Larceny and Old Lace (17 page)

That woman can turn on a dime. “Well, thank you,” she said patting her hair. “Some folks wilt in the heat, but some of us just get ripe.”

“Then you obviously don't need to go to Alaska,” I said generously.

She accepted her compliment with a smile. “You didn't find Penny at the aerobics school, did you?”

It was my turn to scowl. “I did not! What I found was a gigolo in a pigpen.”

“Joe is not a gigolo! He's a sexual addict with financial problems.”

“Hey, wait one minute. How did you know Penny wasn't there?”

“Because she came into my shop a few minutes after you left. She said she was on her way to the mountains for the weekend.”

“Did she say where?”

“Some place called Mossy Lodge. It's near Grandfather Mountain, I think. It sounded expensive.”

I practically ran. There was a lot I had to do if I was going to spend the weekend in the mountains as well.

“I
don't want to go away for the weekend,” Mama said. “We can get back in time for church Sunday morning, I promise. They can count on you for the choir.”

“I don't want to go!” Mama brought the bowl of chicken salad down on the table with considerable force.

I stared at this woman who used to be my mother. Gone were the pearls, the full skirts, and the gingham aprons. Dangling earrings, a tank top, and blue jeans were not adequate replacements by any means. Not for somebody's mother!

“Where have you taken her?” I wailed.

Mama gave me the fish-eye and refilled my tea.

“I've got a life now, Abigail. It's time you realize it.”

“Does this life have a name, Mama? Why won't you tell me who he is?”

“All in good time, Abby.”

The doorbell rang—croaked was more like it. Mama's doorbell sounds like the time I accidentally stepped on a toad in the dark.

“Maybe you can get him to install a new one,” I said, hopping up.

“Maybe we'll just disconnect it and not answer the door,” Mama said to my back.

I ignored her.

“Yes?”

There was a man at the door—about my age—who looked familiar, although I couldn't place a name. Perhaps he was long lost kin come to claim my inheritance.

“Hello, Abigail. May I come in?”

This person was not too lost to know my name. It could only mean one thing.

“Mama, you're robbing the cradle!”

The man smiled nervously. “I'm Breck Whitehead, the probate lawyer for your aunt's estate.”

“You sure? You look awfully familiar.”

“We go to the same church. You sit two pews behind me and three people to the left.”

“Of course. Please, come in.”

I should have known. In Rock Hill you can live your entire life and have it populated solely by the Episcopal church. Want to speak to a teacher? We have tons of those. How about a college professor? Would half the congregation please step forward. Need a dentist? Will a pair of them do? Gynecologist? We have at least three of those. Oh, it's a brain surgeon you need? Why didn't you say so. She sits four pews behind me, next to the family of research engineers. Just behind the architect. At the Episcopal Church of Our Savior we even have a crazy woman mystery writer with frizzed-out blond hair who claims she was raised among a tribe of headhunters in the Belgian Congo. She's not exactly another Sue Grafton, but you have to give her credit for her imagination.

Breck Whitehead obediently followed me into Mama's parlor for a private conference. I was beginning to remember something about him. He was a year behind me in high school, but we attended the same youth group at church. Slow Breck, we called him then. No one from that group could ever totally forget the night Breck Whitehead threw up on the roller coaster on our annual outing to Myrtle Beach, try as we might. He was sitting in the first car and it was a windy night. At least two of the kids changed denominations after that.

“Your aunt was a very generous woman,” Breck said, digging through his briefcase.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, family was always very important to her.”

He looked down at me through the bottoms of his bifocals. “I beg your pardon?”

I smiled warmly. “I was her closest living relative, you know. Except for my brother, Toy.”

He gave me an odd look. “Shall we begin.”

“Begin away,” I said, perhaps too gaily.

“I, Eulonia Louise Wiggins, being of sound mind and body do, on this—”

“Skip the preamble, Breck.”

Breck took his bifocals off and leaned back in one of Mama's Victorian armchairs.

“She didn't leave you the house. Or the store.”

“Not Toy!”

“No, Toy and you fare the same, I'm afraid.”

“Then I don't understand. There must be some mistake.”

