Good Christian Bitches Page 15

  Travis looked at the door to his office, and glanced out into the hallway, checking to see if anyone was listening.

  “I think a ten-percent fee is what the store typically seeks in situations like these.”

  Sharon thought about it. Ninety-eight hundred bucks? And she’d be left with almost ninety thousand in five-thousand-dollar gift cards?

  “If I can count on your discretion,” Travis promised, “you can count on mine.”

  “I think we have an understanding.”

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Chapter 17

  “Where on earth . . . is Sharon?” Darlene asked in her breathy voice.

  It was twenty minutes to nine Monday evening, and Heather and Darlene were sipping iced tea from her fabulous William Yeoward Isabel goblets, seated on the eighteenth-century chaises in Darlene’s living room. Heather made a “beats me” gesture. “I’ve tried her cell a million times,” she said.

  “Did she not insinuate she was coming at eight?” Darlene asked in singsong, stroking the ruffles on her Hermès apricot-orange dress.

  “I thought that’s what we all said. I just don’t know why she’s not picking up her phone.”

  “It doesn’t matter. How do you think Amanda’s first day went as Ball Chair?”

  Heather took a sip of her iced tea and grinned. “Couldn’t have been all that great. Sharon and I spent the whole weekend messing up that office. By the time we got done with it, it looked like a tornado had hit.” She reached for a packet of sweetener and checked to make sure she had the no-calorie sugar substitute.

  Darlene laughed. “That must have been devastating for poor Amanda.”

  “Uh-huh. I wouldn’t have been too pleased if I had to come in there and make some sense out of all that mess. For all I know, she’s still in there, straightening up.”

  “Susie did leave that place in terrible, discomfitable disarray.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” Heather tossed her hair. “But it’s hard to think of Susie without realizing all she endured at the hands of the police.”

  Darlene gave her a withering look. “Don’t tell me you believe all that BS about her getting attacked or molested or any of that stuff about body-cavity searches.”

  “None of that happened?” Heather was puzzled. “But it’s all over town!”

  “Oh, please! None of that happened. She was in and out of there before you could say Martha Stewart.”

  “Really? But I heard—”

  “You heard wrong. Edward got her out in about a New York minute, and then he put her on a cruise. She might have some legal issues stemming from what she did with the money from the Longhorn Ball.”

  “Sharon told me that Amanda and her mom found a ton of cash in Susie’s desk,” Heather said, pointing her feet and admiring her Christian Louboutin pumps, a gift from the latest ex. She envied all the other girls who had a closetful and playfully referred to them as their “Lubys.” This was her only pair and she’d had to badger her ex to death for these.

  Darlene nodded. “Why Susie had to mess with the money belonging to the Longhorn Ball, I’ll never understand. How much money was there?”

  “I think Sharon said there was something like eighty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. We were sick we didn’t find it when we snuck in there!”

  “You’d think Susie was running a drug operation with that kind of cash. What on earth was that girl thinking?”

  “It’s kind of amazing how bad everybody feels for her.” Heather sighed, taking out her cell phone and punching in Sharon’s number one more time. Again, it went straight to voice mail. “I just don’t know where that girl is.”

  “The irony is that Susie brought it all on herself,” Darlene remarked. “All she had to do was just run that Ball with a semblance of professionalism, and she would never have been in this mess. But that whole police brutality rumor? Don’t buy a word of it.”

  “Okay,” Heather said, taking another sip of her iced tea. “But who started it, anyway, if it’s not true?”

  “I did,” she replied, grinning wickedly.

  “But why?” Heather asked, mystified.

  “The more sympathy there is for Susie,” Darlene reasoned, “the less sympathy there’s going to be . . . for Amanda.”

  “So that’s how the big girls do it, huh, Darlene?” Heather gave an admiring nod.

  “That’s right, my little student!”

  “Well, what’s gonna happen now?”

  Darlene leaned forward, eyes shining. “Have you heard the rumor,” she began wheezily, “that Amanda found one hundred twenty thousand dollars in Susie’s desk? But she only tried to put eighty-five thousand in the bank?”

  “No!” Heather covered her mouth with her hand. “I haven’t heard that rumor at all!”

  “That’s because I just started it,” Darlene boasted. “Just you wait. You will. She’s going to have the devil’s own time trying to get any banking done for the Longhorn Ball.” Darlene’s expression suggested that she knew a big secret.

  “Why is that?”

  “Let’s just say I made a few phone calls.” Darlene couldn’t conceal her self-satisfied, smug expression. “I called a few contacts of mine in the banking community here in Dallas. They would never want to sojourn on my bad side.”

  “What’d’ja do?”

  “I just told them,” Darlene answered, matter-of-factly looking at her fingernails, “that if they did any banking business with the Longhorn Ball, I’d make sure my husband and all of his real estate friends pulled out every dime from their plebeiat banks.”

  Heather grinned at her friend’s masterstroke. “How many banks did you call?”

