Death on the Family Tree

by Patricia Sprinkle

  When the rounds were cooked on both sides, they were carried by conveyor belt out of the oil to drain, then under a solid sheet of liquid sugar that coated them. “There’s our batch done,” he said with satisfaction. He tapped on the glass and pointed them out to the woman standing at the end of the conveyor, putting hot doughnuts into boxes.

  “We don’t need a dozen,” Katharine objected.

  “Did you eat lunch?”

  “A sandwich and some watermelon I’d bought for Dutch.” Tears filled her eyes. She blinked and looked away.

  “We need a dozen.” His hand at her waist steered her to the counter, where he handed her the warm box while he picked up two cups of coffee. She clutched the box to her chest and the heat melted some of the ice within her as she followed him to the farthest end of a long counter with an unprepossessing view of the parking lot and street. The only other person in the vicinity was a man who looked homeless, dozing over a cup of coffee.

  The doughnuts were hot to touch and went down like greased sugar. Katharine felt her spirits rise as she reached for her second. Hasty grinned. “I’ve always thought the world can’t be skidding to hell in a handbasket so long as Krispy Kremes are still being made. Remember how far we used to have to drive to get them back home?”

  Miami’s only shop was on a causeway to the beach at the far north end of town. Katharine blushed as she remembered some of their extended stays on the beach after those doughnut runs. “I brought the diary,” she said to cover her confusion.

  He put a hand on her arm. “We had some fun times, didn’t we, Katie-bell?”

  “Yeah, we did.” For one wistful moment she wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten drunk, if she had forgiven him, if they had—

  That road took her places she didn’t plan to go. She drew her thoughts back to hear him saying, “And I was infernally stupid. I cannot imagine why I went off with Janie that night. I made her bring me right back—you need to know that. Nothing happened. If you had just let me tell you so at the time—”

  “I know. I was a self-righteous little prig.” She gave him a searching look. “But it’s over now. You do know that, right? I have Tom, Susan, and Jon. And you have Kelly and Melissa. Have you talked to them about moving down?”

  “Not yet.” He looked away. “I’m thinking about it. I just haven’t decided it’s worth the hassles.” He reached for the diary pages. “But I solemnly swear that my only interest in you at this moment is these pages. Where’s that one about blowing up the brook?”

  She found the page and he perused it and those that followed while she ate a third doughnut. She was reaching for a fourth when Hasty let out a surprised whistle, but before he could explain, her cell phone rang. She snatched it from her purse. “Hello?”

  “What’s going on, Katharine?” Tom sounded rushed. “I’ve got two messages from you on my cell, and just got back to the office and found two more. Louise says you want me to come home today, but that’s not possible. I—”

  “You have to. Somebody else broke into the house again and this time they completely trashed it. Then somebody—” Her voice wouldn’t go on until she swallowed, and even then, it trembled. “Somebody murdered Dutch. I need you, Tom. I can’t deal with all this alone.”

  He used up a minute while he digested all that. “Dutch was murdered?” His disbelief echoed her own. When she confirmed it, he asked, “How bad is the house?”

  “Bad. They took all our silver including Grandmama’s silver ser vice and all my jewelry and some of the paintings and the televisions and stereos and the computer, and they slit our pictures and cushions and mattresses, and—”

  Tom had always been able to go straight to the heart of a crisis. It was one of the things that made him good at what he did and one of the first things she had admired about him. He interrupted her now. “Have you talked to the insurance adjuster?”

  “Yes. He’ll come when the police say we can walk through the house.”

  “Does Chapman know about his dad?”

  “Yes. I called him. He’s coming as soon as he can.”

  “Where are you?” She almost blurted “At the Krispy Kreme” before he added, “Staying at Posey’s?”

  “Yes, for the time being. I practically live there now.”

  “Stay there until I can get home. But it will be at least Wednesday night. I need to mop up a few things here first. If you want to, tell the adjuster to wait until Thursday morning to come, and I’ll do the walk-through. And hang in there, honey. I’m coming as soon as I can.”

