“It wouldn’t have saved the marriage.” She cried anew.
“Did he really threaten to kill you?”
She nodded and sobbed.
Warren wrung his hands. “That should make the divorce go faster.” He glanced to the window. “Your cat wants in.”
Mrs. Murphy froze. Lucinda looked up. “That’s not my cat.” That fast Mrs. Murphy shot off the windowsill. “Funny, that looked like Mrs. Murphy.”
“Tucker, vamoose!”
Mrs. Murphy streaked across the front lawn as Tucker, who could run like blazes, caught up with her. The front door opened and Lucinda, curious as well as wanting to forget the pain for a moment, saw the pair. “Those are Harry’s animals. What in the world are they doing all the way over here?”
Warren stood beside her and watched the two figures silhouetted against silver moonlight. “Hunting. You’d be amazed at how large hunting territories are. Bears prowl a hundred-mile radius.”
“You’d think there’d be enough mice at Harry’s.”
55
The crowd had gathered along the garden level at Monticello. Kimball Haynes’s memorial service was held in the land he loved and understood. Monticello, shorn as she is of home life, makes up for it by casting an emotional net over all who work there.
At first Oliver Zeve balked at holding a memorial at Monticello. Enough negative attention, in his mind, had been drawn to the shrine. He brought it before the board of directors, each of whom had ample opportunity to know and care for Kimball. He was an easy man to like. The board decided without much argument to allow the ceremony to take place after public hours. Somehow it was fitting that Kimball should be remembered where he was happiest and where he served to further understanding of one of the greatest men this nation or any other has ever produced.
The Reverend Jones, Montalto looming behind him, cleared his throat. Mim and Jim Sanburne sat in the front row along with Warren and Ansley Randolph, as those two couples had made the financial arrangements for the service. Mrs. Hogendobber, in her pale gold robes with the garnet satin inside the sleeves and around the collar, stood beside the reverend with the choir of the Church of the Holy Light. Although an Evangelical Lutheran, Reverend Jones had a gift for bringing together the various Christian groups in Crozet.
Harry, Susan and Ned Tucker, Fair Haristeen, and Heike Holtz sat in the second row along with Leah and Nick Nichols, social friends of Kimball’s. Lucinda Coles, after much self-torture, joined them. Mim, in a long, agonizing phone conversation, told Lulu that no one blamed her for Kimball’s death and her presence would be a tribute to the departed.
Members of the history and architecture departments from the University of Virginia were in attendance, along with all of the Monticello staff including the wonderful docents who conduct the tours for the public.
The Reverend Jones opened his well-worn Bible, and in his resonant, hypnotic voice read the Twenty-seventh Psalm:
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
When evildoers assail me,
uttering slanders against me,
My adversaries and foes,
they shall stumble and fall.
Though a host encamp against me,
my heart shall not fear;
Though war rise up against me,
yet I will be confident.
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after;
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life—
The service continued and the reverend spoke directly of sufferings needlessly afflicted, of promising life untimely cut down, of the evils that men do to one another, and of the workings of faith. Reverend Jones reminded them of how one life, Kimball Haynes’s, had touched so many others and how Kimball sought to help us touch those lives lived long ago. By the time the good man finished, there wasn’t a dry eye left.
As the people filed out to leave, Fair considerately placed his hand under Lulu’s elbow, for she was much affected. After all, apart from her liking for Kimball and her feelings of responsibility, it was her husband who stood accused of his murder. And Samson sure had a motive. Kimball could have blown the whistle on his escrow theft. Worse, Samson had bellowed that he would kill her.
Ansley stumbled up ahead. High-heeled shoes implanted her in the grass like spikes. Lucinda pulled Fair along with her and hissed at Ansley. “I thought you were my best friend.”
“I am,” Ansley stoutly insisted.
Warren, high color in his cheeks, watched as if waiting for another car wreck to happen.
“What a novel definition of a best friend: one who sleeps with your husband.” Lucinda raised her voice.
“Not here,” Ansley begged through clenched teeth.
“Why not? Sooner or later everyone here will know the story. Crozet is the only town where sound travels faster than light.”
Before a rip-roaring shouting match could erupt, Harry slid alongside Lucinda on the right. Susan ran interference.
“Lulu, you are making a career of disrupting funerals,” Harry chided her.
It was enough.
56
Dr. Larry Johnson, carrying his black Gladstone bag of medical gear, buoyantly swung into the post office. Tucker rushed up to greet him. Mrs. Murphy, splayed on the counter on her right side, tail slowly flicking back and forth, raised her head, then put it back down again.
“I think I know who the Monticello victim is.”
Mrs. Murphy sat up, alert. Harry and Miranda hurried around the counter.
Larry straightened his hand-tied bow tie before addressing his small but eager audience. “Now, ladies, I apologize for not telling you first, but that honor belonged to Sheriff Shaw, and you will, of course, understand why I had to place the next call to Mim Sanburne. She in turn called Warren and Ansley and the other major contributors. I also called Oliver Zeve, but the minute the political calls were accounted for, I zoomed over here.”
“We can’t stand it. Tell!” Harry clapped her hands together.
“Thomas Walker, like any good medical man, kept a record of his patients. All I did was start at the beginning and read. In 1778 he set the leg of a five-year-old child, Braxton Fleming, the eighth child of Rebecca and Isaiah Fleming, who owned a large tract along the Rivanna River. The boy broke his leg wrestling with his older brother in a tree.” He laughed. “Don’t kids do the damnedest things? In a tree! Well, anyway, Dr. Walker noted that it was a compound fracture and he doubted that it would heal in such a manner as to afford the patient full facility with the limb, as he put it. He duly noted the break was in the left femur. He also noted that the boy was the most beautiful child he had ever seen. That aroused my curiosity, and I called down to the Albemarle County Historical Society and asked for help. Those folks down there are just terrific—volunteer labor. I asked them if they’d comb their sources for any information about Braxton Fleming. Seems he trod the course a wellborn young fellow typically trod in those days. He was tutored in Richmond, but then instead of going to the College of William and Mary he enrolled in the College of New Jersey, as did Aaron Burr and James Madison. We know it as Princeton. The Flemings were intelligent. All the surviving sons completed their studies and entered the professions, but Braxton was the only one to go north of the Mason-Dixon line to study. He spent some time in Philadelphia after graduating and apparently evidenced some gift for painting. Well, it was as hard then as now to make a living in the arts, so finally Braxton slunk home. He tried his hand at farming and did enough to survive, but his heart wasn’t in it. He married well but not happily and he turned to drink. He was reputed to have been the handsomest man in central Virginia.”