  Darlene closed her eyes and threw a solemn hand over her chest. “All of them,” she said, sashaying dramatically toward the iced tea and almost knocking the pitcher over. “Every single bank in Dallas. And even a few in Fort Worth. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Well, Mom, that’s the last of the boxes in the living room,” Amanda said. It was almost eleven p.m. The women surveyed the living room, the floor of which was now entirely visible for the first time since the movers had arrived. Elizabeth looked admiringly around the downstairs and nodded her head in approval. “It’s starting to look like a home,” she said.

  “It is, at that. Mom, I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve helped me out so much here and at the Longhorn Ball office. I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Well, you helped me out, by bringing my grandbabies back to Texas. Maybe in a few months I can knock some of that California nonsense out of their heads. Skateboarding. Organic foods. Please.”

  “As if, Mom. People eat some things that aren’t chicken fried here in Dallas, too. And it’s not like people in Hillside Park have never seen a skateboard before.”

  “I guess,” Elizabeth said grudgingly. “I just don’t see why your kids have to be so different.”

  “It’s not worth worrying about,” Amanda said, flopping down on a couch. “I’m hungry.” She paused. “Maybe even for something greasy,” she added, casting her mother a mischievous grin.

  “I’m guessing you’ve got nothing in your pantry except some organic greens,” Elizabeth said, sitting in an armchair opposite her. “Am I right or am I right?”

  Amanda laughed. “We probably don’t even have that,” she said. “I’ve had zero time for grocery shopping. You know that better than anyone.”

  “We could call out for a pizza.”

  “How can you eat pizza and stay so thin?” Amanda had to admit—the conversations with her mother about things as unimportant as pizza and weight gain were so pleasurable that it was worth coming back to Dallas just to reestablish their relationship.

  “The real question,” Elizabeth said, getting out her cell phone to punch in a number for pizza delivery, “is what’s going to happen when a bunch of those checks for the Longhorn Ball bounce. The Ball was such a disaster, I’m afraid half the people who wrote t
hose checks may have stopped payment on them for a variety of reasons—they never got their auction item, they were seated in the incorrect level of sponsorship—some of them may just not want Susie to get credit for obtaining any money from them. How are we going to cover those bills?”

  Amanda nodded. “Mom, thank God the Longhorn Ball has such a history in this town—it’s almost a monster you couldn’t kill if you tried, and Lord knows, Susie tried! Our supporters are so loyal and they know that by no means was this year business as usual. I’m sure after all the talk they realize we need their money more now than ever. I can’t imagine they would stop payment or have a check come back to us they weren’t willing to make good.” She watched as her mother ordered a pizza, and she was seized with the kind of giddy notion that she wasn’t sitting in a rental house, with no art on the walls, after the dissolution of a long-term marriage fifteen hundred miles away—but that she was just sitting in a dorm room at college, hanging out with her best friend. Mom as best friend? There was nothing in Amanda’s past that pointed to that. But she wasn’t saying no to it, either.

  “What are you going to do about Mr. Black Mercedes’s check?” Elizabeth asked, having completed the order. “I hope you like pepperoni. I forgot to ask.”

  “Mom, at eleven at night, there’s nothing I want more than pepperoni pizza. It’s perfect. Thank God my daughter’s asleep!”

  “I thought so. . . . So what are you going to do about his check?”

  Amanda relaxed further into the couch. “I thought about tearing it up—but this isn’t a car or a bunch of clothes for me. This is a charitable donation, and if he really wants to make it, I shouldn’t be getting in the way. And Lord knows we need the money—that way we can pay all of our creditors and still have some money to spare. Obviously, he sent the check because he wants to get my attention, and he’s certainly gotten it, so I figured I’d meet him first and see what this is all about. Then I’ll go from there.”

  “Makes sense.” Elizabeth stretched her neck to relieve the kinks.

  Amanda decided it was time to change the topic. “Hey, what do you think happened to that Neiman’s card? I’ve looked for it everywhere.”

  Elizabeth thought for a moment. “You really think Sharon swiped it?”

  “I’d hate to believe that.” She stared at the paintings and prints leaning against the walls, wishing that she could magically nail them into place with a glance. The idea of standing there with a hammer and nails for hours on end just seemed too depressing to contemplate.

  “The only other possibility,” Amanda said, returning to the subject at hand, “is that somehow the card got stuck in a file folder or an envelope somewhere. We had so much paper flying around.”

  “We did,” her mother agreed, “but my bookkeeperish instincts tell me that that card is nowhere in that office. I went through absolutely everything after Sharon left, just to put everything in order and make sure we’d be able to find what we wanted going forward. I know a gift card’s a little thing, but I’m telling you, it was gone.”

  “That’s so disturbing,” Amanda said after a moment. “Why would Sharon do such a thing, if she did? I guess I still want to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I don’t,” Elizabeth retorted firmly. “That young lady gave a lot of mothers like me fits when y’all were growing up. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past her. And that Heather Sappington. She’s another piece of work. Out of all the women in Hillside Park, how did you immediately hook up with the two of them now that you’re back? I always told you there was nothing more dangerous than white trash with nothing to lose. Especially when it comes to our neighborhood.”

  “Mom,” Amanda pointed out, “they picked me. After Sharon Peavy didn’t say a word to stick up for me in that Bible study, I had no particular interest in even saying hello to her. And as for Heather, I was never drawn to her.”

