“Hmmm,” said Will, with a faraway speculative look in his eye.
“No,” Amy told him firmly and I added, “It would embarrass Dwight to death to have to arrest you for fraud, wouldn’t it, Dwight?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, reaching for Will’s beer mug. They’ve been friends since grade school and he has no illusions about my brother. “Top anybody else’s glass off?”
It wasn’t long before the children began to clamor for the marshmallows they’d been promised and Jane Ann hopped up to help supervise. The smell of burned sugar was soon rife in the land.
“Toast one for me,” Amy called. She’s Will’s third wife, with short dark hair and dark eyes that she claims come from some Latino blood somewhere in her ancestry. She has a bawdy sense of humor and a fuse as short as Will’s. They blow up at each other at least once a month and we used to hold our collective breaths, fearful that their marriage was going to blow up, too. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that Amy loves drama and Will must as well, because he seems intent on not messing up this time.
Jane Ann brought them both a marshmallow. Dwight, too. I passed. They don’t really go with bourbon. The men licked their fingers and Will said, “Reminds me of Daddy’s bonfires.”
I smiled as he and Dwight began to reminisce about roasting marshmallows when we were kids.
Daddy never burned his brushpiles in daylight. He always waited until dark, and a moonless night was his favorite time. He would poke the fire and send geysers of sparks shooting up fifteen or twenty feet into the night sky.
“A poor man’s fireworks,” he’d say.
And Mother would often walk down from the house with a bag of marshmallows for a perfect ending to the day.
Eventually Dwight decreed that the children had eaten enough sugar and shooed them away so he could replenish the bed of coals with more from a starter can.
While Jane Ann and Amy cleared the porch table and reset it with china and tableware, I sent the kids to the showers to get rid of the stickiness that clung to their hands and mouths—Cal and Jake to his bathroom, Mary Pat to the master bath. Kate and I keep changes of clothing in both houses, so I laid out fresh pajamas for them and popped a DVD into the television in our bedroom.
“Mary Pat’s in charge of the remote and no bouncing on the bed,” I warned them as they settled back against the pillows to watch a movie they’d seen at least a dozen times.
It was full dark and the steaks were just coming off the grill when I got back out to the porch. Conversation had turned to Candace Bradshaw’s murder and the names of various prominent builders were being tossed around as suspects. Not her husband though. Dwight had told me that various neighbors had seen him from their windows throughout Tuesday afternoon.
“Her daughter says you’re her alibi,” Dwight said as he split his potato and added a large dollop of butter to the steaming interior.
“She does?” Will cut into one of the steaks on the platter to make sure it was rare enough before transferring it to his plate.
“She says you interviewed her for a job Tuesday evening. You remember the time?”
Will’s eyes narrowed as he visualized the scene. “Yeah. She was the only one who answered my ad. She got there at five on the dot and by five-thirty I had hired her. All I need is someone who can spell and use a computer for a few hours a week. Of course, she was only there for one morning and then Cam Bradshaw called her with the bad news. Guess I’ll have to find someone else now.”
Stevie paused in the middle of slathering A.1. sauce on his steak. “Dee really did get a job?”
“That surprises you?” I asked at the same time that Dwight said, “You know her?”
“Sure. We graduated from high school together. And yeah, I’m surprised that she got a job.”
“Why? She’s not in school any more,” said Dwight.
Jane Ann made a face. “She was just yanking her mother’s chain.”
“By getting a job?”
“She told us that nobody in her mom’s family had ever gone to college. In fact, Mrs. Bradshaw was the first to finish high school even if it was with a GED, so it was real important to her for Dee to graduate.” Jane Ann served herself some salad made with the greens Cletus had given me and passed the bowl along to Amy. “But Dee wanted a new car, and when Mrs. Bradshaw wouldn’t buy her one, she threatened to quit school and get a job so she could have some decent wheels.”
“She’s a spoiled slacker,” Stevie said flatly. “She’s never had to do a lick of work, she got a big allowance, and she had a car of her own that ran just fine. Remember last spring, when my car was in the shop? She gave me a ride home to pick it up and all she could do was bitch about how her mother gave a worthless, good-for-nothing cousin her practically new Toyota and then bought herself another new one while Dee had to keep driving the Audi she’d had in high school.”
“She thought her mother would come around with a new car to keep her in school. But Dee’ll go back. You’ll see,” Jane Ann said cynically. She shook her head at the offer of garlic bread. “In fact, she’ll probably stay on for two masters and a PhD so that she doesn’t have to punch a time clock for another five years.”
After supper, Stevie and Jane Ann had other plans for the evening. They offered to drop off a pair of sleepy children on the way. Cal’s eyelids were drooping, too, and he only offered a pro forma objection when Dwight scooped him up and carried him to his own bed. He was probably already asleep by the time Dwight came back to join us.
Amy poured coffee and I spooned warm peach cobbler into dessert dishes, then topped each with a dab of vanilla ice cream. Dwight and Will dug in as enthusiastically as if I had peeled the peaches myself and made the flaky crust from scratch.
Amy enjoyed hers, too, but couldn’t resist asking me what brand of piecrust I bought.
“Sh-hhh,” I told her. “Don’t spoil the illusion.”
Will grinned. “She just wants to know because this crust tastes better than what she buys.”
“Bastard,” Amy said amiably.
“If you can’t tell it from the real thing—” I hesitated one second too long.
“What?” said Dwight. He really does know me way too well at times.
“When you go in to appraise an estate, Will, do you ever do jewelry?”
He took another bite of cobbler and shook his head. “Not usually. Most people either want to keep it or else get a jeweler to do the appraisal. And more likely than not, they have an inflated sense of what it’s worth. Why?”
“Just wondering. What about costume jewelry?”
He laughed. “There it’s just the opposite. Most people think it’s worth less than it is because it’s fake. They see Bakelite and think ‘plastic.’ Well let me tell you something, honey. An authentic vintage Bakelite bracelet can fetch anything from two hundred to two thousand dollars depending on its condition and rarity.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Don’t believe me, go check out eBay.”
“What about rhinestones?”
“Again, it depends on the quality and whether the piece is signed by a collectible name.”
He looked at me speculatively over the rim of his coffee cup. “C’mon, Deb’rah. You’re not just wondering. You happen onto a nice find of old costume stuff?”
I shook my head.
The three of them were now too curious to let it drop.
“All right,” I said finally, “but you’ve got to promise not to say anything to the rest of the family about this. I’m probably making mountains out of what’s nothing more than an anthill and I want y’all’s word on it, okay?”