The Ming and I Read online

  But of course—Lilah Greene. The Lilah Greene. Miss Lilah, as she was known around Rock Hill. Quite possibly the oldest money in Rock Hill. Perfect manners, of course. Impeccable taste. Exquisitely groomed. Even as a child she must have stayed out of the sun; after threescore years the milk white skin was still seamless. Her silver hair was pulled back into a flawless chignon. Her lavender-blue silk suit complemented her eyes. The pearls in her choker were at least nine millimeters across, and were an exact match for the simple studs that graced her ears. Lilah Greene is the kind of woman who would make a social climber want to puke (not that I am one), except for the fact that she is exceedingly nice. A true lady in every sense of the word.

  “Frankly none of the other candidates seemed quite suited,” Miss Lilah said, musing aloud. “What do you think, Shirley?”

  Dr. Shirley Hall, PhD, as I later found out, had recently retired from Winthrop University as a full professor of history. Supposedly she had a national reputation as an expert on the Civil War. She looked, however, more like my idea of a retired chef—sort of a cross between the Campbell’s soup twins and the Pillsbury doughboy. Put a tall white hat atop her curly gray hair and tie a crisp white apron around her ample middle, and she would be all set to whip up a late supper for us. Her eyes, which were mere slits, managed to sparkle above her dumpling cheeks.

  “Well, she is a native, after all,” Shirley said in an accent that was anything but native. “She might lend sort of an authentic air.”

  “But the costumes wouldn’t fit her,” said the fourth woman present. “She’s way too short. We’d have to have new ones made, and that simply is not in the budget.”

  Miss Lilah smiled at the last speaker. She was far too well-bred to chide the woman for speaking out of turn.

  “Well, Gloria, you certainly have a point. But we might could squeeze a little extra out of petty cash, if we tried really hard.” Please don’t misunderstand. “Might could” is perfectly proper speech construct in Rock Hill.

  Gloria glared at me. I tried to stare placidly back. It was difficult. Gloria Roach, I was to learn, had perfected that glare in the courtrooms of York County, where she practiced as a defense attorney. Gloria’s glare aside, it was hard to look at the woman and not react somehow. She was heavily into bodybuilding and looked as much like Arnold Schwarzenegger as any woman I’d ever seen. Except for her face. Gloria Roach had an itty-bitty ferret face, replete with beady eyes and remarkably pointed teeth. Throw in the personality of a piranha, and she was a strange bird—to mangle a metaphor.

  “What are your credentials besides being a native of Rock Hill and a friend of Miss Holliday?”

  “Oh, she isn’t my friend,” the Queen Mum protested. “I merely play bridge with her mama.”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I am an antique dealer—I own Den of Antiquity up in Charlotte. I’m not an expert yet, but I am learning. And I assume there are antiques in the Roselawn collection. Perhaps I could help you catalog them. Maybe even appraise them.”

  “There is nothing of substantial value at Roselawn,” Anne Holliday—alias Her Majesty—said quickly. “I really don’t think we need to have anything appraised.”

  Miss Lilah gave her an inquiring look, and then turned to the lone man.

  “Red?”

  He gave me a smarmy look. “If you have a shop up in Charlotte, how do you expect to volunteer down here?”

  I met his smarm with what I hoped was a penetrating gaze. I had figured out who the skinny little bastard was. Red was a nickname because of his carrot-colored hair and the blizzard of freckles that nearly obliterated his features. His real name was Angus Barnes. When not undressing potential docents with his grass green eyes, he was busy as a beaver building Rock Hill. Half the new subdivisions around town were supposedly Red Barnes’s developments. Mama’s friend Mattie has a daughter who moved into a Red Barnes home that, like her marriage, began to crumble immediately. Still, Red has made millions from his business.

  “I thought I might help out in the evenings and on my days off,” I said coolly.

  Red smirked. “We aren’t open in the evenings, and I doubt if you get that many days off in your business. What we’re really looking for is someone younger. Someone with more time on her hands.”

