Scandal in Copper Lake

A lot of people hadn’t seen blessings anywhere around Glory. Instead, they’d seen a stereotype: an uneducated black woman, illegitimate children, no legitimate means of support. But Glory had fit nobody’s stereotype.

“You loved the flowers in my garden, especially the lilies. You have a sister named Lillie, don’t you?”

“I do. And another named Jass.” Lillie was five years older and lived in South Carolina. Jass was two years older and living in Texas. They didn’t miss Glory the way Anamaria did, but they’d never known her the way Anamaria had. They’d been raised by their fathers, by paternal grandmothers and aunts and stepmothers.

“And the baby would have been Charlotte.”

Anamaria looked up, surprised. “Charlotte?”

“Surely you knew that. Glory decided on it about a month before she passed.”

Another of those details that she’d shut out after the shock of seeing her mother dead. She tried the name in her mind: Charlotte Duquesne. My sister, Charlotte. Not just the baby, so generic and impersonal, but Charlotte, with café-au-lait skin, chocolate-colored eyes, wispy black hair and tiny features with the exotic stamp of all her mixed heritages. Having a name made her more real and made her absence sharper, more intense.

“So…” Lydia gazed across the table at her. “Glory used to say that you would follow in her footsteps. She said when you were three, you’d tell her someone was at the door a minute or two before they even stepped onto the porch. She said when you were four, all she had to do was think about fixing meat loaf for dinner, and you’d tell her no in no uncertain terms.”

Anamaria smiled. To this day she couldn’t stomach meat loaf. It was the Thursday special at Auntie Lueena’s diner, making Thursday her regular day off. “I wish I remembered more about her.”

“You were so young,” Lydia murmured. “It was so tragic.”

Before either of them spoke again, the front door closed with a thud. “Miss Lydia? Are you here?”

Robbie Calloway. Anamaria’s muscles tensed. Trust him to find them together; after all, less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d warned her to watch her step with Lydia.

The older woman’s expression remained distant, and her response was absently made. “Back here in the kitchen.” She was still thinking about the tragedy of Glory’s death. Sadness and sorrow tainted the very air around her.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, then the door swung open and Robbie walked in. Except it wasn’t Robbie, but someone who looked and sounded a great deal like him. One of his brothers, Anamaria realized with relief.

He wore a dusty T-shirt with Calloway Construction stamped across the front, along with faded jeans, heavy work boots and a platinum wedding band on his left hand. He wasn’t quite as handsome as Robbie, but there was an air of blunt honesty about him. What you see is what you get.

Lydia’s smile was warm, motherly, as she reached one hand to him. “I was hoping you’d stop by this morning. I caught one of your people about to dig up my lilies in front yesterday. After the chewing out I gave him, he might not be back.”

“I told you, Miss Lydia, you’ve got to quit putting the fear of God into my subs. They’re just men. They don’t know how to handle a formidable woman like you.”

As Lydia responded with a laugh and a protest, Anamaria sipped her tea and quietly observed Robbie’s brother. He radiated contentment. He loved his wife, she loved him, and they were having a girl in August. They would name her Sara Elizabeth, after their mothers, but he would insist on calling her Angel.

It was so easy to see into some futures. So hard to figure out a thing about her own.

“Russ Calloway, this is Anamaria Duquesne. She’s new in town,” Lydia said.

He nodded politely in Anamaria’s direction. “You’ve met the right person to help you get acquainted. Miss Lydia knows everyone and everything that goes on in this town.”

Lydia smiled modestly. “Not quite…but I’m working at it. And in that spirit, did you come looking for me just to brighten your day?”

“Of course. And to tell you that the landscape guy will be over here at one, so you can scare him instead of his employee.”

She smiled again, looking totally harmless, Anamaria thought, but she would scare the guy.

After Russ left, Lydia said, “Those are the flowers your message was about. Mr. John’s prize lilies. I have an entire bed of them at home, and I’d transplanted some here. That idiot had his shovel in the ground about to uproot them when I stopped him.” Her expression turned serious, and she toyed with the teacup before finally glancing up again. “Do you have…You said there might be…”

“Another message from Mr. John,” Anamaria said smoothly. “He’s concerned about Kent.”