  “Social climbers,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head dismissively. “It’s worse than a disease. At least they did you a favor, making you Chair of the Ball.”

  “I’m honestly starting to wonder whether it really was a favor. Knowing the two of them, they must have had some sort of ulterior motive. I mean, this ain’t my first rodeo,” Amanda said in perfect Texan drawl, winking at her mother. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.”

  “Karma’s a boomerang. Either Sharon’s done you a good turn, or she’s just setting herself up for even more trouble. My guess is it’s the latter. Though I still believe that there’s something therapeutic about your being so involved in this whole Ball thing. It keeps you from sitting home and brooding. That’s the worst thing a woman can do.”

  “I suppose,” Amanda answered pensively. “But it’s turning into a much bigger pain in the butt than I ever imagined. I just couldn’t believe all those banks turning me down. I mean, what’s that? Did Susie really poison the well that much in this town? Okay, maybe they fell behind on their accounts receivable. But I’ve never seen a bank want to turn down a few hundred thousand dollars of deposits, including eighty-something thousand in cash. Let alone every bank in town.”

  “It does set the mind to wondering. . . . Where is that pizza?”

  “So we ought to know in a few days what our cash position is, whether we can pay our bills in full or not.”

  “Worst case,” Elizabeth reasoned, “we can go to our creditors and work something out—half now, half later, something. The thing that I don’t understand is, if Susie’s husband really did give three and a half million or four million or whatever it is, the story changes hourly, to the Longhorn Ball, where’d that money go?”

  “That is the question, isn’t it?” Amanda had no answer.

  “Indeed,” her mother mused. “How come there’s nothing in the bank, millions of dollars supposedly donated, and nothing to pay the bills with?”

  Amanda thought for a moment. “Did you see any checks made out to the Pediatric Foundation?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I didn’t see all of the bank records, but the ones that I saw didn’t point toward any four-million-dollar donation. Maybe we ought to call them in the morning and see if they ever got paid.”

  “Somehow, knowing Susie, I’m starting to doubt it.”

  The doorbell rang. “Finally,” Elizabeth said. “I’m famished. Since we’re talking Longhorn Ball business, we could pay for this out of petty cash.”

  “I don’t want to be bothered,” Amanda said. “This one’s on me.” She headed to the door to pay for the pizza.

  “If he’s cute,” Elizabeth called out, “bring him in. I could use a pepperoni pizza and a man right about now.”

  “Mother!” Friends with my mom? she thought. This is definitely going to take some getting used to. But she liked the sound of it.

  Chapter 18

  When Travis had returned to his office that evening, it was not with a stack of five-thousand-dollar, anonymous Neiman’s gift cards, but instead with three plainclothes security officers and one member of the Hillside Park Police Department. Sharon was not exactly under arrest at that point, but neither was she free to leave. To her shock and dismay, she realized that Travis had been setting a trap since the moment that she had allowed him to run the ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card through his magnetic strip reader.

  He had failed to share with her that the card had Amanda’s name on it, and instead was following the traditional procedure at Neiman’s and most other department stores when someone appeared to be using a stolen card.

  After four hours of questioning, Sharon was escorted out of the basement security facility to the Hillside Park Police Department, where she was formally arrested, booked, and charged with possession of stolen property and intent to commit fraud. The difference between Sharon Peavy and Susie Caruth could have been measured in the fourteen hours that Sharon spent in the drunk tank, where her physical attributes met with considerably more interest and enthusiasm than they had back at Neiman’s.

>   Sharon finally made contact with Heather Sappington around eight the next morning, after a harrowing, sleepless night, in which she received numerous invitations from the men in the holding tank across the hall to reveal not just some but all two of her charms, a request she steadfastly denied. Her bail was met by a check from Ann Anderson, which Heather Sappington brought to county jail, where Sharon had been transferred at five in the morning. Heather was waiting outside in her Jaguar when a locked door opened and Sharon was unceremoniously sent back to freedom.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” Heather exclaimed as Sharon rushed to the Jaguar and jumped in. “You poor, poor thing! What happened to you?”

  “That bitch set me up!” Sharon sank into the seat and began to cry like a baby. “She had to know what she was doing, that conniving bitch! After all we were trying to do for her.”

  Heather studied Sharon and her seriously rumpled outfit for a moment, then started the car and pulled away from the jail.

  “What we were trying to do for her,” Heather reminded Sharon, “was to set her up. We weren’t exactly trying to do her any favors, remember?” She reached for a packet of tissues and handed them gently to her disheveled friend. “Poor baby,” she said sympathetically. “You just look awful.”

  Sharon blew her nose piteously. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. Heather couldn’t exactly understand what that expression had to do with the present situation, but she could see that Sharon was in no mood to be corrected.

  “If there’s any justice in the world, she’s going to have to pay for what she did to me. I’m looking at three to five years in prison!”

  Heather looked shocked at first, but then dismissed her friend’s concerns. “I have no doubt that Ann or Darlene can make a phone call to Neiman’s and get the whole matter dropped.” She fished around in her weathered Louis Vuitton bag for her lip gloss.