Buch lesen: «A Plum Orchard novel»

One

“Heaven and a ring o’ fire...”

Under normal circumstances, Marybell Lyman would have laughed at her employer and friend Dixie Davis’s shocked words when she pushed her way into her small basement apartment, stopped dead in her tracks and tipped her head to the side as if she’d just witnessed the second coming.

But this circumstance wasn’t normal.

Dixie stood poised in her doorway for a moment, the cold draft from the late-winter evening ruffling her knee-length burgundy sweater. Dixie, never without words, stared at her, speechless. She tucked a strand of her long auburn hair behind her ear and hummed something else Marybell couldn’t quite hear because of her clogged ears.

Marybell scurried back to her couch without a word, plunking herself down on the new sofa she’d just had delivered. She huddled into her bathrobe, keeping her head down as far as she could without making her nose begin running again.

When her friends from work had all shown up to coddle her with chicken soup and some good ol’ Southern love, she’d panicked. Her heart racing, her head full of cotton, throbbing an endless, crushing beat, she’d battled with whether to answer the door.

No one saw her this way—unmasked—ever, and definitely not Dixie, the owner of the phone sex company where she worked as a phone sex operator.

But it wasn’t as though there was any hiding from the three pretty faces full of concern, pressed against the glass of her front door like a trio of suction-cupped Garfields in the back of a car window.

She couldn’t simply shoo them away or make up some excuse to keep them from barging in even if she truly wanted to. As a whole, Team Call Girls was unstoppable. If you told them no, they yelled, “Bless your heart,” and trampled all over you and your nos with their cute heels.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she thought to pull the shade down over the glass before she’d taken those cold meds and fallen asleep?

Breathe, Marybell. Act natural.

Ha! Easy for the voice inside her head to say. It didn’t have to fend off three gawking mother hens, as well meaning as they were, and remain calm while its insides twisted into a knot fit for a Boy Scout.

LaDawn Jenkins, coworker, friend, best phone sex operator in the universe, stood next to Dixie, a woven basket with a red-checkered napkin covering what Marybell suspected were freshly baked rolls, and cocked her platinum-blond head. “I have rolls,” she mumbled, dropping them on the end table next to her box of tissues. “With butter,” she added, her brow furrowing.

Marybell hunkered farther down in her bathrobe, fighting another violent shudder of chills, almost too feverish to care about her friends seeing her for the first time devoid of what she’d secretly dubbed her “people shield.”

Almost.

She should be in the process of making a break for it. Or at the very least, putting a paper bag over her head. But she’d spent herself simply finding her gel eye mask and answering the door. Her legs were so weak, her chest so congested and tight, it would take everything she had left in her to move again.

Instead, she cast her eyes toward her feet, covered in fuzzy black calf-length socks with the slipper-grippers on the soles.

There’s nowhere to hide but in plain sight now, Marybell Lyman. You’re stewed. Try not to look obvious.

Emmaline Amos, soon to be Emmaline Hawthorne if the way things were shaping up between her and Jax was any indication, almost fell smack into Dixie and LaDawn when she rushed in the front door. The skid of her conservative black pumps screeched to a halt against the wood floor.

She gasped in her “clutch your pearls” way but covered by quickly clamping her lips shut. Naturally, she didn’t mean for her mouth to open before her brain properly filtered her shock. Em was nothing if she wasn’t the epitome of Southern decorum.

That Southern diplomacy was why Dixie had given her the position of general manager at Call Girls Inc. She was tactful, kind and able to appease even the crankiest of customers.

And she always did what was right and decorous—even if it killed her. Though, mostly this behavior was due to her incredibly kind heart. She’d earned Marybell’s deepest respect since coming to Call Girls, newly single after her ex-husband had all but abandoned her and her boys to live his life as a cross-dresser.

Em was down-home tough. Soft and pliable like Play-Doh on the outside, but made of steel parts of resolve on the inside. There wasn’t a coon dog’s chance in purgatory she’d acknowledge just how astonished she was.

Instead, she carried in a large Crock-Pot bowl with two heart-covered oven mitts over her hands to protect them from the heat. Em assessed Marybell for a moment, brief and fleeting, before her eyes flickered, and proper Em was firmly back in place. “We brought you...” She almost stuttered the words, gazing down at Marybell. But then she caught herself reacting and forced her shoulders to square and her spine to straighten. Em cleared her throat. “Soup,” she finished with a warm smile full of perfect white teeth and ruby-red lipstick. “Chicken soup—for your poor, flu-riddled soul, you sweet, phlegmy angel.” Em set the Crock-Pot on the old chest Marybell used as a coffee table, dropping the mitts next to it.

