Chapter One
CORDELIA SAT IN THE BREAK ROOM, POLISHING AN APPLE WITH A WIPE. Her phone buzzed against the plastic card table as she set out her lunch supplies, but she just glanced at the number before she let it go to voicemail. She didn’t deal with business or social matters on her break. While the area code caused a flutter of trepidation to beat against her breastbone—a dead snake could still bite, after all—she quickly shook it off. It had been twenty years since she’d last heard a peep out of Sarsaparilla Falls.
Getting on with sanitizing the remainder of her lunch, a task that took ten of her allotted thirty minutes, she put her hometown out of her mind. But when that area code came up three more times, she reluctantly set aside her apple and picked up the phone.
“Is this Miss Cordelia West, daughter of Sherilynn West?” The unfamiliar voice had a stuffy quality to it, like he’d just come out of a dust storm and didn’t want to breathe through his nose. “Former resident of our great town of Sarsaparilla Falls, current resident of Dallas?”
Cordelia pulled the phone away from her ear to check the number again. Was this one of those phishing calls where they tried to get you to say yes on the phone just so they could sign you up for all sorts of services you didn’t want or need? It was hard to tell these days.
Just to be safe, she opted for “How can I help you?”
“My name is Arbuckle Jenkins. I’m an estate lawyer here in Sarsaparilla Falls. I worked with your great-aunt, Penelope. She ah...” The man cleared his throat. “I apologize for bringing you some news that might be a bit of a shock, but it seems she’s passed away.”
It was indeed a shock, as Cordelia didn’t know she had a great-aunt. Or any remaining relatives in Sarsaparilla Falls, for that matter. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, well.” The sound of cloth rustling came over the line, as if he were dotting his face with a handkerchief. “These things happen.”
“Forgive me for asking, but how did I come by my relation to her?” Her momma didn’t have any living relatives that she knew of, and surely her daddy’s kin would’ve come forward by now, especially if they were from the same small town where she had been born.
“Are you the daughter of Travis West?”
“Only biologically.” No one had seen hide nor hair of her daddy since she was eight months old.
“Well, there you go. He was her nephew.”
A million questions rose in Cordelia’s mind, but since she hadn’t seen the man who could best answer them in near thirty years, she kept them to herself. She rooted around in her purse until her hand found the side pocket where she kept her pen and notepad. “If you give me the address for the funeral service, I’ll send flowers.”
“No need for that.” Mr. Jenkins hacked and the soft thump of his fist hitting his chest reminded her of her momma beating their rugs with a broom when she was young. “Funeral’s already done. It took us some time to track you down. Your momma lefttown real abrupt-like some twenty years back and no longer lives at her last forwarding address.”
Cordelia’s back stiffened at his admonishing tone. She’d had twenty years to distance herself from the lonely girl she’d been in Sarsaparilla Falls, and all it took was a two-minute phone conversation to undo that thread of time. “The town didn’t seem like it had much interest in our comings and goings back then.”
“Yes, well.” The rustling of papers filtered over the line. “Be that as it may, there is certainly an interest in your whereabouts now.”
This sounded like a mess, and Cordelia didn’t care for messes. As a child, she kept her dolls in their boxes, careful not to crinkle the cellophane. She’d line them up in her spotless room and admire the way their hair gleamed, never tangling, and the way their clothes remained pristine, never wrinkling.
Unlike her momma—who often had lipstick stains on her teeth, ketchup stains on her shirts, and unidentifiable stains on her white sneakers—Cordelia strived to be the definition of cleanliness. According to their neighbor Pastor Reed-Smythe, it was next to godliness. Seeing as Sherilynn was the only woman in town who’d ever been turned away from church on account of her showing up four Sundays in a row drunker than a kernel in a corn whiskey barrel, Cordelia figured she could use all the godliness she could get her hands on.
It was a shame Pastor Reed-Smythe didn’t extend those judgments to his own backyard. His son, Archer, had been a hellion from the get-go. He collected dead flies, lit fires on purpose, and rolled around in mud puddles. In the summer, Cordelia would practice sitting still while the grass tickled her ankles. She wanted to see how long she could go without twitching. ButArcher ruined that for her when he wandered over from next door and blew a loud raspberry on his arm, breaking her concentration and making her jump. He’d laughed, and she’d gotten a powerful urge to stick her finger into the empty slot where he’d lost his two front teeth.
It was the grossest image she’d ever conjured in her young life. That night she’d had to wash her hair three times just to scrub it from her head.
Every Sunday morning, he’d come out of his house in a nice clean suit, with his dark hair smartly combed and not a speck of dirt to be found anywhere on his face. He almost looked like the kind of boy she wouldn’t mind being friends with. But then he’d call her Delia, which she hated, or stick his tongue out at her, or tell her Satan was going to eat her toes, and she’d remember why she disliked him so much. Since he was the pastor’s son, folks in town would see him coming up the street dragging a cloud of dust behind him and just smile and nod and say things like “boys will be boys.” But if Cordelia had so much as a speck of lint on her sweater, they’d draw closer together and sneer and say things like “blood will tell.”
By the time Cordelia was ten years old, her momma had gotten so sick of being a pariah that she moved them way on up to Dallas and promised to clean up her act. A handful of false starts later, she attended her first AA meeting. But by that point Cordelia had already formed what the experts called her “core sense of self,” and there was no turning back from the girl who just wanted people to see her as respectable.
No one from Sarsaparilla Falls bothered to stay in touch with them. The only person who had written her was Archer Reed-Smythe, who had sent her a letter informing her he could still smell her across Texas, along with a drawing of a stick figure she presumed to be her next to a large pile of garbage.
She didn’t write him back.
As a teen, she was the only one in her class who had pressed creases in her jeans. She wore her long golden-brown hair straight and flat. No makeup, no jewelry, no loud prints or embellishments of any kind. Her big blue eyes, dark lashes, and wide mouth that tended to smile even as she frowned made some of the boys in her class think she was friendly, but she quickly disabused them of that notion. Boys were just one more thing that fell into the category of messy.
In college, once she’d cleared her gen eds and settled on a major, she figured it was time to partake in the adult tradition of dating. She tested the waters with a handful of movie nights with a few different guys, and, after taking an adequate amount of time to research why her stomach twisted into knots every time Harmony Salto’s arm brushed hers in their tightly packed Postmodern Lit lecture, a few women as well. That was a shock to her momma, who sometimes still struggled to overcome some of Sarsaparilla Falls’ more antiquated ways of thinking, but it didn’t take long for Cordelia to decide dating didn’t get any less complicated in adulthood. Soon after she scrubbed her last relationship from her dorm, her roommate requested a room change because the overpowering scent of bleach had begun to make her sick. After that, Cordelia was mostly alone again.
Once she graduated from school with a master’s in library and information science, she felt as though she could finally live like she’d always wanted: a respected librarian with a tidy apartment, a neat wardrobe, and free from the shadow of being the town drunk’s daughter.
All that seemed imperiled by this call.
Cordelia pulled herself from the grainy memories of her past. “And just why is anyone from Sarsaparilla Falls interested in my whereabouts after twenty years?”
