Scandal in Copper Lake

by Marilyn Pappano

  But, no, he was soaked to the skin, cold, frustrated, jealous of his own best buddy over a woman who was as ill-suited to his life as he was to hers, and worried about her. Worried she would convince herself that Charlotte was alive. Worried about the disappointment when she had to accept—again—that it wasn’t true. Worried about the guilt she felt. That the memories she’d unlocked tonight might have been better forgotten.

  He worried that someone had vandalized her house, whether the act had been random or deliberate. That she might get hurt. That he might hurt her. That she might hurt him. That he would disappoint her as he had always disappointed everyone.

  Damn, Harrison Kennedy wasn’t paying him nearly enough for this case.

  By the time he caught up with Anamaria, she was waiting at the car, her defensive posture relaxed. “Her father,” she said as he drew near. “Charlotte’s father could have taken her. Glory had two appointments that evening. One was Lydia, but no one knew who the second was, just that it wasn’t any of her regular clients. Maybe it was Charlotte’s father. The baby was due in a few days. Maybe he needed assurance that she wasn’t going to tell anyone his name. Maybe she needed money for the medical bills. Maybe that was why she was out along the river, where no one could possibly see them together. And she went into labor and he couldn’t help her, but he took the baby. His baby.”

  “If you’re right…” He clenched his jaw. It was believable: a man with a pregnant mistress, a single mother who wasn’t looking for marriage but needed money, an out-of-the-way meeting place. But if the man had needed reassurance from Glory, if he’d taken the baby but left her, then it became very possible that Glory’s death hadn’t been accidental at all. She hadn’t just gone into labor, according to the autopsy; she’d fallen and hit her head, and the trauma had precipitated labor.

  Instead of falling, maybe she’d been shoved. Or maybe the blow to the head had come first. Maybe Charlotte’s father had assured her silence by killing her.

  What kind of bastard killed the woman carrying his own child?

  One with a lot to lose. Even twenty-three years later.

  Anamaria had a lot to lose, as well, if that was the case.

  He opened the car door and waited for her to settle inside, then circled to the driver’s side. He didn’t speak on the way back to her house, and neither did she. When he pulled into the driveway and shifted into Park, she turned as if to say good-night, but the words faded unspoken as he shut off the engine and got out. He wasn’t leaving her alone. Not yet.

  They left their slickers, shoes and socks on the porch. She unlocked the door, stopped a few feet inside, then gave a soft sigh. “It’s all right.”

  He checked anyway, making sure each window was locked and intact and that the back door was locked, as well. When he finished, he found her in the bathroom, stripped of her wet clothes, wrapped in a bath towel and blotting water from her hair with another towel. Arousal stirred in his groin, along with something else. Something unfamiliar, possessive…tender. Something that knotted in his chest, aching even when he absentmindedly rubbed it.

  She smiled at his reflection in the mirror, a subdued, tired gesture. “Thank you for going with me.”

  He managed a you’re welcome as the phone rang in the kitchen. Her gaze flickered that way, but she made no move from the sink. “Will you get that for me?”

  “Sure.” He padded down the hall and into the kitchen, grabbing the phone on the third ring. “Hello.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and immediately he thought about the person who’d sneaked out of the woods that afternoon to give Anamaria a malicious welcome-home. The hairs on his arms stood on end, and he was reaching for the cell phone in his pocket to call Tommy when the caller finally spoke.

  “Well. Here I am on my deathbed, picturing my grandbaby just worrying herself sick about me, and instead she’s entertaining a gentleman and not giving me any thought at all. Isn’t that a fine situation?”

  Mama Odette’s voice was similar to Anamaria’s, but the cadence of her speech was slow, befitting a Georgia woman born and bred, and her accent was heavy as honey.

  “I doubt you’re on your deathbed, Miz Duquesne, and I’m no gentleman at all.”

  She laughed, a rich rumble. “Then what kind of man are you, Robert Calloway?”

