She tried to reconcile her image of Jack, the piano-playing, car-stealing, kiss-stealing rogue, with her mental image of what a horror novelist would be like, and couldn't. But there was another Jack, the man she had caught glimpses of at odd moments. A harder, darker man with an inner intensity that unnerved her. Just the memory of that man brought out a strange skittishness in her, and so she dismissed all thoughts of him and concentrated instead on the matter at hand.
She looked at herself in the mirror again, deciding she looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes. Not that Vivian had ever allowed them to do such a thing. Savannah rummaged through a drawer in the walnut commode and came back with two safety pins. She made a pair of pleats in the front waist of the skirt and secured them, hiding the pins with the hem of the sweater.
"Instant fit. Old fashion-model's trick," she said absently, studying Laurel with sharp scrutiny.
"Why didn't you stick with it?" Laurel asked.
"You'll wear my new gold earrings," she muttered, then snapped her head up. "What? Modeling?"
"You had a good thing going with that agency in New Orleans."
Savannah sniffed, lifting one shoulder in a casual shrug while she picked up a makeup brush and a pat of blusher and expertly dusted soft mauve along Laurel 's cheekbones. "Andre loved me for my blow jobs, not my portfolio. I wasn't good enough-at modeling, that is. I happen to give the world's greatest blow job."
Laurel didn't comment, but Savannah caught the tightening of her jaw, the thinning of her mouth. Disapproval. It stung, and she resented it. "Do what you do best, Baby," she said, a fine razor edge to her voice. "Your thing is justice. My talents lie elsewhere.
"Now, let's take a look at you," she said briskly, setting the makeup aside. "I can't imagine why you're going to this. I would have told Vivian to go to hell."
"You have," Laurel said flatly. "On numerous occasions."
"So it's your turn. She jerks you around like a dog on a leash-"
"Sister, please." She closed her eyes briefly. Lord, if she wasn't up to this fight, what in hell would she do at Beauvoir? A tremor of nerves rattled through her. Dinner with Vivian and company was like dancing through a minefield. God, she thought derisively, how had she ever survived in the courtroom when she was such a coward?
"I could have said no," she said wearily, "but I don't need the trouble. One meal, and I'm off the hook. I might as well get it over with."
Savannah made a noncommittal sound. "Well, please borrow my new gold earrings, and for chrissakes, don't wear those awful Buddy Holly glasses. They make you look like that little chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons."
Laurel arched a brow. "You don't want me to go, but you want me to look good?"
Her pale eyes turned hard and cold, and a bitter smile cut across her lush mouth. "I want Vivian to look at you and feel like the dried up old hag she is."
Laurel frowned as Savannah went to fetch the earrings from her room. They had always been adversaries-Savannah and their mother. Vivian was too selfish, too self-absorbed to have a daughter as beautiful, as attractive to men as Savannah was. Their rivalry was yet another unhealthy facet in an unhealthy relationship. That rivalry was one reason Laurel had always down-played her own looks. Always the little diplomat, she hadn't wanted to rock an already listing boat by attracting attention to herself. Her other reason wasn't so noble, she admitted, scowling at herself in the mirror.
If I'm not as pretty as Savannah, then Ross will leave me alone. He picked Savannah, not me. Lucky me.
There wasn't a word for the kind of guilt those memories brought, Laurel thought as Savannah returned. Her robe had slipped off one shoulder as she fiddled with the earrings, revealing a hickey the size of a silver dollar marring her porcelain skin. Laurel 's stomach knotted, and she wondered how she was ever going to choke down pot roast.
Sunday dinner at Beauvoir was a tradition as old as the South. The Chandlers had always attended Sunday services-as much out of a sense of duty and obligation to the community as out of reverence for the commandments-then a chosen few would be invited to dine at Beauvoir and pass the day away in genteel pursuits. There were no Chandlers left at Beauvoir, but the tradition endured, a part of Vivian's twisted sense of social responsibility.
If only she had possessed a fraction of that sense of responsibility for her own family, Laurel thought as she stood on the veranda and rang the bell. It had begun to rain again, and she listened to it as she waited, hoping in vain that the soft sound would soothe her ragged nerves. She thumbed a Maalox tablet free of the roll in her skirt pocket and popped it in her mouth.
The downtrodden Olive answered the door, as gray and gloomy as the afternoon, looking at Laurel with dull eyes, as though she had never seen her before. Laurel tried to give her a sympathetic smile as she stepped past the woman and headed toward the main parlor, visions of old zombie movies flickering in the back of her mind.
This would be the perfect setting for a horror movie or a horror novel. The old plantation on the edge of the swamp, a place of secrets, old hatreds, twisted minds. A place where tradition was warped into something grotesque, and family love curdled like spoiled cream. She tried to imagine Jack writing it, but could picture him only in a Hawaiian shirt with his baseball cap on backward and that cat-that-got-the-canary grin on his face. The image brought a ghost of a smile to her lips as she pictured him here, in the main parlor of Beauvoir, observing the assembled guests.
That he wouldn't exactly fit in was the understatement of the year. Ross stood near the sideboard looking freshly pressed and perfectly groomed in a silver-gray suit. He was the model of the well-bred, distinguished Southern gentleman, right down to his neatly manicured fingernails. The easy, patronizing smile. The aura of authority.
Laurel dragged her gaze away from him, sure the hate she felt for him was strong enough, magnetic enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room. She focused instead, briefly, on the other guests, quickly sizing them up in a way that was automatic to her. As a prosecuting attorney she'd had to draw swift and accurate impressions of victims, perpetrators, prospective witnesses, defense attorneys. She did so now for many of the same reasons-to give herself an edge, to formulate a strategy.
The man Ross was speaking with wore a clergyman's collar. He was small and thin and balding, and nodded so often in agreement with Ross's pontificating that he looked as if he had some kind of nervous condition. She labeled him as weak and obsequious and moved on.
A middle-aged couple stood behind the settee where Jack had corralled her the night before. A pair of plump, pleasant faces-the man's slightly sunburned, the woman's pale and perfectly made up. The woman wore a pale pink suit with a flared jacket that looked too crisp not to be brand-new, and her black hair had that wash-and-set roundness achieved by an hour of teasing and back-combing in a chair at Yvette's House of Style. Her gaze strayed continually, covetously to the obvious signs of wealth in the room. They would be neighbors, Laurel guessed. Planters, but not on a par with the massive Chandler-Leighton holdings. People who would be suitably humbled and impressed with an invitation to Beauvoir.
She moved on to Vivian, enthroned in her wing chair, looking cool and sophisticated in a royal blue linen dress. The other wing chair was occupied by a tall, dark-haired man who sat slightly turned, so that Laurel couldn't see his face. Before she could shift positions to get a quick look at him, Vivian caught sight of her and rose from her chair, the corners of her mouth curling upward in her version of a motherly smile.
" Laurel, darlin'."
She came forward, hands extended. Dutifully, Laurel took hold of her mother's fingers and suffered through the ritual peck on the cheek as they became the focal point in the room.
"Mama."
"We missed you at services this morning."
"I'm sorry. I wasn't feeling up to it."