Clever girl, I told myself, as I hitched my purse around my shoulder and lugged my suitcase out, trudging toward the portico.
When I got to the door, I rang the bell, wishing I’d thought to ask for a spare key. I waited a minute, suitcase getting heavy in my hand, and pressed that sucker again.
Where was she? I thought, swallowing a rising sense of worry, but figuring she couldn’t have gone far, not without the car.
For Pete’s sake. I raised my free hand to knock on the door, quickly giving up and wrapping my fingers around the knob. A simple twist, and the door pushed inward.
Good God, hadn’t she locked herself in?
The moment I stepped inside, I dumped my bags, feeling a rerun of yesterday coming on, of calling for Mother and seeing Sarah Lee’s unmoving legs stretched out on her sofa.
I blinked, clearing the vision, reminding myself this was a different house (albeit one where a woman had croaked) and that Cissy had been in no danger when I’d taken off for home. Though that had been several long hours ago.
Why hadn’t I stayed? I chastised myself. What if something went wrong?
Leaving Cissy to her own devices when her emotions ran so high was a lot like tossing a lit match onto dry tinder and hoping it wouldn’t ignite. Disaster could strike in the blink of an eye.
“Mother?” I called out and hurried toward the kitchen, where I’d last seen her poring over Bebe’s mail.
Neat piles of letters, postcards, junk mail, and envelopes had been arranged on the table, but Cissy wasn’t there. Although the clunky black leather handbag with glitter and buckles had been deposited under a chair.
So she had to be around somewhere, I reassured myself, knowing that a Kendricks and her purse were seldom parted.
Maybe she went out for some fresh air.
I scrambled to the sink to peer through the window overlooking the backyard. The cedar-stained patio furniture sat empty. Even the birdbath surrounded by planted peonies supported nary a feathered friend.
“Mother, it’s Andrea! I’m baaaack!”
I jogged through the living room and past the formal dining room filled with reproduction Chippendale; ducked into a nice-sized den with a plasma screen television and leather-bound books that I figured had been bought by the yard to suit the decorator; and finally peered into a full bath downstairs that oozed black marble.
I would’ve paged her on her cell phone, but she refused to turn it on unless she needed it for “emergencies only.” Said she couldn’t stand them always going off during plays or at the symphony, and she hated drivers who yakked on them while swerving through traffic expecting everyone else to stay out of their way.
So I had to track her down on foot.
I told myself not to worry as I raced up the stairs, pausing on the second-floor landing where flattened cardboard boxes leaned, awaiting someone to pop them into three-dimension. A rolled-up woven rug, tied with string, had been pushed against the wall. Guess the cousins had separated a few more of Bebe’s personal effects from what belonged to Belle Meade.
There were two doors on the left side of the hallway and two on the right.
Three were wide open.
I tried the closed one first and found myself breathing in the odor of a cedar closet full of linens. So I turned in a half-circle.
“Cissy Blevins Kendricks? Are you up here?”
Had she fallen and couldn’t get up? Developed a debilitating attack of laryngitis so she couldn’t answer?
Or was she playing hide and seek to test my sleuthing skills (or, at least, my patience)?
I poked my head in the nearest opened door, and a rush of Laura Ashley assaulted my senses: a pattern of yellow-and-sage covered windows and walls and smothered a plump double bed with a fabric headboard. Only an oak chest of drawers and mirrored bureau had been spared the floral print, but were painted a coordinating yellow.
I thought that look had gone out with the eighties, along with Duran Duran, Ronald Reagan, and culottes.
Seeking refuge, I ducked into a connecting bath where embroidered finger towels hanging from a silver rack and untouched shell-shaped soaps sat on the rim on the sink.
The far door opened into another room, but this time I found myself surrounded by a desk with computer, fax, small-sized copier, scanner, and phones. Georgia O’Keeffe prints brightened beige walls.
This had to be Bebe’s office.
Drawers sat half-opened, most of them emptied, a clear sign that Bebe’s lawyers had already given the place a thorough once-over. I wondered if Mother had come up to poke around, too.
