Whatever It Takes

by Gwynne Forster

  Nan could be right, but her answer didn’t satisfy him. He thought for a while. “When I’m ready to take over that house, Cynthia will have to find a place to live; the deacons won’t let her stay in the parsonage after they learn that we’ve separated. Kellie and Lacette are grown, and they need to be on their own away from their mama’s petticoats, and especially Kellie. If she doesn’t change, she’s going to have a hard life.”

  Nan flipped over a mushroom omelet and stuck her left thumb in her mouth to ease the effect of the hot grease that splattered on it. “Tell me ’bout it! You leaving Cynthia for good?”

  With his hands cupping his knees and his feet square on the floor, he stared at her. “When did you know me to take a step this serious and then back up and say I made a mistake? Believe me, it’s over.”

  “I sure would like to know what happened to make you take such a hard position. You always acted like that woman was the apple of your eye, and she acted like she knew she was.”

  “Ask Cynthia. She’s got the whole story.”

  Nan put the omelets, several pieces of toast and slices of ripe avocado on their plates and set the food on the kitchen table. “Milk or tea? I’m having tea. You know, Marshall, Miss Carrie was a good Christian woman, but . . . well . . . you think she did the right thing?”

  “Lord, we thank you for this food and for each other. Amen.” He put a sliver of omelet in his mouth and savored it. “Mmm. Very good, indeed. I’ll get some milk.” He went to the refrigerator, poured a glass of milk and went back to the table. “Nan, Mama Carrie was shrewd, so I’m not questioning what she did. I expect we’ll eventually have all the answers, and I don’t doubt that what we find out will set tongues wagging like an electronic clapper.”

  Nan sipped her tea slowly, a sip now and then as if she didn’t know she was doing it. “You know, I never was crazy about Cynthia. She gave the impression that she served all who needed her, but her main concern is and always has been herself. She was a dutiful housewife, and she was always good to your parishioners. She kept up a good front, all right, but when you went a little deeper, there wasn’t a thing there. She don’t do nothing for nobody ’less something’s coming her way. Still, I feel sorry for her. Miss High-and-Mighty is about to bite the dust, and if you don’t stop Kellie right now, she’ll be right down there in the dust with her mother.”

  He heaved a sigh and shook his head as would one perplexed. “I know Kellie has some bad habits. She wants everything Lacette has, and when Lacette gives it to her, she throws it aside or destroys it. She’s been that way since they began to crawl. As soon as she’d see Lacette’s toy, she would throw hers away and demand Lacette’s identical one until Lacette gave it to her.”

  Nan rolled her eyes. “It’s not just things. Don’t you remember when she stole Lacette’s high school prom date, and Lacette couldn’t go to her senior prom?”

  He put their dishes in the dishwasher and patted his pockets for his car key. “I punished Kellie for that, but it did no good. She was eighteen then, and fifteen years later, she’s going to die trying to get that brooch from Lacette. Thanks for lunch.” He wrote something on a card and handed it to her. “You can reach me at this number.”

  He ambled across the street, got into his car and headed for the funeral home to make arrangements for the woman who had mothered him as his own hadn’t had an opportunity to do. Kellie’s antics troubled him. She had refused her grandmother’s offer to send her to college and didn’t attend, but she resented the fact that Lacette had a university degree and that Mama Carrie financed it. She would be determined to get Lacette’s brooch, and he’d be just as determined to prevent her having it.

  Chapter Two

  Lacette raced to the phone hoping that the caller was the buyer for Beauty Serums, Inc., which had engaged her to demonstrate its products at a fair in Baltimore’s Lord Calvert Hotel. She prospered financially through her work as a product demonstrator, but concentrated on her goal to have her own marketing firm. She hadn’t worked hard for a degree in marketing just to stand at a table and praise the work of whoever invented the product she demonstrated.

  “Hello. Lacette speaking.”

