Daughter of Deceit (2 page)

Fifteen minutes later, Katharine Murray stepped off her shaded veranda and hoped the morning would not be her last.

Riding with her sister-in-law was risky at the best of times. That morning, Posey was tootling up her drive in a new red convertible that looked no bigger than a bumper car, and although Atlanta was eighty-five in the shade, Posey had the top down. In large sunglasses, her bright hair wrapped in a white scarf, she looked like an aging Hollywood star—except that nobody used the word “aging” in the presence of Posey Buiton.

“Do you like it?” she called. “Wrens brought it home yesterday as a surprise birthday present. I’ve got the air conditioner on, but I couldn’t bear to leave the top up on my first day. Okay?” Without waiting for an answer, she waved a gold chiffon scarf. “I brought this for your hair. It will look good with your coloring.”

Posey Buiton might be flighty about some things, but she had a faultless eye for clothes. The scarf was a perfect complement to Katharine’s auburn hair, copper shirt, and creamy slacks.

Katharine wanted to say, “Thanks, but I’ve decided to stay home,” but a voice in her head reminded her,
Be nice!
Y
ou called Posey for a ride and she gave up an aerobics class to drive you.
Was that her mother’s voice or her own conscience? It was hard to tell them apart at times.

Ignoring every shred of common sense she possessed, Katharine lowered herself into the passenger seat. The car had plenty of legroom if you didn’t mind sitting on your tail-bone.

“Wrens spoils you rotten,” she said, tying on the scarf. “You both know your birthday isn’t for another month. By then he’ll have forgotten this was supposed to be your present.”

“And don’t you remind him.” Posey stroked the dashboard. “Isn’t it gorgeous? You ought to ask Tom to buy you one.” The car leaped down the drive and Posey slammed on brakes halfway to the street. “Sorry. I haven’t gotten the feel of the pedals yet.”

Katharine resigned herself to the next fifteen minutes, glad their drive would not take them outside the residential part of Buckhead—streets where Posey had grown up. Katharine had scarcely comforted herself with that thought when Posey flew out of the drive without braking and barely missed the back bumper of a passing navy Jag.

“Sorry. I was looking for my turn signal.” Posey didn’t sound the least bit dismayed. She peered after the Jag. “Wasn’t that Bara Weidenauer? Bless her heart, she is going through so much right now. Have you heard about Foley’s latest little trick?”

Katharine shook her head. “I don’t know them very well.”

“You know her daughter, Payne, Lolly’s roommate. She married Hamilton Anderson.”

Nobody but Posey Buiton would have named three daughters Laura, Mary, and Hollis and insisted on calling them Lolly, Molly, and Holly. So far only the youngest had rebelled and insisted on being called by her full name.

“Only slightly.” Katharine didn’t point out that she’d had little reason to keep track of her nieces’ college roommates—she’d had children of her own to raise.

“You were at their wedding,” Posey persisted.

Katharine’s chief memory of the extravaganza Bara Weidenauer had flung for her daughter was of the receiving line, where the tall dark groom stood beside his lovely but quiet bride while her mother, in a sparkling silver dress, outshone them both. Not intentionally, but because wherever Bara was, she lit up the room. “We sat on the groom’s side,” Katharine told Posey. “Ann Rose and Jeffers put us on the list.”

The Anderson men had been the pediatricians of choice in Buckhead for half a century. Hamilton Anderson took care of Posey’s grandchildren. Hamilton’s father, Jeffers, had taken care of Posey’s three daughters and Tom and Katharine’s children, Susan and Jon. Jeffers’s widowed father, Oscar, had cared for Posey and Tom when they were small. But Katharine’s primary connection to the family was that Ann Rose Anderson, Jeffers’s wife and Hamilton’s mother, was one of her best friends, in spite of being twenty years her elder. Katharine and Posey were headed to Ann Rose’s that very morning for a meeting to discuss adult illiteracy in Atlanta.

“Speaking of Jeffers,” Posey executed a turn without finding her signals and waved at the driver who blew his horn behind her, “didn’t I hear that he and Oscar have gone on a world cruise or something out in the Far East?”

“Not exactly. They’re spending several months on a medical ship that stops in ports and takes care of destitute people.”

