River Road

by JoAnn Ross

  ***

  "So, what do you think?" Nate asked an hour later.

  "I think, after this bash, you'll be elected mayor for life," Finn said.

  "The parish council certainly seems happy enough. Of course, Mrs. Robicheaux's probably gonna have to go out and buy poor old Henri a Seeing Eye dog first thing in the morning, since his eyes seemed to have become detached from his head and glued to Julia Summers's very appealing body."

  "I noticed. Unfortunately for him, so did Marie Robicheaux."

  "Henri will be sleeping in the doghouse for sure, tonight . . . She really is something, isn't she? Julia, not Marie."

  "Yeah. She's something all right. She's a pain in the ass."

  Nate looked at him curiously. "I thought she seemed real nice. Not at all full of herself, like I figured some Hollywood star could be."

  "She's an actress," Finn reminded his brother. "She can probably be anyone you want her to be. She's also on her good behavior with you."

  "More's the pity. You sayin' she's being bad with you? And you're complaining? Mon Dieu, cher, I'm worried about you."

  "Look, I watched the show. The woman can turn the charm off and on without missing a beat."

  "You talking about the woman? Or the character she plays?"

  "Both, since she seems to have been pretty well typecast. The lady's probably as phony as that two-headed coin you had back when you were seventeen and thought you might become a magician."

  "I wasn't all that interested in magic. I was interested in Christy Marchand, who had herself a big old crush on David Copperfield. I convinced her I could make her float on air."

  "And did you?"

  "Hell, no. I never much got past palming quarters in the teach-yourself-magic book. But Christy didn't know that. And we sure passed a good time that summer. Lord, she looked good in that pretty harem magician assistant's outfit."

  "You talked Christy Marchand, the class valedictorian who grew up to be a NASA scientist, into wearing a harem costume?"

  "I billed myself as The Swamp Swami, so the costume fit the theme. And I didn't have to do all that much talking, since I was the closest thing to Copperfield in Blue Bayou. I'll admit, I didn't care whether she levitated or not. I just wanted to get past second base."

  "So did the ploy work?"

  "Far be it from me to besmirch the honor of Southern womanhood, but since you're my brother and I know it won't go any further, I like to think back on that as the summer of my Grand Slam."

  They shared a laugh.

  "So," Nate said, "do you believe the lady's really in danger?"

  "I've heard various theories tonight. But personally, if forced to take a guess, I'd say no."

  "But you're not taking any chances."

  Finn thought of those other women he hadn't been able to protect. "No," he said. "I'm not."

  ***

  "Home sweet home." Julia stepped out of her heels the moment they entered the suite and padded over to the mini bar. "Your brother's a nice man."

  "Everyone's always said so."

  "I'm going to have some juice. Would you . . ." Her voice trailed off as she glanced at him over her shoulder and saw he'd picked up the shoes. "Oh, great." She cast a frustrated glance up at the ceiling. "It's bad enough I'm stuck with Dudley Do-Right. Do you also have to be Felix linger?"

  "Do you have something against neatness?"

  "No. But obsessive neatness is another entirely different matter. It's a definite sign of repression."

  "I suppose you learned that on the commune?"

  "No. Psych 101." Her pretty Manolo Blahniks looked oddly fragile in his big hands. She snatched them away,

  "Ah." He nodded. "Well, that certainly makes you an expert."

  "You're not that hard to read. Don't take this wrong, Callahan, but you're a bit of a walking cliché."

  "That's one of the nicer things I've been accused of over the years. If you're trying to insult me, you're going to have to do better than that."

  "How about you only view the world in black and white?"

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "In case you haven't noticed, the rest of the planet has moved on to Technicolor."

  He shrugged. "Call me old-fashioned."

  "That, too," she muttered. "I'll bet you even dream in black and white."

  He wondered what she'd say if he told her that tonight he'd be dreaming of green eyes that could turn from a soft Southern moss to blazing emerald in a heartbeat. Of hair so bright it looked as if it'd burn his fingers if he gave into the urge to dip them into those lush fiery waves. Of creamy porcelain flesh he suspected felt a great deal warmer than it looked.

