The Ming and I (19 page)

I
t took every one of my feminine wiles to persuade Greg to go along with my plan. Perhaps if I hadn’t looked like an unraveled skein of yarn, the job might have been easier. Nonetheless, just after the supper trolleys had been wheeled away with their empty cargo, the entire board of the Upstate Preservation Foundation trooped in. Frankly I was so nervous, I had scarcely eaten a bite.

“This better be damned good,” Red growled. “I already shelled out big bucks for the bouquet.”

“Shhh,” Marsha said.

I frowned at her. She wasn’t invited. I was considering telling her so when the Roach burst into my room. At least the pecking order was preserved.

“Make it fast,” Gloria snapped. “I have to be in court in twenty-five minutes.”

I gave Miss Muscles the critical once-over. She was wearing a purple spandex tank top and lemon yellow sweatpants. Either her hearing was on a racquetball court, or courtroom etiquette, along with just about everything else these days, had gone to hell in a gym bag. At least she was carrying a briefcase.

“Have a seat,” I said pleasantly.

Of course that was easier said than done. Marsha had taken the only chair, and Mama was the only
person—besides Greg—I would allow to perch on my bed.

I might have made an exception for the elderly lady who stumbled in next, had I not known that Anne Holliday, in addition to being a mistress of Rose, was a master of ruse. She was in fine fettle that day, too, with a flowered hat that shamed some of the arrangements my well-wishers had sent.

“What a cheery little room,” she chirped. She pretended to admire my botanical garden, but her shrewd little eyes were boring holes in me. Squeal and you’ll pay, they said.

I smiled at Marsha. “Would you be a doll, dear, and let Miss Holliday have the chair?”

Marsha sighed, and with all the speed of a teenager jumping up to mow the lawn, relinquished her coveted seat. Anne staggered convincingly over to the chair, but gave no indication that she appreciated my complicity.

The door opened one more time, and in swept the grande dame herself. As usual, Miss Lilah was impeccably dressed, this time in muted spring colors. Her linen suit was ecru, and her long-sleeved silk blouse was robin’s egg blue. True to character, her skirt, though it was linen, showed not a wrinkle. Either the woman had walked to the hospital or had mastered the art of driving while standing.

“Why, Lilah, what have you done to your hair?” Anne Holliday was sitting bolt upright and sounding twenty years younger. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to blow her own cover.

We were all, in fact, staring at Miss Lilah. Gone was the immaculate chignon. It had been replaced by soft silvery waves that brushed across her cheeks and spilled down to almost shoulder level. I’m sure there are some who would consider that length to be too long for a woman of Miss Lilah’s maturity, but frankly it was flattering. Not all of us can afford
plastic surgery—or even want it—which doesn’t mean we enjoy being seen in public with turkey necks. Not that Miss Lilah had pronounced wattles, mind you. I’m just saying that a woman has a right to cover her deficits with her assets.

Miss Lilah graced us with one of her beneficent smiles. “This time of year I always feel the need for a little change,” she said. “I hope I haven’t gone too far.”

“Well, frankly—”

I shot Anne Holliday a warning look, which she wisely heeded. My ice pitcher was within reach, and her English perennial garden was an easy target.

“I think it’s lovely,” I said.

“Ladies, please,” Red grumbled. “I didn’t come here for a fashion show. I’ve got three building sites that need my attention.”

“Hear, hear,” the Roach said as she flexed her arms in an isometric exercise that made her muscles bulge obscenely.

Greg glanced at me, and I nodded.

He cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming. I know it was rather short notice, and y’all have busy schedules—”

“You can say that again.” Gloria Roach’s right biceps had assumed the size and shape of a leg of lamb.

Greg, Mama, and I frowned at her. “The sooner you hush up and listen, the sooner you can leave,” Mama said.

Gloria’s left biceps swelled to the size of a small ham, but she said no more.

“As y’all know,” Greg said calmly, “Ms. Timberlake here was accosted out at Roselawn Plantation on Monday night.”

“I already told the police that I have an alibi,” Red growled. “Marsha, tell them where I was.”

“I have an alibi, too!” Anne warbled.

Red turned viciously to her. “Mr. Johnny Walker or Mr. Mogen David?”

Greg held up a restraining hand. “We are not here to make accusations. We are here to listen to a statement from Ms. Timberlake.”

All eyes fastened on me. I swallowed deeply, trying desperately to remember everything Greg and I had agreed on.

“Go on,” Mama whispered.

“Well, uh—I—uh—”

“She wants to tell you a ghost story,” Mama said.

Red grabbed his wife’s hand. “Hell, I don’t have time for this.”

Greg, my hero, took a step forward. “You’ll make time.”

“There’re no such things as ghosts,” Red snarled.

