Death on the Family Tree

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Katharine stared at the page, trying to work out the connection. If their parents were first cousins, did that make Aunt Lucy and Napoleon Ivorie III second cousins, or first cousins once removed? Either way, that must be why he had slipped into her funeral. He had gone to Uncle Walter’s, too, but Katharine had presumed they’d had business dealings. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Walter had certainly never mentioned the family connection.

  “Okay if we take a break?” Misty stood at the door, a pretty little waif in spite of the funky makeup. Katharine checked her watch and realized that the three cohorts had worked for well over two hours, lugging heavy bags to the dumpster like Santa’s elves.

  She smiled. “Sure. Why don’t I give you some money to go buy some lunch? I don’t have a thing here to fix you.”

  “That’th cool.” Misty and her friends trooped out to a red Audi convertible. Hollis’s friends might be unemployed, but they weren’t exactly destitute.

  Katharine tucked Aunt Lucy’s book on the shelf and resumed work on the kitchen. As she swept and restored order to her much-depleted pantry, she mulled over how much you can learn from genealogy, and how many ways it can be uncovered. In less than a week she had used microfilm, books, personal reminiscences, and newspapers to discover Aunt Lucy’s brother Carter, their connection to the Ivories, and astonishing facets of her own parents’ history. And she hadn’t even begun to use the Internet yet. Who knew what she might find there?

  But first, she wanted to complete the puzzle of the necklace and the diary. How had Carter gotten them? Who wrote the diary? To whom should the necklace belong? And who was trying to get it first?

  Perhaps her two break-ins in three days had nothing to do with Aunt Lucy’s box, but she didn’t believe it. So who had hired the invaders?

  Her prime suspect was still Zachary. Had he asked old Mr. Ivorie’s bodyguards to recommend men willing to rob and trash a house? Was Zach hiding out, waiting for a chance to try for the necklace again? The thought made the hair prickle on the back of her neck, and sent her on a quick tour of the downstairs to make sure all the doors were locked.

  But why should Zachary be so interested in the artifacts? Did he hope to sell them to Napoleon or Brandon Ivorie? Could they have put him up to it?

  Brandon, perhaps, but not Mr. Ivorie. Brandon used demagoguery and force. His grandfather was a gentleman, even toward business associates he ruined. Besides, if Napoleon Ivorie was Lucy’s only remaining family, chances were good that he had known that. Had Katharine told him she found the diary and necklace among Lucy’s things? She was pretty sure she had. Why hadn’t he mentioned then that they were cousins?

  And did he know that Aunt Lucy had never written a will? She had just said in her offhand way, “You take my bits and pieces, Katharine. There’s nobody else who wants them.” That sly old billionaire was probably waiting for Katharine to go through the trouble of authenticating the necklace so he could bring in his lawyers to point out that as her closest living relative, he was her legal heir. That was the kind of stealthy acquisition for which he was famous.

  “If I’d known he was related to her,” Katharine told her dustpan, “I’d have had Mr. Billingslea ship him all those boxes of junk.” But then she would have missed out on seeing the necklace.

  She had gotten that far in her thinking when a shout at the front door disturbed her reverie. “Aunt Kat? Aunt Kat!”

  She ran to the door and found Hollis, her eyes like black holes in a sheet-white face. She stumbled into the breakfast room and held on to the table for support. Her voice came in gasps and gulps. “The police have found Zach. He’s dead!”

  Chapter 24

  Katharine snatched a dishtowel to drape over a ripped chair seat and shoved Hollis into the chair. Then she went to fill Susan’s blue kettle, which had survived the onslaught with only a dent. Not until she turned from the sink did she ask, “How do you know?”

  “When I got up, there was a message on my cell phone from Amy. She said the police had found Zach dead and Brandon had gone to identify him. I called her back and she said she couldn’t talk right then, but she’d meet me here.”

  “Meet you here?” To hide her chagrin, Katharine busied herself finding three intact mugs and usable tea bags. She was sorry for Amy’s grief, but she had enough to deal with at the moment without a hysterical young adult who wasn’t even her own.

