by Lynda Trent
Regina was making her way toward Clare.
“Hello, Regina. Howard.”
Howard made an embarrassed motion of wiping his fingers on his greasy napkin before engulfing her hand in his. “So sorry, Clare. So very sorry.” His wife nodded coolly in but Clare noticed with guilty satisfaction that Regina ‘s eyes were as red as if she had shed real tears.
“Thank you, Howard. It was so sudden. The doctor assured me that Elliot died at once.”
Regina shuddered in spite of herself. “Such a terrible way to die. He was so proud of learning to fly. And the Cessna ‘s are supposed to be so safe. I suppose we’ll never know what happened.”
At once Clare recalled the day was it only two days ago that she had gone out to surprise Elliot at the airstrip. As she watched him approach in his landing pattern, he had suddenly nosed up again, high into the sky. The plane had made a long, graceful loop, its engine purring in perfect order. Then Elliot had flown straight into the ground.
Clare’s hands still bore cuts from where she had gripped the chain-link fence in those panic-filled moments as she watched the huge ball of flames beneath the black, black smoke.
Elliot’s death had not been accidental, but she alone knew it. She wondered numbly if the insurance company would be able to discover that her husband’s death was, in fact, suicide. Not that she wanted to defraud anyone, but the money would be a godsend. It would be enough to put her back on her feet. Unless, of course, Elliot had cashed in the policy without telling her. It seemed unlikely that a man so desperate for money would continue to pay for life insurance. Clare pushed the thought from her mind.
“No, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what happened,” she said levelly. “Are you finding everything, Howard? I see Betty’s put out some fruitcake and poundcake on the side table.” Clare nodded to where her maid was working efficiently. “Go help yourself.” She moved away to speak to the other guests, but not before she overheard Regina ‘s comment that Clare must have ice in her veins to be so composed. Clare forced herself not to acknowledge the barb.
Marla came to her carrying a plate of food. “Here’s some more chicken. Where should I put it?”
“Take it out to the kitchen. The table’s too full to hold another plate.”
“Why do people always bring fried chicken and poundcake?” Maria wondered. “Even when I was a little girl, people did that.”
“Tradition, I suppose.” Clare’s expression saddened at the recollection of the only other funerals she had attended her mother’s and her father’s. Before she could shake off the emotion, first one, then another tear coursed down the soft curve of her cheek and came to rest at the corner of her sensuous lips, which were tightly drawn in an effort to maintain control. In Clare’s twenty-five years, she had seen more sadness than most people twice her age. It had been only two tears, but she carefully turned away from her guests and discreetly extracted a small lace handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed away the evidence from her luminous gray eyes.
“Clare? Is everything okay?” Marla asked.
“Sure. Everything is fine,” Clare answered with a broad smile.
Clare caught the disapproving stare of two old ladies with blue-gray hair and quickly smoothed the smile from her face. She had no wish to be accused of insensitivity again.
What’s wrong with me? she wondered. My husband is barely in the ground and I’m worried about hurting my reputation by smiling! But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t summon up a bit of sadness over Elliot… only frustrated anger at being left alone and penniless.
And worry. The deep-seated, gnawing worry that she hadn’t known for four years. The kind of worry her mother had shown when there were more bills than money and her disabled father was unable to work. The kind of worry that Clare had thought she was safe from forever.
The cut-velvet couches were never empty of people; crystal ashtrays filled and were emptied by Betty and filled again. The food on the huge rosewood table dwindled, then was gone, and the crowd overflowed in solemn decorum into the broad entryway and paneled den.
Now and then, one of the men, forgetting the circumstance that brought them together, would laugh aloud, then choke with embarrassment at his breach of manners. Everywhere she looked, Clare saw studiedly solemn faces and somber manners that befitted the occasion.
Somehow she managed to live through the afternoon.
