She glared at him. “Would you please take those stupid flowers and get the hell out?”
He looked at her a long moment. Then, with a half-smile at whatever he saw in her face, he picked up the plant and left.
Flustered and angry, she called Jamison and McLamb and gave them the bad news.
Pink geraniums indeed!
C H A P T E R
27
I was almost too late getting to the Morrow House. The only ones left were Frederick Mayhew and three of the trustees: Nathan Benton, Betty Coates Ramos, and Suzanne D. Angelo.
Mrs. Ramos I had met earlier that day when we both wound up in the restroom together before Dwight and I left for lunch. She was late fifties, early sixties, with short curly blond hair and wore a bright red wool suit that lit up the late afternoon.
Suzanne D. Angelo looked to be my age, dark-haired and vivacious in a white tweed pantsuit and heavy gold jewelry. When we were introduced, I nodded and said,
“Mrs. D’Angelo,” and she corrected me with a smile.
“I’m afraid it’s D. for Dupree. No, don’t apologize.
Everyone makes that mistake. I married a Yankee and brought him home with me.”
“And we’re so lucky she came back.” Mayhew stopped just short of abject fawning. “The Duprees are one of our oldest families and Mrs. Angelo has given us some wonderful family treasures.”
Dwight had described Nathan Benton in such detail that it kept me from blurting out, “You look so familiar.
Have we met before?” because he really did look like a British commander in some old World War Two movie, right down to his neat little mustache. He even wore an old battered tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbow and a striped regimental tie.
“We’re all so sorry about Jonna’s son,” he said.
“Jonna, too, of course. Bad show.”
The others murmured in agreement and I thanked them for their concern, but couldn’t resist asking Mr.
Benton, “Are you English?”
He beamed. “My mother. My roots are here in Shaysville, but she was a war bride and I’m afraid she infected the whole family with her accent. I keep thinking I’ve lost every trace and then someone like you will come along and remind me that I haven’t.”
Behind his back, I saw Mrs. Angelo roll her eyes at Mrs. Ramos and knew that Mr. Benton probably cultivated that accent.
The four of them were sitting around a tea table in the front parlor when I arrived, and Mayhew immediately pulled up another chair in his most courtly manner while Mrs. Angelo brought me a cup of punch and gestured to the plate of canapes on the tea table. Evidently they were enjoying that pleasant afterglow when something tricky has gone off well.
“You were right about Erdman,” Benton told Mrs.
Ramos. “He seems quite sound on small arms and I rather regret that he didn’t get to see the derringer.”
Mayhew sniffed. “He may know guns but he was off by eighty years on my cut-glass syrup pitcher. Pressed glass, indeed!”
Now it was Benton and Ramos who exchanged amused glances.
“I take it your meeting was a success?” I asked.
“Almost sixty people came!” Mayhew exulted, pushing his rimless glasses up on his nose. “We enrolled four new members for the Historical and Genealogical Society.”
“And one new Friend of the Morrow House,” Betty Ramos added complacently.
“Are you the new president now?”
She shook her head and Suzanne Angelo said with a sigh, “No, that would be me. I was elected first vice president last month and thought I’ve have a year to learn the job. Poor Jonna.”
“Rest assured, we’ll do everything to help you,”
Nathan Benton promised.
With a few casual questions, I soon learned that while Mayhew, Suzanne Angelo, and Betty Ramos were born and bred in Shaysville, Nathan Benton had been here less than four years. He had taken early retirement from a successful business in Norfolk in order to return to the town his ancestors had helped found nearly two hundred years earlier. A Benton Street just off the square and Benton Baptist Church at the edge of town were both named for his people, Mayhew told me.
Benton and Ramos were Civil War buffs, while Angelo, as befitted someone whose husband was the current CEO of Shay Furniture, was more interested in the historical changes wrought by industrialization in the years following Reconstruction. She was lobbying to return the bathrooms that had last been updated in the 1940s to something more appropriate for 1900.
