Sunshine Walkingstick Omnibus

by Celia Roman

  “Couldn’t you just come see me like a normal person?” I snapped.

  His laugh was soft and husky and sensual. “And miss having you in my bed?”

  I glanced around and about kicked myself for being blind as a bat. Yup, I was in bed all right, and there he was laid out like a present waiting to be opened. Dang his sorry hide. Had he set this whole thing up ahead of time?

  A door on my left swung open, an ordinary wooden door sporting an expensive brass doorknob. In walked a middle aged woman carrying a tray. She was short and a mite dumpy under her jeans and hand knit sweater, but what drawed my eye was the teeniny tattoo on her neck, an inch below her right ear.

  I scooted around on the bed and glared at Teus, him what was nekkid and barely covered by the sheet. “How come she got a tiny mark and I got a big’un?”

  He tucked a hand behind that handsome head of his and grinned. “Your situation required something…unique.”

  “Unique my foot,” I sputtered out.

  “Indeed.” His hand lashed out lickety split and snagged mine, and down I went with one pull, sprawling on top of him.

  The woman set the tray down on the nightstand next to the bed, her expression serene and smooth like nothing outta the ordinary was going on.

  Which kindly begged the question: How many women did Teus bring to his bed anyhow?

  “Enough for two, as requested,” she said.

  “Whaddaya mean, as requested?” I demanded, and Teus waggled his perfectly arched black eyebrows at me.

  “Thank you, Brenda,” he said without moving his gaze from mine. “Close the door on your way out.”

  Brenda winked at me, saucy and knowing. “Of course. Enjoy your meal.”

  Soon as the door closed, I pushed myself off him, not a bit careful as to where my limbs landed. He oomphed and groaned a time or two, and I tried hard not to be too satisfied at getting a few licks in.

  I crawled away from him, never taking my eyes off the sneaky son of a water god. I was learning the hard way not to trust him, and about time, too. “I thought we agreed you didn’t want me.”

  “I never said that.”

  I thought back to our last conversation, run it through my head, and glared at him. Dang him, he was right. He’d only admitted to me not being right for him and had as much as said he wanted my companionship.

  I shoulda pressed Miss Jenny harder on the relationship issue or at the very least given her Teus’s number.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked.

  His grin was gone, replaced by a disgruntled frown. “You called.”

  “I done no such thing.”

  “You thought of me while touching your marks of service.” He cupped a hand over his privates through the sheet and adjusted himself. “The enthusiasm of your departure was unnecessary.”

  “Oh, it was necessary, all right,” I said, real cheerful like. “What’d you do to my table?”

  “Your table?”

  “My kitchen table. It’s all blue and green now.”

  “It was an eyesore, Sunshine. You should’ve replaced it years ago.”

  Until here of late, weren’t no money to replace it with, but that weren’t none of his beeswax. “So you took it upon yourself to fix it up, kinda like you took it upon yourself to switch out my carpet?”

  Them blue-green eyes of his took on a speculative look. “I replaced the carpet. The table was not my doing.”

  I throwed my hands up in the air and let ‘em flop onto my lap. “Then how come the table matches the carpet now?”

  “I have no idea.” He held his hand out to me, palm up. “Come, Sunshine. Let’s play detective, shall we?”

  His hand might as well’ve been a snake, for all I trusted it. “I ain’t a-touching you.”

  “Take my hand,” he said, patient as the water on a windless day. “Take my hand, Sunshine.”

  His voice was soothing and calm and near about hypnotic. My hand raised up under its own power, seemed like, and laid itself against his, and we whirled through color and mist and come out standing in the middle of my living room.

  I yanked my hand outta his and staggered to the couch, then about fell over it trying to sit down. “I don’t like that a’tall.”

  “Nonsense,” Teus said. “It’s quite fun once you get the hang of it.”

  Get the hang of it. Yeah, right. “What’re we doing here?”

  “Playing detective.” He walked over to the kitchen table, still nekkid as a jaybird, and run a palm over the mosaic tile surface. “Excellent craftsmanship. James?”

