Miz Scarlet and the Imposing Imposter

by Sara M. Barton

  “Our intruder’s gone inside,” Bur deduced. Sure enough, the footsteps went right up to the back door. “Let’s pull back a bit and call the cops.”

  We turned around to go, planning our hasty retreat, when the sound of the back door opening broke the silence.

  “What do you want?” said a very gruff male voice. I took umbrage at the tone. As a teacher, I had mastered that schoolmarm thing long ago. Pulling myself upright, I put on my most disapproving face.

  “Excuse me?” I turned to find a man in his late fifties. Dressed in a thick sweater and scruffy workman’s pants, his face framed by a three-day beard growth, he glowered at us. Frankly, I didn’t cotton to his tone. A little too belligerent, a little too hostile for someone who was in my cousin’s house without permission. That first impression soon became firmly imprinted on my brain.

  “I said what do you want?” he demanded. His eyes looked us up and down with a rather menacing arrogance that chilled me to the bone. Cheswick is known for its neighborly feel and this creep just didn’t fit in.

  “A cup of sugar,” I replied sarcastically. “Why else would I trudge all this way through the snow?”

  “Easy,” Bur muttered under his breath. “Let’s not get into it now, Miz Scarlet.”

  “You’re trespassing,” the big oaf announced. “This is private property.”

  “Not very neighborly. You must be new around here.”

  “I am. And you need to get going now.”

  “Really?” I took a bold step forward. “You think so? How do I know you have a legitimate reason for being in Wallace’s house?”

  “Wallace’s house? Lady, you have a screw loose. This house belongs to the Jordan family. Now beat it, before I call the cops!”

  Was that a slight accent I detected as he spit out those words? As he continued to bluster, I thought I heard Boston.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I countered. “How about I call the cops and you can explain to them how you got into this house?”

  “Scar....” I felt my brother’s hand on my arm. I could even feel his fingers gripping me as I continued to challenge the big bear of a man on the back step.

  “Bur!” As I turned to call off my dog-of-a-big-brother, the door slammed and the intruder was gone. “Bugger it! Now he’s in the house. We’ve got to call the cops and get him out of there.”

  “What we have to do is call Boynton. It’s his responsibility, Scarlet, not ours.”

  “Oh, fine. Go ahead and call him,” I said with disgust. I didn’t like the looks of that guy and the sooner Boynton agreed to get the cops involved, the better. I wanted a peek inside that house. Were there blood spatters? Were there signs of a struggle? I wanted to know what happened to the Jordan family. “What are you waiting for, Christmas?”

  “Come on and shut up,” my brother instructed me. He grabbed my elbow and pulled me along, brooking no nonsense. By the time we reached the edge of the woods, I was about ready to clobber him.

  “What is wrong with you? You’re acting like you were shot out of a cannon!”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “See what?”

  “The bulge of his gun, Scar. The guy was armed and dangerous.”

  “Holy crap, are you kidding me?” One glance at my brother’s face told me otherwise.

  “Not kidding,” he assured me. I watched Bur dial Boynton’s number and waited as the call went through. He leaned against an old sugar maple as he talked, uttering an “uh-huh” here and an “I see” there. I wasn’t able to overhear much, so I just let my mind wander.

  There were no other tracks in the snow as far as I could see, not even signs of deer activity. That meant the man with the gun at Wallace’s house was probably the culprit who left the note on the post in the bird garden, using a pocket knife in place of a thumb tack. Why? What was the purpose of the note? While Bur talked to Boynton, I set my mind to going over the facts.

  It was interesting that the intruder identified the property as belonging to the Jordans, not Lacey. It remained in Wallace’s family for three generations now, lock, stock, and barrel, right down to the antique furnishings. Boynton handled the financial end of things for his mother, acting as property manager. Since the tenants had suddenly and unexpectedly abandoned the property and stopped paying rent nearly a month and a half ago, I was fairly certain they certainly had no right to sublet it, at least not without Boynton’s approval. I was pretty sure he would have informed us of such a change.

