Dead in a Flash Read online

  “It’ll be fine,” Dinah Leigh said. “If Lenora and Stanton trust you not to gouge me, that’s all the assurance I need. Just send the information to Chelsea and if you need an advance or deposit, she’ll take care of it. Otherwise, just send the bill.”

  Chelsea took the card I offered, slipping it into the case of her iPad. She passed one back and I stuck it in my calendar. There was something about her smile that made me think she considered these bits of paper quaint in this electronic age, but for some things I still prefer something I can hold in my hand.

  Later on I’d come to see that exchange as the pivot point, the moment we took on the second of what should have been two easy jobs that turned out to be anything but.

  Our meals arrived and we gave the food the attention it deserved. I’d heard rumors the chef was a superstar they’d lured with an exorbitant salary and plenty of perks. And I’d also heard some people sniff about the arrogance of his naming this dish after himself. But whatever they were paying him, he was worth every cent.

  “How long have you been with Mrs. Dodd?” I asked Chelsea, who’d remained quiet but somehow still engaged during dinner.

  “Thirteen years,” Chelsea said, which took me by surprise. She looked to be about my age. She was pretty in a girl-next-door way and seemed sure of herself and perfectly comfortable in her role.

  “Can you believe it?” Dinah Leigh said. “And by the way, Mrs. Dodd was my late mother-in-law, may she rest in peace. I’m Dinah Leigh. Chelsea came to me as an intern. She was still in college then and she proved indispensable from day one. She’s never left me, thank all the gods in the pantheon. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  The talk turned to the senator’s birthday celebration, and Dinah Leigh, Lenora, and the senator chatted about who would be in attendance and the activities that were planned. I felt a little forlorn that we wouldn’t get to see the fruits of our labor, but we hadn’t been invited. Then I tuned in to what Lenora was saying.

  “. . . and, of course, we’ve reserved a table for you two and your plus ones if you’re bringing someone,” Lenora said.

  The surprise must have registered on our faces.

  “You got your invitations, didn’t you?” Lenora asked. “You should have received them weeks ago.”

  I thought of the mail still piled on the console in our foyer. We’d been out of town on a job earlier in the month and still hadn’t plowed through the stack.

  “We’ll be there with bells on,” Esme said, sidestepping the question. She leaned toward me. “I could get used to this,” she whispered.

  I’d been thinking the same thing. First a spa day, then a fancy dinner, and now an invite to the affair instead of being asked to deliver the scrapbooks at the back door with the rest of the hired help.

  “We’re honored to be included,” I said. I was itching to pull out my phone and call my plus one to invite him to this grown-up version of prom. But that would have to wait.

  The food was wonderful and the table talk stimulating, but there was a part of my brain that was setting up a worry-buzz about the deadline for Dinah Leigh’s “little job.” Finally I could resist no longer.

  “Would it be terribly gauche of me to ask a few questions about your family now, Dinah Leigh, so we can get off to a fast start? Senator? Lenora? Would you mind?”

  The senator gave a hearty laugh. “Young lady, you are speaking to an old pol who has spent half his adult life at rubber chicken fund-raising dinners and pig pickin’s. Or standing around being bitten by mosquitoes as I’ve wolfed down potato salad at the family reunions of numerous clans not my own. It surely will not offend my sensibilities. For me, every meal is a working meal.”

  “And I’ve generally been right there beside him, except I don’t wolf down my food,” Lenora said. “Though I might make an exception for that Chocolate-Mocha Volcano dessert they have here. Who’s in?”

  All hands went up except the senator’s. “I’m afraid I must watch my girlish figure,” he said, rubbing his hands over his midsection, which was flat enough to make a gym rat envious.

  “That means he’ll be eating half of mine,” Lenora said with an eye roll.

  “Not to worry, this will be short business,” Dinah Leigh said as I dug my trusty notebook from my bag. “I know our parents’ names, of course, and our grandparents’ on our mother’s side and my paternal grandmother’s name I think was Edna. She died long before I was born.” She paused and puckered her lips. “And I’m afraid that’s about it.”

