Death on the Family Tree (10 page)

Thursday, June 8

The phone shrilled in the darkness.

Katharine came instantly awake and snatched the receiver with a trembling hand. Which of those she loved was in danger? Her “Hello!” was a demand for instant information.

Instead, slightly off-key, she heard, “Happy birthday to you—”

She pried her eyes open wide enough to see the clock. Only six? No wonder she was still asleep. “Jonathan Herndon Murray, do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Six? It’s almost dinnertime over here and I wouldn’t have called you so early, but I just finished teaching my first day of classes and was fixing to grab a bite with some guys before we go watch a swordfighting demonstration, so I wanted to call now in case I forgot when we got back.” With that kind of run-on sentence, heaven only knew what kind of English the Chinese were learning from him.

She didn’t have the heart to tell him he was a day late. A dollar short, too, apparently, since he hadn’t mentioned sending even a card. “Daddy’s taking me to dinner and the symphony tomorrow night. You’re sweet to call, honey.” She propped her pillow behind her back and inched up on it. Then she shoved hair out of her eyes and willed her brain to function. “How’s everything over there?”

“Okay, I guess. I don’t know if anybody’s going to learn anything, and I don’t know if I’m a very good teacher, but I’ve met some really great people. Speaking of which, I have to be going. We’re going to dinner and a swordfighting demonstration.”

“You told me that. Don’t get cut or anything.” She wanted to keep him on the line all morning, it was so good to hear his voice. She missed him terribly.

“I’ll stay out of their way,” he promised. “You have a happy birthday, you hear me?”

“I will. Thanks for calling—” She was talking to air. He had already gone.

Katharine got up and headed to the shower. While the hot water ran down her back, she began to think about Carter Everanes again. “Why do I care?” she asked the steam. “It all happened a long time ago, and it had nothing to do with me.”

But it did. As she shampooed her hair and washed away the last remnants of sleep, she dredged up several good reasons for learning all she could about Carter. First, even though she hadn’t known him, he had been part of her family’s story until a few years before her own birth. Like Walter and Lucy, Carter had grown up with her mother and Sara Claire, and once Walter became family, so did Carter, in a Southern manner of reckoning. Carter’s unknown story was like a black hole in the jigsaw puzzle of her life. A family as small as hers couldn’t afford to have missing pieces. So while she had no idea what she would find when she read the newspaper accounts, she suspected they might clarify some of her childhood memories.

For instance, she remembered how Lucy and Sara Claire would never let yardmen inside their houses. Katharine used to sneak them glasses of ice water, but when her aunts found out, they cautioned, “Keep away from them. You can’t trust them. They can be violent men.” Was that because of Carter’s murder? Had Katharine herself been wary of Anthony at first because somebody named Alfred killed a man named Carter before she was born?

Katharine also remembered how Aunt Lucy had given her a new Teddy Bear and she had wanted to name him “Alfred,” but Aunt Lucy had cried, “No!” And her daddy had said, “He looks like a Thomas Bear to me.” When Katharine was introduced to Tom Murray, one of her first thoughts was that he looked a lot like Thomas Bear—a square, comforting figure with soft dark hair and intelligent dark eyes.

She remembered that when she went to Vienna for spring break during college, Aunt Lucy had mentioned, “I was in Austria once. It is very beautiful,” but she had looked sad and had not spouted reminiscences as she usually did. Katharine had been relieved at the time. Now she understood.

As she shut off the water and ran a squeegee down the shower walls, she named another reason for learning about Carter. Her mother firmly believed in “things we are given”—certain people and situations that God gives somebody to deal with at a particular time. Katharine had been given that necklace, diary, and Carter himself. She had no idea why, but she would do her best with what she had been given. And she would not let Carter’s things fall into Hasty’s acquisitive hands.

Still, the thought of Hasty made her smile again. She hummed as she wrapped herself in a towel and wound another in a turban around her head. Imagine him being right there in Atlanta without her knowing it! As she fixed her face, though, she turned her thoughts to Carter again and admitted her strongest reasons for reading newspaper accounts of his death: “I’ll always wonder, if I don’t. And what better do I have to do?”

