Death on the Family Tree (11 page)

Rosa and Katharine staggered down the hall with the boxed books and stacked them in the library beside the rug. Heaven only knew when Tom would get around to doing anything with either the books or the rug, but that was his concern.

“What you gonna put in place of the books?” Rosa asked.

“My own books and favorite things,” Katharine told her. “That can wait.”

Rosa headed toward the door to the garage. “I guess we might as well fetch that rug in, then. I sure hope you hasn’t wasted your money.”

The rug would have to be rolled up again when the room was painted, but Katharine was as eager to see it in place as Rosa. They could scarcely lift it, and by the time they had dragged it from the back of the SUV and carried it through the house, both were panting. Katharine fetched scissors from the kitchen junk drawer to cut the twine and they carefully unrolled it. It lay like muted jewels on the music room floor.

Rosa stared down at it, hands on her hips. “That’s the prettiest rug I ever did see,” she admitted. “but it don’t match your walls or drapes.”

“I’m going to paint the walls,” Katharine explained, “and I’m changing the window treatment, too. Hollis is coming over to help me choose fabrics and colors.”

“You’d better hang on to your seat,” Rosa advised. “Hollis has some pretty wild ideas. Good ones, mind—she’s fixed up her own room real strikin’ lookin’, but Miss Posey is worryin’ herself sick about what she’s fixin’ to do to their carriage house.”

“I’m not worried.” Katharine spoke absently, looking at the window and wondering if she ought to go ahead and take down the heavy drapery while she was in the mood. “She rearranged my living room last night. Don’t you like it a whole lot better?”

Rosa wasn’t committing herself quite that far. “All I’m sayin’ is, you better make sure you got veto power.” She turned back toward the stairs. “Hollis is mighty arty. And strong willed? Next thing you know, she’ll have painted three of your walls black and the other one purple.”

“Over my dead body,” Katharine vowed, but Rosa was already gone. She liked having the last word.

Katharine assembled her new table and carried their lunch out there. Rosa grumbled at the heat, but grudgingly agreed the table was “right nice.” Afterwards, Katharine went to the history center to read newspaper archives for the summer of 1951. She didn’t know the date of Carter’s murder, but it had to have been front-page news. He had been a war hero and a member of a Buckhead family.
And white
, she mentally added.

She found the story in the third week of June. P
ROMINENT
A
TTORNEY
G
UNNED DOWN AT
H
OME
, screamed Thursday’s headline over a picture taken at a formal function some time before. Carter stood with a glass in his hand talking to someone who had been cut from the picture. He was stunning in a tux. It was no wonder the paper described him as “one of Atlanta’s most eligible bachelors.” Katharine did the math. He was thirty-four at the time. She stared at his picture and felt tears sting her eyes. What a waste!

She printed out the story when she had read it, then printed follow-up stories for the next few days without reading them. She was wondering how to find the trial for his killer when she smelled stale coffee and cigarettes over her shoulder. “You back researching your family?” Lamar Franklin asked.

Katharine greeted him with mixed emotions. He had nearly scared her to death the last time she saw him, but maybe he’d been telling the truth and was only trying to protect her from Hasty. And she respected his skill at digging into the past. “I’m still checking out Carter Everanes,” she told him. “The man I was looking for last time.”

He bent and peered at the screen, where the headline read N
EW
L
EADS IN
E
VERANES
M
URDER
. “He got murdered?” She didn’t bother to reply, since that was self-evident. Besides, he was already demanding, “You doin’ this for somebody else or for yourself?”

“Just for myself. Why?”

“Because you’ll need to be certified if you’re goin’ into the business.”

“Business?” Did people look up old murders for pay?

“Genealogy research. They’s people make a living doing family research for other people. For me, now, it’s a hobby, but my daughters say I might as well get paid, ’cause I might-near do it full-time. But I don’t take money for it, exceptin’ for lectures and classes.”

If he lectured and taught, that might explain his familiarity with all the big words associated with genealogical research.

“It does kind of grab you,” Katharine admitted. “It’s like a real-life detective story.”

He gave her a wide grin that showed two gold-crowned molars. “It sure is. You done any research into your own family?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I have very interesting ancestors.”

“Heck, everybody’s got interesting ancestors. They were people just like us—some of ’em good and some as ornery as all get-out. But you find out all kinds of things that help you make sense of who you are. For instance, take my family, now. Every one of us loves to play cards. One night I went home from doin’ research and found my daughters and their husbands all at my house, drinking my whisky and playing canasta. And you know what I told them? That very day I had found records of a church trial where my great-granddaddy was accused of visiting a lady for immoral purposes. You know what he said?”

