Scandal in Copper Lake (20 page)

He looked from Sara to Anamaria, then back again, reluctant to leave them alone. His mother wore a look he knew well—shrewd, determined, judging—and Anamaria wore another he well knew—stubborn. Whatever conversation Sara was intent on having would happen whether he stayed or went, so, like a coward, he stood up and aimed for humor. “Do you know how much of my life you’ve spent sending me away so the grown-ups could talk?”

“I’m not trying to get rid of you. I just think men should make themselves useful whenever possible. Don’t you agree, Anamaria?” She barely waited for Anamaria’s nod. “Go on. Be useful.”

Robbie bent close to her. “Don’t interrogate her and don’t intimidate her,” he murmured.

Sara’s smile was charming and sunny…and pure bull. “We’re just going to talk. Go. Now.”

Like a good son, he went. And truthfully, he was glad to be going.

“I was a single mother long before my husband died. I raised three sons full-time and a fourth one part-time,” Sara said after Robbie was out of hearing range. “I’m very good at interrogation and intimidation. I had to be. But I really do just want to talk.”

Anamaria believed everything up to the last sentence. Since she’d never had a serious relationship, she didn’t have much experience meeting men’s mothers. There had been a few boyfriends from the neighborhood whose mothers she’d known since she was little, but they knew about the Duquesne family curse, so they never felt compelled to “talk.”

Of course, Sara didn’t know there was anything between Anamaria and Robbie besides Glory’s last days in Copper Lake. She couldn’t possibly guess they were lovers, and even if she did, she undoubtedly knew that her youngest son would never get seriously involved with someone so unsuitable for their family.

For a moment, Sara gazed into the distance, and Anamaria took the opportunity to look around as well. The garden was large, probably five or six acres stretched between the rear of the house and an impressive gazebo at the north border. How did it compare with the garden at Calloway Plantation? The photographs in the tourism brochures were spectacular, but if the photos didn’t do the house justice, the garden might be more breathtaking, too.

The only way she was going to find out was to pay her ten dollars and take the tour.

Finally Sara refocused on her, her gaze like Robbie’s—blue and intense. “Did Lydia tell you about Jack Greyson?”

Anamaria shook her head.

“He’s a nice man. Divorced. After thirty-three years of marriage, his wife decided it was ‘me’ time again. She spends her time traveling and having plastic surgery.” Self-consciously Sara touched her cheek. “I don’t care much about wrinkles. I’ve earned them. Might as well display them.”

“He’s not going back to his ex-wife,” Anamaria said quietly. “That’s over.”

Sara’s expression was somewhere between hope and
doubt. “I’ve been alone a long time. Probably as long as you’ve been alive. I’m pretty set in my ways.”

“Mr. Greyson doesn’t want to change you. He just wants to share those ways with you.”

“That’s what he says,” she murmured. She stared a long time, not looking away even when a pickup truck drove past on the graveled road. “What do you see in your future, Anamaria?”

“I can’t see my future.”

“What do you see in my son’s future? Or is it blocked, too, because it includes you?”

Goose bumps skittered down Anamaria’s arms—what she imagined people felt the first time they experienced a true psychic moment. Sara couldn’t know. Robbie never would have told her. But she could suspect and come fishing for information. “I can’t read everybody, and what I see is generally just a small part of their lives.”

“That’s not an answer,” Sara chided.

“I haven’t tried to read him. I usually don’t except for clients.”

“So that bit about Jack and the cruise…was that a little nonbeliever special?”

Anamaria allowed a small smile. “That was just so easy to pick up, and I knew it would surprise Robbie, if not you.”

“It surprised us all,” Sara said drily. “My sons don’t think of me as a woman having ‘needs,’ and Lydia’s been happily married for forty years. I don’t think they realize how lonely life can get.” After a moment’s reflective silence, she fixed her gaze on Anamaria again. “Are you in Robbie’s future?”

“Not for long,” Anamaria answered, regretfully.

“Is that his choice or yours?”

“It’s no one’s choice. It’s…destiny.” Destiny that Robbie didn’t believe existed. A curse that he thought she and her family had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“You don’t want to live in Copper Lake?”

