Hissy Fit (20 page)

Austin waved at me
from a booth tucked into the far corner of the soda fountain at Madison Drugs. He had a huge banana split in front of him, and a spoon poised to dig into it.

“I’m celebrating,” he said, before I’d even had a chance to slide into the booth.

“Hey, Keeley,” called Vivi Blanchard, who’s been waitressing at the drugstore for as long as I can remember. She nodded her head at Austin. “You havin’ what he’s havin’?”

“What he’s havin’ is a heart attack, Vivi,” I said. “I haven’t even had lunch today. Is there any chicken salad left?”

She turned around and opened the door of the refrigerator that stood behind the counter, holding up a half-full Tupperware dish.

“Have you got any ripe tomatoes?”

“Doc brought some in from his garden this morning,” she said.

“Good.” I could hear my own stomach growling. “Just some chicken salad and tomatoes then. And maybe a couple saltines? And a Diet Coke?”

“There’s pie,” Vivi said, winking at me. “One slice of lemon chess is all that’s left. I’ll have to throw it out if you don’t eat it. You want me to save it for you?”

I groaned. “Save me the pie and leave the saltines off then.”

It was late Saturday afternoon. The soda fountain was mostly empty, except for a handful of Little Leaguers and their dads, finishing off ice cream sundaes.

“Okay,” I asked Austin, after I’d greeted the dads and gotten the game results, “what are you celebrating?”

He picked up a file folder from the seat next to him and slid it across the table to me.

“Darvis Kane,” he said. “I believe I may have a lead on the whereabouts of the elusive Darvis Kane.”

My heart was racing, but I wouldn’t allow myself to touch the file folder. Not yet.

“You found the old employee records down in the basement?” I asked.

“Finally! Your daddy didn’t make it exactly easy. It took me forever just to drag the file cabinet out from under an old workbench. And it’s so dark down there, I had to carry all the old files upstairs in a laundry basket, just so I could read the labels. But I did it. I found Darvis.”

Vivi walked up to the table right then, with my chicken salad plate and my drink.

She set everything down, including my check. “Your daddy and them doing okay?” she asked.

“Just fine,” I said.

She hesitated a beat. “I’m sorry about what all you been through. That Paige Plummer oughtta be slapped into next week.”

“Thanks,” I said, hoping that would be the end of it.

“I never liked her. Nor her mama.” She lowered her voice, “Come to think of it, all of them Franklin girls was nothin’ but trash.”

“Well…it’s all water under the dam now.” I was starting to find that clichés were astonishingly useful when one was in a cliché-ridden situation.

Her red curls bounced as she nodded her head in complete agreement. Then she went off to check on the Little Leaguers.

“As I was saying,” Austin said. “Just like your daddy promised, I found the file with Darvis’s birthdate and Social Security number. I was so excited, I did eighty speeding back to town to get on my computer.”

I took a forkful of the chicken salad. “Okay, Nancy, what did you find out?”

“First off,” Austin said. “Darvis Kane was a Scorpio. That should have been a red flag right there. Your daddy never should have hired him. You know how Scorpios are. Back-stabbers.”

“A.J. was a Scorpio,” I said.

“Scorpios are very sexual,” Austin said, grinning wickedly. “And manipulative. They exert a sort of malevolent power over others.”

“Malevolent?”

“Don’t you love that word? You know,” he went on. “It was really inevitable that your mother would end up under that man’s influence.”

“Why?”

“She was born in January, right? An Aquarian. Aquarians are very susceptible to the charms of a Scorpio. They’re creative, but fragile in a way. Your mama never had a chance against a man like Darvis Kane.”

I pushed a bite of chicken salad around my plate with my fork. “Other than voodoo, what do you have that’s concrete?”

Austin opened the file and looked down at his notes.

“Darvis LeRoy Kane. Date of birth: October 30, 1948, in Wedowee, Alabama. Married to Lisa Franklin. Two children. Place of residence, Pine Manor Trailer Court, Lot 9C. Went to work for your daddy in October of 1977, as a salesman. Promoted to sales manager six months later. Employment terminated March 15, 1979.”

Austin looked up at me. “Your daddy kept sending his paycheck to Lisa Kane for two months after Darvis ran off with your mama. In fact, he probably would have kept right on sending it to her, except the last one was returned to him with no forwarding address.”

