Death on the Family Tree (3 page)

“Fibers, then,” Posey conceded grudgingly. “What can she do with that?”

Having had a long conversation with Hollis about that very subject over Christmas, Katharine could answer. “She can design fabrics for home and commercial furnishings, textiles for clothing and accessories, wallpaper, or even stationery. She took a lot of art history courses, too, so she could go into museum work in areas like clothing, quilts, tapestries, or linens. Or,” a concession to Posey’s greatest goal for all her daughters, “she could get married and design fabrics and wallpapers for her own home.”

Of course, considering the procession of weird young men Hollis had brought home, that idea might not comfort Posey much.

Sure enough, Hollis’s mother made a rude sound. “I certainly hope she won’t marry her latest. Do you remember Zach Andrews?”

“Oh, yes. He used to come play with Jon when he was little.” Katharine conjured up a slender child with brown curls and an angelic face that completely belied the devil inside. She still had five small holes in her bedroom carpet to commemorate the day he had convinced Jon to light matches, drop them, and see whose could burn the longest. The boys were seven at the time, and that was one of several episodes that had led Katharine to tell Jon he could not invite Zach over any more. “Wasn’t he in Jon and Hollis’s class at Westminster School?”

“Only until he got kicked out his junior year,” Posey corrected her. “Lord only knows where he went after that. Some folks said he was in juvenile detention. Then his parents sent him to an odd school out in California, one where they don’t pay tuition, but work on a cattle farm.” Posey sounded like Zach had been sent to outer Siberia to work the mines—which, if he hadn’t improved, might have been a good idea. “Still, he finished at Emory, so maybe he’s okay now,” Posey conceded, “but do you know who he’s gone to work for since he graduated? The Ivorie Foundation. And you know as well as I do that old Mr. Ivorie has practically turned the whole thing over to Brandon, who is downright tacky!”

The Ivories were a Buckhead family who had amassed a fortune three generations ago by dint of what some claimed were unsavory tactics, then had become so blatantly religious and radically conservative that moderate Chris tians and moderate conservatives alike considered them an embarrassment to their cause. The Ivories had no compunction about proclaiming that God blessed the wealthy with riches because they were more righteous and worked harder than anybody else—forgetting their own antecedents and that nobody amasses a fortune without somebody helping along the way and others going without so they can have what the Ivories considered their fair share of the national GNP. The Ivorie mantra was that the primary role of government was to make sure the wealthy retained their wealth and privilege so it would trickle down—although, as Katharine’s father often pointed out, the only part that trickled down was what was left after they took what was required to maintain their own lavish lifestyle. The Ivories also claimed that the only way to keep the nation strong was to expel or forcibly restrain any persons whom they deemed undesirable. In the middle of the last century, Napoleon Ivorie III—the “old man” Posey referred to—had created the Ivorie Foundation to help finance the work of Senator Joe McCarthy. Since then, the foundation had channeled lavish grants to causes and think tanks perched on the far right wingtip of the political eagle.

What most galled Katharine was that while the Ivories regularly attended one of the biggest churches in town, they believed in and proclaimed not love, but hate. They owned a number of religious broadcasting stations that combined large doses of vituperation and a regular call for the faithful to separate themselves and their children from a contaminating world with sermons purporting to be about a God who loved the world so much, he sent his son to save it.

The Ivories practiced the separation they preached. They lived on the Hill, a gated Buckhead estate that most of their neighbors had never been inside. Napoleon Ivorie, who was surely over ninety and was a recluse, lived in the original mansion. He had built a second for his daughter, Rowena Slade, and a third for Rowena’s son, Brandon.

Brandon was simultaneously the most conservative and the most radical twig that the family tree had produced. At twenty-eight, he was a fiery advocate of widespread and, if necessary, violent action against those he despised. Yet in clothing, style, and demeanor, he projected an image so stiff and proper that he made William F. Buckley Jr. look like a hippie.

“Brandon’s never tacky, Posey,” Katharine felt compelled to protest. “I doubt if he has ever been tacky in his life.” But she was as concerned as her sister-in-law that old Napoleon might be fixing to bypass Rowena and put Brandon at the helm, for Katharine liked Rowena. She was conservative but no bigot. In kindergarten terms, she respected and worked well with others.

Posey gave a little huff of disgust. “Well, he’s dangerous. You know as well as I do that he’s paying for those marches down at the capitol, with their cutesy little hats and lovely printed signs, even if the Ivorie name never appears.”

