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

by Barbara Bartholomew

  When David woke up again, he found himself in much more comfortable surroundings. He lay among pillows and clean sheets in what appeared to be a hospital room and though his head still ached, it was with considerably less force. After all his experiences with much greater pain, he felt almost lulled into comfort and then, sharply, remembered what had happened and asked again for Susan.

  “Don’t know who the lady is,” Jon’s voice answered. “But from the way you’ve been asking for her all night, she must be something special.”

  After that the police chief questioned him gently about what had happened to cause his injury. Without elaboration David told how Allie had confronted him over his mother’s work situation and then unexpectedly punched him.

  “Don’t remember him knocking my head though,” he added.

  “We figured. Allie has something of a reputation for fighting, especially when he’s been drinking. Looks like he shoved you into a post on the porch,” Jon explained. “Claims he was nowhere around, but was upstairs with his whole family and they back him up.”

  “My word against theirs?”

  Jon nodded.

  “You’re looking into the possibility they want to cause harm to Grandpa?”

  He nodded again. “Can’t see why though. We’re going to talk to Harry again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Too much had happened. In the last two hours her whole life had changed. She’d been closed within the library for who could guess how many years and, just like that, she’d managed to unlock the door and walk out, free to find out what had happened to David and get help for him.

  She couldn’t help grinning a little at the thought of how she’d disturbed the whole neighborhood with her horn honking. Then the grin faded. Was everything changing and she was becoming more of a real person, capable of actions she’d thought impossible.

  Or had those abilities been hers all along and she’d chosen to stay hidden away here out of fear of some unknown she couldn’t remember.

  She got up and went to the door, unlocking and opening it, then stood trembling in the doorway, frozen in place and unable to take another step.

  What could have happened to that woman named Gertrude to send her such fear?

  Gertrude. The faces of her family, the three brothers and two sisters were clear in her mind. She had been especially fond of little brother Toby, six years younger than herself. He had been a golden haired child with the sunny face of an angel until he wrinkled his nose in a mischievous fashion and the other side of his nature peered out.

  And then, as though more memory seeped through, she saw another face, this one in a cracked and glazed mirror in a farm house bedroom, and she saw her own features, Gertrude’s features and knew herself for a woman of advanced years, her rounded, pleasant face softened by time and wrinkles dug deep in her face.

  She was old, the years gone by with nothing to count for them. Gertrude, she knew, had been born in the last years of the nineteenth century, and now she was here in the 21st. She must be a ghost, haunting her own past.

  David, she thought mournfully. Help me. But then she remembered how she’d last seen him, looking around for her as he was bundled onto the stretcher to be taken to the hospital. Her role wasn’t to ask for assistance, but to give it.

  This was enough to enable her to take the next step. Morning was coming. Mrs. Kaye must not find the library door open. Carefully closing it behind her, she set out to find the hospital.

  They’d told him that he had a mild concussion as well as facial cuts and bruises. Considering already existing physical problems, Heck was insisting he stay in the hospital for a day or two.

  He didn’t much care. What else had he to do?

  Dozing off and on, he drank a little orange juice and nibbled a slice of buttered toast from the breakfast tray they brought him and was lying there, trying to work out a future strategy for keeping Grandpa safe and himself cleared of a murder charge when he saw the door to his room slowly open.

  Lips parted only slightly, he watched in surprise as the long-limbed woman with the oval face and dark-fringed green eyes entered and came to sit, oh, so politely at his bedside.

  “Susan,” he breathed the name with absolute delight. “My good angel.”

  Her face was longish with sharp planes, almost angular in a way that could have been less than attractive. But, like the late Audrey Hepburn, oddities turned into absolute beauty covered with butter-cream skin and a trembling smile that exposed her vulnerability.

  “You look better,” she said, “but I’m not an angel. Don’t say that.”

  “An image,” he whispered, “A mirage. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Don’t tease.” The slightest of blushes tinted her cheeks. “I know what I look like. Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Fun!” he exclaimed, reaching his hand for the one that evaded his. “Don’t you have a mirror, girl. Can’t you see yourself?”

  “No,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. Are you hurt badly?”

  “Not at all. My doctor is just keeping me in the hospital in an excess of carefulness. Heck is an old friend, you see, and he thinks he has to look after me.”

  She allowed him to capture her hand, blinking back tears. “I know Dr. Hector. He brings his boys to the library. He says it’s important for them to learn to love books.”

  He was wordless, absorbing the look on her face and her beautiful speaking eyes. Fragments of long forgotten high school poetry drifted through his mind as he tried to find a way to describe how beautiful she was to him. She was peace, contentment, all the pleasant virtues brought back to him after the heat of war and pain.

  Dammit, he was losing his senses. Probably the medicine they were giving him.

  “Who hurt you?” she asked, not trying to pull her hand away.

  “A guy named Simpson Allie. Got mad at me because I won’t let his mother in the house. You know, sour-faced June’s son.” He hesitated before asking. “You really think she tried to poison my grandfather?”

