JEZEBEL'S BLUES Read online

  The orange she’d been peeling squirted juice in her eye as if in punishment for her lascivious thoughts. Annoyed, she squeezed it closed. Jeans were just jeans, she told herself. It wasn’t as though he’d suddenly appeared in his underwear.

  She risked another peek and decided he might as well have.

  A can of cola landed with a heavy thud near her ankle. “Where did this come from?” she asked, popping the can open.

  “Same place I got everything else.”

  “Thank God,” she murmured, and drank greedily. “I can’t think without caffeine.”

  “You’d get used to it if you had to.” He stood near the window, staring pensively at the gray beyond. Celia thought it was worry that crossed his features.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He shrugged. “I hope not.” He drank a long swallow of cola. “My sister’s out there, somewhere. That’s how I got stuck last night. Kept thinking if I could just keep moving, I’d make it to her place.” His jaw hardened for an instant, then he flashed Celia a smile over his shoulder. “Problem is, I’d have had to cross Jezebel, and I don’t think she was in the mood last night.”

  “I think you’re right.” Celia offered the box of pastries and Eric settled on the edge of the bed, taking one.

  “How’s your lip this morning?” she asked, eyeing the angry cut.

  “I’ll live.”

  “Can I tell you my jokes yet?”

  One side of his mouth lifted. “Not unless you want me to start telling you how your daddy changed my perspective.”

  “No, thanks.” Celia put the last of the pastry into her mouth and brushed her palms clean. “I’ve had enough of that to last me for the rest of my life.”

  Eric nodded and light danced in his thick black hair, swirling over his crown like the water outside. “I bet it was hard to be Jacob Moon’s daughter.”

  “By himself, he would have been okay, but I was also Dahlia Larsen’s daughter.” She rolled her eyes. “Between the two of them, we never went out in public without a camera flashing.”

  “With parents like that, you must be pretty talented yourself.”

  It was the typical response and Celia was oddly disappointed. “No, afraid not.” She stacked orange peelings in a small pile. “I can write a passable sonnet in three languages, dance tap, ballet and jazz without killing myself and accompany any church choir in the world on piano.”

  “Sounds like a lot to me.”

  “I had a great education,” she said. “I just don’t have a drop of talent.” She smiled at this admission, attempting to hold off the sympathetic noises people usually made at this point.

  Instead, Eric plucked an orange slice from the ball in his hand and chewed it slowly. “Did you ever want to do any of those things?”

  “No, not at all. I studied hard, of course, because my parents expected it, but I never enjoyed them.”

  “That’s why then. You’ve got to love something to make it work.”

  “I love teaching,” she said. “I’m really good at it, too.”

  For some reason, this brought a grin to his face. “Miss Moon?” he teased. “I bet the kids go crazy.”

  “Yes. Always. Doesn’t usually last long, though.”

  “What do you teach? English?”

  “Heaven forbid.” She shuddered for effect. “I teach high school math.” She loved telling people this, loved watching their perception of her undergo the change it always did. No one expected a wispy little blonde to be teaching calculus.

  Eric didn’t disappoint her. “Really?” he said, and his chin jutted out a little as he looked at her for a long moment. “You mean algebra and all that?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “And you love it.” His tone was disbelieving.

  Her smile broadened. “Yes.”

  “How can anybody love algebra?” he asked, then held up a hand. “Sorry, that’s rude.”

  Celia laughed. “No, it’s normal. Most people are terrified of numbers and think they’re governed by some obscure set of rules and regulations only a genius can understand.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “But even when I was little, I loved fractions and equations. I badgered my father for a month to teach me how to carry and borrow when I was six.”

  “But why do you love all those equations?”

  His question seemed more intensely focused than the ones she usually heard. “Why?” Celia echoed. “I don’t know.” She looked toward the grayness beyond the window, trying to find words for an abstract idea. The picture that came to mind when she thought about math was one of an ordered row of prisms, row upon row of them, stretching into infinity. “They’re so orderly,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I never could conquer algebra. It drove me crazy. No matter what angle I came at it from, I couldn’t make it work, couldn’t see how to make it clear in my mind.” He shook his head slowly. “I really admire people who can.”

  She heard in his voice not the muddled who-cares-anyway attitude of many people regarding math, but the genuine frustration of one who had tried and couldn’t breach the language. “You probably had a teacher who made assumptions about how people learn that weren’t right for you, or—” she grinned “—you’re hopelessly right brained.”

  His heavy, dark eyebrows raised. “Had a good teacher, so you fill in the blanks.”

  “Right brained.” Her heart sunk a little. Right brained meant creative, which meant like her parents, which meant this man was poison. “What do you do?”

  He’d been open and fluent until that moment. Now his face shuttered with an almost audible slam of defensive armor. “Nothing,” he said, and stood up. “I don’t do anything.”

  Celia looked at his hands braced on the windowsill as he glared at the rain. His unspoken words echoed into the room as loudly and clearly as if he’d shouted them.

  Not anymore.

  Chapter 3

  Eric thought if it rained one more hour, he would go crazy. All day, it had continued. Pattering, dripping, smacking, trickling. The incessant sound wore on him like torture.

