“Sure do. That’s where I get some of the wife’s favorite magazines,” he said.
We brought in a wheelbarrow from the toolshed and loaded it up with shelf after shelf of old magazines. It was nasty work. Clouds of dust and paper particles rose up every time we touched the magazines, and what seemed like millions of tiny cigar-shaped bugs came swarming out of the pages.
I barely managed to stifle a scream at the sight of that first bug when it scuttled across my wrist.
“What the hell?” I asked, madly stomping bugs as fast as they emerged from the rotting paper. “This is what I hate about living in Georgia. Bugs! Roaches and spiders, and now these—”
“Silverfish,” Bobby said, flicking a couple to the floor. “They’re nasty, but they won’t hurt you none.”
Without another word, he went out to the kitchen and brought me a pair of work gloves that extended nearly to my elbows. I tied a bandanna over my hair and plugged the iPod into the docking station, and gritted my teeth and got back to work. As I cleared out magazines and stomped bugs with my dead uncle’s old work boots to the tune of “Billie Jean” I wondered what my old roomies in Washington would say if they could see me now. Dempsey Killebrew, former fashionista, was a bona fide construction worker. All I lacked were some tattoos and a pickup truck to call my own.
When the shelves were finally cleared and the magazines on their way to the dump, Bobby carried Norbert’s old desk and chair down to the basement. I swept and dusted and mopped and scrubbed the room with my new favorite cleaning solution—Fabuloso, which smelled like the chemical version of an apple orchard, and which I’d found in the Mexican foods section at the Bi-Lo.
Bobby got a ladder and swiped down several decades’ worth of cobwebs along the ceilings and window casings. He even washed the windows inside and out. By the time we were done cleaning, weak afternoon sunlight sparkled through the old wavy glass windows.
“What now?” Bobby asked.
“Furniture,” I said. “Let’s bring Ella Kate’s bed, dresser, nightstand, and easy chair downstairs.”
“We might oughtta wait till Trey gets back from the dump,” he said. “You don’t wanna be carrying no dresser down them stairs.”
“I can do it,” I assured him. “Anyway, I feel kind of funny about letting anybody else besides you see Ella Kate’s room.”
Bobby raised an eyebrow.
“She’s a total nut about her privacy,” I said. “She always keeps her door locked. Day in and day out. And I wouldn’t have gone in there, except yesterday, when the weather was getting so scary looking, I needed to find out what the storm was doing. And she has the only television in the house.”
He nodded his understanding, but it didn’t make me feel any less guilty.
“You’ll have to see it to believe it,” I told him finally when we were upstairs.
Bobby stood wordlessly in the open doorway.
“Oh my,” he said, taking it all in. “Oh my my.”
“It’s all the furniture from the rest of the house,” I said.
He inched his way through the narrow path to Ella Kate’s bed, and stopped when he reached the faded chintz-draped dressing table with the silver-topped mirror, combs, brushes, and cold cream jars.
“This here was Miss Olivia’s,” he said quietly, nodding at the silver-framed photograph on Ella Kate’s nightstand.
“It’s all my grandmother’s furniture and stuff, isn’t it?”
“And then some,” Bobby agreed.
“What’s it doing here?” I asked.
He stood with his hands on his hips, looking around the room. “Well,” he started. “I know she was tore up pretty bad when Mr. Norbert finally died. He was sick a good long time, and you know, she wouldn’t let nobody else in the house to take care of him. Had to do it all her ownself. Maybe she started moving this stuff up here after she found out that Mr. Norbert left the house to your daddy. She mighta thought you-all would come down here and cart all this stuff outta here.”
“We wouldn’t have,” I said quietly.
“Ella Kate didn’t know that. She only knew it was Mitch Killebrew got the house, and you know she and the Killebrews had bad blood between ’em.”
I sat down on Ella Kate’s bed. The bedsprings creaked and the mattress sagged badly.
“Bobby, will you tell me now?”
He put his hands in the pockets of his overalls and looked around the room.