“After Lisa moved in with her sister in Athens,” I said. “That sounds exactly like Daddy. He felt guilty that his wife had taken those children’s father away from them. Even after Lisa Kane went around town saying awful stuff about us.”

I cut the tomato with the side of my fork. Red juices and seeds oozed onto the plate. I sprinkled it all with salt, tasted, and then sat back.

“What did you find out with your computer search?”

Austin mashed the banana with a bit of ice cream and tasted it. Next he heaped the whipped cream at one end of the dish and stirred
it around with the syrup until he had a syrup and whipped cream soup. He smacked his lips after a couple of bites.

“Darvis isn’t dead either,” he said. “But Lisa Kane was more determined than your daddy, because she got a no-fault divorce from Darvis in 1982.”

“Three years later,” I said. “Wonder how she tracked him down?”

“She didn’t,” Austin said. “The state of Georgia did. And nailed him for back child support payments, to the tune of thirty-five hundred dollars.”

I put my fork down. “You’re really good,” I said, trying to control my eagerness. “So where is Darvis now? Can we talk to him?”

Austin frowned and dabbed at a bit of whipped cream on his upper lip. “I don’t exactly know where Darvis is. Yet.”

“How’d you find out all this other stuff? I thought you did a computer search and tracked him down?”

“I did the computer search, didn’t find a death certificate on file for him, but I also couldn’t find a recent address. So I tried Lisa Franklin Kane. And I found her. Simple as anything. She’s living in a little town in Florida…” He opened the file folder and paged through his scribbled notes. “Palatka, Florida. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of the state.”

“And she talked to you?” I found that hard to believe. “Willingly?” That didn’t exactly jibe with my father’ description of Lisa Kane’s hostile attitude.

“She might have misunderstood who I said I was,” Austin said.

“You made up a big fat lie,” I said accusingly.

“It’s called a pretense. Your professional private investigators use them all the time to dig up dirt. Anyway, why not? It wasn’t a lie that hurt anybody. I just told her I was an officer at a bank in Madison, and we had a safe deposit box made out to Darvis Kane, and there was twenty years’ rent due on it, and I needed to know where he was to send him the contents.”

“For real? What did she say?”

Austin winced. “Lord, God. The woman cusses like a trooper. She said her deadbeat rat bastard EX-husband had run off with another woman years ago, left her high and dry with two little girls to support, and by rights, anything in that box should go to her. I explained that her name wasn’t listed on the rental agreement for the box, and if she had a claim on it, she’d have to take it through the courts. That’s when she told me about the divorce and the back child support. She claims he still owes her thousands more, too, by the way.”

“Does she have any idea where he is now?”

He shook his head regretfully. “None. Lisa Kane seems to think he’s hiding out, not just from her, but from the law.”

“Why? What’s she think he’s done?”

“She just said he was a crook. ‘Once a crook, always a crook,’ were her exact words. Along with a lot of other words I won’t repeat in a family setting.” He looked around guiltily at the little kids at the next table, who were busy pelting each other with paper napkin spit-balls, and not paying the least bit of attention to us.

“What?” I leaned in closer to get the scoop.

“She said she’d do anything if I helped her track down Darvis Kane so she could get hold of the money in the safe deposit box,” he whispered. “And I do mean anything.” He blushed furiously.

“Austin! What did you say?”

“What do you think I said? I told her I was an officer of a bank, and her coarse language was offensive, and then I asked her if maybe her daughters had heard from their dear departed daddy.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I’d forgotten about the kids. Whitney and Courtney. They were a couple years older than me, so they’d be grown now, of course. What did she say to that?”

“She said on second thought, she didn’t want to fuck me. She suggested I go fuck myself. And then she hung up.”

I sighed and sat back in the booth. “Another dead end. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It was all so long ago. And nobody wants to talk about any of it.”

“Hush!” Austin said. “It’s not a dead end. You just gave me Darvis Kane’s kids’ names. I can try and track them down, same way I did their mother. It’s worth a try. Anyway, what did you find out?”

“Next to nothing,” I said. “Chrys Graham says she knew Jeanine was up to something in the months before she left town, because she asked to be paid in cash, instead of in trade, or with a check. And she as much as said my mother was hanging out with a ‘wild crowd,’ but she wouldn’t name any names. Just said I should talk to mama’s cousin Sonya.”

“The one who moved to North Carolina?” Austin asked.

