Katharine tied the chiffon scarf around her hair. “I don’t mind riding around for a little while, but I don’t need to gossip.”
Posey—who garnered information like jewels, at aerobics classes, spas, and the beauty parlor—sputtered with indignation. “I don’t gossip! I simply share my heartfelt concern for other people. Poor Bara needs all the concern we can give her right now. You know what-all she’s already been through this past year, right? Her son killed in Iraq before Christmas, then right after Easter, her daddy—well, you know the mess about how he died.”
Winnie Holcomb had plunged from the balcony of the penthouse he’d moved into after giving Payne and Hamilton his house. Atlanta had been doubly shocked by his death. Winnie was widely beloved. He had also designed the tower he lived in, and Holcomb & Associates had set a high standard in Atlanta for architectural safety. Their parapets were higher, their railings more closely spaced than any others in the city.
“He must have been pushed,” Buckhead had insisted.
“His deadbolt was locked and his security system armed,” the police reported.
“Do you suppose he jumped?” people began to whisper.
“How could he climb over a chest-high parapet with that artificial leg?” Winnie’s staunchest supporters retorted.
Before anybody had satisfactorily answered those questions, even more shocking discoveries emerged. The autopsy revealed that Winnie had been dead before he hit the ground. A bullet was found in the remains of his skull, but no gun had ever been found.
For weeks, Atlanta was rife with speculation. Had somebody managed to come into Winnie’s penthouse, kill him, lock the deadbolt, and arm the security system on the way out without being detected by cameras in the elevator or stairwell? Or had Winnie climbed on the parapet and blown out his own brains, then dropped the gun as he fell?
Proponents of the first camp drew diagrams to show how a person could stand in the elevator and avoid the camera. Proponents of the second camp were divided between those who believed the suicide gun had been picked up by somebody on the street and those who believed it was still lodged high in one of the trees ringing the condo. Four months later, the mystery remained.
Katharine said soberly, “I’ve heard several people say he adored his grandson, and Win’s death unhinged his mind.”
“It could have. It certainly sent Bara into a tailspin. She had a complete breakdown. And then Winnie died—but you haven’t heard what Foley has done most recently?” Posey’s voice rose in astonishment.
“Only what she told us today. I told you, I don’t know the Weidenauers that well.”
Posey set out to educate her. “Bara’s family on both sides has been here forever. One of her many-great-grandfathers was mayor, back in the mid-nineteenth century, when the town was called Terminus.”
Katharine nodded. “‘Regarded as a brash nonentity south of Marietta, never expected to be anything more important than the place where railroads came together.’ That’s more or less a direct quote from your brother.”
“I’m surprised Tom hasn’t given you the whole history of the Paynes and the Holcombs, then. Their history is Atlanta’s history. Both sides of the family made a lot of money after the war, one in lumber and the other in cotton. Connor Payne, Bara’s granddaddy, ran for governor back when Nettie was in college. He lost, but he got the Buckhead vote, and Harold Holcomb, Winnie’s father, ran his campaign. They were real good friends. My mother used to say that Winnie’s marriage to Nettie was arranged before they were even born.”
“Surely not!” Katharine knew that several Buckhead couples had grown up together, but she had presumed they’d chosen each other in spite of that.
Posey was far more practical. “They could have decided to marry other people if they’d wanted to, but it united the fortunes and kept the money from outsiders.”
“Outsiders like me?” Katharine teased.
“You aren’t an outsider. Your mother grew up in Buckhead, so you belong here, whether you like it or not.”
“But Tom wouldn’t have married me if I didn’t?”
“Tom would have married you if you’d been born on Mars. He came home from the party where he met you and said, ‘Okay, Pose, there might be one woman I could stand to spend the rest of my life with.’ He’d sworn he was going to be a confirmed bachelor if all women were like me. But getting back to Bara and Winnie—”
“I know about Winnie. ‘Football hero, war hero, outstanding architect, and founder of Holcomb & Associates, which has designed and built a number of the skyscrapers that grace our lovely skyline.’ That’s not Tom, that’s too many banquet introductions to count. But Winnie’s dead. Can we move beyond the past and get to the present?”
