Daughter of Deceit (27 page)

“I’m telling Katharine you love cars.”

“I do. See?” He held his arms wide so Katharine could read the message on his bright orange shirt:
I GOT A NEW CAR FOR MY WIFE. BEST TRADE I EVER MADE.

“Don’t believe him,” Janie told Katharine. “He adores me.”

“I adore her cooking.” Viktor patted his ample paunch. “Janie’s the only one in the bunch who can cook.” He sat on the floor and leaned his curly head against her legs.

“Mama did the cooking,” Janie explained. “Even after the girls got married, everybody ate here at night after work. And since I didn’t get married until five years ago—four years after Flossie, even—and since Wanda is hopeless in a kitchen, I was the one who helped Mama. After she died, it fell to me to do the cooking. We still pretty much eat at Daddy’s every night.”

“Is a good family,” Viktor said. “Everybody lives near and helps one another.”

“Who cooks when Mama and the Aunts are on tour?” Katharine wondered.

“We men
can
cook,” Viktor reminded her. “Today the women went to church and we stayed home slaving over a hot pit.”

“For which we are all grateful.” Janie tugged his curls fondly.

“Where did you live before you built your houses?” Katharine didn’t see a sign of earlier habitations, but the small farmhouse surely wasn’t large enough for all the daughters and their husbands.

“Daddy gave each daughter a piece of land when we got married. Melinda and Bessie put trailers on theirs—Daddy can get them cheap from people who are replacing them with houses.”

“Mobile homes,” Viktor said in a voice rich with disgust. “The state house of Georgia. I come to visit Janie’s family the first time and what do I see? A family of builders and not one of them has a proper home. Daddy in this old pile, two of them in trailers, and Flossie and Beau in a little cabin in the woods. I say to Janie, ‘I will not marry you until we build something worthy of you, to hold your precious things.’ She had them in storage. Can you imagine? She and her sisters would go to the storage place to admire their furniture.”

Janie nodded. “It’s true. We’d all started collecting antiques years ago, but we had no place to put them. We planned to build someday, but if it hadn’t been for Viktor, I don’t know if someday would have ever come.” Again she stroked his head. “He got the others busy and they built our house while he planted his vineyard and orchard.”

Viktor waved toward the houses up the cove. “Once her sisters saw Janie’s fine house, they all insisted on houses. Five houses in five years, to suit the owners. Now people come to visit and look!” His hand swept out to encompass the cove. “They see what the men can do, and everybody gets more business. Much better, right?”

“Much better,” Katharine agreed. But if the houses had all been built in the past five years, Kenny had grown up in a mobile home. Did that explain his flushed reluctance to tell Hollis where he used to live? Katharine wished she knew how to tell him not to be ashamed of his past, that a close family is a rare and precious thing.

“I was helping Katharine sort out the family,” Janie said. “Don’t interrupt, Viktor. You distract me.”

He stroked her ankle and gave Katharine a wink. “That is what I do best. But I can tell you about the family. Here is how I learned them apart. Melinda is the oldest and the prettiest. Bessie is the most serious. My Janie is the sweetest. The three of them, they fell down the staircase. Boom, boom, boom.” His hand made stairs in the air.

“We are like stair steps,” Janie corrected him, “one year apart.”

“They were so much trouble, Mama waited eight years to have Flossie. She was such a handful, poor Mama waited another five years to have Wanda. Wanda is the baby, and spoiled rotten. After her, Mama gave up.” His grin was so impish, Katharine smiled back.

“When did you all start singing together?” she asked Janie.

“About the time I got born. We always sang at home, and Mama and Daddy sang duets in churches around here. Bessie and Melinda started singing with them when they were four and five. The next year I joined them, and gradually we girls started getting asked to sing by ourselves. By the time we were in middle school, we were singing all over the South, even up into Kentucky. Flossie started singing with us when she was eight, not long after Kenny was born.”

“But they were not Mama and the Aunts,” Viktor interrupted. “They were the Sunshine Sisters. Even Wanda sang.”

Janie nodded. “We added Wanda when she was six, but poor Kenny couldn’t carry a tune. Nobody can understand it. I guess he takes after Jake.”

“He is too embarrassed,” Viktor declared. “When his Mama sings in public, he goes all pink and wishes he could sink into the earth.”

