Cheri on Top (17 page)

J.J. braced himself on his knees, grabbed a condom and slipped it on, and in seconds he had his hands under her bottom and was lifting her up. There was just enough moonlight for her to see the outline of their joining. She felt speared into—all heat and stretching and pushing deep into her being. J.J. started slowly, careful with her, careful that his hardness and his thickness wasn’t a shock to her system. Once she’d accepted him, he dug his fingers into her flesh and pulled her away and against him, in and out, the music of their bodies meeting the only sound in the world.

Pulling her legs further onto his thighs, J.J. leaned forward and grabbed her behind her back. He pulled her up, balancing her weight on his thighs, pushing deeper, his mouth going to her breasts, her nipples, the orgasm building so slow and hard inside her she had to gasp for air.

Cheri heard a long and high-pitched wail and it took a moment for her to realize the sound was hers, coming from her body, her soul.

She flung her arms around J.J.’s neck and let her head fall back as he continued to ram into her, call out that he loved her, and the force of his explosion was enough to send her over the edge yet again, harder this time, wilder, higher … she was lost in it.

Lost, and found.

*   *   *

The next morning it rained. They slept in as the water beat down on the tin roof of the cottage, waking only to make love and fall asleep again. They made love two more times—just to be sure neither of them were imagining anything, J.J. pointed out. Eventually, they went rummaging for warm clothes. It was quite a sight watching J.J. build a fire in the skintight outfit that was his only option for the moment—a pair of Cheri’s baggiest sweatpants, her largest sweatshirt, and her roomiest socks. Once the fire was going, he grabbed their wet clothes and shoes from the porch and draped them on the hearth and mantel.

Meanwhile, Cheri put Aunt Viv’s sweet potato casserole in the oven along with some leftover ham and set about tidying up the cottage. She dragged the drop cloths out to the back porch lean-to, set the table with mismatched dishes, and placed the canning jar of the still-perky flowers in the center. She opened the kitchen window for fresh air, and smiled at the blue and white checks in the breeze.

Cheri wandered back into the living room and stood behind J.J. as he placed another log on the fire. “I never did thank you for the bouquet,” she whispered in his ear, wrapping her arms around him.

“I never did tell you they’re from me.”

“Of course they are.”

“Damn. I wanted to be a man of mystery.” J.J. spun her around in his embrace. He pulled her tight, and Cheri could feel his heartbeat, slow and sure.

“I don’t want any more mystery,” she heard herself say. “I just want to know things, to be sure of a few things in life for a change.”

He kissed the top of her head. “You’ve come to the right place, then,” he said.

“You sure?”

He laughed. “I’m sure you can be sure about me. I love you, Cheri.” He brushed the hair from the side of her face and planted a kiss on her lips. “I’ll always be straight with you. I promise. These are my real stripes you’re looking at. There’s nothing about me you can’t see or don’t know. As usual, Tanyalee was wrong about that.”

She nodded, resting her head on his chest once more.

*   *   *

By the time they finished eating, J.J.’s clothes were dry and he emerged from the bedroom looking relieved. “Never was big on cross-dressing,” he said with a grin.

Cheri had already arranged piles of financial documents on the living room floor, the couch, the coffee table, and on top of several turned-over bankers’ boxes. She’d sorted them into general categories: year-end income and expense statements, ad revenue summaries, contracts for ad sales, monthly bookkeeping reports, and the newspaper’s state and federal tax returns.

For about two hours, Cheri went over the oldest of the financial records, and found the first indication of missing money was in July 1964. From there it looked like hundreds of dollars were skimmed off ad revenues, month after month, year after year, until 1971, when questionable expenses began to show up. There were breaks in the pattern in 1987 and again in the early 1990s.

She took notes. She entered numbers into the spreadsheet in her laptop. When her brain began to hurt, she decided she’d start in on her father’s things. It would be hard, but it had to be done.

Cheri sat curled up on the end of the couch with the floor lamp nearby, four boxes of her father’s personal belongings arranged at her feet. Granddaddy had said that inside the boxes she’d find everything that was in his office at the time of his death.