“Maybe that depends on your definition, Mr. Barnes. From what Ms. Timberlake tells me, there most certainly is something that goes bump in the night.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? He can’t make us stay and listen to this shit, can he?” Red turned to Gloria.

The Roach looked as if her body had sprung a fast leak. Her muscles drooped, and her little brown ferret face had turned the color and texture of cottage cheese.

“I knew there was a ghost out there,” she whispered, barely audible. “I could feel its presence. Once I even saw it—a little girl standing on the landing with a rag doll in her hand. One second there she was; the next thing I knew she was gone.”

Anne twittered. “You and I should do happy hour together. I lived in that damn house for thirty years and never once saw a ghost.”

“Did this little girl ghost have a name?” I asked pleasantly.

Gloria shrugged. “How should I know? She was only there for a second.”

“Miss Lilah,” I said, “have you ever seen a ghost out at the old plantation?”

“Of course not, dear.”

“How about a ghost named Uma?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No ghost named Uma? Then how about one named Maynard? I seem to recall you telling me about him.”

“Why, that’s pure fiddle-faddle,” she said, just as cool as a cucumber in January. Believe you me, politicians about to undergo a Senate investigation would do well to tear a page from her book.

“Perhaps the complete name will ring a bell,” I said, and reaching underneath my pillow, withdrew a round object.

Red took a step forward. “What the hell is that?”

I pushed a little button, and the object popped open, revealing a pocket watch. “I found this is at the mansion,” I explained. “It reads: ‘To my son, United States Army Corporal Samuel Eugene Maynard III, on his twenty-first birthday. Love, S.E.M. II, April 10, 1862.’”

I snapped the watch shut. “I’m sure that by now y’all have heard about the secret trapdoor under the china cabinet. I’m sure that you also heard that I was not alone during my interment in that horrible pit. My companion didn’t say much, but I have since learned that he was Corporal Maynard.

“This,” I snapped the watch shut for dramatic effect, “was his. I found it in a box with several other watches—all of which, I am told, belonged to the Rose family, and have their initials engraved on them.”

I turned to Greg, who nodded.

“There was other loot, too,” I said. “Silverware, tea sets—oh, and vases. Ming vases, I hear. Lots of
beautiful vases. Some of them very rare and valuable.”

“Shame on you, Anne,” Lilah said sharply.

“Me?” Anne’s voice was a full octave lower now. “I may be lots of things, toots, but I’m no thief. I didn’t even know there was a trapdoor beneath the china cupboard. You, on the other hand, have been spending an inordinate amount of time out there since the foundation took over. Of course most folks would think, just looking at you, that you have all the money you need. But I happen to know that you were raised as poor as a church mouse on welfare.”

Miss Lilah was standing ramrod straight. Rage did not detract from her class act.

“How about you, Anne, would you like to share your past with our friends?”

I jumped to Anne’s rescue. “Well,
I
wasn’t accusing you of being a thief, dear,” I said. “The loot I was referring to was hidden there during the war—the Civil War—to keep it safe from the Yankees. I’m sure that was before even your time.”

Rather than express gratitude for getting her off the hook, Anne Holliday had the nerve to glare at me. Then she turned on Miss Lilah like a bear with threatened cubs.

“So it was
you
who was blackmailing me?”

Greg and I possessed the only pairs of eyes that weren’t in danger of popping out. Even Lilah and Anne looked as if they had thyroid problems.

“Ladies, please,” Greg said. He had stepped between the two women, although I’m sure Miss Lilah would never have raised a hand in public. “It was Shirley Hall who wrote that letter. She seemed to have a nose for sniffing out things.”

“I do, too, when I don’t have a cold,” Mama whined.

“Tell us about the blackmail,” Ferret Face urged.
She had whipped a legal pad out of her briefcase and was busy taking notes.

“Maybe it’s none of our business,” Red growled, and I instantly suspected that he might have been the recipient of one of Shirley’s letters. “Miss Timberlake, is there more to your story?”

I glanced at Greg, who nodded.

“Yes, well, of course the plantation was never burned, but at least one Union soldier found his way there. The unfortunate Corporal Maynard. Mr. Rose was off fighting the war, but someone in the family—probably Mrs. Rose—killed him with a blow to the head and hid his body with the family treasures.

“One would think that after the war the valuables would be recovered, except that life got in the way. Mr. Rose, fighting as a Confederate soldier, was killed in the Battle of Petersburg. Mrs. Rose, it is said, went stark raving mad. There were several little Roses, I’ve been told, one of whom eventually inherited the estate, but the legal heir never knew about the murder or the treasure.

“Only one other adult besides the Roses knew the secret, and that was the house slave who helped Mrs. Rose hide her most portable valuables. This slave was, of course, freed soon after the war. It is my belief that a descendant of this slave—quite possibly a Rose herself—has returned and made it her business to collect what is rightfully hers.”

