Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (27 page)

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

T
HE FLIGHT HOME
to Ithaca was considerably more subdued than the flight to Push Hard had been. Charles sat by himself near the front of the plane, and Leonard and Redmon sat near the back. Redmon had his foot bandaged and stretched out in the aisle and Leonard spent a good deal of time adjusting Redmon’s blanket, propping his leg on a stack of pillows, making sure the stewardesses were prompt and attentive, and in general, trying in every way possible to assure Redmon the shooting had been accidental and very regrettable, and that he hoped their business relationship would continue as before.

“Prop it a little higher, Sport,” Redmon said, as Leonard attempted to adjust the injured limb, “and get me another one of those Percocets out of my pocket.”

Charles put his head back and gazed wearily at the fog rolling past the window. He felt feverish, his stomach was still queasy, and he had not been able to keep anything down in twenty-four hours. Not since waking Friday afternoon to find Stella and the other girls gone. Not since his brawl with Ramsbottom where he demanded a partial refund for the dismal hunting trip and the man, perhaps too readily, complied, seemed even to be trying to keep himself from chuckling as he wrote out the check.

The party with the girls was a blurry memory. He could remember the fistfight with Leonard over Stella, could remember snatches of the strip poker game, could remember Leonard passing out, and Redmon, could remember Stella rising to take his hand. But after that it got smeared and indistinct like images seen through a foggy window, strange figures, flickering lights, snatches of memory—or was it a dream? A dream of something . . . unpleasant. Charles shuddered and shook his head.

He couldn’t even remember if he had slept with Stella. Often they didn’t sleep with the girls Ramsbottom provided, but sometimes they did. The point was, they had paid for the girls’ company and they had not received what they paid for—even Ramsbottom realized that or he would not have been so eager to refund their money.

In any case, the tradition begun by his father was over; Charles had made up his mind this would be his last trip to the Ah! Wilderness Ranch. It had gone on far longer than it should have, and he was not even certain why. His trips in the future would be with his family, he decided. Maybe he would take them skiing at Christmas. Maybe he would take Nita to Europe. It had been a bad year for the firm financially, billable hours were down considerably and Leonard had managed to lose the Moretti case, which should have been a slam dunk, but Charles could come up with the money if he tried. He could take out a second mortage on the house, or hell, even sell the Duesenberg. He’d been shocked to find out how much the car was worth, and the truth of the matter was, it meant little to him outside of the obvious symbolic value it held; the fact he had defied his father in order to keep it, but really, who was around now to see his defiance? He never drove the car, he worried incessantly that someone would steal it or sue him for possession—why not sell it and be done forever with that part of his life?

He found the idea of unloading the Duesenberg oddly comforting. He found the idea of spending more time with his family strangely compelling. The children were old enough, now, not to be annoying in public and Nita, well she was lovely and supportive in an all-American-girl-next-door kind of way. If he could get her the counseling she needed to snap out of her recent surliness, if he could medicate the children so they were quiet and focused and better able to carry on conversations in a sedate and adult manner, this family renewal policy might work. Hell, Dick Melton had put his wife and children on Ritalin and claimed it had made all the difference in family harmony.

Charles put his head back and dozed. He awoke thirty minutes later with a start, his chest pounding and sweat breaking out on his brow and the palms of his hands. He had dreamed again that disturbing dream of long legs and garter belts and frilly underwear and hidden somewhere in that frilly feminine underwear something . . . wrong. Something that shouldn’t be there.

No, no, it isn’t a memory,
he told himself, sitting forward and wiping his mouth on his handkerchief.
It’s a dream, a nightmare, something Freudian and bizarre and to be expected from a man in the grips of a fever.

In the back of the plane Redmon’s leg rolled off the stack of pillows and landed with a loud
thump
on the floor of the plane. He cursed Leonard loudly and profusely and it took two stewardesses and a steward to get him calmed down.

