Die Job (2 page)

I made commiserating noises as I put her under the heat lamp.

As the last customer left for the day and Mom locked the door behind her, the five of us took a deep breath and relaxed, prepping our stations for the next day. I liked the salon at times like this; it felt more like a home than a business. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams angling through the wooden blinds. The comfy waiting area and the hanging ferns and potted violets clustered on the windowsills made it feel homey, as did the wide, heart-of-pine floorboards. The figurehead from the
Santa Elisabeta
, a Spanish galleon that sank off the Georgia coast in the 1500s, provided benevolent supervision from her spot on the wall behind the counter.

As I swept, our shampoo girl, seventeen-year-old Rachel Whitley, stripped off her smock, revealing her usual black attire. After a brief flirtation with being a beauty contestant this past summer, she had reverted to Goth-type clothes and ragged jet-black bangs flopped into her kohl-rimmed eyes. Her pale face with its slightly lantern-shaped jaw stood out against the black hoodie zipped up to her neck. “Guess what I’m doing tomorrow night?” she asked, her eyes sparkling with mischief. She dropped into my styling chair and spun it in circles.

“Going on a date?” Stella asked, aligning her polish bottles in the cabinet and closing it. Her white Persian, Beauty, swiped at her shoelace, and Stella shooed her away. “With that nice Braden?”

“We’re just friends now,” Rachel said.

I couldn’t tell if she was sad or not that they weren’t dating anymore.

“
Studying for your AP History exam,” Mom suggested teasingly. Her periwinkle blue eyes twinkled behind rimless glasses. Comfortably rounded, she had short gray and white hair she gelled into soft spikes that framed her face becomingly, giving her the look of a kind Beatrix Potter hedgehog.

“You’re close,” Rachel said. “I’m going on a ghost-hunting field trip with my science class!”

Oh, yeah, that sounded educational. What was on the schedule for next week—a monster-hunting trip to Loch Ness? A snowshoe adventure to find the Abominable Snowman?

“You’re going on a field trip to do
what
?” Althea Jenkins, our part-time aesthetician, asked. Her brows crinkled her chocolate-colored skin clear up to the hairline of her short, gray-flecked afro.

“Ghost hunting. Debunking, really,” Rachel said, a huge grin splitting her face. “But we need another chaperone,” she said, pleading with Mom with her Nile green eyes. “My mother was going to go, but her boss got, like, sick and is sending Mom to a convention in Lexington this weekend in his place, so we need to find someone else to chaperone or we won’t be able to go.”

“In my day,” Althea said, putting avocado, olive oil, and a handful of herbs in a stainless steel bowl for a new moisturizer she wanted to try, “we read
King Lear
and did algebraic equations and dissected frogs in school. We didn’t go gallivanting about the countryside, chasing after spirits. Fah!” She shook her head, more bemused than angry. A tall woman about my mom’s age, she wore a red tunic over black jeans. She pushed the tunic’s sleeves up before mashing her ingredients with a pestle.

“Where are you going to do your, um, debunking?” Mom asked, plopping combs into the jar of blue germicide at her station.

“Rothmere,” Rachel said. Forearms on her thighs, she leaned toward Mom. “There’s this absolutely awesome ghost out there, Cyril Rothmere, who haunts the house looking for his murderer! Dozens of people have seen him over the years and, like, the Discovery Channel did a special on him a few years back. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” Mom said solemnly. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do on a Saturday night than go ghost hunting with your class, Rachel,” she said, “but Walter’s got tickets to
Wicked
in Jacksonville and we’re headed down there right after my last client.”

Rachel swiveled in the styling chair and opened her mouth.

“Don’t look at me,” Althea cut her off, holding up an avocado-gooped hand. “Kwasi and I have plans.”

“Grace?” Rachel turned to me. “Please?” She drew the word out into three syllables and clasped her hands together prayerfully.

