Sharyn Mccrumb_Elizabeth MacPherson_07 (10 page)

“What did you do, then?”

“I picked up Misti Lynn and I put her in the trunk of my car. I couldn't just leave her laying there. I don't know what I was fixing to do with her. Maybe take her to the hospital, or just leave her somewhere. I don't know. I kind of blacked out again. We had some pills in the medicine cabinet, and I think I took a couple of them. Anyhow, next thing I knew, the cops were banging on the door with their warrant about those damn checks, and it just plain slipped my mind about her being in the trunk.”

“Why didn't you tell me about her when I first talked to you about the check charge?”

He shrugged. “Figured maybe they wouldn't find her. I guess I was hoping I dreamed it.”

Powell Hill stared at her client. There really were people in the world who could forget about having a woman's corpse in the trunk of their car. Or if they dimly remembered, they might ignore it, hoping that it would go away. His story rang true. It wasn't much help with his defense, though. As far as she could tell, not even he knew if he had killed her or not.

   Flora Dabney looked at her watch. It was time to start getting ready to go. At least it was time
to tell Anna Douglas to start getting ready, because she always took twice as long as anybody else. It wasn't really vanity on Anna's part, Flora decided; it was just that Anna was a methodical person, and the good Lord had only given her first gear, so there was no use in trying to speed her up. Anna had lived in the Home for twenty years now and her housemates hadn't found anything yet that could make her hurry. After a long spell of getting upset and angry over Anna's slowness, Flora and the others had learned to give her an extra hour's notice whenever they wanted her to do anything. It saved worry all the way around.

They had all been together for such a long time that they were like family now. At eighty-three, Flora had outlived her own sister by a dozen years, but they hadn't been close since childhood. Flora married late, staying home to care for her invalid father, while her pretty younger sister had married a man from Alabama and moved far away. Finally their lives did not touch at any point. Common circumstances and decades of living together had made these seven women more her sisters than blood ties ever could. Flora felt responsible for all of them, even the exasperating Julia Hotchkiss, who looked like a bird but could eat more than a mule. They needed someone who could take care of them, and after time's winnowing, Flora was left as the strongest in body and mind; so
it fell to her to look after the others. Dolly Smith was her closest friend and she was certainly no fool, but arthritis had nearly crippled her, weakening her fighting spirit. She needed better health care than they could afford.

The others needed tending as well. Mary Pendleton was too trusting for her own good, and Ellen Morrison would rather let people walk all over her than risk offending them. Lydia had lost interest in everything in the world except her precious family tree, and Jenny Wade Allan was all but an invalid. Without Flora they would be at the mercy of any sharpster or bureaucrat who came down the pike.

Until recent years there had been other people that they could rely on: Mr. Bowers, their attorney, who was overseer of the Home for Confederate Women trust; a housekeeper-manager who supervised the running of the property; and a couple of daily maids who saw to the cooking and the cleaning. But Mr. Bowers had died, and inflation meant that prices kept going up while their income stayed about the same. Then the housekeeper resigned, so now there was only one aging maid to look after them. She cooked a little and cleaned every now and then, but it wasn't enough. The house had begun to take on a general air of neglect and they were powerless to stop its decline. The limited income from the trust would not stretch to more than basic maintenance, at least not if
they wanted to keep purchasing food. A broken furnace or a leaky roof would spell disaster for the eight remaining residents of the Home. Really they were running out of choices, just as they had run out of people to help them. Flora felt that it was up to her to take care of the others.

She looked around the spacious, sunny bedroom that had been her lair for more than twenty years. The wallpaper was faded and the ceiling a road map of plaster cracks, but still she loved it. It was familiar and comfortable, and still bore traces of a bygone elegance—like a grande dame who had fallen on hard times. The best bits of the Dabney family furniture were displayed about her, and on a mahogany chest sat her mother's tea service of Mexican silver. Flora wished that she could continue to live there, but modern times being what they were, that wish was a pipe dream.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her white hair was carefully arranged in wings at the sides of her head, caught up in a knot at the nape of her neck. The lavender dress was a little old, perhaps, but then who noticed style in an old lady, and what did she care for the opinion of those young pups who ran the world these days? She opened the dresser drawer and took out her white gloves. It was time to make themselves scarce. Lydia could take the bus to the courthouse, and she would ask Reba to
drive the rest of them to the mall for a few hours.

