"Screw the jacket! What about the paintings and stories?"
He squeezed a little firmer, moving his fingers in a way that suddenly made me sigh with pleasure. "It's a climate-controlled storage vault. The artwork is well preserved."
"You paid for the storage, didn't you?" A place like that would cost several hundred dollars a month. Lawrence could never have afforded it. "That's why he left them to you."
He shook his head. "He left them to me because he knew that I'd see they were properly placed. The Lawrence Ambrose Collection. It sounds nice, doesn't it?"
"You're giving them to a museum?" My stomach fluttered.
"Yes. To a place that will preserve them, along with Lawrence's reputation as a writer and artist. It's the best way I know to make sure he isn't forgotten."
With that kind of money, I could restore Dahlia House and then turn my hand to the life of a liberated Daddy's Girl. Imagine the mischief I could get into with my highly polished attitude and some money.
His hands working the tendons of my shoulders brought me back to reality. "Maybe, Sarah Booth, it would be best if you let the past rest."
Those words undid all of his massage. My neck tightened and I stepped away from him. "Why?"
He met my gaze. "Half a century has passed. Not even the ghosts are interested any longer."
"You're forgetting one small thing, Harold." I was having difficulty breathing. Harold was asking me to drop my investigation into Lawrence's murder.
"No, I'm not forgetting. I'm accepting. And Lawrence would prefer to let it drop. You have to trust me on this."
"Even if I let go, Sheriff Peters won't."
"Coleman has other things to occupy his time. It wouldn't be improbable for Lawrence's death to be ruled accidental. He cut his hand washing dishes."
There was a pain in my chest. I knew it wasn't medical but emotional. "Lawrence trusted you." The words were an accusation of his betrayal, if not more.
"I wish you would, too."
"He was poisoned." Each word was a deliberate stab at him.
"Sarah Booth, he's dead. There are other people who are alive."
I backed away toward the door. "I don't believe this."
He remained where he was, sadness slicing over his face once again and then disappearing in the carefully controlled mask. "You'd better. For your own sake, stay out of the past and away from Moon Lake."
I hadn't heard Brianna come up to the door, but there she was. Her smile was victorious. "You tell her, darling."
18
Tired of pacing, I sat at my bedroom window and watched the sun push back the blackness of the night. It was going to be a gray day, one to match my mood. Although I'd gone to bed early, I hadn't rested. The case was working on me.
Ramone Gilliard's words at Lawrence's funeral were like tiny little digs of a sharp knife. Someone wonderful and unique had left this earth, and he'd been taken away before his time. Greed, fear, the protection of an old and moldy secret—whatever the motive—Lawrence had paid with his life. And half the town was saying to forget about it. Even Harold. Especially Harold.
I stopped at my window and looked out into the grayness. Normally the view from Dahlia House of the surrounding fields soothed me. This morning, the vista held a strange emptiness.
"How important is this case to you, Sarah Booth?"
I'd been expecting Jitty—her question was no surprise.
"It isn't the case." My eyes burned from lack of sleep.
"Maybe you should just drop it."
I rounded on her. "I can't."
"Sure you can. Just call up Madame and tell her you quit. You're not keeping her money anyway. Let Coleman tend to it."
I leaned my head into my hands and closed my eyes. I was bone weary. "I can't."
"Sarah Booth, I know you don't want to disappoint her, but think of what's at stake."
I'd spoken briefly with Jitty the night before, telling her of my conversation with Harold. What I hadn't been honest about were my fears. I'd never truly considered that Harold was involved—in any way—with Lawrence's death. I still didn't believe he'd done anything evil. But he was protecting someone who had. And betraying Lawrence in the process.
"I know what's at stake." I rose slowly. "Harold."
"Can't you just let it go? You don't want to take on the role of that Greek girl who opened the box."
