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  The best thing that Darlene, or anyone, could say about her first four husbands was that they either died (the first and the third), or were deported because of tax and fraud matters (number two), or went to prison (number four). Before their demise, disappearance, or loss of freedom, each had managed to enrich Darlene’s personal fortune by anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, giving her the financial wherewithal to become one of the community’s leading philanthropists and power brokers. A word from Darlene was all it took for an individual to become socially prominent or a social pariah.

  Her fifth husband, a retired admiral with a background in engineering, maintained a separate residence in Fairfax, Virginia, close to his lobbying interests, his fox-hunting farm, and a wide variety of mistresses, whom Darlene monitored by means of various private security agencies, with the thoroughness and at times the ruthlessness of the KGB.

  Darlene knew at all times what her husband was doing and, for that matter, whom her husband was doing. She stored all this information in a file in a wall safe in her living room, behind a Matisse abandoned by the husband who had been deported. He had been an art collector of note before most of his collection was seized by U.S. Treasury agents in partial satisfaction of a tax debt—and it didn’t help that he was in the country illegally, of course. Darlene considered the documentary material in the wall safe a retirement plan that more than offset the prenuptial agreement husband number five had made her sign, although she had need of one worse than he did. The home was a 1930s stone Normandy Tudor with arched stone walls and an entry foyer leading to a main foyer and then to an expansive living room with an eight-foot-high wood-burning fireplace. Another fireplace, almost as high, dominated the vast dining room. The kitchen and the adjacent full-service butler’s pantry were enormous, very catering friendly, and looked as though they had the capacity to feed a small army. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two of the living room walls—complete with removable staircase on a rack—contained thousands upon thousands of books, none of which had ever been opened. They were strictly for show, of course.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Sharon, sounding shaky, asked Heather as they lurked on Darlene’s porch.

  “Making Amanda Chair of the Longhorn Ball? I think it’s a fabulous idea. Don’t you?” Heather responded.

  Sharon, still harboring a measure of doubt, rang the doorbell. A moment later, a liveried manservant, a hot, blond-haired young man in his late twenties, opened the door. Recognizing the ladies, he ushered them in.

  “Miss Darlene is upstairs,” he said, pointing them toward the cavernous living room filled with incredibly valuable, and incredibly uncomfortable, eighteenth-century French furniture. “I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  The women seated themselves on silk-covered sofas and waited. Heather crossed her legs, which was somewhat difficult in her skin-tight dress. Sharon tapped her foot against Darlene’s absurdly expensive antique rug. She still had misgivings about the whole thing.

  “This is nuts!” she finally exclaimed. “What if she does a good job? Then everybody’ll love her. Not just the men.”

  Heather shook her head. “No, no. It’s impossible. Susie screwed up that Longhorn Ball to the point where nobody will walk away from that thing in one piece. Not only will Amanda be jammed from sunup to sundown, she’ll get complete credit for the thing failing for a second year in a row. It will be an absolute wrist-slitting experience for her, and it might completely do her in. Not that we really want to, like, kill her,” she added quickly. “Still, on the heels of her other recent failures—it’s brilliant.” They heard a noise on the stairs. “Okay, here’s Darlene. We’ve got to sell her on this!”

  Darlene Cockburn flitted down the plantation-like grand staircase robed in Oscar de la Renta’s finest, a flowing cerulean shantung dress. There was something dramatic and yet earthy about Darlene, as if she understood that her whole over-the-top house, five marriages, and vast fortune were all somehow part of a grand private joke that only you and she shared. She was nobody’s idea of beautiful, and her addiction to cosmetic surgery had made her eyes look like she was in a catatonic state, her lips looked like a baboon’s ass, and her breast augmentation had been so overdone, she looked like there was a butt on her chest.

