Out of Town Bride

by Kara Lennox

  Muffy grew very still, and her crying subsided as if by magic. “What about the camellias?” she asked, carefully enunciating every word.

  “Nothing,” John-Michael said hastily, but it was too late. Muffy shook off Sonya’s embrace, pushed her chair out, threw her linen napkin into her plate of untouched salmon, stood and marched out of the room. Sonya and John-Michael hastily followed.

  “Mrs. Patterson,” John-Michael said as he pursued her through the foyer, “please forget I said anything.”

  “Mother, you can’t go out without a coat,” Sonya implored. But it was as if Muffy didn’t hear them. She unlocked the dead bolt and yanked the heavy oak doors open, then tromped out into the darkness. It was chilly out, in the forties, and the rain hadn’t let up. Oblivious, wearing only a thin sweater, Muffy marched across the porch, down the stairs and along a walkway to the side of the house.

  There, the mansion’s landscape lighting revealed the atrocity, five gaping holes where Muffy’s mother’s camellias had grown until recently.

  “Sonya, get me a gun,” Muffy said. “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch this time.”

  “Mother, calm down.” The request was ludicrous. Though Muffy had insisted Sonya learn how to protect herself, she’d never touched a gun in her life.

  “We should go back inside,” John-Michael said calmly.

  Muffy turned on him. “You can’t save him this time, John-Michael. He deliberately went against my orders to hurt me. I’m going to fire him. I might even file criminal charges. Those camellia bushes were ancient and valuable.”

  “I saved the bushes,” he said. “I rescued them from the garbage. I’ll replant them tomorrow.”

  “You mean you had a hand in this?” Sonya demanded.

  “No. But I caught Jock throwing them out and I knew something strange was going on. I knew your mother wouldn’t agree to digging up those bushes.”

  “Damn straight I wouldn’t!” Muffy said, and she turned and strode back toward the front porch.

  “What in the hell is going on?” Sonya asked, terribly confused.

  “Obviously my father and your mother fought about something.”

  “But they fight all the time! I’ve never seen Jock do something so deliberately cruel before.”

  “Neither have I. You take care of your mother. I’ll see if I can find Jock.”

  Sonya found her mother standing in the foyer. Her head of steam had evaporated, and she was crying into her hands. “Come on, Mother,” Sonya said. “Let’s go upstairs and get out of these damp clothes. Maybe you’d like a warm bath?”

  “Yes, that would be nice.” Muffy allowed herself to be led upstairs to her suite, where Sonya helped her undress and wrapped her in a fluffy terry robe.

  “I’ll draw a bath for you.”

  “With some of those nice lavender bubbles,” Muffy said. “Mihir says lavender would help me to sleep.”

  Muffy seemed calmer once she was in the bath surrounded by mountains of fragrant bubbles.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Sonya asked gently.

  “No. But I mean it about firing Jock. Give him a month’s severance pay and tell him to clear out tomorrow. I don’t want to ever lay eyes on him again.”

  “Don’t make any hasty decisions.”

  “I should have fired him years ago. Oh, Sonya, what was it you and John-Michael wanted to discuss with me?”

  “Nothing important.” Sonya couldn’t possibly tell Muffy now that the wedding was off. The news would have to wait a little longer, until this current upset was settled.

  SONYA DIDN’T LEAVE Muffy’s room until she was sure her mother was asleep. Then she tiptoed out, carrying Jock’s latest flower offering, a small pot of violets, with her. Muffy hadn’t paid it any mind, but Sonya didn’t want her mother waking up and seeing it and getting angry all over again.

  John-Michael was waiting for her out in the hall. “How is she?”

  “Sleeping. I took her blood pressure and listened to her heart. Everything seems normal.” Dr. Cason had taught her how to do those things. “Did you find Jock?”

  “There’s no sign of him, but his car’s still here. He might have gone for a long walk to cool off. Or, he might have walked to the nearest liquor store.”

  “Or to an AA meeting,” she said optimistically. “He told me there’s an AA meeting going on somewhere in the city at almost any hour of the day.”