  “Like a buxom college girl?” I asked pointedly. Red had a reputation of using and then discarding young women, which is a polite way of saying he didn’t use all his tools responsibly. Mattie’s daughter was one of his victims.

  “The best tour guides are attractive,” he snapped.

  “Zing,” Shirley Hall said, and wet an index finger on her tongue and pretended to mark the air.

  Miss Lilah gave us all her Stern Look, a slight puckering between the eyebrows and a firmly closed mouth.

  The others may have recoiled in fear, but, as yet, I had nothing to lose. “He’s got a point about my time being limited, but I would like to contribute in some way. Even if there is nothing worth appraising in the mansion, you still need it cataloged, don’t you? Suppose there was a fire? And anyway, if I’m just there at night making an inventory, I won’t need a costume, will I?”

  “But we have our own historian, dear,” the Queen Mum said, and bestowed a gracious, albeit brief, smile on Shirley Hall.

  It was Miss Lilah’s turn to bestow a smile, and the unlucky recipient was Anne Holliday. The Queen Mum visibly shrank in her folding metal throne.

  “Well, it’s all settled then, isn’t it?” Miss Lilah clasped her immaculate hands in a decisive gesture. “We can have the contents of Roselawn cataloged, and it won’t cost us a penny, thanks to Mrs. Timberlake’s generosity.” The lavender eyes fixed calmly on me. “When can you start?”

  “Anytime.”

  “I’ll give you a call, then,” she said, and I knew that I had been graciously dismissed.

  I stopped at Mama’s on the way home. Through her front window I could see the flicker of her television screen, but she turned it off when I rang the doorbell. Mama denies that she watches much television, eschewing the tube for books and little literary magazines. That night, for instance, she had Dreaming in Color, a book of short stories by Ruth Moose, on the end table beside her favorite wing chair. The book was actually open.

  Mama answered the door fully dressed. Changing into her nightgown is the last thing she does before falling asleep. Unless she dies in her sleep, Mama will be found dead someday in a dress with a full circle skirt puffed out by crinolines, high heels, and of course her ubiquitous pearls (I honestly have no idea what, if anything, she wears in the shower).

  “Did you go, dear?” she asked needlessly.

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  “Miss Lilah has agreed to let me catalog the contents of the mansion.”

  “But you won’t be a docent?” The disappointment in her voice was clear. No doubt “my daughter the docent” had a better ring to it than “my daughter the cataloger.”

  “I don’t really have the time, Mama. Anyway, I’ll still be able to poke around a little, and I got to meet all the board members. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to meet some of the docents.”

  “I could throw a party,” Mama offered graciously.

  I chewed on that. Mama can throw a party that would make Martha Stewart turn the color of limes. The year I turned sixteen, the debutante reception was held at our house. Mama outdid herself and made more enemies than Fidel Castro. Nobody likes a perfect hostess, and the reception that year created a mountain impossible for future hostesses to scale. Socially we would have been better off taking the group out to supper at Burger King. Maybe it was time Rock Hill got stood on its ear again.

  “How many kinds of hors d’oeuvres?”

  “A dozen,” Mama said without a second’s hesitation.

  “Warm or cold?”

  Mama rolled her eyes. “Warm, of course. There will be two dozen cold finger foods.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly think about it, Mama. Thanks for the offer.”


  “The baked ham and roast beef for sandwiches don’t count toward either.”

  “Thanks, Mama, but I said I’ll think about it.” I started for the door.

  “You didn’t tell me who all was there,” Mama said accusingly. “Besides Anne Holliday, of course.”

  “Well, Lilah.”

  “Yes,” Mama whispered reverently. “Lilah is the crème de la crème of Rock Hill. No, make that York County. The Upstate Preservation Foundation was her idea. Most of the worthy projects in the county are.”

  I told her the rest of the names, and she had something pointed or revealing to say about each person. Being Mama, all her comments are true—you could bet the cotton gin on that—but they weren’t necessarily flattering.