  In Dallas, plastic surgery is considered nothing more than good grooming. Women who don’t have the funds to have a little work done now and then, or those whose need for surgery is so great that their tabs at the surgeon might resemble the national debt, are considered the “unfortunates.” Those girls were forced to play it off like they don’t understand why women do those things. They pretend to be superconfident in their looks, acting as if they don’t feel the need for surgery. Everyone jokes about the fun-house mirrors the unfortunates must have in their homes—the ones that tell them how beautiful they are, although compared to the ones with a maintenance budget, they’re virtually invisible. Most Hillside Park women managed to stay in the well-maintained, aging-well zone. The opposite extremes—the unfortunates and the over-fortunates—were, fortunately, few and far between, but Darlene was definitely one of them.

  Despite Darlene’s overdone face, there was something undeniably sexy about her, even at age sixty-seven, and if her ex-admiral husband ever decided to remain permanently in Virginia with his harem of spied-upon girlfriends, neither Darlene nor any other woman in town doubted that she would very quickly line up husband number six.

  “To what . . . do I owe the unequivocal pleasure?” she asked in her studiously breathy voice, which most people referred to as her “Sunday school voice.” Darlene had a way of melding words together to invent her own language, while punctuating her speech with arduous breaths and silences.

  She wafted into the room on Alexander McQueen stilettos with pencil-thin heels. Immersed as she was in perfecting her ethereal entrance, she narrowly avoided missing the final step. Undaunted, she glanced at her guests to make sure that they were sufficiently impressed with their surroundings—which, to be fair, they were—air kissed them both, and seated herself on a yellow divan.

  “Good Lord, Darlene. You’re more beautiful than ever,” Heather gushed. Flattery had definitely always gotten Heather everywhere.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Sharon concurred, fidgeting with her faux Hermès bracelet.

  “We both know that better not be true,” Darlene said, casting a majestic smile on her subjects. “But as you know . . .” She exhaled deeply for one of her dramatic pauses. “I do so love to hear the expression of it, however erronical.”

  Away from Darlene, Sharon liked to tell other women that Darlene’s vocabulary and syntax made her sound as if she were trying out for a road company of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but there was something so endearing about Darlene’s affectations that, as the expression went, even people who didn’t like her . . . liked her. Not everybody could pull off the five husbands, the house, and the liveried houseman—and rumors involving him and Darlene were rampant—but somehow, she did. Her many husbands were always age appropriate—but when it came to trainers, chefs, and house managers, she was a regular cougar.

  “Darlene, you know Amanda Vaughn is back in town,” Heather stated.

  Darlene nodded. “So I’ve heard. And I also heard that somebody gave her a brand-new Maybach,” she noted with a breathy sigh, extending an arm as if she were introducing a famed performer on the red carpet. “As a welcome-home gift, or a ‘please, date me first’ gift. As of yet, we haven’t quite decided.”

  “You’re kidding!” Sharon was beside herself with jealousy. “A Maybach? Who in their right mind would do a thing like that?”

  Heather swallowed hard. A man with his mind already set on Amanda, she thought. This was just the kind of thing she had been afraid of. Men were already competing for Amanda’s affection, and she hadn’t even moved into her rental home.

  “How . . . how does she get men to do that?” Heather asked, amazed. “I’ve never had a guy buy me a car.”
/>   Sharon threw her a patronizing look. “I’ve had guys get me cars,” she said, a trace of pride in her voice.

  “Yeah,” Heather cracked, “and you had to spend more time in the backseat than in the driver’s seat in order to keep it.”

  “That’s not true,” Sharon replied, stung. Then she smiled. “Look, if a gentleman opens a car door for you, the least you can do is get in. Whether it’s the front seat or the backseat. Right, girls?”

  They all snickered.

  Then Heather became earnest, getting down to business. “But that’s exactly why we’re here. Amanda just got here. If a guy is already buying her a Mercedes, where’s it going to stop? I mean, there are so many great girls in this town who are having a hard enough time finding someone. If the men’re all gonna be focused on Amanda to the exclusion of all other women, what are the rest of us supposed to do?”

