A MistY MourninG

by Rett MacPherson

  “Nothing,” I said and wondered how she knew I was staring at her when her back was to me. “I was just curious if you’d seen my grandmother yet this morning?”

  “Out in the dining room,” she said. “Inhaled a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said. “So, how long have you worked for Mrs. Hart?”

  “Thirty-four years,” she said.

  Well, I’d guessed her age about right. If she had been in her early twenties when she went to work for Clarissa that would make her around fifty-five. “Good Lordy,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

  “All I’ve ever known is cooking for the missus,” she said. “Nothing else.”

  “Have you always lived here or do you have family?”

  “You’re a mighty nosy one,” she said and went about cutting out the biscuits with the biscuit cutter.

  “Sorry,” I said and finished my juice. I put my glass in the sink and turned to leave for the dining room.

  “No,” she said and slowly turned around. “I’m sorry. You’ve got a right to know everything. You’re my new boss. My future is in your hands.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” I said. “Look at me. You don’t want your future in my hands. I can barely balance the checkbook. And I can’t if my husband uses the ATM card. Throws me off completely.”

  “Oh, but I think you’re quite capable in many other ways,” she said.

  “Capable of causing disasters wherever I go,” I said.

  “You didn’t cause the flash flood,” she said. “Happens all the time.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the flash flood,” I said and tied the tie on my robe just a little tighter, afraid that safety-pinned pajamas would become visible.

  “You mean Mrs. Hart?” she asked. “She would have died no matter what: It was her time.”

  “What if somebody murdered her?” I asked.

  “Then it was still her time, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “To answer your question,” she said. “I have a daughter, she lived here growing up. She moved on with her life, though. Not that I blame her for leaving. The isolation is pretty tough. I see her about once a month. I never had no husband.”

  “Oh,” I said. Why do I ask such personal questions if I’m not prepared to hear such personal answers? This was a serious character flaw of mine. “Did you like working for Mrs. Hart?”

  There I went again.

  “Yeah,” she said and turned around to take the first round of biscuits out of the oven. “Nice woman. She always seemed sad somehow. I heard things. Glimpses of stuff every now and then. But I never asked.”

  Okay. . . she might not have asked, but I was going to. “Like what?”

  “Wouldn’t be right,” she answered and shook her head. “Unless you need to know that as my employer.”

  No. I didn’t need to know that as her employer. But I needed to know it as the nosy little busybody that I was. Now she was going to make me feel all guilty and everything if I pushed her to tell me. The scales go back and forth and . . . drats.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t need to know that.”

  I walked into the dining room, thumping myself on the forehead with the palm of my left hand, amazed that her guilt trip worked on me. This should come as no surprise since my family uses it on me all the time. But jeez, if I can’t manipulate a complete stranger, who can I manipulate?

  My grandmother sat at the table, completely dressed, her cane and her purse sitting by her chair. She sipped her coffee, the spoon rattling in the blue and white china cup as she did so.

  “Gert,” I said as I sat down. “What. . . why are you up so early?”

  “In case you tried to sneak out the door again this morning without me, I would be ready,” she said simply.

  My family wrote the book on guilt and manipulation. That had to be why they were all so perfect at it. I rose and headed back to my room to change my clothes, thumping my head as I went.

  I was dressed, seated at the dining room table finishing my breakfast, thinking about the small hotel in town that I would go to and see if they had any vacancies today. I’d just swallowed the last bite of Susan’s homemade biscuit with a generous portion of an excruciatingly delectable strawberry jam when there was a knock on the front door. I heard voices, and within a minute, Dexter Calloway stuck his pointy head into the dining room and informed me, with a rather pale shade to his face, that Sheriff Justice was here to see me.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  “Don’t bother to get up,” Sheriff Justice said from behind Dexter. He slowly entered the room, removing his hat as he did so. A moment passed while my biscuit seemed to lodge in my throat, and only when I took a drink of my milk did it go down. I had a funny feeling about Sheriff Justice’s visit at seven-thirty in the morning.

  “Clarissa Hart was definitely murdered,” he said.

  It felt like my stomach dropped to the floor. “Oh, my gosh,” I said. Until this point I think I’d half convinced myself that she’d just died in her sleep. Now, however, I felt very unsafe. “Shouldn’t you be telling the family?” I asked.

  “I’m goin’ to,” he said and rocked up on the balls of his toes. “Mrs. O’Shea, I don’t know how to say this, but. . . well, you’re a suspect.”

  “I. . . uh. . . I’m a s-s-suspect?” I asked. Why did this surprise me? I was the first one in the room. I knew I would be a suspect if indeed she had been murdered. I guess hearing him say it just sort of creeped me out.

  “I’m gonna have to ask you not to leave the boardinghouse. Don’t leave town,” he said.

  “Should I call a lawyer?” I asked. That biscuit seemed to pop back up out of nowhere, and I swallowed extra hard trying to get it to go down.

  “Up to you, really.”

  “What do you mean? Do you think I actually did it? Do I need a lawyer?” I asked, panic rising in my voice.

  “You’re not under arrest, although I will need you to come down and answer some more in-depth questions,” he said. “You were the first one found in the room. And since the only other person in there with you is dead, that sort of makes it look bad.”

