Southern Comfort (10 page)

“If you feel around a little bit, there should be a light toward the left.”

“There’s a switch on the wall?” The walls looked like part of the ground. He couldn’t imagine any electrical wires coming out of that.

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a shelf with a flashlight on it.”

“Got it.”

He felt around for the flashlight. It wasn’t hard to find. But when he hit the switch it didn’t come on. He called back up the stairs. “Batteries are dead.”

He heard her say something, but couldn’t quite make out what it was. He figured it was unladylike, and she had planned it that way.

“Never fear, I have my cell phone.” He turned on his flashlight app and let his illumination spill over the wall. There were jars of all sorts of things—pickles and eggs and things he didn’t recognize. Sometimes Southerners were a strange bunch. Rows and rows of jellies of all sorts. And then jars of clear liquid that he supposed was the moonshine Bitty had been talking about. Over in one corner several crates were stacked four high. They looked like they had hay on the inside, most probably for cushion. He couldn’t imagine what she had stored down there, but that wasn’t his mission. He grabbed two jars of strawberry and one dark jar that said “purple hull” in red marker across the top of the metal lid. Then he headed back up the steps.

He shoved his cell phone and the dead flashlight in his back pockets and grabbed the handrail. As he got near, he handed the jars to Natalie before hoisting himself out of the cellar.

“You weren’t joking, that’s one steep incline.”

“I keep asking—” She stopped and shook her head. “I really want to have the steps made a little more elderly friendly, but it seems like it gets pushed to the bottom of the list far too often.”

Newland turned and looked down at the steps where they disappeared from view. “I could fix that.” He said the words wondering who Natalie kept asking. But he thought he knew. He couldn’t imagine Gerald Davenport, in his Armani suit and silk shirt, building steps leading into a cold cellar.

“I couldn’t possibly ask you to do that.”

Newland shook his head. “You didn’t ask. I offered.”

“I could pay you.”

“Does it always come down to money?”

She shot him a rueful smile. “Usually.”

“Not this time.” Newland said. “I’ll do it, but not for money. Only for Bitty.”

“And?”

What in his tone had tipped her off? “A date.” They were his stipulations and yet they still amazed him. Why in the world would he want to go on a date with sassy Miss Perfection? He wasn’t sure of the answer to that. But he did. Maybe because he still had a week before the ghost would show up.

“A date?” Her eyebrows shot so high he thought they would get caught in her hair and never come down. “Why do you want to go out with me?”

“Why not?”

“Gerald.” Finally her eyebrows returned to their normal position.

He gave a pointed look at the bare finger of her left hand. She had on other rings, funky little rings that created a juxtaposition with her sleek dress and designer shoes. There was more to Natalie Coleman than met the eye. For some reason he wanted to find out what it was. “Still no ring.”

She sniffed. “Not yet.”

“So why would he care if you go out with me?”

She closed her eyes for just a moment, then opened them again and leveled that blue gaze on him.

“One date,” she finally said. “And you fix the stairs leading into the cellar.”

Newland smiled. “Deal.” He held out a hand to her.

She balanced the jelly jars in her arms and managed to give his a shake.

But he had an ulterior motive. He used his grip to pull her closer and plant a sweet smacking kiss on her lips.

Well, that had been his intent. But once his lips touched hers, the whole world seemed to spin a little differently.

He expected to take her off guard. Surprise her. Deliver his kiss, back away, and watch the emotions chase across her face. But instead she melted into him.

Newland accepted her warm weight, as she leaned into him. Her lips were soft, responsive, and eager for his. And like their first kiss, this one was explosive. A hundred thoughts, feelings, emotions raced through him. Past, present, future. All of it seemed rolled up into that one kiss.

He deepened the kiss, his tongue pushing past the barrier of her teeth to explore the sweetness that was all Natalie.

She gave a little mew, like a satisfied kitten, and edged closer to him.

He slid his arms around her and hauled her to him, pressing all of his aching parts against all of her warm ones.

