Divas Do Tell (2 page)

“It’s on all the bestseller lists. They’re making a movie out of it. Why shouldn’t she show off?”

“Read the book, Trinket. Just read the book.” She got up, left the room, and in a minute came back with a hardcover book covered in a fancy book jacket. She tossed it in my lap, so I picked it up.

Dark Secrets Under the Holly
was printed across the top, and in big letters beneath that title,
by Desirée DuBois
. The background was pale pink, and a huge magnolia blossom and Spanish moss provided no clue as to the content except that it was set in the South. New York publishers obviously thought Spanish moss grows throughout the entire state of Mississippi. It doesn’t. I shook my head.

“Well, the hint about Holly Springs is a bit too obvious, and her pseudonym is rather extravagant and clichéd, but other than that it looks okay.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Trinket, you know you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Speaking of clichés . . .”

“Open it up. Pick any page. Just start reading. Then tell me what you think.”

I thumbed through the book, pages flipping under my fingers. “I’ll have to have more wine if it’s as bad as you say it is.”

“That can be arranged.” Bitty got up, once more dislodging her personal gargoyle, a disgruntled fat pug wearing a bib, diamond studded collar, and a sweater that said Mommy Loves Me across the top. The pug’s name is Chen Ling. I call her Chitling, mainly to irritate Bitty. We live to annoy one another.

While Bitty fetched my wine I scanned a random page. A section immediately caught my eye.

“Jewel Twining and her twin sister Ruby looked nothing alike. Ruby was petite and blonde while Jewel had the physique of a girls’ basketball coach—not necessarily a female one. Seeing them together always struck me as funny. It was Jewel who played with the sharecropper kids down the road and became best friends with a black child named Birdie. Later in life, Birdie would become a housekeeper just as her mother before her, and her mother’s mother before that. Generations of housekeepers cleaned up after Holly Springs children and their parents. Morning maids, afternoon maids, evening maids toiled in the huge antebellum homes with scant pay and plenty of prejudice. This was the Mississippi of the fifties and sixties when Jim Crow ruled, and the ‘colored’ housekeepers knew their place. Those who forgot were swiftly and sharply reminded.”

I felt my face get hot. Jewel Twining could only be me, and while my twin sister Emerald is blonde and petite, I do
not
have the physique of a girls’ basketball coach. I’m tall, yes, and while I could stand to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, I’m hardly gym teacher material. They’re in much better shape.

By the time Bitty returned with my wine, I’d read enough to know that “Desirée DuBois” had skewered most of the Holly Springs Garden Club as well as half the people she called old friends. Bitty took one look at my face and smiled.

“See? I told you. Here’s your wine. Sure you don’t want some Jack and Coke instead?”

“I’m sure. Sufficiently liquored up, I might show up at Cady Lee’s house with a torch and a pitchfork.” I slammed the book closed. “What is Dixie Lee thinking?”

Dixie Lee is Cady Lee Forsythe’s younger sister. The Forsythe family has been in Holly Springs for generations and done quite well for themselves. Their daughters, Cady Lee, Dixie Lee, Delta Lee, and Mossy Lee had gone to our elementary school while their daddy was the mayor; once he was voted out of office they went to more prestigious schools. All four girls and their two brothers—Jefferson Lee and Robert Lee—had graduated from Ole Miss, their father’s alma mater. Their mother had had the oversight of graduating from Mississippi State, but her family forgave that error when she became Queen of the Tailgating Party at The Grove in Ole Miss. She has crystal chandeliers hung from the top of the tent and serves exquisite finger sandwiches, caviar, and the most expensive champagne at every Ole Miss home game.

Her Forsythe family tree limb claims a familial relationship to General Robert E. Lee, hence the profusion of Lee forenames in their children. Floy Anne Lee had married into the Forsythe family in the fifties and immediately began producing a flotilla of namesakes.

