Coup de Glace

by P. D. Workman

  “I don’t mean… it wasn’t like she was laughing and making fun of me. Not overtly. But I started to feel like… she was laughing behind my back. That it wasn’t really me she was interested in, she just wanted to pump me for information about Davis.”

  Erin sighed. She had been afraid of that from the start. Charley was far too mercenary to be making friends with an older woman for no reason.

  “I’m sorry she did that. I never said anything to her…”

  “Of course not. I know you wouldn’t be like that, Erin. But not everyone is like you, and I was… fooled at first.”

  It was about five minutes before Terry got there, K9 panting at his side. He smiled at Erin. “An official visit? What’s up?”

  Erin cleared her throat. “Could we go into your office?

  Terry led the way and Melissa clucked in amusement, as if she thought it was just a ploy on Erin’s part to get Terry alone. Terry motioned Erin ahead of him into the office, and stood with his hand on the door handle, his body language clearly asking whether he needed to shut it. Erin nodded. Terry shut it and went around his desk to sit behind it, treating it as an official interview.

  “So…? This is all rather mysterious.”

  “I wasn’t expecting Melissa to be here. It’s just that it’s about Davis, and you know…”

  The rest went unsaid. That Melissa and Davis had recommenced their decades-old relationship and visited him at the prison. Terry needed to keep anything to do with Davis confidential from Melissa.

  “Ah. Got it. So what do you have?” His expression was puzzled, not sure what else she could have come across about Davis.

  “I’ve been reading Clementine’s journal, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “There is evidence that Davis knew about his brother’s allergy.”

  “Well, we always suspected as much. What evidence?”

  “He had a serious reaction. Davis took him to hospital. They told him it could have been fatal.” Erin slid the book out of her shoulder bag and opened it to the marked page. Terry took his time reading through the passage a couple of times before looking up at Erin.

  “You’re right. They might be able to use this.”

  “Do you see… the margin marking and the smiley face?”

  Terry nodded. “I wondered what that was about.”

  “That was Joelle. She marked a number of things in the journal.”

  “Really.” Terry flipped back a few pages, noting other annotations. “Well, well, well. That made her smile, did it?” He pondered for a few minutes. “This could certainly be helpful to the case against Davis. Thanks for bringing it by. I’ll make a copy and get it back to you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  E

  rin’s familiarity with the route to the Prost farm made it seem like it wasn’t quite so far away as it was the first time. They were definitely out in the bush, but maybe it wasn’t quite as remote as it had felt the first time. They pulled into the parking area, and Erin and Vic climbed out of the Challenger. A large black and white shaggy dog came streaking toward them, barking and growling so fiercely Erin was sure he was going to take a chunk out of her. She backed up into the side of the car, and fumbled behind her for the handle to get back in.

  “Rasher, shut up!” a gruff voice shouted. “Go on, get out of here.”

  The dog lowered his head and looked back at the door of the farmhouse, where Cindy Prost stood with her hands on her hips. She pointed to the dog house.

  “Go on. Back to your house. Leave the company alone.”

  He slunk obediently away and lay down in the dog house, head and front paws out the door.

  Erin breathed heavily, holding one hand over her pounding heart. “Thank you. I guess we should have stayed in the car until after you came out. I didn’t realize.”

  “It’s a good practice if you’re going to be visiting homes out in the bush. Most of us keep dogs to guard the house. Nobody is going to break into my house with Rasher in the yard.”

  “No,” Erin agreed weakly. “I don’t think so.”

  Cindy stood there for a moment gazing at them, hands on hips, then jerked her head.

  “Come on in, then.”

  Erin walked up to the door. She was glad that Vic was there with her rather than Reg. Reg would enjoy getting this woman wound up, and that wasn’t what Erin wanted. She would catch more flies with honey. Vic was far more sociable and wasn’t likely to get them kicked off the property without what they had come for.

  Bella was inside the house, hovering nearby, as if afraid she might get into trouble for acknowledging their presence. Cindy didn’t say anything to Bella, neither telling her to leave nor encouraging her to stay.

