Where Fortune Lies

by James Short

  “Obvious, isn’t it if you think about it a little while?”

  “You gave it back to Tomàs.” Philip wondered if ghosts could be strangled.

  “I wrote him begging him to take it. He was living in a different state under a different name. I offered to deliver it personally. He wrote back saying he couldn’t hold that treasure in his hand and look at Penelope or his sons in the eye. He sort of hinted that the gold for him was tainted with a bad memory.”

  “Then you should have given the gold back to the person Tomàs stole from in the first place.”

  “I decided against trying to find out the original possessor of the gold because that might have compromised me and Tomàs and Franklin and even Penny.”

  “Must I guess?”

  “Yes. You’re closer to the answer than you think. If your wife first hadn’t decided she was finished with you, maybe she could have been the thing you needed to give up of equal value like Tomàs gave up the treasure for Penelope.”

  “Well, I have nothing else of real worth,” Philip commented bitterly.

  The Time Machine Comes to a Stop

  April and Philip arrived at the museum just the eastern sky was hinting at dawn. April rang the doorbell, much to Philip’s consternation. The door opened revealing a fortyish man with a clean chiseled face and eyes as sharp as the eyes of a surgeon about to make an incision.

  “Where’s Augustus?” April asked.

  “Upstairs. I’m his nephew, Robert Middleton. I suspect you’re April Ives and this is your husband, Philip. I’m glad you found each other.”

  “You’re the detective who arrested Aquino?”

  “Yes, I am. Should I add kidnapping to his charges?”

  “No, I’m sure he committed more crimes tonight than most felons commit in their lifetimes, but kidnapping isn’t one of them.” April then felt a twinge of guilt. “He isn’t a bad man.” This obviously wasn’t enough to help Aquino with the law so April added, “I believe he’s mostly a good man. I need to speak to your uncle, Augustus.”

  The second-story window opened. “Let her up, Bob. This night is lost to sleep, anyway.”

  Augustus had steaming mugs of coffee ready for April and Philip as soon as they arrived at his living quarters. “So, my dear young lady, are you after more historical information?”

  While Philip collapsed into an easy chair, April positioned herself face to face with Augustus. “I want to know who pays your salary.”

  “The Solvidado Historical Society,” he replied.

  “Who are they?” She insisted.

  “The name is self-explanatory.”

  “And they pay you enough money to take two months off a year and travel all around the world.”

  “I have my own money. Traveling is my sole vice left in my old age.”

  “How did you know about Doreen?” April pressed.

  Augustus pulled himself up to his full height to look down at her. “Dear young lady I don’t see any sense in your question, and I have no obligation to talk about my business with you.”

  “Why did you call knowing about Doreen ‘business’? And what about Beatriz Lopez who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS. My grandfather was a mortician. I worked a year at this funeral home. I know diseases.”

  “That may be, dear girl, but you haven’t learned yet good manners.”

  April’s usually beautiful eyes became daggers. “I’ve been dragged around Solvidado this whole night in search of a so-called treasure. I’ve been humiliated, chased, almost drowned, imprisoned in a bank vault, cornered on a cliff by an angry mob, not to mention endure the company of a hardened criminal who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I would like some closure. I would like my experiences this night to mean something. I suspect you have a secret that might help. Who pays you?”

  “The bank that manages the trust pays me.” Augustus lowered his head indicating more than a little obduracy.

  “Are there no living members left of those who formed the Solvidado Historical Society? Where did the money originally come from?” She turned towards Philip. “Don’t you see, this is what a good man would do with the money? Set up a charity to rescue sick children like Penelope and Beatriz and Doreen.”

  Philip nodded noncommittally, not wanting to contradict April. Later he would find the way to convey what Jacinto had just told him.

  Middleton now spoke: “That’s a fanciful theory, Mrs. Ives. I’m familiar with the trust. It’s true my uncle does charitable work for the Society, rescuing children here and abroad because the trust is quite flush, however, the founding members in 1950 consisted of a handful of Solvidado’s wealthier citizens, three corporations that were building hotels and a construction company.”

