The Fixer Upper (34 page)

I
jogged down the block and slid into the backseat of the waiting sedan.

“Howya doin’?” Agent Harrell turned around from the driver’s seat and offered me his big all-American smile.

“Great, just peachy,” I said.

Camerin Allgood was in the front-passenger seat. “You sure do look pretty in pink,” she said, barely supressing a smirk. “Love the shoes too. Are they new?”

“A gift from my mother,” I said, pulling my denim jacket closer together in an attempt to hide my exposed midriff. “Could we just drop the fashion chat and get down to business? I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today.”

“We’ve got everything set for the meet,” Agent Allgood told me. “You haven’t had any more calls from Hodder, have you?”

“No, thank God,” I said. “Where is the meet, by the way?”

“You’ll see,” Harrell said.

We drove for about fifteen minutes, leaving the Guthrie city limits behind. It was a beautiful early spring morning. The trees were fully leafed out now, and dogwoods bloomed pink and white and pale green. We passed a fenced pasture, where cows were clustered around a feeder, and another, where a farmer on a bright green-and-yellow John Deere tractor made passes in the newly turned red Georgia soil.

After a while, Harrell turned the sedan off the state highway and onto a bumpy asphalt road called Graham’s Crossing. After another mile, we pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a church. The sign out front proclaimed it to be the new macedonia full gospel church of the brethren, pastor: the reverend edsel rucker.
Another sign, one of those magnetic boards, said questioning life? god knows!

“A church? You want me to meet Alex Hodder in a church?”

“What’s wrong?” Agent Allgood asked. “You don’t like church?”

“I like church fine,” I told her. “I just think it’s…I dunno, sacrilegious? To take a blackmail payoff in a house of God?”

“You’ll be doing God’s work,” Harrell said, getting out of the car and opening my door. “Bringing the evil to righteousness.”

I stood for a moment and took in the scene. New Macedonia had seen better days. Its white clapboard sanctuary hadn’t seen a paintbrush in years. The tiny steeple leaned precariously to the left, and in one of the church’s two stained-glass windows there was a gaping hole covered with plywood. Foot-high tufts of weeds grew up through the crushed-shell parking lot, and the small plot of lawn between the parking lot and the church steps was overgrown and weed choked. Off to the left of the church was a tin-roofed pavilion with weather-beaten picnic tables beneath it, and behind that, a huge live oak tree’s limbs were spread over a bedraggled cemetery, its modest concrete headstones broken and strewn about the weedy graveyard.

“Come on,” Camerin Allgood said, tugging at my arm. “Let’s take a look around. Get you acclimated.”

The wooden steps were rickety and uneven. Harrell took a key from his pocket and fit it into the church door. It opened slowly, with a loud creak that echoed through the high-ceilinged sanctuary. A wave of musty air greeted us. It had been a while since anybody worshipped at New Macedonia.

Sunlight streaming in through the one stained-glass window revealed a sanctuary that was bare, but surprisingly beautiful in its simplicity. The floors were worn pine, and the walls were of whitewashed planking. A red-carpeted aisle bisected two rows of crudely made white-painted pews. Red leatherette hymnals were stacked at the end of each row of pews. There was a choir loft at the back of the sanctuary, reached by a perilous-looking set of stairs covered with more red carpeting.

Harrell walked rapidly to the front of the church, and I followed.

The altar looked like a stage, with two short sets of steps leading onto
it from either side of the church. There was a tall wooden lectern in the middle, and a high-backed throne-looking chair off to the right of the lectern. A six-foot-tall wooden cross hung from the peaked ceiling.

Harrell bounded onto the altar and patted the wooden lectern. “Right here is where we’ve got the first camera,” he said. “Doesn’t matter where you are in this church, the way we’ve got it set up, you’ll be in the camera’s view the whole time.”

I walked over to the lectern and looked it up and down. “There’s a camera? Where?”

He touched the outdated microphone mounted to the lectern. “Right here.”

“Seriously?” I leaned in close and examined the mike. It looked like any other, obsolete piece of audiovisual equipment you might find in a country church that had fallen on hard times.

