warts.” “Have you told all this to Junebug?” I asked. Linda glanced down at the remnants of her peach pie. “Yeah, but he didn’t seem too interested in it.” I leaned back in my chair. Assume, I told myself, for one moment that what Linda says is true. Greg sleeps with Jenny. Greg sleeps with Dee. Does either woman know about the other’s involvement? And what about Parker? What would he do if he thought either his wife or daughter had been seduced by this Yankee interloper? And if Freddy found out about Greg’s alleged misconduct with the ladies Loudermilk, could that give Parker a motive to silence both men? Freddy had said he’d make money even after Greg was dead. I remembered Parker Loudermilk’s dark eyes, the consuming blaze dancing in the black ballroom of his irises, his comment on the fire’s momentarily satisfying beauty. And I felt a chill in my heart.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jenny Loudermilk answered the front door and no one could lean more provocatively into a doorway than she did. She seemed determined to live up to Linda’s image of her. She was real pretty, like her mother, except darker like her dad. A lock of luxuriant brown hair hung down over one eye. She was wearing a T-shirt one size too small, and beneath the fabric, the swell of breasts looked perfect.
Snug jeans finished her wardrobe. Her feet were bare and her toenails were immaculately painted a shade of dark scarlet. The whole stance had the air of not-so-subtle calculation. “Hello, Miss Loudermilk. Are your folks at home?” She regarded me with a bored eye. “Mom’s out back, throwing a pot. Daddy’s not here, though. You’re the library fellow, right?” “Yes, that’s right. Jordan Poteet.” I offered her my hand. She took it limply, gave it a shake, and then trailed her fingertips along my fingers when she let my hand go. My fingers felt itchy, but I kept them still. “I was just having a drink. You want one?” I thought she meant drink of water, but I realized with a jolt that she meant alcohol. The glassiness of her eyes looked like it had been poured from a bottle of wine. “I don’t think that I should drink with you. I doubt your parents would approve.” I’m sure I sounded like a total prude, but what else was I supposed to say? Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t hold with teenagers getting drunk in the middle of the day. And I would hazard a guess that drinking with my boss’s daughter is not de rigueur in Mirabeau government. (Yes, I’m a hypocrite. I drank beer as a teenager, but I only did it while sitting in the back of a pickup truck. I certainly didn’t invite folks in for cocktails.) She opened the door wider. “What would you know about what they approve of? Believe me, there’s not much.” She turned and walked away, her gait slightly unsteady. I stepped inside the foyer and shut the door behind me. My first sensation was of antiseptic; even the air smelled as if it’d been scrubbed. The Loudermilk place was big;
Parker’s construction company was one of the most successful in the tri-county area, and Loudermilk money was old money. The foyer I stood in had a fancy, swirled marble floor in gray and white, and the wallpaper of gray, black, and silver stripes looked expensive. One entryway opened into a living room that hadn’t seen much living; it was decorated with glazed pots of all shapes and sizes, no doubt the product of Dee’s hands and wheel. She’d painted them with all sorts of figures-stylized antelopes in graceful leaps, Egyptian letters (I recognized the ankh, the symbol of life), and Native American totems.
Lifted from other cultures, I thought, without a single symbol from her own heritage. Maybe our culture was just uninteresting to Dee, I reflected. Not even a pot with the Fighting Bees of Mirabeau High on it. I’d stepped away when I noticed the shards in the corner, one of the pots had fallen, smashing into bits on the hardwood floor. It was a shame; it looked like it was a real pretty one, with geometric shapes in red and green painted on it. I wondered why no one had cleaned it up, in this immaculate house. Jenny saw my eyes staying near the shattered pot. “What can I say?” She shrugged. “I’m a klutz.”
I glanced elsewhere; the other entryway opened into a formal dining room with an impeccably tasteful cherry dining table and a huge china and silver cabinet. “You coming or you just gawking?” Jenny Loudermilk bleated back at me. I cut through the dining room and found her in a spacious kitchen. It gleamed white-the appliances, the floor, the lights. Jenny perched on a bar stool, elbows leaning on the spotless Formica kitchen counter, a fashion magazine open in front of her. A tall, clear drink with ice and a fat wedge of lime sat in front of her, sitting in its own puddle of condensation. I picked up the glass and sniffed it. Gin and tonic, and good gin from the smell. “Aren’t you a little young for Tanqueray?” I asked, trying to sound jovial but undoubtedly sounding like a stern nerd. She shrugged. “I’m a little young for a lot of things, but that never stopped me.” She took the glass back from my hand and sipped, pretending not to watch me over the rim. “I’m very impressed with how adult you are,” I said. She ignored the sarcasm, or maybe she just didn’t give a shit what I thought. That seemed a distinct possibility for this little poseur.