“Like I said before, your aunt was a very generous person. Ten—no eleven, years ago she deeded her house over to a charitable foundation. The same with her store.”

“But that's impossible! She was living in that house until the day she died, and running the store. You've misunderstood something in those papers.”

I tried to snatch the sheath from him, but Breck was a lot faster than he used to be. After the roller coaster incident he learned to dodge punches pretty well.

“It's all clearly spelled out here, Abigail. Your aunt deeded her real estate holdings to this foundation with a stipulation that she be allowed to live in the house until her death. And now she's dead.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” I apologize, but one can't be a lady all the time. “What the hell is this foundation?”

Breck cleared his throat and swallowed. “The Society for the Reestablishment and Preservation of the Carolina Parakeet.”

“What!”

“The Carolina parakeet was a little bird that went extinct—”

“I know about the damned parakeet—we studied it in school—and that's my point. It's extinct.”

“Not according to the society. Some hunters in the low country supposedly spotted a pair of them in a swamp in the early sixties, and ever since then a few faithful believers have
dedicated themselves to verifying this report and setting up a preserve in preparation for that day.”

“But that's crazy! That should be against the law.”

“Believing in something is not against the law, Abigail,” he said solemnly.

“But fleecing people is. You can bet your sweet bippy I'm going to contest this will.”

“I'm afraid it won't do you any good. It's already a fait accompli.”

“English please, Breck.”

“Although it mentions your aunt deeding away her property in this document, it isn't part of this will. That she did over a decade ago when she was of sound mind and body, so it's a separate issue. What's in this will is a brief discussion of what she left you.”

“Her savings? Stocks and bonds?”

Breck shook his head while I prayed he wouldn't get motion sickness.

“Your aunt had no savings. Like I said, she was very generous—always giving things away.”

“She was cuckoo.”

“If that's the case, I wouldn't spread it around. Someone might contest her actual will.” In retrospect, I missed the sarcasm.

“Contest away,” I said blithely. “Nothing shared is zero, right?”

He smiled, triumphantly. “In this case it's more like two pairs of green velvet curtains.”

“What?”

“That's what it says. You want to see for yourself?” He thrust the document in my face, bending an eyelash and nearly giving me a paper cut on the lip.

“Well, I was right, then, after all,” I said. I was trying to sound smug, but it is hard to do when you've just had a house and a shop taken away from you.

“How so?”

“The aforementioned curtains—monstrous, ugly things, anyway, are at the cleaners. And I have no idea which one. Not that it makes a difference, mind you.”

“Then sign here.” He shoved a pen at me.

“Hold it, Breck. It may not be in that will, but my aunt was supposed to have left me some valuable antique lace, and I want to know where it is.”

He stared at me. I stared right back, willing him to remember that the night he threw up on the roller coaster I was one of very few kids who didn't make fun of him all the way home from Myrtle Beach. And, if memory serves me right, I gave him some tissues to clean up with. My kindness had to count for something.

“That, I'm afraid, I can't say. Among her effects, I suppose.”

“What about her effects?”

“Lawyer talk for personal possessions.”

“I know what ‘effects' are. I want to know who gets them.” If I sounded crass, so be it.

“Why, you and Toy share in those equally, as well. I was just coming to that.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “For a minute I thought they were going to the birds. You know, someone from the society was going to haul everything down to the swamp and scatter it about.”

He gave me a pained smile. “To the contrary. You will be responsible for removing your aunt's effects yourself. You have until three weeks from today.”

“I see. Does that include the furniture?”

He consulted the papers again. “It does not. Apparently that has all been donated as well.”

“To that damn bunch of bird-watchers?”

He barely nodded and stood. He was about to bolt, now that the dirty deed had been done.

I grabbed his arm. “Look, Slow Breck, just tell me who the hell the chief bird-watcher is, and you're out of here.”

“A Charlotte gentleman by the name of Tony D'Angelo.”

 

I slammed the door behind Breck and stormed into the kitchen. “Mama, I am about to commit murder!”

“Slow Breck get on your nerves again, dear?” Mama has a memory like an elephant.

“It's this man named Tony D'Angelo up in Charlotte. I'm going to wring his scrawny neck.” I snatched my purse off the counter.