Marybell murmured a thank-you into the collar of her bathrobe.

Em flapped her hands in the way she always did, signifying that her kind gesture was much ado about nothing. “Did you really expect we’d let you suffer all alone? Not on my watch, miss. Mercy, we’ve been worried to death about you ever since you called in sick earlier today, sugarplum. Dixie said you sounded like a congested bullfrog, and weak as a kitten to boot. You hafta feed that cold. Which is why we all cooked up something and forced our way in here like the interfering henpeckers we are.”

“Rolls,” LaDawn repeated again stiffly, clearly still experiencing aftershocks of the “holy Hannah in a wet suit” variety. “I brought rolls. With butter.” She pointedly tapped the basket.

Marybell smiled in an abstract, afraid-to-meet-their-eyes way, too cold to pull her hands from the confines of her bathrobe to take a roll, too rattled to move. “Yum, butter. How kind. Thanks, girls.” She dabbed at her eyes, red-rimmed and drippy under the mask.

Now that formalities and justifications were made, she waited, quietly, if not inquisitively, for an answer to the unspoken question.

Why haven’t we ever seen who the real Marybell Lyman is?

They all waited.

For an explanation about her appearance, with plenty of side-eye and questions in the form of an entire conversation played out with only the expressions on their faces.

Em folded her fists at her waist, resting them on her slender hips, her teeth working the corner of her lower lip.

Dixie placed her forearm over her chest, resting her other arm in the crook of it, and cupped her chin with her hand, blatantly stumped.

LaDawn just left the opportunity for flies to congregate in her mouth, which was now, unabashedly, wide-open.

Marybell waited, too. Her fuzzy, medicated brain was searching for a way to handle this without turning it into a topic of long discussion wherein she explained why no one ever saw her freshly scrubbed face.

Under any other circumstances, mentally guessing who’d crack first under the pressure of etiquette would have been as much fun as watching Nanette Pruitt bluster when Marybell sat next to her in church and sang “Onward, Christian Soldier,” loud and entirely off-key.

The stunning difference between this MB—sans red-and-green-spiked Mohawk, heavy eye makeup, nose ring and facial piercings—and the one sitting before them had to be killing them.

This was the Marybell Lyman not a solitary soul had seen in at least four years, except her bathroom mirror just before she spent an hour applying the “people shield.”

If she were a bettin’ kind, she’d lay bets on LaDawn, the most vocal of their group, and while Southern to her last breath, she was also unashamedly opinionated and outspoken. There was no subtext to LaDawn, and it was probably one of the things Marybell loved most about her. She was an ex-lady of the evening, or as she jokingly called her former profession, a “companionator.” Words weren’t something LaDawn struggled with.

Yet nothing. The old clock on her coffee-with-cream-painted wall ticked away the seconds while each woman internally struggled with her appearance and fought not to visibly squirm.

Marybell’s sudden sneeze into a crumpled tissue made all of them jump, forcing her to address the issue. If she made light of it, they would, too, and she needed them to make light. She prayed they’d follow her lead.

“My nose ring is at the cleaners,” she teased, breaking the ice with a honking snort into a brand-new tissue.

Dixie finally spoke, her voice just above a whisper, as though if someone heard her, she’d be tagged responsible for letting the cat out of the bag. “If I didn’t know this was your apartment, I’d never have—”

“Known you from a hole in the wall!” LaDawn crowed, her voice now located. She planted her hands on her hips, encased in her usual skintight jeans, and pushed her hair over her shoulder with daggerlike-tipped fingers of glittery purple. “Dang, girl.” She pulled the words from her lips as if she were pulling a thick milk shake from a straw. “You’d better hurry up and get better so you can do up that hair before the town fair starts next week. I’ll never be able to find my way to the cotton candy stand if that Mohawk o’ yours isn’t stickin’ out in every direction, pointin’ me to the land of sugary pink heaven.” She chuckled, leaning forward to tweak a wet strand of Marybell’s hair with affectionate fingers.

Marybell sniffled, wincing at the sharp tug to her sinuses, afraid to let loose a sigh of relief. Keeping her chin tucked inside her bathrobe, she forced a chuckle. “Oh, you hush, LaDawn. You don’t need me to do that. You have Doc Johnson to light your way.”

LaDawn chuffed, popping her dark-purple-lined lips. “Don’t you talk to me about Doc Johnson. That man hasn’t come callin’ in three solid days.”

Em, obviously unable to stand it anymore, plopped down on the couch next to her, directing LaDawn to bring her a bowl and ladle from the kitchen. She smoothed the fan of her skirt over her knees. “First off, Cat sends her love. She didn’t want to, but we made her stay home. Wouldn’t be good for her to catch somethin’ from you with the baby on the way.”

