another. “Didn’t his father work at Belle Pointe? I seem to remember that you and Ty played together there when you were boys?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned against the table to look at him. “Something on your mind?”
“Oscar was working at Wal-Mart because Pearce fired him,” Buck said, beginning to pace. “We never had a piece of equipment at Belle Pointe that Oscar couldn’t operate. And some of those big combines were monster rigs. When Ty told me what happened, I couldn’t believe it.”
“Was he fired for good cause?”
“No. Hell, no. The men’s hours were mounting up in overtime, so Pearce decided to pay them for a straight work week only. Oscar didn’t think that was fair and said so. Pearce fired him as the instigator of the uprising to bring the others in line.”
Anne managed to conceal her satisfaction over Buck’s newfound interest in Belle Pointe affairs. First, outrage over the Whitakers foreclosing on a mortgage to grab a thousand acres of land from Beatrice’s family and now this. “I take it you didn’t know,” she said carefully.
“If I’d known, I would have hired a lawyer for Oscar and paid him out of my own pocket to sue the shit out of the family.” He halted to look at her. “That man has been a loyal, hardworking employee at Belle Pointe for I don’t know how many years. He knows more about equipment than any three men Pearce might have replaced him with. Firing him was mean and underhanded.”
Anne thought it was interesting that he reacted so fiercely on discovering his family’s unjust practices. Since Belle Pointe was a family corporation, he had to have some notification of transactions. Had his need for emotional distance blinded him to what was going on?
“I’m trying to figure out why you didn’t know about it,” she said. “Your mother kept you from an active role at Belle Pointe, but you were still part of the family corporation. You must have gotten financial statements periodically.”
“I got them,” he said, shoving at a box on the floor with his foot. “But what I’m discovering now wouldn’t show on a financial statement. Which is no excuse. I don’t even read the damn things. Haven’t for years. And I don’t cash the checks.”
She stared at him. “You tear them up?”
He was pacing again, eyes on the floor. “I endorse them over to a charity.”
“Oh.” There had been some pretty lean years after they were married and all along he’d been rejecting income that was rightly his? Did his resentment—or hurt—run that deep? “So, are you going to do anything?”
He poked at a dusty box with his cane. “I’ve done it. I took your advice.”
She waved dust away from her nose. “My advice?”
“You said I should do what my mother wants. I decided the only way I could make any changes is by being right there. So after I left you at lunch today, I went to Belle Pointe and offered my services…with a few conditions. My mother hated it, but she’s pretty much over a barrel.” As if he couldn’t help himself, he grinned. “I got the job.”
Anne found herself smiling back. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. You agreed contingent upon rehiring Mr. Pittman.”
“No contingency. Whether I’m there or not, Oscar’s back…replacing Wilcox. I took care of it a couple days ago.”
“What about Harvey Jones’s thousand acres?”
“As soon as I can find an honest lawyer around here, I’m drawing up a legal document reassigning title to Beatrice.”
She blinked in surprise. “Can you do that?”
“I’ll do it or pay the mortgage amount out of my own pocket. The family corporation won’t be out a cent.”
“Only a thousand acres,” she said dryly. “But it’s good of you, Buck.”
He moved a little closer and her smile faded at the look on his face. She felt a rush of heat. She knew that look. When he put his hands on her waist, her heartbeat went into double time. She felt the strength of him through the layers of her clothes, warm, solid, sure, but at the same time, gentle. And blatantly male. There had always been something about Buck that spoke to all that was feminine in her.
Knowing he wanted to kiss her, she felt a tingle of anticipation. She stared at the hollow of his throat. If she let him, it would be a turning point. It would breach a barrier she’d put up to help her through this dark time. She had spent weeks working through her grief and loss, picking through the ashes of their broken relationship in hopes of finding something worth saving. She raised her eyes. “Buck…”
He pulled her close, wrapping her in his arms. With his face buried in her hair, he simply held her tight. It seemed like forever since she’d been surrounded by Buck’s warmth and tough-tender masculinity.
“You feel so good, baby,” he said, letting his lips move on the skin below her ear. When he bit her earlobe gently, she shivered with the delicious sensation. Encouraged, his breath turned heavy and hot as he kissed a trail down her throat to a spot where her pulse raced. He would leave a mark there, she thought dizzily, but instead of pushing him away, she tipped her head to the side and allowed it. It felt good and it had been so long…
Now his hands were beneath her shirt, tugging it up, seeking the softness of her breasts. Desire and need bloomed inside her as he nuzzled her wisp of a bra aside, abrading and arousing the sensitive flesh with day-old beard. And then he found her nipple, closing on it, his mouth wet and warm and wild. He was like a starving man. And Anne responded with a soft cry, clinging to him, wishing for the sheer power of raw lust to ease the pain that never seemed to subside. The pain of losing her baby.
