“Hey, Adam!” I called, standing at the edge of the pond.
“Hey, Keeley,” he said, turning and waving at me.
“What are y’all doing?” I asked.
“Ripping out this fountain and draining the pond,” Adam said, grinning. “The boss’s orders.”
“The man has no appreciation for fine art,” I said, giving him a wink.
“Guess not,” Adam said. He cocked his head. “Hey, uh, I thought you were fired.”
“No. I quit,” I said. “But I’ve got one last delivery to make.” I gestured toward the van. “That thing is full of furniture for Mulberry Hill, and I need to get it unloaded before three, when I have to return it to the rental place. Do you think you two could help me out?” I batted my eyelashes exaggeratedly. “Pretty please?”
“Sure,” Adam said. “Soon as me and Jorge get this statue thing out of here. It’ll take a while for the pond to drain. Then we got some truckloads of dirt coming to fill it in. We could get the furniture, right, Jorge?”
“No problem,” Jorge said. “Soon as we take care of this horse.”
“They’re unicorns,” I informed him. “And they’re magical, you know.”
“That’s good,” Jorge laughed. “Because we’re fixing to make ’em disappear. You watch.”
He clambered up on top of a thick concrete post that supported the statue, put his arms around it, and tugged. His face contorted with the effort of it, but the unicorns did not budge. “It won’t move,” he told Adam. “They must have cemented it on here.”
“Well, we gotta make it move,” Adam said. “The boss said it had better be out of here by the time he comes back. If you saw the look on his face like I did, you’d know he means business.” With that, Adam waded out and climbed up the muddy embankment to his truck, where he fetched two lethal-looking sledgehammers.
“Now you’re talking,” Jorge said, grabbing one of the sledgehammers. He circled the unicorns looking for a likely place to start, and with no further ceremony, hauled off and gave it a mighty whack.
“Uuuuh,” he grunted. A small chunk of concrete broke off the unicorn’s flank.
Adam took up position on the second of the unicorns and proceeded to give it a whack. The two of them were hammering away, and the pond was slowly lowering. I sat on the tailgate of Adam’s truck to watch the show.
Suddenly a white Porsche Boxster came speeding down the driveway. It screeched to a stop beside Adam’s truck, and a woman in a set of white silk tennis warm-ups jumped out of the driver’s seat.
I saw Adam look at Jorge. “Uh-oh,” Jorge said softly.
“What’s going on here?” Stephanie cried, surveying the scene before her. “What have you morons done to my beautiful pond?”
As if on key, Erwin hopped up on the Porsche’s dashboard and started to bark. “Aaar-aar-aar-aar-aar.” He sounded like a VW with a bad starter.
“Get away from my statue,” Stephanie demanded, striding over to the edge of the pond. “Don’t you dare touch those unicorns.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Adam called. “It’s the boss’s orders. He wants his dove field back.”
“Well, he can’t have it back,” she announced. “The fountain stays. Now, get out of there and turn this pump thing off.”
Jorge put his sledgehammer down and leaned on it, waiting to see what his foreman would do.
Adam just shook his head. “Ma’am? I’m sorry as can be, but Will wants this fountain out of here. And the pond too. And he’s the one who signs my paycheck.”
Adam swung his sledgehammer and landed a blow on the unicorn’s side, and Jorge followed suit.
Bravo, I wanted to cheer. Well done, Adam.
For the first time Stephanie looked around and saw me sitting ringside.
“Keeley,” she said pleadingly, “Those idiots are destroying my statue. Make them stop.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Haven’t you heard? I don’t work here anymore. I got fired. I’m not in charge of anything around here.”
Her eyes flared. “Well, I haven’t been fired.” She clapped her hands. “You men. Stop that this instant. That is a very expensive sculpture. I had it shipped all the way from Italy. It’s a signed, limited edition Vesuvio.”
I thought it looked more like something from the Franklin Mint myself, but Erwin seemed to agree with his mistress, because he hopped out of the car and ran around now in little circles, barking and hopping with anger and energy.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Adam said. “Boss’s orders.” He reared back with the sledgehammer and knocked out a good-sized chunk of the unicorn’s nostril, which landed on the bank with a thud.
