Literary Tour 01 - Frankly My Dear I'm Dead

by Washburn, Livia

  I’M DEAD

  I’M DEAD

  LIVIA J. WASHBURN

  KENSINGTON BOOKS http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  This book is dedicated to my agent, Kim Lionetti, and my editor, Gary Goldstein, who were both instrumental in its creation and development, and of course to my husband, James Reasoner, my Rhett Butler.

  CHAPTER 1

  I

  didn’t mean to lose it. Really, I didn’t. It must have been the two squabbling teenagers. Or the two annoying adults. Or the pressure of setting up a new business and knowing that if I couldn’t make a go of it, it would be just one more in a long list of failures.

  We won’t even mention the divorce.

  All I wanted was a minute to myself. Just one simple, single minute to sit there in the new office and take a deep breath and look around and say to myself, This is mine. And it’s going to work.

  But I hadn’t been there in the chair behind my new desk more than ten seconds when the door burst open and Augusta and Amelia came in snapping at each other over something. They looked at me and said in unison, in the sort of plaintive wail that only teenagers can manage, “Aunt Deliiiiilah!”

  I held up one finger and closed my eyes. If they can do that to me, I can do that to them. They sighed. Together, of course.

  Then I heard heavier footsteps, and Luke Edwards, my assistant—and son-in-law—said, “Miz Delilah, the phone’s not workin’. Are you sure you called ’em and told ’em we’d be movin’ in today?”

  “Of course she called them,” my daughter Melissa said from

  behind him. “She wouldn’t have forgotten something that important.”

  I had hired Melissa, too, as secretary/receptionist. It was sort of a package deal. She and Luke hadn’t been married for very long, and they thought it would be just darlin’ if they could work in the same place and spend all their time together, since they loved each other so much.

  I didn’t call them poor deluded fools. At least not to their faces. You can’t do that to kinfolks.

  “Aunt Delilah, she’s being totally unreasonable,” Amelia said.

  “Well, she’s stuck in the nineteenth century,” Augusta said. “There’s nothing wrong with body piercing. It’s an ancient custom.”

  “We can’t run the office without the phones,” Luke said.

  “Will you leave the poor woman alone? She knows that,” Melissa said as she crowded into the room along with Luke, Augusta, and Amelia.

  “She’s going to mutilate herself and embarrass me—”

  “Embarrass you? It’s my body—”

  “I can call the phone company on my cell—”

  “I’ll call them. It’s my job—”

  “Aunt Delilah—”

  “Miz D—”

  “Aunt Delilah—”

  I opened my eyes. I stood up and put my hands on the desk and said, “Will y’all just hush up for a minute?”

  Now, I admit I raised my voice a little. But not enough so that all four of them should have stared at me like I just choked a kitten or something. Augusta and Amelia got that little bottom-lip quiver

  —you know, like they were about to cry because I’d yelled at them—and to tell the truth, so did Luke, whose big ol’ country boy, football player looks hid a soul that was a tad on the sensitive side.

  Melissa had known me the longest, so she recovered first and said, “I think we should all go on and leave her alone for a minute. She’s got a lot on her plate these days and we don’t need to be bothering her with our petty problems.”

  “There’s nothing petty about tryin’ to run a tour business with no phones,” Luke grumbled as she shooed him out of the office.

  “You, too, girls,” Melissa said to her cousins, who, at sixteen, were six years younger than she.

  I could tell Augusta and Amelia wanted to argue with her, but they left, too, and Melissa eased the door shut on her way out. I was alone again.

  Problem was, I didn’t want to be alone anymore. The mood was gone. Like I said, all I’d wanted was a minute. I hadn’t gotten it, and now it was time to move on.

  But after Melissa had stepped in like that to help me, I couldn’t very well act like I didn’t want to sit there in the office by myself. I took a deep breath and turned around to look out the window. I had a good view of the office complex parking lot and the big-box discount store across the street and the futuristic skyline of downtown Atlanta rising a couple of miles beyond it. I had worked downtown for several years, in one of the city’s biggest travel agencies, and I was glad I didn’t have to go down there every day anymore. That was one big reason for starting my own business. I wanted to be able to slow down a little, to take stock of my life, to devote more time to the things that were really important.

  Divorce will do that to you, I guess. Make you take a hard look at your life and try to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, before anything else breaks down beyond repair.

  You figure out a way to go on, because you can’t just stop.

  I stood up, went to the door, and opened it. Luke and Melissa had gone back to their desks in the outer office. Augusta and Amelia were sitting on the sofa, one at each end with as much room between them as they could get.

  “Luke, I did forget to call the phone company and make sure they turned the phones on today. I’m sorry. Would you take care of that for me?”

  He grinned. “Sure, Miz D.”

  “Augusta.”

  She looked at me. I crooked a finger.

  “You’re going to yell at me? It’s not fair. You’re not my mother.”

  “No, but your mama’s my little sister, and I promised her I’d look after you girls this summer. I just want to find out what all this fuss is about.”

  “And you’re going to listen to her side of it first?” Amelia said. “It’s not fair!”

