Death on the Family Tree

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “That’s right.” He nodded his big head and sipped his sherry. “They met again at Emory around 1952 and got married a couple of years after your daddy was widowed.”

  She sat up so quickly the springs creaked. “My daddy was widowed?”

  “He sure was. He and—let me see—” He placed his thick finger beside a dark laughing girl. “—Mary Frances Wilson met at the wedding and got married the June before Pearl Harbor. She was a real sweetie. Pretty too, if you like brunettes. I dated her a few times myself.” He stopped and looked wistfully at all those lovely young people who had not yet tasted war or death. “Funny,” he added, “that your daddy would meet both his wives at the same wedding.”

  “What happened to Mary Frances?” Katharine felt like she was looking at her life through a kaleidoscope and Dutch had just turned the dial. Did she have a—what would Mary Frances be? A retroactive stepmother?—living somewhere in Buckhead?

  Dutch’s voice dropped. “Died of lung cancer. She smoked like a chimney. We all did, back then, but Mary Frances was the only one who got the Big C. She died in fifty-six.”

  Katharine was still trying to get her head around all that when Dutch rocked her on her heels. “Your mama had come back from Washington and gotten her divorce a few years before, and gone to work at Emory, too—”

  “My mother got a divorce?” Her voice came out a strangled protest.

  “Had to. She was married to a fellah named Frank Bell, who was a card-carrying Communist. Your mama always was a bit of a radical—maybe to balance out Sara Claire. She and Frank were real good friends of Carter’s back then.” Dutch stopped, and added as one both apologizing and explaining, “A lot of guys played around with Communism back before the war. Most gave it up afterwards, of course. But Frank never did. He went to Washington and edited a Communist rag up there until McCarthy started making things hot, then Frank decided to move to Latin America. Your mama had given up a lot for him, but she wouldn’t go to Latin America, so she came back to Atlanta, divorced him, and got a job as a secretary at Emory Law School. Your daddy was teaching there and we all ran around together. He was the one who encouraged her to get her teaching certificate. After Mary Frances died, they started dating, and when he landed that job in Miami, they decided to get married and go down together. You were born a year later.” He reached over and patted her hand. “You were the best thing that ever happened to either of them, Shug. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  Katharine clutched her glass. The kaleidoscope was whirling. She had always pictured her parents as gently aging, each waiting for the perfect mate until they’d found each other. She had known that her daddy once taught at Emory, but had thought that was for a year or two between growing up in New York and moving to Miami. By the time she was born, all his New York relatives were dead, so it had seemed natural that all their family vacations should be spent in Buckhead or Cashiers, North Carolina, with her mother’s friends and relatives. She had never imagined that they were his long-time friends, as well.

  “Did Mary Frances have family here?” she asked, wondering if she wanted the answer.

  Dutch chuckled. “Why, sure. Remember Ouida? She was Mary Frances’s little sister.”

  “Aunt Ouida?” She had been another honorary aunt, a friend her parents always spent an afternoon with when they were in town. Aunt Ouida never forgot Katharine’s birthday, sending small but delightful presents until the year she died. Now, Katharine was startled to realize that if the kaleidoscope had tuned another way, Ouida would have been her blood aunt.

  Or she could have grown up in Cuba or something.

  “Why did they keep all that a secret?” Katharine demanded, her voice harsh to her own ears. “Didn’t they think I had a right to know?”

  “I don’t think they intended to keep secrets, honey. Everybody knew.”

  “Everybody but me.”

  She wondered what other secrets her family had kept, and vowed that as soon as she had solved the mystery of Carter Everanes, she would start researching her own family—if she dared. Who knew what she might find? “If I wanted to research my own genealogy, what books would I need to read?” she asked, hoping she sounded casual.

  “Start on the Internet with www.ancestry.com,” he advised. “That makes things so much simpler. Here let me show you.”