“And he’s mortified by our name,” Janie added, “especially since it was all his fault. One day when he was four, we were rehearsing and Kenny was coloring out in the auditorium—like he had to do a lot, poor thing. A man came up to him and said, ‘Aren’t they really hot?’ and Kenny heaved this tremendous sigh and said, ‘They’re not so hot. They’re just Mama and the aunts.’ The man turned out to be an agent scouting us, and he loved the name, so that’s who we became. He took us international, so poor Kenny spent his whole life being dragged from one gig to another. We home schooled him—or on-the-road schooled him, I guess would be more accurate—until high school, when he pitched a fit and said he wanted a normal life for a change. He moved in with Daddy and Mama and he’s lived here ever since. Won’t even sleep over at Melinda and Jake’s. Says it feels like it’s a museum.”

“Kenny has not suffered,” Vik protested. “Some boys spend their childhood wondering where they will get their next meal. When I grew up—”

“Katharine was reading up on Slovenia last night,” Janie interrupted.

“It sounds lovely.” Katharine agreed with Janie that the afternoon was too peaceful for a recital of sad childhoods. “I think I’d like to visit.”

“It is wonderful,” he agreed. “The Alps in the north, the Adriatic to the southwest, and beautiful vineyards and orchards in between. You would like it there.”

“Do you know the town of…” Katharine struggled to remember where Anton Molnar had come from. “Something like ‘Valentine’?”

“Velenje? My family’s home city, up in the Alps. Famous for coal mining. I still have cousins there, but our branch of the family moved down to more fertile soil and started a vineyard a while ago.” He sounded as if it had happened in his childhood, not two hundred years before.

“Would you be able to locate the family of a man who came from there to America back in 1959?”

“A defector.” Viktor said it fiercely and did not make it a question.

Katharine remembered that he had been born in Yugoslavia during the Communist years, and appreciated the patriotism that kept him loyal to the country he still loved. “I’m afraid so, but he was killed in Atlanta before he could enjoy his freedom. I found the story last night in some old clippings, and wondered whether his family ever knew what happened to him. His name was Anton Molnar.”

Viktor drew his bushy brows together. “Why does the name sound familiar? He is not part of our family, I don’t think. Perhaps he is from a branch family for one of my many cousins. Write down his name and I will try to find out about him. I have several cousins in Velenje with whom I correspond by e-mail.”

She found a pen in her purse, but not paper. He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out two business cards. “Write his name and your e-mail on the back of one and keep the other. Ellijay is not so far from Atlanta. If you get yourself a good European car, bring it to me to fix. I do not work on anything else.”

She pocketed the card. “I’ll keep that in mind. I need to buy one soon. What kind would you recommend?”

He frowned at her rental. “What is the matter with that one?”

“It belongs to Enterprise. My car got totaled last month.”

“Ah.” He sounded relieved. “As a mechanic, I would recommend a Saab. They are wonderful to drive and”—he winked—“they often need repairs. However, if I were your husband, I would buy you a Volvo, for they are very safe. And if I were your lover? I would recommend that you drive several cars until you feel about one the way you feel about me. But as a new friend? Let me think.”

As if drawn by a magnet, Kenny’s uncles and Lamar came up on the porch to join in the automobile discussion. Even the aunts perched on the steps and added comments and objections. Buddy and Jake were in a heated discussion about American versus Japanese when they heard galloping hooves. Hollis raced across the pasture, followed by Kenny shouting something at her.

“Don’t look like a friendly race to me,” Floyd said. They watched Hollis kick her feet free from the stirrups, lie sideways across her saddle, and slide to the ground.

“Odd way to dismount,” said Floyd.

“She got shot in the chest a month back,” Lamar told him. Katharine wondered what else Kenny might have told his grandfather about their family.

“Smart way to get down, then,” said Beau.

They all watched Hollis lead her horse toward the barn while Kenny slid to a stop behind her, still shouting.

Lamar pulled himself to his feet from where he’d been perched on the top step, playing with the ears of one of the red-and-white spaniels. “Maybe I ought to go check on them.”

Katharine stood, too. “I’ll drive you down. It’s time we were going, anyway.”

Beau joined them. “I’ll rub down Hollis’s horse so you can be getting on your way. Traffic gets heavy heading into town if you wait much longer.”

“I will check on Anton Molnar and let you know,” Vik called after Katharine.

They pulled up in front of the barn in time to hear Hollis yell over her shoulder, “I don’t care, you don’t need to talk like trailer trash!”