Posey grimaced. “Lord only knows what germs they’ll pick up.”

“They’re doctors. They know about germs. What were you going to say about Payne?”

“She is worried sick about her mother. I am, too. I don’t know if Bara can survive.”

Bara hadn’t noticed the convertible shooting out of the Murrays’ drive. She’d been taking another slug of bourbon. “I’ve had a bad shock,” she excused herself, “and whiskey is good for shock. Those blasted medals. The Holcomb family has done far more than enough for our country. What has the country ever done for us?”

She felt her father’s grip on her shoulder as soon as she voiced that heresy. Winston Arthur Holcomb Sr. had remained a strong supporter of John F. Kennedy’s sentiments long after Kennedy was shot.

“But Winnie,” she protested as she reached her own street, “we couldn’t all be like you.”

How old had she been when she realized she would never play football at Georgia Tech, never become a war hero? When did she give up her dream of becoming an architect and a partner in Holcomb & Associates? At what age had she finally agreed with Nettie that she could not grow up to be just like Winnie?

As the Jag purred up the long hill to the stucco mansion she called home, Bara demanded of the universe, “How did my life go so flat-out wrong?”

She slammed on the brakes barely in time to avoid crashing into the garage door. That would have been disastrous. She had no funds to repair it, and Foley’s lawyer…

She would not think about Foley or his lawyer.

She would not think about her own lawyer, either. Poor Uncle Scotty knew practically nothing about divorce. His specialty was golf. When he wasn’t on the links, he handled accounts for a few condominium associations. She suspected he didn’t do that very well. Still, her mother’s only brother was all she could afford at the moment, and she had to have a lawyer in this mess.

She took another gulp of whiskey as she fumbled for the door opener, had to press the button twice before the door began to rise. She pulled slowly into the four-car garage, turned off the engine, and laid her head on the wheel. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

She lifted her head to study her face in the flask, a reflection as distorted as her life. “I was programmed from birth for marriage and good works,” she told it somberly. She ticked off the accomplishments of sixty-two years on her fingers. “Debut, Randolph-Macon, marriage to Ray, two kids, all those fund-raising shindigs, then Foley, my own private roller coaster to hell.” She flung back her head and took a swallow that choked her. “Dammit, Mama,” she roared, “between us, we have wasted my life. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing!”

She blearily contemplated the white door in front of her hood and wondered whether she had enough energy to carry in the groceries.

Two months before, Deva would have bought the groceries and brought them home, but Bara had come home one day to discover that Foley had dismissed her entire staff—some of whom had been with her for twenty years. Instead, he had hired a weekly cleaning crew and a lawn service.

“Like a museum or something,” Bara had stormed.

“We’re only keeping the place in shape to sell,” he had said coldly.

“I’m never going to sell. And who’s going to do the cooking and laundry?”

“For those, my dear, you are on your own.”

Since then, Bara had subsisted on yogurt, cereal, fruit, and TV dinners. She had ruined several good garments before she’d discovered care instructions on those little tags sewn in seams. Recently she had noticed, to her dismay, how much Publix charged for milk and detergent.

“I bought too many groceries,” she lamented, resting her forehead on the steering wheel. “Too many groceries, too much house.”

It had been big for four people. For one, it was enormous.

“Not one, two,” she reminded herself. “Foley’s in the basement. I’ve got a rat in my basement, Mama. That’s what happens when you marry one. You know what he said yesterday? He wants me to sell my car!” She clutched the wheel of her beloved Jag. Why didn’t somebody come to rescue her from so much pain?

“I’m going under, Winnie!” she cried. “I can’t hold out much longer.”

She took two long swallows from the flask. To forget. But she couldn’t.

Even after months of therapy, she still woke some nights weeping because she had killed her daddy.

The air filled with the theme from
The Lone Ranger
.

It took a couple of seconds for Bara to realize the music was not the soundtrack to her thoughts, but rather, her new cell phone’s ring tone. As she grabbed her black leather purse and pawed through it, she smiled. She and Chip had chosen the ring tone together. “It goes bump-a-bump,” he had announced with satisfaction. Her three-year-old grandson was the one person in the world who could still make her smile.

