Death on the Family Tree

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Cleetie took three and munched the first with strong greedy teeth. “Don’t tell Vicki and Latisha I ate these things,” she warned Dr. Flo. She turned to Katharine to explain, “My granddaughters feed me the most gosh-awful things. If it wasn’t for my girls and Florence, here, I’d have died of boredom years ago. Only pleasure I get anymore is eating—and talking. So ask me whatever it is you want to know.”

  Katharine chewed her lip. How frank could she be?

  Cleetie seemed to understand her dilemma. “Anything at all.” She waved a sugar-spotted hand. “Alfred has gone where nothing can ever hurt him again.”

  Dr. Flo rose. “I think the coffee ought to be finished. I’ll be right back.”

  Katharine leaned forward in her chair. “I am trying to learn all I can about Carter Everanes. Do you believe that Alfred killed him?”

  Cleetie shook her head without hesitation. “He couldn’t have. For one thing, Alfred had an airtight alibi. He was at our aunt’s for dinner that night. He picked me up and we rode the bus together, and we got there by seven. Mr. Everanes’s sister testified she talked to him later than that. The jury thought we were all lying, of course, to save Alfred’s skin, but it was gospel truth. And there’s another reason I know Alfred didn’t do it. He was terrified of guns. Our stepfather used to threaten him—” She heaved a sigh that made her enormous shelf of a bosom rise and fall. “Maybe I ought to just tell you about Alfred, and you can pick out what you want or need to know.” She raised her voice. “Florence, I don’t know how much of this you want to hear. Close your ears if you want to.”

  She settled back against her recliner and brushed specks of sugar icing off her black skirt. “When I was six and Alfred eight, Mama married a man named Ty Wilson. Ty started molesting Alfred almost as soon as he moved into the house, while Mama worked nights. I didn’t know a thing about that at the time, of course. All I knew was that Ty made Alfred sleep with him and it made Alfred cry. When I begged him to let Alfred sleep with me like he always had, Ty said boys and girls shouldn’t sleep together, it wasn’t right.” She worked her lips in distress at the memory.

  “Sometimes Alfred used to beg to sleep on the couch. Ty would get out his gun and wave it around and he’d say, ‘You do what I tell you, boy, or I’ll give you what-for. And if you ever open your mouth about my private business, I’ll blow your head off. You hear me?’ I felt real left out, because Alfred knew Ty’s private business and I didn’t. Lordy, Lordy, how that sweet child suffered. Ty finally died when Alfred was fifteen, but Alfred never said a word about what had happened between them. Mama and I never suspected a thing until Alfred’s trial. Then he told the court that he was a homosexual, and that he had become that way because our stepfather molested him for years when he was a child.”

  Cleetie stopped. For several minutes she stared out the window at the wreck of her neighborhood—or was it at the wreck of her brother’s life? “Mama sat there with tears streaming down her cheeks, whispering, ‘Oh, God, and I never knew. I never knew.’ Until she died, she carried a broken heart at how that boy had suffered.” She lifted a dark hand and shaded her eyes. It was several minutes before she spoke again.

  “Of course, Alfred cooked his bacon in court by telling them what he was.”

  Dr. Flo spoke from the doorway, where she stood holding a tray of steaming mugs. “So why would he have said such a thing, then?”

  “To explain why Mr. Everanes gave him a ring he was wearing—the one folks claimed he stole after he shot Mr. Everanes. Alfred’s defense was that he and Mr. Everanes were lovers, and Mr. Everanes gave him the ring. Any fool would have known that defense wouldn’t work. Homosexuality was a disgrace in both the black and the white communities in those days. People didn’t talk about it, or admit it. Why his attorney let him testify that way, we’ll never know. He could have said Mr. Everanes gave him the ring for Christmas or something and left it at that. Once he had accused Mr. Everanes of being homosexual, not one member of the jury or the judge, either, heard another word in his defense. They couldn’t wait to get rid of a yard nigger who’d dare say things like that about a rich Atlanta lawyer.” Her lips curved in a humorless smile. “Poor Alfred had the distinction of getting the fastest execution in Georgia history. Mama always said if they could have lynched him then and there, a lot of folks would have been pleased.”

