The Sugar Queen (3 page)

"Hello? What are you doing?" the man called out to her. His voice was melodic, and the air carried it to her like a present. She actually stopped for a moment and turned to him. Seduction was his sixth sense, and he knew he'd caught her.

"You," the man said, smiling with an edge as he walked down the steps toward her. With a beautiful swing of his head, he tossed his long dark hair over his shoulder. "Were you just in my house?"

She heard the caw of a crow nearby, a portent of danger, and she gave a start. Snapping out of his spell, she quickly threw the things into the trunk, then slammed the lid closed.

Josey hurried to the driver's side and got in. As she drove away in the largest, goldest Cadillac in the entire Southeast, the man stood on the sidewalk and watched.

He was still there, his stare as dark as a gypsy curse, as she made the turn at the stop sign and sped off.

After getting her mother
settled in bed that night, the lotion that smelled like lemon tarts rubbed on her small, pretty feet, her sleeping pill and water beside her on the nightstand, Josey crept down the stairs and outside to the car. She was barefooted and her toes curled against the frosty pavement of the driveway, but it was quieter this way.

Regardless, Helena stuck her head out of her bedroom doorway when Josey came back in with Della Lee's things.

"It's okay, Helena. Go back to bed."

She ducked her head back in.

Josey took the things up to her room, then she opened her closet door and set the box and bags in front of Della Lee.

"What is this?" Della Lee asked, surprised. She set aside one of Josey's well-thumbed travel magazines. She had washed her face since Josey had last seen her earlier that day, so the mascara streaks were gone. How she'd managed to do that without anyone noticing was a mystery. There weren't any washcloths smeared with makeup left behind, no sounds of water running hollowly through the pipes from upstairs while Josey and her mother and Helena sat in the sitting room downstairs and watched television.

Josey smiled. She'd barely been able to contain herself all day, waiting for her mother to finally go to bed. "A surprise! I went to your house today."

"You did
what?"

Josey went to her knees and opened one of the bags. "Look. I picked up some of your things. Here are some clothes and makeup and here's your wallet. And this box. It looked like the kind of thing you wouldn't want to leave behind."

Della Lee was shaking her head, slowly at first, then more and more quickly. "I wanted you to get me a sandwich, not go to my house!"

"I did this so you wouldn't have to go back. Say thank you, you closet thief."

"Of course I'm not going back there!" she said. She scooted away from the things, farther into the shadows of the closet. "Josey, get rid of this stuff. Now! People can't know you have this."

"Shh! My mother will hear you," Josey said. "And I don't have it. It's yours. No one knows."

Della Lee's eyes went from Josey, to the box and bags, then back to Josey. "Was Julian still there?"

"The man with long hair? He was asleep on the couch with his hand halfway down his pants. Does he sleep like that all the time? If he had a nightmare, I bet he could really hurt himself."

"But you saw him," Della Lee said, seeing past Josey's too-casual assessment of him.

"I saw him."

"Then you understand."

Josey swallowed. "Yes."

"Bastard. I hate that he's still in my house. That was my mother's house. I wonder what's going to happen to it."

"Well," Josey said, "if you're really leaving, you can sell it."

Della Lee smiled, like there was a secret joke in there somewhere. "Sell it. Yes. That's what I'll do."

"I can help you."

Della Lee's smile faded. "You have to promise me not to do anything else like this, Josey. Don't go back there to him. Don't contact realtors. And don't tell anyone about me.
Promise!"

"Okay, okay. I promise."

"I can't believe you would do this for me." Della Lee reached out tentatively to touch the box, like she wasn't sure it was real. When her fingers touched the cardboard, she gave a surprised laugh.

"When you go up north, you're going to need your things."

Della scooted the box toward her. It made a loud scraping noise against the hardwood floor. "Oh, I get it," she said as she lifted the lid. "You're trying to get rid of me because I know about your sweets."

"Well, there is that," Josey said.

"Josey!" she heard her mother call from down the hall. Josey swung her head around.

