Designated Daughters Read online

  Portland laughed. “When are you going to show him the pig?”

  My brother Will runs an auction house and he’d given me a good deal on a large pink metal sign that was pig-shaped, measured about five feet long by three feet tall, and spelled out BAR-B-CUE & SPARE RIBS in bright pink neon. The metal was rusty and dented, and the pink tubing on the back side was too broken to be repaired, but my brother Herman, Haywood’s twin, is an electrician, as are his daughter and son. Together they’ve done a great job of getting the front side working so that when it’s switched on, the feet look as if they’re running. Cal giggles every time he sees it. When the shed is built and the front sides screened in, that pig should look great on the back wall.

  I’m crazy about neon, the lighted tubes and bright colors rev me up, but Dwight thinks the signs I’ve collected are white-trash tacky. I still have hopes of converting him, but I need to choose the right moment. “I’m going to let Cal give it to him for Father’s Day.”

  “Sneaky,” said Portland. “Be sure you let Avery and me know when you plan to unveil it. We want to see Dwight’s face.”

  We moved on to courthouse gossip. There was a rumor going round that one of the magistrates was sleeping with her husband’s business partner and that her husband might be embezzling from the firm, so was it true passion or a safety play on the wife’s part? Stay tuned, folks.

  As we walked back to the courthouse together, the sun burned down from a cloudless blue sky and made us grateful for the fully-leafed crepe myrtles and acanthus trees that shaded the sidewalks. Middle of May and almost every tree had a ring of colorful petunias, impatiens, or coleus around its base, and bright red geraniums bloomed in the concrete urns on either side of the courthouse door.

  I don’t hear too many jury cases, but when I do, I give a slightly longer than usual lunch break so that people don’t have to bolt their food, which was why Portland and I could take our time.

  “All rise,” said the bailiff as I entered the nearly empty courtroom. Except for a couple of gray-haired courtroom buffs who attend jury trials as a form of cheap entertainment, the other eight or ten seemed to be partisans of the combatants, and that included the group that had come in with my cousin earlier.

  I took my place behind my nameplate, a gift from Barbara McCrory, a Wisconsin friend who made it to the bench before me. My name is on the front, but the back reads: REMEMBER: THIS IS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU.

  “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” the bailiff intoned. “This court is now back in session, the Honorable Deborah Knott present and presiding.”

  With Mr. Connolly back on the stand, Joyce Mitchell, the attorney hired by Connolly’s sister, was ready to cross-​examine. Joyce is a quiet, soft-spoken woman who looks at least fifteen years younger than I know her to be.

  She adjusted her glasses, tucked a strand of dark hair behind one ear, and smiled pleasantly. “Mr. Connolly, were you aware that your mother sold her house at the bottom of the market?”

  “I know she got a lot less than the house was worth, but her rent wasn’t all that much either.”

  “You also know that she needed round-the-clock nursing care the last three months of her life?”

  Mr. Connolly gave an indignant snort. “And that was a waste of good money when she had three daughters living here who could’ve taken turns sitting by her bed.”

  “And you, too, of course?” Joyce asked with sympathetic interest.

  “Objection,” his attorney said. “What bearing does this have on my client’s claim?”

  “It goes to show why there was considerably less money than he expected, Your Honor,” Joyce said.

  “Overruled,” I agreed. “Continue.”

  “Anyhow, I live four hours away.” He removed his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. “All of them are just minutes.”

  Joyce glanced at the jury box and I followed her eyes. A woman sitting in the front row had pressed her lips into a tight line.

  Moving on, Joyce said, “I gather your mother was quite a collector, Mr. Connolly? Had a lot of valuable possessions?”

  “She sure did. And I want to know what happened to them, because when my wife and I went to help clean out her house after the funeral, it’d been picked clean.”

  “You’re sure she had a good eye for things of value?”

  “Absolutely.” He slid his glasses back on and gave a firm jerk of his head to emphasize his point.

  “Like those figurines for instance?”

  He shrugged. “They might not’ve been to my taste, but I’ve looked on eBay and they’re asking eight or ten times what she would’ve paid for them.”

