Daughter of Deceit (33 page)

“Why didn’t you call me?” Tom demanded. He was looking in dismay at the condition of her rental car.

Katharine collapsed against the soft leather of the Lexus passenger seat. “It never occurred to me. You aren’t usually here to call.” She closed her eyes as he started the engine. “Before we go home, I ought to stop by the hospital and tell Bara what’s happened.”

“How about if I drop you off and run over to Enterprise to tell them about their car? I don’t know Bara very well.”

“I will be delighted to let you deal with the car.” She could get used to having him at home.

When she got to Bara’s room, she found Payne propped in the windowsill, Ann Rose in one visitor’s chair, and Oscar Anderson in the other. The normal bags under Oscar’s eyes had doubled in size and darkened from his exhausting trip, but he still rose with gallant courtesy to offer Katharine his chair. “Hamilton tracked me down and told me to come home, that Bara needed me.” He gave Katharine a sharp look. “You don’t look well, either.”

“I don’t feel real well. I’ve just spent the last half hour in a cocktail shaker.” She stumbled to the chair he’d offered and sat down. “It was Murdoch,” she told Bara. “She went to take the things—for safekeeping, she says—and Foley surprised her. He had a gun—the one they found in your buffet—”

“The one that killed Winnie?” Bara’s voice was a croak. She looked away. “He killed him. The bastard killed him. I should have known. Oh, Winnie!”

Katharine was too weary to give Bara time to grieve. She could grieve later. “When Murdoch saw Foley’s gun, she grabbed up the one on your table and shot him.”

“Murdoch always acts before she thinks.” Bara was pale under her bruises, but her wry sense of humor remained. “She’ll probably tell the judge it was my fault for leaving the gun on the table. Was she wanting the silver service?”

“I think it was the Monet. She told me how much it is worth, and on the way over here I remembered that last Monday at Ann Rose’s, she said she hoped to take a trip to England if she could get the money, but in the car this afternoon, she said, ‘
when
I go to England.’ I think it was the money she wanted as much as the silver service. She also told the police she tried to make it look like you had killed Foley because you have more money to pay lawyers than she does. And by the way, all the stuff was in her trunk.”

Bara shook her head. “Good old Murdoch. And she’s right—I do have more money than she does right now, but I sure didn’t that night.” Bara waved a listless hand. “So none of that had anything to do with finding my father?”

Oscar leaned toward the bed. “Your father?” He wheezed when he bent over, so he stood erect again.

Bara huffed. “Come off it, Oscar. You had to know I was adopted. But Murdoch didn’t know.”

“Yes she did,” Katharine corrected her. “Scotty told her, to rub salt in the wound that you had the tea set. That’s the reason she used to justify going to get it—that you weren’t entitled to it because you aren’t…”

“…in her precious bloodline?” Bara finished for her. “Grandmother Payne left it to me by name. Not to ‘my granddaughter,’ but ‘to my beloved Bara Halcomb.’ She left it to
me
.”

“You weren’t adopted,” Oscar said bluntly.

“Yes I was. We found out this week. Rita Louise said they adopted me in New York.”

“Horse feathers! That may be what Nettie told Rita Louise and the rest of her cronies, but I went with Winnie myself, all the way to Yugoslavia, to get you. Your mother had died, and your uncle had gotten word to Winnie that he couldn’t keep you and his mother was old, so Winnie and I flew over and smuggled you out of the country. We hitched a ride over with some of his old army buddies. The whole continent was still pretty chaotic in those days, so it was a heck of a lot easier than it would be now. We went to the house where you were living with your uncle and—”

Bara stared at him. She pressed a hand to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. “The men in the door! I was so scared!”

“You were terrified. You were barely three and had recently lost your mother to tuberculosis, and here were two big men you didn’t know coming to take you away. You kicked and screamed and tried to run away, but Winnie picked you up and held you until you calmed down a bit. When we got back, since I was in med school, I could finagle you a Georgia birth certificate, but Winnie didn’t need to adopt you. You were his daughter.”

Bara struggled up on her pillows. “I was?”

Oscar nodded. “He should have told you himself, but Nettie made him promise. She only agreed to take you if he never admitted to anybody he’d had an affair with somebody else.”

“Who?”

“A nurse who took care of him when he was shot down over Yugoslavia. Ana Molnar. She and her twin brother were active in the resistance, and hid Winnie for several weeks before smuggling him back to U.S. forces.”

“Anton Molnar!” Katharine exclaimed. “The man who got killed.”

A nurse came in and fiddled with Bara’s IV bag. “She’s due for more pain medication,” she explained. Everybody waited to speak again until she left.

Oscar answered Katharine. “Winnie promised Anton while we were there that if he ever wanted to leave Yugoslavia, he’d support him until he could find work. An outfit in Ohio that helped defectors managed to get him out of the country, but Winnie was out of town the weekend he must have arrived in Atlanta. The first Winnie knew Anton had come was when he saw his picture in the paper with an article saying he was missing in Atlanta. He gave me a call and we tried everything we knew to track him down, but next thing we knew, an unidentified body from the prior week turned out to be Anton. He’d been shot in a street robbery soon after he arrived, apparently.”

