It was a full house. If Lottie Bell had been a bit of a local celebrity in life, she was a full-blown star in death. There is nothing like a murdered society maven to pack them in. As it turned out, I was only a few minutes late, but still, there wasn’t enough room for a sardine in slid oil to slide in anywhere. The ushers, apparently all contemporaries of the deceased, kept shaking their heads and muttering admonitions against tardiness. A few, however, were probably not shaking their heads at me, but had merely nodded off to sleep. It was downright hot in that church with the heat turned on and such a big crowd.
Finally, after many failed attempts to breach the pews, I had to take a seat in the least desirable section of any church—the front row. Fortunately I had chosen the left side of the church, the side opposite the mourners. Next to the side aisle sat a nattily dressed couple, with at least six inches of space between them.
“Excuse me,” I whispered, “would y’all mind scooting together just a touch so I can sit down? I’m a very dear friend of the deceased.”
“Mrs. Timberlake?”
I stared at the woman. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her.
“Have we met?” I asked calmly. I have been thrown out of a few weddings in my time, but I had yet to be ejected from a funeral.
“Of course, silly. I’m First Mate Keffert, and this is the captain.”
I stared harder. She was right about who she was. However—and this is what threw me off—she was now wearing an elegant navy wool suit, with a matching wide-brimmed hat, trimmed with a wide black ribbon and large black bow. The captain, who was a tall, broad-shouldered man, was wearing an expensively cut charcoal-gray suit, a white dress shirt, and a plain black silk tie. There was nothing maritime about them at all.
“It’s me,” I confessed. “Do you mind if I join you?”
She whispered something quickly to her husband and turned back to me with a smile. “Be our guest. We’ve never been to a Catholic funeral, you know, and were not quite sure what to do.”
That was the understatement of the year. As an Episcopalian I can bluff my way through a Catholic service, but not so the Kefferts, who, they informed me, were lapsed Presbyterians. They sat, stood, and knelt at all the wrong places, which really isn’t such a big deal unless you are a large man like the captain and sitting in the front row, in front of a bunch of other non-Catholics.
I tried whispering succinct instructions, but they either didn’t hear, or blissfully ignored them. Frankly I think the captain enjoyed causing bedlam behind him. Eventually he was bobbing up and down like a felt puppy in a car rear window. By the sound of things behind us, there wasn’t a Catholic in the bunch.
“You’re supposed to sit now,” I hissed at one point.
The captain stood up, along with half the congregation. The first mate was more obedient.
“What is he trying to prove?” I asked.
She shrugged. “That’s just the captain for you. Say, you still willing to introduce us to the family afterward?”
“If you don’t get thrown out first, dear. Now is when we stand.”
We stood, while the captain and his bunch sat. It was then that I saw Greg, on the other side of the church, talking to Dr. Bowman. After a few seconds the doctor clearly became quite agitated, and when Greg left, he followed him out.
“What was that all about do you think?” the first mate asked. She is one of those people who can’t quite manage a true whisper.
“I don’t know, but that was your husband’s second cousin, Dr. Robert Bowman.”
“He’s cute.”
“Not him. The cute one was Investigator Washburn.”
“Oh?” She said something to her husband, who turned to look at the two departing men. A sea of heads followed in his wake.
Before I sat back down I glanced over at the bereaved family. Greg was conferring with Hattie Ballard, who was shooting daggers my way. Surely she didn’t think I had put the man up to such rude behavior. Hattie left with Greg, but returned a few minutes later. Her face was porcelain-white. As for her brother, the sleazy Dr. Bowman, he never did return to his seat.
It was toward the end of the Mass, as the last of the handful of practicing Catholics there were straggling up for Holy Communion, that I felt someone lightly touch my left shoulder. I looked up to see Greg, his blue eyes very serious. He nodded almost imperceptibly, but I knew exactly what he wanted. I slipped out of the pew and tiptoed up the aisle behind him, to the back of the church. Unseen, we ducked past a sleeping usher and into the narthex.
“What is it, Greg?”
He sighed. “This could have waited, I guess, but I wanted you to hear it from me, not”—he gestured toward the sanctuary—“from the crowd.”
“Mama?” I asked. “The kids?”
He smiled tiredly. “No, this doesn’t have anything to do with you directly. It has to do with Mrs. Lottie Bell Barras Bowman.”
That damn goose walked over my grave for the second time that day. “She is dead, isn’t she? I mean, if she isn’t, then who is in that coffin?”
His smile broadened. “You have almost as much imagination as your friend C. J. Mrs. Barras is undoubtedly in that coffin, although I haven’t personally checked. It’s her house I’m talking about. It’s on fire.”
“What?”
“Hopefully it’s out now, but about twenty minutes ago the call came through. An anonymous tip.”
“So that’s what you were talking to Dr. Bowman and Hattie about.”