Stephanie screamed as though it were her own flesh being assaulted. “Stop it!”
Unwilling to let Adam outdo him, Jorge chimed in with his own sledgehammer, which Adam soon joined, until the two of them were playing their own version of the “Anvil Chorus.” When a piece of the unicorn’s plumed tail whizzed by my ear I ducked down behind the hood of the truck.
But Stephanie was fearless. “I said STOP IT!” she screamed. “STOPIT, STOPIT, STOPIT!” She was hopping up and down, and Erwin was barking in matching staccato, “Arfarfarfarfarf!”
When Adam’s sledgehammer dislodged his unicorn’s magical horn, this action seemed to have triggered Stephanie’s panic button. Suddenly she was splashing her way into the pond. She launched herself forward, grabbing for Adam’s sledgehammer, but he spun effortlessly out of the way, and she did an awkward belly-flop.
Total immersion did little to dampen Stephanie’s fury. When she emerged, water streaming from every orifice, sputtering and spitting, Adam guffawed, a serious tactical error on his part. Without warning, she hauled off and socked him square in the crotch.
Adam howled, dropped the sledgehammer, and doubled over in pain, clutching his privates as though to ward off any further assault. Jorge, wide-eyed, backpedaled as fast as possible away from her.
Erwin seemed to be cheering from the sidelines, “Aar, aar, aar, aar, aar, aar,” which, when you think of it, must be the dachshund equivalent of “Rah-rah-rah!”
Now Stephanie was diving for the sledgehammer, bringing it up and thrusting it menacingly at Adam, who, with no place else to hide, had positioned himself on the far side of the unicorn.
“Get away from my statue, motherfucker,” Stephanie said, lunging at him with the sledgehammer. “I mean it! You get away from my Vesuvio, or you’ll be singing soprano in the church choir in this god-forsaken hellhole. I’ll chop your nuts off and feed them to these goldfish.”
“Stephanie!”
The shocked voice cut through the cool morning air like a hot knife. All four of us turned to see Will standing behind us, hands on hips, a look of shock and disgust on his face.
As if on cue, Stephanie dropped the sledgehammer and burst into tears.
“Oh Will,” she cried, wading toward him. “Look what they’ve done! They’ve chopped up my Vesuvio! I tried to stop them and then Adam turned on me. He actually threatened me with that axe thing. I’ve never been so terrified in my life.”
She’d reached the bank now, and she was trying to climb out, but couldn’t seem to get a proper toehold with her tiny designer Nikes. “Will,” she whimpered, after sliding belly-first in the thick red mud. The white silk warm-ups were caked with mud, her blond hair lay flat against her skull, and her melted mascara ran down both cheeks. She staggered back to her feet and held out her arms, imploringly. “Will?”
“Christ,” he muttered. Then he turned around and stalked back in the direction of the house.
“Will,” Stephanie cried. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up and reached down and hauled her up onto the bank. She flopped on her back like a beached carp. Erwin trotted over, yipped, and tenderly licked her face.
66
“All of this?” Will asked, peering into the open cargo doors of the van.
“Yep,” I said. “All for you. I believe you’ve already seen the invoices.�
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He glowered at me. “Where does it go?”
“Anywhere you like,” I said. “It’s your house.”
“I mean, where do you want it all to go?”
“I don’t work for you anymore, so it doesn’t make any difference to me. Maybe you should ask Stephanie.”
“Not funny,” Will said. He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute, and then looked over at Adam and Jorge, who were waiting expectantly with the furniture dolly at the edge of the loading ramp.
“Keeley,” he said, finally. “Could you step into the library, please?”
I glanced down at my watch. “Okay. But just for a minute. This van is due back at Ryder in half an hour.”
“I’ll pay for an extra day,” Will said. He looked at Adam and Jorge. “Why don’t you guys go out to the kitchen and get yourselves a sandwich or something?”
