Ollie wiped the sweat off his brow and turned to look at me from the dresser. “Just for the record, I do not believe that you could harm anybody. And it’s not just because you’re pregnant. Your eyes are far too honest to be a killer’s.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said.
“I will not show you the will. But I’ll tell you how she changed it. That way, I won’t feel so damned guilty about it,” he said.
Whatever. What did I care why he told me just as long as he spilled the beans? I smiled at him and sat down on the edge of the bed. He gave a sheepish grin as he looked down at my bare feet.
“There’s a reason that ‘barefoot and pregnant’ became a quote. You can’t wear shoes if your feet swell. Mine are swollen something fierce today,” I said.
“The original will was basically the same as the revised one. With the exception of the boardinghouse and the fifty thousand dollars. Oh, and a few small personal items that she decided she wanted somebody else to have. She gave a list of items that were in a box out in the garage. She left about ten old books to a black man who used to be a miner. Never could figure that one out.”
“Robert Miller,” I said. I was touched by that, and it was evident in my tone of voice.
“You know him?”
“And his story. Quite touching, actually” I looked at him with pleading eyes, hoping that he wouldn’t stop there.
“Originally, the boardinghouse went to Dexter Calloway and the fifty thousand dollars went to Sherise Tyler,” he said.
“Did they know this?” I asked, the breath stuck in my throat.
“I don’t know if Clarissa ever expressed the contents of her will to them or not. I’m assuming Dexter at least knew,” he said. “Just because he’s had access to so many of Clarissa’s personal things for so many years.”
“Why?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Why what?”
“Why did she change it? What made her change it? Did something happen?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. I did not believe him. Maybe he didn’t know every single detail, but I believed that Clarissa had told him something.
“Why Sherise Tyler? What was her connection to Sherise Tyler?”
“I’m not clear on that, either. All I know is that Sherise was here a lot. Off and on. Especially when she was younger,” he said.
“Is Tyler her maiden name?”
“For some reason I want to say no. I think she’s divorced,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Jett. You’ve been a big help. Have a safe trip back to Charleston,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “You be careful, too.”
Just as I reached for the intricate cut-glass doorknob, Mr. Jett stopped me. I don’t know if it was for drama’s sake or if it was because he’d just remembered something. Or maybe he’d been unsure if he was going to say it. Whatever it was, I was all ears. I turned around and waited for his words.
“Take the boardinghouse,” he said. “You won’t be sorry.”
“I might argue with you on that. This place seems to be full of bad luck,” I said.
“Yes,” he said and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “But it is also full of coal.”
Thirty-four
Look, Elliott, I’m telling you there is some sort of connection with Sherise Tyler,” I said. “You don’t leave somebody fifty thousand dollars just because she hangs around your boardinghouse. Gosh, if that were the case, Chuck Velasco would leave my husband his pizza parlor, his ex-wife, and his dog.”
“I agree, but I’m not sure how. And short of asking her why or how, I can’t figure out how to find out,” he said. His brown eyes were watching the road, but it was almost as if he wasn’t seeing it. After a moment’s hesitation he added, “Why would Clarissa take it away, though? Why leave her fifty grand then take it away?”
“I don’t know. But think about it. What if Sherise was counting on that money to help get her ‘story’ published, and then she found out she wasn’t going to get it. Enough to kill for?” I asked.
“For some people, yes.”
For some people. I guess that’s what it really all came down to. Who was capable of doing what for how much? What was worth killing somebody for in Elliott’s eyes could be totally different in my eyes. I could kill somebody in self-defense. Of course, that theory had already been proven. You never know until you’re tested. It’s a stupid question to ask somebody, because you really don’t know what you would do.
“Maybe Clarissa found out that Sherise was planning on publishing a story about the whole Aldrich Gainsborough thing,” I said. “That would be reason to cut her out.”
“That’s just so horrible,” Elliott said and made a left-hand turn. “Think about it. Of all the people to fall in love with. The one person who would be despised by everybody that you knew. The entire coal town, all of the miners and their families despised their superintendent. Gainsborough. And Clarissa loved him.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking. “I’ve thought of that myself. And then think about it. She finds the man she loves, the father of her child, hanging from a noose in her own damn front yard. Not just hanging there dead. Badly beaten and bloody and hanging there dead. I’m surprised she didn’t go crazy.”
Elliott steered the car off the road, down a driveway that was so steep, I lost my stomach going over the edge of it. I gripped the seat with one hand and door handle with the other one. “Good Lord,” I said.
“You gotta put your houses and your driveways wherever you can in this state,” he said. “Otherwise you’d have a population of about twelve.”
“Well, you think they could have at least put some sort of warning up there,” I said. “If I had been driving, I would have probably wrecked the car.”
“Well, I think this is the house. Her name is Louanne Hill,” he said.
Louanne Hill answered her own door wearing a powder-blue dress, with a bright yellow shawl draped around her shoulders. She wore wire glasses that rested peculiarly on the bridge of her long slender nose. Elliott introduced us and she invited us in.
