Spring Fever (14 page)

Mason woke with a start. He sat up in bed and listened intently. For a moment, he thought maybe he’d heard Sophie, oak floorboards creaking gently underfoot as she crept down the hallway to his bedroom, as she used to do before Celia moved in and put a firm but loving stop to that.

And then he remembered, Sophie was in the hospital. It was his wedding night, and he was alone.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and rubbed his eyes. He needed sleep, and yet he couldn’t sleep. It was 3:00
A.M.
Too early to call the hospital to check on Sophie. He’d wanted to stay in the waiting room last night, in case she awakened and asked for him, but the nurses chased him off, telling him that Sophie would be just fine without him and promising to call if she did awaken.

Celia had decided to stay with her great-aunt in one of the guest rooms at Cherry Hill. The old lady was overwrought from all the excitement of the day, and Sallie had hinted broadly that she herself was in no condition to play nursemaid.

Just as well, Mason thought. He was in the damnedest mood. Jumpy and irritable. Well, the day had been a disaster, hadn’t it?

He’d left Celia in tears, back at Cherry Hill.

“Our beautiful day,” she’d said, peeling off the false eyelashes and depositing them in the ashtray of the Saab. “All our plans, everything. Ruined.”

“I know,” he’d said, kissing her, trying to soothe her. “And I’m so sorry. But it wasn’t really ruined, was it? I mean, you looked amazing, and everything was just the way you planned it.”

She pulled away and stared at him. “Are you out of your mind? Your daughter collapsed at the altar and had to be rushed to the hospital. All of our guests were just sitting there … stunned. And don’t forget, we never did actually get married. There’s a $3,500 wedding cake at the country club, getting stale even as we speak.”

“The cake? Can’t we just, freeze it or…”

“No,” she cut him off. “We can’t.”

“Oh-kaaay,” Mason said, trying to tread lightly. “But we will get married. I promise. We’ll do it all over again. We’ll get another cake. Just as soon as we get Sophie home and recovered from surgery.”

“It won’t be the same,” Celia said sorrowfully. “You’re a man, and you’ve already had one wedding. I guess I can’t really expect you to understand. A girl dreams of her wedding day her whole life. She has just one shot at one perfect moment. No matter how hard you try, you don’t get that moment back again.”

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could say. As she’d pointed out, he couldn’t fix it, no matter how hard he tried.

He got up to go to the bathroom and stubbed his toe hard on the foot of a damned chair. Christ! Since Celia had redecorated the house, or decorated it, since, as she aptly pointed out, it had never been decorated at all before she moved in, he was always bumping into things, knocking things over, breaking things.

Mason limped downstairs and into the kitchen. He stood in front of the open refrigerator door, not really hungry, but wanting … what?

Celia’s nonfat yogurt containers were lined up in neat rows, as were the bottles of mineral water. Half a roast chicken nested on a plate under a tinfoil wrapping. There were containers of strawberries and blueberries and raspberries, packages of cheeses he’d never heard of, a crisper drawer full of things like scallions and leeks and arugula, carrots and baby spinach and celery sticks. Everything looked healthy and wholesome and totally uninteresting. At the very back of the top shelf, he spied the comforting sight of a tall-necked brown bottle.

He took the beer and a chunk of the least stinky cheese he could find and went into the room Celia called his study.

It was a handsome room, he had to admit. Celia had taste to spare, even Pokey grudgingly gave her that. She’d had the builder-beige Sheetrock walls covered with weather-beaten boards taken out of an old barn out at the farm, had bookshelves built to line two walls, and had conjured up rows and rows of old leather and vellum-bound books to line the shelves. He’d opened one once, just to see what she thought he should be reading. But it was in German. He didn’t know German. The rug underfoot was some kind of rope-textured thing, sisal maybe—and it felt sandpaper-rough under his bare feet. He’d asked about keeping the old red and blue oriental rug he’d originally brought over from the attic at Cherry Hill when he’d bought the house, but Celia had just laughed and promised she’d find a better place for it when she finished redecorating.

He sat down at his desk and thrummed his fingers on the leather top. The desk was one of the very few things he’d insisted on keeping from his short-lived bachelor years. It had come out of his grandfather’s old office at the bottling plant. It was beat-up mahogany, with two banks of drawers that stuck and a deep knee-hole recess, where he could remember playing with his army action figures as a little kid, pretending that he was in a bunker. The chair had been his grandfather’s, too; it was high-backed, with cracked and peeling green leather upholstery that creaked loudly when he reclined in it.