“Come back to the lodge with me, Anne,” he said, breathing the words against one breast. He was hard and fully aroused, locked against the softness between her legs. “I’ve missed you. I need you.”
Anne struggled to resist the pull of her attraction to him. She had missed him, too. Buck was different here in Tallulah from the person he was when caught up in the fishbowl life they lived back in St. Louis. But to go back to it, nothing would be changed. And she knew that was Buck’s plan. Baseball was his real life. He was only here because she’d forced his hand. So before going to bed with him, she needed to be sure that she could live that life again. That it would be enough.
With her hands braced on his forearms, she pushed him back. “Buck…no, I just can’t.”
He went still for a beat or two, breathing hard. Finally, he lifted his head, let her go, and with a sigh looked at her. “How can we fix what’s wrong if we aren’t together, Anne?”
“By being ‘together,’ you mean having sex, don’t you?”
He made a frustrated sound. “Why do you say that, ‘having sex’? Why can’t you call it what it is? We’d be making love, Anne. I still love you.”
“Whatever you call it, it won’t fix what’s wrong.”
He drew in a long breath. “Then how about this. We’ll make love…and we won’t use any protection.”
She felt a pang of anguish. Closed her eyes. He was offering what for years she’d prayed for, longed for, needed. When she could talk, she looked into his eyes. “In other words, now you agree to having a baby, but only to persuade me to come back,” she said quietly.
“No!” He swung away from her, one hand slashing through the air. “It wouldn’t be like that.”
“Then tell me how it would be, Buck.”
He stood with his back to her, taking time to be clear with his words. “It was never that I didn’t want to be a father,” he said. “We had something good, just you and me together. You’ve seen my family now. You’ve seen how they are. Don’t you understand yet why I didn’t want to trade what we had for that?”
“I suppose it’s useless to argue that in having children, we would never have become like that. You’re hung up thinking it’s some kind of gene thing. Inevitable.”
He turned back to face her. “I just think it’s wise not to take the chance.”
She picked up an old newspaper without really looking at it. “You make my point for me, Buck. Since that’s so opposite from the way I think, I believe it’s better to figure out whether we can be happy together and still be at odds about this,” she said simply.
She expected a burst of temper. She knew from experience that when he was sexually frustrated, Buck was testy as a wounded bear. The Buck who’d rejected their baby and driven them recklessly into a ravine a few weeks ago would have gone on a tear. But he surprised her. Standing propped on his cane, with his bad knee cocked at an angle, he didn’t appear furious. Instead, he seemed confounded. And very disappointed.
“I guess I jumped the gun there, huh?” he asked wryly.
“Offering to forget protection and chance another pregnancy if I’ll stay with you at the lodge? Yeah, I guess you did.”
“I guess I sleep alone again tonight, huh?”
She smiled, feeling for the first time a fragile hope that they might be able to work out their differences. With her eyes on the newspaper, she said, “I guess so…unless you can find a warm puppy.”
He reached out and gently tugged a strand of her hair. “Smart-ass.”
Still smiling, she shoved him back and resumed thumbing through the newspapers. Now in an orderly sequence, she scanned the headlines as she went along and picked up the conversation where they left off. “Since you’ve decided to make changes in the way Belle Pointe is being run, what makes you think Pearce and your mother will just roll over and let you?” she asked.
“Pearce will be too caught up in politicking to do much more than gripe. By the way, he did plenty of that when he turned up at the lodge yesterday. Of course, my mother will try crossing me at every turn, but I like a good fight.”
Anne thought of the ruckus to come with some dismay. Franklin’s insight was on the mark. Whether Buck realized it or not, his success in the highly competitive world of professional baseball had given him self-confidence he hadn’t had fifteen years ago when Victoria had banished him from Belle Pointe. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the moment when Victoria realized that.
Anne’s mouth was curled with amusement as she turned up the next newspaper. September 1986, she noted. Front and center was a photo of several men dressed in hunting camouflage. Her smile faded at the headline. BUSINESSMAN KILLED IN HUNTING ACCIDENT. In the group photo were three Whitakers, John and Pearce and, standing between them, a very young, grim-faced Buck.