  Behind her, Hollis had finally noticed the mess around her. “Boy, this is awful! When Amy comes, we’ll go somewhere else, I promise.” She jumped up and began to prowl. “Didn’t Misty and the guys come to help?” she called from Tom’s library. “They said they would.”

  Katharine noted that Hollis didn’t offer her own help—or Princess Amy’s, although work could take one’s mind off grief. She’d been practicing that all morning.

  “They’ve worked a couple of hours already, and gone to lunch,” she called back, “but the whole house is like this. Clearing it out will take days.”

  Recovering could take years. As Katharine turned, she saw pieces of the breakfast room china she had carefully chosen to match her new décor lying under the table. Suddenly the loss of everything in the house was too much. She swayed and clung to the counter to keep from joining the plates on the floor. Fortunately, Hollis was still roaming the downstairs, taking stock. When the doorbell rang, Katharine let Hollis answer it.

  Amy came in sobbing like she had already cried a river and was working on a sea. “Oh, Mrs. Murray,” she blubbered when she saw Katharine, “did Hollis tell you? Isn’t it awful?” She flung herself into Katharine’s arms and held her so tight, Katharine could hardly breathe. She disentangled herself, helped Amy into the draped chair, and pointed Hollis to another.

  “Let me fix you a cup of tea,” she suggested. The herbal tea was one of the first boxes she had rescued from the kitchen floor. “I don’t have any honey, sugar, or milk,” she added as she poured a mug of grass and herbs for Amy and Lipton’s for Hollis and herself and joined them at the table.

  “That’s okay.” Amy’s voice was clogged with tears. She laid her head on her arms and began to whimper.

  “So tell us what happened,” Hollis demanded, her hand resting on Amy’s shoulder.

  “The police called Brandon,” Amy said without lifting her head. “They said—they said—ohhh, I can’t stand it!” The table shook with her sobs.

  Hollis patted her until she grew calmer. “Tell us, Amy. We want to know what happened.”

  Amy sniffed, a drowned shadow with a very pink nose. “Brandon was over at our house talking to Mama, so he had forwarded his calls to his cell. I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying until he hung up, then he told Mama they had found Zach. Shot!” Her eyes filled again at the last word.

  “Here. Blow.” Hollis handed her a tissue from a stack Katharine had reconstructed from the floor. Their box had been destroyed. Katharine looked at her niece with new respect. Hollis and Posey might look very different, but in a crisis they had the same nurturing heart.

  Amy coughed to clear her throat. “They wanted Brandon to identify him because his parents are on that stupid cruise.” She peered at Hollis, her eyes drenched with sorrow. “I tried to call you, but your mama said you weren’t awake yet and she didn’t like to bother you. So I called and left a message on your cell.”

  Hollis uttered an expletive that Katharine took for a comment on mothers who can’t distinguish important calls from trivial ones.

  Katharine dipped her tea bag up and down to hurry the steeping process while Amy picked up her story. “I went up to my room so Mama wouldn’t see me cry, but when the phone rang again, I tiptoed downstairs and saw her listening, and I could tell it was Brandon. When she hung up, she called Papa and told him Zach had been shot to death. Then they started figuring out how to keep his connection with the foundation out of the papers. That’s all they think about, newspapers and politics! While Zach has laid there since Friday and nobody knew.”

  She threatened t
o break down again, but Katharine shoved the hot herbal tea closer to her and asked quickly, “How do you know he’s been there since Friday?”

  Amy sipped her tea and wrinkled her nose at the lack of honey. Poor Amy, so much of her life had been sweetness and light—at least on the surface. Zach’s death would be harder to stomach than tea without honey.

  “Mama told Papa that when Brandon told the police what kind of car Zach had, they looked around the neighborhood and found it in the parking lot of some scruffy apartment not far away. A woman told them it has been there since at least eleven Friday night, because she came in then and found it parked in front of her apartment. She had to park down the hill, and got soaking wet. She said she’s been trying for two days to get the manager to have it towed, but he wouldn’t because the spaces aren’t reserved. Zach loved that car!” She laid her head down again and bawled.