Another harmless message, like the lilies, she thought. But apparently it wasn’t harmless to Lydia. She stiffened, her hand frozen above her teacup, and the color drained from her face. As her hand began to tremble in midair, deep sorrow lined her face.

With a heavy sigh, she busied herself for a moment, straightening photos that were already straight, closing the lid on the pastry box, securing the small tabs that held it shut. Finally she looked at Anamaria. “Kent is my sister’s boy. He’s a Calloway, for all the good it did him. An only child, born to a man whose standards were impossible and a woman too self-absorbed to be any kind of mother. If ever two people were ill-suited to have children, it was Cyrus and Mary. Harrison and I did what we could for the boy, but no matter how much your aunt and uncle love you, it’s still not the same as having your mama and daddy’s love…and that’s all Kent ever wanted.

“Cyrus is dead now. That was no great loss to the world. And Mary still has a home here, but she spends her time traveling. Paying attention to everyone in her life except the ones that count the most. Do you know she didn’t come home when Kent’s son was born?” Her eyes glistened with emotion. “Connor was four years old the first time she saw him. She was in Europe when Kent and Connor’s mother divorced. She was in Asia when he married Lesley, his current wife. Connor will graduate from high school this May, but Mary won’t be there to see it. I hate to speak poorly of my own sister, but…”

But she’d lost the child she loved dearly, while her sister turned her back on her own child. The unfairness of it could cause a saint to turn catty.

“But you and Harrison have been here for Kent. You were here when Connor was born, when Kent divorced, when he married again. You’ll be there at Connor’s graduation.”

Lydia quietly agreed. “We always have been. We always will be.” Again, in one of those changes that Anamaria was beginning to expect, she stood and waited pointedly. “This has been a lovely time, but if I’m going to intimidate that landscape contractor, then I need a little time to get ready for him.”

By the time Anamaria got to her feet, Lydia was already opening the door into the corridor. “Thank you for the pastries, the tea, the conversation.”

At the front entrance, Lydia opened the door, then rested one hand lightly on Anamaria’s arm. “We’ll see each other again soon. And give my best to Robbie.” She nodded, and Anamaria turned to see a familiar figure leaning against the hood of her car. Definitely Robbie, wearing khaki trousers and a pale blue button-down shirt, ankles crossed, hands in his pockets and a hard look on his face.

Her heart rate increased a few beats as she said goodbye to Lydia, then circled around to the side gate. Because of the impending confrontation. Not because he was quite possibly the handsomest man she’d ever known. Not because he might be worth regretting. Simply because he was her adversary.

That was something she couldn’t risk forgetting.

Anamaria moved with the assurance of a woman who knew her body and was comfortable in her skin. She came through the gate, then strolled along the twenty feet of sidewalk that separated them, stopping just out of reach.

Just close enough for him to catch a whiff of her fragrance—exotic, musky, putting him in mind of heat and hunger and long sultry nights. There was nothing exotic about her clothes—a denim skirt that ended a few inches above her knees, a white V-necked shirt, its short sleeves cuffed once—but the image, too, filled him with heat and hunger.

She was gorgeous.

“Three men are traveling,” she said without a greeting. “An accountant, a doctor and a lawyer. A storm breaks, they have nowhere to stay, so they stop at a farm, knock on the door and ask the farmer if they can spend the night. ‘I only have room for two of you inside,’ the farmer says. ‘The third one will have to sleep in the barn with my pig.’ The accountant says, ‘I’ll do it,’ so he goes to the barn. A little while later, he comes back to the house and says, ‘Sorry, I just can’t stand the smell out there any longer.’ The doctor says, ‘I’ll go,’ and he goes to the barn. Soon after, he’s back at the house, saying, ‘Sorry, the smell is so bad.’ The lawyer sighs and says, ‘I’ll go.’ A little while later, the pig comes to the house and says, ‘Sorry, the stench is just too bad.’”

Robbie didn’t crack a smile. Lawyer jokes weren’t overly appreciated in the Calloway family, where about half the adults had law degrees. “River’s Edge is closed to the public on Wednesdays.”

“I know. Miss Lydia says hello.”

“Did she ask you to come here or did you set this up?”

