A Misty Mourning (17 page)

“I mean, mountain people thrive on stories and tales, and the more colorful and dramatic the better. They love nothing better than a ghost story about double crosses, adultery, and murder. How is it there could have been a genuine, bona fide lynching right where
we're standing and you
vaguely
heard about it?” I asked. “Doesn't make sense.”

“How come I never knew that Bridie owned this place at all?” he countered.

“I'm the one asking the questions here. If you start asking them, then I'm going to get all confused,” I said.

“Oh, sorry.”

Dexter Calloway came out the front door, and briskly walked down the steps and around the corner of the house. Maribelle opened the window to her bedroom just in time for me to hear Preston's mouth running at fifty miles per hour.

“What's going on here, Elliott?” I asked as I watched the inhabitants going about their business.

“I'm not sure, cousin.”

“No. . . no, I don't just mean right now, on the surface. I mean, what is really going on? Deep. Under the surface.”

“I'm still not sure,” Elliott said.

A
n hour later I was seated on the ground underneath a very large tree that housed a very healthy bird and squirrel population. I'd dodged bird doodoo at least twice already, and I could no longer feel my feet. Sitting Indian-style on the ground at seven months pregnant was something one only did if she were
trying
to cut off the circulation to her feet.

But here I sat, with Elliott to my right and Chester H. Farnsworth the third sitting across from me. All I could think was what a good thing it was that Gert was mad at me, because she would never have made it up off the ground. And since Mr. Farnsworth the third had insisted we sit under the tree, on the ground, I would have had to go back to St. Louis in a few days with my grandmother permanently employed as Mr. Farnsworth's new scarecrow, or she would have had to ride on the hood Indian-style for twelve hours. See, some things happen for a reason. I'm just certain of it.

Mr. Farnsworth's house was set on a hill, nothing new there, and his yard overlooked the two-lane blacktop that snaked around the foot of the mountain. It was a lovely day, mid-seventies, sunny with an occasional wispy cloud. Oh, and don't forget the soggy ground from the rain the night before that would now have a permanent
dent in the shape of my butt. All I could say was this had better be good.

Chester himself was about ninety thousand years old, and at his age I couldn't imagine being able to even find my legs, much less contort them into the position in which he now sat. I bet he had never taken yoga. I bet he never jogged, ran a race, took karate, ate low-fat, low-sugar, low-caffeine, low-calorie, or low-carbohydrate foods a day in his life. And yet the man was the perfect embodiment of everything healthy and everything I absolutely despised.

I wouldn't mind being more health conscious as long as I didn't have to think about it.

“This is Torie O'Shea,” Elliott began. “Torie, this is Chester. His father was a miner for the Panther Run Coal Company and lived at the boardinghouse.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Who are you, exactly?” the old man asked.

“Clarissa Hart left Torie the boardinghouse in her will,” Elliott said.

Chester's heavy grey eyebrows rose about an inch, and then he took aim and spit about six inches from where I was sitting. Wonderful. Made me wonder what else I was sitting in, besides dirt.

“ 'S'pose I should say congratulations,” he muttered.

‘Torie was wondering if you could give her some information on the building. On the boardinghouse itself,” Elliott said.

“Like what?” Chester asked.

“I don't mean to be rude,” I said. “But what year were you born?” What year he was born would determine my line of questioning. There was no point in asking him things that he wouldn't begin to know because he wasn't alive yet.

“I was born on the twenty-seventh of February, 1910,” he said with his head held high.

Well, that made him pretty darn ancient, but not quite old enough for some of the things that I was curious about. For instance, he would not have a conscious memory of Bridie or her husband,
other than through the eyes of an eight- or ten-year-old. “What do you know about two men named Doyle Phillips and Thomas MacLean?” I asked.

“Been years since somebody asked questions ‘bout them. People still talk about ‘em, but I ain't been asked no questions in a long while,” he said. “Why do you want to know about ‘em? Seen their ghosts?”