Out into the hallway I stepped, calling louder, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I held still for a moment after, straining to catch the slightest whispered, “Help me,” but I didn’t pick up on anything.
The last opened door yielded another bedroom, this one taking up nearly the entire length of the house and dominated by an enormous sleigh bed, now stripped.
I edged my way around it, thinking that’s where Bebe bit the dust.
Or at least where she’d been found.
It got me spooked.
Not wanting to shout for Mother so close to the deathbed, for fear of disrespecting the late Mrs. Kent, I hightailed it into her massive master bath, full of veined marble and mirrors that watched my every move, rather like a carnival fun house.
“Mu-ther,” I tried again, my voice raspy, my arms packed with goose pimples.
Could a kid ground a parent? I wondered, because I was sorely tempted to send Cissy to her room without supper, after I found her, that is.
All that was left was a dressing room and the closet beyond, so I headed in, winding past an elaborate vanity, matching stool, and fringed settee and striding into what looked like a mini-department store with racks of shoes and hats and wall-to-wall clothing in every color under the sun.
And there, beneath a row of ball gowns, sprouting tulle and chiffon, sat my Mummy Dearest, head down, kneeling on the carpet in her rhinestone-studded sweat suit. She was digging through hat-boxes, papers strewn around her. She didn’t even look up, so patently was she ignoring me.
I took a few steps farther in, coming around her side, though she didn’t seem to notice.
She had on those Mr. Magoo glasses and the black wig from which a wire dangled to a pair of headphones in her ears, which in turn connected to a Discman resting on the floor that I knew wasn’t hers. She must’ve “borrowed” it from Bebe.
I shook my head. Would she never learn? To date, she’d swiped another person’s mail, a dead governor’s name, and my CD player.
What was next? Hot-wiring cars? Pyramid scams? Insider trading?
“Mother,” I said, enunciating each syllable as crisply and calmly as a contestant in a spelling bee.
She didn’t even twitch.
For Pete’s sake, how loud did she have the music turned up so that she couldn’t hear me from six feet away?
Enough was enough.
I walked right up behind her and tapped her on the back.
Her head jerked up so fast I thought the wig might spill onto the floor. Her distorted eyes blinked, but that was all the surprise she emoted. Instead, she smiled up at me as she tugged the headphones from her ears and switched off the CD.
“There you are,” she said, as though she’d been the one hunting for me, rather than the other way around.
“Rock and roll?” I said dryly, toeing the Discman.
“Rachmaninoff,” she told me. “One of Bebe’s.”
“Think you had it up a little loud, missy?”
She arched her darkened eyebrows so they disappeared beneath the sharp line of her bangs. “Excuse me?”
“What the heck are you doing?” I started in, even as she reached up a hand and I helped her to her feet. “I’ve been looking all over for you for the past ten minutes, and you might’ve heard me hollering if you didn’t have those things on.”
“Well, I’ve been right here for the last hour, d
oing exactly what I intended, and I apologize that I missed all the yelling. There’s nothing more soothing to a mother’s ears than a daughter who’s screeching like a banshee.”
Wisenheimer.
I gestured at the racks of clothing around us. “Snooping in Bebe’s closet? You think the bad guy wore one of her ball gowns? You figure he’s a serial killer and a cross-dresser, too?”
“No, Andrea, for heaven’s sakes. Don’t be ludicrous. Not many men could wear women’s couture, and Bebe was tiny.” She pushed at the froth of black on her head and nudged at glasses fallen slightly askew. “For your information, sugar, while you went gallivanting off to God knows where . . .”
“I went home, Mother, to get my toothbrush.”
“All afternoon?”
“I had to take care of the next few days in a matter of hours,” I told her, hating the whiny rise of my voice, “so I could be here for you.”
She sucked in her cheeks, and I waited, part of me almost hoping she’d come at me with more criticism. It would give me an excuse to turn tail and burn rubber back to the condo, if that’s what I’d wanted to do.