  “Miss Graham, this is Lawrence Bradley. The brooch your grandmother left you was not in the effects that she stored with me. It’s possible that it may be in her house, so I suggest we get your father’s permission to search for it. However, neither you nor I can do that until he takes formal possession of the place. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Bradley. I’m not worried about it; as soon as Kellie sees it, she’ll want it and she’ll plague me about it until I give it to her.”

  “Really? She got an exquisite diamond ring; that ought to satisfy her.”

  The bitterness of her laugh embarrassed her, and she tried to eradicate its effect with the softening of her voice. “You don’t know Kellie.”

  “I’m getting an idea. I’d appreciate it if you’d go with me to the bank. You’ll remember that Ginga Moore’s twenty-five thousand dollars is in the account Mrs. Hooper willed to you. She needs the money.”

  “We can go today, if you’d like. Suppose we meet there at one.”

  “I’ll pick you up at your house around twelve-thirty, if you don’t mind.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be ready.”

  She spent the remainder of the morning telephoning prospective employers and received three offers to demonstrate products. She turned down an offer to pitch condoms to women at a conference on child care and another one to stand in the window of a department store demonstrating brassieres. She had a nice top and was proud of it, but wouldn’t consider using it for an advertisement. She dressed in a royal blue suit and her standby, a street-length camel-hair tuxedo coat and waited in the living room for Bradley’s arrival.

  The man rang the doorbell promptly at twelve-thirty, and as if Kellie had overheard their conversation—and she had not—she arrived home as Bradley opened the front passenger’s door of his car for Lacette. Kellie stopped, gaped at them with widened eyes, and quickly regained her composure. Self-assurance was Kellie’s trademark, and Lacette stared in disbelief when her sister walked to within a foot of the man and grasped his arm.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t home. I had to do something to take my mind off my gramma’s death, so I’ve gone back to work.”

  “Nice seeing you,” Bradley said, walked around the car, got in and drove off.

  So Kellie was after Bradley. “I shouldn’t get personal,” Lacette said, “but I can’t help wondering how your family deals with your irregular hours. Mama said she was in your office Sunday afternoon.”

  “Not all of my work involves distributing inheritances, thank God. You’d be surprised at how well grief and greed get along. My family understands this part of my job.”

  She wondered if Kellie knew he was married and whether, if she did know it, she would back off. Probably not.

  A bank official deposited twenty-five thousand dollars in an account for Ginga Moore and transferred the remainder of the money in Carrie Hooper’s account, one hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars, to a new account for Lacette.

  “I had no idea Gramma was leaving me this much, Mr. Bradley. I . . . It’s . . . I’m stunned.”

  “Keep it to yourself, unless you want to share it.”

  “Why did she leave Mama so little?”

  “She said she had good reasons, and that your mother knew what those reasons were. If I were you, I’d leave it alone.”

  To Lacette’s surprise, Kellie was still at home when she got back there. One look at her sister and she saw the threat of war as clearly as if Kellie had handed her a document declaring it.

  “What the hell was he doing here with you? You want everything, don’t you, Lacette. Well, you’re not getting it. How much is in the account Gramma left you?”

  “How much is in yours?”

  “I have to get back to the office. I’m already late. You stay away from Lawre
nce Bradley.”

  She was about to assure Kelly that the man didn’t appeal to her and that, in any case, she didn’t get involved with married men, but stopped short when she saw the anger in her sister’s eyes. Instead, she said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from him.” Kellie misunderstood that as a threat, but left without pressing the issue. Their grandmother’s death seemed to have brought out the worst in Kellie: mean, cunning and devoid of her usual humor and wit. I’m getting out of here as soon as I can find a house.

  Kellie slipped into the office minutes before her supervisor returned from lunch. “You just made it,” Mabel, a secretary who sat across the corridor from her said. “And it’s a good thing, because she’s been on the warpath all morning. I’d have covered for you, if you hadn’t made it back.”

