Very good to her.
It had given her a free and clear title to this house. It had helped make her a power in her own right. It would help her take care of that bastard who—
Her head turned alertly. Was that the sound of a door latch?
She quickly stooped for the towel and covered herself even though she was supposed to be alone in the house.
“Deanna?” she called. She had taken Dee’s house key, but locked doors and drawers had never stopped her daughter. Slowed her down, maybe, but never stopped her. Exasperation tinged her voice. “Is that you?”
Silence.
She walked past the mirrored closets, through her bedroom and out into the hall.
“Dee?”
No answer and a quick look through a front window did not show Dee’s car parked on the circular drive outside.
She shrugged and returned to the bathroom. Hot water from three shower heads had begun to steam up the mirrors. She stepped into the stall, lifted her oval face to the needle-fine spray like a sunflower lifting to the sun, and sighed with happiness as water sluiced down her body, pulsating to the rhythm of her heartbeats.
This was her favorite place in the house and it was not unusual for her to shower twice a day. In periods of stress, three times.
Thank God there aren’t any calories in water, she thought.
She could win the lottery tomorrow, the party could nominate her to run for governor, and nothing—nothing!—would give her the same satisfaction as knowing she could have hot water at the turn of a tap, day or night.
Growing up in a dilapidated trailer with a broken water heater that was never replaced, the only way to get hot water was if she heated it on the kitchen stove. Even then, she would often come back with a final kettle to find her mother sitting in the chipped and rust-stained bathtub she had so laboriously filled. “Well, hell, Miss Prissy-pants. What’s your problem? When I was your age, the only thing we had was an old tin washtub and five or six of us would have to use the same water. It’d be pure black by the time it was my turn. You’re lucky you got a tub big enough to wallow around in, sugar Candy, and it ain’t like I’m all that dirty or gonna pee in the water like my brothers did.”
For a moment, she almost wished her parents could see her now. That she could show them how far she had come on her own with no help from them. Admittedly, it was only a fleeting wish. The happiest day of her life was when word came that Macon and Alice Wells had died in a fiery car crash, and she was suddenly free to reinvent herself, to legally change her name to Candace and call herself that instead of the Candy on her birth certificate. Not that she could ever pretend that she came from something more than the trashiest trailer park in Colleton County. The communal memory was too long to forget that her mother was a whore and her father a shiftless drunk. All the same, their ashes were now scattered to the four winds and they could never again embarrass her by showing up at her work or by calling her to come bail them out of jail.
She reached for the bar of soap.
Cake of soap, not bar, she reminded herself as she lathered her body in rose-scented suds. Handmade from organic goat milk. And what would Ma have made of paying five dollars for goat soap?
Or twenty dollars for a bottle of herbal shampoo?
She rinsed her hair, worked a handful of fragrant conditioner into each long chestnut tress that was artfully streaked with gold every five weeks at the best hairdresser in Dobbs, then rinsed again. Even when every trace of soap, shampoo, and conditioner was gone, she continued to stand under the pulsing water. She cupped her hands beneath her breasts and lifted them up to the water till the nipples hardened. It was as if they were caressed by a lover’s gentle hands, an undemanding lover whose only desire was to pleasure her and not himself. Unlike the brutish pawings she had endured to get where she was today, each pulse was a soft pat that calmed her nerves and suffused her senses with a feeling of well-being.
At last, she reluctantly turned off the taps and toweled her body and hair dry. She smoothed scented lotion on her skin; and when she had finished making up her face, she styled her hair with a hand dryer and a brush until it hung sleek and shining halfway down her back.
It vaguely worried her that women were advised to cut their hair shorter as they grew older, but she figured she had at least another six or eight years before she had to make that decision. Men liked long sexy hair and salesclerks still thought that she and Dee were sisters. Indeed, someone had recently taken a quick look at Dee’s hungover pasty face and baggy eyes and mistakenly assumed that Dee was the mother and she the daughter.
Candace smiled at the memory of Dee’s reaction to that.
Satisfied with her looks, she strolled over to the closet and pulled out a favorite spring dress. The white top was a respectable short-sleeved shirt with tiny pearl buttons and a boat collar cut low enough that when she leaned forward to share a confidential aside with one of her fellow board members, he could get a nice glimpse of cleavage. The skirt was green with white polka dots and cut on the bias so that it made a flirty flare at the hemline, a hemline so short that it added an illusion of length to her legs.
The dress made her feel flirty herself and would probably tempt old Harvey Underwood into patting her knees at the board meeting tonight.
As long as his hand stops at my knees and doesn’t try to slide on up under my skirt, she thought. If it got her his vote against the planning board’s recommendations, what did she care?
Let Jamie Jacobson fume and make sarcastic highfalutin remarks that half the time nobody could understand. She’d teach that long-legged bitch a few lessons about trying to take on Candace Bradshaw.
She carried the dress on into her bedroom and laid it on the bed. As she turned to a dresser for lingerie, a voice said, “Very nice, Candy.”
“Don’t call me Candy,” she snapped as she reached for a robe to cover her nakedness. “And what the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to see you. Although I didn’t expect to see quite this much of you.”
“How did you get in?”
“You must have left the door unlocked.”
Candace gave an unladylike snort of derision. “Not hardly likely. What do you want?”
“Nothing that’s not well within your abilities.”
Candace flushed, knowing this was a dig at her lack of education. Okay, so she never went to college. Big damn deal. Most of the county commissioners had degrees from State or Carolina and who was their chair? And who ran Colleton County’s largest managerial service?
“What’s that?” she asked as the other handed her a sheet of paper.
“What do you care? It’s a little late to go reading what you’re told to sign. Just copy it on your pretty notepaper, okay?”
Candace Bradshaw’s eyes widened as she read the few short sentences typed on the paper. “ ‘I take full responsibility for my greediness’? ‘I apologize to everybody in the county who trusted me’? You’re crazy if you think I’ll write anything like this. Get the hell out of my house and stay out or I’ll—”
Her voice broke off at the sudden appearance of a small pistol. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“No?” A pull of the trigger, a soft pfft, and a bullet buried itself in the pile rug next to her bare feet.
Candace’s eyes widened in fear. “My God! You are crazy.”