“Come on,” Harrell said, going down the altar steps and striding down the center aisle. I followed him, and this time we climbed up to the choir loft. The wooden stairs groaned under the weight of our footsteps, and I clung to the metal handrail, just in case.

A battered upright piano had pride of place at the front of the choir loft, and just behind it were a dozen rusting folding metal chairs. Hooks held faded and dust-covered red choir robes, and more hymnals were scattered about on the floor and chairs.

“There’s a camera up here?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Harrell said. “Can you guess where?”

I touched the brass library lamp on the top of the piano. “Here?”

“No, but you’re close,” Harrell said. He patted a stack of hymnals next to the lamp.

“For real? That’s pretty slick.”

“We got guys can put a camera in a rat’s nostril and you wouldn’t know it,” Harrell said proudly.

I followed him back down the steps to where Cam Allgood was lounging on a pew near the front of the sanctuary. Harrell sat down beside her, and patted the spot beside him.

I climbed over their feet and sat down.

“So,” Allgood said. “Here’s how we want this thing to play out. When Hodder calls you, tell him you’ll meet him here, New Macedonia, whatever, church, at three o’clock Monday. We’ve checked all the flights out of D.C. and Baltimore and he should easily be able to get down to Atlanta by no later than noon. He hasn’t booked a flight yet, but when he does, we’ll know about it. Even if there’s a weather delay, or a screwup with his rental car, he can easily get to this church by three o’clock Monday.”

“We’ll give you written directions that you can give him,” Harrell said.

“What if he tries something sneaky?” I asked.

“Like what?” Allgood asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s a sneaky guy. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”

“Relax,” Harrell said. “We’ve got every contingency covered. Right now, there’s an agent watching his house in Georgetown, and another keeping an eye on his wife.”

“Have you got his phones tapped?” I asked.

“That’s not something you need to worry about,” Camerin Allgood said.

“What about the money?” I asked. “What if he doesn’t bring the money? What if he tries to screw me out of it? He probably thinks he can. He thinks I’m an idiot.”

“He went to three different banks yesterday afternoon,” Harrell said. “Withdrew a hundred thou apiece from the first two banks, and at the third bank, he accessed a safe-deposit box, so we don’t know, but we’re assuming he took the balance of your cash from his stash there.”

I felt the knot of anxiety gnawing in my belly. It was back, despite all Lynda’s purification and visualization.

“What if he’s got a gun?” I asked, my anxiety growing. “I mean, I don’t think he’s violent, but you never know. He sounded pretty angry on the phone.”

“He can’t get a gun past airport security,” Agent Allgood said. “And we’ll have somebody on his tail, from the minute he leaves the house in
Georgetown to the minute he lands in Atlanta and picks up a rental car to head down here. Our people know this guy, Dempsey. He’s no gunslinger. You are in absolutely no danger whatsoever.”

I swallowed hard. “So, what now?”

“You meet him here on Monday,” Harrell said. “Get here a little early, say, quarter of. You’ll have the golf scorecard, and an empty satchel, for the cash.”

“And where will you guys be?”

“Around,” Allgood said. “You’ll be on camera, and we’ll also have people in the vicinity, for backup.”

“What if the cameras goof up?” I worried. “What if he figures out I’m wearing a bug?”

“You won’t be wearing a bug,” Harrell said. “If he wants to check you out, let him. He won’t find a thing.”

“I’m not letting him check me for bugs,” I said indignantly. “I’m not letting that slimeball so much as touch me.”

“Whatever,” Camerin said lazily. “We’ve got microphones that will pick everything up, no matter what.”

“Where?” I asked. “I need to know, just in case something happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” she said impatiently. “Can you relax? We know how to do our job, and if you’ll just listen, we’ll tell you how to do yours.”

Allgood glanced at her watch. “Okay, let’s talk specifics. You meet Hodder here in the church, on Monday. He’ll want to take a look at the scorecard. That’s fine. Let him look. But you make sure he has the cash. Okay? Get him to show it to you.”

“Right,” I said. “Show me the money.”