“All I have to drink is milk and bottled water,” she said. I noticed a slight tremor in her hands as they gripped the afghan tighter.
“Oh, we’re fine,” Elliott said. I nodded my head in agreement. She led us through a narrow hallway to the living room and told us to sit. I sat down on a fluffy brown couch that had to be at least thirty years old. Gold shag carpet was covered with those rope rugs that you find at the flea market for five bucks. Daisy doilies were draped over the back of her couch and chairs. She had a walker tucked away in the corner of the room and the television was on.
Louanne Hill slurred her words when she spoke and moved as slow as molasses. It took her three minutes just for her butt to make contact with the chair. She seemed forever hovering above it. This ninety-year-old woman made me think of Sylvia back home in New Kassel. Not that she resembled Sylvia in any way. Rather the opposite. Sylvia was so completely different than this woman. Tall, proud, and crisp as she could be. My gosh, did I actually miss her? I would never admit to it.
“Mrs. Hill,” Elliott began. He was such a good ambassador. He smiled and spoke softly and immediately put everybody at ease. “I talked to you briefly. We are interested in the VanBibber House. A woman named Clarissa Estep, later Hart, went to stay there around 1917 and gave birth to a baby boy.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember that like yesterday.”
I had trouble believing her, but didn’t say anything.
“Why is that? Was there something special about her?” Elliott asked. “Or do you remember all of the women who went there?”
“Part of the reason I remember it is because it was my first summer there. My mother worked there. When school was out that summer, I came to work with her. I had nobody to stay with because my daddy had gone to Massachusetts to visit a business colleague and my oldest brother had just gone off to war,” she said. She stopped and looked at me. “
World War One. The first one. ‘Course, we didn’t call it that back then, because how were we supposed to know there was gonna be another one?”
Made sense.
“Mom didn’t trust me with my next-eldest brother who was fourteen. He was a wild one,” she said. “So I went with her to the house and helped work.”
“And the other reason?” Elliott asked.
So far I had not said a word. I didn’t have to. Elliott was doing a fine job.
“Well, Clarissa had that baby and she was intent upon keeping it. Three, four months went by, and she decided that she just couldn’t provide for it and she couldn’t stay at the VanBibber House any longer. In fact,” Louanne said, “she’d already stayed past her alotted time. Six weeks after a baby was born was usually when they’d move on.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking how absolutely lame it sounded.
“Other than becoming a streetwalker, there wasn’t much she could do. She looked for housekeeping jobs, since she’d run the boardinghouse, but there was nothing open. She had no formal schooling, so she couldn’t teach or anything like that. Finally, she decided to surrender him. Lord, how she cried.”
“I can imagine,” I said. Again, how lame. What words could I choose to express that I could feel Clarissa’s anguish adequately? None. There weren’t any. In fact, Clarissa’s decision was such a heart-ripping one, I don’t think I could even seriously imagine having to make it without breaking down and crying about it. I believe she did what was right. I think Clarissa knew it was what was best, which made it all the more painful to do.
“In fact,” Louanne went on, “she cried so hard that all the blood vessels in her eyes popped and she had red eyes. Poor girl. Well, Mom couldn’t stand that. Just plain ol’ couldn’t stand it.”
“So, what did she do?” I asked. I know something was coming.
“She adopted that baby. It made Clarissa so happy that her baby wasn’t going off to strangers that she cried all over again. ‘Course, Mom made her sign papers saying she wouldn’t try and get him back, which Clarissa did.”
“Wait,” I said, looking to Elliott. “I. . . I think I may be a little slow here. Are you saying that Clarissa’s baby that she had by Aldrich Gainsborough is your adopted brother? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Louanne said, smiling. “See why I remember it so well?”
Sort of an understatement, really. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Is your brother still alive?”
“No,” she said. “He died back in seventy-two.”
“Did he have any children?” Elliott asked, obviously on the same path that I was. We were acting like a couple of dogs who hadn’t been fed in a week, begging for scraps. Hot on the trail of the trash pile. How pathetic we were. How excited.
“Yes. He had a set of twins. A girl and a boy. The boy’s still alive. Up in Morgantown,” she said. “The girl died in a car accident back in the late eighties. Imagine making it all the way to sixty and then dying in a car crash. Doesn’t seem right. Seems like there should be some point in your life when you’re safe from that sort of thing.”
“Louanne,” I said slowly. I took a deep breath and then asked the next question. “What was your maiden name?”
“Gross was my maiden name,” she answered. “Germans from Pennsylvania. Why do you ask?”
Thirty-five
I was stunned into silence as we left Louanne’s house. And believe me, I can count on both hands how many times that has happened to me. In fact, I was so stunned that I didn’t even blink as Elliott backed up his car to get a “run” at the hill known as Louanne’s driveway. Normally, that would have sent me into a panic. I didn’t even blink.
