Shadow of an Angle (9 page)

"Maybe you can teach me to make them," I said, but Augusta didn't answer—which usually meant she didn't want to.

I waited until mid afternoon to phone Vesta—I wanted to get a report on Mildred, too. "Do you remember a family here named Dennis?" I asked when she finally answered the phone. She sounded breathless, as if she'd run up a flight of steps. "What's the matter? Your elevator not working?"

"I was in the shower, Arminda. Now, who's this you want to know about?"

"Oh. Want me to call you back?" I pictured her towel wrapped and scowling, dripping water on her lush burgundy carpet.

"No, it's all right. I grabbed a robe. Dennis who?"

"A family named Dennis. We—I found that recipe for nondescripts in an old cookbook, and it was submitted by a Mrs. Carlton Dennis."

"The name sounds familiar. I know I've heard it somewhere. When was this?"

"1912. It was published by a club your grandmother belonged to. Sort of like a garden club I guess—called themselves the Daisies. I thought maybe her daughter might be one of the Mystic Six."

My grandmother laughed. "The Daisies. Met faithfully once a month. I don't think they ever gardened…but I don't remember a Mrs. Dennis belonging."

"Maybe they moved away…. I was hoping you might know if they had a daughter." It was hard to keep the disappointment from my voice.

"I'm sorry, Minda. Is there some special reason you want to know?"

"Well…no. Just curious," I lied.

"Wish I could help you, honey, but I do well to remember my social security number."

It wasn't until I'd hung up the phone that I realized I hadn't thought to ask about Mildred, but I decided it might be wise to give Vesta time to get dressed before I called again.

She saved me the trouble. "Minda, I've thought of where I saw that name," my grandmother said when she phoned me a few minutes later. "It was in the cemetery. The Dennises have the plot down from ours. I've walked past it for most of my life, going to the hydrant for water."

"The Carlton Dennises? Are other family members buried there?"

"I don't know. Don't think so. I just remember the name on the stone. You've seen it, Arminda. It's a big old thing with lilies carved on it. Mama used to say she thought it was ostentatious."

"Good," I said.

"What?"

"I mean, thanks for the information. How's Mildred?"

Vesta groaned. "Well, I'd really like to tell you how she is, but Mildred's flown the coop."

I tried to picture that. "What do you mean? Where is she?"

"Called from the hospital this morning to tell me her friend Lydia was driving down to get her and she'd see us in a couple of weeks."

"I can't blame her for wanting to put Angel Heights behind her for a while," I said. "Maybe this visit will be good for her."

"It's just as well, I suppose," my grandmother said. "They phoned a few minutes ago to tell me they're ready to settle Otto's estate, and I don't have a good feeling about it."

Chapter Nine

I
'd had enough of cemeteries. After Jarvis died I visited his grave site several times a week, but the experience did nothing to comfort me. If anything, the sight of the shiny new marker against raw, red earth made me hurt even more. Before leaving for Angel Heights, I had left a pot of bright yellow chrysanthemums and said goodbye. Jarvis was in the laughter we'd shared, the love we had for each other. He wasn't there.

My mother lay in this cemetery, and for that reason I hadn't been back here in years, but I knew where she was buried as if I'd made it a daily ritual. Now it was time to go there for real. A magnolia shaded her headstone—a simple slab of granite engraved with her name and the dates of her birth and death. There was a place for my father beside her, but I didn't think he'd be using it, since there wasn't room there for his second wife. Mom had died of a brain tumor, sudden and final. We hardly had time to say the things we wanted to say, do the things we needed to do to ease her going. I was only fourteen, and she was my lifeline. Her death left frayed ends.

But today Augusta walked with me, and I brought the last of the lingering roses from the bushes under the dining room window. Pink and yellow, they weren't nearly so vibrant as my mother had been, but they would have to do. After a couple of days of rain, the weather had turned warmer and I shed my sweater as we walked the mile or so through residential streets and up the curving road to the town cemetery on the hill. The sky was so blue it almost hurt my eyes, and here and there leaves still clung to trees like colorful confetti. The angel-like rock formation on the hill above us seemed to smile her blessing. It was the kind of day that made me glad to be alive, and I felt a slight pang of guilt as I walked past those who weren't here to enjoy it.

