Breeding Ground (28 page)

“Timpson? Was that it?”

“I don't know that I'll remember. But when your mom was off with the grownups, I offered you my piece of cheese. Which you ate. Instantly. And when she came in to check on the ‘children's table,' I spoke right up and said, ‘Tyler ate my cheese.' And she yanked you out of there and did something, I don't know what, and I sat there and gloated. You must've wanted to kill me.”

“I did, actually. But I got you back.”

“You certainly did! You painted over one of my paintings. What was it?”

“A small oil. A house on the river.”

“My study of Carter's Grove.”

They both laughed and finished their salads. And then Alice took her blood thinners.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay. I'll be better. I move slowly. I'm still sore. I get tired easily, so I go to bed early, things like that. But I can't afford to fall, or cut myself, when I'm taking the blood thinner. I'd have internal bleeding if I fell, and with Booker gone I'm extra careful.”

“Good.” Tyler reached for the grapes on the cutting board beside the cheeses Alice had brought with crackers. “I guess I really needed to eat. There aren't many good places on the road.”

“That's what's hard about road trips.”

“Yeah.”

They were both quiet for a minute. And then Alice said, “How would it be if I called a friend of mine who runs her house as a B&B, and got you a room for the night? She needs the money, and you'd really like the house. It's way out in the country, and you'd have a kind of cottage to yourself. It's one of the ‘traveler' rooms the early settlers built so they could offer a stranger hospitality without having to be afraid of being attacked or robbed.”

“That'd be good. Thanks.”

“I'd offer to let you stay here, but—”

“No, that's fine. I'd like the B&B.”

Alice walked into her study, down the side hall toward the front door, and placed the call to Jessamine Collins, who did, in fact, have that room available. When Alice got back, Tyler was on his feet, dressed in his own shirt.

“Thank you. You do know you've helped?”

“We should've kept talking all those years. Then none of this would've happened.”

He put his arms around her and held her softly, rocking her back and forth.

“Could I ask you one other question?”

He smiled as he let her go. “Sure. You always did ask more questions than anyone else I ever knew.”

“Do you still believe in God like you did? You said something once in Sunday School I've never forgotten.”

Tyler was quiet for a minute. And it looked as though he was searching for a way not to have to answer. “I've asked for help once or twice. Though what I believe, I don't know. Not much of anything might be closest. I haven't given it much thought.”

“Ah.”

He watched her while he put on his windbreaker and scratched the beard on his chin. “Why did you ask?”

“Because it's real to me, and it helps me. And I thought maybe if you looked into it again, it might help you with Jenny.”

Tyler turned and started toward the door. “I'll call you tomorrow before I leave.”

At eleven that night Jo Grant was reading in bed,
The Death of Ivan Ilych,
by Leo Tolstoy, thinking how similar the details of everyday life can be from one century to another. That the ups and downs, the hopes and despairs, the isolation and denials in Ilych's fictional experience with cancer in Russia in the nineteenth century were painfully close to what her mother went through – when the phone rang unexpectedly.

It was Alan Munro, just home from Schenectady, asking her to have dinner with him Wednesday in the restaurant where they'd eaten the night Toss got kicked.

He said he was sorry to call so late, but he had to leave for Cincinnati early the next morning, where he'd be working with a professor in the Microbiology Department of the University of Cincinnati, and wouldn't be home till Wednesday afternoon. Could she meet him at the restaurant about six?

Jo said, “Yes. Sure. Thank you.” And hung up wondering why his voice sounded different and how she ought to react.

Excerpt From Jo Grant's Journal:

…I was watching this woman in the checkout line, worn hard and tired looking, who probably works on one of the farms, and another woman a little younger, who spoke well and wore a suit – both of them reading the gossip magazines while standing by the check-out – when I suddenly thought, “We're like a herd of schizophrenics.”

We love reading about movie stars and incredibly rich people. We're fascinated by how they live, and most of us fawn all over them –
if
we get to be around one. But we're envious too and jealous, and we can't wait to see them fall painfully in public.

A fair number of us seem to assume that anyone with money is dishonest and despicable (unless it's a movie star or some kind of sports figure) even without evidence, when assumptions lead to dangerous places, as everyone knows. Especially Toss, of course, who's famous for saying, “
Assume
makes an ass-out-of-u-and-me.”

There are definitely thieves and manipulators in business, just like in politics. But people like the Franklins and the Harrisons, and the Smiths with their hardware store, and the Wetzells with their dry cleaners (and Dad and Toss, now that I think about it) have worked themselves hard for lots of years to get a business off the ground, and from what I've seen it's more about love of what they do, and being obsessed with doing it well, than it's ever been about money.

But will folks be looking for them to fail in some public and embarrassing way if they ever do start to make a lot of money? Probably. Being who we are. The kind who complain about manna in the desert. And hobble horses on the track…

Monday, May 21, 1962

S
o many people were in and out that day, Jo and Alan spent a lot of time afterwards – as did other family and friends, including the county sheriff – wondering if one of those comings and goings had happened five minutes sooner or later, murder could've been prevented.

They all knew it was unanswerable. But the ones who sat and debated it were so shocked and disoriented, they found themselves scouring their own souls to see if there'd been something they could've done or shouldn't have overlooked.

That's one of the outriders of murder. That it makes survivors feel guilty for no reason. And abandoned unfairly too.

First thing that Monday morning, just before eight-thirty, Peggy James pulled up to Alice's house, bringing the dictation she'd done on Friday for Alice to read and sign, along with the mail from the office that she hadn't brought over Friday.

