Got Your Number (4 page)

But lonely.

Leaving town for a few days might throw Capistrano off her scent for a while. Or maybe it was time she moved again, although she rather liked Biloxi and had even fancied living here for a while. Make friends, look for a permanent job—something more challenging than waitressing or retail or temp work. She'd even painted her bedroom, a first. The thought of moving again put a stone in her stomach she'd never felt before. Loading all her worldly possessions onto a U-Haul trailer and looking for a new place to live had seemed so romantic in her twenties. Now she fretted about finding a new gynecologist and if the neighbors had a noisy pet.

Wrestling with her decision to take a roadtrip, she stopped at her post office box to retrieve a week's worth of mail. Bills, junk mail, two Notre Dame University alumni newsletters, both dated and forwarded many times, and—she squinted at the thick ivory-colored envelope and held it up to the light. A
wedding
invitation?

Very curious, considering most of the women she knew were trying to
escape
marriage.

Chapter 3

The invitation originally had been sent to her post office box in Atlanta, then forwarded to the one in Montgomery before being forwarded on to Biloxi. The return address, written in black slanting script by a calligrapher, read "Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder, One Portobello Place, Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Her address, oddly, had been scribbled in blue ink in a different, and less princely, handwriting that seemed vaguely familiar.

Roxann smirked. Her cousin Angora was finally getting married? It seemed likely since she was the only child of Jackson Ryder and Dixie Beadleman, Roxann's father's sister. Of course when Dixie had caught the eye of
the
Jackson Ryder, heir to the Ryder Hotel empire, she'd shortened her name to Dee. More fashionable, and more appropriate, considering all the wonderfully wicked
D
names Roxann had made up for her.

She slid her nail under the flap of the grubby envelope—a little worse for the rounds—and pulled out the origami-like invitation. Impressive. Extensive. Expensive.

Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder request the honor of your presence as their daughter, Angora Michele, is united in marriage to Dr. Trenton Robert Coughlin...

Leave it to Angora to snag a doctor. A little late, considering she was approaching thirty-two, but Roxann assumed the man was just getting his career underway. By now Angora would be the perfectly schooled society wife. She'd been born to it, the upper-class life. Unlike Aunt Dee, who'd had to finesse her way into the Baton Rouge Junior League, Angora was groomed from toddlerhood to look and behave like a white-gloved debutante. When they were in college together, though, even the sweater-wearing tennis players preferred the girls who put out, so Angora and her lily-white virtue had gone ignored. The debs who wised up were engaged by graduation, but Angora had clung to her virginity.

Roxann shook her head. The girl could never please her parents, no matter how hard she tried. Born pretty, and made beautiful through braces, jaw surgery, and rhinoplasty—all before the age of fourteen—she'd had the self-esteem of a leper. True, Angora wasn't the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but she wasn't a bad person. Infuriatingly feminine and a bit of a fibber, but not a bad person.

Their parents, Roxann's father and Angora's mother, hated each other. Well, maybe
hate
was too strong a word for brother and sister, but they certainly maintained a resilient aversion to one another. Walt Beadleman thought his sister had gotten above her raising, and Dee thought her brother was a clodhopper. (During a rare visit when Roxann had overheard her aunt say as much to a neighbor, she'd evened the score by peeing in Dee's bottle of Chanel No. 5.)

Proximity and class distinction had effectively separated the girls until they were seniors in high school. Roxann had been working part-time in an upscale dress shop, and in marched Dee followed by Angora, shopping for a graduation dress. Dee had proceeded to trot Roxann from rack to dressing room for two hours before buying a dress worth what Roxann earned as a shop girl for an entire year. In between fittings, however, she discovered that she and Angora had both applied to Notre Dame. She'd been praying for a scholarship; Angora had confided she was dreading the entrance exam. After that, Angora dropped by the dress shop often to chat—she'd been a prim little thing, and Roxann had felt sorry for her, caught under Donkey Dung Dee's thumb.

They'd both made it into Notre Dame, and signed up to room together, against Dee's wishes. It was the first and last time that Angora had defied her mother, but with good results. The girls had become fast friends—Angora was a neophyte in all things wicked, and Roxann had been happy to tutor. But when Angora had been busted for low grades, her parents had pinned the blame on Roxann (even though she herself was a straight-A student), and whisked their little princess into a chaperoned sorority house.

Subsequently, the girls' paths had crossed only when necessary, although she sensed that Angora missed their late-night pajama powwows consulting the Magic 8 Ball as much as she. After graduating with a liberal arts degree, Angora had returned to Baton Rouge to work for a stuffy art museum. Roxann hadn't seen her in seven—no,
nine
years.

Oh, well, she was sure her cousin would be happy with Dr. Trenton. If not, Dee would be happy enough for both of them to have a titled man in the family.

She turned her attention to more pleasurable reading—the university newsletters. Occasionally, Dr. Nell Oney, the ethics professor who'd mentored her and suggested she become involved with Rescue, wrote a feature column. And sometimes Carl Seger's name was mentioned within the pages since he was active in coordinating alumni activities. Roxann rolled down Goldie's windows and scoured the newsletters while loitering in the United States Postal Service parking lot.

Homecoming week was just around the corner, with lots of activities planned to raise money for a new student counseling center—a brick sale, a bike-a-thon, and a bachelor auction. Her heart skipped a beat when she spotted a black-and-white candid of the man who hadn't been far from her thoughts today.

Dr. Carl Seger, theology professor and coach of the varsity soccer team, will be the guest bachelor auctioned off as part of the Homecoming fund-raising events.

