The Senator's Wife (17 page)

“Go to hell,” she said.

They were pulling into Sedgely now, his car nosing up the long, oak-lined driveway that led to the house. The gray-bearded trees seemed to weep. The white, Greek Revival portico was just visible through the pouring rain. Ronnie frowned as she discerned several figures standing about on the porch.

Tom reached over, flipping down the passenger-side visor so that she could see herself in the lighted mirror.

“Your lipstick is smudged,” he said, wiping his hand over his own mouth.

Without a word, Ronnie did what she could to fix her appearance, then snapped the visor back into place. The car pulled around the paved semicircle that curved in front of the house, and stopped before the porch.

“Sit tight, I’ve got an umbrella in the back,” Tom said, turning off the ignition. Ignoring him, Ronnie got out of the car and ran up the steps, heedless of the pouring rain. The slam of a door and the sound of footsteps slapping on wet pavement told her that he was right behind her.

“Ronnie, honey, you’re just in time to say good-bye to Frank Keith. Lord-a-mercy, you are wet! Frank, you remember my wife?”

Lewis caught her in a one-armed bear hug as she made it onto the porch. In a glance she saw her mother-in-law standing there, too, along with Marsden, Frank Keith, and his wife. Ronnie pasted a smile on her face, and murmured polite platitudes as she shook hands with the lieutenant governor and his wife. All the while she was burningly conscious of Tom behind her.

“Hey, man, how’s it going?” Marsden’s square face relaxed into a smile as he reached past Ronnie to shake hands with Tom. He was a stocky man who looked like a shorter, blurry copy of his father without any of his father’s good looks or bluff charm. “Has Stepmama here been running you ragged?”

Before Tom could answer, Dorothy came over to
envelop him in a hug. At eighty-one, Lewis’s mother was surprisingly youthful-looking until one got up close enough to see the tiny wrinkles that crisscrossed her face like an overlay of flesh-colored net, with a figure kept carefully slim, and dyed mink-brown hair. “How are you, Tom? I haven’t seen you for ages! Will you stay for supper?”

“Thanks, Mrs. Honneker, but I can’t tonight,” Tom said, smiling at Dorothy. Lewis meanwhile caught Tom’s attention with a nod in the direction of the lieutenant governor.

“Frank, this is Tom Quinlan, who I’ve been tellin’ you about. The boy’s an old school friend of Marsden’s here, and he’s got the darnedest polls.…”

“If you’ll excuse me, folks, I’ll go in and get out of these wet clothes,” Ronnie murmured to the group in general, none of whom was paying her much mind. Lewis obligingly released his hold on her shoulders.

As the talk turned to politics, Ronnie walked unnoticed across the porch and went into the house.

Chapter
18

Monday, August 4th
9:30
A.M
.
BILOXI

M
ARLA WAS SCARED
. Despite the happy sounds from the TV cartoons that filled the shabby room, she felt as nervous as a mouse in a roomful of cats, as if something was crouching just beyond her sight, waiting for the right moment to spring.

Last night on one of the news-magazine shows, there had been a brief segment on Susan. “The Life and Death of a Preacher’s Daughter,” it had been called. With the Mississippi Sound as a backdrop, the reporter, a young woman named Crystal Meadows, had talked about how Susan had “gone wrong,” about her drug use and her dropping out of college and her reported “descent” into a life of prostitution. Her family’s grief and horror and helplessness to intervene were described in excruciating detail (none of it true, according to what Susan had told Marla). Her father even shed tears on camera.

Crystal Meadows had also talked about Susan’s death. The autopsy revealed that Susan had been beaten before being asphyxiated. Her father, Charlie Kay Martin, had spoken directly to the camera then,
vowing to leave no stone unturned until the person or persons responsible for his daughter’s death were brought to justice.

The reporter ended the segment with these words: “The heat is on the Biloxi Police Department.”

Marla felt as though the heat was also on
her
.