  “It doesn’t help that I had the pillow in my hands, either,” I said. I realized too late that since the only person who had seen me with the pillow in my hands couldn’t testify against me, I needed to quit confessing to stupid things like that.

  “Doesn’t much matter about the pillow,” he said. “She died of anaphylactic shock.”

  “Anna who?”

  “An allergic reaction.”

  “Like some people are allergic to sulfur or shellfish?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Then how is that murder?”

  “In her case, it was penicillin,” he said. He threw a medical alert bracelet on the table, sealed in a plastic bag. “She wore that always. It was all over her charts. What’s more . . . she hasn’t been to the doctor or been seen by a doctor in over six months. She was not ill. Somebody put it in her food or something that she would ingest.”

  “But she ate dinner with all of us.”

  “There was probably penicillin in all of your food.”

  “How do you know it was penicillin?” I asked, just absolutely amazed at what he was telling me.

  “There were heavy concentrations of it in her system,” he said.

  “Oh, how horrible,” was all I could manage. After a moment of the sheriff standing at the edge of the table with his hat in his hand, I motioned for him to take a chair. He did not take it. He did, however, pick up the bracelet and return it to his pocket. “Who else is a suspect?”

  “Gross was,” he said. “And if he was killed by a panther, I suppose he still could be.”

  “If he was killed by a panther?”

  “Autopsy results are still not back yet on Mr. Gross,” he explained. “If he was murdered, I’d say that he was innocent of Mrs. Hart’s murder, but
a victim because of it.”

  “You think that whoever killed Clarissa killed Mr. Gross, then. Is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

  “I would almost bet on it,” he said.

  “Then that would certainly look good for me,” I said. “Since I doubt I could do that kind of damage to a man in my condition.”

  “That is most probable,” he said, diverting his eyes to his shoes.

  “Okay,” I said. “Who else?”

  “Basically, the will beneficiaries are who we are looking at right now,” he said.

  In other words, her children. I pondered this a moment. “So you are assuming that whoever killed her was after monetary gain only,” I said. “Have you not considered personal reasons?”

  He looked at me peculiarly. “Personal reasons?” he asked. “She was a very old woman. All her sins were ages old.”

  “An ages-old sin can come back and bite you in the butt just as easily as a recent one, Sheriff Justice,” I said.

  I could tell that he considered what I was saying by the look in his eyes. He put his hat back on his head. “Don’t leave, Mrs. O’Shea,” he said. And then he tipped his hat and disappeared out of the dining room’s swinging doors.

  Great. Just great.

  Twenty-two

  What did the sheriff want?” Gert asked.

  “Oh, nothing. He just wanted to drop by and tell me not to leave town and find a good lawyer,” I said. “Actually, he said to not even leave the boardinghouse. He wants me right here.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “When do they vote for the All-Star team?”

  “It’s midway, isn’t it. . . Gert! I’m being serious. Can you stop thinking about sports and feel sorry for me or be appalled or something!”

  “You’re in a heap of cow turds,” she said. “No matter how much you shower, you’re still gonna smell like one.”

  “Oh, thanks. You’re just so helpful,” I spit, waving my arms all around.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Torie. You may go into labor early. You know how worried you are about that,” she said.

  I stared at her, mouth agape. “What is your problem? Why are you deliberately being so blasß about my seriously compromised position here?”

  “Your own damn fault,” she said. “Keep your nose where it belonged and this wouldn’t happen.”

  “Wait, wait a minute,” I said. “You wanted to come on this trip. You were all for it. Now that I’m a murder suspect, suddenly this was all my idea.”

  “I didn’t tell you to go murdering anybody,” she said simply and tried to get up out of the chair. Of course, she did not make it on the first try.

  “I didn’t murder anybody,” I said. “I said, ‘Now that I’m a suspect.’ Why am I telling you this? You know I didn’t murder anybody.”

  “Yes, but if Clarissa hadn’t gone and gotten murdered, you wouldn’t be having this problem,” she said.

  You ever feel like other people live on a hamster wheel? I was beginning to feel that way. She strained and groaned and tried to get up out of the chair. It was her usual show, put in to make everybody aware that she was an old woman. She could get up without all that hoopla, because I’ve seen her do it when she thought nobody was looking.

  “Are you gonna stand there all day with your mouth open or are you gonna help your old grandma up out of the chair?” she asked.

  “Oh, get up yourself,” I said and stormed out onto the front porch.

  At times when I was with her I felt like I was fourteen. I didn’t know if she just brought that out in me or if that was something you were just always supposed to feel with grandmothers. My father’s mother had been dead since I was seventeen. I hadn’t had the pleasure of finding out if she would have infuriated me this much, darn it.

  It occurred to me, standing there on the weather-beaten front porch, that the tree I was looking at was the tree that Aldrich Gainsborough had been hung from.

  It was a big oak with many thick branches that hung low enough for somebody to jump up and grab. There were also plenty of branches that were high enough for a tall man to swing from without his feet hitting the dirt.

