It occurred to Franklin that he’d been letting the weight issue slide, and that his father had been in much better shape those summers than he was now. His dad had seemed pretty old then, but only a six-year-old would consider a twenty-eight-year-old mother and thirty-two-year-old father old.
The screen door slammed open, and Franklin noticed that the wood frame was scarred with the exuberant comings and goings of that slender door. Normally he would disapprove and wonder why no one painted that wood, fixed the spring, or replaced the screen that bowed at the bottom; but somehow the whole effect was so comfortable and homey, he didn’t think he’d change a single thing.
Jodina Calhoun beat the woman (why the hell hadn’t he asked her name?) out the door, and they were both moving so fast, it looked like some kind of a race. They were too much alike not to be related. Not in looks exactly, although it was hard to tell, since Jodina Calhoun had to be in her eighties now or close to it. It was more a matter of their personal ambience.
It struck him then—was this woman the grandniece? The Emma Marsden he had been following in the papers?
The years had made their point with Jodina Calhoun, and Franklin knew very well that she had earned every crease in the aged paper-thin skin. Her back had settled in the C-shaped curve of advanced osteoporosis, and when she held out a hand for him to shake, he was gentle with the thick knobby joints of her long, work-worn fingers. He knew without asking that her fingers were stiff and that the joints gave her pain every day—pain that would be as ingrained in her life as breathing. But she was still vivid, not faded in the way of elderly people who have distanced themselves from a future they have no desire to see. Jodina Calhoun, clearly, was still very much in the game.
“I see you met Emmet,” Jodina said, and Franklin looked again at the woman whose very presence made his nerve ends tingle.
“The notorious Emma Marsden,” she said, giving him her tan, slim-fingered hand.
Franklin was not surprised to find her handshake firm, and the skin soft as fresh creamy butter. She looked soft all over, where a woman ought to be soft, and firm where a woman ought to be firm, and he used the handshake as an excuse to move a bit closer and catch another whiff of the present but elusive perfume.
“It’s not every day I get to meet a woman who’s genuinely notorious.”
“Not living, anyway.”
Franklin was startled into a laugh, and Jodina folded her arms and frowned at her niece.
“It is just like you, young lady, to try and make a bad impression on the one man who might listen to us and see our side of things, and I’d like one good reason I shouldn’t wring your neck right this minute.”
“She’s made a fine impression,” Franklin said, with complete honesty, then closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and asked what was cooking that smelled so good.
“Oh, my Lord, the biscuits,” Jodina said, and Emma held the screen door open as the old woman barreled back through.
Emma Marsden tilted her head and smiled up at him. She was tall, but Franklin was taller. “Masterful,” she said, and her right cheek sank into a dimple.
Franklin took a deep puff on his cigar and grinned. He agreed.
The kitchen was hot, and sweat had beaded up on the back of Franklin’s neck. He stood stiffly beside the kitchen table, trying to stay out of the way. The kitchen floor was old, yellowed linoleum.
The house did not have central air. He’d seen a window-unit air conditioner sticking its rear end from the living room window. The rest of the house seemed comfortable enough—not ice cold like he liked it, but tolerable. His nose was sensitive. He detected the thread of mustiness common to old houses and elderly ductwork, but the kitchen was a study in aromatic layers.
It was a funny kind of kitchen. The table was yellow mosaic tile and black wrought iron, and it looked Italian. Emma told him she’d got it on sale at Pier One when he’d walked in the kitchen and told her he liked it. The black iron chairs had curled-back tops and soft gold cushions lightly coated with animal hair. The tablecloth was French blue, and the dishes some kind of Italian swirl pattern.
