Chapter Three
Lacette knocked on Lawrence Bradley’s office door and waited, shifting from foot to foot. Was she doing the right thing? He opened the door and extended his hand for a handshake. “Come on in. What can I do for you? I doubt I’ll be able to locate that brooch until we have a chance to go through Mrs. Hooper’s effects and, considering how big that house is, finding it there may prove difficult.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t come for that.” When his right eyebrow shot up, she hastened to make herself clear. I want to talk with you about a business venture. I’m planning to open a marketing consultancy, and I need legal advice.”
She couldn’t tell whether he was relieved or disappointed; he certainly hadn’t expected that she would engage him as a lawyer. “Well. Have a seat. The first thing we have to do is get you incorporated. Next, you want a loan. I think it’s inadvisable to start a business solely with your own money.”
He was all business, and she liked that. Two hours later, she had a plan and the confidence that she could carry it through. What an odd man, she thought as she left his office. Very professional. Yet, he had allowed himself to think she might have wanted something personal that had nothing to do with his being a lawyer and everything to do with his gender. She mused over it until she reached home and heard Kellie singing out of tune in the confines of her room. Immediately, she knew that Kellie not only had made passes at Bradley—that much she witnessed—but had gone far beyond that. No doubt he wondered if she would do the same. Don’t wait on it, buddy.
She had intended to begin filling out the mass of forms Bradley gave her, but Kellie waylaid her as she reached the top of the stairs. “What do you think? Mama’s in there preening and fussing like a teenager. Go in there and talk to her. I’ve had it up to here”—she sliced the air over her head—“with Mama’s foolishness. She bought some black fishnet stockings, for heaven’s sake, and I caught her reading a letter from Daddy and smiling like a lottery winner. I asked her if he was coming back, and she got mysterious on me. Lacette, talk to her.”
At her light tap, Cynthia opened the door at once, almost as if, by extrasensory perception, she had anticipated Lacette’s arrival. “Guess what?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Your father wrote me a letter, and he can complain all he wants to about me, but that’s not why he wrote me.”
“Which letter? Let me see it?” She walked to the Duncan Phyfe–style secretary near the window, picked up the letter and handed it to her mother.
Cynthia opened it and read, “Dear Cynthia, I hope you have not forgotten that Frederick is a small place and that most of the African Americans in this town know us. Gossip is their main form of entertainment. Please bear this in mind before you hang out in bars, and go out in the street dressed like a teenager. I hope neither of us does anything to shame our daughters. And if you don’t want to come to Mount Airy-Hill, please go to a church; protestant or catholic doesn’t matter. You need to be around religious people. Faithfully yours, Marshall.”
“Mind if I see it?”
Cynthia handed her the letter, and after reading it twice, Lacette folded it, handed it back to her mother and said, “I don’t see anything in this letter that you should be happy about. If my husband sent me something like this, I’d be furious.”
“He can’t fool me; after sleeping in the bed with him for thirty-five years, I know him. He still cares for me, and that’s why he sent me this asinine letter.”
“Mama, that’s preposterous. You know Daddy doesn’t talk in riddles. He says what he means. He told me he was gone for good, and I have to believe him. But you know more about this than I do, and neither you nor Daddy told either one of your children why you split up after over thirty-five years. Don’t you think—”
Cynthia grabbed her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have shown you that letter. You and Kellie have no sympathy for what I’m going through. Please, let me be. I’m going to lie down; my head is killing me.”
I’ll bet it is, Lacette thought, but didn’t say. “Sorry, Mama. Do you have any aspirin?”
Cynthia walked toward the door, wordlessly inviting her daughter to leave the room. “Yes, thanks.” Lacette didn’t believe her mother had a sudden headache. She was afraid she would have to tell me why Daddy left home. If she knew what my imagination conjures up, she’d tell me, because it can’t be worse than some of the things I think of.
During the next two days, she tried several times to bring up that question to her mother, but couldn’t summon the courage to do it. Lodged in her mind was the thought that she had no right to delve into her mother’s privacy. Yet, she firmly believed that her parents had an obligation to tell her why they no longer lived together. She raised the matter with Kellie while they cleaned the kitchen after supper that night.