  “We can hope. Listen, about what happened earlier—”

  “John-Michael, can we not dissect it like we did last time? I’m not in the mood for apologies or blame or regrets. It happened. In fact, I’m glad it happened. I made it happen. And I liked it.”

  “I wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander. I think you probably could have mashed dirt without my help.”

  She smiled. “For now, let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

  He nodded.

  Sonya retreated to her own suite, but she was much too jittery to sleep. Instead, she called both Brenna and Cindy to fill them in on the latest development with Marvin. Just hearing her friends’ voices made her feel better. But she was still restless. She put on an old pair of jeans and a sorority T-shirt—an outfit she normally wouldn’t be caught dead in. She added some old hiking boots and a hooded rain slicker. She needed some fresh air, and she wasn’t going to let the rain stop her.

  She half expected John-Michael to meet her in the hallway, the way he used to do when she was younger and tried to sneak out at night. But his usually perfect radar wasn’t zeroing in on her whereabouts tonight, apparently.

  She could have left the estate, driven around all by herself for a change. But for some reason she didn’t feel like being defiant. She didn’t want to irritate John-Michael or her mother. The estate was large enough that she could walk around inside the perimeter fence. She could have her solitude and her fresh air and be safe, too.

  The rain was coming down a little harder than it had been earlier, and the temperature was a bit cooler than she’d thought. Sonya pulled the hood up on her slicker and set out, past the swimming pool and tennis courts, past the gardener’s cottage, all dark this late at night.

  There wasn’t much ambient light, but she didn’t need much. She’d become familiar with every inch of the estate as a child. The artificially landscaped hills and valleys, the strategically placed boulders, had served as a perfect backdrop for her solitary games of pretend. She’d wandered off by herself a lot after her father’s death. The house had been a dark, depressing place back then, and it had been easier to lose herself in fantasy, where she could be a fairy princess, a superhero or supermodel.

  She had a small flashlight in her pocket, but she didn’t even use it until she got to the back of the estate, where the manicured landscaping gave way to a woods of oak and cottonwood, bois d’arc and hackberry trees.

  She’d played hide-and-seek by herself among these trees. She remembered one tree in particular, a fat bois d’arc that leaned over so far she could climb it like a monkey.

  Wouldn’t Brenna be surprised to learn Sonya had been a tomboy? She’d given up her half-savage ways the moment she’d discovered boys, makeup and nail polish, but once you learned to climb trees, you never forgot.

  There was the tree. It had leaned so far over that now it was growing horizontally. Sonya brushed off the trunk and sat down. The canopy of leaves overhead protected her somewhat from the rainfall.

  She could think here. More to the point, she couldn’t escape thoughts of that kiss in the greenhouse. She couldn’t pretend it was a fluke this time. Nor could she assign blame to John-Michael. He might have been flirting with her, but she had started the kiss.

  Really, was there any need to blame anyone? A couple of weeks ago, such a kiss would have qualified as unacceptable, an aberration in her behavior and a terrible lapse in his. Now the only feeling she could muster was a sense of wonder that it had happened, that John-Michael hadn’t pushed her away, that he hadn’t tried to deny or mini
mize the chemistry between them.

  For the first time in forever, she let herself anticipate something real developing between herself and her bodyguard. Her soon-to-be-ex-bodyguard. If he had a spark of feeling for her—and clearly he did—there was hope.

  And she wanted it to happen. She wanted to make it happen—not with the naive expectations of a teenager, and not with the walk-on-the-wild-side mentality she’d once had. At nineteen, the only sort of relationship she had seen with John-Michael was a clandestine one. Now she could visualize something much different.

  Her mother might have something to say about it. But she wasn’t going to live her life by Muffy’s snobbish rules any longer. She loved her mother very much, and she would do everything she could to get Muffy through the current crisis, whatever it was. And she would get through this fake-wedding thing. But then she was going to make some big changes. She could only hope John-Michael would want to be a part of them. The idea was almost too delicious to dwell on for long.

  An alien noise intruded into her musings. Sonya sat up straighter and drew her slicker closer about her. Her imagination whirled with images of rabid possums and skunks. Surely there weren’t any dangerous animals in the woods. The noise came again, and Sonya decided it was human in origin—a wild, jungle yell.

