Part 5 (1/2)
A very tall, broad-shouldered person walked into the kitchen and reached for a piece of the bread in the basket. Melanie gave his hand a halfhearted slap.
Vivien craned her neck upward to look at the young man who used to be her nephew. ”What did you do, put him on the rack and stretch him?”
”If only,” Shelby said.
”Is that really you, Trip?” Vivien ignored Trip's grimace. Going up on her toes to reach it, she gave his downy cheek a quick peck. ”You must have grown a whole foot in the last year. I didn't think that was possible.”
”Only for mutants,” Shelby, an apparently equal-opportunity offender, pointed out from behind her.
Melanie ignored her daughter's comment. ”He did grow almost eight inches last year. He's already taller than J.J. was and the doctor claims he's still growing. Too bad his game isn't basketball instead of baseball.”
”Like he even plays baseball anymore.” Shelby was like a rain cloud intent on sprinkling her displeasure all over everybody's parade.
Trip flushed but didn't speak. Munching on a second piece of garlic bread, he turned and went into the family room. The TV flared to life. A moment later a cartoon character began to shout at the top of his lungs.
Melanie gave her daughter an irritated look and pushed the salad bowl and the basket of bread toward Shelby. ”Since you've gotten rid of your brother, you can finish setting the table.”
Shelby's sigh was drawn out and put-upon. Vivien thanked G.o.d that setting her straight wasn't her responsibility. She was preparing to hurry everybody to the table while she could still keep herself from falling on the food and wolfing it down with her hands when the doorbell rang. She was the only one who registered surprise.
”Trip?” Melanie called. ”Turn off the TV and get the door, please!”
Trip didn't answer, but the TV snapped off and her nephew brushed by on his way to the front door.
”Hey, man.” The voice in the foyer was male and upbeat. It sounded familiar, but Vivien couldn't quite place it. ”How're you doing?”
If Trip responded, he did so too quietly to reach them, though she saw Melanie straining, just as she was, to hear. The front door closed and two sets of footsteps sounded on the wood floor of the foyer.
Vivien froze when she recognized the man whose arm was slung so casually across Trip's shoulders and who sauntered into the kitchen as if it were his own. It was Clay Alexander, J.J.'s longtime friend and campaign manager; the only other person at the hunting lodge where Jordan Jackson Jr. had died.
Their gazes locked as he removed his arm from Trip's shoulder and accepted a kiss on the cheek from Melanie. ”Welcome, Vivi,” he said. ”It's good to have you back in town. I know Mel's been looking forward to spending time with you.”
Clay Alexander was tall, though not quite so tall as Trip, with the lean build of a long-distance runner. His hair was a dark brown bordering on black and his gray eyes were wide set under well-arched brows. He'd obviously come straight from work and wore a European-cut black suit with a white-on-white striped s.h.i.+rt and a red tie with a bold diagonal stripe. The words *male model' flitted through Vivi's brain. He could have stepped off the cover or out of the pages of a glossy men's magazine, but his gray eyes were far from vacuous; they gleamed with intelligence and other things she couldn't quite identify.
Vivien hadn't seen him since J.J.'s funeral, but it was clear the same could not be said for the Jackson family. Even the up-to-now-surly Shelby allowed him to ruffle her hair in greeting as if she were a child.
Clearly at home, he removed his jacket and slung it over the back of the nearest barstool then pinched a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the counter.
”Mel told me you were coming to . . . recuperate.” He neatly sidestepped the details of her injury and his tone was casually friendly, matter-of-fact. But there was something about the way he used her sister's nickname that made Vivi think of a dog who'd already marked his territory and wanted to make sure the other dogs knew it.
”What a pleasant surprise to see you,” Vivi said and saw a blush bloom on Melanie's cheeks.
”Clay took us out for dinner last week and I figured since I was cooking in your honor it would be a good time to reciprocate,” Melanie said.
Clay reached for the open bottle of wine. ”Vivi?”
”No, thanks.” She watched him pour a gla.s.s for himself, then top off Melanie's without asking.
During dinner Clayton Alexander presided over his former best friend's table like it was his, asking the kids about school, trying to draw Trip out, for which Melanie kept shooting him grateful looks. He did this from J.J.'s former seat at the end opposite Melanie, which no one but Vivien seemed to find significant.
It all looked very Oedipal to Vivien, but then she made her living tapping into undercurrents beneath the surface, examining relations.h.i.+ps and words for hidden meanings and unspoken intentions.
It wasn't as easy as usual to do this what with the hunger that she couldn't seem to satisfy no matter how many helpings of lasagna she consumed. She caught the others watching her surrept.i.tiously, but was far too busy eating to try to make excuses. In truth, it was hard to actually lift one's head from one's plate to a.s.sess anything when one was completely preoccupied with the act of eating.