I turned to look at her, and for a brief instant I wanted more than anything to find my place in the world she offered. I knew then why she chose to spend her time in the fifties. Women weren't allowed to risk. Father knew best. Men assumed the burden of responsibility. Women nurtured and accepted. I didn't want to completely yield to male dominance, but God, I didn't want to risk—at least not so much.
"What if you find out Harold is involved?" she persisted.
That was the question that had kept me awake all night.
Jitty took a seat on the bed and stared at me. "What will you do?" she repeated, this time with a degree of sympathy.
"I don't know." But I did. There had never been real doubt about what I'd do. All through the night I'd been haunted by another ghost, that of my father.
As if she shared my thoughts, Jitty spoke. "I remember when your daddy took the bench. He had reservations about sittin' in judgment on other people. Most men would have thought only of the power, but he was more worried about the possibility of makin' an error. Many a night he paced the bedroom floor, hashin' out the particulars of a case with your mama."
"He never walked away from his responsibilities."
The silence grew between us as the sun climbed higher in the sky, filtering weakly through the bedroom window.
"Sarah Booth, whether you like it or not, there's a difference between men and women."
"Jitty, not now," I begged. "Please."
"I'm not tryin' to devil you, girl. I'm tryin' to help."
I shook my head. "Like it or not, I have to do what's right. My gender doesn't excuse me from it."
She sighed. "I wish your daddy was here. He'd know what to say."
I swallowed back the rush of emotion that her statement brought on. I would give five years of my life for a conversation with my father. I longed to have him beside me, right now, to help chart my way through these difficult troubles. He would dispense wisdom in a quiet, calm voice that I remembered with such an aching desire that it made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and tried to force him to appear. Jitty was here, why wouldn't he come back to me?
And then I knew what I was doing was wrong. Like the old fifties sitcoms that Jitty watched incessantly, my memories of both my parents had taken on the sharpness of black and white. They were good and noble. Infallible. Death and the passage of time had stolen their humanity and their ability to err.
With the best of intentions, I was reducing them to less than what they'd been.
The fact was that I had to make this decision alone. And then I had to live with it. This case was no longer a game of cops and robbers, of figuring out a puzzle. Lawrence Ambrose had been murdered. Harold was at risk, and though I wasn't certain how deeply I cared for him, I was certain that I cared.
I went to the closet and began pulling out clothes. I settled on a suede suit that I'd bought in New York several years before when I'd gotten a small part in a play. It was a golden green, a nice contrast to my hair.
"Where you goin'?" Jitty asked softly.
"To Clarksdale."
"Going to see that old senator?"
"Yes." I turned to her, still wanting approval but trying hard not to let it matter. "I have to, Jitty. Even if I quit now, this would always be in the way. For me and for Harold."
She nodded, standing and smoothing her hands down her pale blue shirtwaist. In the weak morning light, she looked like a monotone television character. I had a vision of Loretta Young descending a staircase with perfect poise. She had obviously been practicing her deportment. "Be careful, Sarah Booth."
"I will," I promised.
/>
"Take the dog."
I smiled. Sweetie's protection value was in her size and the fact that she'd knock a person down trying to lick them. "You keep her company. She has to go to the vet soon."
"Not soon enough. Any day now you gonna get a bill from some of those other dog owners. She's 'bout killed a couple of 'em."
"The honor of the Delaneys is upheld," I teased.
"You watch your back," Jitty warned. "Old folks are mean by nature, especially one who's lost all the power he once had."
If the Archer home had ever been named, there was no trace of a plaque or marker. It was a beautiful old antebellum style house that had once been the center of plantation life. But Clarksdale had grown up around it, encircling it with paved streets and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. All that remained of what the house had once been was the driveway made from baked-clay bricks hand-fashioned by slaves.
To create the driveway, which was at least a thousand feet, there must have been sixty thousand bricks. Untold man-hours. The Archers had been, and still were, wealthy people.
Jebediah Archer wasn't expecting me, and the young black woman who opened the door wasn't thrilled with my presence, but she let me in and told me to wait in the hallway after I'd introduced myself and asked to speak with the senator.