  Trespassers? In this woods, on her family estate? No one could cross the fence without setting off an alarm. But who could it be?

  Arming herself with a stick as tall as she was, just in case, Sonya slipped silently through the woods toward the noise. She would get just close enough to figure out what she was dealing with, she reasoned. If she didn’t turn on the flashlight, she wouldn’t be seen in the dark—her raincoat was a navy blue.

  She was drawing closer to a creek that wound its way through the property. It was a good-size creek, a branch of Buffalo Bayou, and with the recent rains they’d had, it would be swollen. She could hear it rushing across rocks and tree roots.

  As lightning flashed, she saw it—a man’s naked torso swinging through the trees. The primal yell came again, a loud “Whoop!” And then she knew who it was, and her fear was replaced by concern and no small amount of dread at what, exactly, she would find.

  When she reached him, she realized why she’d seen the body in movement. Jock McPhee was on her old tire swing, the one his son had hung for her in an effort to cheer her up after her father’s death. On a hot summer day, it swung out over a place where the creek pooled into a shallow swimming hole. In the middle of winter, in a thunderstorm, the waters below the tire swing looked more like white-water rapids.

  “Jock!” she yelled, trying to be heard above the rain and the rush of water. He wore only a pair of raggedy cutoff shorts. If he didn’t fall into the water and get swept away, hypothermia would get him.

  Jock shielded his eyes and peered in her general direction. “Someone there?”

  “It’s me, Sonya! Come down from that swing right now!” The tire swing was tied very high up on a long rope. Lord only knew how Jock had reached the tire in the first place. She’d never been able to reach it by herself; she’d always climbed up the tree to the “launching branch,” and John-Michael had swung the tire up to her, requiring her to catch it with one hand while holding on to the tree with the other.

  The tire swung in a wide arc that spanned the entire creek. The trick was to let go at just the right moment so that you fell into the deeper part of the swimming hole.

  Jock hadn’t let go, thank God. But the swing was slowing down. “I don’t know how to get down,” he called back. He sounded a little bit scared.

  “Don’t jump into the water,” Sonya cautioned. “You just stay right there, don’t move. I’ll go find John-Michael.”

  “No! John-Michael will yell at me.”

  “I can’t get you down by myself.”

  “If you leave, I might fall,” he wheedled. “I’ll just jump now.”

  “No!” A strong man with all his faculties could get swept away by the current. A drunk man—for surely Jock was drunk—didn’t stand a chance. “I’ll help you. Just let me think…” If she could pull the tire closer to shore, he could at least fall in a shallower area where he’d have a chance. She remembered the branch she’d been carrying for protection. It was still clutched in her hand.

  Maybe it would be long enough. She climbed down the steep bank, slipping a couple of times in the mud, grazing her hand on a sharp rock. She landed in water a few inches deep. It quickly soaked into her boots, which obviously weren’t waterproof, and it was bone-numbingly cold. She waded out until the water was to midcalf; any deeper and she risked having her feet swept out from under her by the current.

  “Okay, Jock, I’m going to hold this branch out to you. See if you can reach it.” She held the branch up and out, leaning her body out as far as she dared. Jock reached, but he was a few inches shy.

  “I can’t get it.”

  “Can you grab it between your feet?”

  He did manage to hook one bare foot around the branch. Sonya pulled on the branch and caused the tire to start swinging again. Then, somehow, Jock managed to pull together enough coordination to grab the end of the branch when he came close enough. The jerk on the branch unbalanced Sonya, but she regained her footing.

  “Now what?” Jock asked, totally putting his faith in her.

  Oh, God, she hoped she could pull this off. “I’m going to pull the swing toward me, toward the shore. Then you’re going to jump.” She hoped.

  Amazingly, the plan worked. Sonya pulled Jock and the tire swing only a few feet, but that was enough to clear the deepest, most hazardous part of the creek. She had the branch almost straight above her now.

  “Now jump!”

