Rest in Pieces
Rita Mae Brown
REST IN PIECES
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published September 1992
Bantam mass market edition / July 1993
Bantam mass market reissue / April 2004
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1992 by American Artists, Inc.
Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Wendy Wray
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-7257
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
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Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN 0-553-89862-0 Published simultaneously in Canada
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Letter from Sneaky Pie Brown
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Books by Rita Mae Brown
Previews of The Mrs. Murphy Series
Copyright Page
To the Beegles
and their dalmations
Cast of Characters
Mary Minor Haristeen (Harry), the young postmistress of Crozet, whose curiosity almost kills the cat and herself
Mrs. Murphy, Harry’s gray tiger cat, who bears an uncanny resemblance to authoress Sneaky Pie and who is wonderfully intelligent!
Tee Tucker, Harry’s Welsh corgi, Mrs. Murphy’s friend and confidant; a buoyant soul
Pharamond Haristeen (Fair), veterinarian, formerly married to Harry
BoomBoom Craycroft, a high-society knockout
Blair Bainbridge, a handsome model and fugitive from the fast lane in Manhattan. He moves to Crozet for peace and quiet and gets anything but
Mrs. George Hogendobber (Miranda), a widow who thumps her own Bible!
Market Shiflett, owner of Shiflett’s Market, next to the post office
Pewter, Market’s fat gray cat, who, when need be, can be pulled away from the food bowl
Susan Tucker, Harry’s best friend, who doesn’t take life too seriously until her neighbors get murdered
Ned Tucker, a lawyer and Susan’s husband
Jim Sanburne, mayor of Crozet
Big Marilyn Sanburne (Mim), queen of Crozet and an awful snob
Little Marilyn Sanburne, daughter of Mim, and not as dumb as she appears
Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton, Little Marilyn’s husband, is rich by marriage and in his own right. His ambition sapped, he’s content to live very well and be a “gentleman lawyer”
Cabell Hall, a trusted figure in Crozet, is preparing to retire from the bank where he is president
Ben Seifert, Cabell Hall’s protégé, has come a long way from a callow teller to a bank officer. He was a year ahead of Harry in high school
Rick Shaw, Albemarle sheriff
Cynthia Cooper, police officer
Rob Collier, mail driver
Paddy, Mrs. Murphy’s ex-husband, a saucy tom
Simon, an opossum with a low opinion of humanity. He slowly succumbs to Harry’s kindness. He lives in the barn-loft along with a crabby owl and a hibernating blacksnake
Dear Reader:
Here’s to catnip and champagne!
Thanks to you my mailbox overflows with letters, photos, mousie toys, and crunchy nibbles. Little did I think when I started the Mrs. Murphy series that there would be so many cats out there who are readers . . . a few humans, too.
Poor Mother, she’s trying not to be a grouch. She slaves over “important themes” disguised as comedy and I dash along with a mystery series and am a hit. This only goes to prove that most cats and some dogs realize that a lighthearted approach is always the best. Maybe in a few decades Mom will figure this out for herself.
The best news is that I was able to afford my own typewriter. I found a used IBM Selectric III so I don’t have to sneak into Mother’s office in the middle of the night. I even have my own office. Do you think I should hire Pewter as a secretary?
Again, thank you, cats out there, and the dogs, too. Take care of your humans. And as for you humans, well, a fresh salmon steak would be a wonderful treat for the cat in your life.
All Best,
SNEAKY PIE
1
Golden light poured over the little town of Crozet, Virginia. Mary Minor Haristeen looked up from the envelopes she was sorting and then walked over to the large glass window to admire the view. It seemed to her as if the entire town had been drenched in butter. The rooftops shone; the simple clapboard buildings were lent a pleasing grace. Harry was so compelled by the quality of the light that she threw on her denim jacket and walked out the back door. Mrs. Murphy, Harry’s tiger cat, and Tee Tucker, her corgi, roused themselves from a drowsy afternoon slumber to accompany her. The long October rays of the sun gilded the large trotting-horse weathervane on Miranda Hogendobber’s house on St. George Avenue, seen from the alleyway behind the post office.
Brilliant fall days brought back memories of hotly contested football games, school crushes, and cool nights. Much as Harry loathed cold weather, she liked having to buy a new sweater or two. At Crozet High she had worn a fuzzy red sweater one long-ago October day, in 1973 to be exact, and caught the eye of Fair Haristeen. Oak trees transformed into orange torches, the maples turned blood-red, and the beech trees became yellow, then as now. Autumn colors remained in her memory, and this would be that kind of fall. Her divorce from Fair had been final six months ago, or was it a year? She really couldn’t remember, or perhaps she didn’t want to remember. Her friends ransacked their address books for the names of eligible bachelors. There were two: Dr. Larry Johnson, the retired, widowed town doctor, who was two years older than God, and the other, of course, was Pharamond Haristeen. Even if she wanted Fair back, which she most certainly did not, he was embroiled in a romance with BoomBoom Craycroft, the beautiful thirty-two-year-old widow of Kelly Craycroft.
Harry mused that everyone in town had nicknames. Olivia was BoomBoom, and Pharamond was Fair. She was Harry, and Peter Shiflett, who owned the market next door, was called Market. Cabell Hall, president of the Allied National Bank in Richmond, was Cab or Cabby; his wife of twenty-seven years, Florence, was dubbed Taxi. The Marilyn Sanburnes, senior and junior, were Big Marilyn, or Mim, and Little Marilyn respectively. How close it made everyone feel, these little monikers, these tokens of intimacy, nicknames. Crozet folks laughed at their neighbors’ habits, predicting who would say what to whom and when. These were the joys of a small town, yet they masked the same problems and pain, the same cruelties, injustice, and self-destructive behavior found on a larger scale in Charlottesville, fourteen miles to the east, or Richmond, seventy miles beyond Charlottesville. The veneer of civilization, so essential to daily life, could easily be dissolved by crisis. Sometimes it didn’t even take a crisis: Dad came home drunk and beat the living shit out of his wife and children, or a husband arrived home early from work to his heavily mortgaged abode and found his wife in bed with another man. Oh, it couldn’t happen in Crozet but it did. Harry knew it did. After all, a post office is the nerve center of any community and she knew, usually before others, what went on when the doors were closed and the lights switched off. A flurry of legal letters might cram a box, or a strange medley of dental bills, and as Harry sorted the mail she would piece together the stories hidden from view.
If Harry understood her animals better, then she’d know even more, because her corgi, Tee Tucker, could scurry under porch steps, and Mrs. Murphy could leap into a hayloft, a feat the agile tiger cat performed both elegantly and with ease. The cat and dog carried a wealth of information, if only they could impart it to their relatively intelligent human companion. It was never easy, though. Mrs. Murphy sometimes had to roll over in front of her mother, or Tee Tucker might have to grab her pants leg.
Today the animals had no gossip about humans or their own kind. They sat next to Harry and observed Miranda Hogendobber—clad in a red plaid skirt, yellow sweater, and gardening gloves—hoe her small patch, which was producing a riot of squash and pumpkins. Harry waved to Mrs. Hogendobber, who returned the acknowledgment.
“Harry,” Susan Tucker, Harry’s best friend, called from inside the post office.
“I’m out back.”
Susan opened the back door. “Postcard material. Picture perfect. Fall in central Virginia.”
As she spoke the back door of the market opened and Pewter, the Shifletts’ fat gray cat, streaked out, a chicken leg in her mouth.
Market shouted after the cat, “Damn you, Pewter, you’ll get no supper tonight.” He started after her as she headed toward the post office, glanced up, and beheld Harry and Susan. “Excuse me, ladies, had I known you were present I would not have used foul language.”
Harry laughed. “Oh, Market, we use worse.”
“Are you going to share?” Mrs. Murphy inquired of Pewter as she shot past them.
“How can she answer? Her mouth is full,” Tucker said. “Besides, when have you known Pewter to give even a morsel of food to anybody else?”
“That’s a fact.” Mrs. Murphy followed her gray friend, just in case.
Pewter stopped just out of reach of a subdued Market, now chatting up the ladies. She tore off a tantalizing hunk of chicken.
“How’d you get that away from Market?” Mrs. Murphy’s golden eyes widened.
Ever ready to brag, Pewter chewed, yet kept a paw on the drumstick. “He put one of those barbecued chickens up on the counter. Little Marilyn asked him to cut it up and when his back was turned I made off with a drumstick.” She chewed another savory piece.
“Aren’t you a clever girl?” Tucker sniffed that delicious smell.
“As a matter of fact I am. Little Marilyn hollered and declared she wouldn’t take a chicken that a cat had bitten into, and truthfully, I wouldn’t eat anything Little Marilyn had touched. Turning into as big a snot as her mother.”
With lightning speed Mrs. Murphy grabbed the chicken leg as Tucker knocked the fat kitty off balance. Mrs. Murphy raced down the alleyway into Miranda Hogendobber’s garden, followed by a triumphant Tucker and a spitting Pewter.
“Give me that back, you striped asshole!”
“You never share, Pewter,” Tucker said as Mrs. Murphy ran between the rows of cornstalks, moving toward the moonlike pumpkins.
“Harry,” Mrs. Hogendobber bellowed, “these creatures will be the death of me yet.”
She brandished her hoe in the direction of Tucker, who ran away. Now Pewter chased Mrs. Murphy up and down the rows of squash but Mrs. Murphy, nimble and fit, leapt over a wide, spreading squash plant with its creamy yellow bounty in the middle. She headed for the pumpkins.
Market laughed. “Think we could unleash Miranda on the Sanburnes?” He was referring to Little Marilyn and her equally distasteful maternal unit, Mim.
That made Susan and Harry laugh, which infuriated Mrs. Hogendobber because she thought they were laughing at her.
“It’s not funny. They’ll ruin my garden. My prize pumpkins. You know I’m going to win at the Harvest Fair with my pumpkins.” Miranda’s face turned puce.
“I’ve never seen that color on a human being before.” Tucker stared up in wonderment.
“Tucker, watch out for the hoe,” Mrs. Murphy yelled. She dropped the drumstick.
Pewter grabbed it. The fat swung under her belly as she shot back toward home, came within a whisker’s length of Market and skidded sideways, evading him.
He laughed. “If they want it that bad I might as well bring over the rest of the chicken.”
By the time he was back with the chicken, Mrs. Hogendobber, huffing and puffing, had plopped herself at the back door of the post office.
“Tucker could have broken my hip. What if she’d knocked me over?” Mrs. Hogendobber warmed to the scenario of damage and danger.
Market bit his tongue. He wanted to say that she was well padded enough not to worry. Instead he clucked sympathy while cutting meat off the chicken for the three animals, who hastily forgave one another any wrongdoing. Chicken was too important to let ego stand in the way.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hogendobber. Are you all right?” Harry asked politely.
“Of course I’m all right. I just wish you could control your charges.”
“What you need is a corgi,” Susan Tucker volunteered.
“No, I don’t. I took care of my husband all my life and I don’t need a dog to care for. At least George brought home a paycheck, bless his soul.”
“They’re very entertaining,” Harry added.
“What about the fleas?” Mrs. Hogendobber was more interested than she cared to admit.
“You can have those without a dog,” Harry answered.
“I do not have fleas.”
“Miranda, when the weather’s warm, everyone’s got fleas,” Market corrected her.
“Speak for yourself. And if I ran a food establishment I would make sure there wasn’t a flea within fifty yards of the place. Fifty yards.” Mrs. Hogendobber pursed her lips, outlined in a pearlized red that matched the red in her plaid skirt. “And I’d give more discounts.”
“Now, Miranda.” Market, having heard this ad nauseam, was prepared to launch into a passionate defense of his pricing practices.
An unfamiliar voice cut off this useless debate. “Anyone home?”
“Who’s that?” Mrs. Hogendobber’s eyebrows arched upward.
Harry and Susan shrugged. Miranda marched into the post office. As her husband, George, had been postmaster for over forty years before his death, she felt she could do whatever she wanted. Harry was on her heels, Susan and Market bringing up the rear. The animals, finished with the chicken, scooted in.
Standing on the other side of the counter was the handsomest man Mrs. Hogendobber had seen since Clark Gable. Susan and Harry might have chosen a more recent ideal of virility, but whatever the vintage of comparison, this guy was drop-dead gorgeous. Soft hazel eyes illuminated a chiseled face, rugged yet sensitive, and his hair was curly brown, perfectly cut. His hands were strong. Indeed, his entire impression was one of strength. On top of well-fitted jeans was a watermelon-colored sweater, the sleeves pushed up on tanned, muscular forearms.
For a moment no one said a word. Miranda quickly punctured the silence.
“Miranda Hogendobber.” She held out her hand.
“Blair Bainbridge. Please call me Blair.”
Miranda now had the upper hand and could introduce the others. “This is our postmistress, Mary Minor Haristeen. Susan Tucker, wife of Ned Tucker, a very fine lawyer should you ever need one, and Market Shiflett, who owns the store next door, which is very convenient and carries those sinful Dove bars.”
“Hey, hey, what about us?” The chorus came from below.
Harry picked up Mrs. Murphy. “This is Mrs. Murphy, that’s Tee Tucker, and the gray kitty is Pewter, Market’s invaluable assistant, though she’s often over here picking up the mail.”
Blair smiled and shook Mrs. Murphy’s paw, which delighted Harry. Mrs. Murphy didn’t mind. The masculine vision then leaned over and patted Pewter’s head. Tucker held up her paw to shake, which Blair did.