White lace curtains hung across the window on the back door and looked like they’d been there since the turn of the century. The countertops were scratched green Formica, and the cabinets country pine with black hinges and handles that blended well with the table. Emma Marsden kept her spices in a conglomeration of various containers. The economy-sized lemon pepper was Kroger brand. Anise, basil, and bay leaves were lined up in red and white canisters that came from the McCormick Gourmet Collection. The baking powder was the familiar white label, red trim, Clabber Girl brand that his mother kept in their kitchen while he grew up. The bag of flour was White Lily, and it sat in a tuffet of spilled powder that trailed across the cabinets and onto the floor. He noticed that Jodina Calhoun had flour down the bosom of her dress and caked in the creases of her palms. This was a real kitchen, where women who loved to cook and were good at it spent a lot of time. Nothing matched, but everything went together, and the room had the ambience and presence of that little coffee shop or bistro you walk into where the owners run the place to suit themselves. As individualized as a fingerprint.
A glass casserole dish that held a cooled blackberry cobbler sat on the white enamel stove. A matching dish held corn pudding. The biscuits were keeping warm in an iron skillet with a dish cloth over the top, and fried chicken drained on a huge platter right by a stainless steel sink that was overrun by mixing bowls and large wooden spoons coated with dried batter of some kind or another. Dirty glasses lined the countertop near the sink.
Emma poured wine from a huge glass jug of Carlo Rossi burgundy. The wine goblets were huge, and each stem was wrapped with a wine charm made of colored glass. Franklin’s glass had a green charm, and Jodina’s glass had a blue one. Emma’s was ruby red. She winked at Franklin, took a plastic ice tray out of the top part of a refrigerator that was no taller than Emma herself, crammed as much ice as she could into her great-aunt’s wineglass, then filled it from a yellow pitcher that sat by the side of the stove.
“Peach tea,” she explained to Franklin. “You want tea or the wine?”
“The wine,” he said, because that was what she was having, though the peach tea sounded good too.
“You can have both,” Emma said.
“Yeah?”
She nodded as if it was a proper request, when they both knew it absolutely wasn’t. No pretense in this household.
Just as Franklin noticed that there were four places set at the table, the back door opened and a small, long-haired female walked in, followed by a weighty golden retriever.
Emma smiled at the girl and the dog. “Hi, guys. Hungry?”
The girl looked at Franklin and frowned. Her hair was a thick golden brunette, streaked with pink highlights. The hems of her jeans were too long, and ragged from being walked on. A good six inches of slim young tummy showed between the bottom of a tiny green T-shirt and the waistband of her jeans. Her makeup was carefully applied, almost model perfect. She looked a lot like a younger version of Emma Marsden, without the smile.
She’d only glanced once at her mother, but she stopped long enough to give Jodina a genuine hug.
The dog gave a war whoop and ran straight for Franklin, whose knees went suddenly weak.
“Wally, no,” Emma said, and to the girl, “Blaine, get the dog.”
Wally was quicker on her feet than Blaine was. She had both front paws on Franklin’s shoulders and was looking him right in the eye before the girl could get a hand on her collar. The dog’s eyes were brown and intelligent, her muzzle white with age. The animal opened a large mouth, and a pink tongue as thick as a steak fillet hung sideways over the black, saliva-streaked gums.
“Jesus,” Franklin said. He was a man used to working around strong, unendurable odors, but this dog had the worst breath he had smelled in a lifetime.
The girl yanked the dog backward. “Off, Wally.”
Franklin
reached a tentative hand out to the dog’s domelike head. “Good boy.”
“Wally’s a girl,” the child deadpanned, and Franklin wondered if the kid was having him on.
Emma looked at the girl over her shoulder. “Put her in the bedroom and get washed up for dinner. But first say hello. Marcus Franklin, this is my daughter, Blaine. Blaine, Marcus Franklin.”
The girl looked him over, eyes gone dull and bored. Very unimpressed. Franklin offered a hand. She forced a plastic smile and gave him a limp handshake. In all the articles Franklin had read on the Marsden case, very little if any mention had been made of Emma Marsden’s other child. Franklin hadn’t expected a teenager.
“Whatcha drinking, baby girl?” Jodina said, and Blaine grinned at her over one slim and tiny shoulder.
“Wine.”
Jodina winked and splashed just a little bit of burgundy into another wineglass. There was an ease between the two of them that made the tension between mother and daughter stand out.
