Bitch Factor (3 page)

But it wasn’t really Betsy, either. More like a doll made to look like Betsy.

“COURTNEY…”

She picked Ellie up, and they stood looking at the Betsy doll in the coffin.

“Can Betsy come home now?”

“No, she can’t come home,” Courtney whispered. Now that she had finally made herself look, she couldn’t seem to stop looking. Was Betsy really in there? Or was this a big dumb doll someone had made to fake them out? And why the fuck had Mama made Betsy wear that pink dress?

Betsy
hated
that dress. She’d have wanted the purple shirt.

Hot tears crowded behind Courtney’s eyes, threatening to spill over. She blinked hard, willing them to BACK OFF. Betsy would hate knowing her sister was standing here blubbering over her.

“Betsy’s sleeping, Courtney. Wake her up.”

“I can’t wake her up, Ellie.”

“I can wake her!” Ellie lunged toward the doll in the box.

Courtney pulled away in time to keep Ellie from smacking the doll’s face, but Ellie grabbed the side of the coffin and held on.

“BETSY, WAKE UP. LET’S GO HOME.”

A man appeared instantly beside them.

“Now, now, child. Elizabeth doesn’t want to wake up just now. Let’s let her rest awhile longer.” His voice was low and friendly, but firm. The man loosened Ellie’s fingers and
turned the girls toward a larger room with fewer people and more chairs.

Courtney had never seen the man before. He wore a black suit and looked like part of the furniture. She was glad he came along when he did. A few minutes later, she and Ellie were seated, each with a cinnamon sugar cookie and a plastic cup half filled with syrupy red punch.

“Will Betsy
ever
come home?” Ellie’s voice sounded smaller.

“No.” The doll in the box was not Betsy. Courtney didn’t know whether she believed in heaven, but she knew Betsy was someplace good, because even when she was too damn bossy she was a good sister.

Courtney scooted her chair closer to Ellie’s. Ever since Betsy’s… accident… she hadn’t let Ellie get too far away. “Bad things always come in threes” Mrs. Witherspoon had once said. Betsy getting killed was the first
really
bad thing that ever happened to them. A part of Courtney felt sure that what Mrs. Witherspoon said was only superstition, like “seven years bad luck” when you broke a mirror, but another part of her had squeezed down around a terrible feeling that Mrs. Witherspoon might be right.

Daddy Jon, who was Ellie’s real daddy but not Courtney’s or Betsy’s, had said all three of his girls had special gifts. Betsy was a storyteller—a “philosopher,” Daddy Jon called her. Ellie was a performer. She loved to dress up in Mama’s high heels and put on a show when friends came over.

Daddy Jon called Courtney his “clairvoyant,” because she sometimes got these feelings that something would happen. Maybe if she had gone to school with Betsy that day, one of her feelings would have tapped her on the shoulder to warn, “Don’t let Betsy cross the street.”

“No,” she said again, smoothing Ellie’s dress. “Betsy won’t be coming home. Ever.” She felt a squeeze inside as she rubbed at a tiny wrinkle. “But eat your cookie now and drink your punch. When we get home, if you put on your pajamas without a fuss, I’ll read you a story.”

“A Betsy story?”

“Yeah.” Courtney blinked hard. “A Betsy story.”

Courtney had gotten one of her feelings when she looked at Betsy in the coffin—an awful feeling—that if she didn’t take special care of Ellie, another bad thing might happen.

“Aunt Dixie! We might get snow!” Ryan bounded through the back door, enthusiasm bubbling ahead of him.

Hearing her nephew’s bullfrog voice, which had started to change the past few weeks, Dixie’s own enthusiasm welled up. Ryan was the best part of every holiday. Maybe trimming the tree with him would rekindle her Christmas spirit.

“Snow? It’s seventy-five degrees.” She pitched the Parker Dann file on the buffet, out of sight, out of her indecisive mind, at least for the moment, and found Ryan halfway down the hall, cradling two Tupperware containers. “This is Houston,” she told him. “We get rain, or maybe sleet. Once in a coon’s age we get hail. We
never
get snow.”

“Dad says every eleven years. Last time I was a baby. We have pictures!”

“I know we have pictures. Who do you think bought you that baby snowsuit, special overnight delivery from Denver—and you only wore it three days?” She ruffled his hair, an affection Ryan hated. But with his hands full, he was at her mercy. “What smells so great?”