“Speaking of appearing,” Katharine interrupted, “did you notice old Mr. Ivorie and Rowena at Aunt Lucy’s funeral? They slipped in a side door with two men I didn’t recognize just before the ser vice started, and left by the side door right after the benediction. I never heard Aunt Lucy mention him or Rowena.”

“Lucy grew up in Buckhead, didn’t she? And she was about Mr. Ivorie’s age. Maybe they had a fling in their wild, misspent youths and he came to pay his last respects. Brandon wasn’t with them?”

“No.”

“It’s a wonder. He seems to be everywhere else these days. How he manages to get himself in all the papers and on television and radio so much, I will never know. I saw him again last night on Fox, trying to scare folks to death about terrorists among us. I don’t know how Zach can work for him, and I could not stand for a daughter of mine to get mixed up in all that.”

Posey and Wrens, like many of their Buckhead neighbors, were genial, tolerant conservatives who kept friends in and contributed to candidates in both parties. What ultimately mattered in their world were not the vagaries of politics but the stability of their own wealth and the influence that wealth could buy, whichever party held office. No wonder Posey was chagrined that Hollis was dating anybody connected with the Ivorie Foundation.

Katharine disliked the Ivories’ politics even more than Posey did. Whenever their bandwagon included a diatribe against “those godless liberals,” she wanted to stand up and shout, “My parents were liberals and they were not godless!” (Not that she would, of course. She’d been raised by a Southern mother, and had better manners than that.) She was also surprised that Hollis would be dating someone connected with Brandon since during Hollis’s years at SCAD, she had several times mentioned friends who were gay. In addition to terrorists, Brandon had targeted homosexuals as “a heinous threat to Georgia families.”

“What is Zach doing for Brandon?” Katharine wondered aloud.

“Heaven only knows. Writing, Hollis says, and research, whatever that means.”

Katharine suspected that Hollis saw Zach as nothing but a former acquaintance to hang out with to annoy her mother while she got her bearings after college. Time to get back to Posey’s original lament. “My advice is, let her decorate the carriage house the way she wants and see how it looks. You may be surprised at what she does with it. And if you don’t like it, you can always redecorate when she moves out.”

It is so easy to be wise when it’s someone else’s daughter.

“Maybe so,” Posey said dubiously. “Well, I better go. I’ve got a tennis match in fifteen minutes, and I’m running late. What do you have planned for today?”

“This and that,” she said evasively. “Autumn Village sent me ten boxes of Aunt Lucy’s stuff, so I thought I’d go through them and see if there’s anything worth keeping.”

“Poor Katharine. She wasn’t really even kin to you, was she?”

“Not blood kin, but that never mattered. Mother and Sara Claire grew up with Walter and Lucy, so when Walter married Sara Claire, Lucy became part of our family. She always seemed as much my aunt as Sara Claire did, and she was a lot more fun. I don’t mind winding up her last bits and pieces.”

“Well, I think you’re a saint. I don’t imagine she left much of value.”

“She had a nice secretary that belonged to her grandmother that she said I could have. Otherwise, I don’t expect to find anything of value unless there’s an unprecedented demand for small wooden animals and lamps made of Highland cattle horn.”

“You’re a dadgum saint,” Posey repeated. “Well, gotta run. See you later.”

Katharine hung up with a smile. In two or three days Posey would remember that it had been her birthday and would call full of apologies to invite her to a scrumptious lunch. Susan and Jon fondly called Posey “our great late aunt,” for Posey Buiton was a lovable woman, but she had never been on time for anything in her life, including her own wedding and her father’s funeral.

While Katharine had the phone in her hand, she called Dutch back and left a message on his machine asking him to call her when he returned.

She set the diary back in the box, thinking she might try to translate a bit of it later to test her college German, and reached for the thing swathed in cloth. It was metal, and felt like it had started as a long rod about as thick as her little finger and been bent into an almost circular shape, with knobs placed at regular intervals around three-quarters of its perimeter. She pulled back the cloth and furrowed her brow. What could it be? It was the soft green of old bronze. The circle was not quite closed, but one end had been curved into a hook and the other looped into an eye to fasten it. The knobs were of the same metal, either shaped from the rod or shaped and attached to the rod when the materials were hot and pliable. If it were a necklace, it would not have been comfortable to wear. Katharine lifted a yellowed tag, tied by a cord through the eye at one end. On it was written, in faded sepia ink,
HALLSTATT 1850
.

