~ A Bone to Pick ~
bride, or friend of the groom?” he asked automati- cally, and then flushed as red as a beet. “Let’s say friend of the groom,” I suggested gently, and gave myself high marks. Poor Detective Henske marched me down the aisle to an empty seat and dumped me with obvious relief.
I glanced around as little as possible, putting all my energy into looking relaxed and nonchalant, sort of as if I’d just happened to be appropriately dressed and just happened to see the wedding invitation on my way out the door, and decided I’d just drop in. It was all right to look at Arthur when he entered, everyone else was. His pale blond hair was crisp and curly and short, his blue eyes as direct and engaging as ever. He was wearing a gray tux and he looked great. It didn’t hurt
quite
as much as I’d thought it would. When the “Wedding March” began, everyone rose for the entrance of the bride, and I gritted my teeth in anticipation. I was pretty sure my fixed smile looked more like a snarl. I turned reluctantly to watch Lynn make her entrance. Here she came, swathed in white, veiled, as tall as Arthur, her straight, short hair curled for the occasion. Lynn was almost a foot taller than I, something that had obviously bothered her, but I guessed it wasn’t going to bother her anymore.
~ 7 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
Then Lynn passed me, and when I saw her in profile I gasped. Lynn was clearly pregnant.
It would be hard to say why this was such a blow; I certainly hadn’t wanted to become pregnant while I was dating Arthur, and would have been horrified if I’d been faced with the situation. But I had often thought of marrying him, and I had occasionally thought about babies; most women my age, if they do want to get married, do think about babies. Somehow, just for a little while, it seemed to me that I had been robbed of something.
I spoke to enough people on the way out of the church to be sure my attendance registered and would be reported to the happy couple, and then I skipped the reception. There was no point in putting myself through that. I thought it was pretty stupid of me to have come at all; not gallant, not brave, just dumb. The funeral came third, a few days after my mother’s wedding, and, as funerals go, it was pretty decent. Though it was in early June, the day Jane Engle was buried was not insufferably hot, and it was not raining. The little Episcopal church held a reasonable number of people—I won’t say mourners, ~ 8 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
because Jane’s passing was more a time to be marked than a tragic occasion. Jane had been old, and, as it turned out, very ill, though she had told no one. The people in the pews had gone to church with Jane, or remembered her from her years working in the high school library, but she had no family besides one ag- ing cousin, Parnell Engle, who was himself too ill that day to come. Aubrey Scott, the Episcopal priest, whom I hadn’t seen since my mother’s wedding, was eloquent about Jane’s inoffensive life and her charm and intelligence; Jane had certainly had her tart side, too, but the Reverend Mr. Scott tactfully included that under “colorful.” It was not an adjective I would have chosen for silver-haired Jane, never married— like me, I reminded myself miserably, and wondered if this many people would come to my funeral. My eyes wandered over the faces in the pews, all more or less familiar. Besides me, there was one other attendee from Real Murders, the disbanded club in which Jane and I had become friends—LeMaster Cane, a black businessman. He was sitting at the back in a pew by himself.
I made a point of standing by LeMaster at the graveside, so he wouldn’t look so lonely. When I mur- mured that it was good to see him, he replied, “Jane ~ 9 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
was the only white person who ever looked at me like she couldn’t tell what color I am.” Which effectively shut me up.
I realized that I hadn’t known Jane as well as I thought I had. For the first time, I really felt I would miss her.
I thought of her little, neat house, crammed with her mother’s furniture and Jane’s own books. I remem- bered Jane had liked cats, and I wondered if anyone had taken over the care of her gold tabby, Madeleine. (The cat had been named for the nineteenth-century Scottish poisoner Madeleine Smith, a favorite murderer of Jane’s. Maybe Jane had been more “colorful” than I’d realized. Not many little old ladies I knew had fa- vorite murderers. Maybe I was “colorful,” too.) As I walked slowly to my car, leaving Jane Engle forever in Shady Rest Cemetery—I thought—I heard someone calling my name behind me.
“Miss Teagarden!” panted the man who was hur- rying to catch up. I waited, wondering what on earth he could want. His round, red face topped by thin- ning light brown hair was familiar, but I couldn’t re- call his name.
“Bubba Sewell,” he introduced himself, giving my hand a quick shake. He had the thickest southern ~ 10 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
accent I’d heard in a long time. “I was Miss Engle’s lawyer. You are Aurora Teagarden, right?” “Yes, excuse me,” I said. “I was just so surprised.” I remembered now that I’d seen Bubba Sewell at the hospital during Jane’s last illness.