“No, no, I haven't seen any ghosts.” His question did not make me think he was off his rocker or anything like that. Ghost stories were a staple of mountain life, especially ghosts involving unsolved disappearances, murders, and star-crossed lovers. “Did your father ever talk about the men?”

“Sure,” he said. “Lily-livered sons a, uh-hem, excuse me. Forget myself sometimes. My dad always said them boys deserved whatever it was they got, ‘less a course they were on a beach in Hawaii or something.”

“Why?” I asked. “What did they do?”

Chester scratched his paper-thin white hair and spit again. Had he forgotten how to swallow? After a moment he stated, “Don't know. Dad never told me. Don't know if Dad even knew.”

“Okay,” I said. “Exactly what do you know about them?”

“I know that there was a dance a-goin' on that night. Down at the fairgrounds. Everybody was there. Doyle and Thomas showed up in their best clothes, all spit shined and scrubby,” he said. “ ‘Bout an hour into it, they started tellin' people that they had to go. They had dates. Kept tellin' everybody that they was in for a good time and that they'd tell ‘em all about it the next day.”

“Good,” I said. “That's good. What happened?”

“They left and nobody saw ‘em again. Ever.”

“That's not so good,” I said. “Is there nothing else that you've been told?”

“There was rumors aplenty. Some said that Bridie knew where the miners had gone. Others said that Bridie kilt them.”

“What?” I all but screeched.

“Nobody believed that. She had no business with them. What reason would she have to do something like that?” he asked. “Nope. Most nobody believed that. But most everybody believed that she knew where they'd gone off to.”

“Why? Why did people think that Bridie knew the fates of the miners?” Elliott asked before I had a chance to.

“Best as I can tell, when she was questioned about ‘em, she all but said that she knew their whereabouts. When they went and pushed her about it, she said that it wasn't up to her to make people awares,” Chester said with a smile on his face, as if he was proud of her. “Since there was never no crime committed, she didn't do nothing wrong.”

I unfolded my legs, but stayed seated on the ground. I stretched them out in front of me, trying to get the blood to return to my feet. I wiggled my feet and rolled my ankles. “What do you know about the lynching?” I asked finally.

“I saw that body,” he said. “He'd pissed himself but good.”

“That's nice,” I said and nearly hurled my breakfast right then and there. Then I thought about what he'd said. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight. How would he have seen the body? I'd lock my kids in the closet before letting them see something like that. “H-ow did you . . . Weren't you terribly young?”

“Sure,” he said. “My dad had to quit mining because of the seventeen.”

“Seventeen? What exactly does that mean?”

“The cave-in of seventeen. Broke his back. Couldn't mine anymore,” Chester explained. “So, to try and make extra money, before school I'd walk up to the boardinghouse and get the mending, ironing, things like that, and take them back to my mom. She got paid for doin' that sort of thing. It was ‘long about five-thirty when I got there and there's a big crowd. Just a minute.”

Chester jumped up and took the steps up to his house two at a time. I gave Elliott an amused look and he smiled back at me. Not even a minute later, Chester was back and handed me a picture.
“That's me,” he said and pointed to a hollow-faced boy who peered back at the camera with sharp eyes in a dull body. He stood in a crowd of people, who stood around a body hanging from the tree that stood in the front yard of the boardinghouse.

We desperately needed the voice of Danette here so that she could say her usual
oh, gross.
I said it for her. “Oh, gross.”

“Let me see,” Elliott said and took the picture from me.

“What do you know about him? Why would somebody do that?”

“Why?” Chester asked. “Why not? Big-shot company man. He could have your job in a second. Always tryin' to squeeze the local man out and bring in some foreigner that would do the job cheaper. There's a hundred people that coulda done that.”

I thought that Chester was still a little touchy over this particular subject and that I needed to be very careful about what I said and how I said it. Elliott handed the picture back to me and I studied it. I tried to look at the body without really looking at the body, as if the evil presented there could somehow jump out of the picture and invade my safe world. As if just by looking at it, I was bringing his misfortune to myself.

