Mason's Daughter (3 page)

In a flash, he came out from behind the front desk. “I had no idea. Please, let me show you to the dining room. This way, Miss Wallace.”

I followed his stinky Aqua Velva odor across the lobby, my pink bunny slippers padding over the Oriental rugs and dark wood floors, and through some thick double doors. As we entered the dining room, my mouth watered at the smell of bacon and cinnamon, and I was thirsty for orange juice to wash away the leftover glue on my tongue. The desk clerk pulled out a huge cushioned armchair for me and told the waiter to bring whatever I wanted.

“Put it on Mr. Wallace’s tab,” he ordered. “And hurry up. She’s hungry.” He smiled, bowed, and asked if there was anything else he could do for me.

“Thank you. That will be all.” I’d heard my father say exactly those words when he didn’t want the servants to hang around. I wondered how the man kept from tripping over an empty dessert cart as he backed out of the dining room.

Before my French toast was half eaten, Aunt Mary appeared at my side, frowning and pressing her hand against her tummy. “Here you are. I was worried about you.”

“Sorry. I woke up starving and you were still asleep.” I held up a piece of toast toward her mouth and felt the syrup drip down my wrist. “Want some?”

She dodged the food like it was poison and placed a hand to her forehead. As she flopped in the chair next to me, she closed her eyes and waited. Her lips moved as if she silently counted something, and then she burped.

I giggled. “Wow! Clyde would be proud of that one!” Last year he taught me to “burp with gusto,” as he said, but warned me not to tell anyone, especially my aunt.

Aunt Mary squinted, and for a moment her gaze darted around the ceiling as if she didn’t remember where she was. “Sally, I can’t take you anywhere today. The medicine is making me sick to my stomach.”

My eyes went damp in the corners and my voice shrank. “Will Daddy take me?”

“He’s busy in meetings all day, but I’ve arranged for a babysitter. Gwen’ll be here soon.” She took a sip out of my water glass. “We shouldn’t have come along on this trip,” she mumbled from behind the napkin. “But Nate wouldn’t let us stay home alone. What with Clyde gone and all.”

After breakfast, I changed clothes and returned to the lobby to wait. Gwen took me to the hotel gift shop and bought me a swimsuit decorated with yellow daisies, a matching towel, flip-flops, sunglasses, and a purple dragon inner tube. She picked out some movie magazines for herself. On a shelf behind the cash register, I spied a heart-shaped crystal perfume bottle. The squeeze ball was covered in gold lace with a black tassel. I asked her to add it to our purchases.

“It’ll just wash off in the pool,” she said while signing the ticket.

“It’s not for me.” I couldn’t remember Mother’s favorite perfume, but the clerk said ‘Summer Romance’ was close enough. She’d love it anyway.

We headed for the pool and stayed there until our hands and feet turned pruney. At lunch, the babysitter ordered turkey sandwiches brought to us poolside. For two days in a row, Gwen took me to the park, the movies, and the ice cream parlor. There wasn’t much else to do in the little town of Hot Springs for my father either, because at the end of the second day he announced we were leaving in the morning.

“Do you like our hotel?” he asked.

“Well enough, I guess.” I shrugged.

“Good. Because I just bought it.”

“I’d like it better if Mother had come with us.”

He hid behind his newspaper.

By the time we returned home, Aunt Mary needed a doctor, and one waited for us at the house to whisk her upstairs. I carried my shopping bag of swim gear and the special box with the perfume into the entry hall. Mrs. Gussmann had planted herself at the bottom of the stairs, ready to help with luggage. At the console table, my father shuffled through four days’ worth of mail.

“Look what I got!” I squealed. I pulled out the box to show Mrs. Gussmann my gift for Mother. I opened the lid so the crystal could catch the light from the chandelier.

“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” she said. “Did your father give you that fancy bottle for your birthday?”

Blinking, I looked at him. He stopped sorting the mail and stared first at Mrs. Gussmann, then at me.

Mrs. Gussmann picked up my suitcase. “It’s too bad you didn’t have a little friend along to help you celebrate yesterday.” She began her lumbering climb up the stairs. “I bet you had a nice cake at the hotel. How many candles on it this year? Six or seven?”

Without a word, my father turned and went into his office and closed the door. I held my breath. Surely he disappeared for a moment to get my present, the one he forgot to bring along on the trip. After several minutes, I realized he was not coming out. He had no idea yesterday was my birthday, and I gave up expecting him to remember what day I was born.

