Carnal Innocence (15 page)

“Not much.”

“Look here.” She pointed to a small bruise on her calf. “You went tearing out of here so fast before, you kicked up gravel. Now I’ll have to put Erase on that if I want to wear a skirt.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged and went back to looking for the pink dress. “I guess it’s okay. You were upset. Everybody’s going to know she was lying, Tucker. Even before they bury her on Tuesday, everybody’ll know.”

“I expect so.” He spotted a swatch of shell pink and crouched down to pull the dress out from under the pile. “I’ve calmed down, Josie. Hearing it from Burke
just
fired me up.”

She touched the bandage on his forehead, and they stood close, in a drift of Josie’s perfume. They shared more than their mother’s face, more than the Longstreet name. Between them was a tie deeper than blood. It went to the heart.

“I’m sorry she hurt you, Tucker.”

“Poked a few holes in my pride, that’s all.” He kissed Josie lightly on the lips. “They’ll heal up fast enough.”

“You’re just too nice to women, Tucker. It makes them fall in love with you, then you’ve got nothing but trouble. If you were a little harder on them, you wouldn’t get their expectations up.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Next time I take a woman out, I’ll tell her she’s ugly.”

Josie laughed and stood up to hold the dress in front of her as she twisted and turned in front of her cheval glass. “Don’t go reciting any poetry, either.”

“Who says I do?”

“Carolanne told me you talked poetry when you took her over to Lake Village to look at stars.”

Tucker shoved his hands in his pockets. “How come women always tell the intimate details of their life over a manicure or a permanent?”

“It’s the same as men bragging about the size of their wangers over a bottle of beer. How’s this look?”

He scowled. “I’m finished handing out compliments to females.”

Josie only chuckled as he strode off to shower.

Caroline was so stunned by Sweetwater that she stopped her car halfway up the drive to stare. The house was pearly white in the afternoon sun, all gracious curves and delicate ironwork, slender columns and glinting windows. It took no imagination at all to picture women in hoop skirts strolling across the grass, or gentlemen in frock coats sitting on the porch discussing the possibility of secession while silent black servants served cool drinks.

Flowers grew everywhere, climbing up trellises, spilling over the borders of brick-edged beds. The heady smells of gardenia, magnolia, and roses perfumed the air.

A Confederate flag, faded and ragged at the edges, hung from a white pole in the center of the front lawn.

Beyond the house, she could see neat stone buildings. What once were slave quarters, smokehouse, summer kitchen—she could guess that much. The lawn stretched back to acre after acre of flat, fertile land thick with cotton. She saw a single tree in the center of one of the fields, a huge old cypress left standing either through laziness or sentiment.

For some reason that—just that single tree—brought tears to her throat. The simple majesty of it, the endurance it symbolized, touched her in some deep corner of her heart. Surely it had stood there for more than a century, watching over the rise and fall of the South, the struggle for a way of life, and the ultimate end of it.

How many spring plantings had it seen, how many summer harvests?

She shifted her gaze back to the house. It, too, symbolized continuity and change, and the stately elegance of the Old South that so many from the north thought of as indolence. Babies had been born there, grown up and died there. And the rhythm of this quiet
spot on the delta went on. And on. The slow pulse of their culture and traditions survived.

The proof was here, just as it was in her grandmother’s house, in those houses and farms and fields dotting the road into Innocence. And in Innocence itself.

She wondered why she was just beginning to understand that.

When she saw Tucker come out the front doorway to stand on the porch, she wondered if she was beginning to understand him as well. She got the car moving again, eased it around the island of peonies, and stopped.

“The way you were sitting back there on the drive, I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

“No.” She opened the car door and stepped out. “I was just looking.”

