Breath of Scandal

by Sandra Brown

  Hutch deliberated over whether to tell her the truth or what she wanted to hear. He had to admit either to rape or to lusting for her best friend. It was a no-win situation. “Course it wasn’t rape,” he mumbled. “She knew us. How could it be rape?”

  “Did she try and stop you?”

  His wide shoulders rose and fell in a heavy shrug. “She, uh… you know how some girls say they don’t want it when they really do?”

  Donna Dee looked away. “Did you want her, Hutch? I mean, you must have wanted to do that with her or you couldn’t have gotten hard.”

  He shifted his big feet on the living-room carpet. “It wasn’t like that, Donna Dee. Swear to God. It was… it was crazy. Hell, I don’t know how else to explain it.” In an impatient gesture, he spread his hands wide, palms up. “It wasn’t like I suddenly made up my mind to fuck Jade, okay?”

  “Okay.” Donna Dee took a tremulous breath and released it slowly. “I always thought she had lied about y’all forcing her. She just came on so strong, you couldn’t help yourself, right? You’re human. You’re a man. A man can only take so much.”

  He disregarded her rapidly blinking eyes just as she disregarded the beads of perspiration on his upper lip. Neither was being honest, but, for their peace of mind, it was imperative that they continue deceiving each other and themselves.

  At their wedding reception, Neal sidled up to Hutch and whispered, “I can highly recommend the maid of honor.”

  “That’s Donna Dee’s first cousin.”

  “I don’t care whose cousin she is, she screws like a rabbit.” Neal poked him in the ribs. “Think how much fun you can have at the family reunions.”

  “You’re crazy,” Hutch growled, shrugging off the companionable arm Neal had draped across his shoulders.

  “Hey, my man. Is this marriage gonna cramp your style? I’d hate like hell to see that happen.”

  In that instant, Hutch decided to be faithful to his wife. No matter how they whitewashed it to make it acceptable to their consciences, Donna Dee had lied to get him out of a rape charge. Her jealousy of Jade was justified, though neither of them had ever acknowledged that, either. They were bound by a common sin that he didn’t want to compound by being an unfaithful husband. Considering the hardship they had caused Jade, fidelity wasn’t too high a price to pay.

  Following their honeymoon trip to Hilton Head Island, Hutch had worked in his daddy’s sheriff’s department until it was time to report to team workouts. Donna Dee was eager to set up household in Columbia. In his opinion, her nesting instinct was overactive. Last night, while they were unpacking delicate china in a room with cinderblock walls, she had informed him of her plans to cut down on her class load.

  “We’ll save the money we’d spend on my tuition. Anyway, I’m no brain, Hutch. What will I do with humanities and biology? I know all I need to know about that, right?” She reached out and playfully squeezed his balls.

  “You’re still taking your pills, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  He noticed that she didn’t look him in the eye when she answered. “Because the last thing we need right now is a kid to take care of.”

  “I know that, silly.”

  “I promised my folks that I wouldn’t drop out of school if we got married. The courses I’ve got to take this year are tough. The coach is on my ass for not digging in and hustling. I can’t take on any more responsibilities right now.”

  She set aside what she was doing, put her arms around him, and kissed him slowly. “After all I’ve done for you, don’t you know that your happiness always comes first with me?”

  There it was again—that subtle reminder that she had stuck out her neck for him when he had desperately needed it. For the rest of their lives together, was that guilty secret going to serve as a rate of exchange? That dismal thought had plagued him through the night and brought him to Neal’s door this afternoon. Being with Neal and Lamar was like returning to the scene of the crime. It was also like probing a sore tooth. The more he did it, the more it bothered him. The problem was, he couldn’t stop it.

  “So, how is Donna Dee?” Lamar asked him now. “I haven’t seen her since your wedding.” The marijuana had mellowed Lamar. He was sprawled in a chair, one slender leg dangling over the padded armrest.

  “She’s fine. She said to tell y’all hi.”

