The Sugar Queen Read online

  Josey didn’t know what to say to that. She couldn’t imagine someone as beautiful as Della Lee envying her. Josey didn’t have everything. She had only money. And she would give that away, that and everything else she had, every grain of sugar, for the one thing she wanted most in the world but would never have.

  Suddenly her head tilted to one side.

  Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation. Soft nougat pulling from a candy bar.

  So the red sweater did still have some luck left in it.

  “What’s the matter?” Della Lee asked as Josey pushed back her chair and went to her window.

  He was coming up the sidewalk. He was early today.

  The Cirrini house was located in one of the oldest neighborhoods in town. When Marco Cirrini made his fortune with the Bald Slope Ski Resort, he bought a house in the neighborhood he’d always dreamed about living in, then promptly tore the house down. He built a large bright blue Victorian lady in its place. He said he wanted a house that would stand out even among the standouts. He wanted everyone who passed by the house to say, “Marco Cirrini lives there.” All the houses in the neighborhood were recessed except the Cirrini house, which was front and center, the eager look-at-me house built by the son of poor Italian immigrants.

  Adam would be at the door in no time.

  Josey hurried out of the room.

  Helena and Margaret were talking in the sitting room when Josey came down the stairs, slowing her pace to a walk. “The mail is here,” she called to them.

  Margaret and Helena didn’t stop their conversation, which sounded something like this:

  “Naomi O’Toole?”

  “Yes, Oldgret.”

  “She was there?”

  “Yes, Oldgret.”

  Josey opened the front door with its crazy colorful stained-glass panels, then she pushed open the screen, her eyes on the front porch steps, not wanting to miss a moment of him. The screen door abruptly stuck, hitting something soft. She realized, to her horror, she’d hit Adam Boswell with the door as he was putting the mail in the black-flapped mailbox hanging to the right.

  “Whoa,” Adam said, smiling, “what’s your hurry, Josey?”

  He was dressed in his cooler-weather uniform, the pants covering the scars on his right leg, the leg he favored. He was a good-looking, athletic man. His round face was always tan, golden, in fact, like something warm and bright was glowing inside of him. He had curly dark-blond hair he sometimes pushed back with a bandana tied around his head. He was in his thirties, and he had a secret. She didn’t know what it was, but she could tell.

  Adam wasn’t from here, Josey knew that much. Three years ago he’d shown up on her doorstep, mail in hand, and her dreams had never been the same. Adventurous types flocked to Bald Slope and its famous steep ski runs. She’d always wondered if the slopes had brought him here, and if that was the reason he stayed. Though her mother sold the resort shortly after Marco died, it made Josey feel happy to think that she had something, however tenuous, to do with Adam being here.

  He popped one of the ear buds from his iPod out of his ear when she just stood there and stared at him. “Josey, are you okay?”

  She immediately felt herself blush. He was the only person in the world she was tongue-tied around, and yet the only person she really wanted to talk to. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you were already here. You’re early today.”

  “The mail was light. This is all I have for you,” he said, handing her the catalog he’d been about to put in the mailbox before she pummeled him with the screen door.

  “Thank you.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “You have something”—he pointed to her lips, then touched the corner of his own mouth—“right here.”

  She immediately put her fingertips to her lips and felt the cookie crumbs there. She brushed them away, embarrassed. Oh yes, she was witty and clean.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, taking a deep breath. The cool noon air was flavored with the mulchy scent of fallen leaves and the last of the hardiest flowers curling away for the winter. “I love fall.”

  Josey’s fingers froze on her lips, completely enchanted by him. “Me too.”

  “It makes you want to do something, doesn’t it?” he said, grinning. “Like get out and…play in trees.”

  That made Josey laugh. Adam watched her as she laughed, and she didn’t know why. It was like she’d surprised him.

  Adam finally said, “Well, I’ll see you later.”

  “Right,” she said. “Bye, Adam.”

  She held her breath, her own superstition, until he walked down the steps and crossed the street. As soon as he reached the other side, disappearing from her world, she went back in the house.

  She walked into the sitting room, where Helena had set up the ironing board to press some of Margaret’s dresses.

  “Only a catalog in the mail today,” Josey said. “I’m going to take it to my room, okay?”

  “Wait,” Margaret said, squinty-eyed as she looked Josey over. “Were you wearing that sweater at the doctor’s office?”

  Oh no. She meant to take it off when she came in. “Yes,” she said, then added quickly, “but I had my coat on over it.”

  “Josey, I asked you to get rid of that sweater last year. It’s been washed so many times that it’s far too small for you.”

  Josey tried to smile. “But I like it.”

  “I’m just saying you need to find something that fits. I know you love your catalogs. Find something in a larger size. And red isn’t a good color on you. I could wear red when I was your age. But that’s because I was blond. Try white. Or black.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Josey turned and walked back out of the sitting room. She went up the stairs to her room, where she sat at her desk and stared at the wall. She tugged on the sweater self-consciously.

  “So who is he?” Della Lee asked from the closet.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The man you ran out of here to see.”

