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by Rett MacPherson

Eleanore Murdoch

  The Meyersville Lions clobbered the New Kassel Kings in Tuesday night’s varsity basketball game. Father Bingham would like for me to express how it’s not very sportsmanlike for the parents to throw chairs at the referee.

  Still no fairies have been returned to Tobias’s garden. He warns that whoever the culprit is, warts will begin to grow on your face, and your hair will fall out. I’d return them if I were you.

  Arthur Burgermeister has reported that he and his wife, Carol, had a baby boy last night. Nine pounds, four ounces. The bouncing, bawling boy is bald and carries the name of Junior. This is the couple’s second baby, first boy.

  And I want to thank all of you upstanding New Kassel citizens who have been calling our reporter friends to task on their manners. Fraulein reports the incidence of flatulence has greatly diminished.

  Until Next Time,

  Eleanore

  Twenty-five

  The next day, I was on my way to work at the Gaheimer House when I saw Kyle, the Channel 6 cameraman, sitting on the curb of Jefferson Street. Why he’d chosen to sit in the snow, I’ll never know, but then, why he never wore socks would probably remain a mystery to me, as well. I thought about asking him, although it really wasn’t any of my business. But then, when has that ever stopped me?

  “Don’t you own any socks?” I asked.

  Kyle turned around and saw me standing above him.

  “I hate socks,” he said. “My mother said she could never keep them on me, either.”

  He stood up and glanced around, looking sort of embarrassed. His shoulder-length hair was scraggly. I like long hair on guys, as long as it is clean and pretty. Kyle’s was not pretty. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved in a few days, either. He wore his Kurt Warner jersey with great pride, though. Not so much as a smudge anywhere on it.

  “Your butt’s wet,” I said.

  He gave me a blank expression.

  “From sitting in the snow,” I added.

  “Oh,” he said, and wiped at his derriere.

  “You want to come in for a minute? It’s warmer than sitting on the sidewalk.” I gestured to the Gaheimer House, which he looked at in a curious manner. “I work here.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, I’m just waiting for Bradley.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s some footage he wants me to shoot.”

  “Oh yeah? Where?”

  “Out at some cemetery.”

  The hair pricked on my neck. “What cemetery?”

  He shrugged. “Out in the country somewhere.”

  “Do you have to cross a covered bridge to get there?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, haven’t been there before.”

  “Is it Lutheran?”

  “Yeah,” he said, snapping his fingers. “That’s it.”

  I nodded my head knowingly. “You sure you don’t want to come in and wait? I can get you some coffee. Tea?”

  “No,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

  Sheriff Brooke pulled up to the curb at that moment, and Kyle looked around nervously. A flight-or-fight expression played across his face, and for some reason, I found that funny. I waved to Colin as he got out of the car. He glowered at Kyle, who shrank back, as the sheriff had intended for him to do. I remembered that glower. And I remembered how it used to work on me.

  “What’s up?” I asked as he headed toward me.

  “You got a VCR in there?” he asked, pointing to the Gaheimer House.

  “Mmm, maybe. Come on in,” I said.

  We left Kyle standing on the side of the curb with a wet butt and no socks, waiting for Bradley Chapel to arrive. Colin and I walked through the parlor and then down the hallway to my office. After taking my coat off, I set my purse on my desk and booted up my computer. “Want something to drink?”

  “Coffee,” he said. He sat down and I went out to get it.

  Sylvia was standing in the kitchen, taking a pie of some sort out of the oven. “Good morning, Victory,” she said in the most noncheery fashion she could muster. Her salutations are always gruff and sound like required statements.

  I poured Colin his coffee and set the pot back on the stove. “Do we have a VCR here?”

  She gave me a rueful expression, and I almost wished I hadn’t asked. “What would I need a VCR for?”

  “I just asked, Sylvia.”

  “I think there is one out in the shed,” she said.