  “Jacinto was one of the contributors?” Philip asked.

  “There was an odd character named Jacinto, who contributed a few hundred dollars. He had some hand in organizing the society, but he was too old to really be active.”

  “I guess this is another dead-end,” April wearily conceded.

  “Tell me your story, and we’ll see,” Middleton said.

  April and Philip took turns laying out what they knew. At the end of their narration, Middleton’s naturally stern expression had softened. “Maybe you haven’t quite reached a dead-end. We wanted to make changes to the trust, so we tried to get hold of the original contributors. There was no real problem with the corporations, of course, but most of the individual contributors had died; the few still alive were fairly easy to track down. The only original individual contributor who had an address outside of Solvidado at the time of the formation of the trust was Abigail Griggs from Chumley Washington. She contributed four hundred dollars—the smallest contribution to the society next to Jacinto’s, yet certainly sizable enough to show that she was very interested in the preservation of Solvidado’s history. When I tried to contact her in 1998, l learned she had passed away twenty-five years before.”

  “She must have lived here,” April said.

  “Her grandson—I believe his name was Franklin—thought we had her confused with somebody else. She died at an advanced age. What is curious was that she was blind—had been so, he understood, since she had been a small girl, and therefore would have known nothing about any out-of-the-state charity.”

  “Ah, here it is,” Augustus said as he lifted the page of an old photo album. “This must be her. You notice the eyes don’t seem quite right, but she’s pretty—you can’t take that away from her.”

  “Who took that picture?” April asked. The face seemed to fit the imagined face of Penelope, although you couldn’t see the freckles or be certain of the color of the hair.

  “The album came from the undertaker of Solvidado’s cemetery, Jacinto. I didn’t realize he was the only other small contributor. We thought he was a morbid fellow who kept photos of people he buried, but not all the photos could we match to graves. Besides, there’s an early photo of Hal who is still alive. Look what this says on the back. Abigail Griggs, 1888.”

  Judging from their haggard faces and bloodshot eyes, Philip and April seemed to be just a couple returning from an all-night binge. The hotel guests were peacefully asleep, except for a few fearful souls who were certain that a murderous voyeur was slithering past their windows and, of course, those vigorous personalities who rise early to conquer the world—even on vacation. A new maid from the Dominican Republic, anxious to be diligent in this miraculous land, had cleaned up the yellow tape thinking it was a college kid’s prank.

  They sat on the bed for a few awkward minutes, each afraid to breach the invisible wall between them. To Philip, April appeared sublimely lovely if you discounted her bloodshot eyes. To April, Philip seemed more—what? Manly, that was the word, but what did he possess that he didn’t have the day before?

  The hour was six forty-five a.m. They hadn’t realized this when Philip searched online and then called and asked the operator for information on anyone with the last name of Griggs living in Chumley
Washington. Yes, there was a Doris Griggs. He automatically dialed the number.

  “We forgot how early it is!” April exclaimed, realizing this when the phone was on its tenth ring. No one answered so they ordered coffee and two large stacks of pancakes from room service. For both of them, the sweet syrup seemed to fill a deep need they couldn’t articulate. They reviewed their information once more, argued a bit over it, and then Philip telephoned again.

  “Is this Doris Griggs?”

  “Yes,” the voice responded at the other end of the line with a jarring morning cheeriness.

  “We’re looking for information on a couple with the last name of Griggs, who moved to Chumley in the 1880s.”

  “Abigail and Gary Griggs, you must mean. I am their granddaughter. If you have any money from a forgotten bequest, you can talk to me. If you’re a long-lost relative, you need to speak to my sister Alice Miller. She’ll be very happy to paste you onto the family tree. As a matter fact, if you have real information about my grandparents, Alice would probably pay you big money to tell. We know so precious little about them."

