Sarah Booth Delaney

by Sarah Booth Delaney 01-06 (lit)

  "I've gotta go," I said, revving the engine.

  "Wait a minute," Tinkie said, kissing Chablis's head. The dog looked at me, longingly, I swear, and I felt another, deeper gouge in my already wounded chest region.

  "Tinkie, I—"

  "I was thinking, while I was waiting for you to bring my baby home, maybe you could help me out with something else."

  I was all out of playing the role of friend and helper. In truth, I didn't have enough money to save Dahlia House, but I had enough to get across the country and try to find a life. "I don't think I'll be in Zinnia much longer."

  "Just listen," Tinkie said, drumming her Red Passion nails on my car door as she cuddled Chablis to her bosom. "You're the perfect person to do this. I wouldn't confide in anyone else, but you're smart and trustworthy."

  As my soul writhed, Tinkie continued.

  "I never really knew what was at the bottom of Hamilton's family troubles. There were so many rumors, so much gossip." Her brow furrowed. "I want to know the truth."

  The Garrett tragedies had happened shortly after my parents' deaths. I'd had other things on my mind. "I vaguely remember," I said. The Garrett family had been accused of the usual list of Southern crimes that involved everything that could be done to a relative, but most especially matricide.

  "I want to hire you to find out the truth."

  Tinkie's declaration caught me by surprise. "Me?"

  "You're perfect. You understand the code of our set. Whatever you find out, you'll keep it a secret. And you seem to have a knack for solving things." She kissed the dog. "You got Chablis home safe and sound."

  "What good is knowing about Hamilton's past going to do you?" I asked. "You're married." It didn't make a lot of sense.

  "I want to know." Tinkie took a deep breath. "We all accepted the gossip and never thought to find out the truth. Well, I want the facts. If Hamilton comes home, I want to be able to look him in the face and know that I made the right decision or the wrong one. I'm tired of living my life based on perceptions and gossip."

  "Tinkie?" I started to reach out and feel her forehead. Perceptions and gossip were the parameters of her life—of all the Daddy's Girls', except mine. My parameters were a lot uglier—theft and cheating for cash.

  "I mean it, Sarah Booth. This business with Oscar not wanting to pay for Chablis. That's the final straw. I love this dog. And if Oscar really loved me, he would have given me the money. I'm only thirty-three. If I made a mistake by turning away from Hamilton, maybe it's not too late to rectify it. But if he did all of those things . . ." Her eyes rolled.

  She had a point, about Hamilton and about Oscar.

  Men of our class were used to laying down the law and letting the women live with the consequences. This was an interesting consequence.

  "You want me to find out his family secrets?" This didn't sound too hard. There were plenty to pick from in every family.

  "Exactly." Tinkie reached into the pocket of her suede jacket and brought out a slip of paper. She pushed it into my hands.

  I glanced down at a check made out for ten thousand dollars.

  "I'll cover all expenses, and you get another ten if you find out the truth."

  Tinkie had paid cash for Chablis, and now she was forking over another ten grand for information I could get by visiting a few town mavens. "I'll get some answers for you," I promised.

  "The truth, Sarah Booth. And hurry. I want to know before Hamilton gets here for Christmas. Madame Tomeeka didn't say exactly when he'd be home, but I'm sure it'll be for the holidays."

  4

  A small town is a hard place to be different. It's also a good place, because you know everyone else who's different. That's how I knew Cecily Dee Falcon, the society columnist for The Zinnia Dispatch.

  Though I'd not slept well, guilt being worse than a thousand needles in a soft bed, I was up early and dressed for success in wool slacks and a silk blouse. The newspaper was my third stop of the morning; the first had been the bank to deposit Tinkie's check, cleverly written on her mother's account. Once the moola was stashed, I strolled the two blocks to see Cece. On the way I picked up some coffee and two Danishes from the bakery. Cece loved her sweets.

  The newspaper office was small, cluttered, dirty, and a hive of activity. No one paid me much mind as I negotiated between the desks. Cece's office was in the back, the only private office. The details of local society do's were more closely guarded than Washington, D.C., political affairs.

  I knocked and entered, holding out the coffee and treat as a peace offering.

