Bang. And she was gone.

He stood there without moving. The scent of her-spice, sex, obstinacy-lingered in the air even after the front door shut. That ugly kiss should have put an end to it. Instead, it had started things up all over again.

At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone in Parrish had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion: those endless legs, the sway of her hips, bounce of her breasts, dazzle of her long blond hair.

The boys stumbled over themselves watching her while the music from their boom boxes played the sound track to her life. Billy Ocean pleading with her to get out of his dreams and into his car. Bon Jovi taking one look, then living on a prayer. Cutting Crew more than eager just to die in her arms tonight. Guns n’ Roses, Poison, Whitesnake-all the great hair bands-somehow she’d brought them to their knees and made them beg for the crumbs of her affection.

Sugar Beth was still beautiful. Those man-killer light blue eyes and perfectly symmetrical features would follow her to the grave, and that cloud of blond hair should be fanned out on a satin pillow in a Playboy spread. But the dewy freshness had disappeared. She’d looked older than thirty-three and tougher. She was thinner, too. He’d seen the tendons in the long sweep of her neck, and her wrists looked almost frail. But that dangerous sexuality hadn’t changed. At eighteen, it had been new and indiscriminate. Now it was well honed and much more lethal. The bloom might be off the rose, but the thorns had grown poison tips.

He retrieved his drink and settled in his chair, more depressed by their encounter than he wanted to be. As he gazed around at the luxurious house that his money had bought him, he remembered the sneers of his Irish bricklayer father when Colin had been forced to return to England after he’d been fired from his teaching job.

“Comin’ home in disgrace, are you, then? So much for you and your mum’s fancy ways, boyo. Now you’ll be doin’ honest work like the rest of us.”

For that alone, Colin would never forgive Sugar Beth Carey.

He lifted his glass, but even the taste of ten-year-old scotch couldn’t erase the single-minded defiance he’d seen in Sugar Beth’s eyes. Despite that assault he’d delivered in the disguise of a kiss, she still believed she had the upper hand. He set his glass aside and contemplated exactly how he would disabuse her of that notion.

“Have I done wrong? So many prim persons stared as though they could not believe their eyes!”

GEORGETTE HEYER, The Grand Sophy

CHAPTER THREE

Sugar Beth finished the potato chips that made up her breakfast and gazed across the kitchen at Gordon, who lurked in the door, looking hostile. “Get over it, will you? It’s not my fault Emmett loved me more than you.”

He experimented with his psychotic Christopher Walken expression, but bassets were at a disadvantage when it came to projecting menace. “Pathetic.”

He looked offended.

“All right, punk.” She rose from the table, crossed the living room, and opened the front door. As he trotted past, he tried to bump her, but she knew his tricks and she sidestepped, then followed him out into another chilly, drizzly February morning. Since this was Mississippi, it could be eighty by next week. She prayed she’d be long gone by then.

As Gordon began to sniff around, she gazed over at Frenchman’s Bride. She’d been trying not to think about last night’s encounter with Colin Byrne. At least she hadn’t crumbled until she’d reached the carriage house. Old guilt clung to her like cobwebs. She should have tried harder to make amends, but apparently, she hadn’t grown up as much as she wanted to think.

Why, of all people, did he have to be the one who bought Frenchman’s Bride? If he’d ever spoken to the press about moving back to Parrish, she’d missed it. But then he seemed to shun publicity, and there hadn’t been that many interviews. Even his jacket photo was distant and grainy, or she’d have been better prepared for the dangerous man she’d encountered.

She made her way toward the boxwood hedge that separated their properties and pushed aside the bottom branches. “Right through here, devil dog.”

For once, he didn’t give her trouble.

“Make Mommy proud,” she called out.

He took a few moments sniffing around, then found a satisfactory spot in the middle of the lawn to do his business.

“Nice doggie.”

Despite what she’d told Byrne, she’d read Last Whistle-stop on the Nowhere Line right along with the rest of the country. How could she have ignored the story of people she’d heard about all her life? The black and white families, rich and poor, who’d populated Parrish during the 1940s and 1950s, had included her own grandparents, Tallulah, Leeann’s great-uncle, and, of course, Lincoln Ash.

