She stopped and stared at them, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. Katharine looked at her helplessly, having no experience with handling a heartbroken drunk.
“They had to suffer. That’s what they had to do. Suffer and die. Just like me. I’m suffering, Katharine. And if things don’t get better, I’m going to die.”
She got up and lurched toward a box of tissues on the counter, blew her nose and dabbed her eyes, then left the wadded tissue beside the box. She lurched back to the table, fell into her chair, and picked up a bright gold star. “This one was my favorite. See the woman in the center, with long hair and a helmet? I had long hair and I wanted to ride a motorcycle when I grew up. I thought she was beautiful.” She traced the word VALOR on the medal. “I was too little to know what this word meant. I asked Winnie, and he said, ‘Doing something really stupid that people later decide was very brave.’ For years I thought valor meant stupidity.”
She continued to finger the medal. “I wonder if Winnie got this when he lost his leg. You knew he had a prosthesis, didn’t you?”
“I knew he limped.” Katharine spoke cautiously. What should she do with Bara? Call Payne? Drive her home? Put her to bed upstairs? Could she climb stairs?
“It was amputated above the knee, but I don’t know why. He never talked about it.” She fetched the tissue box and swiped away more tears. “I can see why you were crying when I got here. That music is sad.” The CDs had recycled and Mama and the Aunts were singing again.
“I wasn’t crying over the music,” Katharine confessed. “It was the new dishes.”
Bara was willing to abandon memories for a mystery. She gave the gold-rimmed plate before her a bleary look. “You don’t like them? They look okay to me.”
Katharine decided to talk, hoping time would sober Bara up a bit. “They’re fine, but my folks and Tom’s had eaten off the old set, and they’re all dead now. Maybe I’m silly, but I felt like memories got smashed with the dishes.” She stopped, stricken, as she remembered that Bara was likely to lose more than a few dishes.
“Mrrow,” Savant chided from the utility room. Katharine was pretty sure that was cat for “Plates are plates, for heaven’s sake, and it’s been two months. Get over it!”
Or was that Aunt Sara Claire’s voice in her head?
Bara held up her fork and watched light glint off its handle. “Is this new, too? Did the bums steal your silver?”
“Yes, and we had gotten it from Elizabeth and Duncan Moffatt.” Katharine’s voice wobbled. “They were good friends of Tom’s parents, and they retired to Florida about the time we got married. They gave us their silverware for a wedding present.”
“Those old dears? I haven’t thought of them in ages. When I was a girl, we used to visit them sometimes. They had such a quaint little house over in Morningside.”
The Moffatts had lived in a two-story Tudor-style house with four bedrooms—a larger house than the one Katharine grew up in—but she supposed that if you’d lived in mansions, anything smaller seemed quaint.
Katharine took a deep, ragged breath. “I can’t bear to think that somebody has bought Elizabeth’s silver at a bargain, with no idea of how special it is.”
Bara reached over and covered Katharine’s free hand with her own. Her palm was unexpectedly warm and moist. “I know how you feel. When I think of Foley getting his nasty hands on my daddy’s business or my granddaddy’s houses, I could throttle him!” She clutched Katharine’s hand so hard, Katharine winced. Bara didn’t notice. “I tell you, Katharine, there are nights when I lie awake having very dark thoughts. If you ever hear that Foley Weidenauer has been beheaded, stabbed through the heart, or hung up by his thumbs in a deep dark dungeon and left to starve, you’ll know who did it.”
She hauled herself to her feet. “I’d better be going. Have to hang a few cobwebs in my dungeon. Let me know what you find out about the medals.”
“I’ll drive you,” Katharine offered.
“I can drive! You think I’m drunk? I can hold my liquor, just like Winnie.” She snatched up her purse and headed for the door. “Thanks for supper. I have lived more than sixty years and never knew how to make an omelet. Live and learn.”
Katharine watched her down the drive. The Jaguar moved slowly, but did not weave. She stood for an instant praying for both Bara and anyone she might meet on her way home.