  She hung up, blinking back tears, and saw Hasty’s eyes on her with an unreadable expression in them. “He’s coming?”

  “Wednesday night.” She tried to sound casual about it, as if it didn’t matter and she completely understood.

  “Wednesday night? Not on the next plane?”

  She shrugged. “He’s got some stuff he has to mop up in D.C. first.”

  He gave a short sarcastic laugh. “You’ve got some stuff down here he needs to mop up, too. You need him, Kate. He ought to be here.”

  “He can’t just drop everything—”

  “I can’t believe you’re defending him! You need him now, and he isn’t coming until Wednesday night?”

  She glared back at him. “Your wife and daughter need you and you aren’t going at all.”

  His face grew hard. “That’s different. They’re getting along okay.”

  “Does it ever occur to you absent husbands that maybe we get tired of just getting along okay? Of always being strong? Making all the decisions? Does it never enter your pointed little heads that sometimes we’d like somebody around to share the load?” She covered her mouth and darted a look toward the man down the counter, who was watching them like they were better than TV. She lowered her voice and muttered, “I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with you. Did you find anything interesting in the diary?”

  Hasty looked as if he were about to say one thing, but decided to say another. “Sure did. It’s almost unbelievable. Listen to the next day’s entry.” He picked up a page and translated.

  We met at dawn as planned and traveled to the bridge in three groups. L2had purchased plenty of explosives. Hans transported them in his car. D took longer than we had expected to set them and the train passed before we were done, so no lives were lost. Pity. That would have gotten more attention. However, the bridge is utterly destroyed. That ought to make Hitler supporters sit up and take notice that Austria is not unanimous in support of his policies. Power to the people!

  As he read, Katharine’s eyes had grown wider and wider, until she felt the wrinkles in her forehead. “They blew up a real bridge? It wasn’t a figure of speech?”

  “No, and listen to what happened afterwards.” He read:

  We returned this afternoon, where all was in readiness for celebration, but my little love decided he must study for an exam. We quarreled and said hurtful things. I hoped to comfort myself with L2as in days gone by, but was rejected by him, as well. After such a triumph, I must sleep alone.

  “She slept with both of them?” Katharine spoke louder than she intended. The old man down the counter lifted his head again and looked at her through bleary eyes. “Both of them?” She repeated in a whisper.

  “Not only a vamp, but a tramp,” Hasty agreed in an undertone. “Poor little love, studying for finals while his lover is trying to make it with an old friend. Maybe we ought to translate this and send it to Tom.” He caught her expression and held up both hands. “Hey, it was a joke. I told you, I’m only interested in your diary and your necklace. And speaking of that necklace, I’m worried about it. If somebody is after it and has failed to get it twice, the chances are real good he’ll come back.”

  “I took it to the bank,” she admitted. “The police have already suggested I should put a sign on the gateposts: ‘The necklace is no longer here.’ You reckon that would take care of it?”

  “No. I reckon he’d come after you, to mak
e you tell him where it was and get it for him.”

  “Thanks. That’s a cheering thought.” Especially since it was exactly what she had been thinking about him.

  “It’s also a realistic one. Somebody wants that necklace, Katie-bell. You have to have figured that out by now. What I’ve been thinking is, you ought to donate it to Emory, in memory of your dad. Make a public production of handing it over to the history department. We can arrange for newspapers, television, the whole shebang. That gets you off the hook but good. Then when the guy from Carlos gets back, we can take care of having it authenticated. If it’s a fake, it’s no skin off your nose—you gave it in good faith. And I’d sleep at lot better at night knowing you weren’t being stalked to get it.”

  The intensity of his expression startled her, and the picture of Hasty lying awake worrying about her touched her soul. She felt herself leaning toward him. Who knows what might have happened if the old man down the counter hadn’t had a phlegmy coughing spell?

  Katharine straightened in her chair, feeling like she had just come back from a daze. “I’ll think about it,” she promised. “Did you find anything else in the diary while I was on the phone?”

