Damage (2 page)

"I'm Ray Waugh," he said, extending his hand. She shook it. Her hands were petite, but her skin was rough.

"I've seen your name," she said. "You write for the Citizen-Gazette, don't you?"

Ray nodded.

"So, what is the responsibility of a newspaper reporter at a function like this?" she asked.

"That depends on your perspective," Ray said. "My boss would say it's my responsibility to take pictures and make sure I write down the names of every person in every shot. She's very particular about that. If I'm missing just one person's name, she won't use the picture."

"That must be very stressful," the woman said mockingly.

"It keeps me up at night," Ray played along. "Jared Upton would say it's my responsibility to give this Chamber-sponsored affair front page coverage and feature him in at least two photos, not including the obligatory foot-on-the-shovel shot that will top the article at least three columns wide in tomorrow's paper."

"Will he be disappointed?" she said.

"Doubtful," Ray said. "The biggest news we've had in a week is the deer eating all the azalea blooms off landscaped lawns along the golf courses. Unless another rabid fox bites a tourist before tomorrow's deadline, Jared's guaranteed everything above the fold."

"That should make him happy," she said. "Is that all, then?"

"No," Ray said. "Once I have everything I need to make my editor and Jared Upton happy, my primary responsibility is to eat as much prime rib as possible and pocket at least three beers before getting the hell out of here."

"Oh, shit," Ray's new friend mumbled. Something behind him had caught her attention. "Save me!"

He turned and saw Sheriff Redmond's chubby daughter walking directly toward them. She was even more frightening in motion than she had been at rest. Her dour, puckered face was not helped at all by the smirk she tried to pass for a pleasant smile. It barely made a dent in her heavy makeup.

"Good Lord," he said, turning back to face the little woman in red. "That is a lot of ugly crammed into one body."

The woman in red snorted and tried to cover her face. She looked back up at Redmond's approaching daughter and her shoulders dropped in defeat. An eerily unnatural sing-song voice cut through the air like amplified feedback. Several heads turned to locate the source of the grating noise.

"Hello, Correen!" called Redmond's clownish daughter.

Ray's diminutive friend returned the greeting without standing. She addressed Redmond's daughter as Mimi. Not deterred by the lukewarm reception, Mimi pressed closely to Correen and bent over to kiss her cheek, shoving her Christmas wrapped rear into Ray's face. He wasn't sure which of them had Mimi's worse end. An awkward moment passed in which neither woman said anything. Ray shifted his chair back to regain his personal space and improve his view of the conversation.

"How are the horses these days?" Mimi asked, continuing in a falsely sweet tone of voice. She didn't wait for a reply. "We got rid of ours last year. George never could take proper care of the stables. We never had time to ride them anyway. It's all turned to storage now, I'm afraid, but you never can get rid of that horrid smell, can you?"

Correen forced a smile and said nothing.

"Where is your husband?" Mimi asked. "He is the guest of honor today, isn't he? I've been looking all over for him. Is he hiding from me?"

Who wouldn't, Ray thought.

While Correen explained about her husband's early tee time, Ray noticed the same lack of attention in Mimi's eyes that he had seen in her father's. Instead of listening, she was waiting for the next pause so she could regain control of the conversation.

"Are you and Evan joining us for family dinner tonight at St. Thomas?" Mimi asked when Correen had finished. "I know your father would love to see you and the children. I asked him this morning if you were coming, but he wasn't certain. You'll want to change, of course. That dress would be a bit much for all the old men to take."

"Not this time, Mimi," Correen said. "The girls are spending the night with Evan's sister in Asheboro so we can go out to celebrate our anniversary. We'll see Dad tomorrow."

A scandalized expression swept over Mimi's pudgy face.

"But won't they miss school tomorrow?" she said.

"Mimi," said Correen impatiently. "Our oldest is only four. I think she'll survive missing a day of preschool."

"Oh," Mimi said, her falsely sweet voice dropping briefly before kicking back in again. "Well, don't you worry. I'll make sure I'm seated with Avery tonight to keep him from getting too lonely. I wouldn't want your father thinking he was forgotten on family night."

