Present Danger (2 page)

“You’ve got that straight, sugar. Remember that when your old man shows up lookin’ for blood, because I’m just gonna step aside and wave him by.” James turned away. “Lola,
why?”
He raked his fingers through his hair from crown to rubber band. His fist closed around his ponytail and tugged until the roots strained. “Couldn’t you see she’s trouble? God, I don’t fuckin’ believe this. I’ve got a whole truckload of problems to straighten out already, but you just had to saddle me with hers, too, didn’t you? I’m never gonna get a minute to myself now, what with handling all the Ryder shit and now Miss Magnolia Blossom’s, too.”

“Excuse me!” Aunie’s infuriated voice sliced through his complaint. “You’ve got quite an inflated opinion of yourself, haven’t you?” Beneath swollen, blackened lids, her brown eyes flashed fire. Breasts rising with indignation beneath her oversized silk-and-cotton-blend sweater, hands clenched into fists at her side, she stalked forward belligerently. Despite her diminutive size, James found himself backing up a step, wondering how she managed to appear to be looking down her nose at him when she had to tilt her head way back merely to meet his eyes.

“Who the devil
are
you, mistah,” she demanded, “Superman or somethin’? I purely don’t recall him havin’ such a filthy mouth.” She tossed her head, making her shiny brown hair swing away from her bruised jaw. “That apartment is mine, paid for and signed on the dotted line, and I
am
movin’ in on the first. I don’t know what you’re in such an uproar
about, anyway; nobody requested your assistance handlin’ my problems.” She conveniently chose to forget her momentary excitement over his and Otis’s obvious street-aware toughness. It was beside the point, anyway.

“I came here to rent an apartment, period,” she informed him with cool disdain, “not to find myself a big brotha to fight my wars for me. But for the record, suh, if Ah did need someone, I think I’d ask Otis here. He looks a whole lot tougher than you, so you can just give your superhero cape a rest. I won’t be requirin’ it.”

She swung away and plucked her coat and purse off
the
couch. Controlling her outrage with an effort, she managed a weak smile. “Lola, thank you for your warm hospitality,” she said. “I look forward to gettin’ to know you much better. Otis, it was a real pleasuah to meet you.” She turned to James and nodded coolly. “Mistah Rydah.”

And then she was gone.

Otis looked at the stunned expression on his enraged friend’s face and tried to control his grin, but it refused to be subdued. “Well, I guess you can rest easy, Jimmy. I doubt she’s a victim of wife abuse, anyway.”

“Why
the
hell not?” James demanded indignantly. “She’s such a midget, it wouldn’t take much to subdue her.”

“Yeah, well, she may be tiny, Jimmy, but she’s got attitude,” Otis disagreed. “She backed you into a corner, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,
Superman,”
Lola murmured with a throaty laugh.

James muttered something truly foul, turned on his heel, and slammed out of
the
apartment.

Otis put his arm around his wife and dragged her down onto the couch next to him. “You’ve really stirred up something this time, baby.”

Lola shrugged. “She needed a place to stay and she loved the apartment,” she replied calmly. “Was I supposed to turn away the steady income because she was sportin’ a few bruises?”

“Hell, babe, it is James’s apartment house and you know his feelings. You had to know that little gal would be expressly contrary to what he wants.”

“That mon doesn’t know what he wants.”

“And you do, I suppose?”

Lola just gave him her mysterious, three-cornered smile—the one that drove him mad and had led him to pursue her some years back until she had finally agreed to marry him. Laughter rumbled like distant thunder deep in his massive chest. “Yeah, I suppose you do, at that.” With a mock growl, he grabbed her up and rolled her over.

After the fact, Aunie was quite amazed at her temerity in standing up to James Ryder. She sat in her rented car ten minutes later, shaking with reaction. Had that really been she, the Aunie Franklin who, up until a year ago, had never made a wave in her life, angrily defying a man with such dangerous eyes? Perhaps she really
was
going to be able to make all the changes in her life she desired to make.