  “The kind you probably warned Anamaria about.”

  “The best kind.” She laughed again, but underneath it he heard the whoosh of hospital equipment.

  “No one’s called me Robert in twenty-five years.”

  “No one’s called me Miz Duquesne in about that long. If you’re not comfortable with the Mama part, you can just call me Odette.”

  “And you can call me Robbie.”

  From down the hall came the sound of bathwater running. He thought of Anamaria, naked, sliding into a tub smelling of jasmine and piled high with bubbles, and his body responded, albeit accompanied by guilt, since he was on the phone with the grandmother who’d raised her. Swallowing hard, he shut off the overhead light, leaving only the bulb over the sink burning, and stretched the phone cord so he could sit at the table.

  “Anamaria’s told you about me.”

  “Not so much. I see more than I hear.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You’re a psychic, too.”

  “And you’re a skeptic. But that’s all right. Everyone learns eventually. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ and all that.”

  An elderly con artist quoting Shakespeare to him. That was a first.

  “Is my girl handy where I can talk at her a minute?”

  He gauged the length of the phone cord, figuring it would fall about fifteen feet short of the bathroom. “She, uh…” Well, hell, there was something too damn intimate about his being in the house while her girl took a bath. Even the most naive of parents would make the leap to the fact that they were sleeping together, and Odette, based on all he’d heard, wasn’t naive.

  Once again she laughed, a sound that obviously came easily to her. “Now I know I didn’t interrupt you in the act, because you’re not all out of breath, and I don’t hear Anamaria at all. It’s perfectly all right for you to say, ‘She’s soaking in the tub.’ I’m way down here in Savannah, and in a hospital bed to boot, so it’s not like I’m gonna come looking for you with my shotgun. Besides, she’s a grown woman now. She chooses who she chooses.”

  His face flushed hot. He was a skeptic and a coward and a pain in the ass, but he was circumspect about sex. If the women he was involved with chose to share, fine, but he usually kept his mouth shut. It was probably the only thing he had in common with his old man. Gerald had been so expert at hiding his affairs that Sara’s first clue had come after his death, when she’d discovered nine-year-old Mitch.

  Had Charlotte’s father been as expert?

  “How’s my girl doin’?” Odette asked, then went on before he could answer. “I hated to ask her to go there and take care of my business for me, but these doctors won’t let me out of here. They keep telling me I’m gonna die. Well, heavens, chile, we’re all gonna die. It’s just a matter of when. I just couldn’t go, though, without knowing more about my baby’s last days. I had twenty-three years of good health to find out, but…”

  All the pleasure faded from her voice. “It was such a hard time for all of us, but especially Anamaria. Oh, she loved her mama. You never seen a mama and baby as happy as them. When she come here to live with me, it was like all the light had gone out of her. She fretted for her mama and for that baby sister she never got to know, and then she just put it all out of her mind. Did such a good job of forgetting that when she wanted to remember, she couldn’t recall a thing.”

  He thought of her, recent moments flashing through his mind. “She’s all right. She’s strong.”

  “Oh, chile, Duquesne women has always had to be strong. We don’t have the kind of life that other women have, but God gives us strength enough to handle it. How about you? How strong are you?”
/>   His head aching, he squeezed his eyes shut tight. “Not enough.”

  “I don’t know. You know right from wrong, even if you don’t always do it. I bet you were a wild one when you was a boy. Probably gave your mama every gray hair she’s got, you and your brothers. And that’s okay. That’s how boys should be. But you know what? When the time comes, you’ll do what you have to.”

  There was a pause, another voice in the background. Time for your medication, Mama Odette. Then she turned her attention back to him. “Tell my girl I called and I love her and she’s all right. And you—you watch out for her, too. You’ll do that.”

  It wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  She chuckled. “Good night, Robbie Calloway. You know, there’s more to you than you think.”