“This next part is really, really important,” Allgood said. “You need to get him to talk about what he’s paying you for. Not just the scorecard, but what that scorecard means. You don’t have to use the word ‘bribe’ or ‘payoff,’ or anything like that; in fact, don’t say those words at all. It could spook him. But do try to draw him out about the trip to Lyford Cay. You know, kinda like you did on his phone call to you. So, let’s do a little role-playing, all right?”

“What do you want me to say?” I asked impatiently.

“Oh,” Allgood said, “we wouldn’t dream of telling
you
what to say. But Jack and I are just gonna kind of give you an example of how
we’d
handle it, if it was us.”

She got up and walked to the middle aisle of the sanctuary. Harrell went around to the back of the church, and strode purposefully up the middle aisle.

He looked around the church, walked over to the front pew, and looked underneath it as though he was searching for hidden cameras or microphones.

Allgood stood perfectly still, right in front of the lectern, her hands on her hips. “What are you looking for, Alex?” she said. “Bugs? Cameras? This isn’t the movies. This is Guthrie, Georgia. It’s just you and me, partner.”

Harrell looked annoyed. He did it very well. Working with Camerin Allgood, he probably had a lot of on-the-job training. “Did you bring it?”

“Bring what?” Allgood asked.

“You know what,” Harrell snapped. “Don’t play games with me.”

Allgood pantomimed reaching into the pocket of her jacket and bringing something out. It was actually a half-empty bottle of water. She held it up for Harrell to see. “You mean this?”

Harrell walked over and pretended to examine the pretend scorecard. “This doesn’t even look like my handwriting,” he said.

“It’s yours,” Allgood assured him, smoothly putting the bottle back in her pocket. “Now, let’s talk about what you’ve got for me.”

“It’s all here,” Harrell said. He reached into his jacket and brought out a folded-up newspaper, which he extended to her.

Allgood took the newspaper. She unfolded it, and carefully looked through it. “You know, Alex, if you hadn’t thrown me under the bus the way you did, this wouldn’t have had to happen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harrell said gruffly. “Are we done here? I’ve got a plane to catch.”

Camerin Allgood pretended to pout. “You’re kind of hurting my feelings, Alex. I’m taking all the heat for you, and yet you just want to walk away, as if none of it ever happened. You set me up, didn’t you?
Had me make all the arrangements for the hotel, the golf, the dinners, the hookers. Had me call the ‘wakeboard instructor’ to set up the session with Licata, and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, you had me book a ‘massage’ with a known hooker—and charge all of it to my company-issued credit card. That way, you’d look clean, no matter what happened.”

“You knew perfectly well what you were doing,” Harrell said. “What did you think we were really down in the Bahamas for—choir practice?”

That got me. I couldn’t stop myself. I jumped up from the pew. “I thought we were going down to the Bahamas to talk to a congressman about energy policy,” I said heatedly. “I spent weeks working on that position paper. And we never once talked energy policy to Licata. As far as the two of you were concerned, it was golf and tennis and expensive dinners and hookers and champagne—it was all just a big boondoggle.”

Allgood and Harrell turned and stared at me.

I felt my face turn as pink as my cashmere sweater.

Allgood clapped her hands slowly. “Excellent, Dempsey. The perfect touch. I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“Rehearsal’s over,” I said, and I turned and ran out of the New Macedonia Full Gospel Church of the Brethren.

T
he house was quiet when I got home, although Lynda’s rented Escalade was still in the driveway. I went directly to my closet and was relieved to find that, despite her dire promises, Lynda hadn’t gotten around to destroying my clothes. I snatched up Norbert’s overalls, a faded T-shirt, and my Chuck Taylors and went to my new room to change.

My mood was definitely much darker than it had been in the morning. Seeing the location where my meeting with Alex was to take place, and actually anticipating how the meeting might play out, had not had the effect the FBI agents had hoped for. Instead, it had only heightened my anxiety and desire to be done with the whole nasty mess.

I struggled out of the too-tight cashmere togs my mother had bought me. I knew she meant well, but I couldn’t help resenting her makeover campaign. Did she think that dressing me like Hannah Montana would really be an improvement over the Dempsey Killebrew look? Or did she unconsciously hope that making me look like a teenager would, by default, make her look and feel like a thirty-something?