  I walked over to the tree and turned back toward the boarding house. The tree wasn’t that far away from the house. It was almost at the road, so I’d say almost exactly halfway between the boardinghouse and the river. It was a straight shot from the great room of the boardinghouse and a diagonal line from where Clarissa’s bedroom was in the present day. Who knew if that was the room she had occupied then?

  How quiet they must have been. It made me wonder what they had done to Gainsborough to keep him silent when he would have obviously been in pain. Or maybe by the time they got him back here he was nearly dead, and there was no point in giving him anything to keep him from making noise. I assumed, of course, that they would have wanted him quiet long enough for the bad guys to get away.

  Why here? Why bring him back here? Why didn’t they dump him at the opening to the mine? Why not in town in front of the company store? Something that would have made more of a statement, for I was assuming that he was murdered over either union or coal reasons. Why bring him back to the boardinghouse a couple of miles out of town, a place where nobody but the rare passerby at three in the morning would see. It wasn’t as if passing by a place was that easy back then. Most people did not have cars, and thus visiting another location would have entailed hitching the horses or walking.

  There was a reason they brought him back here.

  They wanted somebody here to see him. To find him. To find him hanging by a tree with no dignity whatsoever. Why would somebody do that? It was just as my cousin Elliott pulled up in the driveway that I realized the answer to these questions would come when I knew exactly who Aldrich Gainsborough was. And what his connection had been to the boardinghouse, or the people in it.

  Elliott got out of his car with his khaki pants already wrinkled for the day. Either that, or he was like me and his clothes just wrinkled the minute he laid eyes on them. Surely, that must be a recessive gene of some sort. That’s it. The wrinkle gene. As long as it remained confined to clothes and not my face, I supposed I could live with that.

  “Hey, cuz,” I said. “You’re here early.”

  “There are a few people around that I thought you might like to talk to,” he said. “Thought we’d get a head start.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Like who?”

  “Some old-timers, some sons of old-timers. They have lotsa stories,” he said and smiled.

  I looked back at the boardinghouse and thought about my grandmother inside. For all I knew she could still be trying to get out of the chair. “Gert’s mad at me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause I’m a murder suspect.”

  The expression on his face dropped at least an inch. “Clarissa was murdered? They’ve announced it?”

  “Yeah, and I’m their A number one cookie,” I said and rubbed my belly.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “My mom may not let me hang out with you anymore. You being such a bad seed and all.”

  “Shut up, you jerk,” I said and laughed. Elliott snickered, quite pleased with himself at being a complete smart aleck.

  “Did you know there was a man lynched here?” I asked after we’d had our good laugh. I studied his face closely, to see what he would give away. As usual, with Elliott, the expression I saw backed up his statement.

  “Vaguely heard something about a hanging,” he said.

  “How is that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, mountain people thrive on stories and tales, and the more colorful and dramatic the better. They love nothing better than a ghost story about double crosses, adultery, and murder. How is it there could have been a genuine, bona fide lynching right where we’re standing and you vaguely heard about it?” I asked. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “How come I never knew that Bridie owned this place at all?” he countered.


  “I’m the one asking the questions here. If you start asking them, then I’m going to get all confused,” I said.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Dexter Calloway came out the front door, and briskly walked down the steps and around the corner of the house. Maribelle opened the window to her bedroom just in time for me to hear Preston’s mouth running at fifty miles per hour.

  “What’s going on here, Elliott?” I asked as I watched the inhabitants going about their business.

  “I’m not sure, cousin.”

  “No. . . no, I don’t just mean right now, on the surface. I mean, what is really going on? Deep. Under the surface.”

  “I’m still not sure,” Elliott said.

  Twenty-three

  An hour later I was seated on the ground underneath a very large tree that housed a very healthy bird and squirrel population. I’d dodged bird doodoo at least twice already, and I could no longer feel my feet. Sitting Indian-style on the ground at seven months pregnant was something one only did if she were trying to cut off the circulation to her feet.

  But here I sat, with Elliott to my right and Chester H. Farnsworth the third sitting across from me. All I could think was what a good thing it was that Gert was mad at me, because she would never have made it up off the ground. And since Mr. Farnsworth the third had insisted we sit under the tree, on the ground, I would have had to go back to St. Louis in a few days with my grandmother permanently employed as Mr. Farnsworth’s new scarecrow, or she would have had to ride on the hood Indian-style for twelve hours. See, some things happen for a reason. I’m just certain of it.

  Mr. Farnsworth’s house was set on a hill, nothing new there, and his yard overlooked the two-lane blacktop that snaked around the foot of the mountain. It was a lovely day, mid-seventies, sunny with an occasional wispy cloud. Oh, and don’t forget the soggy ground from the rain the night before that would now have a permanent dent in the shape of my butt. All I could say was this had better be good.

  Chester himself was about ninety thousand years old, and at his age I couldn’t imagine being able to even find my legs, much less contort them into the position in which he now sat. I bet he had never taken yoga. I bet he never jogged, ran a race, took karate, ate low-fat, low-sugar, low-caffeine, low-calorie, or low-carbohydrate foods a day in his life. And yet the man was the perfect embodiment of everything healthy and everything I absolutely despised.