Bodies & Buried Secrets: A Rosewood Place Mystery (Rosewood Place Mysteries Book 1)

by Ruby Blaylock

  “Must have been some mighty strong wind,” Bessie declared, “to knock that lamp plum across the room.”

  Annie stopped mid-sweep. Her eyes darted from the broken lamp at her feet, which lay directly in front of the ancient fireplace, to the plug on the wall by the window, some ten feet away.

  “That’s impossible,” Annie stated firmly. “There’s no way the wind did this.”

  “Annie,” Rory began. “There’s something I need to tell you, but I think I should do it in the kitchen.” He took the broom from her hands and leaned it against the wall by the fireplace mantel. “Bessie, you sit down and rest. Annie and I need to clean up a little mess out back, and then I’ll make you a nice cup of Lady Grey.”

  Annie was too surprised by Rory’s knowledge of her mother’s tea preference to ask him about what it was he wanted to show her, and when she got to the kitchen, she couldn’t immediately see anything out of place. There was still a little water on the floor, but the towels she’d thrown down when she first arrived had cleared most of that up. Thank goodness Rory had managed to get the washing machine and dryer hooked up before all the mess with the Chief--

  “Annie!” Rory whispered loudly in the empty kitchen. “Are you still with me here?”

  She realized that she did feel sort of spaced out, and she was suddenly aware that her thoughts had been drifting. “I’m so sorry, Rory--I just, well, I’m so tired, and I skipped breakfast this morning. Now the storm and all this mess...I just don’t know how much more I can take.” She covered her face with both hands. “Good lord! It feels like my life has become some bad movie that just won’t end. First, David dies and leaves me to raise Devon with barely a cent to my name, then I get the bright idea to move in with my mother in this beautiful monstrosity of a house, and now people keep dying on my property. Oh, and let’s not forget that somebody wants some treasure they think is buried here, so they may kill us all to get to it.”

  Annie threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”

  Rory pulled her into a hug, and she didn’t resist. “I’m sorry, Annie, I really am. I mean, about your husband, about your finances, that sort of stuff. But I’m not sorry you bought this place.” He pushed her away slightly, tilting her head up so that she could see his face. “I’m glad you bought it. I know you’ll make it as beautiful as it deserves to be. And I’m glad you hired me to work for you. Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten how special you were to me all those years ago.” He smiled sadly. “I’m sorry if I hurt you back then, but you needed to be out of this little town.” He left it at that, offering nothing more in the way of an explanation.

  “Wh--what did you want to talk to me about?” Annie wiped the moisture from the corners of her eyes. It wasn’t time to cry just yet.

  Rory took a deep breath. “When you left, did you lock this back door, too?”

  “Of course. There’s no way I’m leaving that one unlocked, not after, well, you know--Suzy.”

  Rory’s jaw clenched, and Annie could see the veins in his forehead begin to twitch. “Annie, that door was unlocked when I came in here, and that’s not all. He pointed to the floor beside the door. “There were footprints there, Annie, wet ones.”

  Annie looked closely at the floor. She could just make out the faintest trace of a footprint, but the water was mostly evaporated. “Are you sure it wasn’t yours or mine?” She knew the answer, but she needed Rory to confirm it.

  “I’m positive. Annie, somebody was in your house during the storm, and they had to have left just minutes before we got here.”

  Annie’s blood felt suddenly like icewater pumping through her veins. She felt lightheaded, and the room seemed to tilt oddly to one side. She reached out to Rory, but he already had his arms around her.

  “Whoa, Annie, sit down.” He lowered her to the floor and propped her up against the wall, then ran to the refrigerator and grabbed a can of soda. Popping the top, he put the can to her lips. “Here, drink a little of this. It should help.”

  Annie sputtered as the cold fizz hit her throat. “Ugh, it’s not diet,” she moaned.

  “Of course not. If you faint, you need some sugar. You probably had low blood sugar from not eating all day. My mama was the same way.” He turned the can of drink and took a swig for himself. “And you most certainly don’t need diet sodas,” he chided. “They’ll kill you with all that artificial stuff.”

