An hour later, when Cheryl came down for dinner, she had redone her hair and makeup and slipped into a sleeveless black Marc Jacobs number she had worn only once before, at an Alpha Kappa Alpha cotillion the previous fall. The dress, with its shirred silk and its low scooped back, was a touch too […]
Frank’s grandfather, Dr. Nelson Watkins, sat slumped in a rocking chair at the far end of the shaded porch, listening politely as a bosomy older woman lectured the table on how, precisely, she was related to the young Buford couple who ran the hotel. “Sorry to interrupt,” Frank said, cutting in. “Grandpa, there’s somebody here […]
“This here’s the start of the old Buford place,” Mae was saying up front. “Where?” Frank asked, twisting around to look out the window. “I don’t see anything.” Cheryl stirred in the back seat, raising her head from the corner of the window. She wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep, but it must […]
The forty-minute flight from Washington DC had been bad enough, their eighteen-seat prop jet bucking and yawing on every stray gust, but when Cheryl stepped out onto the tarmac at the tiny Lathrop airfield and felt that first rude slap of Southern humidity, her stomach lurched again into her throat. Cheryl Crawford had been raised […]