“Well,” Emmett finally replied, after snapping the cuffs in place. “I have a murder weapon, I have a suspect, and I have a dead body, but it seems Annie here had a pretty good motive, and you two certainly have quite a history together.”
Annie couldn’t believe what was happening. “Rory, I can have my lawyer here in half an hour.” She cursed as she realized that she wasn’t in New York anymore, and her attorney back in the Big Apple wouldn’t do her a blind bit of good. “I can get someone here, soon,” she corrected herself.
“Well, that’s probably a good thing, Annie,” Emmett interjected, taking Rory by the elbow and steering him towards his police cruiser. “You’re going to need a lawyer if I find out that you had anything to do with this.” He opened the door to the police car and guided Rory in gently, then turned back towards the now-trembling Annie. “This is serious business, Mrs. Richards. Harboring a criminal at best, conspiring to murder at worst--it all comes down to one thing.”
Annie forced herself to take a breath. “What’s that?” She jutted her chin out, trying to look brave, though she felt anything but.
“You could be heading to prison,” he replied gravely, “and you’re probably going to lose this house.”
Annie held herself together until his car pulled out of the driveway, then she stumbled to the front porch steps and collapsed on them, trying to catch her breath and fight the sobs that threatened to burst from her chest.
17
Pieces of a Puzzle
“You turn my carpenter loose this instant, Emmett Barnes, do you hear me?” Bessie’s voice carried throughout the empty downstairs of the old farmhouse, threatening to shake the very glass in the window panes. “That man wouldn’t hurt a fly--he is reformed,” she added, shaking her head as though the man could see her through the telephone. After a few more heated demands and comments, Bessie handed the telephone to her daughter. “I don’t know how to hang this thing up,” she wailed, before taking a deep breath and straightening her shoulders.
“I am telling you, somebody framed Rory. It may have even been that two-faced Emmett Barnes himself, carrying on like he’s our best friend, then turning right around and stabbing us in the backs.”
Annie wasn’t sure when Rory and her mother had become an ‘us,’ but she understood her anger. After crying for a few minutes on the porch, Annie had gone inside to break the news to her mother and son. She waited until Devon had gone to his temporary room to check on his kitten to tell her mother what Emmett had said about the possibility of them losing the plantation.
Bessie had waited as long as she thought it would take for Emmett to make it back to the police station, then she began calling him, trying four times before she finally reached the man in his office. Annie didn’t hear Emmett’s side of the conversation, but she was sure his ears were bleeding. Bessie didn’t waste time or niceties when she was angry about something, and right now, she was spitting nails over the arrest of Rory Jenkins.
“Oh, that no-good, son-of-a-biscuit!” Bessie hadn’t held back on her insults, though she drew the line at actually swearing. She had her limits, and her priorities, and right now, clearing Rory’s name was at the top of her list.
“Annie, we have to find out who could have taken that mallet and brained that Suzy woman with it. I just know that Rory is innocent, but I don’t know how we can prove it,” she continued, putting the kettle on the stove and switching on the heat. As she pulled two teacups from a cabinet, she continued her tirade. “And to think I almost cooked fried chicken for that man!”
Annie pulled the box of tea bags from another cabinet and handed two to her mother. “Mama, maybe he’s just doing his job. I mean, I don’t want to think that Rory did this, either, but who else would have had access to his tools? The only other people here when Suzy was killed was you, me, and Devon, and I know my son could never do something like that.” Annie looked her mother straight in the eyes, and leaned in to add, “and we know you didn’t do it, right?”
Bessie cocked one eyebrow. “Annie Louise Purdy Richards, I know I raised you better than to ask your mother such a question!” She added sugar to both cups and jostled the not-yet boiling kettle impatiently. “There was one other person here, you know.”
Annie flopped in a chair by the kitchen table. “Who?”
“Well, Suzy, of course. And since we didn’t find her car out there, I’m guessing someone had to bring her here. She sure didn’t walk, not in those heels she was wearing.”
