The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club: A Debutante Dropout Mystery

by McBride, Susan

  “How about I meet you back at Bebe’s house for lunch?” I suggested. “One o’clock all right? I don’t have a key to the place, so you’ll have to let me in.”

  “Oh, sweetie, get one from Annabelle this morning.” She removed the black glasses to rub the bridge of her nose. “Because I might be here all day,” she told me. “Depending on what gets done. I know I should be focused on my undercover work, but I did promise Sarah Lee’s sister, and I can’t go back on my word.”

  “Why don’t you call my cell whenever you’re ready to take a break. I can come pick you up.” I didn’t want her wandering around the grounds alone, but I wasn’t about to say that to her.

  Cissy nodded. “Yes, I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  “Then I’m off to the library,” I said, grabbing my purse and hearing the rattle of pills in tiny bottles—the bag from Bebe’s house—that I’d promised to drop off later at the pharmacy. Which got me to thinking I should pick up Sarah Lee’s leftovers as long as I was here, save Patsy the trip. “Does Mrs. Flax want her sister’s prescription meds?” I asked Mother. “Because Dr. Finch’s wife, who’s the pharmacist, usually collects them. She was by Bebe’s this morning and brought up the subject.”

  Among other things.

  “No, I’m sure Margery doesn’t care what happens to Sarah Lee’s old drugs. The only things she’d like from the bath are the linens.” Mother slipped her glasses back on. “Go ahead and take them.”

  So I stepped over to Mrs. Sewell’s bathroom and switched on the lights. As I tentatively approached the marble-topped vanity, I caught a whiff of rosewater and talc.

  It was disconcerting, the way bits and pieces of a life stayed behind, well after someone had gone. I could still stand in my father’s study, draw in a deep breath, and smell his Cuban cigars. Maybe it was a way of reminding us they weren’t so far away after all.

  Forgive me, Mrs. Sewell, I thought, before I pulled open the mirrored cabinet and added her cache of goodies to Mrs. Kent’s. The plastic bag barely held all the labeled vials and bottles, but I managed to zip the thing closed and shove it back in my purse before I shut off the lights and ducked out.

  “All right,” I told my mother, “I’m off.”

  I pulled open the door and came face to face with Mabel Pinkston.

  Her false-lashed eyes and sagging features cheered when she realized who I was. A grin twitched on her rouged lips.

  “Hello, Andy,” she said, hands clasped at her belly, below the appliquéd teddy bear on her long-sleeved pink shirt. Pink tennis shoes poked out beneath the hem of her tan slacks. She was really into this “pink for Pinkston” thing. “What a pleasant surprise to see you. Were you helping your aunt? Annabelle sent me over, thinking Miriam was at it all alone.”

  “I just dropped by for a minute.” I glanced back at Cissy, who I saw quickly hiding the papers I’d given her beneath a stack of clothes on the bed. “You caught me leaving,” I said, easing myself—and my bulging bag—past her, afraid she’d try to convince me to stick around and pack boxes all the livelong day. “Go on in. You girls have fun,” I called in parting, before I left Mabel to Mother.

  At least Cissy would have someone with her, which made me feel a whole lot better—and less guilty—about dashing off to the main house.

  I took the stairs down two-by-two and skipped over the black tube in the doorway, not decelerating until my butt was in the driver’s seat of my Wrangler.

  Then I followed a pack of three-wheeled scooters going two miles an hour over to the Manor House. Before I got inside, I remembered to put on my name badge, and I used my keycard to get in without having to intercom Annabelle.

  Since I hadn’t exactly studied the brochures with the map, I paid careful attention to signs and arrows, managing to make my way to the library without having to ask for help. (Yes, I was proud of myself.)

  Set at the end of a wing, near a sunny solarium, Belle Meade’s private library was a haven for bibliophiles, with shelves of hardback books spanning the room and paperbacks loaded on spinning turnstiles. A station with four flat-screen computer monitors benefited from placement in back near a bank of windows, and natural light filtered through sheer fabric shades. Cushioned chairs with ottomans and coffee tables filled with newspapers and periodicals had been tucked into each corner. Only one seat had an occupant.

