Social Graces. Dixie Browning

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      One more note: find position that pays in advance.

      Leaning back on the two down-filled pillows, she closed her eyes. “Dad, what am I going to do?” she whispered. “Charlie, Belinda—Miss Mitty, where are you when I need you?”

      The only sound was the plaintive honking of a flock of wild geese flying overhead. It was barely nine o’clock. She never went to bed before eleven, often not until the small hours of the morning.

      Her last memory before sleep claimed her was of her father being led outside to an unmarked car while she stood in the doorway, too stunned even to protest. One of the officers pressed her father’s head down and urged him into the back seat.

      It had been Sunday, the morning of her birthday. Belinda had made blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Frank Bonnard, an early riser, had evidently been in his study. He’d been dressed in flannels, an open-necked white shirt and a navy Shetland sweater when Charlie had answered the door. Val remembered thinking much later that if the ghouls could have stuffed him into a pair of orange coveralls before marching him out in front of the single reporter who had probably tuned in on the police radio and followed them to the Belle Haven address, they’d have done it.

      That had been only the beginning. Within hours, the press had swarmed like locusts. Shortly after that the phone calls had started. Despite all the blocking devices, a few people managed to get through with variations ranging from “Where’s my money?” to “Frank Bonnard owes me my pension, dammit. Where is it? What am I supposed to do now?”

      The calls had ended when the police had put taps on all three phone lines. Not until recently had she wondered why they’d ceased. How could the callers have known their calls could be traced?

      The calls had stopped, but not the nightmares. Both asleep and awake, she had replayed the scene that morning back in late September a thousand times. A pale, stiff-faced Charlie stepping back from the wide front door to allow the two men inside. Her father emerging from his study and carefully closing the door behind him. Belinda, one plump hand covering her mouth as she stood in the dining-room doorway.

      In less than twelve hours her father had been dead. Pestered by reporters, auditors and men in bad suits who seemed to think they had every right to invade her home, Val had tried desperately to cram her emotions deep inside her and lock the door. When confronted, she’d quickly learned to answer with one of several replies that included, “I don’t know,” “No comment,” and “My father is innocent.”

      A part of her was still in hiding, but she had to know the truth, even in the unlikely event that the truth turned out to be not what she wanted to hear. Back in Greenwich she’d been too close for any real objectivity. Here, once she settled down to it, she would be able to think clearly. Then at least the callers who wanted to know where their money was would have an answer, even if it was one that wouldn’t do them any good.

      Valerie Bonnard slept heavily that night. Sometime before daybreak she awoke, thinking about the mouse she’d seen and all the others she’d heard and smelled. Were mice carnivorous? They were grain-eaters, weren’t they?

      Oh, God…now she’d never get back to sleep.

      Eyes scrunched tightly shut, she rolled over onto her stomach. On her own firm, pillow-top mattress, prone had been her favorite sleeping position, never mind that her face would be a mass of wrinkles by the time she reached forty. On a mattress that sagged like a hammock, it was a toss-up as to which she’d succumb to first—strangulation or a broken back.

      Grax, if this was your bed, no wonder your back was rounded, she thought guiltily. Her great-grandmother’s given name had been Achsah, pronounced Axa. As a child, Val had shortened it to Grax. From her one brief visit, she remembered the old woman with the laughing blue eyes and short white hair. Wearing a duckbill cap, a cotton print dress and tennis shoes, she’d been working in the yard when they’d driven up. On their way to Hilton Head, her parents had taken a detour along the Outer Banks so that Lola, Val’s mother, could introduce them to her grandmother.

      To a child of seven, the trip had seemed endless. Her parents had bickered constantly in the front seat. Odd that she should remember that now. Looking back, it seemed as if it had been her mother who was reluctant to take the time, not her father.

      They’d spent the night at a motel, but they’d eaten dinner in the small white house in the woods. She remembered thinking even before she’d smelled the gingerbread that it looked like Aunty Em’s house in the Wizard of Oz.

      Grax had served boiled fish—she’d called it drum—mixed with mashed potatoes, raw onions and bits of crisp fried salt pork. As strange as it sounded, it had turned out to be an interesting mixture of flavors and textures.

      Her mother hadn’t touched it. Her father had sampled a few forkfuls. Val, for reasons she could no longer recall, had cleaned off her plate and bragged excessively. She’d eaten two squares of the gingerbread with lemon sauce that had followed.

      That had been both the first and the last time she’d seen her great-grandmother. Two years later her parents had separated. Her father had been given custody—had her mother even asked? At any rate, Lola Bonnard had chosen to live abroad for the next few years, so visitation had been out of the question. Val had gone through the usual stages of wondering if the split had been her fault and scheming to bring her parents together again.

      She would like to think her mother had attended Grax’s funeral but she really didn’t know that, either. Her relationship with Lola Bonnard had never been close, even before the divorce. Since then it had dwindled to an exchange of Christmas cards and the occasional birthday card. It had been her father’s lawyer who’d handled Grax’s bequest, arranging for someone to manage the house as a rental. At the time, Val had been living in Chicago working for a private foundation that funded shelters and basic health services for runaway girls.

      “I’m sorry, Grax,” she whispered now, burdened with a belated sense of guilt. “I’m embarrassed and sorry and I hope you had lots and lots of friends so that you didn’t really miss us.”

      No wonder the house felt so cold and empty. How many strangers had lived here since Grax had died? There was nothing of Achsah Dozier left, no echoes of the old woman’s island brogue that had fascinated Val at the time. No hint of the flowers she’d brought inside from the Cape jasmine bushes that had once bloomed in her yard. Lola had complained about the cloying scent and without a word, Grax had got up and set the vase on the back porch.

      Val made a silent promise that as soon as she got the house cleaned and repaired, she would see what could be done with the yard.

      But first she had to go through those files, discover what it was her father had wanted her to find there, and clear his name. Frank Bonnard had been a good man, an honest man, if something of an impractical dreamer. He didn’t deserve what had happened to him.

      Two

      John Leo MacBride studied the encrusted mass of plates and cutlery that had been brought up from one of the Nazi submarines sunk during the Second World War off the New England coast. He considered leaving a few as he’d found them instead of soaking them all in an acid solution, prying them apart and cleaning them up. The before-and-after contrast would make a far more interesting display at the small museum that had commissioned the dives.

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