Designated Daughters

by Margaret Maron

  Happy murmurs of anticipation arose around me.

  “Lot number one,” Will said. “Solid brass floor lamp. Probably made in the nineteen-thirties. Who’ll give me five?”

  “Five!” cried a voice from somewhere in the back.

  “Ten!” said a woman in front of me, and Will immediately went into his auctioneer mode, chanting the prices as he urged them on, flirting with the woman on the front row.

  “Ten, ten, who’ll give me fifteen?”

  “Fifteen,” said a man behind me.

  “Now it’s twenty over there. Can you go twenty-five? Do I hear twenty-five? Twenty-five? Thank you, sir! Do I hear thirty? Thirty? Thank you, ma’am. I’ve got thirty here on the front row, do I hear thirty-five? Thirty-five, sir? Can you go thirty-five? He’s shaking his head. All in? All done? Sold to the little lady here for thirty dollars. What’s your number, darlin’?”

  Flushed with success, the woman held up her paddle and Will repeated her number for the two staff members at the desk who were keeping track of who bought what and for how much.

  With so many items to get through, Will kept things moving briskly and did not waste a lot of time trying to cajole more bids once it was clear that the interested parties had reached their limits.

  Several people competed for the stained glass panel, but once the bid passed a hundred, the field narrowed to April and two others. She persisted and it was hers for two-twenty.

  Karen was luckier. Barbara was able to get her the signed Rebecca pitcher for seventy-five. Unfortunately, the beveled mirror Barbara herself wanted went for twice what she was willing to pay, although she did wind up winning an assortment of badly tarnished sterling silver picture frames, all with their glass missing.

  “No prob,” said April. “Picture frames come in standard sizes, so go to a dollar store, throw away the plastic frames, and you’ve got your glass.”

  The woman who collected Miracle pins got three of them for forty dollars and looked happy, but her friend lost out on a small bronze reproduction of a Roman god that some long-dead Lattimore must have picked up in Italy.

  A bidding war broke out between two dealers over a 1928 Seth Thomas mantel clock. The clock was pretty and it did chime, but the catalog clearly stated that the glass front and one of the hands were replacements, something Will felt compelled to repeat aloud when the bidding passed six hundred. It went for eight-fifty.

  To my complete and utter surprise, I got the end table for fifty-five. Sally was the only one who offered a bid on the deer head, and the old rabbit box was hers for another five dollars as well, which encouraged her to go after the two decoys.

  Before the bidding could start on them, a staffer in one of those blue shirts handed Will a flat plastic bag with a small slip of torn paper inside. Will looked at it, then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, one of my staff has just reminded me that we found this receipt stuck in one of the Lattimore account books and it will go to whoever takes the decoys. I can’t guarantee that this receipt is for these ducks, but it’s dated December 9, 1898. The top’s torn, so best I can tell it’s from Hancock Hardware, Morehead City.” He held it up and read aloud, “One box twelve-gauge shells, $1.25. 2 decoys, $1.50. Total, $2.75.”

  He smiled at the crowd. “Now let’s see if we can’t get more than a dollar-fifty for these two ducks.”

  Rusty Alexander hadn’t been kidding when he told Sally not to get her hopes up. No messing around with five-dollar increments. I was astonished to hear an opening bid of five hundred dollars, and it was fifty dollars a bid after that. Soon it was by hundreds and Will was looking equally astonished. When it passed three thousand, everyone was twisting around in their seats to see who was bidding.

  After what Rusty Alexander had said, I was not surprised to see that he was one of the bidders, and I had to look closely to see the almost imperceptible nod from the old man in the wheelchair, but what surprised me most was to see that the third determined bidder was Ned O’Donnell, one of our superior court judges.

  Ned hung in till the twenty-thousand mark. At twenty-seven, the old man straightened up in his chair as if he sensed he’d won. Rusty Alexander hesitated as Will chanted, “All in? All done? Final call—”

  “Twenty-eight!” Alexander shouted.

