She crinkled her brow, mildly suspicious.
I said, “He’s from here. I don’t think he recognized me, but I knew James years ago.”
That should be just enough to sell it, but not too much to bog it down... .
She uncrinkled her brow and said, “Think he’s been with us a couple weeks, anyway.”
Which meant James had been in Serenity at the time of Big Jim Bob’s demise, and our home invasion, and possibly even Anna Armstrong’s murder.
Back in my room, I turned on the Channel 6 news, just catching the end of a report by Erica Paul, the local newswoman who’d been the first to arrive at the Borne homestead this afternoon.
She stood on the sidewalk with our porch and front door looming behind her, hand mic poised before her perfectly made-up face.
“There are now reports,” she said animatedly, “that the young woman in the photo with Senator Edward Clark is not his young lover, rather an illegitimate daughter. I emphasize that this is as yet to be confirmed by our network news division ...” She let the pregnant pause hang, then gave birth to this beauty: “... but one thing is certain: this news, coming at this time, cannot be good for the senator’s reelection.”
“You think?” I said to her, and shot at her with the TV remote, switching to pay-TV, where I spent the remainder of the evening watching a big dumb action movie followed by the new Woody Allen movie (they never come here), and putting a dent in the minibar, and I don’t mean the nuts and Snickers bars.
The next morning I woke with a terrible sinus headache, or was it the flu?
All right!
So I was hung over. I don’t drink that much, and I have had hangovers only rarely in my relatively young life, so when I do have one, it’s two things: a) a shock to my system, and b) a doozy. You know that corny bit in the movies where people with hangovers experience even the most minor noise as exaggerated, an echo-chamber roar? Turns out that isn’t a corny bit. Those were all documentaries, those movies... .
I found two stray aspirins in my purse, expending no more effort than running the last lap of a marathon race. Then I took a cold shower, toweled off, shivering like I really did have the flu, then dressed in the hamper-bound jeans and sweatshirt I’d unpacked from Hello Kitty. After using my lipstick as a cheek blush, trying not to look as sickly as I felt, I somehow exited my room and navigated around the pool on rubbery legs all the way to the restaurant, in hopes something on the menu wouldn’t send my stomach bouncing.
And those damn ducks better leave me alone! Or I swear I’ll ... I’ll ... start crying!
I was about to be seated when I spotted James Lawrence across the lobby, heading for the revolving doors.
Curiosity trumping my hangover, I told the hostess I’d changed my mind about breakfast, and hurried to follow my fellow prodigal.
In the parking lot, James climbed into a black Jaguar with Ontario plates, and I hoped he didn’t notice, in his rearview mirror, yours truly dashing over to my Buick, parked a few rows away. Mother would have been proud, as I followed him out of the hotel lot, onto the by pass, letting a car slip in between us, to give me some cover.
After a few miles, the Jag veered off at the Locust Street exit, and headed back into town. A few more miles later, break lights flashed, and he swung into the main drive of Greenwood Cemetery.
This destination wasn’t user-friendly for somebody tailing a perp. (Well, I know he wasn’t necessarily a perp, but I’m afraid TV and Mother have worn off on me.)
Nonetheless, I pulled in myself, taking a secondary drive running parallel to his, keeping his car in sight, hoping I wasn’t too obvious.
Greenwood was Serenity’s oldest cemetery, dating back centuries. You know the kind, like in horror movies—towering monuments throwing dark shadows, guardian angels warding off evil, and creepy crumbling stone crypts. In more recent years, the wealthy opted out of this ancient grotesquerie, however, in favor of storing their dearly departed in expensive mausoleums—ornate granite structures with stained-glass windows.
Years ago, when Mother brought young Brandy to Greenwood to visit Jonathan Borne—who I’d thought had been my real father—she would ask me, “Do you know how many people are dead in this cemetery?”
And young Brandy would say, “No. How many?”
And Mother would say, “All of them.”
Which I thought was pretty funny at the time, and it did somehow take the edge off having to visit there.
As I drove slowly along, keeping the Jag in sight, the low morning sun shot through each passing monument like a strobe light, sending sharp pains through my already-throbbing head, accompanying the grinding of gravel under my car’s wheels, which reverberated like one twenty-one-gun salute after another.
When James finally pulled his car over in front of a particularly grand mausoleum, I paused long enough to watch him exit his car, debating what to do next.
Mother would have come up with some ridiculous reason for being here exactly at the same time as James ... but I had no patience with subterfuge, and limited talents of improvisation. So I continued on to the next cross drive, then drove back to where the Jag was parked, inching the Buick up to his.
In a brown corduroy jacket and tan slacks, James was seated on a cement bench in front of the mausoleum, his back to me, and when I shut the car door, he craned his neck, his somber expression turning to surprise.
“Well, hello,” he ventured.
“Hi,” I responded as I walked toward him through freshly cut grass.
He looked up at me. “Weren’t you in the hotel’s restaurant yesterday evening?”
“That’s right.”
His eyebrows raised and maybe that was a smile. “... and weren’t you all over the news this morning?”
“Oh yeah. Belle of the ball.”
“Hiding out at the Holiday Inn, huh?”
