Daughter of Deceit (23 page)

Chip, however, was not in evidence when Ann Rose opened the door. She shoved a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses onto the top of her head and stepped back to let them in. “Come on in. Chip is napping and I was putting together the tutor training workshop for next week.” She didn’t apologize for her faded denim skirt, short-sleeved oxford-cloth shirt, or scuffed brown loafers. Like Katharine, Ann Rose preferred comfort to elegance for a casual day at home.

She motioned for them to follow her. “Let’s go to the conservatory. The front of the house is too gloomy to visit in at this time of day.” In the breakfast room, which she had claimed as her office, stacks of books and papers filled the table, spilled onto the floor, and crept toward the door. “I keep meaning to get that stuff organized,” she apologized, “but one project seems to lead to another before I get around to clearing up the first one.”

“It was cleared for the luncheon,” Posey reminded her.

“Only because Francie put everything in brown paper bags in the garage. When I dumped them back out, the stuff was more disorganized than ever. Come on out here. Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’d love some tea,” Posey told her. “Katharine was supposed to take me to lunch, but she reneged.”

“I didn’t renege, I got kidnapped,” Katharine retorted.

Ann Rose stepped into the kitchen to speak to Francie, then joined them in the conservatory. As always, it was humid, but Katharine’s spirit had been chilled by the day’s events. It felt pleasant to be amid tropical plants she had grown up with. When she praised the orchids, Ann Rose gently touched one of the most spectacular ones, a huge white-and-purple cattleya of the sort Katharine had worn to her senior prom. “I’m sorry Oscar isn’t here to see this. He propagated it himself, and this is its first year to bloom.”

Soon after they settled themselves on bright cushions in white wicker chairs, Francie brought out a tray holding iced tea, lemon, and a plate of small sandwiches and éclairs.

Katharine was mortified. “You didn’t need to fix us lunch.”

“I’m glad you did.” Posey was already reaching for one.

Ann Rose waved away Katharine’s protests. “They are left over from the literacy meeting. You don’t want me eating them until Jeffers gets back, do you? Now, what can I do for you?”

“Katharine wanted to ask you some questions,” Posey said promptly.

Ann Rose waited expectantly. Katharine swallowed a bite of sandwich and wiped her mouth with the small linen napkin. “I didn’t,” she told Ann Rose. “Posey and Payne have the bright idea that we ought to talk to everybody Bara visited this week asking about her mother. They seem to think that had something to do with her getting beaten and Foley getting shot. I think they even hope somebody will fling up her hands and exclaim, ‘I did it. Arrest me!’ However, I’ve talked to most of them already today, and so far, nobody has.”

Ann Rose flung up her hands. “I did it. Arrest me!” She lowered her hands with a small, embarrassed smile. “Shame on me for making light of this terrible thing. Of course I didn’t do it, and neither would any of the other women Bara went to see. All she wanted to know was whether any of us knew who her father could have been. Who would have beaten her for asking about that after all these years?” She bent to set her empty glass on the table. “Frankly, I don’t believe Nettie had an affair, either. It wasn’t like her. She was almost pathetically attached to Winnie. Remember how jealous she was if another woman so much as laughed with him at a party? She wouldn’t have jeopardized her marriage that way. I also cannot believe that such a secret could have been kept for so long, especially once Winnie and Nettie were both dead. When Bara roared into the house with all those accusations, I figured she had gotten something very wrong. She wasn’t coherent, anyway. She was what my mother used to delicately call ‘under the weather.’”

“Drunk,” said Posey bluntly. “I sure hope her time in the hospital will get her back on the wagon.”

“I do, too,” Ann Rose agreed, “but I don’t know what her incentive will be to quit. Last time it was her children. She was so afraid Ray would hurt them, or that she’d be drunk and couldn’t take care of them. But what incentive does she have now?”

“Her own self-respect?” Katharine suggested.

Ann Rose shook her head. “It takes more than that. There needs to be a reason why not drinking is worth the agony of quitting. I hope she finds that reason. And I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”

Later, however, as she showed them to the door, she glanced into the library and stopped so suddenly that Katharine bumped into her. “Sorry. I’ve had an idea. Oscar is great about putting pictures in albums as soon as he gets them—much better than Jeffers or I. We’re leaving Hamilton and Payne a mismatched set of shoeboxes filled with unidentified pictures, but Oscar has photo albums going back to his childhood. I’ll look through them tonight and see if I can find anything to shed light on this.”

“Have you called Oscar and Jeffers to come home?” Posey asked. “I think Bara would like to have Oscar here right now, and I’m sure Payne and Hamilton would like to have both of them.”