  Annie let her gaze travel to the spot on the floor where Suzy’s body had been found. “I guess Suzy must have drunk too many diet sodas, huh?” She let out a chuckle, then covered her mouth, but Rory was already laughing, too, so she let her own nervous laughter join his. “We need to get back in there with my mother,” she said at last, pulling herself to her feet with Rory’s help. “I don’t think she needs to know about the back door, but we ought to stick close in case our visitor comes back.”

  They found Bessie sitting in her favorite chair in the sitting room, shuffling papers and trying to dry the few pieces that were damp. She had pulled out a stack of photographs that had been tucked away among some other papers, and she smiled softly as she sat them to one side. “Everything alright in the kitchen? You two certainly seemed to take your time ‘chatting’ out there.” Her bright eyes twinkled and she gave a throaty chuckle. “Should I leave you two alone?”

  Annie blushed, but Rory just laughed. “No, Miss Purdy, I don’t reckon we’ve picked up where we left off if that’s what you’re asking. There was a bit of a mess out there, but we cleaned it up, so you don’t have to worry about slipping in any puddles later.”

  Annie’s curiosity got the better of her and she reached for the photographs sitting beside her mother. “What are these?”

  “Oh, those are some photos I had been meaning to put in an album, but I just never have gotten around to it. I’m lucky they didn’t get wet; it would have ruined them terribly.”

  Annie flipped through the photos and saw pictures of her mom’s old house, then her heart skipped when she saw what was probably one of the last photographs taken of her father. “Oh, didn’t Daddy look good there,” she said, forcing a smile to keep tears at bay. Annie missed her father terribly, and she knew that her mother must have been so lonely after he died. Part of her wished that she’d insisted that David had allowed them to move back to South Carolina back then. If they had, David might still be alive.

  She looked at Rory, then at the still very much decrepit farmhouse. Despite the fact that it needed a lot of work, she knew that she could turn it into something really special for her little family, and she couldn’t imagine sharing that with David. He’d been, she thought, the love of her life, at least, that part of her life that had come after Rory. Now David was gone, and she didn’t miss him nearly as much as she thought a grieving widow should. And here was Rory, stepping up to help her out when her supposed true love had cheated on her and then had the nerve to drop dead.

  She paused as she came to a photograph of David, Devon, and herself. Devon was ten in the photo, and they’d come down to visit her parents for their anniversary, not knowing that only a year later her father would be gone. She couldn’t help but notice that her smile didn’t look at all real, and she realized that much of her marriage hadn’t really been as happy as she would have liked it.

  A tiny spark of thought began to form in her mind. Now was her time. Now she could be as happy as she wanted, without a husband who cared more for his work than for his family. Now Annie could make her dreams a priority, and she was not going to let some murdering treasure hunter take those dreams away from her.

  Annie returned her mother’s photos to the table beside her chair and then turned her attention to the drawer. The journal was still tucked safely away inside, so the intruder hadn’t managed to find that at least. Wordlessly she pulled it out and handed it to Rory. He looked at the book quizzically, then cocked his head to one side.

  “I found this beneath the floor below the attic door,” Annie e
xplained, then reached into her pocket and pulled out the gold coin. She wasn’t sure why she’d tucked it into her back pocket before she left the house that morning, but she was certainly glad that she had. If the person who’d been in her home had found it, they may have waited around to see if she had more, and Annie was fairly certain that she didn’t want to meet whoever was skulking around in a thunderstorm trying to find a mysterious treasure, especially since they were willing to kill for it.

  Rory flipped through the pages of the journal as Annie explained what she’d found to her mother. Bessie’s eyes grew large as she listened, and she could hardly wait to have a turn looking at the ancient diary.

  “Well,” Rory said finally, passing the book to an eager Bessie. “That certainly is a wonderful snapshot of this place’s history. I’d say it probably belongs in the local history museum, or at least needs to be preserved somehow.”