Mason switched on his computer and idly glanced at his e-mails. Nothing that wouldn’t keep. He’d inherited Voncile as his assistant after his father’s death, and she was ruthless about weeding out e-mails he didn’t need to deal with—especially since he was supposed to be on his honeymoon right this minute.

His honeymoon! A week in Aruba, their own villa overlooking the ocean. He shrugged. Knowing Voncile, he was sure she’d gone straight to the office from the church, and begun canceling flights and arranging for refunds.

Thinking of the office reminded him of Annajane, and he frowned. Stuffed in the back of that ambulance, and then later, in the waiting room at the hospital, he’d seen glimpses of the old Annajane. She was as terrified as he, but they were together again, if only briefly, as a team. And then, in the car, she’d been so prickly, hostile almost.

She really thought she was something, getting remarried, telling him all about this Shane guy.

As though he hadn’t already thoroughly checked him out.

Mason clicked a few keys and opened up the file he’d started on this Shane Drummond clown the day Annajane returned from a trip to Atlanta—and announced her engagement.

From what Pokey told him, Annajane had only been seeing the guy since early fall. And three months later they were engaged? Fast work.

Voncile had been only too happy to conspire on this little research project. She’d nosed around the Internet for a few days, made some discreet calls to a security firm recommended by a business associate in Atlanta, and put together a fascinating dossier.

He was looking at that dossier now. Voncile had even managed to scrounge up photographs. Mason studied the largest of these, a color publicity still she’d found on Drummond’s agent’s Web site. So
this
was the kind of guy Annajane was attracted to?

In the photo, Drummond was dressed in a plaid lumberjack-type jacket and scruffy jeans. His curly hair looked unkempt, and he had those dark, brooding, soulful-looking eyes women like Annajane probably found irresistible. And was that a tiny gold hoop earring in his left ear? What the hell was it with women and musicians? Why did chicks always fall for the bad boys?

He shook his head and returned to the document Voncile had assembled.

Hmm. Matthew Shane Drummond, thirty-two. Hah! A younger man. Annajane had resorted to robbing the cradle. Born in Gastonia, he’d received a bachelor’s degree in English at Middle Tennessee State University. He’d knocked around the country for the past few years, working as a bartender and a short-haul truck driver, but mostly earning a living playing in country music dives.

From what Mason could tell, Annajane’s fiancé had formed his current group, Dandelion Wine, in 2008. He found a brief mention of the group in an obscure music magazine, about a recording contract with a Nashville label he’d actually heard of. So what? Did that mean this guy was the next Rascal Flatts? Mason highly doubted it.

Drummond owned a car, a 1999 Dodge Aerostar van, and a house, located in what looked like a rural area outside Atlanta, and valued, for tax purposes, at $82,700.

End of report. Mason scratched his chin and thought. Nothing sinister here. The guy was no tycoon, but he apparently also wasn’t a destitute bum. He owned an old vehicle—a van he probably used for gigs for his band. He owned his own house. It wasn’t a mansion, but it probably wasn’t a chicken shed either.

He scowled and closed the file. Nothing of interest here. Annajane was her own woman. If she wanted to marry an itinerant musician and spend the rest of her life living in a log cabin on a dirt road, driving around in a beat-up Aerostar van with him, that was her right.

The question that had been nagging at him ever since he’d left her earlier that evening was, Why? Why Shane Drummond? Why Atlanta? Why now?

And more important, why did he care so much?

12

Annajane sighed as she opened the door to the loft. She hated living in chaos. Half-packed boxes littered the floor and covered every surface in the living room. She knew without looking that her sink was piled with unwashed dishes and her bedroom floor covered with clothing. This was not like her. Not at all. She had let things get away from her. She picked her way through the boxes and went into the bathroom, where she stripped and tossed everything, except her bracelet, into the trash.

When she emerged from the shower wrapped only in an oversized towel, she pushed aside a stack of unfolded laundry and collapsed onto the bed. Her head still hurt. She was tired, and worried about Sophie. But mostly, she was worried about her own screwed-up emotions.

How could this happen? How could she possibly be falling for Mason Bayless again? And what could she do about it?

