Cherise took a deep breath of mildewed air, reminding herself that she was doing the best she could. Once she’d reviewed the Bugle’s financials, she’d have a clearer picture of how she could help the paper get back on its feet. That was her area of expertise anyway, not news gathering. She decided that in the future, she’d resist the temptation to offer her opinion in editorial meetings.
She wandered past the living room and into the kitchen. It was dingy but intact, except for the battered old refrigerator, with its door hanging off its hinges. That was destined for the junk heap. Everything else seemed usable—the deep porcelain farm sink with a pump handle and wooden drainboard, a mammoth old stove that would probably survive the apocalypse, tall maple cupboards, bead-board wainscoting, and the same narrow-strip white pine floors that ran through the rest of the house. The utilitarian round oak table and four ladder-back chairs resided in the middle of the kitchen, as always, though the centerpiece was a recent addition. At some point in the past five and a half years, a big chunk of plaster had fallen from the kitchen ceiling to the tabletop, almost as if the house itself were daring someone to notice it was falling apart.
She laughed aloud at the irony. Not so long ago, she’d spent nearly sixty thousand to upgrade her Harbour Island kitchen, adding an environmentally controlled wine cooler, dual convection ovens, a separate beverage service island, and the finest black granite and brushed steel money could buy. Yet she never once cooked in that kitchen. In fact, she’d rarely even poured cereal into a bowl or prepared a cup of coffee in it. Catered dinner parties were the only times the kitchen was used for its intended purpose.
And here she was, two years later, her only asset a quarter tank of gas and, if she wanted any privacy, no choice but to cook for herself. Right here. In this Little House on the Freakin’ Prairie kitchen.
Cherise shook her head as she opened one of the cupboards, taking down a dusty old Mason jar from the top shelf. Wincing, she turned it over to shake out the dead insects, then removed the florist paper and stuck the flowers in the glass jar. The bouquet was too big and the jar too small, but it would have to do for now.
She began to work the water pump, still laughing at herself. She’d graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida, and landed a great job at one of the biggest accounting firms in Miami.
Pump. Pump. Pump.
She’d put in three years of accounting grunt work before she was moved to the auditing division of their Tampa office. She’d earned a reputation for sniffing out inconsistencies and rose quickly through the ranks. Two years later she was an account manager in their consulting division, specializing in forensic accounting.
Pump. Pump. Pump.
She started dabbling in real estate—it was a no-brainer in Florida at the time. She started with flipping a few single-family residential properties. Candy invested about ten thousand, and together they began flipping residential and commercial. At the three million mark, Candy sold her various businesses and came in full-time. The profits really started to flow. When they reached six million in assets, Cherise left the accounting firm and sank everything she had into the business.
Pump.
They more than doubled their net worth in a year.
Pump.
They bet it all on a single commercial deal.
Pump.
Fourteen million—gone. Her personal savings—gone. All the people she thought were her friends—gone. Her dream home—gone. Evan—gone. Everything—gone.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
Cherise suddenly stopped her futile effort to get water out of the beat-up contraption. She was out of breath, she’d broken out in a sweat, and tears were forming in her eyes. She swiped them away. If she wanted water for her mystery flowers, she’d be getting it from the lake.
Then it dawned on her—of course water wasn’t coming out of the stupid pump! It had to be primed first! How many times had she watched her father and grandfather pour buckets of water into the fill cap near the well?
Cherise leaned on the drainboard and laughed at her own ignorance. What other basic things had she forgotten how to do? Could she catch a trout out of Pigeon Creek if she absolutely had to? Could she operate Granddaddy’s lawn tractor? The chainsaw? Could she patch up a hole in the rowboat?
Slowly, her gaze moved toward the window over the old sink. Tentatively, Cherise reached up to pull aside the blue-and-white checked curtains and smiled at the serene beauty of Newberry Lake, its deep mountain water edged with the lace of early summer. Though the view was lovely, her stomach clenched with a sharp sadness.
