A MistY MourninG Read online

  “I’ll get right on that,” he said.

  “Thank you. You know, Susan Henry is the one who had access to all of the food, Sheriff. Not me. And . . . and Clarissa’s son Edwin came in and gave her a chocolate bar,” I said, snapping my fingers. I’d forgotten all about that. He could have easily poisoned the chocolate bar. “Did you find a candy wrapper or anything like that in the room?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you,” he said. “I said I’ll dust for prints and I will. And please don’t tell me who is a suspect and who isn’t.”

  Well, he didn’t have to go and get his panties in a wad over it. He seemed a tad more professional and irritated with me than he had the day I visited his office. “Did Mr. Gross’s father ever make it into town?”

  “Yes,” he said. “He came in and identified the body and then took it home. Took a matter of hours.”

  “How sad,” I said.

  “Mrs. O’Shea,” he said. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Yes,” I blurted out before I even thought about it. My heart pounded in my chest, and my face was instantly flushed. “Why do you ask?”

  Like I really needed to ask that.

  “I think you know why,” he said. “Do you have any priors?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “Well. . . actually, I was arrested once. But it was a total misunderstanding and that sheriff is deeply regretful.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Seriously. Fingerprints, Sheriff Justice. Don’t forget to check for those fingerprints.”

  “What have have you found out about the place?” he asked and pointed to the building in front of us that seemed to have been the center of so much activity in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.

  I could play snotty and tell him I didn’t have to share my information with him. And I really wanted to, but no use in making him more angry. “Actually, I have learned so much. But I don’t think any of it is getting me any closer to solving who killed Clarissa,” I said.

  He cut his eyes around quickly, and I could feel the coldness coming from them. “That is, if I were trying to solve her murder. Which I’m not. Of course not. Because if I were, that would probably be interfering or something like that, and I would never do that,” I said.

  And yes, my fingers were crossed.

  “What have you found?” he asked again.

  “Bunch of stuff on the Aldrich Gainsborough lynching. Some stuff on Clarissa leaving shortly after that and not coming back for a year. That sort of thing.”

  “Why do you want to know about that?” he asked brusquely.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to know about it. That’s just what’s come up. You know, when you’re researching something, you don’t know until after it’s all over which path would have been the most direct. When you’re in the process of it, you get a lot of stuff thrown at you that you can just dismiss. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know,” I said. “I really must get going. The day is getting away from me.”

  With that I walked into the boardinghouse, passing Dexter, Maribelle, and Prescott on the way. I headed up the steps just as Danette came around the comer. “Good morning, Mrs. O’Shea,” she said.

  “Good morning, Danette.” I took a few more steps and was stopped by Danette’s voice yet again.

  “Why do you always take the stairs?” She asked. “You’re pregnant, you know.”

  “Can’t forget it,” I said.

  “Well, Granny’s elevator works just fine. Nobody will care if you use it,” she said.

  “Oh, no thank you,” I said. “I have severe claustrophobia and an old rickety thing like that is. . . well, it is a disaster waiting to happen. With me in it, no less. Thanks for the offer, though.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said and went outside onto the porch.

  I ignored everybody else in the great room and finished my trek upstairs to find Gert. She was seated on the edge of her bed rubbing her feet. I was amazed by this because I didn’t know she could get her feet in her lap.

  “Gert, what are you doing? You’ll fall over,” I said.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. “My feet hurt from dancing.”

  “Did you dance?” I asked.

  “Me and Lafayette danced one dance. Around in a circle, because neither one of us could remember how to make a square,” she said.

  “Oh, Gert,” I said, laughing. “You are so mean.”

  “I’ve had plenty of practice,” she said.

  “You still mad at me?” I asked.

  “I’m not mad at you. I thought you were upset with me,” she said.

  “Well, I’m always upset with you in some form or another,” I said. “I thought—”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  Her feet had bunions the size of quarters. Her big toes grew crooked and I often wondered how her feet held up at all after she had waited tables for thirty-something years. She still had an exceptional arch, though.

  “How come you never told me that Lafayette’s nickname was Laffy?” I asked.

  “How silly is that? That’s horrible. Poor guy. Why would I want to deliberately spread something that silly around?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “I see your point.”

  “Have you talked to your mother lately?” she asked.

  “I talked to Rudy yesterday,” I said. “I’ll talk to her today probably.”

  “They still think you’re a murderer?” she asked and put her shoe on.

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh, and Sheriff Justice came by and he said that Norville Gross was definitely killed by a panther. So that’s comforting on one hand. There isn’t some crazed psycho killing off the boarders of the boardinghouse. On the other hand, that means Clarissa’s murder looks more like I did it. But on the other hand, we have a crazed panther on the loose. Wait a minute, that was three hands.”

  Gert shook her head and clicked her tongue. “How do you do this to yourself? How do you get yourself in such messes?”

  “I. . . uh, well, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t try it,” I said, duly scolded. “How was I supposed to know that picking up a pillow could lead to all of this? Would you have known that? I think not.”