  Before she could protest that he didn’t need to bother himself that evening, he had headed to his desk and was typing in commands. She went to stand behind him and watched, fascinated, as he pulled up the same census she had found at the history center. In just a minute he had located her grandparents’ records, showing that her mother and Sarah Claire were both teenagers living in the house at the time. After her experience with Aunt Lucy’s family, Katharine half-expected to find unexpected names listed there, but all she discovered was that her grandmother was two years older than her grandfather. She pointed to the figures.

  “I never knew that, either.”

  Dutch chuckled. “You’ll find all sorts of secrets in here. But don’t hold it against them for not telling you everything, sweetie. You know that old saw—the best kept secret is something everybody knows.”

  Katharine headed back to the couch. “I guess everybody knew Aunt Lucy and Uncle Walter had a brother named Carter and that he got murdered. They just never saw fit to mention it.” If she sounded like a ten-year-old working up to a tantrum, that’s exactly how she felt.

  “Now, that was different.” Dutch held up a hand to still her temper. “The murder and the trial—well, they upset Walter and Lucy real bad. They never wanted to discuss Carter after that.”

  “But why?”

  He sighed. “Some things are best left alone, Shug. No point stirring old pots.”

  “This from a man dedicated to family histories?”

  “This isn’t my family history and it isn’t yours, either.” She could tell that he wouldn’t discuss it any further that evening. She’d have to try again later.

  She reached over and picked up her glass, finished her sherry, and took the glass to the sink to rinse. “I’d better be going. Listen, why don’t you have lunch at my house tomorrow?”

  He pursed his lips to consider the invitation. “What were you thinking of having?”

  “What would you like?” She’d been thinking along the lines of soup and sandwiches.

  “Corn on the cob,” he said promptly. “They never give it to us here. Probably think we can’t chew it. And see if you can’t get us some home-grown tomatoes—the red kind. Haven’t seen anything but a pallid pink tomato this whole blessed summer.”

  The meal was turning into an old-fashioned midday dinner, but Autumn Village served its main meal at noon. She took a mental inventory of her fridge. She’d have to shop, anyway. “Do you want fried chicken? Oh—I forgot. You aren’t allowed fried foods. How about baked fish?”

  “Fry that chicken, Shug. If it kills me, I’ll die smiling.”

  “You want mashed potatoes and gravy with that?”

  “Spoil me that much and I’ll be moving in with you. Don’t worry about how much fat and salt I’ll be eating. If I’d known I was eating right all these years so I could wind up sitting on my duff in a retirement home wondering what to do with myself all day, I’d have eaten what I wanted to. Then I’d be up in heaven with all my friends about to play a perfect round of golf with your daddy. Imagine, no balls in the water, none in the sand traps—”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said crossly.

  He chuckled. “’Have I softened you up enough to invite me to move in? Actually, I like it here. I’ve got that bunch of guys I play poker with every morning, the place shows good movies several nights a week, and I get plenty of exercise running from the widows. If I get bored, why, I get in my car and drive up to Phipps Plaza and ogle pretty girls. But I still appreciate good home cooking. I’ll be delighted to come. Make me a pecan pie from your mama’s recipe, and I’ll be your slave forever.”

  As she started t
o gather up her albums and papers, the copied pages of the diary fell from her hand and scattered on the carpet. Picking them up, she came across the copy of the clipping of Ludwig Ramsauer’s death. “Does the name Ludwig Ramsauer mean anything to you?”

  Dutch beamed and snapped his fingers. “That was the Austrian fellah whose name I was trying to remember, the one Sara Claire was crazy about. He knew Carter and the others at Sewanee, and showed us all over Vienna. Does Lucy have a picture of him, too?”

  “No, but this clipping was in the diary.” She carried it across to him at his desk.

  He took it eagerly then echoed Zach. “Hell, it’s in German.” He peered at the margin. “Why did Carter write ‘1950’ and all these question marks?”

  Katharine took the page with excitement. “Carter wrote that? Are you sure?”

  “Looks like his writing. Do you know any German? Can you tell what happened to Ludwig?”

  “It says he died in a climbing accident. He was climbing alone and fell.” Katharine was still looking at the margin note. It made Carter seem more real, somehow.