Why was I the only one in the room without plans for a Saturday night? Mom and Althea, both widowed and sixty, had boyfriends and were headed out for wild nights on the town. Okay, maybe “wild” was an overstatement, but at least they were going out. My sort-of boyfriend, political reporter Marty Shears, had moved from Atlanta to DC two months ago for a new job with the
Washington Post
, leaving my weekends pretty darn empty. So, at thirty, and divorced for a year, I had rented a Julia Roberts DVD for the evening’s entertainment and was considering purchasing a pint of Chunky Monkey to add to the festivities. If I really wanted
to peg the excitement meter, I would study the MLS listings my new Realtor had given me and decide which houses I wanted to view, even though, if the last few months of house hunting were any indicator, none of them would work for me. My friend Vonda said that was because I wasn’t sure about settling in St. Elizabeth, but that’s just silly. Other than my two years at UGA and my time in Atlanta with Hank, I’d lived in St. Elizabeth all my life. Marty
had
mentioned it would be easy for me to get stylist work in DC, but that hardly constituted a proposal, and our four months of weekend dating—Atlanta was a half-day drive—didn’t justify a cross-country move. Maybe I’d really like DC, though, when I visited Marty next weekend . . . I shook off my thoughts.

“Oh, all right,” I told Rachel. “I suppose I can cancel my plans and go ghost hunting.” I tried to make it sound like I was passing up the opportunity to attend an inaugural ball. Althea’s snort of laughter told me I hadn’t succeeded.

Rachel squealed and threw her arms around me. “Thank you, thank you, Grace! It’ll be a blast.”

Not knowing exactly what to expect from a ghost-hunting field trip, and not having plans for tonight, either—I needed to get a life, as Vonda was always saying—I drove out to Rothmere half an hour later to get the lay of the land. Remembering field trip high jinks during my senior year, not all
that
long ago, I wanted to be one step ahead of the teenagers I was going to be responsible for.

St. Elizabeth sits in the crook of a backward L bordered by the St. Andrew Sound to the east and by the Satilla River to the north. Being surrounded by all that water is partly why
St. Elizabethans get all worried about hurricanes; it’s the flooding more than the winds that we fear. Rothmere lies west of town, up the long arm of the L, and its acreage slopes down to the Satilla. The pure, white lines of the Greek revival building stood out against the cornflower blue of the sky—you’d never know there was a hurricane brewing—and the columns glistened as the sun’s slanting rays gilded them. Venerable magnolia and pecan trees provided pools of shade suitable for Southern belles to hold court in with their beaux gathered around, a la Scarlett O’Hara.

Conscious that it was near closing time, I parked beside the aging Audi in the lot and trotted up the wide stone steps to the portico. Double doors of carved oak swung inward at a touch. A fiftyish woman with a long nose and protuberant eyes glided forward, her mid-1800s skirt swishing. The long-sleeved maroon dress with its tight bodice emphasized her stocky waist, but the sway of the skirt made her look graceful. A lacy white cap half covered frizzy brown hair pulled back into a bun. “Welcome to Rothmere,” she proclaimed.

“Hi, Lucy,” I said.

“Oh, it’s you.” A sour expression erased the gracious Southern hostess look she’d been wearing. Edging me out of the way, she stepped onto the portico, pulled the massive door closed, inserted a modern key into the lock, and shot the deadbolt home. She turned to face me, crossing her arms over her chest.

I must have missed the lesson on hospitality that included locking guests out. “Nice to see you, too.”

“I’m closing up. What do you want?”

“Information.”

“Come back tomorrow.”

“Cyril Rothmere. Do you know anything about him?”

“Of course.” She looked incensed. “I’m the country’s premier expert on all things Rothmere.”

Like there were dozens of historians competing for that title. “So, what can you tell me?”

“I’m busy.”

“Lucy! I’m chaperoning the high schoolers coming for the field trip tomorrow and I want to know at least as much as they do.” Lucy had been snippy with me ever since May when I’d discovered she was “borrowing” jewelry and other mementoes that had belonged to the Rothmere clan for her own use. She’d returned the items when I encouraged her to, but she hadn’t been in for a haircut since.

“They shouldn’t be coming. I told the board of directors it was a bad idea to let teenage hooligans run wild in the mansion—chasing ghosts, of all things—but one of the board members is also the PTO president and she talked them into it. Nothing good can come of it.” She made it sound like the board of directors had authorized the students to hold a rave in the ballroom. “They have no respect for the fact that Rothmere is a family’s
home
.”

“But the family members are all dead.”

“I beg your pardon?” Her protuberant eyes widened.

