by JOAN HESSS
“And to me, too,” Ellie chirped, clapping her hands. “I’m having a terrible time with insomnia.”
“You sleep in your bed, too?” Phoebe permitted herself a small smile, then sat down beside Pauline and began to talk quietly with her. Ellie scowled but said nothing.
Maxie went to the cart and poured herself a glass of sherry. She then noticed yours truly, who’d been trying to hide in the upholstery in case the cozy reunion escalated from verbiage to violence. “You must be Cousin Carlton’s widow,” she said, studying me as if I were a potential arsonist. “I’m Maxine Rutherford Malloy-Frazier.”
“I’m Claire,” I admitted.
“It’s so nice of you to visit after all these years. It must mean so much to Miss Justicia to finally meet you. What a shame you wouldn’t come while Carlton was still alive. Are you interested in genealogy?” Before I could manufacture a reply, she continued. “I’ve done extensive work on the family’s genealogical charts for inclusion in the parish historical society’s files. Are you aware we are in direct descendancy from the Mayflower, and that William Malloy opened one of the first blacksmith shops in the Colonies in 1623?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
“Furthermore, your daughter is entitled to membership in the Mayflower Society, should she provide verification to the proper authorities.”
“Mother’s on the national board,” Phoebe said from across the room.
With a deprecatory laugh, Maxie paused to pat her hair, although every strand was lacquered into position and would have handily resisted a tornado. “It’s true that I have a certain amount of influence with the organization. That is not to say, however, that you yourself qualify unless you can trace your lineage independently. Our guidelines are quite strict about those who try to sneak in on another family’s lineage.”
“As well they should be,” I murmured. “Sneaking in like that would make a debacle of the organization.”
Phoebe took a small notebook from her purse and flipped it open. “Carlton’s daughter is your second cousin once removed, Mother, and therefore my third cousin.”
“Isn’t that fascinating?” Ellie drawled to no one in particular.
“Actually,” Phoebe said, settling her glasses on her nose more firmly in order to glower more darkly at Ellie, “the study of familial relationships is quite fascinating. Cultural anthropologists are able to give us keen insights into specific tribal patterns that have—”
“You must excuse me,” said Miss Justicia. “I’m too frail to risk being bored to death.”
“Now, Miss Justicia,” Maxie began, “Phoebe’s simply sharing—”
Miss Justicia banged her glass down on the wicker cart, shifted into low gear, and, with a wave, accelerated across the carpet and shot through the doorway.
After a moment, I mumbled a generic remark and went upstairs to rout Caron for dinner. The pitiful excuse for a bed was unoccupied. After a short search, I reluctantly accepted the truth that she was not lying under the bed, nor cowering in the wardrobe, nor even engaging in a pimple-monitoring session in the little bathroom. She had vanished. Her luggage was open, and clothes were scattered about, which gave me some degree of comfort. The child might bolt, but not without her new white shorts.
The degree of comfort was no more than that, however. I went back into the hall and studied the half dozen doors on either side. Caron was much too self-centered to bother snooping in anyone else’s bedroom; her curiosity stopped at her epidermis.
I returned to the monastical bedroom and looked out the window at the yard. As I frowned at the unruly scene bereft of postpubescent runaways, Miss Justicia’s wheelchair appeared below me and whipped across the yard at what I estimated to be a good twenty miles an hour. She rounded the azaleas at a dizzying angle and disappeared.
Seconds later, a screen door slammed and Cousin Pauline stumbled into view. She stopped to peer in all directions, clasping her hands like a true heroine in distress.
I opened the window and leaned out as far as I dared. “She went thataway,” I called down.
Pauline stared up at me as if I were a gargoyle on the facade of a cathedral. “Whataway might that be, Cousin Claire?”
I pointed at the path between the azaleas. She hesitated, then took off at an admirable pace. Wishing I’d had the presence of mind to ask her to watch for Caron, I went back out to the hall once again and opened the door across from mine. It was a linen closet, filled with dingy sheets and blankets with satin hems fringed from use. The small corpses on the floor were moths.
