Thyme of Death (8 page)

I listened. I heard an angry voice,
loud and getting louder, coming from the open window of the guest cottage ten
yards away.

“It’s Roz yelling at somebody,” Ruby
said.

“She must be yelling at Jane,” I
replied. “Her agent. She came to bring Roz her new TV contract.”

Ruby raised her eyebrows. “It sounds
like Roz doesn’t want to sign it.”

“—not
going
to renew,” Roz
was saying, “and that’s that. Period. Paragraph. End of script.”

I grinned. Roz’s voice was strident
but clear, no sign of Munchkin breathiness. That answered my question. Roz was
definitely a woman of many talents.

Jane’s voice was much lower, a
steely thread. “You’re crazy, Rosalind. Giving up this contract for a man! You’ve
lost your mind!”

Roz laughed, but her answer was
knife-edged. “Don’t you wish
you
could, Jane? Don’t you wish you were
involved with the man who—”

“Can that crap,” Jane said savagely.
“We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you. This contract is worth
four million dollars! And do you know why? Because I upped the ante, that’s
why! I made them sweat. Four million, you’re getting. Four
million!”

“At fifteen-percent agency fees,
that’s over a half million to you,” Roz retorted. “That’s what we’re talking
about, isn’t it? You’re into me for commissions on residuals at fifteen
percent. But that’s peanuts compared to what you think is coming, isn’t it?
When I say no contract, I’m killing the goose that laid your golden egg.”

Jane’s voice vibrated, low. “I earn
my commissions.”

Roz paused. I could barely hear what
she said next, but there was no mistaking the accusation in it. “Are you sure
you’ve earned it
all,
Jane?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the royalty
account. I’m talking about—”

At that tantalizing moment, before
Ruby and I could hear just what Roz was talking about, the open casement
slammed. The show was over.

“Wow,” Ruby breathed. “I’ve heard of
holdouts, but four
million?”

“Maybe Jane is right,” I said. “Maybe
Roz is crazy.”

“Maybe she’s in love. There was
something about a man. And what was that stuff about royalties?”

We weren’t going to find out. A few
minutes later, we heard the cottage door bang. Jane Dorman stormed down the
path, her high heels crunching in the gravel. She looked like a woman who hadn’t
gotten what she came for.

CHAPTER 5

After lunch, Ruby went home to her
apartment to change for the memorial service, while I put the plates in the
sink and hunted up my one good basic black, a double-breasted cotton blend with
pleated shoulders and long sleeves. But as I pulled it over my head, it seemed
to me that black was all wrong. Jo wouldn’t have wanted black, especially on
such a beautiful day. So I dug in the closet and found a muted autumn green
wrapdress and added the gold pin Jo had given me last Christmas. I tucked a
sprig of rosemary behind the pin, for remembrance, and ran a brush through my
hair. Then I went to back my old blue Datsun hatchback out of the Emporium’s
garage, which I rent from Constance. My place doesn’t have a garage, and I don’t
like to park on the street and take up customer space. Ruby had decided against
black, too. She was wearing an off-white knit with a blue-green scarf and
belt. When she saw my green dress, she grinned and gave me thumbs-up. Then,
with self-conscious solemnity, remembering
why
we were all dressed up in
the middle of a Thursday, she settled herself in the passenger seat for a
silent ride to the park where Jo’s memorial service was being held.

Pecan Springs’ older businesses—the
Grande Cinema (recently restored by the Community Theater Guild), Winn’s
Variety, Hoffmeister’s Clothing Store, the hardware store, the
Enterprise’s
office,
the public library, and so on—are arranged in a square around the pink granite courthouse
that centers the old part of town. Four streets create the square. Crockett
(the street that the shop is on) dead-ends at the CTSU campus ten blocks north,
where there is another, smaller business area, mostly fast-food joints,
bookstores, copy shops, and boutiques. Robert E. Lee crosses the railroad track
and heads a mile east to the Interstate, where two sprawling malls have sprung
up in the last couple of years to house Walmart and Albertson’s and a
four-screen movie theater. LBJ Boulevard extends west past the post office and
the bank, where it turns into Ranch Road 1830 and takes off into the hills
toward Canyon Lake and the posh Lake Winds Resort Village. Anderson Avenue
runs south to the river, lined for four blocks with arching pecans and live
oaks and fine old Victorians behind wrought-iron fences. Arnold Seidensticker lives
on Anderson, in an immense white house with a two-story columned portico across
the front, as do most of Pecan Springs’ leading socialites. Anderson eventually
runs into Pecan Springs Park, where Jo’s memorial service was being held.