  “Asking or getting? I daresay your attorney here could ask a thousand dollars an hour to represent you, but would you pay it?”

  Smiles and laughter from the spectators.

  Joyce allowed a dubious frown to cross her pretty face. “But maybe her furniture wasn’t as valuable?”

  “Oh, yes, it was!” he said quickly. “Some of it—”

  He suddenly realized where Joyce was headed and tried to backtrack. “I mean, some of it was good, but most of it was just ordinary furniture store stuff.”

  “When you drove over in your pickup truck to help move your mother into a smaller house, did you take any of her furniture home with you?”

  “Well, I might’ve taken— I mean, Mother might’ve given me some things she didn’t have room for.”

  Joyce pulled a list from her files. “Did those things include a Chippendale piecrust table, a mahogany sleigh bed, an 1830 blanket chest, a Queen Anne chair, and a Hepplewhite mirror?”

  A juror seated in the second row leaned forward to listen with bright-eyed interest. There was something familiar about her.

  Mr. Connolly glared at Joyce. “Mother wanted me to have them.”

  The juror raised a skeptical eyebrow and I realized that she was a picker for my brother Will’s auction house. I glanced at the seating chart. Jody Munger. I might not know what a Hepplewhite mirror was, but I bet Jody Munger did.

  “Even though those six pieces are worth many times what the figurines would actually bring?” Joyce asked.

  Mr. Connolly finally had the good sense to hush and let his attorney speak for him.

  “Objection. Is there any proof that she owned those pieces or what they’re worth?”

  Joyce held out copies of the document from which she had been reading, one for him and one for the court. “Your Honor, I’d like to enter as evidence this appraisal from her insurance company.”

  I nodded and she reeled off values for the benefit of the jury, then turned back to Mr. Connolly. “At that same time, did you also take a twelve-gauge shotgun that had been appraised at around a thousand dollars?”

  He could not let that go unchallenged. “That shotgun belonged to my daddy’s daddy and I’m the only Connolly male. Mother knew they wanted it to come to me.”

  While the men on the jury might have agreed with that sentiment, two of the women exchanged glances that did not bode well for Mr. Connolly.

  “No further questions,” Joyce said.

  The only other witness for the plaintiff’s side was an antiques dealer from Raleigh who was presented as a specialist in Hummel figurines. She explained that they began as drawings by a German nun and were turned into ceramics in the 1930s.

  “Mr. Connolly thinks that his mother began collecting them in the mid-fifties, so she might well have had some early examples worth several hundred dollars.”

  An enlargement of an out-of-focus snapshot taken a few years earlier was entered into evidence. It pictured the late Mrs. Connolly standing in front of several shelves crammed with the knickknacks. The dealer pointed to one of the clearer items. “That looks like an Apple Tree Boy from the early seventies. Even though it’s comparatively late, it could fetch up to five or six hundred, depending on condition.”

  Upon cross-examination, however, the dealer admitted that she had never actually seen the collection, only th
is picture. “Some of these do look like rare pieces, but without actually seeing them, I can’t be one hundred percent sure.”

  She also grudgingly agreed when Joyce suggested that prices had dropped dramatically in the last few years.

  With no further witnesses for Mr. Connolly’s side, Joyce Mitchell called a Peggy Clontz to the stand.

  Mrs. Clontz was a cousin who had known the siblings from birth—“He was always a greedy little boy”—and she was present when the late Mrs. Connolly expressed dismay at what her son had taken. “She said she had told the girls to keep whatever was left for themselves.”

  “Objection, hearsay, and self-interest,” said Connolly’s attorney.

  Before I could rule, Joyce Mitchell quickly said, “Were you one of her heirs, Mrs. Clontz?”

  The woman looked confused. “I thought she didn’t leave a will.”

  “Let me rephrase that. Did you benefit in any way by her death?”

  Mrs. Clontz shook her head.

  “Did you expect some of the silver or the figurines?”

  “Absolutely not. About three months before she died, we were looking at her collection. That’s when she gave me Feeding Time.”

