The Sign of Seven Trilogy (15 page)

“It was in Sami's Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra at the time.”

“Oh. Well.”

“That's not privileged information as Shelley chased them both out of the back room and straight out onto Main Street—with Sami's miraculous bra in full view—with a rag mop. Want a Coke?”

“No, I really don't. I don't think I need anything to give me an edge.”

Since she looked inclined to pace, he didn't offer her a chair. Instead, he leaned back against his desk. “Rough night?”

“No, the opposite. I just can't figure out what I'm doing here. I don't understand any of this, and I certainly don't understand my place in it. A couple hours ago I told myself I was going to pack and drive back to New York like a sane person. But I didn't.” She turned to him. “I couldn't. And I don't understand that either.”

“You're where you're supposed to be. That's the simplest answer.”

“Are you afraid?”

“A lot of the time.”

“I don't think I've ever been really afraid. I wonder if I'd be so damned edgy if I had something to
do
. An assignment, a task.”

“Listen, I've got to drive to a client a few miles out of town, take her some papers.”

“Oh, sorry. I'm in the way.”

“No, and when I start thinking beautiful women are in my way, please notify my next of kin so they can gather to say their final good-byes before my death. I was going to suggest you ride out with me, which is something to do. And you can have chamomile tea and stale lemon snaps with Mrs. Oldinger, which is a task. She likes company, which is the real reason she had me draw up the fifteenth codicil to her will.”

He kept talking, knowing that was one way to help calm someone down when she looked ready to bolt. “By the time that's done, I can swing by another client who's not far out of the way and save him a trip into town. By my way of thinking, Cal and Quinn should be just about back home by the time we're done with all that. We'll go by, see what's what.”

“Can you be out of the office all that time?”

“Believe me.” He grabbed his coat, his briefcase. “Mrs. H will holler me back if I'm needed here. But unless you've got something better to do, I'll have her pull out the files I need and we'll take a drive.”

It was better than brooding, Layla decided. Maybe she thought it was odd for a lawyer, even a small-town lawyer to drive an old Dodge pickup with a couple of Ring Ding wrappers littering the floorboards.

“What are you doing for the second client?”

“That's Charlie Deen. Charlie got clipped by a DUI when he was driving home from work. Insurance company's trying to dance around some of the medical bills. Not going to happen.”

“Divorce, wills, personal injury. So you don't specialize?”

“All law, all the time,” he said and sent her a smile that was a combination of sweet and cocky. “Well, except for tax law if I can avoid it. I leave that to my sister. She's tax and business law.”

“But you don't have a practice together.”

“That'd be tough. Sage went to Seattle to be a lesbian.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry.” He boosted the gas as they passed the town limits. “Family joke. What I mean is my sister Sage is gay, and she lives in Seattle. She's an activist, and she and her partner of, hmm, I guess about eight years now run a firm they call Girl on Girl. Seriously,” he added when Layla said nothing. “They specialize in tax and business law for gays.”

“Your family doesn't approve?”

“Are you kidding? My parents eat it up like tofu. When Sage and Paula—that's her partner—got married. Or had their life-partner affirmation, whatever—we all went out there and celebrated like mental patients. She's happy and that's what counts. The alternate lifestyle choice is just kind of a bonus for my parents. Speaking of family, that's my little brother's place.”

Layla saw a log house all but buried in the trees, with a sign near the curve of the road reading
HAWKINS CREEK POTTERY
.

“Your brother's a potter.”

“Yeah, a good one. So's my mother when she's in the mood. Want to stop in?”

“Oh, I…”

“Better not,” he decided. “Ridge'll get going and Mrs. H has called Mrs. Oldinger by now to tell her to expect us. Another time.”

“Okay.” Conversation, she thought. Small talk. Relative sanity. “So you have a brother and sister.”

“Two sisters. My baby sister owns the little vegetarian restaurant in town. It's pretty good, considering. Of the four of us I veered the farthest off the flower-strewn path my counterculture parents forged. But they love me anyway. That's about it for me. How about you?”

