Sins of the Fathers (4 page)

She considered it for at least three seconds. She had to eat, and dinner and a gallery opening sounded harmless enough.

Nothing was harmless where Hasty was concerned. Not right now, when she was so tired and vulnerable.

“Not tonight, thanks. I’ll see you out.”

As they passed her study, he stepped into the room and peered down at her computer again. “You want us to hook this up right now?”

She was tempted, but that would just prolong his stay. “No, it will get done eventually.
Everything
will get done eventually.”

“If you live so long.” He turned at the front door. “
Au revoir, hasta luego
, and
auf wiedersehen
. All of which imply that you will be seeing me again. How about a swim tomorrow?”

“I told you—I’m going to the beach tomorrow.”

“Which one?”

She remembered just in time that Hasty used to have a habit of showing up during her family’s vacations on Marathon Key. Back then she had been thrilled. She didn’t want that kind of complication now. “Just down to the coast, with a friend.” In Atlanta, that could mean the Atlantic coast or the Gulf coast. They were pretty equidistant.

She stepped back into the house. “See you when I get back.”

“When will that be?”

“Thursday afternoon, maybe.”

He sketched a wave and headed to his Jeep.

She watched while he backed down the drive, and then she stood for a few minutes longer, enjoying the golden glow of the sun and picturing what might have happened if she had said yes. She saw herself pulling on her new yellow bathing suit, leading the way to the pool, slipping into the water beside him…

“It’s a darned good thing I’m going to the beach,” she told a mockingbird perched on a tea olive near her door. The mockingbird bobbed its head in agreement.

Still, every pore rebelled against returning to the vast, disheveled house behind her. The evening she had planned loomed in a stretch of utter boredom, while her alternative was to stay and work on equally unexciting projects such as hanging pictures or making decisions about upholstery fabric.

She took three deep cleansing breaths. They did have one benefit: they kept you from running screaming through the streets.

Tuesday, Katherine woke with tears snailing in slimy tracks down her cheeks. One by one she replayed the tattered scenes lingering in her head.
The crunch of somebody grinding her Dresden ballerina underfoot. Splinters of light as the Waterford vase Posey brought her from Ireland crashed against a wall. Her beloved new rug being carried in a fat roll out the front door
.

She listened to the hammering of her heart. “It was only a nightmare,” she muttered aloud. “I never really saw them smashing things.”

She tried to summon strength to open her eyes. When she did, they met a blank space that used to hold a small landscape Tom had bought her in Greece. A deep, piercing cold penetrated her bones. Shivering in spite of the spread on her bed, she sat up and pounded the mattress with one fist. “Dammit!” she shouted. “This has got to stop!”

She slung back her covers, strode to the window, pulled the blinds all the way to the top, shoved up the window, and lifted her face to the pulsing heat of July. When her bones thawed, she showered and dressed in white capri pants, a lemon cotton shell, and a sheer big shirt decorated with gold, yellow, and turquoise geometric designs. Beach-going clothes.

“I will get over this,” she vowed to her reflection as she dabbed on a little concealer to cover her summer dusting of freckles.

She packed quickly, but before she could leave her room, she had to remove a chair from underneath her doorknob. “Silly,” she told herself every night. “You sleep in a house with an excellent security system.”

Yeah,
a mocking voice invariably replied in her head,
and in spite of that, people got in twice this summer.

It is not actual safety but the illusion of it that permits any of us to lie down in a hostile world and sleep each night. In the past few weeks, Katharine had accepted the fact that a chair under her doorknob was the only way she would get any sleep at all in the empty house.

“Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s to the beach we go,” she caroled as she hefted her small bag in one hand, picked up her yellow sandals in the other, and headed downstairs in bare feet.

An hour later she opened Tom’s end of the garage to let Dr. Flo park her five-year-old Volvo where his Lexus stayed the few nights a month it was home. It had not been hard to persuade Dr. Flo that Katharine’s SUV would be more appropriate if they had to explore any off-road tracks.

