A Misty Mourning (6 page)

“I don't care about any of this ‘debt repaid' nonsense,” Edwin said. He turned to Norville Gross. “I wanna know who the hell
you
are.”

It was hard to say who was more deathly quiet, Norville Gross or Mr. Jett. They both looked at each other, and then Mr. Jett looked impassively at Edwin. Norville, however, stared at the wall.

“If. . . if Mr. Gross doesn't want to tell you who he is,” Mr. Jett said, “he doesn't have to.”

“Do you know who he is?” Edwin asked.

“No,” Mr. Jett said.

I studied Edwin, and I knew exactly what my grandmother meant by “Edwin was always a slick fart.” He had that sort of shiny-suited, used-car-salesman aura about him. He even wore a gold pinkie ring.

I looked up at the wall that Norville was busy studying to see what was so interesting. The fireplace where I had found the burned will was set back into a redbrick wall. The mantel had one of those Home Interiors sculptures of a deer on one end, a mantel clock that was about fifteen minutes slow sitting in the middle, and an ancient, dusty china doll on the other end. Right above the fireplace, on the brick wall, hung a big picture, with a bunch of people in it. From where I sat, it looked like there were twenty people in the picture. On both sides of that big picture were a few other small pictures. I assumed that the nails were driven into the mortar with special mortar nails.

I didn't think there was anything special on the wall. I think Norville Gross was just trying to avoid looking at any of the Hart children. It did not escape my attention that Norville and I were the only two who were not Clarissa's children who had been left something in her will. We were also the first two who had been in her room after her death.

“I don't think that Mr. Gross is going to answer you,” I said.

“Can I be excused?” Norville asked Mr. Jett. Mr. Jett nodded his head, and Norville got up and left the room. I now had everybody's undivided attention, even though I did not necessarily want it.

“Why wouldn't he want people to know who he is?” I asked quickly, in hopes that people would forget that I now owned the boardinghouse.

“Maybe he doesn't want the will to be contested,” Mr. Jett said. “So he believes it better to remain quiet.”

“Well, we can still contest it,” Edwin said.

“I think,” I said, ignoring Edwin's last statement, “that it would be better if he just came out with it. This way it makes him appear as though he does have something to hide. Maybe you can speak to him about that, Ollie?”

He checked his comb-over to make sure that it was still plastered in place on top of his head. “Certainly,” he said. “I'll try.”

It was quiet, suddenly. All three of Clarissa's children— Lafayette, Maribelle, and Edwin—tried very hard to stare at me without obviously staring at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and finally got up and stretched.

“Well,” I said. “I don't know what to make of this. I honestly had no idea that this would happen or that my great-grandmother had ever done anything important enough to warrant such devotion from your mother.”

“Preston was right,” Maribelle said. It wasn't particularly vicious or ugly the way she said it. She was simply stating a fact.

Slowly, they all got up and left the room, leaving Mr. Jett sitting on the couch to ponder the silence in the great room with me. I walked over and looked out the window for the fifteenth time since six o'clock this morning. The water had started to recede, although not fast enough in my opinion. I wanted to be able to leave this place in a hurry if need be.

“You know,” I said finally. I walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the large picture that hung on the wall. “I most likely will not keep the boardinghouse. I've no need for it. It doesn't exactly turn a profit, and I'm three states west of here and unable to really take care of it.”

“You might want to wait a few months or so before making that
sort of rash decision,” Mr. Jett said. He picked up his briefcase and put the copy of the will inside. “This is an opportunity that has been handed down to you. Even if you just sell it outright. You have children. It's not worth a fortune, but you could start a college fund for them.”

I thought about it a moment as I studied the photograph closely. It was a morbid photograph of a funeral. In the middle of it was a casket, with the lid open and the dead body inside, stiff and pasty-looking. Twenty people surrounded the casket, all looking rather unconcerned. Nobody was partying exactly, but nobody looked all that sad, either, in my opinion.

I'd seen this sort of thing before, especially in Appalachia. One photograph I remember in particular showed the body of Devil Anse Hatfield in his casket. Hatfield of the infamous Hatfields and McCoys.

“Still,” I said, looking to Mr. Jett. “I doubt seriously I'll keep it. I don't feel right about it.”

“Contact your lawyer,” he said. With that he turned and left the room. It was about two hours before dinnertime and I was starving. I'd just been left a boardinghouse, ten acres, and twenty rooms full of furniture and stuff, and all I could think about was food. Well, that and how much I wished the local sheriff would get here.

I
t sounded as though Danette Faragher was trying to wake the dead. I walked past her room on the first floor on my way to speak with Sherise Tyler. I thought if anybody knew any good gossip on the place it would be Ms. Tyler, providing, of course, that she was a local journalist. Instead of going on to Ms. Tyler's room, however, I backed up and knocked on Danette's door. She, of course, didn't answer, since she probably couldn't hear me. I knocked louder.

Finally the door opened with an even louder rush of music. Danette looked fairly surprised to see me. She did not invite me in.

“May I come in?” I asked.

Danette shrugged her shoulders and opened the door the rest of the way so I could enter. She flopped on the bed and reached over with one long, incredibly skinny arm and turned off the music. I got the impression that this must have been Danette's room when she came to visit, because there were a few posters on the wall, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and a few other teenage celebrities that I recognized. Not to mention the CD player and a dresser that had quite a few personal items scattered on top. The room look lived in, even if only on a short-term basis.

“You don't have to turn off the music for me,” I said. “I happen to like the Offspring.”

“Don't think for one minute that you can come in here and pretend to like the in music and that I'll think you're hip and forget that you were the first one in Granny's room. It won't work,” she said with more venom than I was ready for.