“Well…I don't have any relatives nearly as interesting as yours sound, but I'm pretty sure my mother has some old Joan Baez albums.”

“There, that strange and fateful crossroads again.”

She started to laugh, then gasped with pleasure as she spotted the deer. “Look! Oh, look. Aren't they gorgeous, just grazing there along the edge of the trees?”

To accommodate her, Fox pulled over to the narrow shoulder so she could watch. “You're used to seeing deer, I suppose,” she said.

“Doesn't mean I don't get a kick out of it. We had to run herds off the farm when I was a kid.”

“You grew up on a farm.”

There was that urban-dweller wistfulness in her voice. The kind that said she saw the pretty deer, the bunnies, the sunflowers, and happy chickens. And not the plowing, the hoeing, weeding, harvesting. “Small, family farm. We grew our own vegetables, kept chickens and goats, bees. Sold some of the surplus, some of my mother's crafts, my father's woodwork.”

“Do they still have it?”

“Yeah.”

“My parents owned a little dress shop when I was a kid. They sold out about fifteen years ago. I always wished—Oh God, oh my God!”

Her hand whipped over to clamp on his arm.

The wolf leaped out of the trees, onto the back of a young deer. It bucked, it screamed—she could hear its high-pitched screams of fear and pain—it bled while the others in the small herd continued to crop at grass.

“It's not real.”

His voice sounded tinny and distant. In front of her horrified eyes the wolf took the deer down, then began to tear and rip.

“It's not real,” he repeated. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt something click. Something inside her pushed toward him and away from the horror at the edge of the trees. “Look at it, straight on,” he told her. “Look at it and
know
it's not real.”

The blood was so red, so wet. It flew in ugly rain, smearing the winter grass of the narrow field. “It's not real.”

“Don't just say it. Know it. It lies, Layla. It lives in lies. It's not real.”

She breathed in, breathed out. “It's not real. It's a lie. It's an ugly lie. A small, cruel lie. It's not real.”

The field was empty; the winter grass ragged and unstained.

“How do you live with this?” Shoving around in her seat, Layla stared at him. “How do you stand this?”

“By knowing—the way I knew that was a lie—that some day, some way, we're going to kick its ass.”

Her throat burned dry. “You did something to me. When you took my shoulders, when you were talking to me, you did something to me.”

“No.” He denied it without a qualm. He'd done something
for
her, Fox told himself. “I just helped you remember it wasn't real. We're going on to Mrs. Oldinger. I bet you could use that chamomile tea about now.”

“Does she have any whiskey to go with it?”

“Wouldn't surprise me.”

 

Q
UINN COULD SEE CAL'S HOUSE THROUGH THE
trees when her phone signaled a waiting text-message. “Crap, why didn't she just call me?”

“Might've tried. There are lots of pockets in the woods where calls drop out.”

“Color me virtually unsurprised.” She brought up the message, smiling a little as she recognized Cybil's shorthand.

Bzy, but intrig'd. Tell u more when. Cn B there in a wk, 2 latest. Tlk whn cn. Q? B-ware. Serious. C.

“All right.” Quinn replaced the phone and made the decision she'd been weighing during the hike back. “I guess we'll call Fox and Layla when I'm having that really big drink by the fire you're going to build.”

“I can live with that.”

“Then, seeing as you're a town honcho, you'd be the one to ask about finding a nice, attractive, convenient, and somewhat roomy house to rent for the next, oh, six months.”

“And the tenant would be?”

“Tenants. They would be me, my delightful friend Cybil, whom I will talk into digging in, and most likely Layla, whom—I believe—will take a bit more convincing. But I'm very persuasive.”

“What happened to staying a week for initial research, then coming back in April for a follow-up?”

“Plans change,” she said airily, and smiled at him as they stepped onto the gravel of his driveway. “Don't you just love when that happens?”

“Not really.” But he walked with her onto the deck and opened the door so she could breeze into his quiet home ahead of him.