Augusta left me alone to spend some time by my mother's grave, and I cleared it of fallen magnolia leaves, arranged the roses in a jar, and said some things to her that were in my heart. I was getting ready to leave when I heard a car approaching on the gravel road nearby and saw Sylvie Smith get out with a large white potted mum. She seemed to be heading for Otto's grave in the adjoining lot, and not wanting to intrude on a private moment, I stepped behind the magnolia. I heard the rustle and crunch as she waded through the mound of now-dead flowers on his grave to make room for her chrysanthemums. And then I heard something else.

"I'm sorry, Otto. I hope you can forgive me. I didn't know what else to do."

I stood for frozen minutes with my face pressed against the tree, my hands digging into its sooty black bark, until I heard the car start up and she was gone.

Augusta, of course, was nowhere in sight. I found her on the far side of the hill, arranging a spray of autumn leaves on a lonely looking grave set apart from the rest. The person buried there had died in the early part of the twentieth century. "Family must have moved away and left her, "she explained. "She's not here to care, I know, but it doesn't hurt to brighten the spot a bit."

I told her about Sylvie Smith. "What do you think she meant? She asked Otto for his forgiveness, Augusta. Do you suppose she killed him?"

"Was she grieving? Remorseful? How did she act?"

"She didn't stay long, and I couldn't see her without giving myself away, but she sounded sad. Kind of quiet. I wonder what she's sorry for."

Augusta didn't answer, but I could tell by her tiny hint of a frown she thought it worth considering.

The Dennis family plot was right where Vesta had said it would be, and easy to recognize because of the huge lily-festooned stone. Augusta gingerly stepped over the low rock wall to read the inscription.
"Louise Ryan Dennis
and
Carlton Clark Dennis
… Why, they died only a few days apart: February eleventh and February fifteenth, 1918."She paused with her hand on the stone as if giving it a blessing. "The flu epidemic, of course! So many soldiers died—others, too. It was merciless, spreading through towns, cities, sometimes taking whole families."

"Are there other markers?" I looked about for a daughter or daughters who might have met the same fate.

"None named Dennis, but there seems to be another family in the same plot. Relatives, perhaps."Augusta knelt by a small stone in the corner almost hidden by a holly tree.
Carstairs… Susan D. Carstairs.
Husband's buried here, too. Name's Robert."

The Carstairses had died in the 1930s, but over to the side we found a third and more recent gravestone from that family dated 1978. Dennis R. Carstairs seemed to have been the last of the clan. "I wonder if there are relatives still in Angel Heights who might know about the Dennis family, "I said, pulling up a pine seedling that had sprung up in the middle of the last Carstairs grave. "Maybe a wife or children." But I didn't have much hope, as the plot didn't look as if anyone tended to it on a regular basis other than the infrequent mowing.

I made a mental note of the latest occupant's name and looked around for Augusta, thinking she might have returned to our family plot to pay her respects to Lucy and her parents, whom she claimed to have known, but I didn't find her there. Farther down the hill through a hedge of crape myrtle, now bare, I caught a glimpse of her seaweed gown, her upswept hair that rivaled the autumn leaves spiraling past. She stood looking up at a trim, willowy marble angel that towered above her. The angel's wings were folded, as were her hands, as if in prayer, and she seemed to be standing on tiptoe as she looked out over the graveyard with a stony, benevolent gaze and a Madonna-like smile. As I watched from behind the Potts family mausoleum (or the Potts Apartments, as Vesta calls it), Augusta rose up on her toes, brought her rounded arms into a reverent gesture, and sucked in her stomach, keeping an eye on the statue the whole time. I managed to stay quiet until she smiled, mimicking, I suppose the marble angel's expression. She looked like her lips were glued together. Then she threw out an arm for balance, tottered, and grabbed an overhanging dogwood limb to keep from falling over altogether.

"Very well, let's see you do it, Arminda Grace Hobbs!" she said when she saw me laughing. "No one can stand on their toes like that. It isn't natural." She stood back to examine the stone angel. "And no one looks like that, either; her waist is too small, and her wings are crooked."

Augusta laughed as I hopped on a pillar at the end of a wall and attempted to duplicate her stance.

"This reminds me of a game children used to play," she said, pulling me out of a bed of ivy.

"Follow the Leader? They still play it."

"Then, shall we?" With that she skimmed over a low wall, hopped on one foot around a cedar tree, and spun around three times singing her favorite song, which I had learned was

"Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer."

Feeling ten years old, I followed, giggling. "That's not fair! I don't know the words," I told her.

