Then Hang All the Liars (6 page)

“Feed me, for starters. I'm starving.” She checked her Mickey Mouse watch with the rhinestone band. “What time is our reservation?”

“One-fifteen. Emily couldn't get away before that.”

“And here she is,” Sam announced.

George stood and waved in the direction Sam was pointing, though she knew he couldn't see that far.
His encroaching blindness was shrinking his world day by day, inch by inch.

Emily's smile was as crisp as her tailored tan linen. “Sorry I'm late. I couldn't get out of the damned house.”

“You're not. And we're delighted to see you again,” said Sam. “I just got here.”

“She was with a dancer,” George offered.

“How lovely. Felicity champions theater, but it's dance for me. Ballet?”

Once again Sam saw the nearly naked, triple-jointed black woman on stage, the snakelike movement of her hips.

“Classical,” she said and smiled.

“Well, my excuse is that one of my bitches was whelping. I couldn't tear myself away, though I'm sure she would have been perfectly fine without me.”

“Emily raises cocker spaniels,” George explained, and then to Emily, “Samantha has a dog, a little white Shih Tzu named Harpo. He runs our house.”

Sam laughed. “My friend Annie Tannenbaum in San Francisco used to say that if there were such a thing as reincarnation, she would come back as a Shih Tzu in a Jewish household. And then she'd turn right around and bring Harpo chopped liver from the deli.”

“I know what you mean. But I breed and sell, so I try not to become too attached to the pups. It's hard, though. They are so adorable. An old maid's children.”

“Some old maid,” George demurred. “Emily has always been the belle of Atlanta.”

“Not always, dear. I only go back to the War Between the States.”

“You know what I mean. Always elusive Emily, the heartbreaker.”

“I just never did seem to want to be tied down.”

“Emily's like me, always on the go. We counted up one time, and between us, we'd done seventy-five countries.”

“Of course, I was an army nurse for a long time. The military will help you cover a lot of territory.”

“When? Ever in wartime?” Sam asked.

“Oh, yes.” And then she could see memory rise in Emily's eyes behind the tortoise-shell glasses that matched the large pins that kept her white chignon in place. “I was in the Philippines, Bataan.”

“Really?”

“Yes, there were nurses, too, in the camps there, held by the Japanese. Four and a half years. But,” she said and shifted back to the present and the pleasant in the way that Southern ladies do, “now I just putter around with Lighthouse for the Blind.”

“Putter, my foot. She's the director. The place couldn't run without her.”

“Well, they're going to have to learn to. I'm phasing out now, training my replacement. But they still let me come in and flirt with the older gentlemen.”

“Flirt and beat us with a stick. I never had a tougher taskmaster when I was a boy at military school.”

“Well, we've got to train you right. It's bad enough that you contracted that damned disease in the Amazon. We don't want you falling down manhole covers.”

“Your table is ready, Mr. Adams,” the maitre d' announced. “This way, Ms. Edwards. Ms. Adams.”

The horse-racing theme of the restaurant carried from the plaster jockeys outside, through the silks hung in the bar, to the prints on the walls in the Jockey Room where Emily, Sam, and George dined on tagliolini with andouille sausage, cold roasted duck with snow peas, and scallops with ginger, shallots, and mushrooms.

“The food is excelled only by the service,” George complimented their waiter as he cleared and poured them coffee. They shared caramel custard and raspberries with cream for dessert.

“Now that we've stuffed ourselves like pigs at Emily's expense,” George said and pushed back a little from the table, “let's talk.”

“Isn't that just like a lawyer?” asked Emily. “Soften you up and then steal your eye teeth.”

“Now
you
called this meeting, dear, as I remember.”

“I'm only teasing. And I do appreciate your time.” Then she leaned forward on her elbows and her face grew serious. “Well, I know this may sound silly, but I'm worried about Felicity, and I want to ask your advice about what to do. Now I know you don't do these kinds of favors for people anymore, George.”

“I am trying to keep out of trouble.”

Sam only half listened to George as he continued. She was remembering Felicity from the night before, lovely in her fuchsia Fortuny, the pleats dipping and swaying as she traveled somewhere in her own private world.

“But I also know you've always been the soul of discretion in these personal sorts of matters,” Emily said.

“Tell me what's troubling you.” George's bedside manner was better than most doctors'.

“You saw Felicity the other night at the theater.”

“Yes,” he said and nodded. “She seemed to be in wonderful spirits.”

“And she is, most of the time. But she's a touch senile. She comes and goes.”

“It happens to the best of us, dear. I remember thirty years ago much more clearly than I do yesterday. And I can't remember where I left my glasses five seconds ago.”

“Of course.” Emily smiled. “But it's more pronounced with Felicity—the swings are wider and deeper. But that's not really what I want to talk with you about. That's medical; that's
my
field. And much of that can be helped with medication if I can get her away from the clutches of the real problem.”

“Which is?” Sam asked.

“Randolph Percy.”

“And who might this Mr. Percy be?”

Emily described the man's good looks, his charm, his winning ways. She picked up a pack of matches and tapped the racing logo. “I think he plays the horses. And,” she said and sighed, “I don't know his family.”

“Now, Emily, we old fogies place too much stock on families, I think.”

