Gilt by Association (20 page)

“Our house is shaped like a boat,” the first mate said.

“A schooner,” the captain corrected her.

Amy was ready for anything. “We got in some lovely drapery material with a nautical theme. It's a little on the informal side of course, but it would be perfect for a child's room.”

“We don't have any children,” the captain said.

“Or grandchildren, of course” the first mate added. “We're just two officers without a crew.”

The buttery purse yielded a silk pouch containing tissues and Amy delicately dabbed at her remodeled nose. It may have been sentiment that necessitated the act, or just the cold. I was dying to be back home, soaking in a hot bubble bath, with Dmitri balanced on the rim of the tub, batting gingerly at the bubbles.

“Well,” I said, giving Greg's arm a quick squeeze, “I really have to be going. Can you give me a ride back to the church?”

“We can do that,” the first mate said. “We have to drive right by there anyway.”

“So do I,” Greg said. Bless him.

“You sure? It's on our way.”

“Positive,” Greg said.

The Kefferts said good-bye. At some point they had buttoned their coats, but not before they had begun to turn into Popsicles. The poor captain's lips had turned blue, and he was shaking like a three-legged washing machine on the spin cycle. Perhaps their Yankee blood had started to thin.

“We'll stay in touch,” the first mate said. Even though her teeth were chattering, it sounded like an order.

Amy didn't budge. “You want to check on Lottie Bell's house, don't you?” she asked Greg.

“Ma'am—”

“The fire,” she said. “Don't play dumb with me, Investigator Washburn.”

“Ma'am?”

“I know what's going on. I saw you take Robert and Hattie aside, and I saw the fire trucks in front of her house. You want to see what's left of her house, don't you? You want to see if Lottie Bell's little secret gets buried with her, so to speak.”

My frozen ears stood at attention. So did Greg's.

“What secret is that?” he asked.

“I told you not to play dumb with me. It's too damn cold and I don't have the time.”

“But I'm not playing dumb, Mrs. Barras.”

She sniffed. “Then you're not exactly Columbo, are you?”

“No ma'am, I'm not.” Greg had managed to sound enough like Columbo for me to pick up on it, but apparently Amy had not.

She sniffed again. “Columbo would know that it's not the damn furniture everyone is after, or Lottie Bell, or her house—but a secret that goes with the furniture.”

T
rust me, if you stand gaping in a snowstorm you're guaranteed to collect a mouthful of flakes. I'm sure Greg did, as well. In the meantime, Amy seemed to be enjoying her little power trip.

I spit out some snow. “But you told me there was nothing special about that furniture's history.”

A stranger might have interpreted her smile as a smirk. I chose to think of it as collagen contracting in the cold.

“I'm not the fool you think I am, Miss Timberlake. Believe me, if there was anything about that furniture that made it especially valuable, I wouldn't have sold it at a Pineville auction. I would have had it shipped to New York or London. You do think I got a good price for it, don't you?”

“Excellent,” I said quickly. “But apparently the rest of the gang, doesn't. Am I correct?”

The buttery gloves fumbled in the depths of the buttery purse for an interminable length of time. I thought sure she was going to extract something of interest. Her hand, however, came out empty.

“Do you have a spare tissue?” she asked. “Leave it to Robert and Hattie to bury their mama on such a nasty day. Thanks to them I've got a cold.”

“A cold requires an incubation period,” I said. “Besides, they're caused by a virus,
not
the temperature.”

She gave me an icy stare. “No tissues, dear?”

“That's right.” I hadn't even bothered to check my purse, which is always crammed with tissues and enough other hygiene-related sundries to stock a Russian pharmacy.

“Here, you can have this.” Greg gallantly handed her his handkerchief. I could only hope it had been previously used.

“Thanks.” She blew long and hard.

“What is it the others believe?” Greg asked calmly.

She honked a few more times, sounding not unlike the geese in her own backyard. “The stories seem to be different in each family.”

Greg nodded. “People remember things differently and pass on their own versions. It happens all the time.”

“Exactly. Squire's mother—men don't care about such things, you know—said that her mother-in-law told her that the furniture once belonged to Napoleon. That it was sent with him on his exile to Elba. But of course that's silly, and even Miss Timberlake can tell you why.”

Greg looked expectantly at me. I wisely refrained from kicking Amy on her ostrich-leather shins.

“Because the furniture is Louis XV, not Empire,” I said. “It was made at least fifty years before Napoleon's exile.”

“So you see,” she crowed triumphantly, “it's all nonsense. And you should hear some of the other stories—Napoleon's initials carved inside the armoire. Ha!”

“Ha, indeed,” I said bitterly. “The only initial inside that thing was written in blood. Late twentieth-century blood.”