  "Got me," he said easily. Because he was tempted, too tempted, he turned away, opened the closet by the suite's living room door, and took out a spare sheet and pillow.

  "You're sleeping on the couch?" she asked as he tossed them, onto the antique reproduction sofa. "Why? The suite has two bedrooms."

  "They're too far apart."

  Those remarkable eyes widened, just a little. "Surely you don't actually believe I'm in danger?"

  "I don't know." There was no point in getting her overly concerned, but neither was he going to encourage her to shrug off a potential threat.

  "Well, that's certainly honest."

  "I may not always tell you what you want to hear, but if I say something, you can count on it being the truth. There's no way of knowing whether that picture was some guy's socially inept way of expressing admiration, or a threat against your life. But while you're stuck with me, as you so charmingly put it, I'm not taking any chances."

  Their eyes met. And held, just a moment too long.

  "Well. I don't exactly know what to say to that."

  "How about good night?"

  She looked prepared to argue. Finn figured she wasn't accustomed to taking orders. Tough.

  "Good night, Callahan."

  She put the shoes down in order to open the mini bar, took out a bottle of orange juice, and disappeared into the larger of the two bedrooms.

  As the door shut behind her, Finn let out a long, weary breath. "Good night," he murmured. He was about to pick up the ridiculously spindly shoes when her words came back to him. What the hell, he decided. And left them where she'd dropped them.

  * * *

  Julia had just come out of the shower when her cell phone trilled. She threw on a robe, went into the adjoining bedroom, and located it in the bottom of her purse. Afraid it might be Graham, trying yet another shot at a reconciliation, she was relieved when the caller ID displayed her mother's cell phone number.

  The door from the living room opened. During a long, mostly sleepless night, Julia had decided she'd exaggerated Finn's size. Now, looking at him taking up nearly the entire doorway, she realized he was actually even larger than the image that had tormented her sleep.

  "So where are you, and how's the harmony and light tour going?" Although the thick terry cloth robe concealed far more than that dress she'd taunted him with last night, Julia felt vaguely uncomfortable. She turned her back on him.

  "Oh, just wonderfully," the familiar rich, warm voice responded. "We're in Coldwater Cove. It's a charming little Victorian town on the Washington peninsula. People in the Northwest have always been more in tune with nature than some other parts of the country your father and I have visited over the years."

  Julia's parents, Freedom and Peace, had been part of a group of flower children who'd drifted down the California coast when Haight-Ashbury had become too commercially artificial for their tastes. They pooled their funds to purchase a small dairy and, proving surprisingly entrepreneurial for hippies, they'd used the proceeds from milk and ice cream sales, along with ticket revenues to an annual summer solstice music festival, to fund their artistic projects.

  For people who'd professed an aversion to private wealth, many had done quite well for themselves: among their ranks were a world-famous balladeer, two Pulitzer Prize winners—one a novelist, the
other a poet—and a silver craftsman whose work was featured at Neiman Marcus and Saks.

  Her parents had achieved their own measure of fame. One of her father's grapevine chairs had appeared in a retrospective of chairs as art at the Smithsonian, two of his paintings hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art, and a recent pictorial in Vanity Fair had shown one of her mother's woven blankets hanging on the wall of the President and First Lady's Texas ranch house.

  Her mother gave a thumbnail sketch of their travels, then asked, "How are things in Louisiana?"

  "So far, so good." Better now that Finn, apparently deciding her mother offered no threat, had returned to the living room.

  "I'm glad to hear that." Julia could hear her mother's slight exhaled sigh. "You know I try not to interfere in your life, dear. But the reason I'm calling is that I'm worried about you."

  "Me? Why?"

  "I had a dream about you last night. Your aura was decidedly muddy."

  "My aura's fine. All those mountains in the Northwest must be screwing up your signal."

  "Laugh all you want," her mother said mildly. "But the vibrations coming from your way are decidedly unstable."

  "I hadn't realized you'd begun predicting earthquakes." The smile in Julia's voice took the sting from her teasing words.

  "Don't I wish. If I could, we would have been prepared for yesterday's tremor."