  Neal took out an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels and twisted off the lid, then, he took a swig straight from the bottle. “You told Donna Dee you were coming here?”

  “Sure.”

  “And she trusts you with us?” Neal crowed. “She’s even dumber than I thought.”

  Hutch saw red. He shot to his feet. “She’s not so dumb. She says that you’re full of shit, and I believe she’s right.” He headed for the door.

  Neal rolled out of his chair and stepped in front of Hutch, blocking his path. “Don’t go away mad,” he said soothingly. “I was just pricking you for the hell of it. Stick around. A few Delta Gammas have promised to come over and help us straighten up this place. And that ain’t all they’ll straighten up,” he added with a leer. “They’ll be more than Lamar and I can handle by ourselves.”

  “No, thanks,” Hutch said testily. “I’m going home to my wife.” He tried to sidestep Neal, but, despite the liquor and pot, Neal was still agile and in full command of his senses.

  “Man, are you ever going to get out of her debt?”

  Hutch fell still. “Debt?”

  “Don’t play stupid. I’m talking about repaying Donna Dee for what she did for us.”

  Hutch shot Lamar a quick, guilty glance, but Lamar had averted his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The hell you don’t,” Neal said with a nasty laugh. “You’re trying to repay Donna Dee for lying to save your ass from jail. First you fucked her. Then you married her. Now you’re playing lap puppy.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She could really sink her claws into you if she knew how much you had enjoyed her best friend. Isn’t that right, Lamar?” he asked, glancing at the other boy, who looked miserably uncomfortable. “You and I had a good time, but I believe ol’ Hutch here thought Jade’s box came gift-wrapped just for him.”

  Hutch thrust his homely face down to within inches of Neal’s. “You’re a sick son of a bitch, Neal. I don’t want any more to do with you.”

  He knocked Neal aside and stormed through the door. Lamar called after him, “Hey, Hutch, Neal didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t go.”

  Hutch kept walking and didn’t look back. “You’ll be back,” Neal shouted through the screen door. “You know who owns the candy store. When your sweet tooth starts acting up, you’ll be back.”

  Shortly after Hutch stomped from the house, Lamar retreated to his bedroom, leaving Neal to rant and rave alone. Neal didn’t lose his temper often, but when he did, Lamar was afraid of him. He couldn’t say which frightened him more—Neal’s temper tantrums or his sinister silences. When Neal grew still and quite and his anger simmered inside him like brimstone in the depths of Hades, one could almost smell his fury.

  Lamar hated living in that house, but he lacked the guts to tell Neal so and move out. During summer vacation he had stewed about it. He wished his mother would ask him to switch universities or suggest that he stay at home for a year before continuing his education. He wished for something—anything—that would prevent him from having to live under Neal’s dominion for another year.

  Nothing did, and he had never garnered the courage to tell Neal that he wanted to make other living arrangements. Meekly he had moved his stuff from Palmetto back into the old house they had leased for the second year. Boxes and suitcases were still piled around the walls of his bedroom, waiting to be unpacked. Lacking the initiative, he lay down on the bed and covered his eyes with his forearm. Now that Hutch had walked out, Lamar felt little hope that he could ever escape Neal. If he told Neal he wanted to move elsewhere, there was no telling what he
might do. So, it seemed, he was stuck here.

  It was a ’round-the-clock party. Neal surrounded himself with people who claimed to like him. Lamar suspected that they liked what Neal made available to them more than they liked Neal himself. He also figured that more than a few of them feared offending Neal, just as he did. They were intimidated into accepting his invitations.

  The door to the house was always open to strangers on the lookout for sex, liquor, and soft drugs. The constant stream of pleasure-seeking students afforded Lamar very little privacy. Even when he retreated to his room and closed the door, someone was always stumbling in looking for a bathroom or an empty bed in which to copulate.

  Just thinking about another nine months of incessant revelry made him weary. Neal was jealous of anything that diluted his tyranny over his friends. He demanded absolute loyalty and constant availability. That’s why he had gotten on Hutch’s case today. Neal was actually jealous of Donna Dee for taking up the majority of Hutch’s time.