“Achoo!” That's exactly how her sneeze sounded. I wouldn't have been surprised if her cough went “Cough, cough.”

“Bless you,” Greg said.

“And get this, the biggest lalapalooza of them all—
that hidden somewhere in those fancy French pieces is a document, in Napoleon's own hand, deeding one hundred hectares of land to a man named Barras and/or his descendants.”

“What is a hectare?” Greg asked. “Ten thousand square meters, or approximately 2.47 acres,” I said. I couldn't help it if I accidentally sounded smug. “The parcel of land in question is roughly two hundred and forty-seven acres.”

“Yes, but this land was supposedly located on the outskirts of Paris. It is supposed to be worth millions. And I mean dollars, not francs.”

Greg whistled.

“Of course it's all a bunch of nonsense. Everyone with an ounce of Barras blood has gone over those pieces a million times, but of course there's been nothing to show for it. I guess some legends die hard.”

“It's too bad that people have to die, because some legends won't,” I said.

I'm sure she tried to frown at me, but the cold wouldn't permit it. As consolation she blew her nose, and then tried to return the handkerchief to Greg. He wisely and politely refused to accept it.

“You keep it,” he said. “You may need it again before you get where you're going.”

“Tanks,” she said, looking at him intently. She didn't even glance my way. “Hab a pweasant ebening.”

She turned slowly and walked away, deliberately thrusting her hips from side to side with each step. Those beavers hadn't seen that much action since their dam-building days.

I don't care if she was coming down with a cold, and we were standing in near-blizzard conditions in a cemetery. That was a come-on if I ever heard one. Why is it that we women can hear come-ons issued by other women, but the men in our lives act deafer than posts?

“She's sicker than a dog, but she still wants your body,” I said. “Go figure.”

Greg laughed and put his arm around me.

“She may not look it, but she's fifty-six,” I said. “She's too old for you.”

“Age isn't a number. It's how young one feels inside that counts.”

“That's a cliché, which in this case isn't true. That woman's soul was old when Methuselah was a child. Besides, if she looked twenty years older, instead of younger, than she is, we wouldn't be having this stupid conversation.”

He slid his arm off my shoulder. “You're jealous, aren't you?”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“Come on, admit it.” He put his arm back on my shoulder.

I slid out from underneath his arm. “That woman's a walking computer chip. She had to hurry home before her face would crack. What do you think it is I'm jealous of?”

“Jealousy does not become you,” he said pompously.

“Go f—yourself,” I said, and generations of polite Southern ancestors turned over in their graves.

Greg did not drive me back to the church. By sprinting, which meant a great deal of slipping and sliding, I was able to catch up with the captain and his mate. They were delighted to give me a lift, they said, and then they proceeded to pump me all the way to the church on my relationship with Greg. It was not a subject I wanted to discuss and told them so. After telling them that rather gently several times, I finally became emphatic. I didn't mind walking the last two blocks to the church.

Like I said, I am a skilled driver, and despite the intense concentration required to keep my car on the road, I managed to listen to the radio at the same time. The weather
news wasn't good. This was supposed to be the worst snowstorm to hit the Carolinas this early in the season in a hundred years. Of course for the last ten or fifteen years, every bit of weather that comes our way seems to be hailed as the worst of the century, so I was not surprised. I was surprised to hear that even as far south as Hilton Head, where my Aunt Marilyn lives, they were experiencing snow flurries.

The first thing I did when I got inside was to call both children to see if they were safe. They were. Then I called Mama. Ditto for her.

“Are
you
all right, Abby?” She sounded two decibels away from hysterical.

“I'm fine, Mama.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Mama. Why the third degree?”

“Well, that Jane woman called again, asking why you hadn't called her back. Then she went on to intimate that maybe you had been in an accident because of the snow. She said that a cousin of hers—a Norman somebody—had driven off the road in a snowstorm up North—Ohio or someplace, and they didn't find him for three weeks. He was dead of course, and field mice had managed to squeeze through the air vents and had eaten his eyeballs. Do you think that could be true?”

“I don't know, but my eyes are just fine. And if C. J. calls again, you tell her I'll call her back tomorrow, if at all.”

Mama wasn't through yet. Did I know that the latest forecast was predicting an almost unheard-of eight inches, and that a few flurries had been spotted in greater Jacksonville, Florida? I had not. This was terrible, Mama said. The Apathia membership committee was supposed to meet tomorrow morning to decide her fate. Even if Rock Hill didn't get another flake, there was no way the ladies
were going to drive all the way out to the Rock Hill Country Club to cast their votes.

“Can't they do it over the phone?” I asked patiently.

Mama gasped. She continues to be surprised by my gaucheness.

“Abby! That's
not
how things are done,”

I told Mama not to worry. The longer the vote was delayed, the more time she had to impress upon them that she was exactly the kind of member the club wanted. No, needed, in fact.

