Hold on Tight (13 page)

“Good shot. What can I do for you, McClure?”

“Been researching a gal you once interviewed. Recall a Dinah Sheridan, Miss Georgia from about six years ago? Walked out on the Miss America pageant after her father bought the farm in a Cessna crash?”

“Certainly. I was covering the pageant for
Amazing World
back then, before I hit the big time.”

“Oh. The big time bein’ television, instead of print journalism?”

“Well, you know what I mean. I hated to leave my job at
Amazing World
, but I had the kind of talent that the TV news execs were willing to pay big bucks for.”

“Must have been hell, givin’ up
Amazing World
,” Rucker answered slyly. “Helluva lot of prestige. I read it every week.” He added silently, In the grocery store check-out line. Then I put it right back on the rack next to the antacid mints and cheap candy. How appropriate.

“Yes, thank you. Well, at any rate, McClure, what’s the scoop on Dinah Sheridan? Wonderful girl. We were great pals.” Rucker thought there was something calculated about Norin’s sincerity, but he reminded himself that all TV people sounded that way. “What’s become of her?” Norins persisted.

Rucker shrugged. He couldn’t see any reason not to chat openly with the guy. “Well, she’s mayor of Mount Pleasant, Alabama. Great little one-drink, Bible Belt place right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Teaches history at the local high school, coaches the drill team, organizes a funky little festival called ‘Possum Days’…”

“Mount Pleasant, Alabama. Bible Belt,” Norins intoned slowly, as if he were making notes. “Teacher. Mayor. Coach. Sounds like Miss American Pie. Very respectable. Got it.”

“I went up there to absorb some backwoods color, and I got curious about her. That incident with the Miss America pageant. You were real close to that. Did you know something that never hit the papers? About why she walked out, I mean?”

There was a long, careful pause. “Oh, it was just grief over her old man’s death. You understand how chicks are.”

“Not lately,” Rucker muttered under his breath.

“So tell me more about her. Well-built chick, even if she was too brainy and intimidating. Not very feminine in those ways.”

Rucker frowned at that condescending description of Dinah and silently mouthed several choice obscenities at the phone. He suspected that any woman with an IQ higher than a turnip’s was too brainy and intimidating for Norins. Rucker’s instinctive wariness of the man blossomed into pure dislike, and after making small talk for another minute, he thanked him for his time and said a terse good-bye.

Afterwards Rucker sat unmoving, staring blankly at the stack of books he kept by his phone. They were for the times when his creative muses felt like taking a break, which had been often in the days since he left Mount Pleasant. Pat Conroy, Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest Hemingway—Rucker looked at the authors’ names without seeing them. Millie finally stuck her head in the door. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He looked up at her, feeling worried for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom. “Did you ever watch
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
?”

“Devotedly.”

“Would you say that Ted Baxter was a good guy or a bad guy?”

“What?” She arched one blond brow. “Did somebody hit you in the head with a golf ball recently?”

“Aw, never mind.” He waved her away and propped his chin on one hand. Todd Norins is okay, he assured himself. A jerk, but harmless. Now what? Rucker had been digging for a week, and he still had no clue to Dinah’s mysterious fears. There was only one thing left to do. Take the offensive. Rucker turned to his terminal and clicked the power on.

Dinah walked out of her classroom at the end of fifth period Constitutional Studies and was met by Myra Faye, whose corpulent face had flushed a hue that matched her frilly rose blouse. Myra Faye held out the afternoon edition of the
Birmingham Herald/Examiner
,
the newspaper that served Mount Pleasant. “Rucker wrote about us again!” she told Dinah excitedly. “It’s been two weeks since he was here, and I figured he decided not to write any more about us. But look!”

Her heart pounding with dread, Dinah took the folded section of the paper and hurriedly studied the column, which was headlined “Possums and the Good Life.” Other teachers gathered around, peering over her shoulders. Dinah finished reading and mused slowly, “He didn’t mention my name.”

“Well … I’m sure he meant to,” Myra Faye offered awkwardly.

Dinah looked up and saw the sympathy on her round face. “Oh, no, Myra Faye,” she explained quickly, “I’m not upset.” Around her, she saw people smiling over what Rucker had written.

“He made Wally Oscar sound almost normal,” one of the other teachers commented.

“And the football team hasn’t had such a good write-up since they beat Mount Clarion seventy-two to three, in a hail storm,” someone else said. “And that was eight years ago.”