While she loaded her bag, a few groceries, and a cooler into the back, Katharine conducted the conversation she always had with her father when she used the SUV. “See? This will be real practical for driving on back roads looking for a country cemetery.”

Sure,
her father replied,
but this is the first time you’ve ever taken it on any back roads, and a number of other vehicles would maneuver back roads equally well, consume less gas, and create less pollution. Most of them would also have saved you enough money to feed a family of four for a year. And hon? Tuck in a shovel. You might need it.

“Tom bought the car,” she muttered as she went to fetch the shovel.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Flo, pulling a wheeled suitcase and carrying a smaller cosmetics bag, gave Katharine a curious look.

Katharine flushed as she stowed the shovel and reached for Dr. Flo’s case. “I was talking to my dad. He and Mother were big on saving the environment and taking care of the poor, so every time I drive this car, I feel I have to justify it to him, even though he’s been dead fifteen years.”

“I like it.” Dr. Flo gave the shining finish a little pat then looked skyward. “It’s real classy, sir.”

“You look pretty classy yourself.” Katharine cast an admiring look over the petite pantsuit of beige linen. With it, Dr. Flo wore a silk shell in a subdued beige, brown, and white print and tiny beige sandals with high heels. The last few times Katharine had seen her, the professor had favored flowing cotton skirts, cotton tops, and flip-flops. This looked more like the Dr. Flo Katharine had always known—except for her hair. The sleek chignon had been replaced by a short silver afro.

“Thank you.” Dr. Flo brushed invisible lint from the jacket. “This is my lawyer-visiting outfit, but I’ll swelter in this jacket if I have to wear it long. Isn’t this heat amazing?” She dabbed at her forehead with an ecru lawn handkerchief trimmed with white lace. “I’m afraid I have more bags. Marcus always swore I take enough on weekend trips to stay a month, but I never know what I’m going to want.”

She carried over a briefcase, a laptop computer, and a Neiman Marcus shopping bag, which she handed over with the caution, “Put that where it won’t slide around. It’s my grandmother’s Bible. You won’t believe what I have to tell you about that while we’re on the road.” She shrugged out of her jacket and set it, neatly folded, on the backseat before climbing into the front.

Once they were underway, Dr. Flo pulled a map from her briefcase. Glancing over, Katharine was surprised to see that her upper arms were flabby in the sleeveless shell. Articles about the Gadneys used to talk about their extensive collection of exercise machines and how they enjoyed exercising together before they left for work.

“Do you still exercise every morning?” she asked as she maneuvered the cloverleaf at Moore’s Mill Road to get onto I-75 South.

“Not since Maurice died.” Dr. Flo didn’t look up from her map. “I got rid of the equipment.”

“You shouldn’t give up exercise just because he died.” As soon as the words were out, Katharine caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Who was she, couch potato
extraordinaire
, to tell Dr. Flo what to do about exercise?

“I gave up a lot of things after Maurice died.” The words were clipped and bitter. Apparently a year had not been enough to soften the blow of his unexpected heart attack.

Katharine changed the subject. “What were you going to tell me about your grandmother’s Bible?”

That brightened Dr. Flo’s gloomy mood. “Right after I talked to you, I went online and found an e-mail from a woman named Lila Perkins. She was responding to a message I had posted several weeks ago on ancestry.com, saying I was looking for information about Claude or Henry Gilbert. Lila had been clearing out her grandmother’s things and had found a Bible listing both those names on its family page. She gave an Atlanta phone number, so I called right away. As soon as she started reading names from that page, I knew I’d found Daddy’s mother’s Bible.”

“I thought your daddy was an only child.” An only child herself, Katharine couldn’t understand why something like that wouldn’t have stayed in Dr. Flo’s family.