“The wife’s aunt told me there was talk around town. Back when your granddaddy got the divorce and up and took the baby—that’s your daddy—with him. And Miss Olivia was left back here in Guthrie.”
“What kind of talk?”
He squirmed uncomfortably. “Which one of these dressers you want to take downstairs for Ella Kate?”
“This one,” I said, nodding at a heavy walnut chest of drawers standing near the door. I’d seen Ella Kate’s simple white cotton underpants, shirts, and slacks folded in it the day before.
“Bobby,” I said patiently. “I know you don’t like to repeat gossip. And I respect you for that. But this is my family we’re talking about here. If you have an idea about why Ella Kate acts the way she does, it would help me to understand her better.”
“Yeahhh,” he said reluctantly.
“So. Will you tell me what you know?”
He started pulling the drawers out of the dresser, and stacking them outside in the hallway.
“Bobby?”
He sighed. “Reckon you got a right to hear it. You know that when your grandmother, Miss Olivia, up and got married to Mr. Killebrew, it was a big surprise around Guthrie.”
“I’d heard that.”
“He was from away, and Miss Olivia, she’d gone off to college in Atlanta, was gonna be a schoolteacher or something like that. And Ella Kate, she was your grandmama’s best friend since they were little-bitty kids. And cousin too, although I don’t rightly know exactly how the family connection goes on that.”
“Nobody seems to know,” I agreed. “Except maybe Ella Kate.”
“What we heard was that they got married up in Atlanta, right before Christmas, that first year Miss Olivia went off to college. And then, of course, they moved on down here, to Birdsong, right afterward. And Ella Kate, she was Miss Olivia’s roommate at Agnes Scott, and she was kinda shy and a little backward, you know? Her people had all these children, and they didn’t have no kind of money. Everybody always figured one of the Dempseys give the Timmonses the money to send Ella Kate off to college.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“So, with Miss Olivia dropping out of college, I guess Ella Kate didn’t have no reason to stay up there at Agnes Scott College. So she come on home to Guthrie too.”
“And she went to work at the bedspread mill.”
“Sure,” Bobby said. “Got a good job in the office. She wadn’t no lint head, working out on the floor like everybody else.”
“So Olivia had a shotgun wedding?”
He squirmed and jingled some change in his pockets. “Back then, it wadn’t like it is now, with the young folks talkin’ ’bout hookin’ up, and having babies and never gettin’ married and all like that. It caused some talk—them two getting married all the way up in Atlanta instead of back here at Guthrie First United Methodist, where the Dempseys paid for the stained-glass windows, and the church steeple, and even the pipe organ, over the years.”
“So, maybe they just sort of told all the home folks a little white lie about when they actually got married,” I mused. “Maybe they moved the date up by a few weeks.”
“They did say your daddy was born premature,” Bobby admitted. “And he was a sickly baby. The wife’s aunt said Miss Olivia had a real hard delivery. She weren’t right for a long time after your daddy was born.”
“Why’d they get divorced?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” Bobby said. “Miss Olivia’s daddy was an important man in this town. Owned the mill, went to church with the doctors and la
wyers. And the judge. All anybody knew was, one day, they were married, living here at Birdsong, and the next, they were divorced. And your granddaddy left town and took little Mitch with him.”
“How on earth did he get a judge to award him custody instead of Olivia?” I wondered. “Especially if Olivia’s father was friends with the judge. You would think they would have run him out of town on a rail.”
“Seems like your granddaddy had some dirt on your grandmama,” Bobby said. “And it wadn’t nice. Not nice at all.” He looked meaningfully at Ella Kate’s bedside table, with its shrine to her old friend.
“No!” I said. “Really? My grandmother and Ella Kate?”
“Don’t know if it was true. Thing is, he mighta tol’ the judge it was true. And that woulda been a big old scandal. Guthrie, it’s a small town. It ain’t like up there in Atlanta where you got your gay pride parades and all like that. Maybe Miss Olivia’s daddy made a deal with Mr. Killebrew to keep it quiet. Nobody knows.”
“What does your wife’s aunt think?” I asked.
