Then Hang All the Liars

by Sarah Shankman

  “Okay.” He turned. “I guess I can take a hint when I’m not wanted.”

  Just then, just that turn of his head, and he looked exactly like he had the night before at the party when he was talking with—

  “What do you know about Laura Landry?” she blurted.

  He turned back real slowly. She’d love to wipe that grin off his face with the back of her hand.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Forget I asked.”

  “Aw, come on.” He punched her in the shoulder as if they were twelve years old. “I was only trying to get your goat. What do you want to know?”

  Sam told him about the tip Charlie had given her, about the conversation she’d overheard between Laura and Miranda Burkett.

  He whistled long and low. “Boy, wouldn’t that be something?”

  “You heard anything about it before?”

  “Not a word. But then, I’m a pretty clean person, Sammy.”

  She let that slide. “You know Laura well enough to know if she’d be involved, too?”

  Beau shook his head. “I know her mother, Margaret, a little. Beth’s taken some of her children’s acting classes, and she knows Laura. I guess I could ask her and see if she knows anything. Beth’s pretty discreet.”

  “She’s over at Scott?”

  “Just started her freshman year.”

  Beau was very proud of his only child. Sam could tell he was dying for her to ask more.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Looks like it’s going to be aces all the way. She’s knocking ’em dead.”

  “Well, she’s your daughter.”

  His grin almost blinded her.

  “Don’t let it go to your head, pal. Does Beth know Miranda, too?”

  “Sure. She used to come to our house all the time when they were little. They were both at Westminster.”

  “You’ll let me know what Beth says?”

  “Over lunch.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  He looked at himself in the mirror and straightened his tie.

  “Why do I think the answer to that particular invitation’s no?”

  Six

  Though her neat little figure didn’t tell on her, Felicity Edwards had always had a sweet tooth. It was one of life’s little ironies that her sister, Emily, who never gave a damn about sugar in the first place, got the diabetes while Felicity slid through life licking honey off a spoon. Invite her to a dinner party and she’d pick at her supper, then ask if she could have two desserts and, pretty please, some hot fudge.

  Given that, this scenario was no surprise.

  Felicity awoke late this Tuesday morning, as was her wont, slipped out of bed and into her favorite purple quilted silk wrapper, when bump. At the end of her dyed-to-match purple house slipper, her left big toe hit something.

  “Lordy mercy, I hope it’s not a snake?” she said aloud to herself in a tremulous falsetto, her inflection rising on the end in that way Southern ladies have, as if they were always asking a question. But she was just making a little joke. The thing in her shoe was too small to be anything like that.

  She shook it out.

  A Gold Brick candy bar! One of her favorites!

  She peeled off the gold foil wrapper and devoured the morsel of creamy milk chocolate and pecans.

  There was a time when Felicity was more herself that she would have at least brushed her teeth first, but that time wasn’t now. What with her substituting healthy doses of Randolph’s magic elixir for the lithium her doctor had prescribed, her life had become one long ride on a roller coaster. And if along the way there was a Gold Brick or two, that was no surprise.

  So when she found another petit cadeau at the top of the stairs, she clapped her hands in delight, then grabbed it up and popped it down.

  “Oh, a treasure hunt,” she cried.

  She continued down the stairs, and there on the next-to-the-last step she spied a third piece of gold.

  “What fun!” She picked up the pace, really getting into the spirit now, and made a quick turn through the ground floor. Nothing more in the double parlors, the dining room, the music room, the kitchen, the pantry, the utility room, the sun porch. Having completed the circle, she stood once again in the broad entry hall with her bottom lip poked out.

  She stared into a massive mirror at her well-practiced pout. And then something went ting-a-ling in her brain and she struck a pose like one of Sargent’s ladies. Her neck elongated, and the long purple housecoat became a ball gown. She relaxed the moue and replaced it with the faintest of smiles. From beneath languorous lids, she checked herself out. Oh, yes! She was elegant, breathtaking—and young. Absolutely like a debutante.