He was doing some looking of his own, and decided not to speak until the fingers squeezing his heart loosened up. She was wearing a thin white dress, with a full skirt he imagined would billow gloriously in a breeze. Two finger-width straps held it over her shoulders and left her arms bare. There was a necklace of polished stones around her throat. Her hair was sleeked back to set off matching stones that dangled from her ears. She’d done something mysterious and female to her face, deepening her eyes, darkening her mouth.

As she mounted the steps toward him, he caught the first whiff of her light, tempting scent.

He took her right hand in his left, and turned her slowly in a circle under the arch of his arm, as if in a dance. It made her laugh. When he saw how low the dress dipped in the back, he swallowed hard.

“I’ve got to tell you something, Caroline.”

“All right.”

“You’re ugly.” He shook his head before she could comment. “That’s just something I had to get out of my system.”

“It’s an interesting approach.”

“My sister’s idea. It’s supposed to keep women from falling in love with me.”

Why did he always make her want to smile? “It could work. Are you going to ask me in?”

He traded her left hand for her right. “It seems like I’ve been waiting a long time to do just that.” He led her to the door, opened it. Pausing, he studied her, wanting to see how she looked in the doorway—his doorway— with flowers and magnolia trees at her back. She looked, he realized, perfect.

“Welcome to Sweetwater.”

The moment she stepped inside, Caroline heard the shouting.

“If you’ve gone and asked somebody to come and sit at my table, the least you can do is set it.” Della stood at the base of a curving stairway, one hand braced on a mahogany newel post, the other on her sturdy hip.

“I said I would, didn’t I?” Josie’s voice tumbled down the steps. “I don’t know what you’re in such a god-awful lather about. I’m going to finish putting my face on, then I’ll get to it.”

“Way she’s messing around with those paints, it’ll get set next week.” Della turned. The righteous indignation on her face gave way to curiosity when she spotted Caroline. “Well now, you’re Edith’s grandbaby, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“Edith and I, we used to have ourselves some nice chats out on her front porch. You favor her a bit, ’round the eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“This is Della,” Tucker announced. “She takes care of us.”

“I’ve been trying for the best part of thirty years, but it ain’t done all that much good. You take her on into the guest parlor and give her some of the good sherry. Dinner’ll be ready before long.” With a last scowl at the stairway, she lifted her voice. “If somebody would stop tarring herself up and come set the table.”

“I’d be happy to do it,” Caroline began, but Della was already pulling her along the hallway toward the living room.

“No sir, you’ll do no such thing. Tucker peeled the potatoes and that girl’s going to set out the china. Least she can do after asking that dead doctor to dinner.” She
patted Caroline’s arm then scurried off toward the kitchen.

“Ah … dead doctor?”

Tucker grinned, strolling over to an antique walnut server for the sherry. “Pathologist.”

“Oh, Teddy. He’s certainly an … interesting character.” She took a slow sweep of the room with its tall windows, lace curtains, Turkey carpets. The twin settees, as she was sure they were called, were in misty pastels. Cool colors predominated in the subtle stripes of the wallpaper, the hand-worked pillows, the plump ottoman. The richness of antiques melded with it. On the mantel above the white marble fireplace was a Waterford vase filled with baby roses.

“This is a lovely house.” She took the glass he offered. “Thank you.”

“I’ll give you the grand tour sometime. Tell you the whole history.”

“I’d like to hear it.” She walked to the window where she could look out at the garden and beyond to the fields and the old cypress. “I didn’t realize you farmed.”

“We’re planters,” he corrected her as he came up behind her. “Longstreets have been planters since the eighteenth century—right after Beauregard Longstreet cheated Henry Van Haven out of six hundred acres of prime delta farmland in a two-day poker game down in Natchez in 1796. It was in a bawdy house called the Red Starr.”

Caroline turned. “You made that up.”

“No ma’am, that’s just the way my daddy told it to me, and his daddy to him, and so on since that fateful April night in ninety-six. ’Course it’s just speculation about the cheating part. The Larssons put in that bit—they’re by way of being cousins of the Van Havens.”

