“Horace has brought you a small pot of coffee. Shall I serve you some?” George asked.
At her nod, he poured her a cup of Horace’s bracing brew and himself a tot of cognac. All his moves were careful, practiced. He’d been taking lessons from the Lighthouse for the Blind in “the avoidance of making a total ass of oneself,” as he called it.
He was philosophical about his predicament: if he had to go blind, he said, at least the cause was something more exotic than simple old age. He had contracted river blindness while tromping around the Amazonian wilderness of Brazil. Yet he wouldn’t have given up a moment of his world-trekking, even if the eventual price could have been predicted.
“I received an interesting telephone call today,” he said after toasting her health. “From Liza Ridley, the daughter of Forrest Ridley.”
“One of your old partners.”
“Yes, I thought you might remember him.”
“Not very clearly. But I remember your talking about his work,” Sam said.
“Always solid and sometimes brilliant. Anyway, I’ve known young Liza since she was a twinkle in Forrest’s eye, and I’m very fond of her. Bright girl. Different. Gives her mother fits, I’m sure.”
“Sounds like a young lady after my own heart.”
“I suspected you’d think so. That’s why I thought I’d ask you to do me this favor.”
Sam cocked a finger at him. “Pow!” she said. She should have known George was up to something.
He smiled and continued, “Liza said she didn’t know who else to talk to about this. She thinks her father is missing or in some kind of trouble. Seems he calls her every Saturday morning over at Agnes Scott College, where she’s a senior, and they make their bets with one another on the weekend ball games. This is the second Saturday in a row he’s missed.”
“Why doesn’t she just call him at home?” Sam suggested.
“He’s not at home. She said her mother, Queen—I don’t know if you ever met her—Queen told her he’s away on business.”
“Queen?”
“Queen.”
“Of the Bitsie, Bootsie, Muffy, Muggsie school?” Even though she’d grown up with them, Sam had always found these WASP nicknames ridiculous.
“The same genre.”
“So why doesn’t Queen’s word take care of it?”
“Ridley’s never failed to call her before, even when he was out of the country. It seems this betting business is something they’ve done together since Liza was a little girl.”
“Only child?”
“Yes. And the apple of Forrest’s eye. Even though Liza, as I said, is a most unexpected product of the Ridley environment, a bit of a bohemian. He dotes on her.”
“Why doesn’t she get her father’s number from her mother and just call him?” Sam asked.
“Liza said Queen was rather vague about exactly where he is. San Francisco, she said, but wasn’t forthcoming with a phone number.”
“Sounds like a family matter to me, George. And more than a little silly. I know you’ve always loved doing these bits of skulking around when the Four Hundred wanted their dirty linen kept private, but this doesn’t seem worth your trouble. Forrest Ridley will probably call tomorrow, and it’ll all be over.”
“Maybe.” George was thoughtful. “Maybe not.”
Sam leaned forward and played with her coffee spoon, keeping her hands busy the way reformed smokers do when they’d rather be puffing on a cigarette. “Do you suspect something?”
“I don’t know. Ridley’s such a straight shooter, such a dependable man. I find this a bit odd.”
“Your antennae working overtime?”
“Maybe. In any case, I’ve arranged for you to visit with Queen Ridley tomorrow.”
“What? Me?” Sam sat up straight. “George! I don’t have time for this. Have you forgotten I have a job?”
“Were you going in to the office tomorrow?” A five-year-old child couldn’t have asked the question with less guile.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. I’m going to talk to Hoke about this sheriff business. And just because I work my own hours, George, does not mean that you should make appointments for me!”
“My dear, I’m very sorry.”
With that, George rubbed his eyes with a weary gesture. Then he looked up at her with a face so contrite that she was suddenly embarrassed at her flare of temper. This was George, her beloved George. How could she deny him such a small favor?
“Oh, no, I’m sorry.” She reached over and patted his hand. “I didn’t mean to be so sharp. Of course I’ll do it for you.”
“Good.” He grinned, his expression just the tiniest bit triumphant.
And Samantha realized that she had been bamboozled by one of the wiliest of that most conniving, finagling breed of cat, the Southern lawyer.
“Damn you!”
“Ah, ah, ah.” He waggled a finger at her. “Too late. A promise is a promise.”
*
An hour later Sam sat in her bedroom before her dressing table mirror, toweling dry her dark curls. She leaned over and peered at her face, pulling with a forefinger at the corner of one eye. “Still holding, old girl,” she said aloud to her reflection. She chalked up her preservation to good genes, lots of sleep, eight glasses of water a day, and miles of fast walking.
The spacious yellow and white rectangular room, formerly the sun porch, was her favorite in this second-floor apartment—her old digs, which were still being refurbished. Peaches and Horace were above on the third floor, next to the attic studio George had let out for a long time to an artist friend. Sam liked the feeling of being in the middle, once again smack in the bosom of her family.
“I made the right decision in coming back, Harpo,” she said to the small white Shih Tzu who was lying belly-up on the carpet. He was giving her the look that meant she’d take him for a late-night walk if she were really a good person.
She picked him up and gave him a nuzzle. “In a little while. Hold on.”