  I could have told her a few things about how fair life is, but I knew she wouldn’t want to hear it. So I just said, in as calm and rational a tone as I could manage, “I’ll get to you in a minute.”

  She leaned back against the sofa cushion, crossed her arms, and sulked.

  When Augusta and I were back in the office with the door closed, she said, “Aunt Delilah, you’ve got to talk some sense into her—”

  “What’s this about body piercing?” I couldn’t help but frown as I said the words.

  Her response was quick. “It’s very safe. It’s done by professionals, you know. And I just want to get a belly button ring and maybe a little stud for my eyebrow. It’s really no different than having pierced ears. You have pierced ears.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have a hole in my belly button.” I leaned back in my chair. “What do you think your mama would say if I was to call her and ask her if it was all right for you to get these …

  piercings?”

  Augusta looked down at the floor and didn’t say anything.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “It’s still not any of Amelia’s business,” she muttered. “She’s such a little suck-up. And a tattletale.”

  Inside every sixteen-year-old lurks a twelve-year-old, I guess. Especially when it comes to sisters. Twin sisters, at that.

  “Can I at least call myself Gus?”

  That took me by surprise. “Augusta is a beautiful name.”

  “An old-fashioned name.”

  “Honey, you’re talkin’ to somebody named Delilah here, you know.”

  “I still want to be called Gus.”

  I looked at her through narrowed eyes, or maybe I just squinted at her. “Now there’s an elegant name.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with
Gus.”

  “Not many sixteen-year-old girls named that, though.”

  “I don’t mind being different. I want to be different, and since you won’t let me get my belly button pierced …”

  I’d lost track of all the pierced, Gothed-up sixteen-year-old girls I’d seen, not that I’d been counting to start with. Augusta’s concept of “different” wasn’t quite the same as mine.

  “You say that now. How are you going to feel about it when school starts again?”

  “We’ll be back home then, so it won’t be any of your business, will it? Anyway, it’s got to be better than Augusta.”

  “Your sister’s never minded being called Amelia. You think that’s a more modern name?”

  I could see her digging in her heels. “All I’m saying is that it ought to be my decision. It’s not any of her business what I want to be called.”

  She had a point there. And calling herself something else wasn’t nearly as permanent as getting holes stuck in her.

  “Go back out and send your sister in.”

  “You’re not going to make me go by Augusta, are you?”

  “Just send your sister in.”

  I sat down behind the desk and waited. A few seconds later Amelia came in and closed the door behind her a little harder than necessary.

  “Augusta is absolutely immmm possible. Mama would have a fit if she got her navel and her eyebrows pierced.”

  “She’s not going to. But she’s going to change her name to Gus for the summer.”

  Amelia stared at me in horror for a second before she said, “Gus? That’s horrible!”

  “Your sister’s got a right to call herself whatever she wants to.”

  “But Gus Harris sounds like a boy! An ugly boy, at that.”

  “Maybe she could call herself Gussie.”

  Amelia gave me the look. You know, the one that teenagers give adults when they want to say, Could you be any more ridiculous?

  “You know, she’s probably going to change her mind about this whole thing before school starts again. That’s still more than two months off.”

  “But what if she doesn’t? I’ll be Gus Harris’s sister! It’s already hard enough being a twin.”

  “You liked having a twin sister when you were four. You even liked it when you were eight.”

  “I’m sixteen now.” She managed to sound terribly world weary as she said it.

  “I know, I know, everything’s different now. All I’m sayin’ is that if you just let things go for a while, a lot of problems will sort themselves out so they aren’t problems anymore.”

  “Oh? Like the problems you and Uncle Dan had?”

  I felt my jaw getting tight. I didn’t know if I was more hurt or mad.

  She saw that and said quickly, “I’m sorry, Aunt Delilah. I didn’t mean that, you know I didn’t mean that.”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “No, you’re right,” I said. “Sometimes you can’t just let things go and hope they’ll get better. The trick is knowing when those times are and which battles are worth fighting.” I turned my chair so that I was facing the computer and turned it on. “Go on back outside, and we’ll talk about this some more at home. For now, you and your sister just try to get along, all right?”

  “Yeah.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth for a second. “Yeah, sure.”

  I kept my eyes on the monitor and watched the screens change as the computer booted up. I didn’t let myself sigh until Amelia was gone. I didn’t let myself cry at all. I’d been there. Done that. A lot.

  A knock sounded on the door and Luke opened it without waiting for an answer. “Talked to the phone company,” he said. “Phones’ll be on by the end of the day.”

  “Thanks, Luke. Sorry about the mix-up. My bad, as the kids say. If they still say that. I haven’t checked lately.”

  “That’s all right. You’ve got a lot to keep up with these days, Miz D. It’s not easy opening your own business, you know. Not to mention taking care of kids, even if they’re not yours. I hope by the time Melissa and I have kids, I’m a lot smarter and more grown up than I am now.”

  I smiled and said, “That’s a good way to look at it.”

  “ ’Cause sometimes I think I’m dumb as dirt.”

  “No, you’re a sweet young man, and when the time comes, you’ll do just fine.” I sat up straighter, trying to be more brisk and businesslike. “Now, let’s talk about this Gone With the Wind tour.”