She carried it into the downstairs powder room and held it up to her neck, afraid it would break if she stretched it and put it on. It must have been lovely when it was new and polished. As she turned away from the mirror, her reflection seemed to be that of a younger woman with a slim face and long hair as black as a raven’s wing. But when she looked again, it was her own face she saw.

Knowing that most mysteries these days can be solved with a few keystrokes, Katharine went upstairs to her bedroom, where her computer desk occupied one corner. On the Internet, she searched for “Hallstatt” and found listings for an Austrian village advertising the most beautiful lake in the world. Had Aunt Lucy visited it and picked up the necklace as a souvenir? It wasn’t her usual trinket. Why had she kept it in an old box with a German diary, marked
CARTER
?

Katharine read on and discovered that Hallstatt was also a site where many objects from the early Iron Age had been found—so many, in fact, that the term “Hallstatt” was commonly used for artifacts from various cultures of the late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age throughout Central and Western Europe. She balanced the necklace on one palm. Could it possibly be very, very old? She tried to push her mind back past the Renaissance and the Dark Ages to the early days of Rome, but her brain cells wouldn’t stretch that far. Who was the woman for whom it was made? How valuable was it? What right did Lucy Everanes have to posses it?

“And most important,” she murmured, perplexed, “what the dickens am I supposed to do with it now?”

Katharine ripped open Aunt Lucy’s other boxes and rummaged through letters and notebooks, searching for any mention of a Carter. By the time she found three photo albums, she was sneezing from dust. She decided to examine them outside.

She carried the albums out to the patio and stood with her hands full, looking around for some place to sit. She hadn’t put cushions on the wicker chairs yet that summer, since none of the family had been around to sit outdoors.

She set the albums on the patio while she fetched cushions for one chair from the storage locker, then sat looking across her backyard. “Why don’t I spend more time out here?” she asked aloud. “Why don’t I eat out here?”

Because the only table was down near the pool, inconvenient to the house. “I am going to buy a small table to put up here,” she announced to a passing butterfly, “and cushions I can leave out all summer. I’ll come out every pleasant day.”

What was the matter with her? She didn’t normally go around talking to refrigerators, robins, and butterflies. She turned her attention to Aunt Lucy’s albums and found one that contained old sepia pictures with scalloped edges. Katharine chuckled at those labeled “Lucy (5) and her goat cart” and “Lucy (6) swimming with Walter (10).” Uncle Walter already had a pompous look, even in his underwear. “Going to Vassar” showed Lucy beside a train, trying hard to look sophisticated in a fur coat and hat. The other freshman with her had to be Sara Claire. Katharine recognized the tilt of that chin.

Several pictures showed Lucy and Sara Claire in London and Paris—surely before World War II. Finally Katharine found a slim young man dressed in the baggy pants, suspenders, and straw hat of the nineteen thirties, standing in front of a snow-capped mountain. Beneath, Lucy had written, “Carter, Austria, 1937.” The next few pictures showed the same young man with Lucy holding his arm and smiling up at him. In another picture, Sara Claire stood clutching his arm like she would never let go. His face was never quite clear.

Katharine turned the page and found a professional picture of a wedding party labeled “Sara Claire and Walter, 1939.” She pored over it, picking out faces she recognized. Her mother as maid of honor looked calm, poised, and pretty. Sara Claire was as haughty and aristocratic at twenty-two as she had been at eighty. Lucy, a bridesmaid, looked scrawny and miserable in a long straight dress that bared her bony shoulders. Among the groomsmen Katharine saw one man who looked a lot like her father, but it couldn’t have been, since her parents hadn’t met until they were forty. Next to him stood a tall handsome man with wide shoulders, a well-shaped nose, and—could that be Dutch’s bullet head? He wore the same short crew cut, but Katharine would never have imagined he’d ever been that thin. As long as she had known him, Dutch had been what he called “portly.”

Next to him stood a man who could be Carter. He had the same long, slender face, dark curling hair, and tall athletic body, but Lucy hadn’t written names beneath the picture. In the whole album there was no clue as to who Carter was, what had become of him, or why Lucy had kept a journal and a necklace in a box with his name on it.