“All right,” I said. “I understand that. But seriously, who could have done it?”

“Oh, they caught the guys that did it,” he said. He snapped his fingers and tapped his temple as if that would help him remember exactly who they were. “Arlo Davis and William Gross.”

I heard the words that Chester said, but I didn't really hear the words that Chester said. That was because I was engrossed in looking at the lynched man in the photograph. I thought about how unusual it was that in the only photographs of this man that I had ever seen, he was dead. This was Aldrich Gainsborough.

And this was the man in the casket in the photograph that hung above the fireplace at the Panther Run Boardinghouse.

“
W
hat does it mean?” Elliott asked me. His brown eyes were serious and yet somehow there was a certain look of wide-eyed disbelief to them. He downshifted the gears in his Eagle Scout as we came to a four-way stop at the foot of the hill. How brave he was, I thought, to drive a stick shift in a mountain state.

“I don't know,” I said and gazed out the window at the supreme foliage all around. “Why would Clarissa have a picture of a dead guy hanging above her fireplace? Since 1918, I might add. Why would Clarissa hang a picture of the
superintendent
of the Panther Run Coal Company above her fireplace?”

“In his casket, no less.”

“Yes, we've established that. Creepy in and of itself,” I said. “Then add the fact that he was lynched in the front yard. . .”

Elliott turned his vehicle to the left, and we headed up over a mountain. “Okay, so the superintendent of the company gets lynched in the front yard of the boardinghouse, and Clarissa forever hangs a picture of him in his casket above her fireplace.”

“Do you think it was a reminder?” I asked.

“A reminder of what?”

“Of the fact he was lynched? I don't know. I read in one of the
books you checked out for me that the superintendent was pretty much loathed within the community. I didn't really get a chance to read
why
he was loathed, but suffice it to say that he was. So why would she hang a photograph of him in his coffin in her house?”

“Maybe Gainsborough did something really horrible to her and she wanted to see his dead face every day as a reminder that he was dead,” Elliott said and shifted gears yet again.

I sort of stared at him from the corner of my eyes. “You have an active imagination,” I said. “I'm almost afraid to ask where that came from.”

“Well, think about it. Let's say. . . he killed her father or something horrible like that. She absolutely despised him and wanted her own revenge. Now, we know that tiny Clarissa Hart couldn't lynch a man all by herself, so that's out of the question. But somebody else
does
lynch him and makes her day. So, she takes his picture and hangs it in the boardinghouse as a reminder every day that the guy got what he had coming to him,” Elliott said, all worked up at his own devices.

I thought about it a moment while Elliott waited for me to reply. “Well, your theory holds merit. In fact, it's the best theory we've got so far. . . but Lord, it sounds like a plot to a Monday night movie or something.”

“You know they get ideas for movies from real life,” he stated.

“Okay,” I said. “Say you are correct. Where's the connection between him and the miners, Phillips and MacLean?”

“Who said there has to be one?” Elliott asked. “Maybe they were suspects in the Gainsborough lynching. Nobody ever said they actually did it, and besides, Chester said they caught the guys that really did it. You know, if the papers print that you are suspected in the murder of Clarissa Hart, we all know that you didn't do it, but somebody eighty years from now may question it, like you're questioning Phillips and MacLean right now.”

I gave him a sideways glance and pondered what he'd just said.
“Well, that's comforting,” I said. “So you don't think that there is a connection between the Gainsborough lynching and the missing miners?”

“I didn't say that, either,” he said.

“Oh, for Pete's sake, Elliott. You're giving me a headache,” I said.

“What does any of it matter?” he asked. “I mean, seriously. Does any of this really help determine who killed Clarissa Hart? Can it possibly help?”

“I think it could,” I said. “You'd be surprised how many thorns from the past pop up in the present day.”

“I suppose you're right. We could just as easily be wrong,” he said. Elliott pointed up to the top of the mountain where an absolute mansion sat gleaming in the summer sun. “That's where we're headed.”