It was all too much psychodrama for one morning. I should have gone looking for Lynda, to ask her if she’d postponed her shopping trip, or even to offer to go with her now. Instead, I headed downstairs, to the kitchen, determined to finish tiling the counter and backsplash.

I’d already laid out and cut all the tiles to the needed size with the tile saw Bobby had loaned me. I plugged in my iPod and opened the bucket of premixed mortar, slathering it on the tile pieces, troweling off the excess as Bobby had shown me, and then slotting each tile neatly into place.

The thick mortar mix reminded me of cake icing, and once I got the
hang of applying it at just the right consistency, and using the tiny plastic spacer bits to achieve uniform spacing between the tiles, I got into my tiling groove. The music played and my neat little rows of white tiles grew, and I lost all track of time. I didn’t stop until I’d scraped up the last bit of mortar mix from the bucket, only one row short of finishing the whole project.

Damn! Now I’d have to go buy another whole bucket of mix—just to finish that one last row of tile. I glanced up at the kitchen clock. It was already 4:00. I knew the hardware store closed at 5. I unplugged the iPod buds, grabbed my purse, and was scrabbling around inside it, looking for the car keys, when it dawned on me that I didn’t have the keys, because the Catfish was still out of commission.

I went looking for Lynda to see if she’d give me a ride to the hardware store. I tried the dining room first. She wasn’t there, but I knew she had been, because she’d set up her jewelry-making equipment on the dining room table. Bits of beads, glass, metal, and a basket of assorted unidentifiable stuff were strewn all over the tabletop.

I went into the parlor and was astonished by what I found. She’d been there too, and she’d somehow managed to move down most of the furniture that had been stored in Ella Kate’s bedroom. She’d obviously found a stash of Dempsey Mills bedspreads, because she’d covered all the drab Victorian wool and damask sofas and armchairs with the white cotton bedspreads, cleverly pinning and tucking them into makeshift slipcovers. She’d pushed two large, tufted velvet ottomans together in front of the settee to substitute for a coffee table and centered a black-and-gold tole tray, painted with peaches and cherries, on top of the ottomans. The tray held a cut-glass bowl of bright green apples, on top of a stack of three red-leather-bound books, and a horn-handled magnifying glass looked like it had just been set down.

Lynda must have had a field day digging through the crates of family china, silver, and other doodads that were packed away in Ella Kate’s room. She’d sprinkled an array of blue-and-white transferware vases and platters around the room. Two massive blue-and-white ginger jars, filled with glossy green sprays of magnolia branches, now stood on either side of the mantel. A trio of transferware platters stood atop a stack of
leather-bound books on the table in the corner, along with a tall sterling-silver loving cup filled with artfully arranged pink dogwood blossoms.

The heavy velvet drapes that had hung at the windows were now piled in a heap in a corner of the room. She’d rolled up the oriental rug too, and the dark wood floors gleamed in the weak rays of afternoon sunlight that now streamed in through the undressed windows.

I was outraged that she’d had the nerve to invade my decorating territory, and chagrined by the seemingly effortless charm she’d managed to achieve in one brief afternoon.

For the first time, I was aware of low voices coming from the direction of the hallway. I walked toward the voices. They were coming from Ella Kate’s room. As I grew closer, I heard Lynda laughing, and then her voice.

“Oh, come on now, Ella Kate. That’s not a real word!”

The door to the bedroom was open. I looked in and saw my mother and Ella Kate, sitting on opposite sides of a card table they’d set up in front of the window beside Ella Kate’s easy chair. Their heads—Lynda’s blond one and Ella Kate’s steel gray one—were bent over a Scrabble board. Shorty was curled up on a pillow on the bed.

“Sure is a word,” Ella Kate said with a cackle as she scooped up more letter tiles from the tabletop. “You can look it up if you want to. Any fool knows it.”

“Well, I’ve heard it before, but I don’t think it’s a proper word,” Lynda said indignantly.

I poked my head in the doorway. “What’s the word? Maybe I can be the tiebreaker.”