Angelique jiggles my foot with her hand. “Will you at least think about what I’ve said?”

“Sorry, what was it?”

“Get in touch with Nate.”

“I . . . I can’t.”

“When the situation with Colton gets painful enough, you will.” She stretches out her hand to take hold of mine. “How about some lunch? I made turkey Waldorf salad.”

She leads me into the kitchen and I plop down where she points. Our conversation turns casual, about Raúl’s new restaurant on the lake and her gallery reps in Santa Fe and La Jolla. We agree Big Jack’s periodic belligerence elevated my late mother-in-law Trixie to sainthood, and Angelique expresses interest in the workings of my new sprinkler system.

I explain how to set the timer. “But something odd happened this morning.”

Chewing slowly, Angelique listens to my story of the appointment book. She never even asks a question.

“Unless Colton moved it, I can’t imagine how . . . like magic.” I sigh. “Either that, or my mind is going. But thank goodness, otherwise the book would have been ruined. It’s got all the clues I’m going to follow.”

“Trixie certainly would have reason to want her son’s named cleared of suicide, but she was never sharp enough to manage a rescue of such magnitude. It had to be your clever mother. She’s your guardian angel, you know.” Angelique makes it sound easy, like checking last night’s scores in today’s paper.

“Now I believe those far-fetched rumors about you.”

“Which ones, dear?”

“That you are descended from a gypsy who married into Polish nobility. Supernatural events strike you as perfectly normal. Not so much, the rest of us.”

“Do you have another explanation?”

“Colton is trying to hide Jack’s book from me.”

“Why would he do that?” She laughs. “Of course, keeping it safe isn’t the same as deciphering the information inside. You can rely on your mother only for so much. The rest is up to you.”

I start to protest, but the doorbell rings. Angelique returns to the kitchen with her arm linked through Officer Avery’s. “Look who’s come to see you, Sally. Don’t you just love a handsome man in uniform?” She waves him to a place at the table.

“Thanks, I’ve already eaten.” Mike squeezes the brim of his hat and nods at me. “Hello again.”

I smile up at him. “How did you know I would still be here?”

“A sudden funny feeling. I dunno . . . can’t explain it.”

While Angelique shoots me a knowing wink, he twirls his hat and stares at his loafers. “Big Jack’s had a nasty fall in the warehouse.” Mike raises his head to look me full in the face.

“How badly is he hurt?” I can’t make sense of the words. Big Jack is too cantankerous to let himself be injured.

“They’ve taken him to the emergency room. He’s in pretty rough shape.”

Before I have a chance to ask further, Angelique bustles us out the front door, and I follow Mike’s squad car and its wailing siren to the hospital. When we arrive, the ER doctor informs us Big Jack has gone into surgery, but I lose track of whether it was for the broken hip or the head injury. “Don’t expect too much, ma’am. Mr. Edwards wasn’t breathing at the time his secretary found him.”

I clutch Mike’s hand and let him lead me to a seat in the lobby.

Some guardian angel Saint Trixie turned out to be, if she became one. She can’t even keep her husband from falling off a ladder.

On the other hand, I wonder if my mother would be capable of an even more difficult assignment.

CHAPTER FOUR

I have two choices. Sit at the hospital until Big Jack gets out of surgery, which could take all day, or finish my errands and return later.

When Mike Avery leaves to resume his obligations in town, I pace in the empty hallway. Jack was right. Years ago God pitched out virtues, and patience flew right past me. After several minutes, I pick up my purse and head toward the exit, but realize it isn’t lack of patience that prods me. I cannot force myself to stay in a place that reminds me of my mother’s unhappy last years. Besides, I have other matters to resolve.

Detoured to the ladies room, I splash water on my face. If Saint Trixie wants to scold me for deserting her husband, her words will fall on deaf ears. No way will I trade my own sanity for camping out at the hospital, however undutiful to my father-in-law it might seem. On my way out, I hand the ER doctor my business card and drive home.

On the kitchen table, I spread out the telephone directory, a yellow legal pad, three No. 2 pencils, and Jack’s appointment book. I call the first two names listed on March sixteenth last year and get some vague answers. Jack wanted to borrow money, engage a partner, plan an expansion or relocation of the business, and make a deal with someone besides his father.

Which deal? Jack’s plans included a second deal, which never got airborne, perhaps because he died. If the second one had failed, too, I knew him well enough to believe he would have tried to launch a third. He was that cheerful and persistent, but also that unrealistic.

