A Misty Mourning (11 page)

The chickens ran wild in the yard, and they clucked like mad when we opened the doors of the car. Before I could even get all the way out, Aunt Millicent was out the front door, off the porch, and running across the driveway with her arms wide open. “Momma,” she said and hugged Gert.

Gert hugged her back, all the while fighting off the chickens with her cane. Seems they liked the smell of my grandmother's shoes and went about pecking at them.

Aunt Millicent turned to me. “Oh, you're so pregnant!” she said.

“Yup,” I said. “I've tried to convince the baby not to get any bigger, but I don't think it's listening.”

“It's so good to see you, Torie. The last time I saw you was four years ago when I came out to Missouri to visit everybody,” she said. “You-all should move out here.”

“No, no,” I said. “We like it right where we are.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said and took me by the hand to the steps of her front porch. When we got to the top step she turned me around as if presenting me at some fancy ball. Instead, she presented the mountains to me. “Look at that view. No matter how long I've lived here, I have to catch my breath every morning when I look at that.”

From her porch I could see forever. Well, almost. A clearing of trees lined up perfectly with her porch and it allowed me to see the valley below. The river snaked through the valley floor, skating over rocks and fallen tree limbs. Above that were the mountains, swelling gently along the river. Beyond that were more mountains, and beyond that more mountains. I come from a fairly flat state, except for the Ozarks in the south. And to get here I had to come through the really flat land of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. I knew that these mountains did not go on forever. But as I stood there looking at them ripple all the way to the horizon, you would have been hard-pressed to convince me of that.

“Wow,” I said.

“Country roads and misty mornings,” she said with a loud sigh. “Let's sit on the porch.”

Aunt Millicent was about five feet six and of average build. She was a little top-heavy, but most of my mother's family was. She made her way back down the porch steps to help Gert. Once inside the screened-in porch, Gert sat down next to me, huffing and puffing.

“And you were gonna walk up the mountain,” I said.

“Of course not,” she said. “I got you movin', though, didn't I?”

Aunt Milly disappeared into her house and came back out with a tray of cookies and crackers and a pitcher of iced tea. She disappeared
once again and emerged with three glasses and a pitcher of lemonade.

“I didn't know what anybody wanted to drink, so I made both,” she said. “How's your girls? Are they excited about having another sibling?”

“I think for the most part, although Mary insists that it cannot be a boy.”

“Ain't much she can do about it, if it is,” she said.

We talked for close to two hours, during which time I took a few snapshots of her and Gert with the camera I'd brought along. Then I had Gert take one of me and Aunt Milly. Finally, the conversation made its way to the recent events.

“Clarissa Hart left Torie the boardinghouse,” Gert said.

Aunt Millicent nearly dropped her glass of lemonade. “You're joking?”

“No,” I said.

Aunt Millicent got up and disappeared into her house yet again. She came out carrying a box of matches and. what looked like a photo album. It was starting to get dark out, and so she went about lighting the six huge floor candles around the porch. Instantly the porch was awash in a golden hue. Then she sat down next to me with the album. She opened it up and thumbed through a few pages.

“There,” she said. “That's the boardinghouse in its coal company days.”

This time I could make out the coal miners, for they sat along the porch and the upper balcony with their sooty faces staring back at the camera. Some of them held knapsacks, some held lunch pails. There were also a few men who weren't miners—loggers, maybe, for the railroad—and a few women.

“Are you in this picture, Granny?” I asked.

“No, this would have been before her time. This was taken about 1915 or so. When Clarissa Hart ran the boardinghouse for the company,” Aunt Millicent said.

“Clarissa worked for the company?”

“Yes,” she said. “Mom didn't start working it until the late twenties.”

“I worked there up until about 1935,” my grandmother added.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“I got married,” she said. “I think that's when the company went belly-up. At any rate, the company had sold the boardinghouse around 1918, I think.”

“Well, the deed will tell me that much, as soon as I can get into Quentinton,” I said.

Aunt Millicent pointed to another photograph on the next page. It was of Gert sitting on the front steps of the boardinghouse with one of her cousins. I recognized that it was a cousin, because I'd seen pictures of her before, but I couldn't remember which one. They were both about twelve or thirteen.

“What do you know about the boardinghouse?” I asked.

“It's bad luck,” Millicent said.

I was a little surprised by her answer. “What?”

“Whoever owns it receives bad luck.”

“Clarissa Hart lived to be one hundred and one years old and, having been at the reading of her will, I can attest to the fact that she had accumulated a good-sized estate,” I said. “You call that bad luck?”

“You have no clue what her life was like,” Aunt Millicent said.

“Enlighten me,” I said.

“It would take more time than we have for me to tell you her life story. The coal company went belly-up,” she said. “As much as I'd like to see you here in West Virginia, don't move into the boardinghouse.”

“You're serious,” I said, amazed. “I didn't know you were superstitious.”

“I'm not,” she said. “It's proven. That place is bad luck.”

“Well, who else has owned it besides the coal company and Clarissa Hart?” I asked.

She looked at her mother for a second, as if she was waiting for
Gert to say something. After a few moments, Aunt Millicent said, “Your great-grandmother, Bridie McClanahan. She was a widow at twenty-two and died at twenty-six. I'd say that's bad luck.”

“What?” I asked. I whirled around to my grandmother, who was sitting quietly to my right. “Gert, why didn't you tell me she owned the boardinghouse?”

“I didn't think it was that important,” she said. “She only owned it for a short time.”

