Death on the Family Tree Page 4

  “Okay.” She pressed the phone hard to her ear. Even after all these years, she felt their separation most keenly when they spoke on the phone. She missed seeing his face and reading his body language while they talked.

  It was his body language she had first noticed at a Christmas party in Buckhead during her freshman year at Agnes Scott. Her dad had retired and her parents had moved to Atlanta in December, to be nearer her mother’s parents and Sara Claire. Through Sara Claire, Katharine had received invitations to several parties over the holidays. She was just recovering from a tempestuous high school romance and a broken heart and was not interested in men, but at one party, a young man near the fireplace intrigued her. He was medium in most respects—medium height, medium build, medium brown hair—but in that sparkly, frenetic setting he radiated calm. She had moved over nearer to see what he and an older man had found to talk about, and as she listened, she was amazed at both the breadth of what the young man seemed to know and at the courteous way he managed to disagree without being disagreeable.

  When they were introduced, his face lit up and became quite attractive. “I’ve heard about you from Miss Lucy Everanes,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” She suspected he said something similar to every girl he met, but she let him bring her a glass of punch. Soon they were deep in conversation about literature. He was a senior at Georgetown and the first man she had ever met who valued her for her opinions. Her roommates would later tease her that Tom Murray seduced her mind.

  She found him fascinating, with many interests and a daunting intelligence. After he returned to Georgetown they wrote long letters. Katharine found herself looking up new words in the dictionary to be sure she used them correctly. She began to do what he liked to do and to read what he liked to read. She took up tennis, running, and biking, and saw all the movies he mentioned so they could discuss them.

  When he came to Atlanta for spring vacation, they saw each other every day. She tried to go on four or five hours of sleep, as he did, until one night past midnight when he suggested they get up early and climb Stone Mountain the next morning to watch the sun rise. “I can’t keep up with you!” she had cried in defeat,

  “I don’t want you to keep up,” he had replied. “I love you for yourself.” When he kissed her—a gentle, lingering kiss—she had gotten dizzy with joy.

  They got married the summer after she graduated, and over the years of their marriage, she had watched with pride and amazement while his energy, courtesy, and ambition carried him up the corporate ladder. He continued to respect her opinions and to value her as a partner. She considered it a privilege to provide a calm, lovely home for him to return to. At almost fifty, he could still outride, outswim, outthink, and outread anybody she knew, and while he claimed to be looking forward to a day when he could retire and read all the books he had accumulated in his library, she couldn’t picture him sitting still for more than one day at a stretch.

  But she had learned to read his body language more carefully. Although his voice never showed it, she could tell when he was really interested in a conversation and when he was pretending to listen while his mind was miles away. She could tell when he was weary or bored and pumping himself up and when he was so genuinely excited about something that the energy generated itself. He often claimed, “You’re the only person in the world I can’t fool, Katharine. The only one I can really be myself with.”

  She often prided herself that they had built a better, more companionable marriage than most of their friends. They still loved to travel together or to sit by a fire and talk, and his absences lent a zest to the time he was around.

  “What are your plans for today?” He sounded like he was settling in for a long chat, but she knew he must have a full schedule and couldn’t talk long.

  “Nothing much. Autumn Village sent Aunt Lucy’s stuff—the things I told them to give away—so I’ve been going through it. They also want me to come get the secretary. Anthony’s going to fetch it tonight,” she added quickly, not wanting to burden him with domestic details.

  “That’s good. I’d guess the rest can pretty much be thrown out, right?”

  “Most of it. But listen, did you ever buy any books about Celtic archaeology?” She needed to ask before he had to go.

  “Celtic archaeology?” His mind, which catalogued and never forgot a fact, worked silently for a long minute. “One of that series of Time-Life books I ordered years ago was about the Celts, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.”

  “Did you know the Celts were all over Europe, not just in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you take second year Latin?”

  “Yes, but what does that have to do with it?”

  “Remember the first sentence of Julius Caesar?”

  “Gallia in tres partes divasa est?” she hazarded.

  “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” he corrected her. “And what’s the rest of that sentence?”

  “There’s more? I didn’t remember that.”

  “‘Of which one is inhabited by the Belgians, another by the Aquitanians, the third by those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours, Gauls,’” he quoted.

  She never could decide whether to be delighted or exasperated by his incredible memory. “You are amazing. Do you know where the book on Celts would be?”

  “Try the bottom left shelf in my library. Gathering dust, like so many other books. When I retire, honey—”

  “I know, you’re going to read for five years straight, until you have read every book in the house. I hope you can do it on a freighter, because I want to see the world.”

  “You’ll get seasick.”

  “I’ll take pills.”

  She would have loved to talk longer, but somebody spoke behind him and he said, “Gotta run. We’re due in a meeting in five minutes. Happy birthday, darling.”

  As she hung up it occurred to her that Tom hadn’t shown the slightest curiosity about why she suddenly wanted to read about ancient Celts. Once again she had the feeling that she—her interests, crises, and little joys—were mere blips on the screens of other people’s lives.

  She located The Celts: Europe’s People of Iron exactly where Tom had said it would be. She took it to the sofa in the den and in less than an hour had a few answers and more questions.

