A Curious Affair

by Melanie Jackson

  I wandered up the hill and took up a post in the watery shade of the O’Linn mausoleum where it was unpleasantly cold but the acoustics were especially good. It was also a long way from where Cal’s urn stood atop a Romanesque pedestal. I should have gone to visit him, I suppose, but the act was beyond me, especially with so many people watching.

  The stony angel perched on top of the sepulcher seemed to flutter her wings as clouds passed rapidly overhead—light and shade, light and shade, her face first radiant white and then gray with sorrow. Trying to look inconspicuous, I read the mausoleum plaque with great care while I listened to a dozen conversations floating up the hill. peggy, fernie, charlie and nell. Their young lives had all ended the same year: 1916. What was it that had killed them? One of the pandemic influenzas? Maybe Asiatic cholera. That killed within hours of the victim being infected. Or perhaps it had been a fire. I would have to ask Crystal. The story was bound to be sad, but at least the family could afford a monument, a place for the survivors to come and grieve the lost. Not everyone could pay for such things. In fact, most people had passed out of history without anything to mark their departure. The whole world is an unmarked graveyard. We sit on the pretty topsoil and don’t realize we are living on someone or something else’s bones. Or maybe we don’t care because it isn’t yet our turn to feed the worms and therefore can ignore the fact that in life we are still in the midst of death.

  I hadn’t asked what would happen to Irv’s body. I’d assumed it would be cremated once the coroner released it.

  Please, I thought, let it be cremated. I didn’t want to stare at Irv’s restored corpse. My last view had been quite bad enough. I could live with it because it was honest, but I found the sight of the embalmed—madeup and coiffured as they never were in life—to be unutterably horrible.

  Someone had left flowers on the tomb steps in the last day or so. hoc facite in meam commemorationem—do this in my memory, the carving on the threshold said, and so the family had. I didn’t bring Cal’s urn flowers since he had always thought such things a waste—Bring me all my flowers while I’m alive, he’d said—but it still seemed like a nice gesture to me. Perhaps I would visit in the late spring when the wild lupines were out. It was pretty then, and maybe I would feel ready to face his grave.

  I wasn’t ready that day. The sun was out and doing its best to shine, but the graveyard inspired some less than pleasant thoughts. And why shouldn’t it? The cemetery was meant as a reminder that Thou too shall die. I enjoy good physical health outside of my stupid jaw, or think that I do since I have no worrisome symptoms of any dreaded disease, and that amounts to the same thing in terms of everyday living. Yet, standing among the dead, I was very aware of my mortality and how few people would miss me when I was gone, and it made me melancholic.

  I was aware of other things, too. My dreams, visions of a bright future, weren’t dead, but they had been napping long enough to make me ask if they might have slipped into a permanent coma. I needed to find some way to revive them and soon, or I would be dead in all the ways that mattered, just another shadow taking up space until my body was as worn as my soul. But what did I have ambition for? What did I long for? Almost nothing. An end of emotional pain, maybe. To be able to endure human company. That was cause for feeling even sadder. I was lonely, but couldn’t bear to be around most people. It’s a fine line, the one between being alone and being lonely, and one can cross it so easily. Without realizing it, I had strayed from needed solitude into isolation, peace and quiet metamorphosing into loneliness and despair. Days had been fairly horrible, but I was living my life the same old way because I couldn’t think of anything better.

  I turned and looked out over the town that I had chosen because I liked it above all others—and I felt nothing. Everything was familiar, but brought no joy. I could plainly see the dark square of cypress near the courthouse. It was one of three cemeteries in town. They were all distinct. The Jews got the cypress trees, the Catholics had white quartz paths and a sea of crosses and Marys that dazzled the eyes on a sunny day, and the Protestants got this place with green lawns and mausoleums. I don’t know what Buddhists and Muslims do. Go somewhere else, I guess.

