A Misty Mourning (5 page)

“That's it? That's all the advice you have for me?”

Lying in the fireplace was a pile of burned papers. There hadn't been a fire in the fireplace probably since spring, so whoever had done this had just burned the papers and thrown them in the fireplace and left, thinking they would burn all the way. I knelt down and picked them up as carefully as I could so that they wouldn't crumble.

“If you're certain there was no foul play, then I'd say move the body and put it on ice.”

Did everybody think that boardinghouses were equipped with big blocks of ice just waiting to have a dead body piled on it? This was ridiculous. “Well, since we seem to have a shortage of ice, unless you want me to hack Granny up and stuff her in the freezer, I think that one is out.”

I happened to remember that Norville Gross was listening to my conversation, and that probably didn't sound too good. I fished all of the papers out of the fireplace and laid them on the hearth. Norville gave me a very perplexed look, with one eyebrow raised.

“They should be able to get a sheriff in there by boat,” he said. “Once they realize there's been a murder.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, clear the room and seal it.”

“Yes,” he said. “And don't tell your mother.”

It irked me slightly that he was telling me what to tell and what not to tell my mother. That had been, up until recently, my job. The sheriff and my mother had a May/December relationship, which was fine by me. My mother robbed the cradle. More power to her. Their relationship did take some getting used to, though. The sheriff had actually arrested me once, when I was being a Good Samaritan, I might add. He and I never really got along, and was my mother sympathetic? No. She decided to marry him.

“I won't have to tell her,” I said. “Gert will when she talks to her next.”

“What?” he asked.

“Gert will let it slip,” I said. “Well, I gotta go. Thanks, Colin.”

I hung up the phone, still knelt down at the hearth trying to make sense of the burned pieces of paper. Most of it I could not make out. However, there were a few words that had a familiar ring to me. They were:
of sound body and mind.

“Mr. Gross,” I said. “Could you get me a Baggie or something to put this in?”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I believe it is Clarissa's will.”

T
wo hours later, everybody was dressed and assembled in the great room of the Panther Run Boardinghouse. I wore the best maternity outfit that I had, which was a blue and white striped dress, with a big white collar and red bow. Why did it seem most maternity clothes were designed to make you look like a sailor? Almost everything else I'd brought along was shorts and shirt sets.

“Okay, let's be calm,” I said.

“Who put you in charge?” Prescott Lewis asked me.

His question was legitimate. I had just sort of assumed control of the situation, when in fact I was the biggest suspect there was. I was the one found with the pillow in my hand, no one else. Norville Gross, up to this point, had been gracious enough not to point that out to the others. Of course, it took an hour of talking my fanny off to convince him that he would do more harm than good if he let that piece of information out just yet.

All of the people who had been at dinner the night before were present, plus quite a few new faces. “Please, just be cooperative for right now. Everybody. Please?”

The people in the room quieted down a bit, and so I went on.
“If you were not at dinner last night, please introduce yourself and explain how you are related to Mrs. Hart,” I said.

Maribelle wailed at the sound of her late mother's name. Prescott rolled his eyes, but an unidentified man was compassionate and handed her a fresh Kleenex.

“Employees first,” I said.

“My name's Dexter. Dexter Calloway,” a man said. He was about fifty and looked as though he'd lived every year to the limit. He couldn't have spoken any slower if somebody had given him taffy to chew on. “I'm the handyman. Groundskeeper, butler, whatever Mrs. Hart needed me to do.”

“I'm Susan Henry. The cook.”

“Vanessa Killian. Cleaning lady.”

Okay, that took care of the hired help. “Are there any boarders other than Mr. Gross?” I asked.

A tall, slender woman raised her hand. She was about my age, early thirties, had long, straight blond hair to about the middle of her back, and wore tiny framed glasses. “I'm Sherise Tyler,” she said. “I'm a journalist.”

Oh, that was perfect. I could see people around the room reacting to her announcement moments after she said it. A journalist. They were all worried about
the
story being written up in the local papers where they had lived and worked their whole lives. That was called gossip. Only, once it was in print, it became fact to most people.

