“Darnell was kin to Jedidiah Wyatt?”
“He’s an Ollis. Great-great-grandson to Alta Iona. Found it out using one of them family trace DNA databases.”
“Amazing what they can tell from a bit of spit, eh? No gold out there then?”
“Not that anyone ever found. The Feds got those two coins Dode had stashed in his money jars.”
“Confederate money. Worth half a million. Can you beat that? I bet Dode is sorting through his spare change more carefully now. He remember where he got those coins?”
“Nah. He always threw his change into those jars. Those coins could have been in those jars for fifty years. In any case, Veenie and I got zippo, except for this page out of a book. It’s signed by Alta Iona. She left it at the orphanage with Myrtle Mae.”
Queet took the page and slipped on her reading glasses, which hung on a chain around her neck. “Hmm. This looks mighty familiar. Wait here just a minute.”
I had nowhere else to go, so I plopped down in a reading chair.
Veenie was already engrossed in a large print Father Mackie romance novel.
I thumbed through some magazines, then scanned the county paper for Hoosier Feedbag coupons.
A couple of minutes later, Queet motioned for us to come into the conference room behind the checkout counter. She was set up thumbing through a tattered cardboard box of stuff. It was the same box we’d sifted through before with Queet—the Ollis family box. I recognized the photos of Jedidiah and Alta spread out on the table. There was also a stack of yellowed papers. Queet lifted a book out of the box and slid it over to me. “Alta’s Bible,” she said.
The Bible was huge, thick as a cement block. Its black leather cover was cracked. The front was embossed with Alta’s name in gold.
Queet tapped the book. “I think your apple print came out of this Bible. There’s a page missing near the middle. Ripped out. Let me see your page again.”
I handed Queet the page. She held it up against a ripped edge inside the Bible. “Fits like a glove. See.”
She was right. “But what’s it mean?”
Queet shrugged. “There are plates all through this Bible. That one seems to be about the Garden of Eden.”
“The old devil apple story, eh?”
“Appears to be.”
“Why would Alta write that inscription on it?”
“Got me. I don’t recognize that inscription as any known poem.”
“So it was a personal message? Meant for whoever took Myrtle Mae in and raised her?”
“Might be.” Queet lifted the Bible and placed it back in the box. “Guess we’ll never know.”
My cell phone was vibrating. It was a call from Dode.
“Got something for you, missy,” he said. “You anywhere out this way?”
“Give me twenty minutes. I could be.”
“Well, gosh darn, come on over. I got some chicken and dumplings warming on the stove. My sister dropped off a fresh pot for me. Be glad to share.”
He didn’t have to repeat that offer.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Veenie shoveled into her bowl of chicken and dumplings.
I pretty much did the same.
We were sitting around the table in Dode’s kitchen. The place was neat as a pin. He had a cute little table cloth with bluebirds flying around the hemline and curtains to match. The place smelled like warm tasty chicken. We’d stopped at the pie shed and brought Dode an apple crumble from Ma Horton to complete the dinner.
Veenie finished her chicken and dumplings and asked for seconds.
“Help yourself,” said Dode. “Lick the pot clean.”
I asked Dode if his sister brought him dinner often.
“Once a week, most weeks. She lives over in Tunnelton. Widowed. Gardens a little. Makes her pocket money growing organic herbs for bigwig professors at the university. Has a little side business making apple butter in the fall. Comes over and gathers up apples from the Wyatt orchard. Stores them here in my cellar until she’s ready to cook ’em down. Keeps her busy all winter. Been doing that her whole life. Whips up a mean persimmon pudding too. They pay her to bring batches over to the old folks’ home.”
Dode dabbed at his chin with a napkin. “That’s mighty fine pie,” he said. “Can’t beat that.” He forked the rest of the pie into his mouth, then jiggered out a second piece.
I asked Dode why he wanted to see us.
“Oh yeah, almost forgot.” He grinned like a kid. “Wait here, missy. I’ll be right back.”
