Murder at the Bellamy Mansion (11 page)

Binkie voiced what we were all thinking. “But whether a Northern bank bought up Dr. Bellamy’s debts from New York merchants through a purchasing agent . . . well, that remains to be seen. It might not be too difficult to register a lien, but I expect it would not be easy to force the sale of the mansion.”

Aunt Ruby said, “Ashley, Jon, we want you to take great care while you are working in that belvedere. Is there some way to ensure your safety? Benjamin and I are mighty worried about you two. We couldn’t love you more if you were our own children.”

Jon blinked back tears. He adored my aunt and her darling husband.

“
Don’t worry, Aunt Ruby,” he said, leaning forward to touch her knee. “With about a day’s work, we will remove the sashes and take them to the shop to be rehabbed. The empty window frames will then be filled in with plywood. I’ll make sure that all of the windows facing the Carolina Apartments are covered with plywood first. Then if someone should attempt to fire at us from a high window, their bullets will hit only plywood. And the Carolina Apartments is the only tall building within shooting distance of the belvedere.”

“
That is a good solution, Jon,” Binkie said. “But what about when you are working on the exterior? Won’t you be especially vulnerable at that time?”

Jon hastened to reassure them. “The exterior is in good shape. We won’t have to go out there.”

“
Thank heavens for that,” Aunt Ruby said. “Now, you must be very, very careful on the day you are removing the sashes and installing the plywood.”

“
That should be done by the end of the week, weather permitting. And I will insist that the police search the empty apartments and post a uniformed officer in the lobby. After all, this is a matter of public safety.”

Clever Jon. He was going to turn Nick’s threat to our advantage.

“
Thank you for reassuring us old folks, Jon,” Aunt Ruby said with a smile.

That night, Jon made love to me with an intensity we had never experienced before. “You are my life, Ashley,” he said softly. “If anything ever happened to you I wouldn’t want to go on living. I fell in love with you almost the first time I saw you. I remember exactly when it happened. We were restoring Reggie Campbell’s house. You came in dressed in khaki shorts and a white tee shirt. You had a yellow hard hat on your head with curls spilling out around it. And a bulky tool belt strapped around your waist. The tool belt was so big and you were so petite, I thought it would pull you down. God, you were cute. I took one long thirsty look into those huge lavender eyes of yours, and I was lost. I felt clumsy and tongue-tied, and totally turned on.”

“
Like you are now?” I asked, caressing him in the darkness.

“
Just like I am now. I was so hungry for you I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

“
I know what to do with you,” I whispered.

And I did.

14

On Thursday, Melanie met me at the Bellamy Mansion. As usual she was in a whirl, running between one house showing and the next. She was dressed to the nines in a fitted cream-colored wool suit with a short skirt, brown croc high heels, and the double strand of fine family pearls Mama had so lovingly given to her shortly before her hospitalization in a memory-care facility. On that autumn afternoon, which in some ways seems like a lifetime ago, and in other ways seems like only yesterday, Mama had briefly been restored to her old self. She had seized the opportunity for clear thinking to divide the family jewelry between Melanie and me and had presented me with Great-aunt Lillian’s rubies.

Our mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at an early age and lasted only a few years after that. Daddy was already gone. Melanie and I had only each other until Aunt Ruby married Binkie and moved to Wilmington. And now we had Scarlett for a sister, and would soon have Ray for a brother. And, of course, we now had our cherished husbands. The road to happiness sometimes takes a rocky detour, but what really mattered was that we had reached a perfect destination.

Melanie set her briefcase down on the dark pink floral carpeting in the mansion’s front parlor and pulled out a notebook and a pen. “We’ve got five weeks to plan a wedding. I’ve started working on the guest list. Scarlett called and said I should plan that too.”

From high in the mansion the faint sound of hammering drifted down to the first floor.

“
Honestly, Ashley, the nerve. Whose wedding is this anyway? Scarlett and Ray’s? Or mine? You’d think it was mine. But hey! Been there, done that!”

