17

Abby, do you see what I see?”

“It’s not a little drummer boy, is it?”

“That would be easier to believe. Tell me, do you think we made a mistake? That this is a hotel of some kind?”

I shook my head. “Her directions were clear.” I tapped a paper in my lap. “And it says right here that it’s a very large house.”

“Look at that garage, Abby. Six doors. Who, besides Jay Leno, owns six cars?”

We had, of course, brought cameras, and what better place to start? I’ve been to the White House before (only as a tourist!), and this house reminded me of it. It certainly wasn’t any smaller. Or any less white. I’ve often wondered what it is that the owners of these megamansions do to support their lifestyles. Well, today, by golly, I was going to find out.

Both Bob and I were somewhat taken back when a woman in tennis attire answered the door. Oh well, tennis pro, instead of a liveried butler; at least it was something.

“We’re here to evaluate a Persian carpet,” Bob said.

The woman smiled. “Are you sure you have the right house?”

“This is Runaway Slave Plantation, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that was the name of the plantation; of course now it’s just a house. But there are actually several built on the old plantation site. What’s the name of the family you want? Maybe I know them.”

Bob turned to me. “Abby, it’s all yours.”

I’d spent half an hour that morning over breakfast trying to get a handle on that one name. It had come in an e-mail from someone named Marianne, who’d warned me that her last name was French Huguenot and perhaps a bit tricky. What she meant was that there are a lot of these names in the Lowcountry, and they do present a challenge to newcomers, sometimes even to linguists. Over the centuries pronunciations can change so that a family name, or a place name, bears little resemblance to its origin across the Great Pond.

“Uh…” I stared at the slip of paper in my hand where the name was written: Beauxoiseux. If I remembered my high school French correctly, it was the combination of two words: beautiful and birds.

Her eyes twinkled. “If it’s the family I think you want, you pronounce just four letters in their name.”

“Are you sure?” I handed her the paper.

“Yes, that’s us. The thing is, nobody hereabouts could pronounce our name, and after a generation or two of hearing it mispronounced so much, we just kind of went along with the flow. Don’t ask me exactly when it happened, but by the time I was growing up folks were already pronouncing it ‘Bexis.’ That’s what our friends call us, so I know if someone calls on the phone and asks for anyone else, a red flag goes up.

“But hey, I knew who y’all were all along, and I was just flapping my gums to see what you’d do. Sorry about that. As you can imagine, it can get mighty lonely way out here. I can’t imagine how my ancestors survived in the days when they had to hitch a horse up to a buggy and drive that long way back into town.”

“Didn’t a slave do the hitching and the driving?” Bob said.

“Touché. At least until the mid-nineteenth century. My point is that the loneliness must have been so much more acute back then. Gracious me, where are my manners? Please, do come in.” She stepped aside and with vigorous arm motions shooed us up the steps like we were errant chickens in need of corralling.

At the great set of bronze doors, which soared about twenty feet, she stopped and put her thumb in front of a little glass plate. Instantly a smaller door, one I hadn’t even noticed set inside one of the large doors, swung wide open. It was reminiscent of Andrea’s front door, but way cooler.

“One can never be too safe—especially out here. And just so we’re clear on things, you’ve been under surveillance since the moment you turned onto our dirt road.”

“You’re kidding,” Bob said.

“Holy Toledo,” she said.

“You could hear inside our car?”

Until then she’d seemed like an affable native, one who liked to tease newer arrivals, but in a good-natured sort of way. Now she would have come across as downright ominous, if not for the fact that she also thought she’d gone a mite too far.

“I shouldn’t have said that. But really, y’all, it’s nothing the government hasn’t been doing ever since…” She pressed a hand over her mouth and with the other beckoned us to enter first.

I was torn: on one hand, I wanted to dash into the megamansion, camera flashing; and on the other, I wanted Bob to wrestle her to the ground and force her, if necessary, to finish her sentence about the government eavesdropping on its private citizens. And not just through our phone system either. I swear that two or three weeks ago, or thereabouts, when I was sitting on the john, I heard the faint voice of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bob did come to my aid by giving me a gentle push. The next thing I knew I found myself in a foyer with a ceiling that must have soared straight up for thirty feet or more. Bob later said that looking straight up that high put a crick in his neck that hung around for several days.

