A MistY MourninG Read online

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “I want you to find out who did it.”

  “You what?” I asked. I thought about it a moment, and then something popped into my head. “Oh, I get it. You want me to find out who murdered Mrs. Hart and make sure that it isn’t Laffy. I mean, Lafayette. Is that it?”

  He had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. I glanced around the room to find my grandmother sitting at a table with ol’ Laffy Hart. She’d been very short with me all evening.

  “It wasn’t Lafayette. But I’m afraid that boneheaded sheriff might get it in his thick skull that Lafayette did do it and then there would be no stopping him. See . . . if you find out who did it, it won’t be Lafayette because he didn’t do it.”

  I shook my head, thoroughly confused. “Wait a minute. If Lafayette didn’t kill his mother, then the sheriff will know this.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. He hunched his shoulders inward and leaned toward me. “Things have a way of ending the way the sheriff wants them to end.”

  I know I must have looked totally appalled, because, believe me, I wasn’t buying this for one second. He was actually trying to convince me that Sheriff Justice was crooked? Or at the very least incompetent? I’ve seen my share of sheriffs and this one knew what he was doing. “Are you suggesting—”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, Mrs. O’Shea,” he said.

  “If I continue this conversation with you I’m gonna need a real soda,” I said, pushing my glass away and resting my head in my hands. “What do you know about Mrs. Hart?”

  “I know that she was a very generous lady,” he said and smiled at me. “Obviously.”

  “Yes, obviously.” Ooh, I hate it when people get nasty. “Are you angry because she didn’t leave you anything for your church? Is that it?”

  His skin turned as white as his beard. “No, of course not.”

  “Then hurry up, Mr. Breedlove. I need to get back to my grandmother. Can you help me or not? I need to know what happened to Clarissa when she was a young woman. Other than witnessing a lynching in her front yard,” I said.

  The pastor shook his head. “I wasn’t even born yet,” he said. “But I heard how that changed her. She wasn’t ever the same. Never.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  “No, I mean it was so bad that she had to leave.”

  “What do you mean, leave?” I asked, suddenly interested.

  “Couple months after the lynching, she left. Left the state, as far as I know. Least that’s what my daddy told me. Said she was gone about a year. One day she came walking back on up the road, stopped at the boardinghouse and asked your great-grandmother for a job. Nobody knows why she left,” he said and then raised his eyebrows. “Rumor was your great-grandmother knew. People said that Bridie knew where she was the whole time.”

  “Just like they say she knew where the miners had gone, as well,” I said.

  “No amount of coercing would make Bridie talk. Not even the cross burning.”

  “The cross burning?” I asked. I could feel my eyes bulge out of my head. “What cross burning?”

  “The sheriff back then was a KKK member. He was convinced if Bridie was scared enough, she’d tell. So he rounded up about eight members and put switches on her doorstep. When that didn’t get her to go a-running and confess what she knew, they burned a cross in her front yard,” he explained.

  “Man, that front yard has seen a lot of action,” I said.

  “I imagine we will never know the half of it. Regardless, Bridie knew where Clarissa had gone off to, but she never would tell. My daddy said that Clarissa came back a haunted woman, wasn’t never the same.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “Couple months after Gainsborough was lynched. Uh. . . I think it was about a few weeks after those miners went missing. The whole county was thinking that Clarissa was another missing person. But she came back,” he said.

  “From where?” I asked more for myself than for him. “Where did she go?”

  Twenty-seven

  There was an Alfred Hitchcock marathon on television at the boardinghouse when we returned from our night out of do-si-doing. Or my night out of stepping on people’s feet and dancing in a circle. There’s nothing square about my dancing.

  I love Alfred Hitchcock. I also am the biggest Cary Grant fan in the world, so I was doubly upset when I found out I’d missed North by Northwest. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen it a dozen times already, but I wanted to see it again. My spirits rose when I realized I would get to see Suspicion, because even though it was not one of my favorites, I’d get to see Cary.

  So, there I sat with my swollen feet propped up on a pillow on the sofa, trying to get them higher than my head. I had a stack of oatmeal-raisin cookies and a glass of milk, and watched Cary Grant play a not-so-nice character, wishing I was at home in New Kassel listening to my chickens cluck and watching my dog Fritz snore.

  As far as I could tell, everybody was retired for the evening. I was at the part in the movie when Joan Fontaine argued with the portrait of her father. In her mind, the portrait was telling her to be suspicious of her husband, and she defended him. I looked over my shoulder at the portrait of Aldrich Gainsborough in his casket and wished it would talk to me.

  Then I looked up at the gallery of pictures on the stairway wall. I took a bite of cookie and then a drink of milk. I never dunk my cookies because I can’t stand anything that is soggy. Soggy is bad. I finished off my glass of milk and set it on the table as I stood up. Leaving the television on, I walked over to the stairwell wall and flipped on the switch.

  I probably knew everybody on this wall, but I could not recognize them because many of the pictures were baby portraits. I can’t explain my fascination with and love of old pictures. A moment in time captured. A snippet from the evolutionary time scale. A door to another time.