“Kannapolis,” I said.

Austin slapped the tabletop in triumph. “See? That’s not a dead end either. All we have to do is check in Kannapolis, North Carolina, for a Sonya…what did you say her last name was?”

“Wyrick,” I said. I took some money out of my billfold and put it on the table. I felt drained, defeated. The whole experience reminded me of chasing rainbows as a child. The closer I got to finding out anything about my mother, the more distant the truth seemed to be.

“Where are you going?” Austin demanded. “I thought we were going to do some computer research back at my place.”

“No,” I said. “I’m done with research. I’m going for a drive. A Sunday drive.”

“Today is Saturday,” he pointed out.

“So I’ll get an early start.”

I stopped
at the Minit Mart on the way out of town, ran in and bought a four-pack of Jack Daniel’s hard lemonade. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, it occurred to me that this was the same place where I’d had my last sighting of Paige Plummer. The same place Will had demonstrated his kissing prowess. I opened one of the lemonade bottles and took a long swig. Not bad for screwtop. I thought about that kiss. That wasn’t bad either.

At first I didn’t have a plan. How unlike me. All my life I’d been a prodigious planner. I’d sketched and schemed and plotted and planned my life down to the last imported Italian silk tassel on the shimmery organza tablecloths at my wedding reception.

The tablecloths were in a box in Daddy’s garage. I’d never even unpacked them. And now it was Saturday night, and I had no plans, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with. Anywhere would work, as long as it was away from here, with trees and a view and nobody around.

The lake, I thought. I’ll go out to Lake Oconee and watch the sunset.

Lake Oconee isn’t one of those lakes that have been around forever. In fact, I’d been just a little girl back in the late seventies, when Georgia Power created the lake by damming up the Oconee and Apalachee Rivers and a bunch of other smaller, local creeks. The power company bought up millions of dollars’ worth of farm and timberland and created a 19,000-acre hydroelectric lake.

Our part of middle Georgia was changed forever after Lake Oconee was built. People who’d farmed their whole lives suddenly had a little bit of money, but no land to farm on anymore. Of course, the lake brought businesses, and jobs. People said the new lake had
some of the best bass and crappie fishing in the state, because of all the old fallen trees at the bottom of the lake. Later developers moved in and built subdivisions, marinas, golf clubs, and fancy resorts. Only a few years ago the Ritz-Carlton opened a resort and spa on the lake—right on the same land that had once been a hunting lodge owned by the heir to a North Carolina tobacco fortune.

As recently as a month ago, on a Saturday night like this, I’d have been out at the Jernigans’ house at Cuscawilla, one of the fancy golf resorts that ringed the lake. We probably would have had dinner at the clubhouse, then maybe taken a sunset “cocktail cruise” on A.J.’s daddy’s pontoon boat.

The Jernigans actually owned two houses out at the lake. The “cottage” was a brand-new four-thousand-square-foot, three-level mini mansion, complete with a landscaped lawn that sloped down to a seawall and a double-decker boathouse.

But the original family lake place was at the end of an unmarked gravel road. Back in the seventies Chub Jernigan had sold off a hefty chunk of played-out cotton fields to Georgia Power when they’d mapped out the lake, but he’d retained some of the new lakefront lots and built a humble little tin-roofed fishing cabin on one of them.

Not even three miles away from the cottage, the “shack,” as the family called it, had a screened porch instead of air conditioning, one bathroom, and a wooden dock that was on its last legs. It had been the place A.J.’s daddy, Big Drew, took the boys on camping and fishing trips, a family retreat back when roughing it was still the Jernigans’ idea of fun.

A.J. had taken me out to the shack a half-dozen times after we’d first started dating, while the Cuscawilla cottage was still under construction. We’d cooked dinner in the fireplace, skinny-dipped in the lake, and made love on the lumpy Hide-A-Bed on the back porch, but I don’t think A.J. or anybody else in the family had stepped foot in the place since the cottage had been completed.

Clouds of dust rose off the pockmarked gravel road as the Volvo
bumped along through the old cotton fields that had been allowed to grow wild. A single brown horse grazed under the shade of an oak tree, and once a bright flash of blue and orange darted across the road—a bluebird. It had been another hot day, but the sun was getting lower in the sky now, and when I rolled the window down a little bit, I could smell the lake back behind a stand of trees that marked the entrance to the Jernigans’ property.