When she got out of her car and walked toward the front door, she noticed a car parked across the street that looked vaguely familiar. There was someone sitting behind the wheel too, which seemed odd to her, but the driveway was so long she couldn't see to recognize him. And it did look like it had to be a man. The head and shoulders above the dashboard were too tall and broad to make her think it was a woman.

But she didn't spend anytime dwelling on it, because she and Alice went and sat on the gallery and chatted the way they usually did, about what was happening at the office, and how their families and animals were doing – Alice's horses and Peggy's labs – and how when Peggy's puppies were old enough, Alice and Booker would get their pick of the litter.

She told Alice she'd be back at seven that night to bring her mail from the office, and pick up any correspondence Alice had ready. She had to feed the kids dinner early and drop them off at two different school events, and then she'd be out.

Alice smiled and said she knew what that was like. And then told Peggy, just before she left, that she didn't think she'd dictate much that day, but she wanted Peggy to leave the Dictaphone just in case, then pick it up that night and get the heads cleaned at the office.

Alice said she planned to paint most of the morning, and lie down awhile in the afternoon, then paint some more after dinner. So when Peggy came again at seven, she should just walk in the front door, and leave the mail and correspondence in the study, and take the Dictaphone then. Mary would be bringing her groceries in the afternoon, and a casserole too, so she wouldn't have to cook, and could concentrate on her work.

Peggy questioned her closely, because Alice was still walking more gingerly than normal, and bending over a little when she stood, as though her abdomen still hurt. And Peggy knew Alice well enough to worry that she was working too hard.

The phone rang, and Peggy could see Alice was being careful with whoever it was, but pleased too by the call. And Peggy waved and walked out the front, forgetting to look in the car across the street as she drove south toward Versailles, and the Lexington road East.

By nine-fifteen Alice had one of the canvases she'd already primed (a rectangle, two feet by three) set up vertically on her easel, and had started in with a palette knife.

She wanted it to be fluid and abstract, thick layers and thin, maybe, to create a sense of the layered hills that rippled away in the distance around Lexington (which made her get in her car every few weeks and drive all over Woodford, County, and down the river toward Shaker Village, and south and east of Berea too, to Boone National Forest).

She worked, and then put her feet up till lunch. Then lay down and read, and dozed until almost three, when she went back to work.

She'd wanted to approach this painting entirely intuitively, the color palette and the impasto too, and as she looked at what she'd done that morning, and laid on a horizontal sweep of a Thalo Green/Prussian Blue/Titanium White tint, she felt a flush of intense exhilaration – that ended when Richard hollered at her from inside her front door.

“I'm in the gallery, Richard.” She worked until she could feel him behind her, his back to the basement stairs, his eyes hot on her shoulders.

“You're supposed to be resting.”

“I rest. I'm painting for limited periods.”

“I was hoping we could talk.”

“Sure. Just one second.” She laid three more streaks of midnight blue in the center-right of the painting, and scraped them down to the canvas, exposing the texture under the paint, and laid the palette knife down. “You want a glass of tea, or water?”

“Water's fine. I'll get it myself.”

He did. And then sat, in the easy chair without the footstool where Tyler had been the day before.

He crossed his legs and turned the glass on the table and looked as tense as Alice had ever seen him. And she sat too, her legs on the ottoman, with an uneasy flutter in her stomach, waiting for him to begin.

“I'm sorry you've had the medical problems, with the blood clot complication and all. It's nothing to take lightly.”

“No.” Her reading glasses were on the top of her head, and she took them off and set them on the table to have something to do with her hands.

“I see it as another indication that you and Dad should take things easier.” Richard wasn't looking at Alice. He was pleating the crease in his trousers as though it actually mattered, or he was trying to look nonchalant about something that meant a great deal.

“Do you?” Alice was gazing at the painting, studying it from a distance, preparing herself for what was coming, the confrontation he'd come there to have that she'd read on his frayed-looking face.

“You don't need the stress of running the business. You could paint all the time, and do what you like best.”

Alice sat for a second, taking a breath and letting it out, before she picked up the gauntlet. “Richard, can't you see how much I love the business? Building it with your father has been the most significant accomplishment in my entire life. I love to paint as a… I don't know. It satisfies a different side of me. I have to do it some time every year to express that visual part of who I am. But the business matters. There are living, breathing people at stake. People we supply, people we work with, people who depend on what we do. It's dynamic. It's organic. It's fascinating to Booker and me, and the people who work at Blue Grass Horse Vans deserve our dedication. I'm not ready to retire, Richard. And neither is your dad.”

“You don't trust me to run it well!” His skin had flushed a mottled pink, and his hands gripped the arms of his chair as though they needed to be controlled.

Alice studied him for a minute – the small-boned face, the formless chin, the eyes that rarely looked at you directly, the soft sedentary body. “Richard, no one has ever told you that you would take over for Booker. We don't know what we'll do. It would depend on what the business is like when the time comes, or what we think it can be in the future, and what kind of leadership it needs to get there. We might bring in someone from outside with more extensive business experience than any of us in the family has.”

“No, you'll let Spencer run it!”

“Nothing has been decided. And I don't think now is the time to—”

“You've never loved me. You've never taken me seriously, not like you have Spencer!”

“Richard, please—”

“And he's the one who got engaged to the slut from accounting!”

“How can you—”

“Dad even holds it against me that I couldn't go in the army like Spencer, when I wanted to fight and couldn't because of my heart murmur!”

“That's not true, Richard, your dad—”

“I want to prove myself to you and Dad. I want Lily to see what I can do, and that you two have faith in me!

“It's not that we—”

“At least make me a V.P. now, and get Dad to retire next year. I can do the job, I know I can, and Lily would be wonderful as V.P. of Personnel.”

“So is this you or Lily asking?”