Daughter of Deceit (14 page)

Murdoch’s excited chatter reached him where he stood.

Bara huffed. “That’s nonsense and you know it. Nana gave it to
me
. By name.”

Not the house, then. Her grandfather gave that to her. Foley took a mental inventory of its contents. He’d never been clear on what else Bara had inherited from whom. Living in the place was like living in a family museum. What on earth could Murdoch be that desperate about?

He chewed his lip, thinking. He ought to take every portable valuable they had to a vault, some day when Bara went out, to be sure they were still around to be counted in the settlement. Bara was so sneaky, she might think of doing the same thing if he didn’t beat her to it.

Foley had spent several happy evenings going down his appraiser’s list. He looked appreciatively around the dining room. Just the silver he could see was worth a considerable fortune.

An unfamiliar gleam caught his eye and held it. A gun, on the table. He started to pick it up, caught himself in time.

So his dear wife had a gun?

Foley smiled, but he stepped toward the foyer so he wouldn’t be near the gun when she got off the phone. No need to remind her she’d left it there.

Bara spotted the motion. “Look,” she said quickly, “I can’t talk right now. I‘ve got a rat in the house. Call me when you get back.” She laid the phone down on the foyer table beside a crystal heron that was a commissioned, one-of-a-kind piece by Hans Godo Fräbel. It was both valuable and lovely, and Foley was determined to have it. So what if some group had given it to Bara in appreciation of something she had done for them? As he kept reminding her, sentiment has no place in divorce.

“What did you want?” she demanded.

“What did Murdoch want?” he countered, striving to make his voice jovial.

Bara waved the question away as unimportant. “Nothing to do with you.”

“I might disagree with that assessment if I knew all the facts, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about right now. I have a deal for you. Sit down.” He motioned her to a chair beside the table where she had laid down the phone.

To his surprise, she sat. He stood, to keep the advantage, and paced on the Bokhara rug that warmed the marble floor.

“I have changed my mind. I won’t ask for all your daddy’s shares, only for enough of them to give me a slight majority of the company. As an officer, I’ve got some shares of my own, you know.”

“I thought they were
ours,
” she said with heavy emphasis. “Everything else seems to be.”

“I never put you on that account. Listen. Here’s the deal: I’ll let you keep this house, I’ll take the lake house, and we’ll split our investment portfolio fifty-fifty—if you will agree to give me enough shares to guarantee the sale. Once the sale goes through, you’ll benefit like all the other shareholders.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he held up one hand for silence. “Hear me out. If we don’t sell, what will happen to the firm? You know as well as I do that there isn’t another architect at Holcomb & Associates who could touch your daddy for style and business acumen.”

Acumen.
Foley was proud of that word. He’d searched the thesaurus for a term he could use to describe Winnie that would touch Bara’s heart. Was she impressed? She was fiddling with the tie to her robe. Was she considering his offer?

“That’s my final offer,” he said when she didn’t respond. “If you turn this down, so help me, it’s gonna be all-out war.”

She got up and went to the library door, stood looking toward the picture over the mantelpiece.

“Your daddy’s not here to protect you any longer.”

She reached into her pocket. He froze. Did she carry a second gun?

She brought out cigarettes.

“When did you start smoking? You called it a filthy stinking habit.” Besides, she knew good and well that he detested the smell and taste of tobacco on a woman. It reminded him of his mother, whom he had spent most of his life trying to forget.

She brought out a big silver lighter that looked like it ought to belong to a man. Probably another of Winnie’s artifacts. She was surrounding herself with them lately. Didn’t she realize how pathetic that was?

Bara lit up with practiced ease, lifted her face to him, and blew smoke his way.

“I have a deal for you,” she replied. “Why don’t you proceed straight to hell without passing GO? I am not giving you any of Winnie’s shares. If you can give me good reasons why we ought to sell, and if the new owners agree to retain the name of the firm in Atlanta, I might consider voting my shares to sell.” She held up a warning finger. “Might, mind you. But you can live in that basement until you rot before I’ll give you a single share in the company besides those you’ve wangled out of the board over the years. Or the lake house. Or any of the money my family has worked so hard to accumulate. If we go to court, I’ll fight you until neither of us has a penny left, and I’ll raise a stink like you cannot imagine. Or maybe I ought to shoot you now and save myself a lot of trouble.”

She swept past him and ascended the curved marble staircase. She liked to have the last word.