"No one's ever done anything like this for me. You know, maybe I
can
keep this stuff." Della Lee suddenly grabbed the bags and brought them toward her, hugging them.
"My
stuff," she said, laughing. "My stuff, my stuff, my stuff. I never thought I'd see it again. Could I have a little privacy here?"

Josey hesitated at first, then got to her feet.

"Close the door, will you? And don't forget to go see Chloe at the courthouse and get my sandwich," Della Lee said as she brought a shirt out of one of the bags and put it to her face, inhaling. She frowned, then smelled the shirt again. "That's strange. This doesn't smell like I remembered."

When Josey closed the door, Della Lee was taking out another shirt.

Josey shook her head, thinking, if Della Lee were a candy, she would be a SweeTart. Not the hard kind that broke your teeth, the chewy kind, the kind you had to work on and mull over, your eyes watering and your lips turning up into a smile you didn't want to give.

"Josey!" Margaret called again.

Josey turned quickly and went to check on her mother.

Margaret liked to look
at one particular photo after she took her sleeping pill, because sometimes it made her dream of him. She was thirty-one in the photo, but she looked much younger. She always had, until recently. When she looked in the mirror these days, she saw someone she didn't recognize. She didn't see the beautiful woman in the photo. She saw an old woman trying to be beautiful, her skin dry and her wrinkles like cracks. She looked like a very well-dressed winter apple.

Long ago, when she was a young woman, younger even than in the photo, she thought she would be happier here in Bald Slope than she was in Asheville. It meant she would be away from her family and their demands of her. She was only twenty-three when she married Marco, a match made by her father. Marco was almost twenty-four years her senior, but he was rich and charismatic and he had no interest in having children, so it could have been much, much worse. She got what she wanted, a life away from her family and no younger siblings to look after anymore, while her family got what they wanted, money. But Margaret didn't realize how lonely she would be in this strange cool place with the Gothic arches of its downtown buildings and an entire culture devoted to bringing visitors to their town in order to survive. And it didn't take long to understand that Marco only wanted a beautiful wife and the cachet of her old Southern family name. He didn't want
her.
But when she was thirty- one, for one brief wonderful year, she wasn't lonely. She was happy, for the first and only time she could ever remember.

The photo had been taken at a picnic social, and he wasn't supposed to be in the picture. He was caught by accident so close to her. She'd cut the photo in half years ago, when she thought cutting him out of her life was the right thing to do. But she could still see his hand in the photo, a young man's hand, just barely touching hers. The hand wasn't her husband's.

She could hear Josey moving around in her room. Josey was talking to herself, which was a new development, one Margaret wondered if she should be concerned about. Today Josey had taken entirely too long to fetch the peppermint oil, especially considering Nova Berry didn't even have it ready yet. Josey had been doing something else. The thought of Josey making a wider circle, one outside this house, made Margaret feel uneasy. Margaret had given up everything for this life, for this house, for this money. Josey would too.

She heard some scuffling, like something being dragged across the floor in Josey's room.

"Josey!" she called, putting the photo under her pillow.

A minute passed with no response.

"Josey!" she called again.

Soon Josey tapped on Margaret's bedroom door and entered. Margaret knew she wasn't a good mother. But somehow, all the horrible things Josey did when she was young, all the treasures she broke, all the tantrums she threw, all the scratches and bruises she gave, would have been a little easier to forgive if she just didn't look so much like Marco. Marco, who would swoop in once a week to take Josey on a drive because Margaret forced him to. Where was he the rest of the time, when Josey was screaming or breaking the good china? The first nine years of Josey's life, Margaret could only stare at her daughter, at what an unattractive, spoiled child she was, and wonder if she was punishment. She'd had Josey out of desperation and spite. So maybe Margaret got what she deserved. But Marco could do what he wanted, married or not, and he had no consequences to face. Men were thieves.

"Is something wrong, Mother? Do you need something?"

"What are you doing in your room? I heard a scraping sound."

