Harry petted her, put her down, and then thought her friends deserved better than canned food tonight. She put ham biscuits on the floor. Pewter stood on her hind legs and scratched Harry’s pants.
“More?”
“More,” the gray cat pleaded.
Harry grabbed another biscuit, plus some turkey Miranda had brought, and placed it on the floor.
“I don’t see why you should get treats. You didn’t do anything,” Mrs. Murphy growled as she chewed her food.
The gray cat giggled.“Who said life was fair?”
3. MURDER AT MONTICELLO
1
Laughing, Mary Minor Haristeen studied the nickel in her upturned palm. Over the likeness of Monticello was inscribed our nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum. She handed the nickel to her older friend, Mrs. Miranda Hogendobber. “What do you think?”
“That nickel isn’t worth a red cent.” Mrs. Hogendobber pursed her melon-tinted lips. “And the nickel makes Monticello appear so big and impersonal when it’s quite the reverse, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
The two women, one in her mid-thirties and the other at an age she refused to disclose, glanced up from the coin to Monticello’s west portico, its windows aglow with candlelight from the parlor behind as the last rays of the early spring sun dipped behind the Blue Ridge Mountains.
If the friends had strolled to the front door of Thomas Jefferson’s house, centered in the east portico, and then walked to the edge of the lawn, they would have viewed a sea of green, the ever-flattening topography to Richmond and ultimately to the Atlantic Ocean.
Like most born residents of central Virginia’s Albemarle County, Harry Haristeen, as she was known, and Miranda Hogendobber could provide a fascinating tour of Monticello. Miranda would admit to being familiar with the estate since before World War II, but that was all she would admit. Over the decades increasing restoration work on the house itself, the dependencies, and gardens, both food and flowering, had progressed to the point where Monticello was the pride of the entire United States. Over a million out-of-town visitors a year drove up the tricky mountain road to pay their eight dollars, board a jitney bus, and swirl around aneven twistier road to the top of the hill and thence the redbrick structure—each brick fashioned by hand, each hinge pounded out in a smithy, each pane of glass painstakingly blown by a glassmaker, sweating and puffing. Everything about the house suggested individual contribution, imagination, simplicity.
As the tulips braved the quickening western winds, Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber, shivering, walked around the south side of the grounds by the raised terrace. A graceful silver maple anchored the corner where they turned. When they reached the front they paused by the large doors.
“I’m not sure I can stand this.” Harry took a deep breath.
“Oh, we have to give the devil his due, or should I sayher due?” Mrs. Hogendobber smirked. “She’s been preparing for this for six decades. She’ll say four, but I’ve known Mim Sanburne since the earth was cooling.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be the advantage of living in a small town? We know everyone and everyone knows us?” Harry rubbed her tight shoulder muscles. The temperature had dropped dramatically. “Well, okay, let’s brave Mim, the Jefferson expert.”
They opened the door, slipping in just as the huge clock perched over the entrance notched up seven P.M. The day, noted by a weight to the right as one faced the door, read Wednesday. The Great Clock was one of Jefferson’s many clever innovations in the design of his home. Even great minds err, however. Jefferson miscalculated the weight and pulley system and ran out of room to register all the days of the week in the hall. Each Friday the day weight slipped through a hole in the floor to the basement, where it marked Friday afternoon and Saturday. The weight then reappeared in the hall on Sunday morning, when the clock was wound.
Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber had arrived for a small gathering of Albemarle’s “best,” which is to say those whose families had been in Virginia since before the Revolution, those who were glamorous and recently arrived from Hollywood, which Harry dubbed Hollyweird, and those who were rich. Harry fell into the first category, as did Mrs. Hogendobber. As the postmaster—Harry preferred the term postmistress—of the small town of Crozet, Mary Minor Haristeen would never be mistaken for rich.
Marilyn Sanburne, known as Mim or Big Marilyn, clasped and unclasped her perfectly manicured hands. The wife of Crozet’s mayor and one of Albemarle’s richer citizens, she should have been cool as a cucumber. But a slight case of nerves rattled her as she cast her eyes over the august audience, which included the director of Monticello, the exuberant and fun-loving Oliver Zeve. The head of archaeology, Kimball Haynes, at thirty quite young for such a post, stood at the back of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—Mim cleared her throat while her daughter, Little Marilyn, thirty-two, viewed her mother with a skillful show of rapt attention—“thank you all for taking time out from your busy schedules to gather with us tonight on this important occasion for our beloved Monticello.”
“So far so good,” Mrs. Hogendobber whispered to Harry.
“With the help of each one of you, we have raised five hundred thousand dollars for the purpose of excavating and ultimately restoring the servants’ quarters on Mulberry Row.”
As Mim extolled the value of the new project, Harry reflected on the continued duplicity that existed in her part of the world. Servants. Ah, yes, servants—not slaves. Well, no doubt some of them were cherished, beloved even, but the term lent a nice gloss to an ugly reality—Mr. Jefferson’s Achilles’ heel. He was so tremendously advanced in most ways, perhaps it was churlish to wish he had been more advanced about his source of labor. Then again, Harry wondered what would happen if the shoe were on her foot: Would she be able to refuse a skilled labor force? She would need to house them, clothe them, feed them, and provide medical care. Not that any of that was cheap, and maybe in today’s dollars it would add up to more than a living wage. Still, the moral dilemma if one was white, and Harry was white, nagged at her.
Nonetheless, Mim had provided the driving energy behind this project, and its progress was a great personal victory for her. She had also made the largest financial contribution to it. Her adored only son had sped away from Crozet to marry a sophisticated model, a flashy New York lady who happened to be the color of caf? au lait. For years Mim had refused her son entry to the ancestral mansion, but two years ago, thanks to a family crisis and the soft words of people like Miranda Hogendobber, Big Marilyn had consented to let Stafford and Brenda come home for a visit. Confronting one’s own prejudices is never easy, especially for a person as prideful as Mim, but she was trying, and her efforts to unearth this portion of Monticello’s buried history were commendable.
Harry’s eyes swept the room. A few Jefferson descendants were in attendance. His daughters, Martha and Maria, or Patsy and Polly as they were called within the family, had provided T.J. with fifteen grandchildren. Those surviving out of that generation in turn provided forty-eight great-grandchildren.The names of Cary, Coles, Randolph, Eppes, Wayles, Bankhead, Coolidge, Trist, Meikleham, and Carr were carrying various dilutions of Jefferson blood into the twentieth century and, soon, the twenty-first.
Tracing one’s bloodlines back to the original red-haired resident of Monticello was a bit like tracing every Thoroughbred’s history back to the great sires: Eclipse, 1764; Herod, 1758; and Matchem, 1748.
Nonetheless, people did it. Mim Sanburne herself adamantly believed she was related to the great man on her mother’s side through the Wayles/Coolidge line. Given Mim’s wealth and imperious temperament, no one challenged her slender claim in the great Virginia game of ancestor worship.