Cheri upacked all the things a businessman in the 1980s might cling to even as the world went digital—a Rolodex, a desk blotter and calendar, a datebook, a wall clock, a business card collection, a small leather notebook with phone numbers and birthdays, and a stack of paper expense reports. She also found several framed family photos—one of her daddy and mama on their wedding day, Mama’s lacy confection of a princess dress spread out around her in the grass, Daddy standing tall and handsome and proud; one of Granddaddy and Gramma a few years before she passed; one of Aunt Viv in her twenties, a knockout in a tight pink Jackie Kennedyesque Easter suit and matching pillbox hat; and a photo of Cheri and Tanyalee.

She placed that photo in her lap, angled it toward the floor lamp, and studied it. She remembered the day the photo had been taken.

They’d gone to the Cataloochee County Fair. She was six and Tanyalee was four. They’d begged long and hard to be allowed to have a Sno-Kone and so sported the telltale blueberry-blue and raspberry-red rings around their lips. They had their arms linked over each other’s shoulders—which must have been a rarity—and they were smiling and laughing like little girls who hadn’t a care in the world.

That would all come the following year.

But for the moment, there was Cheri with her missing front teeth and Tanyalee with her hacked-off front bangs (Cheri had needed a client for her pretend beauty shop), and they were the picture of summertime sisterly bliss.

Cheri remembered seeing this framed photo propped on a corner of Daddy’s desk, one day in particular. She’d been playing hide-and-seek in the publisher’s office as Daddy and Granddaddy talked business. She’d just turned seven, but even she could detect an odd nervousness to her father’s voice and a rare undercurrent of irritation in her grandfather’s.

She’d sat as still as could be in the corner next to the copy machine, hardly breathing. She stared at that photo of her and Tanyalee while she listened. Granddaddy had said, “That can’t be right,” and her daddy kept saying, “
Follow the money. Follow the money
.”

As a child, she had no idea what the phrase meant. Now she knew it was the infamous tip from Deep Throat to Washington reporters looking into the Watergate cover-up. It had long ago become a cliché in investigating any kind of political corruption or corporate crime. But what had her daddy meant by it that day in 1987, in the publisher’s office of the
Bugle
?

Cheri placed all the framed photos back in the box and closed the lid. She checked on J.J., stretched out on his back on the floor, a leg crossed over a knee, a stack of papers held up over his face, lost in concentration.

She’d forgotten. It was really that simple. All the time she’d been in Florida chasing and pushing and fighting for money and success—both before and after J.J.’s disastrous surprise visit—she’d forgotten what it felt like to be comfortable and at ease and in love with a man.

She didn’t have anything to prove with J.J. There was never a balance sheet with them, one that tracked the giving and the taking and checked for inequities. Maybe it was because they’d known each other so long. Maybe it was because they were just right for each other. Maybe she’d never understand it, and didn’t need to.

His eyes flashed her way and he smiled. “See anything that’s knocked your socks off yet?” he asked.

Cheri smiled back. “Yep.”

“Yeah? What?”

“You.”

He shook his head. “Besides that.”

“Nothing really. But I’ve been thinking about something and I’d like to run it by you.”

“Sure.” J.J. effortlessly sat up, spun around on his butt, and crossed his legs. She loved watching him move. It had to be all the mountain biking, hiking, and weight lifting he’d been doing since he was a kid, but he moved like a wildcat.

“If the possible theft was a story you were reporting for the
Bugle
or for your New York news service, what would be your basic approach?”

J.J. shrugged. “Follow the money.”

“I knew it!”

He laughed. “You getting all Woodward-and-Bernstein on me?”

She laughed, too. “No, but listen, seriously. Where did all this money go?” She got up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. “You want coffee?”

“Sure,” J.J. said. “But keep talking.”

Cheri put the water on to boil. “From what I can tell, somebody was skimming off the top of advertising revenues from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, but then suddenly switched it up and starting padding expenses.” She grabbed the coffee from the cabinet. “With a few exceptions, this has continued month after month, year after year, until very recently.”

“Then what happened?” J.J. asked.

“Well, the books got so fucked up it was like Purnell just gave up trying.”

“But how could that have happened?”