"Then sing one you do know!" Augusta swung into an oak tree, sat on a limb, and balanced an acorn on her nose.

Bellowing out a rendition of "Jingle Bells"—(it was all I could think of)—I did the same. By the time we skipped, ran, and sang our way back to the cemetery gates I was dizzy and exhausted. I had also forgotten for a few happy minutes the somber reasons for our visit.

The phone was ringing when we reached home. "Where in the world have you been? I've been trying to reach you," my grandmother demanded to know.

"I was up on cemetery hill checking out that lot where the Dennises are buried. (I decided not to tell her about Sylvie Smith.) There's nobody else in the plot except for some people named Carstairs. Do you know if any of them still live here?"

"There's Jewel Carstairs—no, wait a minute—she married the Knox boy and moved to Alabama, but I think her brother still lives here…. Why are you so out of breath? You been running?"

"Just trying to keep in shape. Her brother—is he related to the Dennises?"

"Gordon Carstairs? Remotely, I think. What's all this hullabaloo about the Dennises, Arminda? My goodness, they've been dead since before I was born."

"She made nondescripts. I think their daughter might have been a member of the Mystic Six."

Silence. "And what if she was? She's dead, too—unless she's found the fountain of youth. If you're thinking of tracing down that old quilt, you've got your work cut out for you. Give it up, Minda. That thing's long gone."

"It's not the quilt. It's the women who made it. I need to know who they were, what happened to them."

She didn't ask why. I was glad I didn't have to explain that my angel and I thought they had something to do with Cousin Otto's death.

"I called to tell you they're reading Otto's will tomorrow, and I can't get in touch with Mildred."My grandmother sounded put out. I don't know what she expected me to do about it.

"Are you sure you have the right number?" I said.

"It's Lydia's voice on the answering machine, all right. I've left two messages."

"Maybe they went on a leaf tour or something—you know, one of those all day trips. She'll probably call you back tonight. What time are they reading the will?"

"That's just it. It's at ten in the morning, and if I don't get in touch with her soon, she won't get back in time."

"Frankly, I'm surprised Otto left a will," I said. "I didn't think he was that organized."

"I think Butler Pike shamed him into it," Vesta said. "Had his law office where the bookshop is before he built that place downtown. He was the one who sold us the building."

I knew my grandmother and I were thinking the same thing, but she was the one who finally spoke it. "I do hope he remembered Mildred," she said. "I honestly dread for tomorrow to come."

But it did come, and fortunately for us—and for her— Mildred never showed. Otto had left his share of Papa's Armchair to Gatlin.

"It took only ten minutes," Vesta said when she and Gatlin stopped by the Nut House afterward. Otto's share of the shop was all he had to leave."

Gatlin was still flabbergasted. She looked from Vesta to me and tried to speak, but nothing came out—a first for my cousin.

"I—well, I guess—"Gatlin shrugged. "Don't you think Otto left it to me because he didn't think you or Mildred would outlive him?" she asked Vesta. She was wide-eyed and pale, and her voice actually trembled when she spoke.

"That's exactly what I think," Vesta said, putting an arm around her, "and I can't think of anyone I'd rather it go to. I just don't know how to explain it to Mildred."

"Do we have to?" My cousin regained a flush of color. "I mean I know we'll have to tell her he left me his share of the shop, but can't we say he made provisions for her to live there? She seems to want to stay, and I can't see any harm in it."

"What about money?" I said. "She has to live on something."

My grandmother spoke in her "don't question me" voice. "That's taken care of. You don't have to worry about that."

Gatlin and I exchanged glances. I knew Mildred had a modest income along with her Social Security, but I never knew until now who supplied it.

My cousin followed me to the kitchen to help make sandwiches for lunch. "All this time Mildred's thought Otto was putting money into her account! Do you think she ever suspected it was Vesta?"

"I don't think she really wanted to know," I said, slathering bread with pimento cheese. "I just wish she'd call and let us know where she is. It's not like her, and I can tell Vesta's worried."

"If we don't hear from her by tomorrow, let's drive over and see what's up," Gatlin said. "It's Sunday, so Dave can look after the kids." She lifted the cover from a bowl of fruit salad I'd put on the table and sniffed. "Where on earth did you get these heavenly strawberries?…And what's this? Fresh peaches in November?"

Where on earth, indeed? I glanced at Augusta and smiled.