Twisted

His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened—the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.

    She lay in bed that night alone—Bill Ralston had left some hours before—and stared up at the ceiling.
    The anxiety was back. The fear of losing everything.
    Oh, Jim, what’s going to happen? she thought to her husband, lying deep in the red clay of Pine Creek Memorial Gardens.
    She thought back on her life—how it just hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. How she’d dropped out of Georgia State six months before she graduated to be with him. Thinking about how she gave up her own hopes of working in sales. About how they fell into a routine: Jim running the company while she entertained clients and volunteered at the hospital and the Women’s Club and ran the household. Which was supposed to be a household full of children—that was what she’d hoped for anyway. But it never happened.
    And now Sandra May DuMont was just a childless widow . . . .
    That was how the people in Pine Creek looked at her. The town widow. They knew that the company would fail, that she’d move into one of those dreadful apartments on Sullivan Street and would just melt away, become part of the wallpaper of small-town Southern life. They thought no better of her than that.
    But that wasn’t going to happen to her.
    No, ma’am . . . She could still meet someone and have a family. She was young. She could go to a different place, a big city, maybe—Atlanta, Charleston . . . hell, why not New York itself?
    A Southern woman’s got to be a notch stronger than her man. And a notch more resourceful too. . . .
    She would get out of this mess.
    Ralston could help her get out of it. She knew she’d done the right thing, picking him.
    When she woke up the next morning Sandra May found her wrists were cramping; she’d fallen asleep with her hands clenched into fists.
    It was two hours later, when she arrived in the office, that Loretta pulled her aside, gazed at her boss with frantic, black-mascaraed eyes and whispered, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Mrs. DuMont, but I think he’s going to rob you. Mr. Ralston, I mean.”

    “Tell me.”
    Frowning, Sandra May sat slowly in the high-backed leather chair. Looked again out the window.
    “All right, see, what happened . . . what happened . . .”
    “Calm down, Loretta. Tell me.”
    “See, after you left last night I started to bring some papers into your office and I heard him on the phone.”
    “Who was he talking to?”
    “I don’t know. But I looked inside and saw that he was using his cell phone, not the office phone, like he usually does. I figured he used that phone so we wouldn’t have a record of who he called.”
    “Let’s not jump to conclusions. What did he say?” Sandra May asked.
    “He said he was pretty close to finding everything. But it was going to be a problem to get away with it.”
    “ ‘Get away with it.’ He said that?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Right, right, right. Then he said some stock or something was all held by the company, not by ‘her personally.’ And that could be a problem. Those were his words.”
    “Then what?”
    “Oh, then I kind of bumped into the door and he heard and hung up real quick. Seemed to me, at any rate.”
    “That doesn’t mean he’s going to rob us,” Sandra May said. “ ‘Get away with it.’ Maybe that just means get the money out of the foreign companies. Or maybe he’s talking about something else altogether.”
    “Sure, maybe it does, Mrs. DuMont. But he was acting like a spooked squirrel when I came into the room.” Then Loretta brushed one of her long, purple nails across her chin. “How well do you know him?”
    “Not well. . . . Are you thinking that he somehowarranged this whole thing?” Sandra May shook her head. “Couldn’t be. I called him to help us out.”
    “But how did you find him?”
    Sandra May grew quiet. Then she said, “He met me . . . Well, he picked me up. Sort of. At the Pine Creek Club.”
    “And he told you he was in business.”
    She nodded.
    “So,” Loretta pointed out, “he might’ve heard that you’d inherited the company and went there on purpose to meet you. Or maybe he was one of the people Mr. DuMont was in business with—doing something that wasn’t quite right. What you were telling me?—about those foreign companies.”
    “I don’t believe it,” Sandra