Then she glanced from the small dog to the silver framed photograph of Sean O’Reilly that sat on her dressing table. It was Sean who had given her Harpo when the puppy was only a fluff-ball.
It had been the death of Sean, the chief of detectives in San Francisco and her lover, which had caused her to return to Atlanta. Yes, there’d been the fortuitous invitation at about the same time from the Constitution, too; the paper had made the deal very sweet. But she would have flown to the consoling arms of George even without the offer.
What irony—that she, who had almost killed herself with booze during her twenties but had been sober for almost ten years, should lose the man she loved to a drunk driver. The tragedy had felt like a replay of her parents’ deaths. Afraid she was going crazy, afraid of being tempted by the bottle, she’d known it was time to go home again. Nowhere else in the world offered such comfort.
Harpo picked up his rubber carrot, dropped it on her foot, and growled. Playtime was the only time he ever spoke.
“Here, silly.” She threw the toy to the other end of the long room. The dog chased it, then sat down beside it and stared at her.
“Fetch.”
He didn’t budge.
“Rotten. Spoiled rotten.”
She walked to the other end of the room, picked up the little dog, then turned and gazed out the window across the street toward the Talbot house. She stayed there, her attention focused.
Lights were on downstairs, in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Miriam Talbot was probably finishing up her dinner dishes. Sam’s eye traveled up the red brick to the second floor. All was dark there, including the front room on the left, which she’d spent her entire nineteenth summer watching, the bedroom that had belonged to Miriam Talbot’s son, Beau.
“Son-of-a-bitch!”
The words startled her, as if someone else had spoken. Harpo squirmed and stared up at her.
“Not you,” she told him, laughing, and put him down on the floor.
<
br /> But she kept standing there. She threw open the multi-paned casement window and took a deep breath of the evening air. She closed her eyes and thought she could almost smell Miriam’s roses. Beau had once blanketed her with those roses. At that thought, an ancient pain twisted in her gut.
It was amazing. Almost twenty years had passed since Beau had broken her young girl’s heart and caused her to flee Atlanta. All that water under the bridge. She smiled wryly. All that branch water and all that bourbon. All the faces. All the other bodies she’d awakened to. All the roller-coaster ups and downs and all the long, flat, dry spaces. And still she could stand at this window and look across the street to where she’d met Dr. Beau Talbot, the too-handsome intern home for the summer before he began his New York residency, and feel exactly the same emotions. The excitement. The rush. The exhilaration. And the thrumming, drumming pain.
She clutched the window sash. Jesus! Was it always going to be the same? When she was eighty and wrinkled into some apple-doll caricature of her younger self, would all her emotions remain in place? Not just about Beau, but the same jealousies, loves, hates, the same messy mishmash of emotions one felt about oneself and other members of the human race? Well, why not? She couldn’t remember it ever being any different since she remembered feeling at all; the basic sense of self, the voice inside her head, had always been the same.
Now that voice found words once more, and she threw them out into the April night.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” she yelled, slammed the window shut for punctuation, and stood there grinning. Well, now, that felt better.
She hadn’t yelled all those years ago. She’d pulled her blanket over her head and moaned. It had taken George and Peaches days to get the story out of her. Beau had changed his mind. No, he didn’t want her to follow him to New York, to transfer to NYU. He didn’t want her at all. There was another girl. Someone he’d met before, in Boston. He didn’t know how it had happened; he hadn’t meant for it to. They were getting married right away. He was sorry.
Two weeks later and ten pounds lighter, she had climbed out of her bed and begun to pack. Her destination wasn’t New York, but rather the opposite coast.
“It’s too late to get into Stanford,” George had protested.
Sam had given him a look that said she knew he could help her do anything he wanted. And he could. He’d made the calls and pulled the strings even as he’d argued, insisting there was no reason for her to leave.
But there was. Everywhere she turned, Samantha had run into Beau’s ghost. Every place they had ever been during that long, delicious summer was perfumed with their scent and echoed with the sound of their leftover laughter. No, she couldn’t stay in Atlanta.
“I have to, I must,” she’d said again and again, even as she and George and Peaches piled into that year’s Lincoln and Horace drove them to the airport. All the way to San Francisco she’d hummed under her breath Janis Joplin’s paean to pain, “A Little Piece of My Heart.” Janis had known what she was talking about.
Now Samantha was back.
She’d come home.
It wasn’t the first time, of course. She’d dropped in for occasional brief visits during her California sojourn—just long enough to say hello and good-bye and register the changes.
Atlanta. It had changed. And yet … Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. She was only now beginning to discover the static places and the fluid. Whole neighborhoods had disappeared to satisfy the appetite of the freeway monster. There were more Yankee voices. And there were newcomers on the North Side who had never even been downtown. But the Varsity still made chili dogs. Manners still counted. And the television preachers still had an audience, as did the fulminating racists—in a town that was now 60 percent black and well into its second black mayor. Ah, Atlanta. Was she too Yankee for it now? Could their respective changes find a common ground? Discovering the answers to those questions was going to be interesting.