“Well, it’s fortunate you came today,” Bubba Sewell said. He’d caught his breath, and I saw him now as he undoubtedly wanted to present himself: an expensively suited, sophisticated but down-home man in the know. A college-educated good ole boy. His small brown eyes watched me sharply and curiously. “Miss Engle had a clause in her will that is significant to you,” he said significantly.
“Oh?” I could feel my heels sinking into the soft turf and wondered if I’d have to step out of my shoes and pull them up by hand. It was warm enough for my face to feel damp; of course, my glasses began to slide down my nose. I poked them back up with my forefinger. “Maybe you have a minute now to come by my office and talk about it?”
I glanced automatically at my watch. “Yes, I have time,” I said judiciously after a moment’s pause. This was pure bluff, so Mr. Sewell wouldn’t think I was a woman with nothing to do.
Actually, I very nearly was. A cutback in funding ~ 11 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
meant that, for the library to stay open the same num- ber of hours, some staff had to go part-time. I hoped it was because I was the most recently hired that the first one to feel the ax was me. I was only working eighteen to twenty hours a week now. If I hadn’t been living rent free and receiving a small salary as resident manager of one of Mother’s apartment buildings (ac- tually a row of four town houses), my situation would have been bleak in the extreme.
Mr. Sewell gave me such elaborate directions to his office that I couldn’t have gotten lost if I’d tried, and he furthermore insisted I follow him there. The whole way he gave turn signals so far in advance that I al- most made the wrong left once. In addition he would wave and point into his rearview mirror, waiting to see me nod every time in acknowledgment. Since I’d lived in Lawrenceton my whole life, this was unneces- sary and intensely irritating. Only my curiosity about what he was going to tell me kept me from ramming his rear, and then apologizing picturesquely with tears and a handkerchief.
“Wasn’t too hard to find, was it!” he said encour- agingly when I got out of my car in the parking lot of the Jasper Building, one of the oldest office buildings in our town and a familiar landmark to me from childhood.
~ 12 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
“No,” I said briefly, not trusting myself to speak further.
“I’m up on the third floor,” Lawyer Sewell an- nounced, I guess in case I got lost between the park- ing lot and the front door. I bit the inside of my lip and boarded the elevator in silence, while Sewell kept up a patter of small talk about the attendance at the fu- neral, how Jane’s loss would affect many, many peo- ple, the weather, and why he liked having an office in the Jasper Building (atmosphere . . . much better than one of those prefabricated buildings).
By the time he opened his office door, I was won- dering how sharp-tongued Jane could have endured Bubba Sewell. When I saw that he had three employ- ees in his smallish office, I realized he must be more intelligent than he seemed, and there were other un- mistakable signs of prosperity—knickknacks from the Sharper Image catalog, superior prints on the walls and leather upholstery on the chairs, and so on. I looked around Sewell’s office while he gave some rapid instructions to the well-dressed red-haired sec- retary who was his first line of defense. She didn’t seem like a fool, and she treated him with a kind of friendly respect.
“Well, well, now, let’s see about you, Miss Teagar- den,” the lawyer said jovially when we were alone. ~ 13 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“Where’s that file? Gosh-a-Moses, it’s somewhere in this mess here!”
Much rummaging among the papers on his desk. By now I was not deceived. Bubba Sewell for some reason found this Lord Peter Wimsey–like pretense of foolishness useful, but he was not foolish, not a bit. “Here we are, it was right there all the time!” He flourished the file as though its existence had been in doubt.
I folded my hands in my lap and tried not to sigh obviously. I might have lots of time, but that didn’t mean I wanted to spend it as an unwilling audience to a one-man performance.
“Hoo-wee, I’m sure glad you managed to turn it up,” I said.
Bubba Sewell’s hands stilled, and he shot me an ex- tremely sharp look from under his bushy eyebrows. “Miss Teagarden,” he said, dropping his previous good-ole-boy manner completely, “Miss Engle left you everything.”
Those are certainly some of the most thrilling words in the English language, but I wasn’t going to let my jaw hit the floor. My hands, which had been ~ 14 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
clasped loosely in my lap, gripped convulsively for a minute, and I let out a long, silent breath. “What’s everything?” I asked.
Bubba Sewell told me that everything was Jane’s house, its contents, and most of her bank account. She’d left her car and five thousand dollars to her cousin Parnell and his wife, Leah, on condition they took Madeleine the cat to live with them. I was relieved. I had never had a pet, and wouldn’t have known what to do with the creature.