I had to slam on the brakes hard as I rounded a curve in the road, and my open bottle of hard lemonade went flying out of the cup holder, splashing liquid all over the dashboard. Crap! A shiny metal cattle gate blocked the road. I frowned as I stared at it. When had the Jernigans decided that their derelict old shack warranted locking up?

I got out of the car and walked over to the gate to get a better look. A small sign was posted on the right gatepost.
PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. POSITIVELY NO HUNTING.

There was a stout new padlock on the gate. I tugged at it, but it stayed locked.

This was beginning to piss me off. The Jernigans never used the shack anymore. Why should they suddenly start locking it up—and keeping me out? I was practically family. Or, I had been.

I fumed and paced back and forth in front of the gate. A casual impulse had brought me out here, but now, dammit, I wanted to take a dip in the lake, sit on the dock, drink my lemonade, and watch the sunset. I wanted to feel the sun on my back, to hear the birds calling in the treetops, to watch a fish chase a bug as it skittered over the surface of the water.

The gate and the sign, I decided, were the work of A.J.’s anal-retentive brother Kyle. Which made me even more determined to go through with my plan. I got in the Volvo and backed it up. A quarter mile up the Jernigans’ drive, the road forked off to the right, toward the old Bascomb place. This drive was even more rutted and overgrown than the Jernigans’.

Vince Bascomb had been one of Drew Jernigan’s partners in several
business ventures, and at one time the two of them had owned all the land on this little cove of the lake. But Vince was in his late seventies now, and so crippled with arthritis that he rarely left his house in town. Vince and Lorraine Bascomb were divorced in the eighties, and Vince had remarried and divorced two more times that I knew of. I’d heard that wife number three had walked off with the remainder of Vince’s family money five years ago. Lorraine had lived quietly on the edge of town until her death last year. The Bascomb children lived out of state, and hadn’t been back to Madison since their mama’s death.

The Bascomb drive had no fence, no gate, no padlock. It adjoined the Jernigans’ property, but had no dock, because the Bascombs and Jernigans had gone in partners on the Jernigans’ dock.

I allowed myself a smug smile as I pulled the Volvo up beside the Bascomb cabin and got out.

The cabin itself was sad. The tin roof had rusted through, and one corner of the porch seemed to have collapsed on itself. Kudzu vines clambered up the walls and through the broken-out windows. Weeds choked the little yard, and a four-foot-tall oak sapling had taken root in an overturned red rowboat.

As soon as my foot touched the ground I began to regret my unusual lack of planning. White slacks, silk blouse, cute little sandals—to hike through this weed patch? Wild blackberry brambles were already snagging the fabric around my ankles. What was I thinking? I almost turned around and got back in the car. But then I got a mental picture of Kyle Jernigan, that buttoned-down little prick, posting the no trespassing sign on the new fence across the way.

Hell yes, I would trespass. I only wished I had a shotgun and the actual will to shoot at something, just so that I could break all of Kyle’s thou-shalt-nots. I opened the Volvo’s trunk and reached for my gym bag. I hadn’t actually been to the gym in at least six weeks, what with all the wedding preparations. The T-shirt was a little smelly, and the Lycra bike shorts wouldn’t have been my first choice
for lake attire, but I was really happy to see my Nike cross-trainers. I glanced around quickly to make sure the place was really as deserted as it seemed, before stripping down and changing into my gym clothes.

I tucked the cardboard lemonade carton under my arm and started to pick my way through the knee-high underbrush, toward the lakefront. I gave the fallen-down Bascomb cabin a wide berth. To me, there was something disturbing about the gaping doors and windows and the crumbling back porch where a rusted green glider still faced the water. A life had been lived out here. Somebody had rowed around the lake in that once jaunty red boat. I could imagine Bascombs sitting on that porch, a radio playing, a screen door slamming, and the rhythmic back-and-forth squeak of the metal glider. And then one day, they’d just left. A life abandoned, just like that. I wondered why. Why does someone walk away from one life, and into another?

It was a good question, I decided. Maybe someday, if I got the chance, I would pose that very same question to Jeanine Murry Murdock.

In the meantime I decided to concentrate on watching where I was walking. Snakes were a very real possibility out here. And those vines I was stomping through could just as easily be poison ivy as kudzu.

