by Nora Roberts
Unlike his father, Beau, Tucker didn’t compound the interest daily or lock in his desk drawer a little leather book filled with the names of the people who owed him. Who would keep owing him until they plowed themselves under instead of their fields. Tucker kept the interest to a reasonable ten percent. The names and figures were all inside his clever and often underestimated mind.
In any case, he didn’t do it for the money. Tucker rarely did anything for money. He did it first because it was effortless, and second because inside his rangy and agreeably lazy body beat a generous and sometimes guilty heart.
He’d done nothing to earn his good fortune, which made it the simplest thing in the world to squander it away. Tucker’s feelings on this ranged from yawning acceptance to an occasional tug of social conscience.
Whenever the conscience tugged too hard, he would stretch himself out in the rope hammock in the shade of the spreading live oak, tip a hat down over his eyes, and sip a cold one until the discomfort passed.
Which was exactly what he was doing when Della Duncan, the Longstreets’ housekeeper of thirty-some years, stuck her round head out of a second-floor window.
“Tucker Longstreet!”
Hoping for the best, Tucker kept his eyes shut and let the hammock sway. He was balancing a bottle of Dixie beer on his flat, naked belly, one hand linked loosely around the glass.
“Tucker Longstreet!” Della’s booming voice sent birds scattering up from the branches of the tree. Tucker considered that a shame, as he’d enjoyed dreaming to their piping song and the droning counterpoint of the bees courting the gardenias. “I’m talking to you, boy.”
With a sigh, Tucker opened his eyes. Through the loose weave of his planter’s hat, the sun streamed white and hot. It was true that he paid Della’s salary, but when a woman had diapered your bottom as well as walloped it, you were never in authority over her. Reluctantly, Tucker tipped the hat back and squinted in the direction of her voice.
She was leaning out, all right, her flaming red hair peeking out from the kerchief she’d tied around it. Her broad, heavily rouged face was set in the stern, disapproving lines Tucker had learned to respect. Three strings of bright beads slapped against the sill.
He smiled, the innocent, crafty smile of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Yes’m?”
“You said you’d drive into town and bring me back a sack of rice and a case of Coca-Cola.”
“Well, now …” Tucker rubbed the still-cool bottle over his torso before bringing it to his lips for a long swallow. “I guess I did, Della. Figured I’d ride in once it cooled off some.”
“Get your lazy ass up and fetch it now. Else there’ll be an empty plate on the table at dinner tonight.”
“Too damn hot to eat,” he mumbled under his breath, but Della had ears like a rabbit.
“What is that, boy?”
“I said I’m going.” Graceful as a dancer, he slid out of the hammock, polishing off the Dixie as he went. When he grinned up at her, the hat tipped rakishly on his sweat-curled hair, and the light of the devil in those golden eyes, Della softened. She had to force herself to keep her mouth pursed and stern.
“You’re going to root to that hammock one day. See if you don’t. A body’d think you were ailing the way you’d rather lie on your back than stand on your feet.”
“Lots more a man can do lying down than nap, Della.”
She betrayed herself with a loud, lusty laugh. “Just make sure you don’t do so much you end up getting hauled to the altar with someone like that slut Sissy, who snagged my Dwayne.”
He grinned again. “No, ma’am.”
“And bring me back some of my toilet water. It’s on sale down at Larsson’s.”
“Toss me down my wallet and keys, then.”
Her head withdrew, then popped out a moment later just before she flung both objects down at him. Tucker snagged them out of the air with a deft flick of the wrist that reminded Della the boy wasn’t as slow as he pretended to be.
“Put your shirt on—and tuck it in,” Della ordered, as she would have had he been ten.
Tucker lifted it from the hammock, shrugging into it as he walked around the front of the house, where a dozen Doric columns rose from the covered porch to the lacy ironwork of the second-story terrace. His skin was clinging to the cotton before he reached his car.