Marybell loved Cat Butler. A free spirit, a hugger, one of her first real friends, and now madly in love with Flynn McGrady and well on her way to beginning their family. “Tell her I said thank you, and keep that bun in the oven safe.”

Em popped her lips. “So, how is it that we’ve been friends for all this time now, and we’ve never seen the true Marybell?” She plucked at the eye mask, making Marybell swat at her hands. “Well, almost the true Marybell. You’ve seen us in all sorts of manner, miss. Drunk, seminaked, riding a mechanical bull, for heaven’s sake. Fair is fair.” She asked the question as though it were some slight for Marybell never to have revealed herself without her makeup and gel-spiked hair.

She really wanted to ask why they’d surprise-attacked her with food and hospitality when she’d expressly told Dixie she’d be fine and back at work within the week. All she needed was some rest and cold medication. She’d done that with the fervent hope they wouldn’t catch her exactly as they’d done.

But leave it to Em and Dixie to have to see for themselves she wasn’t going to do something as dramatic as die of the latest illness they’d hunted down on WebMD.

Still, her friends made her smile. They were a reason to get up these days when for so long, there wasn’t any reason at all.

They were loving, nurturing machines, the lot of them. Give them an ailment, and they were fixing it with age-old home remedies and more smothering love than you could shake a stick at. How could she be angry with them for caring about her?

But she hadn’t been prepared for their insistent knock on her door. It left her more than uneasy without her cloak of heavy makeup and piercings in place. There was always the chance, even in small-town Plum Orchard, Georgia, she’d be recognized. The people here had been ever so slow to come to terms with how different her appearance was from the likes of them.

Yet she’d sucked up the strange looks and whispers behind hands at Madge’s Kitchen where she had dinner almost every night before her shift for a reason. It beat the livin’ daylights out of the alternative.

Rather than answer Em, Marybell deflected, looking her friend square in the eye. She was the master of deflection. “Do I ever see the true Emmaline?” she asked with mock innocence, glad for the cloak of her congestion concealing her weak attempt at subterfuge.

“Bah! You most certainly do see the true Emmaline. You see her with lipstick.” Em pursed her lips, dragging a throw from the back of Marybell’s couch to cover her with it. She tucked the edges under her chin with gentle fingers, pressing the back of her hand to Marybell’s forehead with a wince.

Marybell coughed, turning her head and using her arm to shield Em from her germs. “Exactly.” She smiled.

“Gravy,” Dixie murmured, patting her on the back while setting a cup of steaming lemon tea laced with honey on the end table, her eyes perusing Marybell’s freshly scrubbed face. “Even stricken with the flu and a gel eye mask, you’re beautiful. I don’t like this turn of events Ms. MB,” she joked with her infamous flirty smile. “I’m glad Caine didn’t see you without your goo or I’d be a goner. Plus, you’re younger than me by six years. I simply won’t have you, or anyone in this town, bein’ prettier than me.”

Em clucked her tongue, shooting Dixie a chiding finger. “Are you sayin’ Caine wouldn’t fall for her with her makeup and the pointy green-and-red things all over her head? Are you sayin’ he doesn’t love you for what’s on your insides, Dixie Davis? That he’s nothing more than a shallow shell of a man with a heartbeat and a chiseled jaw?”

Marybell giggled, letting a little of her tension ease. Conversation successfully deflected. “I don’t think you have to say anything, Dixie. Caine can’t see anyone but you, whether you have insides or not. Now, I thought I told y’all to stay away so you don’t catch this nasty bug. Surely you don’t want to leave me to answer everyone’s calls because you’re all too sick to do your jobs, do you? Especially if I have to answer LaDawn’s calls. I’m not nearly the Jedi master with the flyswatter she is. I always miss and end up swatting myself.”

The joke at the Call Girls office, situated in the guesthouse of dearly departed multimillionaire Landon Wells, a man who’d given Marybell everything when she’d had nothing, was LaDawn’s skill with her beloved flyswatter.

She was like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchakus. Daryl from The Walking Dead with a bow and arrow. Phone sex operators throughout the land should all cower in fear when LaDawn broke out the flyswatter.

It was really just an audio prop for her BDSM clients to hear over the phone, but she fooled them into believing it was a flogger every time. For her birthday, they’d collectively had a real flyswatter bronzed with her name on it, which she proudly displayed in her office on her desk.