When I got to the water’s edge I stopped and looked back at the Bascomb cabin. An involuntary shudder ran down my spine. I turned my back on it again, and picked my way through the underbrush toward what I knew was the edge of the Jernigans’ property line.

My mood improved when I caught sight of the dock a hundred yards away. A few boards were missing, but at least it hadn’t been allowed to fall completely apart. I caught a glimpse of the Jernigan shack through the trees, but I made a deliberate decision not to go any closer to it. I didn’t want to look at that back porch, and I really didn’t want to see that lumpy Hide-A-Bed. Although, come to think
of it, Kyle had probably roped it off and posted it with a “No Trespassing, Absolutely No Fucking” sign.

The sun-blistered cedar planks of the dock buckled a little under my weight. I hesitated. Would the whole thing collapse? But then I moved forward. It hadn’t been all that long since I’d been to the gym. And anyway, I hadn’t really been able to eat much since the rehearsal dinner debacle. A lot of chocolate, yes, and a reasonable amount of wine, but very few actual meals.

Sunlight sparkled off the lake so brightly that I had to shade my eyes with my hand. It was at least fifteen degrees cooler out here than it had been in town. If I kept my back to the shore, all I could see was the green trees of the opposite side of the Jernigans’ cove, blue skies, and the emerald waters of the lake itself. No one was in sight. No boats, no people.

Now I could feel the tension start to drain from my body as I reached the end of the dock. I put the lemonade carton down and did some stretches. I rolled my neck, then my left shoulder, then my right. I sat down on the dock and unscrewed the cap of a lemonade bottle.

My thoughts turned, inevitably, to my mother, and I felt a familiar, if unwelcome, sense of gloom settle over me. What, I wondered, if Austin was right? What if I really was incapable of having a lasting relationship, as long as I suppressed the unresolved issue of my own abandonment?

Dammit, Mama, I thought. Why couldn’t you just get a divorce and stick around? Why couldn’t you fix things up instead of walking out? I wondered again about the Bascomb place, and about lost causes and lost people. And then I shook it off. The gloom, the doom, and all the unanswered questions. So what if I never knew what had happened to my mother? Big effin’ deal. Life is short, I thought. Get over yourself.

That’s what I’ll do, I promised myself. Let Austin play Nancy Drew if he wanted. Let him track down Darvis Kane and his ex-wife
and his kids. If that led us to my mother, good enough. If not, so be it. I was nothing like that broken-down, haunted house at the Bascomb place.

I was a strong, resilient, capable woman with a great career and a promising future ahead of her. A. J. Jernigan was not the only man in Georgia.

Affirmation, I thought. What you need is a little affirmation.

I held the bottle up in a silent toast to myself. Here’s to you, kid, I told myself. You are one lawless, trespassing, take-no-prisoners, spur-of-the-moment kind of babe.

I took a long drink of the lemonade and burped loudly. I giggled, liking the sound of it. I finished off the first bottle, then opened a second, finishing it just as quickly. I burped again, gaining momentum, hoping the sound of my lawless, spontaneous belch would echo and reverberate, and maybe, somehow, be heard at the Jernigan cottage three miles away at Cuscawilla. I gulped in a bunch of air, and burped it right back out again. Here’s to you, Kyle Jernigan, I belched. And you, Big Drew. I belched again. And you, GiGi. But somehow it didn’t seem enough to toast A.J. with a belch. Some other kind of gesture was needed. Something grander, yet trashier.

Half drunk with lemon-flavored malt liquor and the unaccustomed, yet heady feeling of spontaneity, I peeled off my T-shirt and shorts, and dressed only in my sparkling white Nike cross-trainers, I turned, and with a deliberate and dramatic flourish, bent down, touched my toes, and physically and metaphysically mooned my ex-fiance, Andrew Jackson Jernigan.

Talk about cathartic!

“That’s for you, A.J.” I hollered into the nothingness of the cove. I straightened up and took a bow. A slight breeze rippled across the cove. I was naked in the middle of nowhere. Well, almost naked. My skin prickled with the chill.

Without another thought, I sat down and unlaced my Nikes, and jumped into the lake. I let myself sink all the way to the muddy bottom
before I powered back up to the water’s surface. The lake was deliciously cool. I floated on my back and gazed up at the clouds, which had gone peachy and pink. I swam a few strokes and floated some more.

I threw my head back and shook the water out of my hair. When I opened my eyes, I was facing the dock. And Will Mahoney.