  I tried to smile but it took effort. This wasn’t enough for a shrub, much less a family tree.

  “Conrad will know more,” she said. “Like I said, he’s developed an interest of late. He’ll be here tomorrow and you can talk with him then. I’ll be meeting his fiancée for the very first time. I really hope we like each other. I dote on my baby brother, always have. It’d be dreadful for him if the two women in his life didn’t get along.”

  I did some math in my head and puzzled over her description. “Could you give me your brother’s full name and date of birth?” I asked.

  She smiled and recited his full name and the date. “I remember the day he was born like it was yesterday. It felt like Christmas, my birthday, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And yes, he’s now sixty-four years old, so it’s silly to keep calling him my baby brother, but that won’t stop me from always thinking of him that way. This is his first marriage. And his bride-to-be is forty and it’ll be the first trip to the altar for her as well. Can you imagine? I think this could go two ways. One, they’re both so set in their ways they can’t bend and the marriage will dissolve before the ink is dry on the marriage license. Or two, they’ve waited so long for the right person they’ll cherish each other and be happy together to the end of their days. Course, I’m hoping for the second scenario. That’s what Conrad says, that Phoebe is the woman he’s waited for all his life. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “It is,” Esme agreed, and I could have sworn her eyes were misting. Esme’s not overly sentimental, so I had to wonder if she was thinking of her own situation with her beau, Detective Denton Carlson of the Morningside Police Department. They’d been seeing each other for a long while, but Esme hadn’t allowed things to progress because she’d been afraid to tell him about her unusual gift, for fear he’d be repelled by the whole notion. I’d threatened to tell him myself, but she let me know straightaway that wouldn’t play. Finally, a couple of months ago, she’d gotten tired of holding back and told him. He’d accepted it without question, which is more than I can say for myself when she first told me.

  I asked Dinah Leigh a few more questions but saw it wasn’t going anywhere and gave up.

  “My aunt Yvonne can tell you more, too,” Dinah Leigh said, actually shivering as she spooned up a mound of chocolate lava. “She’s coming to the birthday celebration and I’ll ask her to bring along anything that might help. And I’ll call down to my house in Charlotte and have my housekeeper send up the one box of family memorabilia that survived my mother’s constant household purgings.”

  “That’d be great,” I said. “But I want to caution you—with this tight schedule we may not be able to trace your lineage back many generations. As a rule, the further back you go, the more time-consuming it gets.”

  “Oh, I understand,” Dinah Leigh said. “Just do whatever you can. I’m hoping you find enough branches to fluff out a pretty tree. That’ll be enough to please me, and Conrad will be happy with whatever you turn up.”

  We enjoyed our chocolate with unladylike groans of pleasure. Lenora swatted away the senator’s spoon as he tried to steal a bite, then laughed and relented. He stopped with one bite. I admired his discipline, but found this behavior incomprehensible. What kind of person could resist this chocolate concoction once they’d tasted it?

  When the meal was over we thanked our hosts profusely and said good night. On the way through the lobby, I turned on Esme.

  “Were you not the o
ne bemoaning all the work we have to do when we were walking through this very lobby earlier? What changed your mind? Why were you so hot to take on this job for Dinah Leigh?”

  “Do you even know who she is?” she asked, unperturbed by my chittering. At my blank look she plowed on. “Her husband, Preston Dodd, was the founder and sole owner of Dodd Enterprises, one of the biggest privately held companies in the southeast. I can’t tell you what they manufacture, doohickeys and thingamabobs, but I know they’re big. When her husband died back in the early nineties, Dinah Leigh took the helm. Everybody thought she’d sink the company within five years, but instead she built it to nearly twice its size in less than a decade and kept it in family hands.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said. “And how do you know all this?”

  “A friend from my church used to work for Dodd Enterprises. She can’t say enough good things about the Dodds and how they looked out for their employees.”

