Closer than the Bones (7 page)

“How extraordinary!” Miss McElroy said. I didn’t see the expression on her face which accompanied this pronouncement because I was glancing around the table, trying to catch surprise on someone’s face. But everyone more or less mirrored the puzzlement expressed by our hostess.

“What was this doing in your room?” Brett asked, reaching for the knife. He picked it up and turned it in his hands. “It looks wicked sharp.”

“It is,” I assured him, my voice grim.

“May I see that, please?” Phillips asked.

Brett handed the knife to me, and I passed it across the table.

“It looks like one which belongs in the kitchen here,” Phillips said, after examining it.

“Just where in your room did you find it, Miss Carpenter?” Miss McElroy asked.

“It was on my bed,” I told her. I would explain later, in private, just how I had found it on my bed. For now, I preferred not to broadcast the details.

“How extraordinary,” she said again, looking straight at me. I raised my eyebrows at her, and she took that as a signal that I had more to tell her. “Something like that shouldn’t be left lying around. Morwell, please speak to the girls and see what you can find out.”

“Certainly, Mary Tucker,” he said. “I can’t imagine that one of them took it upstairs, so I’m curious to know how it got there.” He glared at me as if he suspected I had taken it myself, but I gazed blandly back at him.

“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Alice Bertram said, her voice peevish. “So you found a knife in your room. Since no one stuck it in you, there’s nothing to complain about. At least you can climb the stairs without feeling like you’ve got knives sticking in your back and legs every step of the way.” Her husband gazed down at his plate, his face ashen. How did the man live with this, day in and day out? No wonder he wasn’t publishing much these days. How could anyone create if he lived with such a complaining harridan twenty-four hours a day?

“I did offer, as usual, Alice dear,” Miss McElroy said, her voice deceptively mild, “to have a bed made up for you downstairs, but you insisted that you’d be more comfortable in one of the rooms upstairs.”

“The rooms downstairs are just too drafty, even in the summertime. In the winter, it’s too cold downstairs, and in the summer, it’s too hot, and all sorts of bugs seem to get in. The last time I tried staying downstairs, I had bugs in my bed all the time.”

“I should think that was better than sleeping alone,” Lurleen said.

I nearly spit out the mouthful of tea I had just put in my mouth. When this woman turned catty, she did so in fine style.

“Speaking of sleeping alone, Lurleen dear,” Alice said, “where is your charming young secretary? Did she decide not to come with you on this trip? How could you bear to be parted from that sweet girl, even for a few days?”

Beside me Brett snorted, and I watched in amazement as Lurleen’s face suffused with red. What on earth was Alice trying to imply? I had never heard that Lurleen was a lesbian, though she had also never been married, as far as I knew.

Lurleen took a deep breath before she spoke. “I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said that although we’re all in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars. Have you ever, for even one moment in your life, my dear Alice, seen the stars?”
Bravo!
I thought. I would probably just have poured my glass of tea over the woman’s head, but Lurleen had class.

“As you can no doubt tell by now, Miss Carpenter,” Miss McElroy said, “things are never dull here at Idlewild. We do tend to have such amusing conversations, don’t you think?”

While I was trying to muster some sort of reply, the door of the dining room flew open and almost banged against the wall from the force. “Hello, everyone! Sorry I’m late, but I missed my ride and had to come on my own. Blasted rental car broke down about two miles away, and I had to walk the rest of the way here.”

The newcomer stood in the doorway, clutching a bulging briefcase in one hand. Almost as wide as he was tall, in his mid to late sixties, he wore a crumpled and sweat-stained dark suit. His florid face perspired heavily, and with a handkerchief, he mopped ineffectually at the moisture beading his forehead. Wisps of gray hair clung to his sunburned head. He had the face of a predator, with coldly assessing eyes and a lupine grin. I didn’t like him, just looking at him.

“Hamilton!” Miss McElroy spoke his name in an exasperated tone. “If only you’d buy a cell phone, you could have called, and someone would have retrieved you. You must be the only literary agent in the world without one.”

“Who needs ’em?” he said. “Just another way for idiot writers to bug you when you don’t want to hear from ’em.” He walked around the table, pulled out the empty chair next to me, and plopped himself down in it. “Damn, but I’m still hot.”