T
HE HOUSE WHERE CAL HAD GROWN UP WAS, IN
his opinion, in a constant state of evolution. Every few years his mother would decide the walls needed “freshening,” which meant painting—or often in his mother's vocabulary a new “paint treatment.”

There was ragging, there was sponging, there was combing, and a variety of other terms he did his best to tune out.

Naturally, new paint led to new upholstery or window treatments, certainly to new bed linens when she worked her way to bedrooms. Which invariably led to new “arrangements.”

He couldn't count the number of times he'd hauled furniture around to match the grafts his mother routinely generated.

His father liked to say that as soon as Frannie had the house the way she wanted, it was time for her to shake it all up again.

At one time, Cal had assumed his mother had fiddled, fooled, painted, sewed, arranged, and re-arranged out of boredom. Although she volunteered, served on various committees, or stuck her oar in countless organizations, she'd never worked outside the home. He'd gone through a period in his late teens and early twenties where he'd imagined her (pitied her) as an unfulfilled, semidesperate housewife.

At one point he, in his worldliness of two college semesters, got her alone and explained his understanding of her sense of repression. She'd laughed so hard she'd had to set down her upholstery tacks and wipe her eyes.

“Honey,” she'd said, “there's not a single bone of repression in my entire body. I love color and texture and patterns and flavors. And oh, just all sorts of things. I get to use this house as my studio, my science project, my laboratory, and my showroom. I get to be the director, the designer, the set builder, and the star of the whole show. Now, why would I want to go out and get a job or a career—since we don't need the money—and have somebody else tell me what to do and when to do it?”

She'd crooked her finger so he leaned down to her. And she'd laid a hand on his cheek. “You're such a sweetheart, Caleb. You're going to find out that not everybody wants what society—in whatever its current mood or mode might be—tells them they should want. I consider myself lucky, even privileged, that I was able to make the choice to stay home and raise my children. And I'm lucky to be able to be married to a man who doesn't mind if I use my talents—and I'm damned talented—to disrupt his quiet home with paint samples and fabric swatches every time he turns around. I'm happy. And I love knowing you worried I might not be.”

He'd come to see she was exactly right. She did just as she liked, and was terrific at what she did. And, he'd come to see that when it came down to the core, she was the power in the house. His father brought in the money, but his mother handled the finances. His father ran his business, his mother ran the home.

And that was exactly the way they liked it.

So he didn't bother telling her not to fuss over Sunday dinner—just as he hadn't attempted to talk her out of extending the invitation to Quinn, Layla, and Fox. She lived to fuss, and enjoyed putting on elaborate meals for people, even if she didn't know them.

Since Fox volunteered to swing into town and pick up the women, Cal went directly to his parents' house, and went early. It seemed wise to give them some sort of groundwork—and hopefully a few basic tips on how to deal with a woman who intended to write a book on the Hollow, since the town included people, and those people included his family.

Frannie stood at the stove, checking the temperature of her pork tenderloin. Obviously satisfied with that, she crossed to the counter to continue the layers of her famous antipasto squares.

“So, Mom,” Cal began as he opened the refrigerator.

“I'm serving wine with dinner, so don't go hunting up any beer.”

Chastised, he shut the refrigerator door. “Okay. I just wanted to mention that you shouldn't forget that Quinn's writing a book.”

“Have you noticed me forgetting things?”

“No.” The woman forgot nothing, which could be a little daunting. “What I mean is, we should all be aware that things we say and do may end up in a book.”

“Hmm.” Frannie layered pepperoni over provolone. “Do you expect me or your father to say or do something embarrassing over appetizers? Or maybe we'll wait until dessert. Which is apple pie, by the way.”

“No, I—You made apple pie?”

She spared him a glance, and a knowing smile. “It's your favorite, isn't it, my baby?”

“Yeah, but maybe you've lost your knack. I should sample a piece before company gets here. Save you any embarrassment if it's lousy pie.”

“That didn't work when you were twelve.”