Buck leaned over to get a look. “What—” His question died as he read the headline. “Oh, shit.”
Anne looked up at him in confusion. “A man was killed and Pearce was involved? Why have you never mentioned it?”
Buck rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. “What would be the point? It’s just one more piece of garbage in my family. I don’t like talking about garbage.”
“It says here that the man who was killed—Jim Bob Baker—was forty years old. You and Pearce were on a dove hunt with older men? How does that work? I never understood this culture of young boys handling guns.”
“Men have been hunting since they lived in caves, Anne. It’s an ancient sport. You make it sound barbaric, but it’s not. In fact, where I grew up it’s not only a sport, it’s a social thing.”
“I know that. But—” She tapped the newspaper, repeating, “A man was killed while hunting and you were there. This surely must have made a major impression on you and it just seems…odd that you never mentioned it.”
He was shaking his head. “Like I said, it’s in the past. Why can’t it stay there?”
She looked at him in silence for a long minute. “This is a good example of why we’re in trouble in our marriage, Buck. I discover small pieces of your life that you claim are best left in the past, because you’ve decided they’re meaningless. But I know they aren’t. They can’t be. You hate guns and you never go hunting, even though you’ve had dozens of opportunities. I thought surely you’d go on that African safari a couple of years ago with your friends, but you refused. Now that I’ve stumbled on this article, I understand why.” She paused. “So, talk to me.”
She saw that he was tempted to refuse. But then, with a heavy sigh, he pushed away from the table and went to one of the shelves stacked with boxes to the ceiling. With his back to her, he propped one arm high with his weight resting on his good leg, using his cane. “I was seventeen and Pearce was twenty,” he said quietly. “From the age of ten—maybe even before—I knew how to hunt. Pearce, too. It was something we did in season, whether dove or deer or turkey…whatever. Dove season opens in early September, on Labor Day. But there’s more to the pleasure of a hunt than the actual killing of your limit,” he told her. “It’s like I said, a—for lack of a better word—a social gathering of men.
“This happened the first day of the hunt. I was paired with Dad and Pearce was paired with Jim Bob Baker. It doesn’t always happen that a younger hunter is paired with a more experienced one, but Dad always insisted, that for safety’s sake, we do it that way. Baker was a businessman. He operated one of the largest cotton gins around here and Belle Pointe was one of his major customers. Which is why he was invited to the lodge for the hunt. It was an invitation that wasn’t extended to just anybody. As I said, it’s a social gathering as well as a sporting event.”
He paused and looked back at Anne, who listened in fascination.
“The night before the hunt, there was a lot of drinking.” As he expected, Anne looked unsurprised. “And eating. The menu is usually barbecue with all the trimmings. After, there’s usually a poker game. Some of the men go to bed early, others late. As you know, there are a lot of bedrooms at the lodge and—”
“No, I don’t know. I’ve never seen the lodge.”
He gave a short laugh. “Say the word and you can have a tour right now. In fact, bring your clothes and you can move in. Separate bedrooms.” He held up both hands, palms out. “Swear to God.”
Shaking her head, she waved his invitation off. “Tell me what happened, Buck.”
“We rolled out early, me and Pearce all paired up with grownups as Dad demanded. There were so many birds that it didn’t take long to kill our limit that day. By midmorning, most folks had drifted back to the lodge. Finally, it was only Pearce and Jim Bob still out.” His gaze wandered to the newspaper lying on the table with its dark headline. “We heard Pearce yelling before he reached the lodge. I remember running out to meet him. He was frantic. Pearce hardly ever got rattled, but he was more than rattled that day. He said there’d been an accident, that Jim Bob was back at a clearing near the river and he’d been shot.
“It was a pretty sophisticated group of Tallulah society at the hunt and a couple of the men were doctors. With Pearce leading, we all rushed out there.” He gazed beyond her, as if seeing it all again. “There was so much blood….”
Anne put a hand over her heart. “You were only seventeen,” she said, imagining the scene. “It must have been devastating, seeing a man die of a shotgun wound.”
“I didn’t see him die,” Buck said stonily. “When we got there, Jim Bob was already—he’d passed away.” He poked at the toe of his Nikes with the cane. “He’d been shot with his own gun.”
