The Ming and I (4 page)

I
t had been a long, hard day. I had managed to strain all my important relationships and lose a good customer, and now my only son was eschewing college in order to overhaul Hoovers. I would have to resort to drastic measures if I was to avoid a plunge into a virtual slough of despondency.

I locked up early, treated myself to a supper of chicken cordon bleu, took a relaxing soak in a gardenia-scented bubble bath, and settled down to watch a taped episode of my favorite sitcom, “The Nanny,” with Dmitri purring contentedly in my lap. Life, if not redeemed, was at least manageable.

Lord only knows why I answered the phone when it rang.

“Yes?” I said, somewhat tersely.

“This is your mama!” When it comes to terseness Mama can give tit for tat.

“Sorry, Mama,” I said quickly. “What is it?”

“You know our little agreement, Abby?”

“Mama, I haven’t yet agreed to go with you to Tiny Tim’s Tattoo Palace.”

“Nonsense, Abby, you all but promised. Anyway, I want you to know that I have already lived up to my half of the bargain.”

“Oh?”

“I found out what you wanted to know, dear.”

“Oh?”

“It turns out that Anne Holliday, who is a member of my bridge club, is also on the board of directors of the Upstate Preservation Foundation. She filled me in.”

“Oh?” Dmitri had stood up and was beating me around the face with his tail.

“Is that all you can say, Abby?”

I spit out a mouthful of fur. “What exactly did you find out?”

“Why, how to become a docent, of course. That’s what you asked.”

“And how do I become a docent, Mama?”

“By showing up at meeting room number one at the Rock Hill Library.”

“When?”

“Tonight at eight,” Mama said with just a hint of mirth in her voice.

I glanced at the clock above the TV. It was seven-thirty on the dot.

Under the best of conditions, it takes me forty minutes to get from my house to Mama’s down in Rock Hill. The library is five minutes farther. Usually when I drive that route I am fully dressed, not lounging about in flannel pajamas with wet hair and a face scrubbed as clean as one of my mama’s copper pots.

It took me half an hour just to get presentable, so I hope you understand why it is that I barreled down I-77 at more than ten miles over the speed limit, passing all the cars going my way except for that unmarked state trooper’s car just past the border in South Carolina.

“Where’s the fire?” Smoky asked.

I thought it would be clever to answer a cliché with a cliché. “My wife’s having a baby, officer. Would you escort me to the hospital?”

Officer Belinda Daniels was not amused.

“My boyfriend is Investigator Greg Washburn,” I
said desperately. “He’s with the Charlotte Police Department, Division of Homicide.”

Officer Daniels was even less amused. She vehemently assured me that she was not in cahoots with the CPD or any other police department. When she had made that perfectly clear, she laboriously wrote out the longest traffic citation I had ever seen (not that I’ve seen that many, mind you). Another lecture followed.

So it was that a thoroughly chastised Abigail Timberlake showed up at meeting room number one a full hour late. I may even have perspired a little. The door was tightly closed, and I knocked timidly.

“Come in,” a muffled voice said.

I opened the door slowly and stepped in as gracefully as I could. Believe me, I could not have been scrutinized more intensely had I been strolling down the runway at the Miss Universe pageant.

There were five people sitting at a round table in the room, four women and one man.

“Yes?” the man said. His eyes in particular were giving me the once-over. In the short time it took me to respond, I could feel him undress me, reject me, and dress me again.

“My name is Abigail Timberlake. I am a native of Rock Hill. My mother is Mozella Gaye Wiggins. I believe she spoke to one of you about the possibility of me becoming a docent.”

They looked at one another accusingly. Finally one of them, a little old lady who looked like the Queen Mum, waved perfunctorily.

“That might have been me,” she said in a high, girlish voice. Apparently the Queen Mum and Anne Holliday were one and the same.

The man, who was seated next to her, raised his eyebrows. “Well, it’s a moot point, isn’t it? That part of our meeting has been concluded.”

The Queen Mum turned to the neighbor on her
right. “Well, Madame Chairman,” she chirped, “it’s your call. I was only doing Mozella a favor.”