“For goodness sake, Lacette, don’t sweat it. What’s done is done. Mama is a better woman single than she ever was when she was married. She looks and acts like a female, and not like some groveling, frontier wife. This is the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake.”
“You have a great figure,” she heard Kellie say to her mother the next morning, “but you don’t take advantage of it. Get some dresses and skirts that fit across the hips and the bust. Join a reading group or take classes that attract men, and put some spice in your life. The only way to get a man back is to show him that another man wants you. I wouldn’t waste myself mourning over a man, whether he was dead or alive. Ten years from now, it won’t matter how you look.”
Lacette didn’t hear her mother’s reply, but she imagined that if Kellie hadn’t shocked the woman, she had at least made her wonder how her daughter developed that philosophy. “Maybe it’s better I don’t know what’s going on with Mama,” she said to herself. “It’s all I can do to get some order into my own life.”
The next morning, Kellie darted past City Hall Fountain as fast as she could, bracing herself against the fierce wind that whipped through the open square and smarting from the icy splinters punishing her face. Inside City Hall at last, she leaned against the wall beside the elevator and breathed deeply. She was about to push the elevator button when she glimpsed Douglas Rawlins in her peripheral vision, barely recognizable in a gray overcoat, red woolen scarf, gray hat and black leather gloves. His arrogance had piqued her interest, and she’d checked the staff roster to find out who he was. According to the personnel listing, he was Douglas Rawlins, groundskeeper. When she recognized him, her first thought was that he didn’t look like a common laborer. She stared at him until he reached the elevator and pushed the button.
“Hi,” she said, “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Good morning.” He said it grudgingly, almost as if he wished he could walk away. The elevator arrived, and with only the two of them on it, she’d have thought he would at least make small talk, but he focused his gaze upon the floor numbers above the door and ignored her.
She got off first, looked over at him and said, “Have a nice warm day.” Annoyance surged in her. He could pretend he didn’t know who she was, but he knew, and she would make certain that he got even more familiar with her. She refused to allow a man to treat her as if she was a nobody and to do it with impunity. Mr. Rawlins would hear from her.
“What you so heated up about, girl?” Mabel asked her before she had a chance to sit down.
“Who said I was hot? As cold as it is outside, I’ve been trying to stay warm.”
“I’ll be nice and not comment on that. Guess who’s leaving us.”
“You’ll tell me.”
“Douglas Rawlins, and I never got a crack at him,” Mabel said. “I’m a thirty-four-year-old, decent-looking woman, and that brother hasn’t given me a thing but the time of day. He doesn’t believe in smiling, at least not at me. Heck, I don’t even know whether he’s got any teeth. Maybe he swings the other way.”
“That’s not the impression I got of him. He’s an arrogant SOB, and if he wasn’t leaving, I’d show him a thing or two.”
“Yes, I bet you would,” Mabel said, “’course, he might have done the same for you. You have to watch those quiet ones.”
Kellie answered the phone on the third ring. “Transportation. Ms. Graham speaking. Daddy! How’s everything?”
As she listened, she recalled how she had always loved his deep masculine voice and how, during her rebellious teenage years, his patience and willingness to listen to her and to reason with her had shamed her into obedience. Where Cynthia had alternately pampered and lectured her, he had at no time indulged her misbehavior; when she deserved punishment—which to her mind wasn’t often—he administered it. She loved him, and she could not understand why her stronger loyalty resided with her mother.
“You want us to have lunch together today?” she asked him, and agreed to meet him at Nellie’s, two blocks from City Hall, where she worked. She hoped he didn’t want to talk about her mother, because she didn’t plan to listen to him criticize Cynthia.
“I won’t second-guess him,” she told herself. “I’ll deal with it when I see him.”
To Kellie’s surprise, her mother was not the reason why Marshall wanted to have lunch with her. No sooner had they settled at their table and picked up their menus than he let her know what he had in mind. “I’ve collected the keys to Mama Carrie’s house and signed the papers. It belongs to me now.”
She hoped he didn’t hear her heart thundering in her chest. “Uh . . . when are you planning to move in?”
“I’m having lobster bisque and a green salad,” he told the waitress.
“I’ll have the same.”
“Now,” Marshall said, “I want you to understand what I’m saying. I intend to renovate that house before I move in. Bradley will accompany your mother to choose any of Mama Carrie’s clothing that she wants, though the way she’s acting, I don’t suppose she’d want to have any decent dresses.”