  "Sarah Booth," she squealed as she stood up and rushed toward me. After air kisses on each cheek, she grabbed the pastry bag with an elegant hand adorned with bronzed two-inch nails. She peeked inside. "Cream cheese, my favorite."

  The deliberate effort of memory for small detail is a social grace that will take a person far.

  Already biting into the Danish, she bumped the door closed with her narrow hip and went back to her desk. "What brings you to the paper?"

  The question was casual, but her eyes were not. She'd heard that Dahlia House was in trouble and though she was my friend, she was also a columnist. "I need your help," I said.

  "Are you organizing a fund-raiser?"

  Now that wasn't a bad idea. I'd reserve it for the future in case my job for Tinkie didn't pan out. "No, actually, it's the past I'm interested in. Discreetly interested."

  "Do tell, dahling." She reluctantly deposited the pastry on a napkin, licked her fingers, and found a pen.

  "As you no doubt know, Dahlia House is in . . . financial disrepair." This was not news to her, but I had her attention. The fall of the House of Delaney would make headlines in the Delta. "I've decided to write a book to raise some cash." Authors were her weakness.

  "What kind of book?"

  "Oh, fiction." I shrugged a shoulder. "But I need a good, juicy scandal. I was thinking about the double murder of the goat man over in Natchez."

  "No, dahling, that's been done!" Cece pinched off a bit of Danish and popped it into her mouth. She had strong white teeth.

  "What about the Crawford love triangle?" I suggested. "She was sleeping with both of the brothers."

  "Passe." Cece waved her hand.

  "I need something really meaty. Something that will titillate the readers." I paused and furrowed my brow.

  "What about the Nelsons?" she suggested. "Your daddy heard that case before—"

  "No legal thrillers," I said quickly. "Too much competition in this state."

  "Hummm," she said, her face brightening. "Think Greek."

  My first reaction was disappointment. The last thing I wanted to discuss was a stupid sorority thing. She saw my face.

  "Something e-lec-tri-fying," she hinted.

  I had a vision of curling irons and singed hair, not the direction I wanted to go at all. "I thought you were going to help me," I grumbled.

  "Tragedy," she said.

  "Tragic is good," I agreed.

  "The Greeks were the masters of tragedy, and every author from Shakespeare on has borrowed the great themes from them."

  Cece had been magna cum laude at Ole Miss, with a double major in literature and journalism.

  "Definitely something Greek," I agreed, wanting to tap my foot with impatience.

  "Although great tragedy is based on fact, the type of page-turner you're talking about might rest more solidly on conjecture," she said, nodding. "Supposition."

  This was the alley I wanted to explore. "Such as?"

  "Do you remember the Garretts?"

  Oh, baited trap, spring shut! "From up around the prison?" I asked, all puzzlement. My minor at Ole Miss was drama.

  "Big, big house called Knob Hill. Landed, wealthy, and hot-blooded. Mr. Garrett was killed in a dove field. A hunting accident." There was a hint of speculation in her tone.

  "Wasn't there a son about our age?" I pressed.

  "Hamilton Garrett number five." Cece pushed the Danish away, ha
nds going unconsciously to her hips. "He's a bit older, but I remember him clearly." Her pupils dilated. "It was the Christmas parade, 1979, just after Mr. Garrett was tragically killed. Hamilton drove his father's white Cadillac convertible, and Treena Lassiter was the homecoming queen. The whole parade, with the band and floats and Santa Claus, was coming down Main Street

  . Treena was in his car, waving. I was watching her, thinking how wonderful it must be to be the one picked to wear a white winter gown with a tiara, and wave and smile. Then I looked at him. Hamilton the Fifth. He was gorgeous." She smiled. "That's when I realized I was not a normal boy." She shifted her bra to maximize her cleavage and accentuate the fine bones that angled out from her throat. "Hamilton went away shortly after that."

  I'd accepted Cecil as Cecily for so long that I sometimes forgot about the trip to Sweden and the drain on the Falcon inheritance for medical bills. Cece made a good-looking woman, and she was the best society editor Zinnia had ever seen. She lived and breathed peau de soie and Belgian lace, Gucci heels and Versace designs. She brought a touch of the exotic to Zinnia, and the readers of the local paper had grown to love her.

