Death on the Family Tree

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Are you listening?” Posey demanded.

  “Of course.” Katharine grabbed the phone before it fell off her shoulder. “I was wondering what your real problem is with Hollis living in your carriage house.”

  Something fell from the journal and fluttered to the floor. She bent and retrieved a newspaper clipping, also in German, with a small inset of a man’s picture. She was gratified to find she could translate part of the headline: [CHEMIKER] DIES IN ACCIDENT. The man, identified as Ludwig Ramsauer, had a lean face and an attractive mouth bordered by a thick mustache and a pointed beard. In one margin of the article, someone had scrawled “November 1950?????”

  Katharine stared at those five question marks while Posey insisted, “It’s not that I mind her living in the carriage house, at least for a while. But do you know what happened this morning? At breakfast, trying to be nice, I offered to give up my whole day to go look at wallpaper and floorings. I knew she was going to be out most of the day at some birthday party, but I figured I could get some ideas for what might look pretty up there, you know? But guess what Holly said.” Posey’s voice trembled and Katharine knew her blue eyes were wide with indignation under her tousled blond curls.

  She slid the clipping back into the book. She would try to read it when she found her dictionary. Right then it was a distraction she didn’t need. Posey was reaching the climax of her latest Holly crisis.

  “Hollis, not Holly,” Katharine reminded her.

  “Holly—Hollis—whatever. She said she already knows what she wants to do with it. You know what she’s like, Katharine. If she’s allowed to do anything she wants, we could get purple walls with orange carpet. I can’t stand to have her ruin that charming little apartment!”

  They had finally reached the place where the pecan met the brittle.

  Katharine didn’t mention the carriage house’s rapid metamorphosis from a poky old place to a charming little apartment. It was time to take Hollis’s side. Part of why Posey called was to be persuaded Hollis wasn’t really odd or stark raving mad.

  “Hollis has had four years of training since high school,” Katharine pointed out, “and she won an award for that wallpaper she designed. Besides, she’s now got a degree in—”

  Like a bull seeing red, Posey charged in that direction. “Fabric! A perfectly useless degree. What does one do with a major in fabric?”

  “It was fibers,” Katharine corrected her. How did Posey think her other two daughters were using their degrees? Did she picture Lolly reading French novels to her seven-year-old twins, or Molly discussing economics with her five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter?

  “Fibers, then,” Posey conceded grudgingly. “What can she do with that?”

  Having had a long conversation with Hollis about that very subject over Christmas, Katharine could answer. “She can design fabrics for home and commercial furnishings, textiles for clothing and accessories, wallpaper, or even stationery. She took a lot of art history courses, too, so she could go into museum work in areas like clothing, quilts, tapestries, or linens. Or,” a concession to Posey’s greatest goal for all her daughters, “she could get married and design fabrics and wallpapers for her own home.”

  Of course, considering the procession of weird young men Hollis had brought home, that idea might not comfort Posey much.

  Sure enough, Hollis’s mother made a rude sound. “I certainly hope she won’t marry her latest. Do you remember Zach Andrews?”

  “Oh, yes. He used to come play with Jon when he was little.” Katharine conjured up a slender child with brown curls and an angelic face that completely belied the devil inside. She still had five small holes in her bedroom carpet to commemorate the day he had convinced Jon to light matches, drop them, and see whose could burn the longest. The boys were seven at the time, and that was one of several episodes that had led Katharine to tell Jon he could not invite Zach over any more. “Wasn’t he in Jon and Hollis’s class at Westminster School?”

  “Only until he got kicked out his junior year,” Posey corrected her. “Lord only knows where he went after that. Some folks said he was in juvenile detention. Then his parents sent him to an odd school out in California, one where they don’t pay tuition, but work on a cattle farm.” Posey sounded like Zach had been sent to outer Siberia to work the mines—which, if he hadn’t improved, might have been a good idea. “Still, he finished at Emory, so maybe he’s okay now,” Posey conceded, “but do you know who he’s gone to work for since he graduated? The Ivorie Foundation. And you know as well as I do that old Mr. Ivorie has practically turned the whole thing over to Brandon, who is downright tacky!”