  Hollis rose and started to prowl the room. Amy looked up and accused, “When we couldn’t find him Friday night, you said he was fine, that he’d just gone away for a little while. You said he’d be back.”

  “I thought he would!” Hollis’s voice rose in anger and grief. “Aunt Kat’s house had been robbed that night. I thought Zach might have taken her jade and was hiding out somewhere.” She threw Katharine a desperate look. “The key to your house was missing from my ring. I’d just noticed when they gave me one to the theater that evening and I was adding it to the others. I was scared Zach might have taken it when I let him drive my car that afternoon—and that he had come after your jade.”

  Amy glared up at her and pushed damp hair off her face. “Zach wouldn’t steal!”

  “Zach liked that jade,” Hollis countered. She spoke to Katharine. “After you told me about the robbery, I got really scared he was the one who had come in. So Amy and I drove around all night looking for him.” She sank back into her chair as if all the air had gone out of her balloon. “But now we know where he was. At least he didn’t break in here.”

  Katharine could have pointed out that Zach’s innocence wouldn’t be proven until they knew exactly when he had died, but she didn’t. Amy was too heartbroken and Hollis too frustrated by her inability to help Amy’s dreams come true. Hollis was learning a nurturer’s bitterest lesson: we cannot always protect the weak or grant the desires of their hearts.

  “God help us,” she murmured in almost silent prayer.

  Hollis turned her wrath where she thought it belonged. “Why didn’t God protect you from all this? And Zach? And Dutch?”

  Katharine had no idea what had happened to Zach, but she would have been willing to wager that his death was the result of his own bad choices, somebody else’s, or a combination of the two. She remembered Dutch, the night before he died, telling her how ready he was to die. Had God withdrawn protection to give Dutch his heart’s desire? If there was golf in heaven, she hoped he and her daddy were enjoying a round. But Hollis wasn’t looking for old men’s fantasies about heaven.

  Katharine sent up a quick plea for help. It was answered by a memory that curved her lips in a smile. “God did protect me. Monday morning I was furious because I started late, the bank was slow, and I got a clerk at Publix who was new and took forever to check me out. I wanted to hurry home to cook lunch for Dutch. Instead, I was delayed long enough so that the robbers were gone before I got here. In a very real sense, God saved my life.”

  “That’s dumb.” Hollis shoved back her chair and went to stand at the window, glowering at the lawn. But Katharine, who had claimed faith in divine protection for years, had finally recognized it. Thanksgiving rose like a winged thing in her heart.

  Amy had been too lost in her own grief to pay them any attention. Now she took a ragged breath and gave Katharine a pleading look. “Would you do me a favor, Mrs. Murray?”

  Katharine hesitated. When Amy’s mama asked that question in a committee meeting, it usually turned into a lot of work for somebody. “If I can.”

  “Would you call Mama about the funeral?”

  Katharine was bewildered. “What about the funeral?” First Chap Landrum and then Amy—did she look like a funeral planner? Had she missed a calling that was obvious to everybody else?

  Amy swallowed. “I want to sit with his family. I was almost family. But Mama doesn’t know that, so I wondered if maybe you could, you know, like tell her.”

  Katharine wondered if the Atlanta Aquarium had an opening for someone to swim with the sharks. She would far rather take that job than tell Rowena Slade that her daughter wanted to sit on the family pew for Zach’s funeral because she considered herself engaged to him.

  Chapter 25

  Katharine was clearing her living room when Officer Williams called. She answered in the music room—my study, she mentally corrected herself—and was pleased that Hasty’s telephone worked fine.

  “Mrs. Murray? We’ve found your jade. It was in a car connected with a homicide. I checked it against the list you gave us, and it’s all there. The diary wasn’t, though.”