She was a beautiful woman who moved with the stealth of a cat, and the same arrogance. I had the strangest sensation that I'd run across another species of Daddy's Girl.
While she was gone I had time to examine the hallway, checking my makeup and outfit in the large mirror, inspecting the lush red leaves of the poinsettias that graced a marble table, snooping over some carved ivory figures of amply endowed women. Fertility goddesses, if I had to guess. Interesting.
"The senator will see you."
She'd slipped up behind me and caught me with one of the figures in my hand. Removing it as if I were a naughty child, she replaced it exactly where it had been. She made it clear that she thought I might try to steal it.
I followed her down the hallway past what I presumed would be the formal parlor and into a room that had been furnished as a study. A huge mahogany desk gleamed in the pale light that filtered in a large window hung with damask draperies. The walls were lined with books and the ghoulish heads of lions and tigers and bears. The senator was a big-game hunter. I wondered if he'd made his kills on safari or on some of the canned hunts in Texas where declawed animals, often former pets, were shot in cages as trophies. Either way was reprehensible.
"What is it you want, Miss Delaney?"
I hadn't seen the senator. He was sitting in a large leather chair that faced the window. When he turned around, I was startled.
He was older than dirt, at least a hundred, his face creviced by wrinkles and the raw patches where skin lesions had been removed. When he looked at the black woman, fury sparked in his eyes. "Get out."
She said nothing, just left the room. The door closed behind her with a soft click, and I had the desire to follow on her heels. Malice seemed to ooze from the old man.
"I don't have all morning. What do you want?"
"To talk about the past." It was a fumbling start, and one I knew I'd pay for.
His laughter was sharp, a bark of anger rather than mirth. "I have no future, but I won't dwell in the past. That makes the present a very miserable experience."
For a very miserable man, I could have added. But I didn't. "Moon Lake. Nineteen forty."
I expected him to tell me to leave. Instead he leaned forward. "The summer my son was murdered."
"Yes," I said. "The summer J. Edgar Hoover visited Mississippi."
He sat back in his chair, putting his face in shadow. "Sit down," he said. For all of his meanness, he was smart. His eyes, so old that all color had faded, were alert, cunning.
I took a seat across the desk from him and waited. Moments ticked by. The room was oppressively warm, and my suede suit was becoming uncomfortable. Still, I waited. He was trying to unnerve me and force my hand, but I didn't give in to the urge to explain.
"I knew your father," he finally said.
Of all the opening gambits I'd expected, this wasn't one. "Yes, he knew you, too." My voice was cool. "He was—"
"A weakling."
If his intention was to make me angry, he accomplished his goal. It took all of my restraint to remember that this wasn't about me. Or my father. I stood up. "Integrity is often viewed as weakness by someone who has none. Moon Lake. Nineteen forty," I repeated. "Your son was murdered and nothing was ever done about it. Why?"
"Sit down. You came here to get something. If you want it bad enough, you'll stay."
His game was to insult, anger, and abuse me, and ultimately he'd give me nothing. He'd lost every bit of power, except to inflict suffering. "You're mistaken." I picked up my purse. "I heard your son was a bully. I see he came by it honestly."
He laughed. "Don't go home and cry because the world is such a mean old place. Wait fifty years, then see what hard reality is like. Deloris! Deloris!" He shouted the woman's name with a gusto that left me terrified he was having a stroke.
The door opened and the black woman returned carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses. She put it on the desk, ignoring his bellows. Without a word she walked out again, closing the door firmly behind her.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"I thought you came to talk about the past." He leaned forward and poured the bourbon over the ice in the glasses.
It was only nine o'clock, and I had no desire to share a drink with this man. I ignored the second glass.
"Her name is Deloris Marsales Archer."
"Your wife?"
"My daughter," he said, draining the glass and pouring another. "She's counting the moments until my death."
I was still standing, purse in hand. This was surely hell, or as close to it as I'd ever come. I started to leave.