  My brother moved away from me, speaking in a low voice as he headed back towards the inn. I fell in behind him, using my eyes to inspect the trail, even as I let my mind wander. Who was the stranger and what was he doing here?

  In the tiny enclave of Cheswick, all of the mansions in this neck of the neighborhood had been built by my grandfather and his partners, better known as the Four Oaks.

  The house that Frederick Toms built on White Oak Hill was now owned by an insurance magnate who migrated out to the suburbs from Hartford. Well-fortified by fencing, security cameras, and guard dogs, the property was definitely off-limits to the public. Once in awhile we’d catch sight of Steven Kim’s limo on its way to and from the city.

  Boswell Tom’s home burned down in a tragic fire in December of 1962. He was killed, as were his wife, Mildred, and two married daughters, Margaret and Eleanor, visiting for the holidays. The local fire department couldn’t get there in time, due to the unplowed driveway. Eleanor’s husband, Peter Van Erk, was down in Raleigh, at the mill. Her son, Theodore, was finishing finals at prep school.

  Father and son never found the heart to rebuild after the fire. Peter eventually settled in North Carolina. As the executor of his in-laws’ estate, he managed the Toms family trust and their interest in the mill, but he let the land where the house once sat go back to its natural state. That’s really what began the concept for the park. A group of conservationists approached him in 1974, with a request to use the land for recreational use and he agreed. Theodore, a forestry student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, returned to the home of his great aunt and great uncle every summer, throwing himself into the project. They left the ruins of the old foundation of the house for a few years, but eventually began to remove it, stone by stone, in the hopes of encouraging new growth on White Oak Hill. Theodore went on to become a dendrologist with the Forest Service, flying all over the country to monitor ongoing reforestation programs.

  As far as the park was concerned, the trails were clearly marked, as were the boundaries. “No Trespassing” signs were posted every fifty yards, along with the occasional “Private Property” notice scattered here and there, to warn those who strayed into our backyard. As I followed my long-legged brother on the snowy path, I saw no other evidence of White Oak Hill Park visitors traipsing through the woods and onto our turf. It had to be that menacing man in Wallace’s house.

  “You’re not going to like this,” said Bur, as he pocketed his phone. His voice brought me back to reality.

  “Oh?”

  “Boynton doesn’t want us to call the cops on this guy. We’re to butt out.”

  “He used those words? Those exact words?”

  “No, what he said was he’d handle it, Scarlet.”

  “Handle it how?”

  “Handle it without having to tell us what he’s going to do.”

  “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” I replied.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Boynton can handle his problem. I’m going to handle mine.”

  “You have a problem? Why, because the guy with the gun told you to go pound sand?”

  “I have a problem because someone left a threat on the grounds of the Four Acorns Inn. Or have you forgotten that? And just so we’re clear, if the cops ask me if I’ve noticed anything unusual lately, I’m telling them about the creep at Wallace’s.”

  “Vintage Miz Scarlet,” my brother scoffed. “Once a tattletale, always a tattletale.”

>   “Maybe so, but we have liability for our guests and a responsibility to protect them from bodily harm. I’m not just going to sit around waiting for Boynton to get off his fat....”

  “Let’s compromise,” said Bur, suddenly putting as much silk in his voice as he could muster. Probably why he’s been divorced twice. He’s good with the charm, but falls short in the Department of Show-Up-and-Take-a-Stand. “We’ll call the police and show them the note. We’ll even tell them about the intruder up at Wallace’s. But we also tell them that Boynton’s making arrangements to handle it and will likely be in touch. That way, the cops don’t have to rush the place with guns drawn.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll let you know when I make up my mind.”

  “You are one stubborn....”

  “Brrr-ring, brrr-ring! Pot calling Kettle,” I pretended to hand my brother an imaginary phone. “It’s for you, Kettle.”

  “What do you do every morning, gargle with vinegar? No wonder you never married, with a personality like that.”

