Page 50 of Hello, Summer
“Bye-bye.” The little girl waved her tiny panties as a farewell gesture.
“I’ll walk you out,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got to start setting up for a service this afternoon.” She glanced behind the sofa and sighed. “Oh Lord. What am I gonna do with this child? Stay right there, Graceanne,” she said sternly. “And put those clothes back on. Right now, before you give some old fart a heart attack.”
Conley stared straight ahead as Kennedy steered her toward the funeral home’s front door, but she still had flashbacks of standing in a never-ending receiving line inside one of the reception rooms just off this hallway, dressed in a starchy black dress, pantyhose, and heels, as somber-faced well-wishers grasped her hand and murmured condolences after her father’s funeral.
“Doesn’t it ever bother you, living with all this death, constantly?” she asked.
“Guess I don’t think of it like that,” Kennedy said. “There’s sadness, yeah, but like my dad always says, we’re helping families say goodbye to their loved ones. That’s not a bad thing. And I get to raise my kid here and work with my family. You get that, right, working in your own family’s business?”
“Have you met Grayson?” Conley grimaced. “Not so much. There’s a lot my sister and I don’t see eye to eye about.”
“How is she?” Kennedy asked. “I’ve been so busy with work and the kid, I haven’t made it over to the Wrinkle Room in what seems like ages.”
“The Wrinkle Room? What’s that?”
“You know. That’s what we call the bar at the country club. We’re usually the only people in there under the age of sixty.”
“Ohhh. Good one. Grayson’s fine. I guess.”
“Tell her I said hey,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll let Dad know you dropped by.”
17
She was on the way back to theBeaconoffice when Grayson called. “Where are you?” she asked, skipping, as usual, any niceties like a greeting.
“Just leaving the funeral home,” Conley said. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the office. We just got an emailed press release from Robinette’s office about the funeral arrangements, with some canned statements from a bunch of political types. Want me to email it to you?”
“You can, but I’m on my way to the office now, so I’ll look at it when I get there,” Conley told her.
When she arrived at theBeacon,she found Grayson at her desk, working her way through a stack of bank statements. The bedding and clothes she’d seen earlier were gone, and so was the rest of the staff. Grayson was dressed in a faded Griffin County High Marlin’s tank top and blue spandex bike shorts. Her arms were tanned, but shockingly thin. Grayson had lost weight. A lot of weight.
Standing over the desk and looking down at her older sister, Conley noticed the number of silver streaks in Grayson’s hair, and with Grayson’s reading glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, she looked like a feminine version of their father at that age.
It struck her then that Grayson was exactly the age their father had been when Melinda pulled her first of many vanishing acts.
“What happened to Lillian and Michael?” Conley asked.
Grayson shoved the bank statements aside, covering them with page proofs of the IGA’s next display ad. “I sent ’em home. I can’t afford to pay overtime. Lillian worked late last night, and Michael’s covering a minor-league baseball game in Apalachicola tonight.” She pointed at a desk in the outer office. “I had Lillian clean off a work space for you. I printed out the press release from Robinette’s office.”
“Thanks.”
“You getting any good stuff about Robinette?” she asked.
“Depends on how you definegood.According to Kennedy McFall, there’ll be a ceremony to honor Robinette in D.C. on Tuesday at the Capitol, then the actual funeral is next Saturday, pending the medical examiner’s release of the body. I’ve also got some juicy stuff courtesy of my session with Rowena this morning.”
“How’d that go?”
“The old bird’s definitely got the good dirt,” Conley said. “Listen to this—she told me Robinette got Vanessa pregnant while Symmes was still married to his first wife.”
“You mean with Charlie? No shit? Are you sure? I mean, consider the source.”
“Rowena claims she saw the baby’s birth certificate with her own eyes. Charlie was born three months before Symmes Robinette’s divorce from his first wife was final. Symmes and Vanessa got married the day after the divorce was final—in the House chapel in D.C.—by the House chaplain.”
“Damn,” Grayson chortled. “I thought old Symmes was Mr. Christian Family Values. How come this is the first I’m hearing about it?”
“Granddaddy wouldn’t run the story Rowena wrote about the kid,” Conley said. “He considered it gossip and beneath the paper’s dignity.”
