The Ladies of Garrison Gardens (2 page)

Chapter Two

LAUREL

2004

A
LITTLE ALLEY
alongside the one-story brick building that housed the
Charles Valley Gazette
functioned as an unofficial parking lot for the newspaper's staff. Hank parked his car there, and Laurel had too, when she was his assistant. In the past week, a beat-up blue Buick had been in her old spot every time Laurel drove by—which she had done a little too often to be totally healthy. The presence of the new car confirmed the rumor that Hank had hired a new assistant. Again.

But the Buick wasn't in the alley this Saturday morning. Nor was it parked on the street in front of the newspaper office. Hit by a sudden impulse, Laurel pulled into her old space, walked quickly to the big bay windows in the front of the newspaper building, and looked in. No one was inside. When she'd been his assistant, Hank had insisted that she be on duty at the crack of dawn on Saturday. She'd done it because he threatened to fire her if she refused, and because the
Gazette
was the only newspaper in town and it made her feel special to work there. Her other options for employment had all involved food services.

She checked the street quickly. The tourists who would be swarming around in a few hours were still sleeping in their beds in the resort or in the less pricey motels and B and Bs that jammed the area. The locals, who wouldn't be caught dead in tourist territory on the weekend, were nowhere around. She took a set of keys out of her purse—her spare set of the office keys Hank had forgotten to take when he dumped her—and let herself into the
Gazette
building.

Inside, it was dark and still relatively cool. Later in the day, the heat would accumulate under the tin roof and drift downward, defeating the efforts of the ancient air conditioner and turning the place into a hot box. The newspaper took up the entire building, including a basement that was used as the morgue. At the back of the ground floor, where the air rarely circulated, was her desk—what used to be her desk. In front was Hank's desk, and in between was the space with the computers where she and Hank used to lay out the paper in an all-night marathon each week.

Hank had paid her a salary that was low enough to qualify her for food stamps, and there were undoubtedly laws against the working conditions she'd put up with, to say nothing of the hours. She'd had the job from hell. And she missed it like hell.

She stood in the empty space, breathing in the quiet. Ironically, what she missed most of all was the Saturday morning shit shift. The time alone in the silent office had been hers for writing and thinking. That was when she worked on her story for the next week and checked the issue that had just come out for mistakes they'd been too busy to catch. Laurel was murder on punctuation and spelling, a fixation that would have surprised most people who knew her. She had a reputation—well earned, she had to admit—for being a wild child. Actually, white trash was more like it.

The newspaper could have been hers. Hank had been toying with the idea of selling it for a couple of years, and Peggy had offered to buy it for her. Peggy Garrison had been her friend, as were the two other members of a trio of older women known in town as the three Miss Margarets. They were Dr. Margaret Long, Margaret Elizabeth Banning, and Mrs. Margaret Garrison, known as Dr. Maggie, Miss Li'l Bit, and Miss Peggy, respectively.

Dr. Maggie was in her late eighties and still ran the clinic where she'd been treating patients since the 1930s. Miss Li'l Bit was in her late seventies and had a pedigree as impressive as the fortune she used to fund charities throughout the state. Miss Peggy was in her mid-sixties, and while her family tree might not have been as illustrious as the Bannings', the fortune she'd inherited when she became the Widow Garrison was even bigger than Miss Li'l Bit's. And she used it just as generously.

Most of Charles Valley addressed the trio formally with the emphasis on the titles “Doctor” and “Miss.” Laurel was one of the privileged few who was close enough to call them simply Maggie, Li'l Bit, and Peggy. She was the only person in town who joined them every afternoon on the porch of Li'l Bit's antebellum home to chat and sip the beverage of her choice as the sun went down.

There could not have been a more unlikely combo than thirty-five-year-old Laurel and the three older women, who were all icons of Charles Valley respectability. Laurel's past was, to put it politely, colorful. Her mother, Sara Jayne, had been a drunk with a high profile at the major and minor honky-tonks along Highway 22. Her daddy, who hadn't lived long enough to see Laurel born or give her his name, was equally well known as a murderer who then went out and got himself killed over the affections of a black woman in a scandal that still lived in the hearts and minds of many of the townspeople, even though it was thirty-six years old. The fact that Laurel Selene, with her family history, was welcome at the sacred afternoon gathering of the three Miss Margarets drove the Charles Valley grapevine nuts.

But two years ago, on a cold autumn evening, the three women had told Laurel a secret—one they'd kept since before she was born. In doing it, they had given her a kind of peace about her past, but they'd put themselves at great risk. If Laurel had chosen to betray them she could have destroyed them and might even have sent them to jail. But Laurel had kept their secret, and the three Miss Margarets considered her a friend for life. Only they weren't the three Miss Margarets anymore, because Peggy was gone.

Laurel swallowed hard, the way she always had to when she thought of Peggy, and looked around the
Gazette
office. She and Peggy had been alone on Li'l Bit's porch the day Peggy had offered to buy the
Gazette
for her. Li'l Bit was inside the house, and Maggie hadn't come over from the clinic yet. Peggy had wrapped up her pitch by saying, “Hank wants to get out of the newspaper business, which does seem to prove there's a God, and I'd love to watch you try your hand at it. What do you say?”

Peggy was sitting in the wicker rocking chair that was her spot on the porch. Her hair was the shade of blond favored by the starlets of her youth; under an expert makeup job, her once-beautiful face showed the wear and tear of her ongoing relationship with Jack Daniel's. She was smiling at Laurel with the kind of affection that felt dangerous if you had spent your whole life not trusting anyone. “I would have loved having a daughter like you, Laurel,” she said softly.