It had been a July night twenty-three years ago. Her mother smiled and sang to herself as she washed dishes by hand at this sink. A warm breeze ruffled the curtains and touched her mother’s strawberry-blond hair.
As usual, Cherise and Tanyalee had been fighting like cats. Her parents had exchanged angry looks and deep sighs and separated their daughters. Cherise’s mother took her into the kitchen and asked her to put away the leftovers, which made Cherise furious, because her father was out on the porch reading aloud to Tanyalee. Why had she gotten chores while Tanyalee got books with Daddy?
It’s not fair!
That was the complaint Cherise was prepared to lodge with her mother when she slammed the refrigerator door and spun around.
But the words wouldn’t come.
Cherise stood transfixed by the sudden transformation of her ordinary mother in the ordinary room. The sun had partially dipped behind the mountains and shot a beam of its richest light directly through that little kitchen window, gilding her mother’s skin in gold. In that instant, her mother became magically beautiful, a singing angel framed by blue and white checks, with her eyes closed and her sweet, high voice causing a seven-year-old girl to forget what had been bothering her. In that moment, Cherise expected bluebirds to start twittering around her mother’s head, like in the movie Cinderella.
“Do you still love Daddy?”
“What?” Her mother’s yellow-red hair whipped around her shoulders when she turned her head, laughing. “Of course I do, sugar! I’ve loved Daddy since the first time I laid eyes on him! Now what in the world made you ask me something as silly as that?”
Embarrassed, Cherise shook her head and looked down at her feet. “You and Daddy seem angry sometimes, is all.”
Her mother chuckled. “Sweetheart, it’s a full-time job to keep you and your sister from clawing each other’s eyes out. If your daddy and I seem angry it’s because we’re exhausted from refereeing the two of you all the time! I swear, you two need to learn to share. It’s just not right how you girls can’t get along.”
Her mother dried her hands on her apron and bent down to hug her little girl. She smiled at Cherise. “Sugar, you’re the oldest, you know. It’s your responsibility to set a good example for your little sister. You need to show her how to be nice and how to take turns. That’s your job.”
Cherise nodded. She’d heard this before, of course. “I’ll try, Mama.”
And that’s how it happened that a few weeks later her mother and father were found dead in a little beach rental in Nags Head, where’d they’d gone in search of “a moment’s peace” as Aunt Viv had described it.
After they died, Cherise wanted to be dead, too, but she somehow kept breathing, sleepwalking through her days and dreaming at night of that lost moment, when her mother was golden and warm and alive, her hands in the soapsuds and her face turned to the setting sun.
Why hadn’t I been able to get along with Tanyalee? Mama and Daddy would still be alive …
Cherise dropped her hand from the curtain, turned away from the sink, and pushed the pain aside. She had no time for this crap—she needed to wrap up her little excursion down memory lane and get back to the newsroom, where fifteen year-end finance reports were waiting for her to wade through. She had a month to decide if and how the paper could ever be profitable again. Once she’d accomplished that, she’d take her earnings and go.
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Cherise walked quickly, making a cursory check on the rest of the house. The two bedrooms needed painting. The old iron beds were fine but the mattresses and box springs would have to be pitched. The bathroom needed scrubbing from ceiling to floor and the whole thing needed regrouting.
Cherise stepped into the hallway and gasped at what awaited her. The squirrel!
“Ohmigod! Shoo! Get out! How did you get in here?”
The thing wouldn’t move. Cherise stomped her boot and waved her hands. “Go! Git the hell out! I know how destructive you little shits can be.”
“Is that how y’all greet each other down in Tampa?”
Tanyalee.
Cherise looked up. Her sister stood in the open front door. She wore a buttery linen suit and spike heels. A large metallic bag hung from her shoulder. Her reddish-blond hair was twisted back in a tidy chignon, held in place by beautiful mother-of-pearl hair combs that looked like expensive antiques. She had pearls at her ears, a smirk on her face, and hands curled into fists at her sides. She looked like she belonged at a Junior League meeting.
Cherise had never seen Tanyalee look so chic—or chilly. “Hi!” she blurted out. “What a nice surprise!”
