Death on the Family Tree

A Family Tree Mystery

To Jim Huang,
who asked the inciting question

Wednesday, June 7

Katharine Murray woke on her forty-sixth birthday and realized that nobody needed her.

She got the message slowly, not being at her best early in the day. She was halfway through brushing her teeth before she even remembered it was her birthday, which was surprising, considering how much she loved any cause for celebration. She spat, rinsed her mouth, smacked her lips to get full benefit from the peppermint flavor, then crooned, “Happy, happy birthday, baby,” as she leaned closer to the mirror for the world’s first glimpse of herself at forty-six.

She looked remarkably like she had at forty-five: same heart-shaped face with prominent cheekbones and a dusting of freckles, same long auburn hair in a practical blunt cut so she could wear it in several styles, same golden-brown eyes that Tom, her husband, used to call topaz back when he still said things like that. With one fingertip, she traced what she hoped people thought were smile lines around her mouth, not teeth-clenching lines from raising two children to adulthood.

“Same old same old,” she murmured to her reflection and padded back to her bedroom.

She didn’t bother to change out of the cotton knit shorts and T-shirt she slept in when she was alone in the house, just stumbled downstairs barefoot to fix birthday breakfast for one.

At the kitchen door she was stopped in her tracks by her first clear thought of the day:
Why did I re-do this kitchen? I don’t have a soul to cook for.

Tom left Atlanta each Monday morning to keep Washington lawmakers aware of the needs of his corporation’s far-reaching empire, then returned each Friday night to spend the weekend playing golf, puttering at their lake house, or watching televised sports.

Their daughter, Susan, was happily climbing the lowest rungs of the New York Stock Exchange with visions of her own trader’s jacket one day.

Their son, Jonathan, had tossed his Emory mortarboard into the air three weeks before and caught a plane to China to teach English for two years.

And with the deaths of her mother and two elderly aunts in the past eighteen months, Katharine’s membership in the Bi-Delts—that vast sorority of Dutiful Daughters—had expired.

Aunt Lucy had died five days before, and with her death, Katharine was well and truly orphaned. Her parents had married late and produced only one child. They hadn’t even had the foresight to provide her with cousins, which in the family-conscious South made her impoverished indeed. She had never felt family-poor in the years when she was creating a home in Buckhead (still Atlanta’s most desirable neighborhood) for Tom and the children, meeting the increasing needs of her mother as she battled breast cancer and Aunts Sara Claire and Lucy as they became frail and sank gently to sleep. But now—

She reached for the carton of orange juice and informed the refrigerator, “All the people in my life have gone away and left me like a useless piece of driftwood on the beach of life. Do you realize it is my birthday, and for the first time in my life, I don’t have a soul to celebrate with?” As she turned for a glass, she added over one shoulder, “And don’t you think it’s pathetic that a woman has to have the first conversation of her birthday with a refrigerator?”

She tried a few bars of “Happy birthday to you” while she filled the glass, but it is not a song that sounds best when sung to oneself.

At the breakfast table she lifted her glass in a salute. “To us, kitchen. To the unneeded of the world.”

If the room felt unneeded, it didn’t show it. Its pale yellow walls were bright and cheerful, hung with blue-and-white plates she and Tom had been collecting for years from countries they visited. The plates echoed Delft tiles behind the stove and blue-and-white plaid cushions on the white chairs in the adjoining breakfast room. Katharine was particularly proud of the bay window they had added by the breakfast table. Sunlight spilled through it across African violets that sat like rich jewels on the deep sill, and ran in a broad stream across the white tile floor—a floor that was finally possible now that the children were grown and no longer tracking in red Georgia mud. Just looking at the kitchen lifted her spirits.

“It’s not the end of the world to spend a birthday alone,” she announced as she considered breakfast options. “Shall I make eggs Benedict, to prove I matter? No, I don’t matter that much. An English muffin will do.”