“I know, but you always pounded the whole if-you don't-succeed chestnut into my head.”

“You just keep trying, sweetie. Now, why are you worried about this girl, who I'm told you've been seen out and about with a few times, coming around for dinner?”

“It's not like that.” He wasn't sure what it was like. “It's about why she's here at all. We can't forget that, that's all I'm saying.”

“I never forget. How could I? We have to live our lives, peel potatoes, get the mail, sneeze, buy new shoes, in spite of it all, maybe because of it all.” There was a hint of fierceness in her voice he recognized as sorrow. “And that living includes being able to have a nice company meal on a Sunday.”

“I wish it were different.”

“I know you do, but it's not.” She kept layering, but her eyes lifted to his. “And, Cal, my handsome boy, you can't do more than you do. If anything, there are times I wish you could do less. But…Tell me, do you like this girl? Quinn Black?”

“Sure.” Like to get a taste of that top-heavy mouth again, he mused. Then broke off that train of thought quickly since he knew his mother's skill at reading her children's minds.

“Then I intend to give her and the others a comfortable evening and an excellent meal. And, Cal, if you didn't want her here, didn't want her to speak with me or your dad, you wouldn't let her in the door. I wouldn't be able, though my powers are fierce, to shove you aside and open it myself.”

He looked at her. Sometimes when he did, it surprised him that this pretty woman with her short, streaked blond hair, her slim build and creative mind could have given birth to him, could have raised him to be a man. He could look and think she was delicate, and then remember she was almost terrifyingly strong.

“I'm not going to let anything hurt you.”

“Back at you, doubled. Now get out of my kitchen. I need to finish up the appetizers.”

He'd have offered to lend her a hand, but would have earned one of her pitying stares. Not that she didn't allow kitchen help. His father was not only allowed to grill, but encouraged to. And any and all could and were called in as line chefs from time to time.

But when his mother was in full-out company-coming mode, she wanted the kitchen to herself.

He passed through the dining room where, naturally, the table was already set. She'd used festive plates, which meant she wasn't going for elegant or drop-in casual. Tented linen napkins, tea lights in cobalt rounds, inside a centerpiece of winter berries.

Even during the worst time, even during the Seven, he could come here and there would be fresh flowers artfully arranged, furniture free of dust and gleaming with polish, and intriguing little soaps in the dish in the downstairs powder room.

Even hell didn't cause Frannie Hawkins to break stride.

Maybe, Cal thought as he wandered into the living room, that was part of the reason—even the most important reason—he got through it himself. Because whatever else happened, his mother would be maintaining her own brand of order and sanity.

Just as his father would be. They'd given him that, Cal thought. That rock-solid foundation. Nothing, not even a demon from hell had ever shaken it.

He started to go upstairs, hunt down his father who, he suspected, would be in his home office. But saw Fox's truck pull in when he glanced out the window.

He stood where he was, watched Quinn jump out first, cradling a bouquet wrapped in green florist paper. Layla slid out next, holding what looked to be a wine gift bag. His mother, Cal thought, would approve of the offerings. She herself had shelves and bins in her ruthlessly organized workroom that held carefully selected emergency hostess gifts, gift bags, colored tissue paper, and an assortment of bows and ribbons.

When Cal opened the door, Quinn strode straight in. “Hi. I love the house and the yard! Shows where you came by your eye for landscaping. What a great space. Layla, look at these walls. Like an Italian villa.”

“It's their latest incarnation,” Cal commented.

“It looks like home, but with a kick of style. Like you could curl up on that fabulous sofa and take a snooze, but you'd probably read
Southern Homes
first.”

“Thank you.” Frannie stepped out. “That's a lovely compliment. Cal, take everyone's coats, will you? I'm Frannie Hawkins.”

“It's so nice to meet you. I'm Quinn. Thanks so much for having us. I hope you like mixed bouquets. I have a hard time deciding on one type of mostly anything.”

“They're wonderful, thank you.” Frannie accepted the flowers, smiled expectantly at Layla.