  “Who?”

  He sighed, long-suffering and patient all at once. “Jazz.”

  “Oh. No. I went to bed last night with an ordinary table and woke up this morning to that.”

  “Hmm.” A small smile played around that sensual mouth of his. “And you have no idea why.”

  “Not a one,” I said slowly. “But you do.”

  “I may.”

  I waited a beat or two, and when no answer was forthcoming, near about shouted, “You gonna tell me or what?”

  “I could tell you,” he agreed, “but that would deprive you of the joy of figuring it out for yourself. Adieu, love.”

  His body shimmied and wavered, then he become mist, dissipating slowly in the early morning light shining into the trailer.

  “Wait a goll darn minute,” I hollered, but it was too late. He done vanished on me again. I looked at the critter sitting statue still in his cage. “Ain’t that just like a man.”

  Its round eyes fixed on me, but it said nary a word, just like it done for days now.

  The follow up doctor’s appointment was scheduled for the next afternoon. While I was waiting for Riley to come pick me up, I finished the section in Mooney’s outlining what he learnt on the history of the Cherokee. By that time, I was more’n ready to be shed of the past. Dang book was thicker’n my wrist. How was a body supposed to absorb all them words in a solitary week?

  I was about to drop Mooney’s book onto the couch when mine and Riley’s conversation about them what shifted between animal and human popped into my noggin. On a whim, I picked Mooney’s up again and thumbed through the index, then looked up the painter references listed in the index.

  None seemed of particular interest ‘til I landed on a legend about a man what was out hunting one winter day. A painter appeared and frightened him, and just when he was raising his gun to kill it, it spoke to him and asked where he was going. So the man explained as how he was out hunting deer. The painter replied that him and his kin was about to do the Green-corn dance and was looking for a buck, and seeing as how the hunter and them was looking for the same thing, why didn’t they all hunt together?

  So along the hunter went with the painters. After a successful hunting trip, the hunter followed the painters back to the underground den whereupon the dance begun with the hunter joining right in. ‘Long and along, he decided he better get back home to his own kin, so the painter let him out a door and away home the hunter went. He died a few days later, having took too much of the painter nature into himself. A small note at the end said as how if he’da stayed with the painters, he woulda been just fine.

  I shivered under the familiar hand of uneasy and stared across the room, unseeing. Painters what could speak. Humans what took on the painter nature after being among ‘em. It followed, then, that them painters’d been human once themselves, didn’t it? Or was I just reading too much into an old legend?

  My phone buzzed against the table, and I closed the book. I could think on it later, after Riley dragged me to that doctor and I maybe got cleared to go back to work.

  Chapter Fifteen

  About ten minutes before Riley was supposed to pick me up, a soft knock hit the front door, startling me out of the nap I fell into outta sheer boredom. I scrubbed my hands over my face, grimaced at the sweaty feel, and about jumped outta my skin when the knocking picked up, a good deal harder.

  “Sunny?” David called,
just loud enough to be heard.

  I groaned and pushed myself off the couch, and stumbled across the living room toward the door, too groggy to temper my progress. “Come on in,” I hollered.

  The door opened and David stepped into the living room. Dark shadows highlighted a fine array of wrinkles under his eyes and his skin was ashen. I stopped dead still and eyed him real close. His cheeks was sharper’n they was the last time I seen him and his lips was pinched and thin.

  “Lordy, David.” I hooked my hands on my hips and clucked my tongue. “You’re about as gaunt as a scarecrow.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he murmured, absent the humor I’d intended to give him. “Riley called and told me you were sick.”

  Why, that scoundrel. See if I baked him a black walnut cake again. “Ain’t nothing wrong with me outside of his and Missy’s imaginations. What about you?”

  He huffed out a laugh and them hazel eyes of his drifted away from mine. “Gregory left me.”

  “Oh. Dang, David.” I stood there a minute, torn between wanting to comfort him and not knowing how, and finally waved toward my bedroom. “Come on back. We can chew the fat whilst I clean up.”

