Good Christian Bitches (14 page)

“W
here on earth . . . is Sharon?” Darlene asked in her breathy voice.

It was twenty minutes to nine Monday evening, and Heather and Darlene were sipping iced tea from her fabulous William Yeoward Isabel goblets, seated on the eighteenth-century chaises in Darlene’s living room. Heather made a “beats me” gesture. “I’ve tried her cell a million times,” she said.

“Did she not insinuate she was coming at eight?” Darlene asked in singsong, stroking the ruffles on her Hermès apricot-orange dress.

“I thought that’s what we all said. I just don’t know why she’s not picking up her phone.”

“It doesn’t matter. How do you think Amanda’s first day went as Ball Chair?”

Heather took a sip of her iced tea and grinned. “Couldn’t have been all that great. Sharon and I spent the whole weekend messing up that office. By the time we got done with it, it looked like a tornado had hit.” She reached for a packet of sweetener and checked to make sure she had the no-calorie sugar substitute.

Darlene laughed. “That must have been devastating for poor Amanda.”

“Uh-huh. I wouldn’t have been too pleased if I had to come in there and make some sense out of all that mess. For all I know, she’s still in there, straightening up.”

“Susie did leave that place in terrible, discomfitable disarray.”

“No doubt, no doubt.” Heather tossed her hair. “But it’s hard to think of Susie without realizing all she endured at the hands of the police.”

Darlene gave her a withering look. “Don’t tell me you believe all that BS about her getting attacked or molested or any of that stuff about body-cavity searches.”

“None of that happened?” Heather was puzzled. “But it’s all over town!”

“Oh, please! None of that happened. She was in and out of there before you could say Martha Stewart.”

“Really? But I heard—”

“You heard wrong. Edward got her out in about a New York minute, and then he put her on a cruise. She might have some legal issues stemming from what she did with the money from the Longhorn Ball.”

“Sharon told me that Amanda and her mom found a ton of cash in Susie’s desk,” Heather said, pointing her feet and admiring her Christian Louboutin pumps, a gift from the latest ex. She envied all the other girls who had a closetful and playfully referred to them as their “Lubys.” This was her only pair and she’d had to badger her ex to death for these.

Darlene nodded. “Why Susie had to mess with the money belonging to the Longhorn Ball, I’ll never understand. How much money was there?”

“I think Sharon said there was something like eighty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. We were sick we didn’t find it when we snuck in there!”

“You’d think Susie was running a drug operation with that kind of cash. What on earth was that girl thinking?”

“It’s kind of amazing how bad everybody feels for her.” Heather sighed, taking out her cell phone and punching in Sharon’s number one more time. Again, it went straight to voice mail. “I just don’t know where that girl is.”

“The irony is that Susie brought it all on herself,” Darlene remarked. “All she had to do was just run that Ball with a semblance of professionalism, and she would never have been in this mess. But that whole police brutality rumor? Don’t buy a word of it.”

“Okay,” Heather said, taking another sip of her iced tea. “But who started it, anyway, if it’s not true?”

“I did,” she replied, grinning wickedly.

“But why?” Heather asked, mystified.

“The more sympathy there is for Susie,” Darlene reasoned, “the less sympathy there’s going to be . . . for Amanda.”

“So that’s how the big girls do it, huh, Darlene?” Heather gave an admiring nod.

“That’s right, my little student!”

“Well, what’s gonna happen now?”

Darlene leaned forward, eyes shining. “Have you heard the rumor,” she began wheezily, “that Amanda found one hundred twenty thousand dollars in Susie’s desk? But she only tried to put eighty-five thousand in the bank?”

“No!” Heather covered her mouth with her hand. “I haven’t heard that rumor at all!”

“That’s because I just started it,” Darlene boasted. “Just you wait. You will. She’s going to have the devil’s own time trying to get any banking done for the Longhorn Ball.” Darlene’s expression suggested that she knew a big secret.

“Why is that?”

“Let’s just say I made a few phone calls.” Darlene couldn’t conceal her self-satisfied, smug expression. “I called a few contacts of mine in the banking community here in Dallas. They would never want to sojourn on my bad side.”

