Where There's Smoke
Janellen’s eyes darted between them, wanting desperately to keep this unspoken truce in force. “Let’s go inside and have a drink together before dinner.”
Jody preceded them into the parlor. She declined a drink but lit a cigarette. “I read that the rebel army confiscated your airplane.” She aimed a plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
“That’s right. Thanks, sis.” He took the scotch over rocks his sister had poured for him. “Doesn’t matter. The guy who rented it to us was hoping we’d crash or that something catastrophic would happen so he could collect the insurance. He needed the cash more than the airplane.”
“I figured it was something like that. You deal with such unscrupulous characters.”
“Speaking of unscrupulous characters,” Janellen said, trying to avoid any nastiness, “Darcy Winston was at the Curl Up and Dye the day I got my perm. She was going on about her daughter Heather and how she and Tanner Hoskins can’t keep their hands off each other. She said before it was over, she might have to turn the garden hose on them.”
Key laughed. Janellen looked at him with perplexity. “Everyone else laughed when she said that. I don’t get it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Janellen,” Jody said impatiently.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Key said. “Go on. What else did Mrs. Winston have to say?”
“When the news bulletin about you and Dr. Mallory came on, she elbowed everybody else out of the way and hogged the TV. When they announced that Mr. Porter wasn’t dead after all, she made a spectacle of herself.”
“In what way?” Key was no longer smiling.
“By laughing. No one else thought it was funny. She crowed. Honestly, that woman gives ‘tacky’ a bad name.”
“She’s a hot little tramp,” Jody said as she flicked ashes into the ashtray. “Fergus thought that marrying a white-trash slut would automatically make her respectable. It didn’t, of course. Underneath her fancy designer clothes, she’s still trash. Fergus has always been a fool.”
Maydale called them to supper and served Key his favorite foods: chicken-fried steaks and roast beef with all the trimmings. For dessert there were two pies—one peach, one pecan—and homemade vanilla ice cream.
Janellen expected him to wolf down the banquet she’d ordered for him, but he ate sparingly. He smiled when talking to her and answered all her questions, but with little elaboration. H
e was polite to Jody and said nothing to goad or provoke her. For a man who had narrowly escaped death at the hands of guerrilla rebels, he was abnormally subdued.
During lapses in conversation, he stared broodingly into space and had to be forcibly drawn back into the present when talk resumed.
Following the meal, Jody excused herself to go upstairs to watch TV in her room. Before she left the dining room, she looked at him and said, “I’m glad you’re all right.”
He stared after her thoughtfully.
“She means it, you know,” Janellen said quietly. “I think she was more worried about you than I was, and I was crazy with it. She had a real turnaround the day we heard that you were alive and on your way home.”
“She looks better than when I left.”
“You noticed!” she exclaimed. “I think so, too. I think she’s getting well.”
He reached out and stroked her cheek, but his smile was sad.
“There’s something else, Key. Something about Mama. Yesterday when I came home from work, I couldn’t find her and went looking through the house. Guess where she was. In Clark’s room, going through his things.”
No longer distracted, he was suddenly alert and interested.
“To my knowledge she hasn’t been in that bedroom since we picked out his burial suit. What possessed her to go in there now?”
“She was going through his things?”
She nodded. “Papers, certificates of merit, yearbooks, memorabilia, memos he’d written while he was a senator. And she was crying. She didn’t even cry when he was buried.”
“I know. I remember.”
It struck her then that Key looked very much now as he had at their brother’s grave site. Although his actions and verbal responses appeared normal, she got the sense that he was only going through the expected motions, just as he had following Clark’s death. He wore a shattered and lost look, as though something incomprehensible had happened.