Chapter 2

"Lucy, don't just walk past me like I'm not standing here! Come in here... I want to talk to you!" Kate Barrett had changed into a dress and stockings; she was always an early riser, and this morning it would just be a bit earlier than usual. She had never really intended to go back to sleep anyway, but she needed some excuse to get away from those adolescent police officers. Another minute of the way they were ogling Lucy and she'd have lost her cool completely!

"Sorry, Mother," the younger woman said politely, her lips pressed together in what passed as a smile. "I didn't see you. What do you want? I have classes in just over three hours."

"Never mind your classes. What's the idea of parading around this house like some kind of... some kind of whore!" Her teeth clenched as she spat out the word; it left her lips like some bit of bad food.

"Parading where? I've just been walking around my house. Oh, excuse me, your house. I wasn't aware that doing so made me some kind of fallen woman." Lucy stood barely an inch shorter than her mother, and she showed no signs of backing down. Arguing like this had become something of a nightly ritual since John Barrett's death, and both women had plenty of practice by now.

"You know damn well what I mean! You and that see-thru outfit with those pimply-faced cops peering at your bosom. Honestly, what do you take me for? I'm not blind!"

Lucy laughed weakly. "I'll tell you what I take you for... if anybody's the whore, it's you! Those men were nearly thirty, young enough for me maybe, but not old enough for you! I think you're just jealous because I got all the attention! That's what's eating you, you're jealous! Why don't you call up your friend with the lavender cologne? He might pay some attention to you!"

"Lucy Barrett, I won't listen to that kind of talk! Maybe I was a little hasty, but you've got no right to talk that way about Mr. Marlowe. He's a good friend of the family and he's been a real help these last few months!"

"Yeah, I'll bet... help at what? Or should I guess. I'm not blind either, you know. I've seen you two kissing and grabbing at each other like a couple of..."

Kate's palm flashed upward and stung across her daughter's cheek with a loud smack. Lucy scarcely moved, but her face bore the mark of four red fingers like a stenciled hand on her cheek. "Lucy... I'm sorry... Lucy?"

Lucille Edgecombe Barrett turned on her bare feet and walked away silently to her room, closed the door behind her, and locked it carefully. Not until she was in bed with her head beneath her pillow did she let herself go. A half hour later she had cried herself to sleep, and she did not awaken until the alarm rang at quarter past seven.

Kate Barrett's room was closed when she passed it on the way down to fix herself a quick breakfast. The Barrett domestic, Clara had arrived and was cleaning up the broken glass by the back door when Lucy came in. "Trouble, Miss Lucy? You look like you haven't slept a wink. That is, unless you got them red eyes from drinking."

Lucy gave the elderly black woman a warm hug. "No, Clara, just the same old thing. Mother and I had another of our fights. This one was a real lulu."

"Which one of you broke the door?"

"Neither one. We had a break-in here last night. Or rather almost had one. I guess the lights must have scared him away."

"A break-in? Did you call the police?"

Lucy was pawing through the cupboard in search of a snack- sized box of cereal. "Oh, yeah, police and guns and everything. And then Mother accused me of being a whore and slapped me."

"What? Why, Miss Lucy, that don't sound right to me. Are you sure it happened just like that?"

The long-haired blonde girl sat down at the kitchen breakfast table and stared into the empty coffee cup that Clara had provided for her. "No, Clara, I don't know how it happened. It was just like all the other nights. She said something or I said something and we were off and running. Only this time she hit me... hard." She was trying not to look at Clara, for the gray-haired Negro woman had practically raised her and it was impossible to keep anything from Clara. She could lie to Kate, even once in a while to Daddy when he was alive, but never to Clara. She was too sharp.

"Listen honey, you forget all about that school this morning. They'll understand you missing a couple of classes. I'm gonna fix you a nice hot breakfast just like I used to do when you was a baby. And then you can tell ol' Clara all about it, 'ya hear?" She did not receive an answer, but when the elderly woman turned from her dishes, Lucy had her face buried in her hands and it was plain to see she was crying.