T
HE SOMBER FEELING
of waking in the grips of a nightmare persisted as they landed in Atlanta and discovered there was no one there to meet them. They had driven up with Trevor earlier in the week and with him gone, Charles had had no choice but to call Nita to pick them up. He had called from the Push Hard airport and the Bozeman airport and had not been able to reach her either time, but he had left clear and concise messages when and where she was to pick them up at Hartsfield. He tried her on her cell phone thinking she might be caught in traffic, but there was no answer. Redmon had himself wheeled to the curb in a wheelchair, and without a word to either Charles or Leonard, he took a cab. They waited thirty minutes and then went to the desk to rent a car.

They were quiet on the trip to Ithaca, Charles worrying about his wife’s erratic behavior and Leonard wondering how he was going to be able to keep his income up now that he had lost Redmon as a client.

Traffic was light and they made good time, speeding along the expressway past scattered herds of grazing cattle, and cornfields, and soybean fields, and a barn that read
See Rock City
in big black letters across its roof. Darkness descended gradually, rolling in like ominous clouds of billowing smoke.

I
T WAS DARK
by the time they reached Ithaca. They had decided not to stop for dinner and they were both hungry and tired and eager for a hot shower. Charles swung into the subdivision and slowed as he reached their block.

Something was wrong. Charles knew it instantly as he pulled into their street. Both houses were dark and there was a sign in Leonard’s front yard that read
Another Sale by Delores Swafford—Your Friendly Christian Real Estate Broker.

“What the hell?” Leonard said, as they drove slowly past his house and pulled into Charles’s driveway. Leonard didn’t even wait for the car to stop before he opened the door, rolled out, and limped at a fast clip across the lawn toward his front door.

Charles stood in his driveway feeling like he was caught in some bizarre parallel universe; this
looked
like his house, but it was not his house, something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. Nita’s car was not in the garage. Where was his wife? Where were his children? He wondered suddenly if there had been some kind of an emergency and he picked up his cell phone to call his mother before remembering that she was in the Bahamas with Myra Redmon.

Leonard stood at his front door trying unsuccessfully to open it with his key. He gave up finally and went around to the garage but that door wouldn’t open either, nor would the French doors in the back. He peered through the glass but the house was dark and seemed suddenly cavernous. He called Lavonne on her cell phone. She picked up after the third ring.

“I can’t get in the house,” Leonard shouted. “There’s something wrong with my key.”

“Meet me at the Pink House Restaurant at eight. Bring Charles,” she said.

“I think we’ve been robbed!” he screamed into the phone, but she had already hung up. He tried to call her again but the line went instantly to voice mail.

C
HARLES OPENED THE
kitchen door and stepped inside, noting that his footsteps sounded odd, that they had a strange ringing quality in the darkened house. He switched on the light. Everything was as it should be. Dishes gleamed in the glass cabinets, the appliances sparkled, the floor shone. But there was an oppressive quality to the stillness of the house, a lingering sense that something was wrong. Behind him he could hear Leonard stumbling through the garage.

Leonard stepped into the house and said, “Oh my God, I’ve been robbed.” He was out of breath and his face was the color of bone. “Lavonne says I’m to meet her at the Pink House Restaurant and bring you. I need to call the police.”

For some reason he didn’t yet understand, Charles said, “No, wait.” They went through the house, room after room, and everything was as it should be, neat and orderly. But coming back into the kitchen, he saw a note lying on the breakfast bar addressed to him. It was in Nita’s handwriting.
The children are with my parents at the beach. Meet me at the Pink House Restaurant at 8:00. Bring Leonard.

“What does this mean?” Leonard shouted, looking wildly at his partner. “What the hell does this all mean?”

Standing in the kitchen door, Charles suddenly realized what it meant.

He ran through the back door and the screened porch, and down the deck steps with Leonard limping behind him like an old stiff-legged dog. “I can’t get into my house,” Leonard kept shouting. “What in the hell’s going on?”

Leonard followed him through the yard to the back gate, down a garden path to a small garage at the rear of the property. His knee ached with each step and his lungs felt like he had swallowed a dagger that pierced and sliced his chest with every breath. He stumbled into the garage just as Charles flipped on the light.