“He was, but Grandmother Lucy had three half sisters by her daddy’s first wife, and they never forgave her mother for outliving their daddy and inheriting what little he had. Even though Grandmother Lucy shared with all of them after her mother died, they always felt like she got more than her fair share. So when she died, her two living half sisters came in the house while Daddy was out making funeral arrangements and made off like bandits with things they claimed had belonged to their daddy. My father always believed one of them took his mama’s Bible, but none of them would own up to it. Lila, the woman who called, turned out to be the granddaughter of Elouise, the eldest. I went right over yesterday afternoon to look at the Bible and took along samples of Grandmother Lucy’s handwriting. As soon as Lila heard what had happened and saw the handwriting, she gave me the Bible. I cannot tell you the thrill it gave me to hold it. It used to stay in Grandmother Lucy’s front room, and if I was very good, I was permitted to sit on the couch, hold it on my lap, and look at the pictures. I didn’t care about the family page back then, but yesterday I discovered Grandmother Lucy carefully listed the birth and death dates of her parents and Granddaddy’s birth and death dates, as well.”

“But not his parents?”

“No, but in his father’s space she had penciled in
Henri
, spelled with an
i,
and put a question mark after it.”

“It’s puzzling that she wouldn’t know his parents’ names.”

“The Bible was a wedding present from her second husband. It was too late to ask Granddaddy by then.” She smoothed her pants with one palm. “But now, just in time for this trip, I have my Claude Gilbert’s birth and death dates. If they appear on Mr. Curtis’s stone, I’ll have found my grandfather’s grave. I feel God must have a hand in whatever is going on.”

Given everything else on the divine agenda, Katharine doubted whether God had much time to assist in genealogical research, but she would not burst Dr. Flo’s bubble. “Could be,” she agreed.

An hour later, spying a sign for a rest area ahead, she remembered she hadn’t told Tom she was leaving town. He had attended a late function the night before, so they’d agreed on Sunday that he wouldn’t call Monday night.

“I need to make a call. Do you mind if we stop for a minute?”

“You’re asking a woman of seventy if she minds stopping by a bathroom? You’ve got a lot to learn, girl. I could use a drink of water, too.”

“There are bottles of water on ice in the cooler. Let me open the back.”

While Dr. Flo used the restroom, Katharine stayed in the car and called Tom’s office. “Louise? It’s Mrs. Murray. Is Tom in?”

“No, he’s meeting with two senators this morning.”

Louise was always eager to tell Katharine about important things Tom was doing. Katharine wished she were equally eager to inform Tom when his wife called. After leaving a message that she’d be down at Posey’s Jekyll cottage for a couple of days, Katharine stressed, “It’s real important that he get this message.”

“Of course.” Louise sounded huffy, but she hadn’t promised a thing.

They didn’t stop again until time to eat. Stiff and weary, Katharine climbed down and felt the heat hit her like a soft pillow. They hurried into the air conditioning. Katharine ordered a cheeseburger with two milks. Dr. Flo ordered a small salad and drank water.

“No wonder you’re so thin,” Katharine teased. “Do you have to watch your weight at all?”

“Not lately.”

While they ate, Katharine began to worry about her companion. Dr. Flo used to be petite. Now, she looked gaunt. She and Dr. Maurice had been very close. Had she lost her will to live since his death? “Would you at least share a dessert with me?” Katharine urged when she’d finished her cheeseburger. “I’m ordering a hot fudge brownie with ice cream, but there’s no way I can eat the whole thing.”

Dr. Flo grinned. “Nobody ever knew me to turn down chocolate.”

To Katharine’s relief, when the dessert arrived and was halved, Dr. Flo cleaned her plate.

Bright coastal sunlight and the bleached asphalt road were so hypnotic, Katharine felt she and her companion had been journeying forever and would never arrive.

“Do you think we’ve strayed into the Sleeping Beauty’s woods?” she asked. Ever since they had left I-95 a few miles south of Savannah and taken U.S. 17, the primary view had been a dense forest of scrub oaks, sweet gums, and long-leaf pines, with bunchy palmettos along the ground. An occasional cabbage palm stood a stiff sentinel against the chaos.

The professor didn’t answer. She was consulting directions written in a small notebook.