“In a minute. Did you ever know Winnie’s son, Winston Arthur Junior? Of course you didn’t. He was killed before you came. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Art was a lot like Nettie—stuffy, rigid, self-righteous. I think he must have been a disappointment to Winnie, although I never heard him say so, but Nettie adored him. The light of Winnie’s life was Bara, who was five years younger. She—you weren’t here when she was in high school, were you?”
“I wasn’t born until she was in high school.”
“I wasn’t hardly born, either.” Posey conveniently forgot the five years she had on Katharine. “But I was fascinated by her. She was a track star, president of a lot of clubs, and always up to pranks. She also wore dreamy clothes. I thought her utterly glamorous and wanted to grow up to be exactly like her. Once she started Randolph-Macon, though, she went off the rails. Started smoking and drinking and did wild, zany things. One night she danced in her slip in a downtown fountain. Mama said they were fixing to put the picture in the paper until Winnie called Ralph McGill and got him to pull it. Another night she sideswiped the governor’s limo, drag racing down Peachtree. And when she got arrested for driving under the influence, she wound up teaching the entire lockup a series of bawdy songs.”
“Are those stories true?”
“Absolutely. Daddy was the lawyer Winnie sent to bail her out of jail. He said she wouldn’t leave until the prisoners got the harmony right.”
“That’s weird. I heard the drag-racing story back when I first joined the Junior League, but at a small dinner party at Aunt Sara Claire’s one evening, I mentioned it and Aunt Sara Claire said, ‘Don’t believe those ridiculous lies, dear. Bara would never have gotten into the Junior League if they were true.’”
“Pooh,” was Posey’s inelegant reply. “Bara got into the Junior League the same way anybody else in Atlanta does, including you: because of her mother. And every one of the stories is true, no matter how much Sara Claire and Rita Louise tried to whitewash them for Nettie’s sake.”
Katharine remembered more of that long-ago conversation. “Father John and Rita Louise were at dinner that night, and Rita Louise said, ‘I always thought Bara got into difficulties because she lost her grandmother her freshman year of college. Except for Winston, Viola Payne was the only person in the world who could exert any control over that girl.’ But Father John frowned at both of them and said—pretty sternly, for him—‘Perhaps that was because Viola was the only person besides Winston who ever showed that child any love.’ Do you think he could have been right?”
“How should I know? Like I said, I was a mere infant when she was growing up. But I do know Bara stopped drinking after she married Ray Branwell.”
“For love?”
Posey’s laugh held little mirth. “For self-preservation, is more like it. Ray was the heir to a restaurant-chain fortune, but very wild. He drank a lot, got into public brawls, and my mother used to wonder if he beat her. Mama claimed Bara would never have married him if her mother hadn’t disapproved of him so strongly. But for whatever reason, Bara stopped drinking soon after Payne was born, and settled down.”
“Settled down?” During Katharine’s years in Buckhead, Bara’s excesses had provided constant fodder for conversation. Her clot
hes were brighter, her vacations more daring, her conversation spicier than Buckhead was accustomed to. Her most flamboyant excess had been her steamy romance with Foley Weidenauer six months after Ray Branwell died. Their escapades had furnished the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with “Peach Buzz” tidbits for two months before the couple flew to Greece and married. Bara had been forty-seven, Foley, thirty-two. Her children were fifteen and twelve.
Posey went on sharing her heartfelt concern for Bara.
“All this mess with Foley is what has started her drinking again. It’s a dadgum shame she ever married him in the first place, and let him worm his way into Holcomb and Associates. Nobody knows who his people are, but anybody could tell when he first got to town that he wasn’t raised right. His manners have improved a lot since he married Bara.”
Katharine, whose parents had firmly preached the equality of all people and had declined to raise their daughter by society’s restricted definition of a lady, felt pity for the man. “Wasn’t he a CPA? I thought that’s why Winnie hired him.” At the time of the Weidenauer marriage Katharine had been busy raising two children and keeping house while Tom traveled, but she had absorbed that much.
