“And I’ve brought the wine,” Sudie added. “A pinot gris. Jonathan said we needed something buttery to stand up to all that spicy stuff he put in the crawfish cakes.”
“Honey, did you put the dishes of Rolaids on the table?” Randy joked, poking his wife in the side. “You know how crazy Jon goes with that hot sauce of his.”
“Randy, you’re awful,” Merijoy said. But she stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on his chin.
Chapter 27
The Ruckers’ garden reminded me of a painting I’d seen once at a museum in Atlanta. Huge old live oaks ringed a velvety green lawn, which in turn was bordered with shoulder-high hedges of azaleas, camellias, and gardenias. One gardenia bush was as tall as the roof of the porte cochere. There was a small swimming pool with a fountain in the middle, and a buffet table had been set up on the brick patio, under the shade of a towering sweet-gum tree.
I took a glass plate and helped myself to a crawfish cake. Before I knew it, Daniel had spooned a puddle of remoulade sauce onto my plate.
“Hey,” I said. “I can serve myself.”
“Just trying to be helpful. You know—acting like I like you,” he said.
He poured me a glass of wine, then leaned over and nibbled on my ear.
“Enough already,” I said, pushing him away. But he smelled wonderful, and that particular ear had been woefully neglected for a very long time.
We wandered over toward what looked like a pool house, a one-story brick structure with a green-and-white striped awning. Merijoy was chatting with two women I’d never seen before.
“Weezie,” she said. “Have you met Anna and Emily Flanders?”
The two women were in their early to mid-forties, striking, but not exactly pretty, with shining chin-length bobs of dark hair, olive skin, and lively brown eyes. They were unmistakably sisters.
“Anna and Emily are the most successful real estate agents in town,” Merijoy said. She winked at Daniel. “Be careful, Daniel, or they’ll sell you a house you didn’t even know you needed. Randy and I weren’t even thinking of moving from downtown until these two shanghaied me on the pretense of taking me to lunch at the Chatham Club.”
One of the sisters was slightly taller than the other, with a more pronounced squareness around the jaw.
“Emily was driving that day, and she insisted all she wanted to do was run by this new listing in Ardsley Park to drop off the lockbox,” the tall sister said. “Of course, I wanted to see the inside too. It was Emily’s listing, and so we dragged Merijoy along.”
“And the next thing you know, Randy Rucker’s got himself a three-car garage and a half-acre lawn to mow,” Emily said.
She leaned in closer to me. “I hope you don’t mind, Weezie, but Merijoy mentioned on the phone about the, uh, situation out at Beaulieu. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for your troubles.”
Daniel took my hand and kissed the back of it. “She’s been a rock, haven’t you, darling?”
I took my hand back. “It was all a misunderstanding.”
Anna Flanders nodded sympathetically. “We knew Caroline DeSantos, of course.”
“You want my opinion?” Emily chimed in. “She was a real piece of work, that gal was. Shrewd.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Em,” her sister said. “Let’s call a spade a spade. She was ruthless. A real bitch. She knew what she wanted and she didn’t care who she had to step on to get it.”
“That’s right,” Merijoy said. “Anna, tell Weezie that story you told me.”
Anna stared down at her shoes. She wore sandals and her toenails were painted hot pink.
“Oh, come on.” Emily nudged her sister. “The woman’s dead and buried. You don’t owe her anything. Especially after the way she tried to cheat us.”
Daniel took a sip of his wine. “You did business with Caroline?”
“Not really,” Anna said. “But I guess it won’t hurt to tell now. We met Caroline about six months ago. She called the office to ask about one of our listings.”
“A double row house on Gaston. The Sheehan-Poligny house. It was on the garden tour a couple years ago.”
“Caroline was house hunting?” It was news to me. “Why? She’d just moved in with Tal.”
The sisters exchanged a look.
“You,” Anna said. “Caroline DeSantos was not your biggest fan.”
“She hated your guts,” Emily added. “Said some awful things about you. And your dog. I should have known she was evil. I never trust anybody who hates animals. It bugged the daylights out of her that you were living in her backyard.”