I followed him into the library and he carefully closed the door behind him. He gestured toward the only seat in the room, the leather wing chair behind the desk. “Would you like to sit?”
“Sure,” I said. I sat down and folded my hands on the desktop and waited.
Will paced around the room. He reached down into one of the boxes stacked against the bookshelves and brought out a leather-bound volume.
“Keeley,” he said, his voice low, his eyes on the pages he was thumbing through, “I’ve been an ass.”
“That,” I agreed, “is an understatement.”
“I’ve been an ass in a lot of ways. About Stephanie, this house, blaming you for that disaster out in the dove field, all of it. I, uh, got caught up in some crazy fantasy, and then I was concentrating on getting Loving Cup back on track, and I guess I just lost touch with reality.”
He looked up and smiled crookedly. “The only thing I did right since I moved here was to hire you in the first place.”
“Probably.”
He stared down at the book. “As it turns out, you were right about her all along. She, uh, didn’t have any real interest in living in Madison full-time.”
“Imagine that,” I said. “How’d you figure it out?”
“A broker called me yesterday, wanting to set up an appointment to come out and list the house.”
“This house?” Now I was shocked.
He nodded. “He was with some Atlanta real estate agency that handles what they call exclusive properties. He’d been showing Stephanie houses in Buckhead, and I guess she let it slip that I owned a plantation house over here, and that we’d eventually be selling it. I think he actually jumped the gun. I called her as soon as I got off the phone with the guy, and of course she tried to deny it, but I even had the guy’s name and the name of the agency, so she couldn’t really lie her way out of it.”
“Ouch,” I said. “I’m sorry you had to find out about her that way.”
He sighed. “Better now than later. Anyway, I uh, want to apologize to you. And I’d really like it if you’d come back to work for me. I want you to finish up Mulberry Hill.”
Now he was standing directly in front of the desk, looking down at me. “Without any interference. Or outside influences.”
I gave it some thought. “What about that Thanksgiving deadline?”
He reached in the pocket of his slacks and brought out a small black velvet box. He looked at it sadly, then put it back in his pocket. “No more deadline. Take all the time you need.”
67
On Wednesday Gloria came back from the post office with a package, which she laid on my drawing table. It was wrapped in brown paper recycled from a Bi-Lo grocery sack and addressed to me in wavery black ink. “Open it,” she instructed.
I slit the box with the edge of my scissors, and out slid a thick rectangle wrapped in a cardboard sleeve. I cut the tape on the sleeve, unfolded the flaps of cardboard, and found myself looking down at a formal black and white portrait of Jeanine Murry Murdock. She wore the same kind of black off-the-shoulder drape I’d worn in my own high school senior picture. Her dark hair was teased and flipped up at the ends, and her lips were parted, just slightly, into a smile that promised everything.
Gloria stood by my shoulder, looking down at the photo. “You like?”
I nodded. “Where’d you get it?”
“Sonya Wyrick,” she said. “She called me, not long after you went to see her that second time. Said she wanted to do something to make amends. We talked. I told her how you felt. She hadn’t heard about Vince Bascomb. I told her what Drew said—you know, about the fact that we’ll never be able to recover your mama’s body. She said then that if she could find it, she had something she wanted you to have. I think this is it.”
“And I’m just supposed to forgive and forget, is that it?”
“That’s up to you,” Gloria said.
I turned around. “What would you do?”
“Me?” she asked. “I think I would want to lighten my load. Right now, Keeley, you’re carrying around an awful lot of black muck. You hate Drew Jernigan. Hate Lorna Plummer. Hate Sonya. Hate Darvis Kane. And you know what? It’s not doing you a damn bit of good. Sonya feels bad, but she’s apparently the only one of ’em who has a conscience.”
“I want them to hurt,” I said. “I want Darvis Kane found. I want him in jail for killing my mother.”
She sat down at the conference table and started flipping through the rest of the mail she’d brought back from the post office. “Look,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you this at all, but I hate to see you spending all this energy making yourself miserable, so here goes. I talked to Howard Banks about Darvis Kane, and he’s been doing some digging.”
