Including the important issue of what Dutch wanted on his tombstone.
“Do me one more favor, Kat. Pick out something nice for him to be buried in. I couldn’t stand to go into his closet.”
She was touched. That was the first sign Chap had ever given of caring for his dad—until he added, “But you’d better wear sunglasses, his clothes are so bright.”
Then she wanted to knock him down again. But she was sorry he wouldn’t give himself the gift of time in Dutch’s closet. Clothes carry a person’s scent long after the person is gone. Katharine still had her mother’s old bathrobe in tissue paper in the guest room closet. Sometimes she took it out and buried her face in its silken folds. The fact that Chap would not enter his father’s closet was more his tragedy than Dutch’s.
When she told Mr. Billingslea what Chap had asked her to do, he referred her to a policeman in the hall. “There will be time for that later,” he told her. “The body won’t be released for several days.”
“Besides,” Mr. Billingslea chimed in, “we don’t permit anything to leave the unit until family arrives.”
“I promised,” Katharine pointed out, “and like you said, I’m practically family here. I was practically part of Dutch’s family, too. I’ve known him all my life. And I’d like to choose the clothes before I leave, please. I don’t want to have to come back. My house was broken into today, and completely trashed. I’ll be dealing with that for days. All I want is one outfit. I will take it with me and give you a receipt.” When the policeman started to speak, she repeated, “I don’t want to have to come back here.”
His eyes flickered.
She realized she had used the same tone she used to use with Jon, when she would call, “Don’t make me come up there.” Her social instinct was to apologize. Instead, she stood and waited.
He sighed. “Come with me, ma’am. And don’t touch a thing. Just point to what you want.”
Katharine stood in Dutch’s closet for several seconds inhaling his scent and missing him. Then she began to look for clothes. He had far too many, and they were jammed together in a haphazard way that made her suspect his wife had organized his closet until she died. Several plastic bags of laundry and dry cleaning hadn’t even been opened, just hung among the rest.
She spied the jacket to his best gray suit—the one he’d worn to Lucy’s funeral such a short time ago—and pointed it out. She found the pants farther down the bar. She pointed to a red tie, certain Dutch would want a red tie, then she stopped, chagrined. How could she choose a shirt that would please both Dutch and Chap? Dutch had liked colorful clothes. For daily wear he preferred knit polo shirts from various golf matches where he had marshaled. With suits, he favored green, blue, yellow, violet, or pink dress shirts. Not exactly what the starched-white-shirt Chap would consider appropriate for a funeral.
Katharine finally spied a white shirt with blue stripes hanging in an unopened cleaner’s bag with three yellow ones. She pointed. “That will do.”
As the officer reached his gloved hands up to bring out the shirt, she noted that the laundry was the same one she and Tom used.
“You all okay?” Norm called from the hall door.
“Fine,” she called back. “We just have to get shoes, socks, and underwear.”
“He won’t need all those,” Norman objected. She suspected he might be the clothing beneficiary for most of the men who died. It was hard to picture Mr. Billingslea wearing a former resident’s suits to work. However, she refused to shortchange Dutch in order to increase Norman’s legacy. Chap had left it up to her, so Dutch was going to be buried in full dress.
She accepted the top pair of shorts, the first undershirt, and the first pair of black socks she saw in the drawers. Then she nodded toward his best black shoes. “That’s it,” she said.
At the door to the bedroom she took one last look around. She had not been in Dutch’s bedroom since she used to play hide-and-seek with Chap and their friends, but he still used the old mahogany suite he and his wife always shared and the pictures on the dresser were familiar. “Goodbye,” she whispered softly before she followed the officer toward the hall.
Leona was waiting for them, holding a large carrier from Macy’s. “Mr. Billingslea told me to brang you up somethin’ to put ’em in. You don’t want to carry them thangs loose through the buildin’.” Katharine interpreted that to mean that Mr. Billingslea didn’t want other residents reminded of their own mortality.
