The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (13 page)

 

In the Flower Van, I slunk down in my seat as the Dick pulled out of our neighborhood. All together in the Flower Van again.

“Darla’s been very affected by the news at Palmetto,” he said. “She’s been working on an editorial for the school paper. How are you handling it, Nat?”

The Dick’s handlebar ’stache barely fit in the rearview, and I could feel him trying to catch my eye in the mirror. But there was no way I was going to let him see the deer-in-headlights look on my face. I shivered, pulled my sweatshirt tighter around me, and pretended to be absorbed by the traffic outside.

“Oh, it’s awful,” Mom jumped in to say. She wheeled around in the front seat to put her hand on my knee. “Natalie and Justin used to be great friends.”

“You were?” Darla asked, prying her eyes off my mom’s chest brimming over the top of her shirt to look at me. Her own chest was only slightly more contained by the conservative bust of my dress.

Why did Mom have to go and say that? So what if
one
time, years ago, during a mother/daughter morning gossip session in bed, I’d spilled to Mom that I couldn’t get J.B. out of my head? I’d never go around bringing up all the details of her flings in front of the Dukes. Some confidences were supposed to be a little more sacred than that.

Now I was forced to shrug. “Not really. We just ran in the same circle.”

“Well, have you heard the latest about Baxter Quinn?”

My head darted from the window to look at Darla. What did she know? Was I really going to blow my cool and stoop to asking the Double D for the news?

Wait—just because I was flailing didn’t mean the rest of the world was turning upside down. Here was Darla with her jutting lower lip and lack of chin, with the stringy hair that needed washing and some shine spray. She didn’t know anything. Obviously, she was looking to me.

“To be honest,” I said finally, “I’m pretty tired of talking about it.”

Darla nodded, all apologies.

By then, the Flower Van was turning down an oak-lined avenue toward the Coveted. I knew this area well; we were heading down a ritzy alcove where Rex Freeman and Kate Richards both had weekend homes. I knew if we walked out past the bend to where the Cove dipped into a whisper-thin peninsula of pine trees, I’d be able to see Mike’s house across the bay.

He didn’t like the Dick any more than I did, but he was always really nice to Darla. I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but it really just bugged me to the point where I hadn’t even bothered to tell him I’d be stuck with the Dukes today.

“I think you’re going to like this one, Dotty,” the Dick was saying, running his fingertip along the bra strap that had slid down my mother’s bare upper arm. Again, he looked at me in the rearview, his mustache glinting in the sun. “Are you as picky as your mother, Nat?”

This time, I held his eyes in the mirror. “Let’s just say Mom and I have very different tastes.”

His eyes snapped back to the road as he pulled into a lot in front of a bright-yellow three-story house. Every house I’d ever seen in the Cove was a strict plantation-style mansion, with high white entry columns, a sprawling wraparound porch, and painted wooden shutters. To look at them all lined up along the water, you’d think keeping with that style was some sort of zoning law. But not this house. This hacienda had yellow stucco walls and a purple-and-red Mexican-tiled roof. It was massive. It was heinous. It stuck out worse than a sore thumb. It stuck out the way that only new money can.

But apparently Mom disagreed. When we got out of the car and looked up at the monstrosity, she threw her arms around the Dick, cackling and kicking her legs up in the air. My mother was a buxom Julia Roberts.

“
¡Ay caramba!
” Mom giggled. The Dick’s head virtually dropped into her chest when she murmured playfully, “
Mi casa es su casa, señor
”?

When they fell into a sloppy kiss, I caught Darla’s eyes. For a second, my instinct was to roll mine sympathetically. After all, she might not be an A-lister at Palmetto, but the Double D was in my same boat of suffering on the shores of parental embarrassment. Why couldn’t we exchange some mutual mortification?

But then, I noticed Darla looking back and forth between my mother and me—as if she were sizing us both up. She cocked her head at me and said, “Huh.”

“What?”