  The sex change business had worked against her when she'd applied at The Commercial Appeal. They didn't come right out and say so, but they didn't hire her. Nor in Atlanta, or anywhere else. Her talent was overshadowed by her medical history. That's how she'd ended up back in Zinnia. Home is where they have to accept you.

  "So Hamilton was your first pulse," I said, figuring in my head. I was thirteen at the time. If Hamilton was old enough to drive, he was fifteen or sixteen. Whatever image I might have had of him on the day of that Christmas parade, it had been blotted out by the death of my parents. They had died in November, a car wreck with a drunk on their way home from Memphis. My world had been destroyed, and it was no wonder I had little recollection of Christmas parades or handsome boys.

  "Hamilton was one fine hunk of man."

  In deference to the wistfulness in Cece's voice, I phrased my next statement with delicacy. "I remember Hamilton's departure was rather . . . hush-hush."

  "He was loaded on a plane and sent to Europe before they could even get his mother in the ground. Sylvia, the sister, had to be institutionalized." She licked a crumb from her bottom lip. "One finds those facts deeply interesting." Cece was over her wistful moment and was in full-blown hypergossip mode.

  "I never knew he had a sister." I honestly had never heard Sylvia's name spoken.

  "She played Electra to his Orestes."

  In contrast to Cece, who'd left college with her brain jammed with facts and ideas, my education was experiential—I had acquired intensive knowledge of moments, men, and mistakes I didn't want to repeat. "Electra?" I asked, wondering if she might have been a Delta Chi sister.

  "Revenge is the motif," Cece said. "Rumor has it that Hamilton the Fifth murdered his mother at the behest of his sister."

  "No kidding," I answered. This was finally sounding more Southern than Greek. "Why would he kill his mother?"

  "Revenge!" Cece leaned forward. "Hamilton's father, Hamilton the Fourth, was murdered in that dove field. It was a gruesome shooting. It was ruled an accidental death, but the gossip around town was that Hamilton the Fourth was actually murdered by his wife, Veronica Hampton Garrett. Somehow the daughter, Sylvia, discovered the plot and enlisted Hamilton the Fifth in the revenge. Supposedly, Sylvia and her mother never got along."

  This was a dark tragedy, if there was a scrap of truth in it. The problem with Cece and the Daddy's Girls was that fiction was as good as fact—even better if it made the story move along. "And so now, Sylvia is in a nuthouse and Hamilton is exiled to Europe." It wasn't hard to see which sibling got the best end of that bloody stick. Women always got screwed, even in revenge.

  "A private institution. Glen Oaks, over at Friars Point near the river. My understanding is that she committed herself, but there's something fishy there." Cece lifted eyebrows perfectly feathered with gel. "Most folks think she was responsible for her mother's death, but she was never charged. Surely your father talked—" Cece put a hand over her mouth as she realized that by the time the Garretts became the source of gossip, I was an orphan.

  "It's okay," I said, then pressed on. "But why was Hamilton the Fourth killed in the first place?"

  "Because Mrs. Hamilton the Fourth, Veronica Hampton Garrett, had a lover. She wanted to be free of her husband."

  I took a sip of the cold coffee. This was exactly the end to which my affairs were headed—one big sordid mess. And because I was a Delaney, there would be some womb malfunction thrown in. "Who was her lover?"

  It was a logical question, but one that put a look of concentration on Cece's pretty face. "No one has been able to find that out. Sylvia won't discuss it, won't discuss anything, from what I hear. Hamilton dropped off the face of the earth. And Veronica is dead."

  "Exactly how dead?"

  "Very. Car crash, 1980, just a few months after her husband was shot."

  "No charges were ever filed against Hamilton or Sylvia?"

  Cece gave me a look that showed pity for my chronic stupidity. "There was no evidence. Just a lot of gossip and innuendo."

  "A murder and no evidence?" That was a neat trick.

  "Veronica and one of the Garrett oaks became intimately acquainted. I was a kid, but I remember the talk. She was hamburger. Her whole body went through the windshield. There was no question that the service would be closed coffin."

  Cece's imagery was as vivid as her writing. "Then it was an accident?"

