Southern Comforts by Joann Ross

certainly don’t want the roof caving in during my gala open house ball,” she agreed.
    He had to give her credit for having a vivid imagination. The place, which was even more a challenge than he’d expected, reminded him of the house the Addams family might live in were they to decide to relocate to the old South. But she was already planning balls. Which figured. Balls were a traditional southern event—like high school Friday night football—planned with all the attention that the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave to planning an invasion. And with as much hoopla and pageantry as a New Orleans Mardi Gras.
    â€œThe house has a marvelous history,” she told him as she followed him through the rooms. Lacy spider webs hung in all the corners, draped over fireplace mantels. “It was built by a young man, Edwin Blount, a distant cousin to Eugenia Blount Lamar.”
    The name had been dropped as if he were expected to know it. He didn’t.
    â€œEugenia was a president-general of the Daughters of the Confederacy,” she explained at his politely blank look.
    â€œAh.” He nodded. “That Blount.”
    Her eyes narrowed momentarily, as if suspecting she’d heard a tinge of sarcasm in his mild tone. Obviously deciding she’d imagined it, she went on with her story.
    â€œThey were to be married in the gardens out back. But the bride ran off with her daddy’s cotton broker on the day of the wedding. Poor Edwin.” She sighed dramatically. “It was a terrible scandal.”
    â€œI can imagine.” Cash’s mutinous mind conjured up another image of Chelsea, seated behind him on his Harley, escaping from her cousin’s wedding.
    It had been their last night together. And their hottest. He could remember every single detail except how many times she’d come. They’d both lost track long before dawn. Before he’d taken her back to her safe, traditional, old-money life. And her stiff-necked boyfriend.
    What would have happened, Cash wondered, if she’d agreed to go to San Francisco with him that night? Would they have gotten married? Would he have become successful—and in turn, rich enough—to turn his back on the career he’d sought with such single-minded determination, to return home to his roots?
    Hell. Reminding himself that Sunday morning quarterbacking was an amateur sport, and that thinking about might have beens was for losers, Cash returned his thoughts back to Roxanne’s running monologue.
    â€œOf course the poor man couldn’t possibly live in the house,” she was saying. “Not after having received such a crushing emotional blow. Not to mention such a public humiliation.”
    As he ran his fingers through the dust coating a nearby window, Cash murmured something that could have been an agreement.
    â€œSo he sold it to Ezekial Berry. Who was, of course, a descendant of the Virginia Berrys of Atlanta. His wife, Jane, was one of the Chattahoochee Valley Fitzgeralds. She was pregnant with their first child at the time.”
    There was simply no escaping it. Who are your people? Cash decided that the old European aristocracy had nothing on southerners when it came to tracking ancestral blood-lines.
    He wondered how anxious Roxanne Scarbrough would be to work with him if she knew his background. “Thewindow glass has lost a lot of glazing,” he said. “But the majority of it, at least on this floor, seems in good shape.”
    â€œWell, that’s good news.”
    â€œIt could be all you’re going to get.” He crossed the room. “The plaster’s a mess.” He picked at the cracked and broken wall. “See this?” He plucked out some black fibers and handed them to her.
    â€œThey feel a bit like paint brush bristles.”
    â€œClose. It’s hair. Curried from the backs of horses or hogs undoubtedly raised on the plantation. Builders used it to help hold the plaster