Susan Phillips - Ain’t She Sweet?

Colin, who’d been such a misfit himself, had understood. He’d been kind to her from the beginning, kinder than he’d been to her classmates, who were frequently the target of his sharp, cynical tongue. Still, the girls had daydreamed about him. Heidi, with her passion for historical romances, was the one who’d come up with his nickname.

“He reminds me of this tortured young English duke who wears a big black cape that snaps in the wind, and every time there’s a thunderstorm, he paces the ramparts of his castle because he’s still mourning the death of his beautiful young bride.”

Colin had become the Duke, although not to his face. He wasn’t the kind of teacher who inspired that sort of familiarity.

The men began to wander in, drawn by the smell of food and a desire to hear their wives’ reactions to the news of Sugar Beth’s return.

Merylinn flapped her arms at them. “Y’all are in the way.”

The men ignored her, just as they always did when it was time to eat, and the women began their familiar dance around them, carrying the food from the kitchen to the late-eighteenth-century sideboard that occupied one wall of Winnie’s graceful formal dining room.

“Does Colin know Sugar Beth’s back?” Merylinn’s husband, Deke, asked.

“He’s the one who told Winnie.” Merylinn shoved a salad bowl in his hands.

“And you sweet thangs complain because nothing ever happens in Parrish.” Amy’s husband, Clint, had grown up in Meridian, but he knew the old stories so well they sometimes forgot he wasn’t one of them.

Brad Simmons, who sold home appliances, chuckled. He was Leeann’s date for the evening. Leeann didn’t really like him, but since her divorce, she’d been working her way through every eligible bachelor in Parrish, along with a few who weren’t eligible, but none of them talked about that because Leeann had it hard. With two kids, one of them handicapped, and an ex-husband who was always behind on child support, she deserved whatever diversion she could find.

Winnie’s husband was the last to appear. He was the tallest of the men, lean and fine featured, with wheat-colored hair, caramel eyes, and one of those perfectly symmetrical male faces that had, on several occasions, prompted Merylinn to tell him he needed to fulfill his God-given mission and sign up to be a regular sperm donor. The Seawillows were too polite to stop what they were doing and cross-examine him the way they wanted to, but they watched from the corners of their eyes as he picked up the corkscrew and began to open the wine Winnie had set out.

Winnie felt the old ache in her chest. They’d been married a little over thirteen years. They had a beautiful child, a lovely house, a life that was almost perfect. Almost … because no matter how hard Winnie tried, she would always be second best in Ryan Galantine’s heart.

After two days living on Coke and stale Krispy Kremes, Sugar Beth couldn’t put off buying groceries any longer. She waited until dinnertime Tuesday evening, hoping the Big Star would have emptied out by then, and drove into town. Luck was with her, and she was able to pick up what she needed without having to speak with anyone except Peg Drucker at the register, who got so rattled she double-scanned the grape jelly, and Cubby Bowmar, who caught up with her while Peg was bagging and revealed a gaping hole where his right canine tooth had once been.

“Hey, Sugar Beth, you are even mo’ gorgeous than I remember, doll baby.” His eyes trailed from her breasts to the crotch of her low-rise pegged pants. “I got my own business now. Bowmar’s Carpet Clean. Doin’ real good, too. What’s say me and you go toss back a few beers at Dudley’s and catch up on old times?”

“Sorry, Cubby, but I swore off gorgeous men the day I decided to become a nun.”

“Dang, Sugar Beth, you ain’t even Catholic.”

“Now that sure is gonna surprise my good friend the pope.”

“You ain’t Catholic, Sugar Beth. You’re just bein’ stuck up like always.”

“You’re still a smart ‘un, Cubby. Tell your mama hi for me.”

As she walked out of the Big Star, she refused to look at the poster that had stopped her dead on the way in:

The Winnie & Ryan Galantine Concert Series

Sunday, March 7, 2:00 P.M.

Second Baptist Church

Donation of $5.00 benefits local charities

The night felt as if it were closing in on her, so she headed toward the lake, only to realize she couldn’t afford the gas. She made a U-turn on Spring Road, not far from the entrance to the Carey Window Factory, the business her grandfather had founded, except it was called CWF now. She found it hard to imagine Winnie and Ryan hosting a concert series. They’d been married for more than a dozen years now. The thought shouldn’t be painful, since Sugar Beth was the one who’d dumped him. With her typical bad judgment, she’d taken one look at Darren Tharp and forgotten all about Luv U 4-Ever. Now, Winnie was the driving force behind the town’s revitalization, and she sat on the boards of most of its civic organizations.

Cubby Bowmar’s carpet cleaning van passed her going the other direction. In high school, Cubby and his cronies used to show up on the front lawn at Frenchman’s Bride in the middle of the night, howling at the moon and calling out her name.

“Sugar… Sugar… Sugar…”

Her father generally slept through it, but Diddie climbed out of bed and sat by Sugar Beth’s window, smoking her Tareytons and watching them. “You’re going to be a woman for the ages, Sugar Baby,” she’d whisper. “A woman for the ages.”

“Sugar… Sugar… Sugar…”

The woman for the ages turned her battered Volvo into Mockingbird Lane and glanced at the French Colonial that had once been the home of the town’s most successful dentist but now belonged to Ryan and Winnie. The past two days couldn’t have been more dismal. Sugar Beth had cleaned up the carriage house so it was habitable, but she hadn’t uncovered a trace of the Lincoln Ash painting, and tomorrow she faced the unpleasant task of searching that wreck of a depot for it. Why couldn’t Tallulah have bequeathed her blue chip stocks instead of a shabby carriage house and a train stop that should have been torn down years ago?

She came to the end of Mockingbird Lane, then braked as the Volvo’s headlights picked out something that hadn’t been there when she’d left-a heavy chain stretching across her bumpy gravel driveway. She’d barely been gone two hours. Someone had worked fast.

