Designated Daughters (7 page)

At that point, he had hidden them somewhere in the old two-story house situated in what used to be the richest side of Dobbs but which had now gone downhill.

“Somewhere on the first floor, though, because he couldn’t climb the stairs the last few years of his life,” JoAnn said. “When Amy was a little girl, he used to keep them in a secret compartment in the fireplace surround and bring them out and let her try on the necklace, but after he died, the compartment was empty.”

“I’d almost forgotten about them,” her aunt said.

(“
She forgot about a set of Tiffany jewels?
” asked my disbelieving internal pragmatist.)

(“
Not everyone’s as materialistic as you
,” said the preacher who never misses the moral of any story.)

The old man had died eighteen months ago and they had searched the house from top to bottom. No Tiffany jewelry. That’s when Frances decided to sell her parents’ best antiques, under the impression that they would bring enough for her to keep the house and keep looking. She had inquired among her friends and quite soon, Rusty Alexander, the owner of an auction house over in Widdington, had approached her about consigning the best pieces to him. She had spoken to two others, but they wanted fifteen percent of the sale, whereas Alexander Auctions agreed to take only ten plus advertising costs.

Papers were signed. The furniture, the silver tea set, the Limoges china—all were trucked over to Widdington. Frances and JoAnn had gone to the auction and were shocked at how little those things brought. That was last fall. Shortly before Christmas, Frances passed by an antique store in Raleigh and saw her tea set in the window. She went in and inquired about it and got another shock when she was told the price—almost exactly what the whole sale had brought in.

“You didn’t have a reserve on any of the items?” I asked.

“I didn’t know I needed to,” Frances said tearfully.

“The bank’s going to foreclose next week,” Sally said. “We’ve helped her look and we can’t find the jewelry without ripping up every floorboard, which I still say we should do since it’s only the ground floor, but—”

“Stop!” I said. “I don’t want to hear about any crimes you’re planning, okay?”

“God, Deb’rah,” Sally said. “This judge thing’s really gone to your head, hasn’t it? You used to be willing to take it off the road and straight through the underbrush. When did you get to be such a tight-ass?”

“When I took my oath of office,” I snapped, knowing I sounded like a sanctimonious prig.

Sally tried to give me a sneer but her face is so tight after that second face-lift that I didn’t feel the full force of it. “I’ve gone online,” she said, “and I’ve read about how dishonest auctioneers have a bunch of crooked dealers in their pocket. The dealers won’t bid against each other, the prices stay low, and then later they get together, divvy everything up, and pay the auctioneer a percentage of the real value. So what we want to know is, can Frances sue that auctioneer?”

“Depends on what kind of contract she signed,” I said. “But I’m willing to bet that everything he did is absolutely legal as far as the paperwork is concerned. If you could prove that it wasn’t an honest sale, then you might have a chance of recovering part of it, but can you do that?”

From the look of despair on Frances’s narrow face, I knew she couldn’t.

“My brother Will’s an auctioneer here in Dobbs,” I said. “Too bad you didn’t consult him.”

“Knott? Will Knott? But I did. He was one of the ones that wanted fifteen percent of the sales.”

“Fifteen percent of a lot would’ve been a hell of a lot more than ten percent of nothing,” my cousin said sourly. “But Will! I forgot all about Will.”

A big grin spread from her Botoxed lips to her eyes and my heart sank.

“He’s totally legit now,” I told her, hoping it was true.

“I still say we need to get my gun,” croaked Spencer Lancaster.

S
o what did Sally want?” Dwight asked as we drove out of Dobbs barely an hour after we’d arrived.

He was thoughtful as he listened to what I had to say about the crooked auctioneer who had conned Frances Jones out of her antiques.

“Alexander Auctions? I keep hearing about them,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s any recourse, is there?”

“Nothing legal that I’m aware of. She said the guy got her to sign the contract in front of a notary, supposedly to protect her, but of course, it was to protect himself.”

“Too bad.”

“If you’ve heard about him, Dwight, why haven’t you shut him down?”

“Same reason, shug. No proof. I keep thinking we ought to run a sting operation, but you know what our budget cuts were. Violent crime’s up all over the county and there’s still a hiring freeze on.”

“It may not be a violent crime, but Miss Jones is losing her house and will probably need welfare for the rest of her life because of him. And you won’t go after him because he used fast talk instead of a gun to rob her?”

“Not true, Deb’rah, and you know it. We can’t go after him because no one’s filed a complaint.”

“But he gamed her with legal-looking contracts.”