“What’d’ja do?”

“I just told them,” Darlene answered, matter-of-factly looking at her fingernails, “that if they did any banking business with the Longhorn Ball, I’d make sure my husband and all of his real estate friends pulled out every dime from their plebeiat banks.”

Heather grinned at her friend’s masterstroke. “How many banks did you call?”

Darlene closed her eyes and threw a solemn hand over her chest. “All of them,” she said, sashaying dramatically toward the iced tea and almost knocking the pitcher over. “Every single bank in Dallas. And even a few in Fort Worth. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Well, Mom, that’s the last of the boxes in the living room,” Amanda said. It was almost eleven p.m. The women surveyed the living room, the floor of which was now entirely visible for the first time since the movers had arrived. Elizabeth looked admiringly around the downstairs and nodded her head in approval. “It’s starting to look like a home,” she said.

“It is, at that. Mom, I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve helped me out so much here and at the Longhorn Ball office. I don’t even know what to say.”

“Well, you helped me out, by bringing my grandbabies back to Texas. Maybe in a few months I can knock some of that California nonsense out of their heads. Skateboarding. Organic foods. Please.”

“As if, Mom. People eat some things that aren’t chicken fried here in Dallas, too. And it’s not like people in Hillside Park have never seen a skateboard before.”

“I guess,” Elizabeth said grudgingly. “I just don’t see why your kids have to be so different.”

“It’s not worth worrying about,” Amanda said, flopping down on a couch. “I’m hungry.” She paused. “Maybe even for something greasy,” she added, casting her mother a mischievous grin.

“I’m guessing you’ve got nothing in your pantry except some organic greens,” Elizabeth said, sitting in an armchair opposite her. “Am I right or am I right?”

Amanda laughed. “We probably don’t even have that,” she said. “I’ve had zero time for grocery shopping. You know that better than anyone.”

“We could call out for a pizza.”

“How can you eat pizza and stay so thin?” Amanda had to admit—the conversations with her mother about things as unimportant as pizza and weight gain were so pleasurable that it was worth coming back to Dallas just to reestablish their relationship.

“The real question,” Elizabeth said, getting out her cell phone to punch in a number for pizza delivery, “is what’s going to happen when a bunch of those checks for the Longhorn Ball bounce. The Ball was such a disaster, I’m afraid half the people who wrote those checks may have stopped payment on them for a variety of reasons—they never got their auction item, they were seated in the incorrect level of sponsorship—some of them may just not want Susie to get credit for obtaining any money from them. How are we going to cover those bills?”

Amanda nodded. “Mom, thank God the Longhorn Ball has such a history in this town—it’s almost a monster you couldn’t kill if you tried, and Lord knows, Susie tried! Our supporters are so loyal and they know that by no means was this year business as usual. I’m sure after all the talk they realize we need their money more now than ever. I can’t imagine they would stop payment or have a check come back to us they weren’t willing to make good.” She watched as her mother ordered a pizza, and she was seized with the kind of giddy notion that she wasn’t sitting in a rental house, with no art on the walls, after the dissolution of a long-term marriage fifteen hundred miles away—but that she was just sitting in a dorm room at college, hanging out with her best friend. Mom as best friend? There was nothing in Amanda’s past that pointed to that. But she wasn’t saying no to it, either.

“What are you going to do about Mr. Black Mercedes’s check?” Elizabeth asked, having completed the order. “I hope you like pepperoni. I forgot to ask.”

“Mom, at eleven at night, there’s nothing I want more than pepperoni pizza. It’s perfect. Thank God my daughter’s asleep!”

“I thought so. . . . So what are you going to do about his check?”

Amanda relaxed further into the couch. “I thought about tearing it up—but this isn’t a car or a bunch of clothes for me. This is a charitable donation, and if he really wants to make it, I shouldn’t be getting in the way. And Lord knows we need the money—that way we can pay all of our creditors and still have some money to spare. Obviously, he sent the check because he wants to get my attention, and he’s certainly gotten it, so I figured I’d meet him first and see what this is all about. Then I’ll go from there.”

