Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes (30 page)

He cleared his throat, trying to think of something supportive to say. Something that didn't commit him one way or the other. “Look on the bright side,” he said finally. “When she's fourteen, which is only a couple of years away, she'll have the right to choose who she wants to live with anyway.”

Nita's face clouded. She said, “After a couple of years under Virginia's roof, under Virginia's influence, who do you think she'll choose?”

She was clever to have realized this. Virginia was a formidable enemy, as Charles well knew. He had spent most of his life in skirmishes with his mother, determined to get the upper hand, and always losing. The only battle he had ever won was the one over his engagement to Nita, which Virginia had vehemently opposed. And now it was his mother's scheme, the one he had refused to participate in, that had brought Nita back into his arms, where she belonged. There could be no doubt, now, what he must do. He would promise to help Nita but he would allow his mother to go on with her revenge, unchecked. He would wait until Nita's marriage crumbled under the strain of Virginia's plot, and then he would make his move. The deceit of this decision posed no moral dilemma for Charles. He had been practicing law for twenty years and had long ago given up the illusion of morality. A man had to do what a man had to do, to get his family back. Once Jimmy Lee had gone and Nita had returned to him, they would retrieve Whitney and settle down again as a family.

They would be one big happy family again.

N
ITA DROVE HOME THROUGH THE RAIN-DRENCHED STREETS
. T
HE
storm had passed and the sun, wreathed in ragged clouds, dropped slowly behind the dark line of distant trees. She felt drained, lifeless. Nothing had ever mattered as much to her as her children, and now she had lost her only daughter to her heartless conniving ex-mother-in-law. She had built her defenses against Charles and instead it had been his mother who snuck around Nita's unguarded flank in the dead of night and stole her child. For the first time in her life, sweet Nita, former Homecoming Queen and Crusader for Christ, understood why one human being would kill another. She could understand why Angel Phipps's mother had poured antifreeze into her husband's oatmeal to protect her child. Once on this tack, her imagination veered off into uncharted waters. She spent the rest of the ride home with her mind crowded with images of Virginia shrieking in pain from arsenic poisoning, Virginia flopping down a flight of stairs like a broken rag doll, Virginia lying in a watery grave at the bottom of the Black Warrior River, food for fish and slimy gastropods. Caught up in her visions of vengeance, Nita could think of nothing else.

When she arrived home, Jimmy Lee was gone.

L
AVONNE AND
E
ADIE ARRIVED AN HOUR LATER
. T
HE
house was dark except for the kitchen. Nita sat alone at the table in a pool of light clutching a shot glass. On the table in front of her sat a bottle of tequila and two small glasses. Eadie hugged her and Lavonne sat down across from her and said, “Okay. Start at the beginning and tell us exactly what happened.” Nita poured out three shots of tequila and told them.

“That low-life bitch,” Eadie said, when she'd finished. “That slimy, backstabbing female Judas. You know why she's done this, don't you? She's getting even for what we did to fucking Charles. She found out what happened in Montana and now she's getting even with all of us, through Nita. She was pumping me at Nita's wedding, trying to find out what happened on the hunting trip, and I'll bet she finally figured out some way to get Redmon to spill the beans. Some way I don't even want to think about.” Eadie made it a habit not to think about other people's sex lives, but she knew a dominatrix relationship when she saw one. Even if the dominatrix dressed in Anne Taylor suits and talked like Scarlett O'Hara on speed.

Lavonne patted Nita's hand and looked through the doorway to the darkened house beyond. “Where's Jimmy Lee?” she asked.

“Gone with the wind,” Nita said bitterly, lifting her glass. She told them about the failed business deal with Virginia and Redmon.

“He'll be back,” Eadie said, pouring another round of drinks. She was an expert when it came to hot-and-cold relationships, and she figured, given the right circumstances, Jimmy Lee and Nita's would heat up again.

“He should be here now,” Lavonne said firmly.

“He's probably feeling humiliated and guilty.”

