“You haven’t answered my question,” she pointed out. “Where were you last night?”
He frowned. “Mostly on the telephone with my daughter, Kelly. She and her mother were having one of their eternal quarrels, and she had to give me a blow-by-blow description.” He gave an exasperated huff. “I guess it’s her being fifteen, but I don’t remember them fighting so much before. Now, they’re at each other’s throats half the time, and I get caught in the middle. You’ve raised teenagers. What am I supposed to do?”
“Be there,” she said promptly. “Be there to back up your wife when she has to be the heavy and to take your daughter out when she’s feeling moody.”
“Your husband wasn’t here,” he reminded her.
“He was here almost every weekend, and I had Jon. A third person in the house is a lot of help. Why don’t you go back up there and persuade them to come down here with you? Does your wife hate Georgia so much?”
“No, she likes living near her mama so much.”
“Is her mother ill?”
“No, demanding. Things were fine all those years we lived away, but once we’d been in the same town for three years, Melissa got convinced her mother needs her.”
“Persuade her you need her more. Have her come down to visit. Look at houses. Bring her and Kelly over here to swim. She might be just waiting for you to beg her to come.”
“I don’t beg.”
“You could.”
“That’s my business. Now where is the necklace?”
“That’s my business,” she parroted him. “But would you like to look at the diary? I tried translating more of it, but I’m very slow. I made a second copy to make notes on.”
He started clearing the table. “Let’s get it, then.”
He took in the scraps and dishes while she fetched the copy and a couple of pencils. She also brought her dictionary, in case his German wasn’t as perfect as he had bragged.
They laid the pages on the table between them and weighted them down with stones from her flowerbed. Katharine knew she was taking a risk. Would Hasty eventually try to overpower her and make her tell him where the necklace was? Would Dane attack him if he tried?
The man didn’t look dangerous as he picked up a handful of pages and started riffling through them, scanning lines here and there. He looked like a handsome college professor going gray around the temples, with bifocals.
The telephone rang. “Good afternoon,” Officer Williams said, “I wanted to check back and see if you have discovered anything else missing, ma’am.”
She got up and moved away from the table, out of earshot. “Nothing except the jade collection and that diary. And you might be interested to know that Zachary Andrews has disappeared. His employers called here this morning wondering if I knew where he was.”
“They called us, too. We’re checking him out. Now, if you can get those pictures and the list for us Monday, we’ll pick them up.”
She got back to the table to find Hasty muttering while he read. As soon as she sat down, he slammed the pages on the table and exploded. “This isn’t Ramsauer’s diary! It’s tripe—some woman prattling about her boyfriend. Listen to this.” He snatched up the top page. “‘As we stood watching the sun set over the Alps, did I feel you beginning to care for me as I care for you, my little love?’ Drivel!” He flung the pages back on the table. “You told me this was from Hallstatt.”
“I never did,” she protested. “I said the diary was with the necklace, and they were the only two things in an old box. I have no idea what it is. The most logical explanation is that it belonged to Aunt Lucy’s brother, Carter.”
“The phrase ‘my little love’ is masculine. It was probably your Aunt Lucy’s diary.”
“I can’t imagine her keeping a diary in German. Besides, she wasn’t in Austria very long, and she certainly wasn’t holding meetings and making plans. Here, read the first three entries.” She found them and slung them toward him.
He read swiftly what had taken her hours to translate. “It’s a seduction,” he concluded. “A deliberate plan to meet somebody in Vienna and seduce him. But I don’t understand about these meetings. The whole thing is ambiguous enough that if that’s all you had read when you first saw me, no wonder you said it was Ramsauer’s diary.” It was a grudging admission, but as close to an apology as she was likely to get.
Katharine’s temper rose. “I hadn’t read any of it yet, and I didn’t say it was Ramsauer’s diary. I said it might be. Later that afternoon, when I read the first page, I still thought it might be. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Think it’s some love-crazed woman plotting to get her man. I can’t think of any other explanation, can you?”
He picked up another couple of pages and skimmed them. “It’s twentieth century, too. Here the writer talks about going to the movies.” He dropped the page to the table and scanned another. His lip curled. “Well, here it is. ‘Drove to a rustic inn in the mountains to spend the weekend, and I have achieved my desire. Oh, ecstasy! L2 was right—the right setting, good wine, plus gentleness and tenderness won in the end. Afterwards, my little love wept in my arms with remorse, but I overcame all his qualms and we have pledged our love forever.’”
Hasty read to the bottom of the page then gave a grunt of disgust. “The writer of this diary was not a nice person, Katie-bell. After the seduction, she shared all the juicy details with the one referred to as L-squared, and boasts, ‘How jealous he was.’ Not a nice person at all.”
“I thought L-squared might be Aunt Lucy,” Katharine said hesitantly.
“No, he’s a man. Besides, L-squared implies somebody whose first and last names both begin with ‘L.’ Maybe Aunt Lucy was the seducer, and used unorthodox methods of inducing jealousy in multiple lovers.”
“It was more likely Sara Claire.” Had Sara Claire been fluent in German? How little she knew about her relatives!
“The Acid Aunt? Not likely.” Hasty’s laugh was rude. He had met Sara Claire when she visited Miami and had dubbed her that immediately.
“She might have been different in college,” Katharine argued. “More—you know—loose.”
“This woman was loose all right. A vamp.”
“Dutch was saying this week that he liked Aunt Sara Claire back then,” Katharine protested. “He wouldn’t like a tramp.”
“I said vamp, not tramp,” he corrected her. “Is Dutch still around? I always liked him.”
“He’s very much around. Lives over at Autumn Village, where Aunt Lucy and Aunt Sara Claire used to be. And he was telling me just this week about how he, Lucy, Sara Claire, and Carter were all in Europe the summer of 1937, and how much fun they had.”
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 girlfrie
nd. 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 L2.”
“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.”
Chapter 17
“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.
Death on the Family Tree Page 18