She wrenched herself from his embrace and pressed the trembling fingers on one hand to her mouth, somehow keeping her hold on the jelly. Her blue eyes were wide and filled with the surprise that he had wanted. But he had a feeling that his own expression reflected hers. What had just happened here?

“Did you find the jelly?” Bitty’s voice floated to them from the other side of the porch. He hadn’t heard the screen door open, but maybe Natalie had and that was what had caused her flight from his arms. Still, from where they stood no one in the house could see them. But Newland knew. This was life altering.

Natalie smoothed her free hand down her dress and fanned her face, he was sure, to get the redness in her cheeks back to normal. “Y – yes,” she said, her voice as trembly as her fingers. “We found the jelly. We’ll be right in.”

“You didn’t happen to get any of that moonshine while you were down there, did you?”

He wasn’t sure but he thought he heard Bitty laugh.

The words seemed to serve as an anchor for Natalie. She straightened her shoulders before rolling her eyes and calling out, “No, Aunt Bitty, you don’t need any moonshine.”

“Who said anything about needing it?”

Newland watched as Natalie turned on one spiky little heel and marched back to the house.

He needed to remain right where he was for a few minutes. He could shove his hands into his pockets but he wasn’t sure it would convincingly hide the evidence of their kiss.

Think of something boring,
he told himself. Bank statements, spreadsheets, board meetings. But those things just brought Natalie to mind and made his hard-on worse.

Damn!

“Newland?” Bitty called. “Are you coming in or not?”

Newland shook his head. “I’ll be right there.” And he walked slowly back to the house, tugging on his shirt hem as he went.

• • •

Newland spent the rest of the morning at the hardware store, which was a cross between an old-fashioned general store and a true hardware store with a soda fountain in one end. Who even had those anymore? Groceries were in the middle with a section for the do-it-yourselfer on the other side. He’d promised to fix Bitty’s steps, and he would. He knew the Colemans had more money than God, but he wasn’t about to ask for any to complete the project. Any extra expense at this point strained his already so-thin-he-could-see-through-it budget, and these days he didn’t have a company credit card to fall back on. So there he stood looking through the stacks of lumber remnants. If he was clever, and he usually was, he could find enough in the scraps to build her a decent set of steps going down into her cellar. Then again, was that such a good idea, if she kept all her moonshine down there? She might go down after one nip too many and break her leg.

He shook his head. That wasn’t his responsibility. But as it was now, the poor lady couldn’t even get jelly, and that was unacceptable as far as he was concerned.

He continued to filter through the lumber, measuring off pieces and going through the design in his head. That was one thing about being poor and raised by an uncle who couldn’t care less. He had learned a lot with a plethora of odd jobs under his belt. He could paint. He could build things. He could re-shingle a house if necessary. He had a host of small talents to get him through the hard times. Some people called that a jack-of-all-trades, but he preferred Renaissance man. It sounded so much nicer.

He placed his lumber into a shopping buggy, trying not to shake his head at it all. What kind of lumber store had shopping carts anyway?
The kind that are conjoined with grocery stores.

There was no one behind the cash register in the lumber-slash-hardware part of the store, and considering the thick layer of dust on the counter, nobody had been there for quite some time.

He grabbed some nails, thinking surely that Bitty would have a hammer stashed somewhere, and took his finds back through the grocery store. It was busy enough for a Thursday afternoon. He was third in line, which had to make this the rush of the day in Turtle Creek. In front of him was a lady with a box of unmentionables and a can of ravioli. In front of her, a young mom with a baby on her hip juggled a bag of diapers, a can of formula, and other miscellaneous baby things. The poor child squalled even as she tried her best to soothe his cries.

Newland took a deep breath. If there was one thing he hated it was a baby crying. Not that it made him irritable, but he hated that one so young could be so unhappy. He had spent so much of his childhood sad and missing his parents. If he knew what to do for the child, he would do it right away just to stop that flow of tears.

In front of the poor mother stood Gilbert Hughes. Or was it Darrell? The twins were nearly identical, big hulking mountains of men who didn’t look like they had the good sense to get out of the rain. He shook his head at his thoughts. He really had been hanging out here too long if he was even thinking things like that. Or maybe those Southern sayings were just too easy to pick up. After all, he’d only spent about a week in the South his whole life put together.