  “He claimed Carter Everanes was homosexual?” Katharine tried to fit that piece into her puzzle. No wonder she had never heard Lucy or Walter mention him. That wasn’t the sort of thing either of them would have discussed around a niece. She remembered a time when Jon had been writing a paper on gay rights in high school and his granddad had warned him in a mild voice, “Don’t mention that subject around your grandmother’s relatives, okay?” Katharine had presumed that was because they wouldn’t be comfortable discussing sex in any form.

  “Oh, yes,” Cleetie said, reaching for her fifth doughnut. “Alfred claimed at the trial that he loved Mr. Everanes and Mr. Everanes loved him—that that was why Mr. Everanes had hired him in the first place. But if Alfred thought claiming to have been in love with his white boss was going to get him off, he was sorely disappointed.” Her teeth bit into the doughnut like she would have preferred to crush jurors between those strong teeth.

  A key turned in the lock and a fresh-faced boy of about nineteen looked in the door. “Hey, Granny, where’d you get that doughnut?” He noticed her visitors and turned to Dr. Flo in indignation. “You know Mama said she’s not to have sugar.”

  “What’s it gonna do, kill me?” his grandmother asked, reaching for a sixth. “I’m here to tell you, boy, I’d rather die eating a doughnut than linger several years eating healthy.”

  “Well, don’t hog them,” he told her. “Save some for me.” He reached over and took one, perched on the couch and ate it, dripping sugar all over the rug.

  “You got everything you needed to know?” Dr. Flo asked Katharine.

  Katharine nodded. She had gotten far more than she needed to know.

  Neither woman spoke for a long time on their drive back to Katharine’s house. Dr. Flo broke the silence. “When I think how many years I wasted, moping around thinking the love of my life had died in the electric chair—and all the time, he wasn’t interested in me at all.” Her voice was so sad that Katharine looked out the window to give her privacy for her grief. Dr. Flo was silent again for several blocks, then spoke as if she was making a discovery while speaking. “Some good came out of it, though. I never had any interest in any other man until Maurice came along. I guess Alfred saved me for Maurice.”

  Katharine scarcely knew what she replied. Her thoughts were going around and around. If Carter was gay, he couldn’t have been the little love of the Austrian woman. He must have stolen the diary as well as the necklace.

  All she had to show for a difficult week was the name of the person to whom the necklace belonged and a house that had nearly been destroyed.

  She wouldn’t have minded never hearing Carter Everanes’s name again. No wonder Aunt Lucy and Uncle Walter had stricken him from their lives.

  Chapter 27

  Misty greeted Katharine at the front door as she returned. “We finithed the upstairth. Do you want uth to clean up the attic?” That tongue stud could become annoying, Katharine thought as she followed Misty upstairs to take a look at the attic.

  Once they stood in the dusty space, she had to confess, “The robbers didn’t get this far—this is the way it always looks. I keep meaning to clean up here, but I never get around to it.”

  Misty wandered over to peer beneath old sheets at dresses they swathed. “Cool! You’ve got thum neat vintage dretheth up here.” Katharine refrained from mentioning that most of them were her own prom dresses and formals. She didn’t want to be classified as an antique.

  While Misty examined dresses, Katharine wandered over and looked down at Dutch’s boxes. She felt she ought to get them to Chap, although she doubted he’d want his father’s old yea
rbooks. Yearbooks?

  She knelt on the dusty floor and pulled open the first box.

  She found what she wanted in the second: four Sewanee annuals. Dutch had already had the social instinct to keep track of people he knew, because he had bought one every year and collected signatures from every class. Katharine’s dad used to claim that Dutch never forgot a person and was a world champion at networking. He’d parlayed those skills and connections into a successful investment firm.

