Venom and the River (20 page)

Emily coughed.

Leigh counted. “You’re buying twelve books?”

The teacher nodded. “One of each title for my classroom and the rest are giveaways, incentives for my reluctant readers. My own money, but, oh, it’s worth it.”

Reluctant readers. A dedicated teacher. Leigh said, “Of course I’ll sign them.”

Peach’s grip tightened. “This way. We have a table all set up.”

Leigh peeled Peach’s hand from her arm. “I will not sign copies of
The Cottage
.”

Peach wheeled around. “Why not?” she whispered. “You live where Ida May lived. These women think that’s important. It’s a small thing, Leigh. Is that so hard to do? Are you one of those writers who’s stubborn about small things?”

Leigh heard the threat in the question: Toe the line or there will never be any Little Girl spin-offs to write. She wasn’t convinced she wanted to write stories about little brothers and puppies and special days spent trapped in caves, but she knew a scene in this place at this time would be as good as pissing on the opportunity. She wasn’t ready to do that. She nodded once. “Fine.” Peach’s public smile flowered once again.

She’d been signing nonstop for twenty minutes when she glanced up from a
Volcanoes!
title page and faced a camera. “Whoa!” she said.

Emily was right there. She slipped in front of the woman who was about to take Leigh’s picture and said, “Sorry, no photos.” Leigh glanced around. Would Peach demand she give in to this too?

“Why?” asked the disappointed woman.

Leigh exchanged looks with her daughter, then looked down at the purple pen in her hand. Why indeed? Because she was a once notorious liar, and if her picture got out in public, even in a Little Girl newsletter, her first shot in years for decent money could very well go down the drain. There’d be no political memoirs to write and probably not even stories about puppies.

“She gets migraines,” Emily said. “You’d need a flash in this room and that always triggers a major one.” A sympathetic murmur of understanding rippled down the line.

The camera disappeared, but its owner produced four copies of
The Cottage.
“One for each of my sisters and one for me,” she said. “Please make them out to Jessica, Jennifer, Julie, and Jean. I’m Jean.”

Leigh did as told for the rest of the hour.

“Time’s up, everyone!” Peach finally announced. “Didn’t I say you’d be busy,” she said to Leigh. “Just wait until you’re signing Little Girl books with your name on them! I knew if we could just get you down here, you’d see the light. That’s what I told Emily. I said, Get her here and I’ll do the rest. Oh, Leigh, how I adore your daughter. Can you be here tomorrow at three? Until our real author arrives you may as well sign.”

“No.” Leigh stood up. The pen dropped from her hand.

“Why not?” The knife’s edge had returned to Peach’s whisper.

Leigh glanced toward the cashiers. Emily was helping bag purchases. So it all had been a ruse, a clever ploy carried out at Peach’s request. “My hand has given out,” Leigh said. She rubbed it. “I have a touch of arthritis around the thumb. If I’m not careful it will be useless tomorrow and I have a long day of work ahead of me.”

“Arthritis and migraines?” Peach said.

Leigh pushed back from the table. “I’m done.”

Peach spun around. “She’ll be back tomorrow!” she shouted. “Three o’clock, right before the tea!”

“I’m not available tomorrow. Night or day. Before or after any program.”

“You can’t miss tomorrow night,” said a woman standing in line. “It’s the trivia contest, the sing-a-long, and the waltz competition!”

“Sounds fun, but I’m not available,” Leigh repeated. “Good night, everyone.”

Emily followed her to the door. “What was that about?”

You, Leigh thought. It was all about clever you and foolish old me. “I didn’t appreciate that Emily. I did not like being tricked into showing up and signing books. I’m happy to see you’re being so helpful to the Little Girls, but please keep me out of it. I can’t risk being in such a public forum.”

“No one knows who you are. If they did, no one would care. Besides, if you’re going to write Little Girl books and be part of it, you’ll need to come clean with Peach. You owe it to her to be honest.”