“Chocolate chip cookies and pecan pie. I made the cookies!” He grinned, standing hunched over from the weight of his backpack. Dixie could see the bulge of his laptop computer
stuffed inside, and a favorite game, Gorn & Tribbles, threatening to tumble out. “Where’s Mud?” he asked.

“At the vet, getting poked and clipped.” When Ryan’s grin faded in disappointment, she punched him playfully. “Hey, kid, who’d you come to see, anyway, that mongrel pup or me?” Aiming him toward the dining room, she copped a swift kiss. “Put the food on the buffet.”

Then Dixie turned to help her sister carry a pair of enormous shopping bags. Amy looked all cushiony and warm, in a rose-pink nubby sweater and wool pants. Pearl earrings dangled beneath her blond bob. In high school, she’d been a knockout cheerleader, the girl everyone wanted to chum with. To Dixie—short, plain, brainy, a total nerd—Amy had been a goddess. You didn’t compete with a goddess, you worshiped her, even when she asked your help with homework two grades harder than your own, or when she cried in your room over a different boy every week, but especially when she knuckled your head and said you were the world’s greatest sister. Now Amy’s glamorous curves had softened and spread. “Happy fat,” Dixie often teased. “The downside of a contented lifestyle.”

“Here, Amy, give me one of those!” Dixie said now. Red and gold Christmas balls peeked from the top of the bag. “What is all this?”

“Christmas decorations. You didn’t buy anything new for the tree, did you?” Freed from carrying the shopping bag, Amy patted Dixie’s shoulder and tucked her hair back. She could win first prize in a patting-and-tucking contest.

Dixie waited until Amy looked away, then untucked her hair.

“I thought we could use the stuff from the attic.” Actually, Dixie had stopped at a Trim-a-Tree store, but the vast selection there had overwhelmed her. She hated shopping for anything that came in more than one color. Besides, her adoptive parents, during their fifty-odd years of marriage, had collected boxes and boxes of trimmings.

“Dixie, you’ll have enough Christmas ghosts in this old house without drenching it in memories.”

“I’m not afraid of ghosts—certainly not Barney and Kathleen. And Christmas would be damned empty without memories.” Dixie bit down on a grain of annoyance. Kathleen had been dead only eighteen months, Barney less than a year. She
wanted
to remember them, and she couldn’t understand why Amy, their own blood daughter, wanted to bury the memories like old bones. She stopped short of saying it, though, having promised herself no arguments tonight. But dammit, it was Dixie’s house, Dixie’s tree, and if she wanted to deck the place with cobwebs of Christmas Past, why shouldn’t she?

“That porch has a loose rail,” Carl called from the doorway. The smell of smoked meat drifted down the hallway with him. Carson Royal had his faults, but no one could barbecue a yummier brisket. “What I’m saying, someone’s going to fall, and you’ll have a lawsuit. Mailman takes a tumble, sue you for everything you own and then some.”

“Thanks for pointing that out, Carl. Cheers to you, too.” As they entered the living room under one of Kathleen’s needlepoint maxims—
Visitors Always Give Pleasure: If Not The Coming, Then The Going
—Dixie congratulated herself on keeping the edge out of her voice. Her brother-in-law could get under her skin quicker than anybody, but tonight Carl’s tiny barbs were going to bounce like water off a glass dome.

She mentally encased herself in a bubble… filled it with tranquillity… and lifted the corners of her mouth. Yes, that would work. That would definitely work. She would enjoy this evening if it killed her.

“I see you haven’t stained the fence lately.” Carl shook his head. “Got to keep that wood treated, keep the damp out, or it’ll rot. I told Barney you’d never be able to keep this place up.”

Bounce
…
bounce
…
bounce
…

“Too much work for a woman, running a pecan farm. Best thing is to sell the place now, while you can still get top dollar. What I’m saying, once you let it run down—”

“Carl, the same people are handling the orchard who handled it for three years before Barney died. You and Amy received the financial reports and your profits from this year’s
crop.” Dixie dropped the bulging shopping bag near the Christmas tree, where Amy was already unloading ornaments. The room smelled pleasantly of wood smoke. By turning the air conditioner down to freeze, Dixie had felt justified in building a fire in the fireplace.