Annie realized that her mother was right. How had Suzy made her way to the farmhouse? The police never mentioned finding a car anywhere nearby, and Suzy’s heels had been immaculate, so she hadn’t been traipsing through the briars and brush to sneak into the house. If she had driven herself, there would be a car nearby somewhere, but there wasn’t.
“Do you think somebody came with Suzy and killed her, then tried to make it look like Rory did it?”
Bessie slapped the counter, making the teacups jiggle. “Bingo! Someone had to drive Suzy here, then whoever it was took the chance to whack her, right there in our kitchen.”
Annie shook her head at her mother’s lingo. Obviously, she’d been watching too many crime dramas on television. “But who would want to do that?”
“Maybe somebody wanted to frame Rory,” she replied. “What about that fella he beat up? The one he went to prison for?”
Annie had her doubts. “I don’t know, it seems like it would be awfully hard to plan something as big as framing a guy for murder when you don’t even know he’ll be at the place where the murder happens. Nobody knew Rory would be here, remember? He only came because you called him and he felt like he owed us a favor.”
“Well, what about that ex-wife of his?”
Annie was surprised by how much her mother seemed to know about Rory’s checkered past. “I don’t know, but I doubt she would have waited until now to try and get revenge for something that happened all those years ago.” Try as she might, Annie just couldn’t come up with a likely scenario that involved someone deliberately framing Rory for Suzy’s murder. She didn’t want to think that he was capable of killing Suzy, but all the signs seemed to point to Rory as the most likely suspect.
“Has that fiancée of Suzy’s called you again?” Bessie picked the whistling kettle up and tipped it over, filling the two teacups with boiling water. “You know, I just didn’t like the way he turned up like that. I mean, sure, Suzy was his fiancée, but he had no business just turning up unannounced like that. He should just let the police do their job.”
Annie wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, he kind of gave me the creeps. I mean, he seemed sort of desperate to find out if we knew why Suzy was here. It was almost as though he was more concerned with how much we knew about her death rather than the fact that she’d been murdered.” Daniel definitely seemed off to Annie, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that bothered her about him. His charm had seemed insincere, but his sadness had seemed real enough. She supposed that grief affected everyone differently. She had hardly cried when her own husband had died, but then again, meeting his girlfriend at his funeral had slapped the sadness right out of her, at least temporarily.
Bessie sipped her tea and seemed lost in her thoughts, calmed for the first time since Emmett had driven away with her favorite carpenter in the back seat of his patrol car. “I guess you’d better go check on Devon. I think he took this hard, you know. He really likes Rory. We all do, don’t get me wrong, but I think Devon really took a shine to him.”
Annie nodded, pausing to take a drink. “I’ll go check on him. You try and relax a little, because, without Rory, we’re all going to have to work extra hard to get this place pulled together in time for the summer tourist season.” She rose from her chair and made her way upstairs, pausing to peer out the front door, where Rory’s truck and camper remained. It seemed surreal that he’d been taken to jail so unceremoniously. Annie decided right then that she would go to the police stati
on as soon as she’d made sure that Devon was okay. Rory shouldn’t have to go through this alone, not when Annie was still certain that he couldn’t have committed such a heinous crime.
Devon was in his room, staring at his phone when Annie poked her head into the room. “Dev, you okay?”
The teen had a look of pure concentration on his face, and Annie surmised that he must be playing one of his games, but when she slipped into the room and sat beside him on his mattress (he had refused to assemble the bed frame on principle, since he was determined to move into the attic as soon as possible) she realized that he was staring at an image of the map that Emmett had shown them.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked, moving TigerLily aside so she could lean in for a closer look.
“Snapped it when the old guy wasn’t looking,” Devon replied, tilting the phone so his mom could look more easily. “I didn’t think he’d let us keep a copy, so I took a photo when nobody was looking. I thought we could use it if we find the other half of the map. Rory thought these were GPS coordinates, and he might be right.”