“I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Me, too,” Tucker replied.
“May I help you?” Harry asked as the others leaned forward in anticipation.
“Yes. I’d like a post box if one is available.”
“I have a few. Do you like odd numbers or even?” Harry smiled. She could be charming when she smiled. She was one of those fine-looking women who took few pains with herself. What you saw was what you got.
“Even.”
“How does forty-four sound? Or thirteen—I almost forgot I had thirteen.”
“Don’t take thirteen.” Miranda shook her head. “Bad luck.”
“Forty-four then.”
“Thirty-four ninety-five, please.” Harry filled out the box slip and stamped it with pokeberry-colored ink, a kind of runny maroon.
He handed over the check and she handed over the key.
“Is there a Mrs. Bainbridge?” Mrs. Hogendobber brazenly asked. “The name sounds so familiar.”
Market rolled his eyes heavenward.
“No, I haven’t had the good fortune to find the right woman to—”
“Harry’s single, you know. Divorced, actually.” Mrs. Hogendobber nodded in Harry’s direction.
At that moment Harry and Susan would have gladly slit her throat.
“Mrs. Hogendobber, I’m sure Mr. Bainbridge doesn’t need my biography on his first visit to the post office.”
“On my second, perhaps you’ll supply it.” He put the key in his pocket, smiled, and left, climbing into a jet-black Ford F350 dually pickup. Mr. Bainbridge was prepared to do some serious hauling in that baby.
“Miranda, how could you?” Susan exclaimed.
“How could I what?”
“You know what.” Market took up the chorus.
Miranda paused. “Mention Harry’s marital status? Listen, I’m older than any of you. First impressions are important. He might not have such a good first impression of me but I bet he’ll have one of Harry, who handled the situation with her customary tact and humor. And when he goes home tonight he’ll know there’s one pretty unmarried woman in Crozet.” With that astonishing justification she swept out the back door.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Market’s jaw hung slack.
“That’s what I say.” Pewter cackled.
“Girls, I’m going back to work. This was all too much for me.” Market laughed and opened the front door. He paused. “Oh, come on, you little crook.”
Pewter meowed sweetly and followed her father out the door.
“Can you believe Rotunda could run that fast?” Tucker said to Mrs. Murphy.
“That was a surprise.” Mrs. Murphy rolled over on the floor, revealing her pretty buff underbelly.
“This fall is going to be full of surprises. I feel it in my bones.” Tucker smiled and wagged her stumpy tail.
Mrs. Murphy gave her a look. The cat was not in the mood for prophecy. Anyway, cats knew more of such things than dogs. She didn’t feel like confirming that she thought Tucker was right. Something was in the air. But what?
Harry placed the check in the drawer under the counter. It was face up and she peered down at it again. “Yellow Mountain Farm.”
“There is no Yellow Mountain Farm.” Susan bent over to examine the check.
“Foxden.”
“What? That place has been empty for over a year now. Who would buy it?”
“A Yankee.” Harry closed the door. “Or someone from California.”
“No.” Susan’s voice dropped.
“There is nothing else for sale around Yellow Mountain except Foxden.”
“But, Harry, we know everything, and we haven’t heard one word, one measly peep, about Foxden selling.”
Harry was already dialing the phone as Susan was talking. “Jane Fogleman, please.” There was a brief pause. “Jane, why didn’t you tell me Foxden had sold?”
Jane, from the other end of the line, replied, “Because we were instructed to keep our mouths shut until the closing, which was at nine this morning at McGuire, Woods, Battle and Boothe.”
“I can’t believe you’d keep it from us. Susan and I just met him.”
“Those were Mr. Bainbridge’s wishes.” Jane held her breath for a moment. “Did you ever see anything like him? I mean to tell you, girl.”
Harry fudged and sounded unimpressed. “He’s good-looking.”
“Good-looking? He’s to die for!” Jane exploded.
“Let’s hope no one has to do that,” Harry remarked drily. “Well, you told me what I wanted to know. Susan says hello and we’ll be slow to forgive you.”
“Right.” Jane laughed and hung up.
“Foxden.” Harry put the receiver in the cradle.
“God, we had some wonderful times at that old farm. The little six-stall barn and the gingerbread on the house and oh, don’t forget, the cemetery. Remember the one really old tombstone with the little angel playing a harp?”
“Yeah. The MacGregors were such good people.”
“Lived forever, too. No kids. Guess that’s why they let us run all over the place.” Susan felt old Elizabeth MacGregor’s presence in the room. An odd sensation and not rational but pleasant, since Elizabeth and Mackie, her husband, were the salt of the earth.
“I hope Blair Bainbridge has as much happiness at Foxden as the MacGregors did.”
“He ought to keep the name.”
“Well, that’s his business,” Harry replied.
“Bet Miranda gets him to do it.” Susan took a deep breath. “You’ve got yourself a new neighbor, Sistergirl. Aren’t you dying of curiosity?”
Harry shook her head. “No.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, Harry, get over the divorce.”
“I am over the divorce and I’m not majoring in longing and desire, despite all your hectoring for the last six months.”
“You can’t keep living like a nun.” Susan’s voice rose.
“I’ll live the way I want to live.”
“There they go again,” Tucker observed.
Mrs. Murphy nodded. “Tucker, want to go over to Foxden tonight if we can get out of the house? Let’s check out this Bainbridge guy. I mean, if everyone’s going to be pushing Mom at him we’d better get the facts.”
“Great idea.”
2
By eleven that night Harry was sound asleep. Mrs. Murphy, dexterity itself, pulled open the back door. Harry rarely locked it and tonight she hadn’t shut it tight. It required only patience for the cat, with her clever claws, to finally swing the door open. The screen door was a snap. Tucker pushed it open with her nose, popping the hook.
For October the night was unusually warm, the last flickering of Indian summer. Harry’s old Superman-blue Ford pickup rested by the barn. Ran like a top. The animals trotted by the truck.
“Wait a minute.” Tucker sniffed.
Mrs. Murphy sat down and washed her face while Tucker, nose to the ground, headed for the barn. “Simon again?”
Simon, the opossum, enjoyed rummaging around the grounds. Harry often tossed out marshmallows and table scraps for him. Simon made every effort to get these goodies before the racoons arrived. He didn’t like the raccoons and they didn’t like him.
Tucker didn’t reply to Mrs. Murphy’s question but ducked into the barn instead. The smell of timothy hay, sweet feed, and bran swirled around her delicate nostrils. The horses stayed out in the evenings and were brought inside during the heat of the day. That system would only continue for about another week because soon enough the deep frosts of fall would turn the meadows silver, and the horses would need to be in during the night, secure in their stalls and warmed by their Triple Crown blankets.
A sharp little nose stuck out from the feed room. “Tucker.”
“Simon, you’re not supposed to be in the feed room.” Tucker’s low growl was censorious.
“The raccoons came early, so I ran in here.” The raccoons’ litter proved Simon’s truthfulness. “Hello, Mrs. Murphy.” Simon greeted the sleek feline as she entered the barn.
“Hello. Say, have you been over to Foxden?” Mrs. Murphy swept her whiskers forward.
“Last night. No food over there yet.” Simon focused on his main concern.
“We’re going over for a look.”
“Not much to see ’ceptin for the big truck that new fellow has. That and the gooseneck trailer. Looks like he means to buy some horses because there aren’t any over there now.” Simon laughed because he knew that within a matter of weeks the horse dealers would be trying to stick a vacuum cleaner hose in Blair Bainbridge’s pockets. “Know what I miss? Old Mrs. MacGregor used to pour hot maple syrup in the snow to make candy and she’d always leave some for me. Can’t you get Harry to do that when it snows?”
“Simon, you’re lucky to get table scraps. Harry’s not much of a cook. Well, we’re going over to Foxden to see what’s cooking.” Tucker smiled at her little joke.
Mrs. Murphy stared at Tucker. She loved Tucker but sometimes she thought dogs were really dumb.
They left Simon munching away on a bread crust. As they crossed the twenty acres on the west side of Harry’s farm they called out to Harry’s horses, Tomahawk and Gin Fizz, who neighed in reply.
Harry had inherited her parents’ farm when her father died years ago. Like her parents, she kept everything tiptop. Most of the fence lines were in good repair, although come spring she would need to replace the fence along the creek between her property and Foxden. Her barn had received a fresh coat of red paint with white trim this year. The hay crop flourished. The bales, rolled up like giant shredded wheat, were lined up against the eastern fence line. All totaled, Harry kept 120 acres. She never tired of the farm chores and probably was at her happiest on the ancient Ford tractor, some thirty-five years old, pulling along a harrow or a plow.
Getting up at five-thirty in the morning appealed to her except in darkest winter, when she did it anyway. The outdoor chores took so much of Harry’s free time that she wasn’t always able to keep up with the house. The outside needed some fresh paint. She and Susan had painted the inside last winter. Mrs. Hogendobber even came out to help for a day. Harry’s sofa and chairs, oversized, needed to be reupholstered. They were pieces her mother and father had bought at an auction in 1949 shortly after they were married. They figured the furniture had been built in the 1930’s. Harry didn’t much care how old the furniture was but it was the most comfortable stuff she’d ever sat in. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker could lounge unrestricted on the sofa, so it had their approval.
A small, strong creek divided Harry’s land from Foxden. Tucker scrambled down the bank and plunged in. The water was low. Mrs. Murphy, not overfond of water, circled around, revved her motors, and took a running leap, clearing the creek and Tucker as well.
From there they raced to the house, passing the small cemetery on its knoll. A light shone out from a second-story window into the darkness. Huge sweet gum trees, walnuts, and oaks sheltered the frame dwelling, built in 1837 with a 1904 addition. Mrs. Murphy climbed up the big walnut tree and casually walked out onto a branch to peer into the lighted room. Tucker bitched and moaned at the base of the tree.
“Shut up, Tucker. You’ll get us both chased out of here.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“Once I crawl back down, I will. How do we know this human doesn’t have good ears? Some do, you know.”
Inside the lighted room Blair Bainbridge was engaged in the dirty job of steaming off wallpaper. Nasty strips of peony paper, the blossoms a startling pink, hung down. Every now and then Blair would put down the steamer and pull on the paper. He wore a T-shirt, and little bits of wallpaper stuck to his arms. A portable CD player, on the other side of the room, provided some solace with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number One. No furniture or boxes cluttered the room.
Mrs. Murphy backed down the tree and told Tucker that there wasn’t much going on. They circled the house. The bushes had been trimmed back, the gardens mulched, the dead limbs pruned off trees. Mrs. Murphy opened the back screen door. The back porch had two director’s chairs and an orange crate for a coffee table. The old cast-iron boot scraper shaped like a dachshund still stood just to the left of the door. Neither cat nor dog could get up to see in the back door window.
“Let’s go to the barn,” Tucker suggested.
The barn, a six-stall shed row with a little office in the middle, presented nothing unusual. The stall floors, looking like moon craters, needed to be filled in and evened out. Blair Bainbridge would sweat bullets with that task. Tamping down the stalls was worse than hauling wheelbarrows loaded with clay and rock dust. Cobwebs hung everywhere and a few spiders were finishing up their winter preparations. Mice cleaned out what grain remained in the feed room. Mrs. Murphy regretted that she didn’t have more time to play catch.
They left the barn and inspected the dually truck and the gooseneck, both brand-new. Who could afford a new truck and trailer at the same time? Mr. Bainbridge wasn’t living on food stamps.
“We didn’t find out very much,” Tucker sighed. “Other than the fact that he has some money.”
“We know more than that.” Mrs. Murphy felt a bite on her shoulder. She dug ferociously. “He’s independent and he’s hard-working. He wants the place to look good and he wants horses. And there’s no woman around, nor does there seem to be one in the picture.”
“You don’t know that.” Tucker shook her head.
“There’s no woman. We’d smell her.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know that one might not visit. Maybe he’s fixing up the place to impress her.”
“No. I can’t prove it but I feel it. He wants to be alone. He listens to thoughtful music. I think he’s getting away from somebody or something.”
Tucker thought Mrs. Murphy was jumping to conclusions, but she kept her mouth shut or she’d have to endure a lecture about how cats are mysterious and how cats know things that dogs don’t, ad nauseam.
As the two walked home they passed the cemetery, the wrought-iron fence topped with spearheads marking off the area. One side had fallen down.
“Let’s go in.” Tucker ran over.
The graveyard had been in use by Joneses and MacGregors for nearly two hundred years. The oldest tombstone read: CAPTAIN FRANCIS EGBERT JONES, BORN 1730, DIED 1802. A small log cabin once stood near the creek, but as the Jones family’s fortunes increased they built the frame house. The foundation of the log cabin still stood by the creek. The various headstones, small ones for children, two of whom were carried off by scarlet fever right after the War Between the States, sported carvings and sayings. After that terrible war a Jones daughter, Estella Lynch Jones, married a MacGregor, which was how MacGregors came to be buried here, including the last occupants of Foxden.
The graveyard had been untended since Mrs. MacGregor’s death. Ned Tucker, Susan’s husband and the executor of the estate, rented out the acres to Mr. Stuart Tapscott for his own use. He had to maintain what he used, which he did. The cemetery, however, contained the remains of the Jones family and the MacGregor family, and the survivors, not Mr. Tapscott, were to care for the grounds. The lone descendant, the Reverend Herbert Jones, besieged by ecclesiastical duties and a bad back, was unable to keep up the plot.