Katharine took a quick reading on her conscience and decided to withhold what she knew about that for the moment. Bara was having enough shocks for one day.

Ann Rose seemed to read her thoughts. “I’ll bet that’s what’s haunting Rita Louise. I’ll bet Nettie told Rita Louise about Winnie’s little fling and who Bara was, and when the man came to the house and talked to Nettie, I’ll bet Nettie told Rita Louise that too, but made her promise not to tell. When Rita Louise realized he had been killed—”

Katharine nodded. “But she had given her word not to tell.” She looked at Bara to see if she was listening.

“A grave sin of omission,” Ann Rose said soberly.

Bara wasn’t interested in Rita Louise’s soul. She was still back in Yugoslavia, mulling over her own existence. “Winnie had lost a leg and was in awful shape. How…”

“The leg wound wasn’t originally too bad,” Oscar informed her. “It was healing nicely until he and Anton started south, but they got caught in the middle of a skirmish and had to bed down in a barn for three nights. Winnie’s wound got infected. By the time they got help, it was too late to save it. He told me the Messerschmitt didn’t cost him a leg, it was manure.”

“The locket,” Bara said to Katharine.

“Do you still have that thing?” Oscar exclaimed. “Great big silver heart? You had it around your neck when we fetched you, with your mother’s picture in one side and Winnie’s in the other. It was much too big for such a little neck, but you wouldn’t take it off, even to sleep. We had a fine flight home, I can tell you that. You didn’t understand a word we said, Winnie only understood a few words you said, and you were hysterical most of the time.” His eyes twinkled to take away the sting of his next words. “There were minutes when I’d gladly have pitched you out the door, but Winnie held you the entire way.”

Bara smiled. “He was my daddy.” A shadow creased her forehead. “Poor Nettie. No wonder she didn’t like me. I look so much like my mother, it must have been hard on her….” She closed her eyes, growing sleepy. “She put up with it better than I would have.”

Oscar stood. “We’ll go and let you rest. You’ve got a lot to think about. Don’t try to process it all today.”

“I won’t.” She opened her eyes slightly. “Where’s Murdoch?”

“The police have taken her away,” Katharine told her.

Bara closed her eyes again, as if tired of the subject. “Tell her I’ll pay her legal fees.”

“You won’t!” Payne objected. “Not after all she’s done.”

“I will. Life is about choices, Payne. I’ve made more than my quota of bad ones—your daddy and Foley, to name two. But some good came out of that.” She reached for her daughter’s hand and squeezed it. “You, and Win…” her voice faltered. She pressed her lips together and took a deep breath through her nose, then went on with determination. “Anyway, my life isn’t over yet, so while I have some choices left, I want to make a few good ones. I’ve already decided to sober up again, and get rid of my house.”

“Your house?” Payne’s voice rose in protest.

“It has never been a happy house, not since Nana died, and I don’t need all that space. I’m also going to vote Winnie’s shares the way he—no, the way
I
think they ought to be voted. It’s time I took seriously the responsibilities he left me. I may even see if I can get a place on the board. And I want to pay Murdoch’s lawyer.”

“She tried to kill you!” Payne reminded her.

Bara squeezed her hand again. “No she didn’t, honey, she killed Foley. And I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have killed her for trying to take those things if she had not shot first. He was getting real violent.” She gingerly touched her discolored cheek. “I’ll testify, if she wants to plead self-defense, and I want to pay her lawyer. I don’t want Murdoch spending the rest of her mother’s life in jail.”

“Granddaddy wouldn’t have,” Payne muttered.

“Winnie was a man, not God,” Bara said drowsily. “He made mistakes, like the rest of us.” Her mouth curved in the old impish grin. “But I’ll bet even Winnie would pay Murdoch for ridding my house of vermin.”

Katharine and Tom arrived home to find two burly men and a truck in their front drive. “We got your sofas and chairs,” one announced cheerfully.

“Bring them in,” Katharine ordered. “I need to go freshen up.”

Upstairs, she washed her feet again, put on more antibiotic cream and Band-aids, and slipped into soft slippers. She sat for a moment on the side of her bed, feeling the soreness in her neck and shoulders. She wished she could crawl in and sleep for a day, but she couldn’t leave Tom to do all the work downstairs. She padded down to find him in the living room, directing the men to place two blue-plaid chairs beside the peach living-room sofas.

“Those chairs belong in the den,” Katharine told him.

He frowned. “Are you sure? They look okay in here.”

“They belong in the den down the hall,” she told the men.

“The den already has chairs,” Tom protested.

“Then they must be the ones that belong in here.”

They weren’t. The chairs in the den were small red wing chairs Katharine had never seen before. “Those aren’t our chairs! Our chairs are large and upholstered in blue and peach, with one matching ottoman.”

The smaller of the two men scratched his head. “I didn’t see any pink and blue chairs. Did you, Willie?”

