Daughter of Deceit

by Patricia Sprinkle

  She picked up the iron skillet from the floor and tried to scrape out the dried egg. After a futile two minutes, she hurled the skillet into the trash compacter and reached for a stainless-steel one. She turned the gas on high and stood over the burner while the chop fried, flipping it every few seconds to be sure neither side burned. The meat was eventually hard on the outside and pink inside, but edible.

  The cantaloupe, on the other hand, turned out to be full of slime and seeds. Annoyed at having wasted money on the rotten thing, she scraped out the disgusting part and tried the rest. It tasted exactly like it was supposed to. She ate dinner standing at the kitchen counter: the entire cantaloupe, her chop, and a glass of water. Not a bad supper.

  Feeling virtuous, she tossed the dishes into a sink overflowing with glasses, mugs, bowls, and spoons, and cursed Foley for firing her staff.

  Her eye lit on the case of liquor sitting on the counter. She couldn’t remember putting it there. Had it miraculously appeared in her kitchen to tempt her?

  She leaned against the counter and eyed it judiciously. Four thirty, and she had not had a drink all day. She felt euphoric. Healthy, even. She could lick this thing! She had done it before.

  But she felt the liquor calling her. To distract herself, she picked up the old envelope she had found Monday morning. She couldn’t remember bringing it into the house, or if she had opened it again since she’d found it. She dumped it out and pawed through the contents.

  Her old report cards she set to one side to burn the next time she lit a fire. She browsed through her old letters and found that her worst fears were true. They were inane, often little more than a request for money. “I’m sorry I didn’t write more often,” she murmured to Winnie, wherever he was.

  The clippings were mostly about her. Seven years old, dancing with Winnie at a ball. Ten years old, standing stiffly beside Nettie at some function, pouring tea. Gads, how she had hated that dress! At sixteen, winning a track meet. “I was as fast as the wind,” she boasted aloud. Most of the others were pictures of Winnie with various committees. One—presumably the oldest, since it was yellow and brittle—pictured a foreigner who was missing in Atlanta. It asked readers with information about the man, to call the paper. Bara could not imagine why Winnie had kept it.

  She shoved the clippings and letters back into the envelope and picked up Winnie’s driver’s licenses. Discarding those too old to have pictures on them, she held the most recent and looked at the dear, familiar face. It shimmered and shifted under the fluorescent light, and became the face of a man she no longer trusted.

  “Why did I open that cigar box?” She slammed the license down on the counter. “Just like Pandora, I should have left well enough alone.”

  She was reaching for the locket when the telephone rang.

  “I’m in the driveway,” Foley announced. “We need to talk. Open the garage door and let me come in.”

  “Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin.” The line from the “Three Little Pigs” came as an automatic response to his last words. She hadn’t thought of it before, but Foley looked a lot like the Big Bad Wolf in a book she’d had as a kid.

  “Seriously. I need to talk to you. Let me in.”

  “You hit me!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I got a little out of control. It won’t happen again. Let me in.”

  She unlocked the back door, disarmed the security system, and pushed the button to raise his garage door. He parked his black Mercedes, climbed out, and followed her inside.

  “Look,” he said, setting his briefcase on the counter, “we got a call from the folks who want to buy the firm. We have to make a decision by tomorrow afternoon. I need your shares.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Convince me to vote them the way you want.”

  “I don’t want your vote, I want the shares. Then I’ll move out this weekend and leave you everything—both houses, the investments, your precious car.”

  She was tempted. If she had been drinking she might have agreed. If Winnie hadn’t raised her to look every business deal over carefully—every business deal except marriage, she thought ruefully—she might have agreed. But she was cold sober and she didn’t like the look in Foley’s eye.

  “I’ll have to think about it. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no time to think. I need you to sign them over to me now.”

  “No deal.”

  Before she saw it coming, he’d done a one-two punch to her face and her stomach, smack in the middle of her pork chop and cantaloupe. A rush of hot liquid spewed from her mouth and down his tailor-made suit.