It appeared things were going to change with Blair Bainbridge’s arrival. The tombstones that had been overturned were righted, the grass was clipped, and a small camellia bush was planted next to Elizabeth MacGregor’s headstone. The iron fence would take more than one person to right and repair.
“Guess Mr. Bainbridge went to work in here too,” Mrs. Murphy remarked.
“Here’s my favorite.” Tucker stood by the marker of Colonel Ezekiel Abram Jones, born in 1812 and died in 1861, killed at First Manassas. The inscription read: BETTER TO DIE ON YOUR FEET THAN LIVE ON YOUR KNEES. A fitting sentiment for a fallen Confederate who paid for his conviction, yet ironic in its unintentional parallel to the injustice of slavery.
“I like this one.” Mrs. Murphy leapt on top of a square tombstone with an angel playing a harp carved on it. This belonged to Ezekiel’s wife, Martha Selena, who lived thirty years beyond her husband’s demise. The inscription read: SHE PLAYS WITH ANGELS.
The animals headed back home, neither one discussing the small graveyard at Harry’s farm. Not that it wasn’t lovely and well kept, containing her ancestors, but it also contained little tombstones for the beloved family pets. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker found that a sobering possibility on which they refused to dwell.
They slipped into the house as quietly as they had left it, with both animals doing their best to push shut the door. They were only partially successful, the result being that the kitchen was cold when Harry arose at five-thirty, and the cat and dog listened to a patch of blue language, which made them giggle. Discovering that the hook had been bent on the screen door called forth a new torrent of verbal abuse. Harry forgot all about it as the sun rose and the eastern sky glowed peach, gold, and pink.
Those extraordinarily beautiful October days and nights would come back to haunt Harry and her animal friends. Everything seemed so perfect. No one is ever prepared for evil in the face of beauty.
3
“He has not only the absence of fear but of all scruple.” Mrs. Hogendobber’s alto voice vibrated with the importance of her story. “Well, I was shocked completely when I discovered that Ben Seifert, branch manager of our local bank, indulges in sharp business practices. He tried to get me to take out a loan on my house, which is paid for, Mr. Bainbridge. He said he was sure I needed renovations. ‘Renovate what?’ I said, and he said wouldn’t I be thrilled with a modern kitchen and a microwave? I don’t want a microwave. They give people cancer. Then Cabby Hall, the president, walked into the bank and I made a beeline for him. Told him everything and he took Ben to task. I only tell you this so you’ll be on your guard. This may be a small town but our bankers try to sell money just like those big city boys do, Mr. Bainbridge. Be on your toes!” Miranda had to stop and catch her breath.
“Please do call me Blair.”
“Then to top it off, the choir director of my church walked into the bank to inform me that he thought BoomBoom Craycroft had asked Fair Haristeen to marry her, or perhaps it was vice versa.”
“His vice was her versa.” Blair smiled, his bright white teeth making him even more attractive.
“Yes, quite. As it turned out, no proposal had taken place.” Mrs. Hogendobber folded her hands. She didn’t cotton to having her stories interrupted but she was blossoming under the attention of Blair Bainbridge—doubly sweet, since Susan Tucker and Harry could see his black truck parked alongside Mrs. Hogendobber’s house. Of course she was going to walk him through her garden, shower him with hints on how to achieve gargantuan pumpkins, and then bestow upon him the gifts of her green thumb. She might even find out something about him in the process. Some time ago Mrs. Hogendobber had borrowed some copies of New York magazine from Ned Tucker, for the crossword puzzles. After meeting Blair the other day, she had realized why his name was familiar: She had read about him in one of those magazines. There was an article about high-fashion romance. When he introduced himself, the name had seemed vaguely familiar. She was hoping to find out more today about his link to the article, his ill-fated relationship with a beautiful model named Robin Mangione.
The doorbell rang, destroying her plan. The Reverend Herbert Jones marched through the door when Mrs. Hogendobber opened it.
Now this curdled the milk in her excellent coffee. Mrs. Hogendobber felt competitive toward all rival prophets of Christianity. The Right Reverend Jones was minister of the Lutheran Church. His congregation, larger than hers at the Church of the Holy Light, served only to increase her efforts at conversion. The church used to be called The Holy Light Church, but two months ago Miranda had prevailed upon the preacher and the congregation to rename it the Church of the Holy Light. Her reasons, while serviceable, proved less convincing than her exhausting enthusiasm, hence the change.
A cup of coffee and fresh scones were served to Reverend Jones, and the three settled down for more conversation.
“Mr. Bainbridge, I want to welcome you to our small community and to thank you for fixing up my family’s cemetery. Due to disc problems, I have been unable to discharge my obligations to my forebears as they deserve.”
“It was my pleasure, Reverend.”
“Now, Herbie”—Miranda lapsed into familiarity—“you can’t lure Mr. Bainbridge into your fold until I’ve had a full opportunity to tell him about our Church of the Holy Light.”
Blair stared at his scone. A whiff of brimstone emanated from Mrs. Hogendobber’s sentence.
“This young man will find his own way. All paths lead to God, Miranda.”
“Don’t try to sidetrack me with tolerance,” she snapped.
“I’d never do that.” Reverend Jones slipped in that dig.
“I can appreciate your concern for my soul.” Blair’s baritone caressed Mrs. Hogendobber’s ears. “But I’m sorry to disappoint you both. The fact is I’m a Catholic, and while I can’t say I agree with or practice my faith as strictly as the Pope would wish, I occasionally go to Mass.”
The Reverend laid down his scone, dripping with orange marmalade made by Mrs. Hogendobber’s skilled hands. “A Lutheran is just a Catholic without the incense.”
This made both Blair and his hostess laugh. The Reverend was never one to allow dogma to stand in the way of affection and often, in the dead of night, he himself found little solace in the rigors of doctrine. Reverend Jones was a true shepherd to his flock. Let the intellectuals worry about transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth—he had babies to baptize, couples to counsel, the sick to succor, and burials to perform. He hated that latter part of his calling but he prayed to himself that the souls of his flock would go to God, even the most miserable wretches.
“If you don’t mind my asking, Reverend, how did you find out about the cemetery being mowed?” Blair wondered.
“Oh, Harry told me this morning as she walked in to work. Said her little doggie dashed over there as she was doing her chores and she caught her in the cemetery.”
“She walks to work?” Blair was incredulous. “It has to be two miles at least, one way.”
“Oh, yes. She likes the exercise. By the time she gets to the post office she’s already put in a good two to three hours of farm chores. A born farmer, Harry. In the bones. She’ll make a good neighbor.”
“Which brings me to the subject of your renaming your place Yellow Mountain Farm.” Mrs. Hogendobber composed herself for what she thought would be a siege of argument.
“It’s at the base of Yellow Mountain and so I naturally—”
She interrupted him. “It’s been Foxden since the beginning of the eighteenth century and I’m surprised Jane Fogleman did not inform you, as she is normally a fountain of information.”
The Reverend shrewdly took a pass on this one, even though the land in question was part of his heritage. He hadn’t the money to buy it nor the inclination to farm it, so he thought he had little right to tell the man what to call his purchase.
“That long?” Blair thought a moment. “Maybe Jane did mention it.”
“Did you read your deed?” Mrs. Hogendobber demanded.
“No, I let the lawyers do that. I’ve tried to wrestle some order out of the place though.”
“Pokeweeds,” the Reverend calmly said as he downed another scone.
“Is that what you call them?”
“In polite company.” Herbie laughed.
“Herbert, you are deliberately sidetracking this discussion, which, for the sake of the Historical Society of Greater Crozet, I must conduct.”
“Mrs. Hogendobber, if it means that much to you and the Historical Society, I will of course keep the name of Foxden.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Hogendobber hadn’t expected to win so easily. It rather disappointed her.
The Reverend Jones chuckled to himself that the Crozet Historical Society sometimes became the Crozet Hysterical Society but he was glad the old farm would keep its name.
Both gentlemen rose to go and she forgot to give Blair one of her pumpkins, a lesser specimen because she was saving the monster pumpkin for the Harvest Fair.
Blair walked with Reverend Jones to his church and then bade him goodbye, turning back to the post office. He passed a vagrant wearing old jeans and a baseball jacket and walking along the railroad track. The man appeared ageless; he could have been thirty or fifty. The sight startled him. Blair hadn’t expected to see someone like that in Crozet.
As Blair pushed open the post office door Tucker rushed out to greet him. Mrs. Murphy withheld judgment. Dogs needed affection and attention so much that in Mrs. Murphy’s estimation they could be fooled far more easily than a cat could be. If she’d given herself a minute to think, though, she would have had to admit she was being unfair to her best friend. Tucker’s feelings about people hit the bull’s-eye more often than not. Mrs. Murphy did allow herself a stretch on the counter and Blair came over to scratch her ears.
“Good afternoon, critters.”
They replied, as did Harry from the back room. “Sounds like my new neighbor. Check your box. You’ve got a pink package slip.”
As Blair slipped the key into the ornate post box he called out to Harry, “Is the package pink too?”
The sound of the package hitting the counter coincided with Blair’s shutting his box. A slap and a click. He snapped his fingers to add to the rhythm.
Harry drawled, “Musical?”
“Happy.”
“Good.” She shoved the package toward him.
“Mind if I open this?”
“No, you’ll satisfy my natural curiosity.” She leaned over as Little Marilyn Sanburne flounced through the door accompanied by her husband, who sported new horn-rimmed glasses. Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton devoured Esquire and GQ. The results were as one saw.
“A bum on the streets of Crozet!” Little Marilyn complained.
“What?”
Little Marilyn pointed. Harry came out from behind the counter to observe the scraggly, bearded fellow, his face in profile. She returned to her counter.
Fitz-Gilbert said, “Some people have bad luck.”
“Some people are lazy,” declared Little Marilyn, who had never worked a day in her life.
She bumped into Blair when she whirled around to behold the wanderer one more time.
“Sorry. Let me get out of your way.” Blair pushed his carton over to the side of the counter.
Harry began introductions.
Fitz-Gilbert stuck out his hand and heartily said, “Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton. Princeton, 1980.”
Blair blinked and then shook his hand. “Blair Bainbridge. Yale, 1979.”
That caught Fitz-Gilbert off guard for a moment. “Before that?”
“St. Paul’s,” came the even reply.
“Andover,” Fitz-Gilbert said.
“I bet you boys have friends in common,” Little Marilyn added—without interest, since the conversation was not about her.
“We’ll have to sit down over a brew and find out,” Fitz-Gilbert offered. He was genuinely friendly, while his wife was merely correct.
“Thank you. I’d enjoy that. I’m over at Foxden.”
“We know.” Little Marilyn added her two cents.
“Small town. Everybody knows everything.” Fitz-Gilbert laughed.
The Hamiltons left laden with mail and mail-order catalogues.
“Crozet’s finest.” Blair looked to Harry.
“They think so.” Harry saw no reason to disguise her assessment of Little Marilyn and her husband.
Mrs. Murphy hopped into Blair’s package.
“Why don’t you like them?” Blair inquired.
“It helps if you meet Momma. Big Marilyn—or Mim.”
“Big Marilyn?”
“I kid you not. You’ve just had the pleasure of meeting Little Marilyn. Her father is the mayor of Crozet and they have more money than God. She married Fitz-Gilbert a year or so ago in a social extravaganza on a par with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di. Didn’t Mrs. Hogendobber fill you in?”
“She allowed as how everyone here has a history which she would be delighted to relate, but the Reverend Jones interrupted her plans, I think.” Blair started to laugh. The townspeople were nothing if not amusing and he liked Harry. He had liked her right off the bat, a phrase that kept circling in his brain although he didn’t know why.
Harry noticed Mrs. Murphy rustling in Blair’s package. “Hey, hey, out of there, Miss Puss.”
In reply Mrs. Murphy scrunched farther down in the box. Only the tips of her ears showed.
Harry leaned over the box. “Scram.”
Mrs. Murphy meowed, a meow of consummate irritation.
Blair laughed. “What’d she say?”
“Don’t rain on my parade,” Harry replied, and to torment the cat she placed the box on the floor.
“No, she didn’t,” Tucker yelped. “She said, ‘Eat shit and die.’ ”
“Shut up, Fuckface,” Mrs. Murphy rumbled from the depths of the carton, the tissue paper crinkling in a manner most exciting to her ears.
Tucker, not one to be insulted, ran to the box and began pulling on the flap.
“Cut it out,” came the voice from within.
Now Tucker stopped and stuck her head in the box, cold nose right in Mrs. Murphy’s face. The cat jumped straight up out of the box, turned in midair, and grabbed on to the dog. Tucker stood still and Mrs. Murphy rolled under the dog’s belly. Then Tucker raced around the post office, the cat dangling underneath like a Sioux on the warpath.
Blair Bainbridge bent over double, he was laughing so hard.
Harry laughed too. “Small pleasures.”
“Not small—large indeed. I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so funny.”
Mrs. Murphy dropped off. Tucker raced back to the box. “I win.”
“Do you have anything fragile in there?” Harry asked.
“No. Some gardening tools.” He opened the box to show her. “I ordered this stuff for bulb planting. If I get right on it I think I can have a lovely spring.”
“I’ve got a tractor. It’s near to forty years old but it works just fine. Let me know when you need it.”
“Uh, well, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to drive one,” Blair confessed.