  “Tell them I want to see pictures,” April whispered in Philip’s ear.

  “Can we visit you?”

  “But…” April’s voice rose and Philip covered the receiver with his hand.

  “How else are we going to find out what happened?”

  “Well, I’m always glad for a visit,” the voice at the other end of the line said, persisting in its cheeriness.

  “It might be a few hours. We have to take a flight.”

  “You’re that eager! Well, I’ll call Alice. If you were giving away money, you’d insist I come to you.”

  What could they say to each other? The relationship was over, yet here they were breaking the speed limit in the effort to make their 9: 45 a.m. flight leaving the San Francisco Airport for Seattle. April and Philip briefly discussed driving all the way, and they had at the moment enough residual adrenaline to make that marathon drive appear feasible. However, they didn’t want to face the problem of what to say to each other during ten hours of close proximity. This recent awkwardness was perhaps more difficult to bear because until their wedding night they had always talked easily together, and so they chose to limit the hours of being together.

  The nap they both caught on the plane served them well. There was for Philip an agonizingly delicious fifteen minutes when April’s head drooped on his shoulder. She was so beautiful while she slept, sniffling a little bit. Oh, to truly possess her. Then he remembered the torment that he preferred to never go through again in his life. April actually blushed and apologized when she woke up.

  At the counter of the rental car agency, a strange argument occurred. Philip had requested a subcompact, and April asked why not a midsize model. He agreed, and then she changed her mind to wanting a subcompact. He then requested a Cadillac, and for some reason, that made both happy.

  So six hours after leaving Solvidado, they were passing through towns picturesque in their own way but not so much as to tempt tourists for more than a breakfast or lunch stop. Chumley was one of those with an actual Main Street and a drugstore with a soda fountain. Few young people were in evidence. They called Doris again who gave them more exact directions.

  Five minutes later, they found themselves motoring up a long driveway. Waiting at the front door were two women on the far end of middle-age, their sisterly resemblance more evident in the way they held themselves than in their features. The graying blond woman wearing a pleasant smile introduced herself as Doris. It wasn’t hard to imagine her being related to the young Penelope in the photo. Alice, the darker sister, was more standoffish. Her fingers at the end of her long extended hand lightly brushed April and Philip’s fingers. Age had roughened her skin and had taken the young woman out of her figure, but her large dark eyes still retained a childish innocence.

  “We are very excited, especially Alice,” Doris said.

  April and Philip looked at the dark distant woman who seemed to be in an emotional state the antipathy of excitement except for a glistening in one of her eyes. She smiled thinly at their stares, and then she blushed and added stiffly, “I am glad you made the effort to come here.”

  “Alice has devoted the last five years of her life to filling out our genealogy, but as far as our paternal grandparents, well, for all we know, they might as well have been space aliens.”

  “I believe we do have information that could help you,” April said.

  “I’m forgetting myself. Come on in. We have tea. We have hot chocolate.” Gazing doubtfully at Philip, Doris added, “You seem like a man who might not refuse a fine scotch. We have that, too.”

  The living room was all warm colors and cushiony surfaces; the hand-painted china showed an affinity for Victorian nostalgia. A wall covered with photos drew April’s attention. The smiling young were interspersed with serious formal faces staring from other eras. She understood that this was the wall of those not present. Looking more carefully she spotted what she had hoped and had been afraid to recognize—a middle-aged Tom standing with his arm around Penelope protectively. The pose was more intimate than the style of photographic portraits of that time, yet it came naturally to them.

  “Are those your grandparents in the photo in the corner?” April asked.

  “Yes, there they are—the mystery couple,” Doris said.

  “What can you tell me about them?” April quickly shifted her gaze to see who was going to answer.

  Doris started: “When we knew our grandmother, she was already near sixty. Granny Abigail was a handsome woman, to be sure. You could see why our grandfather fell madly in love with her. What was remarkable about her was that she couldn’t see—almost completely blind. She could sense movement out of the corner of her left eye or was it her right, Alice?”