“Spoilsports,” Caroline said, smiling.

“Could be that, or it could be the God’s truth, but neither changes the outcome.” He was enjoying the way she looked at him, her lips tilted up just a little, her eyes laughing. “Anyhow, Henry got so irritated about losing
the land, he tried to ambush old Beau when Beau finished celebrating with one of the Starr’s best girls. Her name was Millie Jones.”

Caroline sipped and shook her head. “You ought to write short stories, Tuck.”

“I’m just telling you the way it was. Now, Millie was pleased with Beau’s performance—did I mention that the Longstreets have always been known as exceptional lovers?”

“I don’t believe you did.”

“Documented, through the ages,” Tucker assured her. He loved the way laughter brightened her eyes, softened her mouth. If he hadn’t had a story to tell, by God he would’ve made one up. “And Millie, being grateful for Beau’s stamina—and the extra five-dollar gold piece he’d left on the night stand, went on over to the window to wave him off. It was she who spotted Henry in the bushes with his flintlock loaded and ready. At just the right moment, Millie shouted a warning. The gun went off. Beau’s frock coat was singed at the arm, but his reflexes were keen. He pulled out his knife and sent it whipping into the brush where the shot had come from. Hit Henry dead in the pump, as my grandpappy used to say.”

“He was, of course, an expert at knife-throwing as well as lovemaking.”

“A man of many talents,” Tucker agreed. “And being a prudent man as well, he decided it best not to stay around Natchez and answer uncomfortable questions about a deed, a dead man, and an Arkansas Toothpick. Being a romantic, he took pretty young Millie out of that bawdy house, and they traveled to the delta.”

“And planted cotton.”

“Planted cotton, got rich, and had babies. It was their son who started building this house, in 1825.”

Caroline said nothing for a moment. It was much too easy to become caught up in the flow of his words, the easy rhythm of his voice.
It’s not really the point—-how much is true and how much is made up,
she decided.
It’s all in the telling.
She moved away from the window, acutely
aware that he was about to touch her again, and less sure if she’d want to stop him. “I don’t know much of anything about my family history. And certainly nothing that goes back two hundred years.”

“We look back more than forward in the delta. History makes the best gossip. And tomorrow … well, tomorrow’s going to take care of itself anyway, isn’t it?”

He thought he heard her sigh, but the sound was so soft, it might have been silence.

“I’ve spent my whole life thinking about tomorrow—planning next month, next season. It must be the air here,” she said, and this time she did sigh. There was something wistful in the sound. “I’ve hardly thought of next week since I walked into my grandmother’s house. Haven’t wanted to, anyway,” she said, remembering the phone calls from her manager that she’d been dodging ever since she decided to come to Mississippi.

He had a strong urge to hold her—just to offer her the circle of his arms and the support of his shoulder. But he was afraid the gesture would spoil whatever was happening between them.

“Why are you unhappy, Caro?”

Surprised, she looked back at him. “I’m not.” But she knew it was only part of the truth. And part of the truth was a lie.

“I listen almost as well as I talk.” His hand was gentle as he touched her face. “Maybe you’ll try me sometime.”

“Maybe.” But she moved back, marking the distance. “Someone’s coming.”

Now he knew the time wasn’t right, and turned to the window again. “The dead doctor,” he said, and grinned. “Let’s go see if Josie set the table.”

I
n the county jail in Greenville with its scarred, ring-less toilet and graffiti-laced walls, Austin Hatinger sat on a board-hard bunk and stared at the bars of sunlight on the floor near his feet.

He knew why he was in a cell, like a common criminal, like an animal. He knew why he was forced to stare at bars, in a cage with filthy sayings painted on the sweaty walls.

It was because Beau Longstreet had been rich. He’d been a God-cursing rich planter and had tossed all his tainted money to his bastard children.

They were bastards, sure enough, Austin thought. Madeline might have worn that traitor’s ring on her finger, but in the eyes of God, she had belonged to only one man.

