Just Wanna Testify (8 page)

When the big glass door closed behind the last of the Too Fine Five, Serena turned to Aretha.

“Congratulations.”

“For what?” Aretha said. “You haven’t seen any pictures yet.”

“For holding your own with Scylla. Most people are intimidated by her.”

“I survived my daughter’s terrible twos,” Aretha said, rummaging around in the bag slung over her shoulder as she headed back toward the truck to reorganize her equipment. “I don’t scare easily.”

Good for you
, Regina thought.
Don’t take any stuff off these girls. We’re in charge in West End, and don’t you forget it
.

“That’s good to know,” Serena said, falling into step beside her, “because I’d love to work with you again.”

That was the last thing Aretha expected to hear. She wondered
suddenly if that whole scene with Scylla had been some kind of test to see if she was tough enough for the big time. She didn’t like those kinds of games, but if that’s the best they got, she thought, I’m home free.

“What did you have in mind?”

“A big assignment,” Serena said. “Artistic freedom. Creative control. Great money.”

Aretha chuckled and pulled out another camera, peered through the viewfinder, and set it down close by. “You should cut that as a record. Make yourself a video. Get the girls to do a little dance. How could anybody resist?”

“Can you?”

Aretha stopped sorting through her equipment. “Are you about to make me a job offer, Ms. Mayflower? Because if you are, I’m kind of busy right now, so I think you should probably talk to my agent.”

“I already have,” Serena said. “Perhaps she can share some of the details with you while I go check on the girls.”

“Absolutely,” Regina said, smiling in spite of herself. “I’d be glad to.”

“Good,” Serena said, nodding at them both as she headed inside. “It’s a pleasure watching you work, Ms. Hargrove.”

“Thank you, Ms. Mayflower,” Aretha said, sweet as pie, but when Serena was safely out of sight, Aretha turned to Regina and shook her head.

“You better hurry up if you’re going to make me rich and fabulous because I am about to knock one of these Glamazons out before the day is over.”

“You’re already pretty fabulous,” Regina said, “but you’re about to be a whole lot richer.”

Aretha snapped open one of her cases and pulled out her favorite Leica. “As long as I don’t pose them in front of any graven images, right?”

“They want you to shoot all the photographs for their new portfolio.”

Aretha’s busy hands stopped all motion. “Are you kidding?”

Regina shook her head. “Serena’s ready to make you an offer right now.”

“That’s crazy! I almost came to blows with her superstar and now she wants to make a deal?”

“Some artists need that kind of drama to do their best work.” The comment sounded innocent enough, but Regina was
signifyin’
and they both knew it.

“Then I guess I need to get back to that work.” Aretha grinned. “Since I’ve got to rethink the whole afternoon’s shoot.”

“Go! Be creative!” Regina said, shooing her away. “I will open formal negotiations and find out exactly what these girls have in mind.”

“Thank you,” Aretha said, looking around the area quickly to be sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. “I’ve got so much stuff! What I really need is an assistant!”

“Duly noted,” Regina said. “I’ll put it in the contract.”

Aretha hoisted her camera bag and looked at her friend. “You’re good at this, you know?”

“Getting better all the time,” Regina said. “Getting better all the time.”

The drive from Atlanta to Savannah was about four hours and then just a short hop across the causeway to Tybee Island, Georgia’s best-kept beach secret. An island too small to support the rampant overdevelopment that had already destroyed so many coastal communities, Tybee had great restaurants, amazing white sand beaches, friendly full-time residents, and enough local traditions to keep the mix lively, perhaps the best known of which was the annual Beach Queen Pageant, a veritable who’s who of the island’s eccentrics and the best party of the year.

When Abbie first saw Blue’s beach house, nestled behind a giant sand dune, the view it offered of the Atlantic literally took her breath away. She spent hours just sitting on the back deck at dawn or watching the sunset from the tiny widow’s walk that was reachable only by crawling out the window. Getting up there always made her feel like a kid shinnying up a backyard tree to sneak in after curfew.

She spent hours exploring the island, jogging on the beach, searching the horizon with Blue’s big binoculars for the first glimpse of the giant freighters, pulling into Savannah Harbor with their mysterious loads of cargo containers stacked high against the bright blue sky. She watched the tiny shrimp boats chugging out before dawn and delighted in the porpoises leaping and splashing solely for their own pleasure, but maybe for hers, too, Abbie thought.

She was a great believer in the sacred interconnectedness of all things in the complex, never-ending circle of birth, life, death, spirit. That’s why the whole idea of vampires was hard for her to accept. They were the antithesis of everything she believed. The
undead
? That meant the circle stopped with them, and so did the possibility of continuous regeneration. No idea of God she embraced could account for the presence of such beings, but there they were, roaming around her own West End neighborhood, with nothing to keep them in check but Blue.

She wasn’t sure exactly how she was going to ask Louie Baptiste if he’d known any beautiful vampires back before the water chased them out, like it did almost everything he held dear. She shivered again, realizing as she turned into the almost empty parking lot at Sweet Abbie’s that she hadn’t asked Blue if she should tell Peachy what was going on. Probably not, she decided, spotting Louie’s perfectly restored 1967 Cadillac DeVille in the spot reserved for Chef Baptiste. The spot marked for Peachy Nolan was empty.

Abbie glanced at her watch as she pulled into the space next to Peachy’s. It was a little after two and the place was closed until dinner started at five. She knew Peachy would be back from wherever he was shortly, so she switched off the motor and walked around to the back kitchen entrance. A young man in a white T-shirt and a big white apron, its strings double wrapped around his slender midsection, was standing several feet away from the door smoking a cigarette. When he saw Abbie, he dropped it to the ground and smashed the butt out with his heel. She recognized one of Peachy’s part-time dishwashers, Johnny Asbury, a third-generation islander, struggling
through his last year of high school to please his mother before he went to work on the family shrimp boat. Shrimping was the only job he’d ever wanted to do and everybody smoked on a shrimp boat.