  Few tourists knew that the acres of grass I was standing in were kept cropped by a flock of grazing sheep, brought in bimonthly in the spring and summer. They were a sensible choice for a cemetery on a steep slope. The sheep were traditionally pastoral and there was a groundskeeper who made sure that there were no unsightly piles of dung desecrating the graves or visitors’ good shoes during daylight hours. At night the flock was watched over by a sheepdog whose job it was to make sure that the coyotes and mountain lions did not enjoy a free lamb-chop dinner.

  The churchyard is perched halfway up the side of western hills. From there it is easy to see that the town is really just one long chain of buildings put up a hundred years ago out of handmade bricks, made after they had run out of river rock and learned the futility of building with wood. Repeated fires had convinced folks that rock or brick was the sensible choice in a place where summer wildfires are an inevitability.

  What wasn’t so easy to see was that those bricks were made as much from blood, sweat and prayers as from local clay and straw. The current occupants of Irish Camp were white—blinding winter white—but what people had forgotten was that a lot of those prayers embedded in the walls where they lived had been said in foreign tongues: Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Yiddish. They’d all been here, praying for gold, then praying for water, praying to live to see another spring. Gold appealed to all races, and they had come in droves seeking their fortune in the gold-rush of ’49. There were many stories and legends of old murders for the nuggets and flakes—many, many, many. I was most afraid of the Chinese ghost who supposedly haunted the old drug store. He had died in the fire that destroyed what used to be Chinatown. The ghost was said to push people down the backroom stairs that led to one of the numerous underground tunnels that zigzagged under the town. The tunnels were all closed to the public now for safety reasons, but some store owners had failed to board up the entrances. I knew of three that were still open: one ran from under the art gallery that had been a bank, one from the music store that used to be a butcher’s shop—I’d been down there and all the old meat hooks were still embedded in the walls—and one from a used bookstore that used to be a bordello to what is now the courthouse. These tunnels survived because the old merchants found it safer to travel underground to both the bank and the bordello, the former because it protected them from robbers, that latter from their watchful wives who didn’t approve of their spouses visiting the soiled doves.

  I’d heard of one other shaft as well. There was supposed to be a tunnel under The Mule. Supposedly it had collapsed, killing three miners, but I had heard a rumor that the present owner had opened it back up and was using it for storage. With how honeycombed our streets were, it was a wonder we hadn’t had more of them collapse.

  I shivered and pushed the thought of ghosts and cave-ins away. The present day offered tragedy enough. There was no need to be morbid about old losses and the number of souls that seemed to get trapped here when they died.

  As I watched, hoop-skirted women and men in duster coats hurried through the streets, calling out to one another as they organized a posse. A man in black, riding on an equally black mount, galloped onto Grant Street and fired a pistol into the air. The men in dusters responded by running for the horses tied up in front of The Mule. They chased after the bank robbers heading at a full gallop for the part of Vermillion Creek called The Red Rapids.

  I wasn’t seeing specters from the past. These reenactors were my civic-minded neighbors who still enjoyed playing dress-up, and this hubbub meant the rodeo would be coming soon and people were getting ready for the parade, the first big tourist event of the season. It meant we’d be hearing gunshots and general whooping twice a day at eleven and two for the next couple of weeks to bring in spectators who would spend th
eir dollars here.

  Irish Camp has always been deliberately—even theatrically—antique. But these days it was closer to thrift-shop goods than anything that belonged in a museum. The people tended to look a bit vintage, too, artifacts dressed in hand-me-downs that didn’t fit them all that well. There were exceptions, of course, like Linda who ran the Queendom Come boutique and the natty gentleman who had just bought the art gallery and expanded it to include sculpture and mosaics, and even paintings that didn’t have cowboys or miners in them. But by and large, the population wasn’t trying to make Blackwell’s Best Dressed list. That was one of the few things I missed about living in a city. However, for one week a year, the town dressed in its finest—circa 1880. In addition to the rodeo and parade, there was also a pioneer ball held at the old opera house. Period costumes were mandatory. Cal had adored this tradition and dressed up for it every year.