“Preaching to the choir, shug. Let her swear out a warrant and we’ll haul him in. Enough people complain, even our lazy DA might step up to the plate.”

I sighed, knowing there was little likelihood of that happening.

Instead, we discussed the unidentified body that Baltimore was going to take possession of, then he told me how the alleged shooter in last night’s barroom incident planned to plead self-defense. “He’s already hired Zack Young to represent him.”

“Don’t tell me another word,” I said. “Or I’ll have to recuse myself if he shows up in front of me for a probable cause hearing.”

We had worked out a mutual agreement clause as soon as he proposed: I wouldn’t ask about any case with district court potential and he wouldn’t second-guess any of my rulings if I dismissed the charges or lowered the penalties on people his department had arrested.

Because a lot of his work is with major crimes that would go directly to superior court, it hasn’t been much of a problem.

We got home in plenty of time for Cal’s game, and even though his team lost, he scored one run on a grounder past the shortstop and caught a pop-up foul, so he and Dwight high-fived each other and we parents treated the team (and Reese) to pizzas afterwards. Dwight’s brother Rob and his kids came, too. Jake’s T-ball league doesn’t keep score. They’re focused on just teaching the kids which way to run to first base, but Mary Pat’s softball league does and they had won, so she was ragging on Cal in the car.

Her mom Kate wasn’t with us. R.W. still takes naps, and Kate had elected to stay home today.

“To be perfectly honest,” she confided to me as Dwight and Rob loaded the car with bats and gloves, “baseball bores me to tears. If I’m forced to watch grown men chase around after small round objects, I much prefer hockey.”

“You New Yorker,” I teased.

She laughed. “Go, Rangers!”

The sun had dipped below the tall pines when we got back to the house. We walked down to the pond to see how the concrete was drying and discovered that Bandit had run across the smooth surface while we were gone.

“Sorry,” Cal said, abashed. “I tried to call him back but he wouldn’t listen.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Look there. Aren’t those squirrel tracks? That’s probably why he didn’t listen to you.”

“And those look like crow feet,” Dwight said, pointing to a set of large avian prints in the middle of the slab.

“Maybe a possum or a coon or a fox will go across it tonight,” said Cal. “Then we’d have a whole zoo.”

“Not as fast as it’s drying.” Dwight pressed down lightly with his fingers and they left no mark. “In fact, with all this sunshine today, it’s drying too fast. C’mon, buddy, grab one of those buckets and let’s get some water on it before it cracks.”

I left them to it and headed back to the house to see what I had in the way of drinks and munchies for tomorrow.

Above the pines, wispy clouds blazed orange and red. Sailors would be happy with tomorrow’s weather if red skies really did mean anything.

E
ven though there were no sailors in our vicinity, Sunday morning did indeed dawn bright and clear. Dwight wanted to adjust the carburetor on our riding mower and then start looking at the DVD Mayleen had put together, so Cal and I drove back into Dobbs to go to church with Aunt Zell, something I try to do at least once a month, in addition to dropping by the house for lunch every week or so.

Aunt Zell is my mother with some of the strong-minded edges smoothed down, not that she’s anybody’s pushover. But she never challenged the status quo the way Mother did, and when she married, it was to a respectable and educated buyer for one of the large tobacco companies, not a fiddle-playing bootlegger with a houseful of half-wild little boys.

She was the dutiful one who joined all the expected small-town social groups: Junior League, the DAR, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Democratic Women. She helped organize the town’s first Friends of the Library and she continues to raise money for the community college, the hospital, and the shelter for victims of domestic violence.

Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash had no children, so she sublimated with Mother’s brood. When I ran off to dance with the devil after Mother died, she never gave up on me, and when I was ready to come back to Colleton County, she let me use the apartment on the second floor of their house, where Uncle Ash’s mother had lived until her death.

Cal and I got there in time to sit down in the kitchen and share a cup of coffee while Uncle Ash went up to put on a tie. She poured chocolate milk for Cal, and their little dog Hambone jumped up in his lap as soon as he patted his knee.

“Well, young fellow,” Uncle Ash said when he came back down. “I hear you drove a tractor yesterday.”

Cal beamed and was soon describing how he’d had to stand up on the pedals to change gears and how balky the blade had been when he tried to raise it, but he’d managed to do okay.