Correen forced another smile. She gave Ray a look that suggested she would sooner stab the other women with her cocktail fork than continue speaking with her. Ray stood, drawing Mimi's attention. He assumed there would be no point reintroducing himself to the sheriff's clown-faced daughter since she had snubbed him twice already in the span of twenty minutes.

"Would you ladies mind if I took your picture for the Citizen-Gazette?"

To his surprise, Mimi perked up and loudly declared it a wonderful idea. Correen eyed him suspiciously. He directed them to stand in front of an easel holding a poster-size architectural rendering of the new community's clubhouse. Neither woman touched the other. Both affected insincere smiles. Ray snapped several shots, then asked them how to correctly spell their names.

"You can't be serious," exclaimed Mimi when Ray asked for Correen's last name. "She is the wife of Evan Wallace, the man responsible for this entire development, and her father has been a pillar of this community for the last fifty years. I would think you should know who she is without having to ask. Oh, Correen, look! Isn't that Evan just coming in now?"

Correen craned her neck to see around Mimi. Ray turned to see the man of the hour enter the tent and make a beeline for chamber president Jared Upton. He stood about six foot three and had the lean, strong build of a tennis player. He took long strides, gliding effortlessly across the short cut grass. Waves of light brown hair framed a ridiculously handsome face. Correen stood and began to excuse herself.

"I'll come with you, Corrie," Mimi imposed. "I have a bone to pick with your husband."

"I'm sorry," Ray interrupted. "I just need to get the spelling of your last name for the Citizen-Gazette."

As he delayed Mimi by asking her three times how to spell McGinnis, Correen Wallace slipped away to join her husband. Within minutes, they were seated next to each other at the head table on the riser.
 

Carrie Gallagher from radio station WCBT sat next to Ray during the ceremony with her padfolio on the table and pen in hand. Ray rested his small spiral notebook on his knee and twirled a blue click pen like a miniature baton from finger to finger, dropping it several times. When it came time for Evan Wallace to speak, Ray copied down only one quote, something about "overcoming many logistical and legal hurdles to take this development from a dream to a reality. I am thrilled to finally be able to say we have reached the construction phase."

Satisfied the quote was good enough to lead the short article that would accompany the photos in Monday's edition of the Citizen-Gazette, Ray picked up the camera and began snapping pictures of Evan Wallace and the other people seated at the head table. A majority of the shots focused solely on Correen Wallace. Either she glanced at Ray by chance, or she noticed the attention he was paying her. Whatever the reason, she turned to look at him. He lowered the camera. She gave him a blushing, broad smile, and turned back to watch her husband finish his speech.

Sunday, Part III

Seven years earlier, when Ray began his career as a print journalist at the Citizen-Gazette, he would wait patiently while whomever he needed to photograph shuffled and repositioned themselves into a chaotic cluster. He didn't yet understand one basic rule of photography, which is that most people want the photographer to take charge. Even Chamber of Commerce President Upton came to readily defer to Ray's guidance as he turned the four men and one woman just so, got each to place a foot on a shovel, and snapped several quick shots.

Upton handed Ray a fact sheet about the proposed Lonesome Pines Country Club that provided much of the details needed for his article. He offered canned responses to the few questions Ray asked, and tried to bring each answer back around to the community's impact on local real estate and sales tax revenues.

Evan Wallace, whom Ray had met many times at meetings of the Tramway County Commissioner back when Wallace served as county manager, greeted him warmly. The man towered over Ray, his tailored gray suit with matching tie and pressed white shirt striking a sharp contrast to Ray's business casual attire.

"How'd I do?" Wallace asked about the speech he gave during the ceremony.

"Fantastic," Ray lied. "You're a natural."

"Excellent!" Wallace seemed oblivious to the sarcasm. Then again Ray never had considered him the sharpest tool in the shed. It always amazed Ray how far good looks and straight white teeth could carry a simpleton. "I haven't had to do much public speaking since entering the private sector. I was afraid I might have gotten rusty."

