Hell's Belles

by Alison Claire

  HELL’S BELLES

  Book One

  Alison Claire

  Copyright © 2017 by Alison Claire

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Natasha Snow Designs

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  Contents

  Also by Alison Claire

  CALISTA EMBERS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  JOSEPHINE BERKSHIRE

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  ALETA INDIGO

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  ZILLAH MARCH

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  VIRGINIA EMBERS

  Chapter 21

  PALMER MARTIN

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  MARIE DIXON

  Chapter 24

  ALETA INDIGO MEETS VIRGINIA EMBERS

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  ZILLAH MARCH

  Chapter 27

  VIRGINIA EMBERS

  BRIAR GIVHANS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Alison Claire

  SOUTHERN CHARMED

  CAROLINA CONJURING

  Coming in 2018:

  PALMETTO MAGIC

  PALMETTO MOON

  PALMETTO CURSE

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  To Greg. For believing in me even when I don’t believe in myself. I’ll love you until forever. And beyond.

  CALISTA EMBERS

  Most jobs come with perks; store discounts in retail, free food for waiters, that sort of thing. Zane Holt quickly deduced that the major perk associated with his summer gig cleaning pools for his uncle's company was the scenery. Not the architecture and gardens of the spectacular homes South of Broad that drew the tourists; rather the kind of scenery that filled the bikinis of the trophy wives and their typically stunning daughters as they lounged away sweltering Charleston afternoons, poolside.

  A few of the older guys on the crew described the occasional pool house tryst with lonely ladies of the house, but Zane— despite reasonable good looks and a physique sculpted on the football field at his small Ohio college— didn’t have such luck.

  Admiring the view had been fine for the first few weeks, but his buddies back in the Midwest were demanding photographic evidence, which he'd been more than happy to provide. A digital camera hidden in his work bag could be counted on for some good shots, which he brazenly supplemented with pictures taken directly from his phone, which he camouflaged as texting, when the subjects were particularly jaw-dropping.

  Two of his co-workers faking food poisoning so they could fish the Ashley River had Zane at an unfamiliar address on a late Wednesday morning, and he admired the ornate wrought-iron gate, with the family name "Embers" emblazoned across the top, as he waited to be buzzed into the side entrance of the house.

  The house was typical for the South of Broad area of downtown Charleston, old and elegant, filled with personality and the smell of old money.

  What wasn't typical however, was what he found poolside. Although he'd grown accustomed to being impressed by the beauty of Charleston's women and girls, the sight that greeted him on a chaise lounge next to the Embers' pool was something altogether different.

  Calista Embers was the sort of beautiful that stretched past uncommon. Beyond "the hottest girl in school," further than "she was in pageants," or "she used to do some catalog modeling." Everything about Calista was impeccable, not merely elite among pretty girls, but beauty at its absolute zenith.

  The ordinarily cocky Zane Holt couldn't get his throat clear enough to speak— not for lack of trying— and his hands were actually shaking as he fumbled through his bag and tried to make certain his camera was set just right to inescapably capture the radiant, sun-drenched Calista as he busied himself servicing the pool.

  He threw a few sheepish smiles her way as he worked, and milked his time at the pool all he could, but his presence elicited no reaction at all from Calista, and for all he could tell, she was asleep behind her Lugano sunglasses.

  He was sure he'd gotten some fantastic profile shots of her on the creeper camera hidden in his bag, but he had to have some frontal portraits too, in order to complete his collection. This goddess was worth taking a risk, and he pretended to fumble with his phone from across the pool, zooming in on her as he quickly snapped pictures that would be showing up on the phones of a great many of his Mount Union College teammates, just as soon as he made it back to his truck.

  “SALT LIFE, BITCHES!” was the caption Zane included with the first picture he sent back to school. He constantly talked up his hometown of Charleston, and bragged about the food, weather, and women to his teammates, most of whom knew everything they knew about the South from summer visits to Myrtle Beach or reruns of Dukes of Hazzard.

  There definitely isn’t a girl like this Embers chick anywhere in Ohio, he playfully thought to himself.

  It didn't take long before his phone was exploding with text replies, but the grin on his face disappeared as he began to read them. The consensus (to put it in a much more polite way than a group of college football players normally would) was to ask him: ”Are you coming out of the closet, dude?”

  Taken aback by the bombardment of texts questioning his sexuality, rather than the expected congratulatory replies and requests for more, Zane scrolled through the pictures on his phone, and then his camera –shocked to find these were not the pictures of a stunning raven-haired beauty that he'd taken, but instead image after image of hairy, balding, middle-aged men, wearing Speedos.

