House on Diablo Road: Resurrection Day (The McCann Family Saga Book 3) (7 page)

“
Can’t tell you. It
is
a secret club is it not? Can I come in, or are you going to make me stand here at the top of the stairs?”

Clancy peered down the staircase to be sure no one had followed his surprise visitor and nearly jumped out of his tightly stretched skin, when a stray cat knocked over a garbage can in the alley below.

“
You know I can’t let you in up here without a membership,Jesse. Besides, you're a law abiding town leader and family man. You have to know there’s drinking and card playing and well…some of these lumberjacks bring in
flappers.
They aren't bad sorts, but some get three sheets in the wind and dance the Charleston on top of tables, for goodness sakes. For a gentleman like yourself, it just wouldn’t be fitting, that’s all. Why don’t we hike downstairs to the bookstore?”

Through the half open door, Jesse heard raucous laughter and breaking glass and decided Clancy was right. Besides, if Annie should find out , she would pull a wall-eyed fit.

“Downstairs might be quieter,” he said.

Clancy came out and relocked the door, and the men went down the back staircase, entered the book store from the front door, and seated themselves at a reading table. Clancy’s beady eyes darted around the shop and then out to the front where shoppers bustled back and forth.“You didn’t bring nobody with you, did you?”

“
No, Clancy, of course not. I’m not trying to expose your operation, but y’all
are
breaking the law up there. Aren’t you a bit
old
to be drinking and carrying on?”

“
You bet I am, and all the more reason to do so. Now what is it you want?”

“
I want to know everything you know about the house on Diablo Road. To begin with, I want to know about the caretaker there. I have a score to settle with him.”

“
His name is Elias Crow. He used to be a drifter who had his eye gouged out cheating at a card game, somewhere up North. He showed up here ten years ago, and Jonathan Bonney hired him when he got too old to tend to things, just before he died. There wasn't much for the man to do except maintenance, but some folks think he's there to keep out trespassers and will use any means necessary—if you know what I mean.”

“
Who oversaw the workers after Jonathan died?”

“
Most of them drifted away after the Emancipation. There wasn’t any work anyhow, since they stopped planting cotton after Cyrus McCann was gone. Didn't take Jonathan long to take over the place and move right in with Lucinda. He took advantage of her, since she had nowhere else to go. He told everyone she lived on one side of the house, and him on the
other, before he married her. Nobody believed that. The old timers used to say he’d always been sweet on her
—
besides being covetous of the McCann house to the point of obsession. Some folks said it wasn't Lucinda but the house that had Jonathan under its spell.”

“
So what did Jonathan do with all that land Cyrus accumulated?”

“
Ran some cattle on part of it. Sold most of the back acreage when the railroad came through to service the timber business. He married Lucinda when a decent mourning period had gone by.”

“
Who owns the place now?”

“
Jonathan’s great-grandson Nathan inherited it, but the old man specified he had to wait until he turned thirty. Figured he'd take care of things better, after sowing his wild oats, I suppose. The old man was particularly fond of him when he was a little boy. Some said the boy was the apple of his eye in his last years. Everyone but Nathan got bypassed in the will.”

“
What happened to Lucinda?”

“She
was in her grave by the time she hit forty
.
She
died right there in the house, from an overdose of rot-gut. So the story goes. The old timers said after she took up with Jonathan Bonney, she went downhill. Others believe she lost her will to live from never having children, even with Jonathan’s motherless brood to take care of. They say she grieved for the babies she never had, and she grieved for Cyrus. Only it was something more than grief, something hard to put a name to.”

“
Didn’t she receive any treatment for depression?”

“
Well, she always kept various so called 'tonics' around, since she was a young woman. Doc says he was never called out there, though. She died, and Jonathan buried her. End of story. We’re talking about old time ways, when country folks laid their loved ones to rest on their own property and sometimes without bothering with a death certificate, though some folks tried to get the information to do just that. He made it awful hard to even come on his land.”

“
Was there a funeral?”

“
No one knows. If there was, no one was invited to the service. There were bad feelings between Lucinda and Cyrus’ friends over their dislike of Jonathan. They felt like he took advantage of Lucinda’s predicament, since she had no one to take her in, and he had virtually stolen the plantation for the back taxes. The rest of her family was gone when her cousin died. Charlotte was her name I think.”

“
Yes, she was Buck Hennessy’s wife.”

The bell on the shop door jingled, as a trickling of customers entered, some smiling and nodding in their direction. One man stared at the oddly matched friends with unabashed curiosity. There was the calm and self-contained Jesse, tall with a head full of blond wavy hair mixed with gray and eyes of bright blue ice. Across from him sat the short paunchy Clancy, with small button eyes and the jitters of a caged hamster.

