Death on the Family Tree Read Free Page B

be after him.
    Not until a minute later did Katharine realize he might remember a Carter connected with Aunt Lucy. Dutch had known Lucy since they were children. But before she could dial his number, the phone shrilled with another caller.
    The voice that flowed over the line this time was thick as honey and almost as sweet. “Oh, Katharine, I am so glad I caught you. I was afraid you’d already gone out to some old meeting, and I am at my wits’ end. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
    “What’s the matter?” Katharine didn’t know why she bothered to ask. Posey Buiton, Tom’s older sister, had been pouring her problems into Katharine’s telephone for twenty years, and they all began with the same word.
    “Holly, of course—or Hollis, as she now insists on being called. Neither of my other girls ever changed their names.” Posey’s voice dripped with indignation.
    Katharine set the old box on the kitchen table and headed to the cabinet for a tall glass. She tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder, fumbled in the freezer for ice cubes and silently slid them into the glass, filled the glass with sweet tea, squeezed in a slice of lemon, and stirred with one forefinger—remembering too late that she had carried those boxes and hadn’t washed her hands. With a shrug to dismiss the germs, she carried the tea over to the breakfast table and settled in for the duration. All that time, Posey had burbled on about the ingratitude of children who change the names their parents bestow upon them.
    Katharine raised her glass in a silent toast to Hollis for having the gumption to stand up for her name. Who but Posey would give three daughters sensible names like Laura, Mary, and Hollis, then call them Lolly, Molly, and Holly? After Holly’s birth, Posey had even considered changing her own name to Polly until Wrens, her easygoing husband, said with a wave, “Go ahead, Sugah. Do whatever you like. But Polly sounds like a damned parrot to me.” Tom claimed that Wrens Buiton was the only man in the world who could live with Posey for thirty years and still adore her.
    Katharine had always had a soft spot for Hollis. The child was dark, thin, and intense, unlike her sisters. They had been cheerful blond children who enthusiastically played soccer and tennis, won ribbons on swim teams, and served as secretary or treasurer of every ser vice organization at Westminster School. They had grown into robust young women who efficiently organized their own households around their children’s sports practices and their own aerobics classes, tennis matches, and Junior League events.
    Holly had not arrived until Molly was six and Lolly eight. When taken to join a soccer team, she had gone onto the field, plopped down to the ground, and spent the next hour drawing designs in the dirt. When taken to the pool, she floated on her back watching clouds and refused to race. While her sisters were improving their tennis at the Cherokee Town Club, Holly was badgering the maid to teach her to sew. While her classmates were showing off the latest styles from Saks, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus, Holly was stitching up outlandish concoctions from scraps of silk, feathers, and beads. When other girls were getting blond highlights, Holly was streaking her dark hair purple, green, and blue. When her peers applied to Agnes Scott, Vassar, Sewanee, and the University of Georgia, Holly announced that if she couldn’t go to the Savannah Campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, she wouldn’t go to college at all.
    “I swan,” Posey had wailed more than once, “if I hadn’t been awake for that child’s birth, with Wrens right there beside me, I’d swear they switched her at the hospital.”
    Back when Holly and Jon were both in seventh grade, he had summed up the struggles between his cousin and her mother in succinct terms: “Holly hates exercise and good works.” Katharine had thought that perceptive for a