The Lucky Ones (19 page)

“You don’t mean…me?”

Valentine’s hands slid up her back, holding the back of her head as he brought his lips to hers. Any resistance she had felt before, any lingering guilt over Sophia, any offended sense of decorum evaporated. Living with the O’Dells had at first seemed extraordinary. Almost
too
lucky. But now, when she was being handed so much more—cradled in the arms of the dreamiest man she’d ever known, about to star in a real motion picture—nothing felt wrong. All the pieces fit together so neatly; she could see the scheme of the whole puzzle. Valentine had been here waiting for her all this time, and his image on screen had been some cosmic message, beamed to her in that faraway town. They
were
two halves of the same soul, after all—a more perfect team than O’Dell and Ray had ever been.

“Yes, I could love you,” she said, and let him kiss her again.

20

“YOU’VE BEEN NEGLECTING ME, DARLING, AND WHEN it’s raining, too.” Despite her age, Virginia Donal de Gruyter Marsh put on a pouting face as her daughter approached from the far side of Marsh Hall’s airy sitting room. The lady of the house was dressed impeccably in white chiffon dotted with small green circles, and her dark hair was pinned away from her face, but she slouched against the sofa as if she hadn’t changed out of pajamas in several days. The frown remained even after Astrid kissed her mother hello and sat down next to her on the ivory cushion. “
Summer
rain,” the older woman muttered, as of some pestilence for which there was no cure.

“It doesn’t seem to keep Billie in,” Astrid replied as she arranged the skirt of her coral-colored tank dress over her crossed legs and cast her gaze through the large glass windows. Her stepsister was out on the grounds, practicing archery despite the intermittent downpours of the last few days. The skin of Billie’s bare arms appeared damp, it was true, and her instructor had removed his shirt. But she was concentrating furiously on her stance, and her arrows seemed to be hitting their mark with fair accuracy.

Virginia’s head lolled toward Astrid. “But my dear, Billie is not like you or me.”

“No.” Astrid exhaled in faint amusement. “I can’t argue with you there.”

“So tell me everything. Who is going around with whom, and who is giving the best parties, and who is hosting flops. About the liquor biz, and how much money your husband is making, and all of that.”

“Ohhhh…” Astrid’s hand waved gracefully so that her collection of tennis bracelets clinked lightly against each other. “It’s all the same faces, Mother, you know how it is. But Charlie—well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Despite her facade of careless indifference, Astrid must have conveyed something of the confusion that she had discovered married life to be, because her mother sat up straight, and the light of calculating intelligence returned to her eyes. “Oh, dear,” she murmured. “Trouble in paradise.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Astrid replied quickly. “Only—I thought since you are so much
older
and more
experienced
than I am, you might be able to give me some advice.”

Ignoring the insult, Virginia patted her daughter’s knee. “Of course, my darling. But go make your old mummy a bourbon and soda first, won’t you?”

As Astrid slid across the room to the well-stocked bar, she thought how strange it was that a few months ago she had wanted nothing more than to be out of her mother and stepfather’s house, with its constant fighting and ever-changing rules of propriety. But now her mother’s decadence seemed amusing, like an occasional irritant one could nonetheless depend upon. The well-kept rooms of the Tudor-style house smelled of hyacinths, and as she mixed the drink (nice and strong, the way her mother liked it) she realized that Dogwood was badly in need of a cleaning woman to dust and mop and do probably a dozen other tasks she never thought about.

“Now, my dear,” her mother said, as Astrid handed the drink over. “All men cheat; you cannot go to pieces over a little infidelity.”

“It’s not that,” Astrid said with a sigh. In fact, this assertion did make her think of the time, before they were engaged, when she’d found Charlie in bed with Gracie Northrup, a rather full-faced girl a few classes ahead of her at Miss Porter’s. The memory made her heart sore. “Everything is peachy, really it is. We’re rich and we throw wonderful little parties and everyone wants to be just like us. Only, every
now
and then, forever sounds like an awfully long time, do you know what I mean?”

“
Do
I,” Virginia replied, rolling her eyes and sipping loudly from her highball. “I can’t tell you, sometimes I wake up in the morning and see Harrison there snoring into his pillow and I think—”

“Mother,” Astrid interrupted delicately. “Really, I thought you and Harrison were getting along so well.”