  As if annoyed, the old man prodded his chauffeur with his cane and was quickly wheeled out the door to his limo.

  “Sold!” Will said, looking slightly dazed. “All yours, Rusty.”

  The crowd erupted in spontaneous applause. As the entourage from Maryland passed, I took a second look at his nurse. Amazing how much it changed a young woman’s appearance to forgo lipstick, put her hair in a severe bun, and add oversize horn-rimmed glasses. Kaitlyn Lancaster?

  And that stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform with visored cap and mirrored sunglasses? I could see only his back now as they went through the door, but I had heard a familiar squeak when he passed. With the cuffs of his black pants falling across his instep, his black socks and black leather sandals could almost pass for dress shoes.

  I searched the crowd with my eyes. Near the back, Marillyn Mulholland beamed at JoAnn Bonner and her aunt, and Sally had a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on her face.

  After all that, it was hard to get the crowd to settle down, and Barbara scored a charming three-drawer oak chest for peanuts.

  When Will brought his hammer down on the final lot, it was a quarter past one and I was more than ready for lunch. Barbara and April went off to pay and collect their booty and I made my way over to Will, who was talking to Judge O’Donnell. I got there in time to hear Will say, “What’d I miss, Judge? I don’t know decoys, but I looked online and I couldn’t find any collectible decoy carver in eastern North Carolina with the initials HN.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t HN,” said Ned. “It was HW. A carver named Hanley Willis used to sign his ducks like that—slanting uprights with a crossbar between the first two. Mostly he carved redheads. We know of a couple of pintails, one ruddy duck, and one green-winged teal, but this is the only known example of a Hanley Willis drake surf scoter. When I saw the picture of those initials and saw that speck of white in the eyes, I was really hoping nobody else would notice. Especially not ol’ Rusty there, but I should’ve known it was too good to be true. Don’t feel bad, Knott. He may have gotten a bargain, but you got a fair price for a piece that hasn’t been market tested.”

  As he walked away, I glared at Will. “And what would you have done if Ned had outbid Alexander?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, all wide-eyed innocence.

  “You know damn well what I mean. That was old Spencer Lancaster in that wheelchair, not some Maryland decoy collector.”

  Will shrugged. “I told him to keep bidding till I rubbed my nose. If Rusty dropped out first, he’d have kept on bidding. I know better than to try to con a judge.” He hugged me with a big grin on his face. “You either, honey.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  …he may be old in body, but will never be so in mind.

  — Cicero

  We stopped for lunch at a grill on the edge of Dobbs, so it was 2:30 before we got back to the farm. April and I dropped Barbara and the oak chest she’d scored off at her house, then drove on over to the pond, where Andrew and some of my other brothers were. I hadn’t been down to the site since last weekend when it was nothing but a concrete slab. Now the shelter was nearly finished.

  “Wow!” said April. “Look how much they got done.”

  Not only was it completely framed in pressure-treated 2x4s, there were waist-high walls on three sides, a full wall at the back, and a low-pitched roof covered with sheets of tin. A first coat of stain had been applied to all the wood. As soon as it dried and a second coat was added, they would hang the double screen doors at the front and screen in the sides to make a shady, mosquito-proof place to gather on summer afternoons and evenings.

  Annie Sue or Reese must have stopped by after I left, because electr
ical outlets had been roughed in on all four sides and wires dangled from the ceiling where a fan would eventually go.

  Dwight and Andrew were cutting strips of molding for the screens when we drove down the slope but Dwight paused and walked over to where I’d parked beside Andrew’s truck. I nudged April. “He’s making sure I didn’t bust the headlights or dent the fenders.”

  She swung down from the cab. “You gonna tell him about the taillight?”

  “Tell him what?” Dwight asked.

  Even though we were both laughing, he still stepped around to the back to check. “I see you got your table.”

  “And I got my stained glass,” April told Andrew.

  He and Dwight shifted her panel into the back of his truck.

  “Y’all eat?” April asked.

