Designated Daughters (2 page)

S
o who died?” I asked Portland Brewer when she joined me for a late lunch at Bright Leaf Restaurant, a block from the Colleton County courthouse.

Her uncle Ash is married to my Aunt Zell and we’ve been best friends ever since we got kicked out of the junior girls’ Sunday school class for reducing prissy little Caroline Atherton to tears two Sundays in a row. Black does nothing for her olive skin or dark curly hair or even for her figure now that she’s back to her pre-pregnancy shape, so the only reason she has a good black suit is because she still believes red isn’t suitable for funerals.

“Laurel McElveen’s niece,” she said, and when she saw my blank look, she elucidated. “You know…the woman that came to live with her after the accident?”

Mrs. McElveen is one of Portland’s blue-chip clients and a mover and shaker here in Dobbs. The widow of a wealthy cardiologist, she sits on several boards, including the library and the hospital. Two or three years ago, she was crippled in a car crash. I heard about the accident at the time, of course, but I’d never met the companion and her name wasn’t familiar.

“What happened?”

“Heart attack, apparently. Same thing that killed her mother. Mrs. McElveen blames herself for not realizing Evelyn might’ve had a weak heart, too. In a weird way, though, it seems to have put the starch back in her.”

“Starch?”

“She used to be so opinionated and decisive before the accident, and no rubber stamp for any of the board members she worked with.”

“I’ve heard Barbara on the subject,” I said dryly. My brother Zach’s wife is Colleton County’s library director. “Mrs. McElveen browbeat the county commissioners into keeping the libraries funded.”

“Don’t I know it? For a while there, I was afraid she was going to make me take the whole board to court, but ever since Christmas, it was like she was drifting into a fog or something. She stopped going to board meetings, stopped her therapy, just didn’t seem to care about anything.”

“Depression?”

“Maybe. She worked really hard to get the use of her legs back, but she still can’t walk more than a few steps, so maybe she did get depressed. But she called me last week and when I saw her right after the funeral today, it’s as if she’s decided to rejoin the living. All piss and vinegar again. Wants to rewrite her will now that her niece has died. You having wine?”

She’d been totally conscientious about alcohol while carrying and then nursing the baby, but she’d missed her occasional glass of wine with our lunches.

I shook my head. “You go ahead, though. I have to be back in court this afternoon.”

The waitress had already brought me a glass of iced tea, and when she came back with Portland’s wine, she asked if we wanted to split the shrimp salad, our usual choice when we eat here. Bright Leaf serves the same gigantic portions that made it popular back when farmers came to town on Saturdays after a week of heavy manual labor in the tobacco fields that used to surround Dobbs; and while I have a healthy appetite, I do try to keep it reined in.

Now that we’re both working mothers, we don’t hang out together as much as we used to, so there was a lot of news to catch up on. Her baby, Carolyn Deborah, was seventeen months old now and talking like an iPod left on autoplay, while my stepson—no, not my stepson, I happily reminded myself, not since the adoption went through last month—my
son
. Cal turned ten last month and would be playing Little League baseball again this summer.

Three years ago, neither Portland nor I had seen this coming.

She and Avery had been married for fourteen years and had almost given up hope of ever having children, while Dwight wasn’t even on my radar except as a longtime family friend who furnished a handy shoulder to cry on whenever my love life turned sour. Then suddenly we were married. A month later, his ex-wife was murdered and his son Cal came to live with us. Happily, we’ve all managed to adjust and now it’s hard for Portland to remember what her life was like before Carolyn. Same for me. I can’t begin to imagine mine without Dwight and Cal in it.

“Did I tell you that we’re finally building the pond shed?” I asked as I speared the last grape tomato on my plate. “Seth and Haywood are going to help Dwight pour the slab this weekend.”

Portland laughed. “When are you going to show him the pig?”

My brother Will runs an auction house and he’d given me a good deal on a large pink metal sign that was pig-shaped, measured about five feet long by three feet tall, and spelled out
BAR-B-CUE & SPARE RIBS
in bright pink neon. The metal was rusty and dented, and the pink tubing on the back side was too broken to be repaired, but my brother Herman, Haywood’s twin, is an electrician, as are his daughter and son. Together they’ve done a great job of getting the front side working so that when it’s switched on, the feet look as if they’re running. Cal giggles every time he sees it. When the shed is built and the front sides screened in, that pig should look great on the back wall.