The door next to it led to an antiquated bathroom, complete with a bathtub on claws and a cracked porcelain sink. Great-Uncle Eustice eyed me sternly as I closed the door and contemplated my next move, which might or not be the next door. I had no desire to pop in uninvited on Maxie or Phoebe, much less on Stanford, who would misinterpret my motive and, in his eagerness, fall all over me—literally.
From the main floor, I heard a gong reverberate. Ellie came out of her bedroom, now wearing a tight white evening gown, with a mass of glittery glass beads dangling into her cleavage and a white feather boa draped around her neck and down her back. My nice blue dress suddenly seemed to be of bargain-basement origin, at best.
She swept up one end of the boa and posed at the top of the stairs. “Dinner is announced, Auntie Claire. We mustn’t be late, or dear Miss Justicia will have yet another fit, this one fatal. One second thought, let’s both hide in the linen closet. How long does it take to probate the estate? Are they allowed to advance money before it’s settled?”
“You’ll have to ask an attorney,” I said, unamused.
“Suit yourself.” She sailed down the stairs, the ends of the boa swishing in her wake.
I glared at the top of her head until it was no longer visible, then glared at the empty hallway. Miss Justicia was volatile enough to react forcefully to cold soup; the self-perceived slight of Caron’s absence might result in Ellie’s vision. While I tried to decide how best to produce a facsimile of a granddaughter within a matter of minutes, the gong rang again, this time with an undertone of vexation.
Rehearsing excuses in my mind, I went down the stairs, although I certainly did not sail and the only thing in my wake was a expletive. As I reached the foyer, I heard Stanford’s voice.
“Then you find him!” he commanded, not sounding in the least like a gallant Southern gentleman. “That boy is going to sit down at the dinner table or I’m going to know the reason why! You’d think he was raised by white trash in some shack along the railroad tracks.” After a pause, he bellowed, “May I remind you that you were sent to Miss Garman’s finishing school, at considerable expense and sacrifice on my part, so you could learn how to preside over tea parties and speak French? You are pushing me, girl, and I do not care for it. Find that sorry excuse for a brother and drag him by his ponytail to the dinner table!”
Ellie strode down the hall and went out the front door, her expression reminiscent of my missing daughter’s. I chewed on my lower lip while I studied the possibilities. On my right was the parlor; that much I knew, being an observant sort who’d been in there less than fifteen minutes earlier. The hall led to the back of the house, where one might reasonably assume there would be a kitchen, pantries, a dining room, and a red-nosed, lecherous bore. That left the set of double doors. I had taken a step when a small doorway beneath the staircase opened and Keith crawled out. From what I could see of his expression—and it wasn’t much—we were equally startled.
“Ellie’s looking for you,” I said.
The sunglasses and hair blocked whatever reaction there might have been. The thick lips did not move.
“Ellie’s looking for you,” I repeated more loudly, resisting the urge to rip off the headphones along with whatever hair was tangled in them.
He fiddled with the cassette player clipped on a belt loop of his jeans. Once he’d turned down the volume, he said, “What?”
“Your father sent Ellie outsi
de to find you for dinner. She went through the front door forty-five seconds ago.”
“If she has any sense, it’ll be the last we see of her.”
I held back an acerbic response. “The gong’s been rung twice, so I suppose it’s time to sit down. Is this the way to the dining room?”
He tipped his sunglasses to peer at me. I caught a glimpse of dark, distrustful eyes before they disappeared behind the shields. “Who are you?” he demanded, suddenly belligerent.
“Claire Malloy. I’m Carlton’s widow.”
“Yeah, okay. I thought maybe you were the Avon lady or something. I’m gonna pass on this dinner thing. The old lady gives me hives, and I’m into vegetarianism, anyway.” He toyed with the cassette player, then retreated through the door from which he’d come. It closed with a click.
“He’s rather like the White Rabbit, isn’t he?”
Phoebe stood in the parlor doorway. She’d combed her hair and applied pink lipstick, but her efforts had done little to soften her appearance. She held her notebook and a tape measure in her hand, but when she noticed me looking at them, she tucked them in her bag.