“
You planned mine too, remember, Mel? Our double wedding was fabulous. Without you, I would never have been able to pull off such a spectacular wedding. It was perfect. Scarlett knows how talented you are. And capable. That is why she is leaving all the details to you. Who else could do it better?”

I was intent on creating peace within our little family that had only recently grown to admit a step-sister we had never known existed.

Melanie preened and got a self-satisfied expression on her face. “It’s true. I can pull this off better than anyone else. Now where’s that wedding planner? I got her name from Candi. She planned the party on Candi’s yacht. And with such short notice we are lucky to get her. She’s supposed to be here now. And Elaine is on her way. At least Elaine is someone we can count on.”

Elaine is a caterer who had been Melanie’s friend since high school. She had catered our wedding reception. She was tops. No one could out cook Elaine.

I had not told Melanie about Jon’s and my near miss out on Front Street from a potential hit-and-runner on Monday evening. Nor had we told anyone about Lonnie’s rigged accident on the stairs. For one thing we were trying to protect the Bellamy’s reputation. But the public, being composed of perverse individuals, had flocked to the Bellamy Museum in record numbers. The number of visitors touring the mansion had increased ever since the news got out that someone had shot into the belvedere. Bookings for parties and weddings had increased. The shooting and what you’d normally expect to be bad publicity only attracted people to the scene of the crime. Again I thought how difficult it was to get a handle on human nature.

But Melanie was off and running about her own problems. “When will this dreadful recession end?” she groaned. “Ahhh, the sales I have lost. Still, were it not for the recession and that groom losing his job so that they had to scale down their wedding, we would not have been able to get the Bellamy Mansion on such short notice. And on Valentine’s Day. The director said they are always rented out for Valentine’s Day.”

“
I hate the economic downturn too,” I said. “It’s just as well Jon and I are involved with this volunteer project. I don’t know if we’d be able to pick up a big, paying restoration project just now. It’s like someone pushed the ‘pause’ button. People are just holding their breaths. But we’ll have a new president in a couple of weeks, and then I think things will start to improve.”

“
I think you are right. About the only real client I’ve got these days is Candi Cheng. The rest are just window shopping. Looking for a steal. And despite what I tell clients, that is rare. Unless the sellers are really desperate, or it’s a foreclosure property, which in most cases is trashed property . . . well, the owners of good houses are just biding their time until the market upswings again.”

“
It’ll pick up,” I said. “After all, people have got to live somewhere.”

“
Ohmygosh! I almost forgot. Ray and Scarlett want me to find them a beach house. They’ll continue to live in Ray’s townhouse in New York, of course, but they’ll fly down for long weekends and holidays. Won’t that be great? Maybe Ray can give me some stock tips. There must be some stock worth buying these days.”

Ray was a future’s trader on Wall Street, the youngest member of the New York Stock Exchange. Very successful. Very rich. Very good looking. Very nice.

“
That’s great news, Mel. We’ll get to see them often. We can all go out to their beach house in the summer and have parties. I can’t wait to see them again.

“
You know, Scarlett and Ray are lucky to have found each other,” I continued, thinking about how my love for Jon was developing many facets: passion of course, but tenderness, and protectiveness. He was up in the belvedere right now, inserting plywood panels into the apertures.

I walked over to the parlor’s southeast window and gazed out at the garden. The first floor windows rose to a little over nine feet tall. They were called "hollow-head" windows, constructed so that the bottom sash slid up into a pocket above the window head, thus creating a portal through which persons could step through to the piazza. Immense magnolia trees surrounded the house, shading and cooling it during our long, hot summers.

“
There’s Elaine,” I called to Melanie as I watched Elaine’s van pull into the parking lot. “She’s brought her assistant.”

“
Oh, you mean Kimberly. Such a sweet girl. So eager to please.”