"I was sitting at my desk," Josey said. "I pulled back the chair. I'll go to bed now. I won't make any more noise."

"All right," Margaret said. Josey started to turn. "Josey?"

"Yes, Mother?"

"Did you get rid of that sweater like I asked?"

"Yes, Mother."

"I wasn't trying to be mean the other day. It just doesn't look good on you."

"Yes, Mother," Josey said.

The truth was, that sweater, that color, looked good on her daughter. And every time she wore it, it hinted at something that scared Margaret.

Josey was growing into her beauty.

Margaret watched Josey leave.

She used to be a beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman around.

She brought out the photo again.

But that was forever ago.

Rock Candy

Across town, early
the next morning, Chloe Finley stared at the door of her apartment.

Her boyfriend Jake was on the other side of the door, outside in the hall.

She couldn't believe this was happening. She'd just kicked Jake out after he'd admitted he'd cheated on her.

Dazed, she turned around . . . and tripped over a book on the floor.

She looked down at it and sighed. She'd half expected this. Whether she liked it or not, books always appeared when she needed them. She'd stopped reading as much once she met Jake. And over the past five years, ever since moving in with him, books had come to her less and less frequently. When they did show up, she ignored them. After all, how did you explain such a thing? Books appearing all of a sudden? She was always afraid Jake would think she was crazy.

She could remember very clearly the first time it happened to her. Being an only child raised by her great- grandparents on a farm miles from town, she was bored a lot. When she ran out of books to read, it only got worse. She was walking by the creek along the wood line at the end of the property one day when she was twelve, feeling mopey and frustrated, when she saw a book propped up against a willow tree.

She walked over and picked it up. It was so new the spine creaked and popped when she opened it. It was a book on card tricks, full of fun things she could do with the deck of cards her great-grandmother kept in a drawer in the kitchen for her weekly canasta game.

She called out, asking if anyone was there. No one answered. She didn't see any harm in looking through the book, so she sat under the tree by the creek and read as much as she could before it got dark. She wanted to take it with her when her great-grandmother called her home, but she knew she couldn't. The owner of the book would surely want it back. So she reluctantly left it by the tree and ran home, trying to commit to memory everything she'd read.

After dinner, Chloe took the deck of cards out of the kitchen drawer and went to her bedroom to try some of the tricks. She tried for a while, but she couldn't get them right without following the pictures in the book. She sighed and gathered the cards she'd spread out on the floor. She stood, and that's when she saw the book, the same book she'd left by the creek, on her nightstand.

For a while after that, she thought her great- grandparents were surprising her with books. She'd find them on her bed, in her closet, in her favorite hideouts around the property. And they were always books she needed. Books on games or novels of adventure when she was bored. Books about growing up as she got older. But when her great-grandparents confronted her about all the books she had and where did she get the money to buy them, she realized they weren't the ones doing it.

The next day, under her pillow, she found a book on clever storage solutions. It was exactly what she needed, something to show her how to hide her books.

She accepted it from then on. Books liked her. Books wanted to look after her.

She slowly picked the book up from the apartment floor. It was titled
Finding Forgiveness.

She stared at it a long time, a feeling bubbling inside her. It took a few moments for her to realize it was anger. Books were good for a story or to teach a card trick or two, but what were they really? Just paper and string and glue. They evoked emotions and that was why people felt a connection with them. But they had no emotions themselves. They didn't know betrayal. They didn't know hurt.

What in the hell did they know about forgiveness?

She went to the kitchen, put the book in the refrigerator and shut the door. She slid her back down the door and sat on the floor. Jake had woken her up that morning by kissing his way down her stomach. She could feel her lower abdominal muscles clench at the memory, even though she was furious with him now,
livid.
But she could never seem to help her physical reaction when it came to Jake. She was sometimes frightened by how much she felt for him, frightened by his intensity, by the way he never closed his eyes when they made love. He pulled her to him the way wind pulled leaves, like she had no control. She'd never loved anyone as much, or felt such passion. To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him. And she thought Jake was just as consumed by her. The day they met at the courthouse, on his first day of work out of law school, he forgot where he was going and sat at her shop staring at her until the district attorney herself came to look for him.