“Where are you from, Mr. Bainbridge?”
“New York City.”
Harry considered this. “Were you born there?”
“Yes, I was. I grew up on East Sixty-fourth.”
A Yankee. Harry decided not to give it another minute’s thought. “Well, I’ll teach you how to drive the tractor.”
“I’ll pay you for it.”
“Oh, Mr. Bainbridge.” Harry’s voice registered surprise. “This is Crozet. This is Virginia.” She paused and lowered her voice. “This is the South. Someday, something will turn up that you can do for me. Don’t say anything about money. Anyway, that’s what’s wrong with Little Marilyn and Fitz-Gilbert. Too much money.”
Blair laughed. “You think people can have too much money?”
“I do. Truly, I do.”
Blair Bainbridge spent the rest of the day and half the night thinking about that.
4
The doors of the Allied National Bank swung open and the vagrant breezed past Marion Molnar, past the tellers. Marion got up and followed this apparition as he strolled into Benjamin Seifert’s office and shut the door.
Ben, a rising star in the Allied National system, a protégé of bank president Cabell Hall, opened his mouth to say something just as Marion charged in behind the visitor.
“I want to see Cabell Hall,” he demanded.
“He’s at the main branch,” Marion said.
Protectively Ben rose and placed himself between the unwashed man and Marion. “I’ll take care of this.”
Marion hesitated, then returned to her desk as Ben closed the door. She couldn’t hear what was being said but the voices had a civil tone.
Within a few minutes Ben emerged with the man in the baseball jacket.
“I’m giving the gentleman a lift.” He winked at Marion and left.
5
The dew coated the grass as Harry, Mrs. Murphy, and Tucker walked along the railroad track. The night had been unusually warm again and the day promised to follow suit. The slanting rays of the morning drenched Crozet in bright hope—at least that’s how Harry thought of the morning.
As she passed the railroad station she saw Mrs. Hogendobber, little hand weights clutched in her fists, approaching from the opposite direction.
“Morning, Harry.”
“Morning, Mrs. H.” Harry waved as the determined figure huffed by, wearing an old sweater and a skirt below the knee. Mrs. Hogendobber felt strongly that women should not wear pants but she did concede to sneakers. Even her sister in Greenville, South Carolina, said it was all right to wear pants but Miranda declared that their dear mother had spent a fortune on cotillion. The least she could do for that parental sacrifice was to maintain her dignity as a lady.
Harry arrived at the door of the post office just as Rob Collier lurched up in the big mail truck. He grunted and hauled off the mail bags, complaining bitterly that gossip was thin at the main post office in Charlottesville, hopped back in the truck, and sped off.
As Harry was sorting the mail BoomBoom Craycroft sauntered in, her arrival lacking only triumphant fanfare. Unlike Mrs. Hogendobber she did wear pants, tight jeans in particular, and she was keen to wear T-shirts, or any top that would call attention to her bosom. She had developed early, in the sixth grade. The boys used to say, “Baboom, Baboom,” when she went sashaying past. Over the years this was abbreviated to BoomBoom. If her nickname bothered her no one could tell. She appeared delighted that her assets were now legend.
She did not appear delighted to see Harry.
“Good morning, BoomBoom.”
“Good morning, Harry. Anything for me?”
“I put it in the box. What brings you to town so early?”
“I’m getting up earlier now to catch as much light as I can. I suffer from seasonal affect disorder, you know, and winter depresses me.”
Harry, long accustomed to BoomBoom’s endless array of physical ills, enough to fill many medical books, couldn’t resist. “But BoomBoom, I thought you’d conquered that by removing dairy products from your diet.”
“No, that was for my mucus difficulty.”
“Oh.” Harry thought to herself that if BoomBoom had even half of the vividly described maladies she complained of, she’d be dead. That would be okay with Harry.
“We”—and by this BoomBoom meant herself and Harry’s ex-husband, Fair—“were at Mim’s last night. Little Marilyn and Fitz-Gilbert were there and we played Pictionary. You should see Mim go at it. She has to win, you know.”
“Did she?”
“We let her. Otherwise she wouldn’t invite us to her table at the Harvest Fair Ball this year. You know how she gets. But say, Little Marilyn and Fitz-Gilbert mentioned that they’d met this new man—‘divine looking’ was how Little Marilyn put it—and he’s your neighbor. A Yale man too. What would a Yale man do here? The South sends her sons to Princeton, so he must be a Yankee. I used to date a Yale man, Skull and Bones, which is ironic since I broke my ankle dancing with him.”
Harry thought calling that an irony was stretching it. What BoomBoom really wanted Harry to appreciate was that not only did she know a Yale man, she knew a Skull and Bones man—not Wolf’s Head or any of the other “lesser” secret societies, but Skull and Bones. Harry thought admission to Yale was enough of an honor; if one was tapped for a secret society, too, well, wonderful, but best to keep quiet about it. Then again, BoomBoom couldn’t keep quiet about anything.
Tucker yawned behind the counter. “Murph, jump in the mail cart.”
“Okay.” Mrs. Murphy wiggled her haunches and took a flying leap from the counter where she was eavesdropping on the veiled combat between the humans. She hit the mail cart dead center and it rolled across the back room, a metallic rattle to its wheels. Tucker barked as she ran alongside.
“Hey, you two.” Harry giggled.
“Well, I’ll be late for my low-impact aerobics class. Have a good day.” BoomBoom lied about the good day part and left.
BoomBoom attracted men. This only convinced Harry that the two sexes did not look at women in the same way. Maybe men and women came from different planets—at least that’s what Harry thought on her bad days. BoomBoom had attractive features and the celebrated big tits but Harry also saw that she was a hypochondriac of the first water, managing to acquire some dread malady whenever she was in danger of performing any useful labor.
Susan Tucker used to growl that BoomBoom never fucked anyone poor. Well, she’d broken that pattern with Fair Haristeen, and Harry knew that sooner or later BoomBoom would weary of not getting earrings from Cartier’s, vacations out of the country, and a new car whenever the mood struck her. Of course she had plenty of her own money to burn but that wasn’t as much fun as burning a hole in someone else’s pocket. She’d wait until she had a rich fellow lined up in her sights and then she’d dump Fair with lightning speed. Harry wanted to be a good enough person not to gloat when that moment occurred. However, she knew she wasn’t.
This reverie of delayed revenge was interrupted when Mim Sanburne strode into the post office. Sporting one of those boiled Austrian jackets and a jaunty hunter-green hat with a pheasant feather on her head, she might have come from the Tyrol. A pleasant thought if it meant she might blow back to the Tyrol.
“Harry.” Mim’s greeting was imperious.
“Mrs. Sanburne.”
Mim had a box with a low number, another confirmation of her status, since it had been in the family since the time postal service was first offered to Crozet. Her arms full of mail and glossy magazines, she dumped them on the counter. “Hear you’ve got a handsome beau.”
“I do?” came the surprised reply.
Mrs. Murphy jumped around in the mail bin as Tucker snapped from underneath at the moving blob in the canvas.
“My son-in-law, Fitz-Gilbert, said he recognized him, this Blair Bainbridge fellow. He’s a model. Seen him in Esquire, GQ, that sort of thing. Mind you, those models are a little funny, you know what I mean?”
“No, Mrs. Sanburne, I really don’t.”
“Well, I’m trying to protect you, Harry. Those pretty boys marry women but they prefer men, if I have to be blunt.”
“First off, I’m not dating him.”
This genuinely disappointed Mim. “Oh.”
“Secondly, I have no idea as to his sexual preference but he seems nice enough and for now I will take him at face value. Thirdly, I’m taking a vacation from men.”
Mim airily circled her hand over her head, a dramatic gesture for her. “That’s what every woman says until she meets the next man, and there is a next man. They’re like streetcars—there’s always one coming around the corner.”
“That’s an interesting thought.” Harry smiled.
Mim’s voice hit the “important information” register. “You know, dear, BoomBoom will tire of Fair. When he comes to his senses, take him back.”
As everyone had her nose in everyone else’s business, this unsolicited, intimate advice from the mayor’s wife didn’t offend Harry. “I couldn’t possibly do that.”
A knowing smile spread across the carefully made-up face. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” With that sage advice Mim started for the door, stopped, turned, grabbed her mail and magazines off the counter, and left for good.
Harry folded her arms across her chest, a respectable chest, too, and looked at her animals. “Girls, people say the damnedest things.”
Mrs. Murphy called out from the mail bin, “Mim’s a twit. Who cares? Gimme a push.”
“You look pretty comfortable in there.” Harry grabbed the corner of the mail bin and merrily rolled Mrs. Murphy across the post office as Tucker yapped with excitement.
Susan dashed through the back door, beheld the fun, and put Tucker in another mail bin. “Race you!”
By the time they’d exhausted themselves they heard a scratching at the back door, opened it, and in strolled Pewter. So, with a grunt, Harry picked up the gray cat, placed her in Mrs. Murphy’s cart, and rolled the two cats at the same time. She crashed into Susan and Tucker.
Pewter, miffed, reached up and grabbed the edge of the mail bin with her paws. She was going to leap out when Mrs. Murphy yelled, “Stay in, wimp.”
Pewter complied by jumping onto the tiger cat, and the two rolled all over each other, meowing with delight as the mail bin races resumed.
“Wheee!” Susan added sound effects.
“Hey, let’s go out the back door and race up the alley,” Harry challenged.
“Yeah, yeah!” came the animals’ thrilled replies.
Harry opened the back door, she and Susan carefully lifted the mail bins over the steps, and soon they were ripping and tearing up and down the little alleyway. Market Shiflett saw them when he was taking out the garbage and encouraged them to run faster. Mrs. Hogendobber, shading her eyes, looked up from her pumpkins. Smiling, she shook her head and resumed her labors.
Finally, the humans pooped out. They slowly rolled the bins back to the post office.
“How come people forget stuff like this when they get older?” Susan asked.
“Who knows?” Harry laughed as she watched Mrs. Murphy and Pewter sitting together in the bin.
“Wonder why we still play?” Susan thought out loud.
“Because we discovered that the secret of youth is arrested development.” Harry punched Susan in the shoulder. “Ha.”
The entire day unfolded with laughter, sunshine, and high spirits. That afternoon, as Harry revved up the ancient tractor Blair Bainbridge drove up the driveway in his dually. Would she come over to his place and look at the old iron cemetery fence?
So Harry chugged down the road, Mrs. Murphy in her lap, and Tucker riding with Blair. Harry pulled up the fallen-down fence while Blair put concrete blocks around it to hold it until he could secure post corners. Working alongside Blair was fun. Harry felt closest to people when working with them or playing games. Blair wasn’t afraid to get dirty, which she found surprising for a city boy. Guess she surprised him too. She advised him on how to rehabilitate his stable, how to pack the stalls, and how to hang subzero fluorescent lights.
“Why not use incandescent lights?” Blair asked. “It’s prettier.”
“And a whole lot more expensive. Why spend money when you don’t have to?” She pushed her blue Giants cap back on her head.
“Well, I like things to look just so.”
“Hang the subzeros high up in the spine of your roof and then put regular lighting along the shed row, with metal guards over it. Otherwise you’ll be picking glass out of your horses’ heads. That’s if you have to have, just have to have, incandescent lights.”
Blair wiped his hands on his jeans. “Guess I look pretty stupid.”
“No, you need to learn about the country. I wouldn’t know what to do in New York City.” She paused. “Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton says you’re a model. Are you?”
“From time to time.”
“Out of work?”
Harry’s innocence about his field amused him and somehow made her endearing to him. “Not exactly. I can fly to a shoot. I just don’t want to live in New York anymore and, well, I don’t want to do that kind of work forever. The money is great but it’s not . . . fitting.”
Harry shrugged. “If a guy’s as handsome as you are he might as well make money off of it.”
Blair roared. He wasn’t used to women being so direct with him. They were too busy flirting and wanting to be his date at the latest social event. “Harry, are you always so, uh, forthright?”
“I guess.” Harry smiled. “But, hey, if you don’t like that kind of work I hope you find something you do like.”
“I’d like to breed horses.”
“Mr. Bainbridge, three words of advice. Don’t do it.” His face just fell. She hastened to add, “It’s a money suck. You’d do better buying yearlings or older horses and making them. Truly. Sometime we can sit down and talk this over. I’ve got to get back home before the light goes. I’ve got to run the manure spreader and pull out a fence post.”
“You helped me—I’ll help you.” Blair didn’t know that “making a horse” meant breaking and training the animal. He had asked so many questions he decided he’d give Harry a break. He’d ask someone else what the phrase meant.
They rode back to Harry’s. This time Mrs. Murphy rode with Blair and Tucker rode with Harry.
As Mrs. Murphy sat quietly in the passenger seat she focused on Blair. An engaging odor from his body curled around her nostrils, a mixture of natural scent, a hint of cologne, and sweat. He smiled as he drove along. She could feel his happiness. What was even better, he spoke to her as though she were an intelligent creature. He told her she was a very pretty kitty. She purred. He said he knew she was a champion mouser, he could just tell, and that once he settled in he would ask her about finding a cat or two for him. Nothing sadder on this earth than a human being without a cat. She added trills to her purrs.
By the time they turned into Harry’s driveway Mrs. Murphy felt certain that she had totally charmed Blair, although it was the other way around.
The fence post proved stubborn but they finally got it out. The manure spreading would wait until tomorrow because the sun had set and there was no moon to work by. Harry invited Blair into her kitchen and made a pot of Jamaican Blue coffee.