Forget it. Forget him, she vowed. Think of Shane. Of her new life. And get the hell out of Passcoe.

She could still make a clean break. By the end of the week, she would, by God, finish packing and get everything loaded in the rental van. By next Saturday, she’d be moving into her own studio apartment in a close-in Atlanta neighborhood. She would be with Shane, who was good and true and loved her without reservation.

And I love Shane, too,
she thought fiercely
. I do. I really do. Shane is my future.

And the Monday after the move, she would start her first day of work at the ad agency. She’d be so busy, there’d be no time to think about everything she’d left behind in Passcoe.

She found a clean T-shirt and pair of jeans among the jumble of clothes on her bed, got dressed, and got busy.

For three hours, she worked feverishly, packing up a lifetime’s worth of belongings. The quicker she got it done, the sooner she could see Passcoe—and the Bayless family—in her rearview mirror.

Annajane abandoned any semblance of order or organization in her packing. Emptying kitchen cupboards, she dumped spice containers in with dishes, cookware in with cookbooks.

She took grim satisfaction in assembling the flattened cardboard boxes, filling them, and then snapping a length of shipping tape across the intersecting flaps to seal them shut.

From the kitchen she moved into the living/dining room. She positioned a box in front of the bookcases and began unloading the shelves with a long sweep of her arm. A slip of paper escaped from one of the books and fluttered to the floor.

Stooping to pick it up, Annajane froze. It was a picture, an old snapshot of her and Mason, arms wrapped around each other, sitting on the front steps of the lake cottage.

She sank to the floor and studied the photo. They looked so young! Her hair was in a ponytail, and she wore a pink polka-dot halter top and white shorts and was sunburned, with a bad case of raccoon eyes from her sunglasses, and her mouth was wide open, in midlaugh. Mason was tanned and shirtless, his sunglasses obscuring his eyes, but his smile was wide and matched her own. The picture was undated, but she knew it had to be from their first summer together, when she was only nineteen. Funny, she remembered that top, bought on sale at the Gap for six bucks, but she couldn’t remember the circumstances surrounding that picture. Most likely it had been taken by Pokey.

There were no other photos of them together. Annajane had burned them all, the day her divorce was final. They’d made a nice blaze in a rusty old grill in her mother’s backyard at Holden Beach. How, she wondered idly, had this picture survived the fire?

Not that it mattered. She stood up and tucked the photo back into the book, but instead of dumping the book back in the box with the others, she walked into her bedroom and placed it on her nightstand. Thinking better of it, she put it under her pillow.

Then she picked up the phone and called Shane. His voice, when he answered, was husky.

“Oh no,” Annajane said softly. “You were asleep. I thought you’d just be getting in from your gig. I’m sorry. Go back to bed. I’ll call you in the morning.”

“No, no,” Shane said. “Don’t hang up, baby. It’s fine. I wasn’t even in bed. Must’ve just dozed off in front of the television. What time is it?”

“Past three,” Annajane said.

“What are you doing up so late?” Shane asked. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said quickly.

Liar. Liar. Liar.
Her subconscious taunted her even as she spoke the words.

“I just needed to hear your voice,” she said, and that part was true.

It was his voice, deep, honeyed, and southern as sorghum syrup that had melted her heart the first time they met.

She’d gone down to visit her mother at Holden Beach back in September. After two lo-o-o-n-g evenings of watching
Wheel of Fortune
and
Golden Girls
reruns, in desperation one night, after Ruth went to bed at nine, she went out for a drive. She’d seen the Holiday Inn sign and noticed they had a lounge, and since her mother was a teetotaler and didn’t keep any liquor in the house, she decided to go in and get a drink on the spur of the moment.

The Sandpiper Lounge, as it turned out, was the happening nightspot for locals. A band called Dandelion Wine was playing to a packed house that night. Annajane sat at a table near the bar, slowly sipping a glass of wine. The band played mostly bluegrass, with a little country and rockabilly, which she was surprised to discover she enjoyed. There were two long tables close to the stage, both of them packed with women, maybe two dozen, who all seemed to know each other and the band. The women seemed to range in age from early twenties to early sixties, but they were drinking and having a great time, singing along to every song, whooping and clapping at their favorites. The lead singer and Dobro player seemed to be their favorite.