“God, Harry, I hope we’re past that in Bedford County.”
“They’re racist in Boston.” Susan, anger in her voice, started back toward the house. “But the South takes the rap for it; we’re the scapegoat. Do you know they still had slaves in Delaware after the war’s end?”
“Lose a war and all sins are heaped on your head. That’s just the way it is.” Harry accepted that.
“Makes you wonder if we’ll ever know the truth about Japan or Germany, doesn’t it?” Robert shrewdly remarked. “Not that both countries weren’t guilty of creating hell on earth, but it does become difficult to accept official histories when every American is a hero and saint, every German a bloodthirsty Nazi, every Japanese screaming, ”Banzai,“ or whatever they are reputed to have screamed. I become dispirited.”
“Don’t.” Harry suddenly smiled. “We’re still swallowing lies from the War of the Roses, and that was in the fifteenth century. Never ends. I just nod, smile, and go on my way. But I do try to read original sources and not interpretations when I have time. Character is fate. Character creates history. That’s why I believe, believe like a fanatic, that Tazio did not kill Car la Paulson. It makes no sense in terms of character.”
Back in the house, the three musketeers located the tittering. It came from behind a wall in the large room behind the south portico.
“I know you’re in there.” Pewter slashed her tail back and forth.
“We know you’re out there,” a deep voice responded.
“Big.” Tucker’s ears moved as far forward as they could go.
“Show yourself,” Mrs. Murphy requested. “We’ve seen the work of your ancestors. I suppose you are all ¥RV, First Rats of Virginia.”
“Of course we are, you silly twits.” Another voice answered, this one slightly higher.
“Did you see anyone in here the night of the murder?” Mrs. Murphy got right to the point.
“Three hundred people,” the deep voice replied, and then a sleek nose and clean whiskers appeared just underneath the window west of the door out to the south portico.
Pewter began to wiggle her hind end, but Mrs. Murphy commanded, “Don’t.”
“You can try, fatso,” the male rat taunted. “I’ll duck back in here so fast…”
“Sooner or later the humans will find this opening.” Tucker peered at the spot.
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll close it up, we’ll chew a new one. We know this place better than they do,” he sassed.
“What if they put out rat poison?” Pewter sounded tough.
“What? Kill Mr. Jefferson’s rats? Heaven forbid,” he joked.
“Was anyone in here? .Anyone besides the staff person?” Mrs. Murphy kept to business.
“Melvin spent most of the night with his face pressed to the window—until the murder, that is.” The female voice chimed in, and now she stuck her head out.
“Did you see anyone else?” Tucker sounded pleasant.
“No, someone was here, though, because when we went downstairs—we have passages everywhere, you know, we don’t have to show ourselves—well, anyway, I found a cigarette. Fresh. Hadn’t been smoked.” The female rat was jubilant.
“My wife likes to chew tobacco, and it gets harder to find these days.”
“Randolph, they don’t have to know that,” she chided him, then by way of explanation said, “Soothes my nerves. You try living with him.”
“You didn’t see the person. It could be Melvin’s cigarette.” Tucker made conversation.
“Oh, no, no one is allowed to smoke in here. Even the workmen have to stop and go outside for a smoke or a chew. Then again, not as many people smoke as they did in Grandmas day.” The lady rat, Sarah, sounded sorrowful about that. “Even Melvin, who smokes, doesn’t cheat and smoke in the house when he’s here alone.”
“You say you found it downstairs?” Mrs. Murphy asked again.
“Not a puff.” She beamed.
“Well, maybe whoever ducked inside knew there was no smoking,” Tucker posited.
“Maybe.” Pewter’s brain started turning over, but she was behind Murphy. “Then again, maybe they needed to move on and put it aside.”
“Where’d you find it?” Tucker inquired.
“On the floor. It might have been on the table and rolled off. Right by the corner it was, very convenient to snatch up.” She came out the whole way now, and she was quite sleek, gray and fat. “You know, Randolph and I and our ancestors have even more treasures than what they’ve found in the bedroom wall. They’ll never find ours, though. We learned when they started removing walls.”
Mrs. Murphy, surprised at how big the rats were, remembered the conversation Cooper had had in Harry’s kitchen. “Ma’am, do you remember what brand it is?”
“Virginia Slims.”
Little Mim drove down the long, twisting drive of Rose Hill. She liked picking up the mail, delivered in the afternoon, and sorting it. Aunt Tally, awash in magazines, would read them quickly and pass them on to Little Mim and Blair. They need never fill out a subscription form again.
She lifted the rubber-band-bound bundle and tossed it in the car. Then she pulled out that day’s magazine haul, which totaled six, not including one from the National Rifle Association. Although the magazine was improving, it was so thin she thought of it as a colorful pamphlet.
She drove to the main house, put Aunt Tally’s magazines on the table in the front main hall, then started sorting the mail.
A blue airmail envelope with her name on it caught her eye. She slit it open with her fingernail and read. Her face turned white, her hands shook, and she stuffed the letter in her pocket.
21
Along the southeastern side of her house, Big Mim had planted hundreds of hydrangeas of all manner in the gardens. Even though they had been long out of fashion, Big Mim loved them, so she planted them. Now that hydrangeas had come back in a big way, people cooed over the massive white, blue, pink, and purple heads.
One of the secrets to her success was that fifteen years ago she’d supervised the digging of narrow trenches, a foot and three-quarters deep. She had placed leaky pipe—piping with tiny holes—there.
Although despite her best efforts it took years for the lawn and the garden to recover from this scarring, the leaky pipe proved a godsend in the long run. Watering was no longer a chore.
She’d dutifully go out and give everything a little spray so the leaves could drink, too, but the leaky pipe was the key.
Standing in the afternoon sun as it washed over her gardens this Monday, she heard a car coming down the drive.
Pressman, her young springer spaniel, heard it first and bounded to the front to greet Little Mim.
Absentmindedly, Little Mim bent down to pet the exuberant dog, who was a beauty.
Little Mim figured her mother, a creature of order, would be in the gardens, since she usually did her weeding, planting, and thinking then. She walked around to the back of the house.
“Aren’t they stupendous?” Big Mim swept her arm toward the hydrangeas.
“They are.” Little Mim watched a black swallowtail flutter to the massing of butterfly bushes. “Mother, I have to talk to you.”
Noting her daughter’s grim visage, Big Mim removed her floppy straw hat and said, “Would you like to sit on the bench under the weeping willow? It’s so refreshing out this afternoon.”
“Yes, fine.” Little Mim, glad to be in comfortable espadrilles, took long strides toward the long bench, a copy of an eighteenth-century English one.
“Fight with Blair?”
“No, no, he’s an angel.” She reached into her skirt pocket, pulling out the blue envelope. “I received this in the mail.”
Big Mim used her clear-coated fingernail to tease out the thin paper, same blue as the envelope. She read the two lines:
Put $100,000 in the
Love of Life Fund by this Friday.
If you don’t, I’ll talk.
Jonathan Bechtal
She dropped her hand, the letter still in her fingers, to her lap. “Have you paid him before?”