Morning Glory (13 page)

Will’s head snapped up. His shoulders straightened. “Much obliged, ma’am.”

She folded her hands over her portly belly. “Ah, you’re reading about bees.”

“And apples. Yes, ma’am.”

“For what purpose, Mr. Parker?”

“I’d like to raise ‘em.”

She cocked one eyebrow and thought a moment. “I might have some pamphlets in the back from the extension office that would help.”

“Maybe next time, ma’am. I got all I can handle here today.”

She offered a tight smile and left him to his studies, trailing a scent strong enough to eat through concrete.

It was mid-afternoon. The only things moving in town were the flies on the ice cream scoop. Lula Peak was bored to distraction. She sat on the end stool in an empty Vickery’s Cafe, grateful when even her brassiere strap slipped down and she had to reach inside her black and white uniform to pull it up. God, this town was going to turn her into a cadaver
before she even kicked the bucket! She could die of boredom right here on the barstool and the supper customers would come in and say, “Evenin’, Lula, I’ll have the usual,” and not even realize she was a goner until thirty minutes later when their blue plate specials hadn’t arrived.

Lula yawned, leaving her hand inside her uniform, absently rubbing her shoulder. Being a sensual person, Lula liked touching herself. Sure as hell nobody else around this miserable godforsaken town knew how to do it right. Harley, that dumb ass, didn’t know the first thing about finesse when he touched a woman. Finesse. Lula liked the word. She’d just read it in an article on how to better yourself. Yeah, finesse, that’s what Lula needed, a man with a little finesse, a
better
man in the sack than Harley-Dumb-Ass-Overmire.

Lula suppressed a yawn, stretched her arms wide and thrust her ribs out, swiveling idly toward the window. Suddenly she rocketed from the stool.

Christ, it was him, walking along the street pulling a kid’s wagon. She ran her eyes speculatively over his lanky form, concentrating on his narrow hips and swaying pelvis as he ambled along the town square and nodded at Norris and Nat McCready, those two decrepit old bachelor brothers who spent their dotage whittling on the benches across the street. Lula hustled to the screen door and posed behind it.
Look over here, Parker, it’s better than them two boring old turds.

But he moved on without glancing toward Vickery’s. Lula grabbed a broom and stepped into the sun, making an ill disguised pretense of sweeping the sidewalk while watching his flat posterior continue around the square. He left the wagon in the shade of the town hall steps and went inside.

So did Lula. Back into Vickery’s to thrust the broom aside and glance impatiently at the clock. Two-thirty. She drummed her long orange nails across the countertop, plunked herself onto the end stool and waited for five minutes. Agitated. Peeved. Nobody was going to come in here for anything more than a glass of iced tea and she knew it. Not until at least five-thirty. Old Man Vickery would be madder than Cooter Brown if he found out she’d slipped away and left the
place untended. But she could tell him she’d run over to the library for a magazine and hadn’t been gone a minute.

Deciding, she twisted off the stool and flung off her three-pointed apron. The matching headpiece followed as she whipped out her compact. A dash of fresh blaze orange on her lips, a check of the seams in her silk stockings and she was out the door.

Gladys Beasley looked up as the door opened a second time that afternoon. Her mouth puckered and her chin tripled.

“Afternoon, Mizz Beasley,” Lula chirped, her voice ringing off the twelve-foot ceiling.

“Shh! Read the sign!”

Lula glanced at the sign on the front of Miss Beasley’s desk: S
ILENCE IS
G
OLDEN.
“Oh, sorry,” she whispered, covering her mouth and giggling. She glanced around—ceiling, walls, windows—as if she’d never seen the place before, which wasn’t far from the truth. Lula was the kind of woman who read
True Confessions,
and Gladys didn’t stoop to using the taxpayers’ money for smut like that. Lula stepped farther inside.

Cleats!

“Shh!”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll tiptoe.”

Will Parker glanced up, scanned Lula disinterestedly and resumed his reading.

