A MistY MourninG

by Rett MacPherson

  I took the same seat that I’d had last night at dinner, with Gert to my right. This dinner wasn’t nearly so formal; in fact, Danette, Maribelle, and Sherise were the only other people at the table with us. In my house, you eat when it’s served, because there may not be anything left over otherwise.

  The menu was navy beans, corn bread, a large ham with little pineapple slices stuck on the sides of it, collard greens, green-bean casserole, and fried onions. Dessert was blackberry cobbler or peach pie. In my case, it would probably be blackberry cobbler and peach pie, because I really wasn’t much of a ham eater. That would be my official excuse for eating two desserts, anyway.

  The conversation consisted of the polite type. The weather, what sort of schools we have in Missouri, and remedies for certain ailments. My grandmother also managed to get a few digs in on the fact that West Virginia did not have a professional baseball team.

  “We don’t need a team of our own,” Sherise Tyler said finally. “St. Louis already has Mark McGwire, so what would be the point?”

  “And don’t you forget it,” Gert said.

  Sherise smiled at Gert and then winked at me. I smiled back, happy that somebody in this place knew something about St. Louis and baseball, so that my grandmother wouldn’t go crazy.

  “You know, Yogi Berra was from St. Louis,” Gert said.

  “Yes, but he didn’t play for St. Louis,” I said.

  “My uncle Max played baseball,” she said.

  “Yes, but he didn’t play for St. Louis, either,” I said.

  We were all so busy talking that we did not hear the boat approaching the boardinghouse. However, we all jumped when a ferocious hammering at the front door interrupted our conversation. At first, we all just stared at each other.

  Then simultaneously we rose and headed for the great room. Maribelle and Gert got stuck in the doorway together, each one thinking the other was going to give way. Neither one backed down and so they just squeezed themselves through it. I think they may have widened the doorway a little bit. I just shook my head.

  We reached the great room, but before I could open the door, it burst open. Two deputies entered the room with shotguns in their hands (pointed down, of course), muscles bulging, each one standing well over six feet. A scrawny man about five feet eight stepped in between them, put his hands on his hips and posed for us. It was like something out of a Western.

  “Howdy, Sheriff,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Ma’am,” he said and tipped his hat. “Are you the one who made the 911 call?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The body is upstairs where we found it.”

  “The body?” he asked, his voice betraying just a slight bit of uneasiness.

  “There is usually a body when there’s a dead. . . body,” I said. “Did you bring something to carry her back in?”

  “Yes, we’ve got a pontoon out here. Water’s receding fairly quick,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Victory O’Shea,” I said. “Call me Torie, though. This is my grandmother, Gertrude Crookshank.”

  “And your relationship to the deceased?” he asked.

  “Long story. Suffice it to say that she knew my grandmother’s mother and summoned us here for the reading of her will. Sometime this morning she either accidentally put a pillow over her face or somebody did it for her, and now she is dead.”

  “Who found her?” he asked.

  “I did. With Norville Gross fast on my heels,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I walked in and removed the pillow, because I didn’t know. . . I thought she could still be alive but knew she wouldn’t be much longer if I didn’t get the pillow off her face. Norville walked in within half a minute. Danette,” I said and pointed to Danette, who was lounging in one of the big brown recliners, “came in about two minutes after that.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Boys, go get the stretcher.”

  The two very large men relaxed and went back out the door. Dusk was approaching, but it was still light enough outside to see well. The sheriff had a thin mustache and thick, round spectacles that made his eyes look twice as large as they actually were. He had a certain crispness to him, though, which gave the impression that he was efficient and on top of his game. His uniform was spotless and seamed. I knew a sheriff that could take a few pointers from him.

  “Sheriff, what is your name?” I asked.

  “I’m Sheriff Thomas T. Justice,” he said. He reached out and shook my hand. I couldn’t help but smile at the fact his last name was Justice and he was a sheriff. Wonder how much ribbing he took over that? “Those are my two best deputies. I’ve got three others. Small community, you know.”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” I said. “I live in a town of a couple of hundred. We don’t even have our own sheriff. We have to borrow the one from the next town.”

  “Did you seal everything off?”

  “As best as we could,” I said. “We taped up her bedroom, where she was found, and her office.”

  “Where will you take my mother?” Maribelle asked.

  “Ma’am,” he said and tipped his hat. “We’ll take her to the nearest hospital. Saint Catherine’s probably.”

  “I’m going to go tell my brother, if you’ll excuse me,” she said.

  “How much longer?” the sheriff asked and pointed to my stomach.

  “Oh, at least two months,” I said, rubbing it absently.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes, I know. I always look huge the last trimester. I think it’s because I’m so short. The baby doesn’t have anywhere to go except out,” I said. It was my theory, but I had no idea if it was true.

  “Good,” he said. “Then you’re not going to need an emergency evac or anything, right?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll be fine right where we are. As long as the water is gone by Friday, because we have to head back home.”

  “That’s almost a week. It’ll be gone probably late tomorrow. So, where’s home?” he asked.

