Frankly My Dear,
I’M DEAD
LIVIA J. WASHBURN
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
This book is dedicated to my agent, Kim Lionetti,
and my editor, Gary Goldstein, who were both
instrumental in its creation and development,
and of course to my husband, James Reasoner,
my Rhett Butler.
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 1
I didn’t mean to lose it. Really, I didn’t. It must have been the two squabbling teenagers. Or the two annoying adults. Or the pressure of setting up a new business and knowing that if I couldn’t make a go of it, it would be just one more in a long list of failures.
We won’t even mention the divorce.
All I wanted was a minute to myself. Just one simple, single minute to sit there in the new office and take a deep breath and look around and say to myself, This is mine. And it’s going to work.
But I hadn’t been there in the chair behind my new desk more than ten seconds when the door burst open and Augusta and Amelia came in snapping at each other over something. They looked at me and said in unison, in the sort of plaintive wail that only teenagers can manage, “Aunt Deliiiiilah!”
I held up one finger and closed my eyes. If they can do that to me, I can do that to them. They sighed. Together, of course.
Then I heard heavier footsteps, and Luke Edwards, my assistant—and son-in-law—said, “Miz Delilah, the phone’s not workin’. Are you sure you called ’em and told ’em we’d be movin’ in today?”
“Of course she called them,” my daughter Melissa said from behind him. “She wouldn’t have forgotten something that important.”
I had hired Melissa, too, as secretary/receptionist. It was sort of a package deal. She and Luke hadn’t been married for very long, and they thought it would be just darlin’ if they could work in the same place and spend all their time together, since they loved each other so much.
I didn’t call them poor deluded fools. At least not to their faces. You can’t do that to kinfolks.
“Aunt Delilah, she’s being totally unreasonable,” Amelia said.
“Well, she’s stuck in the nineteenth century,” Augusta said. “There’s nothing wrong with body piercing. It’s an ancient custom.”
“We can’t run the office without the phones,” Luke said.
“Will you leave the poor woman alone? She knows that,” Melissa said as she crowded into the room along with Luke, Augusta, and Amelia.
“She’s going to mutilate herself and embarrass me—”
“Embarrass you? It’s my body—”
“I can call the phone company on my cell—”
“I’ll call them. It’s my job—”
“Aunt Delilah—”
“Miz D—”
“Aunt Delilah—”
I opened my eyes. I stood up and put my hands on the desk and said, “Will y’all just hush up for a minute?”
Now, I admit I raised my voice a little. But not enough so that all four of them should have stared at me like I just choked a kitten or something. Augusta and Amelia got that little bottom-lip quiver—you know, like they were about to cry because I’d yelled at them—and to tell the truth, so did Luke, whose big ol’ country boy, football player looks hid a soul that was a tad on the sensitive side. Melissa had known me the longest, so she recovered first and said, “I think we should all go on and leave her alone for a minute. She’s got a lot on her plate these days and we don’t need to be bothering her with our petty problems.”
“There’s nothing petty about tryin’ to run a tour business with no phones,” Luke grumbled as she shooed him out of the office.
“You, too, girls,” Melissa said to her cousins, who, at sixteen, were six years younger than she.
I could tell Augusta and Amelia wanted to argue with her, but they left, too, and Melissa eased the door shut on her way out. I was alone again.
Problem was, I didn’t want to be alone anymore. The mood was gone. Like I said, all I’d wanted was a minute. I hadn’t gotten it, and now it was time to move on.
But after Melissa had stepped in like that to help me, I couldn’t very well act like I didn’t want to sit there in the office by myself. I took a deep breath and turned around to look out the window. I had a good view of the office complex parking lot and the big-box discount store across the street and the futuristic skyline of downtown Atlanta rising a couple of miles beyond it. I had worked downtown for several years, in one of the city’s biggest travel agencies, and I was glad I didn’t have to go down there every day anymore. That was one big reason for starting my own business. I wanted to be able to slow down a little, to take stock of my life, to devote more time