“Now, Carl, stop nagging,” Amy said, patting a huge red velvet bow into place on a tree limb. “Mom and Dad left the orchard to Dixie because they knew she’d take care of it.” She twirled a faceted gold ball. Light fragments darted around the room.

“All I’m saying is she’ll never get top dollar—”

…
bounce
…
bounce
…
bounce
…

What Carl was
not
saying was that he’d rather have thirty percent of a two-million-dollar sale to invest in the stock market than twenty-thousand-a-year income.

Actually, it had been Amy’s idea that Dixie inherit the family home and pecan orchard. From the day twenty-seven years ago when the Flannigans adopted Dixie as a troubled adolescent, they’d treated her as their own. Amy, an only child nearly three years older, had been eager to have a little sister. And Dixie had clung to all their love and attention like a flagging swimmer to a life raft—but she’d never hoped to inherit more than a few family mementoes. Then the day Kathleen learned she had cancer, Barney called a family meeting to discuss the property. “I don’t want to run a pecan farm,” Amy had told her parents. “And Carl wouldn’t know how. I’ll never understand why Dixie loves this moldy old house, but she does, so she should have it. We’ll take the summer house in Maine.” After Barney’s death, the will specified that proceeds from the pecan farm would be split seventy-thirty in Dixie’s favor, with a provision that she could sell at any time. So far, she hadn’t wanted to.

A thunder of drums blasted from the stereo.

“Ryan!” Amy shouted. “Turn off that racket.”

“It’s Christmas music, Mom.”

“Find a station playing
traditional
carols. And turn it
down”
Amy handed Carl a string of colored lights. “Plug
these in, would you, honey? I think they’re supposed to wink.”

Dixie opened one of the boxes she’d brought down from the attic. Some of the decorations were still in their original boxes, but older ones were wrapped in recycled gift paper. Dixie found the beaded balls she and Amy had made in a craft class, then the salt-and-cornstarch gingerbread men Kathleen had baked and the girls had painted. She carried them to the tree. Amy had already tied several gold balls to the limbs with red velvet bows.

“Now, Dixie! We can’t use those things. They’ll upset the color balance. These are designer decorations. The latest fashion.”

“Gold balls and red bows. That’s new?”

“Look at the impressions in the gold. Computer chips!”

Dixie tucked the gingerbread men back in their box. “These beaded balls won’t clash. They’re mostly red and gold.” Ignoring Amy’s exaggerated sigh, she hung the two ornaments in prominent positions, then stepped aside to let Carl work another string of lights among the branches.

“I said
traditional!”
Amy shouted at the paneled wall—on the other side, “Jingle Bells” was being rendered in something between rap and reggae.

Carl anchored the light string, then stood back to scowl at the electrical outlet.

“Must be fifty years old. This whole house likely needs rewiring. Cost you a bundle, changing all that wire.”

…
bounce
…
bounce… bounce
…

As Dixie resumed her exploration of the boxes from the attic, Ryan charged into the middle of them. He found a snow family Kathleen had bought one Christmas—snowman, snowwoman, two snowbabies, the Flannigans’ names embroidered on their hats.

“Cool!” Ryan carried them to the tree. “I remember these. Gramma used them every year.”

Amy heaved another martyred sigh. “Put them somewhere inconspicuous, please, Ryan. Carl, what’s wrong with those lights? They’re not winking.”

“It’s the wiring. Old wiring’s not going to work with these new-style lights.”

“I think you have to replace one of the bulbs with that special bulb in the plastic bag,” Amy pointed out. “Dixie, maybe you
should
consider selling this house—or rent it out—and move closer to town. There’s a nice place for sale right down the street from us.” She paused, then, offhanded, like it was nothing special, she added, “The nicest man has joined our choir.”

Dixie felt bad news coming like a blast of cold air.

“You mean Mr. Snelling, Mom?” Ryan rummaged through the attic boxes for more treasures. “Snelling’s
old
, and he stares at everybody over the top of his glasses.”

“Old? Delbert Snelling is younger than me!” Amy pinched her son playfully on the ear. “And your Aunt Dixie’s not getting any younger.”

Dixie had turned thirty-nine in November.

“Anyway, I invited him to dinner Christmas night—”

“Amy! I asked you not to fix me up—”

“Now, Dixie, this isn’t a
date
. I just thought… well, the poor man doesn’t have any family here, not a
soul
. I know how you hate to see anybody spend Christmas alone.”