“You have the same mannerisms as your mom. That swinging hug thing—you did that at a pep rally once.”

Before I could respond to my freaky future stepsister, my matching-mannerisms mother linked her elbow through mine and started prancing with me up the path toward the house.

“Richard said,” she whispered in my ear, “if we
really
like this one, he’ll give it to me as an engagement present.”

My mouth dropped open.

“I know,” she gushed. “Which
means . . .
”

“You’re actually getting married,” I filled in. “Again?”

“Well, yeah.” She shrugged. “But what I’m saying is—his gift, in
my
name . . . a whole house, on the good side of the Cove?” Her voice climbed up a few notes. “Don’t you get it, Natalie?” She faced me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Oh, someday you will. Even if things don’t work out with the Duke—”

She looked up at the Dick who was opening the upstairs balcony door.

“Did you see the swim-up bar out back, Dotty?” he called.

“Oh,
Richard
!” Mom bounded toward him, leaving me alone at the threshold of Casa de Tacky. The whole I’m-social-climbing-for-your-own-good routine was an old one with Mom. Only this time, I’d been through enough to see through it.

It was strange; Mom seemed so happy. And God knows, there’d been days when I never thought she’d get here. When my dad left town thirty-two days into my seventh-grade year at Cawdor Middle, Mom was even more desperate and lost than me. I spent most of my middle school career helping her through the rough patches in between jobs and boyfriends and bottles of wine. It got to the point where I was holding her hair back so often, I didn’t have time to have problems of my own. She threw up; I grew up. By the time I transferred to Palmetto, I’d already fielded more drama than most of the girls in the senior class.

Now, here she was, four husbands later and going on her second multimillion-dollar property—purely based on her uncanny powers of feminine persuasion. My mother might be a tramp, but she was no idiot. She’d figured out her own golden secret: Security didn’t come from having a man who “loved” her; it came from what those things bought her—in her own name.

I could
not
end up like this.

“Honey, come see the labyrinth,” Mom called to me from the backyard.

I sighed and started trooping around the side of the house so I wouldn’t have to shudder at the decor inside. But before I got to the labyrinth, I spotted Darla leaning over the balustrade talking to Kate Richards. I’d been so consumed by the god-awful hacienda, I hadn’t even noticed we were just two houses down from her family’s lake house.

I was just about to round the magnolia tree when I heard Darla’s voice.

“It was Nat’s idea that I borrow the dress,” she lied, smoothing over the fabric where it puckered at her heaving chest. “Our parents are
together.
”

“Nat Hargrove’s mom and your dad?” Kate asked with a tiny throaty laugh. It bugged me that she suddenly sounded so interested. “And you’re moving in next door? Is Nat here with you today?”

Darla nodded. “But don’t bring up Baxter or J.B. or anything. It’s, like,
all
people are talking to her about,” she said, nodding knowingly. “Since she’s Princess. She’s kind of over it—”

“Oh, hi, Kate,” I said, coming up on them from behind. Her Rapunzel hair was mounted in a messy bun on top of her head. Where her white wifebeater tank top cleared her jeans, I could see the pink heart tattoo on her hip. “Any word from Baxter?” I asked.

Kate raised an eyebrow at Darla, then turned to me.

“Actually,” she breathed. “He finally got in touch.”

Fighting the urge to seize on her for details, I calmly hoisted myself on the balcony and drawled, “Oh yeah?”

Kate leaned in. “He apologized for disappearing. He said we’ll probably have dinner or something soon.”

Her voice carried the unmistakable female urgency to deliver the news—and to be consoled that it was good news. I sighed. This wasn’t strong-willed, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-miniskirt Kate that I’d befriended last year. You think you know a girl—and then she goes and loses her virginity at a Mardi Gras party and goes soft.

“That’s great, sweetie,” I cooed. “And did he mention anything about the night he disappeared?”

Kate bobbed her head. “He swears he’s innocent. He says he’ll prove it soon, but he wouldn’t tell me where he’s been or when he’s coming back.”