Beau hadn’t gone off to the stinking hole of Korea to serve his country and save good Christians from the Yellow Peril, but had stayed behind, in sin and comfort, to make more money. Austin had long suspected that Beau had tricked Madeline into marriage. Not that that excused her betrayal, but women were weak—weak of body, weak of will, weak of mind.

Without a strong guiding force—and the occasional back of the hand—they were prone to foolish behavior and to sin. God was his Witness that he’d done his best to keep Mavis on a straight path.

He’d married her in a blindness of despair, trapped by his own raging lust. “The woman thou gavest me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Oh, yes, Mavis had tempted him, and, weak of flesh, he had succumbed.

Austin knew that from Eve down, Satan spoke first to women in his smooth, seductive voice. They being more open to sin, they fell and with a wily heart took a man down with them.

But he’d been faithful to her. Only once in thirty-five years had he turned to another woman.

If there were times when, exercising his marital rights, plunging into Mavis, he felt, tasted, smelled Madeline in the dark, it was only the Lord’s way of reminding him what had belonged to him.

Madeline had pretended to be indifferent to him. He’d known, all those years ago he’d known, that she’d gone with Beau only to tease and torment him, as women did. She’d belonged to him. Only him. Her shocked denial when he’d made his declaration before shipping out to war had only been another pretense.

If it hadn’t been for Beau, she’d have been waiting for him when he’d returned. That had been the beginning of the end for him.

Hadn’t he worked his fingers raw, broken his back, sweated out his heart trying to make a decent life for the family he’d taken? And while he’d worked, and failed, sweated and lost ground, Beau had sat up in his fine white house and laughed.

And laughed.

But Beau hadn’t known. Despite all his money and his fine clothes and fancy cars, he’d never known that once, on a dusty day in high summer, when the air was thick and still, when the sky was baked white with heat, Austin Hatinger had taken what was his.

He remembered still how she’d looked that day. And the picture in his mind was so clear, his hands trembled and his blood pumped hard and hot.

She’d come to him, carrying a basket up to his porch, a big straw basket filled with charity for him, for his squawling son, for his wife who lay inside, sweating through the birthing of another child.

She’d been wearing a blue dress and a white hat that had a filmy blue scarf trailing from the crown. Madeline had always been one for floating scarves. Her dark hair was curled under the hat so that it framed the creamy skin of her face—skin she could pamper with the lotions Beau’s godless money could buy.

She’d looked like a spring morning, strolling up the dirt path to his sagging porch, her eyes soft and smiling, as if she didn’t see the poverty, the broken cinder-block steps, the dingy clothes hanging on the line, the scrawny chickens pecking in the dust.

Her voice had been so cool as she’d offered him that basket filled with cast-off clothes Beau’s money had bought for the babies he’d planted in Austin’s woman. He couldn’t hear past it, to the weak whine of his own wife calling to him that it was time to fetch the doctor.

He remembered how Madeline had started to go in, concerned for the woman who would never have laid in his bed at all if it hadn’t been for betrayal and deceit.

“You fetch the doctor, Austin,” she had said in that cool, spring-water voice. The kindness in her golden eyes burned a hole in his gut. “Hurry and fetch him, and I’ll stay with her and your little one.”

It wasn’t madness that had gripped him. No, Austin would never accept that. It was righteousness. Right and wrath had filled him when he had dragged Madeline off the porch. Truth had pounded through him when he had pulled her down to the dirt.

Oh, she’d pretended that she didn’t want him. She’d screamed and she’d fought, but it had all been a lie. He’d had the right, the God-given right to push himself into her. No matter that she’d worn a mask that had wept and pleaded, she’d recognized that right.

He’d emptied his seed into her, and all these years later, he could still remember the power of that release. The way his body had bucked and shuddered as the part of him that was a man flowed into her.

