He took his time moving out of stabbing range into the living room. “On the practical side . . . maintaining Frenchman’s Bride is nearly a full-time job, and it’s cutting too deeply into my writing. This would be six days a week, from seven in the morning until after dinner. Long hours and, it goes without saying, each one as difficult as I can possibly make it.”
“Where the hell is that knife?”
“You’ll answer the phone, take care of grocery shopping and simple meal preparation, although I suppose that will be beyond you. The household bills have to be organized, the mail sorted, laundry done. I want an efficiently run household with absolutely no effort on my part. Do you think you could manage that?”
He made no effort to hide his smug contempt, and she told herself she wasn’t this desperate yet. Except she was.
He named a salary that lifted her spirits, and she shot into the living room. “I’ll take it! You mean for a day, right?”
From across the room, Colin watched Sugar Beth’s entire face light up and knew he should feel like a cad. He didn’t, of course. He hadn’t felt better since the day she’d arrived. “Don’t be foolish.” He gazed down his nose at her. “That’s for the entire week.”
She looked as though she was choking, and he didn’t try to hide his smile. The idea of offering her a job had come to him that day at the depot. He’d had time to think about it since then, but until he’d seen her standing on the curb in those tight jeans, cell phone pressed to her ear, looking like a very expensive hooker, he’d rejected the idea as far more trouble than she was worth. Then the wind had caught her blond hair and sent it streaming behind her head like an advertising banner. She looked so untouched by the harm she’d caused, and right then he’d changed his mind.
He didn’t plan to destroy her, but he bloody well intended to see some flesh wounds, or, at the very least, a few honest tears of regret. Even a forgiving person would have to agree that he deserved more than he’d gotten so far. Putting that chain across her driveway had been like going after an elephant with a peashooter. This, on the other hand, should do the job right.
She tightened her grip on the chair, still dazed by the insulting salary he’d offered her. “No human being could possibly be that cheap.”
He regarded her imperiously. “Don’t forget you’ll be eating my food, doubtless using my telephone. Then there’s the miscellaneous pilfering one expects from the help.” Her blue eyes snapped like pompoms. “Just to prove I’m not unreasonable, I’ll take the chain off the driveway.” He paused as inspiration struck. “And, naturally, I’ll provide the uniform allowance.”
“Uniform!”
Oh, yes. Having her slink around his house in tight pants and seductive tops would be too much of a distraction. Just watching her put away groceries had tested his self-restraint: the stretch of those long legs, the four inches of rib cage that had shown when she’d reached for the top shelf. This was the downside of being male. His body didn’t recognize poison, even when his mind knew it was there.
“You’ll be a housekeeper,” he said. “Of course you’ll need a uniform.”
“In the twenty-first century?”
“We’ll discuss the details on your first day.”
She clenched her small, straight teeth. “All right, you son of a bitch. But you’re buying the dog food.”
“My pleasure. I’ll expect you tomorrow at seven.” He began to leave, but he still wasn’t quite satisfied. He needed to make absolutely certain she understood exactly how things would be, and he searched his mind until he found one last nail to hammer in her coffin.
“Let yourself in the back door, will you?”
Colin Byrne’s housekeeper! Sugar Beth stomped around the carriage house until Gordon got so aggravated he clamped his jaws around her ankle and refused to let go until he was sure she knew he meant business. She bent down to examine the skin, but he was too wily. “One of these days, fatso, you’re going to leave marks, and then you’re out of here.”
He lifted his leg and licked himself.
She stalked upstairs hoping a good long soak would calm her down. The bathroom had a claw-footed tub and a single window with a yellowed shade. She dropped her clothes on the old-fashioned black-and-white honeycomb tiles, clipped her hair on top of her head, and tossed some ancient lily of the valley bath salts in the water. As she settled in, she tried to look on the positive side.
She’d already combed every inch of the depot, the carriage house, and the studio, and she only had one place left to look. Frenchman’s Bride. There was nowhere else for Tallulah to have hidden the painting. But why hadn’t she removed it before Byrne had moved in? Unless she’d been too ill by then.
Lincoln Ash had arrived in Parrish during the spring of 1954. Until then, he’d been living in a cold-water flat in Manhattan and hanging out with the equally impoverished Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village. The established art community had sneered at the work of “the dribblers,” as they tagged them, but the public had begun to take notice, including Sugar Beth’s grandmother, who considered herself a patron of the avant-garde. She’d agreed to provide him with room and board for three months, a studio where he could work, and a small stipend. In return, she’d have bragging rights as the first woman in northern Mississippi with her own artist in residence. Griffin had been sixteen at the time, and he loved telling people that he’d learned to smoke cigars and drink good whiskey from Lincoln Ash.
The water had nearly reached the rim of the tub, and Sugar Beth turned off the faucet with her foot. She thought of Frenchman’s Bride with its deep closets and odd-shaped cubbyholes. More enticing, the secret cupboard in its attic . . . Her grandfather had ordered it built “in case those fools in Washington ever decide to bring back Prohibition.” Did Byrne know about that cupboard? Tallulah certainly had.
She wouldn’t consider his theory that Tallulah had destroyed the painting, but as she sank deeper into the tub, an equally alarming thought hit her. Byrne had bought the house. Did that include its contents? What if he owned the painting now? She knew nothing about property rights, and she couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. If she found the painting, she’d simply have to get it out of the house without tipping him off, which wasn’t an enticing proposition. But she’d risk that and a lot more because selling the Ash painting would finally give her the money she needed to keep Delilah at Brookdale. As for supporting herself, she’d go back to Houston and wait tables until she could get a real estate license.
She didn’t fall asleep until well after midnight, and then a nightmare awakened her. She lay there for a moment, skin damp, heart thumping, the dream still with her. Usually she found Gordon’s snores irritating, but now the raspy sounds coming from the bottom of the bed were a comforting reminder that she wasn’t entirely alone in the world.
She’d dreamed about Winnie again. Not the sophisticated woman she’d seen in the antique store last week, but the insecure girl who’d hidden behind her hair and stolen what Sugar Beth wanted the most.
Daddy, you were a real jerk, you know that?
She could never recall exactly how she’d come by the knowledge of her father’s other family—bits and pieces absorbed here and there, snippets of conversations, glimpses of her father in places he shouldn’t have been. Eventually she’d come to understand some of the subtler dynamics of his relationships with the two women in his life. Diddie was Griffin’s mercurial unobtainable Scarlett O’Hara, Sabrina his nurturing, loving Melanie Wilkes; but her earliest memories were merely of her father walking away.
“Watch me do a cartwheel, Daddy.”
“Not now, Sugar Beth. I’m busy.”
“You’re coming to my dance recital, aren’t you?”
“I don’t have time. I have to work so I can pay for those shoes you’re scuffing in the dirt.”