Death on the Family Tree (19 page)

Hasty wiggled his eyebrows at her. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you
all
about how much fun they had. Not if he was part of this.”

She scarcely heard. She had just remembered Dutch’s real name: Lionel. Lionel Landrum. L-squared. And he had once been crazy about Sara Claire.

The thought of Dutch listening to a blow-by-blow description of the seduction of another man was repugnant, but so was the notion that either Lucy or Sara Claire had deliberately set out to seduce a man sensitive enough to cry with remorse.

Hasty perused another page. “You may be glad to know that the seduction was not in vain. Three weeks later, the seduced seems to be enjoying himself, from the amount of time they spend in the hay. Torrid descriptions abound—considerably stretching my vocabulary. I never needed these words to get a Ph.D.”

Katharine was trying to translate a description of a party when Hasty dropped another bombshell. “I think the writer is Austrian. Here she says they spent the weekend at a house up in the mountains ‘which has been in our family for four generations.’ And here,” his long finger jabbed the page, “she talks of the joy of showing off her beloved Vienna.”

“So it wasn’t Lucy or Sara Claire.” Katharine was astonished at the relief she felt. “Carter must have had an Austrian girlfriend. Maybe she gave him the diary when he came home, as a memento of their time together. He left right after Hitler took over Austria, so she may have realized they might never see each other again.”

“That’s an awful feeling.” Hasty glared at her over the rim of his bifocals and Katharine felt her cheeks grow pink. She bent to the cooler to replenish the ice in their glasses so he couldn’t see her face. But when she refilled both glasses with iced tea and handed him one, he said sourly, “You don’t have to start blushing. Reading this diary is enough to turn anybody off sex for life. Listen to this. ‘A rainy afternoon between the sheets. Delirium. Ecstasy. Well worth the long wait and all the planning.’”

Katharine laughed. “‘Lacks literary style and merit of content.’ Remember Miss Cole in eleventh grade?”

Hasty snorted. “Don’t I, though. She wrote that on most of my papers.”

“All the ones I didn’t write for you.” Katharine ducked to avoid an ice cube he tossed at her. “I wish we could find out for sure whose diary it was, and why Aunt Lucy had it. I wonder if Dutch would tell me, if he knows.”

“Do you see him regularly?”

“Not regularly enough, but we talk on the phone pretty often.” She hesitated, then admitted, “His real name is Lionel. He could have been L-squared.”

Hasty laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Old Dutch and Sara Claire? I can’t picture it.”

“You don’t have to picture it,” she retorted. “Not if the woman was Austrian. I just wonder who she was. Dutch said they were all over there that summer. He was studying at Oxford and Lucy and Sara Claire were touring with some friends from Vassar. Meanwhile, Carter and some of his Sewanee friends were in Vienna. But Dutch didn’t mention any Austrian girls.”

Hasty gave a gusty sigh and leaned back farther, still cradling the back of his head in his hands. “Ah, the carefree lives of the rich and to-be famous. Austrian vacations, Baltic cruises, Parisian nightclubs. I spent my college summers stacking concrete blocks.”

“I spent mine filing for an insurance company. But didn’t that diary start in June? Carter and his girlfriend seem to have been carrying on before Lucy, Sara Claire, and Dutch arrived. That wipes Dutch out as L
²
.”

“If it was Carter doing the carrying on,” he reminded her. He brought his chair back to earth with a thump that made her fear for its legs.

“Who else?” She drained her glass and reached for the jug. “The personality fits. Dutch said Carter was more interested in books than in Sara Claire, but if he was involved with an Austrian girl by the time Sara Claire arrived, that could explain why. She’d have looked like chopped meat next to that sizzling romance. I’ll talk to Dutch again and see what he remembers. His memory is still pretty good.”

“I wonder if he remembers me,” Hasty murmured.

“Oh, yes,” she replied without thinking.

“Confess,” he ordered. “You are blushing again. What did you tell him?”

“I mentioned to him that I ran into you at the history center the other day.”

“And?”

“That’s all. I wasn’t about to tell him how you scared the living daylights out of me, following me all over Buckhead. The man has a bad heart. But he remembered you.”

“That doesn’t sound like enough to make you color up like you did.”

She pursed her lips and turned to look over the pool, hoping he wouldn’t notice she was coloring up again. “He remembered that you were ‘sweet on me,’ to use his very words.”