  Then Felicity Edwards stepped out of the portrait for which she had so patiently posed, which was asking a lot of a girl with her high spirits, and walked out the front door of her parents’ Elizabeth Street house. My God, what a beautiful morning! It had been a perfect year for that matter, her year, 1933. For Felicity was eighteen, and Atlanta was her oyster. Only a few months ago she had made her bow to society, and there was no question in anyone’s mind that she was the belle of the season.

  “The Depression be damned,” her father, the good Dr. Edwards, had cried, pounding his fist on the table so hard his wife and the crystal shivered. “My darling daughter won’t be cheated of her due because of some Goddamned fluke of Wall Street.” And she wasn’t.

  Neither were the twenty other debs who danced with their fathers across the polished ballroom floor of the Piedmont Driving Club that spring, each and every one of them as sweet in their white net and tulle and lace as a wedding cake. And that was the point, that within a year or two the girls would be standing in a room much like this ballroom, hands joined with those of an ever-so-charming brand-new husband. For what else was a debut, this whirl of dances and parties with eminently available and desirable stag lines, culminating in Daddy’s last dance, if not a wedding rehearsal?

  And she had done very well. Felicity turned left now as she reached the sidewalk. Her dance card had always been filled before the band had played the first tune. In fact, she had danced so much that year that even with all the party sandwiches, the Virginia hams, the oyster and milk pies, and all those delectable desserts, her father had been afraid she was going to disappear. He had prescribed beer four times a day to keep her weight up. The alcohol had kept her head up, too, way up in the clouds so that much of the season was a hazy blur. Some nights she could hardly remember coming home to this house on Elizabeth Street, which her Grandfather Edwards had built just before the turn of the century and then later given to his son, her father, for a wedding present.

  She stopped and looked back. There had never been a house in her entire life that she had liked better. Not even the townhouses of New York could hold a candle to this High Victorian Queen Anne mansion. Those were all cold stone, no matter how elegant their interiors, their public faces elbowed on either side by other buildings, pinched and cramped as if they had a headache. But this Delft blue three-story Victorian was set in a generous yard with both kitchen and flower gardens and a stable, now a garage, with servants’ quarters. And a line of glorious oaks. For though most of Inman Park’s trees had been sacrificed for building trench lines during Sherman’s siege, Joel Hurt, the suburb’s developer, had replanted oaks and exotic shrubs and trees.

  Now Felicity looked up at one of Hurt’s oaks that separated her home from that of the more restrained Beaux Arts house next door. Her glance swept from its wide branches down to its roots, and there she saw another golden twinkle!

  She pounced on the chocolate tidbit. Oh, she hadn’t had such a fine morning since—well, she couldn’t remember when. She licked her fingers slowly. The chocolate had gone a bit soft in a spot of late-morning sun.

  Then she crossed Euclid Avenue. There was Callan Castle, the former home of Asa Candler, the Coca-Cola king.

  The Candlers had left this house some years ago and had built a mu
ch bigger mansion, Callanwolde, in Druid Hills when Inman Park had passed out of vogue. The Candlers had not only moved their house north, they had dug up their ancestors from Oakland Cemetery and taken them along to Westview. Many climbers, dragging family coffins behind them, had followed suit.

  But the Edwards family had stayed put. They would never leave Inman Park, not even when the electric streetcar line stopped running downtown. They would ignore bumptious new bungalows. They would persevere through decay and decline and hang on until the neighborhood rose again with the phoenix of gentrification.

  But Felicity wasn’t thinking of any of that now. Felicity, who imagined herself once again eighteen, was just taking a stroll down Elizabeth Street on this bright, early fall morning.

  More gold glinted beneath a hollyhock in Springdale Park and she gobbled her fourth Gold Brick.

  A woman coming down the steps of her house across the street stopped and stared.

  “Felicity, is that you?”

  “Hello,” Felicity caroled, waving the arm of her purple dressing gown. “Marjorie, have you decided where you’re going away to school?”