  So that was how things started out on the first-ever day for Delilah Dickinson Literary Tours. A little ragged, maybe, but I had high hopes. We’d get over all these rough patches. Things were going to get better as they went along. I was sure of it.

  Of course, folks hadn’t started getting killed yet… .

  CHAPTER 2

  D

  owntown Atlanta was hot and muggy, even at eleven o’clock in the morning. Clouds scudded across the sun every now and then and offered a little relief from its glare, but that didn’t affect the humidity.

  I was sort of used to it—although anybody who tells you that you can get used to ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity is a flat-out liar—but many of my clients weren’t. They were from cooler, drier climates.

  The German couple was really sweating. I heard them sigh in relief as we went into the air-conditioned Visitors Center next to the Dump, as Margaret Mitchell had called the house on Peachtree Street, which had been known as the Crescent Apartments when she and her husband, John, moved into it in 1925. They lived there while she was writing a little book called Gone With the Wind.

  I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s not such a little book, actually. More of a doorstop. They could’ve sold it in the bookstores by the pound. It’s been read by more people around the world than any other novel ever written.

  People love Gone With the Wind.

  Some of them love it so much they’re willing to pay to come to Atlanta and see the apartment where Margaret Mitchell lived while she was writing it, visit the Gone With the Wind Movie Museum located in the same house, and have an authentic, genteel Southern lunch at Mary Mac’s Tea Room nearby.

  The highlight of the tour, though, is the visit to Tara Plantation. It’s not the real Tara, of course—not that there ever actually was a real Tara except in the mind of Margaret Mitchell and the imaginations of Hollywood filmmakers. In the first draft of the novel it was called Fontenoy Hall and was based on the farm of Mitchell’s maternal grandparents, but the name Tara and the image of the magnificent house were set firmly in the minds of millions of readers and moviegoers. One of the old plantation houses outside of Atlanta, a place originally called Sweet Bay after the magnolia trees that grow there, had been remade into a near-replica of the movie location. It was also a working plantation, producing a good cotton crop most years using only historically accurate methods.

  Well, except for the slaves, of course. Historical accuracy only goes so far.

  I had a short spiel prepared and went into it as soon as all the tourists were inside, along with Luke, Augusta, and Amelia. Melissa was holding down the fort at the office.

  I’d done quite a bit of reading about Margaret Mitchell, from her birth in Atlanta through her early life and her disastrous marriage to Red Upshaw, the man most people believed to be the model for Rhett Butler; her later marriage to John Walsh and the ten years she had spent writing Gone With the Wind, with John editing it page by page; her other works (most people didn’t know she had ever written anything other than the one book); and her tragic death after being run down by a car on Peachtree Street, not far from here, as she and John tried to cross it to go to a movie theater. I covered that ground pretty fast, because I knew that what people really wanted to do was wander around the house, look at the exhibits, take pictures, and buy stuff in the gift shop: the same things that tourists do at every attraction in the world.

  Luke sidled up to me after I turned the tourists loose to sightsee on their own. In a quiet voice, he said
, “I think it’s goin’ pretty well, don’t you, Miz Delilah?”

  “I hope so. Everybody seems to be having a good time.”

  He hitched up his pants. “Yep, this here is a fine tour. Gonna be real popular. You’ll see.”

  “It was my idea, Luke,” I reminded him. “I always thought it would work.”

  “Yeah, sure, but you had your doubts. I know you.”

  He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I had doubts about everything. That’s just part of being a naturalborn worrier.

  “Believe I’ll just circulate,” he went on, “in case anybody has any questions, you know.”

  “Thanks, Luke.”

  “All part of the job.”

  He moved off through the Visitors Center and on into the Mitchell house itself. I walked into the gallery, where various historical exhibits that had to do with the South, not necessarily Margaret Mitchell or Gone With the Wind, were on display.

  Right now it was a series of famous photographs from the Depression. I was glad to see some of the younger members of the tour group studying them. Too many young people don’t have much interest in history these days. I think there’s a lot of truth in that old saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it.

  “Mrs. Dickinson?”

  I turned to see one of the men from the tour standing there. “It’s Ms. Dickinson,” I told him, trying to sound nice about it. But I had taken my name back when Dan and I got divorced a few months earlier. I wasn’t Delilah Remington anymore and never would be again—although after more than twenty years of marriage I sometimes had a hard time remembering that myself.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you what a fine tour this is. I’m really looking forward to visiting the plantation tomorrow. I hope you’ll do me the honor of dancing with me at the ball.”

  The Gone With the Wind tour that I put together with Luke’s help lasts three days. One day in Atlanta to see Mitchell’s apartment, as well as through the Visitors Center next door and the movie museum. The Tea Room lunch breaks up that part of the tour.

  The next day, the group loads onto a bus in the morning and rides out to Tara—not the movie set, but the other plantation remade into a tourist attraction—where they get not only a tour of the whole place but also an elegant dinner and dance hosted by actors portraying characters from the novel, before staying overnight and having breakfast the next morning, then returning to Atlanta.