He folded himself into his Porsche—an impulse buy of six months before that he’d yet to grow tired of. He weighed the comfort of air-conditioning against the excitement of wind slapping his face, and opted to leave the top down.
One of the few things Tucker did fast was drive. Gravel spat under the tires as he slammed into first and streaked down the long, meandering lane. He swung around the circle where his mother had planted a bounty of peonies, hibiscus, and flashy red geraniums. Old magnolia trees flanked the lane, and their scent was heavy and pleasing. He flicked by the bone-white granite marker where his great-great-uncle Tyrone had been thrown from a bad-tempered horse and had broken his sixteen-year-old neck.
The marker had been set by Tyron’s grieving parents to honor his passing. It also served as a reminder that if Tyrone hadn’t chosen to test himself on that mean-spirited mare, he wouldn’t have broken his stubborn neck, and his younger brother, Tucker’s great-great grandfather, wouldn’t have inherited Sweetwater and passed it down.
Tucker could have found himself living in a condo in Jackson.
He was never sure whether to be sorry or grateful when he passed that sad old piece of stone.
Out through the high, wide gates and onto the macadam was the scent of tar going soft in the sun, of still water from the bayou behind the screen of trees. And the trees themselves, with their high, green smell that told him, though the calendar claimed summer was still a week away, the delta knew better.
He reached for sunglasses first, sliding them onto his face before he chose a cassette at random and punched it into its slot. Tucker was a great lover of fifties music, so there was nothing in the car recorded after 1962. Jerry Lee Lewis shot out, and the Killer’s whiskey-soaked voice and desperate piano celebrated the fact that there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on.
As the speedometer swung toward eighty, Tucker added his own excellent tenor. His fingers drummed up and down on the steering wheel, looking like piano keys.
Barreling over a rise, he had to swing wide to the left to avoid ramming into the back side of a natty BMW. He tooted his horn, not in warning but in greeting as he skidded around the elegant maroon fender. He didn’t slack his speed, but a glance in his rearview mirror showed him the Beemer was stopped, half in and half out of the lane leading back to Edith McNair’s house.
As Jerry Lee switched into his raw-throated “Breathless,” Tucker gave a passing thought to the car and driver. Miss Edith had passed on about two months before—around the same time that a second mutilated body had been discovered floating in the water down at Spook Hollow.
That had been sometime in April, and a search party had been whipped up to look for Francie Alice Logan, who’d been missing for two days. Tucker’s jaw clenched when he remembered what it had been like, trudging through the bayou, carrying a Ruger Red Label and hoping to hell he didn’t shoot off his own foot, or find anything.
But they’d found her, and he’d had the bad luck to be with Burke Truesdale when they did.
It wasn’t easy to think about what the water and the fish had done to sassy old Francie, the pretty little redhead he’d flirted with, dated a time or two, and had debated sleeping with.
His stomach clenched and he bumped up the volume on Jerry Lee. He wasn’t thinking about Francie. Couldn’t. He’d been thinking about Miss Edith, and that was better. She’d lived to be nearly ninety and had passed on quietly in her sleep.
Tucker recalled that she’d left her house, a tidy two-story built during the Reconstruction, to some Yankee relative.
Since Tucker knew that no one within fifty miles of Innocence owned
a BMW, he concluded that the Yankee had decided to come down and take a peek at his inheritance.
He dismissed the northern invasion from his thoughts, took out a cigarette, and after breaking a thumbnail-length piece from the tip, lighted it.
Half a mile back, Caroline Waverly gripped the wheel of her car and waited for her heart to slide back down her throat.
Idiot! Crazy bastard! Careless jerk!
She forced herself to lift her trembling foot off the brake and tap the gas until the car was all the way into the narrow, overgrown lane.
Inches, she thought. He’d missed hitting her by inches! Then he’d had the gall to blast his horn at her. She wished he’d stopped. Oh, she wished he’d stopped so she could have given that homicidal jackass a piece of her mind.