The phone was ringing as she stepped inside. Tom was calling to say he’d arrived safely and was in his place. “What were you doing?”
“About to recycle your bourbon bottle.”
“You drank all that?” He was astonished. “You hate bourbon.”
“Your sudden absence has driven me to drink.” She paused long enough for him to wonder if it was true, then explained, “I had Bara Weidenauer over. She drank it.”
“Is she drinking again? I thought she’d given that up.”
“Apparently this mess with Foley started her again.”
“If she drank all my bourbon, is she passed out on the floor?”
“No, she is driving home as we speak. I’m praying she gets there.”
“What did she want? I didn’t know you knew Bara well enough to invite her to supper.”
“We’ve never been drinking buddies until today,” Katharine agreed, “but she’s in bad shape.” She filled him in on her evening.
“You aren’t thinking she’s been given to you, are you?” Tom was well acquainted with Katharine’s mother’s theory that certain people are given to us by God, to take care of for a season, but he was not a believer. “Don’t let her consume you. If she’s that needy…”
“She won’t,” Katharine said quickly. “She wasn’t given to me by God, she was thrust on me by Posey. I have no trouble distinguishing between the two. Besides, I have a party to get ready for, remember? All I’m going to do is check on these medals for her in my free bits of time. It shouldn’t take long, and it might be interesting.”
“I have an art book on bomber missions somewhere in the library. Try the fourth shelf from the top at the right. It might have information you can use.” Tom had a huge collection of books and an amazing memory for where every one of them was shelved. “It has paintings of some of the planes they flew.”
“I’ll check it out. Sleep well, hon. You’ll be home Friday?”
“Ought to be Thursday evening, with bells on.”
“I’ll be listening for them.”
With a smile she headed to her computer. She could finish the dishes in the morning. She wanted to see what she could find online about military medals.
Her first attempts yielded little. Ancestry.com, which had been so helpful in checking old census records, had few military records as recent as World War II. A simple search for “military medals” yielded a number of companies that wanted to sell her medals. Who knew you could buy a medal? But they had no useful information for Bara. Katharine read a Wikipedia article about the British military medal and an article that said the U.S. had little use for military medals before 1917, because they were reminiscent of European armies and their domination. None of that was any help, either.
By then it was very dark outside, and her house seemed big and empty. She went to look for Tom’s book and tucked it under one arm. Reaching down, she scratched Phebe under the chin. “Let’s call it a day, little kitty, and go upstairs to read in bed. I can try more sites in the morning. This isn’t a matter of life and death.”
Or so she thought at the time.
Chapter 10
Tuesday
Determined to finish with Bara’s request and get on with preparations for her party, Katharine went to her computer right after breakfast.
She got only a blank screen.
“You’re not but a month old,” she reminded the computer.
It still wouldn’t boot.
She checked the plug, made sure she hadn’t left a disk in the drive, and tried again. Nothing. She stared at it in frustration. Whom should she call?
“Nobody should let all their children leave home,” she muttered to Phebe, who was batting at dust motes in the hall. “You need to keep one at home to maintain the technology.”
She had a heartening thought. Morning in Georgia was evening in China, and any excuse to call Jon was a gift.
She fetched her cell phone, grateful that Tom had ignored her protests and invested in one that let her make international calls without breaking the budget.
“Hey, Mom.” He sounded so close. She pressed the phone to her ear. She missed him terribly, but being Jon, he swept away sentiment with a rush of practicality. “Can’t talk long. I’m heading out to a class on sword fighting. What’s up?”
“Sword fighting?” Katharine pictured him lying on a mat covered with blood. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s cool. We don’t use real swords yet, just sticks.”
Yet?
Katharine bit her tongue. Protests would have no effect. She might as well save her breath for prayer.
“I’ve got a problem with my new computer. It was fine last night, but today it won’t boot. I’ve tried several times, but get nothing. Is it possible to figure out what’s wrong without carrying the whole shebang back to where I bought it?”