  “That doesn’t sound right.” Dutch furrowed his brow. “Ludwig was always telling us not to climb alone, that the mountains could be treacherous and you never knew when an accident might happen. I went for a little walk alone once and he had a hissy fit.”

  “An accident seems to have happened to him. What else do you remember about him?”

  “Not much. I didn’t know him well. He was a year ahead of me at Sewanee and hung around with chemistry majors—that wild bunch I was telling you about. Lee and Donk Western spearheaded the group. Did you know Donk? No, he died in the war.”

  He had said the exact same thing before, with exactly the same intonations. Some of his memory tapes were probably automatic by then, replaying at the push of a particular button.

  “So I guess you don’t know whether Ludwig Ramsauer was related to a man named Georg Ramsauer who excavated a Celtic cemetery in the eighteen hundreds.” She made it a statement, but hoped he’d correct her.

  “Nope. Don’t know a thing about his family. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though, if it matters. I’ll call the Sewanee alumni office and see what they know about Ramsauer. It’s amazing how alumni offices keep up with folks. Looking for money, of course. But would that help?”

  She doubted it, but it was worth a try. “Ask them something else, please,” she added as he showed her out. “Ask if there was an Austrian girl in the class, as well.”

  Dutch guffawed as he held the door for her. “If so, she’d have been kept well hidden, sweetie pie. In those days, Sewanee was a college for men.”

  Chapter 20

  Monday, June 12

  Monday was hot and muggy from the start. Instead of dragging the necklace up with the pool net, Katharine decided to dive for it, and the water was so tempting, she stayed in longer than she should have. By the time she threw on some clothes and wrapped the necklace in its original cloth to take to the bank, she was running late. She’d barely have time to take Dane home, go by the bank and the grocery store, and cook a midday dinner before Dutch arrived at noon. And while she wouldn’t mind if the meal was late, she knew he liked to nap at two.

  Just before she left, she snatched up both copies of the diary and took them with her. She would put one with the necklace and keep the other with her at all times.

  She dropped Dane off, arranged to pick him up that afternoon, and turned down Posey’s invitation that she have one cup of coffee. “Dutch is coming for lunch, and he’s expecting a feast. It’s been so long since I cooked a chicken dinner, I may have forgotten how.”

  The bank was crowded, so she had to wait to get into her safe-deposit box. She dashed out of the bank lighter by one piece of jewelry, one copy of the manuscript, and a load of anxiety she didn’t realize she had been carrying. She carried out a copy of the list of Tom’s jade and all the pictures, for the police. She’d photocopy the pictures and drop them off that afternoon.

  At Publix, she hurried through the produce department trying to pick the tenderest white corn, the reddest tomatoes, the creamiest potatoes. She added a big slice of a watermelon that looked particularly sweet and headed to the meat counter. Checkout lines were longer than usual, and the clerk in her line was a new trainee who took forever to ring her up. “Help!” she winged a prayer as she wheeled her cart to the parking lot. “I’ll never get dinner ready on time at this rate.” She wanted to fix a dinner that Dutch’s own mama would have been proud of.

  As she slowed to pull into her drive, a dark blue truck roared out. It was the size of a large U-Haul and its cab windows were tinted so she could not see inside. It had no company name on its side, either. Had Hollis’s painters come a day early and found her out? Puzzled, she parked in the garage, collected her groceries, and headed to the kitchen with five plastic bags dangling from her hands.

  In the doorway, she froze.

  Every drawer had been dumped. Pantry containers had been emptied and tossed. Cereal, corn meal, sugar, coffee, and flour mingled in a filthy mess on the floor. The seats to her new chairs had been slit, their stuffing yanked out and left in piles like snow.

  Katharine knew she needed to leave, but her feet wouldn’t move. Finally she took a deep breath and plunged back into the garage. In the car, she locked the doors and tried to get the key in the ignition, but her hands trembled too badly. Once she got the SUV started, she nearly forgot to raise the garage door in her frantic haste to depart. She hurtled down her driveway panting and shaking, pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, and punched 911.

