Paging the Dead Page 3

  “I’m sure she did,” Winston said. “She got teased about it when we were kids in school.”

  The silence fell again, all of us lost in our own thoughts, until Marydale spoke up. “Sophreena, do you and Esme want to skip tonight? Would you like us to clear out?”

  “No, please, don’t go,” I said. “I think we’d both welcome some distraction.”

  “We’re good at distraction,” Coco said. “But before we leave the subject, Esme, have you, you know, heard anything from Mrs. Porter?”

  Esme, her ire exhausted, was patient in her answer. “It doesn’t work that way, Coco, at least not for me. I hardly ever get anything from people who’ve died recently. Maybe it takes a while for them to process out or something. I don’t think time works the same in that dimension. Maybe there’s something they have to do before their spirits join the transcendence or whatever. But, in any case, I don’t think Dorothy Porter would pick me as her tether to the temporal world.”

  “Probably just as well,” Coco said. “I mean, even if she did tell you something that’d help with her case, how would you explain how you knew?”

  “Good point,” Jack said, fiddling with his phone. “Listen, I’ve got a reporter friend over in Raleigh. We’ve been texting back and forth while you were talking with the cops. I wanted to see if I could find out anything.”

  “And did you?” I asked.

  Jack continued to stare at his phone’s screen. “Apparently the cause of death was strangulation,” he said. “That’s all for now.”

  “Please, tell him if he finds out anything more to let us know,” Esme said.

  “Her,” Jack said, and put his thumbs to work.

  I felt a pang. What was it? Jealousy? I certainly had no right to feel that. Jack and I are just friends, pals, amigos. And while there’s a part of me deep down that might like that to change, it never will. I care too much about the friendship to risk it. And anyway, he doesn’t think of me that way.

  “Okay, now,” Coco announced, uncurling from her end of the couch and starting to clear away the food. “We said we were going to move on to more pleasant things. Let’s get this cleared and go to the shop to work.” She slipped on her sandals and headed for the kitchen, her bracelets and the tiny bells on her anklets tinkling like wind chimes for leprechauns. It was a happy sound.

  • • •

  We headed out our front door into the hot, muggy dusk for the four-block walk to Keepsake Corner. I hoped Marydale’s niece, Roxie Mimms, who watches the shop for her a few hours a week, had remembered to leave the air-conditioning on this time. Last week we’d been miserable for the first half hour as we worked in the small back room where motors from the dehumidifiers had pushed the temps into sauna range.

  Morningside is a beautiful town. Except for my college and post-grad years this has been my home. I’ve traveled a lot for someone my age, but I’m always happy to come back again. I can’t remember the dying town Winston described.

  Morningside is technically an incorporated town. We have a council government, several churches and a compact commercial district. But during the revitalization campaign the town elders had taken to calling it Morningside Village and made sure all the literature and signage reflected that designation. It sounded quaint, though Morningside had long ago outgrown village status.

  Winston dropped back to walk alongside me, pointing to one of the wrought-iron lamp stanchions bordering the sidewalk. “That was Dorothy’s handiwork. That was the opening salvo in her war on shabbiness.”

  The stanchions held old-fashioned globed streetlights, and on lower arms hanging baskets of greenery and colorful perennials gave the commercial district a charming, vibrant look.

  “Dorothy gave those to the town?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” Winston said. “It wasn’t like that. If you saw old pictures of this strip here you wouldn’t recognize it. The shops were all rundown with peeling paint and dirty windows. The sidewalks were cracked and the gutters littered. No such thing as landscaping. People just let things grow as they might, weeds and all. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “What happened to turn it around?” Jack asked.

  “Dorothy and her family pride,” Winston said. “She was not going to have the place her grandfather founded go to shambles. Dorothy had a pet word she used: tacky. Couldn’t abide anything she found tacky. She made a fiery speech to her garden club on the sorry state of affairs and got those women stirred up enough to go to the historical commission to rabble rouse. When they didn’t get action there they marched on the town council, which in those days met conveniently around the supper hour at the old Bar-B-Que Hut out on Orchard Road.”

