her.
“I want to talk to you sometime soon,” Lynn said, with an air of suddenly made decision.
Arthur and Lynn, through some law-enforcement channel, had heard something about Martin’s former activities, I thought. All I needed at this point was someone else lecturing me. Or telling me something I didn’t know about my own husband, pitying me.
“I’ll give you a call when I’m free,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
A SPRING DINNER at an employee’s house; our first social engagement as a couple since our wedding. I finally chose a short-sleeved bright cotton dress and pumps. Martin brushed my hair for me, something he enjoyed doing. I was ready to get it cut. Its waviness and resultant bushiness made it a pain if it got too long, but Martin really liked it below my shoulders. I would tolerate the extra trouble until another Georgia summer. Since the dress was blue and red, I wore my red glasses, and I felt they added a cheerful touch. For some reason, my husband found them amusing.
Martin wore a suit, but when we got to the Andersons‘, only a few houses down Plantation Drive from my mother’s, we found Bill Anderson shedding his tie.
“It’s already heating up for summer,” he said, “let’s get rid of these things. The ladies won’t mind, will you, Roe? Bettina?”
Bettina Anderson, a copper-haired, heavy woman in her mid-forties, murmured, “Of course not!” at exactly the same moment I did.
Our host took Martin down the hall to deposit his coat. They were gone a little longer than such an errand warranted. While they were gone, I asked Bettina if there was anything I could help her with, and since she didn’t know me, she had to say there was nothing.
I was glad we hadn’t brought the wine when we were offered nothing to drink stronger than iced tea.
Bill and Martin reappeared, Martin wearing a scowl that he made an effort to smooth out. Bettina vanished into the kitchen within a few minutes and was obviously flustered, but I noticed that when the doorbell rang again, it was Bettina who answered it.
I wondered how long the Andersons had been married. They didn’t actually talk to each other very much.
To my pleasure, the other dinner guests were Bubba Sewell and his wife, my friend Lizanne Sewell, nee Buckley. Bubba is an up-and-coming lawyer and legislator, and Lizanne is beautiful and full-bodied, with a voice as slow and warm as butter melting on corn. They had married a few months before we had, and the supper they’d given us had been the best party we’d had as an engaged couple.
I gave Lizanne a half-hug, rather than a full frontal hug, befitting our friendship and the length of time we hadn’t seen each other.
Bettina turned down Lizanne’s offer of help as well; so she was certainly determined to keep us “company.” We chattered away while our hostess slaved out of sight in the kitchen and dining room. Lizanne inquired about the honeymoon, but without envy: She never wanted to leave the United States, she said. “You don’t know where you are in those other countries,” she said darkly. “Anything can happen.”
I could see Bill Anderson had overheard this and was about to take issue, an incredulous look on his face. (I was beginning not to like Bill, and unless I was mistaken, Martin didn’t like him either. I wondered if this was something we would have to do often, dine with people with whom we had nothing in common.)
“Are you enjoying not having to go to work every morning?” I asked Lizanne instantly, to spare her discomfort. (Lizanne probably wouldn’t care one bit what Bill Anderson or anyone else thought about her opinions, but her husband would.)
“Oh… it’s all right,” Lizanne said thoughtfully. “There’s a lot to do on the house, yet. I’m on some good-works committees… that was Bubba’s idea.” She seemed slightly amused at Bubba’s efforts to get her into his own up- and-coming pattern.
We were called to the dining room at that moment, and since I had my own agenda, I was pleased to see I was seated between Martin and Bubba at the round table.
After the flurry of passing and serving and complimenting an anxious Bettina on the chicken and rice and broccoli and salad, I quietly asked our state representative if he had been the lawyer in charge of the Julius estate since their disappearance. It was heartless of me, since the conversation had turned to regional football.
“Yes,” he said, dabbing his mustache carefully with his napkin. “I handled the house purchase, when Mrs. Zinsner sold the house to T. C. Julius. So after they vanished, Mrs. Totino asked me to continue as the lawyer in the case.”
“What’s the law about disappearances, Bubba?”
“According to Georgia law, missing people can be declared dead after seven years,” Bubba told me. “But Mrs. Totino was able to show she was the sole remaining relative of the family, and since she had very little without their support-she’d been living with a sister in New Orleans, scraping by with Social Security-we went to court and got her appointed conservator of the estate, so I could arrange for her to have enough money to live on. After a year, we got a letter of administration, so she could sell the property whenever she could find a buyer. Of course, this is all a matter of public record,” he concluded cautiously.
“So in a few months, the Juliuses will be declared dead.”
“Yes, then the remainder of their estate will be Mrs. Totino’s.”
“The house sale money.”
“Oh, no. Not just the house sale money. He’d been saving for a while, to start his own business when he retired from the Army.” And Bubba indicated by the set of his mouth that this was the end of the conversation about the Julius family’s financial resources.
“Did you like him?” I asked, after we’d eaten quietly for a minute.
“He was a tough man,” Bubba said thoughtfully. “Very much… ‘everything goes as I say in my family.’ But he wasn’t mean.”
“Did you meet the others?”
“Oh, yes. I met Mrs. Julius when they bought the house. Very sick, very glad to be within driving distance of all the hospitals in Atlanta. A quiet woman. The daughter was just a teenager; not giggly. That’s all I remember about her.”
Then our host asked Bubba what was coming up in the legislature that we needed to know about, and my conversation with him about the Julius family was over.
On the way home, I related all this to Martin, who listened abstractedly. That wasn’t like Martin, who was willing to be interested in the Julius disappearance if I was.
“I have to fly to Guatemala next week,” he told me.
“Oh, Martin! I thought you weren’t going to have to travel as much now that you’re not based in Chicago.”
“I thought so, too, Roe.”
He was so curt that I glanced over with some surprise. Martin was visibly worried.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Oh, I don’t know. As long as it takes… maybe three days.”
“Could… maybe I could go, too?”
“Wait till we get home; I can’t pay attention to this conversation while I’m driving.”
I bit my lip in mortification. When we got home, I stalked straight into the house.
He was just getting out of the car to open my door, and I caught him off guard. He didn’t catch up to me until I was halfway down the sidewalk to the kitchen side door.
Then he put his hand on my shoulder and began, “Roe, what I meant…”
I shook his hand off. “Don’t you talk to me,” I said, keeping my voice low because of the Youngbloods. Here we lived a mile out of town, and I still couldn’t scream at my husband in my own yard. “Don’t you say
I stomped up the stairs, shut the door to our bedroom, and sat on the bed.
What was the matter with me? I’d never had open quarrels with anyone in my life, and here I was brawling