  He waited until the line went dead, then slowly hung up. You’ll do what you have to. A lot of faith from someone who clearly didn’t know him. Outside of his office, he didn’t live up to obligations; he didn’t accept burdens. He was the irresponsible one.

  Besides, he didn’t have a clue what it was he needed to do. Stay with Anamaria?

  Or walk away?

  Chapter 7

  She was all right.

  Robbie had passed on the message from Mama Odette, and in the early dawn hours the following day, Anamaria knew it was true. Mama Odette had read her cards, spoken to her spirit guides, all topped off with a generous dose of good ol’ prayer, and the answers were the same. Anamaria was all right.

  Did you ask Auntie Charise what she saw? she’d wanted to know. But by the time she’d finished her bath, and Robbie had carried her to bed and made love to her until she was senseless, it had been too late for calling her family. She didn’t need Charise’s confirmation anyway. Things were different. She’d awakened a few minutes ago to the certainty that her life had changed for good. She had found passion, and her own sweet little girl was now growing safe and protected inside her.

  Unwise love and a pretty daughter to remind her of it. That was her destiny, and she accepted it, but was it wrong to want more? To wish that just once destiny could include a husband, marriage and a little convention? To wish that her daughter might always know the love and acceptance of her father and his family?

  Lillie and Jass both had that, but they’d had to leave the Duquesne family to get it. They’d been sent away and raised to fit in someplace else so thoroughly that they no longer fit in where they came from. They didn’t know Mama Odette the way they should; they didn’t know the family history, didn’t understand the family gifts, didn’t develop their own gifts. They were Duquesnes only by birth, not by living.

  Anamaria couldn’t bear that for her child.

  Behind her Robbie stirred, one arm pillowing his head, one leg thrust out from beneath the sheet. She hadn’t asked him to stay last night, though she’d wanted him to. She’d watched her aunties and her cousins never ask for a thing from a man beyond money to help raise their children. Mama Odette had been with the same man off and on for twenty years. She never asked him to go when she got tired of him, never asked him to stay when he was leaving. She accepted what he gave her, just as she accepted what he denied her.

  Call it a curse, fate or destiny, but sometimes it sucked.

  Easing from the bed, she pulled on her nightgown, then walked barefooted through the house. Light shone in wedges across the floor, reminding her of other early mornings, when she and Glory had slipped outside to sit on the back stoop and watch the stars twinkle out in the face of the rising sun. If it was chilly, they’d wrapped the shawl around them both, and if they were feeling silly, they’d run barefooted across the grass, leaving trails in the dew.

  It felt so good to have some of those memories back. Foolishly, she’d thought if she’d unlocked one, they would all return, all those years of living in this house with Mama. But she’d been only five years old. She’d lacked the kind of recall adults had. A few memories might be the best a former child could hope for.

  After completing her walk through the house, she returned to the bedroom, turned on the tiny frilly lamp on the dresser and took a shirt and capri pants from their hangers. She was about to turn away when her attention caught on the suitcase above. Behind it was the wooden chest, still unopened. When it’s time, Mama Odette had told her as she handed over the chest.

  She gazed at the chest, then at Robbie, now snoring lightly. He would go through it for her, or with her. He would share the task and his strength if she asked him to. But hadn’t she just reminded herself that her family didn’t ask for things from the men in their lives?

  She lifted the box from the shelf, set it on the rug beside the bed, then seated herself cross-legged with the mattress at her back. The filigree latch was stiff from disuse, but it lifted. Her fingers trembled with emotion, but they raised the lid.

  She was afraid of what she would find inside, and of what she wouldn’t.

  The springs creaked; then soft footsteps circled the bed. A moment later Robbie slid down to sit beside her on the floor, his shoulder bumping hers companionably. He was naked and not the least bit uncomfortable with it, or with the silence that cocooned them in the thin circle of light.

  Secured to the inside of the lid was a photograph, the edges curled, the colors faded. When she pulled on it, the tape fell away, landing on the rug.