Her neighbor considered this, and I considered her neighbor. I knew the woman from somewhere. The newspaper, that was it. The
Herald
doesn’t have a society page per se, but society does have a knack for finding its way into print, sometimes even as far as the
Charlotte Observer
. This woman’s face had been reproduced in ink enough times to make it indelible. If only her name had stuck. Some kind of color perhaps.

But of course—Lilah Greene.
The
Lilah Greene. Miss Lilah, as she was known around Rock Hill. Quite possibly the oldest money in Rock Hill. Perfect manners, of course. Impeccable taste. Exquisitely groomed. Even as a child she must have stayed out of the sun; after threescore years the milk white skin was still seamless. Her silver hair was pulled back into a flawless chignon. Her lavender-blue silk suit complemented her eyes. The pearls in her choker were at least nine millimeters across, and were an exact match for the simple studs that graced her ears. Lilah Greene is the kind of woman who would make a social climber want to puke (not that I am one), except for the fact that she is exceedingly nice. A true lady in every sense of the word.

“Frankly none of the other candidates seemed quite suited,” Miss Lilah said, musing aloud. “What do you think, Shirley?”

Dr. Shirley Hall, PhD, as I later found out, had recently retired from Winthrop University as a full professor of history. Supposedly she had a national reputation as an expert on the Civil War. She looked, however, more like my idea of a retired chef—sort of a cross between the Campbell’s soup twins and the Pillsbury doughboy. Put a tall white hat atop her curly gray hair and tie a crisp white apron around her ample middle, and she would be all set to whip
up a late supper for us. Her eyes, which were mere slits, managed to sparkle above her dumpling cheeks.

“Well, she is a native, after all,” Shirley said in an accent that was anything but native. “She might lend sort of an authentic air.”

“But the costumes wouldn’t fit her,” said the fourth woman present. “She’s way too short. We’d have to have new ones made, and that simply is not in the budget.”

Miss Lilah smiled at the last speaker. She was far too well-bred to chide the woman for speaking out of turn.

“Well, Gloria, you certainly have a point. But we might could squeeze a little extra out of petty cash, if we tried really hard.” Please don’t misunderstand. “Might could” is perfectly proper speech construct in Rock Hill.

Gloria glared at me. I tried to stare placidly back. It was difficult. Gloria Roach, I was to learn, had perfected that glare in the courtrooms of York County, where she practiced as a defense attorney. Gloria’s glare aside, it was hard to look at the woman and not react somehow. She was heavily into bodybuilding and looked as much like Arnold Schwarzenegger as any woman I’d ever seen. Except for her face. Gloria Roach had an itty-bitty ferret face, replete with beady eyes and remarkably pointed teeth. Throw in the personality of a piranha, and she was a strange bird—to mangle a metaphor.

“What are your credentials besides being a native of Rock Hill and a friend of Miss Holliday?”

“Oh, she isn’t my friend,” the Queen Mum protested. “I merely play bridge with her mama.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, I am an antique dealer—I own Den of Antiquity up in Charlotte. I’m not an expert yet, but I am learning. And I assume there are antiques in the Roselawn collection. Per
haps I could help you catalog them. Maybe even appraise them.”

“There is nothing of substantial value at Roselawn,” Anne Holliday—alias Her Majesty—said quickly. “I really don’t think we need to have anything appraised.”

Miss Lilah gave her an inquiring look, and then turned to the lone man.

“Red?”

He gave me a smarmy look. “If you have a shop up in Charlotte, how do you expect to volunteer down here?”

I met his smarm with what I hoped was a penetrating gaze. I had figured out who the skinny little bastard was. Red was a nickname because of his carrot-colored hair and the blizzard of freckles that nearly obliterated his features. His real name was Angus Barnes. When not undressing potential docents with his grass green eyes, he was busy as a beaver building Rock Hill. Half the new subdivisions around town were supposedly Red Barnes’s developments. Mama’s friend Mattie has a daughter who moved into a Red Barnes home that, like her marriage, began to crumble immediately. Still, Red has made millions from his business.

“I thought I might help out in the evenings and on my days off,” I said coolly.

Red smirked. “We aren’t open in the evenings, and I doubt if you get that many days off in your business. What we’re really looking for is someone younger. Someone with more time on her hands.”

“Like a buxom college girl?” I asked pointedly. Red had a reputation of using and then discarding young women, which is a polite way of saying he didn’t use all his tools responsibly. Mattie’s daughter was one of his victims.