Ann Rose shook her head again. “I can’t call them. They’re busy, and it’s not possible to take calls. And even if they could, Bara’s in no danger, and I’m sure they would think what they are doing more important than hanging around watching her heal. So do I. They’ve looked forward to this trip for years, and it’s not as if they could do anything here. Still, they touch base every few days. I’ll tell them about it when they call.”

“I don’t see how you can stand having Jeffers gone so long,” Posey told her.

Ann Rose’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll bet Katharine knows. Francie and I are enjoying having the house to ourselves. We eat in the kitchen, I go to bed when I want to and get up when I want to—two nights ago I read an entire book in bed without worrying I was keeping Jeffers up when he had to be up early for morning rounds. I’ve spread projects out all over the back rooms, and Francie and I have reached an agreement: I don’t mess up the front of the house and she doesn’t mess with my projects at the back. I’m not advocating divorce or widowhood, but it is very nice to have some time on your own.”

Posey looked unconvinced.

“Shall we go see Eloise and Scotty next?” she asked Katharine as they got in the car.

“I’m done with this. It’s pointless.”

“Don’t fuss at me,” Posey protested. “This mess isn’t my fault.”

“It most certainly is. You were the one who told Bara I could research those medals. If I hadn’t done that—by the way, have you registered for that tutor training yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll get around to it.”

“You’d better. You owe me big time, lady.”

“I owe you? You owe me lunch at the Swan Coach House.” Posey gave Katharine a defiant look, then nibbled her lower lip. “I didn’t mean to let you in for all this, you know.”

Katharine’s anger evaporated. “I know. Things snowball. I’ll tell you what. You take the tutor training, and I’ll take you to lunch at the Coach House to celebrate when you’re done.”

When Posey got out at her front door, she asked, “Has Tom gotten back, do you think?”

“Back and gone again. He had to go up to the lake house. We’ve sprung a water leak.”

“Does he know how to cope with a water leak?”

“He will after this weekend.”

Katharine was halfway up her driveway when she noticed a forest on her veranda.

“Damn!” She only swore in times of great distress, but this was such a time. She had completely forgotten that the nursery had promised to deliver five large potted plants for her house that morning. How was she ever going to get them inside?

She pulled into the garage and laid her head on her steering wheel. If she had been there when Tom arrived, they could have managed together. If Tom had noticed the plants, he could have taken them in by himself. Instead, once again she faced a problem that would require all her ingenuity to solve. Why, oh why, had she permitted Jon to head to China? Since he was twelve, he’d been her muscle man. “I need to buy me a dolly,” she decided. But not that afternoon. She’d have to think of something else.

As she climbed out of the car, she saw dirt and the glint of glass on her front seat carpet. She and Payne must have tracked it from Bara’s front hall. She fetched the small vacuum and cleaned it up. When she went to hang up the vacuum, she noticed Bara’s envelope on her backseat. Would she be invading Bara’s privacy by looking at its contents?

What the heck? Bara was invading her schedule with a vengeance, and there must be something in that envelope that Bara considered important, since she’d made Katharine drive all the way to Piedmont Hospital and begged her to get it.

She dumped it out onto her breakfast-room table to sort through the contents. The locket bounced on the countertop, then clattered onto the ceramic-tile floor. Katharine picked it up and checked to be sure it hadn’t been dented. It hadn’t, but it was already a battered thing, black with tarnish and ornately decorated with a raised rosebud surrounded by three leaves. It looked not so much old as old-fashioned.

She slid a fingernail inside the crack and popped the two halves open. As Payne had said, the picture inside was of Bara in her early twenties, dressed in a vintage dress from the thirties or forties. Perhaps for a party? Whose locket had it been? Katharine couldn’t imagine Nettie wearing it—or wearing Bara’s picture around her neck. Not only was Nettie not the sentimental type, but the locket would have been too large and ornate for her austere taste.

Katharine flipped it over and traced script initials engraved on the back. “
A.M.”

She had no idea who that could have been. Bara might know. If she didn’t, Murdoch would be certain to.

Winnie’s old driver’s licenses told her nothing she didn’t know except his birthday.

Katharine smiled at Bara’s excellent report cards, which contained recurring teacher comments:
Bara talks too much. Bara distracts other students with her antics.
Nothing had changed on that front.

A pile of letters turned out to be all from Bara to Winnie: trivial chatter about a college girl’s days. If any of them contained something pertinent to Bara’s current situation, Katharine couldn’t detect it. Still, she suspected that the letters and report cards were what Bara didn’t want to lose.

She picked up the locket again. Had Bara mentioned the locket at any point before the hospital conversation? If so, she could not remember when.