She’d stopped her weeping. While he’d rolled over in the dirt to stare up at that white sky, she had gotten up, gone away, and left him with the sound of triumph in his ears and the taste of bitterness on his tongue.

So he’d waited, day after day, night after night, for Beau to come. His second son had been born and his wife lay stony-faced in the bed, and Austin waited, his Winchester loaded and ready. And he’d ached with the need to kill.

But Beau had never come. He knew then that Madeline had kept their secret. And had doomed him.

Now Beau was dead. And Madeline. They were buried together in Blessed Peace Cemetery.

It was the son now, the son who had brought the circle twisting back. From generation to generation, he thought. The son had seduced and defiled his daughter. The girl was dead.

Retribution was his right. Retribution was his sword.

Austin blinked and focused on the bars of light again. Bars that came through bars. They had shifted with oncoming dusk. He’d been sitting in the past for more than two hours.

It was time to plan for today. In disgust he stared down at his loose blue pants. Prison clothes. He would be rid of them soon. He would get out. The Lord helped those who helped themselves, and he would find a way.

He would make his way back to Innocence and do what he should have done more than thirty years ago. He would kill the part of Beau that lived in his son.

And balance the scales.

Caroline stepped out onto the flower-decked patio and inhaled deeply of summer. The light was gentling, easing quietly toward dusk, and insects stirred in the grass. She had that smug, too-full feeling she’d forgotten could be so pleasant.

The meal had been more than platters of food served on old silver trays. It had been a slow, almost languorous pocket of time filled with scents and tastes and talk. Teddy had done magic tricks with his napkin
and the flatware. Dwayne, passably sober, had displayed a remarkable talent for mimicry, moving from old standards like Jimmy Stewart to Jack Nicholson and on to locals like Junior Talbot.

Tucker and Josie had kept her laughing with rambling, often graphic stories of sex scandals, most of which were fifty or sixty years old.

So different, she thought now, from her own family dinners, where her mother would dictate the proper conversation and not a drop would spill on the starched damask cloth. Those dinners had been so stifling and lifeless—more like a corporate meeting than a family meal. The peccadilloes of ancestors would never have been discussed, nor would Georgia McNair Waverly have found it amusing to have a guest pluck a salad fork out of her bodice.

No indeed.

But Caroline had enjoyed the evening more than any she could remember, and was sorry it was nearly over.

“You look happy,” Tucker commented.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s just nice to see, that’s all.” He took her hand, and what he felt when his fingers linked with hers was not so much resistance as uncertainty. “Want to walk?”

It was a pretty evening, a lovely spot, and her mood was mellow. “All right.”

It wasn’t really a walk, she thought as she wound through rosebushes and the heavy scent of gardenia. It was more of a meander. No hurry, no destination, no problems. She thought meander suited Tucker perfectly.

“Is that a lake?” she asked as she saw the glint of water in the last light of the sun.

“Sweetwater.” Obligingly he shifted directions. “Beau built his house there, on the south side of it. You can still see what’s left of the foundation.”

What Caroline saw was a scattering of stones. “What a view they had. Acres and acres of their own land. How does that feel?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

Dissatisfied, she looked out over the wide, fiat fields of cotton. She was a child of the city, where even the wealthy held only squares of property and people crowded each other for space. “But to have all this….”

“It has you.” It surprised him to say it, but he shrugged and finished the thought. “You can’t turn away from it, not when it’s been handed down to you. You can’t see it go fallow when you’re reminded that the Longstreets have held Sweetwater for the best part of two centuries.”

“Is that what you want? To turn away?”

“Maybe there are some places I’d like to see.” His shoulders moved again with a restlessness she recognized and hadn’t expected. “Then again, traveling’s complicated. It takes a lot of effort.”

“Don’t do that.”

The impatience in her voice nearly made him smile. “I haven’t done anything yet.” He skimmed a hand up her arm. “But I’m thinking about it.”