Foley picked up the portable phone. Sure enough, she hadn’t remembered to disconnect. That used to irritate the hell out of him.

Hearing Murdoch’s excited breath, he smiled. “Murdoch? I’m sorry. Bara forgot to disconnect again. Good night.” He rang off and laid the phone back on the foyer table. If the batteries ran down, that was Bara’s problem.

But he was elated. Mason could subpoena Murdoch to testify that he’d made Bara a more than decent offer, and she had not only spurned him, she had threatened him.

He wasn’t through. No woman since his mother had threatened him and gotten away with it. He ascended the stairs and caught his wife’s elbow before she reached her door. He swung her around and punched her in the stomach, hard.

She doubled over, unable to breathe. He shoved her into her room. She stumbled and fell, still clutching her stomach. Her dark eyes blazed with anger, but he saw the flicker of fear.

He stood over her and growled, “That’s a taste of what you’ll get if you ever threaten me again. Do you understand?”

She slammed the door behind him. He heard the key in the lock. “You will get controlling shares in that company over my dead body!” she yelled.

He paused in his journey down the hall to call back, “If necessary, my dear, that is precisely how I will get them.”

Wednesday

Bara was dreaming she was a child, drawing in a corner of Winnie’s library while he worked. He sometimes took her drawings to his office downtown and posted them on his bulletin board. “She draws far better than I did at that age,” he often boasted. “Of course, she’s known since she was five that she wants to be an architect. I didn’t decide until I was grown.” The horror of bombing beautiful buildings had driven him to spend his life replacing them.

Bara had wanted to be an architect until her junior year in high school, when her school guidance counselor and Nettie’s incessant hammering finally persuaded her that women had no business being architects, that she would be far happier and fulfilled if she attended a good women’s college, married well, bred children, and served on charitable boards. If Winnie had been disappointed, he had never let her know. But although Bara had done her duty to society, she had never gotten the raw thrill even from breeding her children that she used to get from drawing a building exactly right.

In her dream, Bara was drawing a house. She wanted it to be perfect for Winnie, but the proportions were wrong. Again and again she erased and tried again, but she could not get them right. And why didn’t Winnie answer his phone?

She rolled over and felt a pain in her gut. Awareness swept her like a riptide. Foley had hit her. Winnie was dead. Her life, not her drawing, was all wrong. And it was
her
phone that was ringing.

She fumbled for the receiver and managed a slurred “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Katharine Murray. I’ve been doing your research, and I found a friend of my son’s who knows something about medals. He says the army gives a citation with each one. Your dad probably kept them somewhere.”

Bara struggled to come awake. She sat up in bed, wincing as her sore midriff protested. “Citations? You mean on paper?”

“I presume so.”

Bara reached for the bottle beside her bed. There were still a couple of drinks left. One sip and her mind cleared. Two, and the pain was dulled. Whiskey was a panacea for everything that ailed you.

“I can look in his files,” she told Katharine. “If I find them, how about if I bring them over to your place and we can match the citations with the medals?”

“If you can get here by ten. I have to go out at eleven. And if we can figure out which bomber group your dad was with, Kenny—Jon’s friend—said that a lot of military groups have their own Web sites with stories and memoirs on them. Some even have pictures.”

As she dressed, Bara felt more excitement than she had in months. She dragged on black linen slacks and a black-and-white top, slid her feet into black sandals, and went to the bathroom for the sketchiest of ablutions. As she washed her face, however, the sight of her ragged, chewed nails repulsed her. She ought to look through a few more boxes and see if she could find more of Winnie’s fifties. She desperately needed a manicure.

Down in the kitchen, she bypassed breakfast but went to the fridge for the gin and Bloody Mary mix. Bloody Marys were good for you. Full of vitamin C. She drank one and put a second into an insulated cup that looked like coffee.

Before she left, she ran down to the basement. As she had hoped, Foley had put more bottles of
Rare Breed
under his sink. As she refilled her flask, she wondered if he knew she was helping herself to his liquor. Probably not. He didn’t know she drank.

She grabbed her purse and the flask and hurried to her car. Not until she was halfway to the storage company did she remember she had forgotten once again to set the alarm.

“What difference does it make?” she asked, lifting her cup to her lips. “If somebody comes in and takes everything there, I won’t have much less than I have right now.”

