the lake, where a swimming beach and boathouses filled the shoreline. Rather short and pudgy, Slim had pleased the crowd last weekend with his ability to play several instruments. His singing wasn’t all bad, either, when it came to the slow ballads that some of the older folks liked dancing to.
“Quite the gala you have going on tonight, Twyla,” he said as she and Forrest approached.
“Thank you. Palooka George has been a friend of my father for years, and he expected nothing less than the best.” Tossing a glance at Forrest, she added, “I’m sure you won’t disappoint any of us.”
Forrest grinned, which irked her.
Slim grinned, too, but he sounded sincere when he said, “I hope not.”
She stepped forward to rest her arms on the wooden rail, hoping Forrest wouldn’t follow. The warmth of his hand on her back had burned her skin. Right through the sequins of her dress. Maybe the tiny bits of metal were the reason why his touch had felt so hot. Then again, it could just be her fury. Keeping him away from Norma Rose was seriously going to interrupt her good time tonight. She’d noticed how his eyes had rested on her sister during the meal. That alone had made her stomach ache. His gaze hinted he wanted to renew the relationship he’d ended when he’d left town years ago. That would not happen. Not on her watch. She’d just gotten her life back and wasn’t going to lose it again. Most definitely not over some old flame.
He’d stepped up on the other side of Slim, and the two of them started talking about guitar strings and how Slim had restrung his instrument for tonight. For the most part, Twyla ignored them, still trying to get her mind and body in sync after Forrest’s little walk down memory lane. She hadn’t needed the reminder about her grandfather’s wine cellar. Not now. Not tonight. Back then, when they all used to play together, Forrest had been a part of the family—a mixture of the big brother she’d never had and the boy she’d wanted to grow up and marry. That part—the marrying part—had dissolved when it was clear Norma Rose was the sister he wanted. Having him as a brother-in-law would have been the next best thing to a girl in her early teens. Therefore she’d accepted it readily enough and gone on to search for her own knight in shining armor.
Just when that search should have hit its peak, Prohibition was introduced. One would have thought that would have increased her opportunities of meeting fascinating and interesting men, but in her case, it threw up a roadblock faster than if she’d been a bootlegger driving an old jalopy in downtown Minneapolis. That city was as dry as an empty bottle. An odd thing, considering all one had to do was cross a bridge into St. Paul to enter a city as wet as the Mississippi River, which separated it from Minneapolis. Prohibition seemed to have separated the two cities far more than anything else ever had.
Like many others, it hadn’t taken long for her father to capitalize on the new law. His work at Hamm’s Brewery had helped. He knew the ins and outs of the world and those in it, and used all of that to turn Nightingale’s into a highfalutin resort that rivaled others nationwide. Men poured into the place like leaves falling off the trees in October, but rather than being able to rake them in, she and her younger sisters had become little more than prisoners, locked in their gilded cages atop the largest speakeasy in the nation, watching all those men come and go.
Forrest was the reason Norma Rose wasn’t locked away like her, Josie and Ginger. The two of them, Forrest and Norma Rose, had never really dated, it was just known they’d be together. After finishing the private high school he’d attended, Forrest had gone to college, but by then he had a car, so he was home more often than the previous years. He’d spent a good portion of the days he was home at their house. Back then, her family had still lived in the old farmhouse on the other side of the barn located across the resort’s parking lot, and Forrest had always been welcome.
It wasn’t until he’d graduated from college that things had changed. He’d been gone for months and her entire family had been looking forward to seeing him. They’d all gone to his graduation party, even her father, which had been unusual. Galen Reynolds and Roger Nightingale had never seen eye-to-eye. Their relationship became worse after that night. The rest of the sisters had already gone home, leaving Norma Rose behind for Forrest to give a ride home.
It had been a scene she’d never forget. The way Galen had hauled Norma Rose into the house that night, cursing and shouting.
Galen had never liked any of them, but after the flu epidemic had taken many lives, including his five-year-old son, August, he’d really started hating all of the Nightingales. He claimed the girls’ mother had killed August by exposing him to the flu.
Forrest’s mother, Karen, didn’t agree with her husband, but she’d never said that in front of him. No one ever said much in front of him. He was too mean. His evil glares used to put the fear of the devil in all of them.
When Galen had hauled Norma Rose into the house that night, their father had ordered all of the girls upstairs. The walls hadn’t prevented them from hearing Galen calling them gold-digging doxies. Twyla had feared for her father’s life that night and had been thankful after Galen had left and she’d snuck downstairs to find her father unscathed.
The feud really started then. Galen spread rumors about Norma Rose, calling her all sorts of names. Though things calmed down some over the years, the rivalry hadn’t completely stopped until last year, when her father, by then far wealthier than Galen Reynolds ever hoped to be, had seen that the man was run out of town.
The damage had been done to Norma Rose. After that dreadful night, she’d flipped into a tyrant whose goal became proving to the world that none of the Nightingale girls would ever be doxies.
Twyla couldn’t say she wanted to be some man’s doll, but she couldn’t stay locked up any longer. She wanted to live fancy-free. A man wasn’t needed to do that, but they did make things more fun. A woman just had to know how to play with them. To Twyla’s way of thinking, one never knew what was in someone else’s heart. Especially a man’s heart. And that’s where the problem lay. In a person’s heart. That’s what made someone who they were. They could think all they wanted, or say all sorts of things, but their actions showed what was in their heart. Who they really were.
Take Forrest, for instance. He’d supposedly been in love with Norma Rose, but he certainly never showed it. Rather than standing up for Norma Rose against his father’s blasphemy, he’d left town. Without a word he’d just vanished, and hadn’t retuned until last year, after his parents had gone to California. It had been hard to believe. For years Forrest had protected all of them. Not that they’d ever been in real danger, but he’d squashed spiders and shooed away garter snakes.
She snuck a peek his way, where he stood next to Slim.
Rumors, mostly started by those who’d been in cahoots with Galen Reynolds, claimed Galen had gone to California for his health. Others said he’d run away with his latest doxy. Only those close to Twyla’s family knew Roger Nightingale had been behind Galen’s move. She wondered if Forrest knew that, and what he thought about it. From the tidbits she’d heard—because her father didn’t ever let them hear much of anything—the film company Galen bragged about owning in Hollywood was nothing but a front for something much more illicit.
Exactly what, she didn’t know, but considering the mobsters who used to frequent the Plantation, she assumed bootlegging was involved. It was behind most everything that went on anymore. From small towns to big cities, there was rarely a person who wasn’t somehow and in some way involved in making, selling or running booze.
Apart from Forrest. Word was there hadn’t been any booze served at the Plantation since his return.
He hadn’t even bothered to
