Riding Shotgun Read online

  The blood drained from Cig’s face. “What year do you think it is?”

  “The year of our Lord sixteen hundred and ninety-nine. November third, and just think, Pryor, it will soon be a new century. The eighteenth century. I can scarcely believe it.”

  Cig could scarcely believe it either. One of them was nutty as a fruitcake.

  “1699—Margaret?” She half-whispered.

  “Indeed.” Margaret shook her head, the glossy curls spilling out from under her mobcap.

  “It’s 1995,” Cig stated firmly.

  Margaret appeared solemn for a moment then squeezed Pryor’s arm. “You always were one for japes. If it were, what, 1995, I’d be dead and as you can see I am very much alive.”

  “Maybe I’m dead?” A cold claw of fear tore at Cig’s entrails.

  Margaret laughed as she thought Cig was joking…. “You’re home in your own bed now. Sweet dreams.”

  Cig, eyelids heavy, mumbled, “You don’t have a telephone, do you?”

  Books by Rita Mae Brown

  THE HAND THAT CRADLES THE ROCK

  SONGS TO A HANDSOME WOMAN

  THE PLAIN BROWN RAPPER

  RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

  IN HER DAY

  SIX OF ONE

  SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

  SUDDEN DEATH

  HIGH HEARTS

  STARTING FROM SCRATCH:

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF WRITERS’ MANUAL

  BINGO

  VENUS ENVY

  DOLLEY: A NOVEL OF DOLLEY MADISON IN LOVE AND WAR

  RIDING SHOTGUN

  RITA WILL:

  MEMOIR OF A LITERARY RABBLE-ROUSER

  LOOSE LIPS

  Also by Rita Mae Brown

  with Sneaky Pie Brown

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  REST IN PIECES

  MURDER AT MONTICELLO

  PAY DIRT

  MURDER, SHE MEOWED

  MURDER ON THE PROWL

  CAT ON THE SCENT

  SNEAKY PIE’S COOKBOOK

  FOR MYSTERY LOVERS

  And look for

  OUTFOXED

  Coming soon in hardcover from Ballantine

  With love

  to

  Herbert Claiborne Jones, Dr. Foxhunting

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Flopping on my butt and sliding over an entire acre, the ice six inches thick, caused my mind to speed along as fast as my body. During the winter of 1993, the power died: no heat, no hot food, no hot water… and no light except for candles during those long, dark nights.

  As I searched my shelves for something to read, I passed on my Greek and Latin books. After all, I was struggling enough trying to keep the farm going during the hammering storms. Did I really want to conjugate irregular verbs?

  Then I thought about improving my German. That might require a miracle beyond study.

  I pulled out Das Kapital, put it right back with a big “ugh.”

  The worn spines of Tom Jones, War and Peace, all of Jane Austen, and all of Turgenev greeted me, but I’d read them many times. I wanted something new, something to take me away.

  It wasn’t just the ice storms battering me, I’d lost a chunk of my timber crop to the pine beetle; acres and acres of fine, healthy trees quickly devastated; and not a hint of relief from Washington. Between that and the Tax Reform Act of 1986, I was feeling like the tail end of bad luck.

  I tried to look on the bright side. None of my horses or cattle had died in the storms. No tractors or trucks had been smashed. No one had broken any bones, and the fences were still standing, despite the battering.

  Still, I wanted something to read to escape my troubles, small when compared to some of the truly awful things that can happen, but troubles nonetheless.

  Travel was impossible for a week during the worst storm. I couldn’t cruise into town and pick up a new novel. So I wrote one.

  Riding Shotgun was started with a pen and yellow tablet while I sat in front of the fireplace surrounded by cats, dogs, and one abandoned puppy. The winds howled, rattling the windows, the snow swirled with each gust.

  Whenever and wherever you pick up this novel, I hope the weather will be kinder, and whatever troubles you may have will vanish for an hour or two.

  Rita Mae Brown, M.F.H.

  Afton, Virginia

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part III

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART I

  1

  Cig Blackwood was stuck the entire day with a middle-aged couple from L.A. who were bent on fleeing that unstable basin. It wasn’t just the earthquakes they wanted to put behind them, it was everyone else in the Los Angeles basin, all three million of them squeezed into a crescent once paradisial and now parasitic.

  The husband, Troy Benedict—though that could hardly be his real name—wore a burgundy silk shirt buttoned so high up on his neck Cig wondered if his Adam’s apple might not be pressed into a cherry. A dark, swirling-patterned tie, a pair of perfectly pressed khaki pants, and crocodile Gucci loafers completed what he perceived as his country outfit. His Schaffhausen watch cost more than the car in which she was carrying them. The wife, Lizbeth, must have been on her second facelift because her eyebrows were poised midway between her eyes and her hairline. The hair itself had been crimped so that it exactly resembled a Hereford’s tail. And it was about the same color, too.