Melanie came to stand behind me; together we watched Elaine and Kimberly climb down out of the cab of the catering van. After Elaine’s husband Larry’s death, she was forced to take on an assistant to fulfill many of the duties he had once performed.

Elaine and Kimberly came in through the back and immediately Elaine went to Melanie and gave her a big hug. Then one for me. Elaine is a plump, motherly sort of woman with wild curly hair. She has raised her capacity for nurturing to an art form through cooking and serving the most divine food. Kimberly hung back, but when we greeted her she joined our circle.

“
I’ve hired Vanessa Holder to be the wedding planner. And where is she? I’ll probably get stuck doing all the work,” Melanie complained. “But at least she can coordinate the arrangements with the Bellamy staff, and relay my instructions to the vendors.” She tapped a toe on the floral carpeting. “If she doesn’t get here in five minutes, she’s fired before she starts!”

“
Vanessa Holder, the wedding planner?” Elaine said. “I’ve worked with her before. A bit overbearing for my tastes, but basically she’s OK. She’s rather pretentious.”

“
Well, she’d just better not be overbearing on my time,” Melanie rejoined.

“
Kimberly’s got some suggestions for the menu. She was up half the night researching the Valentine’s theme. Go ahead, Kimberly, tell her.”

Kimberly stepped forward shyly. She was about four years younger than me, about twenty-two. With dark honey-colored flyaway hair and hazel eyes. Tawny complexion. Medium height and wiry. Elaine had told us she had graduated from UNCW in December with a degree in computer science. A very poor girl from West Virginia, Elaine had explained, who had paid her way through college with part-time jobs and student loans. She was now looking for a job in her field and supporting herself with the same part-time jobs.

Now Kimberly said, softly at first, but then warming to her subject, so that it became obvious she put her heart into her work, “We’ll serve the food from a big tent. I thought we’d go with the love theme. If you approve we could start off with an oyster bar. We’ll serve oysters on the half shell from a bed of chipped ice. We can get the oysters from Southport or Calabash. You know February has an ‘r’ in it and oysters are to be eaten in months with an ‘r.’”

“
Oysters! Oh, I love it. The men will all associate them with aphrodisiacs and just wolf them down,” Melanie said. Then chuckled suggestively. “Especially my man.” She got another one of her pleased with herself smiles and said, “Not that he needs any help.”

I was so glad their marriage was working out and that Melanie was happy. Good for Melanie and Cam. They were making it, despite both having big-time careers and Cam’s burdensome mother whom, happily, they had not heard from in a week.

Melanie regarded Kimberly with renewed respect. “Good idea, Kimberly. What else do you have in mind?”

“
I’ve planned the entire menu around aphrodisiacs and ingredients related to love,” Kimberly said, warming up and losing her shyness. “We’ll have tomatoes with mozzarella and basil.”

“
Tomatoes are aphrodisiacs?” I said.

Kimberly ducked her head, then lifted defiant eyes to peer at me through long bangs. “Yes, ma’am. Those French folks refer to tomatoes as love apples.” Had she become a mite defensive?

Uh oh. A sensitive creature. I was going to have to be careful and not appear to be challenging her.

15

“
Stop interrupting, Ashley,” Melanie warned. “Kimberly knows what she’s doing.”

Kimberly beamed, her skin flushing red.

After that I kept my mouth shut. This was Melanie’s show and if she was happy, I was happy. Besides I had other things on my mind. There had not been any homicidal attempts since Monday. Three days without an episode. I was keeping my fingers crossed. My bruised knees were healing up just fine.

“
Then we’ll have cucumber salad,” Kimberly was saying. “The scent of cucumbers is supposed to be a turn on for women. Personally, I don’t see it, but that’s what the food experts say. And we’ll serve asparagus with hollandaise sauce. Caviar topped roasted new potatoes. Eggs are an obvious fertility symbol.”

I wondered to myself if Scarlett was interested in having children. I doubted that Melanie did. Spunky, the cat, was her baby.