  “Gloria Roach beat her ex-husband to a pulp last year. Abby, did you know that?”

  I hadn’t, but unless Gloria’s husband was Arnold Schwarzenegger, it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did he press charges? Was she indicted?”

  “No, ma’am. Ed Roach mows grass and cuts down trees—when he’s working. Gloria is his meal ticket.” It was only a slight exaggeration. Roach Tree & Service was not a one-man operation. Its ad in the yellow pages took up a quarter page.

  “I see. Why do you think she’s on the board, Mama? Because she’s a lawyer?”

  “Undoubtedly. Old Mr. Rose died without a will, which in effect left the plantation to the state of Carolina—”

  “Which it in turn sold off to collect back taxes,” I said, proud of my knowledge.

  Mama’s look told me to climb down off my high horse. “So I’m sure you’re aware then that Mercedes-Benz was hoping to acquire the property for their second Carolina factory.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “And they might have, except for Ms. Roach. But she found an old law that required the state to give preference to a historical foundation—even a private one—over a foreign company. She donated her legal services for free.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” I could respect the muscled shark, but I didn’t have to like her. “And Red Barnes? What’s he doing on the board?”

  Mama shuddered. “That Red should keep his barn door shut. Mattie Markham is still traumatized by what happened to her daughter.”

  “Her daughter Phyllis Sue had an affair,” I said. “She wasn’t raped.”

  Mama gave me a glare worthy of Gloria Roach. “The only reason Red Barnes is on that board is because he has money. Ill-gotten, of course, but it’s still green. Red Barnes figures he can bolster his social standing by flinging wads of money around. Did you know that Rock Hill Country Club won’t let him join?”

  I confessed that I didn’t. “And I can guess why Shirley Hall is part of the team,” I said.

  Mama shuddered again. “That woman may be a history expert, but whose history is she an expert on? Did you know she calls it the Civil War?”

  I shook my head sympathetically. “And your buddy Anne Holliday?”

  Mama grimaced. “Please, Abby, she’s not my buddy. Anne and I play bridge together, that’s all. I hope you appreciate the call I made to her on your behalf to find out about tonight. The meeting date had already been advertised in the paper. Apparently they were looking to train more docents before that unfortunate incident in your shop on Tuesday. I felt like such a fool when she told me that.”

  “Thank you, Mama, but you haven’t answered my question. Why is Anne Holliday on the board?”

  Mama rolled her eyes for the second time that night, prompting me to ponder the possibility that she was on the threshold of her second childhood. When my daughter, Susan, was a little girl, she rolled her eyes so often that I actually took her to an ophthalmologist for fear that something was wrong. The diagnosis was, of course, simply that Susan thought I was stupid.

  “Abby, don’t you know any Rock Hill gossip?”

  I knew some. I knew that the frizzy-headed blond author who lives in town supposedly spent Christmas Day with David Bowie on a Bali beach, watching a Hindu cremation.

  “Do tell,” I begged.

  Mama took a deep breath. “Anne Holliday was Jimmy Rose’s—mistress.” If she had been holding the word, she would have held it at arm’s length, like a dirty diaper.

  “What?” I was honestly surprised. James L. Rose VI had to have been in his nineties when he died.

  “You heard me, dear.”

  “Mistress,” I said maliciously. “So she was his mistress.”

  Mama shook her head while her hand reached up to caress her pearls. I had succeeded in annoying her.

  “So it’s a courtesy position then, is it?”

  Mama continued to caress her pearls in silence.

  “But she looks like the Queen Mum,” I said.

  A smile tugged at the left corner of Mama’s mouth.

  7

  I woke up flat on my back, with Dmitri on my chest. His right front paw was jammed between my lips. I pushed it away and spat. Dmitri thinks I was put on this earth to feed him, sift his litter, and scratch under his chin. He has learned that a surefire way of getting his chin scratched is to sit on me and pat my face. I like to think he tries to pat my chin and isn’t a very good aim. While I love my cat dearly, a paw that’s been pawing around in a litter box is not welcome in my mouth.