I’m crazy about neon, the lighted tubes and bright colors rev me up, but Dwight thinks the signs I’ve collected are white-trash tacky. I still have hopes of converting him, but I need to choose the right moment. “I’m going to let Cal give it to him for Father’s Day.”

“Sneaky,” said Portland. “Be sure you let Avery and me know when you plan to unveil it. We want to see Dwight’s face.”

We moved on to courthouse gossip. There was a rumor going round that one of the magistrates was sleeping with her husband’s business partner and that her husband might be embezzling from the firm, so was it true passion or a safety play on the wife’s part? Stay tuned, folks.

As we walked back to the courthouse together, the sun burned down from a cloudless blue sky and made us grateful for the fully-leafed crepe myrtles and acanthus trees that shaded the sidewalks. Middle of May and almost every tree had a ring of colorful petunias, impatiens, or coleus around its base, and bright red geraniums bloomed in the concrete urns on either side of the courthouse door.

I don’t hear too many jury cases, but when I do, I give a slightly longer than usual lunch break so that people don’t have to bolt their food, which was why Portland and I could take our time.

“All rise,” said the bailiff as I entered the nearly empty courtroom. Except for a couple of gray-haired courtroom buffs who attend jury trials as a form of cheap entertainment, the other eight or ten seemed to be partisans of the combatants, and that included the group that had come in with my cousin earlier.

I took my place behind my nameplate, a gift from Barbara McCrory, a Wisconsin friend who made it to the bench before me. My name is on the front, but the back reads:
REMEMBER: THIS IS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU
.

“Oyez, oyez, oyez,” the bailiff intoned. “This court is now back in session, the Honorable Deborah Knott present and presiding.”

With Mr. Connolly back on the stand, Joyce Mitchell, the attorney hired by Connolly’s sister, was ready to cross-e
xamin
e. Joyce is a quiet, soft-spoken woman who looks at least fifteen years younger than I know her to be.

She adjusted her glasses, tucked a strand of dark hair behind one ear, and smiled pleasantly. “Mr. Connolly, were you aware that your mother sold her house at the bottom of the market?”

“I know she got a lot less than the house was worth, but her rent wasn’t all that much either.”

“You also know that she needed round-the-clock nursing care the last three months of her life?”

Mr. Connolly gave an indignant snort. “And that was a waste of good money when she had three daughters living here who could’ve taken turns sitting by her bed.”

“And you, too, of course?” Joyce asked with sympathetic interest.

“Objection,” his attorney said. “What bearing does this have on my client’s claim?”

“It goes to show why there was considerably less money than he expected, Your Honor,” Joyce said.

“Overruled,” I agreed. “Continue.”

“Anyhow, I live four hours away.” He removed his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. “All of them are just minutes.”

Joyce glanced at the jury box and I followed her eyes. A woman sitting in the front row had pressed her lips into a tight line.

Moving on, Joyce said, “I gather your mother was quite a collector, Mr. Connolly? Had a lot of valuable possessions?”

“She sure did. And I want to know what happened to them, because when my wife and I went to help clean out her house after the funeral, it’d been picked clean.”

“You’re sure she had a good eye for things of value?”

“Absolutely.” He slid his glasses back on and gave a firm jerk of his head to emphasize his point.

“Like those figurines for instance?”

He shrugged. “They might not’ve been to my taste, but I’ve looked on eBay and they’re asking eight or ten times what she would’ve paid for them.”

“Asking or getting? I daresay your attorney here could ask a thousand dollars an hour to represent you, but would you pay it?”

Smiles and laughter from the spectators.

Joyce allowed a dubious frown to cross her pretty face. “But maybe her furniture wasn’t as valuable?”

“Oh, yes, it was!” he said quickly. “Some of it—”

He suddenly realized where Joyce was headed and tried to backtrack. “I mean, some of it was good, but most of it was just ordinary furniture store stuff.”