“That's no excuse.”

“I don't want to talk about Jimmy Lee right now,” Nita said in a brittle voice, setting her glass down on the table. “I want to talk about how to get my child back.”

“Did you get an attorney?” Lavonne said.

“I got Rosebud. She says it's going to be a long, expensive fight going up against Virginia and Redmon. She says his pockets are pretty deep and I have about six hundred and eighty dollars in my checking account.” Nita looked like she might cry and Lavonne said, “Don't worry. I'll help you with the attorney's fees,” and Eadie got out her checkbook and wrote her a check. “Y'all don't have to do that,” Nita said. Then she began to cry in earnest and Eadie and Lavonne put their arms around her. After a while, Nita sat up and blew her nose. “I'll get a sinus infection if I don't stop,” she said, sniffing.

“Go ahead and get it out,” Lavonne said. “You'll feel better.”

Eadie got up and went to the sink to wet down a paper towel so Nita could clean her face. “Does Loretta know?” she said, flipping the faucet on.

“I wasn't going to tell her but then one of daddy's old cronies down at the sheriff's department told him and now she knows. She's on her way over here now.”

“Oh, Lord,” Eadie said. “Is she armed?”

“Most likely. But Virginia's in Florida for another week so she can't shoot her, at least not until next Friday.”

“That won't stop her from shooting out Virginia's windows or maybe taking a few potshots at the Mercedes.”

Nita hadn't thought of that. “Shit,” she said.

“If I were you, I'd do my best to talk her out of any gunplay,” Lavonne said. “The judge in your custody case might not take kindly to your mother taking potshots at Virginia and her belongings.”

“Lavonne's right,” Eadie said, sitting back down. “Let's try to talk her out of shooting Virginia until
after
the hearing.”

The refrigerator rattled and hummed in the background. Nita stared despondently at her shot glass. She felt numb. She felt like she might be frozen inside and she didn't want to be here, sitting in the kitchen with Eadie and Lavonne talking revenge. Anger was sure to follow, flaring in her breast and melting the cold hard lump that had formed around her heart, and then she'd have no choice but to feel deeply what she'd been avoiding all day—the loss of her daughter and her husband. “The truly ironic thing is I'd actually begun to feel sorry for Virginia.” Nita grimaced and shook her head, ashamed of her own naïveté. “I learned all that stuff about her childhood and I felt sorry for her. I trusted her the way I never trusted her when I was married to Charles.”

Eadie said, “What stuff about her childhood?”

“I convinced myself she wasn't really a bad person, deep down inside.”

“What stuff?” Eadie frowned and looked at Lavonne, who shrugged. “What do you know about Virginia's childhood that we don't know?”

Nita got up and went into the bedroom to get her notebook while Eadie poured another round of drinks. Nita came back out and handed the notebook to Lavonne. “Read the entries circled in red. Those are the ones I took down from Leota Quarles.” Lavonne read them aloud and when she was finished, she laid the opened notebook down on the table. No one said anything. The moon came up and pressed itself against the window screen like a ghostly presence. Lavonne stared at the notebook, an expression of bemused astonishment on her face.

“So Virginia knew about the Indian artifacts buried on the island all along,” she said in a quiet voice. She picked up the notebook and read aloud, “
Miss Virginia never said a word, she just clipped the article and took it up and put it in her little cigar box where she kept all her other treasures since she was a little girl, the pottery pieces and spear points she'd dug up on Big Ridge, the corsage she'd worn to her first cotillion, all her love letters from Hampton Boone
.”

Eadie said, “I'll bet she even called the state herself. I'll bet she's behind the injunction that shut the job site down. She knew Jimmy Lee didn't have the money to invest. She knew he'd have to go to Nita, and once she figured Nita's bank account was drained, she called the authorities.”

“Oh my God,” Nita said as the truth slowly dawned on her.