“Maybe so,” Posey sounded dubious, “but the board would never have considered Foley for chief financial officer a few years ago if he hadn’t been Winnie’s son-in-law. God only knows why they made him CEO after Winnie died, but Wrens says Foley’s strength is knowing how to charm the socks off people in high places.”
“Has he done anything worse than ask for a divorce, take a mistress, and get himself made CEO of Holcomb and Associates? I mean, that’s bad enough, but you sound like he has single-handedly introduced bubonic plague to the city.”
“He just about has. Apparently, even before Winnie’s death, Foley had been chatting up an Arab conglomerate that’s interested in buying the firm. A couple of weeks ago they made him an offer, but in order to get the votes to sell, he needs Winnie’s shares. Winnie’s lawyer informed Foley that Winnie left those shares exclusively to Bara, so Foley informed Bara that she can either give him those shares, or they will have to sell both houses and most of their investments to give him all he’s entitled to.”
“Can he do that?”
“Wrens says he can. When they got married, Bara was stupid enough to put Foley’s name on the titles to both her Buckhead house and her Lake Rabun house, and she let him mingle their bank accounts and investment portfolios—which means all of that is now legally common property, and Foley is entitled to half of it. Bara would have to sell a lot more than their Buckhead house to give Foley half of everything they own. If he can manage to get Winnie’s shares put into the mix, she could well lose everything else. Wouldn’t you think she would have insisted on a prenuptial agreement? But no, she was crazy in love.” Posey’s drawl deepened in disgust.
“I never thought about a prenuptial when I got married.”
“Neither did I, but we were kids, starting out. Bara was in her forties when she married Foley, with two big houses and pots of money she had inherited from both sets of grandparents, her mother, and Ray. The worst thing Foley has done so far, besides parade his bimbo all over town, is tie up their bank accounts and put a freeze on the credit cards. Bara is practically destitute.”
“Destitute? She drives a Jag and lives in an humongous house.”
“But she had those things before this mess started. She couldn’t sell them if she wanted to, until the divorce is settled.” Posey slammed on her brakes at a red light. “Sorry. I was going a little faster than I realized.”
Katharine had to wait for lunch to settle back into her stomach before she asked, “Would her shares in the firm be an equal exchange for half of all the rest?” She had no idea how much Bara’s shares in Holcomb & Associates were worth, but big houses on Lake Rabun were worth small fortunes, and a house about the same size as Bara’s in Buckhead had recently listed for seventeen million dollars. Housing woes that had afflicted the rest of the country scarcely made a ripple in the sale or purchase of houses that size.
“It doesn’t matter what’s worth what.” Posey sounded like she was reminding a sixth grader that two plus two equals four. “Bara’s daddy founded that company and her granddaddy Payne built both houses. Her granddaddy Payne gave Bara the Buckhead house when she married Ray, so they could raise their children there, and her mother left her the lake house when she died. Foley’s only been married to her for fifteen years. Both houses and the business ought to be hers.”
A car across the intersection moved. Posey took out her rage at Foley by gunning her engine and leaping forward. Brakes squealed. Two very expensive pieces of machinery nearly collided. The other driver shook his fist.
“Watch where you’re going,” Posey shouted at the other driver as she roared by.
“He was making a left on the arrow.” Katharine hoped her heart rate would eventually revert to normal. “Our light hadn’t changed.”
Posey slapped one cheek in chagrin. “Oh, drat! I forgot that arrow. It didn’t used to be there.” She waved an apology at the other driver, but he had already disappeared—probably to vent his anger on another hapless motorist.
“The arrow has been there for years,” Katharine reminded her.
“I told you, I’m getting used to the car. I can’t think about everything at once.”
“Then think about driving.”