  “Yeah. A couple of days later the group was discussing whether to leave Austria and go help the freedom fighters in Spain. Our writer wonders whether her father will lend his Mercedes to the endeavor.”

  “Freedom fighters? I don’t know much about Spanish history.”

  “Also known as Communists. They opposed General Franco, who appealed to Hitler and Mussolini for help.”

  In a sudden awareness of how much faster he could read and understand the diary than she could, she thrust the pages at him. “Take this home with you and translate the rest. I’m going to be real busy these next few days. And just let me have the high spots, okay? I’ve had all the death and destruction I want for a while.”

  He picked up the last doughnut and said in a somber voice, “I just hope you’ve had all you are going to get.”

  Chapter 23

  Wednesday, June 14

  Early Wednesday morning, a man from Atlanta’s Midtown neighborhood took his Doberman for a walk along a stretch of old railroad line that surrounds central Atlanta.

  The stretch he chose was at the bottom of a gentle embankment covered with kudzu, but the tracks continued through a number of in-town communities, brushing the edge of Emory to the northeast and Georgia Tech to the west. For decades they had not been used except for short scenic train rides for tourists and school children. Then a Gen-X Georgia Tech graduate student looked at the tracks with fresh eyes. He pointed out how easily those rails could form an in-town beltline that could circle the city and connect to existing transit lines. City mothers and fathers began taking a serious look at the tracks. Developers rushed to acquire land along the route for condos and townhouses. Environmentalists began to talk green space. New in-town residents girded their loins to put up inevitable protests against change—for it is the nature of pioneers to become the most vehement against newcomers after they secure their own private patch of ground.

  The man with his dog was one of a cadre of interested citizens who regularly monitored the tracks, although at that particular point there was little to monitor except beer cans and the growth rate of the kudzu.

  The man whistled as his dog veered off the tracks toward the embankment. “Watch out for snakes,” he called. Snakes love kudzu. The animal ignored him. He nosed the long green tendrils, backed off, stiffened his dainty legs, and howled.

  Annoyed, the man strode toward him. When he neared the dog, he became aware of a sweet unpleasant odor floating up from the leafy ground cover. His first thought was a dead ’possum. Then he saw the hand.

  He lost his morning yogurt and granola before he pulled out his cell phone. By the time sirens wailed to a stop on the street high above, he had clipped a leash on the dog and dragged him a short way down the tracks. That hand would haunt his dreams for years.

  Police officers scrambled down the banks on faint paths worn by dogs, ’possums, raccoons, and neighborhood children, paths that the kudzu had not yet obliterated for the summer. The jogger’s Doberman raised his hackles and bared his teeth, defending his prize. The man held the leash and pointed. “There. In a straight line from that pole up there.”

  The officers poked around in the kudzu for only a few seconds before they found the body. It had a bullet hole in the forehead.

  About the time the officers in Midtown were calling for a forensics team, Katharine was meeting the insurance adjuster at her house. He was a short middle-aged man with a round belly, thinning gray hair, a soothing tone of voice and a perpetually worried expression. She had tried to stall him until Tom got home, but he’d said he’d like to go ahead and look the place over and take pictures, then he could talk with Tom after he had run some numbers.

  She walked beside him with her senses raw and bleeding, not only seeing and smelling the devastation but feeling it with every nerve in her body. As he walked around making notes and snapping photos, she grieved the death of her home.

  “I think that’s all I need,” he finally said. “I’ll take a quick look around outside, then talk with your husband tomorrow or the day after.”

  That was the only comfort she could derive from the situation. By that afternoon, Tom would be there to shoulder this burden. After the adjuster left, she leaned against her kitchen cabinets drained and helpless. She couldn’t even think where to begin.

  Dane, whom she had brought over at Posey’s urging, looked through the panes that remained of the French doors and whined to come in, but Katharine said, “Sorry, fellow, but there’s glass on the floor. Your paws might get cut.”

  He gave her a reproachful look. “You could sweep,” he seemed to say.

