Death on the Family Tree (27 page)

Not Lutheran, then. Katharine would never make a detective. Ludwig’s sister was probably a tiny woman with the bones of a bird and gray sausage curls. And if she knew about Carter’s romance—which seemed likely—she wasn’t going to gossip about it.

Katharine had only one more question to ask. “Are you related to Georg Ramsauer, who excavated Hallstatt back in 1846?”

A sharp intake of breath bounced up to a satellite and back down to earth, followed by eager words. “Did you find anyt’ing else in Carter’s box? A circle of metal, perhaps? Green, vit little knobs on it?”

“Yes,” Katharine admitted. “They were both in the box.”

“Dat circle is mine! Carter stole it from dis house! You must send it back. It is very special to our family, and it curses dose who misuse it.”

“How did it come to your family?” Katharine intended it for a test. She held her breath while she waited for the answer.

The accent grew strong with agitation. “My many times great-grandmudder vas a daughter of Georg Ramsauer. He gaf it to her for a vedding gift. It has been in our family for many generations. It does not belong in America!” Katharine heard a pounding sound, as if she were pounding the wall or a table with her fist.

“If you will give me your address and send me a letter, describing it and saying what you have just told me, I will return it to you,” Katharine promised.

Maria gave her address readily. “I vill write you dis afternoon, and God vill reward you for an honest voman ven de necklace has been returned.”

Katharine hung up feeling like she had been pummeled by large, heavy hands. Whatever Maria might look like, her spirit was not that of a bird-framed little female.

Katharine rummaged in the fridge again and found a carton of yogurt in the far corner. It was a couple of weeks out of date, but she carried it outside with a spoon and sat on the patio, her back to the disaster inside. It was good to know where the necklace had come from, but she felt a decided sense of anticlimax.

Carter Everanes was a thief. Perhaps Maria and Ludwig had regaled him with stories of their famous ancestor, showed him the necklace, and left him alone with it once too often. If he had stolen the necklace, he might have stolen the diary, too, thinking it was Ramsauer’s accounts of the dig. Perhaps it was Maria’s mother’s diary, or maybe she and Ludwig had a sister who died in the war. Carter could even have stolen it from another house altogether. Did he make a practice of lifting items from his friends? Was that the dreadful secret that had come out during his trial? If so, had a providential balancing of the scales of justice decreed that he be killed by a thief? She hoped Dr. Flo’s cousin would provide a few answers.

Thursday, June 15

“I don’t know what to tell you about Cleetie except Alfred Simms was her brother and she’s willing to talk to you about what happened to him.”

Dr. Flo had suggested that she pick Katharine up and drive her to Cleetie’s house, which was in the same quadrant of Atlanta as Buckhead, but out what used to be called the Bankhead Highway—a term synonymous with drugs and death until the city dealt with that problem in typical bureaucratic fashion: they changed the name of the street to Hollowell Parkway.

Katharine had not been in that part of Atlanta for several years, since she had tutored in an elementary school. While Dr. Flo continued talking, Katharine found herself surreptitiously checking her car door lock. She felt ashamed—until she saw Dr. Flo reach over to punch the button to make sure all four doors were locked.

“Cleetie was a nurse,” Dr. Flo continued, “and a choir soloist back when Daddy King and Martin were preaching at Ebenezer Baptist. She doesn’t get out much any more, though. Her legs are so bad, she can hardly maneuver from her chair to the bathroom or her bed.”

“But she lives alone?” Looking at the poverty of the neighborhood, Katharine couldn’t help comparing the plight of her own elderly relatives with the plight of the elderly poor.

“Not exactly. Her three daughters, their children, and even their grandchildren take turns staying with her, so there’s somebody over there all the time. One granddaughter is a doctor and checks her out at least once a week, one is a nutritionist and plans her meals, and one grandson owns a lawn ser vice and keeps up her yard. It helps to have family in town. But they would all move her out of here in a second if Cleetie would go. She flat-out refuses to give up her house.” Katharine detected exasperation in Dr. Flo’s voice as she pulled her Volvo up to the curb. “She says, ‘I been livin’ in this house for more than fifty years, and I might as well stay here ’til the end.’” Dr. Flo’s voice changed to a deep boom, then resumed its normal pitch. “Watch your step on that sidewalk.”

Katharine opened her door and stepped onto a patch of grassless red clay littered with cans and shards of glass. The sidewalk it bordered was cracked and uneven. Beyond it, a short, smooth walk led to a small house with two concrete steps leading up to a wide screened porch. The house was dazzling white, its concrete steps fresh green, its gray roof neat and whole. Bars on the windows were green to match the steps. Pink and white begonias bloomed on each side of the steps, and a handkerchief-sized plot of grass lay on each side of the walk.