She got out of the car to investigate. The quick-set cement had done its job, and a couple of hard kicks didn’t budge either of the posts holding the chain. Apparently the new owners of Frenchman’s Bride didn’t understand her driveway wasn’t part of their property.

Her spirits sank lower, and she tried to convince herself to wait until morning to confront them, but she’d learned the hard way not to postpone trouble, so she headed for the long walk that led to the entrance of the house where she’d grown up. Even blindfolded, she would have recognized the familiar pattern of the bricks beneath her feet, the point where the walk dipped, the spot where it curved to avoid the roots of an oak that had come down in a storm when she’d been sixteen. She approached the front veranda with its four graceful columns. If she ran her finger around the base of the closest one, she’d come to the place where she’d gouged her initials with the key to Diddie’s El Dorado.

Lights shone from inside the house. Sugar Beth tried to tell herself the uneasiness in her stomach came from lack of a decent meal, but she knew better. Before she’d gone into town, she’d tried to boost her confidence with a tight candy pink T-shirt showing a few inches of belly, a pair of low-riding, straight-legged jeans that hugged her long-stemmed legs, and black stilettos that took her nearly to six feet. She’d topped the outfit with a copycat black motorcycle jacket and the pea-size fake diamond studs she’d bought to replace the ones she’d hocked. But the outfit wasn’t doing a thing to boost her morale now, and as she crossed the porch of her old home, her heels tapped out a dismal reminder of what she’d lost. Sugar Beth Carey… doesn’t live here… anymore.

She set her shoulders, lifted her chin, and punched the bell, but instead of the familiar seven-note chime, she heard a jarring, two-tone gong. What right did anyone have to replace the chimes at Frenchman’s Bride?

The door opened. A man stood there. Tall. Imperious. It had been fifteen years, but she knew who he was even before he spoke.

“Hello, Sugar Beth.”

“Shaking, eh?” said that hateful voice. “I shan’t beat you if you behave yourself.”

GEORGETTE HEYER, Devil’s Cub

She swallowed hard and spoke around a croak. “Mr. Byrne?”

His thin, unsmiling lips barely moved. “That’s right. It’s Mr. Byrne.”

She tried to catch her breath. Tallulah hadn’t told her he was the one who’d bought Frenchman’s Bride, but she’d only passed on the news she’d wanted Sugar Beth to hear. The years fell away. Twenty-two. That’s how old he’d been when she’d destroyed his career, barely more than a kid.

He’d looked so odd in those days with his Ichabod Crane body-too tall, too thin, his hair too long, nose too big, everything about him too eccentric for a small Southern town-appearance, accent, attitude. Naturally, the girls had been dazzled. He’d always dressed in black, most of it threadbare, with silk scarves looping his neck, some fringed, one a muted paisley, another so long it came to his hips. He’d used phrases like bloody awful and don’t muck about, and, just once, feeling a bit dicky, are we?

The first week of school they’d spotted him using a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. When he’d overheard some of the boys whispering that he looked like a queer, he’d gazed down his long nose at them and said he regarded that as a compliment, since so many of the world’s great men had been homosexual. “Alas,” he’d told them, “I’ve been sentenced to a life of mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope a few of you will be more fortunate.”

That had brought ’em out for the old parent-teacher conference.

But the young schoolteacher she remembered was a pale harbinger of the imposing man who stood before her. Byrne was still odd, but in a far more unsettling way. His ungainly body had become hard-muscled and athletic. Although he was lean, he was no longer skinny, and he’d finally grown into his face, even that honker of a nose, while the cheekbones that had once looked gaunt now seemed patrician.

Sugar Beth knew the smell of money, and it clung to him like smoke. When she’d last seen him, his hair had fallen to his shoulders. Now it was just as thick, but cut in a movie star’s short, dramatic rumple. Whether an expensive salon product or good health had produced its dark sheen was hard to tell, but one thing was certain. He hadn’t gotten a haircut like that in Parrish, Mississippi.

He wore a ribbed turtleneck with Armani written all over it and black wool trousers that had a thin gold pinstripe. Not only had Ichabod Crane grown up, but he’d also gone to grooming school, then bought out the place and turned it into an international franchise.

She hardly ever had to look up at any man, especially not when she was wearing dominatrix heels, but she was looking up now. Into the same haughty jade eyes she remembered. All her old resentment came rushing back. “Nobody told me you were here.”

“Indeed? How amusing.” He hadn’t lost his British accent, although she knew accents could be manipulated. Her own, for example, could go North or South, depending on circumstances. “Do come in.” He stepped back and invited her into her own home.

She wanted to give him the finger and tell him to go to hell. But running was another of life’s luxuries she could no longer afford, right along with throwing hissy fits and maxing out her credit cards. The contempt that tightened the corners of his thin lips told her he understood exactly how much his invitation stung. Knowing he expected her to stomp off gave her the determination to set her shoulders and step over the threshold… into Frenchman’s Bride.

He’d ruined it. She saw that right away. Another beautiful Southern home ravished by a foreign marauder.

The rounded shape of the entrance hall and its sweeping curl of staircase remained the same, but he’d destroyed Diddie’s romantic pastels by painting the curved walls a dark espresso brown and the old oak moldings chalk white. A jarring abstract hung in place of the painting that had once dominated the space, which had been a life-size portrait of herself at age five, exquisitely dressed in white lace and pink ribbons as she curled at her beautiful mother’s fashionably shod feet. Diddie had insisted the artist add a white toy poodle to the painting, even though they didn’t have a poodle, or any dog, despite Sugar Beth’s pleas. But her mother said she wouldn’t have anything in the house that licked its private parts, or licked anybody else’s for that matter.