Cry Wolf

Chapter Eight

Sava

"Jack?" She arched a brow, stiffening slowly but visibly, her back straightening. She sat on Laurel 's bed, wearing her champagne silk robe open over a black lace teddy, looking like an ad for Victoria 's Secret with her hair mussed and her lips kiss-swollen. "What the hell were you doing out on the bayou road with Jack Boudreaux?"

"A question I asked myself as we hurtled along like some kind of rocket test car on the salt flats," Laurel grumbled as she studied herself with a critical eye in the cheval glass.

The skirt she wore was soft and flowing with a pattern of mauve cabbage roses and deep green leaves on an ivory background. The waist was riding at the top of her hips, and the hem hung nearly to her ankles. Weight loss was hell on the wardrobe. It would have to do. She hadn't brought many good outfits with her. At any rate, the petal pink cotton summer sweater was baggy enough to hide the sagging waist. She heaved a sigh of resignation and looked at her sister via the glass.

"I can't drive a stick. He offered-no, he commandeered," she corrected, irritated all over again with his highhandedness. If he hadn't been so pushy, she never would have ended up kissing him, never would have ended up staring at the ceiling half the night.

Sava

"He's trouble," she said, rising to come and stand behind Laurel. "Stay away from him."

Laurel shot a curious look over her shoulder as Sava

"It's one thing for me to be charmed by him. I don't want him charming you, Baby. The man's a cad."

Sava

"You said he was a writer. What does he write?"

"Oooh," Sava

Laurel couldn't remember the last time she'd read anything that wasn't written in legalese. The Case had consumed all her time, pushing all else out of her life-her hobbies, her friends, her husband, her perspective… at any rate, she wasn't given to reading the kinds of books that kept people up wide-eyed with fear of everything that went bump in the night. She didn't need to pay money to be horrified and get depressed. She dealt with enough real-life horrors. Depression was something she could get for free.

She tried to reconcile her image of Jack, the piano-playing, car-stealing, kiss-stealing rogue, with her mental image of what a horror novelist would be like, and couldn't. But there was another Jack, the man she had caught glimpses of at odd moments. A harder, darker man with an i

She looked at herself in the mirror again, deciding she looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes. Not that Vivian had ever allowed them to do such a thing. Sava

"Instant fit. Old fashion-model's trick," she said absently, studying Laurel with sharp scrutiny.

"Why didn't you stick with it?" Laurel asked.

"You'll wear my new gold earrings," she muttered, then snapped her head up. "What? Modeling?"

"You had a good thing going with that agency in New Orleans."

Sava

Laurel didn't comment, but Sava

"Now, let's take a look at you," she said briskly, setting the makeup aside. "I can't imagine why you're going to this. I would have told Vivian to go to hell."

"You have," Laurel said flatly. "On numerous occasions."

"So it's your turn. She jerks you around like a dog on a leash-"

"Sister, please." She closed her eyes briefly. Lord, if she wasn't up to this fight, what in hell would she do at Beauvoir? A tremor of nerves rattled through her. Di

"I could have said no," she said wearily, "but I don't need the trouble. One meal, and I'm off the hook. I might as well get it over with."

Sava

Laurel arched a brow. "You don't want me to go, but you want me to look good?"

Her pale eyes turned hard and cold, and a bitter smile cut across her lush mouth. "I want Vivian to look at you and feel like the dried up old hag she is."

Laurel frowned as Sava

If I'm not as pretty as Sava

There wasn't a word for the kind of guilt those memories brought, Laurel thought as Sava

Sunday di

If only she had possessed a fraction of that sense of responsibility for her own family, Laurel thought as she stood on the veranda and rang the bell. It had begun to rain again, and she listened to it as she waited, hoping in vain that the soft sound would soothe her ragged nerves. She thumbed a Maalox tablet free of the roll in her skirt pocket and popped it in her mouth.

The downtrodden Olive answered the door, as gray and gloomy as the afternoon, looking at Laurel with dull eyes, as though she had never seen her before. Laurel tried to give her a sympathetic smile as she stepped past the woman and headed toward the main parlor, visions of old zombie movies flickering in the back of her mind.

This would be the perfect setting for a horror movie or a horror novel. The old plantation on the edge of the swamp, a place of secrets, old hatreds, twisted minds. A place where tradition was warped into something grotesque, and family love curdled like spoiled cream. She tried to imagine Jack writing it, but could picture him only in a Hawaiian shirt with his baseball cap on backward and that cat-that-got-the-canary grin on his face. The image brought a ghost of a smile to her lips as she pictured him here, in the main parlor of Beauvoir, observing the assembled guests.

That he wouldn't exactly fit in was the understatement of the year. Ross stood near the sideboard looking freshly pressed and perfectly groomed in a silver-gray suit. He was the model of the well-bred, distinguished Southern gentleman, right down to his neatly manicured fingernails. The easy, patronizing smile. The aura of authority.

Laurel dragged her gaze away from him, sure the hate she felt for him was strong enough, magnetic enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room. She focused instead, briefly, on the other guests, quickly sizing them up in a way that was automatic to her. As a prosecuting attorney she'd had to draw swift and accurate impressions of victims, perpetrators, prospective witnesses, defense attorneys. She did so now for many of the same reasons-to give herself an edge, to formulate a strategy.

The man Ross was speaking with wore a clergyman's collar. He was small and thin and balding, and nodded so often in agreement with Ross's pontificating that he looked as if he had some kind of nervous condition. She labeled him as weak and obsequious and moved on.

A middle-aged couple stood behind the settee where Jack had corralled her the night before. A pair of plump, pleasant faces-the man's slightly sunburned, the woman's pale and perfectly made up. The woman wore a pale pink suit with a flared jacket that looked too crisp not to be brand-new, and her black hair had that wash-and-set roundness achieved by an hour of teasing and back-combing in a chair at Yvette's House of Style. Her gaze strayed continually, covetously to the obvious signs of wealth in the room. They would be neighbors, Laurel guessed. Planters, but not on a par with the massive Chandler-Leighton holdings. People who would be suitably humbled and impressed with an invitation to Beauvoir.