  To make matters worse, the air in the attic room grew stale with their breathing and a stifling humidity. In spite of the storm, it wasn’t exactly cool, either, and Eric knew from experience what they’d be in for when the rain stopped and the flood abated: jungle weather.

  Restlessly, he prowled the perimeters of the room, pacing between the trunks at one end to the boxes and discards at the other, tapping the windowsill with his hand as he passed, flipping the doorknob on the other side of the room as he passed it.

  Celia stretched out on the mattress, reading a thick novel she’d brought upstairs with her last night. She was only halfway through it and had been reading most of the day, and she kept reading now in spite of his pacing.

  Part of his problem was the picture she made in that soft bed, her long, slender legs stretched out, her hip jutting up casually, a spray of silvery hair spilling over the hand that propped her up. Sometimes she flipped over onto her tummy and he had to contend with the high, round contours of her fanny—one of the prettiest rear ends he’d yet had the pleasure of admiring.

  It was clear that she was not the sort of woman who wore her beauty with knowledge and an edge of manipulation. He doubted she even knew that she was a beauty. He might have questioned the intelligence of a woman who had looked in the mirror at her face and body for twenty-plus years without coming to the obvious conclusion, but in this case, he was pretty sure he knew why. He’d seen pictures of her mother, the dancer. Dahlia had been full of breast and hip, with wide, erotic eyes that drove men wild. Her coloring had been vivid, her style polished.

  Eric tapped the doorknob on his way by, his fingertips registering the pattern carved into brass. He had known women like Dahlia, driven by a need for recognition from everyone. Retta, with her wild beauty, came to mind.

  Eric frowned and pushed the thought away, deliberately calling forth
a picture of Celia’s mother. He’d seen too often how women like her had operated, and Celia had probably faded into the background a lot more than was good for a little girl.

  He glanced at her, sprawled unselfconsciously on the bed, the swell of one breast peeking demurely over the edge of her scoop-necked shirt. Instantly, he felt a restless pulse below his belt.

  Dog, he told himself, forcing his gaze back toward the window where rain splatted and patted and smacked against the glass. She wasn’t his kind of woman. There was a fragility and honor about her that was so far removed from the lusty women he’d known on the road that it was hard to imagine they were the same species. And the truth was, he liked his women ripe, even a little bawdy. It saved time.

  No, he corrected himself. That made those women sound cheap, and they weren’t. They were just like him—raised to fend for themselves, to fight for whatever they got. When you had to scramble for your daily bread, it put the niceties of social convention into perspective—life was too hard and too short to waste on ridiculous social dances, particularly if both parties knew ahead of time what they were looking for.

  He tapped the windowsill on another restless round. No, Celia Moon was not his type. She’d need some wooing, and once bedded, she’d expect more than he’d ever be able to give.

  At the window he paused, noting the water level was still rising, although it had slowed somewhat. On impulse, he threw the casement open and inhaled deeply the cooler, fresher air that sailed through.

  From behind him, Celia spoke, her voice amused. “Too bad you can’t dive from there and go swimming. It would probably make you feel better.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and felt himself grin. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy, being trapped like this?”

  “A little.” She put the book down, face first. “I learned early how to amuse myself almost anywhere, so it’s not so bad, really.”

  With a nimble movement, she stood up and stretched. For one weak moment Eric admired the narrowness of her waist, the long lines of her arms and legs, then shifted his gaze. “I hate the sound of it. It grates on my nerves. Pat, pat, pat, pat—”

  She laughed. “I was thinking exactly the same thing last night before you showed up. I made popcorn so that I wouldn’t have to listen to it.” She dug into the boxes of provisions and came up with a can of Vienna sausages, a sleeve of crackers and peanut butter. “Want something to eat?”

  Eric wanted to growl at her. He had an appetite for something besides eating. But it wasn’t her fault she made him hungry or that she wasn’t the kind of woman to ease that hunger without some return. “Sure,” he said, exhaling suddenly, and pointed to the window. “You mind if I leave this open? There’s not much rain coming in.”

  “Considering everything,” she said, “a little rain on the floor of the attic isn’t going to bother me much.”

  After they ate, Celia dragged one of the trunks away from the corner, brushing cobwebs from it. Eric settled on the edge of the mattress and pulled out his harmonica to fiddle with while he watched. “What’s in there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Thought it might be fun to see.” The latch had an old key still dangling from it, and it turned easily. “I hope it’s not filled with black widows,” Celia said with a wrinkled nose.

  “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  Her wide, pale eyes reflected utter skepticism. “I seriously doubt that.” She stood up, gripped the edge of the trunk lid and took a long, deep breath. She flung it open, then jumped back.

  Eric chuckled over her peering into the trunk from three feet back. She inched closer, her chin jutting out as she stretched her neck to make sure there were no spiders inside.

  He couldn’t resist. Just as she reached the trunk, assuring herself there were no creepy crawlies inside, he jumped forward. “Boo.”

  Celia flinched, then her eyes narrowed. “That was mean.”

  “A little,” Eric agreed cheerfully, and blew a quick scurry of notes through his harmonica.

