Daughter of Deceit Read Free

the pedals yet.”
    Katharine resigned herself to the next fifteen minutes, glad their drive would not take them outside the residential part of Buckhead—streets where Posey had grown up. Katharine had scarcely comforted herself with that thought when Posey flew out of the drive without braking and barely missed the back bumper of a passing navy Jag.
    “Sorry. I was looking for my turn signal.” Posey didn’t sound the least bit dismayed. She peered after the Jag. “Wasn’t that Bara Weidenauer? Bless her heart, she is going through so much right now. Have you heard about Foley’s latest little trick?”
    Katharine shook her head. “I don’t know them very well.”
    “You know her daughter, Payne, Lolly’s roommate. She married Hamilton Anderson.”
    Nobody but Posey Buiton would have named three daughters Laura, Mary, and Hollis and insisted on calling them Lolly, Molly, and Holly. So far only the youngest had rebelled and insisted on being called by her full name.
    “Only slightly.” Katharine didn’t point out that she’d had little reason to keep track of her nieces’ college roommates—she’d had children of her own to raise.
    “You were at their wedding,” Posey persisted.
    Katharine’s chief memory of the extravaganza Bara Weidenauer had flung for her daughter was of the receiving line, where the tall dark groom stood beside his lovely but quiet bride while her mother, in a sparkling silver dress, outshone them both. Not intentionally, but because wherever Bara was, she lit up the room. “We sat on the groom’s side,” Katharine told Posey. “Ann Rose and Jeffers put us on the list.”
    The Anderson men had been the pediatricians of choice in Buckhead for half a century. Hamilton Anderson took care of Posey’s grandchildren. Hamilton’s father, Jeffers, had taken care of Posey’s three daughters and Tom and Katharine’s children, Susan and Jon. Jeffers’s widowed father, Oscar, had cared for Posey and Tom when they were small. But Katharine’s primary connection to the family was that Ann Rose Anderson, Jeffers’s wife and Hamilton’s mother, was one of her best friends, in spite of being twenty years her elder. Katharine and Posey were headed to Ann Rose’s that very morning for a meeting to discuss adult illiteracy in Atlanta.
    “Speaking of Jeffers,” Posey executed a turn without finding her signals and waved at the driver who blew his horn behind her, “didn’t I hear that he and Oscar have gone on a world cruise or something out in the Far East?”
    “Not exactly. They’re spending several months on a medical ship that stops in ports and takes care of destitute people.”
    Posey grimaced. “Lord only knows what germs they’ll pick up.”
    “They’re doctors. They know about germs. What were you going to say about Payne?”
    “She is worried sick about her mother. I am, too. I don’t know if Bara can survive.”
     
    Bara hadn’t noticed the convertible shooting out of the Murrays’ drive. She’d been taking another slug of bourbon. “I’ve had a bad shock,” she excused herself, “and whiskey is good for shock. Those blasted medals. The Holcomb family has done far more than enough for our country. What has the country ever done for us?”
    She felt her father’s grip on her shoulder as soon as she voiced that heresy. Winston Arthur Holcomb Sr. had remained a strong supporter of John F. Kennedy’s sentiments long after Kennedy was shot.
    “But Winnie,” she protested as she reached her own street, “we couldn’t all be like you.”
    How old had she been when she realized she would never play football at Georgia Tech, never become a war hero? When did she give up her dream of becoming an architect and a partner in Holcomb & Associates? At what age had she finally agreed with Nettie that she could not grow up to be just like Winnie?
    As the Jag purred up the long hill to the stucco mansion she called home, Bara demanded of the universe, “How did my life go