“It’s a nice town.”

“You don’t want to marry into a white family?”

“I’m white, too.”

Sara nodded in polite deference. “I see that. But when I look at you and think race, I think black.”

Anamaria nodded, too. She lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, with predominantly black friends. It was easier to find acceptance there, especially in a world where race was an easy way to categorize people.

“There would be a fair number of Calloways—and others—who wouldn’t welcome you.”

Would you be one of them?

“My boys mean the world to me. Ever since they each graduated from college, I’ve been anxious for them to settle down and start giving me grandbabies. It took Mitch and Russ getting married, then divorcing, to show me that it was better they wait for the right woman than to try to make it right with the wrong one.” She smiled broadly. “Now I have one adorable granddaughter and two more on the way.”

Three more, Anamaria thought. Even if Robbie chose not to tell her about this one. Of course, she had to tell him first. That had been one of Mama Odette’s lessons: you always tell the daddy…if you know who he is.

“I guess this is just a long way of saying that if you make my son happy, then the part of the family that matters will be happy. The rest of them, as far as I care, can go suck pond water.”

Footsteps approached as she finished, just one set that didn’t belong to Robbie. Anamaria would have sensed it if they had. A moment later, a tall, slender man appeared in the break between azaleas. “Hey, Aunt Sara. I heard voices and thought Aunt Lydia might be with you.”

“She’s in the house. Anamaria, this is Lydia’s and my
shared nephew, Kent. This is Anamaria Duquesne, Glory Duquesne’s daughter. You remember her, don’t you?”

So this was Kent Calloway, subject of Mr. John’s second message to Lydia. In his early forties, blond-haired and brown-eyed, he was handsome in a faded, superficial sort of way. His father had criticized and belittled him, his mother had abandoned him, and he’d let it sink into him until bitterness and resentment hovered in the air around him. Unhappiness had become a permanent part of who he was, staining everything else about him.

He stared at her a moment before answering Sara’s question. “I’ve heard the name. I never met her, though.” He nodded curtly. “Nice to meet you. I’ll catch Aunt Lydia at the house.”

According to Glory’s notebook, she’d done a reading for K Calloway the same time she’d advised Sara to buy stock in hair coloring. Was there another Calloway with the same initial, or had Kent been too young and disinterested to notice her?

She asked the question of Robbie as they drove away from the house two hours later, and he snorted. “He’s at a table with two women old enough to be his mother and an exotic, beautiful girl only a few years older than him and he doesn’t notice her?”

“Could there be another K Calloway besides Kent?”

“I don’t know. My grandmother spends her spare time working on what she calls the family forest. She’s got every birth and death in the family from 1800 to the present. I’ll call her.” After another moment, Robbie asked, “What did you and Mom talk about?”

“I told her that we were going home after lunch and I intended to make wild, wicked love to you.”

His look was as chiding as his mother’s voice had been earlier. “Anamaria.”

“Last night you called me Annie.”

“Did you like it?”

“I don’t know.” She liked her name, but it was a mouthful, and there were times when something shorter and sweeter, like Annie, a special name to be used by a special person, would be nice. “I’ll let you know next time you use it.”

He reached for her hand, his warm and calloused as it closed around hers. “What did you and Mom really talk about?”

“I told her she should make wild, wicked love to Mr. Greyson.”

His grimace was exaggerated; the shudder running through him wasn’t. “Jeez, this is my mom we’re talking about.”

“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about my mother and her sex life, and it didn’t bother you.”

“Yeah, because it’s
your
mom. This is mine. If she has a sex life, I don’t want to know it.”

“Sara’s only—what? Sixtyish? Don’t you intend to still be dazzling women in bed when you’re sixty?”

“Women? Plural? I’m pleased that you think I’ll be capable.” Raising her hand, he pressed a kiss to her palm. “But right now, I’m just looking to dazzle you.”

He didn’t have anything to worry about there. She was already pretty dazzled, and they hadn’t even reached her house yet. If she wasn’t careful, he could dazzle her right into heartache and heartbreak and loneliness too enormous to bear.

But she would manage. Duquesne women always did. It was a lesson drummed into her when she was a little girl, and it was a lesson she would start teaching her own little girl in a few years.

