A Death On The Wolf (25 page)

Frankie tapped his finger on the name
Thompson
and said, “My uncle.”

“
Really?” I said.

Frankie just rolled his eyes and opened the door for Mary Alice and me.

We entered a huge reception area chilled to the temperature of a meat locker. The oak parquet floor was covered with several elaborate Oriental carpets, all mostly in deep shades of red. The walls were done up in heavy oak paneling and there were several portraits of what I assumed were past and present lawyers of the firm all along the wall to our right. There was a sitting area in the middle with a couch and two big wing-back chairs arranged around a coffee table that had a few magazines on it. In the far back corner sat a nice-looking lady at a desk. There was soft music coming from somewhere. I looked around but I didn’t see any speakers.

“
Is there a receptionist?” Mary Alice asked.

“
Yes,” I said and led her over to the lady at the desk. Frankie stayed behind and plopped himself into one of the wing-backs.

“
May I help you?” the lady said with a smile. She was eyeing Mary Alice’s walking stick. “Oh, are you Mary Alice?” she said, as if recognizing the girl standing before her.

“
Yes, ma’am,” Mary Alice responded. “My brother is Beau Hadley. He’s clerking here this summer for Mr. Shane.”

“
Beau told me to be expecting you. I’ll let him know you’re here. If y’all will just have a seat back over there it shouldn’t be too long.”

“
Thank you,” Mary Alice said. I smiled at the lady and Mary Alice and I walked back over to join Frankie in the sitting area. We sat on the sofa and Frankie was already reading a
National Geographic
. He held the magazine over to me open to a picture of some African woman with no top on and huge brown tits hanging nearly down to her belly button.

I pushed the magazine away and shook my head. “Grow up,” I said dismissively. Frankie flipped me a bird and resumed reading. I looked at Mary Alice sitting beside me. “I still don’t know what good you think this is gonna do, Mary Alice. Your brother has made his decision. He doesn’t want me and you together.”

“
And you’re okay with that?” she said, picking up on the resignation in my voice.

I guess over the past 24 hours I had allowed myself to accept what appeared to be the inevitable. “No, I’m not okay with it,” I said. “But—”

“
There’s no but,” Mary Alice retorted. “I’m not a little girl anymore and my brother needs to learn that right now. He’s not going to make me lose you.”

With that declaration, Mary Alice revealed for the first time that she saw what we had together as something more permanent than merely the girlfriend-boyfriend relationship of two fickle teenagers. I felt the same way, and I was now angry with myself (and not a little ashamed) that I’d been so willing to just let Beau have his way without putting up a fight. Unlike her feckless boyfriend, from the moment I had read Beau’s letter to her, Mary Alice had formed a plan of action to deal with it. Frankie’s first reaction after reading the letter was to assume I was driving to Jackson to beat her brother up. As immature and unrealistic as it may have been, it was a plan, and one Frankie assumed I had in mind. But I had no plan, just acquiescence.

“
So you all made it.”

I looked up out of my thoughts to see Beau Hadley standing there. He had on an impeccably tailored dark gray suit, white shirt, and a red and white striped bow tie. He held out his hand and I stood up and shook it. “Hi, Beau,” I said coolly. I looked at Frankie, who still had his nose buried in the
National Geographic
. Whether he was ignoring Beau because he was mad about his letter, or because he was remembering how close he came to making a fool of himself when he first met the man, I didn’t know.

“
I don’t have much of an office,” Beau said, “but we can talk in the conference room.” He gestured toward the double doors that were over by the receptionist’s desk.

Mary Alice stood up beside me. “I want to talk to you alone, Beau,” she said.

“
All right,” he said with a frown. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked, looking at me.

“
No, thanks,” I said.

Beau turned to Frankie, who still hadn’t looked up from the magazine. “Would you like something?” he said.

I kicked Frankie in the leg when it seemed he wasn’t going to respond. “What?” he said, looking up at me.

“
Beau wants to know if you want something to drink.”

“
No,” Frankie said and went back to the magazine.

Beau looked at me with raised eyebrows and then led his sister over to the conference room doors. After he closed the doors behind them I sat down on the sofa and looked at Frankie. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“
What do you mean?”

“
Why were you rude like that?”

“
Because he’s an asshole. Is that why you drove all the way up here? To kiss his ass and be nice to him?”

“
Frankie…” I sighed and just decided to let it go. I didn’t feel like getting into a discussion with him about civil comportment.

Twenty minutes later Mary Alice and her brother emerged from the conference room. Mary Alice’s eyes were red and I could tell she’d been crying. It was looking like this trip was a big waste of time, just as I’d feared it would be.

“
I want to thank you for bringing Mary Alice up today,” Beau said. His tone was sounding strangely conciliatory. He stuck his hand out to me and said, “I owe you an apology for that letter to your aunt.”

This time Frankie did look up from his magazine. And I didn’t know what to say as I shook Beau’s hand. “I…uh…thanks. I wasn’t expecting that,” I stammered.

“
I can be overly protective of my little sister sometimes, Nelson. But she’s not so little now and I trust her judgment.”

“
So you’re okay with me being Mary Alice’s boyfriend?”

“
Yes,” Beau said without hesitation. “As long as she is, I am.”

I almost forgot all those comportment thoughts that had been running through my head earlier. I wanted to grab Mary Alice and dance around that big oak-paneled room with her in my arms. I wanted to jump and shout.

Evidently, Beau could see all that pent up emotion in my face, for he gave me a wink and a grin, pointed to his sister, and said “Give her a hug; she deserves it.”