“Yeah, I hated to disturb them during the funeral, but the procession is scheduled to drive past her house. I didn’t want them to be surprised by fire trucks or whatever.”
“I get your point. You don’t think it was deliberate, do you? Like arson?”
“Who knows. We’ll have to wait and see what the fire chief says. Unofficially though, it seems a little odd to me that someone’s house would burn down the day they were buried. It’s not like she was there to leave a cigarette burning or knock over a lamp.”
I shook my head. “It could have old wiring that finally gave out during a power surge. That happened to Mama once. She was cooking dinner—” I stopped. “I do sound like C.J., don’t I?”
We both laughed.
“You want to ride with me to the cemetery?” he asked.
“Well, I, uh—”
“It’s snowing, and you don’t like driving in the snow.”
“It is?”
I rushed over and pushed open one of the heavy wooden doors. Clumps of wet snow, the size and shape of popcorn kernels, were falling heavily to the ground. Fortunately they melted as soon as they hit the sidewalk and street beyond. Even the grass seemed too warm to warrant more than scattered wisps of slush. Still, given the general hysteria that any frozen precipitation arouses in us Carolinians, I preferred not to be behind the wheel. Not that close to rush hour.
“Okay,” I said, just as the inner doors opened and the casket containing Lottie Bell Barras Bowman came bearing down on me.
Either Lottie Bell’s friends were all fair-weather friends, or they were incapable of following in a procession. By the time we got to the cemetery, there were only a handful of cars trailing the hearse. At the grave side I counted only eleven people I didn’t know. To be fair, I will have to mention that the popcorn had changed to pea-size pellets and was coming down at a fast rate, fast enough to start sticking on the grass. In Charlotte that is genuine panic time. No doubt the grocery stores would be filled with people stripping the shelves bare of bread and milk. Tomorrow when the snow had melted and it was sixty degrees, thrifty housewives would be busy baking bread pudding. Every five years or so we do get a genuine snowstorm, but seldom does it last long enough for the average household to run out of perishable staples. Still, a tradition is a tradition.
Much to my surprise, Captain and First Mate Keffert were there, and they latched on to me like magnets to a steel plate. We stood apart from the family, outside the small tent that sheltered the grave site and a small knot of people. It didn’t matter much, since the wind drove the snow under the tent roof. We were all cold, stamping our feet and wiping our noses futilely on soggy shreds of tissue.
“You call this snow?” The first mate was wearing a topcoat, but she wore it unbuttoned. “Back in Connecticut this would barely count as a flurry.”
I smiled tolerantly. “I’m glad I don’t have to put up with Connecticut winters then.”
“Well, they’re not that bad,” she said defensively. She sounded homesick. “Connecticut is not like Maine or New Hampshire. So are you going to introduce us to the handsome young man you’re with?”
I introduced them to Greg, who charmed them—at least her—with his good looks and his good manners. I had filled him in on my visit to Belmont during our drive to the cemetery. He had been both very surprised and very interested to know that they were Barras kin.
“How long have you been in the area,” he asked, “and what brought you here?” He made it sound very casual.
“Two years,” the captain said. “I retired from the yacht-building business about four years ago. My wife and I looked around the entire country and decided that Charlotte was hands down the best place to retire.”
“Not Hilton Head, or someplace on the coast?” Greg asked.
“Naw, too many tourists. We wanted a place where we could belong, feel like we were part of a permanent community. Besides, we’ve got Lake Wylie.”
I suddenly felt sorry for the pair of them. Living in a monstrous stucco boat was not going to speed up the process. I wondered if they had made any friends yet. According to C.J. they had at least joined a church.
“So you’ve never met your relatives,” Greg said just as casually.
The captain flushed. “Well, there’s no time like the present, is there?” he said heartily.
Personally I would rather not meet a long-lost cousin at Mama’s funeral, but then again I expect to be devastated when she dies. The Barras bunch, on the other hand, seemed to be taking their grief in stride. Dr. Bowman had rejoined the mourners, and I had observed him conferring briefly with each of them. To a soul, they looked sullen, rather than sad.
Courtesy dictated that we postpone the family reunion until after the interment, perhaps sneak it in as part of our condolences offered on our way from the grave site. Unfortunately the weather decided to be rude. A sudden gust of wind, and the tent sheltering the grave collapsed. I could see it happening as if it were in slow motion. The gust caught the back flaps first, straining to uproot the aluminum poles, which it did. Then the entire tent bulged like a hot air balloon before collapsing, the poles splayed out like the legs of a fallen colt. Everyone managed to get from underneath the tent before it came down, except for Lottie Bell, of course.
“Oh my God,” I heard Toxie rasp, “it’s a goddam omen!”
“Shut up,” someone said. I think it was Garland.