As he had moved over her that morning, she'd met his eyes and felt that rush of overwhelming feeling, her body panicking with it. It was almost too much, yet she could never imagine being without it.

"I would die before I could ever be with anyone else," she'd said, reaching up to touch his face. His eyes bored into hers, just as his body did.

I would die before I
was a game they played. One of those things couples did. An inside joke. If they were in a restaurant, one of them might say,
I would die before I would ever eat
that much again.
And the other would say,
I would die before I
let you.
Or if they were out walking through the park, one of them might laugh and say,
I would die before I would ever make
a dog of mine wear a bandana.
And the other would say,
I
would die before I let you.
But it was always serious in bed.
I would die before I would leave you. I would die before I could
ever get enough of this.

Jake had suddenly closed his eyes, which he never did when they made love.

He stopped and fell away from her.

And that's when he told her.

There was only her.
There's only you, Chloe.

He made a mistake. He hadn't meant for it to happen.

It was just one time, he'd said. Three months ago. The office had been celebrating after winning the Beasley murder case. Everyone had committed so much time to it and there had been all this stress, all these emotions needing a release, and before he knew it he'd done it.

He loved Chloe, not the other woman.

He begged her forgiveness, telling her he'd do anything to make this right. Anything, it seemed, but tell her the name of the woman he'd slept with.

Chloe sat on the floor in front of the refrigerator and stared into space until the phone rang. The voice that came over the machine was Hank's, one of the security guards at the courthouse, wondering where she was.

She got up, got dressed and went to the door. The book was sitting on the console by the door. She frowned at it as she left.

It was on the passenger seat of her car when she got in.

It was lying on the counter by the cash register when she lifted the security gate to the shop.

Downtown was busy
that afternoon. Josey had forgotten that preparations had begun for the three-day Bald Is Beautiful festival, which was held every year to kick off the ski season. There was always live music and beer to attract college kids, and a famous bald-head contest the first night that received a lot of media attention. The festival had been Marco's idea. Josey used to go to the festival with him when she was young, but it had been almost twenty years since she'd last attended. After Marco died, the town invited Margaret and Josey to the festival as guests of honor, but Margaret always refused, and the invitations eventually stopped. They were poor substitutes for the charismatic man who had once ruled the mountain, anyway.

Because of the preparations, it took Josey longer than she thought it would to get to the courthouse downtown and find a place to park. She finally found a parking space big enough for Lola the Large Cadillac, then, when she entered the courthouse, she set off the metal detector twice. When the security guards finally waved her on, she walked across the cavernous pink marble rotunda that smelled of grease from the old elevators and went to the small shop Della Lee had told her about. It looked like a newsstand from a distance, with shelves of magazines and newspapers and paperback books, but as she got closer she noticed there was a sandwich counter and two small cafe tables.

There wasn't anyone there when she approached.

She looked around and checked her watch anxiously.

Suddenly she heard from the back room behind the counter, "Would you please go away? I don't need you!"

"Excuse me?" Josey said, surprised.

A young woman with the most beautiful hair Josey had ever seen popped her head out of the doorway. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said as she walked all the way out of the room. "I didn't know anyone was out here. Can I help you?"

Her color was high and her brown eyes were shining. Her gorgeous red hair was a thick mass of curls that fell down her back. She looked like a painting, fragile, caught in a moment she couldn't get out of. "Are you all right?" Josey automatically asked.

The woman's smile didn't quite meet her eyes. "I'm fine, thanks. What can I get for you?"

"A grilled tomato and cheese sandwich to go, please."

"Coming up," the woman said, and turned around to the

grill.