  Josey immediately sat up straighter. She put the catalog on the desk and opened it, startled. How on earth did she know that? “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Della Lee was silent for a while as Josey ate cookies and pretended to look at the catalog. “It feels like he’s taken your heart, doesn’t it?” Della Lee finally said. “Like he’s reached in and pulled it from you. And I bet he smiles like he doesn’t know, like he doesn’t know he’s holding your heart in his hand and you’re dying from him.”

  It was the truest, purest, saddest thing she had ever heard spoken. It was like hearing gospel for the first time, how it shocked you, how it made you afraid because you thought no one could see inside you. Josey leerily turned to look at Della Lee.

  “You’re wondering how I know. Girls like us, when we love, it takes everything we have. Who is he?”

  “Like I would tell you.”

  Della Lee leaned forward. “I swear I won’t tell anyone,” she said seductively.

  “Yes, and we both know how honest you are.”

  “Fine. Tell me when you’re ready. I can help you, you know. Yes, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to help you.” Della Lee leaned back. Josey caught a whiff of tobacco and mud.

  “You’re in no shape to help anyone. What happened to you, Della Lee? You still look like you’re wet.”

  Della Lee looked down at her clothes, then she touched her hair, which was heavy and flat. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “I took a little dip in the river.”

  “You swam in the river at this time of year?” Josey asked incredulously.

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time. The last stupid thing I did before I went up north.” Della Lee shrugged. “Like redemption, you know?”

  “Redemption for what?”

  “More than you c
ould ever imagine. Listen, I want you to go to a sandwich shop on the first-floor rotunda of the courthouse. It’s across from the elevators. A woman named Chloe Finley owns the place, and you’ll love her. She makes a grilled tomato and three-cheese sandwich that will make your head spin it’s so good. Get me one, will you?”

  Josey, stuck on the image of Della Lee in the cold Green Cove River, dunking herself in her own version of a baptism, was caught off guard by the sudden change of subject. “You want me to get you a sandwich right now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have to eat lunch with my mother at twelve-thirty. Then I have to sit with her when our financial advisor comes by this afternoon. Then I have to get her into the bathtub this evening, then get her settled in bed.”

  Unfazed, Della Lee said, “Tomorrow, then.”

  “I take my mother for her manicure and pedicure tomorrow.”

  “Thursday?”

  “I have to take my mother to her ladies’ club meeting Thursday.”

  “No wonder you have so many travel magazines. If you ever manage to get off this gerbil wheel, I bet you’ll take off.”

  “I will not,” Josey said, indignant, because respectable daughters stayed. Never mind that she dreamed of leaving every single day. “What if I like living like this? Did you ever think of that?”

  Della Lee snorted.

  Josey put the lid back on the cookie tin and stood. She took it and the uneaten packet of Mallo Cups back to the closet. “You can eat anything you want back here. I’m not getting you a sandwich.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll wait.”

  “You’re going to be waiting a long time.”

  She laughed. “Honey, I’ve got nothing but time.”

  2

  SweeTarts

  For nearly a century, the town of Bald Slope barely sustained itself as a High Country summer getaway for the hot, wilted wealthy from North Carolina’s Piedmont. The town slept like a winter beast during the cold months, summer houses and most downtown shops boarded up. Locals got by on vegetables they’d canned and money they’d made in the summer. By the time the last snow melted, they were weak and hungry and couldn’t wait for the summer residents to return.

  Marco Cirrini had been skiing on the north face of Bald Slope Mountain since he was a boy, using the old skis his father brought with him from Italy. The Cirrinis had shown up out of nowhere, walking into town in the middle of winter, their hair shining like black coal in the snow. They never really fit in. Marco tried, though. He tried by leading groups of local boys up the mountain in the winter, showing them how to make their own skis and how to use them. He charged them pennies and jars of bean chutney and spiced red cabbage they would sneak out of their mothers’ sparse pantries. When he was nineteen, he decided he could take this one step further. He could make great things happen in the winter in Bald Slope. Cocky, not afraid of hard work and handsome in that mysterious Mediterranean way that excluded him from mountain society, he gathered investors from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte to buy the land. He started construction on the lodge himself while the residents of the town scoffed. They were the sweet cream and potatoes and long-forgotten ballads of their English and Irish and Scottish ancestors, who settled the southern Appalachians. To their way of thinking, the way it had been was the way it should always be. They didn’t want change. It took fifteen years, but the Bald Slope Ski Resort was finally completed and, much to everyone’s surprise, it was an immediate success.

  Change was good!

  Stores didn’t shut down for the winter anymore. Bed and-breakfasts and sports shops and restaurants sprouted up. Instead of closing up their houses for the winter, summer residents began to rent them out to skiers. Some summer residents even decided to move to Bald Slope permanently, moving into their vacation homes with their sleeping porches and shade trees, thus forming the high society in Bald Slope that existed today. Marco himself was welcomed into this year-round society. He was essentially responsible for its formation in the first place, after all. Finally it didn’t matter where he came from. What mattered was that he’d saved Bald Slope by giving it a winter economy, and he could do no wrong.

