«John Mason, leave your sister alone!» Shelby Sheridan-Talbot shouted, bustling out onto the gallery.
She was a fraction of an inch shorter than Serena with a softer, slightly rounder figure. Her brown eyes were a bit more exotic in shape, and her mouth seemed perpetually set in a petulant frown. Beyond those slight differences they appeared very much the same physically. Shelby looked ready to address the chamber of commerce in a bright yellow suit with a fitted jacket that flared out at the hips in the current style intended to denote femininity. The emerald silk blouse beneath the jacket sported a flamboyant candy-box bow at the throat. Serena felt like a bag lady in comparison.
«Oh, my Lord, Serena!» Shelby exclaimed dramatically. She pressed perfectly manicured hands to her cheeks, displaying a diamond ring big enough to choke a cat and a large square-cut topaz. «What on earth has happened to you? You look like you've been mugged or run over by a truck or both.»
«Gee, thanks.» Serena trudged up the steps, uncharitably wishing that she had been born an only child. Shelby 's temperament was as capricious as the weather-sunny one second and stormy the next. She tended to be silly and frivolous. Her constant theatrics were tiring in the extreme, and she had a way of saying things that was at once innocent and cuttingly shrewd and that made it exhausting to endure a conversation with her.
Serena frowned at her as she limped onto the gallery and Shelby inched back, making a moue of distaste, careful not to brush up against her.
«I'm not having a great day here, Shelby, and I don't have time to go over the gory details with you,» Serena said. «I've got to change and get going. Can you please arrange to have someone pick up my car in town? I left it down by Gauthier's.»
Shelby 's expression quickly clouded over from feigned concern to childish annoyance. «Of course, Serena. I have nothing better to do than run errands for you. My stars, you come home looking like something the cat dragged in, worrying me to a frazzle, and the first thing out of your mouth is an order. Isn't that just like you.»
Serena limped past her sister. She seriously doubted Shelby had given a single thought to her absence from the house. Shelby 's most pressing concerns in life were her children, her wardrobe, and her prominence in community affairs-which she entered not with an eye to civic duty but social status. She was as pretty and shallow as a lily pond in a Japanese garden.
Serena stepped into the house and made her way down the hall, regretting the fact that she didn't have time to take in the ambience of the home she'd grown up in. Aside from one major renovation in the early 1800s and modifications since then to install plumbing and electricity, it had remained largely unchanged over its long history. It was a treasure trove filled with heirlooms and antiques that would make a museum curators mouth water. But there was no time to appreciate the cypress-paneled walls painted a mellow gold or the faded Turkish rugs that spilled jewel-tone colors across the old wood floor. She went directly toward her old bedroom, where earlier in the day she had done nothing more than deposit her suitcases before storming off in a stubborn huff to find a guide.
«Going, did you say?» Shelby questioned suddenly, as if Serena's words had only just managed to penetrate through her sense of indignation. She rushed to catch up, plucking at the sleeve of Serena's rumpled jacket like a child trying to catch its mother's attention. «Going where?»
«To see Gifford.»
«You can't go now!» Shelby whined in dramatic alarm, following Serena into her room. She positioned herself well within her sister's range of vision and put on her most distressed expression, wringing her hands for added effect. «You simply can't go now! Why, you only just arrived! We haven't had a chance to chat or anything! I haven't had a chance to tell you a thing about our new house or about how well the children are doing in school or how I may very well be named Businesswoman of the Year by the chamber of commerce. You simply can't go now!»
Serena ignored the dictate and began undressing, tossing her ruined clothes into a pile on the floor. She frowned at the suitcase on the bed, knowing there was nothing in it suitable for a swamp. She might have grown up dogging Gifford's heels around the cane fields, but the woman she had become in Charleston had no call to wear jeans or rubber knee-boots.
«And Odille is making a leg of lamb for supper,» Shelby went on. She moved around the room in quick, nervous motions, flitting from place to place like a butterfly, lighting only long enough to straighten a lace doily or fuss with the arrangement of cut flowers in the china pitcher on the carved cherry dresser. «You can't know the battle I had to wage to get her to do it. Honestly, that woman is as churlish as the day is long. She has defied me at every turn since Mason and I moved in. And she frightens the children, you know. They think she's some land of a witch. I don't doubt but what she told them she'd put a spell on them. She's just that way. I don't understand why Gifford keeps her on.»
«He enjoys fighting with her, I imagine,» Serena said, smiling as she thought of the cantankerous Odille facing off with the equally cantankerous Gifford.
Odille Fontenot was as homely and hardworking as a mule, a tall rack of bones with the hide of a much smaller person stretched tautly over them. Her skin was as black as pitch, her eyes a fierce shade of turquoise that burned as bright as gas jets with the force of her personality. She was dour and superstitious and full of sass. She had taken over as housekeeper after Serena and Shelby had gone and Mae, the woman who had helped raise them, had retired. Odille was probably well into her sixties by now, but no one could tell by looking at her and no one dared ask.
Serena opened her suitcase and pulled out a pair of white crop-legged cotton slacks and a knit top with wide red and white stripes. A quick glance in the beveled mirror above the dresser confirmed her suspicions that her hair was coming down, but there was no time to fuss with it.
«Besides,» she said, her voice muffled as she pulled her top on over her head, «Odille's brother is Gifford's best friend.»
Shelby abruptly stopped rearranging knickknacks on the dresser and looked sharply at her sister's reflection in the mirror. «Did you say you're going after Gifford? You're going out into the swamp?»
Serena zipped her slacks, meeting Shelby's gaze evenly. «Isn't that what you told me to do?» she said with deceptive calm.
Shelby's cheeks flushed beneath her perfect makeup, and she glanced away, suddenly uncomfortable. «I guess I didn't think you'd really do it. I mean, for heaven's sake, Serena, you going out into the swamp!»
«What did you think I'd do, Shelby? Nothing? Did you think I'd just ignore the problem?»
Shelby turned and faced her then, her mood changing yet again. «Ignore it the way I have, you mean?» She narrowed her eyes and pinched her mouth into a sour knot. «Well, I'm sorry, Serena, if I don't live up to your standards, but I have many other responsibilities. If Gifford wants to go live in the middle of some godforsaken, snake-infested swamp, I can't just drop everything and go after him.»
«Well, you won't have to,» Serena said tiredly. «Because I'm going.»
«Yes.» Shelby flitted to the French doors that opened onto the gallery. She drew a length of sheer drape through her fingers, then twirled away, tossing her head. «Won't Giff be tickled to see how you've overcome your fears.»
Serena gave her twin a long, level look brimming with anger and hurt, but she made no comment. She refused to. She had never once discussed with Shelby her fear of the swamp or how she had acquired it. The topic had tacitly been declared off-limits years earlier, a dangerous no-man's land that Shelby danced along the edge of when she was feeling spiteful.