  Lizbeth, Versace all the way, wished to share her innermost feelings with Cig as they drove through the emerald rolling hills of central Virginia. Each time they stopped to inspect an elegant estate, nothing under a million and a half, Lizbeth would discover some resonance of her childhood or her first marriage or the three films she’d acted in during the late 1970s—“B.T.” as she said. “Before Troy.” These confidences, registered in a lowered, breathy voice, must have been a form of big-city female bonding, Cig thought. To her a bond was what the dentist stuck on your teeth, or if you were a little kinky, something you did in bed with black leather.

  During these intimate exchanges, Lizbeth probed Cig’s own psyche while Troy inspected the heating system or put his hands—no callouses—on the basement walls searching for dampness, unaware that dampness and central Virginia were synonymous. If you want dry, she longed
to tell him, go to the Sahara.

  Lizbeth, when not wrenching treasures from her deepest self, breathed Troy’s name every third sentence. This cast a spell on him as though his name were a mantra that belonged on the lips of his wife and, Cig suspected, on other women’s lips as well.

  Cig, trapped in her aging Wagoneer, which guzzled gas like rednecks guzzle beer, heard how Troy, president of Mecca Studios for fifteen years, a miracle of survival in that business, had been forced out in a conglomerate takeover.

  Lizbeth embellished her story. “Troy, poor darling, used to drag home from meetings with ungrateful producers and egotistical directors—they were the absolute worst—and he’d say, ‘When I grow up I’m going to be a farmer.’ And here we are. The takeover by those dreadful people was a blessing in disguise.”

  Cig thought to herself, Yes, indeed, farming in a two-thousand-dollar Versace scarf.

  At three in the afternoon she dropped the Benedicts at Keswick Hall, just east of Charlottesville. It was the only hotel that approached their comfort zone, a phrase Lizbeth repeatedly used.

  They waved merrily, and Cig waved back good-bye, a smile frozen on her face like dried glacé. Her shoulders sagged as soon as they crossed the threshold.

  Troy had used her car phone every five minutes. The Bill would be more than her mortgage. He assured her he’d pay, he’d simply forgotten his cellular phone. Cig believed such promises when the check cleared the bank. Her experience was that often people with the most money were the most insensitive to others’ need for it—on time.

  She headed back to the office, turned on the radio and listened to twenty ads in the half hour it took to get back to the Boar’s Head complex. As she clicked off the radio she knew she wasn’t a true American because she didn’t buy Chevrolet, America’s truck; she’d never be beautiful because she didn’t use the antiaging compound touted by Princess Marcella Borghese; and she didn’t really know how to have a good time because she rarely drank an ice-cold Bud. Funny that women’s voices never sold beer on the radio. Would men switch brands if they heard a woman’s voice pitching the sudsy brew? She gladly would have grabbed a beer at that moment despite the antifemale bias of brewers, anything to wind down, but the day was far from over.

  An avalanche of pink message slips spilled out of her office mailbox. Tiffany, the receptionist at Cartwell and McShane, known lovingly among the women realtors as Slutbunny, never folded message slips for anyone—they were just stuffed into the wooden cubicle—except the messages for Max Cartwell, the head broker and company owner. His messages were delivered personally. Why anyone would want to name her child after a Yankee jewelry store mystified Cig, but then why anyone would keep Tiffany as a receptionist also mystified her. If she’d been the girl’s mother she would have wrapped her lunch in a road map.

  As she picked up her messages—two already from Troy and Lizbeth—Tiffany flounced by.

  “Roger Davis called. I’ve been so busy I just didn’t have time to write it down.”

  No, but she’d had time to do her nails. Plum today. Went nicely with the magenta silk blouse and the black skirt clinging just above the dimpled knees.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Blackwood, I have a video of my cousin singing at the Foxfield Races. She was the entertainer for the Mobile Phone Company’s annual picnic. Do you think Mr. Benedict would look at it?” Her impulse was to flirt, but since that rarely worked with women, Tiffany’s approach had an uneven quality to it.

  “No. He ran a film company. You need to send the video to a record company.”

  “What about the music in movies?” Tiffany was either very loyal to her family or getting a percentage of the action.

  “The producer selects the composer. It’s a closed circle, Tiffany. You need a record producer.” Cig, while not an expert on media responsibilities, knew the basics.

  She eyed the mountain of paper on her desk as an annoyed Tiffany sashayed off. On top of the pile was an article cut from the tabloid paper that Jane Fogleman insisted on bringing to work every morning to read aloud over everyone’s second cup of coffee. Jane should have been on Entertainment Tonight because her rendition of aliens turning Granny into a sex-crazed rap goddess filled the office with screams of laughter.

  The attached note read,

  “Cig, you were out with the mogul at the crack of dawn, so I saved this clipping for you. P.S.: Do you need me to whip in or should I just whip Roger instead?”

