The Three Miss Margarets (4 page)

The half he didn’t get was for not realizing that at that very moment, even as he was suspended over her getting ready to hump his way to glory, she was wishing he was in the next country. And then suddenly it seemed she was going to get her wish. Before she could murmur, “What’s going on, sugar?” Josh had rolled his nice tight body off and was lying next to her.

“So were those women who freaked you out the three Miss Margarets?” he whispered cozily.

It took her a second to get her bearings. When she did, she sat bolt upright, a move she would have sworn never happened except in fiction until she did it.

“Yeah, I thought that would get your attention,” he said smugly.

“How the . . . how do you know about the three Miss Margarets?”

“Actually it was a lucky guess. But I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Who
are
you?”

For an answer he swung out of bed and padded across the room to get his blue jeans. She got out of bed, started to follow him, and stubbed her toe. He watched for a few seconds as she hopped around in pain, bare boobs bouncing.

“My, this is romantic,” he remarked.

“You’re the one who cut off the romance,” she panted. “Damn, shit, damn!”

“Maybe some ice?” he offered sympathetically.

“How do you know about the three Miss Margarets?”

“Could I have a cup of coffee?”

“You didn’t make a mistake when you turned the wrong way, did you?”

“Not exactly.”

He finished putting on his jeans and went into the living room. She pulled on her robe and limped after him.

“That’s got to smart.”

“Shut up about my damn toe!”

“Okay. You want to know how I know about the three Miss Margarets.” He paused. “I’m a writer.”

For a moment she thought he was putting her on. Her job description at the town newspaper was
reporter.
Her real work was that of handmaiden and periodically just plain maid, but she was foolishly protective of her title. She was about to inform him that she was a writer too when he said, “Most of the time I write celebrity profiles.” And she had the presence of mind to ask, “Where?” before spouting off about the
Charles Valley Gazette.

“For the past few years I’ve been a regular contributor at
Vanity Fair.
I was on staff at
People
before that, and I worked for
Entertainment Weekly, Us
—the usual stuff.”

And she’d been getting beer smell on the inside of his jacket all night. She sent up a silent thank-you to God for not letting her mention the
Gazette
and make a total horse’s ass of herself.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’ve been working on a story about Vashti Johnson,” he said.

That was when she decided to go put some ice on her foot. Because she needed time to get herself together. The night had just officially gotten too strange.

Chapter Four

I
N A WAY IT MADE SENSE
that a writer from New York was writing a story about Vashti Johnson. Vashti was the Valley’s golden girl—golden woman by now. She did something no one could pronounce that had to do with scientific research. Something massively important and esoteric in the field of genetics that only two or three people in the world understood. But that was just the beginning of her accomplishments. She was an advocate for children’s education in the sciences. She had testified in front of Congress twice. There were rumors in Charles Valley that she had missed getting the Nobel Prize by inches. She had written a book, and there was a scholarship fund for minority kids that had her name on it. So even though no one was clear on exactly what it was she did in her laboratory out in northern California, she was as close to a celebrity as the town had. Not that she had ever claimed the town as her own. Not since she and her mother ran from it years ago.

Vashti was Lottie’s granddaughter. She was also the daughter of the woman who, when the booze was flowing and the listener was sympathetic, Laurel’s ma had cursed in bars up and down most of the major highways of southwest Georgia. Every tragedy that had occurred in Sara Jayne’s life, from the death of her ancient pickup in the parking lot by the Winn Dixie to the time Laurel’s appendix burst, could be laid at the feet of Vashti’s mother, Nella. Any blame Ma had left over went straight to the three Miss Margarets.

Not that Laurel was planning to mention any of that to Josh Wolf Eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m out of coffee. Do you like tea?”

“Let me make it. You keep that ice on your toe. Just point me in the right direction for the tea bags.”

“First shelf, cabinet over the sink.” He began rummaging around. She sat at the kitchen table, trying to seem a lot more together than she felt.

“So that wrong turn . . . ?”

“When I was interviewing Vashti, she said something about living on a pie-shaped piece of land in the middle of a forest.”

“And you thought you’d check it out.”

“Since I was there, it seemed like a good idea.”

“And Vashti told you about the three Miss Margarets?”

“Once. She described them enough so I thought I recognized them tonight. Did I?”

“Yeah, that was them.” But she wasn’t ready to talk about the three Miss Margarets. “What gave you the idea to write about Vashti?”

For the first time he didn’t want to answer her. “Do you have any sugar?”

“Canister next to the stove. Where’d you get the idea?” Two could play the question game.

Finally he plunged in. “There was this woman. Smart and angry. At me.”

“Why?”

