Closer than the Bones (8 page)

“Alice! This is neither the time nor the place.” Russell said; and, miracle of miracles, she shut up.

“Then I guess you think you have a surefire bestseller on your hands?” I said.

Packer cut his eyes sideways at me. “Yeah, I do. No doubt about that. Once the publishing world gets a hold of this juicy little masterpiece, there’s gonna be a bidding war like you ain’t never seen. Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer will be crying their eyes out when they read this book.”

“Just what is this book?” I asked. “Novel, autobiography, poetry? What?”

Packer didn’t respond. From the head of the table, Miss McElroy sighed heavily. “I imagine it’s a roman a clef, Miss Carpenter. I believe I told you earlier of Sukey’s tendency to turn on those who had befriended her. I suspect that this book of Sukey’s is a thinly veiled portrait of everyone in this room, with the exception of you, naturally. I’ve no doubt that, were we to read it, we would find characters who are barely disguised versions of us. And, it goes without saying, each of these characters is somehow vicious or unspeakably tainted, if not both. Sukey could be horribly vindictive.”

Hamilton Packer laughed, again spewing forth that raucous, unpleasant sound. “That about sums it up.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way we could persuade you not to try to publish this thing,” Russell said, his voice once again weary and defeated.

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” Packer assured him gleefully.

“If you’re not careful, Hamilton,” Lurleen said, “you may be meeting that snowball in hell before too long.” The words sounded incongruous, coming from her dumpy, suddenly too-elderly face, but the glint in her eyes convinced me, at least, that she was angry enough to kill.

“You know,” Packer said, pushing his chair back and standing up, “that bath sounds like a pretty good idea about now. Wanna come along and scrub my back?” He leered at me again.

I stared at him for a moment, then reached over and picked up the butcher knife from where Phillips had placed it. I held it up in front of me. “Sure. As long as you don’t mind if I use this.”

Packer’s laugh wasn’t very convincing. “See y’all later,” he said, making a hasty exit from the room.

When I did see him again, he was no longer in any condition to threaten anyone.

Chapter Seven

Though the air smelled considerably fresher once Hamilton Packer left the room, no one seemed to have much appetite left.

“I don’t suppose anyone would be interested in dessert, after that little announcement?” Miss McElroy asked in a voice laden with irony.

“The colossal nerve of that man!” Alice said. “Surely there must be some way to stop him from selling that, that travesty of a novel!”

“Good luck,” Brett said, his voice harsh. “I don’t know whether any of us has enough money to stop him. If the book is what we all think it is, it’ll go for millions, and we’ll all be the laughingstocks of the literary world.” He grinned suddenly. “But maybe it’ll get us on ‘Oprah’!”

“I think I’m going to be ill,” Lurleen said, pushing herself back from the table and standing up. “Brett is right, though I hate to admit it. Nothing short of murder is going to stop Hamilton from selling that book.”

I decided it was time to do a little digging for information. “Now, I’ll admit that I don’t know for sure how these things work, but are you all certain that Mr. Packer has the right to represent this book? Did Miss Lytton leave a will, for example? Who was the executor of her estate, such as it was?”

Miss McElroy sighed heavily. “You bring up good points, Miss Carpenter, but unfortunately, Hamilton does have the right to represent Sukey’s work. There is very little we can do. Short of murder, as Lurleen so succinctly put it.”

“How certain are you that this manuscript is what you think it is?” I persisted in my questioning, because it seemed to me I had finally hit upon a convincing motive for believing that Sukey Lytton had been murdered. If, that is, this book was what the assembled company seemed to think it was.

Russell Bertram, sounding inexpressibly weary, responded. “If you knew Sukey Lytton the way we all did, Miss Carpenter, you’d have no doubts whatsoever. She was like one of those creatures that devours its own offspring. No matter how you tried to help her, to befriend her, sooner or later she turned on you.”

“Even dying didn’t stop her,” Alice said, her face twisted in hate.

Lurleen, who had been standing all this time, announced, “I’m going to my room. I have a sick headache.” She walked away from the table and out the dining room door.

