This did not include Chief Judy Hammer, since she was originally from Arkansas. She ran through the ivy-framed entrance and up the old brick front steps of the historic and aristocratic club where women could not be members, but as guests of husbands or male friends were welcome to enjoy all amenities except the Victorian bar, Men’s Grill, swimming pool, gym, steam and sauna rooms, squash and racquetball courts and reading rooms. Such restrictions were of little concern to public-service minded women busy with forming various committees for the Bal du Bois and its debutantes, or supporting the arts
with auctions of wine, vacations, fine jewelry and other luxury items, or planning wedding receptions or exhibits for the Maymont Flower & Garden Show, or lunching with the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, Daughters of the American Revolution or Daughters of the Confederacy, and with the Junior League, and of course, first families of Virginia and wives of legislators.
Hammer was twenty minutes late. She rushed into the marble foyer, impervious to the splendid Oriental rug, the antique crystal chandelier, the velvet love seat and gilt mirrors and wall-size portrait of George Washington. She did not pause to check her coat or to admire the stunning paintings of Robert E. Lee and Lighthorse Harry. Judy Hammer had little interest in a hundred-and-eight-year-old club founded by former Confederate officers who, according to the original charter, wished to promote social intercourse and maintain a library.
The door to the board room on the first floor was shut. She opened it slowly and quietly as Lelia Ehrhart held forth. Hammer scanned the faces of City Councilman Reverend Solomon Jackson, Mayor Stuart Lamb, Lieutenant Governor June Miller, NationsBank president Dick Albright, Richmond-Times Dispatch publisher James Eaton, and Metropolitan Richmond Convention & Visitors Bureau president Fred Ross.
The men glanced at Hammer. Several of them nodded. All of them looked restless and ready to tell Ehrhart to commit suicide. Hammer found a seat.
‘… It’s so much and more than the city of the deads,’ Ehrhart was saying with authority. ‘It is the Valhalla of we brave mens who carried the Southern Cross into their bosom of deadly, waving it for the because of states’ right, to at last be buried, many we don’t know who, in Hollywood.’
Ehrhart would have been a stunning blond were it not for several physical flaws that caused her to be more unpleasant and driven than she otherwise might have been. Her hair wasn’t really as blond as she let on, and as she got older it was getting darker, requiring frequent trips to the Simon & Gregory hair salon. Nor did arduous hours with her personal trainer remedy her genetically coded long neck, narrow shoulders, tiny breasts and broad hips.
Ehrhart covered up as best she could, exclusively in Escada. This morning she was dazzling in a blaze orange skirt and blouse with matching earrings, pumps and purse. Hammer, out of breath and perspiring beneath her gray pinstripe suit, thought Ehrhart looked like a traffic cone.
‘Two presidents and five governors are restful there,’ she preached. ‘Not to forget, also, Brigadier Generals Armistead, Gracie, Gregg, Morgan, Paxton, Stafford and Hill.’
‘Hill was a major general,’ Lieutenant Governor Miller remarked blandly. ‘And all the generals you just mentioned were interred in Hollywood only for a time. Aren’t still there, in other words.’
Ehrhart had found the seven names in the back of a booklet listing Confederate States of America generals, and had not noticed nor comprehended the parenthetical phrase interred for a time. Indeed, it wasn’t until this moment she realized her husband’s alleged ancestor, General Bull Paxton, was among the seven war heroes whose remains she was now being told had been moved out of the cemetery. Ehrhart refused to stand corrected.
‘I believe I’m in the right.’ She smiled coolly at the lieutenant governor.
‘You’re not,’ he matter-of-factly replied in a voice that rarely rose or showed strain. ‘There are twenty-five generals in Hollywood, but not those seven. You might want to go back and check your booklet.’
‘What booklet?’
The one you didn’t read very carefully,’ he said.
CHAPTER twenty-three
Bubba, Smudge, Half Shell and Tree Buster had spent the night in the woods. This was not by choice. When Bubba had blasted the rubber rattlesnake and Smudge had taken a flying leap, Smudge had ended up with a bump on his head.