Instead, she delicately cleared her throat. “As I was sayin’, while you were gone, I’ve been doing some reconnaissance, and I do believe I’ve found a few more pieces to the puzzle.” She shuffled papers from her left hand to her right and shook them in my face so I couldn’t miss them. “Ta da!” she said.
“What are those?” I asked. “Insurance payouts? Blackmail notes? Death threats?”
“Not even close.” She smiled a superior smile with her burnt-umber mouth, clutching the pages to her chest. “These, my dear, are Cupid’s arrows.”
Silly me.
And I thought she was looking for a killer, not a love connection.
Chapter 14
TWO HEARTS, INC.
That was the name on the letterhead along with an embossed gold logo showing a pair of Valentine hearts intertwined. Mother explained that it was apparently a dating service for wealthy widows, which I would’ve figured out soon enough on my own if I’d read the motto laid out in fancy script at the bottom of the page:
“Matchmaking At Its Most Discreet—For Discerning Women Over Sixty.”
From the sum that Beatrice Kent had paid for a one-year membership—$20,000—I’d say “discerning” translated into “filthy freaking rich.”
Business must have been good, because they had offices in Dallas, Austin, Chicago, L.A., New York, and London, according to the gilded letterhead.
My eyes skimmed through the details of the contract, noting that the $20,000 annual fee was for local matches only. Should the client request a nationwide search, the fee went up to $75,000. In the case of an international hunt for the perfect dude, the cost was a staggering $150,000.
Woo doggie.
I would’ve fixed up Bebe with Charlie Tompkins for free.
“I had a feeling I’d find something incriminating in Bebe’s personal files,” Mother told me as we settled in the kitchen, dusk falling outside the window. “We used to joke that anything we didn’t want our husbands to come across we could stow away in our closets, a place they would never dare to venture.”
“You hid things from Daddy?”
She patted my hand and said, with a sigh and a heavy dose of condescension, “Dear, dear Andrea. You always were one for fairy tales.”
So I liked to imagine there was a “happily ever after.” Was that a crime? And Mother and Daddy’s marriage had seemed straight out of a storybook, at least to this child’s eyes.
Call me naïve, but I’d never dreamed I’d hear her all but confess to keeping secrets from my father. I had figured they’d shared absolutely everything, and learning otherwise gave me a funny feeling. It’s not that I was wide-eyed enough to believe couples didn’t keep secrets—please, it was my usual M.O.—but I’d thought my parents were different. Sure, there were things I held back from Malone. In fact, we’d made a pact not to discuss past relationships, for starters. But Brian and I were still in the fetal stage of our partnership. Mother and Daddy had always seemed to operate as one, at least in my selective memory.
“Yoo hoo, Andrea?” She waved her fingers in front of my face. “Pay attention when I’m talking to you.”
“The papers from the dating service,” I said, remembering where we’d left off, despite the momentary distraction. “You found them in her closet.”
“Well, I checked Bebe’s office first, though there wasn’t much left of her paperwork. But I was fairly certain they hadn’t dug into her hatboxes, and I was right.” Cissy spread the pages relating to Two Hearts across the table, having pushed aside the pile of mail she’d bundled up for Bebe’s lawyer—the junk mail had gone in the trash. “I had to believe there was more of a connection than the glasses by the sink, and my instincts were on target.”
Where did I hit “Rewind”? She’d already lost me for the second time within a couple of minutes.
“Connection? Right about what? Did Bebe tell you that she’d paid big bucks for someone to find her a man?”
Mother slipped off her pointy specs, setting them on the table. She rubbed her eyes, her drawl slow with fatigue as she responded, “No, Bebe never uttered a word about it. I knew she was itching to socialize more, and I don’t mean lunching with the ladies or chairing committees. She missed Homer tremendously, and I sensed she didn’t want to live out the rest of her life alone. She’d made comments about how hard it was for women of our ilk to find suitable men, but she never uttered a word about signing up with a matchmaker. Perhaps she’d thought I’d disapprove.” She pursed her lips, shook her head. “I’m not surprised she kept it to herself, because Sarah Lee didn’t tell me, either.”