She dried her hair and dressed in white cotton slacks, an emerald top, and white sandals. With a white blazer over one arm, she headed downstairs, carrying her birthday daisies. When she reached the kitchen, she was astonished to find it was still not yet seven.

Her stomach wasn’t ready for breakfast, so she took her secateurs and headed into the yard to deadhead some flowers. The day was still cool enough to be pleasant, the grass dewy enough to exchange her sandals for green rubber clogs. When she had cut off old blooms, she cut a small bouquet of sunny yarrow and spiky blue veronica to add to Hasty’s daisies on the kitchen table. She snipped one perfect yellow rosebud as well.

As she set the rosebud over the sink, she thought with a pang,
this is the first time I ever cut flowers just for myself.
Usually she was taking them to friends or preparing the house for the arrival of Tom, the children, or a guest.

That morning, she prepared breakfast as if for a special guest—a slice of cantaloupe, a sunny-side-up egg, hot buttered toast with strawberry jam—thinking about what she would like instead of reaching for whatever was handiest. Then she sat at the table and ate slowly, savoring each bite. As she looked out at the patio and how pleasant it was out there, she firmed up her resolve to buy a little table and chairs so she could eat out there whenever she liked.

“I’ll do it today,” she announced to the dishwasher as she put her dishes in. “I’m going to clear off my desk and get ready to move it downstairs. I’m going to box up the books from the music room shelves and roll up that ugly rug. And I’m going out to buy me a new rug!”

When the maid arrived and saw the changes to the living room and music room, she placed both hands on her ample hips and demanded, “What fer you want to go changing all the furniture around? Nobody plays that piano, so why put it in your living room, takin’ up all that space?” Rosa might only stand five feet tall in her new running shoes, but she could swell like Mighty Mouse with indignation.

“Because nobody goes in the living room except for parties, when somebody might want to play it, and I plan to make the other room my office.”

Why did she feel forced to explain? Katharine wondered. Posey, for whom Rosa’s sister Julia worked, never had to justify the many changes she made in her house.

That
, Katharine told herself ruefully,
is one of the big differences between us.

Rosa galloped on to another topic. “What you needin’ an office fer? You ain’t workin’, and you got a perfectly good computer desk in your bedroom fer your little bits and pieces. Nobody can see it up there, which is a good thing, as messy as you keeps it. You put it down here, you gonna have to learn to tidy it up and keep it that way. And you gonna have ridges in the bedroom rug, too, where the computer desk usta be. Just leave it where it is and get on with things. That’s what I say.”

“Well, I say I want an office,” Katharine retorted in exasperation. “I’m the only person in this house most of the time, yet I do all my work scrunched up in one corner of my bedroom.”

“You just restless, is what it is,” Rosa muttered, heading down the hall to fetch her supplies. She called back over one shoulder, “Jon and Miss Lucy leavin’ so close together has discombobulated you, that’s what. Or maybe you’re goin’ through the change of life. Why don’t you go up to the lake for a little spell? Or throw a party? Miz Buiton’s havin’ a party in a coupla weeks. I’m gonna help Julia in the kitchen.”

“I know all about Posey’s party,” Katharine told her, “But today I’m not planning a party. After you vacuum the rug in the front room, I want us to roll it up and I want you to clean that floor real good. I’m heading out to buy a new rug.”

“What you wantin’ a new rug fer?” Rosa objected. “They’s years of wear in that rug yet.”

“Probably so,” Katharine agreed, “but I hate it and don’t want to look at it any more. Tom can figure out something to do with it. I’ll bring some boxes back, too, so we can pack up the books and clean the shelves real good. When Tom comes, he can help me move my desk.”

“You’ll mess up your back,” Rosa warned. “Better call some of Jon’s friends to help, or Hollis’s new boyfriend. He’s sturdy-looking.” She sidled to the door of the music room and peered in at the new secretary. “Where’d you get that piece in there now?” Her tone implied that Katharine had picked it up on the black market.

“It was Aunt Lucy’s. She left it to me.” Their conversation could go on forever unless she left. Rosa would far rather talk than work. “Well, I’m off now, to buy a new rug and a surprise for the patio. I don’t know if I’ll be back before lunch, so don’t count on me.”