‘Taith and Gerrold Faragher,” a spunky-looking woman said. She pointed to the man sitting next to her. They were probably in their mid-forties, obvious suburbanites not from this area. “I'm Lafayette's daughter.”

And the mother of the ever-rebellious Danette, I thought to myself.

“Craig Lewis,” a smooth voice said, and a man held out his hand for me to shake. He had been the bearer of the Kleenex to Maribelle. “I'm Maribelle's son. And this is my wife, Tiffany.”

Okay, let's just say that Craig was about forty and Tiffany was. . . well, Tiffany was barely drinking age. She couldn't have been over twenty-two, with long, long legs and bouncy chestnut hair. I didn't think it was my imagination that certain family members turned their noses up and shifted in their seats. She seemed to provoke a reaction from almost everybody there. Oblivious to the reaction she caused, she wrinkled her nose and waved to me.

There was only one other person that I did not know. A round, balding man with a hideous comb-over sat on the edge of the couch clutching a briefcase. It seemed as if nobody else in the room knew who he was, either, because every eye was now focused on him. He looked very uncomfortable in the accusatory silence.

“Sir?” I asked.

“Uh, I. . . uh, I'm Oliver Jett. My friends call me Ollie.”

“So who the hell are your Lafayette asked.

“I'm Clarissa's lawyer and I came here to read the will. The new one,” he said.

I thought about the burned pages that I'd found in the fireplace. Norville Gross thought about them too, because his head snapped around and he looked at me as soon as Mr. Jett made his announcement.

“You've come all this way for nothing,” Dexter Calloway said. “As soon as we found out she was dead, I went to her office to get the will to put in a safe place, and it was gone. It was the only copy.”

There seemed to be relief in the room. What changes had Clarissa made in her will that had the family so concerned? And who had been bothered enough to go to the great lengths of burning it?

“Does this mean the old will stands?” I asked Mr. Jett the lawyer.

“It would in most cases,” he said.

“Why not this one?” I asked.

“Because I have a copy of the new one,” Ollie said. “Clarissa downloaded it to me over the Internet three days ago.”

You could almost hear the family saying, “Drat! Plan foiled again.”

When I'd rebounded from the astonishment of the little old centenarian surfing the Net and transmitting her new will to her lawyer, something occurred to me. “Mr. Calloway,” I said.

“Yes?”

“We need to see to it that no more people go in and out of Clarissa's office. Seal it off too until the sheriff arrives,” I said.

He nodded his head that he understood.

“I've had about enough of you, Mrs. O'Shea,” Prescott said. “Just who put you in charge?”

“My granddaughter,” Gert said, “knows what she's . . . Her step-father
is
a sheriff.”

“I don't care if he's an alien,” Prescott said. “You think you can just come here from your fancy big city and boss us all around. Well, you can't!”

“Mr. Lewis,” Ollie said. “Somebody has to keep things under control, and Mrs. O'Shea is doing a fine job.”

“She's just concerned about her inheritance,” Prescott said.

“You seemed to be equally concerned about it,” I said. “Mr. Lewis, I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm sure that if Clarissa had anything to give to me, it was something that belonged to my great-grandmother. That's all.”

“You can act all innocent if you want,” he went on. “But we all know better.”

I looked around the room, astonished. “Just what do you think is going on here?”

“The boardinghouse,” Maribelle said from behind her Kleenex.

“What do you mean?”

“We feel that—”

Maribelle was cut off in mid-sentence by who else? Her husband, Prescott. “She's leaving you the boardinghouse!”

All was quiet a moment and then the quiet was shattered by my
laughter. That was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. Why would Clarissa leave me the boardinghouse? And why would they care? It's not as if the place was worth much. The land that it sat on was probably worth something, but not a huge amount.

“Clarissa Hart did not leave me the boardinghouse,” I said. “This is the most absurd accusation. There is no reason for her to leave me the boardinghouse. Why would she think I would even want it? She doesn't even know me.”