“What?” Katharine was interested in spite of herself. She rested her chin on one palm while she listened.

“He told ’em he hadn’t done what they accused him of, but he had two sins on his conscience. He had traveled on a Sunday and he had a habit of playing cards. What you think of that? Card playin’ has come down in our family for at least five generations.” He chuckled softly. “Talk about the sins of the fathers bein’ visited on their children—You never know what you might find if you start diggin’ into your family. Could be horse thieves or could be kings.”

“Farmers and merchants, more likely.” But his enthusiasm was contagious. Maybe she would check out her family one day.

However, his blend of stale cigarettes and coffee was almost overpowering. She gathered up her papers and prepared to leave. She wanted to read the stories about Carter, but not with him breathing fumes down her neck.

“Did you find out anymore about that necklace?” he asked as she picked up her pocketbook and stood.

“Not yet. But this was the man who apparently owned it before my friend got it, so maybe I’ll find out something if I learn more about him.”

“Well, you keep it safe, now.”

“I will,” she promised—not that it was any business of his.

She drove to a nearby Starbucks and perused the clippings over a cold frappuccino.

A neighbor had found Carter Everanes late Wednesday evening. “I figured something was wrong,” he had said, “because the dog kept howling. Then, when I got over there, the front door was standing wide open and all his lights were on. He’s usually in bed by ten-thirty, and his dog wasn’t the noisy kind. So I called through the screened door, and that’s when I saw him, sprawled on the living room floor. I ran right home and called the cops.”

According to the police, Carter had been killed by a shot through his brain, probably sometime between seven and nine p.m. It had been a warm evening, so doors and windows stood open, but all his immediate neighbors had been at church for Wednesday night suppers and prayer meetings. The perfect time to commit murder in the Bible Belt.

Robbery was believed to be the motive, for the house had been torn apart. Walter Everanes had declared, “Whoever did this was after my brother’s money and valuables. Several pairs of jeweled cuff links are missing and a set of diamond studs, along with a gold and ruby ring he was particularly fond of and a fine set of silver he inherited from our parents.” Walter also claimed that his brother was accustomed to carrying several hundred dollars for day-to-day expenses and emergencies, but no money was found in the house.

Saturday’s paper carried an article that filled more than half of page two, and contained pictures of Carter in his army uniform, Carter with his law partners, and Nappy, Carter’s pet schnauzer, sitting woebegone on the front veranda of a one-storied house with a graceful mock-Tudor roof rising to a point, then swooping down to one corner. The grounds, according to the article, included a second lot which was shaded by mature trees and beautifully landscaped, “with a small fountain splashing merrily, oblivious to tragedy, surrounded by early summer flowers and a freshly mown lawn.”

Sunday’s paper announced that two boys playing ball had found Carter’s silver, money, and all his jewelry except the ruby ring late Saturday afternoon. The valuables were in a large grocery bag that had been shoved inside a stand of tall Formosa azaleas circling a tree two blocks down the street. The boys were pictured receiving a quarter each from Walter Everanes for their honesty in returning the valuables.

“Good old Uncle Walter,” Katharine murmured. “Generous to a fault.”

Tuesday’s paper reported that Alfred Simms, Negro, Carter Everanes’s yard man, had been seen wearing his employer’s ruby ring and was being questioned in the case. Alfred’s high school picture was included. He had been a sweet-faced young man with a shy grin.

E
VERANES
M
URDER
S
OLVED!
screamed Thursday’s headline. A picture showed Alfred hiding his face behind handcuffed wrists as he was led to a police cruiser. The story said that the ring “and other evidence” linked Simms to the murder.

Katharine found herself wanting to see the house where it had happened.

She checked the address and found it on a street map she always carried, Atlanta’s metro area not being the easiest in the world to get around in. Streets are apt to change names once or twice and may cross each other a couple of times under various pseudonyms.

Thirty minutes and only two wrong turns later, she pulled up to the curb. The house hadn’t changed much in fifty years, but the side yard had been replaced by a long narrow house that looked like it had been added in the midfifties. Knowing Walter Everanes, Katharine figured he had built that one. Uncle Walter had had no use for any unproductive land except the spacious acres around his own home.