When the tent collapsed Hattie had scrambled in our direction, and she seemed to notice us now for the first time. She strode up to our little group.
“You,” she said wagging a gloved finger at me, “what are you doing here?”
“I came to pay my respects to your mother,” I said. “I owe her a lot.”
I rubbed my thumb appreciatively against the Kashmiri sapphire. It wouldn’t fit in my glove, so I kept my hand in my pocket.
“And just what it is you owe Mama?”
“Well—”
“You have my sympathy, ma’am,” Greg said, gallantly stepping forward.
“Yes, you have my deepest sympathy,” I said. It sounded dumb repeating Greg’s words, but I never know what to say at funerals, even under the best of circumstances.
“I don’t need your sympathy,” she snapped. The clipped tip of her nose was bright red, but whether from the cold or emotion, it was hard to tell.
I smiled, and my teeth got stung with sleet pellets. “This is Cap—I mean, Mr. and Mrs. Keffert. They’re distant cousins of yours, actually. All the way from Connecticut.”
Hattie put her hands on her hips. “So, the roaches are coming out of the woodwork already.”
I was stunned. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. Well, I have news for all of you. Mama’s will mentions only Robert and me. Fifty-fifty. As for you, Mrs. Timberlake, there isn’t going to be an estate sale—”
She burst into tears and turned away. The four of us stood there, speechless, like mute penguins—two with their coats buttoned, two not. The snow stung our eyes and whipped our hair. We would all have been better off fleeing with Lottie Bell’s other fair-weather friends.
“What did she say to you?”
I turned, startled.
Amy Barras was dressed in a fur coat and hat—beaver, I think. Real animal skins, nothing spun out of petroleum-derived threads. The coat came down below the tops of her hand-crafted leather boots. Clearly her business was doing very well. She certainly didn’t need my patronage.
“Hey Amy. I’m sorry about your aunt,” I said.
The other three chorused similar greetings.
“Yeah, thanks. You know how I felt about her, of course. Still, one needs to do the right thing in public, doesn’t one?”
“I guess one does,” I said.
I introduced her to the Kefferts. She seemed neither surprised nor offended by their presence. She shook their hands with her buttery soft lambskin gloves, delved into her buttery soft purse, and extracted a little gold case containing her business cards. The gloves were so flexible, she was able to open the tiny hasp and extract a card without removing her gloves. She handed one to them.
“My shop is down in Rock Hill,” she said. “We do entire living spaces, inside and out. No construction work, but we do have a landscaper in our employ.”
“Their house is already shipshape,” I said wickedly.
“Our house is shaped like a boat,” the first mate said.
“A schooner,” the captain corrected her.
Amy was ready for anything. “We got in some lovely drapery material with a nautical theme. It’s a little on the informal side of course, but it would be perfect for a child’s room.”
“We don’t have any children,” the captain said.
“Or grandchildren, of course” the first mate added. “We’re just two officers without a crew.”
The buttery purse yielded a silk pouch containing tissues and Amy delicately dabbed at her remodeled nose. It may have been sentiment that necessitated the act, or just the cold. I was dying to be back home, soaking in a hot bubble bath, with Dmitri balanced on the rim of the tub, batting gingerly at the bubbles.
“Well,” I said, giving Greg’s arm a quick squeeze, “I really have to be going. Can you give me a ride back to the church?”
“We can do that,” the first mate said. “We have to drive right by there anyway.”
“So do I,” Greg said. Bless him.
“You sure? It’s on our way.”
“Positive,” Greg said.
The Kefferts said good-bye. At some point they had buttoned their coats, but not before they had begun to turn into Popsicles. The poor captain’s lips had turned blue, and he was shaking like a three-legged washing machine on the spin cycle. Perhaps their Yankee blood had started to thin.
“We’ll stay in touch,” the first mate said. Even though her teeth were chattering, it sounded like an order.
Amy didn’t budge. “You want to check on Lottie Bell’s house, don’t you?” she asked Greg.
“Ma’am—”
“The fire,” she said. “Don’t play dumb with me, Investigator Washburn.”
“Ma’am?”
“I know what’s going on. I saw you take Robert and Hattie aside, and I saw the fire trucks in front of her house. You want to see what’s left of her house, don’t you? You want to see if Lottie Bell’s little secret gets buried with her, so to speak.”
My frozen ears stood at attention. So did Greg’s.
“What secret is that?” he asked.
“I told you not to play dumb with me. It’s too damn cold and I don’t have the time.”
“But I’m not playing dumb, Mrs. Barras.”
She sniffed. “Then you’re not exactly Columbo, are you?”
“No ma’am, I’m not.” Greg had managed to sound enough like Columbo for me to pick up on it, but apparently Amy had not.
She sniffed again. “Columbo would know that it’s not the damn furniture everyone is after, or Lottie Bell, or her house—but a secret that goes with the furniture.”