“My backyard,” I said firmly. “Anyway, I was there first.”
“We showed her the Gaston Street house,” Emily said. “Not once, mind you, twice. She went over the place with a fine-tooth comb. Wanted to see the blueprints and property survey. Everything. The house needed some work; the kitchen in particular was a disaster. But that’s how all these old houses are. She’s an architect, she should have known that. After a week of nit-picking, she finally called and said she’d decided to pass.”
“Two months went by,” Anna said. “And by that time, the owner had about decided to take it off the market and do the renovations himself. Our listing agreement still had a month to run, but we took the sign down so people wouldn’t keep calling about it.”
“Right after we took the sign down, it just happened that we were both out of town on the same Sunday. And in the meantime, wouldn’t you know it, the owner gets a call from somebody who wants to see the house right away. Now the owner is having second thoughts again. What the hell, he decides to show the house himself, since he can’t reach either of us. And guess who the prospective buyer is?”
“Not Caroline?”
Anna nodded so emphatically it set her long earrings swinging back and forth like crazed chandeliers.
“Caroline tells the owner she loves the house. But the kitchen’s so awful, it’ll cost at least one hundred thousand dollars to fix—which is a complete exaggeration. You could do a very nice kitchen in that space for under fifty thousand. But that’s Caroline for you. She makes a lowball offer right there.”
“The owner refuses,” Emily said, taking over the narrative. “Now Caroline asks if she can bring somebody else over to get a second opinion. The owner agrees. Says he’ll wait right there. Half an hour later, Caroline comes back, with a man she introduces as ‘her friend.’ ”
“Was it Tal?” I asked, confused.
“Wait,” Merijoy said. “It gets better.”
“They go through the house again. Hand in hand, and he’s calling her honey, and she’s calling him baby, and it’s all very lovey-dovey. After an hour, the man gets in his car and leaves. Alone. And Caroline makes the owner another offer. She says her friend has advised her to offer ten thousand dollars more.”
“By this time, the owner is fed up,” Anna said. “He suggests if she wants to make a legitimate offer, she should present it to his real estate agent.”
“The bitch,” Emily said, her nostrils flaring, “tells him very sweetly that he doesn’t need a real estate agent. If he sells it by owner, he won’t have to pay those silly Flanders girls a seven percent commission. He can keep all the money himself, and since he’s saving so much money on the commission, he can afford to negotiate on the price.”
“Ha,” Anna said. “Unbeknownst to Miss Caroline, the owner happens to be an old family friend of ours. He tells her it’s impossible, that he’d signed a listing agreement with us, and even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t cheat us like that.”
“He laughed in her face,” Emily said. “Then he called me and told me what had happened. You can imagine my reaction.”
“Did you call her on it?” I asked.
Merijoy put her wineglass down on the buffet table. “Weezie, you’re missing the whole point.”
“What? That Caroline was a lying, conniving cheat? That’s not news.”
“The man,” Merijoy said. “What about
the man she was playing kissy-face with?”
“Tal?”
“Uh-uh,” Anna said. “I fussed and fumed about it, and threatened to have a showdown with her, but I never got around to it. Then, maybe a month ago, I saw Tal at the golf club. We’ve known each other forever. He was by himself, getting takeout from the dining room, and I just lit into him. I told him I didn’t appreciate the fact that he and his fiancée tried to stiff us on the Gaston Street deal.”
“Tell her what he said,” Merijoy prompted.
“He was flabbergasted,” Anna said. “He insisted he had no idea what I was talking about. He said Caroline was not in the market for a house, and neither was he. And he insisted neither one of them had ever talked to our client, or stepped foot in his house. Tal got pretty hot under the collar about it. He suggested I check my facts before I went around slandering people, and then he went stomping off with his takeout.”
“Now,” Merijoy said triumphantly. “Do you get the picture?”
I didn’t, actually. “Did you double-check with the owner?”