  Confusion turned to horror as he went through dozens, and then hundreds of pictures on his phone. From work, from parties, from Spring Break in Panama City Beach, in every picture, without exception, all girls had been replaced by an assortment of increasingly repulsive men, some with their arms draped across Zane Holt’s broad, well-muscled shoulders, just as the women he’d been partying with had been.

  Across the pool, the hint of a wicked smile crossed the lips of Calista Embers.

  Chapter 1

  The thing that bothers me most about people is their insistence in beliefs. At the end of the day, what you believed in isn’t what matters. It’s what you did that does. Deeds always outweigh words. Or the belief system behind them.

  This thought rang through my head as I listened to the pastor (a man I had never met) eulogize my parents and my sister. He droned on and on about it being their time and how they were now sitting in the palm of God’s hand without pain, suffering, or sadness.

  And without me, I thought. I pictured my sister Merritt sitting in the rafters rolling her eyes as she adjusted her angel wings.

  My parents spent their lives serving people. My mother was an underpaid and under-appreciated middle school history teacher. You can’t tell me there isn’t a place in heaven waiting for her, no matter what religion she wasn’t. My father
was a social worker, someone who labored day in and day out to teach young people how to better themselves when the “adults” in their lives failed them.

  I’m not sure what they thought of God, but I know what they did believe in; people, as well as the conviction that we can only save ourselves.

  I wondered if the pastor knew this. Knew them. Who was this man? I wanted to scream and make a scene and remind everyone that the three most wonderful people in the world were dead and nothing would ever be good again. My legs were itching to move, but instead I felt the strong clutch of my grandma. She sat next to me sobbing into a monogrammed handkerchief as the organist began playing a Baptist hymn, “I Surrender All.”

  She was a woman destroyed. My father had been her only child. My sister and I were her only grandchildren. She’d been through enough already.

  I didn’t make a scene. I turned on the numbness and went back to the place in my head and heart where they still lived.

  On a clear April morning, they’d decided to take a drive to Rhyolite. It’s a ghost town in Nevada that my sister had been obsessed with since she was a kid. My mother, always the history buff, loved this about her.

  We must have visited Rhyolite at least twice a year. It was a deserted boom town that didn’t boom for long and sat quaintly in the middle of a desert that millions of years ago had been the bottom of the ocean. What’s left of it is mostly rubble. The one building that’s mostly intact is made out of empty glass beer bottles. Wood was in short supply in the desert back in the day; beer was not. In the right light, it was absolutely beautiful. Merritt and I used to pretend it was where we were going to retire one day. We would joke about it even as teenagers. It was our special place.

  A family of feral cats resided in and around the bottle house, and it seemed like every time we visited, a new litter of kittens were mewing and exploring. No matter how much we begged, mom and dad never let us bring any home with us.

  On that April morning, they went without me at the very last second, due to a ridiculous argument that I’d had with my mother. I can’t even recall what it was about, that’s how inconsequential it was. How completely typical: a daughter has an argument with her mother right before the mom drives off to her death.

  Well, when it happens to you, it’s more than just an anecdote in a story. I will always wish I could rewind time like an old VHS tape, watch the spindles turn so I can tell my mother something kind. Tell her I love her. Join my family so we can all be together in the end.

  Instead, my last words to her will always be, “I’m not spending five hours in that shitty car with you. I’d rather die.”

  The road to Rhyolite is US-95. It’s desolate and mostly empty. The chances of a family in a mini-van (that my father had planned on trading in the following week) being hit by a truck driver who has fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into their lane, just as they’re passing, are lottery-level remote.

  I remember reading once about a tree that sat in the Sahara Desert, in the African nation of Niger, that was considered the most remote tree in the world. It was the only tree for two or three hundred miles. Yet it managed to get hit and killed by a drunk driver. The odds of that tree getting hit by a car were only slightly worse than those of my family being killed where and when they were, but there you have it. That tree, and my parents and sister, shared the same fate.

  It was a terrible scene. I won’t go into the details, but needless to say, there wasn’t much of my family left to bury. Instead, they now sat at the front of my grandmother’s Southern Baptist church, in dreary Lumberton, North Carolina, all in one urn. This is not how my parents would have wanted it, but they weren’t here. Only I was, and no one listens to the eighteen-year-old girl who is left behind after a tragedy.