She toyed with the glass of water beside her plate, using that as an excuse not to look at him. “Why don’t I go with her in case there’re some clothes she doesn’t want that I can use?”
He leaned back in his chair and let laughter roll out of him. “I’m surprised that you’re so transparent. There isn’t a chance that you would wear any of Mama Carrie’s things. This is why we’re having this conversation, Kellie. You are not to enter that house for any reason until after Bradley delivers Lacette’s brooch to her.” He shook his right index finger. “Not for any reason. If you do, I’ll get an injunction to prevent your doing it again. You have your diamond ring, and that brooch belongs to Lacette. I intend to see that she gets it.”
“What makes you think I’d try to take it?”
“You’ve already tried. Bradley told me that you would stop at nothing to get into that house and search it for Lacette’s brooch, and from the way he said it, I can imagine what you’ve been up to. One of these days, your recklessness and your self-centeredness are going to catch up with you. God is not pleased with your behavior, Kellie. Now, I want to know why you’ve stopped coming to church. If I’m forced to announce that I no longer live in the parsonage, the deacons will insist that my family leave there. Unless you want to hasten that day, come to church Sunday, and tell Lacette to do the same.”
The more and the bigger the rocks people put in her way, the more determined she was to get what she wanted, and the more exciting the challenge. The morality of the issue, the rightness of it didn’t occur to Kellie; to her mind, she should have the brooch because she wanted it. He can’t frighten me. He’s too proud to indict his own daughter. Knowing his need to have the last word, she didn’t reply to his indictment of her, and when their food arrived, she used that as a reason to change the subject. He, too, seemed glad to avoid further confrontation.
“You might want to start looking for a place of your own,” he said, giving her the same advice he gave Lacette. “Before long, some changes will have to be made.”
“Mama thinks the two of you may get back together.”
He stopped eating, and at the expression of incredulity on his face, she nearly apologized for having mentioned it. “She doesn’t think any such thing.”
She didn’t probe, because she knew he couldn’t be led; he had said all he planned to say on the subject of his relationship with his wife.
They walked out of the restaurant to an overcast sky. The wind whipped around her legs while she walked the half block with her father to his car. “I only have a block and a half to walk, Daddy, but thanks anyway,” she said when he offered to drive her back to City Hall. She reached up, kissed his cheek, wound the long woolen scarf around her neck, and headed back to work.
“I need a plan,” she said to herself. “A good one.”
While Kellie connived to appropriate her sister’s jewelry, Lacette was about to embark upon a life-changing adventure. Buoyed by the chance to demonstrate bread makers and other kitchen tools made by the Warren Pitch Company, she went about setting up her booth in the west lobby of the Belle Époque, a five-star hotel in downtown Frederick at the edge of the historic district.
“If you need anything,” the manager of the hotel told her, “all you have to do is dial # 418 on the house phone. I’ll be at your service.”
She thanked him and hoped she wouldn’t need so much as a thread; his leer wasn’t so blatant that she would dare accuse him of it, but it had sufficient strength to get his message across. And his strut announced that if she accepted his unspoken invitation, he was well prepared to back it up. She released a labored breath, symbolically cleansing her system and her thoughts of him and got busy organizing her booth, placing notices around the lobby and writing out press releases to send to local television and radio announcers. She wished the company had given her a longer engagement, but her contract covered November the fifteenth through January the second, the peak selling period of the year, and she intended to make the most of the opportunity.
She decided not to wear a cook’s uniform, as most demonstrators of foods and kitchen products did; she wanted to meet people, especially men, and she wanted to be at her best. Early that afternoon, she noticed a man decorating the lobby near her with branches of autumn leaves, pumpkins, and gourds.
Mmm, she thought, Wonder who he is. He didn’t come near her, but when he looked her way and she smiled at him, he smiled in return. But he didn’t walk over to her and introduce himself, and he didn’t speak. Quickly, her mind returned to the business at hand, for hotel guests began crowding around her. By six-thirty that evening, she had twenty-two orders, more than she had dreamed of getting in one afternoon. She closed for the day, and had started to the lower-level garage where she parked her car, when she passed a florist shop and, remembering the man she saw earlier in the day, she walked over to the house phone and dialed #418.