“Hell yes,” Emily said. “He described her perfectly, down to that silly yellow car of hers. Besides, she gave him her business card. He showed it to me. It was her, all right.”
Now it was dawning on me, dim bulb that I am. “You mean the boyfriend she showed the house to wasn’t Tal.”
“Not even close,” Anna said. “The guy who looked at the house was only about five ten. Stocky. A good bit older than Caroline. Maybe early fifties. He wore a baseball cap, so our guy didn’t see his face or hair, but the build is definitely not Talmadge Evans III.”
“Definitely not,” Merijoy crowed. “She was running around on Tal. Don’t you just love it?”
But there wasn’t time for me to think about that.
Randy Rucker stood in the middle of the garden and tapped his goblet again with the silver spoon.
“If everybody’s all set here, we’re gonna adjourn to the dining room,” he said. “Who’s got the next course?”
“We do.” A ruddy-faced guy in a white sport coat with rumpled seersucker slacks called. “And y’all better get moving. ’Cause Judy doesn’t want her soup getting warm.”
“You got it all wrong, Doug,” Randy said. “Soup’s supposed to be warm.”
“Tell my wife,” Doug retorted. “I don’t fix this stuff, I just pay for the groceries.”
Merijoy herded us all back into the house. “Do you know Douglas and Judy Hunter?” she asked.
“I know the name,” I said. “Didn’t he used to be on city council?”
“Oh yes,” Merijoy said. “But this last election, Judy put her foot down and told him if he ran for reelection she’d file papers on him. She’s tired of politics.”
“He looks familiar,” Daniel said. “I think they’ve been in the restaurant.”
“They come with us all the time,” Merijoy said. “Now scoot on into the house. Judy’s a wonderful cook. I can’t wait to get the recipe for this soup of hers.”
Merijoy’s dining room was immense, with fourteen-foot ceilings, chinoiserie wallpaper, and a crystal chandelier that I was pretty sure was Waterford.
A long oval mahogany table was polished to mirror brightness and set with white cutwork placemats, rose medallion china, and heavy Sheffield silver. Three different crystal goblets at each place setting. Just a casual little summertime clambake. Ha. I looked around and surreptitiously tugged my neckline up.
“I saw that,” Daniel murmured. “You’re not wearing a bra, are you?”
“Behave,” I whispered.
A row of silver vases bursting with all white flowers marched down the middle of the table, and their sweet perfume filled the room.
“This is lovely,” I told Merijoy.
She smiled. “Hattie Mae liked to have killed herself getting these linens starched and ironed and all this silver polished.”
She lowered her voice. “I slipped in here while everybody else was outside and switched place cards so you’d be between Daniel and Jonathan. That Daniel is divine. How on earth did you hook up with him, Weezie?”
“We, uh, have a mutual friend,” I said.
Doug Hunter stood in the dining-room doorway, beside his wife. She was pretty, with honey-blond hair and dimples that made her look like a little girl at a grown-up party.
“Y’all shut up now, so Judy can tell you about this soup. She’s been slaving over a cold stove all day,” he said, drawing laughs from the faces around the table.
I looked down at my plate. An engraved menu card sat atop the carefully fanned and folded damask napkin.
The Ardsley Park Supper Club
Hosts: Merijoy & Randy Rucker
CRAWFISH CAKES WITH SPICY REMOULADE SAUCE
CHILLED CUCUMBER SOUP WITH CHIVES & LEMON
HEARTS OF PALM SALAD WITH CREAMY VIDALIA ONION DRESSING
CHICKEN-AND-SHRIMP POTPIES WITH SILVER QUEEN CORN
KEY LIME MOUSSE WITH GEORGIA BLUEBERRY COULIS
“Wow,” I said, holding up the menu for Daniel to read.
“I’m out of my league here tonight,” he said. “If these folks decided to cook every night I’d be out of a job.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Randy said, clapping a hand on both our shoulders. “This little shindig is about the only serious cooking we do around here. The rest of the time, Merijoy’s got us eating Happy Meals and Pop-Tarts.”