  At least I wouldn’t have to deal with an angry mob of bookworms on my “first day.” Ha ha.

  I approached a woman perched behind a curved wooden desk. Her pink scalp gleamed through white hair, light as down. She was reading the morning paper with a large magnifying glass. I softly cleared my throat, and her pale eyes looked up. The badge at her breast read, MILDRED PIERCE, but she didn’t look a thing like Joan Crawford.

  “I’ll bet you got teased a lot,” I said, pointing at her nametag. “Great book and not a bad movie.”

  She sniffed. “Dear girl, I could tell you stories. The film came out when I was just a girl. I can still see those sordid promotions.” She framed a theatre marquee with thick knuckled hands and recited dramatically, “Don’t ever tell anyone what she did . . . A mother’s love leads to murder. Oh, boy, now that’s hyperbole.” She looked me over. “I’m surprised someone your age even knows about it.”

  “I love noir film,” I confessed, “and James M. Cain.”

  “What can I help you with?” she asked.

  “I’m Andy, a temporary volunteer. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do exactly, except show up . . .”

  “Oh, perfect timing, dear girl. Yes, lovely of you to relieve me.” She smiled and gingerly rose from her seat, picking up the cane that leaned beside it. “If you wouldn’t mind—Andy, is it?—why don’t you take the desk while I have my break.” She patted my hand. “Thank you, dear, I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Pierce.”

  Although I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do in the meantime.

  Her gait slow but steady, she ambled out of there, and I went behind the deserted desk to drop my purse, sitting down in her still-warm chair.

  I glanced at the newspaper article she’d been perusing, about the rising costs of Medicare premiums and prescriptions, the square of glass that lay atop it increasing the print to the size of the biggest letters on an eye chart. I could’ve read the piece from twenty paces.

  It made me want to start eating carrots, much as I hated them.

  I tapped my fingers, glancing around, wondering if I should at least pretend to be studying the Dewey decimal system. But the only other person in the room—the woman in the easy chair—didn’t appear to need volunteer assistance. She had a book in her lap, her head drooped forward, her mouth wide open, soundly snoring.

  Well, I wasn’t about to do anything that might wake her, which meant doing something quiet.

  So I reached for my bag and juggled around the bagful of prescriptions in order to retrieve the folded-up e-mails from Janet Graham. I smoothed the pages and started with her feature on Belle Meade she’d done for the PCP.

  PARADISE FOR THE PLATINUM YEARS, her headline cried, with the subtitle, BELLE MEADE OPENS ITS DOORS IN DALLAS.

  “Forget the golden years,” her story began. “So-called ‘retirement villages’ are now aiming for the platinum set, men and women in their sixties or better who have no fiscal worries and want to live free of care, in a safe-guarded environment offering all the amenities of Club Med with an on-duty geriatric specialist. After proving so in demand in Austin that the waiting list to move in runs six months to a year, Belle Meade, the apex of luxury living for the aging jet-set, has opened its doors in Dallas . . . and is already filled to the gills.”

  Janet went on to describe the “amenities” in great gushing detail, sounding an awful lot like a press release, with plenty of color photos to boot. But then the PCP was hardly the New York Times. Its hard-hitting pieces covered Highland Park High football games and upping of property taxes. The rest of its
pages touted local restaurants and hair salons, home decorating tips, where to get the best bikini waxes, and plenty of photos of the Park Cities glitterati at fundraising galas. They even had a column called “He Said, She Said,” with the latest gossip from “field hockey moms” and “polo dads.”

  I skimmed down to her quotes from Annabelle, whom she described as “a full-figured Texas beauty with a master’s degree in business administration from UT-Austin and a tragic past involving the deaths of her parents, Gretchen and Stanley Meade, of the Austin Meades, in a house fire at Lake Travis.”

  I shuffled the papers, sticking Janet’s feature beneath the other pages she’d sent, articles from the Austin American Statesman about the fire itself, dated six years earlier.

  I figured Janet had gleaned her info about the fire from there, and from her reliable sources, rather than from Annabelle, who had to have been reluctant to discuss it. I could see that it had pained her to tell me, and I was her most trusted Camp Longhorn bunkmate.