  A faint smile softened his mouth. “Chew the fat?”

  “Yeah, you know. Jaw away at each other.” I pivoted on a socked foot, not easy to do on shag carpeting, and stalked toward the back of the trailer. “You coming or what?”

  “Coming,” he murmured, and his footsteps shooshed along behind me on the recently revitalized floor. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Not a thing.” I waved him to a seat on the end of the bed, then skeedaddled into the bathroom and cut the water in the sink on to warm. “How come I had to hear you was in Atlanta from Teus?”

  “Ah.” David cleared his throat and the mattress squeaked. “It was a spur of the moment trip.”

  I stuck my head outta the bathroom door and leveled by best no nonsense stare on him. “And that’d be why?”

  “Gregory called.”

  “You wanna talk about it?” What was I saying? ‘Course, he wanted to talk about it, else he wouldn’t be slumped on the foot of my bed looking like he done lost his best friend. “He say why he was a-leaving you?”

  David’s breathy laughter held not one whit of humor. “To spare me. Can you believe it? After everything we’ve been through, he thinks he can keep me from being hurt by leaving me.”

  “He loves you.”

  “So he’s leaving me?”

  “Love don’t always make sense.” Look at me and Riley. What made sense about that? But we was hanging in there, wasn’t we, and at the very least, we got our friendship to fall back on. “He don’t want the deal he made with the rest of the Greenwood Five to touch you.”

  The half-questioning note in my voice weren’t intended to be there, but once the words was out, I couldn’t take ‘em back.

  David took ‘em at face value, bless him. “He told you that?”

  “I guessed.”

  “It’s a shitty excuse,” David said flatly, and I kindly had to agree. Leaving a man like David, one what loved you to the moon and back, was pure plumb foolishness, you asked me. A love like that only come along ever once in a while, and once ‘twas gone, weren’t no getting it back.

  On the other hand, I understood what it was like to be on the wrong end of a scandal. A body in that position wanted to protect their loved ones best they could, even if it meant leaving ‘em high and dry.

  I pressed my lips together and slipped back into the bathroom, washed my face and brushed my teeth right proper, and come back out feeling like a decent human being. “You gonna talk him ‘round?”

  “I tried. He kicked me out of our apartment. Said he’d let me know when he found a place of his own.” David’s head dropped down. He scrubbed a hand over his nape, then let it fall lifeless into his lap. “What am I going to do?”

  I sat down beside him and leaned my head against his shoulder. Strong David with his nimble hands and wide open heart. He been there for me when I needed him. What little could I do to pay back that gift?

  “Don’t give up,” I said at last.

  “What choice do I have?”

  His voice strained thin on the last note and near about broke. I wrapped an arm around his waist and held on under the firm certainty that one day soon, he’d be comforting me the same way.

  David left soon as Riley banged on the door and come in, his scowl a mite softer’n usual. I reckoned he knowed something was wrong with David and decided to save his macho possessive routine for a day when David weren’t so dadgum vulnerable.

  Me and Riley trotted off to the doctor’s office, then spent an hour past the appointment time in the waiting room, chitchatting and reading out of date magazines.

  Which, if they was gonna schedule a body for a certain time, why didn’t they just stick to it?

  I was politic enough not to say nothing, but it sure did get my panties in a twist sometimes, ‘specially since the doctor was too busy to see me. Once I was ushered to an examination room, some young woman come in looking barely old enough to drive and introduced herself in a perky tone as the doctor’s assistant. I forgot her name just as quick, then sat through her humming and ohing while she checked my blood pressure and heart rate and asked me a bunch of silly questions about how I felt.

  I felt fine, had since the day after Old Mother’s visit. I drawed a deep breath to say so, and Riley interrupted me.

  “She’s almost one hundred percent.” He rubbed a finger over his lower lip, hiding a smile. “Her mood’s back to normal, too.”