“Aunt Viv told me I might find you here.” Tanyalee let her eyes roam up and down Cherise while she produced a smile that did not spread to her eyes. “And, of course, Wim told me yesterday that you were back in town.”
“Wim?” Cherise nearly stepped on the damn squirrel as she moved toward her sister. “Wim Wimbley?”
Tanyalee laughed. “Of course. How many men do you know named Wim?” Just then, Tanyalee raised her left hand to smooth an unseen stray hair, making certain the huge solitaire diamond caught the light to its best advantage. “We’re engaged. I manage his real estate office.”
Cherise opened her lips to comment on her sister’s happy news, but her mouth simply hung open, lifeless and silent. Her brain, however, shifted into overdrive. Wim Wimbley? Candy’s one-time sleazeball boyfriend? And Tanyalee? When the hell had this happened? I hope Wimbley keeps the cash register padlocked.
“You can’t possibly be serious about living in this dump,” Tanyalee said. “Why don’t you rent a loft downtown? Wim has some units more suited to your lifestyle. Unless you have a newfound love for…”—Tanyalee looked around again—“camping.”
“Well, I—”
“No one said how long y’all plan on playing publisher, but I’m sure Wim would be willing to do a month to month. As a favor to me, of course.”
With that, Tanyalee reached in her metallic bag and pulled out a brochure for Wimbley Real Estate. She held it in front of her body with a straight arm, as if she were offering a treat to a stray cat she couldn’t trust.
Cherise blinked. She closed her mouth. She took the five steps necessary to reach her sister, walked right into the brochure, and extended her arms to hug her.
Tanyalee remained as stiff as a corpse. She patted Cherise on the back awkwardly, then pushed her away.
“Here,” she said, shoving the brochure in Cherise’s hand.
Cherise looked from the five-color glossy booklet to Tanyalee and cocked her head, unsure how to handle her sister. “Are you free? Can we go for a cup of coffee and chat? Catch up? We haven’t talked in years.”
Tanyalee produced a quick little laugh. “Five years. And unfortunately, no. I’ll have to take a rain check. I just wanted to stop by and welcome y’all back.” Again, she examined Cherise from head to toe. “You look good. What are you, a size four? I bet you could almost fit into my clothes now.”
Cherise smiled pleasantly, though her body hummed inside with a low-level warning. What the hell is up with Tanyalee? No, we’ve never slobbered over each other with affection and there’s still an undercurrent of jealousy here, but when did my baby sister turn into a freakin’ ice queen?
“I hear that J.J. has already moved in for the kill. That sure didn’t take long.”
Cherise shook her head, truly not understanding. “What are you talking about, Tanyalee?”
Her sister chuckled and raised an eyebrow. “Wim saw the whole thing. Told me you’d barely gotten out of your damn car before he started manhandling you in front of half the damn town—while a dead girl was being pulled from a lake, no less. Talk about tacky.”
Cherise froze. Had everyone seen that? But it was nothing! J.J. said so! And why was there such bitterness in Tanyalee’s voice? “I don’t under—”
“Water under the bridge, my dear sister,” she said with a quick wave of her hand. “I forgave you a long, long time ago.”
Cherise felt her belly tie itself into a sick knot. “Forgave me for what?”
Tanyalee let go with a full-bodied laugh before she patted her sister’s shoulder. “You’ve always been so above it all, haven’t you, Cheri? Always pretending you don’t know what effect you had on him or how you managed to ruin my marriage from three states away.”
Cherise stopped breathing. “What?”
“Come on now, big sis. I was praying you’d be more mature about all this by now, even though I waited and waited for you to come to me with the truth and you never did.” Tanyalee withdrew her hand from Cherise and pulled her lips tight, then shrugged. “I know everything, Cheri. I know how J.J. never stopped loving you. I know how you were calling him from Florida and telling him to leave me. He confessed everything once the divorce was final. And the weird thing is that I think I knew all along—a wife’s intuition and all that—and looking back, I’m pretty sure it was the stress of the betrayal that made me lose the baby in the first place.”