The public’s appetite for atmospheric Southern nonfiction had been whetted by John Berendt’s runaway best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But while Midnight had dealt with murder and scandal among the wealthy aristocracy of old Savannah, Last Whistle-stop had mined gold from small-town life. Colin Byrne’s story of a Mississippi town recovering from a segregationist legacy had been filled with the eccentric characters and domestic dramas readers loved, along with a strong dose of Southern folklore. Other books had tried to do the same thing, but Byrne’s fondness for the town, combined with his wry observations as an outsider, had put Last Whistle-stop in a league of its own.

She realized Gordon was trotting toward the house, not one bit intimidated by its grandeur. “Come back here.”

Of course he ignored her.

“I mean it, Gordon. I have to go into town, and if you don’t come here right now, I’m leaving without you.”

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he blew her a raspberry.

“You know you’ll try to nip me if I come after you.” He never went so far as to actually hurt her, but he liked to keep her on her toes.

She watched him trot up the steps to the veranda. “Fine. Do me a favor, and don’t bother to come home.” Contrary to the habits of the rest of his breed, Gordon refused to roam. He liked torturing her too much to hit the open road. She stomped back toward the carriage house. What did it say about a person when even her dog hated her?

She grabbed her purse, stuck an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and set out to search the depot for the painting. But as she tramped down the drive to her car, she found a ticket for unlawful overnight parking tucked under her windshield wiper. Terrific. She shoved it beneath the visor and headed for town.

Purlie’s Auto Shop was still doing business, but an office supply store sat in the space once occupied by Spring Fancy Millinery. Diddie had taken her there every year to buy an Easter bonnet, right up until sixth grade, when Sugar Beth had rebelled.

Diddie’s nostrils fluttered like butterfly wings when she was displeased. “You ungrateful child. Exactly how is our Dear Lord supposed to know it’s Resurrection Day if He sees you sittin’ there in church bareheaded like some heathen? Answer me that, Miss Sugar Baby?”

Sugar Beth had fluttered her nostrils right back. “Do you really think Jesus Christ is goin’ to stay in his grave just because I’m not wearin’ a hat?”

Diddie had laughed and gone to find her cigarettes.

A longing for her loving, imperfect mother welled up inside her so strong that it hurt, but her feelings toward her father were all bitter. “He’s not my real father, is he, Diddie? Somebody else got you pregnant, and then Daddy married you.”

“Sugar Beth Carey, you hush your mouth. Just because your father is a reprobate doesn’t mean I am, too. Now I don’t ever want to hear you say anything like that again.”

The fact that Sugar Beth’s silver-blue eyes perfectly mirrored her father’s made it impossible to hold on for long to the fantasy of Diddie having a secret lover.

She supposed her parents’ marriage had been inevitable, but they couldn’t have been more ill-suited. Diddie was the extravagantly beautiful, fun-loving daughter of a local storekeeper. Griffin was the heir to the Carey Window Factory. Short, homely, and intellectually brilliant, Griffin was smitten by Parrish’s reigning belle, while Diddie was secretly contemptuous of the boy she considered an “ugly little toad.” At the same time, she coveted everything a union with him would bring her.

Griffin must have known that Diddie was incapable of giving him the adoration he craved, but he’d married her anyway, then punished her for not loving him by openly living with another woman. Diddie retaliated by appearing not to care. Eventually, Griffin raised the stakes by turning his back on the person Diddie most loved… their daughter.

Despite their mutual hatred, they never considered divorce. Griffin was the town’s economic leader, Diddie its social and political one. Each refused to give up what the other offered, and the marriage ground on, dragging a confused little girl in its destructive wake.

Sugar Beth passed a McDonald’s, spruced up since her high school days, and a travel agency sporting one of the downtown area’s new maroon and green awnings. She turned on Valley. The one-block street, which was anchored at the end by the abandoned railroad depot, had escaped the town’s revitalization efforts, and she parked her car on a crumbling patch of blacktop. As she gazed at the dilapidated redbrick building, she saw the place where Colin Byrne had stood for his fuzzy author photo.

Shingles had blown off the depot’s roof, and ancient graffiti covered the splintered plywood boarding up the windows. Cans and broken bottles littered the weeds by the tracks. Why had Tallulah thought it was so important to preserve this old ruin? But her aunt had been obsessed with local history, the same as Sugar Beth’s father, and apparently she hadn’t seen the wisdom of bulldozing the place.