The girl had the look of her mother—but she was shorter and more petite, and while Emma exuded presence, the girl’s energy, undeniably strong, smoldered beneath the surface. The mother would always be noticed. The daughter had learned to tone down the essence and to blend.
Franklin looked up in time to catch the look the kid threw him on her way through the doorway. Keen, intelligent, suspicious. Emma gave Franklin a sharp look, and he was jolted by the defensive and protective air she suddenly acquired. There was nothing friendly or amused in that look, and Franklin realized that if he didn’t get along with the daughter, he was dead meat.
“Blaine, put Wally in the bedroom,” she said.
“Not on my account,” Franklin said quickly.
Emma grinned at him over her shoulder as she fixed two large glasses of peach iced tea and put one in front of his place and one in front of her daughter’s. “If we don’t put Wally up, she’ll sit by your side and beg.”
“I grew up with dogs,” he said.
“Liar.”
“What do you know about it?” he asked.
Jodina Calhoun looked to the heavens. “She knows everything. If you don’t believe me, ask her.”
The splash of water was noisy from the bathroom, which was evidently right off the living room. The door slammed shut suddenly, then a toilet flushed, and the door opened again.
“Wash your hands,” Emma said.
“Mom.” The tone, mortified.
Franklin sympathized. The kid looked old and smart enough to take care of her bathroom habits privately without any input from her mom.
SYD
CHAPTER EIGHT
Syd sometimes had to reassure herself that everything her husband, Dr. Theodore Tundridge, was doing was completely legal. She was the one who had urged Ted to turn the videotape of the Marsden woman over to the police, and now she was questioning the decision. She had not expected the tape to make the six o’clock news. How had the media gotten hold of it?
Ted, however, was very sure. Sure that he was right about the Marsden woman and the death of her child. Sure that he was right about the research. He had no tolerance for anyone questioning him. The Marsden woman had objected to the pathology lab, and Ted was furious. Syd lay awake at night, wondering if Ted was accusing the woman because she had the nerve to challenge his right to use tissue samples for research. Ted did not like his authority challenged. He was one of those tiresome people who were always right.
He had assured Syd, in a drawn-out and huffy conversation, that there was solid evidence the Marsden woman might have had something to do with her son’s illness. Might have. From what Syd could gather, the only evidence was staff suspicion.
The videotape that had so strangely and suspiciously been mailed to the clinic had ended any sympathy Syd had for Emma Marsden. That kind of behavior, on her child’s birthday—it was weird. It made Syd squirm.
But if she was honest, the path lab made her squirm too.
She wondered how far she could push her objections. There was no question she had the upper hand in the marriage.
Syd was usually careful to keep her opinions to herself. Theodore took this silence as approval, and Syd’s approval, though he rarely realized it, was integral to his happiness.
Syd did not like her husband. She hid her opinion of him from everyone but herself. She never spoke negatively about him in front of the children. (Girlfriends were a tempting indulgence she was not always able to resist.) Theodore was completely unaware of how she felt. This she also knew. She was not having affairs, not that she didn’t have offers. She was fairly attractive, though her husband was not aware of her on a physical level and never had been—there was very little that could penetrate his self-obsession. She had not put him through medical school, so she had no debts for him to repay—financial or emotional. She was not wealthy, not until she became Mrs. Theodore Tundridge, but she did not have a single thread of avarice in her soul. She simply admired his work, and did not wish to disrupt the lives of their four children—all adopted, siblings left orphaned after an automobile accident killed their parents. Syd had adopted the two oldest initially, twelve- and ten-year-old boys. They violently opposed being separated from the others, and it was clear from the outset that the children needed to be together. Syd had planned all along to adopt all four of them, but it had taken time, patience, and a certain manipulation. Being a doctor’s wife had many advantages. Eventually Syd managed to convince the family and Child Protective Services to allow her to adopt the two youngest—a little girl of five and a toddler of one and a half, another boy. That had been five years ago, and her children were now seventeen, fifteen, ten, and six. She loved them with all her heart, and felt they were meant to be in her life. She was perfectly able to conceive, and she and Ted had something of a sex life now and then, but she was obsessively and phobically afraid of childbirth. Someone had shown her a Lamaze class film at an early age, and it had made an eternal impression. (Syd thought showing such things to women after they got pregnant was the height of cruelty.)