“He got that right.” Hasty glowered at her over the top of his glasses. “You damned near broke my heart, woman. It’s no thanks to you I’m not a confirmed misogynist.”

“So how did you finally get rid of him?” Posey’s penciled brows rose, and then dropped faster than an amusement-park high drop. She must have remembered wrinkles.

Katharine wished she hadn’t mentioned Hasty. She wished she had kept Dane and slept at her own house. But Posey had been so solicitous, calling to insist that she come to dinner and reminding her she had promised to spend one more night with them. So at dusk she had put Dane in the car along with her pajamas and her own pillow, and driven back to the Buitons’ house like a teenager come for a slumber party. On the way, though, she had vowed, “This is the last night. Tomorrow I will sleep in my own bed and face the rest of my life.”

She just wished it didn’t seem so empty.

“Well?” Posey asked. Katharine realized she was still waiting for an answer.

She shrugged. “I just told him I had things to do, and we could read more of the diary later. That was why he came, you know.” Why had she mentioned to Tom’s sister that another man had come for lunch? Maybe the wine Posey had plied her with at dinner had something to do with it.

“I thought the diary got stolen.” Posey tapped one nail on the glass top of her wicker table. Stories she couldn’t follow always made her irritable.

They were sitting out on her sunroom, a place of white wicker, colorful cushions, and a red tile floor. Outside, the light was beginning to fade and lightning bugs danced across the lawn. A breeze wafted through the open windows, heavy with the scent of night-blooming jasmine. Katharine rubbed her bare feet across the cool tiles under the table and wished all of life could be so pleasant and simple.

“It did get stolen,” she explained, “but I made copies we can work with. Hasty thinks it’s probably contemporary, though, and not very important.” She wasn’t about to mention how torrid it was. Posey would insist that they translate it themselves, and her German wasn’t any better than Katharine’s. They’d be up all night.

“
We
can work with?
Hasty
thinks?” Posey parroted what Katharine had said last, with emphasis, and gave her a shrewd look. “So you’re planning on seeing him again?”

Katharine wished she didn’t blush so easily. “Heavens, no, unless it’s to translate more of the diary. He’s good at German. And he’s a friend, that’s all.”

The trouble with protests is, they sound like protests. Posey’s mouth puckered like a drawstring bag. “Sounds like my little brother better get his behind on a plane and head back to Georgia if he knows what’s good for him. Whose diary does this guy Hasty think it is?”

Katharine shrugged again. “We haven’t figured that out yet. At first, I thought it might be Aunt Sara Claire’s.”

Posey snorted. “Was it written in vinegar?”

“Maybe she changed as she got older,” Katharine tested the theory. “Maybe she had a wild, misspent youth.”

“Yeah, right. And I’m the Little Mermaid. You want some more wine?” Posey heaved herself to her feet and trotted barefoot to the kitchen. She appeared a minute later with a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two iced-tea tumblers.

“Those aren’t wine glasses,” Katharine pointed out.

“No, but they hold about half what I need right now, hon, after putting up with Holly all day. I swear—” Katharine braced herself for the old story about Hollis being switched at birth, but Posey surprised her. “—the way she’s been moping around here all day, I wonder if she’s going into a depression or gotten bipolar or something. One minute she’s snapping off my head, the next she’s bawling in her room, and the next she’s mooning out the window like the world has come to an end and she’s waiting for the messenger. You think I ought to call a psychiatrist?” She poured both glasses full to the brim. “Or maybe she has broken up with Zach. If that’s the case, I’m gonna have a hard time pretending to be sympathetic.”

Katharine hesitated, but surely it couldn’t hurt anything for Posey to know as much as she knew. “Zach seems to have disappeared. Rowena Slade called me this morning and Brandon got on the phone asking if I knew where Zach could be. Remember how Brandon messed up his speech last night? He claims that was because Zach was supposed to bring him a speech and he never showed.”