The phone was buried deep in her purse, eluding her shaking fingers. “Blasted nuisance,” she muttered as she searched. “Never would have gotten the danged thing if Payne hadn’t insisted. I sure named her right. The girl can be a royal pain.”

She pulled out the phone and flipped it open without looking to see who the caller was.

“Bara?” It was her cousin, Murdoch Payne, Uncle Scotty’s only child.

Bara scowled. Next to Foley, Murdoch was her least favorite person on earth. In order to reach the phone in the Jag, Murdoch’s voice had needed to travel from her house to a satellite thousands of miles above the earth and back to a very small target. Couldn’t it have gotten sidetracked along the way?

“You didn’t forget the literacy meeting at Ann Rose Anderson’s this morning, did you?” Murdoch sounded exactly like her Aunt Nettie used to:
Oh, Bara, what have you done now?

Bara huffed. Of course she had forgotten the meeting. Who wouldn’t, with the shock of finding those medals? If she had remembered, she needn’t have gone to the grocery store until later. Ann Rose was serving lunch.

“I didn’t forget, I’m running a little behind.”

“It’s already ten forty. If you aren’t here in five minutes, we’re going to be late.”

Murdoch lived in a small white house on the unfashionable fringe of Buckhead. The street hadn’t even been in Buckhead when Murdoch’s family had moved there, but Buckhead was oozing in all directions as developers co-opted the name. Winnie used to predict that all of metropolitan Atlanta would eventually be in either Buckhead or its equally prestigious neighbor, Vinings.

“I’m coming,” Bara snapped.

Murdoch gave another righteous huff. “You’d better hurry.”

Some people claimed that Murdoch, eight years younger than Bara, was a saint. Hadn’t she given up her job and condo to move back in with her father after her mother’s dementia got so bad they’d had to put Eloise in a nursing home? Every time Bara heard about “Saint Murdoch,” she had to clench her teeth to keep from pointing out that Murdoch had hated her job and had never liked the one-bedroom condo that was all she could afford after she lost most of her money in the technology bubble—convinced, with her usual stubbornness, that she knew more about investing than her broker. Murdoch had been delighted to move back home and devote herself to travel and genealogy while Uncle Scotty spent his days happily serving a few clients, playing countless rounds of golf, and dropping in once a day to visit Eloise—who often had no idea who he was, but thought him charming.

Bara sometimes wondered if Murdoch and Uncle Scotty were aware that she knew they lived comfortably because Eloise’s teacher’s pension was supplemented by income from a generous trust fund Winnie had set up to take care of his wife’s brother and his family, after Scotty climbed into the saddle of his father’s successful law firm and rode it to the brink of bankruptcy. If so, they never mentioned the fact. Murdoch often publicly praised her daddy for paying the bills so she could use her money for frequent trips and genealogy books.

How ironic, Bara thought, that Winnie supported Murdoch, Uncle Scotty, and Eloise, when he could not support his own daughter. Not yet. He had left his estate divided between Bara and Payne with a special trust fund for little Chip, but Foley—

She would not think of Foley. Why further ruin her day?

She shook the flask instead, to see if there was more whiskey in it.

“Bara? Are you still there?” Murdoch demanded.

Bara blinked. She had forgotten she was talking to Murdoch. Murdoch was so easy to forget.

“I’ll be there in a jiff.” She hiccupped and tried to conceal it with a cough. “The world won’t end if we’re a few minutes late.”

“Get here as soon as you can.” Murdoch hung up with another righteous huff.

Bara took a defiant slug before she reached for the door handle. As soon as she emptied the trunk and stopped to powder her nose, the
William Tell Overture
again filled her car. She punched the button and shouted to Murdoch, “Keep your britches on! I’m coming!”

It wasn’t Murdoch, it was Payne. Murdoch must have called her, because Payne sounded like she was edging her way barefoot across a field of shattered crystal. “Hey, Mama, it’s me. What you doing?”

“Sitting in my garage trying to get off the damned phone so I can carry my groceries into the house and go pick up Murdoch for an imbecilic meeting.”

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? You never swear unless you’ve been drinking. Were you drinking and driving?”