“The best tour guides are attractive,” he snapped.

“Zing,” Shirley Hall said, and wet an index finger
on her tongue and pretended to mark the air.

Miss Lilah gave us all her Stern Look, a slight puckering between the eyebrows and a firmly closed mouth.

The others may have recoiled in fear, but, as yet, I had nothing to lose. “He’s got a point about my time being limited, but I would like to contribute in some way. Even if there is nothing worth appraising in the mansion, you still need it cataloged, don’t you? Suppose there was a fire? And anyway, if I’m just there at night making an inventory, I won’t need a costume, will I?”

“But we have our own historian, dear,” the Queen Mum said, and bestowed a gracious, albeit brief, smile on Shirley Hall.

It was Miss Lilah’s turn to bestow a smile, and the unlucky recipient was Anne Holliday. The Queen Mum visibly shrank in her folding metal throne.

“Well, it’s all settled then, isn’t it?” Miss Lilah clasped her immaculate hands in a decisive gesture. “We can have the contents of Roselawn cataloged, and it won’t cost us a penny, thanks to Mrs. Timberlake’s generosity.” The lavender eyes fixed calmly on me. “When can you start?”

“Anytime.”

“I’ll give you a call, then,” she said, and I knew that I had been graciously dismissed.

I stopped at Mama’s on the way home. Through her front window I could see the flicker of her television screen, but she turned it off when I rang the doorbell. Mama denies that she watches much television, eschewing the tube for books and little literary magazines. That night, for instance, she had
Dreaming in Color
, a book of short stories by Ruth Moose, on the end table beside her favorite wing chair. The book was actually open.

Mama answered the door fully dressed. Changing
into her nightgown is the last thing she does before falling asleep. Unless she dies in her sleep, Mama will be found dead someday in a dress with a full circle skirt puffed out by crinolines, high heels, and of course her ubiquitous pearls (I honestly have no idea what, if anything, she wears in the shower).

“Did you go, dear?” she asked needlessly.

I nodded.

“And?”

“Miss Lilah has agreed to let me catalog the contents of the mansion.”

“But you won’t be a docent?” The disappointment in her voice was clear. No doubt “my daughter the docent” had a better ring to it than “my daughter the cataloger.”

“I don’t really have the time, Mama. Anyway, I’ll still be able to poke around a little, and I got to meet all the board members. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to meet some of the docents.”

“I could throw a party,” Mama offered graciously.

I chewed on that. Mama can throw a party that would make Martha Stewart turn the color of limes. The year I turned sixteen, the debutante reception was held at our house. Mama outdid herself and made more enemies than Fidel Castro. Nobody likes a perfect hostess, and the reception that year created a mountain impossible for future hostesses to scale. Socially we would have been better off taking the group out to supper at Burger King. Maybe it was time Rock Hill got stood on its ear again.

“How many kinds of hors d’oeuvres?”

“A dozen,” Mama said without a second’s hesitation.

“Warm or cold?”

Mama rolled her eyes. “Warm, of course. There will be two dozen cold finger foods.”

“Well, I’ll certainly think about it, Mama. Thanks for the offer.”

“The baked ham and roast beef for sandwiches don’t count toward either.”

“Thanks, Mama, but I said I’ll think about it.” I started for the door.

“You didn’t tell me who all was there,” Mama said accusingly. “Besides Anne Holliday, of course.”

“Well, Lilah.”

“Yes,” Mama whispered reverently. “Lilah is the crème de la crème of Rock Hill. No, make that York County. The Upstate Preservation Foundation was her idea. Most of the worthy projects in the county are.”

I told her the rest of the names, and she had something pointed or revealing to say about each person. Being Mama, all her comments are true—you could bet the cotton gin on that—but they weren’t necessarily flattering.

“Gloria Roach beat her ex-husband to a pulp last year. Abby, did you know that?”

I hadn’t, but unless Gloria’s husband was Arnold Schwarzenegger, it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did he press charges? Was she indicted?”

“No, ma’am. Ed Roach mows grass and cuts down trees—when he’s working. Gloria is his meal ticket.” It was only a slight exaggeration. Roach Tree & Service was not a one-man operation. Its ad in the yellow pages took up a quarter page.