The library was U-shaped, wrapped around the entry steps. Miss Beasley’s desk, backed by her private workroom, separated the huge room into two distinct parts. To the right was fiction. To the left nonfiction. Lula had never been on the left where Parker sat now. Remembering about finesse, she moved to the right first, drifting along the shelves, glancing up, then down, as if examining the titles for something interesting. She removed a book bound in emerald green—the exact shade of a dress she’d been eyeing over at Cartersville in the Federated Store. Classy color that’d look swell with her new Tropical Flame nail polish—she spread her hands on the book cover and tipped her head approvingly. She’d have to think up something good to entice Harley to buy that little
number for her. She stuck the book back in its slot and moved to another. Melville. Hey, she’d heard of this guy! Must’ve done something swell. But the spine was too wide and the printing too small, so she rammed it back on the shelf and looked further.

Lula
finessed
her way through a full ten minutes of fiction before finally tiptoeing past Miss Beasley to the other side. She twiddled two fingers as she passed, then clamped her hands at the base of her spine, thrusting her breasts into bold relief.

Gladys tightened her buttocks and followed where Lula had been, pushing in a total of eleven books she’d left beetling over the edges of the shelves.

Lula found the left side arranged much as the right, a spacious room with fanlight windows facing the street. Bookshelves filled the space between the windows and the floor, and covered the remaining three walls. The entire center of the room was taken up by sturdy oak tables and chairs. Lula sidled around the perimeter of the room without so much as peeking at Will. She grazed one fingertip along the edge of a shelf, then sucked it with studied provocativeness. She turned a corner, eased on to where a bank of shelves ran perpendicular to the wall and moved between them, putting herself in profile to Will, should he care to turn his head and see. She clasped her hands at the base of her spine, creating her best silhouette, watching askance to see if he’d glance over. After several minutes, when he hadn’t, she grabbed a biography of Beethoven and, while turning its pages, eyed Will discreetly.

God, was he good looking. And that cowboy hat did things to her insides, the way he wore it low, shadowing his eyes in the glare of the afternoon sun.
Still waters,
she thought, taken by the way he sat with one finger under a page, so unmoving she wished she were a fly so she could land on his nose. What a nose. Long instead of pug like
some
she knew. Nice mouth, too. Ooo, would she like to get into that.

He leaned forward to write something and she ran her eyes all over him, down his tapered chest and slim hips to the cowboy boots beneath the table, back up to his crotch. He
dropped his pencil and sat back, giving her a clearer profile shot of it.

Lula felt the old itch begin.

He sat there reading his book the way all the “brains” used to read in school while Lula thought about bettering herself. When she could stand it no longer she took Beethoven over and dropped it on the table across from him.

“This seat taken?” she drawled, inverting her wrists, leaning on the tabletop so that her breast buttons strained. His chin rose slowly. As the brim of the cowboy hat lifted, she got a load of deep brown eyes with lashes as long as spaghetti, and a mouth that old Lula had plenty of plans for.

“No, ma’am,” he answered quietly. Without moving more than his head, he returned to his reading.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Go ahead.” His attention remained on the book.

“Watcha studyin’?”

“Bees.”

“Hey, how about that! I’m studyin’
B
’s, too.” She held up her book. “Beethoven.” In school she’d liked music, so she pronounced it correctly. “He wrote music, back when guys wore wigs and stuff, you know?”

Again Will refused to glance up. “Yeah, I know.”

“Well...” The chair screeched as Lula pulled it out. She flounced down, crossed her legs, opened the book and flapped its pages in rhythm with her wagging calf. “So. Haven’t seen y’ around. Where y’ been keepin’ yourself?”

He perused her noncommittally, wondering if he should bother to answer. Mercy, she was one hard-looking woman. She had so much hair piled onto her forehead it looked as if she could use a neck brace. Her mouth was painted the color of a chili pepper and she wore too much rouge, too high on her cheeks, in too precise a pattern. She overlapped her wrists on the table edge and rested her breasts on them. They jutted, giving him a clearer shot of cleavage. It pleased Will to let her know he didn’t want any.

“Up at Mrs. Dinsmore’s place.”

