82 Desire

United Oil held the top lease on the property, the one that now became effective. Within four years of meeting Russell Fortier, Ray had lost his lease, his company, his livelihood, and his balls.
    As soon as United took over the lease, Ray knew there had to be oil.
    And there was oil—just a few hundred yards from the area where Ray had drilled. Once more Ray ran the map and the profile by the geologist, who came to the same conclusion he had. If the shot points—the sites of the dynamite blasts—were five hundred yards to the west of those shown on the map, oil would very likely be found where United had found it. In other words, Fortier had planted skewed data and a skewed map right where Ray couldn’t resist stealing it.
    Ray had reflected on the entire years-long sequence of events almost continually since it happened. The loss was enormous, the humiliation well-nigh unbearable. With perfect hindsight, he could see that if Fortier had never come calling, he would eventually have done what he had to do. He would have acquired his own data and found the new production himself, before his producing wells played out and his resources were exhausted.
    There was no question in his mind he’d been defrauded, yet so cleverly that he’d executed part of the fraud himself. The scheme was a little like a pigeon drop, and he was the perfect pigeon—stupid enough and greedy enough to fall for it. His ears rang with anger whenever he thought of it.
    He needed with all his being to get Russell Fortier and United Oil and make them pay. He was going to do it if it took him the rest of his life.
    Ray knew just how, too; didn’t even think it ought to be difficult. There had to be others like himself. All he had to do was find them, and he had a class action suit.
    But he’d pored to no avail over records of leases that had changed hands, interviewing leaseholders who held bottom leases when United held the top ones. So far he hadn’t been able to find a single similar case. And United held literally thousands of leases—there was absolutely no way to check them all out.
    There was nothing left to do but get the data from United itself.
    He’d almost had it when he made his fatal mistake. He shouldn’t have threatened Fortier before he actually held it in his hand.
    What he’d said was that he’d been talking to some of his neighbors, and it wouldn’t be long before he blew United out of the water. He might have saved Allred’s life if he’d kept his mouth shut.
    And now he wondered if Fortier were in it alone. His wife’s account of his disappearance just about squared with the time of the murder.
    At any rate, there was nothing to do but proceed calmly and heed Cille’s advice—he didn’t kill Allred and he didn’t bed Bebe and he didn’t cut Mrs. LaBarre’s wrists. He had no control over any of that, and could only do what was in his power. That was where The Baroness came in.
    ***
    “Grab a bite,” Darryl had said.
    Either that was a euphemism for an actual date, or the thing had taken on unexpected proportions.
    Talba had dressed in a flowing outfit made of African cloth, cheaply procured in Krauss’s last days and run up for her by a neighborhood seamstress. When she wore The Baroness’s clothes, heads turned.
    Miz Clara appeared mysteriously in her room, something she never did. Evidently she was checking up. She said, “Girl, where you goin’ in that? That’s not clothes, that’s a costume.”
    “What should I wear, Mama? Crummy old jeans like I do when I go out with Lamar?”
    “How ‘bout just a ordinary dress?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    Well, that was true. There were three choices—the navy and white uniforms, the crummy old jeans, or the royal finery.
    Miz Clara went off harrumphing, putting Talba in mind of Mammy in Gone With the Wind: “Young ladies who wear strange clothes most generally don’t catch husbands.”
    When she was ready, Miz Clara was in the living room reading the paper, something else she almost never did.
    Talba said, “Mama, if you insist on inspecting him, you could at least put on real shoes.”
    Her mama loved her slippers so much Talba didn’t expect her to budge, but she looked down at the floor and laughed. “Guess you right.”
    Talba smiled at her. It had been a long time since she and her mama had laughed together. Maybe it had as much to do with Lamar as Miz Clara’s rigid expectations of her.
    The doorbell rang while her mama was getting