She sucked on a piece of ice, then dropped it back into her glass. “So why do you want to see my mom? She overdue with those Dr. Seuss books she borrowed for me?” “Actually I was curious as to how you were doing. You seemed awful upset at the fire last night.” I pulled up a stool and sat down. She examined the free-floating morsels of lime pulp in her drink. “It was upsetting, seeing that beautiful old house burn down.” “I didn’t think you were the type to care much about antebellum architecture.” It was the wrong thing to say. “What the hell do you know about me, anyhow, Mr. Poteet? Where do you get off coming in and telling me what I care about? Jesus, I get enough from the King and Queen!” Her dark eyes flared in outrage, flinting like struck stones. I raised a hand in pretend surrender. “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.” Jenny snorted and sipped at her drink again. “I thought maybe you were still upset about Greg Callahan,” I ventured. Or your mother and Greg Callahan, I added silently. Her fingers had been sliding up and down the cool wet length of the cocktail glass and they braked. She stared at her hand and did not look at me. “What is any of this to you?” “I don’t want my friend Lorna getting hurt. Whoever killed Greg and Freddy might come after her next. You’d gotten to know Greg Callahan, right? Someone here killed him and we have to find out who.” She was quiet again, as silent as a statue. “Look, Mr. Poteet, just leave it alone. Okay? I’m not going to weep anymore for him. I-” “Weep for him? What was he to you?” The words tasted terrible in my mouth, but I had to know. “He was just a friend, a business associate of Mom’s. He wanted to buy Mom’s land.” “And you got all worked up over a man you hardly knew?”
“I-I cried because I’m just not used to death, okay? It shocks me.
Older people get jaded about it, but us kids, we’re different.” It nearly rang true; I remembered my first funeral, my grandmother Schneider’s when I was twelve, and fighting back unexpectedly hot tears simply at the sight of her closed coffin. But a tone in Jenny’s voice was too calculated; she would not have made for a good actress, despite her poses. “Your father didn’t seem too upset.” I remembered the excited glow in Parker’s eyes as he watched the fire. “He likes burning.” Jenny shrugged. “He gets a boner lighting a fire in winter.”
If it was intended to shock, it did. I didn’t go around talking about my folks’ sexual responses much when I was a teenager, I was too interested in my own. I suddenly didn’t want to be around Jenny Loudermilk anymore. She looked unutterably sad to me, sitting alone in this huge, cold house, a little girl drinking hard liquor to show how mature she was, trying to engage in witty repartee that she was sadly ill-trained for. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go have a word with your mother.” I stood and pushed the stool underneath the counter. “She won’t like being interrupted when she’s throwing pots,” Jenny warned me, coming a little unsteadily off her stool. “You better not-” “I think I better. And I think you better go sleep off this little afternoon drunk you’ve enjoyed.” I went out the back door toward a small potting shed, decorated on the side with fanciful paintings of children gathering mushrooms. Bright beds of wildflowers surrounded the shed, bestowing a rustic charm they usually only talk about in magazines. As I knocked on the door I could see Jenny Loudermilk watching me from the curtained breakfast nook. I rapped again on the door. I could hear a gentle humming noise from within, and then Dee Louder-milk’s hard-edged drawl: “Come in.” I entered the dark pottery studio. Dee Loudermilk sat hunched over a whirling wheel, shaping a mound of clay into something that looked like a cross between a vase and a lozenge. Her hands moved with infinite patience up and down the spinning clay, and I saw they were very like her daughter’s hands moving up and down on the glass of cold gin. I stared spellbound, and Dee, one lock of light hair hanging in her face, glanced past her errant strand at me. “Shut the door, please, and push the hair out of my face, if you don’t mind,” she said, and I obeyed. It was an oddly intimate moment as I gently moved her hair back behind the delicate shape of her ear. I stepped back, uncomfortable with the sudden closeness between us. She wasn’t bothered. “Thanks, Jordy,” she said with a workman’s bluntness. “I usually wear a kerchief, but I couldn’t find mine today.” The humming I’d heard was the whirr of her potter’s wheel, powered by electricity rather than her sandaled feet. I watched in respectful silence as she finished molding the small pot, its gentle curves taking shape under her clay-smeared fingers. Finally, when it had spun long enough, she slowed the wheel to a stop then pried the new vase free with a flat-edged knife. She
