Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “But the family has sold the house, and it closes Friday. They want the place empty by then. So we’ll take a thousand.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  I went out to the garage to look at the rest of the Heywood-Wakefield. It was truly wonderful, with big rounded arms and backs and tabletops of varnished blond wood. I could picture it in a beach house, the cushions covered, maybe in a reproduction bark cloth with big palm fronds and caladium leaves. I know a woman who lives out at Spanish Hammock, she calls herself Tacky Jacky, and she does upholstery and slipcovers at the best rates in town.

  A beach house. That gave me an idea. The rattan would be too expensive to buy and expect to make a profit on, but it would be perfect for a certain Tybee Island beach shack.

  I flipped my cell phone open and called directory assistance for Daniel’s number.

  “It’s Weezie,” I said. “Were you serious about having me buy furniture for your beach house?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Did you find something already?”

  “Maybe. A set of rattan furniture. For your living room. You’d have to have the cushions re-covered, but I know somebody who can do that for you. There’s even a bar. It’s very cool. Very forties-looking.”

  “Go for it,” he said. “If you like it, I’ll like it.”

  “Don’t you want to know how much?”

  “I trust you,” Daniel said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Worrying about my mother,” I said. “She’s run away from home.”

  “Screw that,” Daniel said. “I’ll pick you up at six. OK? Just casual. Shorts and sneakers.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “See you at six.”

  The cashier was still paring his nails when I got back to the living room. I’d been mulling over my approach. The rattan was good, and a thousand dollars was a fair price, but I had a gut feeling I could get it cheaper. After all, he only had two days to empty the house, and dealers weren’t exactly crawling over the place.

  “I like the rattan,” I said, flashing the dealer a smile. “But the price is a little steep if I’m going to turn it around.”

  He shrugged and kept working on his nails.

  “How about if I leave a bid?” I asked.

  “You could do that,” he said. He scrabbled around on the table until he found a green-lined steno pad, and turned to a blank page.

  I scribbled away, making a bid of $750 and listing my name and number.

  “When will you let me know?” I asked.

  “Pretty soon. I’ll talk to the family and see what they say.”

  Chapter 43

  I stopped at my parents’ house on the way back into town. I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, scowling down at a pamphlet.

  “Hey, Daddy,” I said, landing a kiss on the top of his head. “Did Mama come home with you?”

  “No. She says she’s not ready to come home yet. But she did let us in the house. And the three of us had a long talk.”

  “Is she going to get help?”

  He put the pamphlet down and took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his shirt. The pamphlet was called “Family Response to Alcoholism.”

  “She says she will,” Daddy said. “We’ll have to wait and see. We’re going to go over and talk to this friend of James’s who works at Candler-St. Joe’s tomorrow. Marian promised she would go and at least hear what they have to say.”

  For the first time, I noticed that Daddy had changed recently, and not for the better. His once brown hair had gone to gray while I wasn’t looking. His once cheerful face suddenly looked like unset pudding. And for the first time in my life, I saw that Daddy didn’t look taken care of.

  His thick-rimmed glasses were held together with a Band-Aid, his short-sleeved sport shirt needed pressing, his pants were faded and shrunken, and most shocking of all, his black lace-up brogans needed polishing.

  Once upon a time, Mama would never have let Daddy walk around looking the way he did now. But this was not something my father would talk about. It would seem disloyal to Mama, and he would have no part in criticizing her.

  “Mama agreed to go,” I said, seizing on the positive. “And she let you in the house. And she admits now that she is an alcoholic?”

  Daddy rubbed his eyes again. “No,” he said. “She won’t admit that at all.”

  “She doesn’t think she has a drinking problem?”

  “She says we’re picking on her,” Daddy said. “The only reason she has agreed to go talk to these people is so that they will tell us that she is not an alcoholic.”

  “But Daddy, she is. She gets drunk near about every day. She has for years now. And it’s getting worse.”

  “I know, sweetheart,” he said. “I know it and you know it and James knows it. He says Marian is in denial. But we have to start somewhere. So that’s what we’ll do.”

  “She hates me,” I said. “This divorce of mine has been her undoing.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “That’s the liquor talking. And the denial thing. She loves you more than anything in the world. But she’s hurt and upset, and she’s scared to death of going back to a hospital. We have to be patient with her.”

  “Why won’t she come home?” I asked.

  “She says she’s tired of people spying on her. Truth is, I think she’s ashamed to face us, now that it’s out in the open,” Daddy said. “She knows the drinking has gotten out of hand, and she feels bad about letting us down.”

  I nodded, looking around the kitchen. Like Daddy, the house had seen better days. The café curtains hung limp and greasy at windows that hadn’t been washed in months. There were fingerprints on the refrigerator and dirty dishes in the sink, and the floor was feeling gummy. Why hadn’t I noticed any of this? Waxy yellow buildup on Marian Foley’s kitchen floor? That should have been a red alert that something was bad wrong with Mama.

  I put my pocketbook on the kitchen table and went to the sink, getting out the mop bucket and the Spic and Span.