Anamaria gazed at him a moment, all dark eyes and full lips, revealing nothing. “And this is your business how? Oh, right, her husband’s paying you to spy on both her and me.”

He didn’t feel guilty. A lawyer’s job was to protect his client. If Anamaria were as innocent as she wanted him to believe, she wouldn’t mind that.

“Where’s your toy car?”

He gestured over his right shoulder. “In my sister-in-law’s parking space.” Jamie’s office came with one space in the private lot behind the building, but deeming the alley spooky, she never used it. Since he knew the only two tenants who did, he figured the Vette was safe there.

“My car may not be as pricey—or apparently as high maintenance—as yours, but it is mine, so please get off it.”

He stood, brushing dust from his butt, then stepped onto the curb beside her just as she stepped off. She didn’t go to the driver’s door, though, and let herself in. Instead, she headed across the street.

“Where are you going?”

She waved one hand in the air but didn’t slow or turn back. “Follow me and see.”

It was a nice, sunny Wednesday morning. He had nothing on his schedule for the rest of the day and had a cooler packed with ice-cold water and sandwiches and his boat waiting at the Calloway dock for an afternoon’s fishing—his favorite pastime.

Then he glanced at Anamaria again, at the gentle sway of her hips, the strong muscles of her calves, the swing of her arms—and amended that thought to second favorite. The fish were always biting.

He jogged across the street and caught up with her as she started along the block on the north side of the square. “How is Lydia this morning?” he asked as he matched his stride to hers.

“She’s perturbed with one of your brother’s subs for messing with her flowers.”

He grimaced. He’d once crashed his bike into one of Lydia’s flower beds and had spent the better part of the next month doing penance in her garden, digging, hauling rock, weeding. He’d never gone near anyone’s flower beds after that. “I suppose you had another ‘message’ for her today.”

She glanced at him as they reached the corner, then turned onto the path that led to Ellie’s Deli. Steps led to a broad covered porch, and a screen door opened into the main dining room. Ignoring his comment, she said, “I met your brother.”

“Which one?”

“Russ. He seemed very nice. I was surprised.”

The waitress greeted them with a smile. “Table for two?”

Anamaria gave him another glance, quick but seeing more, he’d bet, than others saw in twice the time. “Are you going to skulk nearby if I don’t invite you to share my table?”

“Calloways don’t skulk.” Then he added, “Yes, I am. We’ll take a table in the back room, Carmen.”

Anamaria opened her mouth as if to object, glanced around the dining room, then closed it again. Ellie’s was a busy place, the main room nearly full, and more than a few people were watching them. Wondering who she was. Wondering what he was doing with her.

Carmen led them to a wrought-iron table on the glassed-in back porch, set out menus and silverware, then left to get iced teas for them both. Anamaria chose the chair facing out. He sat where he had a great view of brick wall and her.

“How many brothers do you have?” she asked as she spread a white linen napkin over her lap.

For a moment, he closed his eyes, aware of her slow, even breaths and that sweet, exotic fragrance, of warmth and desire and need. When he opened them again, she was giving him a level look. “I was projecting the answer. You didn’t get it? Some mind reader you are.”

“I don’t read minds. I read futures.”

Reaching across the table, he held out his hand, palm up. “Read mine.”

“No.”

“Why not? Am I not gullible enough?”

“Because you’re a skeptic. I don’t waste my time on skeptics.”

“How convenient, to deal only with people who already believe your mumbo jumbo.”

She studied him a moment, a cynical smile curving her lips, then opened the menu and turned her attention to it. One instant she was focused entirely on him; the next, she wasn’t. The difference was as obvious as turning off a light.

Carmen returned with the teas, delivered a loaf of warm dark bread and soft butter, then left with their orders. Anamaria continued to ignore him. He didn’t like it.

“Three,” he said at last. “Rick lives in Atlanta, Mitch in Mississippi and Russ here. We look alike, we talk alike, we sometimes act alike, but I’m the charming one.”

Finally she shifted her attention back to him. “I doubt everyone who knows you would agree.”

“Maybe their wives would argue the fact.” Rick’s wife, Amanda, certainly would. Jamie might adore him, and Mitch’s wife, Jessica, hardly knew him, but Amanda tolerated him only for Rick’s sake. Robbie couldn’t even blame her. He’d given her plenty of reason to despise him.

