Those Who Mourn: A Wolf Creek Mystery (Wolf Creek Mysteries Book 1)

by Barbara Bartholomew

  “Could happen to anyone, Harry,” Jill assured him.

  He went with his old friend to the kitchen where they made a pitcher of tea, pouring it over glasses of ice and adding a few bottles of soda pop to the tray for those who didn’t like tea.

  “We’ll be going home in a few days, David,” Jill told him. “It’s hard to leave, but we’ve got to get back to work and the kids are missing school.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve arranged for a cleaning service to come in and a realtor to take over the sale of the house.”

  He grimaced, hating to think of the Ellers presence being removed from the neighborhood.

  “I know,” Jill said miserably. “But there’s no point hanging on to it. Unoccupied, it will just get run down. And there’s no chance we’ll ever move back.”

  He nodded, started to pick up the tray, then paused to ask. “What do you know about this friend of Grandpa’s that’s visiting?”

  She shrugged. “He’s from before my time. Says he grew up here and knew my folks and yours way back when. Harry seemed pleased to see him.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Susan felt more at peace within her own conscience after she’d managed to convey something of her anxiety about June Allie and her fears for David’s grandfather. At least she’d tried. She’d done her best.

  Thus it was for the second time in her memory that she consciously dreamed. It was a pleasant dream; she was in a wide field with plants white with fluffy cotton bolls. “I’ll finish my rows before you, Gertrude,” a boy’s happy voice called to her.

  She glanced up from her task of plucking cotton bolls and plunging them into the dirty-white sack looped over her shoulder. She wasn’t exactly fond of pulling cotton, a job that made her shoulder sore, her back ache, and sifted red dust all over every inch of her from head to toe. Still it was fun working in the fields with the family and knowing that on Saturday they would have money to spend when they went to town.

  “George, keep playing around and I’ll finish way ahead of you,” she called in response to the challenge and looked down at her own gloved hand.

  Then as she stared she began to waken and, that small hand changed to a woman’s slender grownup hand. She blinked. She looked down at her own hand, adorned with that glittering ring.

  She spent the next hour wondering if she had actually remembered something or if she only still been lost in a dream.

  Gertrude. George had called her Gertrude. But then, who was George?

  When she awakened fully, it was to find the only light in the library came from the lamp down the street. She’d fallen asleep in one of the big chairs, a folder of the pioneer memoirs tumbled to the floor from whence it had slipped from her hands.

  She swallowed, feeling much alone. For a long time now, she’d been perfectly content with her nighttime solitude. These hours had, in fact, been her favorites when she’d been in total control of her setting, able to browse the books without fear of discovery.

  Now she felt unsettled, almost frightened by where she found herself and wondering what had happened. Until now she’d been without questions, comfortable with whatever had happened to her.

  Now it had all changed. She was beginning to remember little snippets of information and, now that she was fully awake, almost certain that she had for a second or two actually glimpsed her own past.

  Somewhere, somehow, she was a flesh and blood person and she not only wondered what would happen next, she was both eager and alarmed at the thought of what had occurred to bring her to this state of being.

  The visitor’s name was Perry ‘Red’ Lawrence. Apparently the bushy white hair had once been such a bright red that his friends had dubbed him with the obvious nickname. And now, thanks to Grandpa’s invitation, his status had elevated from visitor to houseguest. His room was the one to the right of David’s own, the next few steps down the long hall.

  Late that night, David set in one of the big chairs in the living room, sipping at coffee to keep himself awake, unwilling to go to bed and leave his grandfather alone with this loquacious stranger.

  The two old men enjoyed a festival of memory. One would mention an event from their joint boyhood and both would be off, proving that though they could sometimes forget what they had done yesterday, they had detailed and explicit recall for the events of the past.

  Both had grown up out in the country and were now discussing the days when, back in the forties, they had been twelve-year-olds, traveling the seventeen miles from their neighboring farms on foot, walking all the way if not offered a ride by a passing neighbor, to spend an exciting day in Wolf Creek.

  Grandpa’s own grandparents already lived in this very house, but as he laughingly explained, his strict grandmother hadn’t exactly welcomed two rowdy youngsters into her very proper home.

  Red joined his friend’s laughter. “She thought I was a bad influence who led you into evil ways,” he said. “That old lady had a poker up her spine. As straight-laced as they came. She would have had us sitting in these chairs, singing hymns every day, if she could have managed.”

  “She wasn’t that bad,” Grandpa protested. “Grandmother just had her own notions of how things should be done and her idea of a boy’s life was a little different than mine. Also she and Mama didn’t see eye to eye. She thought my mother had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks and Mama and Papa never made a lot of money and preferred life out on the farm instead of going into business with my grandpa. She saw it as her job to introduce me to the polite world.”

  Red cracked a laugh. “I guess a red-headed country boy didn’t exactly fit into her plans.”

  The two went on to tell David about a trip to the picture show they’d seen on one of those fabled Saturday’s, detailing so exactly the film, something called Trail of the Lonesome Pine, that he felt he had almost seen it himself.