  “Sometimes the daddies let Lillie and Jass come for a visit,” she said softly, cradling the snapshot where Robbie could see it, too. “That was what we called most of the men—the daddies. There were so many of them, usually far out of our lives. It wasn’t worth it to us girls to remember their names.”

  “That’s Augusta. Downtown at the river.” He grinned. “You look like a princess.”

  She grinned, too. She’d been standing on a wall that made her head and shoulders taller than both of her sisters, with her hair in beaded braids and her dress fussy enough for any toddler beauty pageant. “I don’t know whether I really liked pink, or if Mama did, but it’s what I’m wearing in just about every picture before I turned ten.”

  Glory was in pink, too, eye-popping bright, and looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Her arms were around her three girls, and Jass rested her head on Glory’s swollen belly. According to the date on the back, it had been taken two months before she died.

  “What else is in there?” he asked, but he didn’t reach in, instead letting her proceed at her own pace.

  “I don’t know. Stuff that was in the house, in Mama’s purse and her car. Mama Odette’s been keeping it for me for years, but I never looked. At first, all I remembered was the vision, and I didn’t want to see anything else. Then I couldn’t remember. For a long time, I pretended that none of it mattered. I had more family than most people would know what to do with. I was happy. What did it matter that I never knew my father and couldn’t remember my mother?”

  “Then Mama Odette got sick.”

  “And it was time. Time for me to remember. To pay my respects to Mama. Someday I’m going to have daughters of my own, and I’m going to tell them all the stories she told me, and I’m going to tell them about her. About how much she loved us. About what a good mother she was, and what a good grandmother she would have been.”

  The photo trembled when she mentioned having daughters of her own. In her lifetime, not one Duquesne woman had had two children by the same father. They were a vast family of half sisters. How dearly she would love to be the first one to break that tradition.

  Robbie steadied her hand with his own, his fingers firm and warm where hers were shaky and cold. After a moment, she released the photo to him and took out the next item in the chest. A bonnet, sized for an infant, fine white linen edged with lace and tied with pale pink ribbon. More photos: Glory with Lillie’s father, with Jass’s, with other men neither of them knew in places they didn’t recognize. Enclosed in a folded sheet decorated with a crayoned heart were a few dried dandelions, and beneath it, a half-doz
en slim spiral notebooks, held together with a rubber band.

  She pulled the rubber band, and it broke. Each cover was marked with a name: Savannah, Peach Orchard, Charleston, Beaufort, Atlanta, Copper Lake. Each held names, addresses with directions, phone numbers, dates and times, all in her mother’s handwriting, which was as gawky as she had been graceful.

  “They’re appointment books,” Robbie said quietly.

  Anamaria selected the one identified as Copper Lake and opened it. The wire binding was warped, and it crackled the pages as she turned them. “Mama Odette uses a calendar from the local funeral home, and I have a date book. Auntie Charise uses a BlackBerry. She does readings by e-mail and text message and has her own Web site. She’s woo-woo meets high tech.”

  His smile came and went as she turned to the last filled pages in the notebook. Glory had shared none of Charise’s organizational skills. There were names with no numbers, dates and times with no names. Sometimes she abbreviated names to initials, then a few lines down wrote them out in full.

  The final page held two entries: Liddy, 5:00, dated February 18, and the other, 2/21 scrawled inside a heart.

  “Maybe her second appointment that evening was a date instead,” Robbie suggested.

  “She was three days from her due date. She was big and round and cumbersome and forbidden from having sex. Not what most men find prime date material.”

  “You’d still be gorgeous and sexy even if you were about to deliver triplets.”

  Anamaria stilled on the outside, but everything inside was fluttering—her heart, her breath, the baby girl she was convinced had found life there. Would Robbie be around when their daughter’s birth grew near? Probably not. She would send him a polite note from Savannah, once medical tests had confirmed what she already knew, and he could acknowledge it or ignore it as he chose.