“Well, well, would you look at that,” he and I said simultaneously.

Marianne snorted, apparently in agreement. “That means you don’t approve.”

“I didn’t say that,” I said.

“You’ve been well-brought-up, Mrs. Washburn, so you didn’t have to come right out and say it; I read between the lines. As it happens, I share your sentiments. Think what a creative person, such as you, could do with all this wasted space. Unfortunately, this is my brother’s house. They removed his tonsils when he was five, and along with them they removed his imagination.”

“I didn’t realize we shared the same brother,” Bob said.

Marianne’s laugh was rather pleasant. “I knew I liked you two. You might be wondering what it is that I’m doing here. Well, Clayton and his family are in China for three years selling coffin nails to people who can’t afford them, and I offered to act as live-in caretaker. It’s not that I’m such a generous big sister; au contraire, I’m rather niggardly with my limited resources, and I can’t stand Clayton, his wife, or two out of their five children. Did I mention that I was dirt poor?”

“You did mention limited resources,” I said, feeling curiously elated by the revelation.

“Ah yes. As y’all may know—especially you, Mrs. Washburn, given that you have a Deep South accent—many fine, old Southern families are as poor as a mule skinner on a camel train. Our fortunes were lost during the Late Unpleasantness, and we”—she sighed dramatically—“never learned how to roll up our own sleeves to get them back. My brother, however, is a notable exception; he could sell solar heating in Hell, if you’ll pardon the vulgarity. At any rate, I live by my lonesome in the thirteen rooms of the northeast wing, but I’m fixing to move out in late August when Clayton returns from Asia. As big as this monstrosity is, it can’t contain the two of us.”

“Do the Chinese really buy that many coffin nails?” Bob asked. As I don’t want his question to be misinterpreted as a regional slur, I must point out that it is only folks from a particular neighborhood in Toledo who can be a little slow on the uptake from time to time.

“She means,” I said, “the business of selling cigarettes. And I’m guessing her brother is a high-ranking marketing exec, and not someone selling cartons on some street corner. But even then, he must be doing exceptionally well to get all this.”

“Oh, didn’t I mention that Clayton owns Smokes and Croaks? And that he already has forty factories over there? I heard somewhere that in thirty years a hundred Chinese a minute will die, thanks to my dear, sweet brother.”

“What a scumbag,” I said.

Bob didn’t comment. Instead he was glancing around at the enormous space, still in apparent disbelief. “Surely, living here can’t be all that bad,” he said.

Marianne put her hands on her hips; this was either an indication of extreme spunk or at least one Yankee ancestor. “Before my brother left for China he donated a million and a half to the pet project of a certain senator—he’s not from South Carolina, by the way—on the condition that he vote to make gay marriage unconstitutional, should he ever get the chance. There was another stipulation as well: this senator is to introduce a bill that will require all gays and lesbians to register nationally as sexual deviants, whose agenda it was to destroy the family. Of course the bill doesn’t stand a chance of passing, but it will stir up a lot of ugly discussion.

“Anyway, the Sunday after Clayton made this donation, his pastor’s wife confessed to the congregation that she’d been carrying on a five year affair with Clayton, and that at least two of her children were probably his. Clayton, who was already in Beijing by then with his family, denied the allegations, and of course Gloria, his wife, believed him. They always do—if the husband has enough money. But wait, the story doesn’t stop there, because after the wife confessed in front of the entire congregation that she’d been sleeping with Clayton, then her husband—the pastor—said he’d slept with Clayton too. Don’t you just love it?”

Bob was blushing. I knew him well enough to know that he was more embarrassed at being outed than angry at hypocrites like Clayton Beauxoiseux.

“Why did you look at me when you told us that story? Do you think I’m gay?”

“Give me a break, Mr. Steuben. You’re practically a walking stereotype.”

“I am not effeminate.”