He crab-walked out of the kitchen and down the hall. I heard some shuffling. He loped back in and held something out in his outstretched hand. It was a personal check for five thousand dollars.
“What’s this for, Dode?”
“You and Miss Lavinia.”
“You already paid us. The retainer. The money jars. Remember?”
“Oh sure, but this here money is from the government. Your share.”
“Our share of what?”
“You found them gold coins. The government pays a tidy recovery fee for stolen merchandise long as a feller signs a release saying he won’t make no claim on the stolen property or against the government. That there is your half. I figured I owed you this much. I got some too. Gonna use mine to buy a new squirrel rifle. Put some tires on the tractor.”
Veenie inspected the check. “Hot diggity. I’m going to buy me a whole new summer outfit. Something new and classy from the Walmart, maybe even hit the Costco.”
“Dode, you sure you want us to have this money?”
“Sure am. You earned it. I ain’t had so much fun since I was a kid in short pants. What with the ghosts and the medium, and all. Most folks don’t pay me no mind, but you gals showed me a real good time.”
Veenie piped up. “We had a great time too, didn’t we Ruby Jane?”
“Yep. The best.”
I wondered what Dode thought about all the buried treasure stories. “You reckon Jedidiah buried all that Confederate gold out here?”
“Don’t rightly know. Wish I could remember where I found those Confederate coins, but shucks I don’t. Probably found them when I was a kid. I’ve been stashing money away most all my life.”
“We were wondering if maybe there was more gold out here.”
“What makes you all think that?”
I showed Dode the print from the Bible with the handwritten message from Alta. “Under the three apples, not on the tree. On the word of God, that’s where the gold will be.” I asked if the inscription meant anything to him.
He nodded no, but took the page and stuck it up closer to his face. “No, them words don’t mean much to me. But I know that picture.”
“The woman with the three apples?”
“Yep. Sure do.”
“You seen that picture before?”
“Sure. Lots of times. It’s carved in a stone, out back in my apple cellar.”
“Can you show us?”
He forked down the last of the apple pie. “Don’t see why not.”
• • •
Veenie and I stared at each other in disbelief. We were standing at the threshold of Dode’s apple cellar, out behind his farmhouse. The cellar was at least one hundred years old. It was built into the side of a natural embankment. The front was curved like the top of a beehive. The walls were constructed of stacked slabs of lichen-crusted limestone. Plant and tree roots crawled in tangles along the limestone wall. The door was fashioned of weathered boards lashed together, with an iron pull ring as a handle.
I asked Dode how long the cellar had been there.
“Don’t rightly know.” He lifted the black seed cap on his head, put it back down. “Long as the house, I expect. Granny Schneider kept blue john milk and cream out here. I just keep apples, persimmons, root vegetables. Extra jars of pickles and beets and three bean salad my sister cans for me. Some zucchini relish. Got a natural cold spring runs inside. Come on in. I’ll give you a peek.”
Dode creake
d open the door. The bottom of the door scraped the mud and stone floor, but he managed to get it leveraged back. He kicked a stone against it so it would hold open. A spray of light from the pole light out by the barn lit up the interior of the cellar.
We stepped over the threshold stone of Eve with the three golden apples. The cellar ceiling was made of mud and roots. Dode and I had to stoop and duckwalk to make it in, but Veenie strolled in like a Keebler elf. A pocked limestone trough ran along the back wall where water trickled into the cave-like structure. Dode pulled a penlight out of the pencil pocket on the bib of his coveralls and flashed it around the interior. Moldy boards held together by rusty nails lined the right side of the cellar. Dode took the flat of his hand and swept away cobwebs so Veenie and I could step farther into the depths of the cellar. It smelled like a cave.
Dode pointed to the far corner of the cellar, where two muddy holes were filling with spring water. “That’s where I kept my money jars.”
“You come out here much?” I asked.