I clutch the crumb of evidence. Jack couldn’t have killed himself. Anyone could see he hadn’t given up. Maybe his optimism will rub off on me.

The next call gives me hope and points me toward the potential mother lode, the name of the man in the midst of each deal. For once, Jack’s scribbles prove useful. A moment after I scrawl “Dr. Brett Kennedy” at the top of the page and underline it, my phone rings.

Oh, hell! It’s Big Jack’s secretary. The pique in her voice blames me for something besides forgetting to call her.

After she summoned the ambulance, Harlene couldn’t leave the office and later the hospital staff informed her only family members can be privy to patient information. I apologize for my lack of communication and hope she blames it on anxiety.

“I’ve never seen Big Jack so spitting mad,” Harlene begins. “When he got here after breakfast, I thought he would break something.”

Already I can picture Big Jack’s scowling face.

“I couldn’t even get his signature on this stack of checks. He stormed out to the warehouse, and I could hear him cussing and shoving cartons around.”

I detect sniveling. Her lacquered face must be streaked with black.

Harlene blows her nose. “I didn’t go hunting for him until he didn’t answer my page, maybe twenty minutes later. Customers had started to come in, so I never heard the crash when he fell off the ladder.”

“It’s not your fault, Harlene.”

“What happened this time to set him off like that?” She says it like she has the answer already. According to her, nothing is ever Big Jack’s fault. Goodness knows, he could part the seven seas all at once.

“Don’t blame yourself. You did everything you could.” Harlene had a rough early life, not much education, and raised a son while tending a disabled veteran for a husband. Without admiring her, I acknowledge her fierce loyalty to Big Jack, something I had never achieved with anyone. But she treated Jack like a bothersome salesman instead of her future boss. Biased robot that she is, she couldn’t have failed to notice how much the store meant to him. “The rest is up to the doctors.”

“Oh, but if you’d seen him, all pale and unconscious. He wasn’t even breathing.”

Her words throw ice water on my heart. In place of Big Jack, I see his son’s face, ashen and still, as if he had fallen asleep in our garage, frozen against the driver’s headrest. I shudder and pick up a pencil, doodling to distract myself, pressing down as I draw.

When the lead tip of my pencil snaps, my mind shakes off its inertia, as if I just woke up to an alarm. “Tell me something, Harlene.” I wait for her to stop sniffling. “Who is Brett Kennedy?”

She gasps. “Don’t mention his name around Big Jack.”

Not that it would make any difference to him right now. “Why not?”

“He sold some company stock to that Dr. Kennedy last year, about this time. But something happened afterwards, I don’t know what, and Big Jack has been furious about it ever since.” She begins to whimper. “If he doesn’t pull through, I don’t see how . . .”

“We’ll deal with it at the time, if it comes to that.” I sit up straight, square my shoulders, and promise to call her the instant I hear any news. “Now, don’t you worry. It’s all in God’s hands.”

Perhaps not entirely. Who can guess what interference Saint Trixie might attempt? Maybe my mother-in-law misses the cantankerous old coot up in heaven.

Come get your husband anytime you want.

At least now I know what my next phone call will be. I root through the yellow pages like a pig under an oak tree.

Dr. Kennedy doesn’t practice medicine, but higher education. I finally locate him in the history department at the University of Texas in Austin. He agrees to see me tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. Better a short trip to the big city than a long visit to the funeral home. I cross my fingers.

The phone rings again. Judith Cromwell, my best friend and cousin by marriage, can’t remember if it’s her day to pick up Colton and her son Max after school.

“Your turn,” I say. “Plus, I need you to keep Colton through dinner, if you can.”

“Overnight, if you like, in case you’re on watch.”

Judith’s kind offer to help with laundry or meals brings tears to my eyes. She and I have shared many trials, and I often wish we had grown up as sisters. In a crisis, Angelique can be counted on to provide any alibi, no questions asked, but Judith would help her friend hide the body.

“I guess word has already spread around town about Big Jack’s accident.” I glance at the kitchen clock and try to calculate how long the local buzz has been active. Judith could tell me, but I have a more pressing concern. “Do you know anyone named Brett Kennedy?”

“I’ve heard the name from Charlie.” She giggles like a teenager in love. “He’s never met a stranger and remembers everyone’s face. I don’t see how he does it.”

I gather that her husband has had some dealings with the professor and later served up all the personal scoop to her like gravy. Judith sounds pleased to tell me Kennedy’s military service broke up his marriage after the Vietnam War, but
before
he struck it rich.