“I’ve always considered him a genetic mutant,” she said as she joined me. “Luckily, our branch of the family has never shown any indication of incipient insanity; otherwise, I’d feel morally obligated to have myself sterilized.”
I bent down. The outline of the door was almost invisible in the dark wood; only a small wooden knob indicated its presence. I determined that it was locked from the inside, and straightened up with a frown. “What on earth is he doing in there?”
She sniffed the air. “Smoking marijuana, or Cannabis sativa, to be more accurate. It produces a mild euphoria, along with alterations in vision, distortion of time and space, and muscular incoordination. It has long served as a sedative or analgesic, and was first mentioned as a Chinese herbal remedy in about 2700 B.C.”
I saw no reason to contribute personal observations made in the late sixties, long before this pedantic twit was born. “Imagine that,” I said.
Phoebe was well into an analysis of possible therapeutic properties when the gong struck three. She ran her fingers through her hair, undoing what minimal results she’d achieved with a comb, and sighed. “We’d better go into dinner if we don’t want Miss Justicia to have a stroke in the gumbo.”
“What about Keith? Should we try to persuade him to come out, or just leave him?”
“I wonder if there’s any way to nail it shut from the outside. It wouldn’t take much more than a handful of nails, and I’ve become quite handy with a hammer since I moved into my apartment.”
“I don’t think we ought to do that,” I said, alarmed at the seriousness with which she seemed to be considering her proposition. “He might suffocate.”
“He’s been in prison, you know.” She said this as if presenting an argument for the judicious use of nails.
“Stanford mentioned something about it. We’d better…”
She cast a final, wistful look at the door, then nodded and said, “Yes, we’d better…”
We went down the dark hallway and into a room dominated by an enormous table. The gong beside the door still quivered from its final whack. Miss Justicia sat in her wheelchair at the head of the table, drumming her swollen fingers on the yellowed tablecloth. Stanford paced in the narrow space behind her. Cousin Pauline sat midway along the table, looking a bit wan from her latest pursuit. Maxie sat on Miss Justicia’s left.
And on Miss Justicia’s right sat Caron Malloy. She looked quite demure in white blouse with a round collar. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the tablecloth hid a navy blue skirt, cuffed socks, and shiny little patent leather shoes, neatly buckled.
“Are you here to gawk or to eat?” Miss Justicia said with a sweet smile.
3
I sat down next to Caron. “Where have you been?” I said in an angry whisper.
“Out.” She looked down at the daunting array of tarnished knives, forks, and spoons. “Wow, there’s enough hardware to equip a small nation for hand-to-hand combat.”
“The silverware is counted after every meal,” Miss Justicia said. “Phoebe, you’re standing there like you’d been hit between the eyes with a magnolia branch. Please sit down next to your mother. Stanford, sit down at once, on the other side of Claire. Where are Keith and Ellie?”
“Ellie went to look for him,” Stanford said as he sank down heavily next to me.
“Under all the rocks?” Miss Justicia began to cackle, but, as before, lapsed into ragged coughing.
Pauline shoved back her chair and stood up. “Shall I fetch a glass of water?”
Maxie pushed the wine decanter across the table. “The water around here tastes as though it’s pumped out of the bayou. The wine might be better, although I find it on the sweet side. I myself prefer a dry white wine with dinner.”
“Justicia is not supposed to…” Pauline began.
“But I do,” Miss Justicia said as the coughing spasm eased. “Maxie, pour me a glass of that stuff. Colonel Maynard Malloy bought cases of it fifty years ago from a New Orleans pimp, and it’s been good enough for the family ever since.”
“I find it overly sweet,” Maxie insisted as she filled a glass.
While the two debated the merits of the ancestral wine cellar, I said in a low voice to Stanford, “I saw Keith a few minutes ago, crawling out of a little doorway under the staircase. He said he was a vegetarian, declined to come to the table, and went back through the same door.”
“A closet vegetarian? Sweet Jesus, the next thing I know, he’ll claim to be a satanist or some other assinine thing. I did my best, Claire, but it just wasn’t good enough. I sent child-support money every month until they were eighteen. Maybe it would have been better for everybody concerned if I’d gone off to war like Miller and gotten myself blown up by jungle gooks.”