  The Ivories were a Buckhead family who had amassed a fortune three generations ago by dint of what some claimed were unsavory tactics, then had become so blatantly religious and radically conservative that moderate Chris tians and moderate conservatives alike considered them an embarrassment to their cause. The Ivories had no compunction about proclaiming that God blessed the wealthy with riches because they were more righteous and worked harder than anybody else—forgetting their own antecedents and that nobody amasses a fortune without somebody helping along the way and others going without so they can have what the Ivories considered their fair share of the national GNP. The Ivorie mantra was that the primary role of government was to make sure the wealthy retained their wealth and privilege so it would trickle down—although, as Katharine’s father often pointed out, the only part that trickled down was what was left after they took what was required to maintain their own lavish lifestyle. The Ivories also claimed that the only way to keep the nation strong was to expel or forcibly restrain any persons whom they deemed undesirable. In the middle of the last century, Napoleon Ivorie III—the “old man” Posey referred to—had created the Ivorie Foundation to help finance the work of Senator Joe McCarthy. Since then, the foundation had channeled lavish grants to causes and think tanks perched on the far right wingtip of the political eagle.

  What most galled Katharine was that while the Ivories regularly attended one of the biggest churches in town, they believed in and proclaimed not love, but hate. They owned a number of religious broadcasting stations that combined large doses of vituperation and a regular call for the faithful to separate themselves and their children from a contaminating world with sermons purporting to be about a God who loved the world so much, he sent his son to save it.

  The Ivories practiced the separation they preached. They lived on the Hill, a gated Buckhead estate that most of their neighbors had never been inside. Napoleon Ivorie, who was surely over ninety and was a recluse, lived in the original mansion. He had built a second for his daughter, Rowena Slade, and a third for Rowena’s son, Brandon.

  Brandon was simultaneously the most conservative and the most radical twig that the family tree had produced. At twenty-eight, he was a fiery advocate of widespread and, if necessary, violent action against those he despised. Yet in clothing, style, and demeanor, he projected an image so stiff and proper that he made William F. Buckley Jr. look like a hippie.

  “Brandon’s never tacky, Posey,” Katharine felt compelled to protest. “I doubt if he has ever been tacky in his life.” But she was as concerned as her sister-in-law that old Napoleon might be fixing to bypass Rowena and put Brandon at the helm, for Katharine liked Rowena. She was conservative but no bigot. In kindergarten terms, she respected and worked well with others.

  Posey gave a little huff of disgust. “Well, he’s dangerous. You know as well as I do that he’s paying for those marches down at the capitol, with their cutesy little hats and lovely printed signs, even if the Ivorie name never appears.”

  “Speaking of appearing,” Katharine interrupted, “did you notice old Mr. Ivorie and Rowena at Aunt Lucy’s funeral? They slipped in a side door with two men I didn’t recognize just before the ser vice started, and left by the side door right after the benediction. I never heard Aunt Lucy mention him or Rowena.”

  “Lucy grew up in Buckhead, didn
’t she? And she was about Mr. Ivorie’s age. Maybe they had a fling in their wild, misspent youths and he came to pay his last respects. Brandon wasn’t with them?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a wonder. He seems to be everywhere else these days. How he manages to get himself in all the papers and on television and radio so much, I will never know. I saw him again last night on Fox, trying to scare folks to death about terrorists among us. I don’t know how Zach can work for him, and I could not stand for a daughter of mine to get mixed up in all that.”

  Posey and Wrens, like many of their Buckhead neighbors, were genial, tolerant conservatives who kept friends in and contributed to candidates in both parties. What ultimately mattered in their world were not the vagaries of politics but the stability of their own wealth and the influence that wealth could buy, whichever party held office. No wonder Posey was chagrined that Hollis was dating anybody connected with the Ivorie Foundation.