Until Jo started the anti-airport
campaign, Pecan Springs Park had been her major civic project. A few years ago,
she and some of her environmentalist friends infiltrated the Pecan Springs
Garden Club, a namby-pamby group whose most controversial project was planting
Japanese iris around the county courthouse. But Jo got herself elected
president and set about infusing the club with a sense of environmental
urgency. Her target was the Pecan River, where it flowed along the southern
edge of town. The river emerges from a small spring-fed lake, flows through the
CTSU campus, and eventually through a swampy patch of poverty weed and scrub
willows that used to border the old town dump. Jo armwrestled the City Council
for control of a strip of land on both sides of the river, including the
dump. Then she energized the women of the town (and a few of their husbands)
into months of long, hard cleanup work. When that was done, she browbeat the
downtown merchants into contributing

major bucks for landscaping,
including an amphitheater and rose garden. Now the thirty-acre park is one of
Pecan Springs’ most widely trumpeted tourist attractions. The Chamber of
Commerce rents inner tubes and canoes for float trips down the river. Arnold
Seidensticker

has brought in one of the major golf
pros to design a course on the other side of the old dump, adjacent to the
park. And Harley Chadwick is talking about starting an upscale development on
the other side of the golf course. One thing leads to another.

The park’s rose garden was set up
with metal folding chairs arranged in neat rows, most of them already occupied.
Meredith was sitting in the front row, dressed in a pale beige two-piece dress
with green trim, her face carefully blank. Beside her was a plump middle-aged
woman in a dark blue suit with a fussy lace blouse whom I took to be Lucille,
and on the other side was Mayor Pauline Perkins, brisk and efficient-looking in
spite of her thirty extra pounds. I see the mayor regularly at Jerri’s Health
and Fitness Spa striding determinedly along the treadmill. Reverend Lewis, the
Unitarian minister, sat next to the mayor, solemn and self-impressed in a
slate-gray suit and tie. Reverend Lewis was new to Pecan Springs and scarcely
knew Jo, but no doubt he’d been given a list of appropriate compliments to pay.

If none of the other mourners was
wearing black, Roz was. She was sitting conspicuously alone in the second row.
I wondered whether she’d just happened to have a black suit, black strappy
heels, and black gloves in her luggage, or whether the outfit was what she’d
gone shopping for. Her mourning garb gave her a look of fragile composure,
which was heightened by her deeply shadowed blue eyes and her blond hair severely
twisted into a knot at her neck.

I glanced at the other mourners.
Most of the people who counted in the town were there, friends and enemies,
arranged on either side of the center aisle like guests at a wedding. On the
anti-airport side was RuthAnn Landsdowne, square-jawed and capable. RuthAnn was
Jo’s chief co-conspirator and current president of the garden club. She was
sitting with a large group of women whom I recognized as Coalition members and
the half of the City Council that had been brave enough to go on record against
the airport. On the pro-airport side was Arnold Seidensticker, his neatly
parted brown hair, brown horn-rimmed glasses, and brown suit giving him the
look of a tidy brown owl. He was sitting next to his wife Lila, whose platinum
hair had a salmon tint that was set off by her salmon-pink coatdress. She
looked remarkably bony, and her thin hands as she twisted her handkerchief were
like claws. Seated in the same row were Mr. Schwartz, president of Hill Country
Fidelity Bank, Harley Chadwick, and several real estate developers whom I
recognized by sight. Behind them were those members of the City Council who
supported the airport. Bubba Harris, uniformed as usual in tan polyester,
stood at the rear of the crowd, nervously twirling his cowboy hat. For the
first time since I’d known him, he was minus his cigar.