I nodded.
“Not very dignified, is it?”
“Not when you raid the minibar and pay for it in the morning.”
That made him laugh. “Well, I don’t blame you for ducking the media. I’ve had my own share of bad publicity. I don’t think anyone will think to look for you in a cemetery.”
That was a smile, and it was nice—mischievous. I liked him already.
I nodded toward the mausoleum. “Visiting your mother?”
“Yes.” He patted the cement seat next to him. “Please, sit.”
I did. “I guess you know who I am. If you were paying attention to the news, anyway.”
“I know you’re my friend Peggy Sue’s sister. Or should I say daughter?”
“It’s like that scene in Chinatown,” I said. “ ‘Sister, daughter, sister, daughter’ ... without the slapping, thankfully.”
“Nice to meet you, Brandy Borne.” He extended a hand.
I shook it—warm, firm, not show-offy strong. “Nice to meet you ...”
Should I admit I knew who he was?
“James Lawrence,” he said, like somebody in the wings prompting Mother. “But don’t you know that? I mean, you did follow me out here.”
“Spotted me, huh?”
He grinned. “Not till you ran that red light to keep up.”
“It was pink. Not that running a light’s okay, but there weren’t any other cars, and ... look, I don’t normally follow men around, you understand.”
“They probably follow you some,” he said, having swiveled to look at me. “So what can I do for you, Ms. Borne?”
“First, you can call me ‘Brandy.’ ” I took a breath. “Second, you can quench a sister / daughter’s curiosity.”
“I’m willing to try, within reason. And my friends call me Jim.”
“Okay, Jim. You visited Peggy Sue in the hospital, either today or yesterday, not sure which ... anyway, you brought her some flowers. I was just wondering what your relationship was.”
His eyebrows raised. “What did Peg say it was?”
I shrugged. “She didn’t. All she said was tha
t there had been ‘something’ between you years ago. But the age difference makes anything romantic, at least back then, very unlikely. Hey, don’t worry—I already figured out who my father is.”
Again wearing an almost smile, he remained silent for a moment, gazing at the mausoleum, clearly wondering whether or not to tell me to mind my own business.
Finally he said, “It wasn’t romantic. Only in the vaguest, someday-when-you’re-old-enough-give-me-a-call kinda way. But I was a little wild when I was young—”
“A regular J.D., I heard.”
“What’s the phrase? Rebel without a clue?” He spread his hands. “Anyway, sometimes I’d give Peggy Sue a ride from school—I was a senior in high school, and she was in middle school. I had this Corvette convertible, and I’d see her walking those couple miles home.”
“Back then, a neighborhood guy giving a girl her age a ride was no big deal.”
“Right. And I was just being friendly. But, again, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that I wished she were older, because she was so beautiful.”
And even at that age, Peggy would have known James was “so rich”... .
“Well,” he was saying, “one day, just before graduation, I was in a jewelry store downtown, looking at a gold necklace for my mom, when Peggy Sue came in to buy another charm for her bracelet—or some such thing. And while the owner was busy with her, I swiped the necklace.”
“What? Why? You come from—” I couldn’t find the polite way of saying it.
“Yeah, my family was stinking rich. Still are.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why I did it—I had the money.”
Rebel without a clue was right.
“What happened?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Peg must have seen me do it. Anyway, she comes running out after me, and really lays into me. Then she grabs the necklace out of my jacket pocket, and runs back in the store and says she swiped it.”
“Really?” That didn’t sound like Sis.
He went on: “She told the store manager that she did it on impulse, and she was sorry, and she wanted to give it back. She worked up a bunch of tears, too—probably was scared enough that that wasn’t hard. Now the store manager doesn’t believe her, not really, he knows I took it, just can’t prove it. And anyway, the store got it back, and with a nice little kid like your sis involved, no charges were filed.”
“You were eighteen,” I said. “You’d have done time.”
He nodded. “You are so right. And I already was on probation for something else stupid I did. So I owed Peggy Sue. I owed her a lot.”
I gave him a half smile. “You don’t think she was motivated by losing her ride in a Corvette with an older guy? Particularly a cute one from a wealthy family?”
He gave me the other half of the smile. “Well, there’s that. She was a smart, pragmatic kid. But, nonetheless, it was a spunky thing for someone her age to do. Took spine. Took guts.”
I had to agree.
“And for me, that incident was one of those life-defining moments, coming to that fork in the road you hear so much about. Turn one way, your life goes bad, the other way, good ... or, anyway, better, in my case. Ever have one of those?”
“Oh, yeah.” Like the night of my tenth high school reunion when I threw my marriage out the window for an old flame. A real bad fork up.
He seemed about to ask for details I didn’t want to share, so I asked, “Jim, what brought you back to Serenity, after all this time?”
He nodded toward the mausoleum. “When my mother died in 1975, I couldn’t make it home.”
“Because you were in Canada.”
“Avoiding the draft, yeah. You seem to know a lot about me.”
I shrugged. “My mother, Vivian, is the twenty-four-hour news of local gossips.”