She’d better. It wasn’t as if she had any other options.

The first thing she did when she reached her downtown hotel room was call her lawyer in Atlanta. The phone rang several times before she remembered the
three-hour time difference. She disconnected and dialed his home number.

The phone there rang several times also and she was just on the point of hanging up when he answered.

“Hello?”

“Jordan? This is Aunie.”

“Aunie! Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m at the Westin Hotel in Seattle; I’m fine, and guess what? I’ve already found a place to live.”

“That was quick.”

“Oh, Jordan, I wish you could see it. It’s wonderful.” She sat down on the side of the bed and kicked off her shoes. “It’s in a beautiful old buildin’ just blocks from the college I hope to attend, and it has a fireplace and lots of natural wood and it’s filled with such interestin’ lines.”

“Sounds perfect. Is it a secure building?”

“Yes.” She clutched the receiver more tightly and asked with quick alarm, “Wesley is still in jail, isn’t he?”

He hesitated then said, “They let him out on his own recognizance.”

“NO!”

“Don’t worry, Aunie. It was stipulated he could not leave the state before his trial, and he doesn’t have the first idea where to find you even if he could leave Georgia. Also, there is some good news.”

“Let’s heah it. Ah could use a little good news about now.” Feeling her grasp on her accent slipping—always an accurate barometer to the amount of stress she was feeling—she took several slow, deep breaths.

“You don’t have to return to testify. Because of the threats to your personal safety, the judge has agreed
to allow your deposition and the photographs of the damage Wesley did to you to stand in your stead.”

“Oh, Jordan, that is good news. The fewer trips I have to make between here and Atlanta, the less chance there is for Wesley to track me.” She threaded her fingers through her hair. “Let me give you my new address. Do you have a pencil?”

“Shoot.”

She recited it and he read it back to her for verification. “Will you send the things I put in storage?” she requested. “The rest can be sold with the house, or if it’s easier to sell it separately, do that. Either way, I don’t want it. I’m moving in on the first, so if you could get my stored stuff here by then, I’d sure appreciate it. I realize it doesn’t give you a great deal of time …”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll do the best I can.”

“Thank you Jordan. You’ve been such a comfort through all of this.”

“Don’t mention it. How do you like Seattle?”

“It’s green. And cold.” She glanced out the window. “I’m supposed to have a view of the Olympic mountains from my hotel room, but so far I haven’t seen anything except clouds where they’re supposed to be. They tell me they’re quite beautiful, though.”

“I’m going to send you the name of a lawyer there,” Jordan said. “I’ll send him a copy of your file and, Aunie, I want you to go see him. Get a restraining order … just in case.”

She shivered. “The restrainin’ order didn’t do me a whole lot of good last time.”

“I know, sweetheart. But it should add clout to the case against him, and I want you to have one.”

“Oh, Jordan,” she said with quiet despair, “is this never going to end?”

“It will, Aunie. Maybe sooner than we think.”

“God, I’ve been prayin’ for the day.”

“You just enjoy your new life and try not to worry, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

“Call me again if you need anything or if you just want to talk.”

“I will. Thank you again, Jordan.”

“You’re welcome, dear. Keep in touch.”

They rang off and Aunie sat for several despondent moments in the gathering gloom. Finally, she returned the phone to its resting place and rose to pull the drapes and turn on the lights. She bumped up the thermostat and retrieved from her purse the curriculum brochures she had picked up at the college. After briefly consulting a menu, she ordered room service; changed into a warm sweatshirt, leggings, and two pairs of socks; pulled the little writing table and a chair in front of the heat register, and sat down to read.

At her appointment with the college counselor earlier in the day, she had been warned that it was quite late to be registering for the fall quarter. One or two of the classes that interested her had already started this week and another class was full. Aunie had felt a bit discouraged, but the counselor had also offered hope. She had said it wasn’t uncommon for classes to be dropped in the first week, so there was still a very good possibility that Aunie could get the ones she desired. Sitting in her hotel room, she finished selecting her alternate choices and filled in the registration form to be returned to the school tomorrow.

