Killer Market

“Co-signed the mortgage. Helped me move. Was always there across the alley in any emergency.”

“But you never told Evelyn,” I said, guessing.

“No.” Her voice was sad. “Pell’s choice, not mine. He was so sure that a teenage girl would rather have no father than one who was gay. Then when she married Chan… Well, you’ve seen Quentin Ragsdale, you know the homophobic culture Chan came from. Not that he was ever snide to Pell’s face. Evelyn loved Pell too much to stand for anything like that, but he understood and again he didn’t want her to know, to risk Chan’s throwing it up to her.”

She took a swallow of wine and I followed suit.

“Obviously he wasn’t always so totally committed to same-sex sex,” I observed.

“Too bad I wasn’t Deborah Kerr,” she said wryly.

“Deborah Kerr?”

“As in Tea and Sympathy. Or is that before your time?”

I made a mental note to rent the video sometime.

“Under other circumstances, it would have been so funny that night when you were practically shrieking at Millie that no nineteen-year-old woman would make love to a seventeen-year-old kid. Yet that’s exactly what happened with us. He was late to mature and he wanted so desperately to be as straight as all his male friends. I was just as ignorant. I honestly thought that he could choose, that friendly sex with me would prove to him that he was as hetero as anybody else.”

She lifted her glass to her lips and drained it. “We did it twice, but all we proved was that he really didn’t have a choice. He was having such a hard time dealing with it that I couldn’t lay a baby on him, too. He really was just a kid. I was going to do like Savannah did—have the baby and then give her up for adoption. But once I held her in my arms, I couldn’t do it.”

Tears were streaming down Dixie’s cheeks. “I just couldn’t do it,” she whispered.

I started to crawl down to her end of the couch to put my arms around her, but she shook her head and got up to get a tissue. “I’m okay. Honest.”

She topped our glasses and sat back down again. “I’m sorry Evelyn never knew, but I did tell Millie that Pell is Lynnette’s grandfather and I’m going to tell Lynnette when she comes next month. I think she’ll be glad.”

Her smile was indulgent and downright grandmotherly. “Did I tell you what she did?”

“Millie?”

“No, doofus, Lynnette.”

“What did she do?”

She gestured toward the bookshelves across the room. “You know those family albums?”

I nodded.

“When we finally decided that she was going to go live in Maryland, she got cold feet at the last minute. Started saying she didn’t want to be David Henry.”

“The relative that went West during the gold rush and no one ever heard of again?”

“God, you do have a memory, don’t you?”

“I love family stories,” I murmured defensively.

“Well, you’re right. That was David Henry. Fell completely out of our family tree. And Lynnette was afraid the same thing would happen to her if she went North.”

“What did you do?”

“Explained that David Henry didn’t have telephones and E-mail and a grandmother who knew exactly where he was every step of the way and could hop in her car and be there in no time.”

“And that reassured her?”

“Not completely.” She walked over to the shelves and pulled out one particularly bulging scrapbook. “We were in such a tizzy that morning, getting all the bags and boxes packed up, so they could get on the road before lunch. I noticed something odd about her, but I thought it was because she’d pinned her braid up in a ball on top of her head. Later, after she’d driven off with Millie and Shirley Jane, I came in here to straighten up and I couldn’t fit this scrapbook back into its usual slot. Here’s why.”

She opened the book and I saw a thick, four-inch length of braided hair the color of beach sand held firmly to the page by many crisscrossings of Scotch tape.

Beside it, in her best promoted-to-second-grade printing: DONT FORGET LYNNETTE.

You bet.

—«»—«»—«»—

MARGARET MARON grew up on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, but for many years lived in Brooklyn, New York, where she drew her inspiration for her Lieutenant Sigrid Harald mystery series. When she returned to her North Carolina roots with her artist husband, Joe, she began thinking about a series based on her own background and went on to create the award-winning Deborah Knott series. In 1993 Margaret Maron swept the top mystery awards for her bestseller Bootlegger’s Daughter—the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. Southern Discomfort was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel. Shooting at Loons was also nominated for an Agatha and an Anthony Award.

—«»—«»—«»—[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away][A 3S Release— v1, html][October 06, 2007]