old geezer?”
Jacquelyn saw her mother veer toward her along the brick sidewalk, carrying a plastic shopping bag. It bulged from the weight of several clinking liquor bottles.
“I walked to town,” Stephanie Rousseaux explained, “with all sorts of healthy aerobic intentions. But next time I get the fitness urge, I’ll remember to wear tennis shoes. Good God, my feet are killing me! I can’t wait until your father and I return to Atlanta. How I wish at least one of our local rednecks would exchange his pickup truck for a limo service.”
At forty-eight, Stephanie was still a striking woman, her hair covering the right side of her face in a hip style. Though lately she was stouter than she had been and a bit more grim around the mouth. She made it a point of honor to always be civil and even-tempered. But while she was far too cultivated and controlled to ever create an emotional scene, Stephanie had developed a chilly, disengaged manner that stymied others around her. Including her own daughter.
“Some of the local yokels,” Stephanie remarked as her daughter backed out into the sparse traffic of Main Street, “seem surprised that I’m still sober at midday.”
“Mother,” Jacquelyn pleaded, “please don’t start with that.”
“Start with what, Miss Goody Two-shoes?” Stephanie countered, adjusting her diva shades. “I’m quite proud that I have strict rules concerning my addiction. I’m disciplined, just like your dear old dad. After all, baby, decorum should rule everything, don’t you agree? Even a Southern debutante’s failed life.”
Mine or yours? Jacquelyn felt like shouting. But there was no point. She knew her mother meant herself.
“You know,” Jacquelyn said, keeping her tone patient and persuasive, “they have A.A. meetings out here, too, Mom. I checked it out. And you know, Dr. Rendquist told you—”
“Zip it. Renquist doesn’t know his elbow from his libido. The only reason I go to him is because he keeps me in touch with the charming Prince Valium. I’ve decided A.A. is for the great unwashed masses. Your elitist mother has a better system.”
Stephanie shook the bag, clinking the glass bottles inside to emphasize her point.
“Discipline. No therapy until the sun goes down. I despise a daylight drunk. Those lushes at A.A. lack discretion, self-control.”
Discretion and self-control. Two traits instilled in Stephanie back in Queen Anne County, by parents whose ancestry traced back to the First Families of Virginia. Traits that had proven invaluable for surviving a loveless marriage to a faithless, hypercritical man.
Jacquelyn ached to say something that might break through to her mother’s inner core. She knew, from her own childhood memory of her mother, that she had once possessed a deep well of inner feeling. But that well had long since gone dry.
Jacquelyn had borne silent witness for many years. By now Stephanie Rousseaux merely went through the motions of living. She simply reminded herself to change her facial expression now and then, so people would think she was properly “involved.” But in fact her existence had become a long, unbroken silence—the empty and meaningless stillness left behind when love and hope are abandoned.
And there was nothing her daughter could tell her to make things different. Stephanie was the frost queen Jacquelyn feared she herself was becoming—had perhaps already become. A chip off the old ice block.
Now Jacquelyn watched the town of Mystery roll past the car windows, alone with her thoughts. Downtown Mystery still included plenty of its original red brick buildings with black iron shutters—nothing fancy, just practical and sturdy. But the ornate, nineteenth century opera house with its scrollwork dome still placed the community a cut above plain saloon towns. So did the stately old courthouse, the only gray masonry building in town.
“Not exactly the height of sartorial splendor or exotic cuisine,” Stephanie drawled in her droll, husky voice. “But no squalid industrial sprawls, either. Although your father is working on that as I speak—that is, unless he’s relieving his stress with one of his new consultants.”
Consultants. The euphemism of choice, Jacquelyn realized, to designate the string of mistresses that Eric Rousseaux seemed to require in order to “validate his manhood.”
Hazel’s Lazy M Ranch slid by on their left as Jacquelyn headed toward the Rousseaux’s summer lodge at the western edge of Mystery Valley. A. J. Clayburn’s old rattletrap pickup truck was just at the entrance, turning to town. He passed them, tipping his hat while he went. Jacquelyn wondered if he recognized her car, or if he was just the good-ol’-boy type who tipped his hat to everyone in his path.
Again cold dread filled her limbs as if they were buckets under a tap. She wondered again what she had agreed to.
The Rousseaux place sat in a little teacup-shaped hollow about three-quarters of a mile west of the Lazy M. It was surrounded by bottom woods and Hazel’s pastures on the east and south, jagged mountains to the north and west.
The sprawling two-storey lodge was made of redwood timbers with a cedar-shake roof. Out back was the lodge guest house that Jacquelyn—insisting on independence—rented from her father. Additionally, there was a big pole corral, and low stables sported a fresh coat of white paint. Jacquelyn liked the lodge’s proximity to town. Often she had time to ride Boots, her big sorrel thoroughbred, into Mystery instead of driving. Though her mother and father both kept horses, too, neither of them rode much anymore.
Jacquelyn parked in the paved stone driveway out front.
“Home sweet home,” Stephanie said with lilting irony. “Thanks for the ride, kiddo.”
Jacquelyn headed through the house instead of around while Stephanie took her purchases into the basement to re-stock the wet bar. Jacquelyn encountered her father on the phone in the living room.
At fifty-one, Eric Rousseaux was trim and athletic—one of those vain middle-aged men who constantly found excuses to remove his shirt so others could admire the hard slabs of his sculpted abs and pecs.
He had accumulated his considerable fortune in newspaper publishing. Eric owned controlling interest in several major daily newspapers and a handful of smaller weeklies. Including, by monopolistic takeover, the Mystery Gazette. Recently, however, he had diversified into land-site development ventures.
“Money,” her father had once solemnly informed her, using the old cliché, “is like manure. It has to be spread around.”
Eric tossed his daughter a careless wave as she entered the room. Before she could hear what he was saying, he backed into his den and closed the door with his heel—talking in private on the phone was something he did a lot these days.
Was “the Lothario of the ink-slinging industry,” as her mother called him, involved in yet another romantic intrigue? Stephanie’s liquor consumption lately suggested he was.
A hopeless weight seemed to settle on her shoulders as Jacquelyn escaped to her house. A.J.’s words from earlier pricked at her again like nettles: huh, ice princess?
Cold on the surface, cold within. Everybody, it seemed, sensed a basic lack in Jacquelyn—something missing down deep inside her. Some empathetic quality necessary to complete her femininity. But the empathy was there, all right, and anyone who sensed the chink in her armor pounded away at it incessantly, so the scab never got a chance to heal.
Ice