  “And the council came up with a plan?” Jack asked.

  “Not really,” Winston said. “The town fathers—and it was all men back then—allowed as how, yes, things were looking a little downtrodden and could use some sprucing up. But they never did anything about it.”

  “Well, clearly, someone did,” I said, gesturing toward the row of shops with their faux Old World facades, tasteful signs, immaculate landscaping and sparkling panes of glass. The rest of the group had keyed in on Winston’s story and he held court as we strolled, more comfortable now that the sun was setting.

  “Dorothy went commando on ’em.” Winston said. “She said if they weren’t going to do anything she would. She and her garden clubbers started staging unsanctioned beautification projects. They had bake sales and quilt raffles and all such as that and raised a good bit of money, plus they put their backs into the actual physical work. Big planter pots like those,” he pointed to an urn overrun with brightly colored petunias, coleus and trailing honeysuckle vines, “just showed up along the sidewalks and Dorothy and her posse of women—and it was mostly women—started having come-to-Jesus talks with the shop owners about taking pride in the appearance of their places. I know ’cause I was one of those owners.” He nodded toward Sugar Magnolias Bakery on the opposite side of the street.

  We’d arrived at Keepsake Corner and Marydale was, as usual, having difficulty with the lock. She wiggled the key and jiggled the knob as she spoke. “Your shop was beautiful, Win. And the new owners are keeping it up nicely.”

  As Winston turned his back to the bakery I thought I detected a wistful expression. “You’re being generous, Marydale,” he said. “But I’ll be honest, back in those days I was as guilty as anybody around about letting things fall into disrepair. I kept it clean and sanitary inside, but I was so focused on getting bread and pastries into my ovens I didn’t give much thought to how the place looked outside.”

  “Enter Dorothy?” Esme asked.

  “Enter Dorothy,” Winston confirmed as Marydale finally freed the door and we all caught a blessed waft of cool air. “But she didn’t just yammer at us about it. She actually drew up sketches and plans and helped us figure out what we could accomplish with the meager spare dollars any of us had back then.”

  “So this showcase town came about because of a grassroots movement?” Jack asked. “That is so cool.”

  “That’s how it started,” Winston said. “And it was pretty cool in the beginning. Course, like it happens with lots of great ideas, this one got hijacked by politicians. Dorothy got active in local politics and staged a coup at the next election. She and her cohorts took over the town council and all her gentle encouragement hardened into regulations, codes and ordinances. She got a little power drunk and they started pushing stuff through that put a real hardship on some of the shop owners. Put some people out of business. I nearly went under myself, but I managed to hold on through a couple of lean years. That’s one thing about being a baker; you’ll always have bread so you won’t starve.” He took off his Panama hat and set it on the counter. “Now we said we were going to talk about something more cheerful; sorry I got off on all this.” He went to the shelves to pull out his scrapbooking box.

  “Just one more question,” I said, pulling out my own overflowing container. “I take it Doro
thy may have earned herself some bad feelings after she took over the council?”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Winston said. “She was widely and deeply hated there for a while. And while Morningside is made up of mostly kind and gentle people, there are some folks around who really know how to hold on to a grudge.”

  five

  ONCE WE’D SETTLED AT THE LONG WORK TABLE ESME CALLED the meeting to order by asking, “Okay, y’all, what’s up?”

  This was about as formal as we get.

  “I’ll go first,” Marydale said. She flipped open her scrap-book to a copy of the daguerreotype she’d scanned and painstakingly repaired with computer software. “I’ve found out who this woman is. I emailed a copy to everybody in the family and a cousin sent me tons of info on her. She’s my great-great-aunt. I’m going to make a page for her tonight and write in everything I’ve learned about her life.”