  “What are you up to now?” Daddy asked.

  “Setting things right,” I said, running hot sudsy water in the sink. “So Mama can come home again.”

  “I’ll help,” Daddy said, getting up heavily from his chair. I watched speechlessly as he opened the cupboard and got out the broom and dustpan. Never, not once in my entire life, had I ever seen my father do a lick of housework. I couldn’t believe he even knew where the broom was, let alone how to use it.

  He saw my amazed expression and gave me a wink. “Never too late to try something new, is it?”

  “No sir,” I said.

  I had one more stop to make on my way home. It was a little lingerie boutique on Whitaker Street downtown. I’d passed the place hundreds of times before and never stopped. Now I slipped guiltily inside the carved wooden door, hoping nobody passing by would see me.

  My excuse was that I really needed a new bra, since Cousin Alice had swiped mine. Really though, I was browsing for more of a new me.

  My days of white cotton were over. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it—a black lace over blond bra with matching silk panties that reminded me of the negligee Lana Turner wore in an old pinup poster from the 1940s. My size, my new style, and together it made a ninety-dollar hole in my shop money. I bit my lip and paid cash. The salesgirl took her time wrapping it in peach tissue and then a peach shopping bag tied with peach chiffon ribbon, when all I wanted to do was grab and go.

  At home I took a quick shower and dressed in pale yellow linen shorts and a matching linen top. I painted my toenails—just because. It had been a gritty, gruesome day. I was ready for red toenail polish…and the most expensive undies I’d ever owned.

  Daniel rang the doorbell just as I was coming downstairs. He looked me up and down. “Aren’t you kind of dressed up for crabbing?”

  “You never said we were going crabbing,” I pointed out. “You said shorts.”

  “Not nice shorts.”r />
  “I don’t wear grubby clothes when I go out on dates,” I said, starting to do a slow burn. Why did he have that effect on me?

  “You look great,” he relented, “but don’t blame me if your clothes get ruined.”

  I gave him a look and went back upstairs and threw grubby cutoffs and a T-shirt in a tote bag, along with a pair of beat-up sneakers.

  “Let’s go,” he said, yanking me out the door. “We’ll miss the tide.”

  The next thing I knew, we were in the middle of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, which crosses over the Savannah River and divides Georgia from South Carolina.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, slightly alarmed.

  “Bluffton.” He glanced over to see if I would object. “It’s the only way I can pry you away from your family and your dog and your ex-husband.”

  I looked down at the slow-moving brown water of the Savannah River. “Are you transporting me across state lines for immoral purposes?”

  “I sincerely hope so,” he said. “A buddy of mine has a house with a dock on the May River, and I’ve got the use of it while I’m on vacation this week.”

  “I can’t go to Bluffton for a week.”

  “I’ve got the house for the week, not you,” he said. “I just thought you might like to see it. It’s kind of junky, like you seem to like. We’ll have a little dinner, go crabbing, maybe go for a swim afterward.”

  “You didn’t say anything about a bathing suit,” I pointed out.

  “Must have slipped my mind,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “I’ll bet.”

  It started raining just as we reached the South Carolina side of the bridge. The rain came slow at first, and steam boiled up off the sunbaked pavement. July had been bonedry, but now it was getting to be prime hurricane season. The sky darkened and the rain came down harder, quickly flooding the low-country roadway.

  Daniel turned up the volume on the radio to drown out the sound of the rain. He had it tuned to his favorite oldies station again.

  They were playing “Summer Rain,” an old Johnny Rivers number that I remembered from long years ago, when I’d gone to sleep-away camp and had a counselor who was lonesome for her boyfriend back home, and who played that song over and over at night after lights out.

  Daniel hummed along with the music, and I watched the marshland flash by in a rich green streak, punctuated here and there by a fireworks store or a tomato stand.

  He slowed the truck as we came into the town limits of Bluffton, and pointed at a small strip shopping center on the right. “Ever been in there?”

  I looked where he was pointing. Half the shopping center had been given over to a place called La Juntique. Chairs and tables and dressers lined the sidewalk in front of the place.

  “No,” I said, craning my neck to get a better look. “Is it any good?”

  “I’ve never been there,” he said. “You want to take a look?”

  This was something new. A man offering to stop at an antique store instead of speeding by, as Talmadge Evans would have done.

  “Is there a catch?” I asked, looking at him suspiciously.

  “I’m just trying to be nice,” he said. “Can’t a guy be nice?”

  “You want something.”

  The grin again. “Yes.”

  “I’m guessing it’s not my cheesecake recipe,” I said.

  “Maybe later.”

  Chapter 44

  True to its name, La Juntique was mostly junk, with just enough antiques scattered around on the shelves and cabinets to keep me browsing.

  Daniel followed me through the narrow aisles of the shop, studying me as I studied the merchandise. “What’s that?” he’d ask as I picked up a pressed-glass fruit compote or a Victorian beadwork pillow. “Is it any good?”

  He was starting to wear on my nerves. Maybe it had been a good thing that Tal avoided junking with me.