"No grit, girl. Maybe you should go home and bake cookies. That's a woman's job. Domestic chores."
His life was obviously comprised of hurling insults and hoping that one of his victims would rise to the bait. I took a page from Deloris's book and kept walking to the door.
"You want to know about that summer. They were all a bunch of fools and degenerates. My son. Hoover. They were disgusting."
Whether it was the same fascination that makes people watch tragedies on the six o'clock news or the hope that he actually knew something, I didn't walk out the door.
"A good man has been killed. Lawrence Ambrose. Something happened at Moon Lake that may have played a role in his murder. I want to know what."
"Sit down."
It was a command, and I considered ignoring it. But if Archer knew something, I wanted it. I did not want to come back to this place ever again. I returned to my chair.
"I remember Ambrose." His lips stretched into the design of a smile, but there was only cruelty there. "He tried to come home. Thought he was going to get a teaching job, bring all his cultured ideas and ideals back home to Mississippi. Hah! He went packing back to Frogland, where he belonged."
"You stopped him from getting the job at Ole Miss?"
"With one phone call." He chuckled, and it was the sound of old bones rubbing. "It wasn't hard to convince those ivory tower fools to work with me. Rabbits. That's what they are. They'd eat their own young to keep from sharing."
"Why?"
He moved forward suddenly in his chair, and I had the impulse to jump out of mine. He saw my revulsion and grinned.
"He betrayed his country. All of them, those prancing young people who thought they knew so much. Those singing, dancing whores, all eavesdropping for bits and pieces of information." He poured another drink and belted it back. "They thought they were so sly, but I was on to them. Hosea, that damn idiot, mixed in there, thinking he was so clever. He was worse than stupid."
My heartbeat had almost doubled. So Lawrence had been on to something at Moon Lake. Hanging around the wealthy and powerful, he'd learn
ed secrets. He was going to put them in his book. All I had to do was find out what Lawrence had known. Find out and then stay alive.
"What happened that summer?" It wasn't the greatest question, but I was feeling my way forward.
The sharp old eyes flattened out of focus for a moment. I was wondering if he was truly insane when he spoke again, and I realized he'd slipped into the past. "Hosea didn't have the backbone of a tadpole. He could have been an officer in the army. Lazy coward! That life was too harsh for him. He said if I made him sign up, he'd humiliate me, ruin my name. He was going to buy the Crescent casino." Jebediah's laughter rang out against the walls. "Buy it! 'With what?' I asked him. He didn't have two dimes to rub together. The Depression had ruined his big scheme to sell cars. No one wanted a car. They wanted food. Gambling was his ticket home, he said. And when I wouldn't give him the money to buy the casino, he decided to sell information to my enemies. Steal it from me, his father, and sell it to the Germans. He was an imbecile."
I was mesmerized by his venom. I couldn't stop myself from staring at him. "That's why he was killed?"
"My son was killed in a card game, a tragedy." He poured another drink, holding the glass this time as he met my gaze. "You came here for the truth, didn't you? Well, here it is. I found out what Hosea was up to. I got Hoover down there. I had the local sheriff raid the Crescent. I paid him to do what he'd been paid by others not to do. But there were no arrests. No gamblers were busted, no charges were filed. One shot was fired, right into Hosea's heart."
I braced my hands on the arms of the chair. "Hoover shot him?"
"I shot him. I gave him life and I killed him. He wasn't fit to live. He should have been drowned at birth."
His eyes never left mine, and I knew he was feeding off the horror that I felt.
"You've finally got the truth, Miss Delaney. Now what are you going to do with it?" He downed the liquor. "Not a damn thing, that's what. Not a damn thing. Good riddance to Lawrence Ambrose and all of those traitors. I knew what was going on back then. Tom Williams writing his trash, holding up the South to criticism so that everyone who saw his plays viewed us as products of incest. And your Lawrence Ambrose, stirring up trouble. He lived longer than he deserved, and he finally came crawling home to Mississippi."
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