  She fetched the broom and dustpan and began to clear the kitchen floor. She stacked metal mixing bowls, cutting boards, spice bottles, and other unbroken objects in an indiscriminate heap on the counter and collected larger pieces of broken dishes and crushed cartons into a garbage bag. Finally she swept up a large pile of flour, sugar, cornstarch, cereal, and oatmeal.

  “If you added milk and eggth, you’d have a cake,” joked a perky lisp at her doorway.

  Katharine jumped, spilling a stream off her dustpan.

  “Hey. I’m Misthty, Hollith’th friend,” said the young woman who went with the lisp. “Matt and Dave are in the front hall. The man outthide let uth in. We came to help, and it lookth like you thure need it.” Misty stood about five-feet tall in her chunky sandals. Her hair was the vibrant green of emeralds and less than an inch long all over her head. She had lovely brown eyes, ringed by thick mascara on both upper and lower lashes. And she looked like she had been attacked in a piercing shop by a man with a long needle and an inexhaustible supply of silver studs. They sparkled from her lips, her nose, and her eyebrows, and ran up both earlobes. One pierced her navel, perching atop the jeans slung low on her hips. The one in her tongue was responsible for the lisp.

  Katharine went with her to meet the others. Dave was short and chunky with soft dark hair and a scruffy goatee that made him look like a pudgy goat. Matt was a tall, gangly blond with almost as many piercings as Misty. Katharine wondered whether they realized that the initial impression they made might have something to do with their failure to find jobs, but maybe she was just being old-fashioned and provincial. Besides, if they’d found jobs, they wouldn’t be there to help when she needed them. She gave them her genuine thanks and took them upstairs, where she set Misty to hanging clothes back in the closet and worked with the other two for a time filling garbage bags with debris to be hauled to a large red dumpster that was squatting in her driveway.

  When she was sure they understood what to do, she returned downstairs. At the foot of the steps she stumbled over Beethoven, with a large piece missing from the back of his skull. She picked him up and held him for a moment of sad farewell, for even his scowls belonged to the era that had been dest
royed. When Dave clomped down the stairs carrying two large bags, she thrust the broken bust under his elbow. “Put him in the dumpster, but gently. He’s family.”

  She wandered into the music room, pleased that it had suffered so little. The invaders had ripped the makeshift drop cloths from the bookshelves and flung them in heaps on the floor, so the piles of cloth had cushioned the fall of the small items she had arranged in front of the books. She idly began to restock the shelves, taking special pleasure in each unbroken item. She had so few left.

  As she was replacing some of Aunt Lucy’s books on the bottom shelf, she noted one bound in blue with the word FAIRE on the front cover in gold. The spine read The Conrad Faire Family. She wrinkled her forehead. Faire. Where had she heard that name before?

  She carried the book to the window, where the light was better, and turned the pages. It was a genealogical history, with a pullout family tree in the front. Each chapter dealt with one descendent of Conrad Faire and contained short paragraphs marked by odd numbers like I-5, I-11. Thank heavens for Lucy’s compulsive historical nature, for she had penciled inside the front cover, “Page 178.”

  Katharine turned to page 178 and found the family of Eugene Claude Faire, one of the shorter branches on the family tree. Eugene and his wife, Emily Simpson, had five children, but only two survived: Simpson Claude and Delia Jean. Simpson Claude Faire had one daughter, Mildred, who married Clifford Charles Everanes. Of course! Mildred and Clifford had Walter Charles, Carter Simpson, and Emily Lucille. Katharine touched the names with sadness. Since none of those ever had children, that branch of the family was extinct. She had never before considered the fact that entire branches of a family tree could come to a screeching halt in one generation.

  Curious about the rest of the family, she turned the page to see what had happened to Delia Jean. The answer was so surprising that she carried the book into the living room and sat down on the piano bench—the only intact seat in the room. Delia Jean had married Napoleon Ivorie. They had two children, Napoleon Jr. and Emily Faire, but Emily died at sixteen. Napoleon Jr. sired Napoleon III. Napoleon III had one daughter, Rowena Ivorie Slade, and she had two children, Brandon Ivorie and Amy Faire Slade.