“Why aren’t you married?” she asked.

“How do you know I’m not?”

She nodded toward his left hand and the bare ring finger. He held out his hand, fingers spread, gazing at it. “Rumor has it that my old man had so much practice at removing his wedding band that he could do it with just his thumb, and so quickly that a prospective one-night stand never even noticed his hand moving.”

“I bet he was your hero.”

“I hardly remember the bastard. I was five when he dropped dead of a heart attack. I never missed him.” He sounded callous but didn’t care. “Tell me about your father.”

She gave another of those cynical smiles. “Don’t disappoint me and tell me you didn’t check out my birth records.”

He shrugged. “Mother—Glory Ann Duquesne. Father—Unknown. That’s officially. Unofficially, did you ever meet him?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Did you ever miss him?”

She waited until Carmen had served their meals to answer. “The last marriage in the Duquesne family took place more than two hundred years ago, and the only children born since then have been girls with gifts. Men have little place among us. We have no husbands, brothers, uncles or sons, no fathers or grandfathers. We don’t miss what we don’t have.”

“So your only use for men is to bed them and forget them.” Somewhat similar to his own policy for women. He didn’t indulge in one-night stands; that would be too much like his father. He preferred pleasant, short-term relationships that ended amicably on both sides. In a town like Copper Lake, with its twenty thousand or so citizens, the “amicable” part was important.

“Not forget,” Anamaria disagreed. “The Duquesne women love well.”

But temporarily. It sounded as if the two of them were a good fit, on that issue, at least. But the Duquesne women, apparently, made little to no effort to avoid pregnancy. Robbie made every effort. Adults might not owe each other anything after an affair ended, but a baby…that changed everything.

“Are you planning to move back to Copper Lake?”

She shook her head.

“Sell the house?”

Another shake.

“Come back in another twenty-three years for a visit?”

She speared a tiny tomato and a chunk of cucumber on her fork and dipped them in dressing before shaking her head. Her earrings, silver chains that cascaded from a diamond-shaped shield, caught the sun, winking as they swung gently against her neck. “Who knows? I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing twenty-three days from now, much less twenty-three years.”

“Not a wise thing to say for a woman who claims to read the future.”

“Not my own future. I rarely see anything about myself or people I’m close to.”

“What else do you do? Do you know who’s on the phone before you look at the caller ID display? Can you pick lottery numbers?” He made his voice Halloween-spooky. “Do you see dead people?”

A stricken look crossed her face, shadowing her eyes, chasing away the easy set of her mouth and making her lower lip tremble just a bit until she caught it between her teeth.

Robbie felt like an ass. He’d forgotten that her mother had died, that seeing her dead in her casket was likely the most traumatic event in Anamaria’s life.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean…”

After a moment, she smiled, a quiet, resigned sort of gesture. “It’s all right. I should have expected…”

What? Tactless questions from him?

“I read emotions. I do numbers and charts. I read palms. I have visions. But people are always fascinated by communication with the dead, even nonbelievers. Everyone’s hoping that Grandma will pass on the location of a fortune no one knew existed or that Grandpa will tell them where the casket of priceless jewels is hidden.”

“Do they ever?”

She shrugged, unaware that the tiny action made his fingers itch to touch her. To stroke over her skin. To smooth the cotton of her shirt. To brush her neck the way the earrings did.

Or maybe she wasn’t so unaware, he thought as something came into her eyes. Heat. Intimacy. Mystery. Though a person didn’t need to be psychic to see he found her damned attractive.

“If any of Mama Odette’s clients ever struck it rich as a result of her communing with the spirits, I’m not aware of it.”

“For a seer, you seem to be unaware of a lot of things.”

If his comment annoyed her, she didn’t let it show. She was cool, serene. He liked cool and serene.

They ate in silence for a few moments, until voices became audible in the hallway that led to the room. One of them was a waitress; the other belonged to Ellie Chase. She and Tommy had had an on-again, off-again thing that started about five minutes after she’d moved to Copper Lake. They seemed pretty good together, except that Tommy wanted to get married and have kids, and Ellie didn’t. Occasionally, Robbie wondered why. Even he wanted kids someday.