  “Good to know,” I said, realizing why Esme had been so eager. It’s not that we market ourselves exclusively to rich people, but only the financially comfortable are likely to hire us, especially for our deluxe services, which involve archiving materials and producing heritage scrapbooks in addition to our genealogical research.

  “So, worth the midnight oil,” I mused. “Plus, I like her. She seems like a fun lady.”

  “And even better than that, she’s a chatty lady. If we please her, she’ll spread the word. She and Lenora share a lot in common, don’t they? They’re both widows, both have daughters approaching middle age and younger sons with wanderlust. Course, Dinah Leigh’s filthy rich and Lenora’s not, but Lenora’s got grandbabies and I’m betting she feels herself the richer of the two.”

  “No doubt, Lenora dotes on her grandkids. Too bad they both came down with the stomach flu. She was already upset that her son couldn’t come for the celebration. Now her son-in-law and grandkids will miss it, too. But as far as finances go, Lenora’s no pauper,” I said.

  “No, she gets by fine enough,” Esme said. “But she’s not cost-is-no-object rich. You remember how she questioned us about every little line item when she hired us? Dinah Leigh just said ‘Send the bill.’ ”

  “Must be nice,” I said.

  “Oh, I imagine it is in some ways, but sometimes money makes more problems than it solves, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d like to find out firsthand if that’s true, just for a little while. But for now we’ve still got to hustle for a living. I’m worried we’ve overcommitted. We can’t call in the cavalry right now, remember?”

  The members of our Tuesday night genealogy club, otherwise known as our closest friends, are normally available to help when we get into a bind on a job, but not this time. Marydale and Winston Lovett, the newly wedded senior members of our group, had gone off to visit Marydale’s daughter in Chicago. Coco Newsome, our resident hippie and most talented scrapbook designer, was at a sustainability workshop with a former client of ours, River Jeffers. And Jack Ford, the youngest, and I might add the handsomest, member of the group, needed to concentrate on his new role as my boyfriend. Jack and I, after being pals for years, had finally fessed up about our feelings for each other. And, as my grandmother McClure used to say, thanks be to God and all the saints, it turned out the feelings were mutual.

  “We’re pretty much on our own,” I said.

  Esme sighed. “But still, it’s worth some sleep deprivation.”

  “But, Esme, you’re going to be moving in the middle of all this, too.”

  “That’s flexible,” she said, “and anyhow, as you keep telling me, I’m not moving cross-country. And as long as you’re not planning to rent my room out from under me, there’s no big hurry.”

  Esme and I had been roomies in the house my parents left me for more than five years, ever since she came from Louisiana to join my genealogy business. I’d invited her to stay in the mother-in-law suite over my garage until she found a place, but the arrangement had suited us both so well she’d never quite gotten around to finding a place of her own. But now that we were both involved romantically, privacy had become more of an issue.

  Esme had decided it was time to go and bought a house less than a block away. She’d had to replace the faulty furnace and have some structural work done before she could move in, but the house was almost ready, and both of us were getting more apprehensive about what the change would mean to our lives. I was going to miss her desperately but we both knew it was time. Jack and I had agreed to take things slow, fearing that if we rushed it and things went badly, we’d lose our friendship. But Esme and Denton were an established couple, and everyone except Esme seemed to recognize they were ready for the big step. Denny would have to overcome Esme’s prejudice against the institution of marriage and her distrust of any arrangement that infringed on her independence. But my money was on Denny.

  “I’m not planning to rent the room out,” I said. “I didn’t intend to rent it to you in the first place, but you insisted on paying.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to mooch off you,” Esme said. “I like to pay my own way.”

  “You like to have your own way,” I said. “Anyhow, every penny you’ve paid in rent I’ve socked away in a contingency fund for house repairs. I’m in good shape and not at all interested in taking in boarders.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Esme said as we pushed open the doors and got a blast of warm, outside air in our faces. “Not everybody’s as easy to live with as I am.”