The only question was whether she would do the teaching alone.

Chapter 9

H
er tires were flat. The rusty screens that encircled the porch had been slashed and torn. The porch furniture was upended, two legs broken off the table, and the light fixture was shattered, leaving only wires hanging from a hole in the wall. The front door had been kicked with enough force to break both the lock and a hinge, and inside, clearly visible in the dim shadows, a word sprayed in paint led off to the kitchen. WHORE.

Robbie stood at the bottom of the steps, hands knotted into fists, as fury vibrated through him. Who the hell had done this? Was the bastard a coward who’d waited for them to leave that morning, or had it just been coincidence? What would he have done if he’d found them there? Worse, if he’d found Anamaria alone there?

She sat in the front seat of the Vette, with her door open and her arms wrapped around her as if she were freezing. She didn’t look so strong and serene now but hurt and frightened.
Soon enough, she would become angry. Robbie wanted her angry. Then she could deal with it.

“You have any ideas who was behind this?” Tommy asked, stepping off the porch and onto the concrete slabs below.

“We have a whole notebook full of ideas.” He told him about Glory’s appointment books, the customers versus the clients versus the dates.

“You didn’t find your dad or mine in there, did you?” Tommy asked, only half joking. In addition to his long-term affairs, Gerald had had a lot of women like Glory. Tommy’s father, on the other hand, had lived like a monk for twenty years after his wife left.

“No, but we did find Uncle Cyrus.”

“That old devil?” Revulsion crossed Tommy’s face. “Well, hell, let’s get Mama Odette on the phone, head over to the cemetery and ask the bastard what he knows.”

Robbie watched Bonnie DeLong and a couple of evidence techs working on the porch and inside the house. A few days ago, the idea of asking someone to pass on a question to a dead man would have been reason for a good derisive laugh. But if he thought for a second that Mama Odette really could contact Cyrus, he would get on the phone that quick. Though he doubted it would do any good. Cyrus alive hadn’t been exactly sociable. Dead, he was likely to be downright unpleasant.

“You really believe this psychic stuff?”

Tommy put him off a minute while he talked to one of the officers, then turned back. “I heard she broke the news of your mom’s new boyfriend. Where do you think she got that information? Your mom sure as hell didn’t tell her. The guy, Greyson, doesn’t even live around here, so odds that she found out from him are pretty slim. Lydia didn’t even know part of it. So where do you think Anamaria got it?”

Robbie stared at him. “Where the hell did
you
get it?”

“You and Lydia discussed it in front of the cook, who told her daughter the dispatcher, who was repeating it to—” Tommy broke off and laughed. “There are a lot of ways to get information. For me, the gossip hotline works pretty well. You can’t deny that for Anamaria there’s something more at play.” Without taking a breath, he switched subjects. “Are you taking her home with you?”

For an instant, Robbie stiffened. Just that morning he’d noticed that the condo smelled different from this house, totally absent of Anamaria’s fragrances. If he moved her in there, even for a day or two, that would change forever. Her scents would seep into his bed, his furniture, his very walls, and after she left, her essence would linger, barely noticeable but impossible to remove.

“Afraid you can’t sneak her in through the garage without the neighbors noticing?” Tommy asked with a scowl. “If you’re not gonna man up, she can stay at my house.”

“Screw you. Can I go in and get her stuff?”

“DeLong!” Tommy shouted. “Take him inside to the bedroom. Don’t touch but what you need. And look around while you’re there and see if anything obvious is missing.”

Robbie nodded, glanced at Anamaria, who was gazing into the distance, then followed Bonnie across the porch. Besides the insult painted on the floor, there was no other damage inside the house. The kitchen, the bathroom and the bedroom were just the way they’d left them.

He packed Anamaria’s clothes and toiletries hastily, then took the wooden chest from its place high on the shelf. Cautioning her to be careful with it, he handed the chest to Bonnie, carried the suitcases into the hall and stopped short, gazing at the dining table.

“Is something wrong?” Bonnie asked.

“There was a baby bonnet on the table when we left this morning.”

“A baby bonnet?”