“When you drove over in your pickup truck to help move your mother into a smaller house, did you take any of her furniture home with you?”

“Well, I might’ve taken— I mean, Mother might’ve
given
me some things she didn’t have room for.”

Joyce pulled a list from her files. “Did those things include a Chippendale piecrust table, a mahogany sleigh bed, an 1830 blanket chest, a Queen Anne chair, and a Hepplewhite mirror?”

A juror seated in the second row leaned forward to listen with bright-eyed interest. There was something familiar about her.

Mr. Connolly glared at Joyce. “Mother wanted me to have them.”

The juror raised a skeptical eyebrow and I realized that she was a picker for my brother Will’s auction house. I glanced at the seating chart. Jody Munger. I might not know what a Hepplewhite mirror was, but I bet Jody Munger did.

“Even though those six pieces are worth many times what the figurines would actually bring?” Joyce asked.

Mr. Connolly finally had the good sense to hush and let his attorney speak for him.

“Objection. Is there any proof that she owned those pieces or what they’re worth?”

Joyce held out copies of the document from which she had been reading, one for him and one for the court. “Your Honor, I’d like to enter as evidence this appraisal from her insurance company.”

I nodded and she reeled off values for the benefit of the jury, then turned back to Mr. Connolly. “At that same time, did you also take a twelve-gauge shotgun that had been appraised at around a thousand dollars?”

He could not let that go unchallenged. “That shotgun belonged to my daddy’s daddy and I’m the only Connolly male. Mother knew they wanted it to come to me.”

While the men on the jury might have agreed with that sentiment, two of the women exchanged glances that did not bode well for Mr. Connolly.

“No further questions,” Joyce said.

The only other witness for the plaintiff’s side was an antiques dealer from Raleigh who was presented as a specialist in Hummel figurines. She explained that they began as drawings by a German nun and were turned into ceramics in the 1930s.

“Mr. Connolly thinks that his mother began collecting them in the mid-fifties, so she might well have had some early examples worth several hundred dollars.”

An enlargement of an out-of-focus snapshot taken a few years earlier was entered into evidence. It pictured the late Mrs. Connolly standing in front of several shelves crammed with the knickknacks. The dealer pointed to one of the clearer items. “That looks like an
Apple Tree Boy
from the early seventies. Even though it’s comparatively late, it could fetch up to five or six hundred, depending on condition.”

Upon cross-examination, however, the dealer admitted that she had never actually seen the collection, only this picture. “Some of these do look like rare pieces, but without actually seeing them, I can’t be one hundred percent sure.”

She also grudgingly agreed when Joyce suggested that prices had dropped dramatically in the last few years.

With no further witnesses for Mr. Connolly’s side, Joyce Mitchell called a Peggy Clontz to the stand.

Mrs. Clontz was a cousin who had known the siblings from birth—“He was always a greedy little boy”—and she was present when the late Mrs. Connolly expressed dismay at what her son had taken. “She said she had told the girls to keep whatever was left for themselves.”

“Objection, hearsay, and self-interest,” said Connolly’s attorney.

Before I could rule, Joyce Mitchell quickly said, “Were you one of her heirs, Mrs. Clontz?”

The woman looked confused. “I thought she didn’t leave a will.”

“Let me rephrase that. Did you benefit in any way by her death?”

Mrs. Clontz shook her head.

“Did you expect some of the silver or the figurines?”

“Absolutely not. About three months before she died, we were looking at her collection. That’s when she gave me
Feeding Time
.”

“
Feeding Time
?”

“It’s a little farm girl feeding the chickens, like when we were children.”

I smiled at that, having a soft spot for chickens myself.

There being no questions from the plaintiff, Joyce called the sisters to the stand, beginning with Mrs. Morefield, whose blue eyes flashed with indignation at being accused of acting unfairly.

The two younger sisters confirmed what Mrs. Clontz had said and one added, “Dotty could have emptied Mother’s bank account, but she didn’t want to bust up the family over money.”

Her voice broke and she searched in her bag for a tissue. “He’s our brother, yet that’s all he seems to care about—money.”