  I stopped by the soda machine and got a Dr Pepper. Entering my office, I said, “Sylvia says there is a VCR out in the shed. You can go get it if you want. But beware that the only television in the house is some thirty-year-old thing in the kitchen. I’m not sure if it will have the right hookups.”

  Taking a drink of the coffee I gave him, he handed me a videocassette and smiled. “I guess I’ll go out to the shed.”

  While he was gone, I checked through the papers on my desk and then logged on to see if I had any e-mail. I had the usual requests from people looking for info on their ancestors, grandparents or great-grandparents who had lived here at one time. I saved them all to answer later, then went about reading the others.

  There was an answer to an e-mail I had sent out earlier to the historical society in Arkansas. It read:

  Dear Mrs. O’Shea,

  In reply to your question about the diamonds and the Hills diamond mine: The mine has been defunct for close to twenty years or more. We checked the list of names that you gave us and found that Samuel Higgins mined close to forty pounds of uncut diamonds. The case he would have carried them in would indeed have been marked clearly “Hills Mine. Hills, Arkansas.” And most likely, it would have been made of some sort of metal. So it looks as though Samuel Higgins was the one carrying the diamonds on board The Phantom. As to your other request, I am attaching a jpeg file, which is a photograph of The Phantom when she was in port. However, I can’t be sure that the photograph was taken on the same run when she sank. If I can be of further assistance, please let me know.

  Carol Klein

  I opened the file and up came a photograph of The Phantom, with the crew and passengers posing along the railings. She was definitely loaded flat, even if it wasn’t the same run as the one when she sank. Maybe it was Eli Thibeau’s habit to load her as full as he could.

  I sat back and tapped my pen on my lip. My gaze landed on a sticky note on my telephone from Sylvia. It read: “Torie, do you have all the info together for the Phantom memorial?”

  When would I have done all of that? Most of the things I wanted to say for the memorial plaque, I already knew. I even had a photograph of the boat, thanks to Carol Klein, showing what the steamer looked like before it sank. I thought about what Kyle had said out on the sidewalk—that they were going to go shoot some footage out at a cemetery. A Lutheran cemetery. He had to be talking about Granite Lutheran. And I supposed it made sense that Bradley Chapel would want footage of the tombstones of the seven dead passengers of The Phantom. If I were shooting a documentary or a spot for the news, I would want the tombstones as part of my footage.

  I think he and Bradley Chapel have struck a bargain.

  Those words sort of meandered in and out of my head without form at first. And then I remembered. I had sat in the booth across from Krista and we were talking about how Bradley and Jacob Lahrs had struck a bargain because Jacob was letting Bradley film his dive. What if Bradley had decided that he wanted the story of Jessica Huntleigh and Eli Thibeau? He was probably smelling Pulitzer for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  “I worked my ass off on this project”—that’s what Justin had heard one of the men say the night Jacob Lahrs was murdered.

  I logged off the Internet and stared at my computer screen for a moment. I flipped through my Rolodex and found the number for Baxter Monument Company. They were the closest and largest monument company in Granite County. What’s more, they were family-owned and had been in business since 1901. I dialed and waited for somebody to answer, tapping my pen on the edge of my d
esk the whole time.

  Tom Baxter answered the phone. “Baxter Monument.”

  “Tom, this is Torie O’Shea over in New Kassel,” I said.

  “Yeah, hi, Mrs. O’Shea. What can I do for you?”

  Tom knew who I was. I’d called him many times to ask for his assistance. “I need you to check and see if you guys made the tombstones for the seven unidentified bodies of The Phantom wreck in 1919.”

  “Well, it may take a minute, since they were unidentified. I’ll have to check by year,” he said.

  “It happened in January, so it should be at the very beginning,” I said.

  “You know, I think we did do them. For some reason, I think I remember my grandpa talking about it. Let me check, though.”

  “Thanks.”

