Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [14]
“Don’t forget Alice.”
“Like anyone could? Humph. Alice?”
“Don’t talk to me about sin today. Shirley Hackett was probably right. It’s a good thing he’s gone or I might have helped her husband plot Addison’s demise myself.”
I picked up a small roll and examined its contents—smoked salmon with chive cream cheese. Platters of beautiful sandwiches—lobster salad on croissants, turkey on a combination of pumpernickel and rye bread, Black Forest ham and brie on sourdough, and others I had yet to discover—were placed on one side of the table and platters of bite-size pastries on the other. The coffee samovar stood on the far end with cups, saucers, cream, and sugar, and the tea service was on the other. Almost all of it was untouched.
“And no jury in the world would convict you either. Where are the kids? Russ!”
“I’m right here, Aunt Patti.”
“Get something to eat, sweetheart,” I said. “This is dinner.”
“Yeah, sure,” Russ said. “Gotta wonder what my little half-brother is eating tonight, right?”
Although Russ was usually my quiet child, it never meant the wheels of his clock weren’t turning. The woman with those baby pictures had clearly upset him.
“You listen to me right now. There’s no proof of anything,” I said. “That child could be the mailman’s for all we know.”
“Your mother’s right,” Alice said and I smiled the incredulous smile of the mother-in-law who would be happy with only the merest crumb, the tiniest bit of support, and then is so very pleasantly surprised when the daughter-in-law throws her a whole baguette. “Won’t you ask for DNA tests? I mean, she might be a complete fraud. I’ve heard of people like that, you know, showing up at weddings and funerals and making claims?”
I almost liked her then.
Mark, who was standing by taking large bites of a lobster salad sandwich, said, “Alice might be right but I think we ought to wait for her to rattle our cage. In the meanwhile, I asked Mel if there was a wills and estate guy in his firm.”
Alice beamed with pride, vindicated for a brief moment from her unchallenged position as the family’s royal pain in the ass.
“He’s with Smythe and Lincoln,” Patti said. “They probably have a hundred people who can take care of this.”
I knew Smythe and Lincoln. They were an old, white-shoe law firm with a pristine reputation that dated back to the Revolution, one of the few left in the world you might actually trust to represent you with dignity and integrity. However, I also knew their historic dignity and integrity would probably cost four hundred dollars an hour. Or more. Ah, lawyers. Everyone knows the minute lawyers get involved, they turn their meters on like a taxi on a wild goose chase and that having a paralegal merely Xerox a document and send it across the street could cost you an outrageous amount of money. Before you know it, your wallet was hemorrhaging and you could have bought oceanfront property in Costa Rica for what it would cost to probate a will. I always exercised caution when I called a lawyer.
“Yeah, well, that sounds like a good plan to me,” I said. “If I hear from her . . . what was her name?”
“I don’t even remember,” Mark said. “Did she say . . . ?”
“Jezzy LaBelle,” Patti said over Mark.
“She never said her name,” Sara said. “I was standing right there. All she did was flash the pictures of her bouncing little bastard and then Mom hit the dirt.”
“Nice way to phrase it,” Alice said, with her mouth twisted in disapproval.
“Who asked your opinion?” Sara said. “Do you have to have an opinion about everything?”
Alice shrugged her shoulders and looked away.
The doorbell rang and Albertina, who had been picking up glasses in the living room, hurried across the foyer to answer it. I put my arm around Sara to give her a little maternal support. My tiny Sara, dark-haired and moody, had never found her groove with her blond, lanky sister-in-law. Simply stated, the problems between Sara and Alice were that Alice had a boatload of advanced degrees, had stolen her precious brother,