A Brilliant Death

by Yocum, Robin

  “Our phone number is unlisted,” Travis said.

  Travis looked away and blinked back the tears. I wondered how many times Big Frank was going to break his son’s heart. There didn’t seem to be any limit. Fortunately, the old man couldn’t break his spirit. “I’ll give you Mitchell’s address before I leave. You can write to me there.”

  Travis’s grandmother insisted that we check out of the motel and ordered me to go pick up our things. We would spend the night at their home. They couldn’t have been nicer, or more excited. Mrs. Virdon gave thanks to Jesus no fewer than two dozen times, and she continually hugged and kissed Travis, and cried. The evening meal was a feast. All the while, Travis was the center of attention, and he basked in the spotlight. He didn’t tire of answering their questions.

  They were all disappointed that Travis and I couldn’t stay for church services the next morning, as they wanted to show off their rediscovered grandson. However, I explained that we had to get on the road early, as that was part of the deal with my parents. At nine p.m., Travis’s uncle and his family left for home, promising to be back for breakfast. I had stuffed myself and was heavy in the eyes when Grandmother Virdon entered the living room with a box, the contents of which were the various remembrances they had kept of their daughter. Travis had spent the entire day talking about himself. He was now going to get a chance to learn about his mother from those who knew her best.

  I excused myself and retired to one of the spare bedrooms. There was nothing Travis could tell his grandparents about himself that I didn’t already know. But the discussion that was about to take place was for the family, for Travis. If he chose to tell me later, fine, but I didn’t want to be there for what would be an emotional discussion. It would be a long drive tomorrow, I explained, and I needed to get some sleep.

  This evening, I assumed, was the fitting end of Project Amanda. I was happy for Travis, but I knew that I had just lost my best friend. We would drive back in the morning, but I knew he was not long for Brilliant, Ohio.

  We were on the highway headed north out of Asheville at a few minutes after nine the next morning. Mr. Virdon had gotten up early and gassed up the Buick, then pressed forty bucks into my hand for gas on the return trip. They forced Travis to take two hundred dollars and promised to make up for all the gifts and money they had sent, but he had never received.

  They had stayed up well into the night talking about his mother, and Travis fell asleep a half-hour after we were on the highway. He did not wake up until we were almost out of Virginia. “You’re a hell of a traveling partner,” I said.

  He blinked, yawned, and said nothing. How much his life had changed in the last twenty-four hours. He had gone from having virtually no family to a family who couldn’t wait for him to return. As we left, his grandparents were making plans for a holiday visit to Wheeling, where they could rent a cabin at Oglebay Park and see their grandson.

  “Unbelievable, huh?” he finally said, fifty miles into West Virginia.

  “Absolutely. You couldn’t have scripted it any better.”

  “No doubt.”

  We stopped and ate lunch at a diner just outside of Beckley. “I’m buying,” Travis said, flashing the wad of twenties that his grandfather had given him. We sat in a corner booth and Travis showed me a few snapshots of his mother during her high school years.

  “It’s kind of sad to see it come to an end,” I said.

  “See what come to an end?”

  “Project Amanda. I figure that there’s little else left to do. You’ve found your family. You probably know more about your mom than you ever thought you would.”

  He sipped at his water and looked out a window streaked with a drizzle that had followed us most of the trip home. “You’re probably right.”

  The waitress stopped and took our orders. Travis had the meatloaf, and I had the fried chicken and coffee. I was not ordinarily a coffee drinker, but I was charging up for the stretch drive home. “Things were going so well, I half expected to get up this morning and have you tell me you were staying in Asheville.”

  He smiled. “I would have liked to have done just that. Man, what great people.” He sipped his Coke and frowned. “Why do you suppose Big Frank’s been hiding my mail?”

  “Wouldn’t it be hard to explain why two dead people were sending you cards and presents?”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot he told me they were dead. Jesus, what a son of a bitch. Why did he do that?”

  I shrugged. “Once again, you’re looking at me to explain Big Frank? If I had to guess, I’d wager he knew your grandfather suspected him in your mother’s murder.” I paused for a moment, wondering how many times in the history of mankind someone had spoken similar words to his best friend. Damn few, I hoped. “He probably didn’t want your grandparents putting that idea in your head.”

  “Just when you think he couldn’t be any more despicable, he proves you wrong.”

  “Why didn’t your grandparents come up north to see you after your mom died? Did they say?”

  Travis nodded. “Yeah. They said they tried, but Big Frank made it miserable for them. They came up to see me about a year after my mom died. They arranged this vacation and visit, and when they got there Big Frank had apparently taken me and left town. He told them he had the dates mixed up, but he did the same thing on the next visit. After that, Grandpa said he and Big Frank got into a big argument on the phone, and Big Frank told him not to ever come to Brilliant again. He said that Mom was a cheating whore and he didn’t want his son to have any contact with a family who raised a daughter like that.”

  “A pure charmer, that father of yours.”

  “I know. Big Frank told Grandpa that he was friends with the cops and if they ever came back he would have them arrested for harassment or something. Big Frank moved us into the new house and had the phone number unlisted. They said they wanted to come up and see me, but they were afraid it would cause problems for me. And since I never got their mail, I had no idea that they wanted to have any contact with me. Hell, I didn’t even know they were alive.”