  Katharine disliked the Ivories’ politics even more than Posey did. Whenever their bandwagon included a diatribe against “those godless liberals,” she wanted to stand up and shout, “My parents were liberals and they were not godless!” (Not that she would, of course. She’d been raised by a Southern mother, and had better manners than that.) She was also surprised that Hollis would be dating someone connected with Brandon since during Hollis’s years at SCAD, she had several times mentioned friends who were gay. In addition to terrorists, Brandon had targeted homosexuals as “a heinous threat to Georgia families.”

  “What is Zach doing for Brandon?” Katharine wondered aloud.

  “Heaven only knows. Writing, Hollis says, and research, whatever that means.”

  Katharine suspected that Hollis saw Zach as nothing but a former acquaintance to hang out with to annoy her mother while she got her bearings after college. Time to get back to Posey’s original lament. “My advice is, let her decorate the carriage house the way she wants and see how it looks. You may be surprised at what she does with it. And if you don’t like it, you can always redecorate when she moves out.”

  It is so easy to be wise when it’s someone else’s daughter.

  “Maybe so,” Posey said dubiously. “Well, I better go. I’ve got a tennis match in fifteen minutes, and I’m running late. What do you have planned for today?”

  “This and that,” she said evasively. “Autumn Village sent me ten boxes of Aunt Lucy’s stuff, so I thought I’d go through them and see if there’s anything worth keeping.”

  “Poor Katharine. She wasn’t really even kin to you, was she?”

  “Not blood kin, but that never mattered. Mother and Sara Claire grew up with Walter and Lucy, so when Walter married Sara Claire, Lucy became part of our family. She always seemed as much my aunt as Sara Claire did, and she was a lot more fun. I don’t mind winding up her last bits and pieces.”

  “Well, I think you’re a saint. I don’t imagine she left much of value.”

  “She had a nice secretary that belonged to her grandmother that she said I could have. Otherwise, I don’t expect to find anything of value unless there’s an unprecedented demand for small wooden animals and lamps made of Highland cattle horn.”

  “You’re a dadgum saint,” Posey repeated. “Well, gotta run. See you later.”

  Katharine hung up with a smile. In two or three days Posey would remember that it had been her birthday and would call full of apologies to invite her to a scrumptious lunch. Susan and Jon fondly called Posey “our great late aunt,” for Posey Buiton was a lovable woman, but she had never been on time for anything in her life, including her own wedding and her father’s funeral.

  While Katharine had the phone in her hand, she called Dutch back and left a message on his machine asking him to call her when he returned.

  She set the diary back in the box, thinking she might try to translate a bit of it later to test her college German, and reached for the thing swathed in cloth. It was metal, and felt like it had started as a long rod about as thick as her little finger and been bent into an almost circular shape, with knobs placed at regular intervals around three-quarters of its perimeter. She pulled back the cloth and furrowed her brow. What could it be? It was the soft green of old bronze. The circle was not quite closed, but one end had been curved into a hook and the other looped into an eye to fasten it. The knobs were of the same metal, either shaped from the rod or shaped and attached to the rod when the materials were hot and pliable. If it were a necklace, it would not have been comfortable to wear. Katharine lifted a yellowed tag, tied by a cord through the eye at one end. On it was written, in faded sepia ink, HALLSTATT 1850.

  She carried it into the downstairs powder room and held it up to her neck, afraid it would break if she stretched it and put it on. It must have been lovely when it was new and polished. As she turned away from the mirror, her reflection seemed to be that of a younger woman with a slim face and long hair as black as a raven’s wing. But when she looked again, it was her own face she saw.

  Knowing that most mysteries these days can be solved with a few keystrokes, Katharine went upstairs to her bedroom, where her computer desk occupied one corner. On the Internet, she searched for “Hallstatt” and found listings for an Austrian village advertising the most beautiful lake in the world. Had Aunt Lucy visited it and picked up the necklace as a souvenir? It wasn’t her usual trinket. Why had she kept it in an old box with a German diary, marked CARTER?

