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Death on the Family Tree
A Family Tree Mystery
Chapter One
Wednesday, June 7
Katharine Murray woke on her forty-sixth birthday and realized that nobody needed her.
She got the message slowly, not being at her best early in the day. She was halfway through brushing her teeth before she even remembered it was her birthday, which was surprising, considering how much she loved any cause for celebration. She spat, rinsed her mouth, smacked her lips to get full benefit from the peppermint flavor, then crooned, "Happy, happy birthday, baby," as she leaned closer to the mirror for the world's first glimpse of herself at forty-six.
She looked remarkably like she had at forty-five: same heart-shaped face with prominent cheekbones and a dusting of freckles, same long auburn hair in a practical blunt cut so she could wear it in several styles, same golden-brown eyes that Tom, her husband, used to call topaz back when he still said things like that. With one fingertip, she traced what she hoped people thought were smile lines around her mouth, not teeth-clenching lines from raising two children to adulthood.
"Same old same old," she murmured to her reflection and padded back to her bedroom.
She didn't bother to change out of the cotton knit shorts and T-shirt she slept in when she was alone in the house, just stumbled downstairs barefoot to fix birthday breakfast for one.
At the kitchen door she was stopped in her tracks by her first clear thought of the day: Why did I re-do this kitchen? I don't have a soul to cook for.
Tom left Atlanta each Monday morning to keep Washington lawmakersaware of the needs of his corporation's far-reaching empire, then returned each Friday night to spend the weekend playing golf, puttering at their lake house, or watching televised sports.
Their daughter, Susan, was happily climbing the lowest rungs of the New York Stock Exchange with visions of her own trader's jacket one day.
Their son, Jonathan, had tossed his Emory mortarboard into the air three weeks before and caught a plane to China to teach English for two years.
And with the deaths of her mother and two elderly aunts in the past eighteen months, Katharine's membership in the Bi-Delts—that vast sorority of Dutiful Daughters—had expired.
Aunt Lucy had died five days before, and with her death, Katharine was well and truly orphaned. Her parents had married late and produced only one child. They hadn't even had the foresight to provide her with cousins, which in the family-conscious South made her impoverished indeed. She had never felt family-poor in the years when she was creating a home in Buckhead (still Atlanta's most desirable neighborhood) for Tom and the children, meeting the increasing needs of her mother as she battled breast cancer and Aunts Sara Claire and Lucy as they became frail and sank gently to sleep. But now—She reached for the carton of orange juice and informed the refrigerator, "All the people in my life have gone away and left me like a useless piece of driftwood on the beach of life. Do you realize it is my birthday, and for the first time in my life, I don't have a soul to celebrate with?" As she turned for a glass, she added over one shoulder, "And don't you think it's pathetic that a woman has to have the first conversation of her birthday with a refrigerator?"
She tried a few bars of "Happy birthday to you" while she filled the glass, but it is not a song that sounds best when sung to oneself.
At the breakfast table she lifted her glass in a salute. "To us, kitchen. To the unneeded of the world."
If the room felt unneeded, it didn't show it. Its pale yellow walls were bright and cheerful, hung with blue-and-white plates she and Tom had been collecting for years from countries they visited. The plates echoed Delft tiles behind the stove and blue-and-white plaid cushions on the white chairs in the adjoining breakfast room. Katharine was particularly proud of the bay window they had added by the breakfast table. Sunlight spilled through it across African violets that sat like rich jewels on the deep sill, and ran in a broad stream across the white tile floor—a floor that was finally possible now that the children were grown and no longer tracking in red Georgia mud. Just looking at the kitchen lifted her spirits.
"It's not the end of the world to spend a birthday alone," she announced as she considered breakfast options. "Shall I make eggs Benedict, to prove I matter? No, I don't matter that much. An English muffin will do."
Until that moment, she had been clowning, for Katharine was not gloomy by nature. But then, as she turned toward the bread drawer, she caught sight of her reflection in one of the new glass-fronted upper cabinets and drew a startled breath. In that light, her face was a mere transparency through which she saw rows and rows of glasses. She had the dizzying sensation that she would spend the next thirty or forty years growing increasingly invisible until she disappeared.
Or had she already?
"Oh, God!" she cried, clutching the cold granite countertop and taking short, shallow breaths of terror. "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?"
It was a purely rhetorical prayer.
She never expected FedEx to answer.
The doorbell rang while she sat waiting for the muffin to pop up from the toaster and her tea water to boil, wondering which appliance would win the breakfast derby and whether her entire future would consist of such fascinating moments.
Two large boxes sat on the stone veranda and a FedEx man was heading down the walk to his truck. The Murrays' house was up a hill and far enough from the street that delivery trucks always came up the drive.
"Thank you," she called. The Birthday Angel had come through after all, providing a day scented with roses, a mockingbird cantata, and presents before breakfast.
Death on the Family Tree
A Family Tree Mystery. Copyright © by Patricia Sprinkle. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