Until that moment, she had been clowning, for Katharine was not gloomy by nature. But then, as she turned toward the bread drawer, she caught sight of her reflection in one of the new glass-fronted upper cabinets and drew a startled breath. In that light, her face was a mere transparency through which she saw rows and rows of glasses. She had the dizzying sensation that she would spend the next thirty or forty years growing increasingly invisible until she disappeared.

Or had she already?

“Oh, God!” she cried, clutching the cold granite countertop and taking short, shallow breaths of terror. “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

It was a purely rhetorical prayer.

She never expected FedEx to answer.

The doorbell rang while she sat waiting for the muffin to pop up from the toaster and her tea water to boil, wondering which appliance would win the breakfast derby and whether her entire future would consist of such fascinating moments.

Two large boxes sat on the stone veranda and a FedEx man was heading down the walk to his truck. The Murrays’ house was up a hill and far enough from the street that delivery trucks always came up the drive.

“Thank you,” she called. The Birthday Angel had come through after all, providing a day scented with roses, a mockingbird cantata, and presents before breakfast.

“Just a minute,” the deliveryman called over one shoulder. “There’s more.”

Katharine watched mesmerized as he carried stack after stack of boxes to her door. So many presents? From whom? Tom had never been wildly romantic even in their dating days. Jonathan was the dramatic one in the family, but surely he wouldn’t ship so many things from China. And when did Susan have time to shop?

Maybe they had ordered all this on the Internet. What a thoughtful family!

The man staggered up the steps and deposited two more boxes with a grateful “Oooph!” He wiped his hands on his shorts and announced, “That’s the lot.” He couldn’t have sounded more satisfied if he had just moved a new family into the governor’s mansion a few blocks away. He thrust a small metal pad toward her. “Are you authorized to sign for the lady of the house?”

Katharine was already scribbling her signature.

He craned his neck to look up at the pale gray shingles, white trim, and slate roof with its many gables. “Nice house they got here.”

“Thanks.” Katharine would have liked to chat a while longer, maybe tell him how lucky they had felt to find the house, how much they had enjoyed living in it for twenty years. Anything, really. She hadn’t spoken to a human soul for twenty-four hours and could have used the practice. But he was already headed to his truck.

As he climbed in, she recalled his first words. “Hey!” she yelled after him, “I
am
the lady of the house.” He was already backing down the drive.

Not until then did it occur to Katharine that she would have to lug all those boxes inside.

He’d brought ten, four very large. But even the daunting task of getting them into the house couldn’t dampen her excitement. She felt like she had on her fourth birthday when she had realized all the presents at the party were hers.

Until she bent to read the return address:
AUTUMN VILLAGE
.

Her excitement whooshed down an invisible drain.

These weren’t birthday presents. They were Aunt Lucy’s personal effects, shipped from the retirement home. Katharine had told the manager on Monday to distribute Aunt Lucy’s clothes, furniture, and knickknacks to anyone who wanted them, and to ship her only a mahogany secretary that had belonged to Lucy’s grandmother. He had either misunderstood or hadn’t listened. From previous experience, Katharine could guess which.

“Happy birthday to me,” she muttered to a robin seeking worms in the dewy grass. He gave an unsympathetic hop and flew away.

For one long minute she considered hauling every dratted box to the garbage cans, to be carried away. However, it was faintly possibly that one of the boxes contained something somebody in the family might want. She’d carry them into the music room and go through them there.

She picked up the first box with no idea at all that it was about to change her life.

She had chosen the smallest box. It was so old that the cardboard felt like it could dissolve in her hands, and unlike its companions—which advertised products Autumn Village bought in bulk—this one was dusty and had no printing on its sides. Somebody had put tan tape over older tape that had yellowed and grown brittle with age, and Aunt Lucy had penciled on one side, in her round schoolteacher’s hand,
CARTER.

Katharine could not recall any Carters connected with the family.

