When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance) (3 page)

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Authors: Gwynne Forster

BOOK: When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance)
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Lean, fit, and self-confident, as usual, Richard stepped out of the taxi—a bedraggled vehicle that had seen better days—and looked up at the big white green-shuttered house before him. If he got back in that automobile and headed for the luxury he knew he’d find in Ocean City, he would defeat the purpose of his trip. He’d try it for a few days.
“It’s a nice place, sir,” the driver, an aged and whiskered black man, assured him. “We all know Miss Fannie, a good God-fearing woman who’ll mother any human she comes across. She’ll take good care of you. If I had time, I’d go in and see if I could buy a few biscuits.”
Richard counted out the fare and added a five-dollar bill for a tip. “She’s a good cook?”
“Somebody there is.” He tipped his old seaman’s cap. “Thank you kindly. If you need a ride, just ask Miss Fannie for Dan. She’ll call me.”
Richard put a bag under his right arm, picked up another one with his right hand, took a third one in his left hand and headed up the walk. Just before he reached the door, Fannie stepped out.
“Glad you got here safe and sound, Mr. Peterson. I’m Fannie Johnson.” She reached for the bag in his left hand.”
“Oh, I can manage this,” he said, startled that she would attempt to relieve him of his heavy load. The women to whom he had become accustomed wouldn’t consider relieving a man of a burden. “You just hold the door.”
“I’ll show you your room. We can talk on the way upstairs.” She punched what proved to be an intercom button. “Rodger, would you please come and take Mr. Peterson’s bags up to his room.”
He appreciated a business-like person, but the litany of regulations that rolled off the woman’s tongue made him nervous. “At least I’m allowed to have wine with my dinner,” he said, offering a mild protest.
“It’s late for lunch, but I can get you a sandwich. Ham or turkey?”
“If you have any warm biscuits, I’d like the ham.”
“Be downstairs in fifteen minutes. Your food will be on the dining room table. We use first names here. I’m Fannie. May we call you Richard?”
Taken aback by her casual use of his first name, a frown clouded his face. “Uh, well . . . yes, of course.”
She looked hard at him before adding “Been a long time since I had a full house.” With that she strode out of the room and swished down the stairs singing, “How Great Thou Art,” a religious song that he’d heard his mother sing at least a hundred times.
He looked at his suitcases and remembered that for the last ten years, his butler had packed and unpacked his bags, hung his clothes and seen to his laundry and dry cleaning. With a quick shrug, he walked over to the window for a view of his surroundings and gasped. There before him lay the vast expanse of ocean, or maybe it was a bay, but beyond the shore, he could see nothing but water. His gaze took in the room, a neat and graciously furnished, though not luxurious, chamber. Beige and white. He liked that. After inspecting the bathroom, he decided that if everything else suited him as well, he’d stay a while.
Richard ambled downstairs and wandered around until he found the dining room. He stood transfixed at the door, for seeing the twelve places set for a meal discombobulated him. He hadn’t counted on being a member of a community of strangers. His plan had been to stow himself away in a quiet place, write his memoirs, and figure out what to do with the rest of his life, a life that didn’t include Estelle Mitchell.
“Come on, sit down before these biscuits get cold,” a plump and heavy-hipped black woman in a white dress and apron said to him. “You must be our new boarder. I’m Marilyn, and if you want to eat good, you got to treat me right.” She flashed him a smile. A flirtatious smile. The weapon of a woman who knew how to handle men. “What’s your name?”
“Peterson.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at him from beneath lowered lashes. “That your first name?”
As his gaze swept over her, he remembered that they didn’t know who he was or how he was accustomed to being treated. “My first name is Richard.”
Her white teeth glistened, and the dimple in her left cheek winked at him. For a woman who had to be in her late fifties, this one was a piece of work. But she was also the kind of woman he’d played with in his philandering days, and before he realized what he was doing, his right arm went around her shoulder and the grin that had always accompanied his bursts of charisma captured his face.
“I plan to eat well,” he said. “Very well.”
What the hell am I doing encouraging this woman? This sort of thing is behind me.
He pulled a curtain of solemnity over his face. “I’d better get to those biscuits while they’re still warm.”
“Not to worry, honey. I can always heat ’em up.” She left and returned with a glass of iced tea and a dish of raspberry cobbler. “Do you have any diet problems like no fat, no salt, vegetarian?” she asked.
“Uh, no. I eat anything except rhubarb, chitterlings, and brains.” He thanked her for the food and, after eating, looked at the two new keys Fannie gave him and struck out for the beach. He’d heard it said that a leopard didn’t change its spots but, by damn, his days of taking women for the sport of it were behind him.
With his shoes in his hands, Richard stood on the sandy beach and stared out at the ocean. He couldn’t see anyone or anything but water. Shading his eyes from the sun’s rays, his thoughts went to Estelle and what he wouldn’t give to frolic there with her knowing that she was his. He shook himself out of it and headed back to the boarding house.
What did a man do with his spare time in Pike Hill? As he walked back to his new home, it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a building more than three stories high, no public transportation, and that there were very few moving automobiles. Well, he had wanted a change, and he had one now. The problem was what he’d do with it.
Over the last ten years, he had dressed for dinner every evening, and fifty percent of the time he wore a tuxedo. He shook the sand out of his socks, threw them on the closet floor, washed up and looked through a suitcase for something to put on. He settled on a blue dress shirt with the collar open and an oxford gray suit. He put a red tie in the pocket of his jacket in case he needed it, grabbed the second section of
The Maryland Journal
and walked down the stairs—he had always loved a winding staircase—to the dining room. A peep from where he stood at the door assured him that he didn’t need the tie, that, indeed, a pair of Wranglers would have been adequate.
He looked around for a place to sit, saw an empty table for two in the corner and rushed to claim it. Rodger, the porter who carried his bags to his room, had become a waiter, and he nodded slightly to the man who greeted him as would an old friend.
“How far’d you go down the bay this afternoon? I tried to ketch ya to tell you not to get your feet wet. We got a lot of jellyfish right now, and I tell you those buggers can sting. Fore you know it, you’ll be hobbling back here with your feet feelin’ like they on fire. Cook’s got some mighty good shrimp soufflé to start, or would you rather have oyster chowder?”
“What? Does she serve things like that every evening?”
Rodger’s broad grin exposed his gold left bicuspid. “If you like fish and seafood, the eatin’ here is real good. Soul food ain’t bad either. Marilyn’s a fine cook, and she’s got a real good helper.”
“I’ll take the chowder.” Rodger left, and Richard opened his newspaper, as he would have done if dining alone in a restaurant.
A brown skirt appeared beside the table, and he looked up into Fannie’s frowning face. “Richard, everybody’s looking at you. This isn’t a restaurant. We’re all family here, and we don’t read the paper during meals; we talk to each other. I’m gonna say grace, and then I’ll introduce you and my other new boarder. A glance around the room and his gaze caught the other uncomfortable person in the room.
Fannie said the grace and added. “We have a full house now, thank the good Lord. I want you all to meet Jolene Tilman, who joined us yesterday. I neglected to introduce her last night at supper, and I apologize. This gentleman is Richard Peterson. He came to us all the way from Europe. Switzerland, I believe. Welcome both of you. Now, let’s eat.”
“No place left for me to sit but right here with you, Richard,” Fannie said, “so you can read your newspaper later upstairs when you don’t have anybody to talk to. These people may not have been to Europe and seen the world, but they’re good folks, and if you let yourself get to know ’em, you’ll like ’em and you may even learn something.”
He had hoped not to have a dinner partner, but he suspected that he’d drawn the least disagreeable one. “Give me time to find my way here,” he said, trying to keep the harshness out of his tone. “I’m a careful man.”
“Maybe. Just make sure you don’t look down on anybody. You can’t look at a person and tell what he’s like inside.”
Marilyn appeared at the table, saving him the need for a response. “How’s your chowder, Richard? You want some cornbread to go with it? My cornbread’s so good it walks all by itself.”
“I’ll bet it does. The chowder is wonderful. I’ll take the cornbread next time since I’ve just about finished this.” He loved cornbread and he wanted it with the rest of his chowder, but he didn’t want Marilyn in his hair, and he could see that she was primed for it.
When the cook left the table, he said to Fannie, seeking her estimation of the woman, “She’s a nice person, very motherly.”
Fannie’s laugh startled him. “Motherly? Marilyn? That woman doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Biggest hussy that ever walked. She’s tried every man in here, except Judd, and I can see that you’re next.”
“Thanks for warning me.”
“What you planning to do with your time? You can’t spend all of it on the beach, ’less you want to look like a lobster. The school could use you. The library, too. You look like a person with a lot of good experience.”
A person with good experience. What the hell!
He had signed his letter to her with his title, executive director. Didn’t she know what that was, for heaven’s sake? “I’m hoping to find the peace and quiet I need in which to write my memoirs, and this seems like the perfect place.”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and pulled air through her front teeth. “Humph. So you planning to spend your time
on
yourself and
with
yourself. That has never brought anybody anything. You get something when you give something. I don’t eat dessert. Enjoy yours.”
She left the table, but her words stayed with him. For as long as he could remember, he had focused on himself, what he wanted, and how he’d get it. But when he finally reached the pinnacle, his trophy ran like water through his fingers, and only then had he realized what was really important to him. Too late. Much too late.
Encumbered by the weight of his past indiscretions, he climbed the stairs as if he had gained a ton since ambling down those same steps an hour earlier. He took out his cell phone and placed it on his night table. If he could only talk with her just once! He’d promised himself that he would never do it, but he opened the cell phone to call her and then slumped on the bed. It didn’t work in that remote area. Thank God. He’d almost done the unpardonable, and he prayed he would never again be tempted.
 