I felt a little uncomfortable with all of the people staring at me as I stood in front of the fireplace where I'd found the burned pages to the will. The
new
will, I reminded myself. Somebody had burned it thinking that the old will would be the one filed in probate since the new one would be nonexistent. And whoever had burned the new will had done so either last night or early this morning. If it was this morning, I would assume that whoever had done so had also put the pillow over her face.

“Now, Prescott,” Maribelle cooed. “Maybe Mrs. O'Shea doesn't want the boardinghouse.”

“No, I don't want the boardinghouse, and Clarissa didn't leave it to me.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Prescott asked. “Do you really think that we believe you drove all the way from Missourah for a. . . a. . . cake plate or something?”

“We would have driven all the way from Missouri just for the chance to see Clarissa and speak with her. She invited us, we have family here. We had the opportunity to come back here and we did. That's all there is to it,” I explained.

“Gertie,” Lafayette said. “Talk some sense to your granddaughter.”

My grandmother was as confused as I was. She said nothing to me or him, she just looked around the room with a blank stare on her face.

“Do you guys really believe that Clarissa was leaving the boardinghouse to me?” I asked.

“Why else would she invite you to the reading of the will?” Lafayette asked.

“Look, I am telling you that there is no way that Clarissa Hart left me the boardinghouse. Absolutely, positively no way. She had no reason to. It would make no sense. Now, everybody, calm down and relax. I assure you she did not leave the boardinghouse to me.”

C
larissa Hart had left me the boardinghouse.

I felt so stupid. She had left the boardinghouse, the land it sat on, and all of its contents to me. Little old me. What was up with that?

I sat across from Mr. Oliver Jett with Maribelle Lewis, Lafayette Hart, Edwin Hart, and Norville Gross on my side of the great room in the boardinghouse that I now owned. As a matter of fact, if I wanted to get technical, they were sitting on my couch and eating my food. I'd better not go too far with that though, since there was also the matter of my new employees that I would now have to pay.

“I don't understand, Mr. Jett,” I said. How can you take a man named Ollie seriously? It's sort of the male equivalent of Buffy. “How can this be? Why would she leave me her boardinghouse?”

“She claimed that it was a ‘debt repaid,' “ Mr. Jett said.

“A debt?” I asked. “What sort of debt?”

“Yeah, what sort of debt?” Edwin asked.

I was very happy, by the way, that Preston Lewis was not in the room as we discussed this. Mr. Jett had made the spouses leave the room. Preston would have made this uncomfortable situation all the
more uncomfortable. But I truly didn't understand what the big deal was about the boardinghouse, anyway. Clarissa Hart owned many other properties, along with insurance policies, money market accounts, and stocks. All of which were worth a lot more than this old boardinghouse, and all of which she had divided up between her three children.

Except for the nice tidy sum of $50,000 dollars. Which she left to Norville Gross. Fifty grand! It takes Rudy almost two years to make that kind of money. I could not imagine having that kind of money just sitting in the bank, much less signing it over to somebody else.

This was very interesting information, though. Just who the heck was Norville Gross? Clarissa had made him out to be just another boarder last night at dinner. I'd say that he was a tad more than that, but I did not know his relationship to her, and he had not volunteered it.

“A debt repaid,” I said aloud. “What does it mean?”

“I heard Momma say many times that if there was a person in this world that she owed her life to, it was Bridie McClanahan,” Lafayette said.

“My great-grandmother,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did she say why?”

“She hinted at a lot of things,” Maribelle said. “None of which you could actually pin her down on.”

I thought about it a minute and tossed it around in my head. It made absolutely no sense. What could my great-grandmother have done for her that would have inspired this degree of loyalty? My great-grandmother, on my mother's side, had died at the age of twenty-eight in 1926. So whatever it was she had done, she had done it in a relatively short period of time, from about 1916 to 1926. Whatever it was, it had also been extreme enough that Clarissa hadn't forgotten it in the eighty years that followed Bridie's death.