  “Left eye.”

  “That’s remarkable.” April felt an odd sense of fulfillment.

  “Yes, yet she raised four of her own children plus an adopted boy—our Uncle Emile, who had lost both of his parents and part of his leg in a train wreck. He arrived here all the way from God knows where. He didn’t speak English. Imagine a blind woman raising a handicapped child who couldn’t speak English. She did it. She did it well because everybody loved our Uncle Emile.

  “Granny functioned better than most people with sight. It was amazing to watch her cook or clean house. I used to try to do blindfolded what she did and became convinced for a while that she was just trying to fool us she couldn’t see. She could walk into town three-quarters of a mile away, buy groceries and walk back. When cars came into popular use, she swore that she was going to learn how to drive one. It became a family joke. She kept on coming up with ideas like extending a long stick out the window to feel in front of the car or train a dog to sit in the passenger’s seat to bark at anything she might bump into or a thousand other ridiculous ideas. She did it in fun, but she was half serious.” Doris smiled at the memory.

  “For her seventieth birthday, our Uncle Emile who had become a teacher got a driver’s education car as a loan, the sort with two brakes, and she had the greatest time driving down the country road with Jack, a grandson, going on ahead in his car honking like mad warning everybody that an old crazy blind lady was driving while we ran behind her. We ended up pushing her out of an irrigation ditch, a farmer’s vegetable patch and righting a rickety outhouse, which she had hit squarely on. We were all laughing so hard we were crying. After the outhouse had put a substantial dent in the fender, we decided that enough was enough. But it was worth it. You should have seen the smile on her face. ‘Now I can die a perfectly happy woman,’ she said. 'I don’t believe I’ve ever had more fun in my life.”

  “Do you have memories of your grandfather?” April asked.

  “Not really,” Alice replied. “He died roundabout when Uncle Emile arrived. He was a hardworking man from what I hear. Father used to say that he would take him and his brothers on long camping trips. He seemed to know
how to do everything a man should know how to do: ride a horse, hunt, and fish. Father swore my grandfather could walk quieter than an Indian and deal you any poker hand you wanted. Most of the life he just kept a store and devoted himself to his family. He loved Granny Abigail to distraction. He never pitied her. He had no reason to. She kept as good a house as anybody, and she was almost always in a good humor—singing, going about her business as if she could see twenty/twenty.”

  “Did your grandmother mention her parents?”

  Doris jumped in. “Granny Abigail only mentioned Franklin—the man who adopted her out of the orphanage for the blind. He was long dead before any of us came along. She loved him dearly. His memory seemed to be the only thing that would make her cry. Crying was unusual with her. She was so cheerful most of the time, but if she mentioned Franklin—sometimes she called him her benefactor, sometimes she called him father—she’d choke up a little. We drew the conclusion that he rescued her from dire circumstances.

  “Our Uncle Franklin, named after him, I believe, had actually met him. And my father said that when he was very young, a black gentleman named Franklin had visited them. Now, as far as I understand African-American men couldn’t adopt white children, even if the child was blind, so that must have been a coincidence. Now you can see there is this mystery about my grandparents. Okay, I’ve told nearly all I can. It is your turn to tell us why you’re here asking about our mystery grandparents.”

  “She said Franklin was her adopted father?” April asked.

  “That is what I understand. Do you know about this Franklin?”

  “Well, I believe I do. Much of what I’m going to tell you is a guess, yet I’m certain that Penelope and your Abigail are one and the same. I’m also certain that your grandfather was Thomas Deering. Hold on, it’s quite a tale.” April related the story carefully and slowly.

  “You’re right about one thing: it is quite a story!” Doris said when April had finished. “It even has a lost treasure. A pot of gold! Nobody is going to believe our family history if what you say is true. My grandparents were rich in every way except in money. I’m sorry, if you’re here looking for gold, you’re out of luck.”