  I squinted at him in the too bright fluorescent light. Dang his hide. He was getting to know me a mite too well, weren’t he? And since I was getting so predictable, maybe it was time I shook things up a bit.

  The doctor substitute cleared me after a stern warning about coming back the minute I exhibited any similar problems. I ignored her. Weren’t hard, seeing as how her lecture was delivered in the same tone as a cheerleader talking to a kindergartner.

  Since we was in town, Riley took me to lunch and cajoled me out of my cantankerous mood, and I let him, just ‘cause I could.

  Besides. He was charming and sweet, and when we was done eating and on our way outta the restaurant, he kissed me right there in front of God and ever body, a nice, long, heartfelt smooch, leaving me addled as a schoolgirl.

  My wits reassembled themselves about the time we turned off on Persimmon Road. “Dang it.”

  Riley glanced over at me. “What?”

  “I forgot Billy Kildare’s card at home.” I slid a side-eyed glance at him. “And you got my car keys, so I can’t deliver it on my own.”

  “They’re in the glovebox.”

  “Why you…” I let my words trail off and fished my keys outta the console. “I’m gonna remember where you hid ‘em for next time.”

  “I moved them around every day.” He downshifted and steered around a curve, then dropped a casual hand onto my thigh. “By any chance does Dori still make the best pound cake in the county?”

  “She do.”

  “I’ll tag along, then.”

  “Riley Treadwell,” I said, mock severe. “Dori Kildare is married.”

  He grinned and squeezed my leg, not the least bit contrite by the looks of him, and I laughed and rested my hand on his, and all was right with the world.

  Half an hour later, sorrow card retrieved from my desk, we pulled into the Kildare’s driveway and parked. Dori opened the front door before we reached it, looking polished and pressed as a model on the runway, and tried a half smile out on us. “Hey, Sunny. Riley. I wasn’t expecting company.”

  I shook my head and jogged to a stop in front of her on the concrete porch. “I just wanted to drop a card off for Billy. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s not taking Ol’ Blue’s loss well at all.” Her lower lip trembled and firmed, and her hand tightened into a white-knuckled grip on the doorknob. “I hear him crying at night when he thin
ks we’re asleep.”

  A sharp pang twisted through my heart. Poor kid. It was tough to lose somebody you loved, ‘specially the way he loved that dog. “Anything I can do?”

  “You’ve already done so much for him.” She sniffed and a tear slid down her face, and next thing I knowed, she launched herself at me and hugged me tight against her bosom. “I wish so much that Henry was still alive. I wish it every day, Sunny. He and Billy would’ve been the best of friends.”

  I patted her back, at a loss what else to do. No telling what the future woulda brung if the deep wood hadn’t stole my boy, and no sense dwelling on what couldn’t be helped.

  The card was still in my hand. It give me an excuse to ease back and put some distance between me and her. The way I was going, I’d be hugging the whole county by the end of the week, and not just the folks I knowed well.

  I held out the card to her and tried not to squirm under all the touching. “Here. I got this for Billy. I know it ain’t no substitute for Ol’ Blue.”

  “Sunny.” Dori sniffed through a laugh and tucked the card close to the pale pink button down shirt hanging just right across her trim chest. “Thank you.”

  I glanced at Riley outta the corners of my eyes. “Woulda been here sooner if somebody hadn’t filched my car keys.”

  “If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have rested,” he said.

  Dori’s laughter faded to concern and the faintest of wrinkles appeared under her cornflower blue eyes. “I heard you were sick.”

  “Pffft,” I scoffed. “Was just a touch of soreness.”

  Weren’t gonna tell her the cause. The less folks outside of close kin knowed about my business, the better. For their own protection and peace of mind, if not for my own.

  “It was the next thing to a heart attack,” Riley said, his tone a hair shy of patient. “Not to mention hypothermia.”

  Dori gasped and her hands fluttered at her waist over the card’s edges. “What happened?”

  I shot an exasperated glare at Riley. Now he done it. Word of Old Mother’s visit’d be all over Persimmon by nightfall.