Katharine was still puzzling over those questions when the phone rang again. This time it was finally Tom. She felt her spirits rise at the sound of his voice.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart. Sorry I can’t be there with you today, but I’ve got great seats for the symphony Friday night, and I’ll fly in early enough so we can get dinner. Okay?”

“Okay.” She pressed the phone hard to her ear. Even after all these years, she felt their separation most keenly when they spoke on the phone. She missed seeing his face and reading his body language while they talked.

It was his body language she had first noticed at a Christmas party in Buckhead during her freshman year at Agnes Scott. Her dad had retired and her parents had moved to Atlanta in December, to be nearer her mother’s parents and Sara Claire. Through Sara Claire, Katharine had received invitations to several parties over the holidays. She was just recovering from a tempestuous high school romance and a broken heart and was not interested in men, but at one party, a young man near the fireplace intrigued her. He was medium in most respects—medium height, medium build, medium brown hair—but in that sparkly, frenetic setting he radiated calm. She had moved over nearer to see what he and an older man had found to talk about, and as she listened, she was amazed at both the breadth of what the young man seemed to know and at the courteous way he managed to disagree without being disagreeable.

When they were introduced, his face lit up and became quite attractive. “I’ve heard about you from Miss Lucy Everanes,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” She suspected he said something similar to every girl he met, but she let him bring her a glass of punch. Soon they were deep in conversation about literature. He was a senior at Georgetown and the first man she had ever met who valued her for her opinions. Her roommates would later tease her that Tom Murray seduced her mind.

She found him fascinating, with many interests and a daunting intelligence. After he returned to Georgetown they wrote long letters. Katharine found herself looking up new words in the dictionary to be sure she used them correctly. She began to do what he liked to do and to read what he liked to read. She took up tennis, running, and biking, and saw all the movies he mentioned so they could discuss them.

When he came to Atlanta for spring vacation, they saw each other every day. She tried to go on four or five hours of sleep, as he did, until one night past midnight when he suggested they get up early and climb Stone Mountain the next morning to watch the sun rise. “I can’t keep up with you!” she had cried in defeat,

“I don’t want you to keep up,” he had replied. “I love you for yourself.” When he kissed her—a gentle, lingering kiss—she had gotten dizzy with joy.

They got married the summer after she graduated, and over the years of their marriage, she had watched with pride and amazement while his energy, courtesy, and ambition carried him up the corporate ladder. He continued to respect her opinions and to value her as a partner. She considered it a privilege to provide a calm, lovely home for him to return to. At almost fifty, he could still outride, outswim, outthink, and outread anybody she knew, and while he claimed to be looking forward to a day when he could retire and read all the books he had accumulated in his library, she couldn’t picture him sitting still for more than one day at a stretch.

But she had learned to read his body language more carefully. Although his voice never showed it, she could tell when he was really interested in a conversation and when he was pretending to listen while his mind was miles away. She could tell when he was weary or bored and pumping himself up and when he was so genuinely excited about something that the energy generated itself. He often claimed, “You’re the only person in the world I can’t fool, Katharine. The only one I can really be myself with.”

She often prided herself that they had built a better, more companionable marriage than most of their friends. They still loved to travel together or to sit by a fire and talk, and his absences lent a zest to the time he was around.

“What are your plans for today?” He sounded like he was settling in for a long chat, but she knew he must have a full schedule and couldn’t talk long.

“Nothing much. Autumn Village sent Aunt Lucy’s stuff—the things I told them to give away—so I’ve been going through it. They also want me to come get the secretary. Anthony’s going to fetch it tonight,” she added quickly, not wanting to burden him with domestic details.

“That’s good. I’d guess the rest can pretty much be thrown out, right?”

“Most of it. But listen, did you ever buy any books about Celtic archaeology?” She needed to ask before he had to go.

“Celtic archaeology?” His mind, which catalogued and never forgot a fact, worked silently for a long minute. “One of that series of Time-Life books I ordered years ago was about the Celts, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.”

“Did you know the Celts were all over Europe, not just in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland?”

“Sure. Didn’t you take second year Latin?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with it?”

“Remember the first sentence of Julius Caesar?”

“
Gallia in tres partes divasa est
?” she hazarded.

“
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
,” he corrected her. “And what’s the rest of that sentence?”

“There’s more? I didn’t remember that.”

“‘Of which one is inhabited by the Belgians, another by the Aquitanians, the third by those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours, Gauls,’” he quoted.