  She hesitated a moment before saying, ”all know is that she started coming into the library reading up on poisons about the time your granddad was . . .made sick.”

  “I could have taken Allie, but he hit me with a sneaky punch.” Even fuzzed as his mind was from both injury and medications, he recognized that he sounded silly as any seventh grader protesting to his girl that the other fellow had started it.

  “No, No,” she protested, her expression earnest, “You don’t understand. I’m not an angel, a ghost perhaps, but certainly not an angel.”

  It seemed his darling had a very literal mind. He’d have to teach her to have a sense of humor. “To me, you are an angel,” he said and then, a smile lingering on his lips, fell into a healing sleep.

  She still sat at his side, his hand rested in her own when the three men came into the hospital room. She recognized two of them as the police chief and Dr. Hector. The third was a stranger to her.

  They didn’t see her, of course, and she had to get up quickly to keep the tired looking police chief from slumping into her lap. Dr. Hector pulled up a second chair for the unidentified man, who was older with a thick white mustache and a balding head.

  “Sound asleep,” the chief said. “Should we wake him up with the good news.”

  The doctor shook his head. “Don’t you dare. He looks like he’s sleeping peacefully and that’s the best thing that could happen to him.” A frown cut into his thoughtful forehead. “But if there’s good news, I want to hear it.”

  The other two met each other’s gazes and then the stranger nodded. “Might as well. It’ll be all over town by noon,” Jon advised. He looked up at his still standing friend. “This is Gene Tyler, Heck,” he said. “From the OSBI. Dr. Heck, Gene,” he completed the introduction.

  The doctor’s scowl deepened. “I’m ready to give you a piece of my mind, sir, for being so foolish as to arrest our David here. That’s the most r
idiculous. . .”

  Jon held up a hand, stopping the protest. “Captain Tyler is here to eat crow,” he said with an exhausted grin. “No need to rub it in.”

  The slender, dark-skinned doctor waited, not continuing his scolding.

  Captain Tyler sighed deeply. “I am happy to say that charges have been dropped against your friend,” he said. “We’ve checked out his history and find he’s highly regarded both for his military service and for the way he’s lived his life since. It seems he’s something of a hero.”

  “We all knew that,” the doctor snapped impatiently.

  “Get down to brass tacks, Gene,” the police chief advised.

  Susan noticed what none of the three men had observed. David’s eyes were open. He was hearing every word.

  Captain Tyler sighed again. “And his alibi has been proved. He was e on an airplane when the first poisoning, the one involving his grandfather, occurred. He’s been positively identified by both airline personnel and other passengers.”

  “Ha!” the doctor exclaimed. Jon nodded.

  “Well, he was locked in the house with just his grandfather and Lawrence when Lawrence was given a toxic dose,” the captain complained defensively. Then added, “We thought.”

  The doctor raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Lawrence wasn’t poisoned. He died of congestive heart failure.”

  “Which is what I thought,” Hector Gilson said with an air of slight triumph.

  “You’ve got to admit the situation looked suspicious. But his family members have confirmed he had a terminal heart condition. Coming to see your grandfather was the last item on his bucket list.”

  Nobody said anything, but Susan felt a tremor of triumph. It was over. David would not be sent back to jail.

  David shook his head, wincing at the motion. “That still leaves us with no answer as to who killed Marian and tried to kill Grandpa.” He looked past the men to where Susan stood just behind them. She could see that he was about to ask for her opinion.

  Frantically she shook her head, putting a finger to her lips in a shushing gesture. He frowned, but closed his mouth without speaking.

  “You said Simpson Allie was the one who hit you,” Jon pointed out in an even tone.

  He didn’t remember saying any such thing, but no doubt It was true. For an instant he relived the moment when a fist crashed into the side of his face, lifting his hand to gingerly touch the wound with one finger. “It must have been him. He was the only one there.”

  “Hardly evidence of murder,” Dr. Hector said thoughtfully, ”though, of course, the members of the Allie family were close enough to have plenty of opportunity.”

  The two police officers didn’t comment, their faces expressionless.

  David, guessed they wouldn’t rush to judgement after making the awkward mistake of charging him, and was glad. Much as he wanted this whole matter resolved, he knew the worst would be if the wrong person was convicted of two deaths, leaving his grandfather’s enemy free.

  He allowed his gaze to drift back to Susan’s face and found himself again falling into sleep. The last words he heard were those of his doctors admonishing the other two that David must be left alone to rest and recover.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When Jon dropped him off at the house after a quick visit to the police station where he was released from charges, David felt for the first time that he was coming home. The only thing missing was having Susan accompany him and though she had remained at his side at the hospital until he was allowed to leave, he found she was no longer with him as he was wheeled out to Jon’s vehicle.

  By now he’d figured out that though he could see her clearly and certainly could hear her voice, no one else shared that privilege. The doctor, nurses and other attendants acted as though she were not present, as had Jon and Captain Tyler.