She folded each piece and put it in the carrier under Leona’s critical eye. “Don’t you thank he oughta be buried in a white shirt?” she demanded.
“He doesn’t have any white ones,” Katharine told her. “Besides, he liked this one.”
“What about them the laundry brung today? They was white. I know, ’cuz the man had to lay ’em on the counter while he signed in, and I noticed, seein’ as how I ain’t never seen Mr. Landrum in a white shirt before.”
“Maybe he was bringing them to somebody else.”
“No, he weren’t. He had to ask me for the room number. Said he’d just started with the company and hadn’t been here before. Didn’t even know to go around back and use the ser vice entrance—just parked his little white van right in front of the door.”
“What did he look like?” The dry cleaner was owned and run by a Vietnamese couple, and the only workers Katharine had ever seen there were members of their extended family.
“Sorta old, I thank, but he wore a Braves cap that covered all his hair but the sideburns. They were white. Had on dark glasses, too. Said he had a sinus infection that had spread to his eyes. Had a soft scratchy voice, not much more’n a whisper, and he was tallish and walked all stooped over and real slow, like this.” Leona hunched her shoulders and tottered down the hall. She had a gift for mimicry Katharine had never suspected.
Katharine’s breath caught in her throat. None of the Vietnamese she had ever seen at the laundry were old, and all were short, but she knew one man who had fooled a lot of people by impersonating an elderly street sweeper. The same man who got bad sinus infections from going underwater, and who knew she was visiting Dutch this morning.
“He brought Dutch white shirts?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, in a long plastic bag. Coupla white ones, at least. That’s all I saw. They must be in there somewhere.” Leona peered into the living room as if expecting to see it festooned with shirts.
Katharine called to the policeman, “Could we look in the closet once more, please? There were a couple of white shirts delivered this morning we seem to have missed.”
He reluctantly led her back to the closet and, at her request, checked all the plastic bags. They found no white shirts. “Maybe they are in with dry cleaning,” she suggested.
He checked four suit bags, as well. “None of them have shirts, ma’am. Besides, all of these were promised at least two months ago. He had a lot of clothes.”
She gave him a wan smile. “Yeah, he liked clothes. I wonder where those shirts are.”
She asked him to reexamine the laundry bag the striped shirt had been in. It held only pale yellow shirts. “Maybe Leona thought they were white,” she murmured.
The officer looked at the tag still attached at the top. “These were promised four weeks ago. You think they waited a month to deliver them?” He didn’t expect an answer. “Looks like that laundryman is somebody we’ll need to be talking to.”
Chapter 22
“You haven’t talked to Tom?” Posey sat with Katharine at the kitchen table drinking chilled white wine while Julia was over at the stove fixing her special grilled-cheese sandwiches with a slice of Vidalia onion and a big slice of one of Katharine’s own red tomatoes. “And why you aren’t bawling your head off, I cannot understand.”
Katharine sighed. “I’m cried out. And I’ve tried to reach Tom twice, but can’t.”
“Eat up.” Julia lifted the crisp brown sandwich onto a plate and added a slice of cold dill pickle and a few chips. �
��It’s the best thing you can do right now.”
“And while you do,” Posey added, “I’m calling Tom myself and telling him to get his backside home before dark, if he has to sprout wings.”
Suddenly she jumped up, her ear cocked toward the kitchen television, and dashed toward the den. “Wait a minute! Holly asked me to tape this if it came on.”
The small kitchen television showed an antigay rally in front of the Georgia capitol. People on both sides of the issue faced off and shouted hate slogans at one another. Katharine couldn’t help thinking of one of Jon’s gay friends from college, a sweet, gentle boy who never hated anybody and who died in a car accident at twenty. She wasn’t the only person with troubles in the world.
“What could Tom do if he did come home?” she asked as Posey came back. She smiled her thanks as Julia refilled her glass and set the wine bottle in easy reach.