“Nah. Just to get canned goods in the early winter to tide me over. My sister comes in here in the fall to squirrel away apples. Not much in the bins now. Too early. Come September this cellar will be busting with apples. She stores them over yonder in the metal-lined bins. Keeps them cool. Keeps the critters from gnawing on them.”
I walked back to the door and stared at the threshold stone. The woman with the three golden apples was the same as on the Bible etching. She’d probably been carved into the limestone by one of the quarry masons over in Bedford or Oolitic. The stone looked tightly set in the doorway.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” said Dode. He flashed his penlight across the stone.
Veenie strolled over and stared at the stone with me. “You ever look under that stone, Dode?”
“Can’t rightly recall.” He danced the light across the apples. “You reckon I should?”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Dode fired up the tractor. He fastened a grappling hook over the ends of the threshold stone to drag it up out of place. The stone had been ground deep into the clay. Once the hook bit into the limestone, Dode gunned the tractor. The stone slid easily up and out of place across the wet greasy grass.
Melvin was there, down on his hunches, watching the excavation. I’d called him to keep things on the up-and-up. Veenie had wanted to keep the excavation on the down low, but that gold—if it was there—belonged to the US Treasury, and I wasn’t about to end up bunking alongside the likes of Darnell and Kandy in the big house on grand larceny theft charges.
Melvin was all dandied up in gray slacks and a gentleman’s light blue sweater, per usual. He borrowed some duck boots from Dode so he didn’t get his expensive tasseled loafers ruined in the muddy ground around the spring.
We’d called Harry in too, just because, well, he was the boss. He’d been slinking around like a spanked puppy since Kandy had whipped his ass and took him for a ride. I figured if there were gold under that stone, it might cheer him up a bit. It might even put him in a good enough humor to sign our paychecks for the week. I had my eye on a new goose down pillow over at the Farmer’s Market. Thirty bucks cash, and it’d be mine.
When the stone slid away, we were all disappointed not to see any shiny gold.
Melvin duckwalked closer and held up his hand for us to wait a minute. He took a long, flat-head screwdriver out of the utility tray on Dode’s tractor and starting poking in the clay. It wasn’t long before we heard a rattling sound. He’d hit metal. A couple of pokes later and he had a rust-riddled tobacco tin pulled up onto the grass.
In a way, Alta Iona really had been haunting the Wyatt homestead. Under the threshold stone she had left not only the Confederate gold but also a handwritten letter, sealed in wax inside a metal Red Injun tobacco tin.
Melvin unfolded the letter, careful not to crumble it in his grip. The letter was a bit moldy with a worm hole or two. He had to hold it up to the light from the barn poles to read it aloud to us. It was addressed to “Dear Gentle People,” and talked about the Confederate gold. Alta Iona had meant for the gold to be used for her baby’s care and upbringing.
The letter outlined how heartbroken she was that Jedidiah, whom she had loved, had taken her family’s hard-won fortune and left her, the baby, and everyone else in the town destitute. The letter explained how she felt poorly during her pregnancy. Even worse after they took the baby away. Food ran through her. She was dizzy. She saw demons swinging in the apple orchard. She couldn’t feed or care for the baby in even the simplest way, so she had, heartbroken, allowed her brother Jeb to place the girl child in an orphanage.
The rest, she wrote, was up to the Lord God to make right someday.
April, the coroner, who’d also come out for the excavation, confirmed that Alta’s symptoms were consistent with a slow death through arsenic poisoning. She shook her head, sad as we all were to hear the story. “Jedidiah probably added the poison to Alta’s food in small quantities for a good while before she took deathly sick. His goal had likely been to make sure Alta didn’t have the wits about her to see that she and the town were being robbed blind. Alta would have felt like she had the flu. Eventually grew so weak she couldn’t hold anything down in her stomach. Would have hallucinated a good bit at the end, poor woman.”