I had no idea what I should be saying or doing. I was so stunned I couldn’t think what would be most seemly. I had done my mild grieving for Jane when I’d heard she’d gone, and at the graveside. I could tell that in a few minutes I was going to feel raw jubila- tion, since money problems had been troubling me. But at the moment mostly I was stunned. “Why on earth did she do this?” I asked Bubba Sewell. “Do you know?”
“When she came in to make her will, last year when there was all that trouble with the club you two were in, she said that this was the best way she knew to make sure someone never forgot her. She didn’t want her name up on a building somewhere. She wasn’t a”—the lawyer searched for the right words—“philanthropist. ~ 15 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
Not a public person. She wanted to leave her money to an individual, not a cause, and I don’t think she ever got along well with Parnell and Leah—do you know them?”
As a matter of fact, I am something rare in the South—a church hopper. I had met Jane’s cousin and his wife at one of the churches I attended, I couldn’t remember which one, though I thought it was one of Lawrenceton’s more fundamentalist houses of wor- ship. When they’d introduced themselves I’d asked if they were related to Jane, and Parnell had admitted he was a cousin, though with no great warmth. Leah had stared at me and said perhaps three words during the whole conversation.
“I’ve met them,” I told Sewell.
“They’re old and they haven’t had any children,” Sewell told me. “Jane felt they wouldn’t outlast her long and would probably leave all her money to their church, which she didn’t want. So she thought and thought and settled on you.”
I thought and thought myself for a little bit. I looked up to find the lawyer eyeing me with specula- tion and some slight, impersonal disapproval. I fig- ured he thought Jane should have left her money to cancer research or the SPCA or the orphanage. “How much is in the account?” I asked briskly. ~ 16 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
“Oh, in the checking account, maybe three thou- sand,” he said. “I have the latest statements in this file. Of course, there are a few bills yet to come from Jane’s last stay in the hospital, but her insurance will pick up most of that.”
Three thousand! That was nice. I could finish pay- ing for my car, which would help my monthly bill sit- uation a lot.
“You said ‘checking account,’ ” I said, after I’d thought for a moment. “Is there another account?” “Oh, you bet,” said Sewell, with a return of his former bonhomie. “Yes, ma’am! Miss Jane had a sav- ings account she hardly ever touched. I tried a couple of times to interest her in investing it or at least buy- ing a CD or a bond, but she said no, she liked her cash in her bank.” Sewell shook his receding hairline several times over this and tilted back in his chair. I had a vicious moment of hoping it would go all the way over with him in it.
“Could you please tell me how much is in the sav- ings account?” I asked through teeth that were not quite clenched.
Bubba Sewell lit up. I had finally asked the right question. He catapulted forward in his chair to a mighty squeal of springs, pounced on the file, and ex- tracted another bank statement.
~ 17 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“Wel-l-l-l,” he drawled, puffing on the slit envelope and pulling out the paper inside, “as of last month, that account had in it—let’s see—right, about five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Maybe this wasn’t the worst year of my life after all.
~ 18 ~
Chapter Two
A
Ifloated out of Bubba Sewell’s office, trying not to look as gleeful as I felt. He walked with me to the elevator, looking down at me as if he couldn’t figure me out. Well, it was mutual, but I wasn’t caring right now, no sirree.
“She inherited it from her mother,” Sewell said. “Most of it. Also, when her mother died, Miss Engle sold her mother’s house, which was very large and brought a great price, and she split the money from that with her brother. Then her brother died and left her his nearly intact share of the house money, plus his estate, which she turned into cash. He was a banker in Atlanta.”
I had money. I had a
lot
of money. “I’ll meet you at Jane’s house tomorrow, and we’ll ~ 19 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
have a look around at the contents, and I’ll have a few things for you to sign. Would nine-thirty be conve- nient?”
I nodded with my lips pressed together so I wouldn’t grin at him.
“And you know where it is?”
“Yes,” I breathed, thankful the elevator had come at last and the doors were opening.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Miss Tea- garden,” the lawyer said, setting his black glasses back on his nose and turning away as the doors closed with me inside.
I thought a scream of joy would echo up the eleva- tor shaft, so I quietly but ecstatically said, “Heehee- heeheehee,” all the way down and did a little jig before the doors opened on the marble lobby. Imanaged to get home to the town house on Parson Road without hitting another car, and pulled into my parking place planning how I could celebrate. The young married couple who’d taken Robin’s town house, to the left of mine, waved back hesi- tantly in answer to my beaming hello. The Cran- dalls’ parking space to the right was empty; they were visiting a married son in another town. The ~ 20 ~