  “Come and set,” Cindy invited, motioning to the living room. Vic and Erin found themselves seats. A good southern hostess, Cindy brought them tall glasses of iced tea and fiddled with the fans, trying to make sure they were pointed in Erin’s and Vic’s general direction. “I don’t rightly understand why Bella wanted me to talk to you. This whole thing seems a little silly. If Bell wanted to know about my mother and father, she only needed to ask me.”

  “I have, Mom,” Bella protested. “I’ve asked you about them lots of times, and you never want to tell me anything.”

  Cindy gave no sign that she heard a word her daughter was saying.

  “I guess it’s a bit of a local mystery,” Erin said. “Family history can be so fascinating.”

  Cindy sat down in a carved rocking chair. She rocked back and forth a little, her movements slow. She took a sip of her tea and put it on the side table.

  “It shorely is,” she agreed. “I could tell you many stories about the history of the area. My family has lived here for hundreds of years. One of the first families to settle the area.”

  “That’s what Bella was saying. What a long tradition. That’s really amazing. I guess my family has been here for quite a while too, but I don’t know all of the history and how our lines might intersect.”

  Cindy considered. “I don’t rightly know. Been a long time since I pulled out those dusty old books. And…” Her eyes narrowed as she studied Erin and Vic in turn. “…I get the feeling that’s not why you’re here.”

  Erin shifted uncomfortably. She took a drink of her tea. “Uh… no. It’s not really about my family. Or about ancient history. It was your parents I was curious about.”

  “And why?”

  Erin tried to keep her eyes steady on Cindy and not let them drift over to Bella. “Like I said. A bit of local color. It sounded like an interesting story, and I was hoping you could fill me in on the details.”

  “You want to capitalize on our loss? Write a book about it or sell the story to the newspapers?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I’m a baker. I’m not writing a book or articles for the paper. I just want to know what happened. Whatever you know, even if some of it is still a mystery today.”

  “This is Bella’s doing. She put you up to it. I didn’t like it when she took the job at the bakery. Told her she didn’t need to be working while she was still going to school. She has everything she needs. Didn’t need to be associating with…” her eyes shifted from Erin to Vic, “…odd people.”

  Vic gave a little snort at Cindy’s pained expression. People like Lottie Sturm had already done their best to take Vic down a notch, to make her life miserable and drive her away. Cindy’s distaste wasn’t going to drive Vic to hysterical tears.

  “Mom!” Bella said, red with embarrassment. “These are my bosses! You can’t talk to them like that!”

  “Because you might get fired? That’s a risk that you faced by inviting them here. If they want to know what went on here, they’re going to get the full Cindy Prost, undiluted.”

  “Just don’t… call them names. Honestly!”

  “I didn’t call her queer,” Cindy protested. “I said odd.”

  “That doesn’t make a difference. Don’t call them anything.”

/>   Cindy rolled her eyes and spread her hands in a ‘what can you do about kids these days?’ shrug at Erin and Vic. “Fine. So you came here to find out what happened to my mother. You think you’re the only one who has ever asked?”

  “No,” Erin knew from Clementine’s journal that more than one person had attempted to reason with Ezekiel Prost and to get him to allow them to search the grounds for any sign of Martha. But Ezekiel had denied them. If Cindy had been asked after she moved back to the farm, she suspected the inquirers didn’t get much further with her. “I’m just hoping you’ll share what you do know with us.”

  Cindy rocked. She had physical similarities to her daughter. Heavy. Blond hair—though Cindy’s had a lot of gray in it. Her facial features were similar, though, of course, her skin was more wrinkled.

  “Don’t know what you think you’re going to figure out that no one else has up until now. It’s all pretty simple. My father told me that my mother was out every time I called to have a conversation. I started to wonder what was going on, whether she was ill and didn’t want me to know about it, or maybe she’d even left him after some big blow-up. Some couples do that, you know, break up after all of the kids have moved out and they are on their own again.”