Dinah looked back at the article. “It’s wonderful,” she admitted in a small voice. “I’ll have a copy framed and put it up in my office at city hall. ” Oh, Rucker, is this an invitation to forgive and forget? I hope so, she added silently. A half-dozen times she’d started to phone him during the past two weeks but stopped in each instance, knowing that he wanted to hear more than her sorrowful “I miss you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He wanted the truth behind her fears, and she still wasn’t ready to reveal it.

“You gotta call him and say thanks,” Myra Faye urged.

“I suppose you’re right. It’s the polite thing to do.”

“If you’re goin’ to Birmingham for that conference next Monday, why don’t you stop by and thank him in person? I’ll send him a cream-cheese pound cake.”

“I’ll send some muscadine preserves!” noted Alice Dallyroo, head of the home economics department.

“I’ll have my seniors make a thank-you card,” chimed Glen Norton, the art teacher.

Dinah looked around her in dismay. She was the only person in Mount Pleasant who was trying to resist Rucker’s appeal, and even she wasn’t doing very well at it, because now that she had an excuse to visit him, she found herself wanting to whoop like a cheerleader.

The newsroom of
The Birmingham Herald/Examiner
was huge, and Dinah felt very self-conscious as she trudged across it under the appreciative stares of nearly a dozen male reporters. Her hands felt sweaty on the big cardboard box that held presents for Rucker. Her knees trembled under the slender skirt of her blue-gray suit, and the heels of her gray pumps seemed to thud loudly even on the carpeted floor.

As Dinah neared the far side of the room, a pretty, petite blonde looked up from a desk in a cluttered cubicle next to a closed door. Dinah felt her pulse accelerate as, she noted the boldly hand-lettered sign—Rucker’s handwriting, Dinah deduced—taped to the cubicle’s outer wall. Beware of Miss Hunstomper, it read. She Bites. I’m in the right place, Dinah acknowledged. Rucker’s office is behind the closed door.

The blond dynamo, dressed in a flowing green dress, leaped up and came out of the cubicle almost at a run. “I’m Millie,” she beamed. “I was relieved to get your phone call, Mayor Sheridan. The boss has been a mess.”

Me, too, Dinah told her silently. “Call me Dinah.” She smiled politely at Millie, but her eyes shifted to the closed door. “Did you tell Rucker that I’d be stopping by?”

“No, he hasn’t come back from lunch yet.” Millie led the way to Rucker’s office, opened the door, and swept one hand out in a grand gesture. “Make yourself at home. I have to run some errands for one of the editors.”

Dinah stepped inside, looking at the tiny room in amazement. There wasn’t a spare inch of unused space. “Are there walls under all these … decorations?”

Millie made a huffing sound. “I’m afraid to take anything down and look.”

She left the door open and trotted off on business. Dinah heard a male reporter calling coyly to her and
Millie’s growling, “Stow it, sucker.” Miss Hunstomper was strange but likable, similar to everything and everyone else Rucker brought into his life. Like me? Dinah considered wryly.

She set her box and purse down on a stack of newspapers that occupied the office’s only guest chair. Then she sidled between the desk and a huge hanging plant, intending to study the walls a little closer. But the plant, which had vines as long as ten feet, caught on her arm. She looked at it closely and couldn’t, keep from chuckling.

“Kudzu! I should have known. He has a weed for an office plant!”

She turned her curious gaze back to the walls, and her eyes widened in awe. There, scattered among sports calendars, posters, tractor caps, tennis rackets, a broken, bronzed golf club, and a plaque naming Rucker an honorary Boy Scout, were the chronicles of an impressive career. She studied his writing awards, his photographs with celebrities he’d interviewed, his reviews, both good and bad—only a secure, mellow man displays bad reviews, she thought, with a sense of respect—and the framed covers of his books.

She saw at least a dozen photographs that could only be Rucker’s family: the tall, plump mother tearfully hugging a full-length fur coat that must have been a gift from him; the dead truck-driver father, raw-boned and stern; a handsome, stalwart sister who shared Rucker’s auburn hair and mischievous eyes. Dinah tapped the sister’s photograph and told her, “You’re a rascal, I’d bet.”

“She used to knock the stuffin’ out of me.”