“Sounds like it crashed. Call Kenny Todd. He went to Tech, but he hung out with one of my roommates. He’s a computer genius and he’s still in the area, working for Google. I’ve got his work number here.” He rattled it off. “Tell him I told you to call. He’ll fix you up. Now I gotta go.” He was gone before she could say goodbye.
She cradled the phone in her hand a few seconds longer, trying to absorb the fact that only seconds ago it had connected her to China. China was the other side of the world, the place you ended up if you dug a hole deep enough. Why had she ever let Jon go so far from home?
As if she could have stopped him. He had jumped at the chance to teach English for a couple of years—although given his own casual approach to the language, Katharine wondered what kind of English his students were learning.
She sent up a prayer for protection from sticks and swords as she dialed the number.
“Hello. This is Kenny Todd.” He had such a strong North Georgia twang that he gave the greeting three syllables, lifting the word in the middle, and pronounced his name Kinny Ta-ahhd.”
“I’m Katharine Murray. My son, Jon–”
“Has something happened to Jon?”
She loved him instantly for his concern. “Oh, no, it’s my computer. It’s new, but it seems to have crashed. I called Jon—he’s in China—”
“Yes, ma’am, I know. We e-mail all the time. He seems to be having hisself a fine old time over there on the other side of the world.” Listening to his light laugh, she wondered what Jon told his friends that he did not tell his parents.
“He may be,” she agreed dubiously, “but meanwhile, I have a dead computer and he says you are a computer genius. Do you think you could possibly come look at it for me and see if you can tell what’s the matter? It’s practically new, and if I have to take it back, I will, but I’d hate to go to all that trouble if it’s merely a little something. I’ll be glad to pay whatever you charge.”
“No problem. Can it wait until this evening, though? Say around six? I have to work.” He said it with the pride of a man holding down his first paying job.
“Six would be great. Do you know where we live?”
“Somewhere up in Buckhead is all I know.”
She gave him directions and he repeated them. She hoped he was also writing them down. “I’ll see you at six,” he promised, and rang off.
Rosa arrived at nine to clean. While she worked, Katharine went out to tutor a child, had lunch with a friend, and got home mid-afternoon, as Hollis was riding in beside a stalwart young man with purple streaks in his bleached hair. “This is Dalton,” she greeted her aunt. “We’ve come to hang your living-room drapery.”
Dalton looked at his feet and didn’t say a word.
Hollis perched on the piano bench and watched. Dalton climbed the ladder and hung the drapery Hollis had designed and sewn.
“They are marvelous,” Katharine said honestly. “I am impressed.”
Hollis shrugged, her usual response to a compliment. “Dalton is coming back tomorrow morning to hang your pictures.”
“Not tomorrow. Thursday.” The words came out like a rusty hinge. Katharine wasn’t sure who was more surprised to hear the young man speak, herself or Dalton.
“Thursday,” Hollis agreed. “Dalton has to build sets tomorrow. Have you decided where you want all the pictures to go?”
“I’m working on it,” Katharine hedged.
“You haven’t given it a thought. Admit it, Aunt Kat! You’ve been lolling around eating bonbons and reading trashy novels again. That’s all she does,” she added in an aside to Dalton.
He shuffled his feet, obviously uncertain whether to laugh or believe her.
When he’d gone, Hollis said, “He’s shy as can be, but sweet, and he’s amazing when it comes to building sets. Give the man a hammer and he can work a miracle.” She looked around in satisfaction. “As soon as the furniture arrives, that’s the downstairs almost finished.”
Katharine wished Posey could see her daughter at that moment, cheeks flushed with pride. Hollis looked like she had at three, before she had realized she would never measure up in her mother’s eyes to her two big sisters.
One word, however, caught Katharine’s attention. “Almost? I thought we were done.”
“You need some stuff sitting around. Decorative accessories.”