By the time the preacher excused himself, dusk was falling. As if on cue, all the other mourners followed him. Once again the older women clutched Clare to their bosoms and the younger women squeezed her hands one last time. The men mumbled self-conscious condolences once more. All assured her that it was both a shame and the Lord’s will, then left.
Clare followed the last couple to the door and leaned against the white wood frame. In the deep shadow of the porch, the evening breeze was cool, and she could hear the cicadas calling for rain.
The inky latticework of the oil derrick on her front lawn, silhouetted against the rosy sky, looked like a prehistoric monster in the gloom; its pump was long since stilled. Elliot’s father had made his money in the Great Oil Boom of the early 1930’s. Even when the wells went dry, he let them remain like relics of the past. They had supplied his fortune and he had built his mansion in their shadows. In time, most of the derricks had been removed. This one remained as a monument to the fortune gained, and now lost, by two generations of Marshalls.
Clare stepped back into the house and firmly closed the heavy door. The maid was moving busily around the room, straightening the furniture, cleaning ashtrays and removing the last vestiges of food and drink.
“Don’t worry about that tonight,” Clare said. “I’ll take the plates and glasses into the kitchen, and tomorrow we can air out the tobacco smoke. I know you need to get home.”
“Won’t take me but a minute. I can’t leave wet glasses to circle up a good table.” Betty firmly pursed her lips as she wiped a ring of water from the marble-topped end table. Betty had worked for Marshalls all her adult life, as had her mother before her. Her proprietary kinship to the house was obvious, and she looked after it as if it were her own.
“Thanks, Betty. What would I ever do without you?” Clare stacked three saucers and wiped the crumbs onto the top one. “You’d think grown people would know not to make such a mess, wouldn’t you?”
Betty snorted. “Some folks can’t be taught nothing.” She fished a crust of bread out of the folds of an armchair. “Not nothing at all.”
Clare glanced nervously at the dark-skinned older woman. In view of her new financial straits, she should do her own housekeeping, but she wasn’t sure how to fire someone who had been a part of the household for so long. “Betty, I need to talk to you,” she said uncertainly.
“Ain’t got time now,” Betty said gruffly as she shoved a chair back in a practiced move that stopped it two inches short of hitting the wall. “I got to go cook Eldon’s supper.”
Clare frowned. Eldon, Betty’s husband, was the gardener. Gardeners were also luxuries, but Clare knew she wouldn’t be able to take care of three acres of landscaped lawn and the house as well.
“Besides, I got to talk to you first,” Betty continued without looking at Clare. “Me and Eldon, we’re getting old. Slowing down. I told him the other day, I said, ‘Eldon, we can’t do all we used to.’ He allowed as how I was right. I told him we sure was lucky to have us a place to live yonder over the garage. He said that was true. Fact is, Miss Clare, we don’t need all that salary you been paying us. We up and die, who’s that money gonna go to? Don’t make no sense.” She shook the folds of the pale blue curtains back into the correct line and found the coffee cup that was almost hidden behind them. “Me and Eldon can get by fine on a whole lot less a month.” Finally, she met Clare’s eyes.
Clare stared at her, then blushed. Without meeting her eyes, she said, “I gather you know about my… problems?”
“Of course I do,” Betty answered gruffly as she flic
ked ashes off a marble-topped table and into an ashtray.
“How… did you…?” Clare stammered unable to ask the question. Surely her financial straits weren’t common knowledge already!
“Lordy, child, I raised Mr. Elliot! I knowed that boy before he was out of diapers. When I noticed things commencing to go missing, I asked him about it, and he allowed as how he was in need of money. He knowed he couldn’t never keep nothing from me. Came right out and said he owed it to some gambling man, though he didn’t never speak his name. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell nobody. Said he’d get ever’ thing straightened out himself. Wouldn’t be no need to bother you or tell no one nothing about it.”
Clare turned away to hide her embarrassment, her cheeks aflame. “I’m so ashamed, Betty.”