The man still had all of his glorious salt-and-pepper hair. She rubbed her finger over his handsome face, his winning smile, and nostalgia warmed her limbs. Assuming the picture was current, he'd barely aged a day in the decade since she'd seen him. The fact that he was still single surprised her, since the man wasn't exactly short of admirers. If his classes were still eighty-percent female, he'd probably fetch a hefty sum at the auction.

She'd counted herself among the smitten. Dr. Carl had held her spellbound from the first moment she'd walked into his freshman theology class. Handsome, thoughtful, articulate. In comparison, most of the college boys were hopelessly immature. She and Angora had attended his class together as freshmen and whiled away many pajama powwows spinning fantasies about the man.

But because Angora had moved out of the dorm, she wasn't privy to the relationship that developed between Roxann and Dr. Carl during their senior year.

"After you graduate," he'd murmured once in the library stacks, "we won't have to hide our feelings." The unrealized sexual energy between them had been palpable, and had left her damp and sleepless more nights in the dorm than she cared to recall.

But mere days before graduation, Nell Oney had paid her a visit. Carl was being brought before the Board of Regents to defend allegations of impropriety with a student. He was, after all, a professor of theology, and a deacon of the university church. Knowing she herself was the student in question, Roxann agreed to leave until things settled down.

At Nell's urging, she'd joined the Rescue program, and moved to Memphis, where a facilitator was needed, but remained poised to leave as soon as Carl called. Except when he'd called, it was to beg her understanding for choosing his job over her. If he were ruined, he'd told her in a tortured voice, he'd have nothing to offer her, and honor dictated that he stay. Of course she understood. She'd cried for a month, then thrown herself into her volunteer work, determined to prove something to Carl, even if he never knew.

Seeing his picture brought all that pent-up longing flooding back to her. Everybody had one person in their past, one person who evoked questions of what might have been. Other men had come and gone, men who on the surface appeared to be concerned with the state of the world but, when it came right down to it, were unwilling to do more than write a letter or don a T-shirt for the cause.

Her former lover Richard Funderburk fit that category—he made the bar circuit with his guitar and his backpack, singing about the indulgences of man, then took his pay in Canadian beer. She would lie in bed after cryptic sex and wonder if she would ever again meet someone who moved her as much as Carl had without even touching her.

She closed the newsletter, then blinked her eyes wider at an old photo of herself on the back page under a caption that read "We Remember." In the dated photo, her mouth was open, delivering a yell, and she hefted an unreadable protest sign.
In 1994 political-science student Roxann Beadleman led a protest against modesty discrimination in the art department that resulted in policy change.

Roxann smiled wryly, remembering the rally. The art department had sponsored a show of nudes drawn from live models, but the drawings of the male models had featured little flaps of canvas over their privates that observers had to lift for a peek. The drawings of the female models, on the other hand, were free of the "modesty flaps." Roxann had been outraged at the discrepancy and led a march to have the flaps removed.

When political cartoons in national papers began to parody the issue, school officials caved. But her newly won notoriety made it difficult to see Carl on the sly. Then the allegations against him had ensued and she'd left South Bend to embark on what now seemed a fairly aimless path.

Roxann drove toward her apartment wrapped in a swirl of bittersweet memories, trying to ignore the clench of yearning in her stomach. The road not taken taunted her—marriage, family, a permanent address, Sunday pot roast. Maybe she hadn't fought hard enough for Carl. She'd told him countless times that she didn't believe in marriage. No wonder he hadn't put his career and church appointment on the line...

She hadn't given him reason to believe she was commitment material.

And how could she be? Then or now. Between her parents' fiasco of a marriage and her exposure to the underbelly of relationships through Rescue, she was much more familiar, perhaps even more comfortable, with dysfunction.

Feeling prickly, Roxann parked in a multilevel garage, then walked two blocks before slipping between two houses. After veering right, she tramped through high grass to get to the backyard of her duplex. With one last look over her shoulder, and Capistrano's threat running through her head, she climbed the small stoop and removed her door key from her bag.

"Hi, Roxann!"

She nearly swallowed her tongue before she realized that Mr. Nealy was standing at the rear entrance of his side of the duplex, leaning on a broom. "Hello, Mr. Nealy."

He doffed his plaid flop hat—which might have matched his pants if they'd been the same color. Or the same plaid. "You're home early."

She nodded and smiled, loath to engage in a drawn-out conversation.

"Has your roommate come back?"

She shook her head—another land-mine subject.

"Never liked her myself," he said.

Not sure how to respond without encouraging more trashing of Elise, she said nothing.

"I was thinking that since you're alone now, er, perhaps you'd like to join me for dinner tonight?"

At the jaunty set of his chin, she realized incredulously that the old man was hitting on her. The people who had shown a love interest in her lately were a lesbian and a senior citizen.

"Thank you, Mr. Nealy, but I can't." Even though she was hungry enough to eat his hat.

"You know, Roxann, if you ever need anything, anything at all, you can call on me." His voice was spookily wistful. His wife had died in the flower bed a year ago, before Roxann had moved in.

"Th-thank you, Mr. Nealy. Have a nice evening."

He winked and disappeared into his unit. Sighing in relief, she inserted her key into the lock, surprised when the door swung open with no resistance.

Somebody had been there.

Objects overturned, drawers upended. She froze, her ears pricked for any sound that would indicate the intruder was still inside, but only silence greeted her. As a precaution, she reached into her gym bag and withdrew a can of pepper spray. For a split second, she considered yelling for Mr. Nealy, but then thought better—she might have to save them both. With her heart pounding, she moved toward the TV room, her weapon poised, her muscles twitching in case she had to unleash a few well-placed kickboxing moves:
kneecap, groin, nose.
She suddenly regretted missing class the last two weeks.