"Not at all," Ray assured him. "Evan, tell me about the land for Lonesome Pines? Was it a single large land grab, or a series of smaller purchases?"

Wallace laughed, making him even more wretchedly handsome.
 

"Don't you sit at the county clerk's office and read through real estate transactions and court records anymore? I recall not long ago when you were rather obsessed with the public's right to know every last detail of everyone else's business."

Ray's head bobbed slowly. Back when he was County Manager, Wallace had unsuccessfully tried to keep the Citizen-Gazette from gaining access to court records after the paper printed news of a local politician's conviction for drunk driving. The politician was friends with Avery Lowson, chairman of the Tramway County Board of Commissioners and leader of the county's Republican Party. Wallace must already have been courting Lowson's daughter at the time, so Wallace was likely trying to score points with his future father-in-law by trying to block the newspaper's access to public court records. The matter was dropped after the Citizen-Gazette threatened to run a series of articles on the importance of government transparency.
 

"I'm just giving you a hard time," Wallace said playfully, thumping Ray lightly on the arm to prove his lightheartedness. Then he puffed his chest out again as though he were back behind the podium. "The land on which we stand was handed down through my wife's side of the family over the course of many generations. It's part of almost nine thousand acres granted to the family by King Charles II of England in the 1670s. Over the centuries it's supported livestock, tobacco, corn, and orchards of various kinds. Three major Civil War battles were fought on these lands."

"You sound like you memorized a brochure," Ray said.

"When you marry into the Lowson family," he said, leaning in and lowering his voice, "you learn the heritage if you want to survive family gatherings."

"Understood. So, now the land's being converted into a golf course and luxury homes for the rich," Ray said.

"Actually, the reason we chose this particular area is because it was once home to the very first golf course in Tramway County. It was quite famous among the elite from up north in the late eighteen hundreds. The Lowson family abandoned it during the Great Depression. It's all overgrown, of course, but the bones are still there. That fact alone should knock an entire year off the typical construction time."

 
"I recall some of the locals objecting to the development at one of the planning and zoning board meetings."

"A few of our new neighbors were concerned about construction noise, water runoff, truck traffic, that sort of thing," Wallace said, smiling at Ray the way he must have smiled when defending his development at the meeting. "Once we assured them a minimum amount of disruption, we were able to move ahead with the development rather quickly."

Wallace's attention was caught by Jared Upton. Upton was seated at one of the vacated round tables with the golf course designer and two men Ray didn't know.

"Now," Wallace said. "If you have everything you need for your article, I need to speak with some people."

Most of the attendees had abandoned the massive tent, with more preparing to follow. Several centerpieces were toppled and the white table linens were spattered with spills and smears of unknown origin. Servers had long since stopped replenishing the buffet. What remained no longer appeared edible due to the unseasonably warm temperature. Ray was fairly certain no cheese should ever be that particular shade of dark orange. In one of the corners, an elderly couple held the band captive by stubbornly waltzing barefoot in the grass to whatever tune it played.
 

Ray wandered over to one of the makeshift bar stations only to find the servers had boxed up the leftover beer and corked the open wine bottles. He peeked around the back of the bar to try and locate anything they might have overlooked.

"There's nothing worse than a guest who doesn't know when to leave," said a voice behind him. Correen Wallace, shoes in hand, strikingly charming in her simple red dress, smiled when a startled Ray spun around to face her. "Didn't you get enough to drink?"

"No," Ray said, recovering. "In fact, I didn't get anything to drink."

"That is a shame," she responded, and stepped around Ray to reach behind the bar. She took inventory and came up with a half-full bottle of Chardonnay. "Are you a wine drinker?"

"Too sweet," he said. "And not at all manly."

"That leaves beer, then," Correen said. "Are you too masculine for light beer? It's all they seem to have left."

She plucked two dripping bottles from a plastic bin and wrapped napkins around them, placing them atop the bar. As he reached for one, she pointed at the cocktail glass serving as a tip jar. It had already been emptied. Ray reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled wad of singles. He peeled one away and dropped it in the glass.