“Could you please tell me who the man is who decorated the lobby for Thanksgiving?”
“His name is Douglas Rawlins. Why? Did he get out of line?”
“No. He definitely did not. Thanks. Good night.” Let him chew on that, she said to herself. None of his business why I wanted to know the man’s name. She entered the elevator with the receptionist who worked across the corridor from her booth.
“My name is Lourdes,” the woman said. “If you’re driving, could I get a lift to the bus stop? It’s starting to snow, and I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
“I’m Lacette. Where do you live?”
“On Elk, not far from that Baptist church.”
“Then, I’ll drop you home.” She discovered that she liked Lourdes, a Ladino woman of African descent, and wanted them to become friends.
At home, she found Kellie pacing the floor like a caged animal and the dining room air heavy with the odor of Kellie’s expensive perfume. Her initial reaction to it was to open a window, but she didn’t want the blast of twenty-four-degree air that would follow, so she went up the stairs, looked in on her mother, found that she wasn’t in what she and Kellie called Cynthia’s Sanctuary, went into her own room and closed the door.
The following Tuesday at lunchtime, having settled on her plan, Kellie went to the house her father inherited and stood with her back to the great elm that for years had occupied a spot between the sidewalk and the street facing the house. Grateful for the warming temperatures, she leaned against the tree for over half an hour waiting to see what, if any, activity would indicate that the house was being renovated. She had to get in there before anyone disarranged it. As she was about to leave, disappointed, a white pickup truck with a wildcat logo and an inscription she couldn’t make out drove up into the front yard and parked. A man jumped out and started for the front door.
She rushed to the door as the man inserted a key. “I was waiting for you,” she said. “I don’t have my key, and I can go in with you.”
He stared down at her until she took a step backward. “No, you can’t, babe. Nobody’s going in here but me. You steal something, and there goes my job. My boss said nobody is to enter this house while I’m here but me. I don’t know what your game is, sis, but you’re wasting your time.”
She wished it wasn’t so cold, and he could see how good she looked without her coat. Not many men would willingly pass up thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-eight measurements on a five feet, nine inch, good-looking woman in a size ten dress. “I’ll come back when you’re in a better mood,” she said. He narrowed his left eye, and she added, “I mean, when you can appreciate a real woman.”
His grin affirmed what she had guessed, that his teeth hadn’t had dental care for quite some time, and she stepped away from him, certain that the offense might not be due to laborious work but to his hygiene habits. “When I get to the place that I can’t take care of a real woman,” he snarled, “I’ll be in a pine box.” He stepped inside, closed the door and locked it. She realized the man had a temper, probably an unruly one, and told herself to be careful with him. The thing to do, she figured, was to get there when he was leaving or ready to leave. She’d have to find a reasonable excuse for her boss, but she would find one.
She managed to get back to her desk and sit down a minute before her boss walked in and dropped several sheets of paper in her incoming box. “I need these press releases before you leave today, and before you start typing, read them over for errors and correct any you find.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, her teeth clenched and her gaze averted. The woman left, and she would have given a lot to be able to throw the papers back at her and walk off the job.
“Now, don’t burst a blood vessel,” Mabel said in her unique way of sympathizing. “The woman has never heard of the word ‘please,’ and she wouldn’t say ‘thank you’ if you paid her for it. I’d like to shorten the distance between her ears, too, but I’ve got a kid to take care of.”
Kellie knew that her ire stemmed as much from her guilt about her lunchtime activity as it did from her boss’ treatment of her as a person who didn’t deserve common civility. She needed a job, and since utopia hadn’t come to Frederick, Maryland, neither she nor any other African American could count on getting a white-collar job if somebody white was equally qualified for it. It happened, but you couldn’t count on it; if you had a black face, you’d better be exceptional. She kept her mouth shut, and it needled her to do it. Every time she had to suck up, she hated herself and the person who’d made her a victim of the region’s genteel inequality. She finished the press releases a few minutes before quitting time and took them to her boss’ office.
“You want to watch your lunch hour, miss,” her boss, Adrienne Hood, said, instead of thanks. “You’re entitled to forty-five minutes, and we give you an hour, but you returned twenty minutes late yesterday and half an hour late today. Your work is fine, but I won’t tolerate your long lunch hours. You understand me.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.
