My own breasts began to tingle as he told me where his lips were and described what his hands were doing. I could almost feel the roughness of his stubbled cheek, his face pressed hotly against me.
“Now I’ve unbuttoned the top of your shorts,” he said huskily. “My fingers are on the zipper . . . Slowly, very slowly I—”
The screen door slammed and a male voice said, “Hey, Deb’rah? You home or not?”
I was so into the spell Kidd was weaving that for one confused moment, I felt as if I ought to clutch a cushion to my chest to hide my nakedness. Between telephone and washer, I hadn’t heard Reid Stephenson’s car drive up.
“Oops!” he said as he poked his head through the door and saw me. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you were on the phone. I’ll wait. Go ahead and finish.”
As if.
Mood shattered, I told Kidd I’d call him later.
“’Fraid I won’t be here,” he said with a long regretful sigh. “Roy and me, we’re patrolling the water tonight. Lot of drunk boat drivers’ll be out. But, Deb’rah?”
“Yes?”
“Remind me to punch your cousin in the nose the next time I come up, hear?”
* * *
“Hey, you didn’t have to get off the phone on my account,” said Reid.
“Yes, I did,” I said grumpily. “What’re you doing out this way anyhow?”
Dressed in dark red shirt, white sneakers, no socks, Reid just stood there happily jingling his keys in the pocket of his khaki shorts. Not only is he cute as a cocker spaniel puppy with his big hazel eyes and his curly brown hair, he has a puppy’s sunny good nature and isn’t easily insulted, which is probably why he’s so successful with women. Takes more than a whack with a newspaper to discourage him when there’s a tasty treat in sight.
“I brought you a housewarming present.”
He beckoned me out to the porch. There on the table was a long flat box wrapped in brown paper, tied with a gingham ribbon and topped with a spray of what looked like dried grasses.
“What’s that stuff?” I asked.
He grinned. “Hayseeds, of course.”
It’s been a running joke with some of my town friends that my move to the country was the first step toward turning into a country bumpkin, that I’d soon be coming to court with a stem of broomstraw dangling from the corner of my mouth.
Inside the box were two smaller packages. The first was a yellow-backed booklet covered with dense black typescript that advertised things like blackstrap molasses, copper arthritis bracelets and diuretics—an old-fashioned farmer’s almanac.
“You need to know what signs to plant your crops under,” Reid said.
I had to smile because Daddy and Maidie still consult this same almanac before they plant—a waxing moon for leafy vegetables, dark of the moon for roots, zodiac signs for everything else.
The other package contained a rather handsome walnut board, inset with three brassbound dials. The top one was a thermometer (86°), the middle was a barometer (29.6"), and the bottom recorded the humidity (58%)—actually a pleasant day for the first week in September.
“How about beside your bathroom door?” Reid suggested as I looked around for a place to hang it. “You can see what the weather’s like as soon as you get up every morning.”
As if I couldn’t just look out the window. But he was so pleased with himself and his gift that I held my tongue.
We carried it into my bedroom and he was right, as he usually is about spatial concepts. It was a perfect fit. One of the reasons Reid’s such a good trial lawyer is that he notices details. So far as I knew, he’d only been in this room once since I moved in, when he brought out a small bookcase from my old office a few weeks back, yet he remembered the narrow wall between my closet and bathroom doors.
“Get me a screwdriver and I’ll go ahead and put it up for you,” Reid said.
I fetched one from the garage and we hung it in less than five minutes.
“Dwight see you this morning?” I asked as we walked back through the kitchen and I transferred my wet laundry to the dryer.
“About that pen he found under Lynn Bullock?”
“He told you that?”
“Come on, Deborah. I’m an attorney, remember? I don’t answer any questions from a deputy sheriff without a good reason. Soon as you told him they were Christmas presents from John Claude, you knew he’d come asking to see mine.”
“And you showed it to him?” I asked casually.
“Not yet. It’s back at the office. He’s going to come by tomorrow when I’m there. But I got to tell you, it pisses the hell out of me that he won’t take my word for it. Has anybody ever seen me raise a hand to a woman? Ask Dotty. Bad as we used to fight, the only thing I ever slammed was the door.”
“But you did have an affair with Lynn Bullock,” I said.
He shook his head. “Nope. We went out twice last winter, I slept with her once and that was it.”
Genuinely curious, I asked, “What’s your definition of an affair?”
“More than a quickie and two suppers, that’s for sure,” he said virtuously. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but she turned out not to be my type.”
“Oh?” I hadn’t realized there were such creatures.
“Lynn Bullock was a sexy woman and she really liked to—” He hesitated. John Claude’s lectured him so many times about using the F-word in front of women that it’s starting to sink in. “—to do it. The thing is, she was just a little too trashy for me.”
He spoke with such a straight face that I couldn’t control my laughter.
“After Mabel, the motorcycle mama?” I hooted. “Or little Cass with the big—”
“You don’t have to call the roll,” Reid said, offended. “Look, you know Dolly Parton’s famous remark?”
“‘It takes a lot of money to look this trashy’?”
“Right. But Dolly goes for that look deliberately. It’s her stage persona. Earthy. Playful. Lynn Bullock wore the same big hair, flashy clothes, and gaudy costume jewelry, only she was dead serious. She thought it made her look upper-class—I swear to God, she must’ve spent her formative years studying Dynasty as if it were a documentary on tasteful dressing.”
“I never knew you were such a snob,” I said.
“I’m not! Lynn was though. The first and only time I f—I mean, laid her, she spent the rest of the evening classifying half the people in Dobbs—this person was, quote, ‘society.’ That one was ‘low-class.’ I thought at first she was being funny but, no, ma’am! She was dead serious and she had the pecking order in this county down pat. I told her that if she wanted to see a real pecking order, she ought to come with me to the Rittner-Kazlov Foundation reception at the North Raleigh Hilton and watch artists and musicians put each other in their places. Mother wanted me to go represent her and I’d had just enough bourbon to think it might be amusing to watch Lynn watch them.”
(Between them, Brix Jr. and Jane Ashley Stephenson have sat on half the non-profit boards in the Triangle.)
“I’m guessing all the women showed up in earnest black gowns and ceramic necklaces?”
“I believe there were two maroon velvets and an authentic batik with strings of cowrie shells.”
“And Lynn Bullock wore—?”
“A bright green satin cocktail suit with the skirt up to here, hair out to there, gold shoes, gold purse, chunky gold earrings and gold glitter in her hair. She said she hoped the glitter wasn’t too much, but after all it was Christmas.”
“Oh, Lord.” I’ve always disapproved of extramarital sex, but I could almost find it in my heart to feel sorry for someone that tone-deaf about clothes. “How on earth did she get out of the house dressed like that without her husband noticing?”
“He was in Charlotte that weekend.”
“So how did the artsy crowd react?”
“’Bout like you’d expect. Polite for the most part, but there was a lot of eye-rolling and the older women became very, very kind to me, almost motherly. They did everything except cut up my carrot sticks for me.”