“I hope he’s gone to Outer Mongolia.” Posey sank into her chair and shoved one tumbler across the table, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “I went to aerobics today—a makeup for missing a class this week—and ran into Millie Meister, whose daughter was in Holly’s class at Westminster. I asked—casually, mind you—if she remembered Zach Andrews, and the stories she told me curled my toenails. I nearly had a hissy fit right then and there thinking about Holly dating him. Did you know he stole his mother’s BMW and wrapped it around a telephone pole? Or that he stole tests from a teacher’s desk and sold copies to other kids? Or that he actually told one teacher her life wouldn’t be worth mud if she flunked him?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “But don’t breathe a word of this to Holly. If she thought I didn’t like Zach, she’d run off and marry him—if she could find him.”

“Hollis has better sense than that.” Katharine had been comparing Millie’s stories with Jon’s, and thinking how stories got changed as they progressed up the grapevine, and had forgotten to keep her voice down.

Hollis spoke from the doorway. “Better sense than what?” She looked like an escapee from Halloween in a long black skirt, black tank top, black beads around her throat, and chunky black heels. Her lipstick and nail polish were such a dark red that they looked black, too. But what startled Katharine most were the smudges under her eyes and the pallor of her skin.

The two women exchanged guilty looks. “Better sense than to make a mess decorating the carriage house,” Posey improvised with the agility of one who has raised three girls. “Katharine thinks you’re going to make a good job of it.”

“I am. What are you all drinking?”

Posey held up her glass in a salute. “Wine.”

Her jaw dropped. “In those glasses? You’ll both be drunk as skunks.” She took a vacant chair and set a carton of blueberry yogurt on the table, although a vial of blood would have seemed more appropriate.

Posey heaved a martyred-mother sigh. “What do you care? You’re driving me to drink, moping around here all day. Weren’t you supposed to go to work?”

“No, I went last night to get a feel for the theater. Now I’m going to be working at home, making costumes for the next play. I’ll have to go in for fittings and stuff, and to make sure that what I’m doing matches the sets, but I’ll do the cutting and sewing here. Can I use the dining room table until my own place is ready?”

“Lord help us,” Posey muttered. “Whatever happened to the empty nest?”

“I’ve got an empty nest you can have,” Katharine offered.

Hollis shifted her chair and turned one shoulder toward her mother. “Are you lonesome at your place, Aunt Kat? I could come over and stay until we finish the carriage house here, if you’ll let me sew in your dining room. I won’t scratch your table. I have a pad to put over it when I’m cutting. And as you can see, I am not welcome
here.
” She shot her mother an angry look.

“You’re welcome, honey,” Posey assured her. “I’d just prefer a bit of sweetness and light.” She got up. “I ought to go ask Wrens if he wants a snack.”

“Sorry,” Hollis muttered after Posey had gone, “but I don’t feel sweet or light at the moment.”

Katharine pretended to be fascinated with the wine in her tumbler. “What’s going on?” Young people were more likely to talk if they thought you weren’t seriously interested.

Hollis heaved a sigh that took five seconds to exhale. “Nothing.” She ripped the top off her yogurt as if she’d like to be removing somebody’s body parts, and stirred savagely.

Katharine hazarded a guess. “I understand Zach has disappeared.”

Hollis lifted an overloaded spoon to her mouth with what would have looked like indifference to anybody who hadn’t known her all her life, and didn’t say a word.

“I had a call from Rowena this morning,” Katharine continued. “She was wanting me to sell her the necklace as a present for her father. Then Brandon got on the phone, asking if I knew where Zach was. Apparently he was supposed to take a speech to Brandon last night at some dinner, but he never made it.”

Hollis swallowed the yogurt and wiped her mouth with a cloth napkin she’d found on the table—possibly her own. “Yeah. I heard about that. Rowena came home from the banquet mad enough to chew nails and spit them out.”

“What time did she get there?” Katharine tried not to sound too eager.

“She’d been home long enough to put on a robe before I got there.”

That wasn’t much help, considering that Hollis hadn’t left home until nearly midnight. Katharine was more interested in Zach, anyway. He had shown an inordinate amount of interest in the jade. “So you don’t have any idea where he might be?”