  “Ouch! Tell me, Kettle. Any advice on having a long and happy marriage? After all, you’ve had two,” I shot back. Bur huffed and puffed with disgust, mentally preparing to blast me with another lecture, but then abruptly turned on his heel and stomped off. I followed in his wake, feeling slightly amused by his reaction. One of his favorite pastimes when he was losing an argument was to point out I had never married, as if that meant I had no sense of reality about relationships. That kind of twisted logic defied explanation.

  In case you haven’t noticed, sibling rivalry is alive and well in our family. Bur has always been a competitive guy. It’s that “I’m the oldest kid” crap. One thing I learned early on was that if I wanted to play, I couldn’t afford to let him intimidate me out of the game. I was in it to win it, too, and either he worked with me or I would make every effort to knock him on his keister until he played nicely. Just because I was the only girl in the family, that didn’t make me the weak link.

  As for marriage, I firmly believed any idiot could get a license to wed. It was the staying past the honeymoon that was hard. I’d had three relationships over the last twenty years. I was hardly a cloistered nun. And yet my big brother often felt compelled to suggest he was far more experienced in the ways of the world than I, since he had married and had a son. Poppycock.

  We covered the remaining distance through the woods in silence, leaving me plenty of time to ruminate about our family history and any possible connections to the current situation.

  The Toms family was very much old money and old school. They stuck to traditions and traditional names, handed down from generation to generation, adept at adding on “the third” and “the fourth” to the male offspring, while the females were usually named after grandmothers on both sides. The Googins family, on the other hand, liked to break out of the upper crust traditions. Maybe it was that wacky strain of irrepressibility we all inherited. The Googins offspring were nicknamed “the saplings”, a generation expected to take on the mill once they became adults. Each was named after species of oak trees. Darlington worked his way up to salesman before he was drafted into the Navy and killed at Pearl Harbor. Alas, that threw a monkey wrench into the family plan for succession. Holly was crippled by polio and never married, but she did become a member of the board of directors. She was a scholar of American literature and taught at Connecticut College down in New London for nearly three decades. My grandfather Randolph pinned all his hopes on his youngest daughter, Laurel, and her ability to reproduce. It was a happy day when my father proposed to Laurel and joined the management team of Four Oaks Pressboard Company.

  Chapter Three --

  Wallace followed his brother’s lead in naming his children. Tucker became CFO at the company. Lacey married an accountant at the mill who was an expert with figures, financial and female. The cheating bastard wasn’t always burning the midnight oil as he claimed to his wife, and Lacey gave him a boot when she caught him buck naked at the office one night with his secretary. Myrtle married an engineer who took on the task of modernizing the machinery for Four Oaks.

  As the children of “the saplings”, we were known collectively as “the acorns”. I was named after the Scarlet Oak and my brothers were named for the Bur Oak, the Palmer Oak, and the Emory Oak respectively.

  When we were growing up, Randolph and Wallace used to joke that they were planting acorns who would someday grow into the new owners of the company. Alas, it didn’t work out that way. By the time we were teens, the bottom had begun to drop out of the industry. Trying to stay competitive in a tough market, the expanded Four Oaks company ventured into new uses for pressboard at the start of the Millennium, especially in transformer insulation, and that’s when my father was temporarily transferred. We saw him once a month for a long weekend the first year, and after that, every month for a week. By the third year, he was working two weeks each month in Cheswick and the rest of the time in Raleigh. It was tough on my mother, who had no intention of giving up the family homestead to move south, so I made adjustments in my own life. It never occurred to me the job as family caregiver would be permanent. How could I have known how my life would turn out? That all seemed so long ago and far away as I navigated the snowy trail.

  We were passing Myrtle and Willow’s place when my cell phone rang. Glancing down at the tiny glass screen, I saw it was my mother calling.

  “Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

  “I’m going into town with Lacey. I want to pick up library books and she’s headed to CVS. When are you coming home?”