  A two-column article that Janet had marked with a page number and date, noted simply, LONGTIME LAKE TRAVIS RESIDENTS DIE IN FLAMES and provided sketchy details of the event, revealing only that the fire had been called in by the family’s housekeeper, Mrs. Franklin Albright, who lived in the caretaker’s cottage with her husband, Franklin, the couple’s groundskeeper. Mrs. Albright apparently had suffered burns to her arms while attempting to rescue her employers, but the fire had quickly engulfed the old shingle-style home, built in 1874, reducing it to a pile of rubble.

  There was a grainy photo of the Albrights, a heavy-set woman with bandaged hands covering her face, her husband’s arm around her. I put the page down and slid the magnifying lens over it, though it merely blew up the pixels, like a Seurat painting made up of tiny dots. Though I could better see a mailbox in the background with MEADE painted upon it.

  The next attachment from Janet was the Meades’ obit from the Statesman, recounting their lives with utmost brevity: the fact that they were born and raised in Austin, both hailing from wealthy families, that each had graduated from UT, and had lived quietly on Lake Travis thereafter. It listed their only surviving child as Annabelle Griffin Meade of Austin. The photo of the Meades showed a grim-faced pair who much resembled the stone-faced, pitch-fork-wielding farmer and his wife in the Grant Wood painting, American Gothic.

  Ugh. It’s no wonder they’d shipped Annabelle off to Dallas to attend boarding school and had a local au pair put her on the bus to Camp Longhorn each summer. They looked like the kind of folks who ate children, not raised them. I wonder if they let her come home for Christmas?

  Poor AB.

  If I hadn’t felt sorry for her before, I did then.

  Again, I shuffled the papers, bringing up several smaller follow-up pieces on the fire investigation, one suggesting an accelerant may have been involved, with the police and arson inspectors interviewing several “persons of interest,” including the caretaker Albrights and the Meades’ daughter, who’d been at the house for dinner the very evening of the tragedy.

  I noticed the date between the first article and the last one—stating that all had been cleared in the case and the fire deemed “accidental”—was six months.

  Wow. I couldn’t imagine Annabelle having to live under suspicion for so long, with people wondering if she’d killed her own parents by torching their house. It’s amazing she’d come through as strong as she had. I would have fallen to pieces, no question.

  “Thank you, dear girl.” A finger poked gently into my shoulder, and I looked up to find Mildred Pierce hovering.

  Had it been thirty minutes already? I hadn’t even realized how much time had passed; I’d been so deeply absorbed in the articles.

  She obviously wanted her chair back, so I quickly put her magnifying lens back atop her newspaper, gathered up the pages I’d been perusing, and grabbed my purse.

  “Do you need me to stay for any reason?” I asked her as she settled into her seat and tipped her cane against the desk.

  I saw her glance over at the snoozing woman before she smiled at me. “I think I can manage on my own, hon.”

  No skin off my nose.

  I returned her smile, wished her a good day, and headed into the hallway. Instead, of leaving, I took a left toward Annabelle’s office. As long as I was there, I had a few questions I wanted to ask her.

  The door sat half open, so I poked my head in to find Annabelle on the phone, doing a lot of “uh-huh”-ing. She motioned me in, and I wandered around while she finished up her phone call. I admired the colorful pottery lining a good many shelves, most clearly HECHO EN MÉJICO, but others bore the WELLER or NEWCOMB marks on their bases.

  Expensive stuff, I noted, being a fan of Antiques Roadshow.

  Besides plenty of leather-bound books, I discovered two silver-framed pictures I hadn’t seen before. The last time I was in her office, I’d been too distracted by my mother’s altered appearance to notice any photographs.

  I picked up one that showed a chubby little girl with her dark hair in pigtails stepping into shallow water at lake’s edge while a woman in a tentlike sundress with a floppy hat and sunglasses reached out her arms.

  “That’s my guardian angel,” Annabelle said from over my shoulder. I hadn’t even heard her hang up the phone. She leaned against her desk, arms crossed, watching me. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without her. She was more of a mother to me than my own mother ever was.”