Katharine blinked to moisten her eyes. Her lids were heavy, her mind a spongy blur. She concentrated on reaching the next set of heat puddle mirages in the middle of the long straight road and tried not to doze off. “What are we looking for?”

“A filling station. I think that’s it coming up on the left. The lawyer said it’s easy to miss, and I can see why. What a dreary little place. We turn left right after it.”

Not much more than a white box with a flat roof, the store’s purpose was identified by two ancient gas pumps and a once-red sign above the door:
STAMPERS
. No apostrophe denoted possession. Was that an oversight? Or a deliberate attempt not to claim the place?

“Do you mind if we make another stop?” Katharine asked.

“I need a Coke and probably ought to gas up. How far out to the island?”

“Ten more miles.” Dr. Flo looked dubiously at the shabby concrete building. “That place looks older than I am.”

“They might have a cold drink.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

Katharine laughed. “It’s your hopes that brought us here, remember? I’m just along for the ride. Maybe somebody in there can tell you about the island.”

Dr. Flo brightened. “I’ll bet they can.”

Their tires crunched onto crushed shells over sand that sufficed as a parking lot. The only other vehicle was a decrepit black Ford pickup parked at the front door. The two gas pumps were too old to take credit cards, but the prices displayed were certainly up-to-date. Katharine pulled to a stop beside one.

Dr. Flo reached for her purse. “I’ll get the gas.”

Katharine had expected that, since it was Dr. Flo’s trip, but she didn’t think a woman of seventy should be pumping gas in that heat. “I’ll pump, you pay. Go on in and give them ten dollars. I’ll just get enough to get us down the road. Prices will have to be lower than this.”

Dr. Flo didn’t budge. “I’ll wait and go inside when you do. You never know how welcome a black woman will be in this part of Georgia.”

“Most of the people we’ve seen so far are black,” Katharine pointed out.

“Still…” Dr. Flo pursed her lips and said no more.

Katharine opened the door, and a blast of heat bulged like a wave into the car. As she climbed out, mosquitoes whined to meet her. She pumped the gas and would have washed the windshield if there had been water or a squeegee. “Oh, well,” she philosophized. “There will be a thousand more bugs smeared on it before we get out of here.”

When she had finished, they went inside. The shelves were sparsely furnished, and the place smelled of decades of bare feet on a cement floor, tobacco, day-old bread, and candy. There was no air conditioning, only two ceiling fans that stirred the air like mush.

At the far end of the center aisle, an open door led into an unlit room. An elderly man stood halfway down the aisle calling toward that doorway, “You might as well come out, Miranda. I know you’s in there. And you know what I got to have. Come on out, now. Don’t be like this.” His skin was the soft dusty brown of pecan shells, his hair a mass of close-clipped gray curls.

When he heard the screened door slam behind the women he gave them a polite “Howdy, ladies,” then raised his voice again. “You got other customers out here, sugah, wantin’ to pay for gas and maybe looking to buy sump’n. Come on out.”

Katharine headed to an old-fashioned Coke box near the door, the kind that had ice inside to cool the drinks. More than half the ice had melted. When she reached in to pull out a can, the water gave her wrist a shock that shot up her arm into an instant headache. Blinking back pain, she let the Coke slide into the ice again and turned toward a small assortment of snacks. There wasn’t much to choose from except peanuts, beef jerky, and banana Moon Pies.

Katharine only ate chocolate Moon Pies.

“Are you sure there’s somebody here?” Dr. Flo was asking the old man.

“She’s in there, all right. She just don’t want to talk to me. Miranda!” he called. “Git yourself out here, girl. You got customers.”

“Hello?” Dr. Flo called. “Anybody here?”

“Be rat with you,” a resigned voice called from the darkness.

In another second, an angel floated down the aisle. At least, that was Katharine’s first impression. On nearer inspection, she turned out to be a girl in her midteens with yellow-white hair falling straight from a center part to her waist, hiding most of her face. The angelic effect was enhanced by a dingy white jersey sundress that brushed electric-green flip-flops, but her first words planted her firmly on earth. “Kin I he’p you?” She swiped her hair over her shoulders and tucked it behind both ears, revealing a narrow, pointy face and eyes like pale green water.