On the way to the storage company she watched to be sure she wasn’t followed, and she strode toward her unit with a bounce in her step. She was going to spend the entire day doing something she wanted to do. The citations would explain everything she needed to know. When she and Katharine finished, she would take the medals to a framer her family had used for years and he would help her, as he always had, to select the best way to display them. After that, she would buy a scrapbook and put the citations in it for Chip.

Chip was too young to appreciate the gift yet, but in a few years Bara would read the citations to him. She could picture his awe when he learned what a hero his great-grand-daddy had been. Somewhere she had a photograph of Winnie in uniform. She could put that in the front of the scrapbook, with the citations. If she could find a Web site with pictures, she might locate pictures of Winnie with his men, or pictures of planes like the ones he flew. She could download those and print them for the scrapbook, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so pleased with her plans for a day.

Winnie, like many creative people, had worked best in an atmosphere of cheerful clutter, so his library often looked like it had been visited by a friendly whirlwind. His files, however, he had kept in perfect order. Bara found the citations in a file labeled M
ILITARY
M
ATTERS
. She didn’t bother to read them, just yanked the file out from the others.

The next file, a fat one, caught her eye and made her smile. It was labeled M
UNIFICENT
M
ATTERS
. Her father used to hand out their allowance each week with the words, “Here’s your munificent sum.” Her eyes widened as she opened the file and found five stacks of hundred dollar bills, bound by rubber bands.

“Thank you, Winnie!” she breathed as she stuffed them into her purse.

“I told you he was organized where it mattered,” she informed her mother as she resealed the box of files and locked the unit. Nettie had often deplored the state of her husband’s library, had made him shut the wide double doors when they had guests.

“I used to be like Winnie,” Bara informed the world as she started for the car. “My rooms might be a bit cluttered, but my drawers and files were all in order—before my whole life fell apart. They
were
,” she insisted, although nobody had contradicted her but her conscience.

Lordy, Katharine was perky in the morning! She greeted Bara looking fresh and pert in sage-green linen pants and a creamy shirt, with her hair shining and her lipstick fresh. Bara felt a hundred and two.

She noted with approval that Katharine was barefoot, and kicked off her own shoes. Katharine smiled. “I hate shoes, don’t you?”

“I’ve always thought I must have been born in Micronesia in all my former incarnations,” Bara replied.

“I’ve spread out the medals on the breakfast-room table. Let’s work in there,” Katharine suggested.

The breakfast room must be the woman’s favorite place in the house. She had a perfectly good dining-room table a lot closer. Oh—the chairs were missing. Bara hoped she could make it to the breakfast room. She felt a bit wobbly. Must be the heat. The weatherman had predicted that the thermometer would reach a hundred by noon.

Katharine not only had the medals spread out on the table, she had made neat little paper tents to identify each one. Bara leaned both arms on the table to steady herself while she read the labels aloud: “Presidential Unit Citation, Air Medal, Medal of Honor, Bronze Star, World War II medal, Purple Hearts. Very organized.”

“Thanks. I thought that might help you know which citation went with which medal. I printed up something on the bombing of Ploesti, too, since his whole group earned the Presidential Unit Citation for that. My son’s friend was very impressed with your father, by the way. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Nothing for me but ice water,” Bara said virtuously. “I don’t need all that caffeine.” She collapsed into the nearest chair, riffled through Winnie’s file, and was puzzled. “There are more medals than citations. I only have six citations and there are eight medals.”

Katharine set a glass of water before her. Bara wished she’d thought to stick her flask in her purse before she came in, so she’d have something to add to the water. She took a sip and felt nausea sweep over her.

“Maybe some of the medals didn’t come with citations,” Katharine suggested. “Have you read them?”

Bara shook her head. “I came straight here as soon as I found them.”

“Browse through them while I give some instructions to my maid? I’ll be right back.”

Bara gave her ten points for tact.

The first citation was for Art’s Purple Heart. She knew how her big brother had died, but something clutched at her throat as she read it in black-and-white. She gulped down the whole glass of water and got herself another before she could go on.

She also fetched the box of tissues from the countertop. This might be harder than she had thought. She wiped her eyes as she picked up one Purple Heart and laid it on top of the citation. “One down, seven to go.”

The second citation was for Art’s Bronze Star. She laid it down on that citation. She would read it later.