Apparently Alta had been lucid long enough to find and hide the Confederate gold from Jedidiah. If he ever did come back looking for his stolen fortune, it was safely hidden under the cellar stone. County records confirmed that originally the cellar had been on Jedidiah’s acreage. Alta must have commissioned the threshold stone because she loved that illustration in the family Bible. She was betting Jedidiah, that old hound dog, would never open the Bible or pay much mind to any of the scriptures, keeping her message safe for more righteous eyes.
It was a unique hiding place, a place not likely to ever be disturbed or dug through by accident. She couldn’t have imaged how cellars and springhouses would come to be replaced with indoor ice chests. Over the decades, with no one to claim the Wyatt homestead, the Schneiders had adopted a liberal view of property boundaries. They started making use of the cellar and the apples as their own.
After the press got wind of the gold, Darnell appeared on TV in his pigtails, sniffling, saying the letter was proof that he ought to be getting all the gold as his rightful inheritance. He opened an online account asking people to fund his legal fees. He and Kandy had not gotten far in the Impala. They’d run out of gas on the Sparksville iron bridge and been picked up by the Washington County authorities. Because they both had extensive records, they looked to be headed for a long stint in the slammer.
For a few days after the gold was found, press vans and reporters crawled like fire ants all over Knobby Waters. Harry squeezed himself into every photo. He bought a new hat and some cigars. He handed out his business cards like penny candy.
Randy Ollis found himself on the TV talk shows, telling his family story time and again. He was happy as a squirrel with a nest of nuts to be the focus of so much attention. The money from the talk show appearances allowed him to upgrade to a new trailer and pickup truck.
Some of Squeal Daddy’s blog posts and insider photos went national.
Harry didn’t see why he ought to share the Confederate gold with anyone. “The Shades Agency found that gold. I own the Shades Agency. Heck, I am the Shades Agency,” he told the TV cameras. He puffed up a good bit when he said that.
Melvin Beal disagreed. “That gold is stolen federal property. It belongs to the US Treasury. Of course, if you prefer, Harry, we could get a busload of lawyers down here and some nosey fellows from the IRS.
“The IRS?” Harry clutched his lapels. “Why would we need them?”
“They like to look into things like this. Sudden cash windfalls and all.”
Harry considered his options. “I get a finder’s fee, don’t I?”
Melvin said that could be arranged. The town would get a share too, since some of the money was t
ied to their being swindled, but a full settlement might take a bit. The Confederate gold was rumored to be worth more than ten million dollars all total, but since nothing like this had ever been found before, its full value was uncertain.
Melvin also reminded Harry that the gold was not likely to be sold. It was a part of America’s great Civil War history. It would likely end up in the Smithsonian or some other government museum on display so everybody could enjoy it.
Sassy loved that she got to sashay around town on the arm of a good-looking federal agent all week. She cut out the pictures of her and Melvin that appeared in the news and pinned them to one of her wish boards. She kept what she called these “vision boards.” Her walls were covered with them. She said they portrayed her life the way it ought to be, not the common way she’d been forced to live lately since her last husband went up the river for some harebrained real estate scheme. Unfortunately Melvin was called back to DC when the case was closed. Sassy slid back to living the common life with the rest of us old geezers in Knobby Waters.
While Harry was busy grand standing on the national news, Veenie and I returned to work. We felt a whole lot richer than we’d ever been. Dode’s five-thousand-dollar gift to us was a heap of money. We were dining like queens on an unlimited supply of free mystery meat sandwiches, and we had the Impala back. Dickie towed the Impala back to Knobby Waters from the Washington County impound down in Salem once we could prove it was ours and not involved in any interstate crime.
As a special gift to Veenie, he installed an eight-track tape player he got free at a local barn auction. The player came with a box of mint condition eight-track tapes. Really good stuff too: Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and The Eagles. Now Veenie and I could crank tunes while tooling around town crime-busting.
All of this just in time too.
Down in Hound Holler, on the other side of the knobs, trouble was boiling up. It involved Shap Reynolds and his Combine of Death, and more than one fellow doing the dance with no pants with the wrong lady friend …
Ghost Busting Mystery Page 17