“Not true,” Jonathan said, smiling over at me. “We all love to cook. We just don’t get the time to do it as often as we’d like.”
Judy Hunter came into the dining room carrying a silver tray full of soup bowls. She handed the tray to Doug, who went around the room placing a bowl at each setting.
“As you can tell by the menu card,” Judy said, “I’ve made a cold cucumber soup tonight, with cucumbers out of Doug’s garden. It’s garnished with chives from Merijoy’s garden, and lemons…”
“Which I picked up at the Kroger on the way home from work,” Doug added.
“And that’s his sole contribution to this dinner,” Judy said.
“And the wine,” her husband said. “I paid for the wine.”
“What is it?” Jonathan McDowell asked. “Mogen David? King Cotton Peach Wine?”
“It’s a New Zealand chardonnay, wise guy,” Doug said, brandishing the bottle so everyone could read the label.
After a few bites of soup and a good bit of wine, I felt myself starting to relax. I even slipped my feet out of the killer sandals. Much better.
I was scraping up the last of the soup when I felt something on my foot. I jerked my head up and looked around. Jonathan McDowell had gotten up to pour more wine. A bare foot ran up my ankle, then up my calf, then up my thigh.
“Stop it,” I whispered.
“Stop what?” Daniel asked.
“Stop groping me with your toes.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?”
He moved his foot, and not in a bad way. I felt my face turn crimson, and tried to reach down and push it away.
“Hey,” he whispered, “do that again. I can almost see your nipples when you bend over like that.”
I jerked myself upright and yanked at the shoulders of the dress. Immediately I heard a tiny little tearing sound.
I looked down. The center seam at the scoop neck of my dress was coming unraveled, thread by thread.
“Oh my God,” I said, plastering my hand over the slowly growing tear.
“Oh yeah,” Daniel said appreciatively.
Nobody else was looking. Doug Hunter was taking up the soup bowls, and Randy Rucker was announcing the entrée, a potpie featuring shrimp he’d netted himself off his dock at Bluffton.
“Do something,” I whispered. “Or I’ll be arrested for public indecency.”
“Are you cold, darling?” he asked solicitously, and a little too loudly.
I nodded miserably.
Daniel got up and slipped out of his sport coat. He draped it over my
shoulders and kissed my neck again.
“You’ve got to get me out of here,” I told him.
“What—and miss the key lime mousse?”
Chapter 28
“How’s the potpie, Weezie?” Randy boomed from his end of the table.
“Delicious,” I said, keeping my hand poised delicately at my bosom.
“You gotta give me this recipe, Randy,” Daniel said. “I’ll call it Bluffton potpie. Put it on the menu for nineteen ninety-five, and those tourists will lap it up.”
“No deal unless you call it Rucker’s Bluffton Potpie,” Randy said. He was passing around another bottle of wine. By now I’d lost track of how much wine I’d had, but it was a lot. It seemed like every time my glass got close to being empty somebody would come around and refill it.
“Is it an old family recipe?” I asked.
“Maybe in Martha Stewart’s family,” he said. “Merijoy copied it out of that magazine of hers.”
“But Martha Stewart doesn’t have access to Bluffton shrimp,” Daniel pointed out.
“Or Silver Queen corn from Merijoy’s daddy’s farm,” Randy said. “So hers can’t possibly be as good as this.”
“We have to go,” I said to Daniel under my breath. “Before this dress splits completely in two.”
“I know you can’t wait to get me alone so you can perform unspeakable acts on my body, but it’s rude to leave in the middle of dinner.” Daniel didn’t even move his lips as he said it.
“Hurry up and eat then, damn it,” I said.
“Calm down, or you’ll pop another stitch,” he whispered.
“Listen, y’all,” Merijoy was saying. “You know I am not one to engage in idle gossip—”
“Ha!” Jonathan McDowell shouted. “We love you, Merijoy, but face it: you’re the gossip queen of Ardsley Park.”
Savannah Blues Page 18