  Being Master of the Jefferson Hunt, a full-time job, unpaid, was a labor of love for Cig. There were too many times recently when it provided the only happiness she enjoyed. As the Master of Foxhounds, she assigned the task of assisting the Huntsman to keep the hounds moving in the right direction. Called whippers-in, these wild riders were the unsung heroes of foxhunting. Actually, fox chasing was the more accurate term. Jefferson Hunt did not want to kill foxes.

  The clipping saved for her benefit was about a twenty-five-year-old woman living in Milwaukee who claimed to have the Bible tattooed on her eyelids. This way she would never close her eyes on the Word of God. She also had the Bible tattooed on her other parts; there was something spiritually uplifting about seeing the Lord’s Prayer disappear into considerable cleavage only to reappear on the sumptuous right bosom. One would have to part the protuberances to fully read the prayer. Then again, that may have been a sacrament of the good woman’s form of worship.

  Cig held up the clipping just as Jane popped her head in the door. “Her temple is a body open twenty-four hours a day for worship.”

  “Three points.” Jane made an imaginary basketball toss at Cig. “Sell any property?”

  “They like Hardtack Manor. But then again, Lizbeth feels a deep emotional pull toward Cloverfields. The walls speak to her.”

  “And what do they say?”

  Cig dropped her voice to a hollow whisper. “‘Spend money…’ Course it’s been vacant for five years,” she continued. “Today I heard about Lizbeth’s struggle for self-esteem. She snorted too much white powder and her breasts were too small, past tense, I assure you. Her search for meaning encompassed everything from channeling to a macrobiotic diet to Prozac followed by week-long fasts. And let’s not forget Freudian analysis five days a week. I think I would have liked her better if she’d gotten drunk and rolled in the gutter with those sex-crazed Martians. I don’t know, Jane, either it’s too late to force-feed people manners or I’m a callous bitch. I don’t want to hear this shit.”

  “M-m-m. You have your moments but I don’t believe confession substitutes for conversation. It’s different for us. We’re connected over time, our families knew one another. Out there no one is connected to anything. Maybe they think if they vomit up these intimacies they’ll feel close to one another.”

  “No. They’ll just have a mess to clean up.”

  “You’ve got a mess to clean up no matter what you do,” Jane said matter-of-factly.

  “Would be super if the Benedicts would buy Hardtack Manor and restore it. Remember the barn dances old Miz Amorous used to give when we were in high school? She’d tell us about her seven husbands, or was it eight?”

  “I think some were unofficial, which was why Andy’s mom kept her away from the sauce. She thought it would fry our innocent ears. Andy, to his credit, is the male version of his grandma. He never met a woman he didn’t like.”

  Jane clapped her hands together. “Harleyetta West is reported to have had lunch with Andy yesterday. Now that is a truly fascinating prospect.”

  “Who did the reporting?” Cig, prepared to dismiss the gossip, challenged.

  “A reliable source.”

  “There is no reliable source in Charlottesville.”

  “Your sister, Grace.”

  “Oh.” Cig’s voice dropped. “Well, just who was she having lunch with?”

  “I forgot to ask her that.” Jane leaned against the doorway. “How long are the Benedicts in town?”

  “I don’t know.” Cig sighe
d. “We must all seem like repressed snobs to them because they sure seem like three-dollar bills to us.”

  “We are repressed snobs, Cig. And if we’re not snobs we’re still insular. That’s part of our charm, we’re so parochial.”

  “Call for you on line six, Miz Fogleman.” Tiffany yelled when she could have easily buzzed. Except that she had never completely mastered the switchboard.

  “Hell. Want me to whip?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  That welcome intrusion over, Cig again stared at the pile of papers. She heard the beep of the fax machine down the hall in the office machine room. After the beep came the odd grinding noise the fax made as the page slowly appeared, the machine sticking out its paper tongue. Her colleagues said they didn’t know how they had lived before the fax. She did. She had liked it just fine.

  The beeper, the fax, the Xerox, the computer, the cellular phone, and whatever interactive media would be invented and merchandised soon—these technologies supposedly simplified life but all they did to Cig was add more pressure, especially the fax’s implicit demand for instant replies. If Cig acted in haste she wasn’t as concise or precise as if she’d had time to collect her thoughts. Lately, she wasn’t sure she had any thoughts to collect.

  She checked her watch. Four thirty. She gathered up brochures, messages, notes, and standardized forms, shoving them into her tote bag.

  Her younger child, Laura, aged fifteen, was waiting to be picked up from field hockey.

  Laura, dark, intense, and athletic, looked a great deal like Cig’s younger sister, Grace, a stunning beauty with jet black hair and electrifying cobalt blue eyes. People who didn’t know the family often mistook Laura for Grace’s daughter.

  As Cig dashed through the office foyer, the senior partner in Cartwell and McShane, a University of Virginia graduate in 1969 who never got over it, strode out of his office.

  “How’d it go?” Max Cartwell gave her a hearty slap on the back.

  “Good. They love the area.”

  “Well, close that sale, Cig. A big commission in this one.” The shine of profit glowed on his reddish skin.