When she had lugged nine boxes inside, they practically filled the music room floor. What did that matter? The house had twelve rooms, and that one to the left of the front hall was the least used. The decorator who had re-done the downstairs several years before had claimed, “We are aiming for intimacy in here.” When he had finished, Katharine had wondered what his experience of intimacy had been. The only furniture he had allotted the room were the baby grand piano, a red wing chair that had belonged to Tom’s father and that not even sentiment could make comfortable, and her mother’s mahogany pie-crust table, which wobbled. Over the oak floor he had spread a Bokhara rug that Katharine disliked, but which Tom assured her was a good investment. On top of her mother’s wobbly table the decorator had set a ceramic bust of Beethoven that Susan had won in a piano competition. The composer wore such a ferocious frown that Jon had dubbed him “the angry
artiste
.”

The rest of the decor consisted of dark red floral drapery, taupe walls with creamy woodwork, and mahogany bookshelves from floor to ceiling on each side of the fireplace. The shelves were filled with decorator-selected bric-a-brac and coffee table books Tom planned to read someday. As far as Katharine knew, nobody had been intimate in that room since it was completed.

Beethoven glowered down at the new clutter on the rug. “You can jolly well tolerate these boxes until I get around to opening them,” Katharine informed him, “if I ever do.” She knew what she would find: lopsided straw baskets, poorly carved wooden animals, cheap souvenir mugs, plaques depicting badly colored replicas of well-known paintings, and coffee table books about every country in the world.

Lucy Everanes had been a small, plain woman with the heart of a romantic. Nine months of the year she taught world history at the same private high school she had attended as a girl. Each summer she set off on what she called “my little adventures.” She brought back enormous quantities of souvenirs, most of them schlock, and snapshots of herself perched on various animals, staring up at the Himalayas, or squatting beside a half-naked child. As a little girl, Katharine had loved to visit Aunt Lucy. She would listen to Lucy’s latest adventures and play with her collection of wooden animals from around the world. At seven, she had fiercely defended Aunt Lucy when Aunt Sara Claire had said with disdain, “For a woman of education, culture, and breeding, Lucy has exquisitely bad taste.” As an adult, however, Katharine doubted there was a thing in those boxes she would want to display in her home.

She was carrying in the final box when the telephone rang.

She would have let the machine catch it, except it might be Tom or Susan, so she dashed through the dining room and the adjoining butler’s pantry to her kitchen desk, thinking—as she always did when she made that dash, “We really need a telephone at the front of the house.” Gasping for breath, she dropped the heavy box on the desk and snatched up the phone before the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“Miz Murray?” The voice was nasal, one she didn’t recognize at first. “This is Leona, over to Autumn Village, about Miss Lucy’s thangs. We give away the furniture and her clothes, like you said, and folks was real glad to get ’em, but Mr. Billingslea said you hadn’t said nothin’ ’bout her books and her purty little thangs, so he shipped ’em all to you yesterday, overnight. He’ll send you the bill for the shipping when it comes.”

Katharine was so staggered by the thought of what FedEx would charge to ship ten unwanted boxes across town overnight, she nearly missed what Leona added. “He said to tell you if you’re still wantin’ that old desk with the glass front doors, you hafta bring a truck on over sometime today or tomorrow to fetch it, ’cause he’s needin’ her unit for somebody else.”

The calendar above Katharine’s kitchen desk showed the ordered gardens of Versailles. Why wasn’t she strolling through their well-clipped shrubbery instead of standing in that Atlanta kitchen dealing with yet another crisis on her own? The thing she most disliked about Tom’s working out of town was having to make all the decisions.

“I don’t have a truck,” she pointed out. That wasn’t strictly true. Tom kept a little truck at their house on Lake Rabun. He used it to pretend he was a good old country boy after wearing a suit in Washington all week. Katharine used it to haul plants. However, Lake Rabun was hours away and she didn’t want to fetch the truck and find somebody to help her wrap and move a valuable secretary—if it would even fit the small truck bed and if they could load and unload the piece without scratching it. She would then have to return to the lake for her car.

That was the moment when Katharine realized what Jonathan’s years in China were going to cost
her
: muscles. Even though he’d lived in a dorm and later in an apartment while attending Emory, he’d always been just across town with strong friends willing to work for occasional Mom-cooked meals.