Willie wiped sweat off his forehead in a practiced gesture with a forearm that recently had been pressed against Katharine’s new upholstery. “Naw, Pete. I sure didn’t. Others, neither. Only them checky chairs she don’t like in the living room, and these here red ones. The red ones look nice in here,” he told Katharine in a pleading tone.

“They look nice but they aren’t my chairs.” She headed to the phone.

The upholsterer apologized profusely. He didn’t know how such a mistake had been made. He alluded again to his sick mother-in-law and the woman employee who’d had the gall to have a baby in the midst of their busiest month all year. He admitted that the red chairs belonged to a woman out in Ansley Park, who had expected them a couple of weeks back. He finally confessed that he hadn’t started on Katharine’s flowered living-room chairs. He also confessed that he wasn’t speaking to her from his shop, but from his wife’s parents’ condo down at Panama City Beach. “We thought, now that her mother is better, that we’d all have a little vacation to celebrate.”

“But what about my chairs?”

“I’ll get on them first thing we get back,” he promised.

“I’ve got a hundred and fifty people coming on Saturday. I need those chairs!”

“A hundred and fifty people can’t sit on two chairs, ma’am. Now you calm down. I’m doing the best I can, see? I told you I’ll get right on them when we get back, and that’s the best I can do. Of course, if you want the men to bring them back to you this afternoon, they can, but they’re all to pieces.”

Katharine pictured her living room with two naked chairs, stuffing spilling all over the carpet. “No, do them next week. But I expect a discount, do you understand? They are already a week overdue—”

“I know, but my mother-in-law got sick, and then one of my best workers up and had a baby.”

She hung up. She’d heard that song before.

“We won’t get the chairs until after the party,” she informed Tom.

“It’s a shame we can’t keep the red ones. They wouldn’t look bad with the couches and the rug.”

“That’s brilliant! Willie?”

Willie was in the process of heaving one of the red chairs onto his broad back. “Yessum?”

“Bring the red chairs to the living room. We’ll keep them until ours arrive.”

“But ma’am! If they ain’t your chairs—”

“They are for now. Put them in the living room.”

“I doan’ know what Mister Hammond is gonna say.”

“Mister Hammond is gonna say his mother-in-law got sick and somebody had a baby. I’m saying I have to have chairs for Saturday. You can come get them Monday morning, if you like. But if somebody spills something on them at my party, you all will re-cover them for the other lady free of charge. Do you understand?”

“Yessum. I understand. But Mister Hammond ain’t gonna like it.”

“Mister Hammond is in Panama City Beach. How is he going to know?”

A broad grin split his face. “Right. Pete? Come help me move these here chairs.”

When they had gone, Katharine collapsed onto the newly covered sofa and reached for the gin and tonic Tom handed her. She took a long cold swallow. “Thanks, hon. I needed that.”

He took a swig of beer. “I can’t believe they brought the wrong chairs.”

She set down her glass and rubbed both cheeks with her palms to massage away the past several weeks. “They brought the wrong chairs. The glazier had to order glass for the kitchen cabinets twice because he measured wrong. One of the bedrooms upstairs is the wrong color of blue.”

“FedEx left boxes of china and silver outside by the front door.” Tom continued the litany as he sat down beside her.

“And did you see the trees on the front veranda Friday when you got home?”

“Yeah. I thought they looked a little strange.”

“They were for indoors. I had to call Hollis to find muscles to move them in. I don’t mean to complain, but this gives you a taste of what my summer has been like.”

He pulled her head to his shoulder. “Poor hon. Shall I take you out to dinner?”

“You’d better, if you plan to eat.”

He checked his watch. “Shall we go car hunting before we eat? I’ve been thinking, and I really do think we need another Escalade. They are big and safe, and…” He paused to take another gulp of beer.

“It’s not about you.”

He was so startled he choked. When he’d recovered, he said, “I beg your pardon?” He obviously thought she was joking.

Katharine wasn’t smiling. “We’re talking about my car. It’s not about you, or what
you
want. It’s about me and what
I
want. You picked the Lexus. I want a car that gets good gas mileage and doesn’t cost more than a lot of families make in a year. One that is easy on the environment—things I value. And I want to go sit in cars and get the feel of them. Find one I fall in love with. I’ve got some models in mind, but I need to spend time with each of them before I decide.”

He blinked. “Do you have any idea how long that could take?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll get another rental until the party is over, then next week I’ll start looking.”

“I won’t be here next week.”

“You don’t have to be here for me to pick it out. I promise not to sign anything until you get home.”

“You don’t know a thing about cars.”

“Do you? Really?”

He thought that over. “Not really, I guess. I know what I like, and what has good ratings. But picking cars is supposed to be a guy thing.”

“I spent last Sunday afternoon with a bunch of guys who know cars the way you know senators. They gave me tips about what to look for and avoid, and they suggested three models they’d recommend. I really want to do this, Tom.”

He draped one arm over her shoulder. “If you want to do it, do it.” He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “And I like your style, lady, but could you tell me one thing? What have you done with my wife?”