Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead. Livia J Washburn
Scarlett was the belle of the ball, of course. She danced with everyone—Rhett, Ashley Wilkes, the Tarleton twins, and several of the men from the tour group. The actors playing the Tarletons, who looked like real twins, made a point of dancing with Augusta and Amelia, which made the girls smile and laugh and prompted several people to take pictures of them.
I didn’t dance at all, although Luke asked me. I knew he didn’t really want to and was asking more out of a sense of duty than anything else, so I told him that was all right, not to worry about it.
A little later, I was standing next to the wall, under one of the big paintings, when an unfamiliar voice said from beside me, “Enjoying yourself, Ms. Dickinson?”
I looked over, expecting to see one of the staff from the plantation house, but instead I saw a man wearing a corduroy jacket and jeans, rather than the period costume that the people who worked here wore. He wore glasses and had thinning blond hair touched here and there with gray.
“Have we met?” I asked him.
“No, but I know who you are. Mr. Ralston, who owns the plantation, pointed you out to me.” He put out a hand. “I’m Will Burke. Doctor Will Burke.”
I shook hands with him and asked, “Doctor as in physician, or professor?”
“Professor, definitely,” he said. “My doctorate is in English, and I teach at one of the local colleges. But I do some work on the side as a consultant here on the plantation, as well as at the Center for Southern Literature.”
“So you’re here because of the Gone With the Wind connection?”
“That’s right. My thesis was about the interrelationship between literature and history. I’ve always been interested in the subject.”
“Well, no offense, Professor Burke, but I’m not that academically minded.”
He smiled. “I try not to be except when I’m teaching a class. Kick me in the shin if I start sounding stuffy, okay?”
“You’ve got a deal. What do you do here, anyway?”
“It’s my job to keep things accurate both from a historical perspective and as they relate to Mitchell’s novel.”
“I guess you know about other books, too?”
“Some,” he said with a shrug and another smile. “Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking about trying to set up some other tours that would be centered around different books and authors. I might just have to pick your brain about that sometime.”
“Pick away,” he said. “I’d be glad to help if I can.”
I chatted for a few more minutes with Dr. Will Burke, then he had to go off to check on some detail. He gave me a wave and a smile as he left, and I smiled back at him. He was a nice-looking, interesting guy, I found myself thinking. Soft spoken, but he was friendly and he obviously knew a lot.
And I knew better than to be thinking such things, with the ink on my divorce papers barely dry, relatively speaking. Keeping my new business going would take all of my time for the foreseeable future.
By late in the evening, I was convinced everything was going to be just fine for the rest of the tour. I’m not superstitious enough to believe I jinxed it by thinking that, but looking back now, I shouldn’t have done it anyway. No sense in tempting fate.
Because right about then, somebody screamed and men started to yell in confusion and I looked around for the source of the commotion, halfway expecting that Mueller and Riley had gotten into it again. I was worried about my nieces, too, since I had sort of lost track of them during the evening and I was supposed to be looking out for them.
I found Luke, grabbed his arm, and tugged him along with me. We bulled our way across the crowded ballroom toward the French doors on the far side, which seemed to be where most of the yelling was coming from.
When we got there, I saw that one set of doors was standing open. They led out into an elaborate garden behind the house, which was lit by small colored lamps in the trees. Those lamps were electric, not gas, because nobody wanted to take a chance on setting the trees on fire.
I spotted someone standing just outside the doors on the flagstone terrace. It was Elliott Riley, and he was staring down at his hands in horror. I saw the dark red stains on them and felt my insides go hollow. I hadn’t seen a lot of freshly spilled blood in my life, but my instincts told me that was what was smeared on Riley’s hands.
“He—he’s out there,” Riley stammered, pointing toward a path that led through the garden. I looked where he was pointing and saw the shape sprawled there on the ground. The crazy thought flashed through my head that Riley and Mueller had been fighting again, and that Riley had killed the German somehow.
But the man on the ground wasn’t Mueller at all, because Mueller came up to the French doors, craning his neck to see out.
I started toward the motionless shape, but Luke pulled me back. “You better stay here, Miz D,” he said. “Whoever that guy is, you don’t want to see him.”
“Let go of me, blast it,” I told him. “I’m in charge of this group, and if something’s happened, it’s up to me to see what it is.”
Luke let go of my arm, but he stayed stubbornly beside me as I went along the walk. Within a few steps, I recognized the man lying there. He had changed from the white planter’s outfit he had worn earlier in the day, donning a tuxedo instead for the ball. Now there was a dark stain spreading on the snowy white front of his frilly shirt, spreading from the knife that was buried in his chest.
Rhett Butler—or the fella playing him, anyway—was dead, as dead as the antebellum South that had been recreated here on this plantation.
CHAPTER 5
Don’t ask me how I knew Rhett Butler was dead. I’m not a medical person, and outside of a funeral home or an actual funeral, I’d never even seen a dead body.
But as I looked down at him, there was no doubt in my mind. His eyes were open wide, staring but not seeing anything. His mouth was open and his jaw was slack. His face seemed to be getting paler by the second. I knew from watching crime shows on TV that that meant the blood was pooling in the back half of his body, since that was lower. Lividity, I think they call it. The bloodstain on his shirt was ugly, but it wasn’t spreading anymore because the heart had stopped pumping.
All that’s logical enough now, looking back on it, but at the moment all I heard was a frantic voice in my brain yammering, Oh, no, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!
I took a step back and bumped into Luke. He jumped a little and I did, too, but both of us managed to keep from yelping. I guess Luke felt like letting out a holler. I know I sure did.
“Holy cow, Miz D! Is that…is that…”
“Rhett Butler,” I said. The strain made Luke’s voice sound strange to my ears, but my own voice sounded even more strange.
“Is he—”
I knew what Luke was going to ask, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the question. Instead another voice boomed out, “What’s going on here?”
We turned to see a bulky, tuxedo-clad figure hurrying along the garden path toward us. The lights out here were bright enough for me to recognize the actor who played Scarlett’s father, the man with the faint, underlying British accent who slightly resembled Thomas Mitchell.
He saw the man on the ground and said, “Oh, my dear Lord.” His hand went to his pocket and pulled out a bandanna he used to mop away some of the beads of sweat that suddenly popped up on his forehead. The night was warm and humid, but not enough to make a fella look like he was in a steam bath in a matter of seconds. “What happened here?”
“He’s dead.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew it was a dumb, obvious thing to say.