She picked up her purse and the second volume of the Atlanta Yellow Pages and headed to the garage with the strange feeling that she was going on vacation. She waited until she was in her car before she opened the phone book and ran her finger down the list of Oriental rug dealers, feeling the same anticipation she felt picking out a cruise itinerary.

On the way, she tried to analyze her delight. With Tom gone so much, she chose most things for the house—everything from new carpet for the den after the dishwasher overflowed to a new digital camera to record Jon’s college graduation. But she always made the choice wracked by indecision. Would Tom like it? Was this the very best price she could find for the quality? She also braced herself to answer his invariable questions about why she had chosen that color over another, or why she hadn’t chosen another (possibly superior) model over the one she had bought. He didn’t mean to criticize—just wanted to understand the process by which she had made her choice. But it wore her out having to consider his opinion of every decision.

Exhilaration bubbled up in her as she turned onto West Paces Ferry Road. For the first time in her life, she was going to make a major purchase to please no one but herself.

First, she stopped by Aunt Lucy’s school and dropped off the boxes. On the way to the first carpet dealer she spied a lawn furniture place. They had exactly what she wanted for the patio: a round metal table for two with matching chairs that didn’t need cushions. They also had some cushions that could be left on the wicker furniture even when it rained. Posey and Tom might think them tacky, but Posey and Tom didn’t have to live with them.

“Your husband will have to assemble the table,” the clerk warned as he put the big flat box in the back of her SUV with two chairs on top of it.

“I can manage,” she informed him in a tone worthy of Aunt Sara Claire. “Any woman worth her salt knows how to use a screwdriver.”

Worth her salt? Now she knew where that old saying came from.

Having conquered the patio, she set out to capture a rug. She found an antique Aubusson in shades of cream, green, and peach with occasional accents of deep cherry red and felt she could gaze at that rug forever and never tire of it.

“I’ll take it with me,” she announced.

With the rug fitted around her new chairs, she stopped at a phone store and bought herself a dark green phone to complement the rug. She also bought supplies to install a new line and a book on how to do it. “How hard can it be?” she asked herself as she headed back to the car. “The folks who do it every day aren’t rocket scientists.” That was her mantra whenever she had to master a new skill.

Euphoric from all she had accomplished, she stopped by a couple of dumpsters and fitted cardboard boxes around the rug, table, chairs, and cushions. Feeling like the Joads in
The Grapes of Wrath
, she headed home. Only as she drove up the hill toward her garage did she begin to have qualms. Nothing in the house was in those colors. Except for the kitchen, which Katharine had dreamed of for years, the house was decorated in taupe and cream accented with red, hunter green, or brown. That was what Tom preferred and was what she had preferred, too—until she saw the rug. Now, she wondered, “Do I even know who I am and what I like?”

As usual, Rosa’s growl had been a sham. She had vacuumed and rolled the old rug and dragged it into Tom’s study, where it lay against the far wall. Aunt Lucy’s secretary glowed from a brisk polishing. Rosa had even taken all the books down and dusted the shelves.

Katharine eyed the piles of books on the floor and followed the sound of the vacuum to the upstairs bedrooms. “I’ve asked you not to climb ladders when nobody is here,” she said without preamble.

Rosa shrugged. “I didn’t climb no ladders. I pulled in a straight chair. You get you a rug?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “The way you look, it must be something really special.”

“It is,” Katharine promised. “I’m going to love it.”

“You get us some boxes?” Before Katharine finished nodding, Rosa had abandoned her vacuum cleaner and headed for the stairs. “Might as well get them books out of the way, then. What you gonna do with ’em?”

“Take them to the public library for their book sale.” Katharine had the heady feeling that she was making a lot of spur-of-the-moment decisions all of a sudden. “Except for those from the bottom shelf. We’ll put them back. They were Aunt Lucy’s and I need to go through them.”

She lost her nerve, though, about getting rid of the books without asking Tom. As she and Posey often joked, he might be a businessman by profession, but he was a pilot at heart: pile-it here, pile-it there. And she had promised years ago not to throw out anything of his without asking him first. If those books suddenly disappeared, he would remember them fondly and forever as his favorites.