Bobby made a face. “She didn’t like your granddaddy Killebrew no way! She called him a lying, two-faced Yankee. What she says is—that man got Miss Olivia pregnant, and then, when he seen how rich her family was, he decided to get him some of that money for his own self. He just made up any old kind of lie he could get away with. And then he took the money, and that baby, and got as far away from Guthrie, Georgia, as he could get.”
“Mitch can only remember coming back here a few times after the divorce,” I told Bobby. “And then, of course, Olivia died when he was still pretty young.”
“Yeah, that was awful sad,” Bobby said. “Auntie says Miss Olivia pined for that boy. She never was right again after he took that baby away from her.”
“What did she die of?” I asked.
“Uh, heart disease, or something like that,” Bobby said.
“But she was so young!” I protested. “Barely in her twenties.”
“Your uncle Norbert, he had a bad heart,” Bobby pointed out.
“And he lived well into his nineties,” I countered. “What else aren’t you telling me? Come on, Bobby, I know there’s something else.”
Bobby came over to the bed and took the drawer out of the nightstand. He set it outside in the hallway. He stacked the framed photographs on another dresser, and leaned down and unplugged the lamp.
When he stood up again, his face was solemn.
“I told you Miss Olivia had a hard time in delivery, right? The doctor gave her some pills to help her sleep. And when she was so depressed, after your granddaddy took the baby away, he give her some pills to help calm her down. The wife’s aunt, she did the washing and ironing over here, and some housecleaning too. One morning, when she come to work, she went upstairs to ask Miss Olivia something. Only Miss Olivia wouldn’t wake up. Auntie, she shook her and shook her, but it was too late. She was dead.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “She killed herself. With an overdose.”
“The doctor told the family it was heart disease,” Bobby said staunchly. “But they give Auntie a train ticket to Mobile to visit her cousin the very next day.”
He picked up the nightstand and took it out to the hallway. I took the hand-knotted quilt off the foot of Ella Kate’s bed, and then, carefully, stripped the bed of the thick white chenille bedspread, the same spread my grandmother’s family had been making for decades. I folded it into quarters, and then carried it and the rest of Ella Kate’s bedding downstairs, to her new room.
46
Trey drove the last truckload of papers and magazines and kitchen debris to the dump just as the sun began to dip down below the horizon.
I saw the truck pull away from the house from the window in what had been Uncle Norbert’s study, and what would now be Ella Kate’s bedroom.
Bobby unrolled the worn pastel hooked rug with its faded pattern of pink roses on the freshly mopped floor. Then we placed the bed facing the window so she could watch the comings and goings on the street outside. I’d washed the curtains from her old bedroom, and hung them now in her new room. Her bed linens were freshly laundered too, and I’d dusted and polished the furnishings so that they gleamed and the whole room smelled like lemons and beeswax.
I re-created Ella Kate’s old room as best as I could, minus the warehouse full of furniture.
She’d still have Olivia’s dressing table with the sterling-silver brushes and combs and jars, and she’d have the dressers too, the ones with her things and the one that held Olivia’s clothing. I brought down all the framed photographs and arranged them around the room, along with a representative collection of the porcelain cats. I prayed Ella Kate wouldn’t notice the absence of the cat I’d broken the night of the storm.
When we’d finished, we stood in the doorway surveying the day’s work.
“This looks real nice, Dempsey,” Bobby said. “Real homeylike. Ella Kate is gonna love it.”
I snorted. “She’s going to hate it. And she’ll hate me for doing this. She’ll be furious that I trespassed in her old room, even angrier if she figures out I roped you into helping me out.”
“Had to be done,” Bobby said. “She might get her bowels in an uproar at first, but she’ll get over it pretty quick. Long as Shorty’s here, she’ll be all right.”
As if on cue, Shorty ran through my legs and into the room. He was still sore from his surgery, so I had to lift him up and onto the bed, where he immediately curled up on Ella Kate’s pillow as though he owned the place.
“See? Shorty likes it just fine,” Bobby pointed out. “And soon as Ella Kate gets used to the idea, me and Trey will move them sofas and chairs back downstairs where they belong.”