  My grandma is ninety years old. She had my father at forty-six, after at least a decade of assuming she was barren. You can imagine what a miracle my father was. He was the center of her universe, the light in her harbor. That kind of smothering love drove him away, as you can probably imagine. He went to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he met my mother, and as soon as they graduated, they drove to California. My grandma always disliked my mother for taking her child away from her. Nothing could have been Dad’s fault; he was proof of the divine in her eyes.

  After the funeral, we sat at a distant aunt’s house. My grandma was in a recliner, staring at a wood-paneled wall. I sat in a folding chair, eating a ham biscuit and potato salad. People I didn’t know came in and hugged me. They told me they were very sorry for my loss. They told me I was pretty, even though later when I was in the bathroom pulling off the pantyhose Grandma made me wear, I saw potato salad in my bangs and my face was flushed. “Pretty” would have been at the very bottom of a list of adjectives to properly describe me, in that moment.

  In the South, people telling you that you’re pretty is the ultimate compliment, and also the emptiest.

  Three women with old-lady curly afro hairdos dropped off a platter of pimento cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. They are my father’s favorite. Were my father’s favorite. After they left, I dumped them in the trash, so my grandma wouldn’t see them. It would be too much. It was too him, those sandwiches.

  She continued to vacantly stare at the wood paneling.

  God bless the South and their need to stuff you with carbs in your time of grief. That night, I ate half a pecan pie for dinner. When I couldn’t sleep at midnight, I ate half a dozen deviled eggs. The next morning, I finished off the pie and two ham biscuits.

  “Your ass is going to be the size of the Outer Banks if you keep eating like that,” Grandma commented as she walked into the kitchen for her coffee.

  “Like I care,” I said as I opened a Tupperware bowl full of ambrosia. “Would it be rude for me to just eat straight out of this thing? It’s not like anyone else is going to touch it.”

  Grandma said nothing; she just stared at the coffee maker. We were both silent as it brewed.

  I pulled out a spoon and dug in. I had never had ambrosia until a couple of summers ago when my dad brought us to visit Grandma before she went to live in her nursing home. Tasting it had been like falling in love for the first time. Merritt thought it was gross, but I gobbled it up anyway. I remembered how it made Dad smile. The one thing he missed about his old life was the food, and he liked seeing us appreciate small pieces of his childhood.

  I could feel Grandma’s eyes on me as I scarfed down half the bowl.

  “Can you even taste it?” she asked, with a vitriol I recognized from when I was young and had knocked over one of her porcelain angels. Were you even watching where you were going?

  “Nope. It’s just filling up the empty for now.”

  Suddenly, there was a smack and the bowl was upside down on the kitchen floor. A marshmallow and fruit concoction smeared the linoleum.

  I looked up at my grandma in shock, the spoon still in my mouth, “What the hell was that for?”

  “You’re disgusting, Emma. Get your act together. You’ve a lot of life left to live without that kind of nonsense in your head. Both of my parents were dead before I was twenty. I suffered six miscarriages before I finally had your father. Life is pain. Nothing can fill you. You’re always going to hurt. Might as well not be obese if you’re going to have to stick around. Now, put the spoon away. Go take a shower. Do something with your hair. Put a nice dress on. Smile. Keep the crazy inside.”

  It was the first time I had ever really seen her. She was old and leathery. Tiny and trembling. I loved her so much and suddenly felt such an overwhelming heartache for her. I quietly put the spoon in the sink, running water over it. I cleaned up the mess on the floor and threw it in the garbage on top of the pimento cheese sandwiches. Grandma sipped her coffee quietly while scanning over the morning paper like it was any other morning.

  “I love you, Grandma,” I said. “I’ll be upstairs for a bit if you need me.”

  “You too.” She didn’t look up, but it wa
s enough.

  It only got worse after that.

  My grandma took daily naps from nine in the morning until noon, on the couch in my aunt’s living room. I usually just watched Netflix on my tablet upstairs until she called for me to help her sit back up and have lunch.

  After binge watching episodes of Lost, I realized it was almost one o’clock and I hadn’t heard from her.

  I put the tablet away and sauntered downstairs into the living room. Grandma was laying on her back on the couch, her hands folded on her stomach, her head tilted on the pillow so that her chin was touching her chest. When Grandma sleeps, you can always hear it. She has a soft snore and her mouth is always open slightly. She wasn’t making a sound. The air in the room was still.

  I had a bad feeling.

  “Grandma?” I touched her softly. Her hand was cool. Her chest wasn’t moving up and down like it should be.

  “GRANDMA?” I said loudly, “Grandma, please.”