She never could decide whether to be delighted or exasperated by his incredible memory. “You are amazing. Do you know where the book on Celts would be?”

“Try the bottom left shelf in my library. Gathering dust, like so many other books. When I retire, honey—”

“I know, you’re going to read for five years straight, until you have read every book in the house. I hope you can do it on a freighter, because I want to see the world.”

“You’ll get seasick.”

“I’ll take pills.”

She would have loved to talk longer, but somebody spoke behind him and he said, “Gotta run. We’re due in a meeting in five minutes. Happy birthday, darling.”

As she hung up it occurred to her that Tom hadn’t shown the slightest curiosity about why she suddenly wanted to read about ancient Celts. Once again she had the feeling that she—her interests, crises, and little joys—were mere blips on the screens of other people’s lives.

She located
The Celts: Europe’s People of Iron
exactly where Tom had said it would be. She took it to the sofa in the den and in less than an hour had a few answers and more questions.

Hallstatt, she had learned, was the name given to a burial ground and the remains of a Celtic village discovered in 1846 at Salzberg, an Austrian mountain with a core of hard rock salt (not to be confused with the Austrian city, Salzburg). Salz berg had been mined from 1000–400
B.C.,
and a thriving and prosperous community had grown up near the mine, because salt was a precious commodity for prehistoric people, so valuable it was sometimes called “white gold.” They used it for preserving food and leather, for healing, and for trade. Mining the salt was extremely difficult with primitive equipment, but much wealth could be made from salt.

Katharine paused long enough to think about the woman for whom that necklace had been made. Had she been the wife of one who grew wealthy from the mine?

She returned to the book. A landslide shut down the mine around 400
B.C.
and mining was not resumed until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1846, Georg Ramsauer, the government-appointed director of the salt mines, was overseeing the excavation of gravel needed to pave a road when his men came across a human skull and a bronze earring in the earth. Ramsauer slowly excavated with a shovel and found an entire skeleton, then a second, wearing a bronze bracelet. He suspected he had found an ancient cemetery and tested his theory by staking an area and lifting away the topsoil. Sure enough, he unearthed seven skeletons laid in two rows, adorned with bronze jewelry.

Again Katharine put down the book. Had the woman who owned what she was coming to think of as “the necklace” died young and been buried with her jewelry? How young would she have been when she married? Was he kind to her, or brutal?

She sighed. It was that kind of unanswerable question that most interested her in history, not who fought whom when.

She learned that with the approach of winter, Georg Ramsauer replaced the soil and put off further excavation until spring, and reported his finds to the Austrian government. The following spring he was given authority, funds, and detailed instructions for excavating the site. Ramsauer’s team dug for the next seventeen years, turning up nearly a thousand graves and more than six hundred bronze, iron, and gold artifacts from the Celts, some dating as far back as 1000
B.C.
.

Ramsauer documented every stage of his excavations and kept a detailed diary and a running inventory of all recovered artifacts. He also hired artists to paint watercolors of some of the graves and of his best finds.

One sentence made Katharine catch her breath. Ramsauer’s diary had disappeared, and had never been found. Could it possibly be—?

“Nonsense,” she told herself aloud. “Where would Aunt Lucy get Ramsauer’s diary?” But she felt her pulses quicken at a photograph of bronze necklaces very like the one in the box.

Katharine finished the article, closed the book and mulled over three facts:

1. Georg Ramsauer’s diary disappeared.
   
2. He gave away many artifacts, with no record of who received them.
   
3. He was the father of twenty-four children.
   

Children? Wasn’t the climber in the clipping a Ramsauer?

She returned to the music room, picked up the diary, and opened the cover, hoping for a name and date. The inside cover was bare and the first page simply dated 15/6—the European style for June 15—without a year. She read the first sentence and discovered that even without a dictionary, she could translate it.

Ein neuer Anfang ein neues Tagebuch verdient
. “A new beginning deserves a new journal.” Could that possibly refer to the beginnings of the official excavation?

She shook the book gently to locate the clipping. Sure enough, the dead man was Ludwig Ramsauer. Was he a descendant of Georg?

Katharine sank to the piano bench and held the book reverently. All her life she had marveled when a lost piece of music or work of art turned up in somebody’s attic. She had never imagined it could happen to her. She wanted to sit down and translate the diary immediately, but feared she might damage it. She would make a copy. And first she’d try to find out if it was, indeed, Ramsauer’s diary. Who would be likely to know?