Still, there was something about the careful way Clay watched her that made Vivien's investigative antennae jangle. Once when she reached for the basket of garlic bread she accidentally caught his eye and thought she saw a flash of guilt in them. But guilt about what?
Vivi thought back to the first news reports about J.J.'s death. The press had raced to the hunting lodge in the north Georgia Mountains hot on the heels of the local sheriff and the team he'd called in from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The death had been ruled accidental and no one but the seediest tabloids had claimed that the investigation was anything but thorough. At the time it hadn't occurred to Vivi to question the findings. She'd been in the middle of an investigative report of her own, one that had consumed her for close to six months, and everything had seemed clear-cut.
But Clay Alexander had been the only one there with J.J. He'd found the body and called the sheriff. And now he seemed an integral part of his dead friend's family.
Vivien thought about the guilty look she'd intercepted. And felt like a bull who'd just had a red flag waved in its face.
8.
ANGELA RICHMAN STARED into the lens of the camera, trying to feel bridal.
”Do you think you could work up a smile, luv?” Brian Jennings, her partner in Photo Ops, stepped out from behind the camera, big and rangy and relentlessly upbeat. ”You are getting married to a perfectly lovely chap who seems to wors.h.i.+p the ground you tread on. And the gown's not bad, either.” He stepped closer to pull the white satin train of the Norma Kamali strapless gown into a semicircle at her feet, then rearranged the veil behind her shoulder.
”Sorry.” Angela willed her shoulders to relax and tried to resist licking her overly made-up lips. ”I just can't get used to being on this end. It's way too weird. Can't you just squeeze off a couple shots so we can go have a gla.s.s of wine?”
He didn't dignify the suggestion with a response, but he did bring a gla.s.s of water from a nearby table, held it up for her, and positioned the straw between her lips.
Angela had been photographing others since high school when the Nikon she received for her fifteenth birthday had become her entree to the things that other students seemed to do so easily: the football and basketball games, cheerleading tryouts, student council elections, prom. No one but her parents had ever thought to photograph her; perhaps they didn't have lenses that were wide enough. More likely they figured, quite rightly, that she wouldn't want a reminder of how overweight she was, how completely outside the realm of attractiveness she had fallen with her carrot red hair and her full moon of a freckled face.
”Come on,” he said, setting the water back on the table. ”You're going to be a Wesley,” he reminded her. ”We want a photo that screams, *I'm all that.' ”
Angela straightened, turning her body so that she could throw out her chest and angle her shoulders, creating a more flattering line, just as she had instructed so many of her subjects. But the dress felt too fitted, too close to her body; there was not enough material to hide anything. And she was certain her bare arms were jiggling. ”You're going to have to shave some off my upper arms when you do the touch-up,” she said. ”I don't know why I ever chose a strapless dress.”
It didn't matter that the scale now read one-thirty instead of two hundred five; that she'd actually managed to shed seventy-five unwanted pounds and keep them off for more than three years. That she'd had a breast lift and a tummy tuck and all kinds of other procedures to help clean up the unsightly result. That she exercised like a fiend six days a week and knew she could never stop. None of those things, not even the reality of the reflection that now stared back at her from a mirror, could banish the fat person, the one her cla.s.smates had called ”Fangie,” short for ”Fat Angie,” who still lived inside.
”You chose it because it's perfect on you and because you have fantastic shoulders,” he said as he repositioned the tripod, studied her through the viewfinder, then stepped from behind the camera to adjust her key light. ”Because all of you is now completely gorgeous-SI swimsuit edition gorgeous.”
”And you are completely full of s.h.i.+t, Brian,” she said, wis.h.i.+ng she could believe him, that for just a few minutes she could be thin on the inside, too. ”But don't stop telling me, okay?”
”Never, luv.” He'd known her at her heaviest. Only he and her childhood friend, Susan, continued to treat her as they always had. Behind the camera he crouched down and considered her through the viewfinder again. ”Now tilt your chin just a bit to the left and give me that smile James Wesley fell in love with.”
Angela curved her lips upward and widened her eyes intriguingly. She even managed to add a semblance of a happy twinkle into their green depths.
But she felt like a complete and utter fraud.
They said that you should be careful what you wished for because you might get it. And they were right.
Angela Richman had spent more than half her life wis.h.i.+ng to be thin, wanting to be someone different, hoping to one day find a special man who would love her. Somehow, against all odds, all of these things had happened.
But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't really believe it. Or figure out how to enjoy it.