“Why wouldn’t she be?”
He tapped his head. “She was fragile, up here. Went through a period of deep depression just before she met Haywood, as I recall. Tried to kill herself more than once. She took a leave of absence from her job as a secretary at the courthouse and ended up quitting altogether to enter an inpatient psychiatric program.”
How terrible. “What pain she must have been in.”
“She seemed better when she met Haywood, and it was a shock when they divorced. Most around here feared she’d fall back into a depression. Then she moved and no one ever knew what became of her.” He picked up his glass. “Is she living in Auburn, too?”
“I don’t know. All I know is she once owned the house Avery is living in.”
“You let me know what you find out, y’hear?”
“I will.” I glanced down the street again. No sign of Delia. “Do you know what Patricia might have to do with Twilabeth? She has strong feelings toward her, but won’t admit to any of them.”
“Patricia? Can’t say I do. They didn’t run in the same circles. Twilabeth was down to earth, and Patricia has always had her nose in the air. Twilabeth worked nine to five, and Patricia was busy with her committees and party planning. This was when Dylan was little, so she was busy with him, too.” He shook his head. “Are you sure about the energy?”
“Positive.”
There was definitely bad blood between them, and I hoped beyond hope that Avery Bryan would be able to tell me what it was.
Chapter Twenty-one
The reason why Delia had been late was a failure on our part to plan ahead how we were going to get Jenny Jane down to Opelika.
In a closed space like the car, her ghostly presence was entirely too close, which Delia had learned rather quickly this morning when she set off to drive to my house without the use of her right arm. Delia had struggled for half an hour to find a proper distance for Jenny Jane to follow that wouldn’t have Delia experiencing the symptoms of a stroke.
That distance was twelve feet, which explained why she was floating behind the car and not in it with us as we drove down I-65.
It would have been easy enough to just give her the address and tell her we’d meet her there, but as she couldn’t read, she couldn’t decipher street signs, and Opelika was so far away from Jenny Jane’s comfort zone it might as well have been Paris. She didn’t seem to mind flying behind us—in fact she had a big smile on her face.
It was an almost four-hour drive to Moriah Booth Priddy’s house including pit stops, and we were still a half an hour out. Elvis sang on the radio, and I was growing sleepy in the warm sunshine. If I couldn’t hibernate on All Souls’ Day, being on a road trip was the next best thing.
Delia glanced over at me said, “I think I found out what Idella Deboe Kirby is being blackmailed about.”
Suddenly wide awake, I turned to her. “What?”
“I started thinking about how you mentioned Idella’s letter had been postmarked from New Orleans and how Haywood’s had been postmarked from Auburn. The towns seemed like clues to me. If Hay was being blackmailed because of his daughter, and his daughter lived in Auburn . . . So I started looking into what kind of history Idella might have in New Orleans.”
I hadn’t even thought of the postmarks being clues. I wondered where the other letters had been postmarked from. Would the mayor’s be from Montgomery, because that’s where the casino was? Would Hyacinth’s be from Hitching Post, because that’s where she did the majority of her drinking? Patricia’s was too big a question mark to even hazard a guess.
“It took a while and a subscription to one of those genealogical Web sites, but I found that the name Deboe had been changed from de Bode sometime in the mid-twenties. When I plugged de Bode and New Orleans into a search engine, there were thousands of hits featuring the same subject.”
“You’re killing me. What?”
She grinned. “Susannah and Simon de Bode ran a high-class brothel in New Orleans’s red light district during the late eighteen hundreds and into the late teens, when the area was eventually shut down. They made a fortune.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. A whorehouse? Idella Deboe Kirby, one of the most elegant and high society women I’d ever met, had hailed from brothel keepers?
“Hardly blackmail worthy,” Delia was saying, “especially because brothels were legal back then, but I’m sure she’s terrified her sterling reputation will be sullied if it leaks out that all the expensive things she buys are a result of something so lurid. She gets bent out of shape if too much cleavage is showing.”
She did. Don’t get her started on tube tops and miniskirts, either. “That is quite the family secret, as Doc Gabriel alluded to.”