Ruby nudged me. “Maybe Bubba’s here
to keep an eye on the Seidenstickers,” she whispered. She glanced at them. “Arnold
looks like a big toad gloating over a little puddle.”

Reverend Lewis was beginning the
service. After a
lengthy prayer on behalf of the departed, a psalm and an oration I
couldn’t see the point of, he sat down and Mayor Pauline Perkins got up to
deliver the eulogy. I listened thoughtfully, although the person the mayor was
describing seemed only tangentially related to the Jo Gilbert I had respected
and admired and, yes, loved. Jo’s concern for her friends, her stern sense of
justice and tightness, her ability to sacrifice everything to a cause she cared
for—all the individual characteristics that made Jo a
person
were
submerged in the grand scheme of the mayor’s recollections, in which Jo, motivated
by civic pride and a burning desire to enrich the lives of her fellow citizens,
starred as the Prime Mover of Pecan Springs’ cultural and environmental
renaissance. This praise of Jo’s achievements must have proved a bit trying for
the mayor. She had to skirt the dangerous territory of Jo’s opposition to the
airport to avoid offending Arnold Seidensticker, the banker, and the
developers, and the half of the City Council that favored the airport. At the
same time, she had to recognize Jo’s commitment to the Anti-Airport Coalition
in a way that would placate the greens, the women, and the Coalition. I was
glad I wasn’t in Pauline Perkins’ shoes.

I glanced at Meredith and wondered
whether the mayor’s epic catalog of Jo’s publicly virtuous life or my own
fragmented impressions of a friend tallied at all with the grieving daughter’s
recollection of her mother. What Meredith knew of her, I added to myself,
remembering what she had said about Jo’s deliberate efforts to separate herself
from her daughter. But what do we ever know about another person? We know only
surfaces, facets, impressions—depths elude us. Ruby, beside me, in many ways an
enigma, once an everyday housewife, now a believer in such things as the tarot
and the I Ching and reincarnation. Roz, across the aisle, another
mystery—shallow, silly, famous, and rich Roz, who had somehow been Jo’s friend.
Do we ever truly know another person, or are we eternally deceived by
appearances, posturing, role-playing? For that matter, do we ever know
ourselves?

I was still drifting around in these
muddy metaphysical waters when Mayor Perkins, clearly glad to have her task
safely over, concluded with the triumphant announcement that from this day
henceforth the rose garden would be known as the Josephine Gilbert Memorial
Rose Garden, a designation that probably wouldn’t offend anybody. A women’s
quartet furnished by the Pecan Springs Choral Club sang
all
the verses
of “Amazing Grace,” Reverend Lewis blessed us, and the memorial service ended.

Arnold Seidensticker was the first
to shake Meredith’s hand, murmur regrets, and leave, followed by his nervous,
salmon-tinted wife. The rest of the mourners milled around, admiring the roses
and discussing Jo’s death in whispers. I gave my condolences to Lucille, a
short, tearful woman as huggable as a marsh-mallow. Meredith was thin-faced and
hollow-eyed but controlled. She seemed to be bearing up well enough as Mayor
Perkins introduced her and Lucille to one after another of Jo’s dearest friends
and enemies.

While I was waiting for Meredith to
finish meeting the town’s dignitaries. I watched Roz, who was getting as much
attention as Meredith. That wasn’t especially surprising, since a great many
people obviously recognized her and wanted to get StrawBerry Bear’s autograph
for their children. She signed with a flourish.

After a few minutes I saw Constance
Letterman, the Craft Emporium owner, bumping her way through the crowd of
autograph seekers. Constance is small and round and perky, with a small pink
nose and pink cheeks, and she wears her brown hair permed in tight fingertip
curls.

Constance seemed even shorter and
rounder than usual today. She was wearing a brownish-orange tent dress that
made her look like a ripe pumpkin, an effect
that was heightened by the trailing leaf-green
scarf around her short neck. In addition to owning the Emporium, Constance
also writes the society column for me
Enterprise,
an honor conferred on
her, no doubt, because she is Arnold Seidensticker’s first cousin. Today, I
guessed, she was doing research for her column.