Kenny pulled his horse into the barn after her, his voice high and strident. “I may be trailer trash, but I’m not a drunk or a drug addict!”

“Whoa boy, whoa boy!” Lamar crossed the space from car to barn quicker than Katharine would have believed, and laid a hand on Kenny’s shoulder. “You got no call to talk that way to a guest.”

Kenny grew red and froze up. Hollis rubbed her horse furiously.

Beau took the curry comb. “Let me do that. Don’t want you rubbing a hole in my horse.”

“Sorry,” Hollis muttered. “She’s a wonderful horse.”

“Come ride her anytime, but I think your aunt is ready to go now. I’ll finish up for you.”

“Thanks.” Katharine gave Beau a grateful smile.

He grinned back. “Tell Tom I said hello. My invitation is for you all, too. Come back anytime. We’d love to have you.”

“You know him?” Hollis asked as they got in their car.

“Years ago. He used to live in Buckhead.” Katharine pulled onto the gravel road. Gravel crunched under their tires as she headed uphill toward the ridge.

“Really? Weird.” Hollis looked over her shoulder at the cove they were leaving. “It’s a weird family.”

“Maybe so, but what on earth—?”

Hollis held up one hand. “I do not want to discuss it. In fact, I do not want to hear Kenny Todd’s name again in my lifetime. Is that understood? If not, I’ll get out right here and walk to Atlanta.”

Her eyes were bright and she looked feverish, but Katharine knew it was anger, not drugs or alcohol. Hollis seldom drank, and since middle school she had been vociferous about the stupidity of using drugs. Nor had Katharine seen any of the signs parents are taught to look for that Hollis was a closet alcoholic or addict. Was that the “problem” Kenny had referred to? What had given him that idea?

As darkness shut down around them, she decided to ask. “That was a weird thing he-who-shall-not-be-named yelled at you this afternoon—that he isn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict. Had you said he was?”

“Um, no.”

“Had he said you were?”

Hollis didn’t reply for so long that Katharine thought she was being snubbed. Then, out of the darkness, Hollis asked in a small voice, “Did you ever do one really dumb thing that haunted you for the rest of your entire life?”

Katharine thought it over, in order to answer honestly. The first that came to mind was breaking off with a boy she had really loved in high school over a stupid quarrel on graduation night. She had refused his calls, returned his letters, and driven him away before she had realized what a mistake that was. When she had met Tom, she’d thought that was behind her—until she had run into Hobart Hastings again at the Atlanta History Center the previous June. They were currently trying to work out what it might mean to be friends after all that history.

However, Hollis had seen them lunching together that same day and had worried ever since that Hasty might be replacing Tom in her aunt’s affections. He wasn’t—they had become two different people since high school—but Katharine decided that wasn’t the example she was looking for. Hasty was up in Michigan visiting his estranged wife and daughter. She had no desire to drag him into the current conversation.

“I’ve done my share of dumb things,” she said, “but most of them eventually got worked out. You know what your Uncle Tom says, don’t you? ‘Nothing becomes too big to handle if you deal with it when it’s small enough to contain.’ Or something like that.”

“Yeah, but some things get big real fast.” Hollis rode for another half mile in silence, then admitted, “One time when I was back in Atlanta during college, I went to a party with Jon and some of his friends. Kenny was there, too. We kind of enjoyed each other, even though I thought he talked weird and dressed funny. The party, though, was duller than dishwater, so when some guys I knew from high school asked us to go to another party, I said ‘great!’ Kenny said he thought it would be rude to leave one party to go to another. I said that was silly, we could go wherever we liked, and I went without him. At the other party somebody handed me a drink, but you know I don’t like to drink, so I only drank a few sips and then poured the rest down a potted palm. Still, I began to feel odd, and when I saw some of the girls passing out, I realized somebody might be putting date-rape drugs in the drinks. I was looking for a glass of water when a guy I sort of knew came over with some punch and said, “This is mild.” It tasted like lemonade. I drank two glasses and was feeling woozy when I heard one of the guys bragging to another that chemistry majors had made the punch with hundred-proof alcohol. By then I could hardly walk, but I knew I needed to get out of there. Guys were dragging girls to back rooms all the time. I staggered out to the street and called Jon, because we had a deal that if either of us ever got drunk, we’d call to be picked up.”