  “Afterwards, the town boys ran us off,” Red said, “and we had to creep along the road in the dark with the coyotes howling in the pastures around us because nobody was headed toward home at that time of night.”

  Grandpa chuckled. “But not before we’d bloodied a few noses,” he pointed out.

  “Well, I seem to remember I was enjoying a blackened eye myself. My pa just looked at me the next morning and then said, “I see you had a good time last night.”

  “Things were different back then,” Grandpa agreed, “kids had a lot more freedom. Boys were expected to be boys.”

  “And no matter how late we stayed out, we were expected to be ready to go to Sunday School and church with the family.”

  “After doing our chores,” Red agreed. “I had to milk three cows and feed the calves. But Mama always had a big breakfast after we got back to the house.”

  “She made the best biscuits,” Grandpa agreed heartily and the two men were off in a discussion of the meals presented to them in those days. David heard about plum cobbler, chocolate cream pie and homemade ice cream, of yeasty rolls, brown beans and corn bread, and thick sliced bacon.

  “Nothing tastes that good anymore,” Grandpa said with a sigh.

  David supposed he should be bored with all this reminiscing, but he guessed it was a sign that he was maturing that instead he listened with fascination, imagining what it was like here just after the world war had ended when paved highways had been dirt roads and most of the farms grew cotton, harvested by the farmers and their kids.

  “So you two went all the way through school together?” he asked and saw that they were startled as though they had almost forgotten his presence.

  “No,” Grandpa said, his tone thoughtful. “Not all the way.”

  “When I was sixteen, my folks lost our farm. Couple of failed crops and we couldn’t keep up the payments.”

  “So you moved to town?”

  “Moved to Arkansas where Ma had family. You see we didn’t all go. The day after the land was auctioned off, Pa hung himself.”


  David felt the words in his gut. Awful. Poor Red. No kid should have to live through something like that.

  “It was family land, settled by my grandparents. Pa felt bad to lose family land. Said after all they’d been through to get it, he was the one to lose it.”

  “Happened to too many folks,” Grandpa said softly.

  Red nodded, his bushy white hair moving with the gesture. “Not yours. Your Grandma came in and saved the day. She bought our farm at that auction and gave it to her son, your dad.”

  Grandpa’s head bent. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

  Red nodded again. Then he laughed. “A long time ago,” he agreed, than quoted, “Let the dead bury the dead.” But there was bitterness in his voice.

  David didn’t suppose a person ever entirely got over something like that. He couldn’t help wondering if it was safe to leave his grandfather in the house with his old friend.

  Susan wandered the library restlessly, drifting from the main floor to the children’s library several times before finally settling down to try to focus her attention on the old pioneer accounts. She would think about them rather than her own puzzling history, whatever it was. George, she thought, was that boy, her brother. She was almost sure she had been Gertrude.

  But then, why did she think of herself as Susan?

  Moving over nearer the east window where the street light could more clearly light her pages, she began to read the result of an interview conducted back in 1934. The interviewer’s name was Alice Wentworth and the subject was a man in his sixties, William ‘Bill’ Roberts.

  Roberts told of coming to the territory in 1901 with his parents and family of seven siblings. They’d traveled in winter by covered wagon, driving with them a small herd of cattle. On the way from Missouri, a baby sister had sickened and died, necessitating a burial at a site along the way.

  Saddened and weary, they had purchased a farmstead by trading the team of oxen that had brought them here, and settled in to build a dugout with some difficulty in the freezing January earth.

  They’d come close to starving that winter, but when spring came had dug into the virgin ground to plant a garden and feed for the remaining animals. His mother, mourning the lost daughter and her old home, had surrendered to illness in late spring and hers had been the first grave in a small country cemetery.

  This was all explained, matter-of-factly in simple language, Roberts explain that his young life had been too busy to allow much time for schooling. He had been in his teens when the family moved and his help in farming and feeding the family had been too significant for him to attend the little school that had been formed only a mile from the farm.

  His father, needing a woman’s help in raising his younger children, married that summer too, a widow woman with three children of her own. Roberts had accepted his new step-mother only uneasily and by the time he was seventeen left home to work in town at the stable where his hard work had eventually led to his own marriage and a family of his own.

  It was the story of fierce struggle and more hard times than good, but the man never seemed to feel sorry for himself. This was life, he told the interviewer, and now he and his wife, their children grown, owned a small business in town and a modest home. He was proud that, unlike many of his neighbors, his property hadn’t been foreclosed during the hard years of the thirties.

  Oh, my! Susan looked up too see the dawning sun beginning to peer through the downtown buildings. How brave those first settlers had been and how little had their struggles been rewarded. She had read account after account now of living in underground dwellings co-inhabited by rodents and snakes, almost starving in those first years, a few seasons of prosperity as the hitherto unplowed ground produced hard-won crops, and then the struggles of the late twenties and the harder ones of the thirties when the skies denied them moisture and the soil they’d plowed with their teams blew away.