Posey sulked for several minutes, but she was seldom miffed for long. “By the way,” she said, as if they were in the middle of an amicable conversation, “don’t tell Hollis I was with you today. I told her I was lunching with friends, but I didn’t say who, because her car’s in the shop, and if she had known I was coming over to your place, she’d have wanted to ride over with me and work all morning. But I’d told Molly to take her to the club for lunch. I think she needs to get out a little.” Like many Buckhead matrons, Posey regarded the Cherokee Town Club as an extension of her own dining room. “Hollis looks a little peaky to me,” she continued. “I hope she’s not working too hard on your house.”
Katharine’s home had been vandalized in June. Since then, Hollis had been using her brand-new degree in fabrics and textiles from the Savannah College of Art and Design to help restore it. They’d been moving at a steady pace until Hollis had gotten shot the month before, during a weekend at Jekyll Island—a memory that still made Katharine shudder, for she had invited her niece on the trip. She had been doing all she could in intervening weeks to help Hollis take it easy.
“I don’t think she’s overworking,” she reassured Posey, “but she’s working me like a slave. Don’t tell her I’ve been with you, or she’ll wonder why I wasn’t home figuring out where all the new pictures go. She is determined to have the place finished before the party.”
Posey gave a huff of bafflement. “I cannot imagine why you decided to have a party for a hundred people this month, with Hollis still recuperating and everything you still have to do.”
“It’s a hundred and fifty people, and I offered to give the party before Hollis was hurt. I thought it would give us a deadline to work toward. It was Hollis who insisted that we not call it off. She is sure we can be ready.”
Posey sighed. “You are both crazy as loons.”
Hollis was normal enough, in Katharine’s opinion—she simply danced to a different drum. Her tall blond sisters had gone to colleges their mother approved of, married men Posey liked, borne children she adored, and were now devoting their lives to a routine of children’s sports and standard young-mother activities, while occasionally mentioning that when the children were a little older, they might go back to work. The fact that Hollis preferred a sandwich at her aunt’s kitchen table while poring over fabric swatches to lunch with her sisters at the club was only one of the traits that drove her mother straight up the nearest wall. Hollis’s tendency to bring home men with blue hair and multiple piercings was also high on Posey’s list of complaints.
Katharine, on the other han
d, was very fond of Hollis, the only one of Posey’s children who was small and dark like her uncle Tom and her cousin Susan, and who had brilliant ideas for remaking the Murray home. “You’re going to be astonished at how proud you are of Hollis one day,” she said, adding, “if we live so long,” as Posey slammed on brakes to avoid rear-ending a yellow Cadillac driven by a white-haired woman who had come to a complete stop before turning right.
“Let’s enjoy the ride and not talk for a while,” Katharine begged.
Chapter 7
Bara arrived home to find a silver Mercedes convertible in the circle near her front door and a red Miata on the apron beside the garage, where her servants used to park. The Mercedes belonged to Uncle Scotty. She tried to remember if in some moment of weakness she had invited him and somebody else over. She doubted it. She hadn’t been feeling too sociable lately, or flush enough to lay out money for food and liquor. Besides, who would cook and serve?
Her head was beginning to throb. She needed a drink. But the only thing she had left was gin, and she needed it for her breakfast Bloody Marys. Tomato juice and lime were so good for you, and Bara had been making Bloody Marys with gin instead of vodka since college—she preferred them that way.
Oh, joy, she remembered. I got wine at the grocery store. But when she popped the trunk, her groceries had been stolen! No, Ann Rose’s cook had taken them. “Blast it,” she moaned.
The box of medals and old envelope were still in the trunk, but she’d get them later. Right now, she wanted a drink.
Quietly, so Uncle Scotty wouldn’t hear, she grabbed a tumbler, unlocked the deadbolt to the basement, and tiptoed down the stairs, wrinkling her nose at the mustiness. She crept toward the bathroom Foley was using and extracted a bottle of bourbon from his stash under the sink. She filled her tumbler, downed half of it, and decided to take the bottle with her. Foley wouldn’t notice for a while. A Scotch drinker, he only bought bourbon for guests, and he wasn’t likely to entertain but one guest in the basement. Carlene didn’t deserve Rare Breed.
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