  I found the same picture my aunt Millicent had of the boardinghouse with my grandmother standing in the front yard. There was a picture of Clarissa and a man that I assumed was her husband. She wore an elegant dress from the forties with a string of pearls around her neck. And then I noticed a photograph of Bridie. She stood in front of a quilt that hung draped over the porch railing. A few photographs down the wall, I found another one of her. Only this one was a studio portrait in which she wore a small dark hat and the looser clothing that had become popular in the early twenties. Draped across her lap was a quilt.

  I stepped back down one step and looked at the earlier picture and then back at the studio one. It was the same quilt. It was the same quilt I had upstairs in the attic in a box that Clarissa had wanted me to see.

  Okay, sometimes I’m really dense and I don’t get things. Other times I’m extremely paranoid and imagine theories that could never be true. So I had to be very careful with what my next thought was. Yes, every now and then I do have control of my mind.

  Was Bridie photographed with this quilt several times for a specific reason? Was it the only quilt she ever made? I doubted that seriously. Why had Clarissa chosen those pictures of Bridie to display in frames on her picture wall? Did it mean something? Or was it just a coincidence? More than likely it meant nothing at all. Still. . .

  I went up the stairs and to my room, where I got my keys out of my purse and headed on down the hall to Clarissa’s room. As I reached to unlock the door, I noticed that it was already unlocked. I supposed that Dexter was no longer keeping it locked. The door to the attic was unlocked, as well.

  I waved my hands out in front of me in the suffocating darkness, trying to find the string that was the light switch. I finally found it, turned it on, bathing the stairs in a dim golden hue, and went on upstairs. What I found, although disturbing, wasn’t really a shock to me. Somebody had gone through all of the things in my boxes that Clarissa had set aside for me. This was the second time things of mine had been searched. What was somebody looking for?

  I couldn’t tell if anything was really missing because
it was all just sort of piled into the boxes without being in any order. I spied the quilt and took it, along with the photo album, and then grabbed the sewing basket, as well. As I turned around, I saw somebody out of the corner of my eye and I screamed. It wasn’t a little stifled shriek, it was a full-fledged, full-lung-power scream. I also dropped the sewing basket, sending buttons and thread and stuff all across the attic floor.

  It was Vanessa Killian, the cleaning lady. “What in the hell are you trying, to do?” I asked. “Couldn’t you have cleared your throat or something?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said and began picking up all the stuff that had spilled from the brown antique basket. “I think you enjoyed that very much. I think all of the people in this house have a morbid sense of humor and you’re all trying to drive me crazy. That’s what I think.”

  “Now, tell me what you really think,” she said and smiled. She was about thirty, stocky, and reminded me of one of those nasty women in a Three Stooges movie with a bad Eastern European accent. Except she had no accent.

  “What do you want? It’s at least midnight,” I said.

  “That’s exactly correct, Mrs. O’Shea. I might ask what you are doing up here at midnight?”

  “No, you may not ask,” I said from the floor as I was about finished picking up all of the renegade notions. “If you must know, I came up here to get the quilt because I wanted to have a closer look at it. I barely glanced at it the other day when I was up here.”

  “At midnight.”

  “Yes, Ms. Killian. I couldn’t sleep.” She looked at me blankly. “Have you ever been pregnant? You’re so sleepy you could drop, yet you can’t get comfortable enough to sleep, so you wander around the house doing really odd and stupid things that you normally wouldn’t do when you weren’t pregnant.”

  “I see,” she said. Boy, she had no sense of humor at all. Made me want to ask her if she had a stash of penicillin somewhere. I would refrain, however. I do remember a few things that my mother taught me. You know, it matters not what I teach my children, because when they grow up they’ll flip through their mental file of “Lessons by Mom” and use what they want and throw out what they don’t want. Just like I do all the time.

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked, and stood up.

  “I just heard the noise, I wanted to see if. . . if there was a prowler.”

  “Oh,” I said. Maybe I’d misjudged her. “Have you heard anybody up here earlier? My things have all been gone through.”

  She looked away quickly and then gave a curt, “No.”

  “Did you go through my things?”

  “No, ma’am,” she snapped.

  “What is going on? What is it they’re looking for?”

  “You should go home as quickly as possible,” she said and turned to leave.

  “Why?” I asked. “Don’t you know when you tell somebody to leave quickly, it’s only going to make them stay? Because curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t kill the pregnant lady,” she said.

  “Are you threatening me?” I asked and moved over closer to her. I didn’t look all that intimidating, considering I was pregnant, barefoot, had my hair all messed up, wore cookie crumbs on my lips, and was holding a handful of junk.

  “No. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Well, for your information, I can’t leave,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “The sheriff told me I had to stay put at least for a couple of days. He thinks I killed Clarissa, you know,” I said and raised my eyebrows in exaggeration.

  “We’re aware of what is going on. The Harts are the ones going through your stuff,” she said and descended the stairs.

  “Why?”

  About halfway down she turned back to address me. “They’re looking for it.”

  “For what?” I descended the steps with her.