“But . . . so he is coming back?” I asked.

I could see from the way she was looking at me, forehead creased and eager eyes, that Kate was in pretty deep. I felt for her, I did. No girl dreams of her crush disappearing immediately after her first time. But this girl really needed to snap out of it. On his best day, Baxter didn’t come anywhere near deserving her. Plus, I needed a clearheaded and unemotional source of information on his whereabouts.

If I knew Baxter, wherever he was, he was probably planning on making a grand reentrance as soon as the opportunity arose. If he was already putting out teasers of his innocence and claiming to have proof, that grand reentrance sounded less than promising for Mike and me.

Maybe this wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d thought. I could feel my heart start clamoring in my chest, but the only thing to do was channel that energy into something productive.

“You must be so worried,” I cooed, shaking my head, “to not have any idea how to help him. If only you knew where he was, maybe then there’d be something we could do.”

“I can keep trying to find out.” Kate sounded hopeful at the thought of a Baxter-related project. Darla shuffled her feet.

I brushed a loose strand of Kate’s hair behind her ear. “Whatever happens, you know I’ll be happy to help,” I said sweetly. “Just keep me posted. Anything you find out, anything you need, come talk to me.”

“Of course,” Kate nodded. “Thanks.”

“Girls,” the Dick called from the upstairs balcony, “come on up and get the tour.”

Both he and my mom looked flushed. I didn’t even want to think about what they’d been doing in the master bedroom. Usually, whenever I thought about other people getting it on, I’d get a flash of Mike’s body over mine in bed, followed by a tingly feeling inside. Mike and I called it the flash ’n’ tingle.

But today, something was different. When my mind flashed to Mike’s eyes, they didn’t look turned on. They looked terrified.

If I wanted to see the desire in Mike’s eyes, not the fear, I needed to keep the two of us and our crowns in the clear. When I looked at Kate, I couldn’t stop thinking about Baxter. Mike and I were helpless until we knew enough about what the old druggie had up his sleeve. Only then would we be able to thwart him.

CHAPTER Twelve

B
y Monday morning, the rumors were spreading like wildfire. The school-wide gossip circuit was another long-standing tradition at Palmetto. At the start of the week, anyone with news (loosely defined and ranging from “X made out with Y” to “Guess who spent the night in jail again”) passed it around on a slip of paper—bonus points for pithy creativity. The fun was in seeing how far word could travel by the end of the day—and how screwed up it could get. Since anyone could add to or revise the news that churned, the rumor mill was kind of like the love child of Wikipedia and a game of “telephone.”

No one knew who started the mill, or when, or why by now we hadn’t updated the old-fashioned note-passing format to accommodate any range of technological advances. But every kid in this school loved it (and occasionally loved to hate it). So despite the loathing faculty’s tired attempts to eradicate it, my guess was that the rumor mill would outlast us all.

I hadn’t exactly expected to spend my first official day as Palmetto Princess mitigating rumors that had to do with me, but there I was in first period European history, censoring the notes that came around.

Someone had drawn an arrow under Darla’s name and written:

My instinct was to put a big red circle around False and forge in someone else’s hand:
Premature rumoring. Paperwork not finalized so the deal could still fall through. Someone churned too soon.

Instead, I kept my cool:

By next period, in French class, the second note milled through:

I laid the note down on the middle of my desk and tried to read anyone else’s handwriting into it other than Kate’s. But the telltale hot-pink pen and half-print/half-cursive writing style was unmistakable. I covertly popped a piece of Juicy Fruit and grit my teeth around its juice. I leaned down to stare at the odious note until the letters went out of focus and I could think again.

Something about my close friend relaying Baxter’s Bin Laden-style communication to the whole school felt so subversive. Especially after the little conversation she and I had had at the Cove yesterday. I thought I’d made myself very clear that the lines of Baxter communication between the two of us should be kept open at all times. What became of Baxter was not for the whole school to concern themselves with.