  This town was finally his.

  Josey stopped in front of a small yellow bungalow and compared the number on the mailbox to the address she’d copied out of the phone book that morning. This was it. She leaned into the steering wheel and peered out the windshield. The paint looked fresh, and the windows were clean. But Della Lee obviously hadn’t tended to her small yard since summer. Garden gnomes and plastic flowers still lined the walkway to the porch, and there was a long plastic chair for sunbathing still in the yard, now covered with small red-black leaves that had fallen from the dogwood by the house.

  She put the large gold Cadillac—her mother’s idea—in park and cut the engine.

  This blue-collar neighborhood was one Josey was faintly familiar with because her father would pass through it on their Sunday drives when Josey was a child. Josey lived for those drives. It was the only time in her entire childhood she ever felt calm. The rest of the time, she was locked in a constant power struggle with her mother, a struggle Josey couldn’t even explain today. She had no idea why she’d been so mean as a child. She had no idea why she’d pitched such fits. Her mother certainly deserved better. But during those drives, Josey would relax while Marco talked. He knew everything about Bald Slope. He knew every neighborhood by heart. He was in his late sixties when Josey was born, and by that time he was an established figure in town, rich, silver-haired and swaggering. His father was a chimney sweep, and Marco dropped out of school in sixth grade to work with him. He used to tell Josey that he’d stand on rooftops when he was a boy and look at the houses and dream of owning the tallest house in the best neighborhood, where no one could look down on his roof, let alone look down on him.

  Marco died when Josey was nine, and it felt like someone waking her up with a hard pinch. All she had left was her mother, and she’d been so terrible to her. That’s when she decided, even if it took forever, she was going to make up to her mother every horrible thing she’d done. The day her father died was the first day Josey bit her tongue, the first day she took criticism and didn’t fight back, and the day she began to realize how hard it was going to be to change the way people saw her as a child. Almost twenty years later, she was still trying.

  Taking a deep breath, Josey got out of the car.

  She’d caught a lucky break that day after taking her mother to the salon. Josey usually sat and waited for her, chatting with the older ladies, making sympathetic noises when they told her all about their sciatica and arthritis. But her mother reminded her that she had to pick up the peppermint oil Margaret had specially made by Nova Berry, the strange woman whose family ran the organic market. They were running low. And obviously not enough was being sprinkled on the thresholds of their house. That would certainly explain how Della Lee had managed to get in.

  Josey went to pick up the oil, but Nova didn’t have it ready yet. She said to come back in a few days, then she told Josey once again that red was a magic color for her, which Josey always liked to hear even though Nova probably only said it to get her to buy one of her red crocheted scarves or hats. After leaving the market, Josey only meant to drive by Della Lee’s house. She didn’t have time for this. Still…Della Lee had been in Josey’s closet for two days now, and Josey was still no closer to figuring out why she was there, or how exactly to get her out without revealing Josey’s secret stash to the world. Maybe Della Lee’s house would give Josey something to bargain with. Maybe there was something in there Della Lee was hiding.

  Nothing like a little breaking and entering to liven up a day.

  The dogwood leaves crunched underfoot as Josey picked her way across the yard, trying not to look like she was sneaking around. When she reached the porch, she was surprised to find the door open, even on this cool day. Did Della Lee have roommates?

  She raised her hand to knoc
k, then hesitated. Holding her fist in the air with indecision, she finally knocked once on the screen door.

  No answer.

  “Hello?” she called. Even from outside, she could smell the tight, hot, closed-in scent of the interior, like old linens left in a dryer for too long. The furnace was running on high.

  Still no answer. It occurred to her that Della Lee might have left in a hurry, that she might have left the door open. Curiouser and curiouser.

  She looked over her shoulder to see if anyone might be watching her, then she opened the screen door and entered.

  The place was a mess. There were beer cans everywhere. There was a broken coffee mug on the floor and a stain of coffee on the far wall, as if the mug had been thrown. A chair was overturned.

  She had taken only a few steps in, kicking a beer can and what looked to be the ripped-off sleeve of a woman’s denim shirt, when she stopped short, her scalp tightening and her heart jumping against her rib cage like a startled cat.

  There was a man sleeping on the couch.

  She stood there for a few moments, paralyzed, afraid that she might have made enough noise to wake him.

  He was, very clearly, not the kind of man you wanted to wake.

  He didn’t have a shirt on and his jeans were unzipped, one hand tucked halfway inside his fly. He had a smug smile on his lips like he knew, even in his sleep, that women all around him were dying from love because he’d taken their hearts and hidden them where they’d never find them.

  His muscles indicated he spent a lot of time in a gym. His cheekbones were high and his hair was long and straight and dark. He smelled of alcohol and of something else, like if you took a match to a rosebush. It smelled good, but dark and smoky, and it made Josey feel heady, like she was losing herself in it somehow.

  All at once she understood.

  This was the reason Della Lee left.

  She’d come here to get something on Della Lee, and look what she found. She took a step back, profoundly ashamed of herself. She should just get out of there. Pretend she didn’t know.