Ella Kate gave me a calculating look. “Skeeter. S-K-E-E-T-E-R.”

“I know how to spell it,” I assured her.

Lynda turned her face away from Ella Kate’s and gave me a secretive wink and nod.

“You mean skeeter, slang for mosquito, right?” I asked.

“What else?” Ella Kate demanded. “Even a Yankee knows what a skeeter is.”

“Sorry, Lynda,” I told my mother. “She’s right. It’s slang, but it’s ac
ceptable. I think you have to give her the points.”

“That’s thirty-three points for me!” the old lady crowed. She tapped the
R
tile. “See that? Triple-word score.”

“I see it,” Lynda muttered. She looked down at her own tiles, then back at the board. Carefully, she picked up four tiles and placed them in descending order, using Ella Kate’s
S
tile as a launching pad.

“Squat!” Lynda said. “Ta-da!”

“Hmmph,” Ella Kate said.

“Well, it’s a word,” Lynda insisted.

“Not a very nice one, though,” Ella Kate opined. “Anyway, it’s only fourteen points. I’m still winning.”

“Don’t care,” Lynda said, picking up a pencil to record her score. “Besides, maybe you didn’t notice, but my
Q
is sitting on a double-letter spot. So, actually, that’s twenty-four points for me.”

“This is getting pretty vicious,” I said, looking down at the board. “How long have you two been playing?”

“Since lunch,” Ella Kate said. “Your mama—”

“Don’t call her—” I started to say, but Lynda gave me the nod, so I shut up.

“Fixed me homemade tomato soup with buttermilk in it. Best thing I ever put in my mouth,” Ella Kate said. “Gimme some wheatgrass juice too, but I spit that stuff out. Tastes like mud, if you ask me.”

“The secret for the soup is using fire-roasted San Marzano tomatoes,” Lynda offered. “I saved you some soup. I even went out to the kitchen after you got back from your meeting to see if you wanted some, but you were so fixated on your tiling, I decided not to bother you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I have a hard time stopping once I get started.”

“Oh!” Lynda said, clapping her hands over her mouth. “I almost forgot. Dempsey, you were in such a hurry to get to your meeting this morning that you left your cell phone.”

“You didn’t answer it, did you?” I asked, horrified at the idea of her having had a conversation with Alex Hodder.

“Well, of course I did,” Lynda said. “But don’t worry. It was just a nice young man named Tee Berryhill.”

“Her boyfriend,” Ella Kate said knowingly.

“How nice.” Lynda beamed. “Then I’m glad I accepted his invitation for tonight.”

“What invitation?”

“To dinner,” she said. “He and his father are taking us to the country club tonight. There’s even a dance! Doesn’t that sound divine?”

I hesitated. My relationship with Tee was teetering on the brink of something, but I wasn’t sure what yet. A night out with him—dinner and a dance—did, in fact, sound good, if not “divine,” but did I want to expose Tee and Carter to my flamboyant mother this early in the game?

“I can’t wait,” Lynda said enthusiastically. “A real country-club dance. It sounds so quaint. Your father and I used to go to lots of dances when we first started dating.”

“You and Mitch?” I’d never seen my father dance. It was hard enough imagining him married to someone as outrageous as Lynda, harder still imagining him doing anything as adventurous as the frug or the boogaloo, or whatever the dances were that they did in their youth.

“Oh yes,” Lynda said dreamily. “Mitch was a great dancer back then.”

“He was a little pissant when I knew him,” Ella Kate volunteered.

“I think he reverted back to his pissant ways after Dempsey was born,” Lynda told her. “But believe me, he wasn’t like that when we first met. He was funny and sweet, and so thoughtful! A real Southern gentleman. And sexy!” She grinned and fanned herself vigorously. “I have never had so much fun in bed in my life,” she declared.

“But you got yourself a divorce from him anyways,” Ella Kate pointed out.

“Well, you can’t stay in bed all the time,” Lynda said sadly. “We never should have gotten married. Although it was worth every minute of it, considering I got a beautiful daughter out of the deal.”

She stood up and kissed the top of my head. “Our fellas are picking us up at six. Don’t you think you’d better start getting ready?”