You could always hear David coming long before you saw him; his late-fifties MG had not seen a muffler without holes in more years than anyone could remember. How he managed to keep the thing on the streets was a puzzlement to everyone who knew him or the car. David had the sort of looks that usually draw small-town cops like sugar draws ants: long hair, a Mexican-bandito mustache. And always the latest in freaky clothes. But somehow he managed to elude them, for his racing green MG was almost an institution on the streets between Valley Farms and Alexandria. He never drove his car into the city; because of thieves, he said, but most people suspected it was because the D.C. cops would be less likely to put up with that awful brraaappp!

Lucy Barrett remembered the exact day she first met David; the exact day, the hour, the minute, all of it. It was the night Kate first brought Jerry home with her. Oh, sure, she knew they had been seeing each other. Everyone in Valley Farms knew by that time. But at least until then she had had the decency to keep him out of their home. Her father's home!

And Kate Barrett brought that sawed-off shrimp of a man with his awful pot belly into the study where she was doing her homework and introduced him, just like that. What was she supposed to do, curtsy and pretend she was glad to meet him? That man in her father's house? Well, she didn't, and she was not sorry in the least now as she waited outside the school for David to pick her up. No, not in the least. That was the night she first went to Scottie's, a late-night drive-in hangout not far from Valley Farms, but definitely on the shadier side of the tracks. Lucy had never even felt the urge to go to that awful place, though some of the bolder girls from Valley Farms went over in groups of four or five just for laughs sometimes. Much in the manner that the Park Avenue swells used to go down to the Apollo in Harlem before the blacks declared them non-grata. Lucy went there that night for one reason--to get drunk on beer. She ordered a plate of French fries and a half-quart of beer, just like she had heard the kids did it here; and when it came, she gulped half of it down without a breath. Lucy was no drinker, at least not then, but she had sampled a few different drinks over the years, including a fair share of beer at debutante-season parties and by the pool at the country club. That night, though, she had only wanted to get drunk as quickly and painlessly as possible, and being under legal age, beer was the safest way. She had finished the first and ordered a second when David poked his head in her passenger-side window. Perhaps if she had not downed that large can of beer so quickly, she would have switched on the power window and told him to get lost. Perhaps.

But Lucy invited him inside instead; why not? she asked herself, Mother's at home with her boyfriend. If she can play around with a fat old creep like Jerry Marlowe, then I can pick my own playmates too! she told herself assuringly.

And that was exactly what she did. Call it revenge, getting even, even love, but the end result is the same. Lucy Barrett lost her virginity that night in David's third-story studio apartment in Alexandria. It was all over so quickly she could hardly remember it now; of course, being perfectly soused might have affected her memory a bit. And looking back, she felt not the slightest recriminating pang, not one. She took David home to their Valley Farms house the very next night and treated Kate Barrett to a bit of her own medicine. Of course, John Barrett's charming widow was too much the southern aristocrat to make a scene in front of company, even if the guest was, in her own words, "some degenerate hippie creep and probably an addict as well." The real scene came later, when David dropped her off at half past three in the morning, but Lucy came out ahead on points at the end of round one by turning up the very next afternoon for five o'clock cocktails at the Club with David firmly in tow. Long hair, sandals, dirty jeans, and all. That was the real beginning of a running battle between the Barrett womenfolk that had dragged on for over a month. Kate Barrett with her "gentleman friend" and Lucy with her hippie.

"Hi, baby, been waiting long?" Lucy was so caught up in her reminiscing that she failed to hear David pull to the curb, and that was no mean oversight with his MG.

"No, just a couple of minutes," she lied to save conversation. "Let's get out of here, David. I'm just not in the mood for school today. I slept through the business accounting class and I was supposed to see the Dean about being late this morning, but I just cut out."

"Okay, baby, I think you should have split from that lousy place a long time ago. Who the hell wants to go to school to learn to be a file clerk?"