“Miss Clare, it ain’t nothing for you to be ashamed about. It was Mr. Elliot’s fault. Don’t nobody else know. I kept my word to him. It’s nobody else’s business what goes on in this house. Never was. Never will be. You’ll get back on your feet after a bit, young as you are. You’ll see.”
Clare was touched by the honest. concern on Betty’s wrinkled face. “I understand. Let’s keep things as they are for now. Maybe none of us will have to get by on less. I’ve decided to let Lily go, though. With just myself to cook for, it seems silly to keep her on.”
Betty nodded. “Sounds good to me. She always was a hard one to get along with.” She gave a last swipe with her cloth over the French provincial mantelpiece. “I’ll be getting on now, before Eldon tries to cook for himself and burns the garage down.”
“All right. And, Betty… thanks.”
Clare realized she shouldn’t be surprised or concerned that Betty and Eldon were aware of the sad state of the Marshall finances. After all, they had watched Elliot grow from the cradle up, and had known him as well or better than she had. She was confident her secret was safe with them.
Left alone in the house, Clare carried the saucers she still held into the kitchen. Most of her friends would have insisted that Betty stay until the house was clean. But Clare had a need to do something useful; something to make her life seem real again.
She tied a towel around her small waist, as she had seen her mother do, and ran water into the sink. By the time she finished washing the dishes and had placed the last dried cup into the china cabinet, it seemed like her world was easing back into place.
As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, a healthy tiredness was settling on her. For a moment, she paused outside Elliot’s room. They had not even shared a bedroom for over a year. Somehow that seemed to be the saddest thought she had had all day. It had been even longer than that since Elliot had touched her.
Tears glistened in her eyes and trembled on the fringe of her long eyelashes. At last, she gave way to her pent-up emotions, and sobbed as if her heart would burst.
Chapter Two
In New Orleans, several hundred miles away, a tall man walked through the cloying scent of magnolia blossoms to meet his girlfriend. Dore Armound wasn’t his steady girl nor anyone else’s but earlier on this balmy evening, the musky scent of flowers from his small courtyard had brought her to his mind. Then, when she had called him on the telephone, almost as if she were in tune with his thoughts, he’d agreed to meet her.
Ryan Hastings paused in the yellow glow of a street light, his physique casting a long shadow. The handsome man’s powerful broad shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and the hard muscles of his chest could be seen beneath the fabric of his open-collared shirt. The high cheekbones, straight nose and firm-set jaw of his well-tanned face bespoke his strength and determination, while the laugh wrinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes revealed his innate tenderness. His thick, golden-brown hair, the shade of sun-ripened wheat, had been tousled by the warm night breeze, giving him a boyish appearance.
Yet Ryan Hastings, at thirty-five, was almost legendary in the Louisiana oil fields. Straight out of high school he had gone to work for the small but expanding Huntly Oil Company as a roughneck in the Louisiana fields. He’d alternated his college semesters at LSU with long, grueling hours on the rigs. Not long after graduating, he’d become Huntly’s head geologist. His track record had been excellent and most of his innovative ideas had been well-received, and highly profitable for Huntly Oil. However, recently Ryan had run into stiff opposition with his theory that oil was yet to be discovered in the old, nearly depleted, East Texas oil field near Kilgore. Huntly’s chief engineer, one of Ryan’s staunchest supporters, had cautioned him to back off before anyone noticed he had his head full of drilling mud. But Ryan had studied the history of the field, and its known geology of faults and salt domes near the surface, and what little he could find out about the two new “routine” exploration wells being quietly and deeply drilled by a subsidiary of Exxon.
Ryan was certain that just below twenty thousand feet lay a huge reserve of oil, even larger than the giant discovery in the Woodbine sand in the ‘s.
This morning, he’d decided the time was right. The most recent Middle East crisis had the oil industry stirred up again, and the “Old Man” had appeared to be in a receptive mood. But Ryan wasn’t even allowed to finish his presentation. The company president hastened to explain that the deep well Ryan proposed was much too risky and, with money being so tight, it would be a mistake for Huntly to get in too quickly. Ryan was allowed one concession, however. He was told not to stop his study on the idea and was authorized to go to East Texas and lease a little land if it felt right.