Cady Lee Forsythe, now Kincaid, is a member of the Dixie Divas. The Divas are a group of women in the Holly Springs area who get together every month to drink wine or bourbon, eat chocolate and other delicacies, and generally have a good time. There is usually entertainment at these functions. No men are allowed as members or even guests, but have provided hours of excellent amusement on occasion. What happens with the Divas, stays with the Divas, so I shall not divulge any details here. Suffice it to say only a few men have been brave enough for a repeat performance. The Chippendales’ booking agent no longer takes our calls.

“Mark my words,” said Bitty in a dark tone, “someone’s going to whack Dixie Lee upside her head before this is over with. I’ve thought about it myself.”

“I can see where this kind of thing would rile up folks,” I agreed. “What about the movie? I heard it’s going to be made mostly in Holly Springs.”

“If you ask me, that movie is better off not being made anywhere. You know people are going to talk, and I think Dixie Lee has lost her mind writing something like this, much less making a movie out of it. Besides, it’s too much like that book written by the woman down in Jackson. Dixie Lee probably plagiarized it.”

“Well, her book and movie did well. I read a newspaper review that said even though this novel may sound similar, it focuses more on the personal lives of the white residents instead of the trials of the black domestics.”

“Tell that to Ida Tyree,” Bitty said dryly. “She was up in arms over it, said it doesn’t tell half the story, and what it does tell is wrong.”

Mrs. Tyree is Bitty’s next door neighbor, a former housekeeper who became a much-respected local leader during the Civil Rights movement, then built her job into a cleaning empire that she sold for a lot of money about twenty years ago. Mrs. Tyree is a matriarch of both the black and white community in Holly Springs. Not anybody to mess with, either. She has a tongue sharp enough to skin a catfish when she gets indignant.

“I can see I’m going to have to read the book from the front,” I said after a few sips of wine. “If she says about other people what she’s said about me and Emerald, she’s not going to have any friends left in this town.”

Bitty sucked down half her Jack and Coke. “She did and she doesn’t,” she said while stroking Chen Ling atop her furry little head. “I can’t imagine what got into her to do that. She may have changed the names around, but it’s obvious who she’s talking about. She has unmitigated gall, doesn’t she?”

“Well, you and Dixie Lee were never friends,” I reminded. “You were always rivals.”

“That’s only because she’s a backstabbing little hussy.”

I decided to ignore that. “I wonder what Budgie thinks about being referred to as a sharecropper’s child in a long line of housekeepers.”

“Probably close to the same thing you think about being referred to as a girls’ gym teacher.”

I ignored that, too. “Since she now owns the café, I’m sure she’s not too thrilled. Budgie worked hard to get where she is and have what she has despite a no-good husband and years of working in someone else’s kitchen.”

“If I were Dixie Lee, I wouldn’t sashay into the café and order so much as a biscuit. Budgie might just drag it across the floor before she serves it to her.”

I nodded agreement and then asked, “So what did she have to say about you?”

“Only that I’m a serial bride whose last husband was murdered and found stuffed in my closet. Then she hinted that his affair with a ‘beautiful blonde high school cheerleader’ caused his murder. In other words, that I killed him. I’m ready to strangle Dixie Lee. I wonder if she still has a peanut allergy.”

I had to say, “Well, Philip
was
murdered and stuffed in your closet. She got that part right even if she got everything else wrong. And yes, I’m sure she still has a peanut allergy. I assume you’re going to send her a box of GooGoo Clusters?”

“No, that’s too obvious. I’m thinking a nice tin of popcorn popped in peanut oil.”

“Ah, suitably devious. All joking aside, once I—”

“What makes you think I’m joking?”

“Because you would hate prison. No hairdressers or manicurists, and Chitling would have to stay with me.”

When Chitling heard her name she pricked up her ears and gave me a baleful look. Her little black mask hides a dragon cleverly disguised as a pug. She’s what’s called a fawn color, meaning a light shade of brown, and her muzzle is black. She has three fangs left in front but does very well in intimidation and payback. Brownish-black eyes that look too big for her head followed my every movement as I gestured with my wine glass.

