Monday night, 7:30 P.M.
DAISY SATTERTHWAITE LOOKED AS IF SHE’D SHRUNK SINCE LUNCH AT THE Colony Club. Perhaps it was the gargantuan living room where she greeted Rannie that dwarfed her size. Even a Sotheby’s showroom worth of furniture didn’t begin to fill the space—back-to-back sofas in gloomy green brocade, a grand piano in the corner, laden with silver-framed photos, and fussy upholstered chairs and tables arranged as if in cliques.
“You’re very kind to let me come over.” Rannie accepted a spindly legged chair Daisy pointed to but murmured “no thanks” to a tumbler of scotch. The room, with its damask-covered walls and heavy draperies tethered in strangleholds of tasseled swags, was all a bit too haute Miss Haversham, poorly lit, musty, pervaded by the smell of stale, cigarette-scented air.
“Kind? I crave company. It’s only me, rattling around in this mausoleum. The apartment upstairs went for seven million, can you believe it! But where would I go?” Daisy sat down and dug out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her silk dressing gown, the color of Pepto Bismol. She was still wearing jewelry.
“Beatriz! Beatriz, do you hear me? You may go home now,” she hollered to the rooms beyond, then turning back to Rannie added with an impatient sigh, “she’s fiddling with the TV, trying to tape something for me. She’ll just screw it up, I know it, and I won’t be able to watch a thing.”
Beatriz, Rannie surmised, was the elderly maid, with the same short coarse blond hair as Daisy. She’d shown Rannie into the apartment moments earlier, an apartment on Park Avenue a few blocks south of Mary’s.
Daisy picked up a heavy cut-glass lighter which she had to click a few times before the flame appeared and said, cigarette between her lips, “You know you’re the first person I’ve ever star-sixty-nine-ed. My grandson was here and showed me how.” Daisy seemed tickled as she puffed away. “I knew it was you calling me back…. star sixty-nine, imagine!…I thought my grandson was talking about some pornographic movie!” She paused to swirl her drink while Rannie stole a glance at a small blue-enameled carriage clock on the table between them. She had a little over an hour before Tim arrived. Not a lot of time for small talk.
“So, I gather you’re trying to piece together more of Laura’s sad story,” Daisy said slowly. “And I suppose after all this time, who is left to care if I blab?” With pauses to sip and smoke, Daisy confirmed for Rannie that Laura Scales had returned to Asheville, North Carolina, in 1960 about six months before the birth of her daughter.
“Knocked up at Laura’s age. Ridiculous, if you ask me. Oh, Laura claimed to be overjoyed. Please. Both Laura’s parents gone, her brothers and sisters scattered, no friends left in Asheville and living alone in the house she grew up in—and if you’re envisioning Tara, you’re wrong.”
“But you said she’d wanted children—this was her chance.”
“She wanted Larry. Truth to tell, she was a somewhat cold mother.”
“Did she stay in touch with him?”
“With Larry? Heavens, no. Laura was too bitter. I’m sure she expected Larry to go chasing down to Asheville and beg her to come back. When he didn’t, she erased him, like chalk from a blackboard, and invented a father for the child. Told her that Ted Scales—he was Laura’s second husband—was her father.”
“He was the husband from D.C.? The one in the State Department?”
Daisy answered with a nod. “Ted died smoking in bed, drunk as a skunk. He set himself on fire. Ghastly. It happened while Laura was pregnant. So the timing worked perfectly for her absurd story. The baby grew up with Scales for her last name.”
“Mr. Tut—Larry—did he know when the baby was born? Did he know it was a girl?”
“Oh, yes. He found out that much.”
“What did she name the baby?”
“Polly was what she was called. Short for Pauline? I’m not sure. I’ve wondered what became of her.”
All of a sudden a little soupçon of suspicion flitted across Rannie’s mind. Perhaps Daisy knew exactly what “Polly’s” given name was and exactly what had become of her.
“Laura refused to let Larry see the baby. Refused his offer of financial help, at least so she said.” Daisy waved absently at her housekeeper who was letting herself out of the apartment. “Good night, Beatriz. See you in the morning.”
Rannie recrossed her legs. The chair was impossibly uncomfortable. “From what Mary said, I wouldn’t have expected Laura needed any financial help.” Rich divorcée had been her mother-in-law’s exact words.