  “You’re not afraid of anything, I suppose?”

  “I’m afraid of the dark.” He looked at her. “And airplanes and floods.”

  “Airplanes? Why?”

  He shrugged. “Why are you afraid of spiders?”

  “Because they can get under your clothes and in your hair and bite you.”

  “Well, I hate the idea of being thirty thousand feet in the air with only five feet of steel between me and the ground. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “Do you fly anyway?”

  “Only when there’s no other way.” He grinned. “And I drink a lot of Jack Daniel’s.”

  She bent her head over the trunk and pulled out a crocheted baby blanket, then a pair of tiny leather shoes. “These must have been my dad’s,” she said. A flicker of anger crossed her face, but in contrast, her fingers stroked the blanket reverently. With a tightness around her lips, she put the articles aside and dug deeper, pulling out more baby clothes and then a christening outfit. “Oh, my,” she exclaimed. “This is incredible.” She held it out to Eric. “Feel that satin.”

  Obligingly, he ran the back of his hand over it, and was surprised at the luxurious coolness of it. “Nice.”

  “Do people still get babies christened?”

  “Around here they sure do. This is the Bible Belt, sister. Folks take saving souls very seriously.” For emphasis, he began to play a mournful “Amazing Grace.” He started with the intention of amusing her, but the old spiritual seduced him, pulling him deeper into itself, and he found his attention slipping away. There was a little turn he’d never played before, and he drew it out, closing his eyes to hear it more thoroughly.

  Abruptly he remembered where he was and stopped. Celia sat before the open trunk, staring at him, her hands wrapped around the christening outfit. “That was beautiful,” she said softly. “Why did you quit?”

  He saw something in the big, silvery eyes that puzzled him, an expression of disappointment mixed with wonder. It reminded him of the anger and tenderness with which she had regarded her father’s baby blanket. Curious suddenly, he asked, “Where’s your daddy now?”

  “Heaven or hell, whichever Saint Peter decided upon when he reached the gates.” She didn’t look at Eric, but dipped again into the trunk to pull out a stack of old-fashioned school record books.

  “He’s dead?” Eric asked without thinking how tactless it sounded until after the words were out of his mouth. As usual.

  Celia took a breath. “Both of them are. My mother died about eighteen months ago, very suddenly of an embolism.” She cleared her throat. “My father had a car accident about three months later.”

  The way she said “accident” made it sound like the exact opposite. Eric didn’t say anything for a minute. What was there to say?

  When the silence stretched, Celia put the notebooks aside and continued with her treasure hunt. A frown touched her face as she withdrew a bundle wrapped in heavy plastic, taped and sealed. Without warning, she tossed it to Eric. He caught it, but just barely. The box was heavy and solid.

  “You got a mean side yourself, don’t you?”

  “If that’s what I think it is, it’s only fitting you should open it.” She dragged another one out and dropped it with a thunk to the floor beside him.

  Eric stroked the box, feeling the satiny dust of years on the plastic covered cardboard. Nothing else had the heft of a pile of pages. These were manuscripts.

  A sharp prick of excitement clutched his chest, and for an instant, it scared him. It had been so long since he’d felt anything. With a distinct sense of surprise, he noticed his hands were trembling slightly as he opened the plastic around the heavy white box and lifted the lid.

  When he read the neatly typed title page, his stomach leapt wildly, once. “Song of Mourning,” it read, “by Jacob Moon.” His first novel, published in the late fifties to both critical acclaim and popular success.

  Eric looked at the slight,
silver-haired woman who stood watching him with impassive features. “Celia,” he said, and he heard the wonder in his voice. “You … this … I can’t—” Words failed and he shook his head.

  “Now you have something to do,” she said quietly. A note of something almost tender permeated her voice, and he looked up in surprise. She smiled, her arms crossed over her chest, and for a moment she again didn’t seem quite real. Her beauty was ethereal, not quite of this plane, and he had the strangest feeling that she had delivered some message and would now disappear.

  Come to think of it, did Jacob Moon even have a daughter?

  Disoriented, Eric jumped up, urgently reaching out a hand to touch her arm. To his relief—and embarrassment—it was warm, slender but sturdy, and definitely mortal.

  Her smile widened into a grin and without warning, she touched his cheek. He felt her fingers rasp over the bristles of his beard and then fall away. “Enjoy yourself,” she said.

  She crossed the room and tugged out another trunk, and Eric watched her for a puzzled moment, utterly confused. Had he just snapped at long last?

  Outside the rain picked up tempo, beginning once again to pour in heavy bucketfuls to the already saturated earth. Eric clenched his teeth against a ripple of dread and turned his attention to the other manuscripts.

  Each was bundled in exactly the same fashion—packed first in a white box, then wrapped in heavy plastic. In the days before computers, he supposed, it had been important to have backup copies of a manuscript in a safe place. Jacob Moon had obviously sent a copy of each of his books to his mother’s house for safekeeping.

  Eric had read all of the books at one time or another, but it gave him chills to hold the actual manuscripts in his hands. He’d told Celia jokingly that he wouldn’t talk about her father, and he would stick to that. But he wished, suddenly, that he could share some of his thoughts.