  A long, frustrated sigh exhaled from her body. “That wasn’t a panther attack, I don’t care what anybody says. What are your plans for today?”

  “My plans for today are as follows: I need to get to the courthouse to look at some vital statistics. And I need to find out where Clarissa went for a year.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “It seems that after Gainsborough was lynched, she left town for, like, a year and then came back. At which time Bridie gave her a job,” I said. “Sherise said that she may have stayed at a halfway house or its equivalent in Charleston. Would you know why?”

  She thought about it a moment and then finally answered with a bewildered look on her face. “No. Mom never told me any of that,” she said. “Well, I guess you don’t want me tagging along today, then.”

  “Gert,” I said with my hand on my hip. “Don’t do that. It’s not that I don’t want you to come along. I’m always worried that you’re getting bored. I tell you what, though. I do have a really important project for you.”

  “I quit doing laundry ten years ago.”

  “No, that’s not it.” God, I could just shake her when she got like this. I walked over to the closet and pulled the quilt down off the top shelf. I spread it out on the bed that she wasn’t sitting on. “I think this is what everybody has been looking for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Vanessa Killian told me that Mr. Hart told his children that there was something on this property that would make them all very wealthy. And then last night Sherise mentioned something about quilts being like maps to the slaves for how to make it north. I got to thinking, what if this quilt is a map?”

  My grandmother looked at me over her glasses like I was crazy.
/>
  “Don’t give me that look. Think about it. Clarissa made sure I got this. It’s never been used. And there are two photographs of Bridie on the stairway wall in the great room, and in both of them she is pictured with this quilt. Maybe there is something on this property and Bridie made a map for it,” I said. “It’s plausible.”

  “Why didn’t she just tell somebody?”

  “Maybe this was a safety precaution in case something happened to her. Or, or, maybe she was too afraid or something, but she wanted to give somebody in the future a chance to find it. Maybe it was time-sensitive,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t do anything about it until a certain time, so she made the quilt as a map so that she either wouldn’t forget or it would be there in case she was dead by that time. And she died. Early,” I said.

  “I suppose you could be right,” Gert said finally. “But what am I looking for?”

  “I want you to get a piece of paper and pencil and write down the names of the squares left to right, top row, then second and on down,” I said.

  “I don’t know the names for all of these,” she said.

  “That’s why I’m having Elliott bring some quilt pattern books. There’s one book that has ten thousand patterns with all of their different names. ‘Cause you know some patterns can have several different names, depending on what part of the country you’re in and such,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. As long as you are back here by noon to take me to Denny’s for lunch.”

  She could be such a pain in the butt. It was the only pain in my butt that I loved very, very deeply. “You got a deal. I’ll even buy.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  Very, very deeply.

  Thirty

  A microfilm reader can be your best friend. Like all best friends, it can suddenly become possessed and behave in a completely un-best-friend-like manner. It can become temperamental, jerky, confusing, and downright annoying. What to do in this case? Do what we would all love to do to that best friend, but won’t: Give it a good swift punch. Which I did and I bruised my hand in the process. Love hurts.

  Elliott had gone down to Charleston and was searching vital statistics for some dates and facts on Clarissa and her husband. I’d spent the better part of the morning checking out the Soundex for the 1920 census to see if our boys Doyle Phillips and Thomas MacLean had shown up anywhere else in the state of West Virginia, which they had not. The library had a few of the 1920 Soundexes for the surrounding states, as well, and so I checked them, too. Unless Phillips and MacLean had changed their names, they were not in any of the surrounding states, either. Now, that’s not to say that they hadn’t taken off to Hawaii, but most of the time, people went wherever there were family and friends in times of trouble.

  After the fight with the microfilm machine, which I embarrassedly admit it won, I headed off for the courthouse.

  I love courthouses. I love everything about them. Except for the woman working behind the counter, who’d been working there forty of her sixty years and was genuinely pissed off about it. This courthouse was no different. The pins in Ethel Mae Crutchfield’s hair succeeded in pulling her hair so tight that her eyes were slanted and the skin around her scalp was white. Her cat glasses hung around her neck by a chain that had long ago turned from silver to dingy grey. Ethel Mae would pick up her glasses and hold them to her face every time she needed to read something. Why didn’t she just put them on, for crying out loud?

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of will and probate records?”

  She pressed her lips together and chewed on the inside of her lip. “Down the hall to the left. Photocopies are a dollar, no exceptions. Please don’t mark in the books, tear out pages, or trace the documents. No drinks, smoking, food, or chewing gum allowed. Please sign in,” she said with a nasty tone and shoved a book and a pen in my face. She said all of that without even looking up at me from the letters that she was stamping.

  You know, there were times when I wished I could be mean and rude right back at people. I didn’t care if she hadn’t gotten any sleep last night. I didn’t care if she was bored with her job. I didn’t care if her dog had made a puddle beside her bed, she had forgotten her bologna and cheese sandwich on the counter, or if she had gotten a speeding ticket on the way to work. None of that had anything to do with me. And furthermore, I didn’t care if I appeared stupid or dumb to her. She was the expert. She was the one who got the paycheck for working here. Of course I wasn’t going to know anything when I asked her for help. So therefore, she should be polite to me.