  “Feeding Time?”

  “It’s a little farm girl feeding the chickens, like when we were children.”

  I smiled at that, having a soft spot for chickens myself.

  There being no questions from the plaintiff, Joyce called the sisters to the stand, beginning with Mrs. Morefield, whose blue eyes flashed with indignation at being accused of acting unfairly.

  The two younger sisters confirmed what Mrs. Clontz had said and one added, “Dotty could have emptied Mother’s bank account, but she didn’t want to bust up the family over money.”

  Her voice broke and she searched in her bag for a tissue. “He’s our brother, yet that’s all he seems to care about—money.”

  (Or, as one of my law professors was fond of quoting, “Never say you really know someone till you’ve divided an inheritance with him.”)

  Despite stringent cross-examination, all three sisters were clear about their mother’s wishes. Plaintiff’s attorney argued for the letter of the law, which was that when someone died intestate, the assets should be equally shared. “The furniture Mr. Connolly took should not be figured in, since his mother gave it to him before her death.”

  “By that argument,” Joyce said, “there were no figurines and no silverware to share, because she gave everything else to her daughters before she died.”

  The jury was out less than half an hour. They found for the defendant and wanted to know if they could compel Mr. Connolly to pay her legal fees.

  I suppressed a smile, thanked them for their service, service that would exempt them from jury duty for the next two years, and said, “At this point, I will entertain motions from counsel.”

  Mr. Connolly polished his glasses so vigorously that I expected to see the lens crumble to dust, and his attorney sat glumly while Joyce Mitchell made a formal motion to have me do exactly what the jury had suggested. She presented her figures and her fee was quite reasonable, so I signed the order that would require Mr. Connolly to reimburse his sister.

  Marillyn Mulholland and some of the others seated near her had broad smiles on their faces as they surged toward Mrs. Morefield to congratulate her.

  I rapped my gavel for silence and told them to take their celebration out to the hall. With order restored, I was looking at the documents for the one civil matter that remained on my calendar when my clerk whispered that my brother Seth’s wife had called and asked her to relay a message about my Aunt Rachel, my daddy’s younger sister.

  “She died?” I asked, thinking that this was why Sally had left so abruptly. I was sad for her and for Daddy and Aunt Sister, too, but Aunt Rachel’s death had been expected for several days now.

  The clerk shook her head. “Miss Minnie says she’s talking again and you might want to be there.”

  By now it was after four o’clock, but rather than have me continue a simple uncontested divorce to a later date, the woman’s attorney swore we could get it done in fifteen minutes. I’m a fast reader. Ten minutes later, all the papers were signed, the marriage was formally dissolved, and I was out of there.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Yet there is a certain musical quality of the voice which becomes—I know not how—even more melodious in old age.

  — Cicero

  As soon as I turned into the hospice wing that afternoon, the usual hospital smells of antiseptics and germicidal floor cleaners gave way to a warm yeasty aroma of cinnamon, nutmeg, and honey. Right away I knew Aunt Sister’s twin grand­daughters must have driven down from the mountains with a hamper of the signature sweet rolls they make for the tea room they run up in Cedar Gap. I was holding court up there in the mountains a couple of years ago when they lied to their parents about being enrolled in Tanser-McLeod College and used their tuition money to buy a half interest in the business.* It was only open for lunch and afternoon tea, but the twins shared such a talent for melt-in-your mouth baked goods that the place was usually jammed. I hoped I’d be able to snag one of their buttery caramel buns before they disappeared.

  Knotts old and young spilled out into the hall from Aunt Rachel’s room. Mostly they were the younger generation: my cousins, nephews, and nieces. They sipped from plastic water bottles and munched on sugary rolls, talking in the low voices you always hear when death is near. The older ones had crowded into Aunt Rachel’s room to cluster around her bed.

  Hospice rooms are fairly big and visiting rules are more relaxed so that friends and family don’t have to take turns saying goodbye. Nevertheless, mine is such a large family that the room couldn’t hold all of us at one time. Still, I managed to eel my way past some of my brothers and cousins and their spouses to get close enough to see and hear.