  Jack was next. “Nothing to report,” he said. “No time. With the Honeysuckle Festival coming up everybody wants their places looking good. We’re working from dawn to dusk, or as the old folks say, ‘from can see to cain’t see.’ ”

  Jack’s family lore has it that he’s descended from Robert Ford, the man who shot and killed infamous outlaw Jesse James back in the Wild West days. Though he’d hit a brick wall in his research he was still plugging away on what he’d gathered so far for his scrapbooks.

  Coco had brought along an envelope full of old family photos her mother had found. Her task for the evening was to organize them and start to document what she knew about the people, locations and dates.

  Then it was Winston’s turn. He’d made more progress than any of us on his family research. There’d always been whispered rumors in his family about a liaison between one of his direct ancestors and a slave woman. Winston had set out to get the whole story and he wanted to know everything regardless of how his ancestor’s reputation fared. Winston subscribes to the warts-and-all school of genealogy and I heartily approve. Otherwise it’s just an exercise in vanity.

  “I’m getting somewhere finally,” he said. “I got those papers I sent off for months ago. Remember? From that historical society down in South Carolina?”

  We all nodded.

  “About Bonaventure plantation?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Bonaventure,” Winston said, crooking his head to one side, “though I don’t rightly know if it was much of a plantation by the time my—let me see, it would be my great-great-grandfather—by the time he came to own it.”

  “Let’s use the ahnentafel chart to avoid confusion, Winston,” I said. “Horace Lovett would be your number twelve, four generations back from you.”

  Esme rolled her eyes. She and I have an ongoing argument about how to reference ancestors and it perfectly illustrates the differences in our approach to our work. Esme is unbothered by the monotonous repetition of a confusing string of “greats” to signify generations. I, on the other hand, prefer the Teutonic orderliness of the ahnentafel, the family table, which handily supplies each relation a number.

  “Okay,” Winston said. “So my twelve bought the plantation lock, stock and barrel, including the slaves. Got it at a fire-sale price and looks like maybe there was a good reason for that. It was pitifully rundown by then.”

  “Did you find anything about what you really want to know?” Coco asked.

  “Nothing that’ll stand up to Sophreena’s standards,” he said. “But there’s a list of all the assets that came with the plantation, and, just alongside where they’d put down a plow and a rocking chair, there’s a woman named Delsie.” He shook his head. “Awful. A human being, just another thing in the inventory.”

  “Is that her?” Coco pressed. “Is that the one you think might be your—okay let’s see, what would that be? Your thirteen?”

  “I don’t know if it’s her,” Winston said. “I thought the name I’d heard whispered about in the family was Della, but maybe Delsie is a nickname.” He hunched a shoulder. “Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, could be it’s a different person altogether. But this is a start anyway.”

  Winston hadn’t understood what the family secret was about when he was a child, but he’d known it was something shameful. When he was in his forties a great-aunt decided she was tired of carrying the secret and told him all she knew. That her grandfather had been the master of a plantation and he’d had children with a slave woman and that she was descended from that union. Winston tried to ask his family about it, but was told never to speak of it again. Now Winston had grandchildren of his own and he wanted his family history to be honest and complete.

  This was the purest of reasons for documenting family history, to leave for subsequent generations the legacy of really knowing their people. Winston’s wife, Patsy, felt otherwise; she hated that he was “dredging up all that old stuff.” But his children and his grandchildren were into it. They trailed along with him when he hit the libraries, courthouses and graveyards searching for information.

  Winston’s scrapbooks weren’t beautiful. He didn’t have an eye for layout or embellishment and his craft was a bit sloppy, but they were genuine and personal.

  I couldn’t help but contrast them to the vanity books we’d be constructing for Dorothy. Then it hit me. Would we be making the Pritchett books? The woman was dead; she’d have no use for them now. Then the second thought hit and I felt at once panicked and ashamed. We hadn’t been paid. Thinking of money at a time like this was crass but we’d already put in hours of work and our bottom line for next month was going to look positively anemic without that final payment.