Charles stood there looking at the empty garage. There was a sound in his head like angry bees. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the room like tattered lace. Looking at them, Charles felt suddenly bereft, lonely.

“What does this mean?” Leonard cried, overwhelmed by the panic in his own voice and the thought that everything he had ever worked for, everything he had ever hoped for was on the verge of ruin and collapse. He had survived four days in the wilderness with a morose partner, an ungrateful client, a grizzly bear, a bad-tempered felon, and a wild Sioux Indian only to return and find that the real danger to his health and sanity lay here in the civilized world he called home.

Charles’s face had hardened. He looked like a man on the edge of something dangerous and unpredictable. His eyes glittered. His arms hung down from his shoulders like sledgehammers.

“I can’t get into my house.” Leonard’s swollen eye throbbed and pierced his skull like a hot poker. “I can’t get into my house and my wife wants you and me to meet her at eight o’clock at the Pink House Restaurant. Tell me what’s happening here, buddy. Tell me what I’m supposed to do.” His teeth chattered. His heart pounded his chest wall like a battering ram. “Tell me I’m having a nightmare and all I have to do is wake up and everything will be back the way it was.”

A muscle moved in the side of Charles’s face. The fingers of one hand twitched uncontrollably. “I knew your wife was trouble,” he said, and violently switched off the light. Leonard stood for a moment allowing his good eye to adjust to the darkness, and then, without a word, he followed his partner out into the chilly night.

W
HEN
C
HARLES AND
Leonard arrived at the Pink House they were ushered into a private room at the back of the restaurant. Lavonne, Nita, Eadie, and Trevor were already there, seated around a large table with the women on one side and Trevor on the other. There were two empty Corona bottles on the table in front of him. He looked up at the other men as they came through the door, and chuckled.

“What in the hell is going on?” Charles said.

“Sit down, Charles,” Lavonne said. “And you, too, Leonard.”

The women were drinking Tequila sunrises. The waitress came in to get their drink orders but Charles shook his head and Leonard said, “Do you have any Maalox?” The waitress was nineteen years old and she had never heard of Maalox. “Just bring me some water.” He leaned across the table and said to Lavonne, “My key won’t fit in the lock. There’s a ‘Sold’ sign in front of my house. I want to know what’s going on. I want to know right now.”

Lavonne waited until the waitress had gone out and then she leaned across the table and said, “I think you should calm down, Leonard, and you, too, Charles. We’re going to discuss this like civilized adults and if you two don’t want it getting all over town, I’d suggest you keep your voices down.”

“Goddamn it, Lavonne, don’t you tell me to calm down!” Charles slammed his hand against the table. He pointed a long finger at her. “I know you’re behind this. You and
her.
” He jabbed his finger at Eadie and Trevor said, “Get your finger out of my wife’s face.”

Eadie stared at Trevor. “Mind your own damn business,” she said. “I can handle this myself.”

Charles took a deep breath. His mouth drooped at one corner. “Where’s my c-car?” he said, looking at Lavonne. “I want my car. I want my Duesenberg.”

Trevor raised one eyebrow. “Duesenberg?” he said.

“That’s
my
car.” Charles thumped his chest. “That’s my car and I want it back. I know you two are behind this,” he pointed again at Lavonne but not Eadie. They sat patiently waiting for him to finish venting. “I know you took advantage of Nita and talked her into doing something she didn’t want to do.”

“The only one who took advantage of Nita is you,” Eadie said.

“You shut up!” Charles said. “That’s none of your business!”

Trevor swiveled around in his chair and looked at him steadily and there was in his expression a warning that could not be ignored. Charles made up his mind to leave Eadie Boone out of it from this point forward.

“I want my car! That car belonged to my daddy and I want it back. It’s worth a lot of money and if you think—”

“We sold the car, Charles,” Lavonne said. “The car is gone. Deal with it.”

The waitress came into the room carrying Leonard’s glass of water. “Can I get ya’ll anything right now?” she asked cheerfully and Lavonne said, “No. We’ll order later. Check back in about fifteen minutes.”