“I don’t owe her anything. I’m headed home. I suppose they’ll keep you out late tonight. I’m beat and I’m going to bed. I’ll be at the big house tomorrow, so I probably won’t see you all day and you’ll be busy here in the evening, I imagine.”

“I’m going with Marti to the airport to get Roberta,” Emily said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“No,” said Leigh. “Wear your seat belt.”

The sun had darkened to inky blue, and Japanese lanterns strung between trees on the church lawn cast faint light on the still-reveling Little Girls.

What was that all about?

A maternal tantrum, and a very public one. Another round in the fight for her daughter’s affection—one she’d clearly lost.

Two women in long skirts and tall hair waltzed past as other Little Girls linked arms and began singing.

A trivia contest and a sing along and waltzing and, oh god, Roberta Garibaldi’s arrival. That was a fresh hell right there.

She’d avoid it all. Best, really, if she even avoided her own daughter lest the spectacle of Emily in the clutches of these women caused another childish eruption. “Steer clear,” she chided herself as she walked down the church steps. She’d hide out at the big house all day and then figure something else for the evening. Anything, as long as it kept her far away from Little Girl Land.

4.

“I’m serious, Phil: Clapton is over-rated.”

“If you actually believe that, then I’d say it’s probably a sure bet Ringo was your favorite Beatle.”

“That’s low. And for your information, I’m too young to have been a victim of Beatlemania. I never had a favorite.” She pointed toward the far wall. “You promised some good music. Do you suppose that works?”

He followed her to the jukebox. “I really am sorry about this, Leigh. I hadn’t heard about the drummer dying and the band breaking up. Without the band, this is kind of a sleazy place to bring a girl.”

She tipped her head. “Girl?”

“I can’t believe I said that. Bad move on a first date, right?”

Green eyes, flecks of brown. Oh lord, she thought. Perfect eyes, perfect hands, and she’d been alone too long. A lethal cocktail. “Bad move on any date, but I’ll give you a Get Out of Jail card tonight because I was happy to get out of Pepin. The Little Girls are everywhere. Talk about mania. Even my daughter has succumbed.”

“We’ll have one beer and then we’ll get out of here and find a nice place.”

“No rush.” Her finger scrolled down the jukebox song list, leaving a narrow line in the dust. She tapped the glass.

“Good choice,” Phil said, “as long as we can follow it up with some Sam Cooke.” He dropped quarters into the slot and punched buttons.

Frank Sinatra started singing about flying to the moon. Leigh said, “This song always makes me glad I know how to dance.”

Phil smiled innocently. “Okay, then.” He made a little bow and gestured toward the empty space in front of the deserted band stand.

She took his hand, biting back a smile. Smooth move, Leigh Burton.

*

“Thank you, Leigh.”

She propped herself up on an elbow. “You’re a kind and gracious man, Phil, but let’s not get into being grateful for sex, okay? We both wanted it and we both enjoyed it.”

He shook his head. “Not what I meant. Thank you for not reacting to my tan lines.”

She laughed and lifted the sheet. “They are spectacular. I can even see them in the dim light.”

“I work out of doors, you see.”

“Wearing tall boots and knee-length shorts, it looks like.” She dropped the sheet and lay back down. “I shouldn’t have called you tonight. I shouldn’t be here. This is wrong.”

“But you did call me. We are here. It’s not wrong. We’re adults.”

“And I’m an adult with a visiting teenage daughter who is sleeping on an inflatable mattress in her mother’s room for the next three nights. I’m in bed with a man I barely know, and my daughter is stuck at home entertaining a guest. Worse, she’s lying to her on my behalf.”

“Why is she lying?”

“The jig is up,” she whispered.

He lifted the sheet and looked down. “I’m afraid not, Leigh; I don’t recharge as quickly as I used to.”

“I’m forty seven, Phil. Did you know I was that old?”

“I’m forty two, which makes us practically twins.”