She’d have felt better then, having vented her temper. She was getting damn good at venting since Dr. Palamo had told her that the ulcer and the headaches were a direct result of repressing her feelings. And of chronically overworking, of course.
Well, she was doing something about both. Caroline unpried her sweaty hands from the wheel and wiped them against her slacks. She was taking a nice, long, peaceful sabbatical here in Nowhere, Mississippi. After a few months—if she didn’t die of this vicious heat—she’d be ready to prepare for her spring tour.
As for repressing her feelings, she was done with that. Her final, ugly blowout with Luis had been so liberating, so gloriously uninhibited, she almost wished she could go back to Baltimore and do it again.
Almost.
The past—and Luis with his clever tongue, brilliant talent, and roving eye definitely belonged to the past—was safely behind her. The future, at least until she’d recovered her nerves and her health, wasn’t of much interest. For the first time in her life, Caroline Waverly, child prodigy, dedicated musician, and emotional sap, was going to live only for the sweet, sweet present.
And here, at long last, she was going to make a home. Her way. No more backing away from problems. No more cowed agreeing to her mother’s demands and expectations. No more struggling to be the reflection of everyone else’s desires.
She was moving in, taking hold. And by the end of the summer, she intended to know exactly who Caroline Waverly was.
Feeling better, she replaced her hands on the wheel and eased the car down the lane. She had a vague recollection of skipping down it once, on some long-ago visit to her grandparents. It had been a short visit, of course—Caroline’s mother had done everything possible to cut off her own country roots. But Caroline remembered her grandfather, a big, red-faced man who’d taken her fishing one still morning. And her girlish reluctance to bait a hook until her grandfather had told her that old worm was just waiting to catch himself a big fat fish.
Her trembling thrill when her line had jerked, and the sense of awe and accomplishment when they’d carried three husky catfish back home.
Her grandmother, a wiry stick of a woman with steel-gray hair, had fried up the catch in a heavy black skillet. Though Caroline’s mother had refused to taste a bite, Caroline herself had eaten hungrily, a frail, tow-headed six-year-old with long, slender fingers and big green eyes.
When the house came into view, she smiled. It hadn’t changed much. The paint was flaking off the shutters and the grass was ankle-high, but it was still a trim two-story house with a covered porch made for sitting and a stone chimney that leaned just slightly to the left.
She felt her eyes sting and blinked at the tears. Foolish to feel sad. Her grandparents had lived long, contented lives. Foolish to feel guilty. When her grandfather died two years before, Caroline had been in Madrid, in the middle of a concert tour, and swamped by obligations. It simply hadn’t been possible to make the trip back for his funeral.
And she’d tried, really tried, to tempt her grandmother to the city, where Caroline could have flown easily between tour dates for a visit.
But Edith hadn’t budged; she’d laughed at the notion of leaving the house where she’d come as a new bride some seventy years before, the house where her children had been born and raised, the house where she’d lived her whole life.
And when she died, Caroline had been in a Toronto hospital, recovering from exhaustion. She hadn’t known her grandmother was gone until a week after the funeral.
So it was foolish to feel guilt.
But as she sat in her car, with the air-conditioning blowing gently on her face, she was swamped with the emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the ghosts. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. That I was never here.”
On a sigh, she combed a hand through her sleek cap of honey-blond hair. It did no good to sit in the car and brood. She needed to take in her things, go through the house, settle herself. The place was hers now, and she meant to keep it.
When she opened the car door, the heat stole the oxygen from her lungs. Gasping against its force, she lifted her violin case from the backseat. She was already wilting when she carried the instrument and a heavy box of sheet music to the porch.
It took three more trips to the car—lugging suitcases, two bags of groceries which she’d stopped to pick up in a little market thirty miles north, and finally, her reel-to-reel tape recorder—before she was done.
Once she had all her possessions lined up, she took out the keys. Each one was tagged: front door, back door, root cellar, strongbox, Ford pick-up. They jangled together like musical notes as Caroline selected the front-door key.
The door squeaked, as old doors should, and opened on the dim dust of disuse.