“We had a difference of opinion. She thought I was a cheap commercial sellout, I thought I was being responsible and paying the bills. Anyway, one day she asked me if I was going to waste the rest of my life writing about airhead actresses and models or if I had the balls to do a story on a woman who was working on something worthwhile. Vashti had just been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She—the woman, not Vashti—dared me to do the story.”

“And the woman is?”

“My wife. At the time. Actually, my second wife. Ex-wife.”

It made her really mad at herself that for a second Laurel calculated the likelihood of the existence of a third Mrs. Wolf Eyes.

He went on. “The more I got to know about Vashti, the more I wanted to write about her. She was just a kid when she was elected to the Academy, relatively speaking. She did her post-doc with a team that was working on the Human Genome Project back in the days when it was totally a boys’ club—well, it still is to a great extent. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of women who are doing research at her level, to say nothing of African Americans.” He paused, then added, “I did some digging and found out what happened here with her mother when she was a kid. How the hell do you get past something like that?”

Some of us didn’t get past it, Laurel thought. “So you’re writing about Vashti for
Vanity Fair
?”

“No. I couldn’t get my editor to go for the piece, and
People
would only take a thousand words. I wanted to do a lot more on her than that. So I’m taking a year off to write a book. Only now I can’t find her.”

“What?”

He started pacing. He had a slight dusting of curly hairs on his back.

“About six months ago we were supposed to talk on the phone. She’d agreed to answer some questions. But when I called she’d disappeared. She’d closed down her lab, canceled all her speaking engagements, rented out her house, and dropped out of sight. No one knew where she was.” He stopped pacing. “Water’s boiling.”

He found the milk under her direction, handed her a steaming mug, and slouched into the chair across from her. Even in that slumped position he didn’t have any love handles. No question about it, he worked out somewhere.

“Then about two weeks ago the guy who was renting her house in California got a letter from a lawyer in Atlanta. Vashti was offering to sell the house. The lawyer told me he didn’t know where Vashti was, but he’d been dealing with a Dr. Margaret Harris of Charles Valley. So I caught the next flight to Atlanta and came here.” He smiled at her and she smiled back, but small alarms were going off inside her. In spite of herself, she wanted to like him. And not just because he was the closest thing to a star she’d ever met or was likely to meet, she told herself firmly.

But he’d done some digging. He knew enough about the three Miss Margarets to identify them with a lucky guess. She couldn’t help wondering what else he knew about the three Miss Margarets, and Vashti and Nella. And especially her own mother, Sara Jayne. And if any of that stuff had been on his mind when he tossed his jacket to Sara Jayne’s baby girl in the Sportsman’s Grill.

“What do you think the three Miss Margarets were doing at that cabin?” he asked.

“Don’t have a clue.”

“Why don’t you want to talk about them?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to talk about them—”

“You didn’t have to. Reading people is what I do for a living.”

“You read me wrong.”

There was nothing in his face, nothing in his manner, to say he knew anything about her history with the three Miss Margarets. Laurel’s every instinct told her he was genuinely looking for information. Of course, her instincts usually stank. But just to show him he was wrong, she said, “Dr. Maggie is in her eighties somewhere; Miss Li’l Bit, whose real name is Margaret Banning, is in her seventies; and Miss Peggy is the baby—she’s just in her sixties. Miss Li’l Bit and Dr. Maggie come from fine old families that have been in Charles Valley since before you Yankees came down here to violate our states’ rights with your Civil War. Miss Peggy married into the Garrison family, which around here puts her at the right hand of God.”

“Tell me why you don’t like them.” If he knew anything about her connection to them, he wouldn’t ask that. Or would he?

“They’re from the right side of the tracks. I’m poor white trash.”

“I thought poor white trash was fashionable these days.”

“Not to women like the three Miss Margarets.”

“In that case I can see why you’d resent them.”

“No resenting to it. I just see them clear.”

“Tell me.” He thought she was funny and he was enjoying her. She could swear he wasn’t trying to play her. She could almost swear it.

“When the three Miss Margarets were younger they got a reputation for being a lot better than they were because they did a lot of good deeds that never inconvenienced them,” she said. “Now that they’re old, mostly they just hang out on Miss Li’l Bit’s front porch and believe their own press.”

He leaned back, tilting his chair, and hooked a bare foot on the rung of the one in front of him for balance. He had slim feet with straight toes and high arches. “So it’s an honesty thing with you?”

She had a quick flash of her ma yelling, “Those old bitches lied. I know they lied!”

“What did they do to you?” he asked. If he knew, he was the greatest actor on the planet.

“They never did anything to me. We were talking generally. Is this interrogation over?”

“Nah. Tell me about the Garrison family.”

“You’re staying at the lodge at Garrison Gardens, right? Well, there’s a brochure under the Bible on your nightstand with a picture of Miss Lucy Garrison’s chapel on the front. It’ll tell you all about the family.”