“I'm Layla Darnell, thank you for having us in your home. I hope the wine's appropriate.”

“I'm sure it is.” Frannie took a peek inside the gift bag. “Jim's favorite cabernet. Aren't you clever girls? Cal, go up and tell your father we have company. Hello, Fox.”

“I brought you something, too.” He grabbed her, lowered her into a stylish dip, and kissed both her cheeks. “What's cooking, sweetheart?”

As she had since he'd been a boy, Frannie ruffled his hair. “You won't have long to wait to find out. Quinn and Layla, you make yourselves comfortable. Fox, you come with me. I want to put these flowers in water.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Not a thing.”

When Cal came down with his father, Fox was doing his version of snooty French waiter as he served appetizers. The women were laughing, candles were lit, and his mother carried in her grandmother's best crystal vase with Quinn's flowers a colorful filling.

Sometimes, Cal mused, all really was right with the world.

 

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THE MEAL, WHERE THE CONVERSATION
stayed in what Cal considered safe territories, Quinn set down her fork, shook her head. “Mrs. Hawkins, this is the most amazing meal, and I have to ask. Did you study? Did you have a career as a gourmet chef at some point or did we just hit you on a really lucky day?”

“I took a few classes.”

“Frannie's taken a lot of ‘a few classes,'” Jim said. “In all kinds of things. But she's just got a natural talent for cooking and gardening and decorating. What you see around here, it's all her doing. Painted the walls, made the curtains—sorry, window treatments,” he corrected with a twinkle at his wife.

“Get out. You did all the faux and fancy paintwork? Yourself?”

“I enjoy it.”

“Found that sideboard there years back at some flea market, had me haul it home.” Jim gestured toward the gleaming mahogany sideboard. “A few weeks later, she has me haul it in here. Thought she was pulling a fast one, had snuck out and bought something from an antique store.”

“Martha Stewart eats your dust,” Quinn decided. “I mean that as a compliment.”

“I'll take it.”

“I'm useless at all of that. I can barely paint my own nails. How about you?” Quinn asked Layla.

“I can't sew, but I like to paint. Walls. I've done some ragging that turned out pretty well.”

“The only ragging I've done successfully was on my ex-fiancé.”

“You were engaged?” Frannie asked.

“I thought I was. But our definition of same differed widely.”

“It can be difficult to blend careers and personal lives.”

“Oh, I don't know. People do it all the time—with varying degrees of success, sure, but they do. I think it just has to be the right people. The trick, or the first of probably many tricks, is recognizing the right person. Wasn't it like that for you? Didn't you have to recognize each other?”

“I knew the first time I saw Frannie. There she is.” Jim beamed down the table at his wife. “Frannie now, she was a little more shortsighted.”

“A little more practical,” Frannie corrected, “seeing as we were eight and ten at the time. Plus I enjoyed having you moon over and chase after me. Yes, you're right.” Frannie looked back at Quinn. “You have to see each other, and see in each other something that makes you want to take the chance, that makes you believe you can dig down for the long haul.”

“And sometimes you think you see something,” Quinn commented, “but it was just a—let's say—trompe l'oeil.”

 

O
NE THING QUINN KNEW HOW TO DO WAS FINAGLE
. Frannie Hawkins wasn't an easy mark, but Quinn managed to charm her way into the kitchen to help put together dessert and coffee.

“I love kitchens. I'm kind of a pathetic cook, but I love all the gadgets and tools, all the shiny surfaces.”

“I imagine with your work, you eat out a lot.”

“Actually, I eat in most of the time or call for takeout. I implemented a lifestyle change—nutrition-wise—a couple of years ago. Determined to eat healthier, depend less on fast or nuke-it-out-of-a-box food. I make a really good salad these days. That's a start. Oh God, oh God, that's apple pie. Homemade apple pie. I'm going to have to do double duty in the gym as penance for the huge piece I'm going to ask for.”

Her enjoyment obvious, Frannie shot her a wicked smile. “À la mode, with vanilla bean ice cream?”