Lavonne whistled and shook her head. “And I'll bet Redmon didn't
know about the Indian artifacts. He wasn't in on the plan. He cares too much about his pride and his money to let himself get strung out like that because of some revenge scheme Virginia cooked up.” She shook her head solemnly and looked from one to the other. “Which means Virginia was willing to screw over her own husband just to get even with you, Nita.”

The color drained out of Nita's face. On the wall behind her head, the clock ticked oppressively.

“Damn,” Eadie said finally. “The woman's got balls.” She lifted her glass and Lavonne lifted hers too.

“She's a Kudzu Debutante and doesn't even know it,” Lavonne said. She tossed her drink back and grimaced. “I hate to say this, maybe it's the tequila talking, but I'm starting to feel a certain grudging admiration for Virginia. If the woman could just learn how to channel her energies for good instead of evil, who knows what she might accomplish?”

Eadie nodded her head in agreement. “I hear you,” she said. “We're talking world domination here. We're talking CEO of any major corporation in America or, hell, who knows, maybe even postmaster general.”

Nita was not amused. She gave them a quick dark glance and then shifted her eyes again to her shot glass. “Excuse me if I can't feel any admiration for the woman who just stole my child.”

“Of course you can't,” Lavonne said, putting her arm around Nita and patting her shoulder.

Eadie said, “Hold on a minute.” She sat up straight, the trembling light from the tequila bottle reflecting in her eyes. “Virginia was in love with Trevor's dad. That means, if they'd married, she could have been
my
mother-in-law, Nita, not yours.” She shuddered and took a long drink and then set her glass down on the table. “And I thought Maureen was bad,” she said.

“No, no,” Lavonne, the logical one, said. “That would never have happened, because if Virginia and Hamp had had children, then they wouldn't have had Trevor. Trevor could only have come from Maureen and Hamp, not Virginia and Hamp.”

Nita looked at her glumly and lifted her glass.

Eadie got up and began to pace the floor. Pacing helped her to focus. Another thought occurred to her and she stopped suddenly and said, “Hey, you don't think Virginia and Hamp carried on after they were married do you? You don't think they had an affair later on?”

“Let's ask Loretta,” Lavonne said, hearing Loretta's car in the drive.
Headlights flared suddenly through the kitchen window and then dimmed. “She'd know.”

“Let's not do anything to get her any more riled up than she already is,” Nita warned. “In fact, let's try to mention Virginia as little as possible.” She got up to get another shot glass out of the cupboard.

“You're right,” Eadie said, moving her glass to the middle of the table so Lavonne could pour another round. “Let's just offer Loretta a drink and try to get her calmed down. We can figure out what to do later.”

Lavonne poured the drinks and then put the cap back on the bottle. “You might want to make sure Loretta's unarmed before you offer her tequila,” she said.

“Good thinking,” Eadie said.

The back door banged opened and Loretta stalked in. Her hair stood up around her head in stiff peaks and her face was the color of dried blood. She was wearing a bathrobe and slippers made to look like Tweety Bird.

Nita put her hands up. “Now calm down, Mama,” she said.

Loretta scowled and swung her head back and forth. “What in the hell's going on?” she said.

“If you'll calm down and take a seat, I'll tell you.”

Loretta stomped over to the table, her slippers snapping at her heels like a pack of angry Chihuahuas. She yanked a chair out and sat down.

Eadie said, “You don't have anything in your pockets do you, Loretta?”

“Like what?” Loretta growled.

“Like a handgun.”

“No. Why?”

Eadie relaxed and poured her a drink. “We wanted to make sure you weren't armed before we plied you with tequila. We wanted to make sure you hadn't planned on going over to Virginia's and shooting up the place.”

Loretta tossed her drink back and set the shot glass down on the table. “I hadn't thought of it, but now that you mention it, that's a damn fine idea.”

“Good job,” Lavonne said to Eadie.

Loretta said, “You got any limes?”

“No, Mama, I'm fresh out.”

“Where's Jimmy Lee?” Loretta said. “I didn't see his truck in the driveway.”