Twisted: The Collected Stories (46 page)

“I’ll start tomorrow,” he said.

Three days later, with the evening orchestra of crickets and cicadas around her, Sandra May sat on the porch of their house. . . . No,
her
house. It was so
strange to think of it that way. No longer
their
cars,
their
furniture,
their
china. Hers alone now.

Her desk, her company.

She rocked back and forth in the swing, which she’d installed a year ago, screwing the heavy hooks into the ceiling joists herself. She looked out over the acres of trim grass, boarded by loblolly and hemlock. Pine Creek, population sixteen hundred, had trailers and bungalows, shotgun apartment buildings and a couple of modest subdivisions but only a dozen or so houses like this—modern, glassy, huge. If the Georgia-Pacific had run through town, then the pristine development where Jim and Sandra May DuMont had settled would have defined which was the right side of the tracks.

She sipped her iced tea and smoothed her denim jumper. Watched the yellow flares from a half dozen early fireflies.

I think he’s the one can help us, Mama, she thought.

Appearing from the sky . . .

Bill Ralston had been coming to the company every day since she’d met with him. He’d thrown himself into the job of saving DuMont Products Inc. When she’d left the office tonight at six he was still there, had been working since early morning, reading through the company’s records and Jim’s correspondence and diary. He’d called her at home a half hour ago, telling her he’d found some things she ought to know.

“Come on over,” she’d told him.

“Be right there,” he said. She gave him directions.

Now, as he parked in front of the house, she noticed shadows appear in the bay windows of houses across the street. Her neighbors, Beth and Sally, checking out the activity.

So, the widow’s got a man friend come a-calling . . .

She heard the crunching on the gravel before she could see Ralston approach through the dusk.

“Hey,” she said.

“You all really
do
say that down here,” he said. “ ‘Hey.’ ”

“You bet. Only it’s ‘y’all.’ Not ‘you all.’ ”

“Stand corrected, ma’am.”

“You Yankees.”

Ralston sat down on the swing. He’d Southernized himself. Tonight he wore jeans and a work shirt. And, my Lord, boots. He looked like one of the boys at a roadside tap, escaping from the wife for the night to drink beer with his buddies and to flirt with girls pretty and playful as Loretta.

“Brought some wine,” he said.

“Well. How ’bout that.”

“I love your accent,” he said.

“Hold on—
you’re
the one with an accent.”

In a thick mafioso drawl: “Yo, forgeddaboutit. I don’t got no accent.” They laughed. He pointed to the horizon. “Look at that moon.”

“No cities around here, no lights. You can see the stars clear as your conscience.”

He poured some wine. He’d brought paper cups and a corkscrew.

“Oh, hey, slow up there.” Sandra May held up a hand. “I haven’t had much to drink since . . . Well,
after the accident I decided it’d be better if I kept a pretty tight rein on things.”

“Just drink what you want,” he assured her. “We’ll water the geranium with the rest.”

“That’s a bougainvillea.”

“Oh, I’m a city boy, remember.” He tapped her cup with his. Drank some wine. In a soft voice he said, “It must’ve been really rough. About Jim, I mean.”

She nodded, said nothing.

“Here’s to better times.”

“Better times,” she said. They toasted and drank some more.

“Okay, I better tell you what I’ve found.”

Sandra May took a deep breath then another sip of wine. “Go ahead.”

“Your husband . . . well, to be honest with you? He was hiding money.”

“Hiding?”

“Well, maybe that’s too strong a word. Let’s say putting it in places that’d be damn hard to trace. It looks like he was taking some of the profits from the company for the last couple of years and bought shares in some foreign corporations. . . . He never mentioned it to you?”

“No. I wouldn’t have approved. Foreign companies? I don’t even hold much with the U.S. stock market. I think people ought to keep their money in the bank. Or better yet under the bed. That was my mother’s philosophy. She called it the First National Bank of Posturepedic.”

He laughed. Sandra May finished her wine. Ralston poured her some more.

“How much money was there?” she asked him.

“Two hundred thousand and some change.”

She blinked. “Lord, I sure could use it. And soon. Is there any way to get it?”

“I think so. But he was real cagey, your husband.”

“Cagey?” she drew the word out.

“He wanted to hide those assets bad. It’d be a lot easier to find if I knew why he did it.”

“I don’t have a clue.” She lifted her hand and let it fall onto her solid thigh. “Maybe it’s retirement money.”

But Ralston was smiling.

“I say something silly?”

“A four-oh-one K is where you put retirement money. The Cayman Islands isn’t.”

“Is it illegal, what Jim did?”

“Not necessarily. But it might be.” He emptied his cup. “You want me to keep going?”

“Yes,” Sandra May said firmly. “Whatever it takes, whatever you find. I have to get that cash.”