  The woman, whose name was not Marjorie, and who had finished her schooling in Virginia more years ago than she cared to remember, shook her head. If she got that dotty when she was old, she hoped they’d shoot her—just like they’d shot her favorite horse who’d broken a leg when she was at Sweet Briar.

  “You better go back home and get dressed,” she said.

  “Oh, no. I’m all ready for Mary Eloise’s ball.” Felicity did a cute little turn, showing off her gown.

  Bless Jesus, the woman thought, and stepped back in her house. She was late for a luncheon, but at least she could stop a minute and telephone Felicity’s sister.

  Felicity strolled on down the street. What luck! Right there, marching along in the grass beside her straight as little soldiers, was a parade of Gold Bricks. One by one, she picked them up. She didn’t eat all these right away. Why, there were too many. She’d make herself sick. Slipped them into her pocket. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…marching. Past a clump of golden mums that lurched out toward her. A little coarse, chrysanthemums, common like zinnias. She’d have to speak to the Restoration about replacing them. Asters would be better. Too bad they couldn’t do it all in orchids. Now that would be something.

  But common or not, the clump of mums was home to another Gold Brick. On the other side of the flowers, the candies marched on. They crossed Delta Place, and led her into a little triangular park.

  Numbers eleven, twelve, and thirteen paved the way through the park grass. Then they stopped.

  Felicity looked up.

  Right in front, looking rather like a small Parisian pissoir, was an antique wrought-iron lockup box.

  “A good idea,” Felicity declaimed to the morning air. “Keep the bad guys fast till the police can come and get ’em.” Which is exactly what the lantern-topped structure was used for in the early part of the century.

  But this box wasn’t locked. Its metal door hung ajar.

  Felicity put a hand to it. It creaked, protesting as she pulled it wide open.

  Then, “No, no, no, no!” she moaned, her cries disturbing the still-cool morning air.

  For staring at her with big brown eyes was a life-size rag doll. A doll with red-brown curls, a blue-and-white-checked gingham dress, and a pair of scissors protruding from her heart. The stain around the steel was scarlet.

  When Emily arrived home, Felicity was sitting in the front parlor with the rag doll on her lap, rocking.

  “Oh, look,” she mourned, her tears so big they seemed violet as her eyes. She held up the ruined doll.

  Emily took a deep breath. She had had years of practice in being calm. She took the doll.

  “Oh, dear, she’s been hurt.”

  Felicity kept rocking, wearing that smug look on her face that Emily hated.

  Drunks had that look. I know something you don’t know. Emily didn’t want to know. Keep it to yourself. But they never did. They fed you just enough to make you want to slap them.

  “You said she’d be all right.” Felicity rocked on. “But she isn’t, is she? She’s dead. Someone killed her.”

  “Who’s the someone?”

  “You wouldn’t listen to me. Oh, no, Emily never listens to me. Emily’s too smart.”

  “Felicity, where did you get the doll?”

  “For me to know and you to find out.” But then she changed her mind. “Where you left her. You did! I said she wouldn’t be safe. But you knew better. Now look. Now are you happy?”

  Felicity jumped out of the rocker and snatched the doll back. If Emily hadn’t let go, she’d have torn it in half.

  “You’d bury her somewhere and not tell me.”

  Outside in the kennel, one of the dogs began to howl. A shiver ran up Emily’s back. It was the sound of a mother’s keening.

  “You’d better go see about her,” Felicity said then, having shifted into perfect lucidity. “It sounds like Marilyn, doesn’t it?”

  It was Marilyn, the bitch who had whelped a few days earlier, nuzzling at a mouse-sized puppy who was soaked with her licking. Its brothers and sisters squirmed for position at her teats, but Marilyn ignored them. Emily picked up the limp newborn. No heartbeat. Not even the tiniest.

  “Felicity, Felicity!” At the back door, Emily grabbed her keys and purse. “I’m going to Dr. Grossman’s.”

  Felicity nodded, rocking, rocking, still rocking the rag doll cuddled once more to her breast. “Go ahead. Go on. My baby will be all right. I’ll make sure of it.”