She took up the violin first. It was certainly more important than any of the groceries.
A little lost, and for the first time lonely, she walked inside.
The hallway led straight back to where she knew the kitchen would be. To the left, stairs climbed, hooking to a right angle after the third tread. The banister was dark, sturdy oak, layered now with a fine cloak of dust.
There was a table just beneath the stairs, where a heavy black dial phone sat beside an empty vase. Caroline laid down her case on it and got busy.
She carried groceries back to the kitchen with its yellow walls and white, glass-fronted cabinets. Because the house was oven-hot, she put them away first, relieved that the refrigerator was sparkling clean.
She’d been told some neighbor women had come in to wash and scrub after the funeral. Caroline could see that this country courtesy was true. Beneath the dust of two months, beyond the lacy webs that industrious spiders had woven in corners, was the faint, lingering smell of Lysol.
She walked slowly back to the front hall, her heels echoing on the hardwood. She peeked into the sitting room with its petit point cushions and big RCA console television that looked like an ancient artifact. Into the living room, where faded cabbage roses climbed the walls and “company” furniture was ghosted under dust covers. Then her grandfather’s den with its case of hunting rifles and target pistols, its big easy chair, ragged at the arms.
Hefting her suitcases, she started upstairs to choose her room.
Both sentiment and practicality had her settling on her grandparents’ bedroom. The heavy four-poster and wedding-ring quilt seemed to offer comfort. The cedar chest at its foot might hold secrets. The tiny violets and roses twined on the walls would soothe.
Caroline set her valises aside and walked to the narrow glass door that led to the high, open porch. From there, she could see her grandmother’s roses and perennials struggling against the weeds. She could hear the lap of water against some rock or downed log behind the tangle of live oaks and Spanish moss. And in the distance, through the haze of heat, she saw the brown ribbon of water that was the powerful Mississippi.
There were birds calling, a symphony of sound through the hot air—jays and sparrows, crows and larks. And perhaps the gargled call of wild turkey.
She dreamed there for a moment, a delicately formed woman, a shade too thin, with exquisite hands and shadowed eyes.
For a moment, the
view, the fragrances, the sounds, faded away. She was in her mother’s sitting room, with the whispering tick of the ormulu clock, the scent of Chanel. Very soon they would be leaving for her first recital.
“We expect the best from you, Caroline.” Her mother’s voice was smooth and slow and left no room for comment. “We expect you to be the best. Nothing else is worth aiming for. Do you understand?”
Caroline’s toes were curled nervously in her glossy Mary Janes. She was only five. “Yes, ma’am.”
In the parlor now, her arms aching after two hours of practice. The sun so bright and golden outside. And she could see a robin perched in the tree. He made her giggle and pause.
“Caroline!” Her mother’s voice flowed down the stairs. “You still have an hour of practice left. How do you expect to be ready for this tour if you have no discipline? Now start again.”
“I’m sorry.” With a sigh, Caroline lifted the violin that to her twelve-year-old shoulders was beginning to feel like a lead weight.
Backstage, fighting off the queasy nerves of opening night. And tired, so tired from the endless rehearsals, preparations, traveling. How long had she been on this treadmill now? Was she eighteen, twenty?
“Caroline, for heaven’s sake, put on more blusher. You look like death.” That impatient, hammering voice, taut fingers taking her chin and lifting it. “Why can’t you at least show some enthusiasm? Do you know how hard your father and I have worked to get you where you are? How much we’ve sacrificed? And here you are, ten minutes before curtain, brooding into the mirror.”
“I’m sorry.”
She had always been sorry.
Lying in a hospital bed in Toronto, sick, exhausted, ashamed.
“What do you mean you’ve canceled the rest of the tour?” Her mother’s tense, furious face looming over hers.
“I can’t finish it. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! What good is sorry? You’re making a shambles of your career, you’ve inconvenienced Luis unpardonably. I wouldn’t be surprised if he broke your engagement as well as cutting you off professionally.”