“That’s all.”
By the time Kellie cleaned off her desk and was ready to leave, she had more than made up the thirty minutes, but that wouldn’t win her Brownie points with her boss. As she trudged home with the sound of wind rustling around her and her boots crushing the grainy ice that drifted down and obscured her vision, she wished for a warm, loving man. But she had long accepted that warm and loving men did not fall for women who did as they chose without regard to the circumstances or consequences. The kind of man she wanted preferred women like Lacette and her mother.
At the corner that would lead her to Mama Carrie’s house, if she turned there, Kellie used every bit of her willpower to stay away from the house and from the repugnant man she met there at noon. Cleaned up and neatly dressed, the man would be an eye popper. And with that sexy swagger . . . She told herself not to think of the man; he wasn’t clean, and he probably didn’t know a necktie from a bolo tie if, indeed, he’d ever heard of either.
“The best I can do right now,” she said to herself, “is not make anybody suspicious. I’ll start wearing the ring every day so Daddy and Lacette will think I’m satisfied and don’t care about the brooch.”
Kellie’s cunning was wasted on Lacette, for her sister rarely remembered that she owned a brooch. Instead, she focused upon the business that she hoped to open early in the coming year. After receiving her first week’s report, the Warren Pitch Company offered to extend her contract until the end of January, and she promised to consider it. Everything depended on how soon Lawrence Bradley could get her papers in order and officially processed. She loved the work and, for the past week had rolled out of bed each morning and skipped down the stairs in her rush to meet the day. She gave a customer a lesson on the role of salt and sugar in making bread dough. The man ordered two bread machines and asked her if she’d be willing to demonstrate recipes from his cookbook.
She said she would think about it and accepted the man’s card. She didn’t see Douglas Rawlins when he walked up to her booth, and she had to steady herself when a jolt of anticipation shot through her.
“You’re really good at this,” he said, surprising her with those few words, because he usually nodded when he saw her but didn’t offer conversation.
“I hope to open my marketing consultancy in a few months,” she said. “I’m enjoying this, because I’m learning how people decide to make a purchase.”
“Where will you have your office?”
“Right here in Frederick. My lawyer is checking out some possible places. I’ve dreamed about this since I graduated from college, and my intuition tells me my ship is about to dock.”
“I’m glad for you. Mine is still a little ways out to sea, but I know it will come in. Well, I’d better be getting back to those miniature cypress trees. The manager wants dozens of them decorated and lighting the lobby for Christmas, and I can’t seem to convince him that one huge, well-decorated Frazier fir will be a hundred times more dramatic. Well . . . see you later.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting to know him better,” she said to herself. “He’s hardworking, meticulous, and carries himself well. Dignified. I have a hunch something is going to happen, but it doesn’t point to him. We’ll see.”
She saw him several days later with a replica of a huge turkey that he placed in the barnyard setting he had created for the reading room. “I love the scene in the reading room,” she said, and she did, for it represented Thanksgiving as rural folk still lived it.
He smiled and kept walking, stunning her with his strange behavior. Annoyed, she followed him to the reading room. “How is it that you can be friendly one day and behave the next as if you’ve never seen me before? I hate that.”
An expression that she thought suggestive of pain flittered across his face. “I’m sorry, but I have learned that it’s sometimes best to keep to myself, Miss Graham. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll put this bird over there and get on with my work.”
Outraged, she told Lourdes, the receptionist, what she thought of him. “I don’t know what this is about,” Lourdes said, “but he asked me if you had a sister named Kellie, and when I said you did, he seemed disappointed. Then he nodded and said, ‘I see.’ Does he know your sister?”
“Probably. He worked at City Hall before he came here, and she’s in the transportation department.”
“Maybe something happened between them. Why don’t you ask your sister?”
“Thanks.” But she didn’t say that she would. If Kellie had been as forward with Douglas as she was with most men, Douglas probably expected her to behave the same way. She let out a groan and went back to her booth. Would there ever come a day when there was a man in her life that Kellie didn’t touch?
Lacette’s somber mood was short lived, however, because shortly thereafter her salesman at Barney’s New and Used Cars called to tell her that her new Mercury Cougar had arrived. She drove her old car, got six hundred dollars for it and headed home in her white sports car.