I reached out and embraced Mary Alice and then took her face in my hands and kissed her full on the lips. She was laughing. I was laughing. And for a split second, there was no one else in that room.

Beau cleared his throat. “Mary Alice tells me you all haven’t eaten.” He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a card and handed it to me. “Lunch is on me today.” I looked at the card. It had
The Magnolia Club
printed on it with an address on Congress Street. “The maître d’s name is Vincent,” Beau said. “I’ll call and tell him to be expecting you. Now, if you all will excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work.” He leaned down and kissed Mary Alice on the cheek. “Goodbye, little sister.”

“
Goodbye, brother,” she replied.

And with a quick wave Beau left us and disappeared through a door on the opposite side of the room from the receptionist’s desk. It had all happened so quickly I was still trying to catch up. “So that’s it?” I asked and tugged on Mary’s Alice’s hand.

“
What do you mean?” she said.

“
I mean he was hell-bent on splitting us up and Aunt Charity taking you back to the home in Poplarville, then we come up here and you spend a few minutes talking to him and now everything is just fine, back just like it was?”

“
Yes, I told you yesterday not to worry about that letter.”

“
What in the world did you say to him?” I asked.

“
That’s between me and him,” Mary Alice said with a sly smile.

“
Let’s go eat,” Frankie interjected. “I’m hungry.”

The Magnolia Club was on the top floor of a twelve-story building that had a relatively modest looking exterior. However, the décor of the main dining room was strikingly similar to that of the law firm where Beau Hadley worked. The walls were clad in dark oak paneling; the floor was covered in sumptuous dark red carpet. Heavy linen cloth covered every table. Vincent, the maître d’, escorted us to a round corner table and left us with three huge menus bound in fragrant leather with
Lunch
embossed on the cover in gold. The view of downtown Jackson out the wall of glass surrounding the outer edge of the dining room was breathtaking: Over my right shoulder was the old capitol building and if I looked over Mary Alice’s right shoulder I could see the tall Deposit Guaranty building. I had never been in a restaurant like this, but then I remembered this was a private club. And judging from the way everyone else here was dressed, the three of us looked totally out of place.

“
Why are the plates already on the table,” Frankie asked. “And what do I need three forks for?”

Mary Alice chuckled. “That’s a formal place setting, Frankie. You’ve got a fish fork, a salad fork, and a dinner fork.”

“
I’m not gonna order fish or a salad.”

“
Just shut up and look at the menu,” I said.

Frankie opened the menu and I did the same. I could not believe the prices. And even though I’d had one year of French, most of the stuff listed I couldn’t even pronounce, let alone figure out what it was. I looked up at Frankie and he had a big “Can you believe this?” look on his face.

“
Ah…Mary Alice, I don’t know what to order. I mean, I don’t even know what any of this is. And the cheapest thing on here is twelve dollars.”

Mary Alice ran her hand over the menu lying on the table in front of her. “I don’t think the two of you are going to want anything from this menu. Get Vincent’s attention. I should have had him seat us in the Jeff Davis room. That’s informal and they have a more traditional lunch menu.”

“
The Jeff Davis room? Have you been here before?” I asked.

“
Yes. My grandmother was a member.”

Just then our waiter came up to take our drink orders. We all ordered iced tea and Mary Alice asked him to bring us menus from the Jeff Davis room. He filled our water glasses and took the huge leather tomes away. Frankie took a long gulp of ice water. “I bet that’s the most expensive drink of water I’ve ever had,” he said as he set the glass back down on the white linen.

I was thinking about how at ease Mary Alice seemed to be in this place. Since she said her grandmother had been a member, I was coming to realize that my initial impression of Mary Alice being from another time and another place wasn’t too far off the mark. She was clearly used to a lifestyle that was totally alien to me.

The waiter was back with our glasses of tea and the menus from the Jeff Davis room, which were smaller than the others, but still bound in the same leather. I opened my menu and found fare that I did recognize, even though the prices were totally unfamiliar. The cheapest entrée was the “Jeff Davis Burger with French Fries” for $9.95, the price of the biggest Porterhouse at Bobby Dean’s in Bells Ferry. We all three ordered the Jeff Davis Burger. Twenty minutes later when those burgers were set before us, Frankie and I could not keep from laughing. We had never seen hamburgers like these. They were gigantic. The bun was the size of a soup bowl. The beef patty looked like one of Aunt Charity’s meat loafs and was topped with two thick slices of beefsteak tomato, lettuce, onion, and pickles. Even the French fries were oversized. The waiter set three small containers of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise on the table for us to prep our burgers as we pleased. Mary Alice found our reactions amusing, and I figured she’d never dined in The Magnolia Club with a couple of teenage rubes from southern Mississippi.

It was ten after two when we got back to the car, and I had totally forgotten about the parking meter. It had expired, but there was no ticket on the car so I was relieved. Traffic downtown didn’t seem to have abated any, but I managed to get us back on 49 going south without incident. Frankie napped most of the way home after we stopped at the same station we had going up for a restroom break. He was asleep when we pulled into our driveway at 5:30. When I saw his dad’s pickup sitting there, along with the sheriff’s cruiser, I didn’t want to wake him. Our day in Jackson had turned out to be a great escape, and a success from the standpoint of its mission. But now we had returned to Bells Ferry and the cold hard reality of Frankie’s escapades last night was waiting for us.

Chapter 16

Combat Pay

I made Frankie stay in the car until I took Mary Alice over to Aunt Charity’s and ascertained whether she knew what was going on. She did. Daddy had told her when he got home earlier and called the sheriff, which was why she was fixing dinner at her house and had Sachet there with her.