  “What do they think happened to your mom?”

  “They don’t know. For a long time they thought Big Frank had killed her. They said they would like to believe she drowned, that she was so miserable in her marriage that she really was out on the boat with her boyfriend.”

  “Do they know about Clay Carter?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t bring up his name, but they seemed to know she was planning to leave Big Frank.” Travis quit talking while the waitress set the meals on the table. Travis slathered his meatloaf with ketchup.

  “So, she wanted to get away, but your dad killed her before she got the chance?”

  Travis shook his head. “Remember, Mitch, he wasn’t even in the state.” There was a hint of aggravation in his voice. “I know you think Big Frank was involved, but I’m just not convinced that he had anything to do with it. I know he’s a bastard, but that doesn’t mean he killed her and had her dumped in the river.”

  It was strange to hear the words come so easily from Travis’s mouth. It was his mother and father he was talking about, and the likelihood that a murder had been committed had so long been a possibility that Travis could talk about it very matter-of-factly, discuss it in detail as easily as he poured his ketchup. It gave me a chill. I wondered how many sleepless nights this had caused.

  “I can tell you one thing—Big Frank had better never smack me again,” Travis said. “He does and I’m outta there. I’ll go to Asheville and live. I don’t have to put up with that shit anymore.”

  “Just try to get along with him until the end of the school year, Trav; then you can do what you want. You don’t want to leave before graduation.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to finish out the year at Brilliant, but he isn’t going to beat me anymore. He’s been beatin’ my ass since I was old enough to walk, and it’s going to stop.”

  “You know how he is. Just try not to aggravate him
.”

  “The mere fact that I’m breathing aggravates him. You never know when he’s going to go ballistic. Hell, you’ve seen him explode. It doesn’t take anything to set him off. Say the wrong thing, look at him wrong . . .”

  “Write in his cement.”

  Travis frowned. “Write in his cement?”

  I cleared my mouth of fried chicken. “It was something Alex Harmon told me about when I was talking to him. Big Frank caught Alex and Jimmy Kidwell writing in some fresh cement up at the old place on Shaft Row. He grabbed a switch off a tree and beat their asses.”

  “Writing in what cement?”

  “Alex said he was just a kid, six or so, and he and a buddy had been down in the creek trying to catch crawfish to sell to the bait shop. They came up over the hill and your dad had just poured a cement cap on the cistern. Alex said they found a stick and started writing their names in the cement when Big Frank caught him. Alex never knew he was there until Big Frank lashed him across the ass with a switch from a mulberry tree. He said he jumped three feet in the air, and ran back over the hill with Big Frank stingin’ their butts all the way.” I was laughing at my own story, but Travis just stared, unamused. “What? That was funny.”

  “What was he doing again?”

  “Catching crawfish.”

  “No. Big Frank. He poured cement over what?”

  “The old cistern.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I didn’t know either. Alex said it’s like a well to catch rainwater off the house. People had them before they got city water so they had water for their gardens. We used to have one in the side yard and Dad capped ours, too.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “So you didn’t have a hole in the ground that some kid could fall in, I guess.”

  “That’s why your dad capped his. If every kid in Brilliant fell in Big Frank’s cistern, he couldn’t give a shit less. Remember, I’m living in a house that Big Frank is letting crumble around us. Why would he go through the trouble of capping a cistern?”

  I shook my head. “When Brilliant got city water, everyone capped or filled in their cisterns, Trav.”

  “Sure you would, especially if you were trying to hide a body in the bottom of it.”

  I set down my fork, wiped my mouth and began massaging my temples. “You know, sometimes you give me a migraine right behind my right eye. For the love of God, Travis, please, try for two minutes to enjoy the great weekend you’ve just had. There is no body at the bottom of that cistern. Your mom drowned.”

  He stuffed his mouth with meatloaf. “Doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Everything isn’t a conspiracy, Travis. There is no body. He capped the cistern so no one would fall in. End of story.”

  He shrugged and stared back out the window beyond the orange neon EAT sign. “You’re probably right. But doesn’t it make you wonder?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I pointed at his plate with my fork. “Eat your meatloaf and think about how incredibly lucky you were this weekend.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In its day, Shaft Row was the home to the elite of Brilliant. It was simply a road that extended from Labelle Street up the hillside toward the entrance to the deep shaft mines of the long-defunct Thorneapple Coal Company. The road had been the home of the executives and owners of the Thorneapple Coal Company and the Thorneapple Nail and Rail, a nail and railroad spike manufacturing company and the predecessor of the Ohio Valley Steel Corporation. The homes had wooden siding and elegant gingerbread and lattice, and had to be painted every summer because the acrid smoke from the factories scoured the houses and caused the paint to peel in big chunks. The homes built on the north side of Shaft Row were tucked into the hillside, built on foundations that required the removal of tons of earth and were subjected to flooding from the run-off from every big rain. On the south side, the hill was tapered and homeowners had sprawling yards that led down to Thorneapple Creek.