“Makes sense.” Elizabeth stretched her neck to relieve the kinks.

Amanda decided it was time to change the topic. “Hey, what do you think happened to that Neiman’s card? I’ve looked for it everywhere.”

Elizabeth thought for a moment. “You really think Sharon swiped it?”

“I’d hate to believe that.” She stared at the paintings and prints leaning against the walls, wishing that she could magically nail them into place with a glance. The idea of standing there with a hammer and nails for hours on end just seemed too depressing to contemplate.

“The only other possibility,” Amanda said, returning to the subject at hand, “is that somehow the card got stuck in a file folder or an envelope somewhere. We had so much paper flying around.”

“We did,” her mother agreed, “but my bookkeeperish instincts tell me that that card is nowhere in that office. I went through absolutely everything after Sharon left, just to put everything in order and make sure we’d be able to find what we wanted going forward. I know a gift card’s a little thing, but I’m telling you, it was gone.”

“That’s so disturbing,” Amanda said after a moment. “Why would Sharon do such a thing, if she did? I guess I still want to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“I don’t,” Elizabeth retorted firmly. “That young lady gave a lot of mothers like me fits when y’all were growing up. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past her. And that Heather Sappington. She’s another piece of work. Out of all the women in Hillside Park, how did you immediately hook up with the two of them now that you’re back? I always told you there was nothing more dangerous than white trash with nothing to lose. Especially when it comes to our neighborhood.”

“Mom,” Amanda pointed out, “they picked me. After Sharon Peavy didn’t say a word to stick up for me in that Bible study, I had no particular interest in even saying hello to her. And as for Heather, I was never drawn to her.”

“Social climbers,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head dismissively. “It’s worse than a disease. At least they did you a favor, making you Chair of the Ball.”

“I’m honestly starting to wonder whether it really was a favor. Knowing the two of them, they must have had some sort of ulterior motive. I mean, this ain’t my first rodeo,” Amanda said in perfect Texan drawl, winking at her mother. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.”

“Karma’s a boomerang. Either Sharon’s done you a good turn, or she’s just setting herself up for even more trouble. My guess is it’s the latter. Though I still believe that there’s something therapeutic about your being so involved in this whole Ball thing. It keeps you from sitting home and brooding. That’s the worst thing a woman can do.”

“I suppose,” Amanda answered pensively. “But it’s turning into a much bigger pain in the butt than I ever imagined. I just couldn’t believe all those banks turning me down. I mean, what’s that? Did Susie really poison the well that much in this town? Okay, maybe they fell behind on their accounts receivable. But I’ve never seen a bank want to turn down a few hundred thousand dollars of deposits, including eighty-something thousand in cash. Let alone every bank in town.”

“It does set the mind to wondering. . . . Where is that pizza?”

“So we ought to know in a few days what our cash position is, whether we can pay our bills in full or not.”

“Worst case,” Elizabeth reasoned, “we can go to our creditors and work something out—half now, half later, something. The thing that I don’t understand is, if Susie’s husband really did give three and a half million or four million or whatever it is, the story changes hourly, to the Longhorn Ball, where’d that money go?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” Amanda had no answer.

“Indeed,” her mother mused. “How come there’s nothing in the bank, millions of dollars supposedly donated, and nothing to pay the bills with?”

Amanda thought for a moment. “Did you see any checks made out to the Pediatric Foundation?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I didn’t see all of the bank records, but the ones that I saw didn’t point toward any four-million-dollar donation. Maybe we ought to call them in the morning and see if they ever got paid.”

“Somehow, knowing Susie, I’m starting to doubt it.”

The doorbell rang. “Finally,” Elizabeth said. “I’m famished. Since we’re talking Longhorn Ball business, we could pay for this out of petty cash.”

“I don’t want to be bothered,” Amanda said. “This one’s on me.” She headed to the door to pay for the pizza.

“If he’s cute,” Elizabeth called out, “bring him in. I could use a pepperoni pizza and a man right about now.”

“Mother!” Friends with my mom? she thought. This is definitely going to take some getting used to. But she liked the sound of it.