“I quite agree; I never said you were. But you’re around forty, aren’t you?”

“So?”

“Sorry, but in Charleston that makes you too old to be a metrosexual. And you, sir, have clean fingernails, your eyebrows are trimmed, and there aren’t any bushes growing out of your ears.”

Bob appeared immensely relieved. “That’s it?”

“That, and the fact that I’ve been throwing pheromones your way by the billions, but you haven’t reciprocated with a single one of your own. This is quite all right, mind you. I don‘t have to sleep with every man who walks in the door—not that many do walk in way out here.” She turned to me and whispered behind the back of her hand, “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to call the cable repairman.”

I flashed her a reluctant smile. “If you don’t mind, could we please see the carpet now? We have quite a busy schedule.”

“Certainly.”

Then, much to my immense disappointment, instead of leading us into the main portion of the house, we exited through a side door of the foyer, walked down a long bare hallway, and stepped into an industrial-size elevator. Marianne pushed the third floor button.

“I only get to use the top floor of the northeast wing, but I get the entire floor. Does that make it a penthouse?” She laughed.

I looked around, simultaneously trying to take everything in and keep the green-eyed monster at bay. “Who did your decorating?”

“Sheila Cohen. Isn’t she fabulous?”

“Only the best. We are talking about the Sheila Cohen from London, right?”

“Right. Of course Clayton paid for it all. That’s another reason I have to get out of here; I feel like this is all blood money.” She ushered me into a large room that was being used for storage. When I say storage, don’t think a for minute of boxes, plastic bags, and cardboard wardrobes. Think herds of tables, chairs, and sofas, huddling together by style and wood type. Lining the perimeter of the room, like a stockade, were dozens of paintings, some of which I recognized from Christie’s catalogue. The furniture pile on the right side of the room did not extend as far as it did on the left, due to a mound of rugs approximately a yard high. As if that wasn’t enough opulence in one spot, over everything hung a twinkling sky made of crystal chandeliers.

“Holy Toledo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati,” I said.

“What about Charleston? After all, it is known as the Holy City.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Where did all this stuff come from?”

Marianne kicked at a painting that had the nerve to try and sneak an inch past the doorjamb. “Don’t let this stuff fool you. If you look closely you’ll see that the paintings are student copies made in Chinese art schools, and the furniture is Indonesian. They’re intended for the home decorating trade. Gloria, my sister-in-law, is shipping it back because she wants to open a decorating studio when they return to stay.” She picked up the errant painting; it depicted two leopards, one lying on its back. “You see, it doesn’t even have a signature.” She put it down again, exactly where she’d found it.

Duh. I’d seen copies of paintings just like it dozens of times before. The same thing was true for most of the other artwork. As for the furniture, it was indeed Indonesian. While there are master craftsmen on that island nation capable of producing outstanding pieces, what was assembled in this room was, by and large, a clear waste of rain forest. It was also very marketable to people who desired a lot of visual bang for their bucks, although the odds were that in twenty years most of the things in that room would end up on the secondhand market.

“Why it is that Gloria couldn’t use one of her own bazillion rooms to store this junk in is beyond me,” Marianne said, and gave the leopard painting a second kick for good measure. Fortunately, at least so far, she’d been kicking only the frame.

“Are the rugs all cheap knockoffs as well?” I asked.

Marianne grinned. “Nope, and that’s why we’re here. In her last, rather terse, communiqué, Gloria said she was shipping some rugs she’d picked up in Shanghai. She said she’d bought them from a shop off a back street near the Bundt, and some of them were undoubtedly junk but there were bound to be a few good pieces in there. At any rate, I’m supposed to have my pick. You see, everytime a load of this crap shows up in port, I’m the one who has to see it through customs. This carpet is supposed to be my payment—ha ha.”

Bob and I exchanged worried glances; we were standing next to a veritable mountain of carpets and already running a half hour behind schedule. Even just flipping through the entire pile would take another thirty minutes, and it was hardly the kind of service we’d advertised in the paper.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Marianne said, “which is why I’m prepared to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”