  "Only if one discounts the fact that her brake line had been cut."

  Cece had a real knack for taking a simple story and twisting it around in so many curves that you were worn out by the time you got to the end. It was how she made all of those weddings fun to read.

  "There had to be physical evidence of foul play, then."

  "There should have been. Rumor had it that the sheriff covered up the whole nasty business. The Garretts were the most prominent family, you know." She picked up the Danish and took a big bite. "You get the verdict you can afford to buy." She licked a crumb off her lip. "A good story just whets one's appetite. What's the title of the book?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure yet." I'd almost forgotten the ruse.

  "A little birdie told me an interesting thing about you," she said, daintily putting the last morsel of pastry into her mouth. "I hear you like danger and darkness and doggies in distress." She pushed a sheet of paper toward me.

  I glanced at the headline, daring delaney rescues BOW-WOW. I didn't have to read any further. Tinkie's need to gossip outweighed her common sense. I had assumed that the ransom of Chablis was going to be our secret.

  "Were you afraid? Did you see the dognappers? Tinkie was just raving about you." Cece was leaning so far across the desk I could see the false lashes she'd added to her own.

  "It was nothing," I said, making for the door. I didn't want public credit in a case where I deserved public blame.

  "Can I put it in my column that you're writing a book?" she asked.

  "Wait until I have a title," I said, knowing that day would never come. "Thanks, Cece, you've given me a lot of ideas."

  "What about Kincaid's luncheon? She said she sent you an invitation and it's going to be the charity event of the season."

  It was, at five hundred a plate plus bidding on the outfits modeled by the Zinnia Blossoms, a clutch of anorexic twenty-somethings who wanted to be Daddy's Girls but grew up in the wrong generation.

  "I think I'd better work on my book."

  "Kincaid dated Hamilton," Cece said, flicking a bit of frosting from beneath a fingernail.

  I wasn't a math whiz, but Kincaid was my age. That made her thirteen when Hamilton split. Tinkie might be obsessed by him, yet she never said she dated him. Kincaid had a reputation for being fast, but surely she wasn't dating anyone at thirteen.

  Cece read the doubt on my face. "Kincaid spent a summer in Europe, dahling. I
can't believe you've forgotten that scandal. She was forcibly brought home and pushed into marriage with Chas Maxwell. It was said that she'd fallen completely under Hamilton the Fifth's spell. Some even said she was bewitched."

  I wasn't buying into all of these dark Garrett powers, but Kincaid had come home from Europe a different girl. I always thought it was marriage—that she'd given up the aspects of herself that made working in tandem with a dolt unacceptable. Self-mutilation was considered part of the price of security for women in my set. "Kincaid became a wife."

  Cece arched one finely penciled brow. "I think it was sexual obsession. There are certain men who possess those powers." She picked up pastry crumbs with the tip of her index finger and transferred them to her mouth. "Men who can pleasure a woman to the point where she wants nothing more in life than their touch."

  "What have you been reading?" I asked.

  "You didn't spend time with her. I did. I wrote up the wedding, remember?"

  Cece had me there. I'd put in an appearance at the church, but in the back row, and with my mind on making an escape before all of the lovely young matrons could aim their pity at me for failing to have caught a husband. Kincaid had been pale, and thin. And rather lifeless, as I recalled.

  "She was a zombie," Cece said. "Her mother planned that wedding and ramrodded her through it. I mentioned Hamilton's name, once, and she flushed as if a fever had run through her. She was eaten up with wanting him."

  The luncheon was sounding more and more intriguing. I had ten grand in the bank and another five under my mattress. I could afford a place at Kincaid's table. Especially for a chance to talk to her. "What did Kincaid say about Hamilton?"

  Cece smiled, a tight little smile that told me she'd assaulted that wall more than once. "Not a word. Not a single syllable. Mention Hamilton's name now and this blank wall drops over her face."

  The luncheon was looking expensive again. Maybe I could run Kincaid down in the grocery store. "Does anyone know where he is?"

  Cece shrugged a shoulder, a maneuver that showed off her collarbone and the tricolored gold necklace that shimmered in the light. "He travels. One hears that he gambles."