“I'm not an ass about that kind of thing, George. I don't mean that I want to see his pedigree. But I would feel better if I knew something more about him. He just appeared out of thin air, as it were, at one of Margaret Landry's dinner parties, and swept Felicity off her feet. He's with her practically every moment, doing his card tricks, keeping her in stitches.”

“Doesn't sound bad to me,” said George. “There must be more.”

“Two things. Felicity has been manic-depressive since we were girls. It's hereditary—our mother was given to moods, too. Hers is not a severe case, but she does need to take her medication, especially now that her age is complicating matters.”

“And she's not?” asked Sam.

“No. Not since she started keeping company with Mr. Percy. The man not only does card tricks; he believes in all this mumbo-jumbo magic elixir business.
Something he says he gets from some hot springs in California, for God's sakes.” Then she caught herself. “Excuse me, Samantha, I didn't mean that all Californians are crazy.”

“Please.” Sam pushed away the apology.

“Does this endanger her health?” George frowned.

“Not her physical health. But emotionally she's a roller coaster.”

“Hummph.” George closed his eyes and grasped the bridge of his nose, thinking.

“But is she happy with him?” Sam asked.

“Deliriously. When she isn't sobbing about something that happened twenty or thirty years ago.”

“You mean she slips in and out of time.”

“I mean she doesn't distinguish between now and then. Sorrows from her past are as real as if they're happening now. But mostly she's happy, like you saw her the other evening.”

“You said you had two concerns. What's the second?”

“I think Randolph Percy is going to try to kill Felicity for her money.”

Without taking his eyes off Emily's, George raised his hand and signaled for another pot of coffee.

Five

“Well, you just never know, do you?” Sam asked, fastening her seat belt. Her car, freshly washed by the valet service at Trotters, had been waiting for them when she and George stepped out the restaurant door.

“About other people's lives? Nope. Man sitting next to you on a plane, innocuous fat man with brown shoes and short socks, could end up telling you things'd keep you awake nights for weeks. Yes indeed, lawyering and reporting—both give us license to dig around, then stand back and watch the worms crawl.”

“Ever make you feel funny? Sometimes I don't
want
to know. But I do it. Suck 'em dry.”

“They talk to us because we listen, Sam. People spend their whole lives talking, talking, talking with nobody paying any attention at all.”

“And we do it for a living.”

They were passing the High Museum. Richard Meier's white-enameled structure gleamed in the sunlight.

“Fabulous,” Sam said.

“The only art museum in America that's architecture, ten, art, one.”

“The furniture collection's not bad.”

George snorted and Sam wheeled sharply to the right to avoid a car cutting in front of her. Peachtree was an insurance agent's nightmare, the lanes changing number and direction every other block.

“You think Emily Edwards is crazy?”

“No,” George said. “Emily's one of this earth's most sensible people. I've never known Felicity all that well, though we've bumped into each other forever, but it strikes me that the two of them are like opposite sides of a coin—right brain, left brain. Responsible, flighty. Practical, creative. Science, art. Felicity's the one the crazy label would stick to if you were throwing it around.”

Sam was quiet for a few blocks. Then she turned and faced George. “You think I'm going to end up going to Savannah?”

“Now why would you do that?”

“That's where Emily said Randolph Percy's from.”

“So?”

“I thought we just had this conversation.”

George nodded his handsome head and his silver forelock flopped. “Well, it'd make Hoke happy, wouldn't it?”

“I wouldn't be going to do that damned bus thing.”

“Never say never, dear. Might pan out as the biggest story of your career.”

They'd turned off Peachtree onto the wide boulevard of Ponce de Leon, lined with once-great houses, many of them now apartment buildings. Soon they were at Fairview, their street and the southern boundary of the Druid Hills neighborhood where the old houses were still grand, as were the lawns, the trees an unbroken green canopy across the winding streets thanks to the developers in the century's early years who convinced the utility companies to run their lines in back yards.

The three-story split-timber Tudor where Sam had first come to live as a girl after her parents died was set well back from Fairview. A brick drive, reflected in many mullioned windows, wound up and then around the wide, comfortable house across the street from Miriam Talbot's red Georgian Revival. Now Miriam waved gaily at them from her front yard where she was poking in a flower bed.

“I want you to come over later and have some tea,” George called through the open car window.

“Did you have lunch with Emily?”

He nodded.

“And there's something more you want to know. Want to pick my brain, don't you, dear?”

*

Harpo fell into a shimmy of delight the minute Sam and George opened the back door.

“Dust mop!” she cried, picking him up for a hug. His heart pounded through his strong little chest.

“We've been baking all morning long,” said Peaches, coming out of the kitchen into the back hall. The pencil-thin light-skinned black woman stood with a hand on one hip—her usual pose.

“You and Harpo?” George asked.

“Sure. He's a good tester. Great nose.”

“And where's Horace?”

“Upstairs at his drawing table.” She hooked a thumb in that direction. “Still plotting against your bedroom.”

Her husband, the family chauffeur and major-domo who was also a self-taught cabinetmaker and draftsman, was redesigning George's rooms. He was determined that by the time George went completely blind his suite would be as efficient as ship's quarters.

“The Widow Talbot's coming over to join us for some tea in a little while. You think you and Harpo could rustle us up some cookies?”

“Probably. I made about a million for my board meeting tomorrow. What you think, dog?”