Free The Body in the Boudoir by Katherine Hall Page Page B

or maybe twice.) There was no way the two women would ever sit over coffee or something stronger in the kitchen the way she had with housekeepers in the Delta, and laugh about the guests who’d come to dinner the night before or gossip about family members. Various Walfort kin trekked out to the house for yearly vacations. It was Sky’s house. He’d inherited it from his father, but his sisters all thought of it as theirs, an attitude he encouraged. He was the youngest, and the only boy. Handsome now, and even more so as a young man, Sky had been the apple of his mother’s and sisters’ eyes. Tammy shook her head, watching in the mirror as her hair ever so slightly moved, one strand dropping seductively over one of her eyes. It was her turn now, had been since they’d tied the knot. Not that she didn’t appreciate family. Family was what counted.
    The Walforts, a corruption of the original Dutch “Walvoort,” had arrived with Hudson on the Half Moon and had never strayed far from Nieuw Amsterdam except to move farther and farther uptown. Thrifty and entrepreneurial, always a good combination, one generation had provided for the next and then some. Not that Tammy hadn’t brought her fair share to the marriage, her third. The first—Bobby Ray Benson—didn’t really count, the result of a particularly pie-eyed weekend at Ole Miss visiting a cousin who was a Tri Delt. Daddy had had the whole thing annulled before Bobby Ray, or Tammy herself, had sobered up enough to decide whether tying the knot had been as good an idea as it had seemed at the time. Bobby Ray married one of the Hayes girls and Tammy had been at the wedding, necking a little with her ex at the party the night before just to be friendly, for old times’ sake.
    Tammy’s next husband had been a perfect choice. They’d been to dancing school together and he was her mother’s sister-in-law’s third cousin, close enough to know what you were getting, but not so close as to break the law. She truly loved Wade and she truly loved their life together. He ran the family business and ran it well. By the time of their tenth anniversary, they had a big house and staff in Louisiana plus a nice vacation house on the inland waterway in Florida. Wade did love his boats. The only fly in the ointment was the good Lord’s decision not to bless them with children, but there were plenty of nieces and nephews to spoil. Tammy was a firm believer in the Almighty’s mysterious ways, and she had not given up hope until Wade’s heart gave out on the eighth hole at the country club. It had been hotter than blazes that day and Tammy had always blamed the weather, not Wade’s girth. It was a wonder they didn’t all die from the heat that August. After the funeral, Aunt Susie’s tomato aspic melted into a pool of juice before she could get it into the house from her car.
    Wade had been as good a provider in death as he had in life, maybe better, given the size of the life insurance policy, and she liked the independence it gave her. She took her time before settling down with Sky. He was a Yankee, after all, but it had worked out. He’d been married before, too. She would never have married a man who didn’t have the habit.
    Tammy had never been one to dwell on the past, except for the South’s glory days. She and her siblings had all learned early that in case of fire, they were to grab the sword Great-great-grandfather had carried at the Battle of Baton Rouge and the drawer containing the silver flatware his wife had buried with her own sweet hands in the family cemetery to protect it from the Union troops.
    Therefore, she was a little fuzzy about Sky’s past exes. She knew he’d lost one, or maybe it was two, to disease and then there were two more to divorce, but he’d never had any children, which was probably sad at the time, but a good thing now. She had no desire to be a