Mean Woman Blues

coffee with her, to thank him personally. He went, and he couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious. But she had known that was how it would be. He didn’t try to grab her leg, didn’t tell off-color jokes, didn’t flirt, didn’t behave in any way at all that a perfect gentleman wouldn’t.
    A week or so went by, and he asked
her
for coffee. It got to be a regular thing before she realized she was falling for him. She’d never really met such a concerned, loving person. She was definitely interested in him, and she knew he wasn’t married, but there was a problem: He treated her like a daughter.
    She had to get up all her courage to ask him to dinner, and then he refused! She was flabbergasted. “But why?” she demanded, the words falling out before she thought.
    “Because,” he said, “the gentleman always asks the lady.”
    Stung by the reprimand, she kept her head down for the next three days, thinking maybe he wasn’t nearly as nice as he seemed. Maybe he was just an old rattlesnake waiting for a chance to strike. Now he had, and who needed him?
    On the third day, a Thursday, she picked up her ringing phone to hear his voice. “Ms. Bennett, would you do me the honor of accompanying me to dinner Saturday night?” It was the night she’d asked
him
for.
    She couldn’t help but laugh. “Why didn’t you just say yes in the first place? In fact, why didn’t you ask me first if you’re so picky about who asks who?”
    “First of all, I’m quite a bit older than you. I didn’t want to presume on you. But once I learned you were interested, I thought we should do it by the book.”
    If she hadn’t already been in love with him, that would have turned the trick.
    That night he regaled her with stories of his life. The son of missionaries, he’d lived all over the world.
    “Aha,” she said. “That explains the accent.”
    “Excuse me?” He seemed slightly nonplussed.
    “You sound slightly English.”
    “Ah. Boarding schools,” he said. “But that was for convenience. Actually, my family were very simple, God-fearing people.”
    She found that she liked that— both his claim to simplicity and his announced spirituality. She had felt all along that there was something noble and fine about him. At the end of the date, lying in bed, assessing it, what she felt was safe. She felt that David Wright would never hurt her, would take care of her, would
cherish
her… Now there was a word, she thought, that you never heard outside a marriage ceremony. Funny she should make that connection.
    On the other hand not so funny. She already knew she wanted to marry him.
    Two months ago, she had. She was Karen Wright now, suddenly a young woman about town, all her family ties reinstated, in demand for committees and charity parties, and the fledgling founder of her own charitable foundation.
    She was so proud of her husband she could burst. So much in love she floated through life, hardly remembering the difficult days behind her.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Beset by a strange combination of lethargy and restlessness, Skip Langdon sat at her desk, sighing, drinking coffee, looking at pictures. They were photographs of stone angels, urns, antique wire furniture— cemetery art— currently very hot (in more ways than one) on the antiques market; Aunt Mabel’s angels, Grandpa’s St Francis statue.
    Some of the pictures were from Atlanta, some from Charleston, some from as far away as Los Angeles. But so far, none from New Orleans, except the ones taken in the cemeteries themselves. The pictures from other cities portrayed art currently for sale in antique shops, the ones from New Orleans were blowups of family snapshots— the statues and urns in place at Aunt Mabel’s and Grandpa’s plots before they disappeared. These things weighed tons, quite literally. How were they getting from here to there? That was one of many questions she had to answer, and fast before somebody got lynched, meaning the mayor or the superintendent. From the fury around this one, you’d have thought Mardi Gras itself was threatened.
    The problem was, she couldn’t work up the same sense of outrage as the rest of the citizenry; in fact she could barely keep her mind on the job. She was a lot more interested in finding the man who’d tried to have her killed. And that wasn’t all he’d done to her. At different times, he’d kidnapped two children she cared about with nearly fatal results. That is, he’d
ordered
them kidnapped.