“I’m not feeling particularly chipper myself,” Miss McElroy said, and indeed her face had turned pale. “I think I’ll have a bit of a lie-down in my room. Miss Carpenter, would you see me in the drawing room, about four, perhaps?”

“Of course,” I said.

Brett Doran and the Bertrams followed Miss McElroy out of the room, while I lingered behind in hopes of talking further with Morwell Phillips. I caught his eye, and with a barely suppressed sigh, he waited to hear what I wanted.

“When would it be convenient for you give me that tour?” I asked. “I know you must be quite busy, but if you have time this afternoon, I’d love to see the rest of the house.”

He consulted his watch. “Perhaps in half an hour?”

“That would be fine,” I said. “Where shall I meet you?”

“At the foot of the front stairs, if you wouldn’t mind.” Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and headed for the kitchen.

Maybe at some point I would find out why he didn’t seem to want me here. Not that it mattered all that much, since Miss McElroy wanted me here. He was just another employee, as far as I could see. I frowned. Maybe he was just jealous.

I shook my head as I grabbed my bag from beneath my chair.
What could I do for the next half hour?
I thought for a moment, then headed for the front door.

Just as I had thought. Brett was out on the verandah, smoking an after-lunch cigar.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked, walking over to him.

He stood, waving toward the chair I had occupied during our earlier conversation. “Please,” he said, resuming his seat as I made myself comfortable in mine. He grinned as he held out his cigar case toward me. “Would you like one?”

“Some other time, perhaps,” I said, surprising him. I had been known to enjoy a good stogie, upon occasion, but right now I didn’t have the time to enjoy one properly. I had a little digging to do, and I figured Brett was more likely than some of the others to answer my questions.

“Your former agent is quite a piece of work,” I said.

He snorted. “Yeah, ol’ Hamilton is a bundle of joy.” He frowned at the tip of his cigar. “But despite the act you just saw, he is pretty good at his job.”

“Surely he doesn’t behave like that with the publishing folk in New York.”

Brett shook his head. “No, he reserves that kind of behavior for his nearest and dearest. I know it’s hard to believe, after what you just saw, but he’s completely different when he’s dealing with an editor or a publisher. He’s all charm.” Grinning again, he said, “But he’s all barracuda underneath.”

“That’s probably a good quality in an agent,” I observed.

“Definitely,” he said. “You want someone who will go to the mat for you and get you the best deal possible. Hamilton does that.”

“But you’ve apparently parted company,” I said. “Though of course it’s none of my business.”

Brett shot me a look which informed me he wasn’t buying that one. “Yeah, I fired him about two weeks ago. If you must know, I found out he was doing a little extra dealing on the side, trying to get himself more of a percentage than he was entitled to. I told him I wasn’t going to put up with it, and he laughed. So I fired him. End of story.”

Somehow I wasn’t surprised to hear that Hamilton Packer was ethically challenged. I decided to change tack. “When we were talking earlier, something you said made me curious.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me as he exhaled a plume of smoke. “I think I may start calling you George instead of Ernie.” He laughed.

“Fair enough.” I grinned at him. “So I’m nosy. Anyway, you said something earlier about Sukey Lytton. About how she usually liked men older than you.”

He nodded. “Yeah, she had this real daddy complex. Most of the time she went after guys in their fifties or older. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was an orphan, grew up in foster homes. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But she was definitely into older men.”

“Like Hamilton Packer?”

Brett twisted his face into an expression of disgust. “Even him, if you can believe it. But I think things had cooled off between them before she died. She had her eyes on someone else, I think, but I don’t know whom.”

“Maybe Russell Bertram?” I suggested.

“No, she’d already done that,” Brett said before taking a long drag from his cigar. He exhaled smoke and watched it drift lazily into the humid afternoon air. “You could hear at lunch just how fond Alice was of Sukey. And that’s why. Sukey and Russ had a little thing going two or three years ago.”

“Quite an incestuous little group you have here,” I said, watching his face.

He rolled his eyes but made no other comment.

Deciding that I had dug in the muck long enough for now, I changed the subject to the hit movie he had recently written. I knew how much most writers love talking about their work, and Brett was no exception. His face lit with pleasure, and he was off and running, telling me more juicy tidbits about some of his Hollywood acquaintances.