We were finally on our way back to the boardinghouse when Elliott spoke. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
“Do you want something to drink?”
“Yes.”
“What would you like?”
“Dr. Pepper. Real one. Stop at the next gas station.”
“How about Burger King up here about half a mile?”
“Fine.” Caffeine and bubbles. I would be very happy.
“What do you think?” he asked, smiling at me.
“Pretty trees,” I said and pointed out the window.
He laughed this time. “No, silly. About what Louanne said. What do you think?”
“I. . . I. . . Can we just drive in silence until I get the caffeine? I want to think about this,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I can deal with that.”
And so we did. We drove in silence for the next three or four minutes until we reached the Burger King and Elliott handed me my supersize Dr. Pepper. Although the straws are never long enough for those supersize drinks. It’s like, okay. Supersize bladder requires supersize straw.
“Tell me this is okay,” I said before I took a big drink.
“It’s okay,” Elliott said, still smiling at me.
I took a very long and much-needed drink and then let out a breath nice and slowly. “I think, obviously, that Norville Gross was Clarissa’s great-grandson, that’s what I think. I think that somehow or other Norville found out that Clarissa was his great-grandmother and contacted her. Whether or not he was thinking in dollar signs at the time he contacted her, we’ll never know. In fact, since he was from up in Morgantown, he really had no way of knowing if Clarissa had money.”
“So, why doesn’t the rest of the family know who he is?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Clarissa was going to announce to everybody at the reading of the will just who he was, and she was interrupted, of course,” I said. I threw the paper from my straw into Elliott’s immaculate ashtray.
“I agree. But why wouldn’t Clarissa leave the money to Norville’s father? Why skip him and give it to Norville?”
“Why did she leave me the boardinghouse and not you or your sister, or our other cousins? Maybe it was as simple as Norville’s father not being interested in meeting her and Norville was. Believe it or not, some people could care less where they come from,” I said.
“I can buy that,” he said. “That sounds plausible. But what about Sherise?”
“I still haven’t proven it, but I think she is the descendant of Doyle Phillips,” I said. “The really strange part is, why would Clarissa feel compelled to leave Sherise something because of that? I mean, why not leave money to everybody who was descended from anybody in the mines? There has to be another connection.”
Elliott was quiet a moment. “What about Dexter Calloway?”
“What about him?”
“Why do you think Clarissa changed her mind about leaving him the boardinghouse?”
“I don’t know. Unless she’d found me by then and just felt compelled to return it to the correct family. If it truly is cursed, maybe she liked old Dexter too much to leave it to him,” I said.
“Seriously, Torie. Think about it. Who better than Dexter to know all the nooks and crannies of the boardinghouse? What if he knew he was supposed to get that boardinghouse and had his heart set on it? What if he were the type of man to kill for something like that?”
“Or get me arrested hoping the will would revert back to the original will? Is that what you’re suggesting?” I asked, the hair slowly rising on my arms.
“Or else, get revenge on you by seeing you in jail for half a century.”
“Eek, Elliott. You have an absolutely twisted mind,” I said. “I like it.”
“I’m just curious about one other thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Do you think anybody else has this much fun with genealogy?”
Thirty-six
Elliott and I were going to take my grandmother out for dinner. Not to Denny’s this time, but someplace a little fancier. Like the Village Inn. Am I imagining things or does every town with a population under five thousand have a Village Inn or its equivalent? But dinner would have to wa
it until after we found the mine entrance.
I wouldn’t have taken Gert hiking into the woods to locate the entrance to the old mine even if she hadn’t experienced the bump on her head earlier today. But she drew us a map and told us about how far to go. Of course, that was in her language of measurements. “You go here a jag, and then up the hill a ways, and down over a stone’s throw.” How did we ever make it to the millennium?
I basically went along just in case something happened to Elliott. In fact, if the trail got too steep I was going to sit down right where I was and wait for Elliott, because I didn’t think mountain climbing in my present state was a very smart thing to do.
Lucky for me, however, the “snail’s trail” wound around the base of the mountain and only raised itself enough to go over a slight hill and down the next valley. Which is where, hidden behind overgrown vines and weeds, we found the entrance to the mine with rotted boards nailed to the front of it. A big KEEP OUT sign was set askew on one of the boards, and I looked around the valley feeling all creepy and everything.
“I just had a really awful thought,” I said.
“I thought that was my job,” Elliott said as he yanked on a handful of vines.
“No, I’m serious,” I said.
“What is it?”
“What if Norville Gross was looking for the same thing?”
“What about it?”
He came back dead.”
“That was a panther,” Elliott said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Oh, yeah! What if the panther gets us? I don’t think they are very particular about their victims.”
“Relax, it’s broad daylight.”
“So what? Does the panther know that people will see it in broad daylight?” I asked.
“No, it’s just with civilization moving in closer to the panthers’ habitat, they usually make themselves pretty scarce during the day,” he said.
“Well, Norville Gross was killed during the day.”
A MistY MourninG Page 19