Then she didn’t know what to do with herself. Her dinner was delivered and she ate it while watching the news on the television. Setting her tray out in the
corridor, she wandered around the room, rechecking all its features. She scanned the pay movies listed inside the armoire that housed the television set. Nothing appealed to her. She picked up a paperback, tried to read, then threw it down on the nightstand next to the bed.

Crossing slowly to the window, she pulled back the curtain. It was dark now and her room boasted a panoramic view. Lights formed a cityscape that stretched out before her, and she watched the lighted windows of a ferry in Elliott Bay as it glided slowly toward town. She shivered in the cold emanating off the plate glass and dropped the curtain.

Picking up the evening paper, she read an article about a man who’d been arrested for making obscene phone calls to approximately a hundred women. The article also reported that in an unrelated case, the telephone company and the police were working together to track down a different caller responsible for placing an alarmingly high number of harrassing phone calls to female students at a local college. Aunie tossed the paper aside. She didn’t need to hear about other people’s troubles; she had enough of her own.

In her wanderings around the hotel room, she had avoided looking into any of the mirrors, but finally, she crossed over to one. Bracing her hands on the small built-in vanity, she slowly lifted her head.

All her life, she had heard how beautiful she was. Sometimes it had been a blessing; sometimes it had been a curse. However she viewed it, one thing was certain. The woman reflected in the mirror would surely never hear such compliments.

There had not been sufficient time for most of the swelling to go down. She had walked out of the
hospital emergency room two days ago, closed her account at the bank, called a company to crate the few belongings she would eventually want shipped to her, packed as many herself as she could carry with her, and called the airlines for flight information. She hadn’t known exactly where she was going, but she’d felt the need to cover as much ground as possible while Wesley was still in jail. She only hoped he wasn’t paying private detectives to keep an eye on her while he was incarcerated. But, surely not. He hadn’t had time to arrange it.

Unless, of course, he hadn’t really dismissed the one he’d already had in his employ, as he’d told her he had. She wouldn’t put anything past him.

Leaving Jordan in charge of her stored belongings and of putting her house and car up for sale, she had caught a red-eye to Chicago. At O’Hare, she’d decided on Seattle as her final destination because it was far away from home and she didn’t know a soul there. Wesley would have no reason to assume that she was heading there. She had slipped into a women’s rest room and tried her best to change her appearance. It hadn’t been an easy task with her face in this condition: the swelling and discoloration made it conspicuous. Desperate to escape detection if she were being watched, she had explained her situation to a large group of businesswomen on their way to a seminar, and one of them had gone to purchase her ticket for her. They had then buried her in their midst, carrying her from the rest room to the gate of departure.

She didn’t recognize that face in the mirror. The contusions affected its shape, effectively disguising her much-lauded bone structure. There was a stitched tear in her left earlobe where Wesley had ripped out
her pierced earring. Both eyes were blackened, but thankfully no longer swollen shut. Her nose had been broken, but the emergency room doctor had assured her that once the swelling went down, it should be good as new. Her lip was split; it, too, would mend. Her skin was eventually going to regain what had once been referred to by a suitor given to flowery compliments as its poreless, alabaster complexion. A gross exaggeration, that, but her complexion was
the
one physical attribute she took pride in, and anything would be an improvement over its current condition, which was a rainbow of hideous bruises, ranging the spectrum from dense purple to saffron yellow.

But, basically, the doctors had told her, her injuries were superficial. She was lucky, they had said. No other broken bones, no eye damage, no concussion to report, no lost teeth. After the fuss her mama had made in the emergency room, they’d rushed to assure her she would once again regain her former beauty. Those assurances had satisfied Mama, but left Aunie feeling quite ambivalent.

Because, sometimes, her looks had been a blessing.