“I’m a fraud, Phil. A going-on-fifty fraud who was putting her life back in order. But no. My house of cards is about to tumble down. You’re too good to be true. My job with Terry is too good to be true. This new life with interesting work and new friends in a lovely town is too good to be true. Now I’ll have to go back to cranking out sermons and newsletters and freelance articles for a few cents a word. I’ve been lying again. I should know better. Emily’s right to be scornful.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Once upon a time I sat in a hot tub and exchanged jokes and gossip with Roberta Garibaldi, and now the jig is up. Unless I hide with you for three days. But if I do that my daughter would have another reason to keep hating me.”

His hand slid down until it rested on a breast. “Hiding with me sounds fine. And I didn’t see any evidence Emily hates you, and I played poker with her for two hours. What’s the big lie, Leigh?”

She took his hand and stroked it across the knuckles. “In a previous life I was a reporter. I was a very good reporter. I was married to Emily’s father, who was also a reporter. He wasn’t as good, but it truly didn’t bother him. I always loved that about Chase. He loved that he was married to hot shit, to the woman who always got the story. Chase and I met in Chicago. He was twenty-two, fresh out of j-school, and in his first reporting job—one he only got through family connections because he sure as hell didn’t have the qualifications or talent. I was twenty-five, working on a rival paper, already a veteran with a few local awards and quite a few very good stories to my credit. We both fell hard. He moved in with me three weeks after we met. We stayed in Chicago for two more years before we moved to DC, where he got a job with his family’s papers. We both did. His family has a small empire of newspapers in the south, and once Chase announced he wanted a DC job, that’s what he—we—got. He was White House and I was Hill.” Leigh kissed Phil. “Talk about first-date mistakes. This is a horrible first date conversation, but it’s the long-winded prologue to explaining the big lie.”

“Fair enough. But I get my turn someday, and I’ll talk about my ex when you and I are in bed. Keep going.”

“Do you talk to her often? Is it likely you’ll tell her what you learn about me?”

“We meet occasionally. We have coffee when she’s in town to visit Terry. But I don’t know that I’d mention you.”

“You might tell her about this. It concerns Terry. After Chase and I had been together a while, I got pregnant and then we got married. His family wasn’t thrilled. His parents always thought he’d give me up, move home to South Carolina, and take up with one of the hometown debs. But he didn’t. Emily was born in DC. By then Chase was tired of being second rate, not second to me, just tired of being mediocre. He was bred to run the empire, not write the stories. He persuaded me to give up reporting. It wasn’t hard to do because by then I thought it would be nice to raise Emily somewhere that wasn’t DC. I was offered a column as compensation. It ran in all the Putnam papers, seventy five of them, all across the region, and a few other places. Worst thing I could have done, Phil. Writing a column’s not at all like reporting. Week after week, my opinion.
My opinion.
I was trained as a reporter, and my opinion was drummed out of me the first day of the first job. It wasn’t so bad at the start, the column. But I was in a strange world, foreign as the moon. We had a social life that centered around the country club, and I had an office window with a view of the Confederate flag flying over the state house. I didn’t belong. I lost my way. I couldn’t get people to talk to me. I’d always been so good at that, getting them to open up. I started…I got lazy. There were a few columns where I added things and passed them off as true. Tried to make some good pieces brilliant. And people thought I had. I won a Pulitzer. Then there were questions about what I’d written. When the lie was exposed, that was the end of my marriage and my career.

“I had to get out. I started over, Phil. My name used to be Nancy, Nancy Taylor Lee. I was proud of that byline. Once upon a time it meant something. It meant a good story. But I gave it up because I needed to build a new life and the only thing I could do was write and no one would hire a proven liar. So I turned my daughter over to her father and changed my name and walked away. Emily hates me for that.”

“I don’t think she hates you. And you thought it was the right thing to do.”

“I tell myself that. I tell myself I had no choice.”

“Have you told Terry?”

“Of course not. He intends to publish this book, but no publisher will touch it if a disgraced journalist is the ghost. Roberta Garibaldi will know who I am. She’ll remember meeting me. Once again, my lie is about to be exposed.”