  “A few years before their father died, he told them that somewhere on this property was something that would make them wealthy. They’ve been looking for it ever since.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “When?”

  “When what?” she asked, confused.

  “When did their father die?”

  “I dunno. Sometime in the sixties,” she said. “Go to your room, Mrs. O’Shea. Do us all a favor and stay there.”

  Man, oh man. I hadn’t been told to go to my room in at least a couple of months. I supposed that would change now that my mother would be moving out in August. It was one good thing about her upcoming nuptials.

  I was on my way to my bedroom, honest I was. When I smelled this incredible aroma coming from downstairs. It was spicy and cheesy and. . . oh, my gosh. Somebody had ordered pizza! If it was any of the Harts they’d be far too snotty to share their pizza with me, but it might be somebody else, and what did I have to lose? Other than a nice gooey piece of pizza?

  I entered the dining room, and there sat Sherise Tyler with a bottle of Rolling Rock and a pizza with the lid opened. The box took up a good two feet on the table, and I could see the round red layers of pepperoni on top.

  “Hi, Sherise. I’m going to be rude and ask if I can have a piece of pizza. I’ll gladly pay you for it,” I said, eyeing the box.

  “Don’t be silly. I won’t eat the whole thing. Sit down and help me,” she said and slid the box a few inches toward the empty chair at the head of the table.

  “Did you find somebody who delivered all the way out here?” I asked. I disappeared into the kitchen to get a small plate and a glass of water.

  “No,” she said as I came back in the room. “I picked this up on the way home.”

  “It smells great. What is it about eating pizza at midnight that is so much better than eating it any other time of the day?” I asked. I sat down and put two pieces on my plate. They had mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and onions on it, in addition to the pepperoni I’d already spotted.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But, to me, everything’s better at night. I’m a night person. I know what you mean, though. What is it about a warm, breezy, starry night that makes people want to be close to the one they love, more so than straight-up noon? Or why is that your husband is so much sexier when you’re in his parents’ basement? Ever notice that? I suppose the context is everything,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said and sunk my teeth into the pizza. Wonderful. “Mine is candles. Light the place with nothing but candles and everything looks better. The whole world seems to fall in place and all is right. From a stupid candle.”

  We were quiet a moment while we ate our pizza. “Baby keeping you up?” she finally asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think he’s laying a weird way. Everytime I lay down he sits up or something like that. So, I’m just not laying down.”

  “That’s fine for a while,” she said. “You gotta get tired eventually.”

  “I have an incredible amount of energy, Ms. Tyler. I think my mind just shuts off the valve that says it’s tired. Either that or I’ve convinced myself I’m a failure if I don’t get thirty hours out of every day. It’s a sickness, I’ll grant you.”

  “I was like that in college,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d you go?”

  “SIUE.”

  “SIU . . . Edwardsville? You went to Edwardsville? In Illinois?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “That’s just across the river from—”

  “St. Louis. Yes, I know.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “But you’re originally from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, then. . . tell me what it was like.”

  “What what was like?” she asked.

  “In the coal town. Tell me what it was like to live under the Secret Service known as ‘the company’ I’ve not read a whole lot, and believe it or not, my grandparents have told me very little,”
I said.

  “What makes you think I can tell you?”

  “I think that the ‘story’ you’ve got involves the coal company. Or something along those lines. I think you know more than anybody else that’s here and willing to talk to me.”

  She smiled and flipped her hair over her shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding the pizza. “You sure you’re not a reporter? You’re awfully good at this.”

  “At what?” I asked.

  “At asking the perfect questions,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’m just incredibly nosy and just ask all the questions I can think of. Eventually one of them will be right.”

  “Give yourself more credit than that,” she said.

  “I suppose it’s from tracing my family tree. You come to a dead end so many times on the same ancestor that eventually you start asking yourself some of the more improbable questions to try and solve the puzzle,” I said.

  “Like what? Give me an example,” she said.

  “Okay. . . like, I had this ancestor whom I could track to the census in 1860. His last child was born in 1863. After that he disappeared. I assumed he died, but because of the years, I couldn’t get death records, and I could not find him in any cemetery around. Now, because it was the area that is now West Virginia, and because of his age, it never occurred to me that maybe he died in the Civil War. We all know that plenty of West Virginians fought in the Civil War, but because of its stance against the war, it actually became the state that it is today. My mother always told me West Virginia didn’t fight. I found out later that isn’t exactly the truth. But what happened was this. I found out my ancestor had gone off to war, and he died in a prison camp in Illinois. Thus, he was not buried anywhere in West Virginia. But because I eventually asked the improbable question, I found out that several other ancestors or ancestors’ siblings fought in the war,” I said and took a drink of water.

  “On my dad’s side, there was this ancestor who just dropped off the planet after 1861. Not one person ever mentioned that he’d fought in the war. Not one. And my great grandparents knew him personally. So I checked it out, and sure enough. He not only fought but died in it. It changed my whole way of thinking. Anytime I come across an ancestor who just dropped out of sight with no death record or will, I check to see if that was the year of a war. Any war. I can’t tell you how many times this has helped me.”