But, sometimes, they had been a curse.

There was no place quite like the South for one to be a member of the impoverished gentility. Southerners for generations had been raising that condition to an art form and Aunie felt she could write a book on the subject, no research necessary. After all, she had firsthand experience as an only child in a family that was a poor relation to two venerable old Southern names.

Her daddy was L. Martin Franklin III, a dreamer in a family of overachievers. He was a vague, scholarly presence that barely made a ripple in her life. He cared only for his books and his projects, and his lack of business acumen was an accepted idiosyncrasy regarded by his family with the same half-amused, half-irritated tolerance that was accorded Uncle Asa’s drinking or Uncle Beau’s womanizing.

Her mama was a Pearlin—of the
Savannah
Pearlins? That was the way she always qualified it upon an
introduction … her voice sweet as sorghum with a gently questioning inflection at the end. The unspoken inference was that a body must surely be lacking in breeding indeed if they had never heard of that august family. Aunie was perhaps five or six years old before she realized that the phrase Pearlin-of-the-Savannah-Pearlins wasn’t her mother’s exact maiden name.

She was almost as young when she first began to comprehend the expectations her family had of her. It was difficult to remember a time when her looks and an obligation to marry well had not gone hand in hand.

Her mama was an unhappy woman. She hated her lack of wealth, even if the Pearlins and L. Martin’s family did see to it that they were never lacking in the amenities. They were nevertheless forced to live in those tacky old apartment houses! She found it impossible to forget that, until her marriage, she had lived in a glorious mansion where she’d been raised to expect that her every wish would be granted.

Then she’d had to go fall in love with a scholar with impeccable antecedents and not one ounce of marketable ambition.

She drummed it into Aunie’s mind that she could do better.
It’s all very well to marry for love,
she’d often said.
But when the passion fades
—
and, sugah, it will
—
you want to make sure something tangible remains. Use the attributes God gave you. Fall in love, if you must. Just see to it that you fall in love with a rich man.
How many times had Aunie heard
that
in her lifetime?

Her daddy never gave her advice at all…. He was quite oblivious that she might be in need of it. At the best of times, Aunie was not quite certain he was even more than vaguely aware of her existence.

The rest of her relatives, however, tended to agree with Mama; they talked about her prospects for a good marriage as if it were a foregone conclusion. She grew up in elegant old apartment houses that retained shabby vestiges of their former glory, wearing her cousin Nola’s hand-me-down designer clothing. She was waited upon by servants whose wages were paid by her granddaddy. Attendance at private schools was naturally considered de rigueur; the fees were paid by an uncle. Dance classes were financed by another uncle, and she belonged to exclusive country clubs whose dues were subsidized by yet another. Inescapably, at every family gathering, one or another of her male relatives could be counted on to grasp her chin, hold her face up to the light, and murmur, “Yes, suh! This one’s a beauty. She’ll never have a problem snarin’ herself a real catch.”

Aunie wasn’t quite certain how she was supposed to go about snaring a catch, but she knew it had something to do with her physical attractiveness. As a child she was extremely shy. Everyone at the private schools she attended knew she was a student who needed to be subsidized and with the cruelty of youth, they did not hesitate to taunt her with it. Her own family never credited her with intelligence. All anyone seemed to think she had going for her was her appearance.

And that was before she began to truly blossom.

Life is kinder to the attractive than it is to the unsightly—it’s an indisputable fact of life. Acceptance and approval come easier regardless of how undeserved they may be, since they are based, more often than not, on an immediate visceral reaction to outward appearances.

Aunie was not exactly proud of how very much she took advantage of that fact as an adolescent.

Pretty girls are not supposed to feel inadequate, so she hid her shyness as her beauty blossomed, forcing herself to appear vivacious and outgoing. She felt duty-bound to fulfill her family’s expectations so she never questioned the rightness of accepting from others the luxuries that her father could not provide. Following her mother’s example, she considered them no more than her due.