  Erin nodded. “Yes. It always bothers me when I hear about a couple that has been together for twenty-five or thirty years has broken up. It seems like such a waste.”

  Cindy made no response. Erin had the feeling that she was irritated by Erin’s interruption to her carefully-considered narrative.

  “So I was already wondering what was going on with my parents. Then I got a call from a friend.”

  From Lottie Sturm, as Clementine had suspected? Erin supposed it didn’t make any difference who had called Cindy to tell her.

  “She told me about how everyone was worried about Dad, and that Mom seemed to have disappeared. And just like that… my life changed forever.”

  Erin nodded. “So… you decided you’d better come home and see what was going on.”

  “You bet your sweet behind I did! Dropped everything, my whole life, and just came back out here.”

  “Did you find anything? Any sign of what had happened here?”

  “Not a thing.” Cindy shook her head. “You might think it’s an exaggeration, but it’s the truth. There was nothing to find. My mother wasn’t here, but there was no indication she had planned to go on a long trip. I couldn’t see any missing suitcase or clothes. All of her favorite things still seemed to be here. And no, there wasn’t any sign that something violent had happened here, either. No bloody fingerprints. No rotting corpses. Just an old man…”

  When Erin opened her mouth to ask about Ezekiel’s age, Cindy talked over her.

  “No, he wasn’t that old in years. But it was like he was forty years older than he had been when I’d seen him the last Christmas. He had turned into an old man overnight. He wasn’t eating, and his clothes just hung on him. He didn’t say he was worried about my mom or that he was missing her, but he was obviously pining after her. Whyever she was gone… he was missing her something terrible. I think if I had taken another week to get here, he would have been dead.”

  Erin breathed out. “Wow. But you nursed him back to health. You took care of him, and he lived for a few more years.”

  Cindy ran her fingers through her hair. It wasn’t curly, like Bella’s. Bella had either inherited that from her father, or Cindy had outgrown her curls.

  “My mother has been gone twenty-one years. Dad lived long enough to see his only grandchild, and she’s seventeen now.”

  “Another four years.” Not bad, for someone who had apparently been at death’s door. But it was probably more than Cindy’s cooking that had brought him back from the brink. It was Cindy herself. Family. Something to live for. Someone else to fill the empty spaces that his wife had left behind.

  “That’s really all there is to it. Nobody has ever found any trace of my mother, living or dead. I imagine sometimes that she’s off enjoying life somewhere, that she started over and found the life that she couldn’t have while she was living here and raising her children. But do I think she’s off in Florida or Spain, enjoying the local color? Not really. I don’t have proof of what happened, but I think she died.”

  Bella moved into the room to better hear or provide comfort. “Mom… is that what you really think? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I don’t know how it happened. I hope he just woke up one morning and found that she had passed in the night. Or maybe she keeled over in the vegetable garden in the heat of the day. Just a natural occurrence. I don’t like to think he might have done something to her.”

  “He wouldn’t have,” Bella said, as if she were the one who had known Grandpa and her mother the one who hadn’t. “He wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her, would he? He wasn’t ever a violent person, right?”

  Cindy didn’t immediately jump in and say, ‘Of course he wasn’t. He’d never harmed a fly in his life. He’d never have laid a hand on his wife.’ Instead, she pressed her lips together tightly, not answering for a few minutes.

  “I don’t know. When I was a kid, I was scared to death of him. He was bigger than life. If he told me to do anything and I questioned it, I’d get a whipping. There was never any doubt of that. But in the time I’d been away from home, he’d mellowed. He didn’t have to be the authoritarian figure anymore. When I was little… I don’t know if he ever struck my mother. I kind of assumed he did, but I never saw him do it. Maybe I just figured that if he whipped me, he must have hurt her too. My mother never said he did, but what woman would ever admit that to her child?”

  “So it might have been violence. He might have killed her accidentally, or in a fit of anger,” Vic suggested.