  He had cut deep by bringing up the incident with Jade. The three of them had tried never to acknowledge that it had happened. Even when Gary Parker hanged himself and Jade and her mother left Palmetto, they avoided linking those incidents to what had taken place out by the channel that cold, dreary evening. Hard as they tried to keep it out of their conversations, however, it always found a way to pop in. Come to think of it, Neal was usually the one to bring it up.

  Was Neal manipulating the incident as he had accused Donna Dee of doing? He triggered their memory of it whenever he wanted something. His reminders of it served to keep them in line. For how long? Lamar wondered. For life? The thought chilled him to the bone. The last thing he wanted was to be on the receiving end of Neal’s ridicule. God forbid that Neal ever find out that he was in love.

  Aside from his reluctance to live with Neal through another two years, he was miserable about leaving behind his newfound love, an eighth-grade English teacher at Palmetto Junior High. They had met by chance at the movies. Their first date had been nothing more romantic than going for coffee after the film, yet they had talked well into the night. For the remainder of the summer they saw each other almost every night. One evening after a drive along the seashore, Lamar had haltingly admitted, “I can’t take you home. I live with my mother.”

  “I’d like to be alone with you, too.”

  They settled on a clandestine meeting in a motel. There, except for the rape of Jade Sperry, Lamar lost his virginity. Because his friends were under the misconception that he’d been having sex for years, he couldn’t destroy the myth and confide in anyone about the greatest night of his life.

  He had been meticulously discreet, which was no small feat when living with Myrajane. It didn’t matter to her that Lamar had already lived away from home for a year; she wanted every minute of his time accounted for. A benevolent angel had prevented her from hearing about the incident involving Jade Sperry. Myrajane had been one of the first to condemn Jade when Gary committed suicide. Knowing the unfairness of that, Lamar had wrestled with his conscience over whether to set his mother straight on a few facts. He had put up only a token struggle, however, and had wisely kept his knowledge to himself.

  To this day, he couldn’t believe that he had had the good fortune to walk away from that unpleasantness unscathed. Feeling as though he were living on borrowed time, he took extra precautions to assure that his mother not find out about his love affair.

  Now, he had two sins on his conscience. One never got off scot-free for his transgressions. Lamar was paying for his secret misdeeds by being condemned to another year under Neal’s tyranny.

  He forced himself to get up and prepare for the evening. He really should unpack before the Delta Gammas arrived. Otherwise, they would put things where he wouldn’t know where to find them. Because Neal expected it, he would get a little stoned, a little drunk, and would probably bring one of the Delta Gammas into his bedroom and have sex.

  His recently adopted philosophy of life was that, in order to survive in the cruel world, one did what one had to do, even if one didn’t like it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Morgantown, South Carolina, 1977—81

  “Boy! Was that exam a bitch or what?”

  Jade smiled up at the fellow student who had fallen into step beside her as she left the science building. “That exam was definitely a bitch.” The steeple chimes struck four o’clock. Trees cast long, slanted shadows across the campus lawn, and frisky autumn leaves tumbled in a brisk, cool wind.

  “Biology’s never been my bag. By the way, I’m Hank Arnett.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Hank. Jade Sperry.”

  “Hi, Jade.” He smiled disarmingly. “So, do you think you passed the exam?”

  “I’m on a scholarship. I have to do better than pass. I have to maintain at least a three-point grade average.”

  He whistled. “That’s tough.”

  “If the sciences aren’t your bag, what is?” she asked conversationally.

  “Art. Give me a Monet over Madame Curie any day. Do you figure Picasso knew or even cared how paramecia procreate?”

  Jade laughed. “I’m a business major.”

  “Hmm.” He raised his eyebrows as though impressed. “With a face like yours, I would have guessed music. Literature, maybe.”

  “Nope, marketing and management.”

  “Jeez, my instincts were way off base. I sure as hell didn’t have you pegged for a future tycoon.”