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

“How is your tread?”

“Excuse me?”

“On your tires, Mama. Are they fairly new?”

“Abby!” she wailed. “My only chance for happiness is falling apart in a snowstorm, and you want to talk tires?”

I tried not to laugh. “Mama, what I'm suggesting is that tomorrow,
after
the roads are clear, you call up some of the more nervous ones and offer to go to the store for them. They'll love you forever.”

“They'll see right through me,” Mama said, and hung up.

 

There is nothing like a good hot soak to give me perspective on the world in general and my life in particular. If I was a writer, I think I would do all my plotting in the tub. So soak I would, but I wanted an uninterrupted soak, one that I decided to terminate. So before entering my inner sanctum, I turned off all the lights but the bathroom, and unplugged the bedroom phone.

Ever since that first time I had sex with Buford, I've been a big believer in the philosophy that more is better. Since I adore Mystic Gardenia bubble bath, I poured twice the recommended amount of it into my tub and filled it with water as hot as I could stand it. That's almost hot
enough to cook a lobster, and certainly hot enough to make most people look like cooked lobsters. Then I put on my favorite Mozart CD, the one with Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major.

Next I fixed myself a mug of hot chocolate. The mug I habitually use is ceramic, and can take the heat, but it was originally intended as a beer stein. There is no point in dragging myself, sloshing, out of the tub for refills.

The last thing I did was call Dmitri. Gardenias do for Dmitri what catnip does for most felines. Often there is no need to call him. As always, he hopped up on the rim of the tub, sniffed vigorously at the foam, and then settled down to drowse in a semi-intoxicated state of bliss while I soaked and pondered. As long as I took care not to get him wet, he would remain supine and purring on the rim until the tub drained.

I soaked, sipped, and pondered. I spoke my thoughts aloud to Dmitri, who responded periodically by squinting his eyes and purring louder. I'm not weird about animals. I don't cootchy-coo them and talk to them in baby talk. I don't dress Dmitri up in human clothes and pretend that he's anything other than a cat. A big yellow male cat that looks a little bit like TV's Morris, only not quite as handsome. Still, I'd swear there are times when Dmitri understands every word I'm saying, and there are times, even, when he seems to offer me his opinions.

“I wish I'd never bought those damn things,” I said.

Dmitri purred comfortingly.

“I wish I'd never laid eyes on that damn furniture, or that damn family. I wish that whole damn Barras bunch would get lost in the damn blizzard.”

Dmitri squinted.

“Okay, so I don't. Not really. But you can bet your bippy that it's one of them who killed Arnie Ramsey and Lottie Bell too, I bet. And it could be any one of them. I
wouldn't put it past the sleazoid, or Hattie, to kill their own mama.

“Of course, it's not likely that one of the women killed Arnie and stuffed him in the armoire. I'm not a sexist, Dmitri, you know that, but Arnie's skull was cracked. Would a woman be strong enough to do that?”

Dmitri purred louder.

“You're right. The autopsy showed that Arnie had
two
blows to the head. The one to the left cheekbone just breaking the skin, the one to the back of the head definitely fatal. Maybe Hattie, or Toxie, or even Amy hit him in the face with something, and he staggered backward and hit his head hard on something else. That could have happened, I bet.”

Dmitri purred louder.

“Now we just have to figure out who did it. Hmmm. Hattie is the poorest, or would that be Toxie? Hattie might not make a whole lot selling perfume at Belk's, but she has a husband who works. Toxie, on the other hand, doesn't. And I doubt if a lounge singer makes that much—not unless she's really good, and who the hell has heard of Toxie?”

Dmitri squinted.

“Okay, so I shouldn't be catty—oops, sorry dear, but I'd have to vote Toxie as the poorest. At least based on her income.”

Dmitri's green eyes opened wider.

“Of course wealth is a relative thing. I'm sure Garland Riggs isn't exactly rolling in dough, and even that creepy old Dr. Sex might be having financial problems. Wasn't he sued by some of the patients he exposed himself to?”

Dmitri stood up, stretched, and lay down again, his eyes half-closed.

“It could even be Amy! Sure she has money—at least she says she does—but greed can know no bounds. Well, at least I read that someplace. Anyway, D., maybe Amy—
or any of those women—had second thoughts after the auction, after it was too late, and went into the storeroom for one last final check. Maybe Arnie surprised her, whoever she was, and she panicked and let him have it. Perhaps with her purse.”

Dmitri opened his eyes wide. He didn't seem to think so. “What do you know? You're just a cat. You can't even decide if you want in or out half the time. And you're worse than a chicken about crossing the street. You've already used eight of your lives just doing that.”

Dmitri's eyes became mere slits and he stopped purring. I was tempted to splash some water on him.