  He drew back, disgusted, and swore as he grabbed a paper towel and started wiping his jacket and silk tie.

  While he was distracted, she grabbed a long knife from the butcher block on the counter. “Get out of here. Get out!” She could scarcely breathe and she hurt bad, but she would kill him if she had to. She would not be beaten up by another man.

  He looked at the knife and at the mess down his once-immaculate front. “I warn you. This is all-out war. You needn’t expect any sympathy from me after this.” He picked up the briefcase he’d set on the counter and headed for the door to the basement.

  “So what’s new?” she shouted after him, then hurried to lock the deadbolt.

  Back in the kitchen, the shiny bottles drew her like a magnet. She hurt so bad, and she was so thirsty! She felt physically pulled toward the nearest bottle. A longing. A yearning. A sick hollow in the pit of herself that only a drink could fill.

  “I deserve a little one, after all I’ve been through,” she informed an invisible jury. “I’ve been very good today.”

  Yet even as she poured half a glass of bourbon and threw it down her throat like unpleasant medicine, she was filled with self-loathing. “That’s all I needed,” she pleaded with the universe. “Just one. I’ll go up now and have a little nap before AA.”

  As she headed for the stairs, she didn’t notice she was carrying a bottle in each hand.

  Her bedroom was on the front of the house, facing east, and a big oak grew outside the window. By late afternoon the room was dim. She switched on all the lights to cheer her spirits. It had been a hell of a day. A hell of a week. She sat on the side of her bed and looked at the bottles she had placed on her nightstand. “I overdid it yesterday, but right now, all I need is one more drink to help me relax. I need sleep so badly. Just a couple of hours, then I’ll get up and go to the damned meeting.”

  She finished both bottles and fell across her bed, fully clothed.

  Bara didn’t know what woke her. She’d been having the dream again: two big men standing in her doorway, coming for her. She had been terrified. She had run and run, the big heart thump, thump, thumping against her chest, but then she heard a loud noise and froze. What was that?

  A moment later she knew she was awake, but she was still terrified. Why?

  She tried to turn over and drag the duvet over her head, but rolled off her bed onto the floor. Startled, she clutched the silky cover to pull herself up. The whole duvet slid off the bed and piled on top of her. That was good. The room was too bright anyway. Why were all the lights on? What time was it? She crimped her eyes and peered at the clock. Nine fifty. Morning or evening?

  Beyond the windows, the sky was black. Evening, then. So why were her drapes open? The maid knew she liked her drapes drawn at dusk.

  She pulled the thick cover over her head and lay surrounded by soft darkness, her cheek sinking into the carpet’s deep pile. She was so comfortable. Maybe she would lie there until she died. How long would that take?

  “I got nothing better to do.” Her voice was slurred even to her own ears. “Got nothing better to do for the rest of my life than lie here and die.”

  She pulled her knees toward her chest in her favorite sleeping posture as a child.

  Her stomach cramped. With the pain came memory—fuzzy, but memory. Foley had punched her. Hard.
With the memory came rage. “Damn you, Foley!” she muttered, shifting one hand to press against her sore abdomen. “You could have busted my spleen. I could kill you. I could kill you!”

  Rage fueled her muscles. She shook off the comforter like a dog shedding water. Pain throbbed in her stomach and face, and she realized she was seeing with only her right eye. She reached up to the left one. It was swollen shut.

  “You’ve done it this time, buster!” she warned. “First thing in the morning, I’m calling the cops and swearing out a restraining order. I’ll make them take pictures, too.” All the things she had refused to do while married to Ray. Back then she had still thought it was all her fault.

  She pulled herself to her knees by holding on to the rail of the bed. The room, full of unnecessary brightness, swam around and around. She closed her good eye and rested her cheek on the mattress until the dizziness lessened. She hauled herself to her feet and stood until she was steady, then staggered around switching off all the lights except her bedside lamp. She lurched into the bathroom and was royally sick in the toilet. After she rinsed her mouth, she pressed a cold washcloth to her brow. Only then did she dare confront the mirror.