“How exactly did that happen? If he was an experienced hunter—”
“Pearce said the two of them came to a fence,” Buck said, interrupting her. “He climbed over and instead of Jim Bob laying his shotgun down or handing it over to Pearce, he was holding it when he climbed the fence. Somehow it fired and hit him in the throat. We’re talking a twelve-gauge shotgun. A twelve-gauge can do some damage.”
Anne knew very little about guns and even less about shotguns, but she had a vivid imagination. “He didn’t have the safety on to climb a fence?” she asked incredulously. “Even I know you’re not supposed to climb a fence without taking that precaution.”
“It was the general consensus that he forgot. Pearce said they’d just taken a few shots at some birds.”
After a long minute, Anne said, “The headline called it an accident. Was there ever any doubt?”
He gave her an odd look. “Why would you ask that?”
Her shoulders went up in a who-knows gesture. “Just—I don’t know. I’m a reporter. And something about the way you look, I guess.”
He hoisted himself onto the table and laid the cane across his lap. “I’ve never told anybody else this, but I didn’t go to bed when most everybody else did that night before the hunt. I was outside on the porch. There’s a swing out there. I was lying on it, looking at the stars or doing whatever a seventeen-year-old kid does. Anyway, I heard voices coming from a footpath that’s about twenty yards from the house. Since we had a bunch of guests, it wouldn’t have been unusual, except whoever was doing the talking didn’t sound friendly. It was two people and both were mad and cussing like crazy.”
Leaning forward, he braced the heels of his hands on the edge of the table and stared at his feet, frowning, as if the memory still troubled him. “I could only hear bits and pieces, but I knew it was my brother and I recognized the man he was arguing with. It was Jim Bob.”
“What was the argument about?”
“Money. Something about the cotton gin and the contract with Belle Pointe. And some other personal stuff that—” He stopped. “Personal stuff.”
“What kind of personal stuff?”
He picked up the newspaper and tossed it in the box. “It never made any sense and it’s—”
“Personal. Okay, I get the picture anyway.” She wondered if Buck realized that keeping a part of the events of that day locked away from her was as hurtful as not telling her any of it. He either trusted her or he didn’t. And it was plain he was a long way from seeing that.
Still focused on that day, Buck raised a hand and rubbed the back of his neck. “The police came…and the coroner…and the media.” There was irony in the slant of his smile when he looked at her. “TV and newspaper. It was my first brush with negative publicity.”
“What did Pearce say when you confronted him? When he knew you’d heard him arguing, he must have known you’d have a thousand questions. He must have known you’d be suspicious.”
“He told me that the misunderstanding between him and Jim Bob had been cleared up while they were hunting before the accident. He told me to forget it.” With his hand still at the back of his neck, he met her eyes. “And I did.”
“You did? He expected you to just forget about it and you did?”
With a glance at his watch, he eased off the table, taking care not to put pressure on his knee. “Is there another box you want me to take down before I leave?”
“Because I don’t see how you didn’t press him for details. A man was dead. And under circumstances that seem suspicious, to say the least.”
He moved to the stairs. “Did I mention I’ve arranged for your rental car? It’s another Mercedes. I figured you’d want to stay with the same brand you’re driving in St. Louis.”
“At least, tell me you had a conversation with your father about this.”
He stopped at the foot of the stairs, his gaze fixed on the crook of his cane for a long minute. Then he turned and looked directly at her. “I did. And I could tell he was troubled about the way Baker died. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect something about Pearce’s story didn’t set well with him. Anyway, I got a feeling that he didn’t want his suspicions confirmed.”
Holding her gaze doggedly, he added, “How was I going to tell him something like that? What words would I use? Think about it. Once either of us said it out loud, it couldn’t be taken back. I was thinking all this and before I decided one way or the other, he launched into a lecture about our responsibility to the Whitaker name. Being a Mississippi Delta Whitaker wasn’t just about the land, he said, or the property or our roots going back five generations. No, he reminded me of the various family holdings that provide employment in the community. Didn’t I realize that a scandal would jeopardize more than just Belle Pointe? After all, I was soon leaving to go to college and would not be around to suffer the consequences. So, as a Whitaker, I had a duty to the people of Tallulah that trumped all others.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “So he knew—or suspected—what you were going to tell him?”
He was no longer looking at her. “I don’t know what he knew or suspected. The subject was never mentioned again and I went off to school and tried never to think of it again. And don’t assume I’m proud of weaseling out the way I did. I had a shitload of excuses—it would hurt my dad, it would damage the Whitaker name, it would open a can of worms and, yes, I admit it, although Pearce was directly involved, it might reflect on me and I had a baseball scholarship and didn’t want to be tainted by suspicion of—” He stopped, refusing to say the word.
