The Three Miss Margarets (11 page)

And because she could never ever in her life leave well enough alone, when he was almost out the door she said, “Don’t go.”

B
Y THE TIME
M
AGGIE LEFT
, Lottie still hadn’t eaten the cake. She stopped at the desk and asked them to put it away for her; then she called Li’l Bit on the public phone in the lobby.

“I’m on my way,” she said. “Have you heard from Peggy yet?”

“Not a word,” said Li’l Bit grimly. “I’m going to give her another half hour and then I’m going to call her.”

“No, let her sleep. I’m sure she needs it.”

Li’l Bit made the high little sound in the back of her throat that meant she was rolling her eyes in disapproval.

J
OSH CLOSED THE DOOR
and came back into the lobby. Laurel sat on the couch and waited until he sat next to her. “You already know the good parts of my family saga,” she said, “if you’ve done your homework. My father—John Merrick—and Grady Garrison got into a fight over Nella Johnson, the mother of your heroine. Grady was so drunk he forgot to miss my daddy when he shot at him. So I wound up being a bastard, since at the time my ma had a bun in the oven, as we cute hicks say, but she and John hadn’t made it down the aisle yet. Nella and Vashti left town, and Vashti became your American success story. That about sum up your knowledge?”

“Pretty much,” he said carefully.

“Okay, here’s the part that didn’t get into the newspapers because Mr. Dalt kept it out. My daddy and Grady weren’t just having a little fun sharing a pretty black woman who may or may not have been willing. That was an ugly little pastime of theirs that I’m sorry to admit most folks around here dismissed as boys being boys. No, they were so serious about Nella they killed her husband one night.”

If Josh said anything, one word, she was going to throw him out. If he even showed a sign of sympathy, he was history. His face was a blank.

“Yeah,” she continued. “They ran him over with a car and left him by the side of the road. He may have been dead before they took off; he certainly was by the time the highway patrol found him. The official word on Richard Johnson was he died in a hit-and-run. But everyone knew who did it. They would have gotten away with it because of Grady’s daddy. But when Grady used my father for target practice . . . well, even Mr. Dalt couldn’t keep the lid on that.

“So my daddy was dead, and Grady was packed off to jail, and my mother stayed here in town because, to be honest about it, she was too dumb to do anything else. Down here in those days having a baby without a daddy wasn’t chic, it was just slutty, and she couldn’t accept that my daddy had done her like that. She believed him when he said he loved her and she let herself get knocked up because he swore he had changed his ways. Like I said, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

“When he died it broke her heart, and I hate to offend your PC sensibilities but she was ignorant and racist enough that it made it a whole lot worse for her that she lost out to a black woman. So she probably wasn’t much of a human being, and in the general scheme of things, it probably didn’t matter that she became a drunk and a joke.” She forced a smile that was way too bright. “That’s my contribution to your great work, Josh. I’m the daughter of the redneck who killed a man and then got himself shot. Stick me in a footnote and go make a million dollars selling your book to the movies. I want Sandra Bullock to play me.”

She waited for him to say something. But of course now that she wanted him to talk he didn’t. He just looked at her. And then he moved to her. It was a slow move, like he was underwater, or maybe that was just the way it seemed to her. Then they were facing each other. At most they were only a foot apart. She was the one who closed the gap.

“I’m not sure I like you,” she said softly.

“I know,” he said, at pretty much the same decibel level.

For two people who hadn’t known each other long, they seemed to have quite a repertoire of kissing. Last night it had been mostly playful. This was more about bodies pressing against each other and mouths bruising lips against teeth. When he finally let her go, her knees did a little sagging thing. He seemed to be okay, which made him really hateful. Until he said, “Shit.” Which made them both laugh.

And then the thing about laughing with a man who had his arms around you was, it could really get to you, so she pulled away.

“One more thing you might like to know,” she said, in a masterful change of subject, “the reason the case against Grady Garrison was so tight that even his daddy couldn’t get him off? Miss Li’l Bit and Miss Peggy would have testified against him.”

“I never read a word about that.”

“Nothing was ever written. Grady pled guilty and there never was a trial. But Miss Li’l Bit actually saw the shooting from the ridge behind her house. And Dr. Maggie knew from old Lottie that Nella had been seeing the two men on the sly for months. The clincher was Miss Peggy. She saw Grady trying to hide the murder weapon in his daddy’s gun cabinet. There was nothing even Mr. Dalt could do after the police heard that.”

