Beneath Southern Skies. Terra Little
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dusted and cleaned so much since she was a teenager and now she remembered why. Ma’Dear had been the most loving grandmother that anyone could ask for, but she had also run a tight ship. As a teenager, most of Tressie’s daily, weekly and monthly chores had revolved around housekeeping, which she had always detested, and Ma’Dear had stopped just short of following her around the house wearing a white glove to test for residue just to make sure that she was doing the cleaning correctly. When Tressie was first starting out on her own, far, far away from Mercy, housework had been a necessary evil, but as soon as she’d been able to afford it she had hired a housekeeper and never looked back.
A moan slipped out of her mouth as she put her aching feet up on a nearby stool, let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes. It didn’t help matters any that the temperature outside was at least ninety degrees. Inside the house it felt as if it was twice that, even with the windows wide-open and the electric fans that she’d found in the attic going full speed. After less than forty-eight hours in Mercy, Georgia, she suspected that she’d already lost at least five pounds just by virtue of sweating alone.
And she still had the downstairs to finish up.
Consolidated Investments, the firm that Norman Harper represented, wanted to take immediate possession of the house and the five acres of land that it sat on. She was scheduled to meet with him tomorrow afternoon to discuss terms and sign over the deed, and by then she was hoping to have everything in the house completely packed up and cleared out.
There wasn’t much that she wanted to keep—just a few odds and ends. The rest she was going to donate to charity. As for the house itself...well, giving it up would be bittersweet, but she had to face facts. She never intended to live in Mercy again and she desperately needed the money. It didn’t make sense for the house to continue sitting there like an unwanted and abandoned museum, or the land to go on being an unused burden on the town. As it was, she was itching to get back to New York and start reviving her career, and nothing here could help her do that.
Traffic to her online weblog had drastically fallen off in the months since her column had disappeared from the Inquisitor. Her website had once attracted nearly a million unique visitors daily, mostly because she had always reposted her print articles there, but there were also other tidbits and points of interest that drew attention. Fashion tips, popular high-end cosmetic and fragrance ad placements, updates on some of her favorite scandalous reality TV shows, exclusive celebrity interviews, and on and on. The kinds of stuff that interested women, which was her target audience, and kept them coming back for more. Just as she’d hoped, it hadn’t taken the public long to notice her absence and sound off about it both on her blog and in the Letters to the Editor section of the Inquisitor.
But the loyalty that she’d counted on had turned out to be a joke, and Saul was probably laughing his head off about it now. She could just see him, mumbling I told you so’s to anyone who’d listen, and comforting himself with the knowledge that he’d been right all along about her impulsiveness ultimately being her downfall.
Apparently, Vanessa Valentino was just another disposable commodity. After a few weeks’ worth of inquiring comments, her audience had dropped her like a hot potato and moved on without a second thought. The blog was silent as a tomb now, which had initially struck like a blow straight to her heart, but the more she thought about it, the more she was beginning to feel that maybe it was for the best. When she did make her comeback—and she would make a comeback—she’d make that much more of a splash. Saul wouldn’t be laughing then.
Ma’Dear had never completely understood what she did for a living, because Tressie had never really been completely forthcoming about her occupation. If there had ever been a Bible-thumping, God-fearing woman, it was Ma’Dear. She would’ve seen Tressie’s occupation as a celebrity gossip columnist as a complete and utter waste of God-given time. So Tressie had led Ma’Dear to believe that she was simply a staff reporter, a lowly one at that, who spent her workdays doing research and writing copy for the big-name reporters. If Ma’Dear had ever suspected that there was more to the story, thank God she’d never said so, because Tressie would’ve hated lying to the woman who had raised her after her mother had died in childbirth.
But she would’ve, in a heartbeat.
Fortunately, that was all behind her now. Ma’Dear was the only family that she’d had left in the world and she missed her every day, but without her to act as Tressie’s long-distance conscience, Vanessa Valentino was free to take her game to the next level. And without Saul breathing down her neck and constantly trying to rein her in, she could expand her reach in ways that she’d been wanting to for years. Vanessa Valentino could finally become a brand name.
No, Vanessa Valentino would finally become a brand name. She had the contacts, the ideas and the guts to make it happen for herself. All she had to do now was get her hands on the money from the sale of the two things still tying her to Mercy, Georgia, by a thin thread—the house and land that Ma’Dear had left her.
Determined to meet the deadline that she had set for herself, Tressie forced herself to rise from the rocking chair and stretch her tired muscles. Suddenly starving, she deposited her empty glass in the kitchen sink and went in search of her cell phone. First she’d take a quick shower and then order lunch. Then she’d finish dealing with the house today if it was the last thing she did.
* * *
After an inexplicably delayed clearance from the airport in Darfur and then an excruciatingly long red-eye flight that was riddled with nonstop turbulence, all Nathaniel Woodberry wanted to do was make his way to the nearest bed and hibernate for at least the next twenty-four hours. But there was still an hour-long drive to look forward to once his flight landed in Atlanta and he finally made it through airport security. Fortunately, his bag was the first to appear on the luggage ramp and, thanks to his publicist, who also doubled as his personal assistant, a rented SUV was waiting for him at the valet station outside.
Already missing the love of his life—a vintage Jeep Wrangler that had seen just as much combat as he had—he tossed his gigantic duffel bag into the backseat of an idling Lincoln Navigator, peeled off his leather blazer and slid into the driver’s seat. With the air-conditioning set to high, the radio tuned in to an all-jazz station and his cell phone switched off, he drove away from the airport and headed for the interstate and home.
For the past two decades he had called Seattle, Washington, home, but there was home and then there was home. Seattle was where he had settled right after graduating from college and accepting an entry-level staff reporter position with the Seattle Times. It was where he had gotten his start as a local news reporter and honed his craft—where he had fully indulged his photography hobby and invested in his first Nikon. Even back then his camera had pointed him toward chaos and controversy, which was how he’d found his twentysomething self wandering into the midst of an infamous Seattle riot and snapping a series of pictures that had ultimately catapulted him from staff reporter to frontline investigative journalist.
From there, his camera had taken him into the kinds of volatile and unpredictable situations that many journalists wouldn’t even dream of going into, let alone getting up close and personal with—wars in the Middle East and Africa, the jungles of South America, guerrilla soldier camps... By now the list was endless.
Somewhere along the way he had earned a reputation for being a daredevil. Probably right around the time he had decided to strike out on his own and become a freelance journalist, Nate thought as he picked up speed on the interstate, activated the cruise control and relaxed back into the plush leather seat. Some had thought him a fool for wanting to make his own rules and choose his own path, and others had predicted quick and brutal career suicide for him. But he’d been just hungry enough, just stubborn and fearless enough, to put both himself and his camera in imminent danger again and again for the sake of a story.
His pictures, the words he paired them with and occasionally the sound bites that he sometimes risked his life recording on location—all had graced the covers of magazines and newspapers around the world and been featured on countless online and television news outlets. Now his services were so in demand that his publicist was overworked and in need of a raise, and Nate was lucky if he was