Hollis frowned. “No, and Amy must have called a hundred times asking the same question. He was supposed to help Brandon get ready for a march Monday down at the capitol, and Brandon was hopping mad. I kept telling her I’d call if he showed up, but fifteen minutes later she’d be back on the phone with the same question.” Hollis sighed. “She can be so dense. Just like the rest of her family.” She dipped up another large spoonful of yogurt, and then muttered so low that Katharine almost didn’t hear, “It would never occur to them that maybe Zach has finally decided he doesn’t want to promote hatred any longer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

At the rate she was going, Hollis would soon be queen of sighs. “That march on Monday? It’s part of Brandon’s big campaign to get gays out of Georgia. Hasn’t he ever read European history? He sounds like Hitler when he talks about ‘those people.’” Hollis sketched quotes with sarcastic fingers. “And that’s the only thing he does talk about these days—except terrorists, and how none of us will be safe unless we all carry photo IDs and guns and ship all foreign-born people back to the countries where they came from. To hear him talk, you’d think he was a pureblood American Indian. I don’t know how Zach can stand working for him. Of course, Zach is pretty mixed-up himself.” She stared morosely into her yogurt.

Posey ought to be upstairs dancing a jig. This conversation did not bode well for a long-term relationship. “So have you and Zach broken up?” Katharine inquired.

Hollis shook her head. “Uh, no. We haven’t broken up. I just don’t know where he is.”

Katharine hoped he wasn’t out of town somewhere trying to sell Tom’s jade. Maybe she ought to at least mention that possibility. She listened to be sure Posey wasn’t coming back, then asked urgently, “When you all came over the other day, did Zach watch you disarm our security system? And is there any way he could have gotten your key?”

Hollis’s head came up like a deer’s, alert to danger. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been wondering if it was Zach who came into my house last night. I am almost positive I locked the doors and put on the alarm. I can picture myself doing it. And there was no sign of a break-in. So whoever came in may have had a key and known our code, may have even been in the house before. He knew where to find the safe, knew about Tom’s jade, and actually came into Jon’s closet, as if he knew the hideout was there. Zach used to come play with Jon sometimes, and I’m sure Jon would have bragged about the wall safe and his daddy’s jade. He and Zach played in the hideout a lot, too. So that leaves me wondering—”

“I wouldn’t give him your key!” Hollis shoved back her chair and jumped to her feet, knocking over her carton and sending yogurt flying all over the table. She ignored it, whirled, and dashed into the kitchen. The back door slammed.

When Hollis neither returned to the house nor drove away in her Mini, Katharine became alarmed. She went to the garage and heard the sound of stormy weeping above.

She climbed the stairs to the carriage house and found the door open. In the dimness—for the only light came from a halogen light on the parking apron—Hollis sat on a lumpy couch, shoulders shaking, dabbing her eyes with the remnants of a sodden tissue.

It was not an ideal place to sit and cry. The air was thick and close. In the scant light, Katharine saw that cobwebs festooned the windows and dust lay like white powder on an old coffee table, the only other furniture. The linoleum was cracked. The sofa sagged with age. Through an arch at the left side of the far end, a small kitchen alcove was bare except for a wide shallow sink, supported by two unpainted pipes that dubbed for front legs. Katharine couldn’t suppress a groan of dismay at the thought of how much work would be needed to turn the place into something habitable.

Hollis jumped, and her head swiveled toward the door. Tears sparkled on her lashes.

“I’m sorry I upset you.” Katharine walked in and pretended to examine the angles of the ceiling and the dimensions of the room.

Hollis sniffed. “It’s okay. But I did not give Zach your key. Or your code.” She sniffed again and tossed the soggy tissue into a pile of debris on the floor. “There’s so much dust up here, it gives me allergies.” She got up with an unconvincing little laugh. “I know it doesn’t look like much yet, but this place has great potential.” She walked around waving her arms. “With a little paint and some paper, and the floors refinished, plus some cleaning—it’s a bit dirty.”

A bit dirty? An army of cleaners would need a week to make a dent in the filth. But Katharine wasn’t half as concerned about the apartment as she was about Hollis. Years of living with teens had taught her that while some of their tragedies seem minor to adults, few are to them. Hollis’s expression just then reminded her of Anna Karenina’s before she leaped in front of the train.

Katharine strolled over to peer out the grimy front windows. Because the garage faced the backyard, the carriage-house views were reversed. Its front windows overlooked the acres of woodland that covered the back of the Buitons’s lot while its back windows looked out onto their large front lawn and flowerbeds. Just then the woodlands were so dark, Katharine felt like she perched at the edge of the world. “You’ll have a good view.” She adjusted a crooked blind and it fell with a clatter. She jumped back. “Sorry!”