  “Bur and I are on our way. We went for...a little walk.” No reason to worry her or Lacey about what was happening at Wallace’s house. Better to wait until we knew what Boynton planned to do. I learned a long time ago that the Googins girls, as we affectionately call them, are worrywarts. Then again, they have reason to be.

  Ten years ago, when all of the local mill operations were moved to North Carolina and the original mill building was sold to a manufacturing company, my father retired and started a consulting business here in Cheswick. For a time, things were good. He and mother did some traveling, sometimes bringing me along as her companion on cruises and land excursions throughout Europe and beyond. Even with my mother’s physical limitations, they got around and saw the sights. All that ended when my father keeled over in his swim trunks at the pond on a pleasant summer afternoon eight years ago, struck down by a massive heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. One day he was fine and the next, he was lying in a casket of beautiful burled wood. He looked so peaceful, like he was just having a nap. No one was more shocked than my mother. She was so sure she would be the first to go, she even gave my father instructions on marrying the next Mrs. Wilson.

  To say that it was a blow to the family would be the proverbial understatement. We had assumed my dad was healthy, just like we assumed the family trust was healthy. We all counted on those investments to support us into our old age. Early on, my father wanted to make sure I would be able to continue to care for my mother throughout her lifetime, so he set up a trust fund to that end. I received a monthly salary, a portion was reserved for Laurel’s care and my retirement, and the rest went into the family coffers.

  Bur handled the probate. That’s when the real financial grief began. Our long-time financial adviser retired and the new man who came in to replace him set up meeting after meeting with my brother. Bur briefed us on the revised portfolio at a family gathering. It looked so good on paper, we all signed on. Unfortunately, it was a very large Ponzi scheme that crashed in 2007. To this day, the court-appointed receiver is still working to recover the missing funds. If we’re lucky, we may get some portion of it back, but I’m not holding my breath.

  Have you any idea of what a nasty blow it is to find that you’ve worked for all those years, squirreling away your nuts for the long winter, and in just one day it all goes up in smoke? It felt like someone dropped a match on the leaf-covered ground on White Oak Hill and burned t
he forest down, Smokey Bear and all. I still remember that dreadful look on Bur’s ashen face when he showed up at the door to inform us that the money was gone. At least I had a few years of my teacher’s pension, which I would be eligible to collect down the road, provided that didn’t tank. In the aftermath of the financial debacle, I was scrambling for money.

  Of course, I’m no quitter. I yanked up my proverbial bootstraps and got busy. I realized I could tutor students in our home and make some decent money. Shortly after I started giving lessons, Boynton called from Florida. He had decided to rent out Wallace’s house up on the hill. It was just too big for his mother to live in alone, especially since Lacey and her family lost money on the same deal with the same financial adviser. My mother’s cousin didn’t want to move to Florida, especially not when she was so popular with the gents at the senior center. She was convinced “Tony the Tiger”, a retired cop, would pop the question sooner, rather than later, and she still hadn’t decided whether or not she’d say yes. Boynton offered to pay a generous fee for his mother’s upkeep. It took me all of three seconds to agree.

  That was the unofficial start of my new career as an innkeeper. Once Lacey took over a bedroom, it was only a matter of time before the two conniving cousins would rope me in further.

  My mother was devastated by our financial ruin. She already felt guilty about me giving up my life to care for her, and the thought that I would never get paid again drove her to the edge. The plot was hatched when Aurielle Dumont fell and broke her hip shortly after the family finances went belly up. We had a large, handicapped-accessible house and it had a lot of unused rooms. When Aurielle got out of the hospital, she wasn’t ready to move back home and navigate all those stairs. Lacey suggested I rent Aurielle the pink bedroom. She stayed with us for two months during her recovery. I was available to drive our guest to her medical appointments in between tutoring students. The elevator we had installed in a hall closet years before, for my mother’s convenience, came in mighty handy while the patient was getting reacquainted with her mending hip. Aurielle went through her paces with the physical therapist on our sun porch, did a lot of walking once she was able, and had a fine time socializing with the Googins girls every afternoon in the living room.