“Sheriff Banks,” I said eagerly. “Does he know where Kane is?”
“No,” Gloria said. “Howard ran one of those national crime computer checks. Darvis Kane did some time in the late eighties and the early nineties for mail fraud, auto theft, and bank fraud. He was released from a county jail in Bakersfield, California in 1997. And after that, there’s nothing.”
“He might still be alive,” I said. “Daddy’s detective could still track him down.”
“No,” Gloria said, sounding very definite. “No more detectives. No more digging. Howard says Kane is probably dead. Darvis Kane was a con artist and a thief. He ran with criminals most of his life, and the chances are one of them killed him. So that’s it. End of story.”
“Did you tell Sheriff Banks about Drew Jernigan’s part in Mama’s murder?” I asked. “Does he think something can still be done?”
“He already knew,” Gloria said. “Vince Bascomb called him up and asked him to come out to see him at his house, just a couple of days after you saw him. I guess he didn’t want to take his secret to the grave.”
“Then why isn’t Drew in jail?” I demanded.
“Because Drew Jernigan denied everything,” Gloria said. “And without a body, there’s no proof of any of it. Now, Keeley,” Gloria said sternly. “I want you to stop obsessing about this. Your father wants it too. Jeanine has been dead for twenty-five years. It’s over.”
I propped Mama’s picture up against the drafting lamp on my table. I would need a frame. Sterling silver always looks nice with black and white.
“So that’s it,” I said softly. “No justice. Sounds like a made-for-television movie. No justice for Jeanine.”
“Well,” Gloria said thoughtfully, “maybe just a little. Poetic justice, I guess you’d call it.” Slowly that megawatt smile blinked on. “I passed Madison Mutual coming back from the post office, and I thought I’d check to see if the new console tables we ordered for the boardroom had been delivered. Guess who’s sitting in the president’s office starting today?”
“Drew,” I said. “He’s been sitting there every day for as long as I can remember.”
“Not anymore,” Gloria said gleefully. “It’s Kyle’s office now. According to the new head teller, there was a shake-up at the quarterly board meeting, and Drew was quietly dethroned by unanimous vote.”
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��How?” I asked. “It’s a family-owned bank. The Jernigans are the board.”
Gloria shook her head. “Correction. GiGi, A.J., and Kyle are the board. Together the three of them hold controlling interest in the bank. I guess having the sheriff pay them a visit to inquire about Vince Bascomb’s story got GiGi’s attention. Plus I hear she thought Drew was spending too much time with JoBeth, the old head teller. And the boys had apparently had it with their father screwing around on all of them. So now JoBeth is on the street, and from what I hear, Drew is too. Although it’s a very nice street. GiGi has decided to keep The Oaks and the house at Cuscawilla. She’s decided Drew can have the house at Highlands.”
“So Kyle’s president of Madison Mutual?” I asked. “A.J.’s in Chicago, learning how to be a mortgage broker. And Drew’s out? For real?”
“For real,” Gloria said. She reached for her Rolodex. “I think I’ll give Kyle a call. That new office of his is going to need some work.”
68
We held Mama’s memorial service on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
True to his word, Will had quietly bought up all the lots on the cove from the Jernigans, including, at his absolute insistence, Vince Bascomb’s property. His first acts as new owner had been to burn down what was left of the old cabin, and replace all the planks on the dock.
And so, on that sunny autumn Saturday, at three in the afternoon, the five of us—me, Gloria, Daddy, Serena, and Austin—stood on the end of the dock and finally said our goodbyes to Jeanine Murry Murdock.
Austin had made a beautiful wreath of daisies, Mama’s favorite flower, with a single fat pillar candle set in the middle of it, like a float, and after Dr. Wittish finished with the brief service, we lowered it into the lake and set it adrift.
After a while Dr. Wittish went off to work on his sermon for the next day, but the five of us stayed on. We drank some champagne, cried a little, and stayed out on the dock well past dusk, watching the gently bobbing wreath until finally a soft breeze came up and the candle’s flame flickered and died.
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