  “Missouri,” I said. “South of St. Louis.”

  “Mark McGwire country,” he said.

  With that, Sherise Tyler started laughing across the room. She stood by the fireplace, flipping her ashes from her recently lit cigarette into it. “See, told you,” she said.

  The sheriff looked dutifully lost. I took advantage of the momentary silence to ask a question I’d been wanting to ask for a long time. “Does anybody know who the man is in the casket?” I asked and pointed to the photograph above the fireplace.

  “Heard stories,” Sheriff Justice said. I hadn’t expected him to answer.

  “None of which are true, I’ll bet,” Sherise said.

  I thought that a rather unusual comeback. “How do you know?”

  “Nobody knows who it is. Clarissa would never tell anybody,” she said. Nobody knows who any of those people are.”

  “Well, one of them is my mother and another one is Clarissa,” Gert said before I could stop her.

  Sherise looked at me peculiarly. I said, “She’s right. My great-grandmother is in the picture next to Clarissa.”

  “Still,” Sherise said, her gaze flicking toward the sheriff. “Nobody knows the man in the casket. It’s a fruitless quest.”

  Who was she trying to convince, anyway? I got the feeling she didn’t want anybody to know who the dead man was. First chance I got, I was going to try and find out Sherise’s connection to the Harts and this place. She said she already had her story, she just had to prove it. It had something to do with either this place or people who had owned it.

  The deputy turned to me then. “So, the first ones in the room were you, the girl,” he said and pointed at Danette. “And who else?”

  “Norville Gross,” I answered.

  “Who’s her he asked. Good question, I thought. Nobody knew who he was or if that was even his real name.

  I was about to answer him when one of the deputies came to the doo
r looking pale and worried. “Sheriff, you better come look at this.”

  We of course all followed out onto the porch as the sheriff went out to see just what it was the deputy was looking all anemic about. There we stood: a gorgeous journalist, Sherise Tyler; my screwy grandmother; a sixteen-year-old pierced version of Janis Joplin; and me, the pregnant lady. The scene just struck me as funny until I saw what the deputies were looking at.

  An overturned tree had washed up half in the river and half on the road that was beginning to be visible from the receding water. Lying sprawled over the tree was Norville Gross. Blood pooled just below his neck and all over his shirt, and his eyes were staring off at the top of the mountain.

  “Sort of reminds me of the time they found your uncle Jed floating in the Mississippi,” Gert said to me. I cussed her silently and smiled at Sheriff Justice as he turned to look at the two of us with an upraised eyebrow. Whoever the brilliant individual was who had thought it would be a good idea to go on a long trip with her grandmother, alone, was an idiot. And I was ignoring the fact that I was that brilliant idiot.

  Sherise stepped off the porch, after giving me the questioning eye, to get a closer look. The heels of her shoes sank into the sodden grass as she did so.

  “That’s Norville Gross,” I said to Sheriff Justice, hoping he’d forgotten about what my grandmother had just blurted out. My head was a tad swimmy and I thought I’d lose my dinner as the realization sunk in that here was another dead body. And he wasn’t as peaceful-looking as Clarissa.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Gert asked.

  “Looks like a panther got a hold of him, or something,” Sheriff Justice answered.

  The only phrase spoken after that was a definite expression of disgust from our resident hormone-infested teenager. “Oh, gross.”

  Ten

  I awoke the next morning to find my grandmother sitting on the foot of my bed completely dressed, including wearing a hat and holding her purse. At first I thought I was dreaming so I really didn’t react. Then I realized that she was sitting on my foot and I couldn’t move it, and alas, I knew I was not dreaming.

  Groggily, I leaned up on one elbow and rubbed my eyes. I looked over at the travel alarm clock I had packed that was now next to the lamp on the nightstand. It said 7:15 A.M.

  “It’s about time you woke up,” she said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting here waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Sunday and you’re taking me out for breakfast and then I want you to take me to church. The one that I went to as a kid,” she said.

  “There is water covering the road,” I said.

  “It’s gone. Sometime in the middle of the night it receded enough that you can drive on the road now. By noon the river will probably be back within its normal banks,” she said. “We’d get this two or three times a year when I lived here.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the river takes a sharp turn south of here and narrows like a bottleneck. And because just one or two miles north of here the water comes down off the mountain, just gushing,” she explained. “It gets all backed up in that bottleneck. Services should start about nine.”

  There was no segue most of the time when she spoke. She just said one thing about one subject and then something else about another subject. It was a good thing that I was used to it.

  “Well, I guess I should get dressed,” I said. “As soon as you get off my foot.”

  Gert rushed me around like I was late for school or something so I was completely ready in twenty-five minutes flat. Shower, seven minutes. Makeup, five minutes. Brushing teeth, two minutes. When it came to getting dressed, though, she allowed me a whole ten minutes.

  I was a little perturbed, however, because I’d worn my good dress yesterday, not knowing we would be attending church today. My grandmother squirted perfume on it and shook it outside in the breeze and told me it would be fine to wear again, as long as I wore different panty hose. I didn’t argue with her.