She sat in air-conditioned comfort trying to picture herself in a simpler but less comfortable era when doors and windows were left wide open at night to catch a breeze. She imagined a shadowy figure creeping up the front walk at twilight, pulling open the screen, entering the house carrying a sack. Saw him pull a gun, saw Carter turn in surprise and crumple as the bullet struck him. Saw the man frantically rifling the dim house, stuffing the silver ser vice, jewelry, and money into a sack, hurrying down the sidewalk. Was he surprised into dropping the sack? No, he had shoved it far under the bush. Had he hidden there, hearing something? The paper did not say. Why had he left his loot behind?

A young woman pulling weeds near the front steps had begun to watch the big SUV out of the corner of her eye. A toddler plied his shovel in a nearby sandbox. Katharine wondered if the woman suspected she wanted to snatch the child, or whether she knew her house’s history.

When the woman glanced her way again, Katharine had seen enough. No point in distressing the natives.

She drove back to Buckhead trying to square her imagination with reality.

The fact was, Carter’s front walk was open to the street, not hidden by bushes, and the windows were double at the front. So how had someone crept up the walk and into the house without Carter seeing him? Atlanta is less than fifty miles from the western edge of the eastern time zone, and that was the week of the longest days of the year, so twilight wouldn’t have fallen until nine or so. Surely Carter would have shouted and even run if a stranger had entered. Why didn’t he run? Or fight back? And how could the murderer be certain of not being seen?

She still wanted to read the story of Alfred’s arrest and trial. After she talked with Dr. Flo again, she would return to the history center. She might even read up a bit on her mother’s family.

She smiled as she thought of how engrossed Dutch had been in recent years in putting together the history of his family, with papers and books spilling off his desk. If she got that engrossed in it, she would have a real reason for claiming the music room as her own.

Katharine spent the rest of the afternoon working on the room. She took down the red floral drapery and stuffed it into a black plastic bag to haul to the cleaners. She browsed all the shelves in the house for books she particularly liked and arranged them on the deep music room shelves by category and alphabetically by author. She left lots of space for more books she might want to buy. She chose favorite pieces of porcelain, mementoes, family snapshots, and a couple of her childhood dolls to set in front of the books. Since the shelves were built-in, they could be covered while painting was in progress.

Rosa stopped by on her way out to give one last opinion. “You ain’t gonna want to bring down that tacky old computer table from your room. You better use that pretty piece of Miss Lucy’s for writing on, then you can close it up and hide your mess. And get you a real pretty computer table and a coupla good chairs. Something snazzy, to match the rug.”

“I didn’t know you were a decorator,” Katharine joked. “You ought to go in business with Hollis.” But Rosa was right. Even without its new paint job or anything at the window, the room glowed like a foster child that has finally been adopted. It deserved to be beautifully furnished.

After Rosa left, Katharine decided to take a stab at translating the diary. She took the copy to Tom’s desk, which was pristine except for a blotter, a penholder, and a jade paperweight. It also had good light. She added a desk lamp to her mental list of things to get for her study.

She fetched her German/English dictionary, a legal pad and a pencil, and set to work. Since she had inadvertently cut off the edge of the first page before she had figured out how to place the diary on the copier, she retrieved the original from its hiding place and carefully printed in the end of each line on the copy.

Translating was harder than she had expected. Languages had always been her weak subject, and very few of these sentences used the German vocabulary she had struggled to memorize: “Where is the post office?” “When is the next train?” “Do you have any rooms?” “I would like Wiener schnitzel with strudel to follow.” The last had always been her best sentence. The professor had joked at one point, “If Katharine ever goes to Germany, she may have to sleep on a sidewalk, but at least she won’t starve.”

Determined to redeem those two difficult years, Katharine struggled on. Finally she stopped to read the fruit of her labor.

A new beginning deserves a new journal. That this will actually happen after months of planning and hoping, I still cannot believe, but L
²
assures me it is “set in concrete”—an amusing phrase. L
²
is far more sanguine than I. I fear that something will happen to crush my hopes. Until everyone is here, I will not permit myself to feel secure. Even then, the endeavor may fail.

No, I will not think that way. I must not. So much depends on me, and if I think negative thoughts, it could affect us all. I must begin to plan now, so that all will be perfect from the very beginning.

Katharine was surprised when her stomach growled. She glanced down at her watch and saw it was past seven. At seven-thirty she was due downtown for a meeting to evaluate a tutoring project she participated in during the school year.

She stacked the copy, her legal pad, and the dictionary neatly on one side of the desk and set the diary next to the jade paperweight.

She had been working for hours and completed only two paragraphs. At that rate, she wouldn’t live long enough to finish it.