Dinah whirled around, her mouth open in surprise. Rucker stood in the doorway, looking as shocked as she felt. Her heart in her throat, Dinah noted vaguely that his height nearly filled the door frame, that his eyes were just as soulful as she remembered, that he was the kind of rugged looking man who drew a woman’s rapt attention whenever he entered a room. Especially now, in this exceedingly small room, which gave her only a tiny bit of safety space. The sight of him
brought back every memory of their tempestuous night together.

“Hi,” she murmured.

“Howdy.”

He wore a nondescript tweed sport coat, a white shirt, no tie, jeans, and his black boots. Virility in a casual but effective package, she thought nervously. He shut the door, closing the two of them off from the rest of the world. His gaze moved slowly over her, then back to her eyes.

“What can I do for you?” he asked gruffly.

Excitement and uncertainty hovered in the air between them. Dinah clasped her hands in front of her to hide their shaking. She nodded to the cardboard box, and eventually he removed his gaze from her and glanced at it. “Everyone loved your article. They sent gifts. Everything’s labeled, so you’ll know who to thank,” She cleared her throat. “There’s also … a copy of an official letter from myself to your newspaper’s publisher. I thought I should write him and say how much the article meant to … to everyone in Mount Pleasant.”

“Thanks.”

“Yes. Well. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Dinah trained her eyes on his golf bag, which was propped by the corner of his desk. The leather had his initials sewn on it in gold letters, she noted. RAM. She wondered vaguely what the A stood for. Aggressive? Aggravating? Since he seemed intent on forcing her to grovel, he was certainly both of those.

“I’m in town for a regional conference of mayors,” she explained. “I thought I’d just stop by.”

“Just stop by, huh?” he mimicked, taking a step toward her. She looked up warily, her lips parted, her face burning. “Guess you expect me to take you to dinner tonight, or somethin’.”

Dinah squinted at him defensively. “You egomaniac.” She hadn’t figured on this taunting from him. He was so stern.

“Oh, I want to take you to dinner. We’re gonna talk.”

“The conference won’t end until seven.”

“I’ll wait.”

“It’s at the Sheraton.”

“I’ll be in the main lobby.”

Dinah smoothed her skirt and straightened her shoulders. “I have to go now,” she reported coolly. “Back to the bed—I mean, back to the conference.” Dinah bit her tongue and looked at him solemnly from under her brows. He returned the expression perfectly. She wanted to wrap the Kudzu plant around herself and hide in shame.
Bed? What was wrong with her mind?

“Did I say anything about bed?” he asked innocently. “I’ll walk you down to the elevator, Dee.” He took her arm primly, scooped her purse up, and guided her out of the office.

At the elevator she turned and looked up at him with wary, searching eyes. “My slip about ‘bed’ wasn’t meant to be Freudian innuendo,” she warned.

He arched one brow. “Now who’s an egomaniac? I don’t intend to dive into ‘physical temptation’ again, so don’t worry.”

Her mouth thinned as she recalled the awful insinuation she’d made two weeks ago when she’d implied that their night together was based on lust rather than love. Dinah wanted to tell him that it had been no more than a stupid defensive maneuver. The elevator opened behind her, but she didn’t notice until Rucker gently prodded her. She stepped into it and stood looking at him with a quizzical expression on her face. Aren’t you even going to try to seduce me tonight? she felt like demanding. His neutrality frightened her. She’d kept saying that they weren’t compatible, and now he seemed to believe it too.

“Seven o’clock,” she said primly, her chin up.

“Uh-huh. And we’ll go to my house.” Dinah’s aplomb deserted her and she stared at him with her mouth open. As the elevator doors closed he almost seemed to be smiling.

Neat. His house was neat. And exceptionally clean. And very well decorated in a pleasing mixture of sturdy country styles and early American antiques. Dinah
couldn’t get over her astonishment as they walked through the main floor. He waved a frosty mug of beer this way and that, describing how he tussled with the decorator over styles.

“And I told that lady,” he said sternly, “I said, ‘If you put a Chippendale chair over yonder in that spot, I’m likely to sit in it. And if I bust it, I’ll feel real bad, because it cost a lot of money. Put the antiques out of my way, and put the real furniture where I can enjoy it. And don’t bring any more paintin’s of naked babies with wings!’ ”

“You mean cherubs?” Despite the strained mood, Dinah wanted to laugh so badly that she almost choked on a sip of wine. She took a firmer grip on her ornate crystal wine glass—another oddity in the unfolding vision of Rucker’s home life. She’d assumed that his crystal consisted of a few Mason jars and cartoon glasses.