A bit later Fitz arrived. He and Little Marilyn had indulged in an orgy of spending. He listed the vast number of gifts with glee and no sense of shame. “But the best is, we’re going to the Homestead for a few days starting tonight.”
“I thought Mim was going to the Greenbrier.” Miranda was getting confused.
“Yes, Mother is going, she says, in February, but we’re going tonight. A second honeymoon maybe, or just getting away from all this. You heard that Mim received an ugly present.” They nodded and he continued: “I think she ought to go to Tahiti. Oh, well, there’s no talking to Mim. She’ll do as she pleases.”
Blair came in. “Hey, I’ve got good news for you. Orlando Heguay is coming down on the twenty-eighth and he can’t wait to see you.”
“Orlando Heguay.” Fitz pondered the name. “Miami?”
“No. Andover.”
Fitz clapped his hand to his face. “My God, I haven’t seen him since school. What’s he doing?” Fitz caught his breath. “And how do you know him?”
“We’ll catch up on all that when he gets here. He’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“How about dinner at the club Saturday night?” Fitz smiled.
“I’m not a member.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Fitz clapped him on the back. “Be fun. Six?”
“Six,” Blair answered.
As Fitz left with an armful of mail, Blair looked after him. “Does that guy ever work?”
“He handled a real estate closing last year,” Harry laughed.
“Are you going to be home after work?” Blair asked her.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll stop by.” Blair waved goodbye and left.
Alone again, Miranda smiled. “He likes you.”
“He’s my neighbor. He has to like me.”
55
Four bags of sweet feed, four bags of dog crunchies, and four bags of cat crunchies, plus two cases of canned cat food astounded Harry. Blair unloaded his Explorer to her protests that she couldn’t accept such gifts. He told her she could stand there and complain or she could help unload and then make them cocoa. She chose the latter.
Inside, as they sipped their chocolate drinks, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small light-blue box.
“Here, Harry, you deserve this.”
She untied the white satin ribbon. TIFFANY CO. in black letters jumped out at her from the middle of the blue box. “I’m afraid to open this.”
“Go on.”
She lifted the lid and found a dark-blue leather box with TIFFANY written in gold. She opened that to behold an exquisitely beautiful pair of gold and blue-enameled earrings nestled in the white lining. “Oh,” was all she could say.
“Your colors are blue and gold, aren’t they?”
She nodded yes and carefully removed the earrings. She put them in her ears and looked at herself in the mirror. “These are beautiful. I don’t deserve this. Why do you say I deserve this? It’s . . . well, it’s . . .”
“Take them, Mom. You look great,” Murphy advised.
“Yeah, it was bad enough you tried to give back our crunchies. You need something pretty,” Tucker chimed in.
Blair admired the effect. “Terrific.”
“Are you sure you want to give me these?”
“Of course I’m sure. Harry, I’d be lost out here without you. I thought I was hardworking and reasonably intelligent but I would have made a lot more mistakes without you and I would have spent a lot more money. You’ve been helpful to someone you hardly know, and given the circumstances, I’m grateful.”
“What circumstances?”
“The body in the graveyard.”
“Oh, that.” Harry laughed. She’d thought he was talking about BoomBoom. “I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds, Blair, but I’m not worried about you. You’re not killer material.”
“Under the right—or perhaps I should say wrong—circumstances I think anyone could be killer material, but I appreciate your kindness to a stranger. Wasn’t it Blanche DuBois who said, ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’?”
“And it was my mother who said, ‘Many hands make light work.’ Neighbors help one another to make light work. I was glad to do it. It was good for me. I learned that I knew something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I take bush-hogging, knowing when to plant, knowing how to worm a horse, those kinds of things, as a given. Helping you made me realize I’m not so dumb after all.”
“Girls who go to Seven Sisters colleges are rarely dumb.”
“Ha.” Harry exploded with mirth and so did Blair.
“Okay, so there are some dumb Smithies and Holy Jokers but then, there are some abysmal Old Blues and Princeton men too.”
“Have you ever tracked, after a snow?” Harry changed the subject, since she didn’t like to talk about herself or emotions.
“No.”
“I’ve got my father’s old snowshoes. Want to go out?”
“Sure.”
Within minutes the two suited up and left the house. Not much sunlight remained.
“These snowshoes take some getting used to.” Blair picked up a foot.
They trekked into the woods where Harry showed him bobcat and deer tracks. The deer followed air currents. Seeing these things and smelling the air, feeling the difference in temperature along the creek and above it, Blair began to appreciate how intelligent animal life is. Each species evolved a way to survive. If humans humbled themselves to learn, they might be able to better their own lives.
They moved up into the foothills behind Blair’s property. Harry was making a circle, keeping uppermost in her mind that light was limited. She put her hand on his forearm and pointed up. An enormous snowy owl sat in a walnut tree branch.
She whispered, “They rarely come this far south.”
“My God, it’s huge,” he whispered back.
“Owls and blacksnakes are the best friends a farmer can have. Cats too. They kill the vermin.”
Long pink shadows swept down from the hills, like the skirts of the day swirling in one last dance. Even with snowshoes, walking could be difficult. They both breathed harder as they moved out of the woods. At the edge of the woods Harry stopped. Her blood turned as cold as the temperature. She pointed them out to Blair. Snowshoe footprints. Not theirs.
“Hunters?” Blair said.
“No one hunts here without permission. The MacGregors and Mom and Dad were fierce about that. We used to run Angus, and the MacGregors bred polled Herefords. You can’t take the chance of some damn fool shooting your stock—and they do too.”
“Well, maybe someone wanted to track, like we’re doing.”
“He wanted to track all right.” The sharp cold air filled her lungs. “He wanted to track into the back of your property.”
“Harry, what’s wrong?”
“I think we’re looking at the killer’s tracks. Why he wants to come back here I don’t know, but he dumped hands and legs in your cemetery. Maybe he forgot something.”
“He wouldn’t find it in the snow.”
“I know. That’s why I’m really worried.” She knelt down and examined the tracks. “A man, I think, or a heavy woman.” She stepped next to the track and then picked up her snowshoe. “See how much deeper his track is than mine?”
Blair knelt down also. “I do. If we follow these, maybe we’ll find out where he came from.”
“We’re losing the light.” She pointed to the massing clouds tethered to the peaks of the mountains. “And here comes the next snowstorm.”
“Is there an old road back up in here?”
“Yes, there’s an old logging road from 1937, which was the last time this was select-cut. It’s grown over but he might know it. He could take a four-wheel drive off Yellow Mountain Road and hide it on the logging road. He couldn’t take it far but he could get it out of sight, I reckon.”