“Honey, I don’t think that GPS coordinates were used in the 1700’s. You know this isn’t likely to be a pirate map, right?” Annie really didn’t want Devon to get his hopes up, and she didn’t want him counting on Rory’s help with locating whatever the map led to. After everything that had happened, she wouldn’t be surprised if Rory walked away from the job of renovating the old plantation farmhouse.
“Mom, they still used coordinates. Longitude, latitude--you remember all that from the prehistoric days when you attended school, right?” He gave her a cheeky grin and tossed his phone on the bed beside him. “I just wonder what it is that people have been dying to find. Do you think it’s like gold and jewels and stuff? Could we be megarich if we found whatever it is, or would we have to turn it in to the police?”
Annie had no idea. “It would be great if we had more information,” she agreed, “but unless there’s anything in that notebook we found in the attic, I’m afraid we’re just searching blindly.” This time she gave into the impulse to ruffle his hair, and he pretended to be annoyed, but she could tell he didn’t really mind. One day soon, he would be too old for that, but for this particular moment in time, he was still her little boy.
“I’m going to go close up the attic for now,” she told him. “Until we can get someone up there to install a light, it’s not safe to poke around.”
“Rory will do it when he gets back.” Devon sounded certain of this, and Annie’s heart hurt a little. She hoped that her son was right, but she had to be practical. There was a very real possibility that Rory wouldn’t be finishing the work on her home, and she didn’t want to give Devon any false hope, but she also didn’t have the heart to tell him that she thought Rory might not come back, so she didn’t say anything at all.
She smiled at Devon, kissed him on the cheek, and rose to her feet, disturbing the fluffy orange feline once again. “Sorry, TigerLily,” she whispered, then headed towards the attic door.
Annie almost pushed the door completely shut, but stopped herself. If the floor was warped, she may have a hard time getting it open again. Sighing, she dropped to her knees and ran her hand across the slightly bulging plank of wood below where the door would hang. It definitely rose in the middle and had scuff marks where the door had rubbed against it.
As she slid her hand across the floor, she noticed that the seam between that plank and its neighbor seemed uneven. She ran her fingertips along the edge of the wood, then slipped a fingernail into the space between them. It barely fit, but she estimated that there was enough space to fit a screwdriver, so she scurried back to her bedroom to retrieve the flathead screwdriver that she’d been using to assemble her bed.
Annie settled back onto her knees and wedged the screwdriver between the two planks of wood. They felt surprisingly firm, so she hoped that the wood wasn’t rotted through from moisture. With a wiggle and a push, she managed to pry the offending board up in one piece. She peered into the hole where it had just been, praying that she wouldn’t find rot or termites, or even, god forbid, a mouse. She found none of these, but she did find something that made her heart skip a beat.
Inside the hole, beneath the floor, Annie found an old-fashioned, leather-bound journal and something far more interesting--a single gold coin.
18
The Past, Presented
Annie held her breath as she peeled open the cover of the ancient book. It looked as though it had been very pretty at one time, but age had darkened the leather cover and yellowed the pages, which were now soft, brittle, and felt as though they would simply turn to dust in her hands as she turned them.
The book appeared to be a journal, and at first, Annie couldn’t tell if the flowery handwriting inside belonged to a man or a woman. After reading a few pages, Annie realized that she was reading a diary, and the author was definitely a woman. A date jumped out at her--1831--written at the top of the first page. Annie marveled at how well such an old book had managed to hold up, squirreled away between the floorboards for over two centuries. It was very fragile, very delicate, but still intact, and more importantly, its words were clear and legible.
Forgetting her original reason for returning to the attic, Annie sat back against one wall of the hallway and began reading the entries in the journal. The first few were almost boring, relaying the journal owner’s daily interactions with the staff at the plantation. Then the tone of the entries changed, and Annie realized that the book had been written by a woman, most likely a young one, and this young lady had most definitely been in love.