She shrugged. “Granddaddy never had the books audited. And basically, until the newspaper business as a whole started going into the toilet, nobody paid much attention. If the
Bugle
had eight million in revenue and seven million in expenses, there was still one million in profit, and nobody asked any questions.”

“So you’re sure it was Purnell. And all these years—”

“He was stealing. I’m fairly sure of it. Which brings us right back to my original question—where did it all go?”

Cheri set out two mugs and the sugar and cream. “If the guy had been squirreling away money all these years, wouldn’t now be the time to tap into it? To fix up his house, maybe? To retire with? To run off to Bora Bora? Why is he still working when he’s obviously so ill and way past retirement age?”

“I’ll go to town hall tomorrow and look up Purnell’s property tax records, see if he still carries a mortgage.”

“You should probably do the same with Gladys and Granddaddy—just so we can rule them out.”

“Will do, but I think it’s time you take this to Turner. If you give him enough for probable cause, he can get his hands on all kinds of information—Purnell’s personal tax returns, investments, bank balances.”

“Absolutely, but I’m going to visit Purnell in the hospital first. I have to at least give him an opportunity to explain.”

“Better do it soon,” J.J. said, frowning. “He’s not long for this world, I’m afraid.”

With a sigh, Cheri plopped down into the kitchen chair across from J.J. As the water heated, she let her thoughts wander. “So, hypothetically…”

He raised a brow and nodded.

“Who in this town
does
have money?”

J.J. shrugged. “Same as always. The owners of Amos Paper and Fiber. The Wimbleys. The Gladsen Tannery family. The doctors and the lawyers. Cataloochee County’s pretty much like the rest of the country—the top one half of one percent’s got more than the rest of us combined.”

Cheri nodded.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I’ll need to take that coffee to go.” J.J. reached across the table and stroked the top of Cheri’s hand with his thumb. “I got to go into the newsroom. We’re running a wrap-up feature on Barbara Jean tomorrow—you know, trying to get our sexy back when all we’re doing is rehashing the same, worn-out information.”

Cheri looked up at him and smiled. “I was entertaining my first day on the job, wasn’t I?”

His eyes sparkled. “Not nearly as much as now.”

She giggled as she rose from the table to pour the water through the drip filter. “Can you come back tonight?”

“If you’ll have me again.”

“That was my plan.”

Cheri was grinning as she returned to the table and poured out two mugs of coffee. The little drip pot and a pound of Folger’s gourmet blend from the Piggly Wiggly had been her first official household purchases with Friday’s paycheck.

“So why isn’t there anything new with the Barbara Jean story?” she asked.

J.J.’s sigh was tinged in frustration. “Turner says there’s going to be a break in the case this week.” He took a careful sip of his coffee. “Whoa! This is delicious, Cheri!”

“Really?” It was the first cup of coffee she’d made in close to eight years, and it was a relief to know she remembered how.

“I have a hunch they’ve already ID’d her body but there’s something they don’t want made public quite yet. That’s what I gather from talking to Turner, anyway.”

“So he doesn’t give you scoops, even though he’s your best friend?”

J.J. thought that was funny. “Sure, but not when it comes to a story this big. I can’t say I blame him. He says that as the county’s first black sheriff he’s got to do everything better, faster, and with a big smile. Plus, he’s got a lot of eyes on him right now—regional media, the Feds, the state.” J.J. grinned. “He’s playing this one by the rules.”

Cheri watched J.J.’s smile fade. He lowered his gaze and stared at the scarred old wood of the tabletop. “What’s wrong, Jay?” she asked.

He raised his dark blue eyes to her and tried to smile, but she noticed the tension in his mouth. “I’ve scoured every public record I can get my hands on that’s related to this case, but nothing is jumping out at me. Until they declare it a homicide, Barbara Jean is just another cold disappearance case, and the information’s been gathering dust for more than forty years. Anyone who had firsthand knowledge of the investigation is dead. Sheriff Wimbley died back in 2001. The witness is gone, obviously, and so are the state troopers who had the case, the workers who dragged the lake, the people who owned homes out at Paw Paw Lake—everybody’s dead. But…” He shook his head.