Now Let's Talk of Graves by Sarah Shankman Read Free Book Online Page B

why do you stay here? Sam wanted to ask. Why do you do this year after year? But that was grist for a long sitdown. Not now. Not here.
    The lords and ladies pranced for a while longer, then the tableau ended and the orchestra struck up. The king and queen took the floor.
    “Let the dancing begin!”
    “Miss Cynthia Butler!”
    “Mrs. Archibald Ross! Mrs. Ross!”
    “Miss Penelope Addison!”
    Black-coated committeemen sporting yellow boutonnieres circled their section, calling out the names of the chosen ladies, who rose to take the arms of masked and costumed gentlemen.
    “Did they forget us?” Sam poked Kitty, reminding her she hadn’t come all the way from Atlanta to sit.
    “Just wait. I told you, wives first, then mistresses and/or widowed mothers. They’ll get to us after that.”
    Sam hated cooling her heels. A dancing fool since she was big enough to bop, she wanted to be out there.
    She closed her eyes for a minute, and Sean waltzed in on another wave of memory. Her sweet, redheaded Sean O’Reilly, San Francisco’s hip-popping, slipping, and sliding chief of detectives, her own true love. They’d made lots of good moves together.
    “Miss Samantha Adams.”
    They’d had a date to go dancing the night he’d flown up into the air above rain-slick Van Ness Avenue, tapping his way up into the sky, falling back dead. Stopped in the middle of his twirl through life by a drunk driver.
    “Sam!”
    Kitty was hissing in her ear. She snapped to. Easy does it. One ball-and-chain, one buck-and-wing at a time. She stood, ready to put her little foot right there.
    “Miss Adams?”
    A tall masked man in a golden costume was waiting. Giving her his arm. Leading her onto the dance floor. Now, this was more like it. Dancing with a stranger whose face you couldn’t see was a hoot, the stuff of fairy tales.
    “Mademoiselle.” He bowed and brushed his mask above her hand in a kiss, took her in his arms, and whirled her out and about and around, her silk skirt swinging.
    This was more like it.
    Until he stumbled and almost fell.
    Then she caught a whiff of whiskey from under his mask. Dragon breath.
    Ditto her second partner.
    Both drunk as skunks, having imbibed widely and deeply at the in crowd’s bar behind the stage. Boys would be boys even if they were dressed up in fancy white tights and cloth of gold.
    Fairy tales, indeed.
    No Prince Charming for Miss Samantha in this bunch. Not tonight.
    Nope, she was afraid that as in many things, her anticipation—shopping for the turquoise ballgown, flying over from Atlanta, primping and prettying—was the best part. The reality was a bunch of drunk snobs playing at court.
    For fairy tales were just that, the stuff of young girls’ and fools’ dreams.
    *
    A couple of blocks away, General Taylor Johnson drove her great-grandmother, Ida, up to her house on St. Ann in the Quarter. They sat in the bright red ZZZ Service ambulance pulled up beside a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign at the curb.
    “I don’t know why you had to go to all this trouble, cutting your ambulance through police lines. I told you I could get home my ownself,” Ida was saying.
    “Maw Maw, if you don’t beat all. First you think you’re taking the bus, which isn’t running downtown tonight anyway. You think you’re gonna get yourself down here practically right in the front yard of the auditorium—which you couldn’t get near tonight if you were God Almighty. ’Less He happened to know somebody in Rex or Comus. You’d think you gonna fly? You got that kind of gris-gris, old woman?”
    Ida just sniffed and shot G.T. a look. Then she reached down somewhere inside her clothing and pulled out a little pouch, dipped some snuff behind her bottom lip, said, “Let me get on in my house, where ain’t nobody fussing at me.”
    “In a minute. I want to finish telling you about what happened.”
    “Okay, go on. So the little skinny white boy you picked up fainted out at the airport is laying up in the back of