  I was out of milk, so breakfast for me was a bowl of Cheerios with half-and-half. I’m one of those people who has to eat the second I wake up. I get the shakes unless I do. Some people have to have their caffeine; I have to have my carbs.

  The jitters satiated, I was just stepping into the shower when the phone rang. A saner person would have let the machine pick up, but it was only six-thirty in the morning. It had to be Mama with bad news.

  “Is it Charlie or Susan?” I demanded.

  There was a long pause, which should have tipped me off. “The vase wasn’t here, so where is it?”

  Androgynous again. Maybe I should have hung up immediately. But Mama raised me to be a well-mannered southern belle, one who answers when questions are asked.

  “It’s in the kitchen garbage,” I said, “under the coffee grinds, but above the fish heads.”

  “Don’t mess with me!”

  “Exactly! I don’t know where the damn Ming is, and if I did—Hey, what do you mean by it wasn’t here? Where are you looking?”

  The line went dead.

  I sorrowfully surveyed the shambles that was my shop.

  “He—she—whoever was calling from here,” I said to Greg.

  Greg had his arm resting on my shoulder, and he gave it a quick squeeze. It was at least a small comfort to know that his professionalism took second place to his feelings for me. Not that everything was hunky-dory between us again. He was still ticked, I’m sure, as was I, although we were undoubtedly angry on different levels. He was still mad about the Ming, and I was mad about him still being mad, which, at least in my frame of mind, made my anger a little more righteous.

  “Did they say they were calling from here?”

  I swallowed my irritation. “They didn’t say the name of my shop, but they said ‘here.’”

  “We’ll check the phone for prints,” he said casually. Too casually.

  I shrugged his arm off my shoulder. “They took the goddamn phone.”

  He had the audacity then to walk over to my little desk and check for himself. As if I might have accidentally misplaced a plugged-in phone. It might happen in movies, but I assure you it has never happened to Abigail Wiggins Timberlake.

  Greg ran strong fingers through his head of thick brown black hair. “You’re right, it’s gone.”

  “No shit,” I said. I don’t usually swear, but under extreme stress I revert to patterns learned during all those years of living with Buford Timberlake. “Whoever it was realized they didn’t have time to wipe off the prints, and just unplugged the goddamn thing.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “Don’t you dare ask me if I’m sure I even had a phone,” I snapped.

  “But there is
no sign of breaking and entering, Abigail. Whoever took the phone and did this to your shop had to have a key.”

  “Don’t start down that road, Greg. It wasn’t Mama or my friends.”

  “Well, it had to be somebody.”

  “Exactly. And it’s your job to find out who.”

  He raked his hair again, and I found it intensely annoying. “Can you give me a damage estimate?”

  It was a fair question. Although my shop was in total disarray, remarkably nothing was broken except for one small Depression glass bowl that had apparently fallen off a shelf. I mentioned the bowl.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Maybe a few new scratches here and there. Nothing major, although it’s going to take me all day to set things straight again. I told you, Greg, this isn’t a case of vandalism. They want the Ming.”

  “Ah yes, the old Chinese vase that I have yet to see—even though there is a direct connection between it and the victim of a homicide I’m investigating.”

  “There’s the door,” I said. “Lock it behind you.”

  “I don’t have a key—ha, ha, Abigail. Very funny.”

  He stayed another fifteen or twenty minutes, dusting the doors for prints and just generally poking around. During that time he completely ignored me, and I was happy to oblige his little tantrum. No doubt he would find a sympathetic listener in Hooter Fawn, his old girlfriend, provided her attractive parts hadn’t been recalled by the surgeon general.

  Abigail Wiggins Timberlake did not need a man in her life to be happy. A pint of Hunter’s Dixie Delight ice cream would do just fine. Chocolate and peanut butter were the only perfect combination.

  “Abby, I can’t afford to be your secretary,” C.J. said breathlessly. “I’ve got my own shop to attend to.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come running over here with messages,” I snapped.