“But you can't,” Mama said. It was as close to shouting as I've heard Mama get since I graduated from high school.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, you shouldn't be talking like that. Not with poor Eulonia fresh in the grave.”

“Well, I didn't mean it literally. Not about the strangling. But I may well do this man some bodily harm.”

“No, you won't.”

“I sure as hell will, Mama. I'm driving up there this very minute. The old geezer is not going to get away with it.”

“What exactly do you plan to do to him?”

Of course, I hadn't thought it through, so my answer was perhaps a trifle unrefined.

“I'll whip the shit out of him, that's what. Just because he's eighty something doesn't mean I'm going to take it easy on him.”

“He isn't over eighty, and he could whip the shit out of you with one hand tied behind his back.” Mama sounded almost proud.

“What?”

“Tony is my age. I told you that before. He just has bad skin.”

“What?” Not only had she lost her pearls, but her marbles as well.

“Tony D'Angelo is my boyfriend.”

“What?” It may have been only a coincidence that one of Mama's best wine goblets shattered at that very moment.

“Abigail, calm down, please. I was going to tell you, I really was. It was just taking me a while to work up to it.”

“Mama!”

“Abigail, Tony and I love each other very much. We've been in love for some time now, but it's only been just recently that—”

“I can't hear you!” Actually, I could. Even though my hands were clamped tightly over my ears.

“Abby, honey, I am a red-blooded woman with certain
needs
.”

“You
need
to get your head examined,” I screamed. I swear, even in the worst of my teenage years, I treated Mama better than that.

Mama, to my surprise, was getting calmer by the second.

“I'm sort of glad it's all come out, you know. I didn't want to keep secrets from you.”

“You mean like Tony is keeping from you?”

“What do you mean?”

I had a chance to spare Mama some pain—maybe—but I was still so riled up my head was swimming. I know, there is no excuse for abuse, but I want you to understand that I didn't really mean to hurt Mama.

“I suppose you don't know that your precious Tony was two-timing you.”

Mama laughed, the laugh of innocence about to take the plunge. “Abby, darling, not every man is a Buford.”

“That's right, Mama. Buford discarded me when he found his new toy, but Tony—” I had to stop and catch my breath. It was too horrible to contemplate.

“Tony what? Honey, that man is the salt of the earth.”

I shook my head vigorously. It was a good thing Breck was no longer around to watch.

“Mama, Tony D'Angelo is the slime at the bottom of a stock pond. He was two-timing with you. You weren't even his number-one choice.”

Mama's otherwise porcelain complexion had turned gray.

“What are you saying? Do you have any proof?”

“I got it from the horse's mouth himself, Mama.”

“You know Tony?”

“Unfortunately, yes. He's boarding Dmitri for me.”

“How did you meet him?”

“The question isn't how, but where. I met him at Aunt Eulonia's house. In the bushes, the night after she was killed.”

“The bushes! Abigail!”

“No, Mama, I'm not the other woman! Aunt Eulonia was.”

Despite my sense of betrayal and anger, I hurt for Mama then.

“Are you trying to tell me that my Tony was having an affair with Eulonia?”

“Yes, and no, Mama. He wasn't exactly having an affair; it was a long-term relationship. Apparently it lasted many years. He was having the affair with you.”

“Oh shit,” Mama said, “shit.” Even the best-bred southern women have their breaking point.

“Mama, surely you knew that Tony was living across the street from Aunt Euey.”

“Of course, that's how we got to know each other, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I'm not involved with Bubba Bussey next door.”

“But there had to be signs, Mama. Something over the years.”

Mama was sitting with her hands clasped, her eyes closed.

“I first really remember meeting Tony the year after your Daddy died. I was just coming out of my grief. Not looking for a man, mind you, but opening up to life again. It was a hot day, like today, and there he was mowing his lawn, and without a shirt. In those days, gentlemen did not go without shirts. Not in public, not in the South.”

“Times have changed rapidly, Mama, that's for sure.”

“Something in me turned over then, Abigail. Like an engine turning over, but not catching. Still, it made me feel alive again. That was the beginning.