  “Hag!” She leaned near to examine the swollen, dark eye and to trace a red mark on her cheek with one forefinger.

  If only her memory weren’t so muddy.

  “Old age,” she muttered.

  She remembered fixing supper and Foley coming in from work. They had talked. What had they talked about? She couldn’t remember. He hit her. She remembered that. She just didn’t remember why.

  How had she gotten up the stairs to bed?

  She stumbled back into the bedroom to check out the scene. Two fifths of bourbon stood on her night stand, empty. Rare Breed, the kind Foley bought. Had she taken it? Was that why he’d hit her?

  She couldn’t remember. “I musta needed a little something to forget,” she consoled herself.

  What was that noise? Thumps. Sounded like it came from downstairs.

  Had she locked the doors and armed the security system before she came up?

  “Everybody in town has a key. I gotta set the security system.” She headed for the hall.

  At the top of the stairs she saw that the front door wasn’t even shut. Had somebody already gotten in? Where was that gun? Had she left it on the dining-room table? Could she reach it before somebody else did?

  The next day, she would not be able to remember.

  Katharine flipped on the television at eleven to watch the rest of the news in case something had happened that Tom would mention later and think she ought to know.

  In the middle of a report that Tropical Storm Auguste was pounding the Northeast with strong winds and torrential rain, the anchor’s face appeared. “We interrupt the weather to bring you a tragic breaking story. Foley Weidenauer, CEO of Holcomb and Associates, has been shot and killed this evening in his Buckhead home. Bara Weidenauer, his wife, has been rushed to Piedmont Hospital with severe injuries. We’ll have more on this story as information becomes available. Stay tuned.”

  Katharine sank into her pillows, scarcely able to breathe. Surely this had nothing to do with Bara’s medals. How could it?

  She watched until the news was over, but the only additional information was that the houses were too far apart for neighbors to have heard or seen anything. Katharine could have told them that.

  What she could not have told anyone was why she felt so guilty.

  Chapter 22

  Friday

  Katharine’s night was full of uneasy dreams interspersed with wakeful periods during which she worried about and prayed for Bara. She told herself repeatedly the tragedy had nothing to do with the medals, but guilt hovers close in the dark. Not until dawn did she sink into a dreamless sleep. When the phone rang, she grabbed the receiver with an absolute conviction that any caller at that hour had dreadful news about some member of her family.

  “Yeah?” she managed through frozen vocal cords. She eyed the clock. Eight o’clock. Her muzzy brain sorted through the days of the week and came up with Friday.

  Posey was immediately contrite. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you something I heard on the news. Foley Weidenauer has been shot and Bara is at—”

  “Piedmont. I know.” Katharine stifled a yawn. “I heard it on the TV last night. It is awful. You’re right.” In spite of that, she yearned to cocoon herself in her sheets and sleep another couple of hours.

  “Why didn’t you call me as soon as you heard?” Posey demanded.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  Sarcasm rolled off Posey like oil off Teflon. “Next time, do.”

  Katharine considered saying Foley wouldn’t have a next time and she hoped Bara wouldn’t, either, but it was easier to say, “I will. Do they know who did it?”

  “Not yet. They said the usual stuff about anybody having information please call the police. Maybe you ought to call them.”

  “I don’t have any information.”

  “Payne called Lolly yesterday and said lots of women are no longer speaking to Bara—and probably not to Payne, either—because of what you said. Maybe one of them killed Foley.”

  Indignation shot through Katharine and jolted her awake. “I didn’t say a thing. All I did was print out a citation her daddy got with his Medal of Honor.” Irritated out of sleep, she sat up and shoved back the cover.

  “We ought to go over to the hospital for at least a little while. Lolly won’t be able to go until she gets the twins off to school.”