  She rocked and smiled and smiled and rocked. She smiled down into the doll’s yarn eyes that were wide open.

  Emily looked down at the puppy in her hand. Then, aping Felicity, she cuddled it to her breast. She wanted to warm it.

  “Go,” Felicity repeated. “Go on. Mommy understands. That’s what mommies do.”

  Emily flew then.

  Felicity kept rocking.

  Seven

  Oh, shit! No mistaking the flashing blue light. Sam knew the speeding ticket already had her name on it.

  If only she hadn’t let Peaches convince her that she needed breakfast. If she’d packed last night for Fripp instead of this morning. If she hadn’t stopped by the Little Five Points Pub to ask about the busty red-headed poet. If wishes were horses, she wouldn’t be so late already.

  Dammit!

  Harpo, who was riding shotgun, gave her a look.

  Okay, okay, so she was lying.

  She always drove too fast. Blame it on Horace. He’d put her behind the wheel when she was fourteen and said go like this. Hunkered down, elbows loose, accelerator flat out.

  Don’t call us when you’re dead was how Peaches waved her off. The exact words she’d used for almost twenty-five years to the both of them.

  “You could say Godspeed.”

  “Leave God out of it. We’ll do plenty of talking with him at your funeral.”

  Sam wished Peaches, who could outjaw the devil if she chose, were here now to chat up this state trooper. She watched him striding toward her in the rearview mirror.

  He was wearing those sunglasses. The Canadian Mounty hat, the crisp brown gabardine uniform tailored within a quarter-inch of his behind, the slow, purposeful walk.

  She shivered. The last time a lawman had stopped her like this he’d almost killed her. Murdering son of a bitch was in prison now, but he’d made quite an impression. She rubbed her wrists where he’d snapped the handcuffs on.

  “License, please, ma’am.”

  Crap! She was still carrying California tags and a California driver’s license. How many times had George warned her that she ought to get them changed? Well, it was too late now to say she was sorry.

  He stared at her picture. She stared at him. He was about her age, and from what she could see around the shades, a cop from central casting. Cleft chin, strong jaw, curly brown hair, the works.

  “Registr
ation.”

  She handed it over.

  “Now, ma’am,” he said, leaning down and looking right at her, “you want to tell me about this fire?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, is that little dog there dying? Are you taking him to the vet?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Is someone in your family critically ill? Are you racing to get to a hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, you want to tell me why it is you’re burning up the road?”

  She’d been thinking of Peaches the whole time the man was talking. Horace may have gotten her into this, but her lessons at Peaches’s knee would get her out.

  “Well, officer,” she started, taking off her own shades so he could see her big brown eyes, “I’m trying to get home.” She paused and shifted her Southern accent, which came and went as the spirit moved her, into overdrive. “See, I’ve been living out in California a few years, and I haven’t been home since I can’t remember when, and I’ve been driving I don’t know how many days since I left San Francisco, and now that I’m within a hundred miles or so of Savannah, well, it seems like I just can’t wait anymore.” She was hot now, flying fast and loose. “I’ve been so lonesome for my momma and my daddy, and my brother Rick is going to be there too. I talked to Momma last night from a motel, and she said if I got home by dinner time today, she’d have dumplings waiting on the table.” She laid it on even thicker. “I know all that’s not much of an excuse, but I’m sure you can understand, officer. Now you wouldn’t want to ruin a Southern girl’s trip back home, would you?”

  There now. Scarlett O’Hara couldn’t have done better.

  His mouth was hanging open a little. Could they put her under the jail for lying? His ballpoint pen was still poised. He used it now to tip back his hat. She could see the line where the leather bit into his forehead.

  “I’ll give you credit, ma’am. It’s the best one I’ve heard all morning.”

  He stepped back to his car and pulled out the crackling speakerphone. Now she could hear him calling in her license plate. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Four minutes passed. The radio popped again. Mickey Mouse on her wrist now said five. Was it good news or bad that it was taking so long? Seven minutes.