“Harry,” he teased her, “I thought you were frugal. This stuff costs a fortune.”
“I save my money for my pleasures,” Harry replied.
As they drank the coffee and ate the few biscuits Harry had, she told him about the MacGregors and the Joneses, the history of Foxden as she knew it, and the history of Crozet, named for Claudius Crozet, also as she knew it.
“Tell me something else.” He leaned forward, his warm hazel eyes lighting up. “Why does everyone’s farm have fox in its name? Fox Covert, Foxden, Fox Hollow, Red Fox, Gray Fox, Wily Fox, Fox Haven, Fox Ridge, Fox Run”—he inhaled—“Foxcroft, Fox Hills, Foxfield, Fox—”
“How about Dead Fox Farm?” Harry filled in.
“No way. You’re making that up.”
“Yeah.” Harry burst out laughing and Blair laughed along with her.
He left for home at nine-thirty, whistling as he drove. Harry washed up the dishes and tried to remember when she’d enjoyed a new person quite so much.
The cat and dog curled up together and wished humans could grasp the obvious. Harry and Blair were meant for each other. They wondered how long it would take them to figure it out and who, if anybody, would get in the way. People made such a mess of things.
6
The balmy weather held for another three days, much to the delight of everyone in Crozet. Mim lost no time in leaning on Little Marilyn to invite Blair Bainbridge to her house, during which time Mim just happened to stop by. She deeply regretted that Blair was too young for her and said so quite loudly, but this was a tack Mim usually took with handsome men. Her husband, Jim, laughed at her routine.
Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton’s den struck Blair as a hymn to Princeton. How much orange and black could anyone stand? Fitz-Gilbert made a point of showing Blair his crew picture. He even showed him his squash picture from Andover Academy. Blair asked him what had happened to his hair, which Fitz-Gilbert took as a reference to his receding hairline. Blair hastily assured him that was not what he’d meant; he’d noticed that the young Fitz-Gilbert was blond. Little Marilyn giggled and said that in school her husband dyed his hair. Fitz-Gilbert blustered and said that all the guys did it—it didn’t mean anything.
The upshot of this conversation was that the following morning Fitz-Gilbert appeared in the post office with blond hair. Harry stared at the thatch of gold above his homely face and decided the best course would be to mention it.
“Determined to live life as a blond, Fitz? Big Marilyn must be wearing off on you.”
Mim flew to New York City once every six weeks to have her hair done and God knows what else.
“Last night my wife decided, after looking through my yearbooks, that I look better as a blond. What do you think? Do blonds have more fun?”
Harry studied the effect. “You look very preppy. I think you’d have fun whatever your hair color.”
“I could never have done this in Richmond. That law firm.” He put his hands around his neck in a choking manner. “Now that I’ve opened my own firm I can do what I want. Feels great. I know I do better work now too.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if I had to dress up for work.”
“Worse than that, you couldn’t take the cat and dog to work with you,” Fitz-Gilbert observed. “You know, I don’t think people were meant to work in big corporations. Look at Cabell Hall, leaving Chase Manhattan for Allied National years ago. After a while the blandness of a huge corporation will diminish even the brightest ones. That’s what I like so much about Crozet. It’s small; the businesses are small; people are friendly. At first I didn’t know how I’d take the move from Richmond. I thought it might be dull.” He smiled. “Hard for life to be dull around the Sanburnes.”
Harry smiled back but wisely kept her mouth shut. He left, squeezing his large frame into his Mercedes 560SL, and roared off. Fitz and Little Marilyn owned the pearlized black SL, a white Range Rover, a silver Mercedes 420SEL, and a shiny Chevy half-ton truck with four-wheel drive.
As the day unfurled the temperature dropped a good fifteen to twenty degrees. Roiling black clouds massed at the tips of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The rain started before Harry left work. Mrs. Hogendobber kindly ran Harry back home although she complained about having Mrs. Murphy and Tucker in her car, an ancient Ford Falcon. She also complained about the car. This familiar theme—Mrs. Hogendobber had been complaining about her car since George bought it new in 1963—lulled Harry into a sleepy trance.
“. . . soon time for four more tires and I ask myself, Miranda, is it worth it? I think, trade this thing in, and then I go over to the Brady-Bushey Ford car lot and peruse those prices and, well, Harry, I tell you, my heart fairly races. Who can afford a new car? So it’s patch, patch, patch. Well, would you look at that!” she exclaimed. “Harry, are you awake? Have I been talking to myself? Look there, will you.”
“Huh.” Harry’s eyes traveled in the direction of Mrs. Hogendobber’s pointing finger.
A large sign swung on a new post. The background was hunter-green, the sign itself was edged in gold, and the lettering was gold. A fox peered out from its den. Above this realistic painting it read FOXDEN.
“That must have cost a pretty penny.” Mrs. Hogendobber sounded disapproving.
“Wasn’t there this morning.”
“This Bainbridge fellow must have money to burn if he can put up a sign like that. Next thing you know he’ll put up stone fences, and the cheapest, I mean the cheapest, you can get for that work is thirty dollars a cubic foot.”
“Don’t spend his money for him yet. A pretty sign doesn’t mean he’s going to go crazy and put all his goods in the front window, so to speak.”
As they pulled into the long driveway leading to Harry’s clapboard house, she asked Miranda Hogendobber in for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hogendobber refused. She had a church club meeting to attend and furthermore she knew Harry had chores. Given the continuing drop in the temperature and the pitch clouds sliding down the mountain as though on an inky toboggan ride, Harry was grateful. Mrs. H. peeled down the driveway and Harry hurried into the barn, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker way in front of her.
Her heavy barn jacket hung on a tack hook. Harry threw it on, tugged off her sneakers and slipped on duck boots, and slapped her Giants cap on her head. Grabbing the halters and lead shanks, she walked out into the west pasture just in time to get hit in the face with slashing rain. Mrs. Murphy stayed in the barn but Tucker went along.
Tomahawk and Gin Fizz, glad to see their mother, trotted over. Soon the little family was back in the barn. Picking up the tempo, the rain pelted the tin roof. A stiff wind knifed down from the northeast.
As Harry mixed bran with hot water and measured out sweet feed, Mrs. Murphy prowled the hayloft. Since everyone had made so much noise getting into the barn, the mice were forewarned. The big old barn owl perched in the rafters. Mrs. Murphy disliked the owl and this was mutual, since they competed for the mice. However, harsh words were rarely spoken. They had adopted a live-and-let-live policy.
A little pink nose, whiskers bristling, stuck out from behind a bale of timothy. “Mrs. Murphy.”
“Simon, what are you doing here?” Mrs. Murphy’s tail went to the vertical.
“Storm came up fast. You know, I’ve been thinking, this would be a good place to spend the winter. I don’t think your human would mind, do you?”
“As long as you stay out of the grain I doubt she’ll care. Watch out for the blacksnake.”
“She’s already hibernating . . . or she’s playing possum.” Simon’s whiskers twitched devilishly.
“Where?”
Simon indicated that the formidable four-foot-long blacksnake was curled up under the hay on the south side of the loft, the warmest place.
“God, I hope Harry doesn’t pick up the bale and see her. Give her heart failure.” Mrs. Murphy walked over. She could see the tip of a tail—that was it.
She came back and sat beside Simon.
“The owl really hates the blacksnake,” Simon observed.
“Oh, she’s cranky about everything.”
“Who?”
“You,” Mrs. Murphy called up.
“I am not cranky but you’re always climbing up here and shooting off your big mouth. Scares the mice.”
“It’s too early for you to hunt.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that you have a big mouth.” The owl ruffed her feathers, then simply turned her head away. She could swivel her gorgeous head around nearly 360 degrees, and that fascinated the other animals. Four-legged creatures had a narrow point of view as far as the owl was concerned.
Mrs. Murphy and Simon giggled and then the cat climbed back down the ladder.
By the time Harry was finished, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker eagerly scampered to the house.
Next door, Blair, cold and soaked to the skin, also ran into his house. He’d been caught by the rain a good half-mile away from shelter.
By the time he dried off, the sky was obsidian with flashes of pinkish-yellow lightning, an unusual fall thunderstorm. As he went into the kitchen to heat some soup, a deafening crack and blinding pink light knocked him back a foot. When he recovered he saw smoke coming out of the transformer box on the pole next to his house. The bolt had squarely hit the transformer. Electric crackles continued for a few moments and then died away.
Blair kept rubbing his eyes. They burned. The house was now black and he hadn’t any candles. There was so much to do to settle in that he hadn’t gotten around to buying candles or a lantern yet, much less furniture.
He thought about going over to Harry’s but decided against it, because he was afraid he’d look like a wuss.
As he stared out his kitchen window another terrifying bolt of lightning hurtled toward the ground and struck a tree halfway between his house and the graveyard. For a brief moment he thought he saw a lone figure standing in the cemetery. Then the darkness again enshrouded everything and the wind howled like Satan.
Blair shivered, then laughed at himself. His stinging eyes were playing tricks on him. What was a thunderstorm but part of Nature’s brass and percussion?
7
Tree limbs lay on the meadows like arms and legs torn from their sockets. As Harry prowled her fence lines she could smell the sap mixed in with the soggy earth odor. She hadn’t time to inspect the fifty acres in hardwoods. She figured whole trees might have been uprooted, for as she had lain awake last night, mesmerized by the violence of the storm, she could hear, off in the distance like a moaning, the searing cracks and crashes of trees falling to their deaths. The good news was that no trees around the house had been uprooted and the barn and outbuildings remained intact.
“I hate getting wet,” Mrs. Murphy complained, pulling her paws high up in the air and shaking them every few steps.
“Go back to the house then, fussbudget.” This exaggerated fastidiousness of Mrs. Murphy’s amused and irritated Tucker. There was nothing like a joyous splash in the creek, a romp in the mud, or if she was really lucky, a roll in something quite dead, to lift Tucker’s corgi spirits. And as she was low to the ground, she felt justified in getting dirty. It would be different if she were a Great Dane. Many things would be different if she were a Great Dane. For one thing, she could just ignore Mrs. Murphy with magisterial dignity. As it was, trying to ignore Mrs. Murphy meant the cat would tiptoe around and whack her on the ears. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Mrs. Murphy try that if she were a Great Dane?
“What if something important happens? I can’t leave.” Mrs. Murphy shook mud off her paw and onto Harry’s pants leg. “Anyway, three sets of eyes are better than one.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a raft.”
The dog and cat stopped and looked in the direction of Harry’s gaze. The creek between her farm and Foxden had jumped its banks, sweeping everything before it. Mud, grass, tree limbs, and an old tire that must have washed down from Yellow Mountain had crashed into the trees lining the banks. Some debris had become entangled; the rest was shooting downstream at a frightening rate of speed. Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened. The roar of the water scared her.
As Harry started toward the creek she sank up to her ankle in trappy ground. Thinking the better of it, she backed off.
The leaden sky overhead offered no hope of relief. Cursing, her foot cold and wet, Harry squished back to the barn. She thought of her mother, who used to say that we all live in a perpetual state of renewal. “You must realize there is renewal in destruction, too, Harry,” she would say.
As a child Harry couldn’t figure out what her mother was talking about. Grace Hepworth Minor was the town librarian, so Harry used to chalk it up to Mom’s reading too many touchy-feely books. As the years wore on, her mother’s wisdom often came back to her. A sight such as this, so dispiriting at first, gave one the opportunity to rebuild, to prune, to fortify.
How she regretted her mother’s passing, for she would have liked to discuss emotional renewal in destruction. Her divorce was teaching her that.
Tucker, noticing the silence of her mother, the pensive air, said, “Human beings think too much.”
“Or not at all” was the saucy feline reply.
8
The rain picked up again midmorning. Steady rather than torrential, it did little to lighten anyone’s spirits. Mrs. Hogendobber’s beautiful red silk umbrella was the bright spot of the day. That and her conversation. She felt it incumbent upon her to call up everyone in Crozet who had a phone still working and inquire as to their well-being. She learned of Blair’s transformer’s being blown apart. The windows of the Allied National Bank were smashed. The shingles of Herbie Jones’s church littered the downtown street. Susan Tucker’s car endured a tree branch on its roof, and horror of horrors, Mim’s pontoon boat, her pride and joy, had been cast on its side. Worst of all, her personal lake was a muddy mess.
“Did I leave anything out?”
Harry cleaned out the letters and numbers in her postage meter with the sharp end of a safety pin. They’d gotten clogged with maroon ink. “Your prize pumpkin?”
“Oh, I brought her in last night.” Mrs. Hogendobber grabbed the broom and started sweeping the dried mud out the front door.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to but I used to do this for George. Makes me feel useful.” The clods of earth soared out into the parking lot. “Weatherman says three more days of rain.”
“If the animals go two by two, you know we’re in trouble.”
“Harry, don’t make light of the Old Testament. The Lord doesn’t shine on blasphemers.”
“I’m not blaspheming.”
“I thought maybe I’d scare you into going to church.” A sly smile crossed Mrs. Hogendobber’s lips, colored a bronzed orange today.
Fair Haristeen came in, wiped off his boots, and answered Mrs. Hogendobber. “Harry goes to church for weddings, christenings, and funerals. Says Nature is her church.” He smiled at his former wife.
“Yes, it is.” Harry was glad he was okay. No storm damage.
