A Week From Sunday (25 page)

Weaving amongst the Whipsaw’s tables and customers, Adrianna arrived at the office door seconds after Quinn had entered, closing the door behind him. As she raised her hand to knock, she was suddenly racked by doubts. Would he appreciate knowing that Dewey Fuller wanted her to stop playing the piano on sing-along nights?

“You can’t run from everything,” she muttered.

Screwing up her courage, taking a deep breath, and straightening her back, Adrianna knocked firmly on the door, then entered without waiting for a response. Quinn looked up from where he sat behind his desk, a momentarily surprised look crossing his face, and gave her a warm smile. Several sheets of paper were spread out before him; he quickly brushed them together into a pile before speaking.

“There you are,” he said. “I was just going to come rescue you from Roy.”

“He’s quite the talker,” she admitted.

“If there’s one story in these parts that he doesn’t know, I sure as hell can’t imagine what it would be. It’ll be worse later in the night. The more drinks he has in him, the more his tongue wags.”

As she stood on the other side of the desk, Adrianna had the sudden urge to just blurt out her concerns, but her tongue had abandoned her. Instead, she could only stare at him, her hands growing sweaty. It was as if the walls of the small office were closing in. He looked back at her curiously, his head cocked to one side.

“Nervous about playing?” he asked.

“Not really,” she honestly answered. “After what happened the last time, I doubt there is anything that could possibly happen tonight which could be worse.”

“Let’s hope not. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be if the old girl burned to the ground. After all the trouble Gabe and I’ve gone to, it’d be nothing short of a damn shame,” Quinn joked. He held the papers up in a pile and smacked his hand against them before adding, “But at least these damn bills would burn, too.”

There it was! Her opening! Cautiously, Adrianna asked the question that had been tickling her thoughts for days. “Is there something the matter with the business?”

“What makes you ask?” he asked with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This is 1935. We’re in this depression Roosevelt was going to get us out of. Business is rough all over.”

“The New Deal hasn’t helped, huh?”

“Not one damn bit. One week business is good, but then the next it’s bad,” Quinn explained. “Folks around here are having a hard time keeping food on the table and shoes on their kids. They never have had a lot of money. Whatever they manage to scrape together has to go for food, clothes, and a roof over their head. Whatever we manage to get is the part that’s left over.”

“I want to ask you something,” she said hesitantly. “If I wasn’t here to play the piano, would your business fall off to the extent that you would have to close down?”

“No, of course not. I don’t want you to worry about it.”

In that moment, Adrianna knew she faced a choice; she could either hold her tongue or tell Quinn about her conversation with Dewey Fuller. She’d hoped that if he were facing money troubles, he would have been forthcoming, but she couldn’t tell if he had been telling the truth or not. For the sake of what she hoped was growing between them, she realized that she had no choice.

“I met a man at the mercantile the other day,” she began slowly, the words tripping their way out of her mouth. She paused before plunging forward, knowing full well that she could never take back what she was about to say.

“He introduced himself as Dewey Fuller.”

At those final two words, Quinn stood and angrily crumpled the papers in his hand. Outrage and confusion were written across his face in equal parts.

“Fuller!” he spat between clenched teeth. “What in the hell were you doing talking to Fuller?”

“He came up to me. He knew who I was,” she explained defensively. “He said that he knew I was playing the piano at the bar and asked how I had gotten involved with you.”

“That dirty son of a bitch!”

“He wanted me to quit playing the piano here.”

“Damn it to hell!” Quinn cursed.

Adrianna pushed on. “He said that you owed his father a lot of money.”

Quick as a flash, Quinn was out from behind the desk and standing before her. His brow knit in anger. “Now listen to me and listen to me good. Dewey Fuller is nothing but a goddamn snake in the grass! Every other word out of his mouth is a lie. He’s the type of bastard who’ll say anything if he thinks it will put him ahead of the game.”

“Why was he telling me to quit playing here then?” Adrianna asked.

“He came to you because he thought he could intimidate you and you’d stop playing, which in turn would cause me to lose business,” he explained, trying to hold on to his temper. “He and that father of his would like nothing more than to see me ruined, no matter how they got the job done!”

“Quinn, please,” she soothed, reaching out and placing a trembling hand on his arm. She’d had no idea he would become so angry; if she had, she was certain that she would never have mentioned the encounter. For a moment, she thought her touch was calming him, but she was wrong; he moved away from her and headed for the door.

“Excuse me, sweetheart,” his hand was warm on her shoulder, “I’d better see to business.”

As Adrianna moved to follow him, his words echoed in her ears.
He called me sweetheart. Did he really mean it?
Before she could think further about it, the pain once again dug into her vitals. It was so intense that it stopped her in her tracks. Biting her lower lip, she could do nothing but wait as the seconds ticked by, hoping it would end. What was happening? Finally, the ache subsided enough for her to move. When she looked up, Quinn was gone.

Adrianna’s fingers flowed over the piano keys as if they were walking in a dream. Her eyes followed the notes as they danced across the sheet music, but her mind was somewhere far away. Distantly, she could hear the notes she was playing and the voices singing loudly and off key.

She paused when she finished the song and looked around for Quinn. He was not behind the bar. Gabe walked over. When she asked him where Quinn had gone, he only shrugged his shoulders and said that he must have had something to take care of. “It is time for
la musique, mademoiselle,
” he said, pointing at the clock.

She had wanted to ask the Cajun more about why Quinn was so upset at the mention of Dewey Fuller. Instead she looked out over the crowd and saw the expectant faces staring back at her, knowing that most of those who’d come to the Whipsaw that night had done so for the music, to hear her play the piano.