  “Thanks, girl, you’re a good buddy. Say, did you see that guy pruning trees out there? I think that’s what he was doing. What’s a hunk like that one doing risking his cute little butt up in a tree? He ought to have Mr. Walker’s job.”

  “Yeah. You let Walker hear you say that, and you’ll be up a tree. Laughter poured out of Mabel. Kellie thought her coworker enjoyed her own jokes more than anyone else did.

  “What’s the name of that fellow who’s working on those trees?” she asked Mabel.

  “Now you leave the guy alone. Thank God it’s too cold for you to swish around out there with your tits hanging out and your skirt up to your ass.”

  Kellie grinned. “Shoot, girl. If you got it, flaunt it, is what I say. Anyhow, I don’t show ’em a thing they don’t enjoy looking at, but I don’t waste my assets on Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  “Don’t hand me that,” Mabel said. “If you want something out of ’em, you’ll offer up your booty as fast as a bondsman will put up bail. I’m on to you, girl. You dress like Miss Ann and talk like a lady, but you got grit in your teeth.”

  Kellie let a smile float over her face to give the impression that she thought Mabel was joking, but she knew the truth in the woman’s comment. “Come on, Mabel. Just because I’m proud that I have it doesn’t mean I let just anybody use it.”

  “I ain’t the priest, so don’t be confessing to me. It’s yours; you do what you please with it.”

  “You forget I’m a minister’s daughter; I was properly brought up.”

  “Yeah. I gotta get my work done.”

  Kellie didn’t like being put down by a woman she considered beneath her, but she wanted a promotion from secretary to receptionist, which to her mind was a more prestigious job, and she stood a better chance if her colleagues liked her. “Good idea, Mabel. I want to finish this report so I can leave a little early.”

  She completed it, put it on the supervisor’s desk and headed outside for another look at the man she saw in the tree earlier that afternoon. As she approached, he climbed down from the ladder. “Don’t you get dizzy up there?” she asked him. “I would. What were you doing to the poor tree, anyway?”

  “I was inspecting it for disease.” He collected his tools and the ladder, tipped his baseball cap and headed toward the building’s basement entry.

  Angry with him for ignoring her and furious with herself for speaking to him, she promised herself that she’d make him pay. “Men make me sick,” she said aloud, repeating a sentiment she’d uttered to her mother when her father left home. She wondered if she believed it and wasn’t so sure when she recalled her first sexual experience at the age of fourteen.

  The man was her father’s close friend and a deacon in his church. Suddenly she began to giggle. That man had been crazy about her. He’d keep his head between her legs as often and as long as she’d let him, and all she had to do was caress him and stroke him. He’d be talking with her father in Marshall’s office at home, and she’d go in and make up a yarn to tell her father while she rubbed and pinched her breast as she stood behind her father’s chair, toying with the man. Before he left the house, he would manage to get her in the basement and do all kinds of things to her while her unsuspecting father worked on his Sunday sermons. She hadn’t let the man penetrate her and often wished she had. He heated her up, and no other man had been able to do it.

  She considered stopping by Lawrence Bradley’s office and thought better of it. Desperate to get the brooch before Bradley delivered it to her sister, she stopped at Benny’s Jerked Chicken, a shop less than a block from Bradley’s office, and telephoned him.

  “Bradley.”

  “Hello, Mr. Bradley. This is Kellie Graham. Do you mind if I call you Lawrence?”

  “No, I don’t, but I can’t see that it’s necessary.”

  “Oh, please, not you, too. This has been one awful day. From the time I rolled out of my bed until a few seconds ago, it’s been downhill.”

  His pause lasted too long for her comfort. At last he said, “What happened a few seconds ago?”

  Just the lead she wanted. “I heard your voice.”

  “Oh, come on, Miss Graham. You can do better than that.”

  “I wish I could, but from the minute I heard your voice . . .” She paused. Let him think about that. “I’m not far from you. How about coffee . . . or . . . something?”