  “You go. I scarcely know Payne, and she’ll have lots of friends there, I’m sure.”

  Posey ignored the last half of the sentence. “Of course you know her. She and Lolly roomed together at Vanderbilt, and they’re both Tri-Delts, remember?”

  Posey was a Tri-Delt, her mother had been a Tri-Delt, her grandmother had probably been a Tri-Delt. In the South, the sorority is practically a family legacy. It also forges a mystical bond among women of all generations. Posey’s mother used to tell how, in the thirties, as a college student she had been traveling in England and lost her return ticket. On the wharf, panicked, she had seen a Tri-Delt pin on an elderly woman’s collar. “I put out my hand and said, ‘Brenau.’ She said, ‘Ole Miss,’ and she bought me a ticket home.”

  “I can see why you ought to go over,” Katharine agreed, “but I’m not a Tri-Delt and I scarcely know Payne, so I can’t see one reason why I ought to go. Besides, if she blames me for what happened, I’m the last person she’ll want to see.”

  “She doesn’t blame you, exactly. And you could apologize.”

  “Apologize for what?” Hours spent reminding herself that she had no reason to feel guilty erupted into frustration. “You were the one who insisted I research those medals. You were the one who told Bara I could find out what her father earned them for. That’s exactly what I did and all I did. Maybe you ought to apologize.”

  “What I heard at aerobics yesterday afternoon was that you told Bara that Nettie was sleeping with half the men in Buckhead while Winnie was at war.”

  “I said no such thing! I printed out one citation from the Internet, the one for Winnie’s Medal of Honor. It said that he was wounded in December 1944 and sent home in February 1945. Since Bara was born in September 1945, she herself concluded that Winnie could not have been her birth father.”

  “That’s all you did?”

  “That’s all.”

  Posey paused again to mull that over. “Maybe he flew home for some quick R&R. He was a pilot. Or maybe one of his pals flew Nettie over there. You’re sure you didn’t imply that poor Nettie…”

  “I didn’t imply a thing. But the soldiers were fighting a war, Posey, not flitting across the Atlantic for conjugal visits.”

  “Oh. Then it almost had to be Nettie and somebody around here, didn’t it? I wonder who?”

  After Bara’s histrionics, Katharine suspected a lot of other people were wondering the same thin
g. “I can’t see what any of this has to do with Bara getting shot, can you?”

  “She wasn’t shot, she was beaten up. Why did you think she was shot?”

  “Last night’s news said Foley had been shot and she was taken to the hospital with severe injuries. I presumed…”

  “No, he was shot and she was beaten. They think somebody came in and beat her up, Foley interrupted him, and whoever it was shot him.”

  “And you think Bara upset someone badly enough these past two days for them to want to beat her? That’s ridiculous. Any candidate for her birth father would have to be well over eighty. I have a hard time seeing anybody that age waltzing in at ten o’clock at night to beat her, don’t you?”

  Even as she said it, Katharine remembered that during the summer she had encountered two other men well up in years who had still been capable of inflicting violence on others. Surely they were the exceptions.

  Posey didn’t think so. “They could if they were upset enough. But I don’t really think the killer was anybody from Buckhead. Those kinds of people don’t live in our neighborhood. Probably somebody on drugs or something. And I still think we need to go sit with Payne, at least for a little while.”

  “You go. She won’t want to see me.”

  “I’ve got a little problem.” Posey hesitated, then spoke in a rush. “I was on my way to aerobics when I heard the news, and I got so upset, I went a tad fast around a corner, ran off the curb, and hit a tree. My front fender has a teeny little dent and the engine is making a funny clunk clunk, so I don’t think I ought to drive it, do you? I’ve called Triple A to come tow it to the dealer’s, but could you come get me? I’ll take you to breakfast at the OK Café afterward. Don’t tell Tom if you talk to him, though—he’d tell Wrens, and I’d hate for Wrens to worry.”