Now, sitting on the small wooden stool, she stole glances out into the crowd in the hope that she would see Quinn come back inside. Through the light and the curtain of tobacco smoke, she searched and stared but didn’t find him.
Why did I tell him about Fuller?
she asked herself.
Oh, I wish I hadn’t.

Through her misery, she heard voices singing:

“Let me call you sweetheart,

I’m in love with you,

Let me hear you whisper

That you love me too.”

The song’s lyrics weighed down on her. She bowed her head, and a lone tear slid down her cheek and fell onto the piano keys. Everything around her seemed to be breaking apart. The only bright spot was that Quinn had kissed her and called her sweetheart.

For the first time in days she wanted to cry, cry for the father she had lost, the home she’d had to leave, the strain of staying out of Richard’s clutches, and the stress of living in a house where the housekeeper despised her and who she feared would harm her.

Chapter 21

R
ICHARD
P
OPE WAS
bone tired. He stifled a yawn as the Packard’s headlights cut a swath across the dark and dusty road before him. He had been driving all day, and with the onset of night had come fatigue. If he didn’t manage to find what could pass for a hotel, he might be forced to spend the night sleeping in the cramped confines of the car. It was that sober thought that kept his eyes open and fixed on the road; that was an experience he
never
wanted to repeat.

It had been days since the waitress had identified Adrianna as a customer in the decrepit diner. That spark, that meager piece of information, had consumed him. Now, days removed from the hope he’d initially felt, he was burnt out. All that remained of his physical stamina was a pile of embers. Failure had met failure; he was just as unsuccessful as he had been on his initial forays outside of Shreveport. Regardless, onward he drove.

Darkness surrounded the automobile as he maneuvered around corner after corner. He had the windows down in the sweltering heat of the summer night; the smell of the woods was strong and pungent. A rumble of thunder rolled over him from somewhere in the distance. It might have been foolish for him to push on from Beauville, but he felt as if something unseen in the distance was calling to him, prodding him to move on. He was nearly certain that it was nothing more than the ravings of a sleep-deprived mind.

But still . . .

From around a tight corner, the road straightened. Richard wasn’t sure how many miles had passed since he’d left the last town in his search, but it had been enough time for him to suspect that this was his destination. In the distance, he could see a sprinkling of lights. Slowly, the car’s headlights brought a weathered roadside sign into view. Peering intently ahead, he was finally able to make out the faint writing.

“Lee’s Point,” he said aloud.

In a few minutes he passed from the first scatter of houses on the outskirts of town to the center of the main street. Nothing about Lee’s Point set it apart from the dozens of other small towns he had been forced to visit. Simple businesses offered the barest of necessities, drastically different from the abundance of a city like Shreveport.

As he inched his way down the deserted street, Richard could not suppress a sneer of disdain.
These people and their pathetic lives are beneath me.
They toiled away at their insignificant jobs, returned to their hovels, and bred child after child who would aspire to more of the same. Simply being among them made his skin crawl. He needed to find Adrianna as quickly as he could so that the two of them could return to their true station in life.

“Now to find a fleabag of a hotel,” he muttered.

He traveled the entire length of the main street searching for a place to spend the night but was discouraged to find nothing. Turning around at the church, he made his way back in the direction he had come from in the hope that he’d simply missed what passed for lodgings, but still came up empty.
Was this place so pathetic as not even to have a hotel?

As the thought of sleeping in the Packard sent a shiver of disgust down his spine, Richard began to drive down the main street yet again. This time, instead of continuing on until the street ended, he turned at one of the few intersections, hoping there would be something tucked away off the thoroughfare. However, one turn after another revealed nothing more than closed storefronts and darkened homes.

“Damn,” he swore through clenched teeth.

As he was about to give up hope, he turned another corner and suddenly, right before him, was a business awash with light, with a handful of dented and dirty vehicles out front. He couldn’t read the weather-beaten sign clearly, but seeing the man who stumbled out the door, it took Richard only a split second to realize he had come across a tavern. It figured that the only place of business still in operation at that late hour would be a place of spirit and sin.
Who wouldn’t want to drown their sorrows living in a place like this!

Richard hesitated. Surely there would be someone inside who knew where he might find a bed for the night. But just as surely he might find trouble; liquor did little to assuage the savagery of the simple folk, and a mere slip of the tongue might light the fuse. As if to weigh his options, he looked over his shoulder into the Packard’s backseat.

“So what is it going to be?” he asked himself.

He parked the car down the street and walked back to the tavern. Staring up at the sign, he made out the name “Whipsaw.”

How quaint,
he thought sarcastically.

Upon opening the door, the first thing that assaulted him was the noise. Nearly every patron in the place was singing at the top of his lungs to some rather plebian plinking on the piano. He didn’t recognize the tune, and their caterwauling made his ears hurt. He couldn’t really blame them; these fools wouldn’t know real music if it bit them!

The smell of tobacco and stale beer burned his nose. Stifling the urge to pull his handkerchief out and press it to his face, he decided to simply ask where he might find a bed for the night and then leave; the quicker the better. Weaving amongst a handful of outlying tables and a tipsy couple, he made his way over to the long mahogany bar. He was just about to flag down the bartender, a thin, rustic-looking character, when a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye nearly stopped his heart.

Richard could not believe his eyes. For a moment, he wondered if he were imagining it, if he had spent too many hours on the road and fatigue was playing tricks on him, but when he blinked, the sight was still there. Slowly, a grin spread from ear to ear across his long face. After all of his hard work, after all of his diligence, he had finally found his love.