  Annie agreed. “It’s just a shame that it doesn’t tell us more about how John came into his money. Maybe it’s just me, but that McKinney character sounds like a con artist.” After living in New York for nearly two decades, Annie could smell a con artist from a mile away, or so she liked to think. In reality, she was often a little too soft for her own good, but something about Edward McKinney just felt kind of off to her. Probably it was the fact that he claimed to be Blackbeard’s descendant. She was fairly certain that honest people didn’t go around bragging that they were related to such notorious characters in history.

  “Well, it’s a shame that this John fellow didn’t keep a diary of his own,” Bessie replied, never taking her eyes off the page she was reading. “I guess men really don’t do those sorts of things, though, do they?”

  “Well, now, actually, they did in those days,” Rory replied. “In fact, John would have kept much more than a diary. He would have kept a log of the slaves he bought and sold, the crops they grew and sold, and any other plantation business records. I guess none of them survived throughout the years. Heck, it’s a miracle this diary survived.”

  “Well, something else had to have survived,” Bessie argued, finally looking up from the diary, “because Thomas Anderson had a copy of it. Where on earth did he get his little half-a-treasure map, hmm?”

  Annie sat herself down in the chair opposite her mother. “I guess we’ll never know where he found it. After all, dead men tell no tales, right?”

  Rory groaned at her attempt at pirate humor. “You know, the really frustrating thing is, we are walking through the same rooms that Cooper and his sister walked through all those years ago. It’s a shame we couldn’t just reach back through time and ask them.”

  Annie shivered slightly. “I guess I try not to think about all the people who lived here before us, especially when you know that some of them died right here. I’d like to focus on the living folk, thank you very much.”

  Rory looked around the room. “Rose and John probably entertained their guests in this very room. They probably used this same fireplace to keep warm.” He stepped in front of the old stone fireplace and tapped the hearth with his foot. “At least this looks sturdy. I may be a heck of a carpenter, but I’m no stone mason.” He ran his hand across the thick wooden mantel and upset a cloud of dust.

  “Oops,” Annie said, her cheeks flushing pink. “Guess I might have forgotten to dust that part.”

  Rory started to pull his hand away when he felt something rough under his fingertips. At just over six feet tall, he still had to stand on tiptoe to see the mantle’s surface, so he looked around for something to stand on.

  “What is it?” Annie asked, puzzled by his sudden need to inspect the mantle.

  “I don’t know, but something doesn’t feel right about this mantle. The wood feels split here, and it shouldn’t be.” He finally spotted a folding step-stool by the entrance to the room. He left the mantle long enough to get the stool and put it beneath the mantle to give himself enough extra height to see the top of the wooden shelf.

  “What is it?” Bessie asked, rising from her seat.

  “I’m not sure,” Rory admitted. “It looks like a seam, but there shouldn’t be a seam here. It should just be one solid piece of wood.” He ran his fingers across it several times, then tapped the surface of the mantle. In the middle, the sound that came back was dense and quiet. As he tapped his knuckles closer to the end of the mantle, it changed, growing louder and more hollow. “Well, I’ll be darned,” he exclaimed, tapping one last time.

  “What? What’s wrong with my fireplace?” Annie’s mind raced with worry. Wood rot, termites, who knew what else could be wrong with the mantel. And who was to say the fireplace was even safe to use anymore?

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” Rory replied, giving the end of the mantle a firm tug and a twist. It came away neatly in his hand. “It’s got a secret compartment in it, that’s all.”

  22

  The Truth Will Come Out

  Rory handled the wooden compartment gently, though it felt sturdy enough. He shook it once and was rewarded by the sound of something firm shuffling around inside.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Annie’s eyes widened, giving them the appearance of two cat’s-eye shooters like the marbles in the old five-and-dime store in town. “Rory, what did you find?”

  The compartment was obviously a box, but it wasn’t immediately clear how that it opened or what was inside. Rory slid his hands over the surface of the smooth wood. It was beautifully crafted, and to have remained intact, hiding its contents for hundreds of years, was a pretty impressive thing.