Josey sat at one of the small cafe tables. She kept checking her watch. She had just sneaked out of her mother's ladies' club meeting. She had about twenty minutes by her estimation, twenty minutes to get back to Mrs. Herzog's drawing room before the meeting ended. Josey wasn't a member of the group, and she always stood off to the side with the nurses and paid companions of some of the older ladies. Not even they paid any attention when she slipped out. The only person who seemed to notice was Rawley Pelham, the older man who owned the local cab company. Some mysterious part of the Pelham family tree forbade them from breaking promises. Once a Pelham gave you his word, he had to keep it. If Rawley promised he'd pick you up at ten o'clock, he was always there at ten o'clock. Annabelle Drake hired him to take her to these meetings, and he always waited outside and stared at the house as if the gathering of women inside was a mystery he was trying to solve. He smiled at Josey as he leaned against his cab, his collar up against the cold wind. She knew he wouldn't say anything. For some reason, he went out of his way to avoid speaking to her mother.

Sneaking out was another risk, yes. But someone had to take care of Della Lee. As far as Josey knew, she hadn't eaten anything since she'd shown up three days ago, stubbornly holding out for a grilled tomato and cheese sandwich.

Josey checked her watch again, then she suddenly felt a pull in the center of her body. She put a hand to her stomach automatically, thinking it was hunger. The smell of peppery warm cheese and thick, yeasty grilled bread was beginning to fill the air. She would give the sandwich to Della Lee when she got home, and while Della Lee ate the sandwich Josey would eat oatmeal pies and candy corn and packets of salty pumpkin seeds from her closet. She daydreamed about that for a moment.

She heard the metal detector go off and turned.

That's when she realized it wasn't hunger she felt.

It was Adam.

He was emptying his pockets before walking through the metal detector again. He was still in his work uniform, but he wasn't carrying his bag. He had on a well-worn blue fleece hoodie, and a bandana was pushing his hair back.

Her lips parted when he began to walk across the rotunda toward her.

But he didn't even look at her as he went straight to the counter.

"Chloe?"

The woman turned from the grill, saw who it was, then turned back around without a word.

"Come on, Clo. Talk to me. I just got home from work and found him on my front step."

"I don't care," Chloe said.

Adam stared at Chloe's back, at her beautiful hair. "He never meant to hurt you."

That made Chloe turn again, spatula in hand.
"You knew
about it?"

Adam hesitated. Whatever it was, he knew.

Chloe turned back around. "Just go."

"Do you want me to tell him anything?"

"I'm not talking to him, and I'm not talking to him through you." She looked over her shoulder. "Unless, of course, you want to tell me who it was."

"I don't know who it was," Adam said. "Listen, he asked me to go over to your place and get some of his things because he knows you don't want him there right now. But I'll wait until you're there to do that, okay? I'll call you tonight before I come by. Jake will be staying with me for a while. You know the number." He waited for her to say something, but when she didn't he finally turned and walked away. He glanced at Josey as he passed her. He'd taken a few steps before he stopped. "Josey," he said, as if the glimmer of recognition finally penetrated. "What a surprise."

"Hi, Adam," she said breathlessly.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm waiting on a sandwich." She quickly added, "It's not for me."
It's not for me?
Brilliant.

"Oh, right. Of course." He studied her for a moment. Her hand went covertly to her mouth to feel for crumbs. "Are you okay?"

"You ask me that a lot."

"Do I? I'm sorry. You just seem a little sad."

She shook her head. "I'm fine," she lied.

He looked over to Chloe, then turned back to Josey. "Well, I'll see you later."

She watched him go. "Bye."

"Here's your sandwich," Chloe said, putting a white paper bag on the counter.

Josey stood and approached the counter as Chloe punched some buttons on the cash register. "So, you know Adam?" Josey asked as casually as possible.

"He's my boyfriend . . . my ex-boyfriend's ..." Chloe shook her head and looked frustrated that she couldn't articulate just what Adam was to her, which made Josey's heart sink even lower in her chest. They had history. They had a relationship. "He's my boyfriend's best friend," she finally said. "It's four dollars even."

"Oh." Josey dug around in her purse a little too long, working up enough courage to ask, "Do you mean you and Adam aren't a couple?"