“We want a Coke and a candy bar,” Katharine told her. “Don’t you carry candy?”

“Got Snickers and Hershey bars in the fridge.” The girl jerked her head toward an old refrigerator near the door. “Otherwise they’d melt.” She returned her attention to the old man. “You know I’m not supposed to sell to you. Git on out, now.”

“What am I supposed to say when I get back without it? You know how things is, chile. I’s gonna ketch what-fer.”

She shook her head and firmed her lips. He shrugged and shuffled out like he hadn’t really expected to be served.

Katharine was appalled. She wanted to shake the girl until her teeth rattled. Instead she asked, when the girl looked her way again, “Do you have a restroom?”

“In back.” The girl nodded in that direction. “It’s clean,” she added defensively as Katharine hesitated.

Katharine was embarrassed and annoyed, for she had been wondering that very thing. A door in one corner of the storeroom bore a cheap gold and black sign:
LADIES
. There was no corresponding door for the other sex. After the dark storeroom, Katharine was pleasantly surprised to find white walls, a cheerful green floor, and a window with a yellow blind. The floor looked recently mopped, and while the fixtures were old and rusty from minerals in the water, they were polished to a soft glow.

She returned to the front to find that the ban on serving blacks only applied to locals. Dr. Flo was sipping a Sprite and chatting with the girl, who leaned, propped up by one elbow, on the register side of the counter.

“Katharine Murray, Miranda Stampers. Miranda’s been telling me about Bayard Island.” Dr. Flo’s eyes sparkled. “Her grandmother runs a seafood business there and used to live on the island, but only two households live there now: the Bayard family and a Miss Agnes Morrison.”

“That’s right. You want a Coke and a cold candy bar? Just help yourself.” The girl nodded toward the refrigerator and the cooler. Self service seemed to be standard at Stampers.

Katherine retrieved a drink from the icy water and took a Snickers from the fridge. “How much?”

When Miranda answered without having to think, and made change without calculation, Katharine figured that must be her most common sale. Did her family actually make money in this crummy store? If so, most of their income must be derived from various lotteries, which had colorful signs behind the register. A Georgia Lottery neon sign—a soft pink peach with bright green leaves in a purple square—was lit in the front window even in the middle of the day.

Winning the lottery was the only, if unlikely, hope most nearby residents had of ever breaking out of poverty.

Katharine peeled her candy and considered the chunk of hard chocolate, caramel, and nougat. It looked capable of pulling out every filling in her head. To let it thaw, she asked, “So you used to live on the island?”

“Not me, my granny. She had to move after lightning struck the trailer. Leastways that’s what Mr. Dalt claims. Granny thinks he torched it, but nobody’d ever convict him.”

Dr. Flo looked properly shocked. “Why should anybody burn down her trailer?”

Miranda gave an elaborate shrug. “Wanting to drive her out. Mr. Dalt don’t want nobody but Bayards on that island. He keeps pestering her to sell him her land and the business, but Granny ain’t gonna sell. The judge gave her that land, and Mr. Dalt and Mr. Burch can’t do a thing about it.” She lifted her chin and dared them to disagree.

“Who are Dalt and Burch?” Katharine was irritated by the way Miranda flung names around like everybody knew whom she meant.

“Dalt Bayard and his son. It was Mr. Dalt’s daddy who gave Granny the land to start up her seafood business.”

Katharine took her first bite of cold Snickers and wondered what Granny had given in exchange.

Dr. Flo’s attention was still on the fire. “But would he really burn down somebody’s house?”

Miranda shrugged again. Katharine suspected she practiced in the mirror. “Sure he would. He’s the meanest son of a bitch…oh! here’s Granny now.”

Katharine’s was no longer the only Cadillac in the parking lot, but hers was a mere child compared to the red convertible with windswept fins that crunched over the shells outside and parked near a corner of the store. It was too well acquainted with salt air to have kept its sheen, but its white leather seats gleamed.