Daisy snorted and inhaled so deeply that almost an inch of her cigarette turned to ash. “Mims never gets her facts straight. You should know that by now. Laura got a settlement from Ted Scales after they divorced. That kept her in a cute little apartment near here, over on 63rd Street and Lex, and allowed her to lead a very comfortable life. But she’d just about run through all that money by the time she left New York. As for her family, well, Laura’s people were Southern genteel but not a pot to piss in.” An impossibly long stream of smoke blew out the side of Daisy’s mouth.
“How then Foxcroft? A horse of her own?”
“Darling, I didn’t say the family was on welfare. Laura spent every nickel she had. Loved clothes. Gave terrific parties. She and Larry traveled like gypsies every summer, places nobody went to. Japan. Australia. And then there was the club and the place she rented on Hilton Head. I told you. She liked to have fun. And fun always costs a bundle.”
Daisy tossed back her drink, allowing Rannie a moment to ponder this latest tidbit and the harsh light it cast on Augusta Hollins. Having a rich mother would have crossed out money as a motive for murder. But the twofold news that there’d been no inheritance from Laura Scales along with the sudden windfall from Tut’s recently changed will put Ms. Hollins in “most likely suspect” territory.
“Over the years, when he saw you, did Mr. Tut—Larry—ever ask about Laura? Or Polly?”
“No. Never. I was Laura’s best friend. He’d see me at the club occasionally, and we’d wave, smile. Nothing more.” Daisy sighed. “And I saw less and less of Laura too. It wasn’t just because she lived so far away. She didn’t want her past intruding, I suppose, and destroying this elaborate fabrication she’d created for her daughter. And of course I couldn’t help but remind her of painful times.” Daisy killed her cigarette in a matching cut-glass ashtray. “I’d hear from Laura now and then, Christmas cards, that sort of thing. Polly went off to boarding school and college—Wellesley, I think. I remember Laura writing to tell me her daughter had married and was living in Atlanta. That was the last I heard. Laura’s been dead now, oh, it must be ten years.”
Rannie nodded, piecing together more of the story’s missing fragments. So Augusta Hollins apparently went by her married name. She had begun teaching at Chaps at some point after her mother’s death. It seemed out of the question to consider coincidence as the cause for her winding up at the same New York private school where her father taught; Mr. Tut and Ms. Hollins couldn’t both have been unaware of their relationship. Either both of them knew, which was the nicest possibility—a late-in-life reunion between Mr. Tut and his daughter. Or else one of them already knew by then, but the other didn’t…. “Hello, this is Larry Tutwiler. I’m an old friend of your mother’s whom you’ve never met or heard of, but it suddenly occurred to me that you might be a teacher and might be interested in moving to Manhattan and joining the faculty at Chapel School.” No. If only one of them knew about their shared genes, it had to be Ms. Hollins, who must have discovered her mother’s cover-up and then tracked down her real father.
“So? What do you make of all this? Obviously you think it has bearing on Larry’s murder.” Daisy seemed to savor saying the word “murder,” as if it were a piece of Swiss chocolate melting slowly on her tongue. “Don’t tell me you think Polly suddenly appeared out of nowhere, deciding after all this time to seek revenge on the man who done her mama wrong?”
“No, I don’t think that. I honestly don’t know what I think.” Equally unsure of what Daisy might be keeping close to her vest, Rannie refrained from any mention of a newly minted heiress named Augusta Hollins. And when Daisy pursed her lips and eyed Rannie appraisingly in a way that made Rannie suddenly shift uneasily in the chair, she had the distinct impression Daisy already knew everything Rannie was withholding.
“Well, Laura’s daughter didn’t find out about her father from me. I met Polly exactly once, when she was thirteen. A large ungainly girl, tripping all over herself. She stayed holed up in her bedroom, reading the whole time. I learned of Laura’s death from the Foxcroft alumnae magazine.”
Rannie nodded, again not entirely convinced she believed Daisy. So where did that leave her? As Rannie was shown out of the apartment, it crossed her mind that Daisy might have invited her over expressly to find out what she, Rannie, knew. And what she’d told Daisy a moment before was the truth: She didn’t know what to make of anything. All she had were suspicions that didn’t have much more substance than the smoke curling from Daisy’s new cigarette.