  Cindy glared at her, clearly communicating that she was talking to Erin and didn’t expect to hear any comments from Vic. She looked back at Erin and answered as if Erin had been the one to ask.

  “I told you, there were no signs of violence. Nothing out of place. No blood. If he did hurt her… he cleaned everything up. He never said what he’d done. He never said my mother was dead.”

  “The townspeople assumed that he had done something to her. Or at the very least, that he’d disposed of the body.”

  “The townspeople have never had any idea about anything. Gossip and rumors. I’ve never had any reason to talk to anyone in the town about it.”

  “The Sheriff at the time? He never came out here?”

  “He called me. Talked to me in town. I told him what I told you. There was no sign of anything on the farm. Nothing my father said ever convinced me that he had done anything to hurt her. She was just gone, and he was grieving for her.”

  “So the sheriff never came out?”

  “He’d tried a couple of times before I came back. I made it clear to him that I would not be allowing anyone on the property either.” Cindy picked up her glass and took a long drink, as if parched from her speech. “I never let anyone in here to talk about it, until now. The only reason I allowed you in was because you’re Bella’s boss.”

  “I really appreciate it,” Erin said. “I know we don’t have any right to just barge in here and demand details. You’ve been very gracious about it.”

  Cindy nodded her agreement. Erin didn’t think she was only doing it for Bella. She had avoided Bella’s questions in the past. Maybe she had just decided it was time to talk about it. Twenty years was a long time to stay quiet about something so life-changing. It had turned Cindy’s life completely upside-down, putting her in the role of caregiver before she was prepared for it. Had Cindy ever considered abandoning her family property once her father was gone? Selling the farm that had been in her family for generations and going back to the city to work? It couldn’t have been easy for her to eke out a living and to be isolated there for so much of the time. Just she and Bella.

  “Would it be possible for us to look around the property a little?” Erin suggested, sure Cindy
would say no.

  But Cindy pursed her lips and considered. She rocked back and forth, and her eyes went over to Bella.

  Bella leaned forward a little. “I could show them around, if you want. Then you wouldn’t have to, but I’d make sure they didn’t leave open any gates.”

  Cindy took another sip of tea. “All right,” she agreed finally. “You can take them around. But stay away from the old barn. It isn’t safe in there.”

  Bella nodded her understanding.

  “We really appreciate it,” Erin repeated. She swallowed and looked at Bella. “Do you want to show us around the house first?”

  Again, she was sure that Cindy would jump in and snap at them, telling them they couldn’t intrude on her family life. Looking outside at the goats was one thing. Poking through bedrooms was quite another. But Cindy just looked back at them, her eyes dark.

  Bella managed to nod. “Sure, of course. We’ll start upstairs.”

  There was a pause as everyone waited for an explosion, but one wasn’t forthcoming. Had Cindy decided that she wanted them to look around? She wanted them to figure out the truth and expose it to the light of day twenty years later? It had been a burden that she had carried by herself for too long.

  Erin and Vic stood up and followed Bella to the stairs. They all traipsed as quietly as possible up the squeaky risers. Bella hesitated for a moment, then indicated the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  “I don’t really know what you want to see. I mean… it’s been years since Grandma and Grandpa lived here.”

  The first room appeared to be Cindy’s room, the master bedroom. It was a small, cramped room, large enough for the bed and dresser, with patterned wallpaper that made Erin feel claustrophobic. She had lived in old houses, but none as old as the Prost farmhouse. What progenitor had originally erected those walls? Had it been one man? A family working together? A community project like a barn-raising? It was hot inside, which told Erin that it was not well-insulated and was probably freezing in the winter. Tennessee winters were nothing compared to the northeastern United States where Erin had spent most of her years, but they were still cold for someone with blood thinned by Tennessee summers. The closet was small by modern standards, but it had been built to hold all of a couple’s clothes. Two pairs of pants, two shirts, and a good suit for the man. Two house dresses and a good dress for the woman. It wouldn’t have accommodated much more.