  She looked up as Misty said, “I geth I’ll get back to work, then. What thould we do netht?”

  “Shelve the books in the library,” Katharine suggested.

  “Okay. But if you ever want to thell any of theeth dretheth—”

  “I’ll call you first,” Katharine promised. After all, you never knew when Tom might lose all his stocks and need a few dollars.

  She carried the yearbook for ’36–’37—Dutch’s sophomore year—over to Tom’s father’s chair and wiped the dusty covers before she opened the book. Both inside covers, all the ads, and most of the activities pages were covered with scrawled messages. Many of the remarks were light and some were irreverent, but none were cruel. Dutch seemed to have been a favorite with all classes.

  Two messages caught her eye. One was written in the lovely European script she was coming to know as well as her own. It read, “Come see me in Austria, Dutch. We will party all night long.” It was signed “L1.” The other, written in a tall, skinny hand with compressed capitals, declared, “Gone but not forgotten. We’re passing the torch, Dutch. Don’t drop it!” That one was signed “L2.”

  L-one and L-two, not L-squared. Two men whose names both began with L.

  Ludwig and…?

  Lee. Dutch and Maria had both mentioned him.

  The diary had been Ludwig’s, then. Not an Austrian woman, an Austrian man who liked men. No wonder Maria had been guarded when asked about Carter’s friendship with him. Was it Carter he had seduced and then persuaded to love him? Was that why Carter had kept the diary, as a memory of his first love? Or had Carter stolen it as he had the necklace?

  She looked through the junior class pictures and found Ludwig Ramsauer. He sported no beard, but the high forehead and humorous eyes were the same as in the newspaper clipping that Carter had slipped in the diary. Carter looked young in his picture, a bit ethereal. If he had been one of Jon’s friends, she would have suspected he was gay. Had Ludwig merely awakened something that was already latent?

  She also found Donk—Don K. Western—but didn’t see his brother, Lee.

  She flipped through all the classes. Lee Western did not appear.

  Was he Donk’s brother? She had presumed he was because Dutch and Maria had lumped them together as “Lee and Donk Western,” but perhaps that was another tape from the past—two names spoken together so often they became one, like Kat-’n’-Hasty. She flipped through the entire junior class and came across several other names she remembered from Dutch’s friends and acquaintances. She also saw Mr. Ivorie, already handsome but a lot less formidable than he would become. It took her two trips through the junior class to discover Leland Bradford.

  Leland, shortened to Lee by his buddies. She studied the picture intently. This was the man who had convinced Ludwig’s “little love” to come to Austria and be seduced? Who had bought supplies to blow up a bridge? Who had slept with Ludwig before the big love affair, but turned him down after the bridge exploded? That shy smile and the thick glasses were deceptive, good camouflage for the rake he had been.

  Maybe it was because all those boys were younger than Jon, but to Katharine, Leland looked unfinished and callow, timid enough to run from a mouse. What had become of him? Had he died like the others? Or was he the sole survivor of their unholy band?

  She stood to go downstairs and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror of an old oak dresser. In that light she again saw the woman with long dark hair and pale, thin face. Now she wore a worried expression. She looked like she wanted something from Katharine, but when Katharine moved closer to examine the image, her own face appeared. She had a smudge of dust on her chin.

  She scrubbed her chin with her palm as she headed downstairs to call Hasty. She wanted to tell him what she had learned.

  She tracked him down at his office.

  “Tom get home last night?” he asked immediately.

  “No, he’s coming in tonight or first thing tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” He swore.

  She might berate Tom, but nobody else got that privilege. “He had important business to finish. I don’t suppose you called your wife.”

  “Not yet. I’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah, well, I have, too. I have solved all our mysteries.” She filled him in on what she had learned about Carter from Cleetie and what she had found in Dutch’s old college yearbook. “So Carter may have been Ludwig’s ‘little love,’” she concluded.