She was perfectly aware that her husband did important work. His research into pediatric liver disease was groundbreaking and lifesaving, and he not only served the usual middle-class and wealthy patients but also devoted a significant part of his clinic to the children of those who could not afford medical care, which, these days, could be almost anyone.
It was a good life, in Syd’s estimation, not the least because it was a life she had chosen. She was happy to be able to stay home with her four children, who had needed her so desperately when their beloved mother and father had died on I-75 coming home from a University of Louisville basketball game. She did sometimes miss passion—not the Hollywood version, which, in her opinion, had little to do with any reality she’d ever seen. Those kinds of ideals wreaked havoc with people’s general expectations so that they constantly bypassed love for the occasional spark of infatuated lust. She knew what she was giving up, and sometimes it bothered her, but not very often. There had been someone, once, after she’d gotten married, and she often thought that the two of them could have been blissfully happy. But he, too, had been married, and though his spouse had been cold, critical, and controlling, he had after all made his choice and been happy with it before he knew Syd. When it came to having affairs and breaking up marriages, she was the last woman standing. It just wasn’t in her.
Syd and her children had a lovely life together, with Ted as a distant, distracted father who spent most of his time working. She took the kids bowling every Friday night. They went to soccer games on the weekends, soccer practice during the week. There were dance classes at Diana Evans School of Dance for the Sugar Babe (officially Renee, but she had always been Sugar Babe to Syd and the boys). Syd allowed no television during meals (except on weekends; then it was a free-for-all) and took them all to Second Presbyterian Church every Sunday, no matter how much they complained and begged to sleep in. Involvement in the youth group, however, remained a matter of
choice.
Syd did the tax work for her husband’s clinic, as well as keeping an overview of the books, because, in addition to her skill as a mother, nurturer, and homemaker, she had graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in accounting and a degree in tax law from Emory University. She’d hung both diplomas over the washing machine and dryer. She was not supermom, but she did have a sense of humor. Her weaknesses were romance novels, the thick ones you could really get into as well as the slender quick reads; Pecan Sandies shortbread cookies; and chess, which she played online, no one in her family coming close to being able to give her a good game.
She raised her children in a four-thousand-square-foot house in Heartland subdivision, and because she loved a clean house and hated cleaning, she had a maid come in once a week. She and the maid had become very good friends; she was probably closer to Ginny than to any of her other girlfriends. They exchanged advice on children and husbands. Ginny had one child, and her husband was disabled. They were very much in love and spent a lot of time traveling in their RV now that their son was grown and out of the house. Ginny was fond of Syd’s children, and Lucy and Ethel, the two golden retrievers that Syd and the kids had adopted from Golden Retriever Rescue, had cured her of a fear of big dogs. The household included a foul-tempered iguana named Earl, an odoriferous mouse named Casper, and a cat, Mr. Bo Jangles, who had shown up on the back porch one unseasonably cold morning during the kids’ Thanksgiving holiday three years ago. Once freed of matted hair and parasites, Mr. Bo Jangles had turned into a sleek beauty who never again bothered to venture outside, preferring to spend most of his time peering down at the dogs from the top of the television set.
Syd knew the doorbell was going to ring before the chimes began bonging. The dogs had jumped from their upside-down paws-in-the-air rub-my-tummy positions and were now circling her legs, preventing her from answering the door in their enthusiasm to let her know there was someone out front and wouldn’t it be a great idea if they all went together to bark and take a look? Sadly, the dogs did not seem to respect Syd as pack leader, but held the attitude that she was a member of the gang, albeit an important one. She was, after all, in charge of rides in the RAV4.
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