Murder at Monticello by Rita Mae Brown Page B

profit and loss, and what’s for supper. Sometimes a question or two regarding the arts will pass although sports as a subject is a better bet. Rare moments bring forth a meditation on spirituality, philosophy, and the meaning of life. But the backbeat, the pulse, the percussion of exchange, was, is, and ever shall be gossip.
    Today gossip reached a crescendo.
    Mrs. Hogendobber picked up her paper the minute the paperboy left it in the cylindrical plastic container. That was at six A . M . She knew that Harry’s fading red mailbox, nailed to an old fence post, sat half a mile from her house. She usually scooped out the paper on her way to work, so she wouldn’t have read it yet.
    Mrs. H. grabbed the black telephone that had served her well since 1954. The click, click, click as the rotary dial turned would allow a sharp-eared person to identify the number being called.
    â€œHarry, Wesley Randolph died last night.”
    â€œWhat? I thought Wesley was so much better.”
    â€œHeart attack.” She sounded matter-of-fact. By this time she’d seen enough people leave this life to bear it with grace. One positive thing about Wesley’s death was that he’d been fighting leukemia for years. At least he wouldn’t die a lingering, painful death. “Someone from the farm must have given the information to the press the minute it happened.”
    â€œI just saw Warren Sunday afternoon. Thanks for telling me. I’ll have to pay my respects after work. See you in a little bit.”
    Now, telling a friend of another friend’s passing doesn’t fall under the heading of gossip, but that day at work Harry sloshed around in it.
    The first person to alert Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber to the real story was Lucinda Coles. Luckily Mim Sanburne was picking up her mail, so they could cross-fertilize, as it were.
    â€œâ€”everywhere.” Lucinda gulped a breath in the middle of her story about Ansley Randolph. “Warren, in a state of great distress, naturally, was finally reduced to calling merchants to see if by chance Ansley had stopped by on her rounds. Well, he couldn’t find her. He called me and I said I didn’t know where she was. Of course, I had no idea the poor man’s father had dropped dead in the library.”
    Mim laid a trump card on the table. “Yes, he called me too, and like you, Lulu, I hadn’t a clue, but I had seen Ansley at about five that afternoon at Foods of All Nations. Buying a bottle of expensive red wine: Medoc, 1970, Château le Trelion. She seemed surprised to see me”—Mim paused—“almost as if I had caught her out . . . you know.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Lucinda nodded in the customary manner of a woman affirming whatever another woman has said. Of course, the other woman’s comment usually has to do with emotions, which could never actually be qualified or quantified—that being the appeal of emotions. They both acknowledged a tyranny of correct feelings.
    â€œShe’s running around on Warren.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Lucinda’s voice grew in resonance, since she, as a victim of infidelity, was also an expert on its aftermath. “No good will come of it. No good ever does.”
    After those two left, BoomBoom Craycroft dashed in for her mail. Her comment, after a lengthy discussion of the slight fracture of her tibia, was that everybody screws around on everybody, and so what?
    The men approached the subject differently. Mr. Randolph’s demise was characterized by Market as a response to his dwindling finances and the leukemia. It was hard for Harry to believe a man would have a heart attack because his estate had diminished, thanks to his own efforts, from $250 million to $100 million, but anything was possible. Perhaps he felt poor.
    Fair Haristeen lingered over the counter, chatting. His idea was that a life of trying to control everybody and everything had ruined Wesley