  I swore as something hard bounced off of my head. There’s an acorn season, a time of danger when the little missiles escape the parent oaks and achieve a vertical escape velocity great enough to bury themselves in the stony ground. Or a person’s scalp. However, acorn season was months away. This particular missile hadn’t fallen, but had been hurled at me by another neighborhood squirrel.

  I opened my mouth to scold him for his bad manners, but my ear caught a familiar name and tuned back to the conversation carried on between Molly and Dell as they huddled over their cigarettes beside Dell’s mother’s grave. This combination was like vinegar and waffles. Or peach sauce on lasagna. I didn’t get it, but I listened attentively.

  Sadly, nothing new was being said at the moment. Bored and frustrated with waiting, I looked beyond the bickering pair at the nearly naked rose that twined about the old wrought-iron fence, studying Irv’s pallid nephew. Peter Wilkes, standing alone by a storm-tormented shrub rose, remained a mystery. The recently-active grapevine knew that the sheriff had found him in Lodi, and no one in authority suspected him of anything illegal. In fact, no one suspected him of anything—except me and Atherton.

  Which was understandable, I thought with a frustrated sigh I didn’t bother to contain. Why would anyone suspect this monkey-looking fellow of anything? He didn’t look like the crucible of greed and violence where began a plan for cold-blooded murder. Yet, I believed this primitive-appearing creature, this weak facsimile of Irving with knobby joints and powerful hands, was a murderer. Atherton’s certainty aside, you didn’t travel a hundred miles in the worst weather in a century to visit an uncle you hardly knew unless there was something in it for you.

  I thought about Irv’s corpse and how it had worn the faintest of smiles lying there on the floor. It seemed he’d got the joke before he died. I could—barely—imagine the ignorant nephew demanding money from his uncle and then reacting in anger when Irv laughed at him and said there was none to spare. And Irv probably would have laughed. It wasn’t anything personal, but the thought of him having any money to give to a near-stranger would have incited his sense of the ridiculous. He’d laugh about it for days. Or he would have done so, if someone hadn’t ended his ability to laugh forever.

  “What hast though done? Thou thinkest to conceal it, but thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground,” I muttered, thinking of Cain and the murdered Abel. I swallowed once to shove down sudden bile, surprised as always at my abrupt anger. It vibrated in me a nerve strung the length of my throat and chest that was plucked into sudden life at the memory of Irv’s wry laughter. I reached in my pocket for my roll of antacids and attempted to think calm thoughts.

  “You son of a bitch,” I whispered beneath my breath, which I tried to keep slow and even. “I’m going to prove you did it. I swear to God, you will not get away with this.”

  “You don’t like him, then,” a voice said behind me. The near-whisper made me jump and drop my antacids. My anger had so distracted me that I hadn’t heard anyone approach. Hell, I should have smelled him; he was smoking and smelled like a soggy sidewalk ashtray. His right hand was cupping one of those unfiltered cigarettes that he rolled himself. I’d seen him do his one-handed trick a time or two when he sat outside The Mule on the iron bench that was bolted to the sidewalk with rusting screws. I think he chose to roll his own because of the cool factor, and also because it gave him something to do. Man cannot live by beer guzzling alone.

  I wasn’t fond of the retired steamfitter, but I liked Josh better than Dell and managed to smile slightly at his concerned face and cheerless eyes, whose uneasy gaze seemed to suggest some lingering shame at falling to society’s lowest stratum.

  “No,” I admitted, trying to look welcoming. I bent and picked up my antacids. “I don’t. And I don’t think Irv liked him either.”

  Josh nodded. His neck was so thin that the act looked painful. Poor drunks don’t get fat, even if their livers try their best to give them beer bellies.

  “Molly doesn’t like him at all. Thinks he’s up to something. She says Irv was excited about some new thing—wanted to get us together and talk about some business venture the day before he died, but then he called back to say he couldn’t come; this nephew was coming for a visit. We thought Irv was blowing smoke about a new business but…” Josh looked over my shoulder and then backed away, his lips tightening. His voice was a little louder when he said, “Well, I’ll talk to you later. Glad you could make it, Jillian. Irv would be touched. He always spoke well of you and your husband. If you need any help with the yard now that Irv’s gone, just let me know.”