  “Sophreena?” Esme said and her tone let me know she’d already asked me once. “Are you with us?”

  “Sorry. Tonight I actually have something for my scrap-book,” I said, tapping a small packet of photos, scanned and printed from the originals. “I got these in the mail this week from a distant cousin of my mother’s I’d contacted years ago. Course, you all know Mom was adopted so they weren’t blood relations. And since my mother grew up in Kansas and this cousin grew up in Minnesota they hardly ever saw each other. But she recently ran across these pictures and thank goodness she remembered me and still had my address. This one’s Mom,” I said, pointing to a little girl on a tricycle. “She’d have been about four then.”

  “About four? That’s not very precise, Sophreena,” Coco teased, turning my own words back on me.

  “I know,” I sighed. “But with Mom’s adoption being so murky I have to resort to best guesses about a lot of things.”

  “Have you found out any more about the adoption?” Marydale asked.

  “I wrote more letters last week trying to locate people who might have known my grandparents around the time they adopted Mom, and I’ve got more requests in for public records, but no breakthrough yet.”

  “Your mom would be proud you’re continuing her quest,” Marydale said, patting my hand. “It was very important to her.”

  I nodded, afraid to say more on that subject since my emotions were already raw. “Okay, Esme,” I said, “your turn.”

  “Tonight I’m working on July, 1952,” she said. “It was a busy time in Louisiana. I may have several pages.”

  Esme had enough photographs and memorabilia from her mother to fill many scrapbooks. Clementine Sabatier had been a sentimental woman, a saver and an avid photo buff. Plus she’d kept a regular diary for years.

  We worked companionably for the next couple of hours, with one or the other of us occasionally wandering into the shop to fetch supplies which we added to our tabs.

  Coco whooped as she held up a picture. The hand-tinted photograph depicted a woman dressed in an exotic outfit and holding two giant fans festooned with feathers. She was smiling seductively, one foot drawn up to rest her pointed toe on the humped back of an old steamer trunk.

  “It’s my great-aunt, Colette,” Coco said, showing the photo around. “She was a fan dancer back in the 1930s in New York. She was no Sally Rand, but she was pretty well kn
own. She’s our family scandal but my mother adored her. She named me after her, much to the rest of the family’s dismay. They were afraid it might influence the way I’d turn out. Imagine that.” She jangled her bracelets and laughed.

  Going about our normal routines was like a balm after the shock of Dorothy’s death and being questioned by the police, and we stayed later than usual. Coco, Winston and Marydale had all left their cars in the Keepsake Corner parking lot, but Jack had come directly to our house as usual. He always insists on walking Esme and me home, though until today there’d been little serious crime in Morningside. And anyway, Esme was better bodyguard material. Jack wouldn’t exactly strike fear in the heart of an assailant. Topping out at about five foot eight, he was slight of build, though well muscled—I couldn’t help but notice that. And handsome, which has nothing to do with safety, but is definitely worth noting.

  On the short walk we talked of happy things, mostly to do with the upcoming Honeysuckle Festival.

  “Did you hear there’s going to be music all day long on both Saturday and Sunday on the town square,” Jack said, “and fireworks out over the lake on Sunday night? First time for that.”

  The festival was the highlight of the summer in our little corner of the world. It had started about ten years back as an attempt to entertain visitors who came for a seniors’ golf tournament. The geezer tourney, as Jack called it, was still a highlight of the weekend so once again we’d be inundated with men in plaid pants and women in support hose and culottes. But the festival was growing every year.

  When we got to the house Esme went on inside but Jack put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back.

  “Wait up, Soph. You okay? You want to talk about anything?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Not my best day, but I’m hanging in.”

  “Good,” he said, putting his arms around me. It was a good hug. A really. Good. Hug. I felt myself melting a little, but then there it was, the brotherly pat, pat, pat on my back.