“She told them?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“She was his stepmother.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Grady died in prison.”

“Uh-huh. Ran into a couple of good old boys who didn’t like him.”

“Peggy Garrison helped send him there.”

“You betcha.”

“Her husband’s son.”

“Right.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

Chapter Twelve

P
EGGY WAS DREAMING ABOUT A DOG
. A large starving Irish setter was clawing at the glass doors off the back patio, begging to come in. But she couldn’t let him. Because in the way that you know these things in dreams, she understood the dog was really Grady. And there was no way to help him. Still, the sick look in the dog’s eyes would haunt her for the rest of her life. It had been haunting her for years. The part of her mind that knew she was dreaming wanted to wake up because the dog was crying now, whimpering in pain, and if she couldn’t get herself awake soon the sound would turn to a man weeping. With a huge effort she hurled herself back into consciousness and woke up to look into two brown canine eyes. Elvis had been watching her sleep. The fact that she had fallen asleep—all right, passed out—on the couch in the living room with an empty bottle of bourbon on the floor beside her instead of tucking herself into her bed was enough of a departure from routine to worry him. She reached out to ruffle his scruffy head. “I’m okay,” she whispered to him. At the sound, the rest of the pack, which had been sleeping in various spots around the living room, scrambled awake and crowded around the couch, demanding to be petted or at least noticed. “It’s okay, babies,” she told them. “Mama just had a bit of a night.” She pulled herself to her feet and made her way gingerly to the kitchen door to let them out into their pen. Nausea slopped around her insides in sickening waves. Bending over the food bowls to feed the dogs this morning was going to be a challenge. She walked a fine line as it was; excesses like last night’s were a strain on organs already battered by daily infusions of alcohol, according to Maggie, who warned of diseases painful and ugly. But facing the world without the edge taken off was impossible. It had been ever since Grady was taken to jail. She sat at the kitchen table and rested her swirling head in her hands.

F
OR HER IT HAD ALL BEGUN
with Grady. That was the irony of it. He had made her the person she was. He’d made her weird. Or, if you were listening to Maggie and Li’l Bit, different and an outsider.

She couldn’t remember a time when Grady wasn’t a bigger-than-life figure in Charles Valley. He’d been sent off to private school from the day Miss Myrtis realized that the teachers in the public kindergarten were not willing to discipline the Garrison heir. A kicking and screaming Grady was delivered over his father’s protests to a hard-nosed private school, where the staff understood that Miss Myrtis wanted her son to learn to sink or swim on his own. For the next eight years, until he was finally packed off to the first of three military academies, Grady Garrison had the shit kicked out of him on a daily basis. But the kids in Charles Valley, seeing the pony his daddy bought him as compensation and hearing about wonders like Grady’s swimming pool, never realized what their prince was enduring.

They ran into him at Sunday school, where Grady was a fat scowling presence who never learned even the shortest Bible verse assigned to him. On the rare occasions when he was available to play with the locals, he was mean and lordly. Everyone knew one day he would step into his father’s ventilated Florsheims. It would be Grady who was the county’s largest employer. He would put judges on the bench and representatives in the state capitol, and no state senator he objected to would ever wind up in Washington. He would have a monthly lunch date with the governor. He would entertain presidents, if they were Republican and conservative. And Grady would be rich; all the children knew that. The Garrison money was a fact of their lives and a source of local pride. Everyone knew how the family had outfoxed the Yankees after the Civil War and kept their fortune out of the jaws of Reconstruction.

The truth was not quite as romantic as the legend. In fact, if the South had won its Glorious Cause, the Garrisons might well have been tried for treason. At the first sign of trouble in the years before the Civil War, they had taken all their money out of the South and quietly invested it in northern factories that fed the Union war machine. After the war was lost, they invested closer to home again as soon as the climate was safe. Several decades later they plowed everything into the burgeoning Georgia fabric mills. The resulting millions had been the basis of a fortune that was the stuff of folklore in Charles Valley.

People said it was a good thing that Mr. Dalt was so rich. The rumor was it had cost him a new school library to get Grady through his fancy middle school. Two of the three military academies Grady attended refused to be bought off and bounced him during his sophomore year; no one was quite sure why.