  That was puzzling, but she was delighted about the jade. “Was that the murder of Zachary Andrews?” When he hesitated, she added, “I heard about it from the Ivorie family.”

  The name worked its usual magic. “Yeah. The jade was in a bag behind his car seat.”

  “Will you bring it to me, or do I need to come get it?”

  “We can’t release it, since it’s part of an ongoing murder investigation.”

  She started to argue, but why should she? The jade was Tom’s, and Tom would be home that evening. He’d missed the break-in, he deserved the hassle of fighting the police to get it back. “I’ll tell my husband. He’ll be in touch. Thanks so much for calling.”

  She had finished in the living room and was working in the dining room, mourning her china and crystal, when the telephone rang again. “Katharine? It’s Tom. You doing okay?”

  She gave a short, unfunny laugh. “Sure. I’m having the time of my life. I’ve been picking up all the dishes we bought on our honeymoon, piece by tiny piece, thinking real happy thoughts.”

  “Leave all that. We can get somebody to do it when I get home. Go over to Posey’s and relax until I get there. Go to a spa or something.”

  She knew then how far removed Tom was from the devastation of their home. If he were there, he would be in his library cradling each book in his hands as he set it back on the shelf, or swearing as he returned his clothes to the closet in the precise order he insisted on. She was tempted to do as he said—drop everything and leave it exactly as it was for him to see, but that would be like abandoning an injured child. She couldn’t bear to do that.

  Still, he deserved to know the good news. “They’ve found your jade.”

  “Really? Where did it turn up?”

  “In the back of Zach Andrews’s car. He was killed Friday night, so it’s part of his murder investigation, but you can go down and talk to the police about it when you get here.”

  “That’s fantastic! Did you talk to the insurance adjuster and set a time for me to meet with him?”

  She bent and began to replace her books on the shelves. “Yes, he was here this morning. He said he will get back to you tomorrow, once he’s had time to crunch some numbers.”

  “Good, but tell him to make it Friday afternoon, will you? I’ve had to change my flight. There’s a Senate subcommittee hearing tomorrow afternoon I’ve got to cover. It may run over into Friday morning.”

  “Tom—” She didn’t try to hide the irritation in her voice.

  “I know, honey, I want to be there, too, but this is critical. I thought somebody else from our shop was handling it, but he’s got a conflict.”

  “He’s got a conflict? What the hell do you think you’ve got? Our house is in ruins, I am running on adrenaline, there’s somebody out there who did this thing who could come back any minute—”

  “Steady,” he said, in the same tone he used with a willful horse.

  “Don’t you ‘steady’ me. I’m not some
irrational being having a tantrum. I am overwhelmed. What part of Please Come Home Right Now don’t you understand?”

  “I would if I could—”

  “No, you could if you would. I’m used to covering for you, coping for you, pretending to understand why your work is more important than me, but that’s wearing real thin. I’m warning you, Tom, if you aren’t here for Dutch’s funeral—”

  “When is the funeral?”

  “Friday morning at eleven.”

  “I’ll be there, no matter what. And I’ve taken off all next week. I thought maybe we could fly down to the Bahamas or something, get away a bit.”

  Katharine looked around the house and thought of all the decisions they were going to have to make. She sighed. “You have no clue, do you? I am standing in the middle of a mess like you never saw before. Not one of our chairs or sofas has a cushion we can sit on. Every piece of porcelain is broken, every painting slashed—even the children’s pictures—” her voice trembled, but fury steadied it. “You sit up there in your tidy office with Louise to fetch your coffee and file your papers and dare tell me we can go off for a week in the Bahamas and leave all this mess behind? And then what? You fly back to Washington to your tidy office and I come back here to pick up everything after all?”

  “You can hire—”

  “I can hire?”

  “We can hire.”

  “Who oversees anybody we hire? Can you do that from Washington? Somebody has to stand here and tell them what to save and what to trash.”

  He heaved the sigh of a misunderstood and beleaguered man. “We’ll talk about it when I get home, hon. I can’t do anything from up here.”