The ultra-conservative stand Huntly had taken had left Ryan cold. By the end of the work day, he’d begun to toy with the idea of wildcatting the well himself. The prospect of drilling his own well had always fascinated him, but he had to be realistic. Getting investors would be the problem, he reasoned. Even though he’d inherited a great deal of money and was well-paid professionally, he hardly had a spare million to test his theory. So Ryan temporarily shelved the idea of going out on his own.
All in all, his day had not been easy. As he walked along the deserted street, his thoughts returned to Dore. It had
been almost two months since he’d last seen her, and his step quickened a little. At least he had no illusions about the reception she’d give him. Dore had a interest in physical pleasure… which Ryan had-never found cause to dispute. He smiled ruefully. In fact, there were a lot of rumors about and her social life.
Ryan stepped off the sidewalk and slipped into the dusky bushes that shielded their usual rendezvous. This was a typical ploy of hers. Though her father liked Ryan, she preferred the cloak-and-dagger thrill of clandestine meetings.
As he’d suspected, she wasn’t in the small clearing. It was all part of her game. With a somewhat irritated sigh, Ryan sat on a moonlight-silvered log and leaned back against a tree. As on the most recent occasions, he began to question why he was there. Certainly Dore was no intellectual giant. He found their ran conversations awkward and dull. It certainly wasn’t the melodrama she wrapped about her he found that tedious in the extreme. Her devious ways of playing him against his friends in return for sexual favors was infuriating. Even her alluring body and the love tricks she had so efficiently perfected were quickly losing their appeal. Ryan glanced at his watch. Perhaps she wasn’t coming at all. With a feeling of growing annoyance, he rose to leave.
At that instant, Dore rushed into the clearing and ran into the circle of his arms.
”Were you there all along?” Ryan asked suspiciously. “You aren’t even out of breath.”
Dore ignored the question, burying her head against his muscular chest so that the heady scent of her perfume was unavoidable. She raised her chin to look up at him. Her night-black eyes, which he had once found so enticing, appeared concerned. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come. I had a hard time slipping out of the house. Papa almost saw me.”
Ryan moved her body back from his, gently but firmly. “Dore, I’ve been thinking. I don’t think we should”
“Ryan, I’m pr
egnant.”
For a moment, the words made no sense to him. “What?” he finally asked.
“I said I’m pregnant.”
Ryan stared down at her in confusion. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Why, because you’re the father, of course.” She gazed up at him with artful innocence.
Ryan looked blankly at her as if her words held no meaning. “I can’t be. We haven’t been together since…” he thought a minute, then concluded, “late May.”
“It was June,” she purred, “and I’m certain.”
“No, I was in the field all during June, working on the offshore Colter rig.”
Her black eyes flashed with anger and she stomped her foot like a spoiled child. “All right then, it was May. Anyway, I’m pregnant, and you have to marry me. Soon!”
Marry! Ryan looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Look, if I were the father, I’d marry you, but I was out of town in June. Was it Harry? Or Bill? Tell me who it really is, and I’ll go talk to him for you.”
“May, Juneso I made a mistake! You aren’t getting off that easy! This baby is yours, Ryan Hastings! And you’ve got to do the right thing by me!” Hysteria was creeping into her voice, and her pretty face looked crumpled.
Marry Dore The most blatantly promiscuous woman he had ever met? Ryan frowned. Could she possibly be telling him the truth for once? “Look, I don’t think”
“Think!” she interrupted furiously. “You sure didn’t do much thinking all those times you went to bed with me! Did you?” Her voice had risen to a shriek and her already pale skin was chalk-white against her black hair.
Ryan frowned but made no reply. She was right. He’d never thought of a baby when he’d been busy with her sensuous body.