Frustrated, she broke away. “You know what I mean. One minute you act as though there might be something inside your mind other than a thought for the easiest way out. The next thing, you shut it off.”

“I never could see the point in taking the hard way.”

“What about the right way?”

It wasn’t often he came across a woman who wanted to discuss philosophy. Taking out a cigarette, Tucker settled into the conversation comfortably. “Well, what’s right for one isn’t necessarily right for the other. Dwayne went off and got a degree he’s never done a damn thing with, because he’d rather sit around and brood about how things should have been. Josie runs off and gets married, twice, flies off to anywhere at the drop of a hat, and always ends up back here pretending things are better than they can be.”

“What about you? What’s your way?”

“My way’s to take it as it comes. And yours …” He glanced back at her. “Yours is to figure out what’s
coming before it gets here. That doesn’t make either of us wrong.”

“But if you figure it out, and it’s not the way you want it, you can change it.”

“You can try,” he agreed. “‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’” He inhaled smoke.
“Hamlet.”

Caroline could only stare. He was the last man on earth she’d have expected to hear quoting Shakespeare.

“You take that field there.” He put a companionable arm around her shoulders as he turned her. “Now, that cotton—all things being equal—is going to grow. That topsoil’s better than a foot deep and full of fertilizer. We spray off the goddamn weevils and when summer’s gone it’ll be harvested, bailed, trucked, and sold. And my worrying myself sick about whether all those things are gonna happen won’t help the situation one bit. Besides, I’ve got an overseer to do the worrying.”

“There has to be more to it than that—” she began.

“We’re taking this down to the basics, Caro. It gets planted, it gets harvested, and somewhere along the line it ends up in a pretty dress like the one you’re wearing tonight. Sure, I could sit up nights worrying whether we’re going to get enough rain, or too much rain. Whether the truckers are going on strike, or those dimwits up in Washington are going to fuck up again and shuck us into a depression. Or I can get myself a good night’s sleep. The results would be exactly the same.”

With a half laugh, she turned to him. “Why does that make sense?” She shook her head. “There has to be a flaw in that logic.”

“You let me know if you figure it out, but I think it holds solid. Let me give you another example. You won’t let me kiss you because you’re worried you might like it too much.”

Her brows shot up. “That’s incredibly egocentric. The reason could very well be that I’m sure I won’t like it at all.”

“Either way,” Tucker said agreeably as his arms slid around her waist. “You’re trying to figure out the answer
before there’s a problem. That’s the kind of thing that brings on headaches.”

“Really?” Her voice was dry, and she kept her arms at her sides.

“Trust me, Caroline, I’ve made a study on it. It’s like standing on the edge of a swimming hole, worrying about the water being too cold. You’d be better off if somebody put a foot to your butt and pushed you in.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

His lips quirked in a grin. “I could tell you I was doing it for you, so you’d just fall in and stop thinking about the what-ifs. But the truth is—” He lowered his head. Something twisted inside her when his warm breath fluttered over her lips. “Thinking about this is keeping me up at night.” He gave her chin a playful nip. “And I need my sleep.”

Her body was stiff as his lips, light as moth wings, cruised over hers. Practiced seduction, she told herself as her heart began to thud. She hadn’t forgotten how clever some men were at exploiting a woman’s needs.

“You can kiss me back if you want to,” Tucker murmured against her mouth. “If you don’t, I’ll just please myself.”

First, he indulged in a lazy journey of her face, lips tracing along her temples, over her closed lids, down her cheeks. The gentleness in him was too ingrained for him to heed the urgency growing inside him to rush and take. Instead, he concentrated on her first faint shiver, on that gradual, glorious softening of her body against his. On the quickening of her breath as he slowly, quietly, brought his mouth back to hers.

And oh, it was nice, so nice, to feel that slow, female yielding, to hear that quick hitch of her breath, to smell her over the scent of water and shadows as he eased them both into the kiss.