  This was troubling and, his usual confidence having been shaken by a long course of pain, a head injury, and drugs that messed with his mind, he couldn’t quite press down the notion that his Susan might be no more than an illusion.

  Now he gave a wave to Jon, watched him drive off, and paused for a moment before climbing the steps to the porch. If she was a product of his own troubled mind, then he could only hope that he stayed slightly mad.

  An imaginary Susan was better than no Susan at all.

  He frowned to find the front door slightly ajar and pushed it open to walk cautiously in.

  “That you, David?” Grandpa’s voice called and he went on into the living room to find his grandfather watching a game show on television. “Welcome home, son,” he was greeted.

  Susan wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten back to the library. Maybe she’d walked through the darkened streets of early morning or perhaps she’d been drawn there by some mysterious force that felt she’d been absent long enough.

  Anyway, she was here, seated in her favorite chair in the magazine-newspaper section against the far wall. It was Saturday morning and the library bustling with activity as seniors gathered for the computer class and mothers with young children selected a few mysteries or romances for rare leisure reading while their kids attended the story session in the juvenile library downstairs.

  And she was wondering what had happened. Even here, even in the library where she’d lived for how-some-ever many years, things were different. She had to be careful now not to step too firmly or her footsteps would be heard. No longer fast in place, she had gone out and two times now.

  And she was beginning to remember. She remembered more and more each hour of her life as Gertrude, the pioneer girl who had come with her family to the territory at the age of ten.

  Even as she considered this, she was back on a summer day with her sisters, swimming in the muddy little pond across the road from their house. She could feel the water dragging her down, thick and brown with mud squelching between her bare toes. “Look, Mary Ann, I can swim,” she called and, of course, had drifted out too far where her feet could no longer touch that boggy surface. She’d cried for help and Benny, her next oldest brother, had come laughingly to the rescue.

  They’d eaten a picnic lunch of fried chicken, thick homemade bread and baked sweet potatoes downed with copious amounts of sweetened iced tea on the grassy slope by the pond.

  By the next summer she’d learned to swim well enough to pull little Toby out when it was his turn to think he was drowning.

  Her family. So long ago. Where had they all gone and why was she here?

  “It’s family influence, that’s what it is,” she heard the familiar voice of the town’s biggest gossip. “Harry Johnson has money and he knows how to use it.”

  “But surely, if his grandson tried to kill him, he would want him locked up,” a gentler voice protested.

  “Old Harry will believe what he chooses. I suppose when he’s dead and buried he’ll be forced to face the truth.”

  The younger woman tittered nervously. “If he was dead, then he’d most likely not know anything.”

  The two women had retreated to the privacy of the far end of the library to indulge in private conversation with no knowledge that they’d crept in right next to where Susan had been lost in thought.

  “He’s been cleared,” Susan shouted angrily.

  To her surprise, the two women both started. “Did you hear that?” the younger woman questioned. “It sounded like someone yelling from far away. I couldn’t quite make out what she said.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” the other woman lied, then, protesting that she had ‘so many things to do this morning,’ took off toward the checkout desk.

  Susan was momentarily pleased that she’d made herself heard after a fashion, but as she sank back into her chair, she wondered where this was going. She didn’t want to give the library a reputation for being haunted.

  Her presence was no longer an entirely silent one.

  She still watched the front door through which the two gossips had so hurriedly departed when it
opened and David stepped inside. She found herself staring at him, taking in his pale face and slow, painful entrance while his gaze roamed the library from front to back.

  When he saw her, his face took on a look that was filled with such joy that it made her reflect the same emotion. For an instant, she feared he would call out to her, but his eyes fixed on her, he only mouthed her name. ‘Susan.’ And he stepped up his pace with apparently little awareness of his own injured body, not even noticing that Mrs. Kaye spoke to him as he passed the checkout desk, but heading with single minded concentration toward her.

  She waited, aware not of herself but of him. Her sense of the library and the people within her sight drew into a circle which contained just the two of them.

  “David,” she whispered. “You’re feeling better?”

  “Much better,” he agreed, “especially now that I see you.”

  Her head clanging just to be in his knowing presence, for a few minutes she forgot herself and where she was. She reached out to touch his hand, “I’m so glad. Glad that you’re all right again and that the charges were dropped.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “I’m no longer public enemy number one.” He grimaced slightly. “And Grandpa is home and has had the security system shut down.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “Certainly not. But it’s house and I can’t do a thing about it.”

  She had a feeling that he wasn’t feeling quite as good as he wanted her to think. Standing there showing how happy he was to see her, he still wavered slightly, almost imperceptibly, on his legs. He reached for a nearby book rack for support.

  She sank back into her seat. “Sit down,” she said. “You are just out of the hospital.”

  It was only when they were both seated that reason came back to her. She glanced around to see the eyes focused on him as he appeared to be talking to thin air. Drat! Nobody could do her any harm because of her aberrant behavior, but they could easily classify David. They would say he was out-of-his-mind, talking to himself and ignoring his old friends. Even now Mrs. Kaye was walking toward them, a worried look on her pleasantly rounded face.