  “Yeah, Dwight bought us dinner at the barbecue house.”

  “Least I could do with all the free work I’m getting,” said Dwight.

  April looked longingly at the saws and hammers. “Hope you left something for me to do.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to miter the molding for us?”

  “Sure. Just let me go change out of this dress and fetch my miter saw.”

  Cal had waved to me when I arrived, but he and Mary Pat and Jake were busy watching Haywood. As April drove off, I walked over to watch, too.

  “He’s making us slingshots,” Cal explained as Haywood finished attaching rubber strips cut from an old inner tube to the last of three Y-shaped limbs off a hickory tree.

  “Y’all didn’t have no leather laying around, so I had to make the patches outen duck tape,” he told me, giving the finished slingshot an experimental pull.

  The kids had set up a row of scrap 2x4s some yards away.

  “Let’s see if I’ve still got an eye,” Haywood said. He put a small rock in the patch, then pulled back, sighting through the tips of the Y. When he released it, one of the scrap pieces immediately flipped over.

  Homemade slingshots are a farm kid’s first weapon and soon the three of them were firing away at the targets.

  “Now listen here,” Haywood said sternly before he turned them loose and armed. “You got to pay attention where you’re aiming and mind what’s behind that. Don’t never aim at another person and watch out for windows and trucks. You can shoot at all the tree rats and crows you want, but not any songbirds or lizards or frogs.”

  “What about snakes?” Mary Pat asked.

  “Oh yeah!” Cal exclaimed. “Guess what, Mom? Bandit found a copperhead in the garden and we chopped it in two.”

  “You’re sure it was a copperhead and not a corn snake?” I’m not crazy about any snake, but I don’t believe in killing harmless ones.

  “No, Aunt Deb’rah,” Mary Pat said earnestly. “It was a copperhead, all right. It had a triangular head. Uncle Dwight saw it, too.”

  Dwight nodded. “It was a copperhead.”

  “What’d you do with him?” asked Haywood, and I saw Andrew try to hide a grin.

  “We buried him,” said Jake.

  “How did you bury him? Which way was his head facing?”

  Cal shrugged.

  “Why?” asked Mary Pat. “What difference does that make?”

  “What difference?” Haywood looked outraged. “Deb’rah, you telling me these young’uns don’t know about burying snakes? What kind of mama you call yourself?”

  He turned back to the wide-eyed children. “You better make sure he’s facing west, because if you buried him facing east”—he shook his head—“soon as he sees the sun come up, he’s gonna crawl right out of the ground and come looking for who killed him.”

  Startled, Cal looked up at me. “Is that true, Mom?”

  “I never had one come crawling for me,” I said with a straight face and complete honesty, “but I always made sure I buried them facing west myself.”

  “Get the hoe,” said Mary Pat, and the three of them took off toward the garden while Haywood sat back laughing.

  “First time me and Herman killed a snake, Robert and Frank like to’ve scared us to death telling us that. We was already in bed and I reckon we lay awake half the night thinking it was coming for us. Next day, we dug it up and by pure chance, his head was facing west. Was you there, Andrew?”

  “Probably, but I don’t remember,” said our brother.

  “Anyhow, Robert and Frank said that proved it. Iffen it’d been the other way, they said we’d be dead.”

  “All I know is if Cal has nightmares tonight,” Dwight told me, “you’re the one getting up with him.”

  “Right after I call Haywood and wake him up,” I promised.

  Nevertheless, by the time I took Mary Pat and Jake home, the kids knew that we’d been teasing them, although six-year-old Jake was still glad they’d made sure that copperhead was reburied in the correct position, just in case.

  After Cal was asleep, Dwight put on the DVD Mayleen had assembled and stretched out on the couch to watch it again with his head in my lap. That couch is one of the few things he brought from his apartment and I love it. A rich brown leather and a full ninety inches long, it’s really the best piece in our living room, which is furnished in family castoffs for the most part. I keep thinking I should let Barbara and April redecorate, but in truth, I’ve pretty much decided that we value comfort over beauty and the couch is very comfortable. All three of us fit on it. On Sundays when we don’t go to church, Dwight and Cal can lie at one end and I can curl up with some of my casework at the other end and nobody’s crowded.