“Charlie said she left him because he was a poor ex-GI.” Judith’s voice changes to singsong. “If she’d only waited.”

“Your husband should have been a spy or a reporter, not a banker.” I’m not above returning her tease.

“Why do you ask about this Kennedy guy?”

I share my plans with Judith, along with my anticipation that the professor will prove helpful.

“You’re not serious, are you?” Ominous replaces singsong. “I’d leave that alone, if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Give Colton more time to adjust. That’s all he needs.”

“What Colton needs is to know his father didn’t kill himself.”

“Colton will be fine. He’s getting better every day. Expressing himself around here like he’s normal. You’d be trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer.”

“What do you mean, ‘normal’?”

“He laughs, he talks, he follows directions. Doesn’t run with scissors and plays well with others. He’s especially nice to Maddie when Max torments her.”

“But–”

“Sally, you’re seeing something that isn’t there. Too much imagination killed . . . well, you know.”

“Curiosity.”

“What?”

“It was curiosity killed the cat.”

“Just don’t let your natural stubbornness lead you astray.”

Add Judith to my strikeouts. Great. I had now hit 0-for-four. Maybe Jack would appreciate my baseball metaphor.

BY THE TIME I RETURN
to the hospital, Big Jack has just entered the post-op
ICU,
sedated to the fingertips. The surgeon extracted the broken rib from his punctured lung, inserted a steel plate in his pelvis, and realigned the bones, both ulna and radius, in his right arm. The huge bump on his head had swelled outward.

“Good thing he’s such a strong guy for sixty-seven,” the doctor says. “We had to keep him under for quite a while.”

“Is there any problem with his breathing?”

“Not since we put a chest tube in place. He’s on oxygen, too, of course.”

“I mean, earlier. From the accident?”

“Our neurological monitoring indicates there could be some brain damage, but we won’t know much more until he is alert. We’re watching him closely.”

“Should I wait here until he wakes up?”

“We’re keeping him sedated until he’s able to breathe on his own and his pressure is stable. He won’t even know you’re in the room with him.”

It takes all my courage, but I gut up enough to take a peek at Big Jack from the hallway. Bandages cover parts of him, tubes and wires stick out from different areas of his body, and hospital machinery hums and beeps like a trolley car. My stomach churns and I feel dizzy. When the
ICU
nurse asks if I’d like to go into his room, I decline. I can’t get down the elevator and out to my car fast enough.

IN JUDITH’S AND CHARLIE’S KITCHEN
, four noisy children and two adults chomp on fried chicken and corn-on-the-cob, while trying to answer homework questions. After my brief update, Judith makes everyone get quiet while she recites a quick prayer for Big Jack.

“Amen!” Charlie shouts, and the children, except Colton, reply “Amen” in chorus.

Judith holds out a plate of food, but I shake my head. “Thanks, I’ve got leftovers at home I need to get rid of.”

In the car, I give Colton a few more details about his grandfather’s condition. “He’s still unconscious from the surgery, so he’s not in any pain.” Not enough to worry Colton, I hope. “If you’d like to go see him, I’ll check with the doctor to find out when he’ll be ready for company.”

No answer.

“I picked up your new camera this afternoon. When does photo club start?”

The silence continues.

“How was school?”

“Thursday.”

“You’ve got photo club tomorrow?”

He nods.

When I grow tired of using a verbal crowbar, we ride in silence for a while, until I turn onto our street. “By the way, I ran into Mike Avery today.”

Colton stiffens as he inhales sharply and holds it.

“He offered to take you fishing with his nephews sometime.” I press the button to raise the garage door and wait for it to creep open, panel by panel. “They go someplace down on the Brazos. Sounds like fun.” I pull forward and turn off the engine. “Maybe he can help me with–”

“I hate to fish. I’m not going anywhere with that guy. Ever.” For the second time in one day, Colton gets out of my car and slams the door behind him.

It’s not as if I expect Mike Avery to replace Jack, but how can I get everything so wrong? My son refuses to answer my easy questions. What I think Colton will enjoy, he declines. I feel small and stupid until I remember Angelique’s prediction. His disagreeable behavior points toward meltdown, and I will have to act fast.

Everyone else is wrong. Colton needs closure with his father’s death. All the more reason I should speak to Brett Kennedy. The way to help Colton is to get reasonable proof that Jack died by accident and not his own hand.

I hope my mother hears me because I will need her help.