In that neighborhood, the house looked like a fresh pillow case thrown on a dung heap. Other houses in the block seemed in competition to see which would fall down first, and several had a good chance at winning. Porches sagged. Steps crumbled. What little paint there was curled and flaked. Most roofs sported several shades of shingles, while others had bits of metal nailed over leaks. The yards—lawns would be too kind a word for those plots of tall weeds—were filled with debris and discarded appliances in various stages of rusting out. The air was heavy with a smell she could not identify, but associated with rancid meat and decay.

The specimens of humanity that Katharine could see lounged on porches or steps looking as if they, like their houses, had been inadequately cared for and patched up so often they had given up on life. A shirtless young man sat with his back propped against a discarded washing machine on the porch next door. He raised a hand in languid greeting. “Hiya.” Dreadlocks hung past his shoulders and his eyes were slits in his face, half-covered by lids too heavy to rise.

Dr. Flo grabbed a green thermal cooler from her back seat, then took Katharine’s elbow and led her briskly up the walk. “Don’t say a word and don’t look at him, or he’ll be over here wanting money. Spends every penny he gets on drugs and there’s not a thing you or I can do about it. Let’s get inside before he rouses himself enough to stand.” She hustled Katharine up the steps and used a key to open the first deadbolt Katharine had ever seen on a screened door.

She had time to notice three white rockers—one of them gigantic and rump-sprung—on the screened porch while Dr. Flo used her key to lock the deadbolt behind them and unlock another on the front door, which led straight into a small room. “Cleetie,” she called in. “It’s Florence. I’ve brought my friend.”

“Tha’s nice. Tha’s real nice.” The deep voice came from the corner. Katharine was fully inside before she saw who was speaking.

The old woman was a mound of flesh in a huge recliner over in the corner. She filled the recliner and spread out on both sides, and her enormous calves were elevated and encased in white support stockings. Katharine used to put stockings like that on her mother each morning, and they were so hard to pull up on her mother’s dainty legs that they used to joke that they needed two people and a hydraulic jack to get them on. Who on earth pulled Cleetie’s stockings up each morning—sumo wrestlers?

Whoever it was had also helped her into a black crepe dress with a white linen-and-lace collar. Katharine wished she had put on something dressier than black slacks and a bright green shirt. It was some comfort that Dr. Flo wore another bright cotton skirt and top, but she was family. Katharine realized that Cleetie considered her visit a momentous event.

The woman must have been past seventy but her face was plump, unlined, and ageless, surrounded by gray hair neatly combed and waved around her face. “How do you do?” She put out a hand the size of a salad plate. “I am Cleetie Webb.” Her voice was low and well modulated. Katharine wished she had been able to hear Cleetie sing.

Katharine gave Cleetie her hand and murmured a greeting. Cleetie waved her toward a nearby chair. “Have a seat, and pardon me that I don’t get up. My legs aren’t what they used to be. Florence said you want to talk to me about Alfred.”

Dr. Flo, who had trotted through the small living room to the adjoining kitchen, came back with several Krispy Kreme doughnuts on a large plate and three smaller plates. “I’m making coffee. It will be ready in a minute. But go ahead and start on these. I picked them up on my way, and they were piping hot when I got them.” She distributed plates and napkins and then passed the doughnuts. Katharine took one.

Cleetie took three and munched the first with strong greedy teeth. “Don’t tell Vicki and Latisha I ate these things,” she warned Dr. Flo. She turned to Katharine to explain, “My granddaughters feed me the most gosh-awful things. If it wasn’t for my girls and Florence, here, I’d have died of boredom years ago. Only pleasure I get anymore is eating—and talking. So ask me whatever it is you want to know.”

Katharine chewed her lip. How frank could she be?

Cleetie seemed to understand her dilemma. “Anything at all.” She waved a sugar-spotted hand. “Alfred has gone where nothing can ever hurt him again.”

Dr. Flo rose. “I think the coffee ought to be finished. I’ll be right back.”

Katharine leaned forward in her chair. “I am trying to learn all I can about Carter Everanes. Do you believe that Alfred killed him?”

Cleetie shook her head without hesitation. “He couldn’t have. For one thing, Alfred had an airtight alibi. He was at our aunt’s for dinner that night. He picked me up and we rode the bus together, and we got there by seven. Mr. Everanes’s sister testified she talked to him later than that. The jury thought we were all lying, of course, to save Alfred’s skin, but it was gospel truth. And there’s another reason I know Alfred didn’t do it. He was terrified of guns. Our stepfather used to threaten him—” She heaved a sigh that made her enormous shelf of a bosom rise and fall. “Maybe I ought to just tell you about Alfred, and you can pick out what you want or need to know.” She raised her voice. “Florence, I don’t know how much of this you want to hear. Close your ears if you want to.”