There was a tap at the door, and Mary Lee Pendleton peeped in. “Are you ready, Flora? I was hoping that we could have lunch at the cafeteria while we were out there.”

“All right, Mary. It's an extravagance, but I suppose we could afford it now. We should go soon. I told Mr. MacPherson to bring them by about two.”

“Being run out of our home by Yankees,” sighed Mary. “Well, that's nothing new.”

   In his chrome-and-glass office on the twelfth floor of the bank building, Doug MacPherson was contemplating his lunch: a turd of tuna salad on wilted lettuce, enthroned in a Styrofoam tray—and a cellophane packet containing an assortment of stress vitamins. A few weeks ago he would have felt deprived for having to eat such meager fare, but now the gastronomic austerity made him feel young and invigorated. He pictured his waistline trimmer after a few weeks of such noontime abstinence, and he fancied that he could feel his blood pressure and his cholesterol level creeping steadily down to acceptable levels. A return of his thinning hair was perhaps too much to expect from raw vegetables and vitamins, but at least the attrition might be slowed by this new attention to nutrition. Anything so nonfilling and unappetizing
ought to be able to work miracles, he told himself, but he banished this thought as unworthy and socially incorrect. Caroline would not approve of such an attitude. It was she who had ordered this lunch for him, and he was flattered that she should be so concerned with his health. Similar suggestions about his choice of diet had come regularly over the years from his wife, Margaret, but those he had dismissed as nagging, merely the food fads of a foolish woman. From Caroline, they were expressions of her tender concern, and as he gulped down his vitamin tablet, he raised his mineral water in a silent toast to her.

Life was no longer boring. Of course the children were outraged and embarrassed, and Margaret was behaving as if he had taken to peeing on lampposts, but he was rather enjoying all the fuss. It made him feel young again. He was someone to whom adventures might still occur, not the stagnated man of middle years who'd had stuffed peppers for dinner every Monday night since the Carter administration. The exhilaration of this new freedom was worth any amount of family strife, he thought. It was his life, wasn't it? And he wasn't going to live forever, so he might as well make the most of things while he still had his health. Besides, he'd worked very hard for a great many years to provide for those ungrateful offspring of his,
and he had given Margaret a very comfortable home indeed. Who were they to criticize him?

Of course the apartment he now lived in was a squalid nuisance, compared with his old residence, but it was only a minor annoyance, and a very temporary one at that. As soon as the divorce was settled, he would move into a place more in keeping with his current lifestyle. And surely by then he wouldn't have to do all those irritating domestic chores for himself. Cooking was a great bother after a hard day's work; usually he decided that he couldn't face it and he ate out. And he was certainly tired of having to use the cramped and musty laundry room in the basement of the apartment building every time he ran out of clean underwear. A few times he had given in and simply bought a new package at J.C. Penney's, but that was
not
cost-effective.

All in all, he was doing just fine without Margaret. He felt alive again. But hungry. Still hungry. He looked down at the empty Styrofoam tray. Even the lettuce was gone. With a furtive glance at the closed door of his office, Doug MacPherson began to rummage in his desk for the breath mints.

   Bill MacPherson might have enjoyed a quiet lunch with Nathan Kimball. They could have talked about their respective law practices and swapped law-school yarns, but the presence of
the glacial Mr. Huff made such small talk impossible. Apparently he was too wealthy to bother to be pleasant.

