Chapter 6 - THE UNRAVELING OF EMILY
The news from Legare Street arrived not by telephone, but in the person of my father’s junior partner, a young man named Charles Beaufort who arrived at Oak Bluff on Thursday afternoon in a dusty BMW that smelled of overheated brakes and panic.
Margaret did not invite him into the drawing room. She received him on the lower veranda, standing beside a basket of dried lavender she was stripping for the linen chests, while I sat thirty feet away beneath the shade of the scuppernong arbor with a drawing board across my knees.
My hand was wrapped in a light elastic dressing—the Tuesday procedure had left my wrist sore, but for the first time in nine years, the thumb didn't pull against my forearm like a tethered goat. The fingers rested naturally against the white paper.
“Mrs. Callahan,” Beaufort began, his voice thin, sweating through the collar of his pink oxford shirt. “Mr. Whitmore asked me to deliver this in person. He felt... given the delicate nature of the situation... that a process server would be inappropriate.”
Margaret didn't look up from her lavender. Her fingers, dark-stained from the herb, moved with steady, mechanical precision, dropping the dry gray flowers into a wicker bowl.
“Mark Whitmore hasn't set foot on this island since Arthur caught him shooting woodcock over bait in seventy-eight,” she said. “What does he want, Charles? Be quick. The gnats will be up in twenty minutes.”
Beaufort cleared his throat, glanced nervously at me beneath the grapevines, and pulled a blue-backed legal document from his leather portfolio.
“It is a petition for an accounting,” Beaufort said. “And... a formal notice of trespass against Dr. Julian Callahan regarding the removal of certain medical equipment and personal property from forty-four Legare Street.”
“The van,” I called out from the arbor.
Beaufort jumped slightly. He didn't look at my face; he looked at the hem of my skirt. “Miss Clara... your father’s position is that the vehicle was purchased through a family trust of which he is the sole trustee, and its unauthorized removal constitutes—”
“The van is currently behind the barn,” Margaret said, her voice dropping into that terrifying, flat register. “The radiator is cracked, the rear tires are down to the cords, and Hattie’s nephew has already drained the oil, which looked like molasses that had been left in a sun-porch for five years. If Mark Whitmore wants that piece of scrap iron, tell him to bring a flatbed and four men who don't mind the smell of dead possum, because there’s one that crawled into the air intake three weeks ago and died.”
Beaufort swallowed hard. “Mrs. Callahan, there is also the matter of the... the wedding expenses. Mr. Whitmore has incurred liabilities in excess of forty-two thousand dollars to the caterer, the florist, and the musicians. Since the... the interruption was initiated by a member of the Callahan family—”
Margaret stopped her hands.
She turned her head very slowly. The silence that descended on the veranda was not like the silence in the church; it was hotter, drier, and smelled of the salt mud that was baking in the two o'clock sun.
“Charles,” she said softly.
“Yes, ma'am?”
“Do you know what a forensic audit is?”
Beaufort’s face lost the last trace of its pink afternoon flush. “Mrs. Callahan, I am only the associate—”
“Because if Mark Whitmore files one single sheet of paper in the Charleston County courthouse,” Margaret said, stepping around the basket of lavender, her green eyes fixed on the young lawyer with the dead-level intensity of a surveyor’s scope, “I will have Arthur’s old firm in Columbia file a petition for a full judicial accounting of the estate of Emily Pinckney Whitmore from the year 2012 to the present date.”
She took one step closer. Beaufort retreated an inch, his heel hitting the leg of a wicker settee.
“I will have them subpoena every invoice from the burn center in Augusta,” she whispered. “I will have them depose the contractor who repaired the roof at forty-four Legare Street after the fire. I will have them cross-reference the six-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance payout on that house with the registration papers of the three warmbloods Mark bought for his youngest daughter in Camden.”
She reached out and tapped the blue-backed document in Beaufort’s hand with a single, lavender-stained finger.
“You tell Mark that if I see your little German car on this oyster shell road again, I will not call the sheriff. I will call the federal bankruptcy trustee for the Eastern District of South Carolina. And Mark will spend his retirement not at the Carolina Yacht Club, but in a federal holding cell in Estill, explaining to three men from the Internal Revenue Service why his daughter’s skin-graft fund was used to pay the second mortgage on his beach house at Kiawah.”
Beaufort did not say another word. He did not ask for a receipt. He did not look at me again. He turned on his heel, his leather soles slipping once on the polished cypress of the veranda, and walked toward his car with the frantic, jerky stride of a man who has just heard the first dry rattle of a copperhead in the pinestraw.
Margaret watched the dust from his BMW drift over the marsh grass.
“The horses,” I said from the shade of the arbor.
She turned to me. “What about them, Clara?”
“He really did it, didn't he?” I looked down at my drawing board. I had been trying to sketch the curve of a single scuppernong leaf—the way the yellow veins branched out through the green, tough tissue like the arteries in an open arm. “He took the money that was supposed to pay for the hand surgeries. He took the money that was supposed to buy the electric chair with the standing frame.”
Margaret walked down the three steps to the arbor. She did not sit down. She stood over me, looking down at the white paper.
“He didn't just take it, Clara,” she said. “He spent it in front of you. Every time Emily went to a horse show, every time Linda bought a new hat for the preservation tour, they were wearing your fingers. They were wearing your skin. And they hated you because every time they looked at you, they had to remember what their clothes were made of.”
She reached down, took the pencil from my hand, and turned the drawing board ninety degrees to the left.
May you like
“The light is coming from the south now,” she said. “You’ve got the shadow on the wrong side of the leaf, Clara. Don't let your anger make you sloppy with your values.”
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