“Suspicion of murder, Buck. Say it.” He was shaking his head, so she added, “The thing you haven’t explained is why he did it…if he did.”
“I don’t know. I—”
When he stopped, she studied his grim profile and guessed he did know something. What was it he’d said earlier? That he overheard something when Pearce argued with Baker, but it was too personal to tell her. Was he going to tell her now?
“Actually, I think it could be something to do with my mother.”
“It was something Baker said,” he told her, turning his head to meet her eyes. “This is something else I’ve never told anybody before.”
“The ‘personal’ thing you mentioned?” She made quotation marks with her fingers.
“Yeah. I heard Baker say to Pearce, ‘If I talk, your mother is going to get the punishment she deserves.’”
“But you don’t know what he meant?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“I wonder if your father knew…or if he suspected something about his wife.”
Buck started up the stairs. “We’ll never know the answer to that, will we?”
She watched him climb the stairs thinking that in the litany of excuses he gave for keeping quiet, he hadn’t mentioned protecting any secret his mother might have. “This is just so incredible, Buck,” she murmured.
Buck, now at the top of the stairs, looked down at her. “I keep trying to tell you, I come from a screwed-up family.”
Beatrice and Paige appeared within minutes of Buck leaving. As Paige clambered down the stairs in her combat boots, Anne quickly folded the issue of the Spectator that reported the hunting accident and tucked it out of sight.
“What was wrong with Uncle Buck?” Paige asked, big-eyed with curiosity. “He looked like he was really mad.”
“What have I told you about asking personal questions, Paige,” Beatrice chided, taking the stairs more cautiously than the teenager. She waved a hand in front of her nose and made a face. “Gracious, Anne, it’s more dusty than usual in here. What have you been doing?”
“Digging up the past,” Anne said with a vague look around the room. “That tends to stir up dust.”
“It can stir up more than dust,” Beatrice said, regarding her with a keen eye. “Is this a bad time? Paige is supposed to be organizing the material sent by the Vanderbilt professor, but she can always do something upstairs.”
Paige wedged herself between the two women, her eyes fixed on Anne’s face. “I was right! Buck is pissed off about something, isn’t he? Wow, this week is turning out to be just full of interesting stuff. First my mom and now Anne.”
“Paige…” Beatrice gave her a stern look.
Anne closed the flaps on the box. “There is something you can do, Paige. I picked up one of the cartons and the bottom split open. The contents spilled out over there in the second aisle. Would you find a new box to put it in, please?”
“Don’t you want to hear what freaked out my mom?”
“Not really,” Beatrice said dryly.
“Even if it’s really juicy?” she said, giving them a sidelong glance.
“Juicy usually means personal,” Anne said, fighting a smile.
Paige appeared to consider that with her elbow resting on one arm, tapping her forefinger against her lips. “Hmm, is a love affair personal?”
“Yes!” Both Anne and Beatrice exclaimed together.
She grinned. “Just kidding. How about if it happened when my mom was in high school?”
“It’s still personal,” Beatrice said in a forbidding tone. “And those newspapers won’t jump in that box all by themselves.”
“I’m gonna pick the stuff up, Beady. In a minute.” She backed to the table where Anne was working and hoisted herself up much as Buck had done a few minutes before. “Okay, here’s the deal. Claire and I were on our way to school Monday and she was stopped for speeding in a school zone.” Swinging her legs, Paige waited for a reaction. Undaunted at getting none, she continued. “Well, anyway, guess who stopped her?”
“The police?” Beatrice suggested.
“Jack Breedlove,” Paige announced, with dramatic emphasis on the name. “Her old high school boyfriend.”
“And your point?” Beatrice asked.
“Beady!” Paige put her hands on her hips. “You already know the story, don’t you? Like, you know everything that ever happened in Tallulah.” She switched her attention to Anne. “Mom and Jack Breedlove went steady for a whole year when she was in high school.”
“Hmm, kids don’t go steady nowadays?” Anne remarked mildly.
“She only told me that because I saw how freaked out she was when he was talking to us and I wasn’t going to shut up until she told why. And get this. When he leaned down and looked at her with those sunglasses, she just about had a kitten! She was, like, so freaked.”
“People do get nervous when they’re stopped by the police,” Anne said.