When Katharine still didn’t respond, Hollis said impatiently, “You know—plates, figurines, little bits of art—stuff like you had before.” Hollis encompassed the entire downstairs in one sweep of her arm. “Can you go shopping with me tomorrow?”
Katharine’s eyes roamed the room. For an instant she saw it as it used to be, dotted with mementoes from special people and trips she and Tom had taken around the world. She remembered the bright sunny day in Algiers when they had bought the Islamic prayer rug, the rain pounding outside a London antique shop as they chose the Toby jug for the mantelpiece, the wind that had blown them into the Dublin hole-in-the wall where Tom found the Celtic cross of green marble that used to sit on the chest between the front windows.
She had to clear her throat to get rid of a frog. “That stuff, as you so elegantly describe it, either came from friends and relatives or took us twenty-five years to collect. We can’t replace it in one day’s shopping.”
“No, but we need to get something to fill the space until you buy other stuff at your leisure. Otherwise the place is going to look like some model home a developer is trying to sell.”
“Let’s have a Coke and think that over,” Katharine suggested. “You’ve already been doing too much this afternoon.”
When they were seated at the table with Cokes before them, Hollis asked, “So is it okay if I come around eleven tomorrow so we can go shopping? And is it possible to get the painter out this week to change the color in that one upstairs bedroom?” Seeing her aunt’s expression, she sighed. “Too bad. It really is the wrong blue, so there’s no point in putting up the curtains or the spreads on the beds. They’d clash horribly. And if we close the door, nosy people are going to open it to take a peek. How about locking the door?”
“We’ll need the bathroom off that room,” Katharine reminded her. “And so what if folks see one bedroom unfinished? The point of the party isn’t to show off our house.”
“I’d like to have gotten the whole thing done before the party.” Hollis had the wistful look of an artist required to display a not-quite-finished painting.
“You and I have both worked as hard as we possibly could. Let’s call it a day.”
“Can you shop tomorrow afternoon?”
Katharine repressed a groan. She loathed shopping. Still, it would soon be over. “If I can persuade you not to drag me to every gift boutique in town lo
oking for the perfect stuff. At the moment, I need to comb my hair. I’ve got somebody coming over.”
Hollis called after her as Katharine headed to the powder room, “Who’s coming?” From her too-casual tone, she suspected her aunt of entertaining a string of men while Tom was away.
“A friend of Jon’s who went to Tech and apparently knows a lot about computers. His name is Kenny Todd.”
“Eeew!”
“You know him?”
“Unfortunately.”
Katharine stepped out of the powder room to ask, “This from a woman who dates men with blue hair?”
Hollis looked like she had swallowed an exceptionally sour pickle. “Kenny is a hick from the mountains of North Georgia. I hope you can understand a word he says. Don’t let him track straw all over your carpets.” She drained her Coke with one long swallow. “I’d better go. I don’t want to be here when he arrives.”
Too late. The doorbell rang.
Katharine was surprised at Hollis’s expression. Was that dislike? It looked more like panic.
She went to answer with a frown of puzzlement. Hollis was generally the defender of the poor, outcast, and downtrodden. She had never, so far as her aunt could remember, ever made fun of anybody less fortunate than she. What did she know about Kenny Todd that Katharine didn’t?
Chapter 11
Having entertained Jon’s friends for years, Katharine knew what to expect: a long, lanky male in cut-off jeans, baggy T-shirt, long hair, and scuffed shoes without socks. None of Jon’s friends seemed to own socks.
The young man on her doorstep was not much taller than she, and dressed like a tycoon. He wore khaki slacks with a sharp crease, a white shirt, and a navy blazer with a power tie. His yellow hair was cut so short she could see pink scalp. His brown loafers glowed with polish. Only the red Mustang behind him looked like something that might belong to a friend of Jon’s: it dated from Katharine’s youth, and even though the state was in the worst drought of the century, the car had been polished until it gleamed.
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