  Completely trusting, he did. She released the branch and reached out to break his fall. They both landed in a tumble in the shallow water.

  “Are you hurt?” Sonya asked. She was pretty sure she was okay, just cold.

  “Aye, my heart’s broken in two,” he said on a sob.

  “Now isn’t the time to fall apart,” she said as she stood and dragged Jock to his bare feet. Hurt or not, she had to get him out of the water and somewhere warm. His skin was cold and clammy and he was shivering uncontrollably. Now she could smell the alcohol on his breath.

  He hobbled to the shore on bare feet, and she pushed and shoved and pulled him up the steep bank. Once there, he fell into a heap. “I can’t go on,” he said.

  “Jock! The hardest part is over.”

  “It’s just beginning,” he said miserably.

  Sonya took off her raincoat and gave it to Jock. Though it was a tight fit, he was able to shove his arms into the sleeves after a couple of tries. It might hold some of his body heat in. She was cold in her T-shirt, but she could stand it. “Can you stand up?”

  “Just leave me here. I’m ready to meet the Lord.”

  “You are not going to meet the Lord in this shabby state. Now get on your feet. March!” She felt bad about bullying him, but she couldn’t think of any other way to get him back to safety. She didn’t dare leave him alone to summon help. He might just roll back into the creek.

  That was when she heard something crashing through the underbrush toward them. She’d lost her stick. She groped around for something to use as a weapon. Just as her hand closed over a rock, John-Michael strode into view, drenching wet.

  “Dad?”

  Thank God. “He’s in a bad way, John-Michael. We have to get him warm. I think he might be suffering from hypothermia.”

  “Sonya, what are you doing here?” But even as he asked, he was hauling his father to his feet in a way that indicated to Sonya he’d done it a time or two before. “Come on, Dad,” he said gently, not angry as Jock had predicted, though the anger might come later once Jock was out of danger.

  Between them they were able to walk Jock back to the gardener’s cottage. The Patterson estate had never seemed so large, the distances so vast as they did that night while they inched toward their go
al. Finally they were inside the door, which, thank goodness, Jock never locked. John-Michael flipped on the lights and cranked up the heat.

  The cottage was neat as a starched white shirt—except for the debris sitting on the coffee table in the living room. An empty bottle of Johnny Walker, a half-empty flask of peppermint schnapps, and several empty cans of Old Milwaukee, all testament to the binge.

  “Jeez, Dad…”

  “Let’s get him into a warm shower,” Sonya said. Recriminations could come later.

  “I can handle this,” John-Michael said. “I’ve done it before.”

  Sonya was being dismissed. But rather than feel affronted, she saw what was happening. John-Michael was embarrassed, humiliated, by his father’s behavior.

  She didn’t argue with him. She simply said, “I’ll help you get him to the bathroom.”

  Jock was singing now, some Irish ditty. He clearly wasn’t feeling any physical pain, but that didn’t mean he was out of danger. They lugged him to the bathroom and tugged Sonya’s raincoat off him.

  “Is this your coat?”

  “Yes. He needed it worse than me.”

  John-Michael turned on warm water in the shower and dragged Jock into the stall still wearing his cutoff shorts. He quieted down when the hot water hit him. “Ah, that feels good,” he murmured.

  Sonya retreated from the bathroom, allowing Jock some privacy. She went into his bedroom, found a pair of clean pajamas and laid them out on the bed, which was neatly made up with fluffy pillows and a down comforter. Jock was quite a fastidious man when he wasn’t drinking.

  She felt terrible about him falling off the wagon. Something awful must have happened between him and Muffy. Jock had said something about his heart being broken. Was it possible he’d been carrying a torch for his employer? She thought about all the beautiful flower arrangements he’d created for Muffy during her recovery, and considered that it might be true. And maybe he’d finally gotten the courage to say something, and Muffy had shot him down.

  But why, then, had Muffy been so distraught?

  Chapter Ten

  When John-Michael judged that his father had had enough of the hot shower, he turned off the water and handed him a huge, fluffy blue towel. Jock was alert enough to daub at himself with the towel and rub his hair with it, then wrap it around his shoulders.