  “He was. I finished the diary late last night, and it’s real clear about that at the end. I tried to call you this morning, but I guess you were at Cleetie’s. I didn’t like to leave a message, in case—”

  He broke off, but she could finish the sentence. “In case Tom got it.” With a pang, she realized their relaxed friendship was almost at an end. Once Tom got home—

  Before she could fully explore that thought, he started talking again. “On the last page, there’s a quote. The night before he left Austria, the ‘little love’ said, ‘Ludwig, Hitler has come between us, but you will always be my heart and my life.’ Then Ludwig wrote that he had decided to tuck the diary and ‘a precious family heirloom Carter has often admired’ into his luggage before he left.”

  “He mentioned Carter by name?”

  “Absolutely. And quoted Carter using his name.”

  “So that’s how Carter got the things. He didn’t steal the necklace—it was a gift.”

  She was glad of that, but Hasty had other things on his mind. “That diary turned out to be dynamite in more ways than one.”

  “You mean the part about blowing up the bridge?”

  “Not just that. Our friends were active little boys that fall. They started an avalanche, stopped a train, and set off a bomb in a village square late one night, all in the name of calling for revolution. Each of them seems to have had a specialty.”

  “Even Carter?” Katharine didn’t know why she cared, but she did.

  “No, Carter seems to have been fully preoccupied with his books. But as for the others, Ludwig scouted out the terrain and decided where to attack, Lee bought the explosives, Hans arranged transport, and Donk set the bombs. They apparently hoped to rouse Austria to side with Russia against Hitler. By late autumn, they tired of that and went to Spain to join the Communist forces there. Ludwig kept detailed reports of their daily activities for the rest of the year.”

  “Was Carter fighting in Spain?”

  “No, though Ludwig spent weeks deploring the fact that he would not come, and agonizing that he himself would die alone on a Spanish plain far from the one he loved. It makes for torrid reading. But Ludwig also recorded every detail of their daily lives and battles. That makes fascinating reading. And he finally persuaded Carter to join him once the term was over.”

  “Poor Carter. Imagine surviving both the Spanish civil war and World War II, only to get shot in your own house. I wonder if there’s any way to figure out what happened to him.”

  “You’ve got the mystery bug, Katie-bell. It was probably a good old home invasion, just like yours.”

  “But what about Dutch? Somebody murdered him.”

  “And I know you think his death is connected to the necklace, but it’s probably nothing more than coincidence. Leave it to the police.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence. Daddy always said that what looks like coincidence is usually part of a plan we cannot see. These things are linked. I know it. And I’m getting convinced the key could be Lee. He has come up several times in conversation, and Dutch said he was
going to try to get a hold of Lee and see what he might know. I wonder if he did.”

  “Did you run his name through a search engine?”

  “On what? My computer is history.”

  “What’s his full name again?”

  “Leland Bradford.”

  “Wait a minute.” She heard him typing, then pause. “The name is too common. There are almost forty thousand references, including some bigwig educator from the last century. Any idea how to narrow down the field?”

  “No, but I’ve just had another idea about how to track him down. Napoleon Ivorie was in his class at college. Maybe he’d remember him.”

  “Good luck getting through. I’ve heard he’s an absolute recluse by now. And if you do get through, are you going to tell him why you want to know?”

  “I’ll play that by ear. He may not remember them. Dutch said that Lee and Donk were kicked out after their junior year. But it’s worth a try, don’t you think? And I’m glad the diary turned out to be interesting after all.”

  “It’s a terrific personal account of what was going on at that time in history.”

  “You may have it as a gift. I know Maria won’t want it. But I’ll copy the last page and send it to her with the necklace, to clear Carter’s reputation.”

  “Who’s Maria?”

  Katharine had forgotten she hadn’t told him about that call. “Ludwig’s sister. Dutch tracked her down just before he died, through the Sewanee alumni office. I spoke with her yesterday, and she says Georg Ramsauer gave the necklace to one of his daughters—her ‘many-times great-grandmudder’—as a wedding present. It’s been handed down in their family for generations, and she thought Carter had stolen it. I told her I’d send it back—”