I had expected Miss Lilah to be shaking like a paint mixer at Home Depot, but she was as cool and calm as ever.

“You can’t prove it.”

“No, but Shirley Hall could. She was blackmailing you, too, wasn’t she? She traced your family tree and discovered there were a few ripe fruits on it she could easily pick. Shirley figured she could earn more from you than she ever had as a professor at Winthrop. So you killed her, and then you called me
and pretended to be her. It was you who asked me to come out to the plantation Monday night, where you tried to kill me. That static on the phone was a clever trick.”

“You can’t prove that, either.”

“Of course I can, dear. Would you be a doll and pull your hair back from your face?”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” I said quietly. “Those scratches Dmitri gave you must look pretty nasty. I’ve been handling him since he was six weeks old, and even I”—I shot a glance at Greg—” look like an unraveled skein of yarn.”

It was finally all over. Miss Lilah didn’t even bother to bolt for the door. She had far too much class for that.

“S
o you see,” I said to Wynnell a week and a half later at a party she was throwing in my honor, “it wasn’t a Yankee after all. Miss Lilah was pure southern. Rose was her great-great-granddaddy. The house slave who helped hide Maynard was her great-great-grandmother. Lilah’s great-grandmother was raised in Atlanta, where she passed for white and married a white man. Her grandfather moved to Rock Hill at the turn of the century. Miss Lilah is as southern as you are.”

Wynnell was wearing a dress that looked for all the world like a wrinkled quilt that had had its backing removed. A shmatte, as Rob would say. It was not something Scarlett O’Hara would have worn, even in the most dire of times.

But let it be known that my friend is not a racist, merely a regionalist. “Miss Lilah is actually more southern than I,” she said, hanging her head in shame. “My great-grandmother on my father’s side was born in Chicago, but moved to Charlotte when she was three.”

We all gasped.

“Next to Bob, you’re the most Yankee person here,” Rob said sympathetically. He turned to Wynnell’s husband, Ed. “Too bad my support group is
only for gay partners of Yankees. Otherwise you’d be welcome to join.”

Ed smiled bravely. “Thanks. It’s been horrible keeping Wynnell’s secret all these years. It feels great just getting it out in the open.”

I gave Ed a big hug. The burdens some folks have to bear.

“I’d like to change the subject,” C.J. said.

We all groaned.

She glared at us, but a good-natured glare, I am sure. “This is serious. Abigail, I want to know if there really is a ghost out at Roselawn Plantation.”

I shrugged. “All I know is that I didn’t see one.”

“But the one we saw upstairs—who dropped his cap—that was Miss Lilah?”

“You betcha. But the cap did indeed belong to Maynard, as it turns out. It was the real thing, all right. So was the gun. Miss Lilah’s ancestor kept the items after helping to dispose of Maynard. The gun and the cap were handed down from generation to generation with the story of the loot.”

“But we didn’t see her car that night,” she insisted stubbornly.

“That’s true, and I didn’t see it the night she clobbered me over the head with a table leaf. You see, our dear Miss Lilah was hiding it in the summer kitchen—she was the only one who had keys to the outbuildings. The ironic thing is, it was the weight of her car that made one of the old floorboards buckle, thereby exposing the other entrance to the dungeon—the one Dmitri crawled through after she locked him in the kitchen. It’s a wonder she didn’t notice it.”

“What I want to know,” Bob boomed, “is who gets to keep all that beautiful stuff? Some of those Ming vases are museum quality.”

We looked at Greg.

“They’re part of the estate, and as such belong to
the Upstate Preservation Foundation,” he said. “Gloria—I mean, Ms. Roach—can fill you in on the details.”

“Not bloody likely,” I mumbled.

Greg’s dark eyebrows lifted in amusement. He looked exceptionally handsome that night, in cream-colored slacks and a red polo shirt that was open at the neck. He was my date for the evening, but he had done nothing but talk about the Roach. I knew he didn’t go in for women with bulging biceps, or did he? He had been spending an inordinate amount of time with the woman, and had even gone so far as to hint recently that my tummy could use a little toning.

“What did you say?” Greg asked loudly. The man could be maddening.

Mama came to my rescue. “It was me. I said, I still don’t get it. Lilah Greene confessed to killing June Troyan, who had accidentally stumbled on the trapdoor when she was rearranging furniture. But why, pray tell, did she kill Frank McBride?”

“Frank started out as her fence, Mrs. Wiggins.” Greg had it in him to be gallant to Mama
and
to two-time me with the ferret-faced Hercules. “But it wasn’t just the stuff in the pit they were selling, but all the best pieces in the house. Apparently, with his contacts Frank knew where to buy convincing reproductions.”