After he’d gone, I wandered into the kitchen to check out our progress there. We’d had to put the tiling project on the back burner while we moved Ella Kate’s things, but before we’d started on the bedroom, Bobby and Trey had slotted the junkyard sink into its place on the cabinet base, and hooked up the faucet.
Without thinking, I went to my bucket of cleaning supplies, found a can of scouring powder, and began working on the stained porcelain.
It took me a good half hour, but I managed to scrub away most of the old stains and caked-on debris. There were some minute chips in the porcelain in a couple of places near the top of the sink backsplash, but to my mind they were hardly noticeable. I was working on polishing the nickel faucet and handles when my cell phone rang.
The caller ID screen told the tale. Mitch. I felt my gut clench. We hadn’t talked since that angry exchange over the Washington Post story.
I let it ring three times before answering, wondering how I would handle him.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. Wow, way to put him in his place, Demps, I thought.
“Now listen, Dempsey,” he started.
Uh-oh.
“I just had a visit from a woman named Camerin Allgood. Does that name ring a bell with you, young lady?”
I winced. He hadn’t called me “young lady” since discovering I’d blown all my freshman year meal money on a spring break road trip to Key West.
“The FBI agent. Yes, we’ve met.”
“She showed up at my office and announced she was with the FBI. My secretary nearly had a coronary!”
“I hope your secretary is all right, Dad,” I said.
Especially since if she did have a heart attack, he would blame it on me.
“She’ll live,” he said. “The point is, this Agent Allgood woman says you are refusing to cooperate with the FBI. I told her in no uncertain terms that I thought she was mistaken. I told her I was sure you wanted to clear up this whole shameful episode and get it behind you, and that of course you would want to do anything in your power to help the government bring this slimeball congressman to justice. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Uh, Dad,” I said. “I do want to get it cleared up. And I have been cooperating. The thing is, I’ve given them concrete proof that I hired thos
e women at the direction of Alex Hodder. They have this crazy idea that I should wear a wire and get Alex to incriminate himself, which is ludicrous. He’d never do that. I told them that, Dad. I gave them the evidence. They have everything they need already.”
“That’s not what Agent Allgood told me this morning,” Mitch huffed. “This woman is a veteran at these kinds of investigations. And if she says she needs you to wear a wire, I say you damned well better do as they ask.”
“Dad—” I started.
“This whole thing has gotten completely out of control,” Mitch went on. “I think you need some solid legal advice.”
“I have a lawyer, Dad,” I interrupted. “Carter Berryhill and I have met with these agents twice. And he told them that I’m not going to do anything until they bring me a signed agreement from the U.S. attorney’s office, stating that they won’t pursue charges against me.”
“Carter Berryhill?” Mitch bellowed. “You mean that country-bumpkin lawyer handling my great-uncle’s estate? For God’s sake, Dempsey, use some common sense, for once. Now look. I’ve talked to somebody in our Atlanta office, and they’ve recommended an ace criminal attorney. He used to be a federal prosecutor, and he’s handled dozens of cases like this. I’m calling him tomorrow.”
I felt the blood pounding in my ears. My gut clenched and unclenched. I held my breath, let it out.
“What, Dad?” I said. “I can’t hear you. I think my cell phone battery is dying.”
I punched the disconnect button. If the phone hadn’t been my only link to the outside world, I think I would have stomped on it with the same disgust I’d used earlier on the silverfish.
And now the doorbell was ringing. My day was complete.
I glanced down at my attire, hoping that my visitor wasn’t Tee. My overalls were caked with grime and dead silverfish, and my hands were rubbed raw from all the cleaning compounds I’d tortured them with.
When I opened the front door, I immediately wished I hadn’t.
Jackson Harrell leaned up against the door frame, gazing around the porch with frank curiosity. He was dressed in starched and pressed blue jeans, a starched yellow dress shirt, shiny white Nikes, and a dark blue baseball cap with FBI emblazoned across the bill. He was the face of the new FBI. I wanted to slam the door in that face, but I restrained myself.
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