“Miller?” I said.
“I didn’t say Miller.” Sweat popped out on his forehead. “If I did, my tongue was twisted. I meant to say military. I should have gone off to war like a military…person.”
“Who’s Miller?”
Stanford glanced warily at Miss Justicia, and then leaned toward me and whispered, “My older brother. Didn’t Carlton tell you there were three of us?” He astutely interpreted my look of total bewilderment. “Miller was ten years older than me, twelve older than Carlton, so he was pretty much going about his own business when we were growing up. He joined the army, and they sent him to Vietnam as a so-called military advisor long about 1960.”
“Carlton never even hinted of this brother.”
“We can’t discuss it in front of Miss Justicia. It…ah, distresses her. You and I’ll just find ourselves a comfy love seat after dinner and I’ll tell you the story.” He took a deep drink of wine, mopped his forehead with his napkin, and began to pat my knee under the table. “Your girl seems to have grown into a fine young lady. In a way, she reminds me of Keith and Ellie’s mother. She and Sharlene Anne have the same innocent face, although Sharlene Anne’s eyes were as clear and blue as the early-morning sky and her hair was the color of honey. Look how sweet Caron is, sitting there listening to the adults chatter.”
“Caron? Why, she’s an absolute angel.” I nudged the angel with my elbow. “Isn’t that so, dear? Tell Uncle Stanford how nicely you waited for me in our room upstairs.”
“Oh, Mother,” she said, rolling her eyes in the classic adolescent style that invariably accompanies those two words, “I went for a walk, okay? I wanted to see where my father played as a child.”
“And such a sentimental little thing,” Stanford inserted mistily.
I gritted my teeth as his hand fondled my knee, but I ordered myself to ignore it. “How intriguing,” I said to Caron. “Did you chance upon a tire swing and a sandbox?”
“No, just a bunch of weeds and bugs. I’d have totally died if I’d seen a snake or something gross like that, but I didn’t.” She paused. “Are you okay?”
<
br /> “I’m peachy,” I muttered. I brushed Stanford’s hand off my knee, but it was back before I could rearrange my napkin. I eyed the forks, wondering which one would serve best to discourage him.
Ellie came into the room, draped the boa over the gong, and sat down beside her father. “My brother is not to be found,” she announced. “He’s not been stimulating company since his lobotomy, Miss Justicia. I don’t know why you insisted he come this weekend.”
“Because it’s my eightieth birthday tomorrow, Ellie dear, and I want my devoted family gathered around me. I do hope you’re going to surprise me, because I certainly intend to surprise the britches off all of you.”
“Do give us a hint,” wheedled Maxie.
“You’ll have to wait, all of you. I want Keith to be here, and my lawyer, of course.”
“Good ol’ Bethel D’Armand?” Stanford asked jovially. “How’s he doin’ these days, Miss Justicia? Still going to the old folks’ home every Sunday to visit his—”
“I fired him,” she said.
Phoebe and Pauline broke off their whispered conversation to stare at her. Stanford mutely wiped his forehead with a damp napkin. The wineglass in Maxie’s hand halted halfway to her lips, its contents sloshing perilously. Ellie raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. For what felt like a very long time, the only sound was the rattle of pans in the kitchen.
Stanford let out a wheezy sigh. “Now why would you go and fire Bethel after all this time, Miss Justicia? He’s been the family lawyer for thirty years.”
“I had my reasons. Besides, you’ll find this new lawyer very stimulating, in more ways than one. But not another word. Tomorrow at dinnertime, we’ll have our surprise. If Keith has any wits left, he’ll be here, too.”
Maxie put down her glass. “I hardly imagine the boy’s presence to be of any importance. He may be your grandson, but he’s not a likely candidate to establish the trust and see that Malloy Manor is placed on the National Historic Register.” She put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Luckily, Phoebe has taken several courses at the university in the preservation and management of our national resources. Isn’t that so, dear?”