For a few days Laurel had been thrilled about the idea of taking over the
Gazette
. She floated around in a happy dream of a revamped newspaper that would never again cover bake sales as if they were hard news, devote its entire editorial page to the ramblings of the elderly minister of the Baptist church, or suck up to the Garrisons. The
Charles Valley Gazette
would be relevant and honest, she told herself.

But then her devil voices kicked in and demanded to know who the hell she thought she was? She'd left college before finishing her first semester. She'd never taken a course in journalism or business. The local merchants who kept the
Charles Valley Gazette
afloat by advertising in it would never trust her. Hank was one of them; he went to their Rotary and Kiwanis meetings, laughed at their jokes, and sat next to them in church on Sunday. Laurel hadn't been inside a church since her mother's funeral, and her idea of humor did not include hoary dumb-blonde gags, bad puns, or the word
titties
. Add to all of this her family history. And her dicey relationship with Charles Valley's gossip mill.

Laurel walked a fine line with the town of her birth, hating it almost as much as she loved it. She'd never leave Charles Valley; it was her home, but sometimes she wondered how she was going to keep from going crazy living there.

One thing she was sure of, after she thought over Peggy's offer: The
Charles Valley Gazette
was more than eighty years old, and she was not going to be the one who ran it into the ground. So the next time Peggy brought up buying the newspaper, Laurel said no thank you. “It's not that I don't appreciate it, Peggy,” she said, stumbling around for the right words. “It's real generous of you, and I'm flattered you think I could do it, and I—”

“I'm sorry I scared you, sugar.” Peggy had a way of cutting to the chase that could be unnerving.

“I wouldn't say I'm afraid, exactly—”

“Sure you are. I came at you too fast with the idea. Don't you fuss, we'll talk about it again.”

But they never did, because a few weeks later Peggy mentioned she'd been having some pain in her back. So there was a trip to Atlanta for tests, and a couple of desperate weeks of waiting until the doctor at Emory said the words
pancreatic cancer
. Then Laurel got fired, and Peggy had the exploratory surgery that confirmed the doctor's diagnosis. After that there was the roller-coaster ride of radiation that only worked for a while and chemo that didn't work at all. Laurel was on hand for all of it, because she'd said she would be and because she wanted to be. The subject of the newspaper didn't come up again. But by that point, although Laurel didn't know it, Peggy had made other plans.

In the dark office of the
Gazette
, Laurel rubbed her eyes, which had begun to sting. She'd never begrudged the way Peggy's illness took over her own life, but she'd known from watching her mother die that it would have been easier if she'd had something else to keep her busy. So even though she'd been fired, she'd gone back to Hank.

“I don't need a full-time job,” she'd said. “I probably wouldn't have the time now, because of helping Peggy. But if you could just let me write a story for you every now and then. Or let me do the copyediting; you know how good I am at that. I need something to take my mind off things, Hank—just a little.”

Hank let her beg; then he turned her down with his biggest Rotary Club smile. Even though he had to cancel the paper for the next two weeks because he still hadn't found anyone who could take her place.

Laurel's eyes had stopped stinging. “After everything I did for this place,” she said out loud to the
Gazette
office. “After the way I used to stay up all night getting the damn paper out for that dickweed—”

The sound of her own voice rattling around the empty room stopped her. Because she suddenly realized just how much the dickweed would love to find her breaking and entering. Clearly, she should get the hell out while she still could. Instead, she marched to the back of the room where there was a door marked
PRIVATE—EMPLOYEES ONLY.

In a town that prided itself on offering every amenity to friends and strangers, Hank had what was probably the only locked restroom. He was protective of it in a way that suggested an early potty training Laurel didn't want to think about. When she'd first started working for him, he'd tried to make her go next door and use the ladies' room in the Sweet Home Café until she shamed him out of it.

She found the right key on her chain, unlocked the door, went inside, and peed in Hank's sacred commode. Without covering the seat with toilet paper.

After violating Hank's plumbing, she turned on the light and studied herself in the mirror over his sink. The face that stared back at her was a series of circles: round cheeks, round brown eyes, a round mouth, and a rounded nose. It was an old-fashioned country face, free of makeup, because she had no patience for it, and framed by a mass of red hair she usually kept pulled back in an unhip ponytail. She'd never land on the cover of a magazine, but that was fine with her. She'd always had her own way of being memorable. When she was in the mood, she'd let her hair fly free, put on a tank top, jeans with a wide belt, and cowboy boots. It was a tried-and-true outfit that showed off her good boobs, small waist, and the long legs she'd inherited from her ma. With a couple of beers in her she could pretty much get any kind of attention she wanted—and some she regretted after the fact.

Laurel looked at her face in the mirror. “Oh, what the hell,” she said. She opened her purse and took out the black and gold makeup case Peggy had given her.

“I hope you don't take this wrong,” Peggy had said tentatively, “but you're such a pretty girl. . . .” She'd trailed off. Because that was two years ago and all of the three Miss Margarets were tentative with her then. In some ways, Li'l Bit and Maggie still were. But Peggy had reached out.

“When I was young, I wanted a baby more than anything,” she'd said, when she gave Laurel the makeup case. “A little girl. I was going to name her Amanda. Don't tell Li'l Bit and Maggie, but I used to talk to her sometimes. I told her she'd never be afraid of anything, and if anyone ever tried to call her Mandy she should spit in their eye.” She let out a wicked little giggle, and for a moment Laurel could see how she'd managed to capture the heart of Dalton Garrison so many years ago. Then the giggle died. “I never did have her, of course,” Peggy said. “But if I had, she'd be about your age.”

Laurel dumped the contents of the makeup case into Hank's sink and found the mascara wand. “This one's for you, Peggy,” she murmured, as she began to unscrew the top. The mascara was old and dry because she never used it, although for a while, when Peggy was bedridden and near the end, Laurel had tried for her sake.