Dixie rolled her eyes at Em. “First off, not a chance we’d let you go this alone. There’s nothing like some love and coddlin’ when you’re so sick. Second, you hush, Em. I’m not saying that at all, and you know it. I love our Marybell—even today, nose redder than a tube of crimson lipstick and eyes drippin’ from behind that mask like a leaky faucet.”

Marybell took the tea with a grateful sigh, still keeping her eyes semiaverted over the rim of the china. “I think what Dixie’s saying is, I’m not Caine’s type.”

That was okay, too. She was no one’s type, and that was just as well. Buried in small-town Georgia, she’d never have to worry about the temptation of finding someone whose type she was.

There were few available men in town, anyway, but the men here liked women who wore pretty dresses, the proper-height heel for the appropriate time of day and subtle makeup. Their hair was always long and flowing, or up and smooth. It wasn’t riding a colored line along the tops of their heads, and they certainly weren’t wearing clunky black work boots and leopard-skin leggings slashed as if a knife had been taken to them.

LaDawn sat down on the chest, scooting the Crock-Pot to the side, tilting Marybell’s chin upward to look her in the eye. Well, as much as her cooling gel eye mask allowed, anyway.

Her heart stopped cold for a moment, her fingers trembling on the handle of the teacup. Caught. She was caught. They knew who she was and her safe, quiet, if not terribly exciting life would be over.

That clawing anxiety, usually reserved for late-night insomnia and mentally backtracking every move she made, pushed its way to lodge in her raw throat.

LaDawn’s lips, the color purple meant to match her nails, turned into a smile. She plucked at a strand of Marybell’s now drying, shoulder-length hair “As I live and breathe. You’re a natural blonde, aren’t you? How do you get all that red-and-green gunk in your hair every day? You know, I’d hate you if it wasn’t for Brugsby’s Drugstore and Miss Clairol.”

Marybell gulped before she forced a smile, praying she could stare LaDawn down without looking away. “It’s a spray. It washes out easy. And you’d love me any ol’ way, LaDawn. Who’d bring you those frosty pink doughnuts and coffee from Madge’s on the night shift, if not for me? Not even Doc Johnson does that. I’m forever your girl.”

LaDawn’s eye grew critical, though it still twinkled beneath her purple eye shadow and glittery gold eyeliner. “And when did you stop shavin’ half your eyebrow off? Next thing you know, you’ll be pluckin’ ’em into a fine arch like the rest of us ninnies. Why, if this keeps up, you might even wear a dress. Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’? Our Marybell in anything other than ripped-up or spotted with some kind of animal-print britches?” She chuckled deep and rich.

Conformity. Blessed be.

Em rubbed Marybell’s arm and smiled before pulling her frozen fingers into her hand and warming them. “Never you mind LaDawn and her teasin’. I think you’re hair’s pretty as a picture. All that natural curl leaves me with ugly envy in my heart. I don’t know why you hide it behind black eye shadow and all those colors and hair gel. It looks like it takes an awful lot of work to get it to stand up straight like someone scared the life outta you, but I don’t give a fig either way. I like the way you stare society and all its preconceived notions right down, look ’em square in the eye, and dare ’em to say anything. I like it especially when you do it to Louella Palmer. It always makes me giggle till I swear I’m gonna wet myself when her eyes are forced to give you the look of disdain and you growl and snap your teeth at her.”

Rage against the machine.

Marybell squeezed Em’s hand. Her snarling at Louella Palmer, the most hateful woman she’d ever encountered, was all part of the act to keep everyone she didn’t allow into her circle at bay.

Marybell lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I have a gift. Some people paint. I snarl. If I didn’t have my hair gelled up like I’d been scared half to death, she wouldn’t be afraid of me. Louella fears what she doesn’t understand. Besides, you just like when I growl at her because it keeps her too busy tanglin’ with me to hatch another plot against you and Dixie,” she quipped, accepting the dose of thick emerald-green cold medicine LaDawn handed her, chugging it down like a shot of tequila.

“You’re a wingman for the ages, MB. No doubt,” Dixie assured with her familiar warmth, rubbing her arms and shivering. “So explain to me why it’s so cold in here? Surely this isn’t on purpose, is it?” Dixie’s brow creased, her pretty face lining with concern. “Are you conserving heat for budgetary reasons? I won’t have it with it being so cold out and you ragin’ with flu, Marybell. A raise—I’ll give you a raise,” she offered, pushing through her purse to find her phone and make a note of it. “Em, turn up that heat while I let Nella know, would you?”

Dixie in a nutshell. Generous, funny, gorgeous and loyal to the core. Plum Orchard legend had it back in high school she was once feared for her horrible pranks.

Yet she’d come home just a few months ago, emotionally broken and cash poor only to turn around and win, in what the folks of Plum Orchard called the “phone sex games,” the entirety of the company Marybell worked for.