  Hallstatt, she had learned, was the name given to a burial ground and the remains of a Celtic village discovered in 1846 at Salzberg, an Austrian mountain with a core of hard rock salt (not to be confused with the Austrian city, Salzburg). Salz berg had been mined from 1000–400 B.C., and a thriving and prosperous community had grown up near the mine, because salt was a precious commodity for prehistoric people, so valuable it was sometimes called “white gold.” They used it for preserving food and leather, for healing, and for trade. Mining the salt was extremely difficult with primitive equipment, but much wealth could be made from salt.

  Katharine paused long enough to think about the woman for whom that necklace had been made. Had she been the wife of one who grew wealthy from the mine?

  She returned to the book. A landslide shut down the mine around 400 B.C. and mining was not resumed until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1846, Georg Ramsauer, the government-appointed director of the salt mines, was overseeing the excavation of gravel needed to pave a road when his men came across a human skull and a bronze earring in the earth. Ramsauer slowly excavated with a shovel and found an entire skeleton, then a second, wearing a bronze bracelet. He suspected he had found an ancient cemetery and tested his theory by staking an area and lifting away the topsoil. Sure enough, he unearthed seven skeletons laid in two rows, adorned with bronze jewelry.

  Again Katharine put down the book. Had the woman who owned what she was coming to think of as “the necklace” died young and been buried with her jewelry? How young would she have been when she married? Was he kind to her, or brutal?

  She sighed. It was that kind of
unanswerable question that most interested her in history, not who fought whom when.

  She learned that with the approach of winter, Georg Ramsauer replaced the soil and put off further excavation until spring, and reported his finds to the Austrian government. The following spring he was given authority, funds, and detailed instructions for excavating the site. Ramsauer’s team dug for the next seventeen years, turning up nearly a thousand graves and more than six hundred bronze, iron, and gold artifacts from the Celts, some dating as far back as 1000 B.C..

  Ramsauer documented every stage of his excavations and kept a detailed diary and a running inventory of all recovered artifacts. He also hired artists to paint watercolors of some of the graves and of his best finds.

  One sentence made Katharine catch her breath. Ramsauer’s diary had disappeared, and had never been found. Could it possibly be—?

  “Nonsense,” she told herself aloud. “Where would Aunt Lucy get Ramsauer’s diary?” But she felt her pulses quicken at a photograph of bronze necklaces very like the one in the box.

  Katharine finished the article, closed the book and mulled over three facts:

  Georg Ramsauer’s diary disappeared.

  He gave away many artifacts, with no record of who received them.

  He was the father of twenty-four children.

  Children? Wasn’t the climber in the clipping a Ramsauer?

  She returned to the music room, picked up the diary, and opened the cover, hoping for a name and date. The inside cover was bare and the first page simply dated 15/6—the European style for June 15—without a year. She read the first sentence and discovered that even without a dictionary, she could translate it.

  Ein neuer Anfang ein neues Tagebuch verdient. “A new beginning deserves a new journal.” Could that possibly refer to the beginnings of the official excavation?

  She shook the book gently to locate the clipping. Sure enough, the dead man was Ludwig Ramsauer. Was he a descendant of Georg?

  Katharine sank to the piano bench and held the book reverently. All her life she had marveled when a lost piece of music or work of art turned up in somebody’s attic. She had never imagined it could happen to her. She wanted to sit down and translate the diary immediately, but feared she might damage it. She would make a copy. And first she’d try to find out if it was, indeed, Ramsauer’s diary. Who would be likely to know?

  She had volunteered at the Atlanta History Center for years and knew several curators. While they focused on Atlanta history, perhaps one of them could identify the necklace and diary or steer her to someone who could.

  She could also use the Kenan Research Center to look up Aunt Sara Claire’s wedding on microfilmed back issues of the old Atlanta Constitution, to verify that the man in the wedding picture was the elusive Mr. Carter. Aunt Sara Claire would have made sure her wedding was reported in the Sunday paper, with full names of all the attendants.

  As she headed to shower and dress, Katharine sang, “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.” Except she changed the words to “It’s my birthday and I’ll play if I want to.”

  She took special pains with her hair and makeup and squirted on perfume. Then she slipped on white pants, a soft yellow T-shirt, and her favorite big shirt, a fantasy in Southwest colors of dark brown, rust red, light orange, and turquoise. She added a silver and turquoise necklace and dangle earrings, and slipped her feet into soft brown huaraches she had bought in Mexico. As she passed the mirror, she told her reflection, “If only the FedEx man could see you now, baby. You clean up real good.”

  She wondered again about the heavy necklace downstairs, and the woman for whom it had been made. Was she dark or fair? Lovely or plain? Obviously she had once been the wife or daughter of an important man. Had she peered into a lake as Katharine peered into her mirror, examining her image, wondering if she was still attractive or if her beauty was beginning to fade? As Katharine turned from the mirror, for just an instant she again thought she saw the shadow of a dark-haired woman to one side, but when she stepped back to look, it was a trick of the light.