“But I want to hear it from you,” he said, smiling, like he was settling in for a really good show and knew he wasn’t going to be disappointed.

She wondered if he knew how sexy all that attention was and decided yes indeedy, any man who strutted his stuff the way Josh did knew exactly how sexy he was. Which didn’t diminish his sexiness. So what with one thing and another, she decided to hell with her warning bells. It was probably just a coincidence that he had picked her up, and she wasn’t going to ask him about it. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d decided to trust a man for reasons that had little to do with her better judgment.

“O
KAY
,” L
AUREL BEGAN
, “this is the version of the Garrison legend you won’t get from the tour guides at the Gardens. Your big hotel started out in the twenties as a private lodge for the Garrisons to entertain their friends—many of whom were the financial barons who brought us the Great Depression, incidentally, but we don’t mention that around here. The original lodge was a rustic retreat where the Garrisons entertained in simple style and demonstrated to the world what humble Christian folk they were. Then the Depression hit and local farmers started going belly-up. The Garrisons sent out their agents to buy up the farmers’ land for a fraction of what it was worth, business being business after all, and to hell with all that subversive Commie stuff in the Bible about being your brother’s keeper.”

It was a soapbox she’d been on before, but no man had ever looked quite so fascinated while she was on it.

“By the time the Depression was over, the Garrison family had collected thirty thousand acres that used to be homes and farms. Somebody got the idea that the private lodge could turn a profit if it became a resort. For reasons having to do with the government’s unreasonable application of the income tax, the Garrison accountants tucked most of the newly acquired land into a charitable trust that was to be used in a manner loosely described as being for the public good. Several golf courses were put in, and facilities were built to house an annual steeplechase that put Charles Valley on the map worldwide. How this benefited the public was never made clear; the golf courses were kept private, and tickets for the steeplechase cost as much as the average family earned in six months. But these goodies made the resort into one hell of a draw for the exclusive clientele the Garrisons wanted. Are you with me so far?” Josh’s pale eyes were warm; by now Ed’s would have glazed over.

“Oh, yeah, you’re very clear,” Josh said softly. “You deliver this riff often?”

“Only to total strangers who will soon be leaving town.”

“Smart move. Go on.”

“The land that was not developed reverted back to forest and became hunting grounds for resort guests and Garrison family and friends. The farmers watched the rich people play on what had once been their cotton and sweet-potato fields and tried to tell themselves they were grateful for the resort because without it to provide jobs they would have starved—all but one drunken old cuss, who didn’t like progress and refused to sell, mostly because he enjoyed watching the Garrison agents go nuts trying to con him. And he never had given a damn if his kids were hungry.”

“And this old cuss would be?”

“Don’t get ahead of the story. Right now all you need to know is there
was
one.

“It wasn’t until the fifties that the real bonanza kicked in. That was when Dalton Garrison took over and decided to make a contribution to mankind—while expanding the family’s assets, of course. He hired horticulturists from universities around the country to plant gardens here. Azaleas were the specialty; they put in every species there was, including several new hybrids they developed. Mr. Dalt was the one who built that greenhouse in the Gardens and stocked it with orchids and all those other exotic plants. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should before you leave.”

“I’m not much of an exotic-plant person.”

“Pity. We have some of the best. He also put in that huge vegetable garden that’s been on TV, he had a lake built, and he put in the hiking and biking trails that go through the forest.

“He named the whole thing Garrison Gardens, and in a gesture that was as noble as it was shocking he opened it to the public.”

He smiled as he fed her her cue. “Shocking because?”

“He let the peasants in. For the price of a quarter, a family could park in the public parking lots, picnic on the lawns, swim in the lake, and visit the nurseries where the botanists grew the Garrison Azalea and the Charles Valley Rose. Children got lectures on how flowers are cross-pollinated. New techniques for growing corn and tomatoes were demonstrated at the vegetable garden. Schools sent their kids to the Gardens on field trips. Educators applauded. The lodge became the big pissy hotel you’re staying at. Less expensive A-frame cottages were built for guests who couldn’t afford the hotel. A campground was set up for those who couldn’t afford the cottages. It was democratic as hell. And profitable?”

She let out a little laugh. He laughed along with her.

“Money was rolling in. And Charles Valley, no matter how it felt at first, wound up being grateful. Most country folks were watching their kids run to cities in the North as soon as they graduated from high school, but parents here could tell the young ’uns to stay home and go work for the Gardens. So even if Mr. Dalt rigged the occasional election and made the zoning board keep out new businesses, at least a man would get to know his grandbabies and they wouldn’t grow up talking like Yankees. And because of that, people were willing to forget they had never been anything but waiters and bellboys. Except the family of the old cuss.”