“Sandra Jean,” he said softly.
She tilted her head. “Yes?” An amused light danced in her eyes.
“Why the hell,” he said in the same soft tone, “don’t you go and get dressed?”
The light in her eyes shifted to the other end of the spectrum. She wrapped the robe about her tightly and stamped out of the room.
When she reappeared she was wearing one of Ruth’s print dresses and a pair of Ruth’s flat-heeled straw shoes. Her glance at Tully was spiteful. She went to the bar and mixed herself a drink.
Tully dropped into a chair. “Waiting for someone?”
“Do you mind, Mr. Tully?”
“I’m not sure I don’t. Andy, of course?”
“Of course.”
“I should think my house would have lost its charm for him as a trysting place.”
“Trysting place!” The girl laughed. “You are from Squaresville, aren’t you?”
“Strictly,” Tully said. “But, Sandra, let’s keep our eye on the ball, shall we? I don’t know what Andy’s version was, but last time he was here he made a couple of unpardonable remarks about Ruth. Viciously nasty.”
“And you popped him one,” Sandra Jean jeered. “But we understand, Davey. You were under a great strain, and all that jazz.”
“I still am.”
“Andy forgives you. I forgive you. Do you forgive you?”
“I’m sorry I blew my top. But he had it coming.”
“Going, as I heard it.” Sandra Jean took a thirsty swallow. “You don’t care a lot for my fella, do you?”
“I couldn’t care less. I wish you’d meet him somewhere else.”
“Like in a dirty room in a dirty motel... like?”
Mercedes Cabbott is dead right, he thought. This kid is a bitch. “I suppose that’s a sisterly reference to Ruth.”
“Is that what it was?” Sandra Jean asked innocently. “Who’s being the nasty little boy now?”
Tully shrugged. He was too exhausted to reply.
Hips on gimbals, Sandra Jean prowled about the room, gesturing with her glass. “You get one thing straight, O Pure in Heart. Nobody wrecks me with Andy, but nobody. Mercedes Cabbott can maneuver herself dizzy, you can bar me from this house, but that thar gold strike’s mine! Get me?”
“Not that I give a damn,” Tully murmured. “But it isn’t as if you were penniless.”
“Those icky little trust funds Ruth and I inherited? They might look like a ten-strike to a girl who had to pull herself up by the runs in her stockings, but it’s strictly for the hoi polloi, buster. I need as much in a month as that fund brings me in a year.
Something in the way she said it sounded an alert. But he kept his own voice casual.
“You wouldn’t be in a financial jam, would you, Sandra?”
“Oh, I owe a few people.” She said it indifferently, but he noticed a slight frown.
It came to him in a flash. “Gamblers, maybe?”
“It’s none of your business,” she said, and he knew he was right. There were several gambling joints just outside the town limits, and Sandra Jean liked to play the wheel. “Anyhow, it hasn’t a thing to do with my greedy plans involving Andrew. He’s the biggest chance I’ll ever get, and I’m not letting him get away from me. You remember that, sweetie.”
The door chimed.
Sandra Jean looked at her brother-in-law. “That’s my Andy now,” she said, “and if you’ve any idea of telling him what I just said, forget it. In the first place he wouldn’t believe it. In the second place, I can get pretty nasty myself, Sir David.”
Tully said dryly, “I never had the least doubt of it,” and he got up and opened the door.
George Cabbott stood there.
“Oh, George,” Tully said.
“Anything new on Ruth?” The big bronzed man had changed from jeans and T-shirt to a conservative suit.
“No.”
“If she’d met with any harm, Dave, you’d have heard by this time. By the way, is Sandra Jean here?”
“Here I am,” Sandra Jean said. She was standing stock-still in the middle of the living room. “Hi, George. Is something wrong?”
Cabbott said pleasantly, “That would depend on the point of view. I dropped by to tell you you needn’t wait for Andy to show up — if, of course, that’s what you’re doing here.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“He’s having a long, long talk with Mercedes.”
“Oh, one of those.” Sandra Jean laughed, but Tully noticed that her eyes remained wary.
“I don’t think this one is quite like the others,” Cabbott said. “I’m afraid Mercedes has pretty well made up her mind to cut Junior off without a cent, as the saying goes, in a certain contingency.”
“How does that involve me?” the girl said. “Or is that the whole point?”
“Judge for yourself, Sandra,” George Cabbott said, and Tully could have sworn there was an undertone of amusement in his voice. “The last thing I heard Mercedes tell Andy as I left was that, in her opinion, if he was old enough to take a wife he was old enough to get a job and support her.”
“Now, George,” Sandra Jean said, and there was amusement in her voice, too. She can sure put on an act, Tully thought. She’s about as amused as a lady spider watching her dinner get away.
George Cabbott merely smiled and left.
7
“If that refugee from a TV commercial thinks he can bluff me out of this...!” Sandra Jean was raging up and down the room. “I’ll show him.”
“Maybe he’s being your very good friend,” Tully said.
“And maybe Mercedes Cabbott is a member of the human race! Why, Dave, she put him up to this — isn’t it obvious? I’ll show her, too!”
There was a bubble of froth at the corner of her mouth. And her sister’s predicament, Tully thought bitterly, left her temperature unchanged. That’s what she thinks of Ruth.
As if she had picked up the name on her emotional radar, Sandra Jean said suddenly, “I’m not really worried — that woman won’t cast her precious sonny-boy adrift — it’s the way she treats me. You’d think I was Typhoid Mary. The old bitch wouldn’t act this way if I were Ruth.”
“Well, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” Tully said. “You’re not.”
His tone seemed to calm her down. “I know I’m not, Davey. It’s been thrown up to me all my life. What the hell happened to this drink?” She went over to the bar and got busy again. “It’s always been Ruth this and Ruth that, all that’s pure and holy. In Mercedes’s case it’s easy to understand — she latched onto Ruth as a substitute for her daughter Kathleen, who becomes more and more of a saint the longer she’s dead — in Mercedes’s mind, that is.” Sandra Jean took her fresh drink to the sofa and curled up opposite him. “That’s all right with me...”
“I don’t think it is,” Tully said. “I think you hate Ruth. I think you’ve always hated her.”
Sandra Jean looked into her tall glass and considered this. “Maybe I do at that,” she said at last. “Maybe I always have, as you say. And that makes me out a stinker for real, doesn’t it?”
“Forget it,” Tully said, barely waving his hand. “Forget it. I hardly know what I’m saying.”
“Look, Davey,” the girl said, setting her glass down on the floor. He looked, and he saw a Sandra Jean ten years older, her face drawn down in bitter lines. “Did Ruth ever tell you that our mother died giving birth to me? Till the day he died Daddy never forgave me for it — I was the ‘cause,’ you see, for Mother’s dying. Poor Daddy had a tough time trying not to show it, and it’ll give you a short idea of the kind of cookie our father was when I tell you that his solution was to pretend I wasn’t there. So I never had a mother, and to my father I was a sort of nothing. Naturally, he gave all his paternal attention — and love — to Ruth, who could do no wrong. That’s what I grew up with — a guilt feeling about my mother’s death and having my big sister thrown in my face. And it’s still going on.”