“Splendidly!” Virginia slurped again, muffling her tone with the sound of clinking ice cubes, so that Astrid wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic or not. “You know, Narcissa Phipps told me she saw you at the Yacht Club. The night of that big storm, when all the trees got uprooted. She said you two were making a real spectacle.”

“Who cares what that old bore says. I know
you
don’t.”

“Darling! Of course I don’t. Only…people do talk, you know. And once a girl has made herself very obvious, there is no going back. Now, you ought to do whatever you like and have as much fun as you possibly can. Lord knows
that
doesn’t last. But women like us…we always have at least one practice marriage early on. Maybe two or three.” Virginia sighed and cupped her daughter’s chin. “My dear, I have no idea what is happening between you and Charlie. Perhaps it is some quarrel that will seem absurd to you in a week or two. But you must not forget that if it does fall apart, well, a youthful divorce is nothing a few seasons in Europe and a new wardrobe won’t fix. You’d come out of that one fine. So long as you are not too far gone, that is.”

For a moment Astrid forgot that she was playing the sophisticated and careless married lady, and her voice became low and childlike. “Do you really think so?”

“Of course! Look at your mother. I know life seems dark at times, and a girl can feel awfully trapped. But something always comes up.” Virginia winked over the rim of her highball. “You’ll see.”

Astrid’s instinct was to throw her arms around her mother and kiss her on the cheek like a child, and she was saved from this only by the opening of the door onto the main hallway.

“Sorry to interrupt.” Both women turned to see Victor, slim in his denim shirt and pants, standing all the way across the room on the edge of the Persian carpet. At the Greys’, Victor never looked out of place—there were always rough men dressed in work clothes there. But at Marsh Hall, where people did not enter social rooms without the assistance of the butler and where the art was old but the furniture was replaced every year by an interior decorator, he was like someone from another world.

“That’s all right.” Virginia’s tone waxed seductive. “How can I help you?”

“I just wanted to tell Mrs. Grey that Jones called. He said that—well, that we should go back to Dogwood as soon as possible.”

“All right.” Astrid’s shoulders sank away from her neck with a disappointed sigh that was only half disingenuous, and when she stood to go she bent immediately to kiss her mother good-bye. “Thank you, Mummy, I’ll come back soon,” she said.

“He looks good enough to eat,” her mother whispered in her ear.

When Astrid drew away, she knew her mother was right. It was a long walk across the Marsh Hall parlor, and the closer she got to Victor, the more delighted she was to find him standing there looking good enough to eat, just as her mother said. Virginia’s advice had made her feel bold, and she let her hips rock as she traveled between tall marble lamps and soft sitting areas. Why had she wanted so badly to prove that she was nothing like her mother? Suddenly it seemed rather lovely for a girl to be a little fickle and change her mind now and then, if the result is more happiness.

At the threshold she didn’t say anything, but a dimple was obvious on one side of her face, and she gave Victor an audacious wink as she passed into the hallway. “Don’t forget: I turn eighteen Friday!” she called back to her mother, before leaving the house.

The world as viewed from the backseat of a Daimler, chauffeured by a slim, pretty-eyed boy who happened to know how to kiss, was incredibly full. Astrid didn’t have to look at Victor to feel the wild electrical charge between them.
Victor, my paramour
, she thought to herself.
Victor, my lover
. Even in her thoughts the sentences made her lips curl and her spine shiver with delight.

When the car rolled to a stop, she lifted her drowsy lids and leaned forward and put her hand on the back of the driver’s seat. “Victor, you know I love you, don’t you?”

That was when she saw the tension in his neck. His head went to the left, the beginning of a shake, and their eyes met in the rearview mirror. But he didn’t shake his head. He winced, and she realized she had made a mistake. During the drive, while she had been lounging in the backseat of the car, he had not, contrary to all her fantasizing, been sharing her sense of elation. Before she could ask him what his worry was about, she noticed something else—they were not in Dogwood but parked on Main Street, in front of a square brick building with the words
POLICE DEPARTMENT OF WHITE COVE
carved in the lintel.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Victor, what are we doing here?” she started to say.