“Crazy Elly’s? My, my. How is she?” When Will declined to answer, she leaned closer and inquired, “You know why
they call her crazy, don’t you? Did she tell you?” Against his will, he became curious, but it would seem like an offense against Mrs. Dinsmore to encourage Lula, so he remained silent. Lula, however, needed no encouragement. “They locked her in that house when she was a baby and pulled all the shades down and didn’t let her out until the law forced ‘em to—to go to school—and then they only turned her loose six hours a day and locked her up again, nights.” She sat back smugly. “Ah, so you didn’t know.” Lula smiled knowingly. “Well, ask her about it sometime. Ask her if she didn’t live in that deserted house down by school. You know—the one with the picket fence around it and the bats flyin’ in the attic window?” Lula leaned closer and added conspiratorially, “If I were you, I wouldn’t hang around up there at her place any longer than I had to. Give you a bad reputation, if you know what I mean. I mean, that woman ain’t wrapped too tight.” Lula sat back as if in a chaise, letting her eyelids droop, toying absently with the cover of Beethoven, lifting it, letting it drop with soft repeated
plops.
“I know it’s tough being new around town. I mean, you must be bored as hell if you have to spend your time in a place like this.” Lula’s eyes made a quick swerve around the bookshelves, then came back to him. “But if you need somebody to show y’ around, I’d be happy to.” Beneath the table her toe stroked Will’s calf. “I got me a little bungalow just four houses off the town square on Pecan Street—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Will interrupted, rising. “Got some eggs out in the sun that need selling. I’d better see to ‘em.”

Lula smirked, watching him move to the bookshelves. He’d got the message. Oh, he’d got it all right—loud and clear. She’d seen him jump when her foot touched his leg. She watched him slip one book into place, then squat down to replace the other. Before he could escape, she sidled into the aisle behind him, trapping him between the two tiers of shelves. When he rose to his feet and turned, she was gratified by his quick blush. “If you’re interested in my offer, I work most days at Vickery’s. I’m off at eight, though.” She slipped one finger between his shirt buttons and ran it up and
down, across hair and hard skin. Putting on her best kewpie doll face, Lula whispered, “See y’ round, Parker.”

As she swung away, exaggeratedly waggling her hips, Will glanced across the sunlit room to find the librarian’s censoring eyes taking in the whole scene. Her attention immediately snapped elsewhere, but even from this distance Will saw how tightly her lips pursed. He felt shaky inside, almost violated. Women like Lula were a clear path to trouble. There was a time when he’d have taken her up on the offer and enjoyed every minute of it. But not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be left to live his life in peace, and that peace meant Eleanor Dinsmore’s place. He suddenly felt a deep need to get back there.

Lula was gone, cleats clicking, by the time Will reached the main desk.

“Much obliged for the use of the paper and pencil, ma’am.”

Gladys Beasley’s head snapped up. The distaste was ripe on her face. “You’re welcome.”

Will was cut to the quick by her silent rebuff. A man didn’t have to make a move on a hot-blooded woman like that, all he had to do was be in the same pigeonhole with her. Especially—Will supposed—if he’d done time for killing a whore in a Texas whorehouse and people around town knew it.

He rolled his notes into a cylinder and stood his ground. “I was wonderin’, ma’am—”

“Yes?” she snapped, lifting her head sharply, her mouth no larger than a keyhole.

“I got a job. I’m workin’ as a hired hand for Mrs. Glendon Dinsmore. If she’d come in here and tell you I work for her, would that be enough to get me a library card?”

“She won’t come in.”

“She won’t?”

“I don’t believe so. Since she married she’s chosen to live as a recluse. I’m sorry, I can’t bend the rules.” She picked up her pen, made a check on a list, then relented. “However, depending upon how long you’ve been working for her, and how long you intend to stay, if she would verify your employment
in writing, I should think that would be enough proof of residency.”

Will Parker flashed a relieved smile, hooked one thumb in his hind pocket and backed off boyishly, melting the ice from Gladys Beasley’s heart. “I’ll make sure she writes it. Much obliged, ma’am.” He headed for the door, then stopped and swung back. “Oh. How late you open?”

“Until eight o’clock weekdays, five Saturdays, and of course, we’re closed Sundays.”

He tipped his hat again and promised, “I’ll be back.”

As he turned the doorknob she called, “Oh, Mr. Parker?”

“Ma’am?”

“How is Eleanor?”

Will sensed that this inquiry was wholly different from Lula’s. He stood at the door, adjusting his impression of Gladys Beasley. “She’s fine, ma’am. Five months pregnant for the third time, but healthy and happy, I think.”

“For the third time. My. I remember her as a child, coming in with Miss Buttry’s fifth grade class—or was it Miss Natwick’s sixth? She always seemed a bright child. Bright and inquisitive. Greet her for me, if you will.”