The third belonged to her father’s Air Medal, earned November 1, 1944, after flying thirty missions with the Fifteenth Air Force. She picked the medal up and admired it. She didn’t remember it from her childhood exploration of the box.

The fourth she paired with another Purple Heart. Winnie had earned it for a flak wound in the shoulder during a bombing raid over Germany during May 1944. That shoulder had pained him whenever it rained.

The fifth was for the Presidential Unit Citation that her father’s unit had earned for raids on Ploesti, Romania, during the autumn of 1943. She laid the citation on top of Katharine’s printout, promising herself she would read it, too, after all the medals were identified.

The sixth citation went with another Purple Heart. Winnie had received it for a wound he’d received flying a mission over the Mediterranean in January 1943. That must have been the great red scar on his back. She had only seen it once, when she’d mistakenly walked in on him as he was getting ready to shower.

Those were all the citations in the file, but two medals remained: one with a rather garish ribbon attached to it and the words W
ORLD
W
AR
II across it—in case somebody forgot which war they fought in?—and the gold star that was her favorite, which Katharine had labeled M
EDAL OF
H
ONOR
.

When Katharine returned, Bara told her, “I don’t have anything about the Medal of Honor and this other medal.”

Katharine picked up the bigger medal first. “This is a Victory Medal, given to everybody who served in the war. Maybe it didn’t come with a citation. But Kenny—Jon’s friend—printed out the citation your dad got with the Medal of Honor. They are so important, all those particular citations are available online.” She took it from the countertop and handed it to Bara. “It’s the highest award the military gives. I understand that even enlisted men who earn it get saluted by officers.”

Bara took the sheet and began to scan the page. Her hands trembled with excitement. “This must have been the battle where Winnie lost his leg. I’ve never known exactly how that happened. He would never talk about it. All he’d say was that he got wounded and sent home.”

“Why don’t I leave you to read it to yourself?” Katharine offered.

“No, stay. I need you here.” To her surprise, Bara discovered it was true. She hadn’t made a new friend in years, but she was coming to like this competent woman Tom Murray had married. How had she missed knowing her all these years?

She took an unsteady breath and began to read. She read silently, but her lips began forming the words until she finally murmured aloud, “‘…thinking only of saving his crewman, continued to fly.’” She could read no more.

“‘Something stupid that other folks thought very brave.’ That’s what he told me he did.”

“He must have been in enormous pain.”

Bara thrust the page at Katharine. “You read the rest.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I can’t.”

Katharine found the place. Her voice trembled as the story unfolded, and when she got to the place where Winnie’s death was reported, they both had tears in their eyes.

Bara was the first to recover. “But like Mark Twain said, the rumors of Winnie’s death were greatly exaggerated.”

Katharine laughed unsteadily. “That’s exactly what my niece said last night.”

“How much more is there?”

“Just a paragraph.” Katharine read on.

At the end, Bara held up a hand to stop her. “That can’t be right.”

“What?”

“February 15, 1945. He had to have come home earlier than that.” She silently counted on her fingers. “I was born September fifth in New York City, where Winnie was studying architecture. He, Nettie, and Art moved up there that summer and Winnie started at Columbia in the fall. I was born up there, which made me a Yankee—a fact my elementary classmates never let me forget.”

Katharine grew very still. “Oh.” In the silence, Bara could tell she was also counting months. “Maybe you were premature.”

“Two and a half months? Not likely, given that I once heard Nettie rehearsing with close friends the difficulties she went through with Art’s birth. She wouldn’t have missed that chance to brag about my coming so early.”

Katharine rose. “I left my computer on. Let me see what else I can find out about Blechhammer. Maybe they got the year wrong.” She left like one fleeing.

“On a Medal of Honor citation?” Bara called after her. She was talking to air. She could already hear Katharine tap-tapping at her computer.

Bara had never needed a drink worse. Her body shook. A flash of heat swept over her as if she were in a burning plane. Her mind was addled.

Could
the government make that kind of mistake? She doubted it. But Winnie could not have been in Italy until the middle of February. He couldn’t have!

Bara craned her head and made sure she could still hear the gentle
thump, thump
of Katharine’s fingers on the keyboard. On tiptoe she approached the pantry and, with one watchful eye on the door to the hall, checked inside. No liquor. In the refrigerator, an open bottle of gin sat on the lower shelf. She dumped the water from her glass and refilled it with gin. Drank half the gin and filled it again. Now the bottle was empty.