  The sidewalks and streets were made of red brick from a pottery near Amsterdam. When the wives of the executives complained about having to walk down the hill—all of a couple hundred yards—to catch the streetcar to Steubenville, the Brilliant & Steubenville Trolley Company put rails into Shaft Row with a turnaround at the dead end, near the entrance to the company offices.

  Thorneapple Nail and Rail prospered through the early part of the twentieth century, with Shaft Row as the town’s opulent thoroughfare. But by the 1930s the deep shafts were mined out, and Thorneapple Nail and Rail was sold to the Ohio Valley Steel Corporation in 1935.

  Meanwhile, Shaft Row evolved from Brilliant’s showplace to an eyesore. The trolley car abandoned its line and the brick street and sidewalks were pulled up for use elsewhere, leaving it little more than a mud path that washed away with every storm, leaving Labelle Street covered and packed with gravel and mud. The homes along Shaft Row were claimed by those much less affluent. By the early fifties, only a handful of dilapidated, sun-bleached homes remained.

  At the back of the row, tucked in behind a grove of elms and maples, was the location of the home purchased by Frank and Amanda Baron in the spring of 1950 for thirty-one hundred dollars. It was from this home that Amanda Baron mysteriously disappeared in October of 1953. Less than nine months later, on July 16, 1954, while Frank was allegedly having dinner in Steubenville with a woman he met, married, and divorced all inside of four months, the house mysteriously went up in flames. There was little evidence as to the cause of the blaze, though everyone with a minimum of cognitive power suspected Big Frank had it torched. He collected the insurance money—nearly eight thousand dollars—and bought the house across the street from the bakery.

  On a sunny day in the early spring of 1971, Travis showed up at my back door and waved me out to the back porch. “Put on some old shoes; I need you to help me do something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing major. Come on.”

  I did as he requested, though I was wary of Travis’s interpretation of “nothing major.” Although sunny, it was early April and the temperature was just a few degrees above freezing, the ground still soggy from the thaw. We walked toward the north end of town and turned up Shaft Row. “What’s this all about?” I asked, though I instinctively knew.

  “I just want you to see something,” he said.

  “You’re just not going to let it go, are you?”

  I followed him up the gravel road to where his first home had been. The trees had grown up in a bowl around the old property, which was now covered with a thick bed of desiccated weeds and thistles and thorny locust trees. The village had filled the old root cellar years earlier, using it as a dump for debris from street cleanings. A clear path, new, had been beaten down to where the house had stood, and parts of the concrete foundation were exposed. It wasn’t, I knew, his first visit to the old homestead.

  “So, what have you been up to?” I asked.

  He turned sideways to slip through a thicket of thistle. He knelt and pulled at the corner of a piece of canvas, revealing a shovel and a garden hoe. “I want you to help me find that cistern.”

  “I knew it. For the love of God, Travis! Why?”

  “Because . . . I just want to find it, that’s all.”

  “No, you don’t. You want to find it so you can see what’s in it. I could just kick myself in the ass for ever bringing that up. You can’t possibly believe your mother’s body is in there. She was seen jumping in the river, remember?”

  “I know, I know. But something’s just not right.”

  “I agree. It’s your brain that isn’t right.”

  Travis had met with his grandparents in Wheeling at Christmastime. He spent three days with them, and he couldn’t have been happier. For weeks, all he talked about was graduating and moving to North Carolina. But the cistern had obviously been on his mind since the moment I mentioned it in the diner near Beckley.

  “The cistern in your side yard is thirteen paces from your ho
use—I stepped it off,” Travis said. “I figure this one wouldn’t have been in the front yard, and the backyard is uphill. The other side of the house is too close to the trees, so it has to be out here somewhere,” he said, pointing toward a gentle, weed-covered slope that ran down to where Thorneapple Creek circled behind the old company headquarters.

  “It could be covered with a lot of dirt,” I offered.

  “There were parts of the foundation still exposed. We ought to be able to find it.”

  I stopped at ten paces and began working the ground with the hoe. Travis continued another five paces and scraped the ground with his spade. The thistles were snagging my clothes and jabbing me with every step; the mud worked up over the edge of my new Chuck Taylor All-Stars, which was going to make my mom furious. “That’s why I buy you boots,” she would say. We worked in an oval, moving inward one step with each lap. We had made three laps when Travis struck cement; it was the cap on the cistern. It was covered by a four-inch layer of coal chips, gravel, and dirt. “It looks like it was covered up intentionally,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The hillside has simply moved down and covered it. Everything isn’t a conspiracy, you know.”

  “That’s what they want you to think,” he said, taking the hoe and scraping the dirt from all around the concrete cap. It was circular and eight inches high. I smiled and pointed to the rim on the far side. In rough print was: “Alex Harmon” and “Jimmy Kidwe.”

  “Big Frank must have switched Jimmy’s ass before he could finish his name,” I said.

  Travis said nothing. He took his hoe and began moving the earth from around the disk. After a few minutes the entire cement cap was exposed. Travis took the spade and wedged it between the stone base and the cement cap, using the shovel as a lever. It budged, but the wooden spade handle was cracking under the pressure. “It must weigh a ton,” he said.