I have met the most wonderful man today. An acquaintance of my brother’s, Mister Edward McKinney is a most splendid visitor to our dreadfully boring plantation! He had some business with John, but thankfully my brother didn’t keep him busy for too long, and Edward did entreat me to take a walk with him down by the water of the old bracken pond. John was furious, as he sees himself more of a father figure than a brother since our beloved Papa joined Mama in Heaven last spring.
Edward did regale me with tales of his travels, and he claims that he is descended from most fearsome pirates, why, Blackbeard himself! I have reserved judgment on his outlandish tales, for he is most charming and yet, ever such a gentleman that he dared not even ask to touch my hand as we made our way across the plantation. I do hope that his travels bring him to our farm yet again, and I dare say that I hope he deems me worthy despite our family’s wicked circumstances.
Annie wondered what ‘wicked circumstances’ the girl meant, but as she read further entries, each one discussing the girl’s growing fondness for Edward McKinney, she realized that the Cooper family’s bad luck seemed to be infamous in Coopersville.
Despite the fact that my own family name is upon this town in which my family has dared to settle, and despite the fact that our plantation has grown and flourished, there are those who wish to see our suffering continue and our degradation become complete. My dear brother has informed me that the Governor himself has been blackening the Cooper name, declaring that my father’s fortunes were made not from honest farming, but from stealing slaves from larger plantations and selling them into North Carolina. I am outraged at his candid insult of my family’s name, and I am furious that my poor brother now bears the scorn of such nonsense.
Our crops were, indeed, blighted this spring by the late freeze and harsh storms, but John assures me that we are in no financial dangers at present. Still, I can’t help but wish Papa and Mama were here to shoulder the burden and tell us what we should do. John grows pale from lack of sleep, and I have been feeling unwell for a fortnight, struggling to keep myself from sinking into a black mood from which I fear I might not recover.
Only the thought of seeing my dear Edward keeps me looking upward. I feel as though God himself has sent him to us, for he has been counseling John in some business dealings that both assure me will see us through these desperate times. We had to sell three
of our strongest slaves, and I fear that they went to masters who would mistreat them and beat them terribly. My heart aches, for though I know that my family thrives on the backs of their labor, my family would never wish to see a slave mistreated or harmed. It pains me to think of their families, lost to them now as my own dear Papa and Mama are to me. Perhaps John’s business dealings will prove most fruitful so that we may buy back our slaves and reunite them with their loved ones.
Annie’s stomach churned as she read this entry. She’d always known that slavery was a part of her town’s past, but reading about actual slaves and their young owner made her want to cry. At least, she consoled herself, it seemed that Rose’s family had treated the slaves well and worried about their safety. Annie wondered whether the Coopers were ever able to regain the slaves that they sold, but Rose’s further entries did not mention them. In fact, there were not many more entries in the journal, and as Annie read on, she began to understand why.
I am inclined to conceal these words, my own true feelings and thoughts, from even my own brother, but especially as John has told me that there are those who wish to see our home taken from us. My beloved Edward is gone, having left us to travel north for business which could take some time. I am not a fool, for I know that he does not love me as I do love him, but I fear I won’t be long for this world, and a small love is better than none at all.
John freed most of our slaves last month. He sent them north with Edward, who would take them to a city where they might find employment. There are men who despise my brother for his actions, because they say he is inspiring a dangerous hope among other blacks, but I know he did the right thing. We can barely fill our own bellies, and we will not starve our slaves nor send them to their doom on another farm. Our plantation is not thriving, but it is not because of the slaves. I do believe that my family’s terrible luck has passed to John and now myself. They say that curses are merely stories made to frighten children, but I believe that we are under a powerful curse, one that will not be ever broken.
Bodies & Buried Secrets: A Rosewood Place Mystery (Rosewood Place Mysteries Book 1) Page 12