 
Jolene could hardly hear her own voice when she slipped into her seat at supper that evening and said, “Hi,” hoping that Joe and the woman on the other side of her, whose name she didn’t know, would hear her. Neither responded, but she’d done her duty, and she contented herself with that fact. Still, with everyone around her telling tales in a jocular manner, she couldn’t help feeling excluded. Alone. At least when mama’s voice had sounded from the rafters, it was meant for her to hear and respond to. A woman across the table reached for the salt, and Jolene hastened to get it and hand it to her, and when she saw that only three squares of cornbread were left on the plate, she passed the plate to her neighbors hoping that they would respond in some way.
“I already had my share,” Joe said. “Take one for yourself, or maybe Louvenia over there wants one.”
“Sure is good,” Louvenia said. “You know I cooked for years, Joe, but I can’t say mine were any better than these. Marilyn knows what she’s doing.”
“She does that,” he replied.
Jolene had a sense of defeat. Her gesture had sparked conversation, but it wasn’t directed to her. Maybe she should take a course of some kind. As soon as she ate the last crumb of her apple pie, she said, “Excuse me,” and got up from the table. She wasn’t sure that Joe or Louvenia heard her.
“What a waste!” Jolene thought she heard Louvenia say. “Youth is wasted on women like that one.”
 
 
As she started to walk away, Joe said, “Look, babe, when we leave the table, we push in our chair, so whoever passes won’t stumble over it.”
Mortified at having received another reprimand and angry at herself for provoking it, she stared down at him. “No . . . you look.” She sucked in her breath. “Sorry. I didn’t know it was a custom. Good night.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you. That’s just the way I talk. Don’t let nothing get to ya, babe. Life’s too short. Good night.”

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