I gasped. “So that’s why Miss Lilah agreed to let me do an inventory. She wanted to see if they’d gotten away with their little scheme.”

“Exactly, only it wasn’t such a little scheme. Miss Lilah saw the plantation and its contents as her birthright—but of course she needed Frank to help sell the stuff. Their operation was running real smooth until June Troyan moved the china cupboard one day. If that hadn’t happened, they may never
have been caught. None of the others on the board knew the first thing about antiques.”

Mama shook her head. “That doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why would Miss Lilah purposely invite an antique expert in to appraise a house full of fake furniture? Isn’t that asking for trouble?”

I raised my hand. “Ooh, ooh, can I answer that?”

Greg smiled. “Go for it.”

“Because, Mama, at that point it was too late. I suspected something fishy was going on out there, and so did the police. By inviting me to help her, she was very cleverly shifting suspicion away from herself.”

“The woman has balls,” Rob said, and then immediately apologized to Mama.

“She had chutzpah,” Greg said. He pronounced the “ch” as in China.

We all laughed.

“No, I mean it. In one of the locked outbuildings—an equipment garage for mowers and such—we found a blue van.”

“
The
blue van?” I asked excitedly. “Didn’t I tell you in my shop, on the day June Troyan was killed, that it had to be the blue van?”

“That you did. And the reason it took us so long to find it is that after that day she hid it in the outbuilding and never drove it again.”

“I thought y’all checked the vehicles registered to all the docents and board members,” I said, risking his ire.

He flashed me a broad, self-righteous smile. “We did. The van didn’t belong to her—it was an old work van that belonged to Old Man Rose and came with the estate. The gardener used it to haul bales of pine straw and bags of manure. It was obviously not his primary vehicle, and even Miss Holliday forgot about it.”

“But of course Miss Lilah didn’t,” I said. Much to
my chagrin I found my admiration for her was actually growing. “When the foundation bought that property she made it her business to go over every square inch.”

“She was lucky she didn’t get stopped for driving with expired plates,” C.J. said. “I can’t drive one block without having a siren pull me over. Once in Shelby—”

“We do our best,” Greg said evenly, “but we can’t be everywhere.”

Mama jumped gallantly to his rescue. “What I want to know is, why did she kill Frank?”

“Because after she killed Miss Troyan, she got worried that things might have gone too far,” Greg said. “Apparently Frank didn’t have her—well, she thought he might cave in and expose her. So she shot him with Maynard’s gun, which she thought would be impossible to trace. It’s a wonder it didn’t blow up in her face.”

The sun rose in my clobbered cranium. “Ah, so it was Frank who was pestering me.”

Greg nodded. “Miss Lilah was right. Frank was panicking. He was trying to find out how much you knew. Apparently he stole the Ming from your shop to test the water, so to speak. Finally, he just couldn’t handle the pressure, so he dumped the vase at C.J.’s door. It was his pitiful attempt at a smokescreen.”

“Oh, Abby, the things I do for you,” C.J. whined.

Bob turned to me. “And it would have been easy for him to swipe your notepad,” he boomed. “Abby, you really need to keep better track of your things.”

“I’ve been telling her that for fifty years,” Mama said.

“I’m forty-eight, Mama.”

“I thought you were at least fifty,” Greg said without cracking a smile. “I’ve always liked older women.”

Mama patted her pearls playfully, Wynnell
smoothed her shmatte shamelessly, and I fumed.

“You must be thinking of Ms. Roach,” C.J. piped up. That child has all the sensitivity of a numb armadillo.

Greg grinned. “No, but speaking of Miss Roach—”

“I’d rather not,” I snapped. “That woman is like a summer storm cloud. Her name keeps popping up all over the place.”

Greg had the audacity to smile broadly. “Well, to every cloud there is a silver lining, and Miss Roach has found a very pretty silver lining to this one.”

“What did she do, wrestle the cloud down to the ground and line it herself?” I’m pretty sure those words came from my mouth.

Still smiling, Greg excused himself, and returned a moment later carrying the same Ming vase June Troyan had tried to leave with me.

“Rubbing salt in my wounds, are we?” I snapped.

The Wedgwood eyes danced gleefully. “Abby, this is for you. Miss Roach said that possession truly is nine tenths of the law, and since this was found in your shop, and the case is now closed, it belongs to you.”

“I-uh-I—”

“Here.” Greg thrust the vase at me.

I took the vase, too stunned to apologize.

“Look inside,” Greg said.

I did. At the bottom of the vase, in an open black velvet box, was a ring. In the ring was a modest, but very bright, oval stone. Like Greg, it was winking at me.

“Ooh,” C.J. gasped, “never take a vase from a tall man wearing a red shirt. My cousin Fuzzy in Shelby—”

“Shush, dear,” I said, and winked back at Greg.