“So she owned it, and then after she died you went to live with her sister, and
then
you worked in the boardinghouse, after Clarissa bought it?” I asked.

“Yes,” Gert said.

“Only Clarissa never bought it,” Aunt Millicent countered.

“What do you mean?”

“Bridie left it to her in her will.”

Okay, now I was truly shocked. But it made perfect sense. Clarissa was just returning what had once been Bridie's property to Bridie's family. It stung a little, though, to know that my grandmother had lived in poverty most of her life, sometimes having to work as many as three jobs at a time, and there sat Clarissa with the boardinghouse. She could have signed it over to my grandmother then. Why wait until now and sign it to me? Was there a reason she didn't want my grandmother to have it?

“All right, let me see if I have the chronology correct. The Panther Run Coal Company owned the boardinghouse up until 1918, when they sold it to Bridie McClanahan?”

“Actually, they sold it to her husband, Hank Seaborne,” Aunt Millicent said.

“Okay. . . so they sold it around 1918 to Hank Seaborne, who in turn dies in a logging accident and leaves it to Bridie. Who in turn leaves it to Clarissa in 1926,” I said. “But the whole time, miners for the coal company are still boarding there. Right?”

“Right.”

“Then the coal company goes belly-up about 1938? Isn't that
about right? And then the boardinghouse is just a place for tourists and the occasional logger.”

“That's about right,” Aunt Millicent said.

“Huh,” I said. “Interesting.”

“Sell it,” she said.

“Oh, I have no intentions of moving out here, Aunt Milly, boardinghouse or no boardinghouse. I love New Kassel,” I said. “I don't know what I'm going to do yet. Besides, the Harts may contest the will anyway.”

“Oh, that would be just like them. Greedy ones, they are. Every last one of them,” Aunt Millicent said. “And Maribelle likes to pretend that she's not, but she is. She didn't marry Prescott because of his enigmatic personality. She married him for his money. They are never satisfied.”

I thought about Pastor Breedlove's sermon earlier today. Never satisfied. Were any of us?

“Do you know a man named Norville Gross?” I asked.

“Never heard of him.”

“What do you know about two miners who disappeared from this area?”

She got the most peculiar look on her face. It was hard to determine exactly what she was feeling or thinking with the flickering candlelight playing across her face. “There were cave-ins all the time,” she said. “I'm sure there are plenty of men who were swallowed up by the mountains. Plenty of them.”

I
awoke early the next morning, took a shower, and threw on my very large and very comfortable teddy bear shirt, a powder-blue pair of shorts, and my thongs. My hair was the longest it had been in years, since those maternity vitamins make my hair thick and shiny and increase the speed with which it grows tenfold. It was actually long enough for me to pull it back in a twisty.

I grabbed a muffin from the kitchen and was very happy with myself for being stealth prego and making it out the door without my grandmother knowing I was leaving. I didn't want her to come with me on my errands today, because she would be bored, bored, bored, which would make me feel like I would have to hurry with my research. I'd just finished consuming the blueberry muffin as I came into the great room, with a spiral notebook under my arm and my purse over my shoulder, when out of nowhere I heard my grandmother's voice.

“Why didn't you wake me up?” she asked.

I was so startled I literally dropped my notebook and squealed. “You are determined to make me have this baby two months early, aren't your I asked.

Gert sat in the big brown wing chair, with her cane and purse
clutched in her hands. Clearly, she was ready and raring to go for the day. She stood up and walked toward the door. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go.”

“Go where?” I asked her.

“To see Sheriff Justice,” she said. “And then to the library at Quentinton and, if you have time, to the courthouse. Isn't that where you were going?”

Yes. That was exactly where I was going. To think my poor mother had been raised by this woman. “Gert—”

“We'll have to stop somewhere and get me some breakfast and coffee, since you didn't get me up early enough to eat something here,” she said as she reached the door.

Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.

“Sure,” I said. “Denny's?”

 

 

About an hour and half later, I pulled into the sheriff's department in Panther Run. Oddly enough, from the desk of Sheriff Justice, I could see both the Denny's, which had become our hangout, and the church we had attended yesterday. My grandmother sat quietly next to me. The sheriff looked tired.

“What can I do for you?” he asked me.

Out of my purse, I pulled the plastic bag that contained the burned pieces of Clarissa's will and laid it on his desk. “I didn't want to show you this at the boardinghouse with everybody there,” I said.

“What is it?”

“The morning that I found Clarissa, I came downstairs to call 911. Mr. Gross accompanied me. I spied this in the fireplace. Dexter Calloway said that as soon as he found out Clarissa was dead, he went to her office to get her new will to put away for safekeeping, but it was gone,” I said. I took a deep breath and continued. “Turns out her lawyer already had a copy of her new will. But I think these are the remains of Clarissa's copy.”

“Really?” he asked, sitting up a little straighter. “How do you know?”

“I can make out a few of the words and they say things like ‘of sound body and mind' and other familiar phrases,” I said. “I'm a genealogist. I've read tons of wills.”

“So then what you're driving at is somebody burned this copy of her will, thinking they were destroying the only copy of it and nobody would realize that the old one wasn't the new one,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“You're welcome,” I said. “Any idea who Norville Gross was?”

“Well, I'm limited as to what I can tell you at this point, but I can tell you that he didn't have a record of any kind, based on his DMV record,” he said. “As far as I can tell, he was an average guy, who just happened to be left a nice sum of money by Clarissa.”