“This, I gotta see,” Kellie said. “You didn’t even tell us you were getting rid of that old junk.” She grabbed a jacket from the downstairs hall closet and dashed outside to see it. “Well, would you look at this. Lace has backed into the twenty-first century with a white Mercury Cougar!” She gazed at it, standing near the passenger’s front door with her arms folded to ward off the cold, then dashed back inside.
“Mama, go look at Lacette’s car.” She looked at Lacette. “Girl, you’re gonna have to get some tight jeans, a tight, red turtleneck sweater and some dark sunglasses and show that baby off. That is a man getter if I ever saw one.”
Lacette leaned against the sideboard that rested in the dining room by the door leading to the hallway, folded her arms and crossed her ankles. Her sister was not a scatterbrain but, at times, you had to dig deep to find evidence of mature intelligence beneath that long mane that she was so proud of.
“I’m, thirty-three, Kellie, not thirteen. And who’d want a man tailing behind you because he liked your car? That kind of guy is looking for a meal ticket, and trust me, no man is washing down my food with my wine on a regular basis.”
“All right. All right. Get off your soap box. Poor thing; you’re gonna die a virgin.”
Lacette raised an eyebrow. It had never occurred to her that Kellie perceived her as unfulfilled and man-shy. Her white teeth sparkled in what was half a grin and half a grimace. “You think so, huh?”
If Kellie was after confirmation or denial, she would get neither. During their formative years, she shared everything with her sister, her thoughts, dreams, and possessions. But by the time they reached junior high school, she’d begun to notice that their sharing went one way, from her to Kellie, and that her sister was not averse to taking what she wanted if Lacette refused her. After Kellie made a date with the boy she knew was to take Lacette to their high-school senior prom, leaving Lacette without a date and unable to attend, she shielded her private life, including her dates, from her sister.
Lacette went into the living room where Cynthia sat crocheting and watching Judge Mathis. “If you’d like to try out my new car, Mama, we can go for a ride Sunday afternoon.”
“I’d love to, dear, but I promised my cousin Jack I’d go over to Baltimore with him Sunday afternoon. He’s a football fanatic and loves the Ravens.”
“I didn’t know you liked football.”
“I don’t, but it’s a chance to get out of this mausoleum. I never liked it, but I had to support your father, and living in the parsonage was a part of his salary. I didn’t complain, at least not where anybody could hear me.”
“We can do it another time.” She left her mother and climbed the stairs. Who were these people who she had lived with for thirty-three years? She didn’t know them. She’d have staked her life that her parents had the perfect marriage, that they would live together until death separated them. She’d thought her mother a mild, conservative housewife, and though she knew her sister flirted on the edge of immorality, she hadn’t thought her capable of what she now suspected—that Kellie was involved with Lawrence Bradley, a married man.
She left work later than usual the next afternoon owing to heavy sales late in the day that made up for the morning slump. As she walked through the garage on the way to her car, she saw a man fiddling under the hood of his car.
“Do you need a battery charge?” she asked him.
“I sure do.” He straightened up, and she could see both the surprise and the disappointment that blanketed his face. “I’ve been trying to start this thing for half an hour.”
She positioned her car, and he clamped the jacks on his battery. “Your car is relatively new,” she said, “how could the battery die?”
“It’s been real cold, and it didn’t help that I forgot to turn off my headlights. Best thing is to turn them off as soon as you enter the garage.”
“You ever done that before?” she asked, frankly curious that such a meticulous man would make that mistake.
“Yeah. A couple of times, but I caught it before I got to the elevator.”
“Well, I’m glad I stayed late. See you tomorrow.”
“Thanks a lot. I appreciate your help. You’re working on a Saturday?”
“I’m a freelance demonstrator right now, and a part of my salary comes from commissions. New groups and tours come in on Saturday morning, and I want to get them before they go to Everedy Square and Shab Row and spend all of their money.”
“Or those antiques shops on Urban Pike. Well, see you tomorrow, and thanks again.”
She didn’t know whether to try to prolong the conversation or get in her car and drive off. The more she saw of him, the more certain she was that, if he wasn’t married, she’d like them to be more than friends. The earth didn’t move when she saw him, but stars had twinkled, so to speak, on more than one occasion when he smiled at her. She got into her car, waved and drove off.