“You are getting downright neurotic on that subject. I am not driving. I told you, I’m sitting in the garage. I took a couple of swallows sitting right here, to steady my nerves before going to pick up Murdoch. And I’m swearing because I’ve got to take her to a meeting. I have been to enough meetings in my lifetime to qualify for a Congressional Medal for meeting goers. I wouldn’t go, except Ann Rose twisted my arm so hard she nearly broke it. But I would never have promised if I’d known I’d have to drive Murdoch. You know she makes me think of fingernails on blackboards. I can’t talk now, I’m running late. I had to go get groceries. There wasn’t a bite to eat in the house. Now I have to carry the dratted things in before the meeting or my frozen foods will melt.”

“You carry in your groceries and I’ll come pick you up. I don’t want you driving. I’ll be there as soon as I tear Chip away from his sandbox.”

Normally Bara would have been delighted to see Chip, but Payne’s tone enraged her. “I’m fine to drive, Miss Prissy-pants. And I’ve got to go. I’m late.”

She punched the button to end the call. Almost immediately the phone rang again. That time she checked the name. Maria Ortiz. She pressed the button to disconnect. Maria was one friend Bara was avoiding at the moment. “I can’t talk right now,” she apologized to the air. “I’ve got to get to that blasted meeting.” She wasn’t too drunk to feel a pang of regret. Maria deserved better of her. But Maria also expected too much.

Down in the basement, Foley Weidenauer heard the garage door open while he was shaving. Foley shaved with a blade. His beard was heavy, like the rest of him. He was a bear of a man–tall and burly. He held the razor poised while he waited for the garage door to go down. As soon as Bara slammed the door to the house—Bara always slammed doors, as if she had a grudge against them for standing between her and wherever she wanted to go—he would go upstairs and try once again to make her see reason. She would not win this battle. Foley was determined she wouldn’t, if he had to camp in the basement for a year. His lawyer had advised him not to move out of the house. They didn’t want her claiming he had abandoned it.

Foley was confident he had everything on his side. Not only power and money—although neither Bara nor either of their attorneys had any idea how much he had stashed in offshore accounts, and were only beginning to learn how little he had left where she could get to it. He also had one weapon she could not match: time. He was fifteen years younger than she, forty-seven his last birthday. In his prime. He could wait her out. He would not live in that basement forever.

He inhaled and wrinkled his nose. Even with two dehumidifiers going, the place smelled musty, like the cheap apartments he and his mother used to live in. There had been a lot of apartments, because they kept getting kicked out for the friends she brought home. Foley was ten before he had discovered the nature of her relationship with those friends—one of whom, forever nameless, had been his father. He had been eleven when Social Services took him away. He’d had to scrabble and fight his way through school and into decent society because of that woman. He would not permit another woman to hold him back now.

He leaned forward and frowned to see a new gray hair in the thick pelt that covered his head. He jerked it out and flung it into the toilet. His hair was as dark as it had been when he was twenty. He intended to keep it that way as long as possible. When he inhaled and pulled in his abs, Carlene said he had the figure of a man of thirty.

Carlene had the figure…

He permitted himself a moment’s leisure to mentally scan every curve of her body. Soft. Delectable. Not like Bara, the dried-up old prune. He had another twenty-five good years left. He intended to spend them with somebody who would pleasure and admire him, not constantly carp and compare him to her daddy.

But where was Bara? He opened the door of the bathroom and listened intently.

When old Connor Payne, Bara’s maternal grandfather, had built the house and installed basement living quarters for his servants, he hadn’t worried about whether they would feel the damp or be bothered by noises above them. The way the wooden floors creaked, a listener in the basement could track the movements of anybody on the first floor.

Hearing nothing, Foley left the basement by its outside entrance and hurried around to the garage. Bara was sitting in her Jag.

“I want to talk to you,” he called through the closed window.

She reversed into the turnaround so fast that he had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit by the side mirror. Foley glared until the Jag was out of sight.

She hadn’t bothered to close the garage door. He checked the door into the house and found it unlocked, the security system unarmed. Again. The woman still counted on servants to protect her house. Anybody could come in and steal everything they had. Anybody could come in and hide in a closet, rape and murder her when she returned. Anybody could come in…

Foley smiled.