You Drive Me Crazy novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Head Table

The Charlotte Concours committee wanted to meet the restorer, so I put on the only dress I owned.

It was black, plain, and three years old, with a hem I had let down myself.

Cade looked at me when I stepped out of the truck at the track museum, and for a second he forgot to lock his door.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your face said it."

"My face is allowed an opinion."

He wore a dark suit that fit.

I did not look lower than his tie.

The dinner was in the museum's main hall, under a ceiling of hanging race cars.

A hundred people sat at round tables with white cloths and candles.

Sponsors, committee members, old drivers, wives in silk.

Cade's famous nine car hung right over the head table, red and gleaming.

Vivian stood at the microphone in emerald green, pearls at her throat.

"Friends," she said, and smiled at the room. "Tonight we honor a very special restoration, and the man who made it possible."

Applause.

Cade took my elbow, and led me to a table near the front.

Amos was not there. He had stayed home with Eli, and I missed him badly.

"And of course," Vivian went on, "we thank the restorer, who is here with us tonight."

Heads turned.

"Mara Tolland. A name some of us remember."

Something in her tone made my shoulders go up.

"She was one of the team's own mechanics, once," Vivian said. "A bright girl. She left us very suddenly, seven years ago, the morning after the Charlotte win. We were all so worried."

Murmurs.

"It was a hard time for the Haskell family. My father had just paid her an advance for her work. A great deal of money, in fact, for a junior mechanic. And she simply vanished. Twenty thousand dollars."

I went completely still.

A man across the table whispered, "I never heard that."

"Of course you didn't," Vivian said sweetly. "We kept it quiet. Dale was always a gentleman."

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