  Katharine read on and discovered that Hallstatt was also a site where many objects from the early Iron Age had been found—so many, in fact, that the term “Hallstatt” was commonly used for artifacts from various cultures of the late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age throughout Central and Western Europe. She balanced the necklace on one palm. Could it possibly be very, very old? She tried to push her mind back past the Renaissance and the Dark Ages to the early days of Rome, but her brain cells wouldn’t stretch that far. Who was the woman for whom it was made? How valuable was it? What right did Lucy Everanes have to posses it?

  “And most important,” she murmured, perplexed, “what the dickens am I supposed to do with it now?”

  Chapter 3

  Katharine ripped open Aunt Lucy’s other boxes and rummaged through letters and notebooks, searching for any mention of a Carter. By the time she found three photo albums, she was sneezing from dust. She decided to examine them outside.

  She carried the albums out to the patio and stood with her hands full, looking around for some place to sit. She hadn’t put cushions on the wicker chairs yet that summer, since none of the family had been around to sit outdoors.

  She set the albums on the patio while she fetched cushions for one chair from the storage locker, then sat looking across her backyard. “Why don’t I spend more time out here?” she asked aloud. “Why don’t I eat out here?”

  Because the only table was down near the pool, inconvenient to the house. “I am going to buy a small table to put up here,” she announced to a passing butterfly, “and cushions I can leave out all summer. I’ll come out every pleasant day.”

  What was the matter with her? She didn’t normally go around talking to refrigerators, robins, and butterflies. She turned her attention to Aunt Lucy’s albums and found one that contained old sepia pictures with scalloped edges. Katharine chuckled at those labeled “Lucy (5) and her goat cart” and “Lucy (6) swimming with Walter (10).” Uncle Walter already had a pompous look, even in his underwear. “Going to Vassar” showed Lucy beside a train, trying hard to look sophisticated in a fur coat and hat. The other freshman with her had to be Sara Claire. Katharine recognized the tilt of that chin.

  Several pictures showed Lucy and Sara Claire in London and Paris—surely before World War II. Finally Katharine found a slim young man dressed in the baggy pants, suspenders, and straw hat of the nineteen thirties, standing in front of a snow-capped mountain. Beneath, Lucy had written, “Carter, Austria, 1937.” The next few pictures showed the same young man with Lucy holding his arm and s
miling up at him. In another picture, Sara Claire stood clutching his arm like she would never let go. His face was never quite clear.

  Katharine turned the page and found a professional picture of a wedding party labeled “Sara Claire and Walter, 1939.” She pored over it, picking out faces she recognized. Her mother as maid of honor looked calm, poised, and pretty. Sara Claire was as haughty and aristocratic at twenty-two as she had been at eighty. Lucy, a bridesmaid, looked scrawny and miserable in a long straight dress that bared her bony shoulders. Among the groomsmen Katharine saw one man who looked a lot like her father, but it couldn’t have been, since her parents hadn’t met until they were forty. Next to him stood a tall handsome man with wide shoulders, a well-shaped nose, and—could that be Dutch’s bullet head? He wore the same short crew cut, but Katharine would never have imagined he’d ever been that thin. As long as she had known him, Dutch had been what he called “portly.”

  Next to him stood a man who could be Carter. He had the same long, slender face, dark curling hair, and tall athletic body, but Lucy hadn’t written names beneath the picture. In the whole album there was no clue as to who Carter was, what had become of him, or why Lucy had kept a journal and a necklace in a box with his name on it.

  Katharine was still puzzling over those questions when the phone rang again. This time it was finally Tom. She felt her spirits rise at the sound of his voice.

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart. Sorry I can’t be there with you today, but I’ve got great seats for the symphony Friday night, and I’ll fly in early enough so we can get dinner. Okay?”