  While I was waiting, Colin came in and motioned for me to come to the kitchen. He must have found the VCR and actually gotten it hooked up. I handed the tape back that he’d given me earlier. “Hang on just a second,” I said to him.

  He nodded and went back to the kitchen. In a moment, Tom Baxter came back on the phone. “Yeah, Mrs. O’Shea. We sure did do the tombstones.”

  Normally, monument companys have information like next of kin, surviving family, that sort of thing. Not all monument companies keep records like this, but a lot do. In fact, such records often contain the name of the funeral home and the cemetery, and sometimes even a clipped obituary. I had found the names of all of one of my ancestor’s brothers and sisters that way. And once I had found the burial place for another ancestor, someone I’d looked for high and low. Turned out he’d been buried in the next county over. Funeral home and monument records are a great, albeit often overlooked, source of genealogical information.

  But in the case of the seven unidentified bodies of The Phantom, I wanted to know only one thing. “I’m doing a memorial for The Phantom, and I’m trying to come up with different tidbits of information. You know, how it affected the town, et cetera, and I was just wondering who paid for the tombstones.” I said to Tom.

  “Uh … William Wade.”

  I almost choked on the cap to my pen. “D-did you say William Wade?”

  “Yeah, William Wade. And he picked them up,” Tom added quickly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the records indicate that he picked them up. So I’m assuming he placed the stones on the graves himself. Not an unusual thing to do back then. Especially since these particular tombstones were made out of limestone and pretty lightweight.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Those old limestone monuments all but melted in the elements. Nowadays, the stones are far too heavy for the average person just to pick up and place on a grave without any help.

  “Thank you, Tom,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  I hung up the phone and wandered in a daze into the kitchen, where Colin was waiting for me. He took one look at me and could tell I’d just made an amazing discovery.

  “What?”

  “It can wait. Show me what you’ve got.”

  “You look like … well, you look like you’ve just been hit with a brick,” he said. “Are you sure it can wait?”

  “Yes, but not for long, so show me what you’ve got.”

  “Well, it’s more like what I don’t have,” he said. He pushed the play button and footage of the Murdoch Inn came on. “This was taken by Kyle, Bradley Chapel’s cameraman, the night of the murder. You’ll notice the Murdoch Inn and its parking lot.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This is Jeremiah Ketchum’s car,” he said. “That’s Danny Jones’s car, and this is the Channel 6 van. They are all present and accounted for. Now, if you’ll notice the snow—”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s the same amount on all of the vehicles,” he said, stopping the tape and then rewinding it. “Meaning all three of those vehicles had been in the same place since the snow began. Which was about four that afternoon. Maybe four-thirty.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that if any of those three men killed Jacob Lahrs, he managed to get away from the crime scene and find a way back to the Murdoch Inn, undetected, without using his own vehicle,” he said.

  He let the tape continue to roll, and I saw all the commotion as Elmer and Collette tried to pull me up the bank of the river. I could just see the top of my head bobbing up over the snow-covered embankment, and then I’d slip back down. I saw Collette get behind me finally and push, and I was up. It was weird watching myself on video footage. It was one thing to be filmed when you knew about it, but it was strange watching footage of myself that I hadn’t known was being shot. It was almost like having an out-of-body experience.

  “Now, what news did you have?” he asked.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What about that ticket? If the cars were there all day, then how did Jeremiah Ketchum get a ticket on that day?”

  “Good question,” he said. “I’ll check first thing when I get back to the office and see what Duran came up with on the ticket. Now, what did you find out?”

  “Well, Kyle mentioned this morning that he and Bradley Chapel were headed out to the cemetery to film the tombstones. Then just now, I was poking around, trying to find different tidbits of information about the wreck and how it affected the town. And I just wondered who had paid for the tombstones of the victims. So, I called the monument company and asked.”

  “And? Torie, what did you find out?”

  “Well, I had expected it to be one of the richer patrons in town—you know, like Mr. Gaheimer, or maybe a charity organization like one of the Rotary clubs or something.”