Cherise’s knees felt wobbly from shock. What Tanyalee was saying was so horrific that she could barely follow along. I’m responsible for Tanyalee’s miscarriage? I was calling J.J. from Florida? And J.J. had never stopped loving me?
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, Lord-ee.” Tanyalee repositioned the bag on her shoulder and sighed, as if it took a great deal of patience to deal with her dim-witted sister. “Anyway, I’m sure we’ll have time to revisit this before you leave town.” Tanyalee frowned. “So how long are you here for, anyhow? A couple months? Three? And do you truly have any idea what a mess you’ve stepped in over at the Bugle? Wim says there’s no way it’ll ever bounce back, that it’s as good as dead.”
Cherise closed her eyes and gave herself a moment to distance herself from the whacko world of Tanyalee Marie Newberry. How would she respond? Where to start? It was all a cesspool of twisted lies. She’d never spoken to J.J. on the phone—not once since she left Bigler! So why would he lie to Tanyalee about something like that? Or was it Tanyalee who was lying to her now?
When Cherise opened her eyes, Tater Wayne stood behind Tanyalee in the doorway. He held up a greenish, rotted piece of wood that might have once been a window sash. “The sitch-ee-a-ashun’s more fucked up than I thought,” he said.
Cherise did her best to smile, noting that Tater Wayne was becoming downright prophetic.
Chapter 9
“More beans, Cheri?”
Cherise straightened her posture in the hope the adjustment would help her breathe. She’d already consumed one of Aunt Viv’s breaded pork chops, two pieces of corn bread with butter, a baked apple, two helpings of green beans with bacon, and a glass of milk. She hadn’t eaten with such abandon since high school. The waist of her skirt had cut into her flesh.
“No, thanks,” she moaned, falling back against the dining room chair. “I’m about to pop as it is.”
Granddaddy snickered. “Nonsense. We’re having red velvet cake for dessert.”
“I know how y’all love red velvet cake,” Aunt Viv said, emptying the serving spoon of green beans onto Cherise’s plate as if she’d requested them. “Remember how I made it for your graduation party, with a nice cream cheese frosting?”
Cherise nodded, placing her hands on her pooched-out stomach. “Of course I do. It was delicious.”
“Now, I
would have been happy to make a red velvet wedding cake for Taffy and J.J., but she insisted on a carrot cake. But who in their right mind wants carrot cake for their wedding?” Aunt Viv cut another square of corn bread and put it on Cherise’s plate, then provided her with another pat of butter. “If you ask me, any marriage that starts out with carrot cake is bound to—”
Granddaddy’s knife crashed down against the edge of his supper plate, drowning out the end of Viv’s sentence. “So, Cheri, did Purnell gather up all those reports you’d asked for? Do you have everything you need?”
Aunt Viv sniffed and raised her chin at her brother’s interruption. She began gathering the dirty dishes with passive-aggressive fervor.
“Let me clean up tonight,” Cherise said, starting to rise from her chair.
“I wouldn’t even consider it,” Aunt Viv said, her voice overly chirpy. “Now you’uns just sit and discuss your business while I go and get us some cake and coffee.”
Granddaddy slowly raised his eyes toward Cherise and shook his head.
“If it’s all right with you, of course,” Viv added, mimicking her brother with an eyebrow raise of her own. Then she used one of her pink-laced tennis shoes to kick open the swinging door to the kitchen.
Cherise stared at the clattering door until it fell silent, then she turned to Granddaddy. In her mind’s eye she pictured Lady Justice with her scales, one side holding a single pack of ramen noodles and a cutoff notice from Tampa Electric, while the other was weighed down with the newspaper business, her family of crazy people, J.J., the crumbling lake house, a rabid squirrel, and a huge red velvet cake.
She let out a weak squeal of alarm.
“Don’t mind your aunt Viv. Her dark cloud will blow over as soon as she has a nip of her slush.”
Cherise blinked a few times to regain her focus. “What were you saying?”