A Misty Mourning (26 page)

“Dr. Pepper. Real one. Stop at the next gas station.”

“How about Burger King up here about half a mile?”

“Fine.” Caffeine and bubbles. I would be very happy.

“What do you think?” he asked, smiling at me.

“Pretty trees,” I said and pointed out the window.

He laughed this time. “No, silly. About what Louanne said. What do you think?”

“I. . . I. . . Can we just drive in silence until I get the caffeine? I want to think about this,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “I can deal with that.”

And so we did. We drove in silence for the next three or four minutes until we reached the Burger King and Elliott handed me my supersize Dr. Pepper. Although the straws are never long enough for those supersize drinks. It's like, okay. Supersize bladder requires supersize straw.

“Tell me this is okay,” I said before I took a big drink.

“It's okay,” Elliott said, still smiling at me.

I took a very long and much-needed drink and then let out a breath nice and slowly. “I think, obviously, that Norville Gross was Clarissa's great-grandson, that's what I think. I think that somehow or other Norville found out that Clarissa was his great-grandmother and contacted her. Whether or not he was thinking in dollar signs at the time he contacted her, we'll never know. In fact, since he was from up in Morgantown, he really had no way of knowing if Clarissa had money.”

“So, why doesn't the rest of the family know who he is?”

“I don't know. Maybe Clarissa was going to announce to everybody at the reading of the will just who he was, and she was interrupted, of course,” I said. I threw the paper from my straw into Elliott's immaculate ashtray.

“I agree. But why wouldn't Clarissa leave the money to Norville's father? Why skip him and give it to Norville?”

“Why did she leave me the boardinghouse and not you or your sister, or our other cousins? Maybe it was as simple as Norville's father not being interested in meeting her and Norville was. Believe it or not, some people could care less where they come from,” I said.

“I can buy that,” he said. “That sounds plausible. But what about Sherise?”

“I still haven't proven it, but I think she is the descendant of Doyle Phillips,” I said. “The really strange part is, why would Clarissa feel compelled to leave Sherise something because of that? I
mean, why not leave money to everybody who was descended from anybody in the mines? There has to be another connection.”

Elliott was quiet a moment. “What about Dexter Calloway?”

“What about him?”

“Why do you think Clarissa changed her mind about leaving him the boardinghouse?”

“I don't know. Unless she'd found me by then and just felt compelled to return it to the correct family. If it truly is cursed, maybe she liked old Dexter too much to leave it to him,” I said.

“Seriously, Torie. Think about it. Who better than Dexter to know all the nooks and crannies of the boardinghouse? What if he knew he was supposed to get that boardinghouse and had his heart set on it? What if he were the type of man to kill for something like that?”

“Or get me arrested hoping the will would revert back to the original will? Is that what you're suggesting?” I asked, the hair slowly rising on my arms.

“Or else, get revenge on you by seeing you in jail for half a century.”

“Eek, Elliott. You have an absolutely twisted mind,” I said. “I like it.”

“I'm just curious about one other thing,” he said.

“What's that?”

“Do you think anybody else has this much fun with genealogy?”

E
lliott and I were going to take my grandmother out for dinner. Not to Denny's this time, but someplace a little fancier. Like the Village Inn. Am I imagining things or does every town with a population under five thousand have a Village Inn or its equivalent? But dinner would have to wait until after we found the mine entrance.

I wouldn't have taken Gert hiking into the woods to locate the entrance to the old mine even if she hadn't experienced the bump on her head earlier today. But she drew us a map and told us about how far to go. Of course, that was in her language of measurements. “You go here a jag, and then up the hill a ways, and down over a stone's throw.” How did we ever make it to the millennium?

I basically went along just in case something happened to Elliott. In fact, if the trail got too steep I was going to sit down right where I was and wait for Elliott, because I didn't think mountain climbing in my present state was a very smart thing to do.

Lucky for me, however, the “snail's trail” wound around the base of the mountain and only raised itself enough to go over a slight hill and down the next valley. Which is where, hidden behind overgrown vines and weeds, we found the entrance to the mine with
rotted boards nailed to the front of it. A big KEEP OUT sign was set askew on one of the boards, and I looked around the valley feeling all creepy and everything.

“I just had a really awful thought,” I said.

“I thought that was my job,” Elliott said as he yanked on a handful of vines.

“No, I'm serious,” I said.

“What is it?”

“What if Norville Gross was looking for the same thing?”

“What about it?”

He came back dead.”

“That was a panther,” Elliott said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Oh, yeah! What if the panther gets us? I don't think they are very particular about their victims.”

“Relax, it's broad daylight.”

“So what? Does the panther know that people will see it in broad daylight?” I asked.

“No, it's just with civilization moving in closer to the panthers' habitat, they usually make themselves pretty scarce during the day,” he said.

“Well, Norville Gross was killed during the day.”

Elliott stopped and looked at me. “We're fine, Torie. Don't obsess.”

“I'm not obsessing,” I said. “Who's obsessing? What are you doing anyway? Do we have to see inside to know that the mine is here? Isn't this what we were after? Just to know that it was here.”

“Yeah,” Elliott said. “I just want to look to see if any old equipment or anything is visible from the entrance.”

“You're not planning on going in there, are you?” I asked, hysteria rising in my voice.

“No, no. I'm not stupid. That thing could cave in on me just like that,” he said and snapped his fingers. “I just can't help myself. I want to look inside.”