I showered first, and while Lynda was still in the bathroom, I stood in
front of my tiny closet, surveying the possibilities. I’d packed away most of my business suits and dressy clothes from my lobbyist life—no need for them now that my working days were spent painting and scraping. That didn’t leave a lot of possibilities for a dance. I’d already worn my long skirt and top to the country club on my last “date,” with Jimmy Maynard, and, as it turned out, Tee. There was a long-sleeved charcoal gray knit sweater dress, but it looked more suited to a funeral than a dance. As I rummaged through the clothes, I came across my old reliable, a navy blue matte jersey Marc Jacobs cocktail dress.

It was sleeveless, with a deep V-neck, pin-tuck details at the shoulders and the set-in waist, and a flirty little ruffle at the hem.

Ah yes. Marc had seen me through half a dozen weddings and cocktail receptions in the past couple of years, and he’d never let me down.

I took it off the hanger and held it up to my shoulders while I checked myself out in the mirror, turning to and fro to get the full effect.

Just then, Lynda walked in. She was in her bathrobe, and her damp hair hung in ringlets to her shoulders. “Oh, sweetheart,” she exclaimed, catching the fabric of the hem between her fingertips. “No, no, no. This isn’t right for you at all. Wait! I’ve got just the thing in my suitcase.”

I walked over to her suitcase, which was open, and closed it.

“Mom,” I said firmly. “We have to talk.”

She sank down on the bed. “About what?”

“About you. And me. And your effort to make me into you.”

“What? No, that’s not true at all,” Lynda protested. “I just think—”

“You think I’m ugly, and my clothes are ugly, and that basically I’m wasting my time down here.”

“I never said that,” Lynda protested, grabbing my hand. “I think you’re the most beautiful girl in the entire world. You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m not a girl,” I said gently. “I’m a woman. I’m nearly thirty. I’ve been dressing myself for quite some time now, and although not all the choices I’ve made in my life have been the right ones, they’ve been mine. I love you, Lynda, but you have got to give me some space.”

Her periwinkle blue eyes filled with tears. She stood up and reopened the suitcase. “I knew it! You don’t want me here. You resent me. You’ve
resented me ever since you were a teenager. I told myself you were feeling abandoned, and I wrote it off to your father’s influence over you. No matter how hard I try, you’ll never let me make it up to you. So I’ll go.”

“No, wait,” I said, flipping the lid of the suitcase shut again. “I’m not telling you to leave. I don’t feel abandoned. It took me a while, but I finally realized years ago that you were doing what you thought was best for me when you sent me to live with Mitch.”

I took a deep breath. “Maybe it was the best thing for me. I don’t know. My childhood is in the past. Parts of it were good and parts of it sucked, but I got through it. That’s all that matters.”

She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “You haven’t said a word about all my hard work in the house today. You hate it, don’t you?”

I bit my lip and decided to be honest. “Lynda, I love the way the parlor looks. I never would have thought to use the bedspreads as slipcovers, or to take down the drapes. And I can’t figure out how the hell you got all that furniture downstairs. But the thing is…I’m feeling kind of territorial here. Birdsong is
my
project. The house is Dad’s, I know, but the work, it’s mine. I’m sorry to be so selfish about it, but right now, this run-down, crappy house is all I’ve got. So, yeah, I was kind of bent out of shape when I saw what you’d done.”

“That sweet contractor of yours, Bobby? He dropped by and I roped him into helping me. We can put it back the way it was,” Lynda said tearfully. “I had no right.”

“Don’t you dare,” I told her. “It’s gorgeous. Fabulous. I can’t believe how much you accomplished in a few short hours.”

She smiled tentatively. “I’ve had the most amazing surge of creative energy since I got here. I don’t know what it is. After you left this morning, I decided it wouldn’t be any fun to shop without you. I took another walk, and then I poked around in the basement, and I came up with just the coolest stuff—pecans, sweet-gum balls, arrowheads, old marbles and Coke bottle caps, and bits of broken china. I got so stoked, I made three necklaces in less than an hour. Wait until you see! I think they’re the best work I’ve ever done.”