Morwell Phillips retrieved a glass from the sideboard and filled it with water from a pitcher on the table. “Here, drink this. You’re probably dehydrated by now.” His nose wrinkled in distaste as he spoke.

Judging from the state of his clothes and the odor emanating from them, I’d say the new arrival was dehydrated, at the very least. I wouldn’t want to take bets on the last time he’d bathed, that’s for sure. I tried not to breathe too deeply and wished he had chosen somewhere else to sit.

Brett Doran whispered quietly in my ear, “Meet Hamilton Packer, world-class asshole.”

“Wonder Boy here was supposed to bring me with him,” Packer complained, as if he’d heard what Brett had said to me, “but he never showed up this morning. So I had to drive here in that banged-up piece of rental trash.”

Brett muttered something under his breath. “I tried calling you this morning, Hamilton, before I left Memphis," he protested. “But you never answered your phone, and the staff at the hotel didn’t know where you were. I just figured you’d decided to come on your own.”

More likely, I thought, Brett didn’t want the inside of his car smelling like a skunk’s jamboree and had left the odiferous Packer to his own devices. I cut Brett a sideways glance, and he winked at me. I couldn’t blame him. I was going to have to leave the table before much longer.

“Yeah,” Packer said, “you wouldn’t want to be doing me any favors these days, would you, Brett? Not after leaving me high and dry two weeks ago. Guess you forgot about that high six-figure advance I got you for your first book.”

“Now, boys,” Miss McElroy said, “can we leave such discussions for later? That’s not why I invited you all here this week, after all.”

“Why the hell did you invite us all here, Mary Tucker?” Packer asked. “This is one hell of a reunion, if you ask me. But of course there’s one person missing, isn’t there?” He turned in his chair to look at me. “But looks like we got some fresh blood, though. Who the hell are you?”

Before I could answer, Miss McElroy responded for me. “Hamilton, this is Miss Ernestine Carpenter. She’s here to assist me with my memoirs. That’s why I’ve invited you all here, too. I want you to help me, too.”

“That’s a crock of shit,” Packer said, “if you don’t mind my saying so, Mary Tucker. I know what y’all are after, but it’s too late.” He pulled his briefcase from under the table and set it in his lap. “I got it right here”—he patted the briefcase lovingly—“and nobody else can lay a hand on it.”

I could feel the tension in the air after Hamilton Packer’s announcement. I might not know what he had in his briefcase, but the rest of the group around the table sure did. Every eye in the room, except for mine, was fixed on the crude-talking, smelly man sitting beside me.

“And how did you manage to get hold of it?” Russell Bertram asked, his voice sounding rusty from either disuse or great stress.

“A very interesting question,” Miss McElroy said, when Packer failed to respond. “Do enlighten us, Hamilton. How did you get it?”

Get what?
I wanted to scream.

“And how do we know it’s really what you say it is?” Brett asked.

“Yes, Hamilton,” Lurleen Landry said, her voice hard enough to cut a diamond. “How do we know that you didn’t write it yourself? After all, it’s taken long enough for you to find it!”

“Temper, temper, Lurleen, my love,” Packer sneered. “A lady of your years shouldn’t raise her blood pressure too much, you know.” He laughed, a raucous sound that made me want to punch him. “But what I’ve got here is going to raise blood pressure all over the place. Not to mention my bank balance.” He gloated at all of us, while the rest of the people in the room sat there, fuming in silence.

I had had enough, however. “All right, you odious little man, what are you blathering about? Either tell us what you’ve got there, or go take a bath. Preferably both!” I gave him my best glare, one that has served to quell several generations of unruly students, and he looked as if the tablecloth had reached out and slapped him in the face.

But only for a moment. He laughed again. “Damn, Mary Tucker, where’d you find this old bulldog here?” Then he had the temerity to leer at me. “You may be a bit long in the tooth, sweetie, but I like ’em scrappy.”

He had nerve, I’ll give him that. I almost had to admire the way he refused to be browbeaten. I’ve yet to meet the man, however, who gets the last word with me. “Well, sweetie, I like ’em clean and with something it doesn’t take a microscope to find between their legs or their ears. You lose on both counts.”