Bill soon realized that John Huff was not interested in the particulars of life in the charming city of Danville, and he was at a loss to think of some other topic that might interest his guests. Huff seemed equally lukewarm on the subject of area golf courses, recreational lakes, and local cultural events. Kimball made a few fitful attempts to keep the conversation going, but he didn't seem to know what Mr. Huff was interested in, either. In the end, they ate their chicken and dumplings in a strained silence, punctuated by innocuous remarks about the weather. Bill found that he was glancing at his watch approximately every ninety seconds.

Finally the minute hand crawled up to twelve, and he was able to down the last of his iced tea and announce with forced heartiness, “If you're sure you wouldn't like something else to eat, we can drive out and see the house now.”

He took the expressway to the exit for the old part of the city, the kernel of graceful houses and tree-lined boulevards that lay within the layers of interstates and neon strips encircling the original settlement. John Huff sat silently in the front passenger seat, observing their progress without apparent emotion, but Nathan Kimball peered out the window, exclaiming
over various splendid examples of neoclassical architecture.

“And these date from before the Civil War?” he asked.

“A lot of them, I guess,” said Bill, whose interest in architecture had stopped with his tree house at the age of nine.

“But I thought General Sherman burned all the mansions in the South.”

“I believe he only did that from Atlanta to Savannah,” said Bill diffidently. “You know, Georgia. I expect my law partner A. P. Hill would know. She's descended from the general.”

“Which general?” asked Kimball.

“Oh, never mind,” murmured Bill. “Here's the house. It's quite large, as you can see. It could stand a coat of paint, but the Orkin man assures us that it's free of termites; the woodwork is perfectly sound. And these oak trees are all healthy, too. They're over a hundred years old as well.”

“Very nice,” grunted Huff.

“It looks like Tara!” said Nathan Kimball admiringly.

Bill concluded from this remark that Kimball either hadn't seen the movie or hadn't been paying attention when he did, because in fact the Home for Confederate Women was considerably grander than the O'Hara's North Georgia farmstead as depicted in
Gone With the Wind.
This Virginia mansion was a three-story white frame building built in an L-shape with an arched carriageway on one side, topped by a glassed-in sun porch. The front of the building was adorned with a circular portico supported by four Corinthian columns. Bill hoped that the subject of heating bills wouldn't come up during the showing of the house.

He parked the car on the paved loop behind the carriageway and led the way up the flagstone path to the front door. “They've left the key under the mat for us,” he said, stopping to retrieve it. “It's a very safe neighborhood. I think the ladies were shy about showing their home to strangers. And of course they didn't want you to feel
pressured,”
he said to John Huff.

“I never feel pressured,” Huff replied.

Bill unlocked the door and escorted the visitors into an oak-paneled hallway that extended the length of the house. To their right was a flight of stairs with an elaborately carved banister and newel post. The carpet was threadbare and the dusty light fixture did not sufficiently illuminate the hall, but traces of the home's former splendor were still evident in the workmanship and the materials used. “There are three stories to the house,” Bill told them, stealing a glance at an index card he'd concealed in the pocket of his blazer. “And a full basement. The third floor has been sealed off
for many years, as the number of residents diminished. All in all, though, there are ten bedrooms in the house, and”—another peek at his notes—“eight baths. One on the first floor; the rest are upstairs. The main parlor is to your left. The ornamental plasterwork is original.”

John Huff inspected every room in the house with meticulous care while the two attorneys trailed after him, making what they hoped were intelligent remarks. He examined all three floors, paying particular attention to the shelves of books in the first-floor library. Bill had never heard of most of the titles, but the books were certainly old, many of them were leather bound, and they were probably valuable.

“I would expect these to be included in the sale of the house,” said Huff.

“I'll mention that to my clients,” Bill stammered.

“Is there an attic?”

“I think so,” said Bill. “Would you like to see it?” He was trying to remember how to get there.

“Perhaps later,” said Huff. “When we looked in the basement, I noticed that there were some trunks and boxes. What about them?”

“I'll ask. Do you want that stack of
National Geographic
s down there, too?”