She drove into the parsonage two-car garage, parked in the space that her father had kept for himself, and went across the street for a quick visit with her aunt Nan. “Did you ever get your brooch?” Nan asked. They sat in her aunt’s oversized kitchen sipping hot cider and eating roasted chestnuts. “If you let that thing lie around somewhere, before you know it, it’ll be pinned to a jacket that ain’t yours.”
“That’s true, but the lawyer didn’t find it among the things that Gramma stored with him. He’s going to search the house for it.”
“Well, I hope he finds it; somebody’s been working on the place, but I guess Marshall knows about that. Anyhow, you be careful. Know who you can trust, and don’t forget that some linen that looks clean’s been used and folded back up.” They talked for a while, and Lacette went home to check her mail for she was anxious for letter from Lawrence Bradley. She found both the house and the mailbox empty. After considerable contemplation as to whether she should take the time to stop by her grandmother’s house and check on the person working there, she rejected the idea and stayed home to work on plans for her marketing business.
Lacette’s decision meant a reprieve for Kellie who, at that minute, approached the house that Carrie Hooper willed to her son-in-law. When she saw the front door crack, she bounded up the front steps. It opened, and the same man she met there a few days earlier stepped out. Her first thought was, Good Lord, and in the same old clothes. Doesn’t he ever change? His bulk blocked her way.
“What do you want, babe? I told you you’re not getting into this house.”
“But it belongs to my father. I’m Marshall Graham’s daughter.”
His glare unsettled her; she was accustomed to enticing a man with no more effort than it took to give him her best seductive smile. “Big damn deal! I don’t give a shit if you’re the daughter of the President of the U.S.A. You ain’t coming in here.”
Tough, was he? She stepped closer to him. “You want to bet? I haven’t met the man stupid enough to turn me down.”
“Turn you . . .” He flipped back his baseball cap and scratched the back of his head. “What the hell’s in here that’s so important to you?”
“If you go in with me, I’ll show you.”
He narrowed his right eye. “Oh, yeah? What else will you show me?”
It was the opening she’d waited for. “Anything you want to see.”
When his eyes bulged and his lower lip dropped, she knew she had him. Emboldened by his seeming loss for words, she said, “I don’t want anybody to see me standing out here. Let’s go inside.” While he gaped, she walked past him into the house, pulled off her coat and threw it across the banister.
“You’re sure of yourself,” he said.
Her smile telegraphed to him the satisfaction she felt at having him in her clutches. “I’m just not used to men ignoring me, and I didn’t intend for you to do it either.”
“I could lose my job for this.”
She ignored that. “What do you say I check out things upstairs, and—”
“Yeah. That’s a good idea. Let’s go.”
She pulled off her jacket, threw it on top of her coat and started up the stairs ahead of him, giving him a good view of her tight-fitting skirt. “Let’s see,” she said when she reached the top of the stairs, “that was Gramma’s room over there.”
When she headed in that direction, he grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute. You think you’re just gonna walk in here, take whatever it is you’re after and leave me holding the bag? I wasn’t that stupid the day I was born.”
“Who said you were stupid?” She looked around at the familiar wallpaper and the pictures of her great grandparents who gazed down at her with censoring eyes and shuddered. “It’s kinda cold in here,” she said, not wanting him to see her sudden attack of nerves. “Can’t you do something to warm up this place?”
“Keep it up,” he snarled, “and you’ll get what you’ve been begging for ever since you walked up those front steps out there. Damn right I can warm it up, and you too.”
“Well, I wish you’d get to it.” She rubbed her arms, hoping to tease and confuse him, to rob him of some of his arrogance. But he wasted no time closing the distance between them, pulled her sweater over her head and threw it on the floor. She stood there and let him look, knowing it wouldn’t be long before he went after what he wanted.
“Unhook that thing,” he ordered in deep guttural tones. “Take it off.”
“If I do, you’re going to let me check out this place any time I want to. Understood?”
He reached toward her, but she backed away. “Understood?” she asked him again.
His breathing deepened, and she rubbed her breasts. “Yeah. I’ll do it, dammit. Just take that thing off.”
With a smile of triumph, she moved closer to him. “If you want it off, take it off.”