  “Well,” Darlene replied, stroking the edge of the divan, “what can you do about it? She’s young, she’s pretty, she looks great—”

  “Have you seen her?” Heather asked, surprised. “How do you know all that?”

  “I’ve heard it from a cavalcadium of different people,” Darlene wheezed, making a sweeping gesture with her hand to indicate her vast social network. “She looks fantastic, none the worse for wear, considering what she’s been through. I’d have presumed that, after a nasty divorce, she’d come plodding back into town looking rougher than a night in jail.” Darlene chuckled at her clever use of cowboy slang before growing serious again. “But au contraire, mon petite amours.” She sighed, unaware that she had just addressed her two guests as lovers. “Sounds like she’s managed just fine.”

  “Mmm-hmm. That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” Sharon said, pressing her fingertips tensely against her thighs. “If she’s already doing so well without even trying, what’s it gonna be like once she’s back to feeling like her old self again?”

  “Wait a minute, girls . . . hold on,” Darlene said. “She won’t be interested in a relationship for a while. She’s just been through a horrifically ugly situation and an even uglier divorce. Maybe she’s gonna want to stay on the sidelines for a while. Regroup. Put herself back together emotionally, instead of just . . . throwing herself into another relationship.”

  “I don’t remember you ever doing anything like that,” Heather noted tartly.

  “That’s true, darlin’,” Darlene replied with a grin, “but not everybody is like me. Some gals can stand those empty-bed blues.”

  “Where’s Rick?” Sharon asked, remembering her manners. “Virginia?”

  “Alas, my dear . . . Rick was number four,” Darlene gently corrected. “Greg is number five. And yes, he’s up in Virginia. What he’s doing is his business. And what I do . . . is mine.” She shot a wicked glance toward her manservant, who, embarrassed, quickly looked away. The exchange was not lost on either guest.

  “We have an idea for Miss Amanda,” Heather said.

  “But I don’t think it’s a great idea,” Sharon said, backpedaling. “I think we’re just borrowing trouble.”

  “Sharon!” Heather said, annoyed. “We agreed we were gonna present a united front.”

  “What is this all about?” Darlene asked, very much amused. “What are you two plotting, and what is it that you can’t agree on doing to Amanda?” She threw her hands out and held them at an awkward angle, waiting for a response.

  Heather cleared her throat. It was now or never. “We thought that maybe, maybe Amanda should be, ought to be . . .” She swallowed hard. “The next Chair of the Longhorn Ball.”

  Darlene looked puzzled. “What?” she asked, in a booming vibrato that belied her usual studied breathiness. “She hasn’t lived in Dallas in ages! How would she know whom to ask for what and why?”

  “Mmm,” Sharon said, trying to follow Darlene’s muddled syntax. “That’s just the point—she wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Exactly!” Heather exclaimed. “It’s a full-time job anyway. And this year, whoever takes over has to dig out from the mess Susie made. And then on top of that, since Amanda’s a total outsider at this point, it’ll take her even more time to figure out who’s who and what’s what in Hillside Park these days. It’s just perfect.”

  “Perfect for what?” Darlene asked, not getting it. “What exactly is to be gained by putting Amanda in charge of the Longhorn Ball? Judging from the way you two are talking about this . . . mendaciousative scheme,” she intoned, silently congratulating herself on such an excellent word choice, “it sounds as if you want to cast a net of troubles in her wake, not give her social life a boost.”

  “Oh, it’s a boost, all right,” Heather said quickly. “Let me explain. If she’s Ball Chair, especially this year, when there’s such a messy mess to clean up, it’s gonna take every working minute of every working day. Sharon and I were thinking that there’s no way Amanda would have time for a social life on top of raising her kids, fighting Bill in court, and running the Ball, blah-blah-blah. And if she doesn’t have time for a social life, then men’ll quit showing up at her doorstep with new cars or jewelry or airline tickets or who knows what else they’ll throw at her, just to get a little attention from her. It’s the best way to keep her occupied and unavailable, don’t you think?”