W
hen Travis had returned to his office that evening, it was not with a stack of five-thousand-dollar, anonymous Neiman’s gift cards, but instead with three plainclothes security officers and one member of the Hillside Park Police Department. Sharon was not exactly under arrest at that point, but neither was she free to leave. To her shock and dismay, she realized that Travis had been setting a trap since the moment that she had allowed him to run the ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card through his magnetic strip reader.

He had failed to share with her that the card had Amanda’s name on it, and instead was following the traditional procedure at Neiman’s and most other department stores when someone appeared to be using a stolen card.

After four hours of questioning, Sharon was escorted out of the basement security facility to the Hillside Park Police Department, where she was formally arrested, booked, and charged with possession of stolen property and intent to commit fraud. The difference between Sharon Peavy and Susie Caruth could have been measured in the fourteen hours that Sharon spent in the drunk tank, where her physical attributes met with considerably more interest and enthusiasm than they had back at Neiman’s.

Sharon finally made contact with Heather Sappington around eight the next morning, after a harrowing, sleepless night, in which she received numerous invitations from the men in the holding tank across the hall to reveal not just some but all two of her charms, a request she steadfastly denied. Her bail was met by a check from Ann Anderson, which Heather Sappington brought to county jail, where Sharon had been transferred at five in the morning. Heather was waiting outside in her Jaguar when a locked door opened and Sharon was unceremoniously sent back to freedom.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Heather exclaimed as Sharon rushed to the Jaguar and jumped in. “You poor, poor thing! What happened to you?”

“That bitch set me up!” Sharon sank into the seat and began to cry like a baby. “She had to know what she was doing, that conniving bitch! After all we were trying to do for her.”

Heather studied Sharon and her seriously rumpled outfit for a moment, then started the car and pulled away from the jail.

“What we were trying to do for her,” Heather reminded Sharon, “was to set her up. We weren’t exactly trying to do her any favors, remember?” She reached for a packet of tissues and handed them gently to her disheveled friend. “Poor baby,” she said sympathetically. “You just look awful.”

Sharon blew her nose piteously. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. Heather couldn’t exactly understand what that expression had to do with the present situation, but she could see that Sharon was in no mood to be corrected.

“If there’s any justice in the world, she’s going to have to pay for what she did to me. I’m looking at three to five years in prison!”

Heather looked shocked at first, but then dismissed her friend’s concerns. “I have no doubt that Ann or Darlene can make a phone call to Neiman’s and get the whole matter dropped.” She fished around in her weathered Louis Vuitton bag for her lip gloss.

“I hope so,” Sharon sobbed. “That was just the worst night of my life!”

They navigated the neighborhood around the jail and headed for the interstate.

“What are you gonna do about it, honey?”

“Do about it! Mmmm, where do I begin?” Sharon had spent the entire night concocting a whole list of things she intended to do about it. “First I’m gonna call Darlene, because I’m sure she can make this whole thing go away. You’re right about that. But that doesn’t excuse Amanda for what she did.”

“How are you so sure that Amanda was trying to set you up?” Heather asked, sneaking a quick peek at her lipstick in the rearview mirror. “Isn’t it possible that you just, like, saw a Neiman’s card and swiped it, hoping that Amanda wouldn’t notice?”

Sharon looked accusingly at her friend. “I just came out of county jail,” she sputtered, “and you would dare to contradict your best friend with the truth?”

Heather finally realized just how overwrought Sharon was. “You poor thing. You need a hot shower, a hot meal, and a nap. I don’t think you’re seeing things clearly.”

Sharon blew her nose. “Oh, I’m seeing things just fine,” she responded darkly, adjusting herself under her sweater. “I’m seeing things perfectly fine.”

That same morning, Amanda walked the children to Hillside Park Middle School, where Elizabeth picked up Amanda to drive her to the Longhorn Ball office. Before Amanda could say hello to her mom, her cell phone went off. She glanced at the screen and saw that the caller was “unknown.”

“Who could this be? Hello?”

“Ms. Vaughn?” an authoritative male voice drawled.

“This is she,” Amanda confirmed, puzzled. Elizabeth glanced at her. What’s this all about?