During those years away when people asked her, as they were wont to do, “Why did you leave the South?” she’d answered flippantly, as was her wont, “Because of a summer romance. Because of a broken heart.” She’d said that for years and years and years, long past the time, perhaps, when she should have forgotten.
But this was not a thing that Sam would forget or ever take lightly. She’d come to live in this house when her parents had died. It was Beau’s desertion that had banished her. Now Sean was gone, and she had returned. She stared out at the house where Beau had once lived and heard the old music come back. She softly whistled the refrain to Joplin’s “Ball and Chain.”
Of course, Beau wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed away for so long. Things began, and then they kept rolling. At Stanford, on the rebound, she’d found and married, then later divorced, her bearded draft resister. She’d floated along on that river of bourbon and branch water. Year followed year and things got better and things got worse and then better again, and she’d become Sam Adams, Renowned Girl Reporter. She’d found success and she’d found Sean, and then, hell—it was a life. Which she certainly hadn’t lived in California just to avoid Beau Talbot. Why, she hadn’t known for ages that he had moved back home—and become the state’s chief medical examiner.
She turned from the window and plopped herself once again before her dressing table mirror.
She was going to run into him. It was only a matter of time. An investigative reporter could no more avoid a medical examiner than pigs could fly—not unless, of course, she gave up on murder. But murder was her specialty.
Sam’s series on a serial killer in San Francisco had won her journalistic prizes, had earned her the reputation that had gotten her this cushy spot on the Constitution, naming her own stories, answering only to the managing editor.
Yet she’d heard herself telling George recently that she was thinking about pursuing other avenues, leaving the blood and gore to some other reporter. She’d had her bellyful of middle-of-the-night morgue visits, of psychopaths, of interviewing families who were neck-deep in grief.
George had nodded when she told him all this. And she knew that he knew that she was lying through her teeth.
Two
The first time Samantha had stepped into managing editor Hoke Toliver’s office, he’d stubbed out one of the hundred cigarettes he would smoke that day and said, “Dammit, there are so frigging many reasons I can’t sleep with you.”
It was an interesting beginning, Sam thought, not that she hadn’t heard some doozies in her time. “Shoot,” she’d said. “I’ll admit I’m curious.”
“How old are you?”
“In the 35-to-40 ozone. None of your business.”
“See, I knew you were younger than Lois.”
“Lois?”
“My wife.”
“Lois doesn’t like you sleeping with younger women?”
“Nope. Makes her crankier than a prom queen with a fresh zit on her nose.”
“Well, that’s one,” Sam had remarked.
“Two, I saw you across the room at a meeting last week, and I promised myself I’d never sleep with anybody in the program.”
“Which one?”
“Which one what?”
“Which A.A. meeting?”
“The one at St. Philip’s.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I know.” He’d pulled his mouth down at the corners, run one hand through the first crew cut she’d seen since the late fifties, and with the other hauled up his sagging pants. “I was sitting over in smoking, hiding my stupefyingly good looks under a bushel, ’cause I didn’t want you to get distracted from the qualifying speaker.”
“Fat chance,” she’d said.
Not that he wasn’t good-looking; he was, in a crew-cut, hound-doggish sort of way. But at that particular meeting, the woman who had been talking about her experiences with alcohol could have stood off Joan Rivers in mouth-to-mouth combat.
“So if you don’t find fresh meat at meetings,
and I assume you don’t hang out in bars anymore, where do you find the lucky darlings?”
He’d tweaked his own jowls, which flapped in the lingering blue haze in his office, lit another cigarette, and answered, “At my health club.”
Samantha had to laugh.
“The third reason is that you’re smarter than I am. Or that’s what the new boss-man, the one we imported all the way from New York, says.”
“Does, does he?”
“Yep. Says you’re the smartest thing he’s ever seen in a skirt.”
“Or out—” She’d caught herself, but Hoke was far too fast. He was already grinning as he said, “Yep, out of one, too. And I imagine Mr. Boss’s seen some real smart skirtless women up there in New York.”
Samantha knew better than to rise to that kind of bait, particularly since she knew that Hoke was, in more ways than one, blowing smoke. But she hadn’t been able to resist.
“Did it ever occur to you that there’s a fourth reason we might not sleep together?”
“Yep, I did think that like every other smart woman, you might occasionally have an extraordinary moment of the dumbs when you might choose to pass up such a stud hoss as myself, but I figured it’d pass. You’d get over it.”
*
Sam was standing in his office now. “Hoke, I want to do a series on the corruption of rural sheriffs.”
“’Scuse me,” he said, hitting himself on one ear. “I thought you said you wanted to commit suicide. I must have misunderstood you, right?”
Samantha flopped down in the reasonable facsimile of a wooden chair that sat before his battered desk. “Why is everybody so skittish on this subject?”
“Like who?”
“Like my Uncle George.”
“I’ve always respected George Adams’s judgment. One of the finest barristers the South has ever known. Question is, why’re you here seeking a second opinion?” He lit one cigarette off another. “Now, why don’t you mosey on over to Macon and do something with that mother-raper’s been working the fancy neighborhoods? Be a lot safer. And get you the front page.”
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