“Bridge washed out at Little Marilyn’s and at BoomBoom’s, too. Hard to believe the old creek can do that much damage.”
“Guess they’ll have to stay on their side of the water,” Mrs. Hogendobber said.
“Guess so.” Fair smiled. “Unless Moses returns.”
“I know what I forgot to tell you,” Mrs. Hogendobber exclaimed, ignoring the biblical reference. “The cat ate all the communion wafers!”
“Cazenovia at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church?” Fair asked.
“Yes, do you know her?” Mrs. H. spoke as though the animal were a parishioner.
“Cleaned her teeth last year.”
“Has she gotten in the wine?” Harry laughed.
Mrs. Hogendobber struggled not to join in the mirth—after all, the bread and wine were the body and blood of our Lord Jesus—but there was something funny about a cat taking communion.
“Harry, want to have lunch with me?” Fair asked.
“When?” She absentmindedly picked up a ballpoint pen, which had been lying on the counter, and stuck it behind her ear.
“Now. It’s noon.”
“I barely noticed, it’s so dark outside.”
“Go on, Harry, I’ll hold down the fort,” Mrs. Hogendobber offered. Divorce troubled her and the Haristeen divorce especially, since both parties were decent people. She didn’t understand growing apart because she and George had stayed close throughout their long marriage. Of course it helped that if she said, “Jump,” George replied, “How high?”
“Want to bring the kids?” Fair nodded toward the animals.
“Do, Harry. Don’t you leave me with that hoyden of a cat. She gets in the mail bins and when I walk by she jumps out at me and grabs my skirt. Then the dog barks. Harry, you’ve got to discipline those two.”
“Oh, balls.” Tucker sneezed.
“Why do people say ‘balls’? Why don’t they say ‘ovaries’?” Mrs. Murphy asked out loud.
No one had an answer, so she allowed herself to be picked up and whisked to the deli.
The conversation between Fair and Harry proved desultory at best. Questions about his veterinary practice were dutifully answered. Harry spoke of the storm. They laughed about Fitz-Gilbert’s blond hair and then truly laughed about Mim’s pontoon boat taking a lick. Mim and that damned boat had caused more uproar over the years—from crashing into the neighbors’ docks to nearly drowning Mim and the occupants. To be invited onto her “little yacht,” as she mincingly called it, was surely a siren call to disaster. Yet to refuse meant banishment from the upper echelon of Crozet society.
As the laughter subsided, Fair, wearing his most earnest face, said, “I wish you and BoomBoom could be friends again. You all were friends once.”
“I don’t know as I’d say we were friends.” Harry warily put down her plastic fork. “We socialized together when Kelly was alive. We got along, I guess.”
“She understands why you wouldn’t want to be friends with her but it hurts her. She talks tough but she’s very sensitive.” He picked up the Styrofoam cup and swallowed some hot coffee.
Harry wanted to reply that she was very sensitive about herself and not others, and besides, what about her feelings? Maybe he should talk to BoomBoom about her sensitivities. She realized that Fair was snagged, hook, line, and sinker. BoomBoom was reeling him into her emotional demands, which, like her material demands, were endless. Maybe men needed women like BoomBoom to feel important. Until they dropped from exhaustion.
As Harry kept quiet, Fair haltingly continued: “I wish things had worked out differently and yet maybe I don’t. It was time for us.”
“Guess so.” Harry twiddled with her ballpoint pen.
“I don’t hold grudges. I hope you don’t.” His blond eyebrows shielded his blue eyes.
Harry’d been looking into those eyes since kindergarten. “Easier said than done. Whenever women want to discuss emotions men become more rational, or at least you do. I can’t just wipe out our marriage and say let’s be friends, and I’m not without ego. I wish we had parted differently, but done is done. I’d rather think good of you than ill.”
“Well, what about BoomBoom then?”
“Where is she?” Harry deflected the question for a moment.
“Bridge washed out.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Once the water goes down she’ll find a place to ford.”
“Least the phone lines are good. I spoke to her this morning. She has a terrible migraine. You know how low pressure affects her.”
“To say nothing of garlic.”
“Right.” Fair remembered when BoomBoom was rushed to the hospital once after ingesting the forbidden garlic.
“And then we can’t forget the rheumatism in her spine on these cold, dank days. Or her tendency to heat prostration, especially when any form of work befalls her.” Harry smiled broadly, the smile of victory.
“Don’t make fun of her. You know what a tough family life she had. I mean with that alcoholic father and her mother just having affair after affair.”
“Well, she comes by it honestly then.” Harry reached over with her ballpoint pen, jabbed a hole in the Styrofoam cup, and turned it around so the liquid dribbled onto Fair’s cords. She got up and walked out, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker hastily following.
Fair, fuming, sat there and wiped the coffee off his pants with his left hand while trying to stem the flow from the cup with his right.
9
The creek swirled around the larger rocks, small whirlpools forming, then dispersing. Tucker paced the bank, slick with mud deposits. The waters had subsided and were back within their boundaries but remained high with a fast current. A mist hung over the meadows and the trees, now bare, since the pounding rains had knocked off most of the brilliant fall foliage.
High in the hayloft Mrs. Murphy watched her friend through a crack in the boards. When she lost sight of Tucker she gave up her conversation with Simon to hurry backward down the ladder. Cursing under her breath, she surrendered hope of keeping dry and ran across the fields. Water splashed up on her creamy beige belly, exacerbating her bad mood. Tucker could do the dumbest things. By the time Mrs. Murphy reached the creek the corgi was right in the middle of it, teetering on the tip of a huge rock.
“Get back here,” Mrs. Murphy demanded.
“No,” Tucker refused. “Sniff.”
Mrs. Murphy held her nose up in the air. “I smell mud, sap, and stale water.”
“It’s the faintest whiff. Sweet and then it disappears. I’ve got to find it.”
“What do you mean, sweet?” Mrs. Murphy swished her tail.
“Damn, I lost it.”
“Tucker, you’ve got short little legs—swimming in this current isn’t a smart idea.”
“I’ve got to find that odor.” With that she pushed off the rock, hit the water, and pulled with all her might. The muddy water swept over her head. She popped up again, swimming on an angle toward the far shore.
Mrs. Murphy screeched and screamed but Tucker paid no heed. By the time the corgi reached the bank she was so tired she had to rest for a moment. But the scent was slightly stronger now. Standing up on wobbly legs, she shook herself and laboriously climbed the mudslide that was the creek bank.
“Are you all right?” the cat called.
“Yes.”
“I’m staying right here until you come back.”
“All right.” Tucker scrambled over the bank and sniffed again. She got her bearings and trotted across Blair Bainbridge’s land. The scent increased in power with each step. Tucker pulled up at the little cemetery.
The high winds had knocked over the tombstones Blair had righted, and the bad side of the wrought-iron fence had crashed down again. Carefully, the dog picked her way through the debris in the cemetery. The scent was now crystal clear and enticing, very enticing.
Nose to the ground, she walked over to the tombstone with the carved angel playing the harp. The fingers of a human hand pointed at the sky in front of the stone. The violence of the wind and rain had sheared off the loose topsoil; a section was rolled back like a tiny carpet. Tucker sniffed that too. When she and Mrs. Murphy passed the graveyard last week there was no enticing scent, no apparent change in the topsoil. The odor of decay, exhilarating to a dog, overcame her curiosity about the turf. She dug at the hand. Soon the whole hand was visible. She bit into the fleshy, swollen palm and tugged. The hand easily pulled out of the ground. Then she noticed that it had been severed at the wrist, a clean job of it, too, and the finger pads were missing.
Ecstatic with her booty, forgetting how tired she was, Tucker flew across the bog to the creek. She stopped because she was afraid to plunge into the creek. She didn’t want to lose her pungent prize.
Mrs. Murphy, transfixed by the sight, was speechless.
Tucker delicately laid down the hand. “I knew it! I knew I smelled something deliciously dead.”
“Tucker, don’t chew on that.” Mrs. Murphy was disgusted.
“Why not? I found it. I did the work. It’s mine!” She barked, high-pitched because she was excited and upset.
“I don’t want the hand, Tucker, but it’s a bad omen.”
“No, it’s not. Remember the time Harry read to us about a dog bringing a hand to Vespasian when he was a general and the seers interpreting this to mean that he would be Emperor of Rome and he was? It’s a good sign.”
Mrs. Murphy dimly remembered Harry’s reading aloud from one of her many history books but that was hardly her main concern. “Listen to me. Humans put their dead in boxes. You know that if you found a hand it means the body wasn’t packaged.”
“So what? It’s my hand!” Tucker hollered at the top of her lungs, although with a moment to reflect she knew that Mrs. Murphy was right. Humans didn’t cut up their dead.
“Tucker, if you destroy that hand then you’ve destroyed evidence. You’re going to be in a shitload of trouble and you’ll get Mother in trouble.”
Dejected, Tucker squatted down next to the treasured hand, a gruesome sight. “But it’s mine.”
“I’m sorry. But something’s wrong, don’t you see?”
“No.” Her voice was fainter now.
“A dead human not in a box means either he or she was ill and died far away from others or that he or she was murdered. The other humans have to know this. You know how they are, Tucker. Some of them kill for pleasure. It’s dangerous for the others.”
Tucker sat up. “Why are they like that?”
“I don’t know and they don’t know. It’s some sickness in the species. You know, like dogs pass parvo. Please, Tucker, don’t mess up that evidence. Let me go get Mother if I can. Promise me you’ll wait.”
“It might take her hours to figure out what you’re telling her.”
“I know. You’ve got to wait.”
One miserable dog cocked her head and sighed. “All right, Murphy.”
Mrs. Murphy skimmed across the pastures, her feet barely grazing the sodden earth. She found Harry in the bed of the truck. Nimbly Mrs. Murphy launched herself onto the truck bed. She meowed. She rubbed against Harry’s leg. She meowed louder.
“Hey, little pussycat, I’ve got work to do.”
The twilight was fading. Mrs. Murphy was getting desperate. “Follow me, Mom. Come on. Right now.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Harry was puzzled.
Mrs. Murphy hooted and hollered as much as she could. Finally she sprang up and dug her claws into Harry’s jeans, climbing up her leg. Harry yelped and Mrs. Murphy jumped off her leg and ran a few paces. Harry rubbed her leg. Mrs. Murphy ran back and prepared to climb the other leg.
“Don’t you dare!” Harry held out her hand.
“Then follow me, stupid.” Mrs. Murphy moved away from her again.
Finally, Harry did. She didn’t know what was going on but she’d lived with Mrs. Murphy for seven years, long enough and close enough to learn a little bit of cat ways.
The cat hurried across the meadow. When Harry slowed down, Mrs. Murphy would run back and then zip away again, encouraging her constantly. Harry picked up speed.
When Tucker saw them coming she started barking.
Breathing hard, Harry stopped at the bank. “Oh, damn, Tucker, how’d you get over there.”
“Look!” the cat shouted.
“Mommy, I found it and it’s mine. If I have to give this up I want a knuckle bone,” Tucker bargained. She picked up the hand in her mouth.
It took Harry a minute to focus in the fading light. At first, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Then she did.
“Oh, my God.”
10
Albemarle County Sheriff Rick Shaw bent down with his flashlight. Officer Cynthia Cooper, already hunkered down, gingerly lifted the digits with her pocket knife.
“Never seen anything like this,” Shaw muttered. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
The sheriff battled his smoking addiction with disappointing results. Worse, Cooper had begun to sneak cigarettes herself.
Tucker sat staring at the hand. Blair Bainbridge, feeling a little queasy, and Harry stood beside Tucker. Mrs. Murphy rested across Harry’s neck. Her feet were cold and she was tired, so Harry had slung her around her neck like a stole.
“Harry, any idea where this came from?”
“I know,” Tucker volunteered.
“Like I said, the dog was sitting on the creek bank with this hand. I ran back home and called, then hopped in the truck to meet you. I don’t know any more than that.”
“What about you, uh . . .”
“Blair Bainbridge.”
“Mr. Bainbridge, notice anything unusual? Before this, I mean?”
“No.”
Rick grunted when he stood up. Cynthia Cooper wrapped the hand in a plastic bag.
“If you follow me, I can show you!” Tucker yapped and ran toward the cemetery.
“She’s got a lot to say.” Cynthia smiled. She loved the little dog and the cat.
Shaw inhaled, then exhaled a long blue line of smoke, which didn’t curl upward. Most likely meant more rain.
Tucker sat by the graveyard and howled.
“I, for one, am going to see what she’s about.” Harry followed her dog.
“Me too.” Cynthia followed, carrying the hand in its bag.
Rick grumbled but his curiosity was up. Blair stayed with him. When the humans reached the iron fence Tucker barked again and walked over to the angel with the harp tombstone. Cooper flung her flashlight beam over toward Tucker.
“Right here,” Tucker instructed.
Harry squinted. “Coop, you’d better check this out.”
Again Cynthia got down on her knees. Tucker dug in the dirt. She hit a pocket of air and the unmistakable odor of rotten flesh smacked Cynthia in the face. The young woman reeled backward and fought her gag reflex.
Rick Shaw, now beside her, turned his head aside. “Guess we’ve got work to do.”
Blair, ashen-faced, said, “Would you like me to go back to the barn and get a spade?”
“No, thank you,” the sheriff said. “I think we’ll post a man out here tonight and start this in daylight. I don’t want to take the chance of destroying evidence because we can’t see.”