“Sarah Lee?” That had to be the connection I’d missed, but I was still short of putting two and two together. “What did Mrs. Sewell have to do with this Two Hearts business?”
“Oh, drat, I must’ve forgotten to show you another bit of correspondence,” she said—hardly the first instance she’d held something back from me—retrieving her faux leather purse and rooting around inside it. “I guess it slipped my mind, what with all the excitement this morning in Annabelle’s office.”
Why did it seem there was a steady stream of things she “forgot to mention”? Wasn’t Batman supposed to fill in Robin before they slid down the Bat-pole and raced off for Gotham?
I was beginning to think ours was a seriously unequal partnership. More the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote than the Caped Crusaders, and I was the one that the anvil kept flattening.
“Ah, here it is. It was among the mail in Sarah Lee’s box yesterday.”
The purloined letters, I thought.
She pushed a business-size envelope toward me, which I dutifully picked up, the flap already opened. It was addressed to Sarah Lee Sewell and postmarked that Thursday. The return address read only: T.H., INC.
Discreet, as promised, I thought, noting the company was located on Turtle Creek. Posh real estate, to be sure.
I eased out a folded set of papers and flattened them, carefully looking them over.
There again was the Two Hearts letterhead with the gold logo and the now-familiar motto about discreet fix-ups for discerning women over sixty. Though this was no contract. It appeared to be a customer-satisfaction survey, asking questions like, “Did you find your match(es) well suited to your educational background, cultural interests, and socioeconomic standing?” and “Did your match(es) approach your social engagement in an appropriate way (i.e., respecting any suggestions you made, behaving in a respectful manner)?”
My own heart clip-clopped merrily, thinking this Two Hearts business was the perfect distraction for Cissy. If she poked her nose into her friends’ love lives, it surely couldn’t hurt anyone, and it would keep her busy until Dr. Finch got the results of Sarah Lee’s blood tests, at which point we could both pack up and go home, even if Cissy felt disappointed by the outcome.
I refolded the pages
and slipped them back in the envelope, trying hard not to smile. “Wow, so neither one ever said anything to you about this?”
“Not a peep.” Cissy pouted and plucked at her nylon pants.
I could tell she was upset at being left out. She knew Bebe slept in the buff and that Sarah Lee didn’t leave the house without her lipstick intact, but she wasn’t privy to the fact that her friends had started dating again after all those years.
“Maybe they were too embarrassed to let anyone in on it,” I said to make her feel better. “I mean, they were both in their early seventies, right? Why would anyone want to hook up at that age, anyhow? It’s hard enough when you’re young and gravity hasn’t started dragging things toward the floor.”
“What did you say?” Cissy’s chin snapped up, her eyes narrowed like a Disney villain. The kohl-pencil lines had smudged into gray-black bruises, adding to her angry look. I braced myself for the rant that was sure to follow, uncertain of what I’d done until she rubbed my nose in it.
“The wrong thing?” I offered, as it was obvious.
Gulp.
“For heaven’s sake, Andrea, just because Bebe and Sarah weren’t twenty-five doesn’t mean they didn’t have the same feelings younger women do. We all want to be loved by someone, don’t we? We appreciate a warm word and gentle touch now and then, even if our parts aren’t so pert as they used to be.”
“I didn’t mean that older women don’t deserve to find love again.” I scrambled for an apology, cursing my propensity toward verbal diarrhea. “It’s just that Bebe and Sarah Lee were both married for so long before their husbands died. Isn’t that more than most of us ever get? Shouldn’t that be enough?”
“So you think losing a spouse should turn us into nuns?”
Hail, Mary! Had I said anything about nuns?
I stared at my mother, less surprised that she was twisting everything I said into something critical and more astonished by her use of the word “us,” wondering what that implied . . . if it implied anything at all. I couldn’t imagine her being less than faithful to my father. She still wore her engagement ring and wedding band. In fact, I’d never seen her without them in the dozen years since his death.
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club: A Debutante Dropout Mystery Page 18