Dead Man Docking - Mary Daheim [83]
Still, she felt obliged to inquire about the empty chair. “Who isn’t here yet?” she asked Jim.
Jim looked puzzled, his gaze taking in the table. “We’re all here,” he said. “Even the ones who weren’t asked. I mean—the ones Erma didn’t expect. The kitchen help must have seen to it.”
“But there’s an empty place,” Judith pointed out.
“Oh.” Jim glanced at the vacant chair. “That’s for Wilbur.”
“You mean…?”
Judith was interrupted by Erma, who was standing up and tapping a Waterford wineglass with a sterling-silver spoon. “Family and friends,” she began, “we’re gathered here this evening in mutual sorrow for the untimely passing of our dear friend Magglio Cruz. May I propose a toast to his memory?” She waited while her guests got their cocktail glasses in hand. “To a man of vision and charm who has crossed the bar. Thank you, Magglio, for everything.”
A muffled response went around the table as glasses clinked.
Rick St. George was sitting across from Judith next to Renie. “At least,” he murmured, “she didn’t claim that he’d passed the bar. I certainly don’t want someone saying that about me when I’m gone.”
Judith couldn’t help herself. She turned to Paul and lowered her voice. “What about Dixie and Émile? Shouldn’t we toast their memories as well?”
Paul’s usually pleasant features hardened. “They were employees. Peons,” he added under his breath. “They don’t count in Erma’s world.”
Judith winced. “I don’t understand that attitude. It’s so different from the one I know.”
Paul shrugged. Two young men were presenting the soup course. It looked and smelled like lobster bisque. Judith stared into the bowl, recalling that she had, in fact, collided with this same world of wealth and privilege a few years earlier. Along with Renie, the cousins had been asked to watch over a wealthy woman who lived in a gated community north of the city. The house—a mansion, really—had been called Creepers because of the vines that grew up its stone walls. But the place had been more like a prison, and death had lurked in its corridors and corners. No one in that family had been happy. Their money and their status had brought only grief. Judith felt the same sense of misery in the Giddon house that she had experienced at Creepers. She was tempted to grab Renie and bolt.
Instead, she tasted her soup and discreetly surveyed the other diners. Thirteen place settings, but one was vacant. Wilbur. Wilbur Giddon, Judith suddenly realized. The late Wilbur Giddon. Judith shivered, despite the long sleeves of her new pearl-gray suit. For the first time, she looked at the damask-covered wall behind the empty chair. A large oil painting of a large—and possibly oily—man loomed over the gathering. She didn’t understand how she could have missed seeing it upon entering the room, except that she had been focused on finding her place at the table. But the man in the portrait was bearded, balding, and wearing a Prince Albert frock coat with an ascot scarf. He evoked an era from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, making it more likely that he was Wilbur’s grandfather. Whoever he was, he looked formidable as well as arrogant.
Judith’s gaze dropped down to Anemone, who was seated on the other side of Paul. The young woman seemed so delicate and unprepossessing. It was difficult to believe that her bloodlines must carry some of the same genes as those of the man in the portrait.
Rick, who had been watching Judith, leaned across the table. “Elwood Edward Giddon,” he said. “At one time he owned most of Pacific Heights. Imposing, I suppose.”
“He looks like a big twerp to me,” Renie said to Rick in a voice just loud enough for Judith to hear.
Rick laughed carelessly. “Aren’t all robber barons twerps? Power corrupts and all that. It’s such a relief not to have to work for a living. It’d ruin my disposition. I enjoy being a kept man.”
Rhoda, who was