  “I keep thinking we’ve missed something,” Dwight said. He fast-forwarded through the still photos to play the parts where we could hear Aunt Rachel actually speaking.

  Once again, we listened as she wept over Jacob’s death and for the death of Richard Howell’s sister and nieces. We heard her concern over unpaid debts and domestic violence and her amusement that someone didn’t realize he was parenting another’s child.

  “You haven’t found the answers to any of these questions?” I asked.

  He touched the pause button. “Promise you won’t repeat any of this? Not even to Portland?”

  This wasn’t the first time either of us had extracted such a promise since we’d married, and of course I’d made him promise to keep it to himself when I told him how Will and the Designated Daughters had scammed Rusty Alexander that morning.

  “The domestic violence was Furman Snaveley.”

  “The preacher? And he reformed after the deacons talked to him?”

  “I gather they used a rather forceful argument, but yes, he learned to control his temper and changed his ways for good. We still haven’t fully confirmed his whereabouts during the time Miss Rachel was left alone, but I’d be surprised if it was him.”

  “Who got the cowbird egg?”

  “That was Jim Collins.”

  “Oh? So that pretty little blonde that was with him is his goldfinch and I’m one of their alibis, right?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “I’m glad he’s been ruled out. He’s a staunch Democrat.”

  “I’ve arrested a lot of Democrats,” he reminded me with a big yawn as he pressed the play button on the remote.

  By the time Aunt Rachel got to unpaid debts for the third time and how some little boy ate all the chocolates in two Easter baskets, he was gone. I caught the remote as it slid from his fingers and heard her laughter over bathing suits that turned transparent in water. Hazel Upchurch, Jay-Jay had said, but neither she nor her husband had been at the hospital that day.

  Aunt Rachel had mentioned Annie Ruth several times and how Daddy’s first wife worried about someone who needed her help, someone who’d made her a promise that he didn’t keep.

  And nowhere in all that she’d rambled on about was there anything that could make a normal person want to shut her mouth for good.

  Unless…? Daddy’s first wife. Wasn’t she always called Annie Ruth? Like Herman’s daughter was always called Annie Sue? What if—?

&nb
sp; But Dwight roused up about then, and all the nebulous what ifs went flying.

  CHAPTER

  28

  The consciousness of a well-spent life and a memory rich in good deeds afford supreme happiness.

  — Cicero

  First thing after church on Sunday morning, the calls started coming in. Even though high school was still in session, our college kids were home for the summer and the cousins thought we ought to christen the pond shed before farm work or summer jobs took them off in different directions. They know that I’m always up for a spontaneous party and that they can invite their friends. Annie Sue and Reese had told us they were going to finish the wiring that morning. The whole family was in on the secret of the neon pig sign I’d bought from Will and they wanted to be there when Dwight first saw it.

  The weather was warm enough to drag out the picnic tables and lawn chairs and to fire up the cooker. While my poor oblivious husband ran over to NutriGood for enough chickens, I took a few pounds of link sausage out of the freezer. Seth and Minnie donated a cooler full of soft drinks. Doris and Isabel volunteered vegetables, April brought one of her amazing fruit salads, and Barbara said she’d bring munchables and paper plates. Over the years, flea markets and garage sales have provided us with dozens of knives and forks and spoons that we keep in a communal basket that Daddy brought over with him when he came. Beats flimsy plastic hands down.

  Early arrivals helped Cal lay out a horseshoe pitch, although once the others saw Cal’s new slingshot, Haywood had to draft Robert and Andrew to help him make extras. Drink cans and more scrap 2x4s were balanced on the sawhorses for target practice and they used the coarse gravel spilled around the edges of the slab for ammunition. Who knew Minnie was the Annie Oakley of slingshots?