  "Tremor?" Julia hadn't heard anything about a tremor in Washington state. "Are you all right?"

  "We're fine,. Though it was a bit exciting, since we were crossing the Evergreen Bridge at the time. ... I was just about to get to that, dear," she said to someone Julia heard talking in the background. "Your father's unhappy because that troll candle you bought us the summer we sold my jewelry on the Grateful Dead tour fell off the dashboard. His head broke off. The troll's, not your father's."

  Julia remembered the summer well. She'd been twelve and although she'd grown up surrounded by free love, it was the first time she'd ever been kissed. Woodstock McIntyre, whose mother sold tie-dyed T-shirts and Electric Kool-Aid from the back of a battered old Ford Econoline, had put his tongue in her mouth and touched her breast. Well, he'd touched her nipple, since she hadn't had anything resembling a breast at the time.

  He'd then blabbed that fact to all his stupid friends, making her, for a brief time, consider joining a convent.

  "Oh, you wouldn't want to become a nun," her mother had said when she'd found Julia crying her eyes out in the back of the VW minibus. "We're pagans. Although," she'd tacked on thoughtfully, "I believe Rainbow Seagull became a Buddhist nun for a time when she was living in Tibet. If you'd like, I could ask her—"

  "What I want," Julia had wailed as only a girl whose life had been ruined could, "is breasts."

  Charm bracelets had jingled as her mother had run a beringed hand down Julia's red hair. "And you'll have them. In their own time."

  "Easy for you to say," she'd muttered into a pillow stuffed with organically grown cotton and lavender. Adding insult to injury, Woodstock had pointed out that Julia's mother—who'd be the last person to flaunt her sexuality—was really, really built.

  "The candle's wax," she said, dragging her mind back from that day of adolescent humiliation that she could almost laugh about now. "Can't he just heat it up and shape it back together?"

  "I suggested that. But he insists it wouldn't be the same, since he'd always know it was flawed."

  Julia reminded herself that those idyllic families resurrected from television archives and given a new life on Nick at Nite had never existed. The Cleavers and the Brady Bunch were as fictitious as River Road. But even knowing that, there were times when she wondered what it would have been like to grow up in the suburbs with Donna Reed for a mother. What many now called New Age had been her parents' normal lifestyle for more than three decades, and despite their success, they mostly continued to live as they always had.

  But these days, rather than driving the Volkswagen Julia remembered so fondly, they traveled in a luxurious bus that had been tricked out at the factory with all the comforts of home. Replacing the 70s perky-faced daisies, peace signs and anti-war slogans which had covered the original VW, her father had painted a mural of bearded wizards casting spells, fairies with shimmering wings who danced on sunbeams and slept amid petals of tush flowers, while fire-breathing dragons guarded the mouths of secret caves.

  This wonderland was overseen by stunningly beautiful goddesses who floated above the scene in filmy, translucent pastel gowns and never suffered bad-hair days. Characteristically, when he'd bought this whimsical house on wheels, he'd written checks equal to the sticker price to local charities.

  Her parents had been together thirty-five years, yet had never married. "Starhearts and soulmates don't need cold administrative documents to sanctify their love," Freedom had always proclaimed in his big, booming voice.

  "And a piece of paper can't keep love alive," Peace always serenely pointed out.

  The more Julia witnessed so many of her friends' marriages crash and burn, or even sadder yet, slowly, quietly fade into disinterest, the more she appreciated her parents' relationship. She'd never met two people more suited to one another, alike in every way, so bonded it was impossible to think of one without the other.

  "You are keeping that malachite necklace I sent you close by, aren't you?"

  "Yes, Mother," Julia said dutifully. The variegated green stone was supposed to break into two pieces to warn her of danger, which would admittedly be difficult to notice since she'd forgone wearing it around her neck and now carried it in her purse in a small black velvet bag.

  "And the bloodstone?"

  "Absolutely. Along with the obsidian, the turquoise, and the falcon's eye." There were nearly enough rocks in her purse to make up her own quarry. Remembering her mother's claim that the Danish blue falcon's eye would help her maintain control of her life, Julia idly wondered if she should dig it out.

