Read Online Swindlers by D.W. Buffa - Free Book Online Page A

any
questions, just let me know. I’ll just be in the kitchen. I’m
helping someone write up an offer.”
    When she came back to the table, I raised an
eyebrow.
    “It wasn’t exactly a lie,” she whispered with
a mischievous grin. “I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind.”
    Her gaze drifted toward the window, out to
the trees and the close cut grass and the kidney shaped pool and
the tennis court, out to the ivy covered fence that guaranteed the
privacy of anyone lucky enough to live a privileged life in which
money and the cost of things were never an issue. A soft, wistful
smile played at the corners of her aging mouth and she put aside
the brandished aura of busy efficiency.
    “Justine’s father – I would have married
him.” She looked at me with a quizzical expression, as if wondering
what my reaction was going to be, and then she told me, quite
without any sense of guilt, that she had not been able to marry
Justine’s father because, “He was already married.”
    I had always liked her, and I knew she had
always liked me, and I was old enough now to have a better
understanding of what makes people do the things they do. There
was, so far as I was concerned, nothing to condemn in what she had
done or how she had chosen to live her life.
    “You haven’t had very good luck with men,
have you? And I haven’t had very good luck with women.”
    “Depends on how you look at it,” said Carol
with a good-natured laugh. “I was in love twice, and both times I
got a daughter. Worse things could have happened.” A shrewd,
worried look came into her eyes. “And you fell in love with both of
them, didn’t you? First Jean, and now, unless I miss my guess,
Justine.”
    I started to deny it, but I could not; not
entirely, anyway.
    “No, I didn’t fall in love with her; I
probably could have, though, if she hadn’t been married, and if
there had been more time, if….” I threw up my hands in frustration.
I did not know anything, what I felt, why I was even here, asking
about a woman I was never going to see again. I was curious, that
was all; curious about how Justine had become Danielle, how the kid
I had known, the girl no one noticed, had become the woman every
other woman wanted to look like and every man who saw her wanted to
have.
    “That’s the funny thing,” said Carol. “She
never had a date in high school; no one ever asked her out. She
wasn’t bad looking; she just wasn’t obviously pretty.”
    “Obviously pretty?”
    “I could see it: what she was going to look
like. It was all there: the perfect structure of her face, the
large, green blue eyes, the soft luster of her hair; but she was
skinny and, worse yet, much too serious for her age. I don’t really
remember a single time she laughed.” Reminded of something, she
shook her head. “She laughed at her sister,” she said, staring at
me as if this almost forgotten fact had a new significance.
“Laughed when she found out Jean had broken of her engagement; told
her - she was only sixteen, her sister twenty-two – that she was a
fool and that one day she would regret it. That was the difference
between them,” added Carol with a thoughtful gaze. “Justine always
knew exactly what she thought; with Jean you never knew what she
was going to do.”
    The young couple that had been wandering
through the house looked around the corner to say goodbye. Carol
would not hear of it.
    “Not before you see the pool!”
    It was fun to watch. She was on her feet,
walking toward them as if the pool were some prize possession of
her own, one she shared, when she shared it at all, only with her
closest, most trusted friends. I had seen some of that in Justine,
the way she had made everyone feel important. It was a gift, an
instinct for playing a part, playing it so well that it was not
really playing at all, but, for the time they were doing it, what
they really were. I watched now, seeing the daughter in the mother,
as Carol Llewelyn led the