She idly read the clippings. They were the kind you save in a private envelope if you are a modest man proud of your child, as Winnie had been. Some extolled his various activities in Atlanta, including his work on the Olympic committee, but most were about Bara—not only social pictures of various functions, but of Bara winning track meets all through high school.

Only one clipping was not about the family. Older than the rest, yellowed and faded, it pictured a middle-aged man with a drooping mustache and sad eyes. The story reported that a family in Ohio was asking for information about the whereabouts of Anton Molnar, from Velenje, Yugoslavia. A defector, he was known to have arrived in Atlanta the previous Friday for business of a personal nature, but should have reached their home by the following Tuesday. He had never shown up. Anyone having information about Mr. Molnar was asked to contact the newspaper.

Why would Winnie have kept that clipping?

That was the kind of puzzle Katharine enjoyed. As she made herself a sandwich, she wondered if anybody had ever located Mr. Molnar and where he had been found. While she ate, she read the clipping again. It gave no clue to the date of the paper, but on the back she read a paragraph about progress on the construction of “the new Lenox Square Mall.”

Online, she searched for “history of Lenox Square Mall, Atlanta.” She learned that the mall—at that time the largest in the Southeast—had opened in 1959. She checked her watch. The Atlanta History Center library would still be open. She checked her to-do list, decided she had nothing pressing that afternoon, and drove to the center to peruse back issues of the
Atlanta Constitution
from 1959. She’d think about what to do with the plants when she got home.

She found what she was looking for in a June edition of the paper. The article had appeared on a Friday. The following Sunday, the paper had announced that the body of an unidentified white man, discovered the prior Monday in the parking lot of O’Keefe High School, north of Georgia Tech, had been identified as Anton Molnar, defector from Yugoslavia. He had been shot through the head, apparently the victim of robbery and murder while visiting the city. An editorial deplored the fact that tourists and “those seeking freedom from oppression” were not safe while visiting Atlanta, and urged the city to become a more tourist-friendly place.

Katharine searched for Molnar’s name in subsequent issues of the paper, but found nothing.

As she drove home, she wondered about his family in Yugoslavia. Had they ever learned what happened to him? Had his parents died thinking he had not cared enough to try and communicate once he reached the United States?

At home, she checked out Velenje on the Internet. It was a city located in the Alps of Slovenia, which used to be the northwest lobe of Yugoslavia. While she was online, she looked up Slovenia. A small country, not as large as the state of Georgia, it sounded like a lovely place to visit the next time Tom had to be in Eastern Europe. She bookmarked the site.

She shut off her computer with the determination that, except for featuring prominently in her prayers for the next week or so, Bara Weidenauer had consumed all the time she was likely to get.

She called Hollis. “Do you have any strong male friends who can help me get some plants inside?”

“Dalton is at my place right this minute, discussing sets for a play. Shall I bring him over?”

“If you would, I’ll buy you both a pizza.”

As she waited for them to come, Katharine mused that if Hollis ever moved out of town, she really would be in a pickle.

The phone rang at nine. She reached for it with reluctance. The day had begun with Posey’s call about Bara. Was this someone with more bad news?

The voice on the other end was cheerful enough. “Miz Murray? This is Kenny. Kenny Todd? I’m sorry for calling so late, and I don’t want to bother you or anything, but you said you’d like to hear Mama sing? Well, I came up home this evening and learned they’ve got a gig Sunday morning to close out a revival. It’s up in Ellijay, not far from our house, and everybody is getting together at Granddaddy’s afterward for bar-be-cue. You don’t have to come, of course, but Granddaddy says if you and your husband would like to join us, we’d be proud to have you.”

“Tom’s not here this weekend.” Katharine disliked using Tom as a tactful reason to decline, but couldn’t think of a better one at the moment. “He’s up at our lake house, waiting on a plumber.”

“You can come by yourself, if you want. We’d be glad to have you.”

She opened her mouth to turn down the invitation and was surprised to find herself saying instead, “I’d enjoy that. Maybe Hollis could come instead of Tom.”

“I don’t know about Hollis.”

Katharine was embarrassed. She wasn’t in the habit of inviting people to other people’s parties. “Of course not. I’ll come alone.”

She had misinterpreted Kenny’s hesitation. “Oh, you can ask Hollis, no problem. I just don’t know if she’ll
want
to. I doubt if bluegrass music and bar-be-cue are much her style.”

“You might be surprised. But it’s all right. I’ll come alone.”

“Oh no, ma’am, go ahead and ask her. She can come even if your husband comes. There’ll be plenty of food, and we can find her a seat. You don’t know if she likes to ride horses, do you?”