Jesse waited until the customers selected their books and moved on before he continued: “It’s a shame a woman like her locked herself away from the world. Katie found her picture in an old newspaper at the library and said she was very much the elegant lady. Hard to believe no one cared enough to come to see about her.”

“
It’s no wonder to me. Have you ever been all the way down that path? That house is
isolated
. Cyrus built it there for privacy, but he was no hermit. Now Jonathan ended up a recluse out there. He and Lucinda stopped coming into town and even sent a hired hand out for their groceries.”

“
So no one saw Bonney in his last years?”

“
Someone on an adjoining farm caught a glimpse of him one time and said he’d let his hair grow to his shoulders and had a ragged beard. And to think he was once such a meticulously groomed man. Used to come in the shop every day for a shave and every other Saturday for a haircut.”

“
I don’t suppose he’s still alive.”

“
Oh no. He’s buried out there in that private cemetery behind the main house, next to Lucinda and members of the McCann family. Of course, it was a McCann’s cemetery to begin with. All the more strange for him to lie there, since he hated Cyrus with a passion. Cyrus was a Unionist and a deserter, if only in his eyes. Then too, there was always rivalry over Lucinda between them.”

“
Something seems amiss, but I don’t know what it is,” said Jesse.

Clancy placed his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “You can’t right an imaginary wrong perpetrated by a hot head like Buck Hennessy. I don’t believe it was Jonathan and the Night Riders who hanged Cyrus. Like most folks, I believe it was Louis Monet and his friends. They were either after something, or they were part of a slave uprising. All sorts of stories circulated at the time.”

Jesse shook his head. “Buck says all of Cyrus’ field hands were
free
men. Apparently, my uncle didn’t condone slavery, so that story doesn't hold water. In fact, he treated them all
as equals.”

Jesse paused, glanced around the bookstore and leaned in to speak in a low and urgent tone: “Everything connected to that house and the Bonney family is affecting my children, the youngest and the oldest. First off, I intend to set things straight with Crow for threatening my son. Beyond that, I need to know what kind of family Nathan comes from, before my daughter marries him. You know very well the Night Riders stay in the group generation after generation, and they keep their secrets. I don’t want that kind of people around my family.“

Upon overhearing that remark, a matronly woman peered over the top of a newly released F. Scott Fitzgerald and stared at curiously at both men.

Clancy's eyes widened, and a tiny twitch played about his jawline: “That’s where we draw the line. We don’t talk about the Night Riders
.”

“
Why not?”

“
It’s a
secret
cult. They never shared their secrets, and if a man knew something, he kept his mouth shut.”

“
I heard the Night Riders reactivated to keep down people that don’t fit their mold, and I’ve no respect for that kind of self-righteous mob mentality. Isn’t it likely they were responsible for my uncle’s death? There are Civil War records reporting their rampage during that very month, hanging men they claimed were deserters. Sometimes they killed not out of retribution but just because someone had a grudge. Don’t say you don’t know anything. The perfect place for them to meet is upstairs behind the locked doors of that speakeasy.”

“
Why do you want to relive something that happened nearly six decades ago? “

“
Maybe I’d rather not, but it’s no secret that Buck believes Jonathan Bonney was the ring leader-for his own self-serving reasons.”

“
Let it go, Jesse. You never even got a chance to meet your uncle. He was killed before you were even born.”

“
Then do
you
believe it was Monet and the field hands who killed Cyrus?”

Clancy wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and tucked it back in his pocket before answering. “There were several theories about it. Talk back then was about a fortune in gold coins missing from the house. Cyrus knew Louis Monet was the only worker who had access to his home. So he went over to the Monet cabin to question him. One of the field hands claimed he saw Cyrus go there. They think an argument ensued, and Louis settled it then and there. He may have had help in doing it, but he dragged Cyrus out to the dogwood tree and strung him up to make it look like the work of the riders.”

“
What a wild presumption. Don't you think that's a far reach?”

“
Come on now, Jesse. Innocent men don’t run away and hide for the rest of their lives.”

“
They might, if they feel the deck’s stacked against them. Are you telling me no one has seen the couple in the last fifty-seven years?”

“
Pretty much. Phoebe Monet came into town one time, twenty years ago. I saw her strolling down the boardwalk past the barber shop like she was Queen Esther. I watched the sheriff escort her out by following her wagon on horseback. Not a doubt in my mind he told her to take him to where Louis was holed up. I figured she most likely led him on a wild goose chase out into the thicket. Phoebe Monet was no halfwit.”