Miss Myrtis, meanwhile, was trying to plan his vacations for maximum enrichment. As a child he went to summer camps designed to foster self-reliance or cultural enlightenment. As an adolescent he was forced to volunteer on an archaeological dig in a desert somewhere in the Middle East.

From what folks at home could see, none of it did him much good. He was only in Charles Valley a few weeks out of the year, for which most people were profoundly grateful. Grady had a taste for redneck company. His most loyal follower (
friend
would have been too strong a word) was a seventh-grade dropout named John Merrick. When they hooked up the stories started to fly, about black families being paid off after drunken shooting sprees in colored town, and a trailer-park princess who was set up for life after having been subjected to the attentions of Grady and his sidekick. They said Miss Myrtis was mad enough to let Grady stew in his own juice for that one. But Mr. Dalt bought a brand-new home for the girl and her sister in a neighboring state, where the enterprising ladies soon established a successful house of ill repute.

Neither Mr. Dalt nor Miss Myrtis was dumb, so the question was, How had they managed to make such a mess of their son? Some thought it was Miss Myrtis being so tough. Some thought it was Mr. Dalt being so soft. Others suggested that maybe they spent too much time on good works and business and not enough on their child. But the majority chalked it up to Grady’s nature. He was just born mean as a junkyard dog, they said.

Two who refused to believe that were Peggy and her mama.

B
Y THE TIME SHE WAS TWELVE
, life had taught Peggy two things: Money was the most important thing on earth, and men were far more efficient at getting it than women. Like all lessons that stick, she had learned hers the hard way. When she was ten her daddy died in a car wreck while driving home from an Auburn football game on a sunny Saturday afternoon in October. Her father, who had been a lawyer and should have known better, went without leaving a will or life insurance. He never expected to die so young. Plus his sweet fluttery little wife cried whenever he brought the subject up.

It took his widow eighteen months to go through his savings—Peggy’s mama had a great sense of style but no head for figures—and then mother and daughter were on their own. The beautiful old home Mama had so lovingly decorated had to go. They rented a tiny house with barely enough room for them and the stray mutt Daddy had brought home one evening. The landlord balked at having a dog living in his little cottage and only agreed after demanding an extra deposit which wiped out two weeks’ worth of the food budget.

Mama went to work as a saleswoman at Sally Boots’s Dress Shop, a place she had never dreamed of patronizing back in the days when she could afford new clothes. The chic stores of Atlanta had been her turf, and she was a disaster at selling the cute prints and fringed denim she could hardly bring herself to look at, much less recommend. Soft hearted Bootsie kept her out of pity but put her on a commission instead of paying her a salary. Mostly, Peggy and her mother lived on the Social Security checks the government sent because they’d lost their breadwinner and an occasional handout from Mama’s family. At the end of the month before the checks came in they ate cornbread sopped in buttermilk for dinner like poor people.

There were others who had it worse, families scrabbling out a life on dirt farms in the backcountry, but Peggy’s mother was not bred to poverty. She lacked the swagger and pride of redneck poor. She just became shabby and ashamed. Late at night, Peggy would hear her poor sad little mama crying and she would hold the dog tight and pray for a new father.

Instead, God sent her breasts. They popped up on her chest as if by magic one night while she was sleeping, or at least that was the way it felt. Soon after the breasts sprouted, her skinny tomboy’s body turned itself into a thing of curves, with rounded hips, a tiny waist, and long elegant legs. She had been prepared for menstruation, her red-faced mother had given her a book, but these new bumps and lumps were an intrusion she hadn’t asked for. At first she was angry about what had happened, but then she began to be aware of the effect she was having on the boys around her. She had a sense of possibilities. She wasn’t sure exactly what they were yet, but she knew her new body was giving her a valuable power. Grown men were looking at her too, in the grocery and the drugstore; even the school principal had to work hard to keep his eyes away from her chest when she wore her white angora sweater tucked into her circle skirt and cinched with a wide elastic belt. The effect on the hapless Mr. Dean was illuminating. She began to experiment—tastefully, she was her mama’s daughter after all—with cosmetics. She bought peroxide and began lightening her honey-brown hair by degrees so Mama would believe her when she said it was sun streaks. Then one night Mama brought home a push-up bra from the dress shop and handed it to her. After that she realized there was no need to hide anything. Her soft helpless little mother understood better than she did the campaign she was starting to launch.