He was in the middle of an amusing, but highly scandalous, anecdote about a producer and his three girlfriends when the sound of a clearing throat interrupted us. I looked up to find Morwell Phillips standing near me. I had been so absorbed in Brett’s story that I hadn’t heard the butler approach.

“Are you ready for your tour now?” he asked, his voice more than a bit frosty.

“Yes, of course,” I said, a little flustered as I stood up. “I’m sorry, I got so involved in talking with Brett I lost all track of time.”

“You know me, Morwell,” Brett said, standing beside me. “When I get going, I just keep babbling away.”

Phillips allowed a small smile at that, but then he turned toward the front door and said pointedly, “If you’re ready, Miss Carpenter?”

Smiling at Brett, I said, “Certainly, Mr. Phillips,” though I had been tempted to say something entirely different.

We left Brett on the verandah to finish his cigar in peace. Back inside the house, Phillips paused near the foot of the stairs. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to see inside some of the bedrooms just now, but perhaps later on you’ll be able to see some of them and their special features.”

I nodded.

“Idlewild is, as you know, a house in the Greek Revival style,” Phillips began, warming to his task the longer he talked. “This style became extremely popular in the eastern United States between 1820 and 1840, chiefly in our capital, and then the style began to spread northward and westward. Idlewild was begun in 1851 and completed in the summer of 1852 and is one of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the South.”

“It’s a magnificent structure,” I said, “and from what I’ve seen in Natchez and in other places, it’s also one of the largest Greek Revival houses still standing.”

“That’s correct,” Phillips said, looking very pleased. Apparently complimenting the house was one way to get in his good graces. “Idlewild was designed by an architect who had designed a number of public and private buildings throughout the South, and he was given a free hand by Mary Tucker’s great-great-great grandfather, Belisarius McElroy. Old Bell had been to Greece as a young man, and he was very taken with the Greek style. He wanted his own little bit of it here, in north central Mississippi.”

“It’s a very imposing sight as you come up the driveway and see those twelve columns across the front of the house. And the doorways are wonderful, too, so large.” I laughed. “At my height, I often have to stoop a bit in older houses, but not here.”

Phillips smiled. “Doorways are important in the Greek Revival style, as are columns, since the form is based on that of a Greek temple. Much use of pillared porticoes and pediments, for example.”

“A bit of Athens right here in Mississippi.”

“Exactly.” He beamed at me, and I felt like I had passed some sort of test. He took great pride in his employer’s home, and I couldn’t blame him. I’ve always been fascinated by houses, and I could quite happily spend several days or weeks getting to know every nook and cranny of this grand old girl.

“The rooms are laid out on each of the three floors basically as large squares,” Phillips continued with his explanation. “The dining room is a bit larger than any of the other rooms on the ground floor. The kitchen is right next to it, with a small butler’s pantry off to one side, and a rear staircase on the other. Across the hall are three rooms, each the same size as the other. The front room is, as you have seen, Mary Tucker’s sitting room. It was once the main drawing room.”

I followed him as he moved down the hall. “This second room here,” he said, as he opened the door, “is a library. Feel free to borrow whatever you might like to read while you’re here. There are some items”—he indicated a set of shelves enclosed by glass and secured by locks—“which are too precious to be left out in the open, but if you’d like, I’d be happy to show some of them to you.”

Standing in that room, I stared lustfully at the shelves lining the walls around us. There must be fifteen or twenty thousand books in this room, I estimated, many of them dating from the mid to late nineteenth century, to judge by their appearance. The rich aroma of leather bindings tantalized my nostrils, and I wanted nothing more at this moment than to spend the rest of the day here, seeking out the many treasures housed in this room.

“A room like this is sheer heaven for a bibliophile,” I commented.

Phillips gave a gentle laugh at the wistfulness of my tone. “I understand completely. This is my favorite room in the house.”

With great reluctance, I followed him back out into the hall. The final room on the ground floor turned out to be another sitting room. “It has been a bit modernized, as you’ll see,” he explained. “If you care to watch television, you’ll have to come here. This room has the only television set in the house. Except for the servants’ quarters in the courtyard wing, that is.”