Its top was down, giving a good view of a woman so brown and weathered, she could have been any age between fifty and seventy. When she climbed out, though, brief white shorts and a tight red cotton shirt displayed a figure that was still stunning. Her hair—as close to the color of Miranda’s as a bottle could make it—was piled high on her head and fell in a cascade of curls, and she must have risen early that morning to apply so much makeup. Katharine was willing to bet good money that “granny” was not the way this woman introduced herself to men.

Without glancing inside, she went around to the trunk, hefted out a case of beer, set it on the ground, and reached for another. Her shoes were sensible white running shoes, worn without socks.

Miranda gave her a cursory glance, propped her elbow on the counter again and resumed her gossip. “Mr. Burch, now, he ain’t too bad, ’cepting he wants to cover the whole blamed island with huge houses. Have you seen what developers have done over on Shellman’s Bluff?”

Katharine and Dr. Flo shook their heads in unison, having no idea where Shellman’s Bluff might be. By silent agreement they voted not to mention the reason they were there.

Miranda prattled on, heedless of her grandmother heaving cases of beer like a dock worker. “Shellman’s Bluff used to be a lot like Bayard Island—not much there. But now it’s full of big old subdivisions of great big houses, it has a golf course, a club house—all sorts of fancy stuff. Hilton Head and places up around Savannah have got too crowded, but they’s still a passel of Yankees wanting a place to retire where it’s warmer and cheaper than up north, so now developers are buying up land around here, bulldozing all the trees, and putting up mansions. I love the marshes and can see why some folks want to live on them, but they’re asking more for them houses than folks around here are like to see in a lifetime. When they cover one island, they move to the next. Pretty soon there won’t be any place around here where folks like us can afford to live. God only knows what will happen to the fishermen.”

The way Miranda rolled those facts and opinions out of her mouth, Katharine could tell she was parroting grownups.

Speaking of grownups, the girl’s grandmother was now lugging beer around the building. “Do you need to help her carry that?” Katharine asked.

Miranda shrugged. “She can git it. I’m minding the register. You wanting anything else?”

Dr. Flo headed for the refrigerator. “I might take one of those Hershey bars.”

Katharine tugged off another chunk of her hard, cold Snickers and let Dr. Flo carry the conversation. “You say that Burch Bayard is interested in developing Bayard island?”

“He’s interested in getting money.” Miranda’s hair had fallen over her shoulders again, so she shoved it back with careless grace. “Mr. Burch ’n’ Miss Mona both want to live rich, but they have already run through what her daddy give her—or so Chase says. Chase is Burch’s son.” She added that with a careless wave that made Katharine suspect Miss Miranda was rather fond of the young man. “He lives in Savannah most of the time and goes to a private school. He’d be perfectly happy going with normal folks, but his parents want him going to that prep school.” She said the last two words in the tone Katharine might have used for
reformatory.
“And then they want him to go to college and learn how to handle the fortune his daddy plans on making building houses.”

“He’d do better to learn how to be a lawyer and keep his daddy and granddaddy out of jail.” The voice floated from the back of the store, raspy from a lifetime of liquor and cigarettes. “Granny” (Katharine could only think of her that way in quotes) set down a case between the aisles and strode toward them. “You all got everything you need?”

“Miranda’s been taking care of us,” Dr. Flo assured her.

“Talking your ears off is more like it.” She gave a throaty chuckle, and her eyes—the same seagreen as her granddaughter’s—darted to Miranda. “Well, I need to get this beer in the cooler.”

“Cooter was in here wanting some, but I didn’t sell him any,” Miranda reported.

“Good for you.” Without another word she headed to the back corner.

Miranda waited until she was busy, and then tossed her head again, sending that incredibly light hair cascading around her thin white shoulders. “I was fixing to tell you about Chase’s animals. He carves the most beautiful little things. That’s what he’d rather be doing than go to school. Look.” She reached beneath the counter and brought out a raccoon four inches long, carved of light golden wood. “Isn’t that the most precious thing you ever saw?”