His turn to shrug. “I’m not ashamed of being a so-called draft dodger. I operated out of self-interest, but I really did have strong feelings about the wrongness of that war. And I have never changed my opinions, especially since my brother ended his life facedown in a rice field for nothing.”
His eyes were wet.
“Were you close, you and Stephen?”
“Very. Not all brothers are, you know. Especially when the father makes no pretense about favoring one over the other. But we were tight. Really tight.”
“But your dad favoring Stephen ... I suppose that’s why you were so wild.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I was just wired differently than Steve.”
Like Peggy Sue and me.
I said, “You did all right. Everybody calls you a ‘peacenik.’ But you sure didn’t stay a hippie.”
He chuckled. “Well, I did manage to make a good life for myself in Toronto.”
As owner of Lawrence Communications, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada, having gotten in on the ground floor of cable TV in 1975. (I looked him up on the Net.)
“Jim—mind if I ask you a personal question?”
His laugh was half cough. “Well, what have these been?”
I smiled. “Guilty as charged... . Anyway, I heard that your mother always looked out for you—maybe to offset your father’s indifference ...”
James took a beat, then nodded.
“... but when she died, she didn’t leave you anything.”
“That’s right—more local gossip, courtesy of Vivian Borne?”
“More or less. Didn’t you wonder why she’d left you out in the cold? I mean, you hadn’t made your own fortune yet.”
He drew in a deep breath. Leaves in trees rustled with the wind, as if a physical manifestation of his thoughts.
Then he said: “I’ve come to look at it like this, Brandy—being cut off made me find my own way, make my own success. Besides, I’m not sure how well I would have handled the kind of money my mother said she was going to leave me.”
“She indicated she was going to leave you money?”
“Oh yes. She and I stayed in touch. The money I started my business with came from what I’d saved from regular checks she’d been sending. And of course we spoke on the phone frequently. I was to be well taken care of. But somehow my father must have changed her mind. She was sick toward the end—Alzheimer’s. Manipulating her wouldn’t have been difficult.”
I frowned. “Jim, you’ve been really nice, very generous, about answering my nosy questions ... so I’ll tell you something you might like to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you remember the Bix Beiderbecke cornet that belonged to your brother?”
“Sure! Steve treasured that thing. He was such a jazz buff, Steve.”
“Well ... I know where it is.”
And I went into the whole song and dance about winning the storage unit and finding the provenance papers in the bell of the horn.
He was shaking his head, smiling in astonishment. “I always wondered what happened to that cornet,” he said. “I hoped to someday end up with it. But I figured it was long gone.”
“You’d like to have it because of its ... value?”
“Yes, but not monetary value—sentimental. My interest in that item is strictly personal. You see, I have nothing to remember Steve by, really—just a few old photos that I took when I left home.”
“Did you know Anna Armstrong had been killed?”
He nodded solemnly. “When I passed through Davenport on my way here, I stopped to see her. Tried to see her, anyway.” His chin tightened. “I guess she died the day before.”
We fell silent.
Then suddenly he leaned toward me. “Brandy—would you—you and Vivian—consider selling the cornet to me?”
I said, “As a matter of fact we are planning to sell it ... but when and how will be Mother’s call. Vivian, I mean, not Peggy Sue.”
He nodded, his expression one of understanding. “But you’ll let me know, if you are going to sell? To give me a fair shot at it?”
“Sure. How long will you be in town?”
/> “A few more days, anyway. I have some meetings with the city planning commission. Now that my ... father ... is retiring and leaving town, I’m considering giving something back to the community that put up with me all those years ago.”
“Cool,” I said. “Hey, I’d like to see the bike path extended.”
Even if my old Schwinn did have two flat tires.
“It’s a possibility,” he said with a smile.
He was thirty years older than me, but I could definitely understand what twelve-year-old Peggy Sue had seen in him. And it wasn’t just his money.
I stood. “Well. See you around the hotel. Don’t miss the meeting of the Prodigal Offspring Association at the stroke of midnight.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said, and we shook hands again.
Then I left him alone with his mother.
Back in my hotel room, I risked calling mine.
“Brandy, dear ... where have you been?” She sounded out of breath, and rather giddy. “You’ve missed all the hoopla!”
“That was the point. Have the reporters gone?”
“Yes, dear, they’ve scurried off, like rats off a sinking ship!”
Apparently she hadn’t thought that one through, since that made our house the sinking ship. Or had she?
I said, “I find it hard to believe they aren’t skulking somewhere in the neighborhood.”
“No, they’ve gone, at least for now. You see, the senator and Peggy Sue are holding a press conference this afternoon to explain everything, and it’s not here.”
“Where then?”
“Channel Six in Davenport. They’re the NBC affiliate.”
So the senator was going public. Out of necessity? Or as some kind of PR stunt? I wasn’t sure I cared anymore.
I said, “Guess who besides me is staying here at the Holiday Inn?”
“The national media!”
“No, Mother—James Lawrence.”
And I told her about my morning conversation with Jim, emphasizing his belief that his mother had intended to leave him an inheritance.
“Good work, dear! I’m afraid I’ve allowed myself to get stars in my eyes, with all these cameras and microphones waving at me. It’s just not like me.”
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