Since then, Dixie’d redeemed herself for the most part with nearly everyone who’d once held a grudge against her—well, everyone except the snotty Magnolias, the group of women who considered themselves the backbone of fine Southern breeding and ran Plum Orchard as if they were the mob.

Though, the people of Plum Orchard still didn’t love that not only did she own a phone sex company, but she consorted with her employees on a regular basis. Some of them still made no bones about sayin’ so.

Oddly, those same people who frowned upon her and the wicked women of Call Girls sure didn’t mind Dixie and her fiancé, Caine Donovan, funneling their alleged ill-gotten gains into town functions and fund-raisers for the elementary school.

Either way, Marybell didn’t give a hoot about the things Dixie had once done when she was just a teenager. Not a one of these set-in-their-ways folk were above making mistakes. Small towns had a way of holding a grudge the likes of which she’d never seen.

But Marybell had liked Dixie from the moment she’d been assigned by Cat as her guide to the world of the phone sex industry. Dixie had risen above ridicule and cruel attacks, and she’d defended the women of Call Girls right in front of God and man. Now, several months later, Marybell liked her even more.

And she didn’t want to lose Dixie, or any of them, on the chance they might recognize her. Knowing who she really was would create an invasion the likes of which Plum Orchard had never seen. But it wouldn’t just invade her life; it would invade the women’s lives. Women she’d come to care a great deal for, and she’d die before she let that happen.

Her gut tightened with the fear of loss in that way it always did—uncomfortable, choking her from the inside out. The fear that almost never entirely went away—even after all this time.

Always. It was always with her. Sometimes the panic muted, became a dull roar, but it never truly left. It hovered around the fringes of her life, poking at her like an animal in a cage, reminding her.

Em’s voice interrupted her private misery. She stood over the thermostat, studying it. “It says it’s eighty-five degrees in here, Dixie, but that can’t be right.” Em had a gift for most things DIY. Except anything electrical, as evidenced by the enormous hole Jax Hawthorne had in his backyard gazebo when she’d decided it would be pretty to put in a paddle fan with a light.

“It’s broken,” Marybell croaked, her nose itchy and raw. “And put your bags of money away, Dixie Davis,” she teased on a cough. “I don’t need a raise. You pay me just fine, thank you. I just forgot to ask Miss Carter to fix it with the warm spell we had not long ago. Leave it be, Dixie. I’ll have it taken care of when I’m better.”

She loved the basement apartment she’d rented from Blanche Carter. This apartment was the first place she’d called home in four years. It harbored all the things she’d lovingly collected when she finally decided it was safe to stay in Landon’s, and then Dixie’s, employ. But it was mighty cold in the winter.

Dixie planted her hands on her hips. “I can’t, in good conscience, leave you here to freeze to death. Blanche is in Atlanta till Tuesday and the weatherman said it’s going to be down in the thirties this weekend. With you so sick, it’ll just make it worse. I won’t have it.”

The cold medicine was beginning to work its magic, leaving her too exhausted to fend Dixie’s mothering off.

Suddenly Em was digging in her purse, too, pulling out her phone, her beautiful blue eyes lit up by the face of her phone. “Oh, I know! I’ll call Jax’s brother—he’s a licensed electrician. He’ll come take a look. If he can’t do it today, then you’re comin’ home with me until he can, MB. Hear me? Or maybe with Dixie. Sanjeev’ll take fine care of you.”

The cold meds LaDawn had given her began to affect her train of thought. Was it irony she could pound down a half bottle of vodka shots with the best of them and not feel a thing, but give her a cold remedy meant to help you sleep, and she was a goner?

Words became hazy, her fear of exposure growing dull. She realized her head was falling back to the couch, yet she had no energy to stop it. Hands comforted her, moved over her to lift her feet up on the couch. Dishes clanged in faraway tones and then someone with warm fingers brushed her hair from her face, pressing a heating pad to her chest and dropping a kiss on her burning forehead just before she succumbed to the quiet of her stuffy head.

Though she did remember to do one thing before she allowed her drug-induced haze to take over. It was as important to her as her “people shield” and had become almost a superstition of sorts. Or maybe it was just a stinkin’ crutch.

That’s probably what a therapist would say. Be it crutch, superstition, good-luck charm, whatever, no matter where Marybell Lyman was, who she was with, before she laid her head on a pillow and closed her eyes, she said a quick prayer just in case the universe really was one big ball of positive thinking. It was the prayer she said every night before she went to sleep.

Thank you for all these wonderful blessings, for food to eat, for my friends and for my job.

But please, please don’t take them away.