Ye gods. She was in full “Amelia” mode. I wasn’t sure if she sometimes thought she
was
Amelia Rothmere, chatelaine of the plantation during the Civil War years, or just a descendant, even though, as far as I knew, not a drop of Rothmere blood ran in her veins. Either way, I didn’t want to pursue it. “I understand the Discovery Channel did a special on antebellum ghosts a while back.”

“I was the technical consultant.” She preened.

It crossed my mind that Lucy probably didn’t get a lot of appreciation
for what she did. “I’m sure you gave them excellent information. Any chance I could borrow a tape of the show?”

She heaved a put-upon sigh. “You might as well come with me. I was about to close up the museum. I’m writing a paper, you know, on the impact the local button factory had on the post-war economy. I’m on a panel at the Business History Conference, and I’ve got to get it done by the end of the weekend. So I don’t have time to give you a tour now.”

Finally! Someone whose social life was more stunted than mine. A Julia Roberts DVD was several rungs up the ladder from buttons. Maybe I should try one of those online dating services. I grinned to myself at what Mom’s reaction would be if I told her I was even considering hooking up with someone from cyberspace.

Twenty yards brought us to the old carriage house, now a museum. It smelled a bit musty inside and I wondered if bits of hay from the days of horse-drawn carriages or motor oil from when the building served as a garage were trapped under the flooring. The long, narrow room held displays highlighting aspects of plantation life, mementoes in glass-topped cases, and a glossy carriage in one corner with a sign identifying it as a barouche. Long-dead Rothmeres gazed placidly or sneered down their noses from portraits on the walls. A round portrait of Amelia Rothmere, her hair a richer brown than Lucy’s and her chin a bit more prominent, but otherwise enough like Lucy to be her sister, smiled closemouthed from behind a wooden counter. Maybe she had bad teeth. The room smelled faintly of mint and I finally decided it came from the china cup on the counter with a teabag hanging out of it.

“I’ve told the docents time and again to clean up after themselves,” Lucy said with exasperation, picking up the cup and heading for a small storeroom at the rear of the museum. I trailed her.

We passed a display case filled with 3D art of some kind, featuring framed scenes and jewelry woven out of twisted fibers.

“What are those?”

“Funerary hair art,” Lucy said matter-of-factly. “It was fairly common to use hair from a deceased loved one to make these remembrances: rings, brooches, even bonnets.”

“Really?” I peered at the labeled pieces, not sure if the idea grossed me out or intrigued me. One ornate still life of flowers made with gray strands threaded through a rich brown was labeled “Cyril Rothmere.” Another, blonder piece that looked like a brooch read, “Reginald Rothmere.” I didn’t have time to study them all as Lucy unlocked the storeroom door.

A sink and microwave occupied one corner. Shelves crowded with books and boxes lined the walls, and a small worktable occupied the room’s center, with only a foot-wide alley between it and the shelves.

“Was Cyril really murdered?” I asked as Lucy clattered the cup and saucer into the sink.

“His death is one of the plantation’s great mysteries,” she said, pulling a VCR tape off a bookshelf and handing it to me. “A house slave found him dead at the foot of the stairs one morning. The official verdict was accidental death, partly, I suspect, because he was known to like his brandy and it makes sense that he imbibed too freely and fell. Or maybe . . .”

“How do you know all this?” I asked when she didn’t continue. “About
the house slave finding him and the brandy?”

“I’m a PhD historian,” she said, puffing her chest out. “There are primary sources—letters, journals, household accounts, newspaper reports, personal artifacts, portraits—that allow the trained historian to put the pieces of the past together like a puzzle.”

I’d bet the whole day’s tips that she’d used that line before.

“In fact,” Lucy went on, “I just got a box of documents from Cyril’s time. Well, they were willed to the Rothmere Trust by a descendant who died in California. Can you believe she kept them in her attic all these years without proper environmental controls for temperature and humidity? Criminal!” She shook her head, freeing a wisp of hair to tickle her cheek. “I only wish I had time to catalog them now, but I’ve got to get my paper done.”

“Do you think I could look at them?” I asked, surprising myself and, from the look on her face, Lucy.

“You?” Lucy asked doubtfully. The way she studied me made me think she was going to demand fingerprints and a background check. “I don’t see why not,” she said finally. “I went through them quickly and there’s nothing of monetary value, like a letter from President Davis or one of the Confederate Army’s heroes. Maybe you’ll get interested enough in the family to want to become a docent.” Her eyes brightened at the thought.