Buried Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  DINNER PARTIES AND DEADLY DISH …

  As the hired help served the chicken, Bailey Bronson rose unsteadily.

  “To Lawrence!” He raised his glass. “Underappreciated and now in the cat-bird seat.” He swayed dangerously. “Renowned for his international epicurean flair and his parties, at which too many people drank too much and spilled their guts. May he take his secrets to the grave. The sooner the better.”

  Madame’s gasp was the only sound. Even the cutlery stilled.

  “My death would benefit no one,” Lawrence said as casually as if he were ordering coffee. “All pertinent information is already in writing. As a vessel of secrets, I’ve been drained. But what abomination do you fear, Bronson? We’d love to know. I could hazard a guess, if you’d like.…”

  BURIED BONES

  A Bantam Book / November 2000

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Carolyn Haines

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

  form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48259-4

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1

  Chasing the blues away is a talent Delaney women are still trying to acquire. Perhaps our melancholy is a sign, as Jitty insists, of some obscure womb disorder. Regrettus Wombus, a medical term for the regretful womb, resulting in the deep-dark, down-and-ugly blues.

  Historically, Delaney women have been known to wallow in that place where loss takes up more space than any other organ. I fear I’m no exception to the family tradition.

  There wasn’t a radio station in the small Mississippi town of Zinnia that wasn’t playing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It is my belief that any song mentioning chestnuts, toasty fires, or sleigh rides for two should be banned from the airwaves. It’s a fact, documented in my psychology journals, that suicide rates increase during the holidays. Due, no doubt, to the sadistic disc jockeys playing these songs.

  With the conclusion of my first case, I’d received payment in full from Tinkie for my investigative services. Dahlia House had been saved, for the moment, from my creditors. I should have been on top of the world. Instead, I was in the front parlor, knotted in a tangle of tinsel, and with a Christmas tree that looked as if residents of Bedlam had put up the lights.

  Turning off the radio, I tossed the tinsel in the fire and was rewarded with a multihued flame. I picked up all the magnolia leaves, holly, and cedar that I’d cut and brought in to use as decorations. With a mighty heave, I burned them, too.

  As the last of the Delaneys, I’d inherited my mother’s incredible collection of great albums, and I sat down on the carpet and began to go through them. I couldn’t control the radio stations, but I could find my own music.

  As my fingers closed over Denise LaSalle, I felt a surge of renewed spirit. The album was a little scratched, but there was no denying the feminist power of the Delta-born blueswoman. It was perfect—fight the blues with the blues. And Denise was putting it on her no-good man. She had her Crown Royal, her car, and a juke-joint band to dance to. She’d also given me a new motto—“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

  There were plenty of fish in the ocean. All I had to do was find me a pole and throw in my line.

  With my energy renewed, I crawled behind Aunt LouLane’s horsehair sofa, found the electrical outlet, and jammed the prongs of the extension plug into the holes. Maybe I wasn’t the best with traditional Christmas decorating, but I’d found something even better. Something that spoke to me. And I’d gotten it at a bargain-basement price.

  Peering over the back of the sofa at the mantel, I smiled with satisfaction at what I had wrought. The neon tubing slid to hot green with liquid light, creating the perfect outline of a Christmas wreath. Mingled in the green curlicues that made the body of the wreath were red ornaments that blinked on and off. It was a masterpiece, a real find in Rudy’s Junk Shop.

  I picked up the second extension cord and poked it home. The reds, greens, blues, and yellows of old-fashioned Christmas lights flickered to life, creating a series of fascinating shadows on the high ceilings of the front parlor. Neon meets tradition! A successful Delaney moment.

  Before I could stand up to see the fruits of my labors, I heard the harrumph that warned me Jitty was in the room.

  “You’ve got this place lookin’ like a Chinese whorehouse,” Jitty said. “And you not much better. I didn’t know they made such a thing as a flannel muumuu. Girl, it’s late afternoon. You been wearin’ that getup all day? And look at those socks. Just ’cause they red and it’s Christmas don’t mean you should wear ’em.”

  Bracing against the sofa, I rose to my knees and traced her voice to the brocade wingback. She was sitting there, dark eyes reflecting the multihued Christmas lights that she disdained. Behind her, the neon wreath pulsed and throbbed, seeming to pick up the singer’s declaration of freedom and at the same time give Jitty a hellish halo.

  “Merry Christmas, Jitty,” I said, brushing the dust off my knees as I stood. “I’ve been decorating.”

  “Honey, you need some serious help,” she replied. “This ain’t decoratin’, this is vandalism.”

  I walked across the wide, polished oak planks of the parlor and viewed my handiwork from her vantage point. The thirteen-foot fir tree, trimmed with about a million lights, at least five hundred ornaments, some red-velvet bows, a few wooden toys and trinkets, and five packages of the real old-timey silver icicles looked pretty good to me. Not to mention the stockings hung by the fireplace with care, or the thorn branch that I’d laboriously studded with rainbow gumdrops. I turned back to Jitty. “I think it looks great.”

