Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead. Livia J Washburn

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СКАЧАТЬ been there. Done that. A lot.

      A knock sounded on the door and Luke opened it without waiting for an answer. “Talked to the phone company,” he said. “Phones’ll be on by the end of the day.”

      “Thanks, Luke. Sorry about the mix-up. My bad, as the kids say. If they still say that. I haven’t checked lately.”

      “That’s all right. You’ve got a lot to keep up with these days, Miz D. It’s not easy opening your own business, you know. Not to mention taking care of kids, even if they’re not yours. I hope by the time Melissa and I have kids, I’m a lot smarter and more grown up than I am now.”

      I smiled and said, “That’s a good way to look at it.”

      “’Cause sometimes I think I’m dumb as dirt.”

      “No, you’re a sweet young man, and when the time comes, you’ll do just fine.” I sat up straighter, trying to be more brisk and businesslike. “Now, let’s talk about this Gone With the Wind tour.”

      So that was how things started out on the first-ever day for Delilah Dickinson Literary Tours. A little ragged, maybe, but I had high hopes. We’d get over all these rough patches. Things were going to get better as they went along. I was sure of it.

      Of course, folks hadn’t started getting killed yet….

      CHAPTER 2

      Downtown Atlanta was hot and muggy, even at eleven o’clock in the morning. Clouds scudded across the sun every now and then and offered a little relief from its glare, but that didn’t affect the humidity.

      I was sort of used to it—although anybody who tells you that you can get used to ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity is a flat-out liar—but many of my clients weren’t. They were from cooler, drier climates.

      The German couple was really sweating. I heard them sigh in relief as we went into the air-conditioned Visitors Center next to the Dump, as Margaret Mitchell had called the house on Peachtree Street, which had been known as the Crescent Apartments when she and her husband, John, moved into it in 1925. They lived there while she was writing a little book called Gone With the Wind.

      I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s not such a little book, actually. More of a doorstop. They could’ve sold it in the bookstores by the pound. It’s been read by more people around the world than any other novel ever written.

      People love Gone With the Wind.

      Some of them love it so much they’re willing to pay to come to Atlanta and see the apartment where Margaret Mitchell lived while she was writing it, visit the Gone With the Wind Movie Museum located in the same house, and have an authentic, genteel Southern lunch at Mary Mac’s Tea Room nearby.

      The highlight of the tour, though, is the visit to Tara Plantation. It’s not the real Tara, of course—not that there ever actually was a real Tara except in the mind of Margaret Mitchell and the imaginations of Hollywood filmmakers. In the first draft of the novel it was called Fontenoy Hall and was based on the farm of Mitchell’s maternal grandparents, but the name Tara and the image of the magnificent house were set firmly in the minds of millions of readers and moviegoers. One of the old plantation houses outside of Atlanta, a place originally called Sweet Bay after the magnolia trees that grow there, had been remade into a near-replica of the movie location. It was also a working plantation, producing a good cotton crop most years using only historically accurate methods.

      Well, except for the slaves, of course. Historical accuracy only goes so far.

      I had a short spiel prepared and went into it as soon as all the tourists were inside, along with Luke, Augusta, and Amelia. Melissa was holding down the fort at the office.

      I’d done quite a bit of reading about Margaret Mitchell, from her birth in Atlanta through her early life and her disastrous marriage to Red Upshaw, the man most people believed to be the model for Rhett Butler; her later marriage to John Walsh and the ten years she had spent writing Gone With the Wind, with John editing it page by page; her other works (most people didn’t know she had ever written anything other than the one book); and her tragic death after being run down by a car on Peachtree Street, not far from here, as she and John tried to cross it to go to a movie theater. I covered that ground pretty fast, because I knew that what people really wanted to do was wander around the house, look at the exhibits, take pictures, and buy stuff in the gift shop: the same things that tourists do at every attraction in the world.

      Luke sidled up to me after I turned the tourists loose to sightsee on their own. In a quiet voice, he said, “I think it’s goin’ pretty well, don’t you, Miz Delilah?”

      “I hope so. Everybody seems to be having a good time.”

      He hitched up his pants. “Yep, this here is a fine tour. Gonna be real popular. You’ll see.”

      “It was my idea, Luke,” I reminded him. “I always thought it would work.”

      “Yeah, sure, but you had your doubts. I know you.”

      He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I had doubts about everything. That’s just part of being a natural-born worrier.

      “Believe I’ll just circulate,” he went on, “in case anybody has any questions, you know.”

      “Thanks, Luke.”

      “All part of the job.”

      He moved off through the Visitors Center and on into the Mitchell house itself. I walked into the gallery, where various historical exhibits that had to do with the South, not necessarily Margaret Mitchell or Gone With the Wind, were on display.

      Right now it was a series of famous photographs from the Depression. I was glad to see some of the younger members of the tour group studying them. Too many young people don’t have much interest in history these days. I think there’s a lot of truth in that old saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it.

      “Mrs. Dickinson?”

      I turned to see one of the men from the tour standing there. “It’s Ms. Dickinson,” I told him, trying to sound nice about it. But I had taken my name back when Dan and I got divorced a few months earlier. I wasn’t Delilah Remington anymore and never would be again—although after more than twenty years of marriage I sometimes had a hard time remembering that myself.

      “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you what a fine tour this is. I’m really looking forward to visiting the plantation tomorrow. I hope you’ll do me the honor of dancing with me at the ball.”

      The Gone With the Wind tour that I put together with Luke’s help lasts three days. One day in Atlanta to see Mitchell’s apartment, as well as through the Visitors Center next door and the movie museum. The Tea Room lunch breaks up that part of the tour.

      The next day, the group loads onto a bus in the morning and rides out to Tara—not the movie set, but the other plantation remade into a tourist attraction—where they get not only a tour of the whole place but also an elegant dinner and dance hosted by actors portraying characters from the novel, before staying overnight and having breakfast the next morning, then returning to Atlanta.

      It would be more accurate to say that the actors on the plantation were portraying СКАЧАТЬ