“Want some Cheerios, Mom?” Lying flat on her stomach with her head at the foot of the bed as she watched
Scooby-Doo
, Lissy fanned the box in Marla’s direction. Lissy had been stuffing her mouth with handfuls of the dry cereal. The canned Coke she was washing them down with sat on the carpet near the foot of the bed. Not the most nutritious breakfast, Marla thought, accepting the box that swatted her middle as she walked past the bed, but breakfast nonetheless.

“Thanks, baby.”

They were running out of money. Her savings wouldn’t last much longer. Renting a room in a residential hotel for three weeks cost a lot. So did feeding take-out meals to a skinny seven-year-old who was always hungry and had a thing for the prizes in kids’ meals. They couldn’t go on like this, but Marla didn’t know what else to do. Every instinct she possessed screamed at her to hide out.

Claire had disappeared. At least, Marla hadn’t been able to get in touch with her. She had called her apartment, leaving messages until the answering machine wouldn’t take any more. She had stopped by, pounding on the door until a neighbor had put his head out to see what was going on. The manager of the apartment complex where Claire lived knew nothing, and
wasn’t much interested because the rent was paid up until the fifteenth of the month.

The Beautiful Model Agency had closed down, just like that, after being in business for two whole years. The phones at their office had been disconnected, and the office itself was empty. Marla knew, because she had stopped by to see.

She didn’t know what had happened to Billie, or Joy, who’d filled in for Billie sometimes, or Rick, who’d run the whole thing.

They were simply gone, all of them.

Just thinking about it made the hair rise on the back of Marla’s neck.

Gone, gone, gone, and nobody cared.

She had the feeling that if she weren’t careful, she might be next. She and Lissy. Whatever—or whoever—was out there gobbling up all these people would get them too.

The thought made Marla shiver.

Since running out of the apartment the day the man had ransacked it, Marla had gone back only for a nervous fifteen minutes, to retrieve clothes from the mess for herself and Lissy and throw them into a suitcase. Every nerve ending she possessed had told her that her apartment was no longer a healthy place to be.

Susan was dead. Claire had disappeared. So had the Beautiful Model Agency, and Billie, and Joy, and Rick. The only thing Marla knew of that connected them all was that Thursday-night date on the boat.

She was connected to it too. She had driven Susan and Claire down to the marina. She knew that Susan had gone out on a boat called The Sun-something—and never come back.

Whenever she remembered that, her throat closed up so tight from fear she could barely breathe.

The man who had searched the apartment had used Susan’s key ring to get in. There could not be another one like it, because it was one of those clear rectangular photo-frame deals with a picture of Susan in a bikini on one side and Susan and Marla mugging for the camera on the other. Marla had clearly recognized her own face in the plastic rectangle dangling from the man’s hand.

If he had Susan’s key ring, then it did not require a huge leap of logic to figure out that he had killed her, or at least played some part in her death. Marla had seen him. She could identify him. His face was etched on her memory for all time.

Almost more than anything else, that scared the bejesus out of her.

But he didn’t know it. He could not know it. He had not known she was in the apartment that day. If he had known, she would be dead.

He probably didn’t even know she existed. He wasn’t interested in her. Why should he be?

Marla shivered. Standing up, she walked to the window and flicked aside one corner of the curtain. It was hot already, and thickly humid in the aftermath of yesterday’s rain. Sunlight poured into the narrow street. This section of Biloxi was poor and rundown. The lone car moving slowly down the street was an ancient Chevy with a bashed-in rear door and rust edging its trunk. Her one-room apartment was on the second floor. From its vantage point she could look down on the bald head of the man crossing the street almost
directly beneath her. The sunlight bounced right off his scalp.

As though he sensed someone’s eyes on him, he looked up. Marla stared, then backed away from the window in horror.

It was the man who had ransacked the apartment, the man with Susan’s key ring.

This time he was coming for her
.

Chapter
19

Monday, August
4th
1:00
P.M
.
JACKSON

R
ONNIE LAY FACEDOWN
on a chaise longue beside the pool, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her skin. She was alone, except for the pool man, John somebody, who’d been coming by once a week during the summer to clean and service Sedgely’s pool for as long as she could remember. The quiet swoosh of his net sweeping the water wasn’t loud enough to drown out the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path that led down from the house.