  “Torie. What did you find?” he asked again, exasperated.

  “I think I know where the diamonds are hidden.”

  He dropped the remote control for the VCR. “What?” he said, bending over to retrieve the remote.

  “William Wade, also known as Eli Thibeau, paid for the seven monuments. Why would he do that?”

  “Because he felt guilty, since he was the captain of the boat?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t doubt that was part of it. But he also picked them up and erected them himself. I think that’s where he hid the diamonds. For whatever reason, we may never know, but I think that’s where the diamonds are.”

  Colin picked up his radio. “This is Brooke. Have a car meet me at Granite Lutheran Cemetery.” With that, he headed down the hallway.

  “Hey, wait,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’ll stay in the car,” I said.

  “You’re not going,” he said, twirling around to face me.

  “Look, I found the darn things.”

  “If they’re there.”

  “Whatever, I found ’em, and I’m going.”

  Rolling his eyes, he motioned for me to follow him. “Okay, but if I so much as see one hair on your head outside of that car, I’ll throw you in jail.”

  “No big deal,” I said. “You’ve done that twice already.”

  “Fine, then this time I’ll just shoot you.”

  Twenty-six

  Riding in the front seat of the sheriff’s official car was pretty cool. It was a lot like riding in a fire truck, this exotic place that is normally off-limits. “Ooohhh, what’s this button for?”

  “You touch that button and I’ll break your finger.”

  I withdrew my finger quickly and looked around. “Is that gun loaded?”

  “Of course it’s loaded. You think the bad guys are going to let me take time to load it?”

  “No, guess not.”

  Colin picked up the radio and contacted the other squad car headed out to the cemetery. “Yeah, Duran. Wait on the other side of the covered bridge for me to arrive. I don’t want to interrupt Mr. Chapel if he’s about to incriminate himself.”

  “‘Incriminate himself’?” I asked.

  “You said that Danny Jones and Jeremiah Ketchum didn’t even know w
here the diamonds were, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So then if we get there and Bradley Chapel is hacking away at the tombstones and takes the diamonds, that’s not going to look too good on his part, now is it? How would he know the diamonds were there if Danny Jones and Jeremiah Ketchum didn’t even know?”

  “You know, sometimes you’re all right,” I said.

  “Like I need your approval.”

  “You do, whether you admit it or not,” I said. “If I’m not happy, my mother’s not happy, and if mother’s not happy, then you won’t be happy. It’s simple family dynamics.”

  “There’s the Channel 6 van,” he said, ignoring me. He pointed beyond the covered bridge to the parking lot of the church. We pulled up along the road, a few feet before the turn to the covered bridge. Normally, we would have been able to pull all the way off the road, but the snow kept us from doing that. When the snowplows had gone through and cleared the roads, the snow naturally went to the sides, creating a three-foot-high wall. So we were sort of stopped in the middle of the road.

  “You stay here,” he said.

  “Colin,” I said, whining. “I can’t even see the cemetery.”

  “My heart bleeds for you, Torie. Really it does.” With that, he got out of the squad car and went to meet up with Deputy Duran. The two crossed the covered bridge on foot and then headed up the road toward the church. From where the squad car was situated, I could not see them as they wound around the front of the churchyard to reach the cemetery. Lord knew how long they were going to observe before moving in.

  Colin had left the keys for me—in case of an emergency, I assumed. I thought a moment about turning the engine on so that I could listen to the radio. But I had a feeling this car was booby-trapped, and I just wasn’t going to take the chance of turning on the sirens by accident and warning Bradley and Kyle that we were there. So I tapped my foot and hummed a song by Dido.

  It seemed like twenty minutes had passed when Deputy Duran came walking back across the bridge and motioned for me to come. I got out of the car, half-afraid that this was a test and Colin was going to bark at me from behind a tree and carry me off to jail. But I got out anyway. “Colin says he wants you.”

 

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