“They wouldn’t let you decorate your cell, either. And your Egyptian cotton sheets would have to stay behind. Besides, you’d miss all your Garden Club meetings, Daughters of the Confederacy meetings, and Diva meetings. We’d have to toast you in absentia.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t mind.” Bitty narrowed her blue eyes at me, and I smiled.

“Of course, I wouldn’t mind,” I replied dutifully. “I’d have free access to your wine cellar, right?”

“I’m not going to prison, Trinket. Even if I did do something awful to Dixie Lee—and I’m still thinking about it—Jackson Lee would get me off with probation or some community service.”

Jackson Lee Brunetti—no kin to any of the Forsythes—is a well-known lawyer in Marshall County. His family is a respected firm of excellent attorneys. He’s also madly in love with my cousin and she with him. Both are too cautious to do more than moon around after each other and exchange syrupy sweet baby talk in front of people, but I suspect a little more goes on behind closed doors. It’s not a topic I care to dwell on too long.

“So what are we going to do about this?” Bitty wanted to know, and I shook my head.

“Nothing. What can we do without people thinking there’s a possibility that we
are
gym teachers and black widows? It’s hard to prove a negative.”

I thought Bitty was going to have a fit right there. Her face turned red, her blue eyes turned red, and I could swear puffs of steam came out her ears. Chitling looked up at her and immediately got down from her lap and off the chair and trotted out of the parlor. That dog has great survival skills.

“I’ll think of something,” said Bitty after a moment, and cold fear grabbed me by the throat.

“Think of your children,” I pleaded. “Don’t do anything rash, Bitty. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Of course I won’t do anything stupid. That doesn’t mean I won’t do anything, however. Dixie Lee must be punished.”

“Oh lord . . .”

EVEN MY MOTHER was talking about that book when I got home. She’d read the part about me and Emerald, and she didn’t like it. She especially didn’t like the part about her and Daddy taking in hundreds of homeless cats just like the disturbed people who hoard animals.

Mama’s eyes flashed fire when she said, “We aren’t anything like those people on TV who have a hundred cats in each room and poop in piles high as the roof. We’re responsible. We spay and neuter. We vaccinate and vet them, and we provide good food and fresh water every day.”

I knew this was true because I was often responsible for feeding, watering, and treating the legion of cats that live in their barn. The barn has been remodeled and outfitted with ample cat corners and cat cushions. Cats roam in and out at will. I would like to report that the Marshall County rat and mouse population has been decimated, but alas, I cannot. Cats fat on expensive dry food and tins of cat tuna don’t see much need to rid the woods of vermin. An occasional offering will be left as a gift, but I’m usually the one who steps on it or in it and spends a good part of my day retching. These offerings are always left on the deck or doorsteps. Mama says I’m too sensitive.

“Look at it this way,” I said to her, “now people will know they can drop their unwanted litters of kittens on our doorstep. You’re providing a service.”

That did not amuse or comfort my mother. She cuddled her dog closer to her and said, “Dixie Lee should know better than to write things like that. And bringing up all that mess about things that happened over forty years ago—what was she thinking?”

“What mess? I haven’t read the book. When did publishers start releasing books at the same time as it’s being made into a movie anyway? It takes all the anticipation out of things.”

“Apparently Hollywood and New York are in league and recognize a blockbuster when they see one. Dixie Lee certainly has created a lot of gossip and dragged out old scandals.”

“What scandals? What mess? What am I missing?”

Mama cocked her head to one side and looked at me. “You’re probably too young to remember. It all happened in the sixties. Right at the height of the Civil Rights movement, too. If it’d been just a few years later maybe so much wouldn’t have been made of it, but Darcy Denton—she’s gone now—wasn’t about to let him get away with it.”

“Let who get away with what? And while I’m thrilled there are some things left I’m too young to recall, I remember the mid-sixties fairly well. What does Dixie Lee remember that I don’t?”