  A little while later we drove over the mountain Gert had referred to when telling me about the flash flooding. We then descended the other side and drove around the base of another mountain. Then the road seemed to part the mountains, and there below us, sprinkled along the valley and the next hill, was the town of Panther Run.

  There was one main street with a hanging stoplight and three fairly major cross streets. It was quaint, like a movie set, as if only the fronts of the buildings were painted and perfect and hiding behind them were dirt-poor residents with leaky roofs and yards with no grass.

  “That’s it. That’s the church,” she said and pointed to the left on top of the hill. A white church with a pointy steeple sat proudly surrounded by lush green trees, keeping watch over the town below it.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do you want to eat?”

  “Let’s eat at Bucky’s. Up here on the right—well, what did they do with Bucky’s?”

  I looked to where she pointed. “Looks like it’s a Denny’s,” I said.

  “What happened to Bucky’s?” she asked with genuine sorrow. “Oh, I bet he died.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh because she’d added that last bit as if it was the only explanation for what could have happened to Bucky’s. The fact that chain restaurants had come in and taken over, making it impossible for the little guy to own his own company, had not occurred to her. Gert could tell me anything I wanted to know about massive earthquakes, massacres in schools, rare and deadly diseases, but she seemed clueless over the quiet catastrophes.

  “All right, let’s eat at Denny’s,” she said.

  The food was good. Service was good. Conversation was a bit scattered.

  Gert inhaled her food, which she swears was caused from thirty-five years of being a waitress and never getting an official lunch break. Whatever the reason, with her I always felt self-conscious about the fact that I was still eating. I guess I was worried it would appear as though I had so much more food than she did that it took me twice as long to eat.

  “The sheriff said he should have Clarissa’s room and office cleared by this evening,” Gert said.

  “Good,” I said. “Dexter Calloway said that there was some stuff up in the attic that Clarissa wanted me to have. Said that the stuff belonged to your mother.”

  Gert thought about it a minute. “Wonder what it could be?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Gert, why would somebody want to kill Clarissa? I mean, she was a hundred and one years old, like she wasn’t going to the soon enough on her own?”

  “Seems to me,” she said, shaking her head, “that whoever it was wanted to make sure the new will was not read or filed at the courthouse. What other reason could it be?”

  “Then that would have to mean it was one of her three children. Other than Norville, who is now out of the picture, and myself, there wasn’t anybody else who inherited anything.”

  “Maybe they were left something in the old will and got left out of the new one,” she said.

  “Maybe Mr. Jett would let me look at the old will to see who else is listed,” I said. I took my last drink of orange juice and sighed. “It just seems so wrong.”

  “It could be one of her grandchildren,” Gert suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Making sure that their parents got the inheritance so that they would in turn get their inheritance,” she said. “And I don’t think that was a panther.”

  It took me a second to realize she had shifted gears and was now talking about Norville Gross. “Why not?” I asked.

  “Panther’s not going to come that close to people in the day.”

  “What if he wandered into the woods and stumbled upon the panther?” I said.

  “It wouldn’t drag him back to the boardinghouse. I might be wrong, but do you think a panther could drag a hundred-and-eighty-pound man back to the house? And if she could or would
drag him around, why wouldn’t she go farther into the woods with him, instead of back to civilization?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t dead yet and he crawled back on his own,” I said. It was clear that my grandmother had given this a lot of thought.

  “Nope,” she said. “He wasn’t tore up enough for it to be a panther.”

  I reached into my purse to get out my wallet so I could pay the bill. Her words stopped me. “How would you know?”

  “ ‘Cause, you forget I was born and raised in these mountains,” she said. “I’ve seen what parithers can do. Your great-uncle Martin had a run-in with a panther. Not only did he not live, but there were claw marks and blood everywhere. Teeth marks, too.”

  My stomach was turning.

  “That Norville fellow’s face was all in one piece. Panther’s gonna go for the head and neck area. As would any wild animal,” she said.

  “Gee, thanks, Gert. Thanks for the lesson in animal attacks.”

  “Oh, and the time the bear got a hold of—”

  “That’s okay. Really. I get the picture.”

  The waitress came up to us then to see if we wanted refills on coffee or anything. Since I was having to do the no-caffeine, no-chocolate, low-sugar thing, I had no coffee or soda for her to refill. I know my doctor swears that this is the best thing for me and the baby, but I find this grossly unfair. I’m an American, for crying out loud. Take away my caffeine and chocolate, and what’s left?

  “Where ya’ll staying?” the waitress asked.

  “The Panther Run Boardinghouse,” I said. She must have realized that we either sounded like out-of-towners or acted like them, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Oh, that old place? What for?”

  The waitress pronounced for as fer and I had to smile. My grandmother would slip into her old accent every now and then, but it was just about gone. I always liked it when she’d say things like poosh for push or fer instead of for.

  Before either one of us could answer her, she spoke again. “Heard you had a painter attack.”