It never occurred to her to learn to make her own way in life, to use her brains instead of her looks. If someone had told her that the labor entailed in providing her
own
security would ultimately be more rewarding than snaring a good catch to do it for her, she wouldn’t have understood. She only knew what had been drummed into her head for so many years. Consequently, it took her longer than most to develop an identity of her own.

She thought her looks
were
her identity. No one had ever lauded her intelligence the way they praised her flawless skin or impeccable bone structure. No one had ever told her she was smart enough to do whatever she wanted to do. It was understood that she possessed one marketable commodity. Her duty was to use her physical attractiveness to marry well. Insecure beneath her bogus surface vivacity, that was what she set out to do.

Upon completing a year of finishing school, she was introduced to a number of eligible, family-approved bachelors: young men with solid family connections and bright prospects. But although she often had fun with them and was even drawn to one or two, there was an elemental spark that was missing. She had been taught that wealth was the primary objective, but in a stubborn corner of her mind she was convinced there had to be more. She wanted love as well.

Then Wesley Cunningham entered her life and swept her off her feet.

Wesley wasn’t a boy or a young man; he was thirty-six to her nineteen years. A respected, established gallery owner whose personal collection of rare and beautiful objets d’art was lauded as unequaled in the South, he was an urbane man at ease in the most exalted company. That such a man should exhibit signs of being quite taken with her took Aunie’s breath away. His pursuit of her was persistent, sophisticated, and romantic, and it quite turned her head. When he requested her hand in marriage following an eleven-month courtship, she thought she was the luckiest woman alive.

Later, she liked to believe that if she’d had even a glimmer of realization that she was about to become the prized possession of an obsessed man, she would have run as far away as fast as she could. But the truth was, she simply wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Maybe the signs had been there all along and she had simply refused to see them. Her ego
had
been inflated by Wesley’s attentions and—given her own determination at the time to fulfill every expectation her family had ever had of her—perhaps it was possible she had just turned a blind eye to the flaws in his personality.

She didn’t
think
that was the truth of what had happened.

But she had to live with the knowledge that she would never be one hundred percent certain that it was not.

“Afternoon, Otis.” There was a soft clatter on the stairs. “I swear, you’re one of the hardest workin’
men I have ever met. Lola tells me you’re a fire fighter, and yet all your free time seems to be spent workin’ around here.”

James looked up from his crouched position on the floor near the end of the hall. He watched as Aunie reached the top of the stairs. She stopped in the pool of light cast by the hanging trouble light and smiled brilliantly up into Otis’s face.

James settled back on his buttocks and crossed his ankles, Indian style. He had been relying on the natural daylight pouring through the hall window to illuminate his work up until a few moments ago when the sun had abruptly gone behind a cloud. On the verge of fetching the other trouble light, he was now glad he’d held off.

It gave him an unexpected opportunity to observe without being observed in return.

He couldn’t get over what a looker she was. It had knocked him on his butt every time he’d run across her these past few weeks. Who would have guessed that beneath all those bruises and contusions which she’d been sporting that first day, there would be such creamy, c’mon-and-touch-me skin? The fairness of her complexion was another surprise, a marked contrast to her shiny, dark brown hair, dark brows, and sooty, tangled eyelashes. Her eyes were also a deep brown, large and exotically tilted, the whites almost childlike in their blue-white clarity. That mouth of hers, however, was anything but childlike. The upper lip was narrow and shapely, the bottom lip more lushly full. And just to gild the lily, she not only possessed deep dimples to frame her smile, there was also a tiny mole just to the right of the bow of her upper lip. Talk about a case of overkill, he thought sourly.