Lucy reached inside and opened the latch of the tiny sports car and then climbed into the passenger seat, doubling her long legs to get them inside. David leered down between them at the snatch of white as her panties showed momentarily. "Hmm, nice beaver shot there, sweetheart," he said with a phony Bogart lisp.

"Can it, David," the well-built young blonde shot back irritably. "Step on the gas, will you, I said I wanted to get out of here. How about a couple of beers at Scottie's?"

He threw the gearshift into first and popped the clutch in a howl of burning rubber. "Scottie's?" he inquired over the raucous din of the finely-tuned roadster. "What made you decide that? We haven't been to Scottie's since the night we met. I thought you didn't like the place."

"Well, that was yesterday and today's today. Now I'd like to have a beer at Scottie's. And then maybe over to your place."

David did not need any further hints; Lucy was strangely eager to get into bed today, and whatever the reason, he was game. Lucy was the kind of dish some men lived all their lives without once ever having, and she was his for the taking! "Okay, baby, Scottie's it is. And then my place for dessert, right?" he said with a knowing chuckle.

Lucy turned her head and looked at him blankly. "Don't joke about it, David. I need it today, that's all... I need you!"

David pressed the accelerator a bit closer to the floorboards; he'd never seen her quite like this. And Lucy to practically ask for it. Damn that was almost unthinkable! He glanced to be sure she was looking away and then used the heel of his palm to press down the eager erection that was already bulging in his tight Levi's.

The cramped walk-up studio that he rented was, as usual, in need of a woman's touch. Food from meals already digested and forgotten lay hardening in the sunlight that glared in from outside. This place had little to say for it, but its Southern exposure was its one redeeming point. Even in the dead of winter, there was more sun here than in most penthouses. The one large room was papered floor to ceiling with rock posters from the sixties; David had lived in San Francisco then and was, as he told it somewhat sketchily, somehow loosely connected with the defunct Avalon ballroom. Lucy, in her more cognizant moments, guessed that he was perhaps a ticket-taker, but she never ventured to question him further. David was not the kind of person one ever got to know extremely well; she supposed she knew him as well as anyone, and still there were a lot of stones uncovered. Like, for instance, what he did for a living. He did not seem to have a lot of money, but he always had just enough. Yet when she asked him about his source of income, he always answered in some vague generality about being an "agent," then sometimes a few words about "finders' fees and such."

Lucy had heard of such things; John Barrett always took her into his confidence. He often said that he wanted no daughter who was capable of being just a housewife: therefore, he explained the innermost workings of his businesses in detail to her as a teenager, usually when she would have preferred television or a drive in the country. But she never let on to David that she had any familiarity at all with the world of business and finance; as far as he knew, she understood just what little they taught her at business school. And that was hardly enough to make a decent secretary. In all honesty, she had to admit, if only to herself, that she had some doubts about David's standing in the financial community, but that never bothered Lucy Barrett. She had all the money she needed, and a lot more corning when she turned twenty- five, so what did it matter if David probably had some part-time job he was ashamed to tell her about. Maybe in a service station since he liked cars so much, she sometimes guessed. But only when it crossed her mind at all, which was seldom.

"Want another beer?" he asked, opening the refrigerator.

"No, thanks, those two at Scottie's were enough for me. I have to go home eventually, and one drunk in the house is quite enough."

"Ol' lady's on the sauce again?" he laughed.

"Not so bad as before, when Daddy died. But she's knocking down more than her share. And that boyfriend of hers kills a bottle every day or so. Scotch, naturally, at twelve bucks a bottle."

"Can't the tight-ass afford his own booze? I thought he had tons of money."

"Yeah, I suppose. He's got lots of money, but he'd rather drink for free, I guess," the attractive blonde explained as she dropped across David's unmade double bed. She always felt a tingle of excitement when she lay on this bed; this was where she first had a man. This was the only place where she'd had a man.