“This is Sam Horn, chief of security at Neiman Marcus,” the caller continued. “I hate to trouble you, ma’am, but would you mind coming by the store at your earliest convenience? There are some security questions that only you can answer.”

This is odd. What’s going on? Amanda asked herself, but then she knew. The gift card.

“Really? Why me? What is this about?” Amanda asked, not willing to reveal too much until she knew who had tried to use the card.

“Honestly, ma’am, we’d only need fifteen or twenty minutes of your time. It would be best,” the Neiman’s man said, his tone impassive, “if you could swing by the store. We’ll explain when you get here. We need you to take a look at a security video. I promise it won’t take more than half an hour.”

“I’d better say yes before you tell me it’s going to take all day. We’ll be right over.” She hung up.

“What’s that all about?” Elizabeth asked.

“It sounds like somebody tried to use my card at Neiman’s,” Amanda explained. “They want me to head over there right now.”

Elizabeth checked the dashboard clock. It was just after eight a.m. “But the store doesn’t open until ten.”

“I guess security keeps longer hours.”

“If it means they found your card, I guess it’s a good thing.” She turned the car around and headed for Neiman’s.

Amanda and Elizabeth reached Neiman’s ten minutes later, where they were quickly shown into the same basement security facility where Sharon had been interrogated the night before. Sam Horn, the security officer who had called Amanda a few minutes earlier, ushered her and Elizabeth into seats, pushed a few buttons on his laptop computer, and turned the screen toward the two women. Sam leaned over, pushed a couple of more buttons, and the women listened to the conversation between Sharon and Travis. Sam played the entire exchange, culminating in Travis’s disappearance with the card, presumably to get its contents registered on a bunch of other cards. Amanda and Elizabeth were predictably horrified, although not altogether surprised.

“I never liked her,” Elizabeth said flatly. “She’s just wretched,” Amanda agreed with a sigh.

“Ladies,” Sam drawled, “can you identify the woman on that video?”

You mean the one with the three sixes on her head, just
smokin’
, Amanda wanted to say, but forced herself to suppress the tangent she wanted to go on.

Amanda and Elizabeth looked at each other like a couple of schoolgirls who had shown up unprepared for a pop quiz.

“Do I have to?” Amanda asked.

“It would certainly aid our investigation,” Sam replied. “Can you identify her?”

“Sharon Peavy,” the women chorused.

Sam glanced at the papers on his desk, checked to see that the name was correct, nodded, then closed the laptop. He seated himself behind his desk.

“Ladies,” he began, “do you realize that Ms. Peavy yesterday tried to commit fraud with a gift card, which totaled—”

He paused to check his paperwork again. “Ninety-eight thousand dollars?”

“We didn’t know until just now,” Amanda said, miserably uncomfortable. Sharon had been her best friend growing up, she had baked Amanda a pie—a chocolate pecan pie, no less—and had even gone to the trouble of getting Amanda the position of Longhorn Ball Chair. Why would Sharon do a thing like this?

Sam wanted to know the same thing. “Do you have any idea how Ms. Peavy came into possession of your gift card?”

“Do I have to say?” The idea of getting Sharon in trouble held no appeal.

“You don’t have to tell us,” Sam said, “but it would certainly assist us in our investigation.”

Elizabeth glanced at Amanda, wondering what her daughter would do. It was her call.

“Let me just make sure I understand what’s going on,” Amanda said, buying time. She looked puzzled. “Excuse me, Mr., um—”

“Horn,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Horn,” Amanda said. She felt her heart racing. The idea that Sharon would steal her gift card was just unimaginable, and yet it made all too much sense. “What exactly is going on?”

“We just want to understand the circumstances by which Ms. Peavy came into possession of your gift card,” Sam explained in an East Texas monotone. “How did she get your card?”

“It’s not my card.” Elizabeth threw her a confused look.

Sam looked surprised, as well. “It’s not your card? It’s got your name on it.”

“What exactly would I be doing with a ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card from Neiman Marcus?” Amanda asked. “We’re comfortable, but I don’t have that kind of money.”

This was a twist that Sam had not expected. Nor had Elizabeth, for that matter, who stared at her daughter, bewildered.