  Katharine rewrapped the necklace and tucked it with the diary into a small cloth tote bag. As she picked up her purse, she noticed that she had left Aunt Lucy’s peach-pit necklace on the kitchen counter. She scooped it up and dropped it into the bag with the necklace and diary, intending to stop just before she left her property and toss it into the bushes to decay. At least that way, it would be good for something.

  But she forgot to toss it, because she got engrossed in her standard conversation with her father about her car. “A Cadillac is safer than a lot of other cars,” she pointed out, “and an SUV is practical for hauling things around. Besides, Tom picked out this car and brought it home. I’d have bought a Saab, or maybe a Saturn.”

  Her father, as usual, did not reply—perhaps because he’d been dead fifteen years.

  “What should I do with the rest of my life?” she asked the silence.

  It must be break-time in heaven. She still got no reply.

  She parked on the lower level of the parking deck and climbed the hill to the brick building that housed the history center’s museum, gift shop, offices, and classrooms.

  “I can’t really tell you a thing about this,” the Curator of Decorative Arts said regretfully a few minutes later. “As you know, we specialize in things connected to Atlanta history. I’d suggest you try Emory’s Carlos Museum. But I’ll tell you what—an Emory history professor is browsing the museum this morning and he said he’d be doing research in the Kenan Center later. He might be able to tell you more than I can. Ask the staff to tell him you want to talk to him when he arrives.”

  Katharine went up the hill to the building that housed the research center, produced her membership card, left everything in a locker except for a note pad and a pencil, pulled open the heavy glass doors, and stepped into another world.

  Chapter 4

  The history center library had always been one of her favorite places. In a bustling city, it was an oasis of calm with comfortable reading chairs and soft yellow walls interspersed with large windows looking out on restful green vistas of well-landscaped grounds. On other days she had sat for hours reading Atlanta history for pleasure, with no object in mind. Today she headed straight to the microfilm room, which was separated from the rest of the library by another wall of glass. An elderly woman was scanning one microfilm screen, but did not look up. She had a short silver Afro and skin the color of coffee with lots of milk, and she wore a red cotton top with a flowing cotton skirt in a swirling pattern of reds, blues, and yellows.

  Katharine found the box for 1939, the year of Aunt Sara Claire’s wedding, threaded the machine and moved the film forward to the second week of June. Sure enough, Aunt Sara Claire gloated on Sunday’s bridal page. The article beneath included descriptions of her wedding dress and flowers and a complete list of attendants. One of the men was Carter Everanes.

  Everanes? Was he a cousin of Lucy and Walter?

  Katharine headed to the desk. “Is there a way to trace a man who might be related to the husband of my aunt? My aunt is dead, but I’d like to know if they were related and how.”

  She tensed, waiting for the librarian to ask what right she had to poke around in her aunt’s husband’s past. Nosy was a word that came to mind. But the librarian acted as if it were a normal request—and perhaps where she worked, it was. “You need to speak to our genealogy librarian.” Her British accent hinted that her own genealogy wasn’t catalogued in a Georgia library. “But he’ll be in a meeting all morning. Perhaps—”

  “I’ll help her,” rasped a gravelly voice at Katharine’s elbow.

  She turned to see a man not much taller than she, with a tanned face, a nose like a hawk’s beak, and a gray ponytail pulled back at his neck. He wore black jeans, black boots, and a black T-shirt with GIVE ME LIBERTY OR ELSE on the front. When he smiled, his crooked teeth were stained and brown. “Lamar Franklin, ma’am, at your ser vice. I do gen
ealogy all the time.” His accent was pure mountain Georgia. “What you wanna know? How your aunt’s husband was related to this other guy?”

  It took all her willpower not to step back from a gust of old cigarettes and coffee. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I can come back another day.”

  “It’s no trouble.” He waved a tanned arm bearing an anchor tattooed over ropy muscles. “Do you know when your aunt’s husband was born? Roughly, at least?”

  “Nineteen fifteen.” She had filled out enough forms for Aunt Sara Claire to be able to figure that out.

  “Two years older than my old man. He grow up around here?”

  “Oh, yes. But I don’t know where his—ah—relative grew up.”

  “Let’s hope he came from Atlanta. What’s his name?”

  “Carter Everanes.”

  “Could you spell the last name?”

  When she complied, he took her elbow and steered her away from the desk. “Let’s start with your aunt’s husband, then, and members of his family. We’ll begin with the 1930 census. First, we’ll need the Soundex code.”

  He went to a shelf near the microfilm room and pulled out a thick book. “This here’s The Soundex Daitch-Mokotoff Reference Guide. Soundex is one of the finest systems ever invented.” He led Katharine toward a table, still talking. “It’s a method of indexing names phonetically rather than the way they’re spelled, which makes it easier to find names which sound alike but are spelled entirely differently. This is very important in genealogical research, since a name may be spelled several ways by different generations. Even members of the same family may change the spelling of their name.” The lecture went oddly with his appearance, for he reeled the long words off his tongue like he used them often. “Soundex groups consonants under six categories of key letters and equivalents and ignores vowels, so several names have the same code.” He opened the guide. “What’s the surname we’re wantin’ again?” He opened the book.