  My brother Herman’s wheelchair occupied the space normally allotted to a nightstand, and Daddy and Aunt Sister sat on the other side. Aunt Rachel’s son Jay-Jay and her purple-haired daughter Sally sat shoulder to shoulder. The bed had been lowered almost to the floor, which made it easy for them to reach out and stroke her arms or hold her hands.

  Daddy and I had visited here as soon as Jay-Jay called to say that he and Sally had agreed to have Aunt Rachel’s life-support system turned off, but Sally had gone home to shower and change, so I hadn’t seen her in several weeks. How I’d missed hearing about her new wig was a mystery since Doris and Isabel, my most judgmental sisters-in-law, took great pleasure in starting phone calls with “You will not believe what that flaky Sally’s gone and done now.”

  I myself thought they should cut her a little slack considering that she had beaten the big C and had even taken Aunt Rachel into her home after the stroke. They thought that cancer should have sobered her and they were a little miffed that Aunt Rachel thought the multicolored wigs were cute.

  Tears ran down Jay-Jay’s face as he held one of his mother’s restless hands. As quiet and self-effacing as Sally was loud and flamboyant, he was sixty years old but had remained her baby boy despite a receding hairline, an expanding waistline, two failed marriages, and three children of his own. While he and Sally and everyone else had begun grieving last month when it became clear that Aunt Rachel would never regain consciousness, hearing her voice again had triggered another outpouring of emotions.

  Earlier, when I returned Minnie’s call, my favorite sister-in-law had described how Aunt Rachel seemed to be back in her girlhood, talking to people long dead. “Your daddy and Aunt Sister had almost forgotten some of the names. One minute it’s like Jay-Jay’s just been born. The next minute, she’ll start talking about Jacob and Jed like they were still alive and cutting monkeyshines.”

  Jacob and Jedidiah. Not that I or any of my brothers had ever known them.

  Twins run in our family—Aunt Sister has twin granddaughters and Daddy has two sets of twin boys: Herman and Haywood from his first wife, Adam an
d Zach from my mother. But there had been twins in his generation, too.

  At nineteen, Daddy had been the man of the house for more than four years when they died.

  Aunt Sister was eighteen.

  Aunt Rachel, the baby of the family, was fourteen and just getting interested in boys.

  Jacob and Jed were halfway between them. The summer they turned sixteen, Jacob hit his head on a rock and drowned in Possum Creek. Jed was so devastated that he ran away from home, lied about his age, and joined the army. He was killed in a training exercise at Fort Bragg before he even finished basic.

  Aunt Rachel loved Daddy and Aunt Sister, but she had idolized Jed and Jacob. When her own son was born, she had named him Jacob Jedidiah, Jay-Jay for short, and now that she was wandering back in time, she seemed to be caught in a sort of loop where one name summoned up the others.

  “Jed says her name’s Annie Ruth…Letha says she may not be pretty but she’s a real hard worker. Mammy likes her, Sister, even if you don’t. If they was to get married…”

  I didn’t know who Letha was but, hearing the name of his first wife, I glanced at Daddy and saw him raise an eyebrow at Aunt Sister, who’s a bit of a snob. Not that she had anything to be snobbish about back then. Through the years, though, I’ve always had the impression that maybe she looked down on Annie Ruth, who was indeed a hard worker if my older brothers’ dim memories of their mother could be trusted.

  Daddy couldn’t have been such a great catch himself. The son of a moonshiner? A grade-school dropout with four younger siblings and a widowed mother to support? But they did own a house and a hundred acres of rich bottom land, which was a hundred acres more than Annie Ruth’s family ever held title to. And Daddy’s mother read to them from the Bible every night. I’m not real sure Annie Ruth could read all that good.

  “I’m so sorry, Richard.” Grief laced Aunt Rachel’s voice. “Those poor little babies and Jannie! That house was a tinderbox, just waiting for a match…Her husband…How could he hit her and then stand up in church like that? But the deacons put the fear of God in him, didn’t they?”