  I gave that the raspberry it deserved as we sidestepped the valet and headed for the visitors’ parking lot.

  As we made our way down the hill in the gathering twilight, we met Lincoln, who was so preoccupied, he would’ve walked right past us if Esme hadn’t spoken.

  “Lincoln, are you okay?”

  He seemed surprised to see us, then produced a tight smile. “As okay as a man who’s been royally shafted can be, I guess,” he said.

  “Shafted?” I asked.

  “That article,” Lincoln said, “it was all my fault.”

  Lincoln was a handsome guy if you liked the elbow-patched scholar type. Normally his dress was tidy and his grooming precise. But now he had his shirttail hanging out and his dark hair was tousled.

  “I vetted that reporter, Chad Deese,” he went on. “I’m the one who convinced the senator to do the interview. The guy totally snowed me. He all but promised me—no, he blatantly promised me—a puff piece, a local-son-does-us-proud homage.”

  “But that’s not what you got, I take it,” I said. “We haven’t actually read the article yet.”

  Lincoln shook his head. “It’s bad. Trashy tabloid stuff. Total hatchet job. The senator’s parents come off looking like dolts, and that is one thing he cannot abide.”

  “So we’ve seen,” Esme said. “Did you know this reporter?”

  “I’d met him before,” Lincoln said, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses and polishing them with his shirttail. “He gave me this spiel about his attachments to Quinn County, and you know how the senator is all about the home folks. So Deese tells me he’s got family back there and how his folks knew the senator’s folks and all like that. Like it was all old home week. So I set it up.”

  “Reporter’s tricks,” Esme said. “You shouldn’t beat yourself up. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing,” Lincoln said. “I should’ve looked into him further. The damage is done, but I can’t let this stand. I’ve been out looking for the guy. I just wanted a few select words with him. Didn’t find him, but I found a guy who worked with him. He says Deese has a well-known sore spot when it comes to the senator. He’s been writing attack pieces and shopping them around to newspapers, magazines, blogs, everyplace, but he never got a take until he landed the interview. If I’d asked around I’d have known that. So, yeah, it is my fault.”

  “Any idea why he’s gunning for the senator?” I asked.

  “No, his coworker didn�
�t know; he thought maybe it was some kind of family feud thing. But the senator didn’t recognize the name and I haven’t been able to turn up any family connection. I can promise you this, though, I will find out what Deese’s issue is.”

  “Normally I’d advise you to let it go,” Esme said, “but I’m not inclined to waste my breath and I can see you’ve got your teeth into it. Just don’t do anything foolish. I’ll see you in the morning, right?”

  “Yep, I’ll see you then,” he said, giving a two-fingered salute before heading up the hill.

  “You’ll see him in the morning?” I asked.

  “I promised he could have a sneak peek at the scrapbooks. He wants to make sure there’s nothing that might catch him flat-footed if anyone asks about it. I gather writing this book with the senator has been like herding cats. Lincoln can’t get him to concentrate, and as entertaining as his storytelling tangents are, it’s hindering their progress.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “The senator’s a great storyteller, but like all the great ones, he tends to stretch the truth and sprinkle fairy dust on it. Lincoln will have to force him more into the Dragnet mode—Just the facts, ma’am. And I think he’s just the man for the job. Gentle, but determined. Do you know how Lincoln got picked to work with him on the book?”

  “I think there’s a Quinn County connection there. And Lincoln’s a friend of Dinah Leigh’s son, whose name escapes me. Anyhow, he recommended him. Lincoln’s double-dipping, you know. He’s writing his doctoral dissertation on some bill the senator championed back in the sixties, so he needs facts, not stories.”

  “Well, Lincoln’s right about one thing: the senator seems to enjoy gathering his home territory folks into his inner circle and weaving in all those connections. And I think there may be another one being formed. Did you catch Lincoln peeking in the doorway as we were having dinner?” I smiled as I recalled the look on his face.