Her body tensed. She took a deep breath, forcibly relaxed her muscles, and smiled a little to herself. Tom was on time, as she had known he would be. Punctuality was a real thing with him. Closing her eyes, her head turned away from the wrought-iron gate that led through six-foot-high brick walls to the pool, she pretended to doze. As an afterthought she reached around behind her back and quickly unhooked her bikini top. Shrugging the straps off her shoulders so that her back would be bare to the sun—and his view—she settled back down again.

The quiet swish of the net continued in unbroken
rhythm. The crunch of footsteps grew louder, and then she heard the protesting creak that told her he was opening the gate.

The footsteps stopped dead. Ronnie smiled to herself, imagining Tom standing with one hand on the open gate, displeased into immobility with the scene before him. She pictured it: the peanut-shaped, blue-tiled pool, sparkling like a sapphire in the sun. High brick walls overgrown with honeysuckle enclosing the pool and surrounding the patio like a fortress. John the pool man in his brown uniform glancing around in surprise at the intrusion. Herself, red hair flowing over one shoulder and milky skin exposed, wearing a teeny scarlet bikini bottom and not much else, stretched out on a bright yellow beach towel draped over a chaise longue beside the pool.

Finally came the sound she was listening for: footsteps on concrete. He was coming toward her. The footsteps stopped when he reached her side.

Ronnie lay immobile, a bubble of laughter tickling her throat. She could just imagine his expression. He would be frowning, his jaw hard and set. He would not approve of the picture she made lying there.

But he would want her.

This time he could whistle for what he wanted. She wasn’t putting herself on offer to him again.

“Ronnie.”

At least, she thought, Tom wasn’t hypocrite enough to revert to that honeyed
Miz Honneker
. If he had, she would have stripped herself naked and thrown herself into his arms with John the pool man as a witness, and let the great spin doctor try to explain
that
away.

She stirred, as though she were waking. Turning her
head to the other side so that she could see him, she flipped her hair across her back so that it cascaded off the shoulder away from him and spilled over the side of the chaise toward the concrete floor. Her every movement was deliberately tantalizing.

“Ronnie.” There was an edge to his voice. Ronnie was careful not to smile. She meant to torture and tease and drive him crazy—and then walk away. He would soon discover that when she had told him she wouldn’t work with him again, she meant what she said.

With a quick flutter of lashes she looked up, as though she couldn’t place the voice and had to ascertain who it was who had addressed her. Tom was wearing a blue and white pin-stripe seersucker suit today in deference to the heat, with a white shirt and a tie the exact color of his eyes. Their vivid blueness was narrowed in defense against the blinding sunshine that gilded his hair and bronzed his skin. He looked tall and lean and handsome—and edgy as hell. Definitely edgy as hell.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a bored tone, and closed her eyes again, turning her head away from him. Once again her hair flipped across her back, shutting him out.

His annoyance was as palpable as an electrical field. Ronnie could feel it enveloping her in surges. The knowledge that she was making him angry curled her toes with satisfaction.

The quiet swish of the net across the surface of the pool provided a soothing backdrop to an increasingly charged atmosphere. Birds chirped in nearby trees. Bees buzzed as they went about their daily chores. The
coconut smell of the expensive sunblock she was wearing wafted to Ronnie’s nostrils along with the sweet scent of the honeysuckle blossoms bedecking the brick walls. The soft terry of the beach towel on which she lay felt pleasantly warm. Yet she was most aware of intangibles: Tom’s gaze on her near-naked body, and his growing vexation with her.

The rasp of metal on concrete and the sound of stretching rubber made it clear that he was pulling up a chair and sitting down next to the chaise.

“One question the interviewer is going to ask concerns how you feel about being younger than your stepchildren.” His tone was even. Clearly he meant to overlook her efforts to provoke him. “If we phrase your answer carefully, I think we could rack up some points with women mothering blended families. I think you should say that—”