Fair-skinned, blue-eyed kids with blond hair, he thought with a glance at Anamaria. He’d always been partial to blondes—icy, well-bred, blue-blood, who could fit into his life as if they’d been born to it.

Conversation finished, Ellie rounded the corner. “Hey, Calloway, who let you in here?”

He shifted in the chair to face her. “Don’t bitch, Ellie. I’m one of your best customers.”

“I’ve noticed. All that expensive schooling, and you can’t even put a sandwich together.”

“Yeah, but I work miracles in the courtroom.”

She crossed the small room, her hand extended. “Hi, I’m Ellie Chase.”

“Anamaria Duquesne.” Anamaria took her hand, a quick shake, a light touch, but more than she’d offered Robbie so far. “This is your restaurant?”

“Every table, every brick and every mortgage payment.”

“The food is great.”

“Anamaria’s in the restaurant business in Savannah,” Robbie said, pulling a chair from the next table so Ellie could join them.

“Really? Are you in the market to expand? I’m giving serious thought to selling this place and running away.”

“She threatens to do that about once a month,” Robbie said.

Anamaria smiled as if she knew the feeling. “So does Auntie Lueena. I work for her, so the headaches are hers. I just show up ready to do what she tells me.”

“I love my job. Really, I do.” Ellie sounded as if she were trying to convince herself, but Robbie knew it was so much bull. She’d worked damn hard to make the deli a success and had only recently begun the expansion into a full-service restaurant. She did love her job. “What kind of place does Auntie Lueena have?”

Anamaria smiled again, soft, affectionate. He wondered if that smile was ever spurred by anyone other than family. Friends—he was sure she had them. Boyfriends—he was sure she had them, too. Plenty of them. All that she could handle. “It’s a small family diner. Soul food. Comfort food. She’s been in the same location for thirty years and has had the same menu for twenty-five.”

“And you do a little bit of everything?”

“Wait tables, run the register, wash dishes, cook, bake.”

Robbie had trouble envisioning her in a hot, busy kitchen, hands in steaming water, prepping vegetables, stirring pots, skin dusted with fine white flour. She was too exotic, too sensual for such mundane activities. She should spend her time lounging on a beach somewhere, wearing beautiful clothes, shopping in expensive stores for diamonds and rubies and emeralds to show off against her luscious skin.

Ellie didn’t seem to notice either her exoticness or her sensuality. He supposed, her being a woman, too, that was a good thing. “You ever want a place of your own?”

“No. Not at all.” But Anamaria didn’t say what she did want. A full-time career telling fortunes? Or did “seeing” people’s futures full time require more ingenuity than she possessed? He imagined that on a regular basis it would drain the creative well pretty dry.

“Do you come from a restaurant background?” Anamaria asked.

“No, I—” Distracted, Ellie looked in the direction of the hall, where, an instant later, Tommy appeared around the corner. Right now, judging by the look he wore, if they weren’t off-again, they would be soon.

“You ought to put the boy out of his misery and marry him,” Robbie murmured.

“Worry about your own love life,” she retorted, rising easily from the chair. “Anamaria, it was nice meeting you. Come back soon. I’d love to talk more.”

She met Tommy in the narrow aisle halfway across the room. She stopped; he stepped aside. Their gazes held for a moment, their expressions equally blank, then she moved on.

Definitely off-again. Great. Robbie preferred his buddies to be happily attached or happily unattached. Anything in between was too big a pain in the butt.

Tommy watched until Ellie turned the corner out of sight, took a deep breath, then covered the last few yards to the table. “I called the dock and they said your boat was still in its slip, so I figured you’d be here.” He tossed a manila envelope on the table. “The papers we talked about.”

The case file on Glory Duquesne’s death, complete with photographs. Aiming for relaxed, Robbie slid the envelope off the table and onto his lap. “Thanks.” He gestured toward the chair Ellie had just vacated, but Tommy shook his head. “Anamaria Duquesne, Detective Tommy Maricci.”

One corner of her mouth quirked at his emphasis on Tommy’s title. “Detective Maricci,” she said with a regal nod.

He cocked his head to one side, studying her a moment before saying, “You look familiar. Have I arrested you before?”

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