As they walked back to the squad car Blair halted and turned to the sheriff, now on another cigarette. “I did see something. The night of the storm my transformer was hit by lightning. I didn’t have any candles and I was standing by my kitchen window.” He pointed to the window. “Another big bolt shot down and split that tree and for an instant I thought I saw someone standing up here in the cemetery. I dismissed it. It didn’t seem possible.”
Shaw wrote this down quickly in his small notebook as Coop called for a backup to watch the graveyard.
Harry wanted to make a crack about the graveyard shift but kept her mouth shut. Whenever things were grim her sense of humor kicked into high gear.
“Mr. Bainbridge, you’re not planning on leaving anytime soon, are you?”
“No.”
“Good. I might need to ask you more questions.” Rick leaned against the car. “I’ll call Herbie Jones. It’s his cemetery. Harry, why don’t you go home and eat something? It’s past suppertime and you looked peaked.”
“Lost my appetite,” Harry replied.
“Yeah, me too. You never get used to this kind of thing, you know.” The sheriff patted her on the back.
When Harry walked in the door she picked up the phone and called Susan. As soon as that conversation was finished she called Miranda Hogendobber. For Miranda, being the last to know would be almost as awful as finding the hand.
11
At first light a team of two men began carefully turning over the earth by the tombstone with the harp-playing angel. Larry Johnson, the retired elderly physician, acted as Crozet’s coroner—an easy job, as there was generally precious little to do. He watched, as did Reverend Herbie Jones. Rick Shaw and Cynthia Cooper carefully sifted through the spadefuls of earth the men turned over. Harry and Blair stayed back at the fence. Miranda Hogendobber pulled up in her Falcon, bounded out of the car, and strode toward the graveyard.
“Harry, you called Miranda. Don’t deny it, I know you did,” Rick fussed.
“Well . . . she has an interesting turn of mind.”
“Oh, please.” Rick shook his head.
“Pay dirt.” One of the diggers pulled his handkerchief up around his nose.
“I got it. I got it.” The other digger reached down and gently extricated a leg.
Miranda Hogendobber reached the hill at that moment, took one look at the decaying leg, wearing torn pants and with the foot still in a sneaker, and passed out.
“She’s your responsibility!” Rick pointed his forefinger at Harry.
Harry knew he was right. She hurried over to Mrs. Hogendobber and, assisted by Blair, hoisted her up. She began to come around. Not knowing what another look at the grisly specimen might do, they remonstrated with her. She resisted but then walked down to Blair’s house supported by the two of them.
The police continued their work and discovered another hand, the fingertip pads also removed, and another leg, which, like its companion, had been cleaved where the thighbone joins the pelvis.
By noon, after sifting and digging for five hours, Rick called a halt to the proceedings.
“Want us to start in on these other graves?”
“As the ground is not disturbed I wish you wouldn’t.” Reverend Jones stepped in. “Let them rest in peace.”
Rick wiped his forehead. “Reverend, I can appreciate the sentiment but if we need to come back up here . . . well, you know.”
“I know, but you’re standing on my mother.” A hint of reproach crept into Herb’s resonant voice. He was more upset than he realized.
“I’m sorry.” Rick quickly moved. “Go back to work, Reverend. I’ll be in touch.”
“Who would do that?” Herbie pointed to the stinking evidence.
“Murder?” Cynthia Cooper opened her hands, palms up, “Seemingly average people commit murder. Happens every day.”
“No, who would cut up a human being like that?” The minister’s eyes were moist.
“I don’t know,” Rick replied. “But whoever did it took great pains to remove identifying evidence.”
After the good Reverend left, the four law enforcement officials walked a bit away from the smell and conferred among themselves. Where was the torso and where was the head?
They’d find out soon enough.
12
The starch in Tiffany Hayes’s apron rattled as she approached the table. Little Marilyn, swathed in a full-length purple silk robe, sat across from Fitz-Gilbert, dressed for work. The pale-pink shirt and the suspenders completed a carefully thought-out ensemble.
Tiffany put down the eggs, bacon, grits, and various jams. “Will that be all, Miz Hamilton?”
Little Marilyn critically appraised the presentation. “Roberta forgot a sprig of parsley on the eggs.”
Tiffany curtsied and repaired to the kitchen, where she informed Roberta of her heinous omission. At each meal there was some detail Little Marilyn found abrasive to her highly developed sense of decorum.
Hands on hips, Roberta replied to an appreciative Tiffany, “She can eat a pig’s blister.”
Back in the breakfast nook, husband and wife enjoyed a relaxing meal. The brief respite of sun was overtaken by clouds again.
“Isn’t this the strangest weather?” Little Marilyn sighed.
“The changing seasons are full of surprises. And so are you.” His voice dropped.
Little Marilyn smiled shyly. It had been her idea to attack her husband this morning during his shower. Those how-to-please sex books she devoured were paying off.
“Life is more exciting as a blond.” He swept his hand across his forelock. His hair was meticulously cut with short sideburns, close cropped on the sides and back of the head, and longer on the top. “You really like it, don’t you?”
“I do. And I like your suspenders too.” She leaned across the table and snapped one.
“Braces, dear. Suspenders are for old men.” He polished off his eggs. “Marilyn”—he paused—“would you love me if I weren’t, well, if I weren’t Andover-Princeton? A Hamilton? One of the Hamiltons?” He referred to his illustrious family, whose history in America reached back into the seventeenth century.
The Hamiltons, originally from England, first landed in the West Indies, where they amassed a fortune in sugar cane. A son, desirous of a larger theater for his talents, sailed to Philadelphia. From that ambitious sprig grew a long line of public servants, businessmen, and the occasional cad. Fitz-Gilbert’s branch of the family, the New York branch, suffered many losses until only Fitz’s immediate family remained. A fateful airplane crash carried away the New York Hamiltons the summer after Fitz’s junior year in high school. At sixteen Fitz-Gilbert was an orphan.
Fitz appeared to withstand the shock and fight back. He spent the summer working in a brokerage house as a messenger, just as his father had planned. Despite his blue-blood connections, his only real friend in those days was another boy at the brokerage house, a bright kid from Brooklyn, Tommy Norton. They escaped Wall Street on weekends, usually to the Hamptons or Cape Cod.
Fitz’s stoicism impressed everyone, but Cabell Hall, his guardian and trust officer at Chase Manhattan, was troubled. Cracks had begun to show in Fitz’s facade. He totaled a car but escaped unharmed. Cabell didn’t blow up. He agreed that “boys will be boys.” But then Fitz got a girl pregnant, and Cabell found a reputable doctor to take care of that. Finally, the second summer of Fitz’s Wall Street apprenticeship, he and Tommy Norton were in a car accident on Cape Cod. Both boys were so drunk that, luckily for them, they sustained only facial lacerations and bruises when they went through the windshield. Fitz, since he was driving, paid all the medical bills, which meant they got the very best care. But Fitz’s recovery was only physical. He had tempted fate and nearly killed not only himself but his best friend. The result was a nervous breakdown. Cabel checked him into an expensive, quiet clinic in Connecticut.
Fitz had related this history to Little Marilyn before they got married, but he hadn’t mentioned it since.
She looked at him now and wondered what he was talking about. Fitz was high-born, rich, and so much fun. She didn’t remember anywhere in her books being instructed that men need reassurance of their worth. The books concentrated on sexual pleasure and helping a husband through a business crisis and then dreaded male menopause, but, oh, they were years and years away from that. Probably he was playing a game. Fitz was inventive.
“I would love you if you were”—she thought for something déclassé, off the board—“Iraqi.”
He laughed. “That is a stretch. Ah, yes, the Middle East, that lavatory of the human race.”
“Wonder what they call us?”
“The Devil’s seed.” His voice became more menacing and he spoke with what he imagined was an Iraqi accent.
One of the fourteen phones in the overlarge house twittered. The harsh ring of the telephone was too cacophonous for Little Marilyn, who believed she had perfect pitch. So she paid bundles of money for phones that rang in bird calls. Consequently her house sounded like a metallic aviary.
Tiffany appeared. “I think it’s your mother, Miz Mim, but I can’t understand a word she’s saying.”
A flash of irritation crossed Marilyn Sanburne Hamilton’s smooth white forehead. She reached over and picked up the phone, and her voice betrayed not a hint of it. “Mother, darling.”
Mother darling ranted, raved, and emitted such strange noises that Fitz put down his napkin and rose to stand behind his wife, hands resting on her slender shoulders. She looked up at her husband and indicated that she also couldn’t understand a word. Then her face changed; the voice through the earpiece had risen to raw hysteria.
“Mother, we’ll be right over.” The dutiful daughter hung up the receiver.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. She just screamed and hollered. Oh, Fitz, we’d better hurry.”
“Where’s your father?”
“In Richmond today, at a mayors’ conference.”
“Oh, Lord.” If Mim’s husband wasn’t there it meant the burden of comfort and solution rested upon him. Small wonder that Jim Sanburne found so many opportunities to travel.
13
Those townspeople who weren’t gathered in the post office were at Market Shiflett’s. Harry frantically tried to sort the mail. She even called Susan Tucker to come down and help. Mrs. Hogendobber, positioned in front of the counter, told her gory tale to all, every putrid detail.
A hard scratching on the back door alerted Tucker, who barked. Susan rose and opened the door. Pewter walked in, tail to the vertical, whiskers swept forward.
“Hello, Pewter.”
“Hello, Susan.” She rubbed against Susan’s leg and then against Tucker.
Mrs. Murphy was playing in the open post boxes.
Pewter looked up and spoke to the striped tail hanging out of Number 31. “Fit to be tied over at the store. What about here?”
“Same.”
“I found the hand,” Tucker bragged.
“Everybody knows, Tucker. You’ll probably get your name in the newspaper—again.” Green jealousy swept through the fat gray body. “Mrs. Murphy, turn around so I can talk to you.”
“I can’t.” She backed out of the box, hung for a moment by her paws, and then dropped lightly to the ground.
Usually Susan and Harry were amused by the athletic displays of the agile tiger cat but today no one paid much attention.
Blair called Harry to tell her Rick Shaw had elected not to tear up the cemetery just yet, and to thank her for being a good neighbor.
Naturally, with Blair being an outsider, suspicion immediately fell on him. After all, the severed hands and legs were found in his—well, Herbie’s really—graveyard. And no one would ever suspect Reverend Jones.
The ideas and fantasies swirled up like a cloud of grasshoppers and then dropped to earth again. Harry listened to the people jammed into the post office even as she attempted to complete her tasks. Theories ranged from old-fashioned revenge to demonology. Since no one had any idea of who those body parts belonged to, the theories lacked the authenticity of personal connection.
One odd observation crossed Harry’s mind. So much of the conjecture focused on establishing a motive. Why? As the voices of her friends, neighbors, and even her few enemies, or temporary enemies, rose and fell, the thrust was that in some way the victim must have brought this wretched fate upon himself. The true question formulating in Harry’s mind was not motive but, Why is it so important for humans to blame the victim? Do they hope to ward off evil? If a woman is raped she is accused of dressing to entice. If a man is robbed, he should have had better sense than to walk the streets on that side of town. Are people incapable of accepting the randomness of evil? Apparently so.
As Rick Shaw sped by, siren splitting the air, the group fell silent to watch. Rick was followed closely by Cynthia Cooper in her squad car.
Fair Haristeen opened the door and stepped outside. He knew that Rick Shaw wasn’t moving that fast just to dump off hands and legs; something else had happened. He walked over to Market’s to see if anyone had fresher news. Being in Harry’s presence wasn’t that uncomfortable for him. Fair considered that women were irrational much of the time, a consideration reinforced by BoomBoom, who felt logic to be vulgar. He’d already forgiven Harry for punching a hole in his coffee cup. She chose to ignore him to his face, then watched him saunter next door. She breathed a sigh of relief. His presence rubbed like a pebble in her shoe.
“You know, I want my knuckle bone.” Tucker started to pout. “That was the deal.”
“Deal?” Pewter’s long gray eyelashes fluttered.
Before Tucker could explain, the door flew open and Tiffany Hayes, still in her sparkling white apron, burst in. “Miz Sanburne’s got a headless nekkid body in her boathouse!”
A split second of disbelief was followed by a roar of inquiry. How did she know? Who was it? Et cetera.
Tiffany cleared her throat and walked to the counter. Susan came up from the back. Mrs. Murphy and Pewter jumped on the counter and made circles to find papers to sit on, then did so. Tucker ran around front, ducking between legs to see Tiffany.
The Reverend Jones, a quick thinker, dashed next door to fetch the folks in the market. Soon the post office was over its fire code limit of people.