  Her heartbeat thundered in her chest while she waited out his silence. “I’d like to know what you want,” he said, but the gruffness in his voice only encouraged her.

  Emboldened, she could feel the smile crawling over her face. He might be a big shot lawyer, but he was a man, wasn’t he? “You’re a grown man; you know the answer to that.”

  Again, he let her wait. “Where are you?”

  This time, it was she who let time pass. “I’m at Benny’s Jerked Chicken.”

  “That’s half a block away. Come up here.”

  “Well . . . uh . . .” She pretended to consider his suggestion. Then, as if he initiated the idea of their meeting, she said. “I don’t know if I should. Uh . . . all right, but just for a few minutes.”

  Suddenly, she remembered that she was wearing a red cowl-neck sweater under that charcoal gray coat and that he may think her period of mourning for her grandmother strangely short. She shrugged. I won’t give him a chance to think about that. After repairing her makeup and combing her hair in the women’s room, she set out for her tryst with Lawrence Bradley, her steps quick and sure-footed. Leaving the sixth floor elevator for the short walk to his office, she refreshed her perfume, put the flask back in her pocketbook and knocked on Bradley’s office door.

  He opened the door at once, took her hand and pulled her into his office. She hadn’t expected to find him without his jacket and tie and told him as much.

  “I work comfortably whenever I can. Why did you want to see me?”

  She lowered her lashes, pulled off her gloves and placed them and her pocketbook on his desk. “Try being more subtle, Lawrence. That works better with me.”

  He walked to where she stood and pulled her to him, so close that her breasts felt the pressure of his pectorals against them. “This works for me,” he said and bent to kiss her, but she moved her face and stepped away from him.

  “What’s your game, Kellie?”

  She let a half smile crawl over her face and bathed her lips with her tongue. “I don’t like being pawed.”

  Both of his eyebrows shot up. “I stand corrected. Care for a glass of white wine . . . or something stronger?”

  “Wine, please.” She removed her coat, sat on the sofa that rested in the far end of the office beneath a window and crossed her knees.

  He returned with the wine, handed her a glass and sat beside her. “Let’s get this straight. I am not going to let you toy with me. Understand? Here’s to a beautiful, reckless woman.” He drained his glass.

  Kellie had the feeling that Lawrence Bradley might be more than she could handle. She sipped the wine, and pretended that he wasn’t gazing at her. Then she put the glass on the table beside her and stretched both arms out on the back of the sofa. His hands were hard and firm on her, and his grip
told her he meant business. He gripped her beneath her knees and swung her legs across his lap. Then he maneuvered her until she was lying on the sofa flat on her back. She looked up at him, dazed as he unbuttoned his shirt. It hung open, baring his chest, and he reached down and eased her sweater over her head.

  “Are you going to stop me?” he asked her.

  The question came too late; she had forgotten her scheme, and her only thought was of the man leaning over her, big and strong, both threatening and promising in his masculinity. An unfamiliar urge to explode with him buried inside surged through her, and she didn’t answer, merely unhooked her bra and offered him her breasts. He worked her over like a scientist in a chemistry laboratory, methodical and thorough, until he spent himself.

  At least he enjoyed it, she thought. He didn’t want for skill; indeed, he was probably an expert. The problem was that she didn’t feel anything, and it had nothing to do with him, for it always happened that way.

  “Come back tomorrow about this time,” he said. “I could get used to you, and the more we’re together, the more perfect it will be.”

  Knowing that she pleased him was all that was needed to put her back in her element. He could get lots of women, but he wanted an affair with her. She went into his bathroom, washed up and dressed. He hadn’t given her an orgasm, but he was damned sure going to get that brooch for her. “Tomorrow?” she asked him when she walked back into his office. “You’ve got a big appetite.”

  “For you. Yes. I want you here tomorrow.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’ll have to be day after tomorrow.”

  He stared at her until she thought he could hear her nerves rattling. “All right, then. Day after tomorrow.”