I Still Dream About You

Why Babs Hated Maggie

THEY SAY ENVY IS A COAL THAT COMES HOT AND HISSING STRAIGHT from hell. If so, it had been burning a hole in Babs Bingington from the moment Hazel Whisenknott had introduced Maggie as her new agent. Babs had hated Maggie at first sight. This has-been beauty queen with all her phony manners, just waltzing into the business on her good looks and her “over the mountain” contacts. It made her sick to see how all the male agents in town acted like fools around her, fawning and preening like idiots. It was bad enough that she had to compete with that damn midget; now this.

Three weeks later, when she found out that Maggie had gotten the Caldwell listing, she was livid. The Caldwell house was on a view lot that the people she dealt with at the construction company wanted. Babs had contacted the Caldwells a month before, and they had told her that they were not selling. And now, that beauty-queen bitch had gone behind her back and stolen her listing. And to make matters worse, she had driven by the Caldwell house on Monday afternoon, expecting to see cleanup trucks everywhere, but there had been absolutely no signs that the house had been flooded. The kid she had hired to go upstairs, plug up the tub, and leave the water running had obviously screwed up. The little shit. She had been hoping to get the bimbo fired and take over the listing. And what had made her twice as furious was that before she had enough time to come up with another scheme, the house had sold.

Nothing had ever come easy for Babs. She had never been a natural beauty, and it had cost her a fortune. She had been through two face-lifts, a nose job, a chin implant, and had her hairline moved up before she was forty. People had always been out to get her from the start. A disgruntled employee had done her in in Newark. After she lost her real estate license in New Jersey, Babs had changed her name and moved to Birmingham, where her son was studying medicine at UAB. And that had not been easy, either. She’d had to push and shove every inch of the way to get into the real estate market here. Those southern girls were so clannish; they were nice to her face, but she knew they all thought they were better than she was. Only she would get her revenge on that phony Miss Goody Two-Shoes, Margaret Fortenberry. For now, she was just biding her time.