Once everyone was squeezed in, Tiffany gave the facts. “I was serving Little Marilyn and Mr. Fitz their eggs. She was complaining, naturally, but so what? I walked back into the kitchen and the phone rang. Roberta’s hands were covered with flour, and Jack wasn’t on duty yet so I picked it up. I recognized the voice as Miz Sanburne’s, but lordy, I couldn’t understand one word that woman was putting to me. She was crying and she was screaming and she was gasping and I just laid down that phone and left the kitchen to tell Little Marilyn her mother was on the phone and I couldn’t understand her. I mean I couldn’t say ‘your mother is pitching a fit and falling in it,’ now could I? So I waited while Little Marilyn picked up the phone and she couldn’t understand her mother any better than I could. Well, the next thing I know she runs upstairs and starts to put on her makeup, and Mr. Fitz is waiting downstairs. He was so anxious he couldn’t stand it no more so he bounded up those steps and told her in no uncertain terms that this was no time for makeup and to get a move on. So they left in that white Jeep thing of theirs. Not twenty minutes pass before the phone rings again and Jack, on duty now, picks up but Roberta and I couldn’t help ourselves so we picked up too. It was Mr. Fitz. We could hear both Marilyns ascreaming in the background. Like banshees. Mr. Fitz, he was a little shaky, but he told Jack there was a headless corpse floating in Mim’s boathouse. He told Jack to call and cancel all his business appointments for the day and all of Little Marilyn’s social engagements. Then he told Jack to get hold of Mr. Sanburne in Richmond if in any way possible. The sheriff was on his way and not to worry. Nobody was in any danger. Jack asked a few questions and Mr. Fitz told him not to worry if he didn’t get his chores done today. Thank God for Mr. Fitz.”
She finished. This was possibly the only time in her life that Tiffany would be the center of attention. There was something touching about that.
What Tiffany didn’t know was that the hands and legs had been dug up at Foxden. So now Miranda Hogendobber was able to tell her story again. Center stage was natural to Miranda.
Grateful to Mrs. Hogendobber for taking over the “entertainment” department, Harry returned to filling up the post boxes. She was glad she was behind the boxes because she was laughing silently, tears falling from her eyes. Susan came over, thinking she was upset.
Harry wiped her eyes and whispered, “Of all people, Mim! What will Town and Country think?”
Now Susan was laughing as hard as Harry. “Maybe whoever it was made the mistake of sailing in her pontoon boat.”
This made them both break out in giggles again. Harry put her hand over her mouth to muffle her speech. “Mim has exhausted herself with accumulating possessions. Now she’s got one that’s a real original.”
That did it. They nearly fell on the floor. Part of this explosion of mirth was from tension, of course. Yet part of it was directly attributable to Mim’s character. Miranda said there was a good heart in there somewhere but no one wanted to find out. Maybe no one believed her. Mim had spent her life from the cradle onward tyrannizing people over bloodlines and money. The two are intertwined less frequently than Mim would wish. No matter what story you had, Mim could top it; if not, she would tip her head at an angle that made plain her distaste and social superiority.
Nobody would say it out loud but probably most people were delighted that a bloated corpse had found its way into her boathouse. More things stank over at the Sanburnes’ than a rotten torso.
14
The deep glow from the firelit mahogany in Reverend Jones’s library cast a youthful softening over his features. The light rain on the windowpane accentuated his mood, withdrawn and thoughtful, as well as exhausted. He had forgotten just how exhausting turmoil can be. His wife, Carol, her violet eyes sympathetic, entreated him to eat. When he refused she knew he was suffering.
“How about a cup of cocoa, then?”
“What? Oh, no, dear. You know I ran into Cabell at the bank and he thinks this is a nut case. Someone passing through, like a traveling serial killer. I don’t think so, Carol. I think it’s closer to home.”
A loud crackle in the fireplace made him jump. He settled back down.
“Tell you what. I’ll bring in the cocoa and if you don’t want it, then the cat will drink it. It won’t solve this horrible mess but it will make you feel better.”
The doorbell rang and Carol answered it. Two cups of cocoa. She invited Blair Bainbridge into the library. He also appeared exhausted.
Reverend Jones lifted himself out of his armchair to greet his impromptu guest.
“Oh, please stay seated, Reverend.”
“You have a seat then.”
Ella, the cat, joined them. Her full name was Elocution and she lived up to her name. Eating communion wafers was not her style, like that naughty Episcopalian cat, but Ella did once shred a sermon of Herbie’s on a Sunday morning. For the first time in his life he gave a spontaneous sermon. The topic, “living with all God’s creatures,” was prompted, of course, by Ella’s wanton destructiveness. It was the best sermon of his life. Parishioners begged for copies. As he had not one note, he thought he couldn’t reproduce his sermon but Carol came to the rescue. She, too, moved by her husband’s loving invocation of all life, remembered it word for word. The sermon, reprinted in many church magazines beyond even his own Lutheran denomination, made the Reverend something of an ecclesiastical celebrity.
Ella stared intently at Blair, since he was new to her. Once satisfied, she rested on her side before the fire as the men chatted and Carol brought in a large pot of cocoa. Carol excused herself and went upstairs to continue her own work.
“I apologize for dropping in like this without calling.”
“Blair, this is the country. If you called first, people would think you were putting on airs.” He poured his guest and himself a steaming cup each, the rich aroma filling the room.
“Well, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am that this, this—I don’t even know what to call it.” Blair’s eyebrows knitted together. “Well, that the awful discovery was made in your family plot. Since your back troubles you, I’m willing to make whatever repairs are necessary, once Sheriff Shaw allows me.”
“Thank you.” The Reverend meant it.
“How long before people start thinking that I’ve done it?” Blair blurted out.
“Oh, they’ve already gone through that possibility and most have dispensed with it, except for Rick, who never lets anyone off the hook and never rushes to judgment. Guess you have to be that way in his line of work.”
“Dispensed . . . ?”
Herbie waved his right hand in the air, a friendly, dismissive gesture, while holding his cocoa cup and saucer in his left hand. “You haven’t been here long enough to hate Marilyn Sanburne. You wouldn’t have placed the body, or what was left of it, in her boathouse.”
“I could have floated it in there.”
“I spoke to Rick Shaw shortly after the discovery.” Herb placed his cup on the table. Ella eyed it with interest. “From the condition of the body, he seriously doubted it could have floated into the boathouse without someone on the lake noticing its slow progress. Also, the boathouse doors were closed.”
“It could have floated under them.”
“The body was blown up to about three times normal size.”
Blair fought an involuntary shudder. “That poor woman will have nightmares.”
“She about had to be tranquilized with a dart gun. Little Marilyn was pretty shook up too. And I don’t guess Fitz-Gilbert will have an appetite for some time either. For that matter, neither will I.”
“Nor I.” Blair watched as a log burned royal-blue from the bottom to crimson in the middle, releasing the bright-yellow flames to leap upward.
“What I dread are the reporters. The facts will be in the paper tomorrow. Cut and dried. But if this body is ever identified, those people will swarm over us like flies.” Herb wished he hadn’t said that because it reminded him of the legs and hands.
“Reverend Jones—”
“Herbie,” came the interruption.
“Herbie. Why do people hate Marilyn Sanburne? I mean, I’ve only met her once and she carried on about pedigree but, well, everyone has a weakness.”
“No one likes a snob, Blair. Not even another snob. Imagine living year in and year out being judged by Mim, being put in your place at her every opportunity. She works hard for her charities, undeniably, but she bullies others even in the performance of good works. Her son, Stafford, married a black woman and that brought out the worst in Mim and, I might add, the best in everyone else. She disowned him. He lives in New York with his wife. They made up, sort of, for Little Marilyn’s wedding. I don’t know, most people don’t see below the surface when they look at others, and Mim’s surface is cold and brittle.”
“But you think otherwise, don’t you?”
This young man was perceptive. Herb liked him more by the minute. “I do think otherwise.” He pulled up a hassock for his feet, indicating to Blair that he should pull one up, too, then folded his hands across his chest. “You see, Marilyn Sanburne was born Marilyn Urquhart Conrad. The Urquharts, of Scottish origin, were one of the earliest families to reach this far west. Hard to believe, but even during the time of the Revolutionary War this was a rough place, a frontier. Before that, the 1720’s, the 1730’s, you took your life in your hands to come to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Marilyn’s mother, Isabelle Urquhart Conrad, filled all three of her children’s heads with silly ideas about how they were royalty. The American version. Jimp Conrad, her husband, not of as august lineage as the Urquharts, was too busy buying up land to worry overmuch about how his children were being raised. A male problem, I would say. Anyway, her two brothers took this aristocracy stuff to heart and decided they didn’t have to do anything so common as work for a living. James, Jr., became a steeplechase jockey and died in a freak accident up in Culpeper. That was right after World War Two. Horse dragged him to his death. I saw it with my own eyes. The younger brother, Theodore, a good horseman himself, quite simply drank himself to death. The heartbreak killed Jimp and made Isabelle bitter. She thought she was the only woman who’d ever lost sons. She quite forgot that hundreds of thousands of American mothers had recently lost sons in the mud of Europe and the sands of the South Pacific. Her mother’s bitterness rubbed off on Mim. As she was the remaining child, the care of her mother became her burden as Isabelle aged. Social superiority became her refuge perhaps.”
He rested a moment, then continued: “You know, I see people in crisis often. And over the years I have found that one of two things happens. Either people open up and grow, the pain allowing them to have compassion for others, to gain perspective on themselves, to feel God’s love, if you will, or they shut down either through drink, drugs, promiscuity, or bitterness. Bitterness is an affront to God, as is any form of self-destructive behavior. Life is a gift, to be enjoyed and shared.” He fell into silence.
Ella purred as she listened. She loved Herbie’s voice, its deep, manly rumble, but she loved what he said too. Humans had such difficulty figuring out that life is a frolic as long as you have enough to eat, a warm bed, and plenty of catnip. She was very happy that Herb realized life was mostly wonderful.
For a long time the two men sat side by side in the quiet of understanding.
Blair spoke at last. “Herbie, I’m trying to open up. I don’t have much practice.”
Sensing that Blair would get around to telling his story sometime in the future, when he felt secure, Herb wisely didn’t probe. Instead he reassured him with what he himself truly believed. “Trust in God. He will show you the way.”
15
Although the sheriff and Officer Cooper knew little about the pieces of body that had been found, they did know that a vagrant, not an old man either, had been in town not long ago.
Relentless legwork, telephone calls, and questioning led the two to the Allied National Bank.
Marion Molnar remembered the bearded fellow vividly. His baseball jacket, royal blue, had an orange METS embroidered on it. As a devout Orioles fan, this upset Marion as much as the man’s behavior.
She led Rick and Cynthia into Ben Seifert’s office.
Beaming, shaking hands, Ben bade them sit down.
“Oh, yes, walked into my office big as day. Had some cockamamie story about his investments. Said he wanted to meet Cabell Hall right then and there.”
“Did you call your president?” Rick asked.
“No. I said I’d take him down to our branch office at the downtown mall in Charlottesville. It was the only way I knew to get him out of here.” Ben cracked his knuckles.
“Then what happened?” Cynthia inquired.
“I drove him to the outskirts of town on the east side. Finally talked him out of this crazy idea and he got out willingly. Last I saw of him.”
“Thanks, Ben. We’ll call you if we need you,” Rick said.
“Glad to help.” Ben accompanied them to the front door.
Once the squad car drove out of sight he shut his office door and picked up his phone. “Listen, asshole, the cops were here about that bum. I don’t like it!” Ben, a country boy, had transformed himself over time, smoothing off his rough edges. Now he was a sleek glad-hander and a big deal in the Chamber of Commerce. There was scarcely any of the old Ben left in his oily new incarnation, but worry was resurrecting it.
16
The Harvest Fair committee, under the command of Miranda Hogendobber, met hastily to discuss their plans for the fair and the ball that immediately followed it. The glorious events of the Harvest Fair and Ball, crammed into Halloween day and night, were eagerly awaited by young and old. Everybody went to the Harvest Fair. The children competed for having the best costume and scariest costume, as well as in bobbing for apples, running races in costume, and other events that unfolded over the early evening hours. The advantage of this was that it kept the children off the streets, sparing everyone the trick-or-treat candy syndrome that caused adults to eat as much as the kids did. The children, gorged on good food as well as their treats, fell asleep at the Harvest Ball while the adults danced. There were as many sleeping bags as pumpkins.
The crisis confronting Mrs. Hogendobber, Taxi Hall, and their charges involved Harry Haristeen and Susan Tucker. Oh, not that the two had done anything wrong, but each year they appeared as Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, Harry being the Horseman. Harry’s Tomahawk was seal-brown but looked black at night, and his nostrils were always painted red. He was a fearsome sight. Harry struggled every year to see through the slits in her cape once the pumpkin head was hurled at the fleeing Ichabod. One year she lost her bearings and fell off, to the amusement of everyone but herself, although she did laugh about it later.
What could they do? This cherished tradition, ongoing in Crozet since Washington Irving first published his immortal tale, seemed in questionable taste this year. After all, a headless body had just been found.
After an agonizing debate the committee of worthies decided to cancel Ichabod Crane. As the ball was in a few days, they hadn’t time to create another show. The librarian suggested she could find a story which could be read to the children. It wasn’t perfect but it was something.
On her way to the post office, Miranda’s steps dragged slower and slower. She reached the door. She stood there for a moment. She breathed deeply. She opened the front door.
“Harry!” she boomed.
“I’m right in front of you. You don’t have to yell.”
“So you are. I don’t want to tell you this but the Harvest Ball committee has decided, wisely I think, to cancel the Headless Horseman reenactment.”
Harry, obviously disappointed, saw the logic of it. “Don’t feel bad, Mrs. H. We’ll get back to it next year.”
A sigh of relief escaped Miranda’s red lips. “I’m so glad you see the point.”
“I do and thank you for telling me. Would you like me to tell Susan?”
“No, I’ll get over there. It’s my responsibility.”
As she left, Harry watched the squared shoulders, the straight back. Miranda could be a pain—couldn’t we all—but she always knew the right thing to do and the manner in which to do it. Harry admired that.
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