Okay, okay, so maybe when he was around her he felt a little bit foolish for the way he’d overreacted the day she’d come to rent the apartment, and maybe it made him regard her with less than rose-colored approval. But he’d be damned if he’d take full blame for it. Her own attitude hadn’t helped matters. In fact, instead of graciously ignoring what had happened that day and starting all over—which is what
he
would have done—she seemed to go out of her way to rub it in whenever their paths crossed. Instead of letting bygones be bygones, she was all pretty, dimpled smiles for Otis and Lola, calling them by their first names, while
he was
still
Mistah Rydah,
spoken in that cool, polite manner that never failed to put his back up. Her level, shuttered glances and that damned mister business with his name could really make him feel like a mannerless clod. Which he supposed he sometimes was.

But if she was supposed to be so fucking mannerly, then she sure as hell shouldn’t be bending over backwards to make him feel that way.

Ah purely don’t recall Superman havin’ such a filthy mouth.

James rolled his shoulders uneasily. He’d been hearing those words in his mind repeatedly these past few weeks, and following the casual obscenity of his thoughts, he heard them again now. At first they’d just made him defensive. Not everyone was lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Some folks had to make do with the cold reality of a day-to-day scramble for survival beneath the uncaring eyes of the Housing Authority.

In the Terrace, the low-income project where James grew up, obscenities were a way of life. He hadn’t thought to question his use of them until she’d made
him feel like so much dog shit for his spontaneous utterances.

Sounding like the meanest mother in town had saved his ass on more than one occasion in his formative years. James hadn’t been naturally drawn to trouble the way his brothers had been. He’d much preferred building things with his hands and drawing his cartoons to knocking heads together. He’d had to fight his way out of his fair share of bad situations, of course, but on the whole he’d preferred to depend on his quick wit and offbeat sense of humor to maneuver him out of a tight spot. Sounding as though he’d as soon rip a man’s eyeballs out of his head as look at him sure as hell hadn’t hurt, though. Neither had his friendship with Otis.

They’d both been on the verge of adolescence when Otis had moved into an upstairs unit of their Terrace apartment house. Otis had been blossoming into every bigot’s nightmare even then: already over six feet tall, showing promise of his future bulk, and losing his hair to a rare dermatological condition. James had hung around the base of the stairs the day he had moved in, sketching rapidly as he’d watched Otis’s family pack their meager belongings into their new home. They had marched smartly to
the
tersely voiced directions of a tall black lady. He’d learned later that when Otis’s ma was on a roll, she could put a drill sergeant to shame.

It was, in fact, his quickly drawn cartoon of her in a marine uniform that had more or less introduced
the
boys. Otis had suddenly paused to stare over James’s shoulder, wanting to see what the blond boy was drawing. James had stiffened and held his breath, knowing his cartoon could easily backfire. In their
neighborhood, making fun of somebody’s mama could get your head laid open by a rusty pipe.

But Otis had roared with laughter and snatched the sketch pad from James’s hands. “Hey, Ma,” he’d called and carried the pad over to his mother. “This here white boy’s already got yer number!”

They’d been friends ever since.

Now, two decades later, he suddenly realized that somewhere along the way Otis had cleaned up the worst of his language, while he never had. Maybe it was time he did. They’d both moved well beyond the need to protect themselves or intimidate others through the use of rough, crude language.

But it was going to be one effin’ difficult habit to break.

In any case, he was trying his best not to resent the way the little Southern princess made him feel, because in all fairness, he didn’t think she was doing it deliberately—except for that mister business. Hell, he didn’t harbor any burning desire to be her good friend. They were two entirely different people and the less he knew her, the less apt he was to get corralled into her troubles. It would be much better all around to keep a healthy distance between them. But he didn’t see the need for hostilities either. Living in the same building—hell, on the same floor—they were going to bump into each other. Seemed to him they could at least manage to be polite acquaintances.

“Well, I guess I’d better get going and let you get back to work,” Aunie said to Otis. “I’ve got a ton of homework to do today, myself.” She hefted her book bag. As she started to turn away the sun broke through the clouds, illuminating the end of the hallway. She noticed James for the first time, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, plaster dust liberally coating his hair, bare shoulders, black tank top, and worn Levis.