  I put the frame back and reached for the other, of Annabelle in cap and gown and the same heavy-set woman at her side, in profile, beaming with pride.

  In this one, I could make out enough of the woman to know I had seen her before: in a grainy news photograph.

  “Your guardian angel . . . that’s got to be Mrs. Albright, right?” I set the picture down and turned to Annabelle.

  “Did I tell you about Emmy? I guess I must have. Else how would you know?” She tugged her flowered cardigan closer around her.

  “Actually, I saw a photo that ran with an article from the Austin paper.”

  “What article?” She squinted.

  “An old one, about the fire.”

  “Oh.” She began to twirl her hair around her finger, and I knew that it bothered her, thinking I’d looked it up. That I was checking on her past.

  “It said that Mrs. Albright and her husband had lived in the caretaker’s cottage at your parents’ home on Lake Travis. He kept the grounds, and she kept the house.”

  “Kept the house, waited on my parents hand and foot, and took me under her wing because no one else cared enough to do it.” Annabelle ceased fussing with her hair. “Em made me feel like I was worth something, and she protected me. I think my parents sent me off to boarding school to separate us, because it hurt them to see how much Em loved me, and how I loved her. She’s the only true family I ever had.”

  So much for blood being thicker than water.

  “What happened to the Albrights, after the investigation?” I asked, gently as I could. “Did you keep in touch with them?”

  “Frank passed away,” she said and let out a slow breath, wandering over to the nearest window. She adjusted the shutter slats so she could peer into the courtyard. Sunlight slid across her skin, giving it a pearly cast. “The poor man wanted to take Em and get out of Austin after everything, but he never got the chance.”

  “Heart attack?” I guessed.

  “He went to bed one night,” she said quietly, “and never woke up again.”

  Just like Bebe Kent, I thought.

  “What happened to Mrs. Albright? Did she leave Austin after losing him? I can’t imagine she stuck around.”

  Annabelle closed the shutters with a snap, and her face closed off as well. “I prefer not to discuss her, Andy, if you don’t mind. Not that I wouldn’t want to, but she’s moved on with her life, and I respect her for that. My parents didn’t leave Em or Franklin a penny, would you believe? After all they did for my family.” She made a noise of
disgust. “I’ve done as much as I can to help Em out, but she would never take money from me. She always said that a child shouldn’t be responsible for a parent.”

  “Interesting perspective,” I said. “Do you keep in contact?”

  She frowned. “Can we talk about something else, Andy?”

  “Okay,” I said, as she looked unsettled by talk of her parents and the Albrights. Though I couldn’t blame her. “Any word on the blood tests?”

  She shook her head and crossed back to her desk, dropping into her chair. “It’s only been a day, right? But I’ll let you know as soon as I hear. How’s your mother doing with her sleuthing?”

  I laughed. “Oh, man, you should see her. She’s packing clothes at Mrs. Sewell’s, and it’s a mess over there.” I went to sit in one of the high-backed chairs across from her, hugging my bag in my lap. “Mrs. Pinkston showed up just as I was leaving, about half an hour ago. That should keep her busy and out of trouble, right? Because Mabel doesn’t know anything about what Mother’s really doing, right, Annabelle?” When she didn’t immediately answer, I said again, “Right, Annabelle?”

  “Didn’t I say I’d keep it hush-hush?” There went her prissy side again, acting all affronted. She tucked her hair behind her ears and lowered her gaze to her blotter, suddenly finding the papers spread across it far more interesting than anything we were discussing.

  Whatever.

  I figured it was time to ask for a key to Bebe’s house and duck out. But before I could say anything, my cell chirped from my purse, and I had to extricate the bag of prescription vials in order to find it, buried beneath. Finally, I flipped it open, spotting an unfamiliar number. “Yes?” I said warily.

  “Andrea? You’re not going to believe this! Guess what I’ve gone and done?”

  “Where are you, Mother?” First things first.

  “Still at Sarah Sewell’s, but I have to leave soon. Mabel said she’d stay and keep working so I can dash back to the house and freshen up.”

  “Freshen up? For who?”

  We’d mentioned having lunch, but surely she wasn’t this worked up about eating a sandwich with her daughter.