  At the back of the shop was a large roped-off area. A cardboard sign taped to the back of a chair said “No Admittance. Employees Only.”

  A jumble of stuff; furniture, boxes overflowing with packing paper, wooden crates full of dusty books and old record albums, took up most of the space. Standing out like a diamond in a can of tenpenny nails was a small, square table.

  It was made of cherry, with neatly tapered legs and a top inlaid with ebony.

  I stopped and stared. Daniel was breathing down my neck. “Are you ready to go yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said, stepping over the rope.

  “The sign says No Admittance,” Daniel said. “Come on, Weezie. You want to get arrested again?”

  I squatted down on the concrete floor and poked my head underneath the table. I ran my fingers over the dusty tabletop.

  “What’s so special about that table?” Daniel asked, looking around for the armed guards he obviously expected to descend upon us at any minute.

  “It’s an Empire card table,” I said. “The nicest one I’ve ever seen. That’s what I thought the last time I saw it.”

  “Huh?”

  “At Beaulieu,” I said, walking slowly around the table to get a look at it from all sides. “This table came out of Beaulieu. I’m positive of it.”

  I went up to the front of the shop, where a young woman of about eighteen sat concentrating on the latest issue of People magazine.

  She looked up at me. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “There’s a table back there that I’m interested in,” I said, pointing toward the back of the shop. “But it isn’t priced.”

  She chewed her gum. “You’ll have to talk to the owner.”

  “All right,” I said pleasantly. “Where is she?”

  “At home.”

  “Can you call her?”

  “I guess.”

  She put the magazine down and picked up a cell phone.

  “Liz? It’s Catharine. There’s a lady here with a question about a table.”

  “Tell her it’s the Empire card table,” I said. “In the employee area.”

  The girl frowned at that, but repeated it.

  She listened and hung up the phone. “The owner says to tell you that table is not for sale.” She looked at me accusingly. “You weren’t supposed to be back there. It’s private.”

  “Call the owner back, please,” I said.

  “Weezie,” Daniel tugged at my elbow. “She told you it’s not for sale.”

  “I just want to talk to her,” I said. “To ask her where it came from.”

  The cashier rolled her eyes, but she punched in the number again. “I told her that table wasn’t for sale, but now she wants to talk to you.” She handed the phone to me.

  “This is Liz Fuller,” the woman said, her voice annoyed. “As Catharine explained, the card table is already sold.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But I was wondering where the table came from. It’s really an exceptional piece. Do you know anything about the provenance?”

  “No. I bought it from one of my pickers because I have a customer who was looking for a piece of that description.”

  “But it’s Empire,” I said. “And it’s really exquisite. Surely you know something about it. What’s the picker’s name? I’m a picker myself, and I’d be interested in seeing anything else that might have come out of the same house.”

  “I never share my resources,” Liz Fuller said. And she hung up.

  “Anything else?” the girl asked, smirking.

  I took a business card out of my pocketbook and scribbled a note on the back, then handed it to the girl. “Give that to the owner when she comes in,” I said. And I turned and stomped out of the store.

  Daniel caught up with me at the truck. “What’s with you?”

  I looked down along the shop fronts in the strip center and saw that there was another antique shop at the far end.

  “That table came out of Beaulieu. I saw it the night I was there, when I found Caroline. They canceled the estate sale, and supposedly it’s been re-scheduled
for this weekend. But I’ve been hearing rumors that the best pieces from the estate have already been sold off.”

  “So?”

  “I told you about that cupboard, the Moses Weed. I need to know who is selling off those pieces from Beaulieu. If I knew that, I could approach them before the sale about buying the Moses Weed cupboard.”

  “Can’t you just wait until Saturday?”

  “I’m not the only one interested in the cupboard. There’s a big-deal antique dealer, Lewis Hargreaves. He’s interested in it too. And the rumor is that he’s already bought some pieces from Beaulieu. I want to get to the Moses Weed piece before he does. If it’s not too late.”

  “What did you write on your business card?”

  “Just that I’d be willing to pay a finder’s fee for information about who sold her the card table.”

  “Will that work?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Dealers can be very closemouthed about this kind of stuff. They want to protect their sources, and the names of their pickers, to keep the best stuff for themselves.”

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked. “The rain’s stopped. We can still get some crabbing in before it gets dark.”

  He saw the direction I was looking in.

  “Just one more shop? Just a quick look-see?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to get the coals going for dinner.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  The shop was called Annie’s Attic. Looking through the window, I could see it was a fussy little place, full of crystal and porcelain, with lots of frilly pseudo-Victorian reproduction pieces mixed in with candles and soaps and high-priced teddy bears and dolls. It was really not my kind of place at all…But I wasn’t about to give up another fifteen minutes of junking.

  The shop smelled like cinnamon potpourri. The displays were the opposite of La Juntique’s. Everything in Annie’s Attic was organized and displayed on pristine glass shelves lined with paper lace doilies.

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “Now what’s wrong?” Daniel asked.