  Feeling more than a little depressed, she put down the folder. It was hard, but it was wonderful too. Our family all together. The good times we had. Making our own fun.

  Oh, my goodness! She was remembering again. Somehow that made her afraid as though terrible discoveries lay ahead.

  She sat, trying not to think, not to remember until gladly welcoming the entrance of the three women who provided the core of the library staff. She watched as Mrs. Kaye went into her little office to check the computer, her assistant began to take the latest returns, deposited overnight through the chute by the front door, and the children’s librarian chatted briefly before going down to her own kingdom.

  She felt almost herself by the time the doors were unlocked to admit the public and the first people, three women, were admitted. They were regular patrons and she’d been acquainted with them, after a fashion, for years. But this morning they were so busy talking in low tones that they barely greeted Mrs. Kaye.

  She only caught a few words. “Another death . . . Harry Johnson’s place again”. . . and, “somebody needs to put a stop to this. . .poor dear Marian.”

  She felt a kind of joking panic and crept closer. Not David, she pleaded inside herself. Please, not David.

  Chapter Thirteen

  David could only wish he’d been the one to find the body. But Grandpa had been given that dubious honor.

  He’d still been in bed when he heard his grandfather’s exclamations of horror and ran to the bedroom just down the hall from his own. His face white and his hands shaking, Grandma stood by the bed, looking down at the lifeless body of his old friend.

  “Red?” David questioned in disbelief. He’d been so worried that the other man might be a threat to his grandfather and now he lay so limply, half dangling from the tousled bed coverings toward the floor. “Oh, damn,” he said softly.

  Even though the situation seemed painfully apparent, he checked for vital signs, but found only a cold, unmoving body. “It’s too late,” he said brusquely, then took his grandfather’s shoulders to steer him from the room, down the hall and into his own room where he gently placed him in a bedside chair.

  Grabbing up his phone, he dialed 911, explained the situation as succinctly as possible and then turned back to Grandpa.

  Susan felt not one iota conscience-stricken as she listened in on every possible conversation that morning. Unfortunately the few people that came in seemed concerned with other things, such as their own children and friends and it wasn’t until she’d moved up to two middle-aged women who whispered frantically in a far corner of the library that she struck pay-dirt.

  “Shock,” the one asserted firmly. “After all he’s nearly ninety and just suffered a stroke. “Hector clapped him right in the hospital.”

  They had to be talking about Harry Johnson. She felt as though she were strangling. Was Harry in bad shape because he’d lost his grandson?

  “It’s sad enough after all these years and people say there was bad blood between them because of what happened in the old days. They’re just gotten together and then wham—this happens.”

  “Did you know him, Kathy?”

  “Oh, no the family moved away afterwards, you know, and that was before I was even born. They said he never came back until now.”

  “And he came home to die,” the other woman said in funeral tones.

  “But why? Why would he want to kill a man who was a stranger to him?”

  “They say it wasn’t the stranger he meant to kill.”

  “He’s got to be out of his mind.”

  “Either that or just in a hurry to get his hands on all that money. Anyway, old Harry should be safe enough now over at the hospital and with his grandson locked up at the jail.”

  Finally Susan began to be able to put it together. Her first feeling was one of relief. David had to be the grandson of which they were speaking. He wasn’t dead, only arrested. But if his grandfather was alive in the hospital, who had died and why would they think David a murderer?

  She worried the subject, going round and round in a mental circl
e until later in the morning when Meri Allie came in. The girl looked pale and worried as she returned the pile of books she’d checked out so recently. She dumped them on the desk as though she couldn’t wait to rid herself of them, then, without speaking to anyone, headed down the back entrance. Susan followed her downstairs.

  The city jail was neat and well kept, though the cells were, of course, very basic. He didn’t know any of the younger officers, nor was he acquainted with the dispatchers who saw to locking him up. He’d been arrested by uniformed officers, also strangers, and wished Jon would come by to tell him what was going on.

  Surely they didn’t think he had killed Red Lawrence. He didn’t even know the man, hadn’t even met him until yesterday. Of course he could see how it looked. He and Grandpa had been the only people in the house except for Red and nobody would suspect his grandfather. Especially not considering he himself had been one of the victims of the poisoner.

  Feeling abandoned when even Jon didn’t come to see about him and, worried about Grandpa, he sank down on the bench-like bed and came close to surrendering to despair.

  His body was so damaged, so worn out, and his mind so rattled with that head injury in Iraq that he almost couldn’t remember who he was.

  The person he used to be had been left behind.

  Then he recalled the face of his old friend who had died in the same explosion that had caused him such damage. He could hear him saying, “That’s the thing about you, buddy. You never, ever give up.”

  And he remembered the peace he’d felt in the library when whoever, whatever had seemed to be there with him. Maybe he had a guardian angel. No matter. He had to have somebody and there didn’t seem to be anybody else left.

  She had attempted escape periodically throughout the day, knowing she had to find him and reassure him that she, at least, still believed in him. He was the sanest person she’d ever met and, in his right mind, he would never harm anyone. He certainly would not try to kill the grandfather he loved.