Posey counted on plump pink fingertips. “Call the insurance company. Hassle the police to find the jerks who did this. Take you somewhere for a few days to get away from the mess. Hold you while you cry. But for now, eat up. You look like a drowned hamster.”
“That makes me feel so much better.” But Katharine did feel better, looking at food.
“You want some of this watermelon?” Julia asked, taking it out of its bag.
Katharine teared up again. “That was for Dutch.”
“Then you oughta eat it in his memory. It looks too good to waste.” She fetched two plates and divided it between Katharine and Posey.
Posey might look flighty, with her big blue eyes and flyaway hair, but she was a practical woman at heart. While they ate, she considered what Katharine needed to do immediately. “Call the insurance company as soon as you finish eating,” she advised. “They need to see the house before you start putting anything back in place. Then call a cleaning company. Rosa won’t be able to deal with all that.”
“No, cleaning up is going to be awful. And I’ll have to call Hollis’s painter friends and put them off for a week or two, at least.”
“They could clean.” Posey fetched spoons for the watermelon. “From what she says, they’ve got nothing better to do. Just tell them what you want done.”
“I can ask them.” If Katharine sounded dubious, it was because she hadn’t met a friend of Jon or Susan yet who knew how to clean. Still, at the very least they could carry debris to the curb. “I don’t know when they can start, though. The police have to finish checking everything out, then the insurance adjuster has to come.” She slapped one cheek as another thought occurred to her. “I forgot to call the insurance people after Friday night’s break-in! How could I be so stupid?”
“Or so overwhelmed?” Posey sprinkled her watermelon with salt. “Eat up. Watermelon stimulates brain cells. It’s full of vitamin C.” She chewed thoughtfully. “Do some adjusting of your own. Lump the jade with the stuff you lost today.”
After lunch, Katharine called the insurance company, who said they would speak to the police and call her back to set up a time to come to her house.
“Now call Tom,” Posey ordered.
She got Louise again. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Murray, but Mr. Murray didn’t come back to the office after his meeting. He did call to say he was going to lunch, and I gave him your message.”
“Call him on his cell phone,” Posey ordered when Katharine reported back.
“And try to discuss all this while he sits in the middle of a power lunch?”
“He might not be at a power lunch.”
“Don’t be silly. All Tom’s lunches are power lunches, unless he eats at his desk. Wonder what it would be like to eat elegant lunches all the time while discussing how to run the world.”
Posey added more salt to her watermelon. “In one word? Fattening. Call him!”
She did, but again got voice mail.
Posey waved her toward the stairs. “Go stretch out a while. Molly has a robe in the closet that ought to fit you, if you want to take off your clothes. Get a little sleep and we’ll talk about what else you need to do.”
Katharine went upstairs feeling like her shoes were soled in lead. She got into Molly’s robe—which was blue chenille and as soft as a mother’s hug—climbed onto the bed and pulled the covers over her ears, but she knew at once she couldn’t sleep. When she closed her eyes she saw her house with everything all over the floor. When she opened them and tried again, she saw Dutch lying on his couch with his face purple and his tongue sticking out. Those were not scenes she wanted to meet in her dreams.
She flung off the covers and headed to the chaise. Maybe lurid German prose would distract her. Her vocabulary for terms of passion had increased so much she probably wouldn’t even miss her dictionary.
She flipped through the diary copy and pulled out a page at random. It was dated 15/8 and the first line read: Morgen sprengen wir werden den Brücke.
“Morgen” was tomorrow, and the verb was future tense. Was “Brücke” the word for brook? “Sprengen” was a verb she didn’t know, but it looked like “spring.” Were they going somewhere to spring over a brook?
“Context, context, context,” her professor used to tell her. She scanned down the page. They were to meet very early the next morning and it must be a surprise, for the writer hoped that L2 would not inform “my dearest love” of the plan. The following evening there was to be a party at the writer’s home, and beer had already been delivered. Most of the other sentences could have been Greek. Katharine wished she had worked harder on memorizing vocabulary. She wished she had the dictionary she had left on the kitchen table that morning. Heaven only knew what shape the vandals had left the poor book in.