  She was still giving her address when two police cars came screaming from opposite directions and turned in at her gates. “Never mind,” she told the operator. “They’re here.” She started her engine and followed them in.

  “That was fast,” she called as she climbed down and hurried to the first cruiser. “I hadn’t even finished talking to…” She stopped in surprise. “I thought you worked evenings.”

  “That was last weekend. This week we’re on days.” Officer Howard climbed out of one cruiser, as stiff and pokerfaced as he had been Friday evening.

  “I just got home from the grocery store, and somebody has trashed my kitchen.” She licked her lips and tried to catch her breath.

  Officer Williams approached her from behind. “Your alarm company already called. That’s why we’re here. Have you looked at the rest of the house?”

  “I didn’t wait to check the rest. All I wanted was to get the heck out of there.”

  “Very wise. Please wait in your car for a moment, and lock your doors.” The officers walked the perimeter of the house and then Officer Williams came back and motioned for her to roll down her window. “They smashed in the back door this time. Please wait until we make sure the house is secure. You might want to call your husband.”

  She looked at her watch. “At this moment, he’s in an important meeting in Washington. I won’t be able to reach him until after one.”

  Her teeth chattered in spite of the heat as she waited. Finally Officer Howard ran down the veranda steps at a loose-limbed trot, pulling sunglasses from his breast pocket and putting them on as he approached her car. They made him look like a young Sylvester Stallone. She suspected he cultivated the impression. “They’ve gone, but the place is a mess,” he said. “We’re getting a team out here, and we’ll want you to walk through with us.”

  In the front hall, Katharine felt she had been physically assaulted. Living room cushions had been slashed and the stuffing removed. Oriental rugs had been lifted and carried away. Dining room drawers stood open, their contents flung on the floor. Some oil paintings were missing. The rest had been slit and tossed aside, including two they had commissioned of the children when they were four and two. She moaned when she saw how those had been cut up through the centers of their little faces. The sheets that she and Hollis had so carefully taped to the music room shelves the night before had been torn down and left in puddl
es of white on the bare floor. Her new rug was gone.

  Every feeling froze within her as she walked through the house with the officers. Was this numbness what hurricane victims felt, or victims of war? Moving on autopilot, she pointed out where things were missing, but felt like she was behind an invisible shield. Surely this hadn’t happened to her. Televisions and stereos were gone, as was all the silver. China and crystal had been swept off shelves and left splintered on the floor. Books lay in disorder all over Tom’s library. His desk chair was slashed, the safe forced. All her good jewelry had been taken from it.

  Like a zombie she waded through bedrooms ankle-deep in feathers and mattress stuffing, permeated with perfume from smashed bottles. She peered into closets where clothes lay in heaps on the floor. Jon’s closet had been ravaged by a snowstorm of down from his prized sleeping bag. The door to the hideout stood open, the Jolly Roger flying in defiance of more successful pirates.

  Later, the thought that her jewelry, her grandmother’s silver ser vice, their computer and televisions were probably being sold to buy drugs would make her stomach heave for days to come, but at the time, she felt anesthetized. Dispassionately she told the officers about taking the necklace to the bank for safety. She even smiled faintly when Officer Howard unbent enough to joke, “Too bad you didn’t leave a sign on the gatepost, if that’s what they were looking for.”

  The word gatepost reminded her of the truck. She described it as best she could, and apologized that she hadn’t been prescient enough to turn around and get its license number as it roared away. The first twinge of feeling she had was when Officer Williams remarked, “It’s a mercy you didn’t arrive sooner. They probably had a whole team in the back—almost had to, to cover the house between the time when the alarm went off downtown and we got here. They were probably watching the house until you left, knew what they were doing, and did it and got out. But they could have gotten rough if you’d walked in on them.”

  Katharine caught a ragged breath. Having seen the devastation of her house, she didn’t care to imagine what they would have done to her if she had gotten in their way.