“Oh.” I supposed I could understand that. Just because creepy
enclosed places were not the least bit interesting to me didn't mean that they wouldn't be to Elliott. In fact, there are some things that I would probably do that Elliott wouldn't. So, I should just breathe and calm down over this. He just wanted to look inside. Curiosity. I knew all about that.

Elliott stopped, frozen. One hand held a piece of vine and the other hand rested on a rotted piece of wood. His face turned ashen and all of the color drained from his lips. I'd never seen grey lips before. Except on a dead person.

“Elliott, what is it?” I asked.

“I think I found Phillips and MacLean,” he said.

“What? No way, let me see,” I said and shoved him aside. Sure enough, there were two skeletons leaning up against the south wall of the mine. Their clothes were tattered and dusty, and the clothes looked two sizes too large for the skeletons, since there was no meat or muscle to fill the clothes out. I squealed as a rat ran out of the shirt on one of the skeletons and disappeared into the eye socket.

“Oh, gross,” I said. I quickly put my head between my knees. Well, as close as I could get to my knees, anyway. “I'm gonna puke.”

“Oh, don't do that,” Elliott said all in a panic.

“I can't help it. I am. I'm gonna puke.”

“Oh, Torie,” Elliott said, shaking his hands. “What. . . what do you want me to do?”

“Hold my hair.”

And then I puked.

 

 

Ten minutes later as we walked along the snail's trail, my hands were still shaking involuntarily. “Thanks for holding my hair back,” I said.

“You owe me, big time,” Elliott said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just be happy I didn't have anything particularly chunky for lunch.”

He had to laugh.

Just as we came back over the hill and could see the boardinghouse, I stopped. Elliott bumped into me, catching his balance and me as he did. “What is it?”

I pointed down to the boardinghouse. “The sheriff is there,” I said.

“Why does that bother you so much?”

“Every time he's been here lately it's to tell me something more incriminating. I'm afraid of what he's got to say.”

“You're obsessing again,” he said. “Do you do this all the time? Rudy must have a heck of a time with you.”

“Why is it everybody assumes that Rudy has a tough time with
me?
Doesn't anybody ever stop to think that maybe I have a tough time with
him?”
I asked.

“Sorry,” Elliott said and shrugged his shoulders. “I've only met Rudy twice. I've not only seen you more, but I've had a heck of a lot more phone conversations with you. You're obsessing.”

“So what?” I asked as we came off the footpath. “Does that hurt something? Has a little bit of obsessing ever hurt anybody?”

Elliott just looked at me. It was a look that I received often, so I knew I must have been feeling more like my old self.

As we reached the boardinghouse, the door opened and out came Deputy Benjamin Russell. I hadn't really thought about him since this morning. He hadn't followed me back to the boardinghouse after running into me at the courthouse. I had assumed he had other things to do and would catch up with me later. Sure enough, there he was. I have to admit, I felt a slight bit of relief when I saw him and realized that he was not Sheriff Justice.

“Are you here to see me, Deputy Russell?” I asked as we reached the porch.

“Heard about your excitement here today,” he said.

“I can tell you that I think everybody has an alibi except the immediate family. All of the staff were other places,” I said.

“I'll pass that along. I came out to fingerprint that attic window,” he said. “It must have slipped the sheriff's mind because he didn't
tell me or any of the other deputies to do it, so I just came on out here and got it done.”

“Well, thank you, Deputy Russell.” It was nice to see that somebody was thinking of me and my guilty-looking hide.

Deputy Russell walked down the porch steps and around his patrol car to the driver's side. He opened the door, and just as he was about to get in, he said, “What were you guys doing up in the woods?”

Elliott and I both looked at each other with momentary panic. We hadn't discussed what we were going to tell people. We'd only just found the bodies and we hadn't really decided what to do. Obviously, we would tell the authorities eventually. I cast my eyes downward, hoping that Elliott would read my mind.

“Looking over the property that Mrs. O'Shea just inherited,” he said. “She'd never seen the whole thing.”

It must have sounded plausible to the deputy because he nodded and disappeared into the patrol car. Within a minute he had backed out of the drive and onto the road.

“What do you think?” Elliott asked.

“About what?”

“About the bodies. If they truly are Phillips and MacLean?”

“You want my honest opinion?”

“Yes,” he said and nodded.

“I think that they lynched Gainsborough and I think Clarissa invited them back to the boardinghouse that night to kill them. I don't know how, poison probably. And I think somehow our great-grandmother Bridie either found out about it, or walked in on it. They hid the bodies in the mine shaft and Clarissa went off to have Gainsborough's baby in Charleston. And Bridie never breathed a word of it. That's what I believe.”

“What about the two men who were arrested for Gainsborough's murder?” he asked.

“I think they were wrongly accused. There was a lot of pressure put on the authorities by the coal company to find his murderer,” I
said. “I think the fact that the two bodies are in the mine shaft is a pretty good indication that the other two men were patsies.”

“That was pretty much what I was thinking, too. It makes sense. All that talk about Bridie being able to keep a secret. And how she'd done Clarissa a favor and all. I think you're probably right on the money. Although we will probably never know exactly. Why do you think Bridie made the quilt?”

“I think her conscience was bothering her. I think she had to leave it for somebody to find out. She knew as long as Clarissa lived nobody would set foot in that mine shaft,” I said.

“Do you think Clarissa was going to confess all of this to you?” he asked.