  Darlene looked lost in thought, then finally nodded. “I sure wish I had thought of a similar strategy back when I was married to Sidney,” she said, referring to hubby number two. “If he’d been distracted with something, maybe some charitable thing, he wouldn’t have had time to get all mixed up in that tax shelter thing, whatever it was. He was cute. Crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and a convicted felon to boot . . .” Darlene paused to heave a laborious sigh. “. . . but cute. Whenever Greg neglects me, which is eighty-five percent of the time, I always have half a mind to just get on a plane and go down to Costa Rica and see how Sidney’s doing.”

  “How is he doing?” Sharon asked. “Still single?”

  “He’s in jail in Costa Rica, actually,” Darlene said in an even voice, “for drug smuggling. And the only visitation he gets is through a pane of glass. So unless you want to talk to him on a telephone with that glass between the two of you, you may want to find a different man, precious.”

  “Touché,” Sharon conceded.

  “That’s all that remains of her French major at SMU,” Heather cracked.

  “That was uncalled for!”

  “Well, girls,” Darlene said, breaking up the squabble, “I think the two of you have an excellent idea. Keep her busy enough with the Ball, and she won’t have time for men. I’ve never let my philanthropic endeavors interfere with the pursuit of my romantic life, but I might be a little bit different.”

  “Oh, I think we’d all have to agree,” Sharon said, grinning, “you’re a little bit different, all right.”

  Darlene stood and nodded humbly toward her guests, pressing her palms together in a display of perfect piety. “You must permit me to make a few phone calls,” she said. Heather and Sharon took their cue and stood to go. “I can’t make any promises, but I will see what I am able to arrange,” Darlene continued. “I find the idea very appealing. A threat to one woman is a threat to all of us. I like Amanda, but she’s got to be neutralized, and what better way than by being Chair of the Ball? And it’s not like anybody else is dying to do it, right?”

  The three women shared a conspiratorial laugh.

  “Roland, see these ladies to the door,” Darlene commanded, gesticulating with such grandiose vigor that she smacked him soundly on the chest as he approached. Roland grimaced. Darlene, completely unaware, turned to him with a devilish smile. “And then draw my bath, will you?”

  She gave Sharon and Heather a knowing wink.

  Sharon and Heather winked back, and Roland saw them out. On the doorstep once again, Heather turned to Sharon. “I think we’ve solved our problem.”

  “I don’t know.” Sharon seemed dubious. “I think we may be creating more problems than we’
re solving.” She paused, then spoke in a whisper. “You think she’s really sleeping with her manservant, or butler, or whatever you call him?”

  Heather flashed her a wicked grin. “Um . . . wouldn’t you?”

  Chapter 8

  Amanda was sitting in the guest room of her mother’s home around nine forty-five, watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie but not really paying attention to it, when her mother finally came back from the restaurant. Amanda had had a tough time getting Will to bed—he had let loose with a long string of angry objections to the move back to Dallas, the divorce, and the fact that he wouldn’t be able to see his father quite as often. Amanda’s heart was broken for her children, and they remained her biggest concern.

  Eventually, she had gleaned from her son’s angry monologue that there was a girl in the middle of this, some little surfer girl Will had become very smitten with, and an additional source of the boy’s anger was the fact that he had been cut off from her. It’s amazing how quickly a relationship can seem like oxygen, Amanda thought as she listened to her son, and it was just as amazing how quickly you could suffocate on the CO2 a bad relationship produced.

  “Are you still up?” Elizabeth asked as she came in.

  “Barely,” Amanda admitted. “How was my date?”

  “A no-show, just like you,” Elizabeth replied, glancing at the screen. “He’s no Humphrey Bogart, I’ll tell you that.”

  “He didn’t show?” Amanda asked, surprised. She sat up a bit on the chaise longue.

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Elizabeth answered, sinking down into the other chaise and watching the screen. “Neither of you showed up for your first date. You guys think alike, so I guess it’s a pretty good sign you’re made for each other.”