“She loves to ride. Do you have a horse?”

“We got a couple. Tell her to bring riding clothes, if she comes. You, too, if you like.”

“Not for me, thanks. I’ve never had a speaking acquaintance with horses.”

Kenny laughed. “They can be right nice to talk to.” His voice grew anxious again. “Tell Hollis we’d be glad to have her, but she doesn’t have to come if she doesn’t want to—not that she would. I’ll come down and fetch you, if you like.”

“Let me drive. That way you can stay later with your folks.” And Katharine could leave when she wanted to.

“If you’re sure you don’t mind. Like I said, I’m already up home now, and I’m sure Granddaddy would like having me around here to he’p out a little. He’s roasting a pig.” He gave directions to the church, then advised, “I’d leave by nine. It’ll take you a good hour and a half to get here, and you’ll want to come a little early. The church may fill up fast.”

Katharine hung up wondering what she had gotten herself into. “A country church revival,” she muttered to Phebe, who was weaving in and out around her ankles. “It may not even be air conditioned. Then I have to listen to a program of heaven only knows what quality of music, and spend several more hours with people I do not know and have little or nothing in common with. Whatever possessed me?”

She mulled that over as she got ready for bed. Why had she accepted Kenny’s invitation when she’d meant to decline? What had nudged her to get so involved with Bara that past week?

Like her mother, Katharine believed we are given certain people at certain times for purposes we don’t fathom at the time. She had experienced how nudges and seeming coincidences could be woven together and move inexorably toward an unexpected end. Look at how she had been led from Aunt Lucy’s boxes of personal junk to solve an old Atlanta murder, prove a convicted man’s innocence, and expose vicious hypocrisy. Look at how she and Dr. Flo Gadney had been drawn by an isolated grave down on the coast into a web of deceit spanning several generations.

Even if Posey had been the agent who thrust Bara into Katharine’s life, was Bara part of a similar pattern? Were the medals simply a means to a greater end?

She considered a series of coincidences that past week. Bara found the medals the morning before Ann Rose’s meeting, which Posey attended only because Katharine needed a ride. Posey persuaded Katharine to investigate the medals. Tom brought home a bluegrass CD because he’d gone to a concert on a night when he didn’t have a meeting, Katharine selected the CD at random to wash dishes by, and Bara liked it because she’d had a North Georgia nanny. Kenny came to fix the computer and “happened” to be knowledgeable about military medals. Katharine switched on the CD to calm a stormy atmosphere, and Kenny had noticed it because his mother sometimes sang bluegrass. Less than a week later, his mother “happened” to be singing to close out a revival. Were those coincidences? An archbishop of Canterbury once said, “When I pray, coincidences happen.”

“I haven’t been praying for anything more on my plate,” Katharine protested. But was it possible that Kenny’s granddaddy could shed some light on Bara’s problem? He was a serious genealogist. Did he know how to track a biological father? Maybe Sunday would help to end Bara’s quest.

Or not.

Maybe Sunday had nothing to do with Bara. Maybe Katharine had made a stupid remark over supper on Tuesday and would spend Sunday paying for it.

“I have no clue why I’m going,” she told Phebe as she lifted the little cat into her lap. “Maybe I need a break. But what does one wear to church when there’s a barbecue at Granddaddy’s to follow?”

She punched in Hollis’s number. Hollis would still be up, and Hollis would know.

To her utter surprise—and contrary to Kenny’s prediction—Hollis accepted the invitation. “I want to see what kind of house he lives in. If it’s not an ordinary house near a town, I’ll buy you dinner.”

She had one question when she heard about the horses. “Western or English saddles?”

“I have no idea. You’ll probably be trotting around a pasture, so what difference does it make?”

“I’ll wear jeans. But they’d better not be broken-down nags usually used to plow a field.”

Even with Hollis’s reservations, Katharine would be glad to have her company, whether Tom got home in time to go or not. Hollis would be a lot more fun to talk with about the event afterward. “What do you think we ought to wear?”

“You wear black slacks and a white cotton top with that stunning turquoise necklace Uncle Tom brought back from Arizona last month. And take your embroidered cotton jacket for church and in case the afternoon is cool.”

“Nothing is cool right now,” Katharine reminded her. “The whole country is having a heat wave.” But the jacket was a good idea. It would dress up the slacks for church but wasn’t too dressy if the rest of the women were in polyester dresses. She’d stick a scarf in her purse in case the necklace was too dressy for the barbecue. Maybe the day would be fun. At least she wouldn’t be sitting home alone if Tom stayed at the lake.