When I entered, Glen Morgan was sitting at a small table by the window, watching for my arrival. That alone was sort of creepy, but I let it go. Maybe when he arrived, there had been no other tables.
I sat down quickly and tried to smile.
“Would you like something?” he inquired.
“No, I just ate.”
“A drink?”
“Just a Dr Pepper.”
He called the waitress over and added my Dr Pepper to his order. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?” he asked.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“How did you know where to tell them to find Belle’s body?”
“I received a recording in the mail.”
“So?”
“Well, the recording was a confession of sorts. I figured out that Belle had been murdered and where the killer had put her body.”
Pounding his fist on the table, he said, “And you never thought to call and tell me!”
“Whoa, look, if you’re going to get angry, I’ll just leave,” I said.
“You know I’m working on a book about the family. This is my family!”
“When I received the recording, I was still under the impression that it might be my family, as well. That theory has since been laid to rest.”
“How so?” he asked.
“What, you haven’t talked to Phoebe?”
He sat back then and glared at me. His pizza arrived, along with a side order of french fries, and he began to eat. “I saw the letters,” I continued. “Phoebe brought them to me. In those letters, my great-grandmother was speaking of a boy named Rufus Kiefer.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Research. Not to mention that I spoke with your cousin Johnny Morgan, and he confirmed it.”
“Johnny?”
“Really, Glen, if you’re going to write a book, you should interview all of your surviving family. Johnny could have told you who Scott Morgan’s illegitimate children were. Johnny Keith was not one of them, but apparently his sister, my great-aunt Rena, was. You were right about one thing: My great-grandmother did have an affair with your grandfather. Which is probably why she felt as though she could speak to him that openly in those letters. Scott Morgan refused to help pay for even the basic necessities for little Rufus Kiefer. My great-grandmother was appalled by his behavior.”
He took a drink of his beer and then stared into his glass for a moment.
“That’s just what Johnny has to say,” I went on. “Look, his story and the research I’d already done back each other up. If you really want proof, how about you and my dad get some DNA tests done. I’ll bet if you tested my great-aunt Rena’s offspring, you’d find you match up to them, not us. It’s a simple blood test.”
“All right,” he said. “It’s a deal. We’ll get DNA tests done.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I still can’t believe you didn’t get in touch with me when you got that recording,” he said.
“It was a judgment call.”
“So, when can I hear it? This is a Morgan Family Players recording I’ve never heard, in which someone confesses to killing my aunt Belle. I mean, this is huge. It’s like a true-crime novel. After all these years, I’ve discovered what happened to her.”
“Well, last time I checked, you hadn’t done much of anything, except spread the rantings of my poor demented cousin. The recording was sent to me, not you, and I’m the one who figured out where Belle was.”
“So, what, you want credit on the book? We can coauthor if you want. That’s how big I think this thing is going to be.” He wiped at the pizza sauce in the corner of his mouth with his napkin.
“No, I don’t want to coauthor the blasted book, but you should document how it was discovered. And good luck getting a copy of the recording—it’s evidence.”
“For what? They’re not really going to try to investigate Belle’s murder, are they? I mean, there’s no way to solve it. No way to punish whoever did it,” he said.
“Not that crime. A different crime.”
He swallowed his pizza then and stared at me. His eyes grew wide and he took a very large drink of his beer. “You got the recording from my cousin Clifton?”
“Yup,” I said. “And I’m not sure about all the law enforcement in the state, but in my book, that would make you a prime suspect.”
“That’s preposterous.”
I held my hands up in surrender. “It is what it is.”
“But anybody could have killed Clifton. I mean, anybody who listened to that recording would know that it solved one of the more notorious disappearance cases in the early twentieth century.”
“We’ll see what the authorities think.”
“That’s crazy,” he said, clearly worried.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. I know the sheriff in New Kassel pretty well. And that’s who is going to be hot on your trail, considering the murder of Clifton Weaver took place in his jurisdiction. So, you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll be sure that the sheriff is fair with you.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Well, maybe,” I said. “My association with you ends now.”
I stood to leave, but he grabbed my arm. “No, wait,” he said. “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Who was Belle having an affair with? That’s the key to everything. If I can find out who he was, I can really narrow down my list of suspects who might have killed her. As of right now, anybody in Progress could have killed her. Give me the name of her lover, and I’ll bet it boils down to about five women.”
He laughed and shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re asking,” he said.
“Why is it so hard? Do you know or don’t you?”
“I know what my father told me. And a few of my cousins.”
“Who?” I asked, swallowing hard, hoping like mad that he wouldn’t say it was my grandpa.
“Scott Morgan.”
I must have blinked three times at least. “Wait. You mean Belle was having an affair with her own father-in-law?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Well, that sure as hell put a spin on things.
Twenty-two
After leaving Glen Morgan, I went straight to the Gaheimer House. Our meeting didn’t take as long as I thought it would, so I had time to go to my office and check a few things before I went home.