His calloused fingers fumbled with the front hook, but she didn’t help him and, exasperated, he jerked the garment from her, hooked his arm around her back and sucked her nipple into his mouth. She tried not to react to his rhythmic pulling and sucking, but he kept at it until groans spilled out of her throat, groans that were not faked as they had been with Lawrence Bradley and every other man who had tasted them. He pulled her clothes off and, without looking, threw them across the room where they landed on the dresser.
She had expected brutality or, at the least, that he would be as crude and fumbling in bed as he was coarse in conversation, to relieve himself quickly and let her do what she came there to do, find the brooch. But like a pilot checking his plane for safety, he paid careful attention to every one of her body’s erotic pulses.
Don’t rush me,” he said when she showed impatience. “This takes a lot of energy and I already worked all day—”
“Well, if you’re tired—”
He cut her off. “Don’t even think it. I’m going to take my good time and get everything that’s coming to me. All you have to do is lie back and relax—that is, if you can; I’ll do the rest.” He stripped, rolled her under the covers and slid in beside her.
His mouth, hot and moist, clamped over one nipple while his fingers pinched and massaged her other breast, and she crossed her legs and told herself not to move, not to reward him. But his hand began to move in circles over her belly, to skim her thighs with the delicacy of a soft breeze, inching closer and closer to her vagina. She wanted to grab his hand and force him to touch her, to massage her, to do anything that would combust the embers smoldering inside of her and burst that awful fullness that she could neither name nor identify.
I won’t beg him. I’m damned if I will. At last his fingers delved into her folds and began their dance, and she couldn’t hold back the moans. Her hips began to undulate, as if by instinct awaiting a long sought treasure. When he spread her legs and let her feel the thrust and pull of his tongue, she knew at last that it was not she, but he who was the captor.
“Get in me. What’s wrong with you? Get in me,” she moaned.
He hovered over her, his eyes closed and his head thrown back. “Take me in.”
She grasped him, lifted her body and waited. “Oh,” she yelled, when he surged into her.
“Sorry. It’ll be okay in a minute,” he said.
She forgot the initial pain of his unusual size as he thrust with the skill of an expert, and she moved to his rhythm until the bottom of her feet flushed hot, her thighs quivered, and she thought she couldn’t stand another second of the swelling and pumping. Lord, if only she could burst.
“I can’t stand this,” she moaned.
“You’re doing great, baby. Let it go.”
He accelerated his pace and she let out a keening cry as he hurtled her into spasm after spasm until she gripped his buttocks in frenzy and then went limp. Shocked and disoriented by the unexpected experience, her first orgasm, and humiliated by her response to him, tears drained from her tightly closed eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, using her breast for a pillow.
“At first.”
“That always happens till the woman gets use to me. I’d better warn you. I got my first time to have a woman who didn’t want me again. That’s because I do it right. I don’t cheat women.”
He didn’t have to brag to her; he’d just showed her. Now, she could stop wondering what was so great about sex, but she sure would rather have learned it from some other man.
“What’s your name?” she asked when he finally pulled out of her after rocking her senseless two more times.
He rolled off her and braced himself on his left elbow. “I’m glad you asked. I might have gotten the wrong impression.”
“What do you mean?” She felt annoyance beginning to churn in her, though she knew it was more at herself than at him.
“A prostitute doesn’t ask a man’s name, but she doesn’t let herself burst wide open all around him, either.”
She sat up. “Are you comparing me to a—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t go getting self-righteous on me. You got a helluva surprise. I know what to do with women, and I didn’t short you.”
He got up, found her clothes and threw them on the bed. “Come on. I gotta get the truck back before my boss sends the cops out.”
“You what? I haven’t had time to—”
“Look. I can’t stand cry babies. You can come back Monday about the same time as you showed up here today. Now, let’s get going. Good jobs are hard to get.”
“Now you wait a minute. You’re not keeping your end of the bargain.”
“Look, babe. You wanted to steal something in this house. You can do that Monday. Beside, you didn’t expect a good lay, and what I gave you was first class. Next time, I’ll make you bloom like a flower in the springtime. You and me, babe; we can really get it on.”
She finished dressing, but clothes didn’t erase the chill that sent tremors through her. It wouldn’t be easy to get rid of him, and after what he’d just done to her, she wondered how she could pretend that he didn’t exist.