I put our cups and Cal’s glass in the dishwasher, Aunt Zell picked up her Bible and her purse, and we went out the back door. It was only three blocks to the church and too pretty a day not to walk. Cal held still long enough to let me get rid of his milky mustache and slip him a dollar for the collection plate, then hurried to catch up with Uncle Ash’s long strides. Aunt Zell and I followed at a more leisurely pace because she wanted to hear my take on Aunt Rachel’s death and funeral.

She hadn’t known Aunt Rachel all that well, but she had visited a time or two after Sally brought her to live at nearby Crenshaw’s Lake.

I described the low-cut red dress Sally had worn to the funeral and how scandalized Bel and Doris were by her collection of wigs. “Why didn’t you ever mention them?”

She smiled. “Didn’t realize I hadn’t. They’re just so Sally, I guess I assumed you’d seen her.”

“Not since her hair came back in funny,” I admitted, feeling vaguely guilty that I hadn’t visited more often.

As if reading my mind, Aunt Zell linked her arm in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’ve had a busy spring, honey, and Bel and Doris don’t have enough to do if they’ve got time to keep finding new ways to fault Sally. Maybe she never got over being a teenager, but she’s been through a lot and she was good to Rachel.”

“Do you know her support group?”

“The Designated Daughters? Oh yes. I was one myself once.”

“You?”

“When Ash’s mother was dying. She was a dear woman and a wonderful mother-in-law, but those last few months were bad. Congestive heart failure. Uncomfortable for her and so hard to watch. The Daughters were such a comfort. Ash was still having to travel in his work. South America. Mexico. I couldn’t talk about it with my regular friends—it would have sounded self-pitying and very disloyal to her. But the group understood and didn’t judge. And they had such practical suggestions for coping.”

“You must have missed Mother terribly then,” I said, remembering how close they had been. “And I wasn’t here for you either.”

She squeezed my arm again. “You’d already had your bad time, honey, nursing her. And you didn’t have much of a support group yourself, did you?”

I was eighteen that summer, newly graduated from high school, the only child still at home, and yes, my mother’s only daughter. My last summer at home. I should have been looking forward to college. Parties. New clothes. Instead, it was sickness and grief. Aunt Zell came as often as she could get away from her caretaking duties with her mother-in-law, but it was Maidie Holt, our longtime housekeeper who was dealing with her own grief, who helped me through it on a day-to-day basis. She was my rock. I was her broken reed.

Looking back, I don’t fault my brothers anymore. The boys were building their own lives, getting married, starting families, preoccupied with earning a living and totally unnerved by her dying. Even Daddy. He was so heavy into denial that he couldn’t—
wouldn’t
—talk about it to her, to me, to anyone, so he hid behind farm work. Tobacco. Corn. Beans. He was out on a tractor twelve and fourteen hours a day.

I forced back the lump in my throat that always rises if I let myself remember too clearly and cast about for another subject. “Do you know a Frances Jones? Lives over on West Elm?”

“Jones? Would that be Olive Jones’s daughter?”

I shrugged. “All I know is that she lived on West Elm and her mother used to belong to the UDC.”

“Must be Olive Jones, then. She was president of our UDC before me. Why?”

“Sally’s trying to help her and her niece save the house,” I said, and told her what I knew about the situation.

Aunt Zell was surprised that they were in such financial straits and dismayed to hear they had been cheated by a dishonest auctioneer. “Her Georgian tea set? Oh dear. Olive was so proud of it. Not proud in a ‘Look what I can afford’ way, but more like ‘I’m so lucky to have such a thing of beauty.’ It would break her heart to know her daughter couldn’t keep it.”

Before I could ask if she ever saw the woman’s Tiffany jewelry, we reached the side entrance to the church, where Cal held the door for us.

“Such nice manners,” Aunt Zell said, and I felt a wave of maternal pride that still catches me by surprise even though Cal’s lived with us for over a year now.

With so many nieces and nephews to cuddle, babysit, yell at, or ignore, I’ve never felt any yearning for a child of my own body, especially now that I’ve adopted Cal. When Doris or Bel or Nadine started asking pointed questions about when were Dwight and I going to have a baby together—“You ain’t getting no younger,” they told me—I quickly let them know that Cal was all the child we needed or wanted.

“If you want another one, sure,” Dwight said amiably when the subject came up last summer, “but don’t do it on my account. I’m fine with Cal.”

“Good,” I’d told him, “because I’m fine with my ready-made son, too.”

That didn’t stop my sisters-in-law from sniping or warning me that I might feel differently when it was too late.

Not a chance, I thought, as Cal and I shared a hymnal and he stumbled along earnestly with the words of “Safely Through Another Week.”

Amen.