  “Don’t get that hurt look on your face, Sarah Booth,” she said coldly. “Some women got the touch when it comes to decoratin’, some don’t. You could improve yourself a little bit, though, if you’d take a few hints from—”

  “Stop!” I would not allow the name of the decorating maven from hell to be spoken in my home. My home. The phrase gave me a moment of pleasure. I, Sarah Booth Delaney, had single-handedly redeemed Dahlia House. I still had debts aplenty, but I no longer had to peek from behind closed curtains whenever a car drove up to make sure it wasn’t t
he sheriff and a repo crew.

  “What you lookin’ so self-satisfied for?” Jitty asked with tiny little snake rattles in her voice.

  I looked at her. Really looked at her, for the first time today. Gone were the glitz and gaudiness of the seventies. Jitty had reinvented herself yet again.

  “Where in the hell did you get those clothes?” I asked, pointing at her and moving my finger up and down to indicate the entire package. From the tight curls bound back by a turban-style scarf to the waist-cinched blue gingham dress and high-heeled pumps, Jitty looked like a negative image of Jane Wyatt on a rerun of Father Knows Best. My horrified gaze roved back up to her waist. My Lord, it had to be under twenty-three inches.

  “Somebody around here’s got to put a halt to moral decay. No more of this ‘free love, if it feels good do it’ bull. What we need are some family values.” Jitty looked like a rod had been rammed up her spine. “Once we get us some family values, maybe a family will follow.”

  Her smug tone should have been a warning.

  “You mean you’re done with Gloria Steinem and moved into the camp of that fifties-throwback Phyllis Schlafly?” And I had foolishly thought nothing could be worse than bad polyester and metallic eye shadow. Her hair, normally alive with energy, looked as if it had been beaten into submission.

  “You’re leadin’ a wild and reckless life, Sarah Booth. It’s time you settled down. I thought I’d set you a good example.”

  I briefly closed my eyes, hoping this was all a bad, bad nightmare. Jitty, my great-great-grandmother’s nanny, a ghost lingering in Dahlia House from pre–Civil War days, was going to set an example for me. A woman who fed off me—literally, figuratively, and spiritually—had found me lacking in moral fiber. This from the haint who only four weeks ago would have used a turkey baster to stuff me with the sperm of bachelorbanker Harold Erkwell?

  “Hold on one second, there—” I began.

  “Don’t go pointin’ that finger at me, missy,” Jitty shot back, rising from her perch on the chair arm to stand on those slender little heels. It gave me a stab of pleasure to see her sway dangerously. She hadn’t quite perfected the Loretta Young stance.

  “Missy?” My voice rose an octave. “Missy? What’s going on here?”

  “You are a missy,” she said, her eyes glittering now. “As in unmarried, over thirty, no prospects—you don’t straighten up fast and act righteous, you gone be an old missy. And turn off that sex music. Listenin’ to that stuff will get you—”

  “Bred,” I supplied, finally coming to the heart of the matter. “Which is the real problem here. You’re mad at me because I’m not pregnant.” It was unbelievable. “You’re furious because my … encounter with Hamilton Garrett V didn’t produce a viable … product. This is all some form of ghostly punishment you’ve devised. My God! I’m not living with a badass from the Mod Squad any longer. Now I’ve got Aunt Jemima acting out Donna Reed!”

  “Child,” she said carefully. “Not product. Child. That’s what’s wrong in this picture. You’ve lost your tender parts. I think it might have something to do with the Delaney womb condition. You let that man slip right through your fingers. You didn’t even try to hold on to him.”

  The memory of my passionate—and doomed—Thanksgiving romance was enough to push every holiday emotion I had right out the front door and across the frozen acres of the Mississippi Delta. “Hamilton is back in Europe. He hasn’t even sent a Christmas card. And you’re upset because I’m not the vessel that holds his seed?” My hands went automatically to my hips. I could feel the red spread up my face.

  “You need a doctor’s appointment. If you didn’t have some womb tilt, you might have held on to a few of those Garrett … you know …”

  “Sperm, Jitty. You can say the word.” I didn’t like this new fifties modesty. Jitty had always been a ghost who called a spade a spade.

  “If you’d tried a little harder, you might have conceived.”

  “What do you suggest? That I should have done it standing on my head? Or is that considered immoral in the land where Father Knows Best?”

  “Have a drink of water,” she said. “Your face is red and your eyes are ’bout to pop out of your head.”

  “Could it be that I’m angry?” My pulse throbbed at my temple.

  She snorted. “Sarcasm is lost on me. And it’s very unladylike. You want to get you a man, you gone have to give up actin’ like a harpy.”

  “Hamilton didn’t stick around long enough to see my harpy side.”

  She sat down on the chair arm, kicked off a shoe, and began to massage her foot. “If you’d gotten pregnant, Hamilton would have come back to Zinnia.”

  I was stunned. “You mean I might have trapped him into marrying me?”

