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Emma pulled on her sun hat, a perky straw number. “It’s difficult for me to understand why her parents aren’t helping her.”
“They’ve cut her off,” Kayla said firmly. “And it’s not hard to figure out why. Meg Koranda is on drugs.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Zoey said.
“You always want to think the best of everybody,” Kayla retorted. “But it’s clear as anything. I’ll bet her family finally decided they’d had enough.”
This was exactly the kind of gossip Emma most disliked. “Best not to start rumors we can’t prove,” she said, even though she knew she was wasting her breath.
Kayla readjusted her bikini top. “Make sure your cash drawer is locked up tight, Birdie. Drug addicts will steal you blind.”
“I’m not worried,” Birdie said smugly. “Arlis Hoover’s keeping an eye on her.”
Shelby made the sign of the cross, and they all laughed.
“Perhaps you’ll get lucky and Arlis will take a job at the new golf resort.”
Emma had meant to be funny, but a silence fell over the group as each of them pondered how the proposed golf resort and condo complex could change her life for the better. Birdie would have her tearoom and bookstore, Kayla would be able to open the upscale fashion boutique she dreamed of, and the school system would get the extra revenue Zoey yearned for.
Emma exchanged a look with Shelby. Her young mother-in-law would no longer have to watch her husband deal with the stress of being the only large employer in a town where too many were jobless. As for Emma herself . . . She and Kenny had enough money to live comfortably, regardless of what happened with the golf resort, but so many of the people they cared about didn’t, and the well-being of their hometown meant everything to them.
Emma, however, didn’t believe in moping. “Golf resort or not,” she said briskly, “we need to discuss how we’re going to find the money to get our library repaired and back in operation. Even with the insurance check, we’re still miserably short of what we need.”
Kayla refastened her blond topknot. “I can’t stand having another stupid bake sale. Zoey and I did enough of that in junior high.”
“Or a silent auction,” Shelby said.
“Or a car wash or a raffle.” Zoey swatted at a fly.
“We need something big,” Birdie said. “Something that will attract everybody’s attention.”
They talked for another hour, but no one could come up with a single idea about what that might be.
Arlis Hoover pointed a stubby finger toward the bathtub Meg had just scrubbed for the second time. “You call that clean, Miss Movie Star? I don’t call that clean.”
Meg no longer bothered pointing out she wasn’t a movie star. Arlis knew that very well. Exactly why she kept repeating it.
Arlis had dyed black hair and a body like gnawed gristle. She fed off a permanent sense of injustice, certain that only bad luck separated her from wealth, beauty, and opportunity. She listened to wacko radio shows as she worked, shows that proved Hillary Clinton had once eaten the flesh of a newborn child and that PBS was entirely funded by left-wing movie stars bent on giving homosexuals control of the world. Like they’d really want it.
Arlis was so mean that Meg suspected even Birdie was a little afraid of her, although Arlis did her best to curb her more psychotic impulses when she was around her employer. But she saved Birdie money by getting the most out of a tiny housekeeping staff, so Birdie left her alone.
“Dominga, come over here and look at this bathtub. Is that what you folks in Mexico call clean?”
Dominga was an illegal, in no position to disagree with Arlis, and she shook her head. “No. Muy sucia.”
Meg hated Arlis Hoover more than she’d ever hated anyone, with the possible exception of Ted Beaudine.
What are you paying your housekeepers, Birdie? Seven, seven-fifty an hour?
No. Birdie paid them ten-fifty an hour, as Ted surely knew. All of them except Meg.
Her back ached, her knees throbbed, she’d cut her thumb on a broken mirror, and she was hungry. For the past week, she’d been existing on pillow mints and the inn’s leftover breakfast muffins, smuggled to her by Carlos, the maintenance man. But those economies couldn’t make up for her mistake that first night when she’d taken a room in a cheap motel, only to wake up the next morning realizing that even cheap motels cost money, and that the one hundred dollars in her wallet had shrunk to fifty dollars overnight. She’d been sleeping in her car out by the gravel quarry ever since and waiting until Arlis left for the day before sneaking into an unoccupied room to shower.
It was a miserable existence, but she hadn’t yet picked up the phone. She hadn’t tried to reach Dylan again, or called Clay. She hadn’t phoned Georgie, Sasha, or April. Most important, she hadn’t mentioned her situation to her parents when they’d called. She hugged that knowledge to herself every time she unclogged another fetid toilet or dug one more scummy hair plug from a bathtub drain. In a week or so, she’d be out of here. Then what? She had no idea.
With a large family reunion scheduled to arrive soon, Arlis could only spare a few minutes to torture Meg. “Turn that mattress before you change the sheets, Miss Movie Star, and I want all the sliding doors on this floor washed. Don’t let me find one fingerprint.”
“Afraid the FBI will discover it belongs to you?” Meg said sweetly. “What do they want you for anyway?”