For the next two years she honed her flirting skills and became known as a tease. It wasn’t fair because she never actually promised anything, but there was something about her that
seemed
to promise. It was in the way she carried her body in clothes that were a tad too tight, while wearing lipstick that was one shade brighter than a nice girl should put on. Peggy never withdrew in shock when she was slow dancing and a hard-on suddenly materialized in the pants of her overheated partner. She never cried and declared she wasn’t that kind of girl when a stray hand found its way inside her bra during a necking session. She looked the perpetrator in the eye and smiled a knowing smile she had picked up from watching Barbara Stanwyck at the Saturday movie matinee. But she always put a bit of air between herself and the afflicted dance partner, and she always removed the wandering hand. She listened unmoved to pleas of undying love, respect forever, and enraged complaints in which the term
blue balls
figured prominently.

Boys couldn’t figure her out, and it made them crazy. They drove her home in cars steamy with frustration and swore they would never see her again. But they always did. Because while she was saying no, Peggy managed to suggest that she was on the verge of saying yes. And every boy she’d tormented wanted to be there when she finally gave in. What they didn’t know was, she never would. Because the boys she was dating were simply a warm-up. Peggy had her eye on a much bigger prize than a high school senior with his own car and a summer job at Burger Queen. Without being sure exactly how she was going to pull it off, Peggy had set her sights on none other than Charles Valley’s version of the Prince of Wales, Grady Garrison. Later, when she looked back, she realized it had been Mama who started pointing out every time Grady was back in town.

She had heard the rumors about him, the whispers about drinking and the wrong kind of girls, but the details were vague and, as Mama pointed out, people were jealous and the Garrisons were an obvious target. Whenever she and Mama drove past the resort, or the massive stone entrance to the huge log cabin Miss Myrtis had built behind a grove of towering pines, she was reminded once again of how great the Garrison family was. It didn’t seem possible that anyone who had been raised in such solid, respectable splendor could be capable of the kinds of things the gossips said about Grady. And then the bills would come in again and she would hear Mama weeping, and any little doubts she had about trying to capture the Garrison money would melt away.

She had no specific game plan for accomplishing her goal. Two years of torturing the masculine population of Charles Valley High had taught her the futility of such plans. Experience had taught her you always wound up winging it, which was a special gift of hers. The problem was getting access to her target. With Grady away from home most of the year, her opportunities for catching his attention were limited.

Then, one hot June, Myrtis Garrison had her first heart attack and Grady came home for the summer.

W
HEN
P
EGGY SAW
G
RADY
, she was in the parking lot outside Jenson’s General Store with a bunch of kids who were waiting for Miss Li’l Bit’s station wagon. It was a sweltering day, and as she did every summer, Miss Li’l Bit had asked a group of young people to her house for swimming lessons. She’d started having the lessons in the pond on her property years ago, after her father died and left her the house. Miss Li’l Bit’s mama was alive somewhere, and there was some sort of story attached to the reason why she didn’t live with her daughter, but Peggy and her friends weren’t too clear on the details. It didn’t seem to matter much. The idea of Miss Li’l Bit needing a parent was ridiculous.

In fact, Li’l Bit Banning was only ten years older than Peggy, but it never would have occurred to Peggy or any of the other kids to drop the
Miss
in front of her name. There never had been anything young about Miss Li’l Bit. She was square and slow-moving. She spoke slowly too, in a flutey voice that sounded like Eleanor Roosevelt probably would have if she’d been born in Georgia. But it wasn’t the way Miss Li’l Bit looked or spoke that made her seem old. It wasn’t even the hair done in a knot at the back of her neck, or the old-lady shoes, or the thick glasses she peered through. It was the way she acted and the things she did. Like giving free swimming lessons to anyone who wanted them. This year she had added a Red Cross lifesaving course for her young guests. For most of them it was an excuse to cool off on a hot day, show off their bathing suits, flirt, and have a picnic lunch provided by Miss Li’l Bit. Saving lives was not high on their list of priorities. Peggy was pretty sure their benefactress was aware of their attitude. Though Miss Li’l Bit might seem hopelessly out of touch to the teenagers who were taking cheerful advantage of her hospitality, Peggy had noticed a sharpness in the blue eyes behind the thick glasses. Her take was that Miss Li’l Bit didn’t miss a trick.