Free Just Wanna Testify by Pearl Cleage Page A

relieved. She was his friend, but she was also the boss’s wife and attention must be paid. “Nothing’s going to happen between now and then.”
    “Like what?” Abbie said.
    “Like nothing,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring as he walked her to the door. “The Mayflowers aren’t dangerous anymore. If they were, don’t you think Blue would have said so?”
    “I know he would have,” she said. She watched the sous chef carefully stirring a red sauce in a deep iron pot. The spicy smell of tomatoes and garlic made her stomach growl and she realized she was hungry after all.
    “Then stop worrying,” Louie said gently, opening the door slowly so she wouldn’t think he was being rude. “Everything is fine.”
    Abbie stopped in the doorway and raised her eyebrows. “Is that why you’re giving me the bum’s rush?”
    “Dinner rush, Miss Abbie.
Dinner rush.
”
    “Just checking,” she said, and heard her stomach growl again, this time so loudly that Louie heard it, too. He grinned.
    “I know you’re not hungry, but how about I send you out a coldchicken sandwich anyway? You can just pick at it until your man gets back.”
    “Bless you.” Abbie laughed, heading down the short hallway to the restaurant’s main dining room as Louie’s assistant approached holding out a cellphone and looking concerned. “If things get crazy later, I’ll just see you in the morning.”
    “I’ll be there,” he said as the door swung closed and he was gone.
    Abbie liked being in the empty restaurant before it opened for dinner. It was like sitting in a church sanctuary before Sunday service. Peaceful, but in a nice, anticipatory kind of way. She stopped right inside the front door at the main entrance and there was the picture Louie had been teasing her about. It was a beautiful color portrait of Abbie by the ocean on a perfectly cloudless day. She looked happy and sexy and exactly like the kind of woman you’d want to have a nice long dinner with.
    At Peachy’s request, Aretha, who took the picture, had framed it in a heavy, old-fashioned gilt frame, like the kind that hangs over the bar in all those old Hollywood Westerns. Whenever she came to the restaurant, people got very excited and asked her to pose with them in front of it. She always agreed, smiling pleasantly as they embraced her shoulders awkwardly or pointed up at the portrait, as if anyone could somehow miss the fact that it was her smiling down at them.
    She liked that picture. Aretha had taken it only a few weeks after Abbie realized she was falling in love with Peachy. The idea that he liked it so much that he stood before it, feeling such longing that his suffering was visible to the naked eye, filled her with deep pleasure. Louie was right. There was enough time tomorrow to figure out the Mayflowers. She hadn’t seen Peachy in almost two weeks and she missed him like crazy.
    Tonight
, she thought, smiling back at her own image,
all you need is love. And maybe a nice cold chicken sandwich
.

Chapter Nine

Something Very Strange
    It had been a very busy day. Since he first arrived at eight o’clock and found Serena Mayflower waiting in his office to the last phone call from his friend Noel in Trinidad that had just ended a few minutes before seven, Blue Hamilton had been wearing with equal aplomb the many hats required of him in the course of an average twenty-four-hour day.
    Blue had made his artistic reputation as a singer, but he had made his fortune in real estate. Although he was known for his extensive commercial and residential properties throughout West End, Blue’s holdings went far beyond the boundaries of the small southwest Atlanta community where he had chosen to live and work. Recent developments in world markets had tripled the value of his partnership with a Trinidadian songwriter turned oilman who had a line to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Blue’s friend also held the distinction of having penned more number one hits thananyone