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She laid out the blanket in a su
A church bell tolled in the distance, and she began to read:
I came to Parrish twice, the first time to write a great novel, and more than a decade later, because I needed to make my way back home.
He’d put himself in the book. She was startled. He hadn’t done that in Last Whistle-stop. She rushed through the opening chapter, which told of his first days in Parrish. In the second chapter he used an encounter with Tallulah—Your hair is far too long, young man, even for a foreigner—to take the story back to the late 1960s, when the town’s economy had begun to fall apart. His account of the near bankruptcy of the window factory read like a thriller, the tension heightened by fu
With nearly a hundred pages left, she closed the book and wandered down to the water. She’d assumed he’d end the story in 1982 when the new factory had opened, but there were three chapters still to go, and apprehension had begun to form a knot in her stomach. Maybe Diddie wasn’t the only person she should have worried about.
She returned to the blanket, picked up the book again, and began the next chapter.
In 1986, I was twenty-two years old and Parrish was my nirvana. The townspeople accepted my oddness, my staggering shortcomings in the classroom, my strange accent and haughty pretensions. I was writing a novel, and Mississippi loves a writer more than anyone else. I felt accepted for the first time in my life. I was completely, blissfully happy . . . until my Southern Eden was destroyed by a girl named Valentine.
At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion . . .
Sugar Beth finished the page, read the next, kept reading as her breathing grew shallow and her skin hot with rage. She was Valentine. He’d changed her name, changed the names of all of them who’d been teenagers at the time, but no one would be fooled for a moment.
Valentine was a teenage vampire, sipping the blood of her hapless victims along with her Chicken McNuggets after school. She didn’t turn truly dangerous, however, until she decided not to limit herself to the plasma of teenage boys and began looking for older prey.
Me.
The sun dipped low over the lake, and the air grew cool. By the time she reached the end, she was shivering. She set the book aside and curled into herself. Her story took up less than a chapter, but she felt as if every word had been written into her skin, like the ink tattoos the boys punched in their wrists with ballpoint pens when they got bored in class. Everything was there—her selfishness, her manipulations, her lie—all of it exposed for the world to see and judge. Shame burned inside her. Anger. He’d known from the begi
She stayed at the lake until it grew dark, with the blanket pulled around her shoulders and knees drawn to her chest. When she returned, the carriage house felt empty and oppressive. Wi
Sugar Beth couldn’t breathe. She rose and headed downstairs, but even here, Tallulah’s bitterness permeated everything. The shabby furniture, the faded wallpaper, the yellowed curtains—all of it stained with the anger of a woman who’d made lost love her life’s obsession. Her head began to pound. This wasn’t a home, it was a mausoleum, and the studio was its heart. She grabbed the key and made her way out into the night. She fumbled with the lock in the dark. When it gave, she pulled open the doors and flicked the switch on the bare, overhead lightbulb. As she gazed around at her aunt’s pathetic memorial to lost love, she imagined Colin’s explanations, his justifications. The book was written long before you came back. What good would it have served if I’d told you earlier?
What good, indeed?
She stepped into the chaotic heart of her aunt’s dark spirit and began ripping away the dirty plastic. She would not live her life like this. Never again. She wouldn’t be a prisoner to her own neediness. She’d strike a match to all of it, send this mad energy of paint and loss up in flames.
The colors swirled. Her heart raced. The frenetic dabs and splatters spun around her. And then she saw it.
The painting Lincoln Ash had left behind.
Miss Creed, going dejectedly up to bed, sat for a long time at the open window of her room, and gazed blindly out upon the moonlit scene. She had spent, she decided, quite the most miserable day of her life.
G
EORGETTE
H
EYER
,
The Corinthian
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The painting had been here all along, a ferocious web of crimson and black, cobalt and ocher, with angry trails of yellow and explosions of green. Not a drop cloth at all. It had never been a drop cloth. She gave a choked sob and went down on her knees next to the enormous canvas spread across the concrete floor, ran her hands over an encapsulated paint lid, a fossilized cigarette butt. These weren’t objects dropped by accident, but relics deliberately left in place to mark the moment of creation. A strangled hiccup caught in her throat. There was nothing random about these dribbles and splatters. This was an organized composition, an eruption of form, color, and emotion. Now that she saw it for what it was, she couldn’t believe she’d ever mistaken it for a drop cloth. She crawled around the perimeter, found the signature in the far corner, ran her fingers over the single word ASH.
She fell back on her heels. Even in the garish light of the single bulb dangling from the rafters, the painting’s tumult spoke to the chaos in her own heart. She swayed. Let its angry rhythm claim her. Moved her body. Gave herself up to misery. Gazed into the painting’s soul.
“Sugar . . . Sugar . . . Sugar Pie . . .”
A hoot. A whistle.
“Sugar . . . Sugar . . . Sugar Pie . . .”
Her head snapped up.
“Sugar . . . Sugar . . . Come out and play . . .”
She shot to her feet. Cubby Bowmar and his boys were back.
They stood on the small crescent of lawn in front of the carriage house—six of them—beer cans in hand, faces turned to the moon, baying for her. “Come on, Sugar Beth . . . Come on, baby . . .”