“Well,” I said. “For your information, I'm not the least bit hip, that I know. But I do like the Offspring. I like almost every kind of music there is. I'm a huge Beethoven fan, too, which makes me an old fuddy-duddy. So I assume that makes me a hip old fuddy-duddy? I had no idea that the music I listened to decided my fate on the hip scale. Is that why you listen to it?”

She studied me a moment. Clearly, she was not ready for my retort, as much as I was not ready for her attack in the first place. “What do you want?”

“I simply was going to ask you to turn the music down a little bit, because I know that it drives my grandmother crazy, and I wouldn't doubt it had the same effect on your grandfather,” I said. “And then I was also going to try and reassure you that I did not hurt your granny.”

She leaned back on the bed and somehow managed to get her legs under her in one of those pretzel positions that only teenagers can make look painless, and that I couldn't even begin to attempt in my present state. “My uncle Prescott said that you came here for the boardinghouse and that you killed Granny to make sure that you got it.”

“Why would I have to do that?” I asked. “The new will states that I receive the boardinghouse. The old one does not. So, therefore, if I was after the boardinghouse, I would want to make sure that your granny lived. At least until the will was read.”

She thought about that a moment.

“You might inform your uncle Prescott of that.”

She said nothing to that, but she looked around the room with big tears welling up in her eyes. “I can't believe somebody would
hurt her. She was just a little old lady. She was harmless.” Her voice was nearly a whisper from her grief, and suddenly that tough, rebellious teenager slid away, revealing the true fragile state of most of them. Teenagers' hormones take them on a wild ride that they can't escape until Mother Nature says so: it was kind of like being pregnant, now that I thought about it. No wonder I was so grouchy.

“I don't think Clarissa Hart was as harmless as you think,” I said with a smile. “The woman surfed the Net and downloaded her will to her lawyer, a feat that I couldn't accomplish.”

“She was so cool,” Danette said.

“Yes,” I answered. “And I don't have the foggiest idea why somebody would want to hurt an old lady like Clarissa Hart.”

I walked toward the door and was just about into the hall when Danette turned the stereo back on. She quickly turned it down to a normal decibel level. “Is that too loud?” she asked.

“No, that's just perfect,” I said.

“Shut the door on the way out,” she said. “I don't want to be disturbed.”

I did as she asked. On to get some gossip.

I reached the room of Sherise Tyler at the end of the hall on the first floor, directly under Clarissa Hart's room. I knocked on the door and barely had my hand back to my side when the door was sucked open. Sherise Tyler looked as though she was expecting somebody and it wasn't me. The disappointment on her face was obvious, and she knew that I'd caught it.

“Mrs. O'Shea,” she said from way up in the clouds. This woman was tall, tall, tall. “What brings you to my room?”

“I was hoping that I could have a word with you.”

She only stared down at me, as if she was waiting for the real reason.

“Okay, I was hoping that maybe you would share some gossip with me.”

With that she smiled and motioned me into her room with a wave of her arm. She walked over and opened the window that
faced the river and picked up her cigarettes on the nightstand. “Sorry,” she said as she lit the cigarette. “I know you're pregnant and all, but there's a dead body slowly decaying directly above me, and I think that this calls for a cigarette. I'll try and blow it out the window.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

She inhaled deeply, causing the end of the cigarette to glow bright red-orange, and then she flipped her long silky blond hair behind her shoulder and smiled. “So, somebody finally offed the old lady.”

I tried not to let my surprise register on my face, but I don't think I did a very good job.

“People in this valley have been waiting for Clarissa Hart to the for thirty years,” she explained.

“This is good,” I said. “I came to you for gossip, and it looks like you have no qualms about talking.”

“I can't tell you everything I know, because then I'd have nothing left for my story,” she said and blew smoke directly out the window. She held the cigarette so close to the curtains that I just knew at any minute they would go up in flames.

“So, you
are
searching for a story,” I said.

“Oh, I'm not searching for anything. I've got my story. I just have to prove it,” she said.

“Prove what?” I asked.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Well, partly because if Clarissa was murdered then I'm the number one suspect in a homicide, by the simple fact that I was found in the room with a dead body. I've never been a suspect in a homicide before. I was sort of hoping—”

“Hoping to solve the mystery yourself?” she asked. This time she sucked the smoke up her nostrils, and I wondered if that was worse for her than the initial smoke, since, technically, she would be getting both first- and second-hand smoke. I was enthralled with this,
much as I'm enthralled with people who can blow smoke rings. How do they become so talented?

“Well, yes, actually,” I answered finally.

“Ask me a question, and I'll try to answer it to the best of my ability,” she said.

“Who is Norville Gross?”

“I haven't the foggiest idea,” she said. “Obviously somebody important. Or at least important to Clarissa. People come out of the woodwork when there is money to be given or money to be had.”

Okay, fair enough answer. “What's the story on Edwin?”

“Oh, dear sweet Edwin. The prodigal son returns. He was actually pronounced dead once. During the Korean War. He came home walking alongside his coffin,” she said. “Never married. No children, that he claims, anyway. Knows every shortcut there is to being the richest man in the world.”

“So, then why isn't he the richest man in the world? Or is he?”

“Because he is the only one who believes it. He spends money he doesn't have. He files bankruptcy every ten to twelve years, like clockwork. A complete loser.”

Pretty much what I thought of him, actually. “What about Oilier

“He seems on the up-and-up.”

“And the others? Lafayette and Maribelle?”

“Lafayette is a sweetie. Simpleminded, no great education, mind you. But he has a heart of gold and was a decorated soldier in both Korea and Vietnam,” she said. She'd finally had enough of the cigarette and put it out in the ashtray on the nightstand. “Maribelle is never what she seems.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “She tries to come across as this person who is deeply concerned about others. She likes for people to believe that she's this truly sentimental woman, when all she is really concerned with is her money and her station in society.”