Her cell phone rang while she was trying to decipher another unfamiliar word. She grabbed it without looking at the number. “Tom?”
“No, Hasty. I’ve been thinking—”
“Wait a minute. What does ‘emächtigen’ mean?”
“Empower,” he said promptly.
“So Emächtigen die Leute means—”
“Empower the people. As in ‘Power to the People.’”
“And ‘sprengen’?”
“Blow up.”
“Blow up a brook?”
“Brook?”
“Brücke.”
“That’s bridge. I thought you said you knew German.”
“I do, sort of. I just don’t have much vocabulary.”
He snorted. “That’s like saying you speak English, you just don’t know words. Are you planning to blow up a bridge?”
“No, but maybe our friend was. It says right here—wait a minute. Here it is. ‘Morgen sprengen wir werden den Brücke.’ Are you sure ‘sprengen’ means ‘blow up’? It couldn’t mean ‘to spring across,’ as in the carefree action of somebody in love?”
“No, but maybe it used to be slang for a stupendous romantic encounter.”
“Or maybe it’s like ‘burning your bridges’ in English—maybe they were getting married.”
“Or something.” He sounded impatient. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about that necklace.”
“The necklace is fine,” she snapped. “The diary is fine. It’s just the rest of my life that is currently lying in pieces all over my floor.” Her voice trembled so she laughed to cover it. “I think there’s a curse on Aunt Lucy’s things, given what’s happened to me since I found them. Where were you this morning?”
“Is that related to the curse?” She could picture his black brows rising above his glasses, but he didn’t sound like he was stalling for time. Would she be able to detect it if he were?
“It may be,” she told him.
“Well, let’s see. I got my teeth cleaned bright and early at eight-thirty. Then I had a fascinating department meeting until eleven. After that—”
“That’s enough.” She was surprised at the relief she felt. “Let me tell you about my morning.”
When she had finished, he said, “I’m real sorry about Dutch.”
She wondered if a police o
fficer could detect confession in his voice. She heard only sympathy. “Me, too. He was a special friend.”
“And one of the last ties with your parents.”
She appreciated his understanding that so quickly. “Yes. The very last.” She didn’t mean to sound pitiful, but she did.
“Well, at least you know I wasn’t robbing your house or killing poor Dutch, if that’s what you were hinting at. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“It was just—” She stopped. There is no sufficient apology for suspecting a friend of rampage and murder.
“Where are you now?” he demanded.
“Over at my sister-in-law’s. I’ll be staying here again for a few days until things get cleared up at the house.”
“Why don’t I come get you and take you out for coffee?”
She ought to refuse. It was entirely possible that he wanted to get her alone so he could force her to take him to the necklace—or to simply take him. But she also knew she wasn’t going to sleep, and Hasty could read the diary a lot faster than she could.
“Let’s meet somewhere,” she said quickly. “You know what I really want? A Krispy Kreme fix. You know where the main store is on Ponce de Leon?”
“Who doesn’t? I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be there in twenty.”
“Bring the diary?”
“Of course.”
Posey wasn’t in the kitchen when she went downstairs, which made things simpler. She told Julia she’d be out for a while and left.
Hasty stood inside the store beside a long plate glass window watching soft dough form into circles that were put on shelves and carried up several levels inside a hot-air tunnel while they rose. “Watch this,” he said as she came up beside him. “I’ve got my eye on that row right there.” Together they watched the shelf of skinny doughnuts swell into plump ones and then fall simultaneously into a river of hot oil. Hasty put a hand at the small of her back and guided her down the window while the doughnuts bobbed and cooked. “Now they’re going to turn over,” he announced as if he had personally orchestrated the event.
Death on the Family Tree Page 24