  Just a little soapbox of mine, and I felt much better now. I signed the guest book as Margaret Thatcher and went down the hall to the designated room.

  It had never occurred to me to check for a last will and testament for my great-grandmother, Bridie MacClanahan. She was a woman who died in the twenties, and most women back then did not have a will, unless they were well off. And besides, she’d remarried, and so I also assumed that she had no property at the time of her death to do anything with. Boy, have women come a long way.

  A few minutes into the books I found the will for my great-grandmother Bridie. And yes, she’d left the boardinghouse to “my dearest of all friends, Clarissa Hart. May you take over from here on out.” Just what the heck that meant, I hadn’t a clue. But then, that wasn’t really anything new, now was it?

  She’d had savings of sixty-three dollars, and for back then that was a pretty good sum. Part of it would go to pay her funeral expenses, and the rest was to be divided between her children. Her new husband was not mentioned. She specified that each of the children was to go live with a different aunt. I assumed that the reason she’d made a will at all, considering she was in her twenties, was because she knew she was ill, and she did own a piece of property. If she hadn’t specified, her new husband would have gotten it. Smart woman.

  I decided, just for kicks and grins, to look and see what I could find on Phillips and MacLean. I hauled out the marriage book and scanned the years 1910 to 1920, since I wasn’t sure how old either Phillips or MacLean was. MacLean was not married, at least not in this county during those years. Doyle Phillips, however, was. He married in 1915 one Amanda Sherise Reynolds. Sherise. Sherise.

  Goose bumps shot down my arms as that name echoed through my groggy head. What were the chances that this was a coincidence? Amanda Reynolds had to be the grandmother or great-grandmother of Sherise Tyler. She had to be. Sherise was obviously connected to the boardinghouse. She kept referring to her “story” and wanting to prove it.

  What were the chances that one of the men missing in connection with the lynching of Gainsborough would have married a woman with the middle name Sherise without there being a connection to Sherise Tyler? It’s not like the name was Ann or Elizabeth. Sherise wasn’t that popular a name even now.

  Of course, the next leap my mind made was to Clarissa Hart.

  Could Sherise have murdered Clarissa as some sort of revenge for her grandfather or whatever his relation would have been? But why? And why wait until Clarissa was ready to keel over anyway? Why didn’t she do it years ago? What would she have gained from it?

  The door opened at that moment and in walked one of Sheriff Justice’s G-men. One of the ones with lots of muscles. He smiled at me and I smiled back, suddenly crashing from my adrenaline high. I wrote down the information as fast as I could.

  “Whatcha looking for?” I asked the deputy. Not that it was any of my business, but how else should I have started a conversation with him? Gee, your uniform sure is tight? I guess I could have tried the old “Hey, I just had a contraction” line on him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Sheriff Justice didn’t send you in here to spy on me, did he?” I asked.

  “No, no. I’m not spying. I don’t care what you do. But I’m supposed to make sure you don’t leave town and y
ou’d been in here too long,” he said and took his sunglasses off.

  “Why would you blow your cover like that?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “I’m not trying to hide from you. In fact, if people know we’re watching them, they tend not to run. Honesty is the best policy,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh, you know. I’m trying to save my ever-stretching skin, Deputy. It appears that I look fairly guilty where Clarissa Hart’s murder is concerned and I’m trying to make sure I can go home on Saturday,” I said. “All honestly, of course. I’m not breaking any laws.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Nope. This is all public domain. Freedom of Information Act and all that stuff. In fact, my mother’s fiancé would be very proud of the fact that I’ve minded my p’s and q’s quite nicely while I’ve been here,” I said. I put the marriage book away while I talked to the deputy. “To be perfectly honest, I was hoping that Norville Gross had been murdered.”

  He raised an eyebrow. It was his only reaction.

  “If he had been, it would look more like a double murder and there would be no way I could be guilty of it,” I said. “My grandmother’s just convinced that those marks on him were not made by a panther. But what does an old lady know, right? Certainly not more than your forensics department.”

  “What could you find in here that could help you?”

  “Lots,” I said. “What’s your name again?”

  “Russell. Deputy Benjamin Russell.”

  “Kinda got that James Bond thing going, huh? Well, Russell, Benjamin Russell, I’m finished. I’m going to take my grandmother to Denny’s for lunch. Has Sheriff Justice got that window upstairs dusted for prints yet?” I asked as I picked up my spiral notebook and headed for the door.

  He opened the door for me after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that sort of thing,” he said.

  “Why not? I won’t tell anybody.”

  Thirty-one

  I arrived at the Panther Run Boardinghouse just in time to stop a catastrophe. Screaming assaulted my ears before I even reached the steps. I ran inside the building, letting the rusted screen door bounce behind me. About the time I was halfway into the room, I realized that it was Gert who was screaming.