  After passing on her love to her father and promising to be extra careful, at least until the new moon, she hung up and returned to the bathroom to blow her hair dry and brace herself for whatever outrageous scenarios Warren had thought up for Amanda this time.

  The morning cast meeting did not start out on a high note.

  "What the hell is this?" Margot, looking a bit ragged around the edges, waved her copy of the revised script.

  "It's the new story line I told you about, love," Randy said blithely. "Warren's come up with a ripper of an idea. Amanda's going to time travel back to the Civil War after Vanessa shoots her. We'll be a shoo-in to win our time slot in the sweeps."

  "The hell with the sweeps." She stabbed the page with a long crimson fingernail. "Who is Fancy?"

  "Fancy's who Amanda is in a past life."

  "I'm going to be Amanda's mother? Do I have to remind you that it's stipulated in my contract that I won't play anyone's mother?"

  "The mother's a bonzer part. She's wonderfully neurotic and needy. Gives you a chance to really chew the scenery."

  "I'd like to chew Warren's neurotic ass." She glared around the long table. "Where the hell is the little prick, anyway?"

  "He called and said he's running a bit late. But he's on his way down."

  "Sounds as if Warren's the one who may need protecting," Felissa drawled. "I do hope he didn't use up all his strength doing the nasty with that airhead blond bimbo last night."

  "She's not an airhead." Warren entered the conference room, looking, Finn thought, more than a little smug. "Or a bimbo. And there's no need to be crude."

  "Pots and kettles, darling," Felissa tossed back. "It was obvious that the overteased bleached blonde was just a small town slut looking for a fame fuck."

  "She's not a slut." Finn wanted to remain as far out of the dynamics of the River Road cast as possible, but there was no way he was going to allow this woman to insult a friend. "She's just . . ." Shit. How the hell did you explain Lorelei to anyone who'd grown up north of the Mason-Dixon line?
r />   "Southern," Warren supplied.

  "Absolutely," Finn agreed.

  "If we're through discussing Warren's sex life, I'd like to return to the subject of this new script." Margot pushed the pages away as if they were contaminated. "There's no way the audience—and all my fans—are going to accept me as any grown woman's mother."

  "People married younger in those days," Warren argued. "Your character was a child bride, forced by her father into a marriage of convenience with a much older cotton planter."

  She muttered a short, rude curse and returned to skimming the pages. "Wait a goddamn minute! Amanda seduces my husband? Her own father? That's just sick, Warren."

  "He's your second husband, which makes him her stepfather. And her name's Fancy," he reminded her.

  "Whatever her name is, she's getting to sleep with my fiance the night before he goes off to war," Felissa complained, leafing through the pages. "Why can't I seduce Margot's husband?"

  "Because the audience would never believe it, since you're playing the Melanie Wilkes role."

  "And Julia gets to be Scarlett?"

  Felissa's tone was as much of a storm warning as the rumble of thunder out over the Gulf. Finn could tell the writer knew he'd made a tactical error with that comparison.

  "Fancy's not at all like Scarlett," he backpedaled. "She's really a Confederate spy who has to determine if her mother's new riverboat gambler Husband is secretly selling the plantation's cotton to the Northern army."

  "So now I'm going to be married to a traitor?" Margot looked on the verge of going ballistic.

  "I don't know if he's a traitor or not. I still haven't decided."

  "Well, whichever, I absolutely refuse to compromise my character." She turned toward Kendall, who was seated on a sofa a few feet away from the table. "Tell him he has to change the script, Charles."

  "I'll tell him no such thing." His eyes were hard as stone. "The story line stands as written."

  "But my contract—"

  "Has so many holes in it, it may as well have been written on Swiss cheese. Atlantic Pharmaceuticals' lawyers teethed on the Art of War and they love going into battle, so if I were you, I'd think twice about challenging this story line. And if you get it into your head to sulk in your dressing room, the way you did last month when you balked about that scene in the country club where Amanda threw champagne in your face, I'll fine you a thousand dollars for every minute you tie up shooting."