Almost as much as my family, the Gaheimer House had been the center of my world for close to twenty years. This had been Sylvia’s whole world, and I gladly shared it. The house itself might not have been magnificent, but for the time it was built, on the edge of the frontier, it really was something special. It wasn’t the red brick and mortar or the flaking green paint on the trim of the windows that made it so special. Or even the hardwood floors and the wainscoting. It was all the stuff you didn’t see: the years of love shared between Sylvia and Mr. Gaheimer, the house’s involvement in the Underground Railroad, the countless number of homeless victims from the stock market crash who had sought refuge there during the Depression, and the overwhelming sense of “ground control” that it represented. Everybody knew the Gaheimer House was the center of New Kassel. The house was the repository of the histories of all the families that had come and gone in this town and the surrounding areas.
I forgot all of that sometimes and thought of it as just another piece of real estate that needed the foundation fixed, the trim painted, and the roofing tiles replaced, but it was much, much more than that.
In my office, I stared at the antique Rose of Sharon quilt that Glory Anne Kendall had made almost ninety years ago. I had debated whether or not to put it with the rest of the collection over at the Kendall home, but it had been a gift to Sylvia, and it had hung in my office forever. It got taken down every now and then and replaced with another antique quilt for a few weeks, while it was being cleaned, but I always made sure I put the Rose of Sharon back. It lent such a spark of cheerfulne
ss to the otherwise cramped and cluttered room.
I booted up my computer and opened the file on the families of New Kassel.
Back in the seventies, during the nation’s bicentennial, Sylvia had started collecting family group sheets and five-generation charts for all of the residents of New Kassel. Believe it or not, New Kassel was not the type of place that too many people moved to for jobs. My family happened to be one of the families that had moved here from someplace else, but such families represented about 10 percent of the population. Most families had been here since the 1920s, when New Kassel was a major stop on the rail line that ran along the Mississippi. When the train no longer stopped here, New Kassel had declined—that is, until Sylvia came along and turned it into an enchanting tourist attraction.
By gathering the five-generation charts and group sheets of the people who lived here in the seventies, Sylvia had been preserving the history of the town. Most of those people could trace their families here back to the mid-1800s, or at least to the turn of the twentieth century. So while my personal family charts wouldn’t help anybody with the history of New Kassel, most of Sylvia’s charts would. Not to mention that Sylvia had added a lot of her own research when working on this project.
I typed in the name Mercer and waited to see what came up. I clacked my fingers against the side of the computer while I waited for the information. Back in the seventies, before the age of genealogy software, genealogists recorded everything on charts. On a five-generation chart, a person puts his or her name in slot one, along with pertinent vital statistics, such as birth date and place, spouse, and so on. Then for generation two, he would give information for his parents; for generation three, his grandparents; for generation four, his great-grandparents; and last, for generation five, his great-great grandparents. When I first started tracing my family tree, I thought, Gee, I just want to get this five-generation chart completely full. Well, if you’ve done any research at all, you know you can’t just stop there. If you know all the names of all of your ancestors for five generations, you should have thirty-one names on your completed chart.
A family group sheet is an individual’s family. So, a group sheet for my grandparents would include all their vitals, plus information like their burial place, their occupation, et cetera. Then I would list all of their children, not just my direct line. If you do a group sheet on all of your direct ancestors, you can record who your ancestors’ siblings were. Believe it or not, you can actually find out information on a direct ancestor by following the trail of one of that person’s siblings. You never know who might have a family Bible, letters, or some other form of information.
When Isabelle Mercer’s name came up, I wasn’t surprised. Her family had lived in New Kassel during the first few decades of the twentieth century; that, I knew for sure. Unless Sylvia had submitted the information, somebody in the seventies or later had filled out a family chart for the Mercers. I glanced down at the name of the submitter. It was Frank Mercer. The chart was for the family of Huxley and Evelyn Mercer, whose children were Thomas, James, Isabelle, Lucille, and Grover. That meant Frank had to be a son or grandson of Thomas, James, or Grover. Frank Mercer’s address was for Ona, a little bitty speck on the map just north of New Kassel. The town, situated on a bluff, had maybe sixty residents, a gas station, a church, and a little clock shop with cuckoo clocks sitting out on the front porch.
I picked up the phone to call him, then realized that even if he still lived there and still had the same number as the one listed on the chart, I shouldn’t call right then, since it was at least eleven o’clock at night. Putting the phone back down, I pulled out some ancient volumes of biographies of the noted gentlemen of Granite County, Missouri. I love the way the women are never included in these old histories and biographies, except about three-fourths of the way through a biography, where it mentions whom the gentleman married. Then, more often than not, the woman is just named, and you get more information on her father than you do on her. It really irks me. It seems to me that women are treated as a footnote to history, when nothing could be further from the truth.