“Why would a Neiman’s gift card with something like ninety-eight thousand dollars on it have your name on it?” Sam asked.

“It must be an accounting error of some sort. I’ve never seen a card with that much money on it in my life.” She grinned. “I’d like to.”

“I’ve got one right here for you,” Sam said, reaching into a desk drawer, and taking out a plain white envelope. “The original, as you can understand, is being held by the police as evidence in the case being built against Ms. Peavy.” Elizabeth shot Amanda a deeply puzzled glance.

“We made up a new one with your name on it this morning,” Sam continued. “That’s why we called you in so early, and I hope we didn’t disturb your day, ma’am. We just didn’t want you to be without it. Anybody who had lost a ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card would probably be very upset.”

Amanda forced a laugh. “I’d be upset if I lost a gift card of that size,” she admitted. “Wouldn’t you, Mom?” Elizabeth, stupefied, took a few seconds before she could register exactly what Amanda was asking her to say.

“Oh, no doubt!” she finally said, shaking her head in disbelief. Her daughter, she decided for the millionth time, was somethin’ else.

Sam Horn’s eyes narrowed. “Are you really telling me,” he said, amazed, “that you did not have a ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card in your possession, that you do not have a store credit with Neiman Marcus in the amount of ninety-eight thousand dollars, and that if I handed you this gift card with that value on it, you would refuse to take it?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t take it,” Amanda noted with a grin, “but then I’d be stealing, too, wouldn’t I? I mean, it’s not my card. It’s not my money. I really don’t know what this whole thing is about.”

Sam looked as bewildered as he felt. A routine investigation had turned into something he could not wrap his mind around. “I’m just a little bit confused, ladies, and I apologize. You’re telling me . . . that . . . Sharon Peavy did not steal your card.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Amanda said, the picture of serenity.

Elizabeth shot her a glance that asked “Are you out of your mind?”

“You do understand,” the increasingly flustered Sam said, “that without your willingness to aver to the fact that Ms. Peavy stole your card, we have no case against her?”

Amanda thought for a long time before she answered. “I don’t exactly know what ‘averring’ means, but if it means the same thing as ‘saying,’ then yes, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that I never had a gift card of that size, and Ms. Peavy therefore could never have stolen it from me.”

“But the video—” Sam began.

Amanda cut him off. “That video proves nothing. I’m not a lawyer, but it sure looked like your employee was trying to entrap her into an illegal action. I mean, dividing the one big gift card into a whole bunch of little gift cards was his idea. And unless you’ve got it on tape somewhere that she actually took possession of the smaller gift cards and actually tried to
use
one of them, I don’t even know what kind of case you’ve got against her in the first place.”

Sam looked as if he’d lost his best friend.

“Are you sure—” he asked, hoping against hope that Amanda would say something to implicate Sharon with a prosecutable offense.

“I don’t mean to get involved with your store’s internal affairs,” Amanda began, gaining confidence now. “But if you can’t figure out what she did wrong, I don’t know why you’re asking me.”

“B-but—” Sam sputtered.

“Is there anything else?” Amanda asked impatiently. “My mother and I have a lot of work to do. I’m the new Chair of the Longhorn Ball. If you’d like to donate the value on that gift card to the Ball as an item for our auction, I’d be very interested in discussing that with you. But otherwise, I think we need to bring this conversation to a close.”

Sam was dumbfounded. “That wouldn’t be my decision to make. I’m just in charge of security. Or I will be until somebody finds out what’s gone on here. You’d have to talk to somebody in, I don’t know, marketing or community relations. Or something.”

He looked just devastated that his case was collapsing, and with it, perhaps, his entire career in store security. And if the case was as much in free fall as it appeared, then he would have to answer both to the store and to Sharon Peavy for having pressed charges and sending her for a night in county jail. Elizabeth glanced back and forth between Sam and her daughter, quietly amazed by the turn of events.

Amanda stood, and so did Elizabeth, and so, instinctively, did Sam, a Texas gentleman who rose whenever ladies did. “Don’t you want your gift card?” he asked forlornly, holding the envelope for Amanda to take.