She settled back against her recliner and brushed specks of sugar icing off her black skirt. “When I was six and Alfred eight, Mama married a man named Ty Wilson. Ty started molesting Alfred almost as soon as he moved into the house, while Mama worked nights. I didn’t know a thing about that at the time, of course. All I knew was that Ty made Alfred sleep with him and it made Alfred cry. When I begged him to let Alfred sleep with me like he always had, Ty said boys and girls shouldn’t sleep together, it wasn’t right.” She worked her lips in distress at the memory.

“Sometimes Alfred used to beg to sleep on the couch. Ty would get out his gun and wave it around and he’d say, ‘You do what I tell you, boy, or I’ll give you what-for. And if you ever open your mouth about my private business, I’ll blow your head off. You hear me?’ I felt real left out, because Alfred knew Ty’s private business and I didn’t. Lordy, Lordy, how that sweet child suffered. Ty finally died when Alfred was fifteen, but Alfred never said a word about what had happened between them. Mama and I never suspected a thing until Alfred’s trial. Then he told the court that he was a homosexual, and that he had become that way because our stepfather molested him for years when he was a child.”

Cleetie stopped. For several minutes she stared out the window at the wreck of her neighborhood—or was it at the wreck of her brother’s life? “Mama sat there with tears streaming down her cheeks, whispering, ‘Oh, God, and I never knew. I never knew.’ Until she died, she carried a broken heart at how that boy had suffered.” She lifted a dark hand and shaded her eyes. It was several minutes before she spoke again.

“Of course, Alfred cooked his bacon in court by telling them what he was.”

Dr. Flo spoke from the doorway, where she stood holding a tray of steaming mugs. “So why would he have said such a thing, then?”

“To explain why Mr. Everanes gave him a ring he was wearing—the one folks claimed he stole after he shot Mr. Everanes. Alfred’s defense was that he and Mr. Everanes were lovers, and Mr. Everanes gave him the ring. Any fool would have known that defense wouldn’t work. Homosexuality was a disgrace in both the black and the white communities in those days. People didn’t talk about it, or admit it. Why his attorney let him testify that way, we’ll never know. He could have said Mr. Everanes gave him the ring for Christmas or something and left it at that. Once he had accused Mr. Everanes of being homosexual, not one member of the jury or the judge, either, heard another word in his defense. They couldn’t wait to get rid of a yard nigger who’d dare say things like that about a rich Atlanta lawyer.” Her lips curved in a humorless smile. “Poor Alfred had the distinction of getting the fastest execution in Georgia history. Mama always said if they could have lynched him then and there, a lot of folks would have been pleased.”

“He claimed Carter Everanes was homosexual?” Katharine tried to fit that piece into her puzzle. No wonder she had never heard Lucy or Walter mention him. That wasn’t the sort of thing either of them would have discussed around a niece. She remembered a time when Jon had been writing a paper on gay rights in high school and his granddad had warned him in a mild voice, “Don’t mention that subject around your grandmother’s relatives, okay?” Katharine had presumed that was because they wouldn’t be comfortable discussing sex in any form.

“Oh, yes,” Cleetie said, reaching for her fifth doughnut. “Alfred claimed at the trial that he loved Mr. Everanes and Mr. Everanes loved him—that that was why Mr. Everanes had hired him in the first place. But if Alfred thought claiming to have been in love with his white boss was going to get him off, he was sorely disappointed.” Her teeth bit into the doughnut like she would have preferred to crush jurors between those strong teeth.

A key turned in the lock and a fresh-faced boy of about nineteen looked in the door. “Hey, Granny, where’d you get that doughnut?” He noticed her visitors and turned to Dr. Flo in indignation. “You know Mama said she’s not to have sugar.”

“What’s it gonna do, kill me?” his grandmother asked, reaching for a sixth. “I’m here to tell you, boy, I’d rather die eating a doughnut than linger several years eating healthy.”

“Well, don’t hog them,” he told her. “Save some for me.” He reached over and took one, perched on the couch and ate it, dripping sugar all over the rug.

“You got everything you needed to know?” Dr. Flo asked Katharine.

Katharine nodded. She had gotten far more than she needed to know.

Neither woman spoke for a long time on their drive back to Katharine’s house. Dr. Flo broke the silence. “When I think how many years I wasted, moping around thinking the love of my life had died in the electric chair—and all the time, he wasn’t interested in me at all.” Her voice was so sad that Katharine looked out the window to give her privacy for her grief. Dr. Flo was silent again for several blocks, then spoke as if she was making a discovery while speaking. “Some good came out of it, though. I never had any interest in any other man until Maurice came along. I guess Alfred saved me for Maurice.”

Katharine scarcely knew what she replied. Her thoughts were going around and around. If Carter was gay, he couldn’t have been the little love of the Austrian woman. He must have stolen the diary as well as the necklace.

All she had to show for a difficult week was the name of the person to whom the necklace belonged and a house that had nearly been destroyed.

She wouldn’t have minded never hearing Carter Everanes’s name again. No wonder Aunt Lucy and Uncle Walter had stricken him from their lives.