At any rate, I knew that Huxley Mercer would be in one of these volumes, since he’d been the mayor of New Kassel. Sure enough, there was even a photograph of him. The information included was typical of the biographies of that day. “Huxley Mercer was a noted and distinguished gentleman of great intellect and character. Educated locally in his youth, he later attended school in St. Louis. When he returned, he married Evelyn Geist and raised a very handsome and respectable family.” It was full of the usual adjectives—noted, distinguished, and respectable, among others. I’ve yet to read a biography in one of these books that doesn’t include those terms. It then went on to describe his religious and political preferences and his career as mayor, as well as giving a very brief history of his family. For example, it mentioned where his parents and grandparents were from and that they were part of the “esteemed Mercer family of Connecticut,” as if that would mean anything to the average reader. It wasn’t as if he were a Vanderbilt, for crying out loud.
I got lucky, though. At the time the biography was written, his daughter Isabelle was engaged to be married. They had to mention that, because she was engaged to a member of a “distinguished and esteemed” family in St. Louis. Her fiancé’s name was Archibald Louis Patterson King III. A May wedding was planned. The ceremony was to be held in St. Louis, at the groom’s residence on Westmoreland.
You don’t realize how quiet a house is until somebody disturbs the quiet. I’d been happily reading along, and suddenly there was a loud knocking on the back door of the Gaheimer House. I jumped and let out a squeal, then felt silly. I got up to go answer the door, but and my cell phone rang at the same time. I skipped back into the office, picked my phone up, and flipped it open. “Hello?”
“Torie, where are you?” It was Rudy.
“I’m at the Gaheimer House, going over some charts. I was just about finished. Why? Am I that late?” I asked.
“No, no. You’re not that late. Somebody just set off a smoke bomb in the stables.”
“What?” I stopped in my tracks.
Another knock at the door.
“Yeah, it spooked the horses like crazy. And while we were all out trying to calm the horses down, somebody slipped in the house and ransacked your office.”
The knock at the door grew louder and more insistent.
Chills scooted along my scalp. My hair moved involuntarily. “W-what do you mean?”
“Somebody was looking for something in your office!” he yelled.
“Okay, you don’t have to scream.” I stepped into the hallway and peered at the door in the kitchen.
“Well, you’re not hearing me,” he said.
“Are the kids all right?”
“They’re fine.”
“Is that a siren I hear?”
“Yes, the fire department is out here.”
“Why?”
“The smoke bomb. Look, are you all right?”
Another knock at the door. This time, the curtains moved with the force of the knock.
“Can you stay on the line and call the police if you hear me scream?”
“What? What! Torie, God—”
I stepped toward the door and took a deep breath. Then at the last minute, I glanced around for some sort of protection. I grabbed the rolling pin off the wall and set my cell phone down on the counter. Grasping the end of the rolling pin, I yanked the door open and smacked Eleanore square in the forehead.
“Oh, for the love of God!” she screamed.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I said.
“You’re crazy!” she screamed, holding her head. Her eyes were watering. “You’re a menace. A plague!”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Come in.”
“I’m not stepping foot in any building that you’re in ever again,” she said, and raised her chin—just enough for me to see the huge goose egg that was forming in the midd
le of her forehead like a third eye.
“I really wish you would move to California … or Canada!” she said, seething.
“I said I was sorry. You know, you shouldn’t sneak up on people.”
“Sneak up! I was banging on the door!”
“Well, you shouldn’t do that, either,” I said.
She glared at me. “I just came by to give you the results of our national standings and the photographs of your kids in the horse show we had last fall.”
“Our national standings for what?” I asked.
“For the birds that we saw on Olympic day.”
“You mean we weren’t the only town having a birding Olympics?”
“No, there were cities all over the country,” she said as snottily as she could with a giant bump on her head.
“Oh.”
“You really are a menace to society,” she said and shoved a handful of papers and photographs at me.
“This couldn’t have waited until morning?” I asked.
“I was excited. I saw your light on. It’s not like we live in a big city. People can walk around here at night. We do it all the time.”
I ran to the refrigerator, got out an ice pack, and handed it to her. “Well, you know, Eleanore, I was feeling pretty guilty about your forehead until you told me that you were out wandering around at eleven just to give me bird statistics!”
“You bludgeon me, and I’m the one to blame, is that it?”
“Well, something like that,” I said.
“Stay away from me,” she said and left with my ice pack.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do for twenty years!” I called after her.
I picked up the cell phone and said, “Hello? Are you still there?”
“Did you just maim Eleanore?” Rudy asked.
“Yeah, I thought she was the same person you just told me ransacked my office. Or a burglar.”
“Does a burglar ordinarily knock?” he asked.
I was quiet a moment, contemplating that. “Well, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t just called and told me about somebody ransacking my house. You freaked me out.”
The Blood Ballad Page 19