Savannah Blues by Mary Kay Andrews

Author:Mary Kay Andrews
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061827389
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-02-23T02:14:24.939000+00:00

Cousin Lucy’s house was a neat redbrick box on a narrow street in Thunderbolt, which used to be a fishing village on the edge of the Wilmington River, but the shrimp mostly played out in the 1980s, and now Thunderbolt is just a suburb of Savannah.

Mama unlocked Lucy’s front door. I stepped inside and nearly passed out. The place smelled like the bottom of an ashtray.

“Whew!” I said, fanning my face. “Now I know why that statue’s crying.”

“Blasphemer. Let me just air it out a little,” Mama said, bustling around drawing the drapes and opening windows.

The air helped, but not much. I looked around the living room. Everything was a dull yellow; walls, floors, drapes, and even the frayed and spotted wall-to-wall carpet. Everything had a thin nicotine-tinged sheen to it.

“Isn’t this nice?” Mama said, running her hands over the arm of a sofa. “Cousin Lucy spent a lot of money on this furniture, you know.”

The sofa was an overstuffed roll-arm number from the forties, with maroon cut-plush upholstery. There were two matching armchairs too. I’d have snapped them up in a minute at another house, but here they had that sick yellow tobacco sheen. To be usable, they’d have to be stripped down to muslin and re-covered. Not an inexpensive proposition.

“Look at this dining-room set,” Mama said, moving through the arched doorway into the next room.

It was a good solid Grand Rapids, Michigan–made mahogany dining suite, again from the 1940s. There was a table, six chairs, a sideboard, and a china cabinet. I saw sets like this in every other estate sale in Savannah.

“Real antique,” Mama said. “We were thinking maybe a thousand dollars for the whole set. A bargain, right?”

“Very nice,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal. The varnish on all the furniture had blackened with age and would probably need to be stripped. Again, not too profitable.

“The bedrooms are back this way,” Mama said. I followed her into the hallway. She stopped in front of a small niche in the wall and fell to her knees.

“It’s the Infant of Prague,” she whispered, gesturing toward the niche.

The Infant of Prague looked like every other statue I’d seen in every other little old Catholic lady’s house I’d ever been in. Painted plaster, with a bemused look on its face. But no tears, that I could see.

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