“It was more than nervous,” Paige insisted. “It was way, way more than nervous. I mean, he looks a lot like Brad Pitt, so I can understand it in a way. He’s hot.” She waggled the fingers of her right hand suggestively. “Then they said a lot of stuff, back and forth, you know? And finally she just said, ‘Give me the ticket, Jack.’ Real snippy. Almost mean.” Paige laughed. “So he, like, just gave it to her, not saying a word and boy was she the embarrassed one when he said it wasn’t a real ticket, but just a warning.”
“She must have been relieved,” Beatrice murmured.
Paige hiked up a shoulder. “I guess. And then…the strangest thing. He said it was good to see her.”
“That’s strange?” Beatrice lifted an eyebrow.
“Then she said that was something easily remedied.” Paige waited as if dangling a lure, then gave an impatient sigh when nobody bit. “Here’s the kicker. He said, ‘What’s changed…am I now welcome in your world?’ And Claire went, like…white. As. A. Ghost!”
“Paige, please do not refer to your mother by her first name,” Beatrice requested.
“Okay, okay. So what I want to know is this.” She paused dramatically. “Is Jack Breedlove my real father?”
Both women stared at her. “Of course not!” Beatrice said, recovering first. “You know who your father is.”
Paige shrugged and bent to the job of stacking up the material spilled on the floor as if her question were a perfectly logical conclusion instead of something from outer space. “Well, it seemed kind of interesting—if it had been true. And Mom did act really weird while they talked. I wonder if my dad was the reason they broke up?”
Beatrice, who was leaving, stopped at the stairs. “Claire’s parents were the reason they broke up. Your mother was sixteen years old when she dated Jack Breedlove. He couldn’t be your father because he joined the army and was in Kuwait when Claire got pregnant. Do the math.”
“See, you did know all this, Beady!” Paige said.
With one foot on the stair, Beatrice thought for a minute. “I’m only guessing, but I think Claire’s parents were concerned since she was so young.”
“And he was from the wrong side of the tracks!” Paige said.
Beatrice sighed. “Claire left Tallulah to go to an exclusive school somewhere in Virginia…I believe it was. She finished high school there.”
“She was, like, banished from everything and everyone she loved. That was mean.” Paige slid off the table and, after a moment, said with a thoughtful look, “I wonder if my mom would have been happier if she’d married Jack Breedlove.”
Beatrice met Anne’s eyes over the child’s head. “I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, Paige,” she said gently. “Things are not always what they seem.”
“Maybe not,” Paige said, “but my mom is definitely unhappy.”
“I really must get back to the shop,” Beatrice said, going up the stairs. “Anne, please don’t start dinner before I get home. You’re making me feel guilty cooking for us every night.”
Anne gave a noncommittal wave as the door closed behind her stepmother and braced for Paige to continue to pursue the subject of her mother’s unhappiness. But when Paige spoke, it wasn’t about Claire.
“Hey, Anne, look at this,” she said as she sorted through the contents of the broken box. Settling back on her ugly boots, she spread an old issue on the floor. “It’s dated way back in the sixties. It’s about a man from Tallulah who was killed in Vietnam. Here’s his picture. It’s sad, isn’t it?”
Anne glanced briefly at the grainy photo before removing the cap from a black felt pen to mark a box. “The Vietnam war was sad,” she said.
“Rudy Baker, age twenty-one.”
“Hmm?”
“The soldier. That was his name, Rudy Baker.” With her head to one side, Paige studied the face in the photo. “He looks kind of familiar, doesn’t he?”
Anne put a star beside the date—1985—on the box so she’d be able to find it again. She wanted to read about the hunting accident again later when she was alone. Now that Buck revealed the remark Baker made about Victoria, the incident had taken on the interesting aspect of a mystery. Pearce and John Whitaker—and possibly Victoria—may have been able to rationalize the circumstances of a man’s death without guilt, but not Buck. Even now, years later, he still felt troubled at keeping their secret. More and more, she understood why Buck had chosen to distance himself from his family.
What was most interesting was that Buck suspected his mother of something—a secret or an act or an event—important enough that Pearce may have committed murder to conceal it. That alone was enough to alert any journalist, even one who was woefully out of practice.
Much later, as she lay in bed on the edge of sleep, she thought about the last name of the soldier killed in Vietnam. It was the same as the name of the man who’d died while hunting with Pearce. Baker. Sleepily, she wondered if they were related.