“Then I’ll do it. But it’s going to be complicated, real complicated. We’ll have to file suits in Delaware, New York and the Cayman Islands. Can you be away from here for months at a time?”

A pause. “I could be. But I don’t want to. This’s my home.”

“Well, you could give me power of attorney to handle it. But you don’t know me that well.”

“Let me think on that.” Sandra May took the barrette out of her hair, let the blond strands fall free. She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, the stars, the captivating moon, which was nearly full. She realized that she wasn’t resting against the back
of the porch swing at all but against Ralston’s shoulder. She didn’t move away.

Then the stars and the moon were gone, replaced by the darkness of his silhouette, and he was kissing her, his hand cradling the back of her head, then her neck, then sliding around to the front of her jumper and undoing the buttons that held the shoulder straps. She kissed him back, hard. His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened—the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.

She lay in bed that night alone—Bill Ralston had left some hours before—and stared up at the ceiling.

The anxiety was back. The fear of losing everything.

Oh, Jim, what’s going to happen? she thought to her husband, lying deep in the red clay of Pine Creek Memorial Gardens.

She thought back on her life—how it just hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. How she’d dropped out of Georgia State six months before she graduated to be with him. Thinking about how she gave up her own hopes of working in sales. About how they fell into a routine: Jim running the company while she entertained clients and volunteered at the hospital and the Women’s Club and ran the household. Which was supposed to be a household full of children—that was what she’d hoped for anyway. But it never happened.

And now Sandra May DuMont was just a childless widow . . . .

That was how the people in Pine Creek looked at her. The town widow. They knew that the company would fail, that she’d move into one of those dreadful apartments on Sullivan Street and would just melt away, become part of the wallpaper of small-town Southern life. They thought no better of her than that.

But that wasn’t going to happen to her.

No, ma’am . . . She could still meet someone and have a family. She was young. She could go to a different place, a big city, maybe—Atlanta, Charleston . . . hell, why not New York itself?

A Southern woman’s got to be a notch stronger than her man. And a notch more resourceful too. . . .

She
would
get out of this mess.

Ralston could help her get out of it. She knew she’d done the right thing, picking him.

When she woke up the next morning Sandra May found her wrists were cramping; she’d fallen asleep with her hands clenched into fists.

It was two hours later, when she arrived in the office, that Loretta pulled her aside, gazed at her boss with frantic, black-mascaraed eyes and whispered, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Mrs. DuMont, but I think he’s going to rob you. Mr. Ralston, I mean.”

“Tell me.”

Frowning, Sandra May sat slowly in the high-backed leather chair. Looked again out the window.

“All right, see, what happened . . . what happened . . .”

“Calm down, Loretta. Tell me.”

“See, after you left last night I started to bring some papers into your office and I heard him on the phone.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. But I looked inside and saw that he was using his cell phone, not the office phone, like he usually does. I figured he used that phone so we wouldn’t have a record of who he called.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. What did he say?” Sandra May asked.

“He said he was pretty close to finding everything. But it was going to be a problem to get away with it.”

“ ‘Get away with it.’ He said that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Right, right, right. Then he said some stock or something was all held by the company, not by ‘her personally.’ And that could be a problem. Those were his words.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, then I kind of bumped into the door and he heard and hung up real quick. Seemed to me, at any rate.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s going to rob us,” Sandra May said. “ ‘Get away with it.’ Maybe that just means get the money out of the foreign companies. Or maybe he’s talking about something else altogether.”

“Sure, maybe it does, Mrs. DuMont. But he was acting like a spooked squirrel when I came into the room.” Then Loretta brushed one of her long, purple nails across her chin. “How well do you know him?”

“Not well. . . . Are you thinking that he somehow
arranged this whole thing?” Sandra May shook her head. “Couldn’t be. I called
him
to help us out.”

“But how did you find him?”

Sandra May grew quiet. Then she said, “He met me . . . Well, he picked me up. Sort of. At the Pine Creek Club.”

“And he told you he was in business.”

She nodded.

“So,” Loretta pointed out, “he might’ve heard that you’d inherited the company and went there on purpose to meet you. Or maybe he was one of the people Mr. DuMont was in business with—doing something that wasn’t quite right. What you were telling me?—about those foreign companies.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sandra May protested. “No, I can’t believe it.”

She looked into her assistant’s face, which was pretty and demure, yes, but also savvy. Loretta said, “Maybe he looks for people who’re having trouble running businesses and moves in and, bang, cleans ’em out.”

Sandra May shook her head.

“I’m not saying for sure, Mrs. DuMont. I just worry about you. I don’t want anybody to take advantage of you. And we all here . . . well, we can’t hardly afford to lose our jobs.”

“I’m not going to be some timid widow who’s afraid of the dark.”