But before he could answer, she knew. Jones and Charlie had emerged from the brick building and were getting into the car. The intimacy of the Daimler in the previous moment—the four walls containing her and Victor and everything lovely in the whole universe—was like a distant memory. As soon as Charlie slammed the door behind him, she felt the world close in on her as surely as she had felt it open when she floated across the vast parlor of Marsh Hall toward Victor. Her husband didn’t look at her—his eyes were smaller than she remembered them, and they burned above a tightly constricted mouth. Once Jones was situated in the front passenger seat, he gave the order that they should drive.

Twilight was turning the lawns of Dogwood a sweet orange hue by the time they arrived home, and still nobody had said anything. Victor stopped the car in front of the house, and they all got out and started to walk toward it. Jones reached the first steps up to the front door, with Victor just behind him. She was almost there when Charlie grabbed her arm, spinning her around so she saw how fixedly he was staring at her.

“Ouch!” She returned his glare with an indignant grimace of her own, but he only dug his fingertips deeper into her flesh. For several seconds neither said a word, and his face got more stern and clouded. “What were you doing at the police station?” she asked eventually.

He let go of her arm, as though it disgusted him, and half turned away from her, snarling.

“Nothing. They got nothing on me. No body, nothing.”

“Well, if it was truly nothing, you should take that ugly mug off!” She was attempting her usual gay, breezy manner, but she could hear the strain in her voice and was sure he could, too. He had said
body
, which meant it was that man.

“They wanted to talk to me about Coyle Mink’s man, but they don’t care about him, not really.” Charlie’s eyes darted to the south. Someone was in the pool, splashing, but he seemed to make a quick calculation and determine that it was not a threat.

“They don’t?” Astrid dared a glance up and down Charlie’s back. “Well, that’s lucky, isn’t it?”

“They don’t want to hang me for murder; they want to get me for bootlegging, take down the whole operation.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because it wasn’t just them policemen. It was the Feds in there, too, in their suits. They were all talking nonsense. They got nothing ’cept our reputation to go on.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, Charlie, let’s have a little drink and forget about this icky business.”

He kept facing away from her, his big back a broad rebuke. In the silence Astrid heard all the other noises of Dogwood and also the swimmer climbing out of the pool. It was Cordelia, she felt certain, dripping on the patio. That she was there, not so far away, was the only fact that Astrid could think of.

“But they did know things.”

Astrid’s stomach turned over. “What things?”

“They knew where the car went off the road, which it’s possible they discovered by poking around themselves, or maybe it was a lucky guess. They knew the man’s name, which they coulda got from gossip in Coyle Mink’s operation.” Charlie paused to light a cigarette. The smell of that cigarette intruding on the fragrant night air made her feel a little sick. Meanwhile, she could see the shadows of the boys moving around on the second floor. She wondered if Victor was there, and if he was thinking of her, and she wished that she could just close her eyes and fall against him. “The thing I can’t figure is how they knew what I said to you right before I shot that man.”

“What you said to
me
?” Astrid attempted a laugh. “Who can remember what anybody says in a moment like that?”

“You did. And you told somebody. And that somebody told the Feds. Maybe there’s one more somebody in the equation, or maybe there’s one less. Tell me, Mrs. Grey, have you ever talked to a federal agent?”

“No!” Astrid snorted.

“Then who’d you tell?”

“Who’d I tell what?” she snapped back.

“Who’d you tell how it happened, who said what to whom, right before that man ate it?”

“Nobody!” she screamed.

He brought his hand up and smacked her across the face. It wasn’t a hard slap, but he’d never touched her like that before, and the sting spread from her cheeks down to her chest.

“Oh!” she cried, and put her hand over the place he’d struck her.

His face contorted when he saw her pain. For a moment his eyes softened, and she knew he was confused and remorseful. That he loved her and regretted talking to her that way and wished he could undo the hurt. She looked up at him, trying to make her own eyes as wide and innocent as possible, hoping that his love would overcome him and he would forget his anger. But no such luck—in the next minute, his features had hardened.

“All right. Make it tough. But don’t think I won’t find out. In the meantime you speak to nobody but Cordelia or me. You don’t leave your room. You’re on house arrest, and I’m watching everything you do, you hear me?”

There was nothing to say.
How could I help but hear you
? she might have sassed, but her face was still sore. She stared back at him hatefully until she realized that Cordelia was there too—that she had come over from the pool and had been watching them for some time already.

“Take her to her room!” Charlie shouted, at neither girl in particular. Just loudly into the night.