  She took that as a backhanded compliment. “Well, this is where I turn off.” They stopped at the intersection of two paved sidewalks. “It was nice to meet you, Hank.”

  “Yeah, for me, too. Say, uh, I was going to grab a cup of coffee. How’s that sound?”

  “It sounds good, but I’m on my way to work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’ve really got to run, Hank. ’Bye.” Before he could detain her, she turned and jogged to the parking lot.

  Hank Arnett watched her until she disappeared from view. He had an even temperament, a tall, lanky physique, and a thick Southern drawl. His shoulders were wide and bony, and his thick, wavy, reddish brown hair was frequently pulled back in a pony tail. His affable face wasn’t movie-star handsome, but the twinkle in his brown eyes was engaging. Most of his clothes were flea-market chic, and he wore them with panache without looking effeminate.

  One of his virtues was tenacity. Possessing a good sense of humor, he found the foibles of life more amusing than irritating. During the course of her freshman year at Dander College, Jade would discover that. After their first meeting, Hank fell into the habit of walking her from their biology class to her car. Since it was her final class of the day before she had to report to work, she always had a good excuse for declining his invitations to have coffee. While she liked him very much, she discouraged his subtle overtures toward dating.

  * * *

  As Dean Mitch Hearon had predicted, Miss Dorothy Davis wasn’t the easiest of employers. A maiden lady—and defensively proud of it—she was demanding and persnickety. Her store could outfit females from birth to burial. Miss Dorothy was personally acquainted with every scrap of merchandise in the store and could, by memory, provide a stock number for most of it. Her salespeople were terrified of her.

  Jade’s efficiency and diligence won Miss Dorothy’s approval. She liked her for being a “sensible young person, not like most.” Jade utilized her time at the store wisely, learning all she could about the manufacturing and marketing of clothing and other textile products and the day-to-day trials of running a business.

  She had resolved that in order to irrevocably damage the Patchetts, she would have to attack them on an economic front. She wanted to strip the Patchetts of what was most important to them—money and the influence that accompanied it. She wanted to permanently cripple their power machine. Her ultimate goal was to create in Palmetto an economic upheaval that would benefit the community but overturn the Patchetts’ monarchy. She n
ursed no delusions that it would be easy. She would have to be smart, savvy, and vested with more power than they before she could even attempt it. From now on, everything she did was in preparation of returning and bringing them down. She woke up every morning thinking about it, and fell asleep tasting the victory that was years away.

  If it hadn’t been for Neal, there would have been no rape. He and his father were her central targets. She didn’t intend to let Hutch, Donna Dee, and Lamar off lightly, but they would topple as a consequence of the Patchetts’ destruction.

  Under an assumed name, she subscribed to the Palmetto Post, the daily newspaper, and had it mailed to a post-office box on campus. The newspaper kept her up to date on local news. During the summer she had read the announcement of Donna Dee’s marriage to Hutch. Jade wondered if she had had three bridesmaids all dressed in pink as she had always wanted. She kept the newspapers away from the Hearons’ house for fear that they would discover that she was persona non grata in her hometown. Mitch’s relatives there must be “distant” indeed, because he had no contact with them—no calls or visits, not even birthday cards. The topic had never come up again, but it was months before Jade was able to let go of her fear of discovery. The couple had come to mean so much to her and Graham, and she didn’t want anything to damage their relationship.

  They charged her only fifty dollars a month for room and board, and that had been levied only to spare her pride. Miss Dorothy gave her a 10-percent discount on clothes for herself. But keeping Graham clothed when he was growing so swiftly was expensive, as were his pediatric checkups and inoculations. Every penny counted.

  Because she couldn’t allow anything to jeopardize her job, she wasn’t too pleased when Hank Arnett unexpectedly appeared in Miss Dorothy’s storeroom one afternoon.

  Jade popped erect from the box of velour housecoats she was unpacking. “What are you doing here? Please leave. I’ll lose my job.”

  “Have no fear, Jade. The old girl’s not going to fire you. I told her I had an urgent message for you from your land-lord.”