  After a few tentative pushes and prods, one side of the box slipped open, revealing a small opening. Inside the opening was a bundle of papers, tied neatly with twine. Very carefully, Rory slid the bundle out of the box and pulled one end of the rustic string. Annie scanned the top page quickly for a date, but her gut told her that these papers came from John Cooper.

  “Well, what is it?” Bessie cried, tired of waiting for someone to explain what they’d just found.

  “This looks like pages from a log book, maybe the kind that kept track of inventory here on the plantation.” Rory flipped through the pages, his eyes straining to read the faded words. The handwriting was fairly neat, but still hard to read. After a few moments, he handed the pages to Annie. “I think this is talking about the slaves that lived here,” he explained. As Annie perused the pages, he picked up the box again and discovered that there was still something in it. A quick shake told him it was solid, and as he upended the box a single, shiny gold coin fell out into his hand.

  “Holy hades,” he muttered, minding his manners in front of Bessie. “Would you look at this?”

  Annie glanced up from her reading. Her mouth fell open as she spied the coin, and her hand went to her pocket, where its twin was still tucked safely away. “Jeez, are there really that many gold coins floating around this place?” She explained about Emmett’s revelation and his own coin, and Rory laughed.

  “I guess our guess about hidden treasure was right,” he said, turning the coin over in his hand. “But this certainly isn’t worth killing for.”

  Annie turned her attention back to the old papers. “I don’t think this is the treasure,” she replied, pulling a page out of the stack. “Look at this.” She held out a piece of paper that looked like a bill of sale. On it, several items were listed, but these objects weren’t crops or farm products, they were people. Annie had discovered the bill of sale for nearly a dozen slaves. The year on the bill was 1833.

  Her mind was agitated. Something about the date on the bill of sale and the number of slaves sold bothered her. The fee was listed as ‘six-thousand dollars and several pieces of fine jewellery,’ which seemed like such a small price for a dozen human lives. The bill made no other references to the jewellery, and Annie’s heart sank when she saw the signature at the bottom of the page. There in ink, right beside John’s own signature, was Edward McKinney’s name.

  “I don’t believe it!” Annie took the diary from he
r mother’s hands and flipped to the last few entries. The dates were close enough to the one on the bill of sale to confirm, at least in her mind, that John Cooper had sold one dozen slaves to Edward McKinney. Yet, according to Rose’s diary, the same number of slaves had been freed and sent north with Edward. Realization hit her like a punch to the gut.

  “He lied to her.”

  “Who?” Bessie peered at the diary as if she thought it might tell her what was going on. “What does all this mean?”

  Annie sat down in the easy chair and stacked the pages neatly on her lap. There was more than just a bill of sale here, there was a story. A story of betrayal and heartbreak filled the pages, and as she flipped through the stack one last time, she realized that one of the papers looked out of place. She pulled it free from the others and examined it more closely, and she was shocked to discover that it was a letter, addressed to Rose, signed by John.

  Bessie wasn’t satisfied with her daughter’s silence. “Annie, who lied to whom?”

  Annie gave up on trying to read the letter and put it back on top of the other pages with a sigh. “In Rose’s diary, she wrote that her brother freed a dozen slaves. She says that he sent them north with Edward McKinney, but this bill of sale seems to show that McKinney bought the slaves from John.” Annie shook her head. “How awful. She thought her brother was doing the right thing, doing something noble, and he told her an outright lie. And to make matters worse, Rose was in love with this ‘honorable’ McKinney character! What a scumbag!”

  Rory picked up the papers from her lap and began reading the letter silently to himself. After just a few lines, he stopped. “Annie, did you read this?”

  She shook her head. “No, I just glanced at it. To be honest, I doubt I’d want to hear what the man had to say after finding out he lied to that poor girl.” She realized that she probably sounded crazy, talking about Rose like she was a person that Annie actually knew instead of someone who had been dead for nearly two hundred years.