  She continued to rub her foot, unable, or unwilling, to look me in the eyes. “Lots of marriages start off that way. What difference does it make if you bait the trap with sex or home cookin’ or a child?”

  I waited until she brought her gaze up to mine. “I don’t want a man I have to trap.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” she answered, a hint of the seventies Jitty showing through in the way she flounced to her feet, ignoring the fact that she had on only one shoe. “Men don’t think of marriage on their own. None of them. Women got to put the idea in their heads. And if you’d hung on to that sperm, a baby would have been one unavoidable idea.”

  “Jitty,” I warned.

  “Make a doctor’s appointment. Maybe there’s a kink in some of your tubes. ’Course there’s no rush. It’ll probably be another five years before you slide out of your panties again.”

  “Jitty!” She’d gone too far. I couldn’t tell if I was madder at the implication that I couldn’t get laid or the prediction that I wouldn’t. Truth be told, Hamilton’s return to Europe had done more damage to my heart than I wanted to admit.

  “I was thinkin’ about pot roast for dinner,” she said in an abrupt change of tactics. “You keep eatin’ that fruitcake, you gone be too big to attract anybody ’cept one of those Shelby pig farmers. Now those boys ’preciate a woman with some poundage.”

  I saw her flicker, then begin to fade. It was just like her to start an argument and then disappear. “You come right back here,” I ordered, even as the last trace of her form disappeared. “Jitty!”

  “Answer the door,” she said, her voice only a sigh in the room.

  The chiming of the doorbell pulled me up short. It was Friday evening, the last weekend before Christmas. Who could possibly be at the door? Not Cece, the society editor of the local newspaper and my sometimes employer. It was deadline for her Sunday section. And not Tammy. Zinnia’s local psychic was spending the weekend visiting her granddaughter, little Dahlia, over near Mound Bayou.

  Harold Erkwell?

  My thumb gave a little tingle at the thought of the distinguished banker who’d offered me a rock and a marriage—both rejected in haste. Was it possible I was still carrying some kind of torch for Harold? If not a torch, perhaps a Bic?

  “Sarah Booth, yoo-hoo?” The bell chimed again, and there was a harsh rap on the door.

  I hurried out of the parlor and into the foyer, noticing with a certain satisfaction the tinsel wreath I’d hung on the bust of Stonewall Jackson that had been in my father’s family for almost as long as Jitty. Jackson was a hard-looking man—perhaps not hard but determined. The glittering red wreath gave him a holiday air. Hah! Despite Jitty’s cruel words, I did have a certain flair for decorating.

  The bell rang again, this time with vehemence. The pounding was staccato and solid. A cane? I didn’t know a soul who used a cane. I slipped to the window door and very carefully eased the lace sheer back. Two bright blue eyes, enlarged by black-rimmed spectacles and topped with a shock of snow-white hair, stared directly into mine. I didn’t recognize the man at all.

  “Open up, dah-ling, I’m here on official monkey business.”

  I did as he ordered and found myself face-to-face with an older man who�
��d escaped most of the trappings of age—he was spry. He made a courtly bow, sweeping low to the floor.

  “Let me introduce myself. Lawrence Ambrose, a very dear friend of your parents. Your mother in particular. I adored her. She was every inch a real lady.”

  I was stunned. All of my life I’d heard about Lawrence Ambrose, the Mississippian who’d taken the Parisian world of letters by storm. He was also an artist and playwright and a host of other things. I’d known that Ambrose lived in Zinnia, a recluse on the Caldwells’ large estate, but I’d never anticipated meeting him in the flesh.

  “Please, come in,” I managed.

  “I do believe there’s a bit of the monkey in you, my dear,” Lawrence said, offering his arm to me. “There’s not a Zodiac sign for the monkey, but there should be. Somewhere between the scorpion and the goat, don’t you think? What sign are you?”

  Leaning only slightly on his cane, he escorted me inside.

  In the parlor, Lawrence Ambrose settled into the club chair beside the fire and pointed at my Christmas decorations with his cane. “Lovely, dahling. Very SoHo, fifties. Andy Warhol would have absolutely coveted such a creation. That was before he became a caricature of himself, you know. At one point …” He lowered the cane and I saw his hand tremble before it closed tightly over the horse’s head. He was too pale. “It’s a sign of age when the past seems to dominate one’s conversation. Forgive me.”

  He seemed so genuinely taken aback that I had to think of a change of subject. Food was always good. “Would you care for some coffee? And fruitcake?” If he ate it, I might be able to fit into my pants tomorrow.

  “Fruitcake?” he asked, two shaggy white eyebrows arching. “None of that hideous store-bought gomm that they pass off as fruitcake?”

  Though he was still pale, he’d bounced back. “No,” I assured him, even more impressed that he knew the difference. “Homemade. From a secret family recipe.”

  “Dahling, there’s nothing better in the world than a secret family recipe. Except for an afternoon in Italy with a skilled lover.”