“Sorry, Miss Abbie,” he said, looking sheepish. “You know I’m trying to quit.”

“The only way to quit is to quit,” Abbie said. “Chef around?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s just starting things up for dinner.”

“Thanks,” she said, giving him a motherly smile as she ducked inside. “You keep trying, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, wondering if he had time to sneak one more before he had to get back to work.

The kitchen in Sweet Abbie’s was a large, spotlessly clean room with high ceilings and enough gleaming state-of-the-art cooking equipment to make Martha Stewart green with envy. Peachy had invested a fortune in accoutrements before hiring Louie, who was a traditionalist, preferring to chop his onions by hand and gauge the doneness of the meat by examining the clarity of the juice that trickled out when the meat was pierced with a clean toothpick. Peachy didn’t care. It didn’t make any difference to him
how
Louie cooked as long as he cooked. How could it? The food that Sweet Abbie’s customers enjoyed was so good that once they tasted it, they were hooked.

When she peeked through the round, portal-like window in one of the two swinging silver doors, she could see the kitchen staff already at work. Louie, in his chef’s whites from head to toe, was standing at a huge butcher-block chopping board calmly dictating the evening’s menu to his assistant, also in white, who took it all down with great seriousness. There was no printed menu at Sweet Abbie’s. Each night’s offerings depended solely on the catch of the day, the bounty of the harvest, and the mood of the chef, who was, as in every well-run kitchen, the king.

She watched as the assistant read the menu back to Louie’s satisfaction and then headed over to a quiet corner to transfer it to the small chalkboards that the waitstaff carried until they memorized
the night’s offerings. Abbie took a deep breath and fixed her face into a neutral smile. Of course, she was worrying about the sudden appearance of vampires in her life, but Louie didn’t have to know it. Not yet, anyway.

“Hey, everybody,” she called, pushing open the door. “I’m looking for a good chef. Anybody around here know where I can find one?”

General laughter all around as Louie turned around so fast, his chef’s hat trembled like a half-set bowl of Jell-O. His smile was so genuine, crinkling the corners of his eyes in such a delighted, friendly way, that she was grateful as always for his presence in her life.

“Not one who’s for sale.” He laughed, crossing the room in three giant steps to enfold her in a big bear hug, as the kitchen staff waved and greeted her. Peachy treated his employees with respect and fairness and there was rarely any turnover. She knew them all by name.

“Well, then,” she said, returning Louie’s hug and kissing his warm, smooth cheek. “I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.”

He leaned back and grinned at her as his staff went back to work like the well-oiled machine they were. “Miss Abbie, you are a sight for sore eyes. Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Didn’t Peachy tell you? I had two big projects to finish up in town.”

“He told me, but you stayed away so long, I started thinking maybe you had decided to brighten up some other parlors.”

“Not a chance,” she said, laughing. “You two are stuck with me.”

“Good thing, too,” he said, leading her over to his small cubicle in a sunny corner of the kitchen and taking a seat beside her. He had a small desk, two chairs, and a tiny shelf crammed with notebooks full of his father’s recipes. Katrina had destroyed the restaurant that had been in his family for three generations and scattered his loyal clientele to the four winds, but nothing could diminish his joy in the loving preparation of food. He learned to cook almost as soon as he could stand on a chair beside his father at the kitchen table. One of his first jobs was to carefully stir together whatever ingredients his father tossed into a big wooden bowl without the aid of any
measuring cup or set of spoons. Louie’s father cooked with
handfuls
of cornmeal and
pinches
of salt. His roux, every Louisiana cook’s magic ingredient, was the stuff of legend, as was his gumbo, made from a secret recipe that he passed on as a sacred trust to his son only once Louie had proven himself worthy, well into his twenties.

“Without you, we’d have to change the name of this place, like it or not, and you know how that can confuse people,” Louie was still teasing. “Not to mention the effect your departure would have on Brother Nolan, who is already hanging on by a very slender thread.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s true, Miss Abbie,” Louie protested. “When you’re not on this island, he is just this side of pitiful. He stands in front of that picture up front and looks for all the world like a man about to die of a broken heart.”

Abbie laughed. Their friendship was based on an easy foundation of gentle teasing and they both enjoyed it.

“Where is my true love, anyway?” Abbie said, looking around as if Peachy might be hiding behind a big bag of Vidalia onions or a giant sack of flour.

“Gone to see Mr. Chu about our liquor order,” Louie said and rolled his eyes.

No surprise there, Abbie thought. Mr. Chu owned a number of businesses on the island, including a liquor distributorship, and he and Peachy were engaged in an endless series of discussions about pricing. Peachy claimed he was being cheated blind and Mr. Chu claimed he was being driven to the poorhouse by his efforts to be fair to his valued customers.

“He’ll be back in a minute. You hungry?”

“I’m fine,” Abbie said, realizing this was her chance to raise Blue’s question with Louie before Peachy returned. “Actually, I was hoping to have a chance to talk with you alone.”

Louie grinned at her. “Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“Fair enough,” Abbie said, grinning back. “I just wanted to ask if you ever knew a family of Mayflowers back in Louisiana.”

The smile froze on Louie’s, face, but his voice was noncommittal. “Mayflower?”

“They may have had a lot of daughters.”

Louie tugged at his chin like he was trying to remember. “Tall, skinny gals?”

“That’s right. You know them?”

Louie fiddled with a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce on his desk. Abbie wondered if the vampires were allowed to spice up their tomato juice with some hot sauce; maybe a shot of vodka every now and then.