couldn’t think of another way to rile me). Calla was a horse of a different color. Overworked (at least according to her) at her office job in the local mattress-manufacturing plant, perpetually harried, Calla was determined no one should cheat her any more than she’d already been cheated. She must have been a teenager once, must have laughed and dated boys, but it was hard to believe this pale, dark-haired woman had ever been anything but middle-aged and worried.
“How is he today?” she asked me in a low voice.
Since she’d passed her grandfather on her way in, and he was loudly in fine form, I didn’t respond. “He’s been smoking again,” I said reluctantly, since I felt like a spy for telling on Joe C. At the same time, I didn’t want him to burn up.
“Lily, who could be bringing him cigarettes?” Calla slapped the counter with a thin white hand. “I’ve asked and asked, and no one will admit it. And yet, for someone who can’t go to the store himself, he seems to have unlimited access to the things he’s not supposed to have!”
“Who visits him?”
“Well, it’s a complicated family.” Though it didn’t seem complicated to me, as Calla began to explain it. I knew already that Joe C had had three children. The first was Joe Jr., who had died childless during World War II. The second boy, Christopher, had been the father of Calla, Walker, and Lacey. These three were the only surviving grandchildren of Joe C. Calla had never married. Walker, now living in North Carolina, had three teenage children, and Lacey had Deedra during her first marriage.
Calla’s aunt (Joe C’s third child), Jessie Lee Prader, had married Albert Albee. Jessie Lee and Albert had had two children, Alice (who’d married a James Whitley from Texas, moved there with him and had two children by him) and Pardon, who had been the owner of the Shakespeare Garden Apartments. When Pardon had died, he’d left the apartments to Alice Albee Whitley’s children, Becca and Anthony, since the widowed Alice had herself died of cancer two years before.
The final complication was Joe C’s sister, Arnita, who was much younger than Joe C. In the way of those times, the two babies their mother had had between them had died at birth or in infancy. Arnita married Howell Winthrop and they became the parents of Howell Winthrop, Jr., my former employer. Therefore, Joe C’s sister was the grandmother of my young friend Bobo Winthrop and his brother, Howell III, and his sister, Amber Jean.
“So you, Becca Whitley and her brother, and the Winthrops are all related,” I concluded. Since I was cleaning the kitchen counter, I had been gainfully employed while listening to this long and fairly boring discourse.
Calla nodded. “I was so glad when Becca moved here. I was crazy about Alice, and I hadn’t gotten to see her in so many years.” Calla looked wistful, but her mood changed abruptly. “Though you see who owns a whole building, who ended up in the mansion, and who’s sitting in the house that’s about to be zoned commercial,” she said sourly. Becca had the rent income, the Winthrops were wealthy from the lumber yard, the sporting goods store, and oil, while Calla’s little house was sandwiched between an insurance office and small engine repair service.
There was no response to that. I was mostly indifferent to Calla, but I felt sorry for her some days. Other days, the resentment that was a cornerstone of her character grated at me, made me ornery.
“So, they all come around,” she said, staring out the kitchen window, the steam from her cup of fresh coffee rising in front of her face in a sinister way. I realized for the first time that the day had become overcast, that the darkness was reaching into the room. Like lawn furniture, Joe C and China Belle had to be brought in before they blew away or got wet.
“Great grandchildren-Becca Whitley, all painted up; Deedra, in her slutty dresses… Joe C just loved that. And the great-nieces and -nephews-Howell III, asking can he help by mowing the yard… like he’d ever mowed his own yard in his life.”
I hadn’t realized Calla was quite this bitter. I turned around to look at the older woman, who almost seemed to be in a spell. I needed to go get the old people in, or else rouse Calla to do it. Thunder rumbled far away, and Calla’s dark eyes scanned the sky outside, looking for the rain.
Finally she slid her gaze toward me, cold and remote.
“You can go,” she said, as distant as if I’d tried to claim relationship to Joe C myself.
I gathered my paraphernalia and left without another word, leaving Calla to handle the business of relocating her grandfather and his girlfriend all by herself.
I wondered if Calla was glad of Deedra’s death. Now there was one less person to come by, one less painted woman to titillate the old man and rob Calla of her possible inheritance.
Chapter Four
The sheriff was talking to Lacey Dean Knopp. Lacey, barely into her fifties, was a lovely blond woman with such an innocent face that almost everyone instantly wanted to give her his or her best manners, most conscientious opinion, hardest try. When I’d first met Lacey, the day she’d hired me to clean Deedra’s apartment, that innocence had irritated me violently. But now, years later, I pitied Lacey all the more since she’d had farther to come to meet her grief.
The sheriff looked as though she’d slept only an hour or so for two nights in a row. Oh, her uniform was crisp and clean, her shoes were shiny, but her face had that crumpled, dusty look of sheets left too quick. I wondered how her brother Marlon was looking. If Marta Schuster had been thinking clearly, she’d deposited the grief-stricken young man away from public scrutiny.
“We’re through in there,” she was telling Lacey, who nodded numbly in response. Marta gave me the thousand-yard stare when I leaned against the wall, waiting for Lacey to give me the word to enter.
“Lily Bard,” Marta said.
“Sheriff.”
“You’re here for what reason?” Marta asked, her eyebrows going up. Her expression, as I perceived it, was disdainful.
“I asked Lily,” Lacey said. Her hands were gripping each other, and as I watched, Lacey drove the nails of her right hand into the skin on the back of her left hand. “Lily’s going to help me clean out my daughter’s apartment,” Lacey went on. Her voice was dull and lifeless.
“Oh, she is,” the sheriff said, as though that was somehow significant.
I waited for her to move, and when she got tired of pondering, she stepped aside to let us in. But as I passed her, she tapped my shoulder. While Lacey stood stock still in the living room, I hung back and looked at the sheriff inquiringly.
She peered past me to make sure Lacey was not listening. Then she leaned uncomfortably close and said, “Clean out the box under the bed and the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in the second bedroom.”
I understood after a second, and nodded.
Lacey hadn’t registered any of this. As I closed the apartment door behind me, I saw that Lacey was staring around her as though she’d never seen her daughter’s place before.
She caught my eyes. “I never came up here much,” she said ruefully. “I was so used to my house being ‘home,’ that’s where I always felt Deedra belonged. I guess a mother always thinks her child is just playing at being a grown-up.”
I’d never felt so sorry for anyone. But feeling sorry for Lacey wasn’t going to help her. She had plenty of pity available, if she wanted it. What she needed was practical help.
“Where did you want to start?” I asked. I could hardly march into the bedrooms to start looking for whatever Marta Schuster had wanted me to remove.
“Jerrell carried these up earlier,” she said, pointing at the pile of broken-down boxes and two rolls of trash bags. Then she stood silently again.
“Do you want to keep any of Deedra’s things?” I asked, trying to prod her into giving me directions. “For yourself?”
Lacey forced herself to answer. “Some of the jewelry, maybe,” she said, in a fairly steady voice. “None of the clothes; she wore a size smaller than I do.” Plus, Lacey Knopp wouldn’t be caught dead in her daughter’s just-this- side-of-tarty clothes. “Could you use any of them?”