Beside me, Brett Doran convulsed helplessly with laughter. Lurleen Landry was giggling, Morwell Phillips looked totally scandalized, and even Alice Bertram had the ghost of a smile playing about her lips.

“Miss Carpenter, I do believe you have achieved what no other female of my acquaintance has ever been able to,” Miss McElroy said, the amusement evident in her voice. “You’ve left poor Hamilton speechless—at least for a moment—probably for the first time in his life.”

“A dubious distinction,” I said, angry with myself for having lost control long enough to say something like that, and in front of these people. What must they think? My sainted grandmother was no doubt spinning in her grave this very moment.

“The question remains,” Miss McElroy said, “just how did you come into possession of Sukey’s manuscript, Hamilton? At the time of her death, it couldn’t be found anywhere.”

Once again the level of tension ratcheted up noticeably, and the levity of what had taken place moments before was quickly forgotten. I could imagine that everyone here was curious about Sukey Lytton’s last work-in-progress, but why should they be so uneasy about it? It almost felt like they were afraid of it.

Packer glanced at me, then his eyes shifted away. Maybe I had gotten my bluff in and he wouldn’t try anything further with me. I sat back in my chair, leaning as far away from his noxious odor as possible while I waited to hear what he had to say.

“I guess I might as well tell y’all the story,” Packer began, his voice smug. “It’s almost like something out of one of those mystery novels you’re always reading, Mary Tucker.” He paused to drain his water glass, then held it out for more. Phillips grimaced in distaste, but he filled the glass from the pitcher on the table.

“Sukey didn’t trust any of you not to interfere with the book she was working on,” Packer said, “because she knew none of you would like it. So before she came here last Christmas, she bundled up the manuscript and sent it to a friend of hers. Problem with that was, this friend of hers was working with the Peace Corps somewhere in Africa at the time, and it took the package several months to arrive. By that time, of course, Sukey was dead, but the friend didn’t know that. She stuck the manuscript away without even reading it, because Sukey asked her not to.

“Then this friend became deathly ill and had to be rushed out of whatever hellhole in Africa she was in, and she was in a hospital in Spain for six weeks. After that, she got sent home to the good ol’ US of A. When she finally felt like unpacking her stuff, she came across Sukey’s manuscript. That’s when she discovered that Sukey was dead—when she tried to call her. She didn’t know what the hell to do with the manuscript, but she remembered Sukey talking about her agent, namely me, and she decided to send it to me, not knowing what else to do with it. I got it in the mail three days ago.”

“What an extraordinary story,” Miss McElroy said.

The rest of us sat in somewhat stunned silence. Extraordinary was certainly the right word for the story. Bizarre also came to mind. Why on earth would Sukey Lytton send a manuscript off to a friend in Africa? The whole notion seemed preposterous, but of course I had no personal knowledge of Sukey Lytton or how her mind worked.

Writers had been known to do stranger things. I had a friend who stored the research notes for his dissertation in the freezer, of all places. Though I had thought it peculiarly appropriate to store notes on a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne in such a manner, it was still odd.

Had Sukey Lytton feared for her life to such an extent that she had taken extreme measures to safeguard her manuscript? What could she have been writing that was volatile enough to merit doing something like Hamilton Packer had just described to us?

“It’s crazy, that’s what it is,” Brett said flatly. “But, then, that was Sukey all over.”

“Yes, the poor girl had a persecution complex a mile wide,” Lurleen agreed. “She thought we were all out to get her for some strange reason. I could never figure it out myself.”

“That’s a rich one!” Packer snorted in amusement. “None of you ever really liked the poor girl, and she knew it. She knew most of you despised her, and her poetry, but she’s going to have the last laugh, and I’m going to see to it.”

“And you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank, I’m sure,” Russell said, with more animation than I had yet seen him display. “You can cut out the self-righteous act, Hamilton. All you cared about was how much money Sukey could make from her work. You wouldn’t have wasted any time on her if there wasn’t something in it for you.”

“And you should have been spending your time on someone who deserved your attention a lot more than that vicious little whore did,” Alice added. “That last contract you negotiated for Russ, before he wised up and fired you, was nothing short of insulting.”