“Mine, too,” Annajane admitted.

“And Sallie doesn’t have a say in what happens to Quixie?”

“Nope,” Annajane said. “According to Mr. Thomas, Glenn didn’t think Sallie would want to be bothered with running the company at her age. And, after all, he’d already left her pretty well-fixed in his will.”

“My, my,” Voncile said. “I’ll bet there were some fireworks when all of that came out. Especially the part about Sophie.”

“You already knew about Sophie, didn’t you?” Annajane asked.

The older woman allowed herself a small, private smile. “I guessed,” Voncile admitted. “But I never said a word to anybody. And I never will. I’ll take it to my grave.”

“I know Mason will appreciate that. But how did you know?”

Voncile cut her sandwich half into quarters, and then eighths, but she didn’t eat them. “Mr. Glenn had me handle the paperwork to put that girl on the company payroll. We never had anybody working for us in Jacksoville, Florida, before. And then she’d call the office, sometimes, looking for him.” She pursed her lips in disapproval. “Just how old a girl was she?”

“Young. Just twenty-six when she had the baby.”

“Mercy.” She shook her head. “Mr. Glenn knew I didn’t approve of that kind of thing. He was a good man in so many ways, Annajane. He helped people in this town in more ways than you’ll ever know. Paid doctor bills, got folks out of jail. Had to get a few folks put in jail, too. He bought people cars, gave them jobs.”

Annajane smiled. “He gave me my first real job when I was fifteen, remember?”

“I sure do, honey. You were so serious and business-like. Such a good little worker. Mr. Glenn noticed that, too. You were always his favorite.”

“And he was mine, too,” Annajane said, feeling a little weepy. “Even before Mason and I got married, he always treated me like one of the family.”

“Unlike some folks,” Voncile commented. “Miss Sallie just never did take to you, did she?”

“Sallie … had an old, silly grudge against my mother,” Annajane said. “And she always thought Mason could have done better. Maybe she was right.”

“Never,” Voncile said. “I always thought you were Mason’s one true love, even though I did get hoodwinked by that Celia. Mason is a good man, like his daddy. Did you know Mr. Glenn helped us buy our house? My husband, Claude, had been out of work, so the bank wouldn’t give us a mortgage. Mr. Glenn held the paper on the house and let me pay off a little bit every week. Interest-free. He didn’t go to church like Miss Sallie, but he was as fine a Christian man as I ever knew. Not perfect, though. He just had a weakness for the flesh is all. I used to pray about it all the time.”

“Voncile,” Annajane hesitated. “Well, maybe it’s none of my business. Never mind.”

“Go ahead and ask, honey. You’re wanting to know if Sallie knew about the other women, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Annajane said.

Voncile rewrapped the remnants of her sandwich into a neat wax-paper bundle while she thought about her answer.

“If she knew, she never let on to me,” she said finally. “But she wouldn’t have. She is a proud lady, and of course we didn’t really have that kind of relationship. As far as Sallie was concerned, I was just somebody who worked for her husband at the plant.”

“Did Sallie know about Glenn’s heart condition?”

“I don’t see how she couldn’t have known,” Voncile said. “With them living in the same house. I sure knew about my Claude’s cancer. That man didn’t have a hangnail or a hemorrhoid that I didn’t have to take care of.”

That made Annajane laugh. She remembered Voncile’s husband. He was a skinny stick of a man, who always seemed to have an ailment of some kind. He’d taken early retirement from the plant in his late forties.

She decided to confide further in Mason’s administrative assistant. “At the lawyer’s office today, Sallie said she had no idea Glenn ever had any heart problems.”

“That’s not right. It can’t be right,” Voncile said. “Why, Annajane, that Saturday, the day he died, I talked to him on the phone that morning. With him not making it to the Christmas party the night before, I got a little worried that maybe he wasn’t feeling too good. So I called to see if he was all right.”

“What did he say?” Annajane asked, intrigued.

“He sounded funny; his voice was kind of weak,” Voncile said. “He kept insisting he was fine, but he didn’t sound fine. He sounded like he did the last time he was having chest pains. I told him he needed to call Dr. Mac or get over to the hospital.”

“Did he agree to do that?” Annajane asked.

“He kind of laughed at me and said I was overreacting. He said Sallie was right there, and she’d take good care of him.”

“What time was that?” Annajane asked.

“Hmmm.” Voncile folded and refolded her paper lunch sack while she tried to remember. “It must have been around ten o’clock, because I needed to go out and do some last-minute Christmas shopping.”

Annajane felt a chill go up her spine. “Did you check back later in the day to see how he was?”

“I tried,” Voncile said. “I called his cell phone before noon, when I got back from the store, but my call went straight to voice mail, so I called the house. Sallie answered right away, and I asked her how Mr. Glenn was feeling. She told me he was fine, which kind of surprised me. He sure wasn’t fine when I’d talked to him earlier.”

“Did you tell her he’d been having chest pains earlier in the day?”

Voncile’s face crinkled up in concentration. “It’s hard to remember—it was so long ago. I think I asked to speak to him, but she said he was taking a nap or something.”

“So you never did talk to Glenn again?”

“No,” Voncile said, frowning. “I tried later in the day, around three, maybe, but all I got was a busy signal. I tried and tried, for half an hour or so, but then I kind of forgot about it because we were getting my granddaughter’s angel costume ready for her Sunday School pageant. And then we drove over to Garner to spend the night with my daughter.”

Now it was Annajane’s turn to think back on that Saturday, with all its painful memories. She’d run into her mother-in-law at noon, at the country club, and Sallie had been oddly insistent that Annajane join her group for lunch.

She wondered whether Sallie was aware that her husband was having breathing problems and chest pains earlier in the day.

Voncile looked stricken. “Oh heavens. He must have had his heart attack right after I talked to him.”

“I don’t think so,” Annajane said slowly. “Sallie said she found Glenn unconscious at around six that evening. That’s when she called the ambulance. They worked on him at the hospital, but the doctors said it was too late.”

“But that was hours and hours after I talked to him,” Voncile said. “I thought … I mean, I always assumed he’d gone to the hospital earlier in the day, right after we talked. Are you sure that’s right, Annajane?”

“Very sure,” Annajane said soberly.

Voncile crumpled her paper bag into a tight ball. “I just don’t understand. Why didn’t Sallie call the doctor? Or take him to the hospital that morning?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Annajane told her.

51

Pokey Bayless Riggs stood on the doorstep of her brother’s bachelor pad, a contemporary two-story wooden structure with soaring beams and weirdly jutting angles located on the grounds of the Cherry Hill estate, just out of Sallie’s line of vision. She’d called in advance and left numerous voice-mail messages, but she had gotten no response. Now she was determined to have it out with him, face-to-face.

She’d been ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door with no luck. Finally, she took a step backward and, cupping her hands into a makeshift megaphone, began hollering, “Davis Bayless! I know you’re in there, you weasel, so you might as well let me in.