  “Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that.” And I meant it. I would need help. The garden had been listless all through the heat of summer and autumn. And winter was especially brutal. But given a few days of sun, I knew from experience that the flora would snap into action and I’d need to whack the wild grass back or it would overrun the propane tank. Another week and the sky would begin raining oak pollen, and opportunistic weeds would become aggressive. I had a weed-whacker, but like my stove it hated me, and it refused to cooperate with my trimming efforts.

  Josh nodded and then scuttled away as quickly as his limp would take him. I noticed that he avoided Molly and Dell, and wondered if he thought they would not approve of his talking to me about Irv’s business plans.

  I didn’t turn right away, preferring to take a moment to get my pleasant social face back on. I wasn’t surprised, or particularly pleased, to hear Tyler Murphy’s voice a moment later. Aside from it scaring Josh away just when the conversation was getting interesting, his presence was beginning to bother me in other ways. I didn’t want to admit it, but Tyler Murphy was stirring to life certain feelings—or at least desires—that had been dormant since Cal died. I probably should have been grateful for the proof that I wasn’t emotionally beyond the reach of normal sexual wants, but at that point I mostly resented it. Sex, especially the kind that came with any kind of a relationship, wasn’t something I wanted to think about. Especially not in the cemetery where Cal’s spirit might be watching.

  “The nephew has a boilerplate will naming him heir—and it looks legit,” the sheriff said without preamble. This wasn’t exactly news, but I appreciated his inclination to confide in me. I turned my head finally and wasn’t surprised to see that Tyler’s face looked rather hard. His eyes were lovely, but his gaze could be as disconcerting as a dentist’s above the drill when he’s focused on his work. He really didn’t want Irv’s death to be murder, or for the nephew to have any motive for killing his uncle, but my certainty seemed to have forced him to face the idea that it could be true. And if it was, he wanted to catch the killer. “I don’t know why anyone would want Irv’s old shack, though. Unless there are some drugs up there that we haven’t found yet.”

  I finished crunching my antacid tablet.

  “It could be drugs,” I said, keeping my voice pitched low so it wouldn’t carry. I didn’t believe this theory, but there was no point in dismissing it out of hand—especially if I didn’t want him arbitrarily dismissing my thoughts. “But I don’t think
that’s it. Irv never did anything on his own land. I mean, why risk it when you have the Stanislaus Forest to play in? I know you don’t like the suggestion, but it was more likely gold. You should look at the deed for the land and see if it includes mineral rights.” I didn’t say anything about Josh’s claim that Irv wanted to talk about a new business venture with his friends. There was no point in it. None of Irv’s cronies would talk to the sheriff about anything. And if they thought I was fraternizing with Tyler, Josh might freeze me out too. There had already been an obvious depreciation in goodwill on Dell and Molly’s part because of my reporting Irv’s death to the sheriff instead of calling them. My gut still said that I needed them on my side if I was going to come up with a reasonable, explainable motive for this murder.

  Tyler nodded slowly, glancing at the nephew. I was happy to have his gaze move on to that target.

  “Irv didn’t have much of anything else, and we haven’t found any gold. And we searched that cabin end to end. From what I can tell the marijuana sales were his only income, and the land up the hill isn’t worth spit, so mineral rights are probably irrelevant.” I nodded back. This was true. The land was mostly sandstone, red dirt and misery—impossible to build on or farm. Even the gold miners had given up on it, abandoning their coyote holes when they hit bedrock. Tyler looked away from Irv’s nephew, returning his gaze to my face. “Yet, Mrs. March, in spite of this fact, you think this was a murder for profit—and have from the beginning. I have to ask myself why.”

  I shrugged. “Logically?”

  “I’d prefer that. It looks so much better in my report.” His voice was dry.

  I’d have preferred that, too. I might be going out on a limb here, but I’m betting that more men had walked on the moon than had been hit by lightning and started hearing cats talk about murder. It just didn’t sound plausible, and for sure it could never go in any report.