“Is that all for you?” the cashier asked. She looked no more than fifteen, but he supposed that if she wasn’t in school at this hour she had to be older than that.

She had her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, big hoop earrings dangling from each ear, and a wad of chewing gum the size of Texas in her mouth. She blew a bubble and waited for Gilbert/Darrell to fish out his money.

“Did you get my special order in?” Gilbert/Darrell asked.

She gave him a look, smacked her gum one more time, then went to the microphone on the other side of her cash register. She turned it on and her magnifying voice floated over their heads. “Bob, you got that order for Gilbert?”

“Darrell,” the twin corrected.

“Darrell, I mean.”

From somewhere on the other side of the store Newland heard the man yell, “Gimme a sec!”

She put Darrell’s purchases in a sack, one by one. There were huge cartons of strawberries and blackberries along with what looked to be five large bottles of Karo syrup. Who needed that much syrup?

Was it Southerners in general that seemed to be insane or just the good people of Turtle Creek?

“You’ll have to wait over there, sugar.” Cash Register Girl waved him away.

Newland checked her nametag. Naomi.

Darrell looked about to protest, but took his sack in one beefy hand and stood aside so Naomi could ring up the poor mother with the bawling baby.

Newland could say one thing about Naomi though: she was quick. In no time at all, even before Bob got Darrell’s special order to the front of the store, it was Newland’s turn.

“Is that all for you, sugar?” The girl smacked her gum and blinked at Newland.

“Yeah, that’ll do it.”

“That’ll be twenty-four fifty,” she said with a smile.

He handed her his money, and she punched in the appropriate keys hardly taking her eyes from him as she put his money in the drawer. “You’re new around here, huh?”

“I’m a reporter.”

“I bet you seen a lot of things.”

“You could say that.”

“You going to work for the
Gazette
?”

The
Turtle Creek Gazette
? “No, I’m staying with Bitty Duncan.”

“That Bitty.” Naomi shook her head, her ponytail swinging from side to side. “She’s a piece of work.”

“Why is that?” Newland asked.

The girl shrugged one shoulder as if doing both was too much of an effort. “I don’t know. Some say she’s a little batty. She stays holed up in her house so much these days it’s hard to say. Of course she goes out with her friends when she wants to and everything.” She was talking in circles, and Newland couldn’t figure out the meaning of anything that she was telling him. This was his one good opportunity to get an outside opinion of Bitty Duncan, and yet he couldn’t even seem to do that. “But she’s nice enough, I suppose,” Naomi finished.

“She is at that.” Newland grabbed up his wood and started toward the door. He was halfway there before Naomi called out. “Hey, shug, you forgot your nails.”

He backtracked to get the box of nails just in time to see Bob—or rather he assumed it was Bob—wheel a huge pallet in from the back.

“This ought to set you up for a while.” Bob dusted his hands as he dropped the pallet next to Darrell’s feet.

Newland couldn’t see everything that was on it, but it looked to be mostly Mason jars and sugar.

He remembered a documentary he had seen once a long time ago, about NASCAR racing and how it got its origins in moonshine running. Of course in order to talk about moonshine running, the narrator talked a lot about moonshine.

There was only one reason Newland could think of for somebody to need that much sugar and that many Mason jars. And it didn’t have anything to do with pie.

Natalie let herself in the front door at her aunt’s house ready to relax and just enjoy a little bit of downtime. But as she entered, that was the last thing it seemed was in store for her this evening.

A loud yowl rang through the foyer followed by barks. The next thing she knew, Oskar came scrambling down the hallway, his toenails scraping against the wood floor. Behind him, in a rage, was the fluffy Mr. Piddles, running full speed. Well, it was fast for an overweight, extremely stocky cat.

Fortunately, Oskar could outrun Mr. Piddles. The pooch flew straight toward her and jumped into her arms just in time. Just in time for him, anyway, but Natalie wasn’t so lucky. Mr. Piddles tried to stop himself and instead slid into Natalie. He anchored himself with his claws.