“I didn’t say they were bothering me,” Eleanore said, suddenly dignified. “I’m an open-minded individual, after all. I just thought it might be bad for business.”
I gave her the you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself look. “If somebody starts tearing up furniture or being noisy, call me,” I said. “And I’ll do something about it.”
A car came up behind me on the road and honked. After all, I was in the middle of the road in my huge station wagon. I waved them on around me and they went around. It was Tobias Thorley, our accordion player. He waved as he went by and Eleanore and I waved back.
“If all they are doing is just looking gay, I can’t do anything about that, and won’t do anything about that,” I said. I put my car back in drive but held the breaks on still. “Is there anything else?” I asked. Eleanore looked at me as if I was speaking Martian. “Look, Eleanore, Larry is my cousin. I played with him as a kid. I love him. He’s not hurting anybody.”
She just looked at me. As I drove away I yelled out the window, “When my cousin Danielle checks in, her husband is full-blooded Indian,” I yelled. “Just in case you got something against Indians.”
I left her standing in the middle of the street, my temples throbbing. I looked in the rearview mirror and her hands were back on her hips. I was happy with myself the way I handled that, but knew that it was wasted on her. Instead of her realizing how petty she was being, she was now probably worrying over when the Indian would arrive.
I headed out of town on New Kassel Outer Road. It was a two-lane blacktop that wound around the small undulating hills that made up the landscape between New Kassel and Wisteria. The trees were bare, the sky a gray swish of an artist’s brush and everything was asleep for the winter.
I passed my Aunt Emily’s farm—she was my mother’s sister—and then passed the intersection for Highway P. New Kassel Outer Road became Main Street once I was in Wisteria. I was accosted with signs for every fast food place imaginable. Wisteria is a small town by the country’s standards, but it was the largest town within ten miles so it had all the fast food places that you wouldn’t find until you got up to Arnold.
I passed by Rally’s, Burger King, Long John Silver’s and then finally came to the stoplight in the middle of all of this food heaven. I turned left up a hill and stopped my car in front of the Sheriff’s Department.
As soon as I was out of the car, the biting wind struck me square in the face. It must have dropped ten degrees in the last two hours. I ran into the office and found the sheriff sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, reading a magazine.
Awards and such in thin black frames hung as crooked as a dog’s hind leg on the wall behind him. The one thing in the office that was in a really nice frame and hanging completely straight was a big 18 × 24-inch picture of all the NFL football helmets.
As soon as he saw me he removed his feet from the desk as if a spider had just crawled across his leg. “Torie,” he said.
“Sheriff Brooke,” I said and walked over to him holding the manila envelope under my arm. I unbuttoned my coat and threw my hat on the top of his desk. It landed right next to a picture of him and my mother taken at last year’s Octoberfest. “Working hard?”
“I was just finishing up paperwork and stuff. My lunch hour,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Got two deputies out in cars today and one is on vacation.”
“Oh,” I said again. “I was wondering if you could help me out on a little project.”
A blank look crossed his face and I knew that I was going to have to fight him to get him to do what I wanted. That expression was complete mental shutdown, no breaking through it, he wasn’t listening to me at all. He leaned back in his chair again. “What?”
I handed him the envelope. He didn’t open it, he just looked at me.
“I received this a few days ago with no return address. No signature on the letter. I went to the library to make sure they were authentic and they are,” I explained slowly.
Now he opened the envelope and pulled the contents out. He scanned quickly, reading only the headlines. “What’s this about?”
“The man shot to death on the front porch is my great-grandfather, Nathaniel Keith,” I said.
“Oh, great,” he said and rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Don’t start until you hear me out,” I said.
The sheriff threw his hands up in surrender. “I’m listening.”
“The articles say that it was unsolved, no real suspects, all that good stuff,” I said.
“But you know different?”
“No. I have no clue as to what happened. The problem I have with this is that we were all told he died in a hunting accident,” I said. “It just bugs me that somebody thought there was something worth hiding enough to make up a lie for their children.”
“I can see how that would bother you,” he said.
I looked at him surprised. He never agreed with me. But if he did he wouldn’t usually say so. Not out loud, at least. His blue eyes showed no emotion other than irritation, but at least he had agreed that he understood.
“Thank you,” I said. “It also bothers me that somebody, who I am fairly safe in saying is a family member, brought this to my attention, but didn’t want me to know who they were.”
The sheriff shrugged. He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffee maker in the corner of the room. The phone rang. “Just a minute, Torie,” he said. “Dispatcher is out for lunch.”
He picked up the phone and I looked outside watching the traffic go up and down Main Street. I could see the bags and packages in people’s cars. There were only about fifteen days left to shop.
“Well, Tobias, I don’t know what to tell you. Just calm down, that cat will come down when it gets hungry enough,” he said. “I can’t leave my office to come and get a cat off of your roof. No, no, Tobias, I have other things to do. Well, if you want to take a hose to it, that’s your business. Hope you can live with yourself, though, since it’s about twenty degrees outside.” He slammed the phone down and cussed at it.
“So, what do you want me to do about this?” Sheriff Brooke asked.
“I was wondering if you could find the investigating officer of the crime—”
“Oh no,” he said. “No.”
“I just want to know, if he’s alive that is, if he would just talk to me about it. If he won’t talk to me, talk to you. I know that there was evidence and things kept out of the papers, there always is. That’s it. He’s got to be retired if he’s still alive, and the case is long closed. What can it hurt?” I asked.
“Does your father know?” he asked.
“Yeah, I talked to him about it last night. I think he wants me to find out who it is as long as I don’t find out who it is.”
“Huh?” he asked.
“I think he’s afraid I might find out it’s one of his brothers or sisters or his parents or something.”
“He could be right,” Sheriff Brooke said. “You willing to take that risk?”
“I’m not saying I want this case solved, I would just like to know more about it, and why we were fed a huge lie about it,” I said. “That’s all.”
Sheriff Brooke took a drink of his coffee and looked at me blankly. He was waiting for me to say something else.
“I just want to know who the suspects were.”
Still the blank expression.
“And the motive. Why would somebody kill my great-grandfather?”
He took another drink of coffee.
“Please,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said like magic. “I’m sure it won’t hurt to just talk to him about it. He may be dead,” he said.
“I realize that, and if he is, well … I’m not sure what I’ll do then.” I tried hard not to let him see how happy I was that he was going to at least try to find the guy. “His name is Hubert McCarthy,” I added and pointed
to the papers.
The sheriff took the papers over to his copy machine and made copies of everything and then handed them back to me. “I am not going to investigate this,” he said. “I’m just going to take you to talk to him if he is willing. That’s it. I’ve got other things to do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Actually, that’s wonderful.”
I put my hat back on my head and buttoned my coat. It was a little strange that I didn’t have to beg, plead and do a polka for him to grant me this one little wish. Why was he being so nice to me?
“Thank you,” I said. “Very much.”
He just nodded to me and I left. As I stepped outside I felt something wet on my face. I looked up at my car and saw tiny snowflakes blowing on the hood. The sheriff was going to find Hubert McCarthy for me and it was snowing. It almost made me forget that I still had to tell my husband about that blue stick at the doctor’s office.
Eight
New Kassel Lake is situated about a mile out of town. It was frozen over completely solid. It wasn’t a large lake, but it was too large to be considered a pond. Fishing was tolerable in the summer, but mostly the lake was used for swimming by the local teenagers. I stood in my ice skates on the edge, waiting for Mary to get her skates laced up. It was about eight o’clock at night and a large portion of my reunion-going family were in attendance skating or sitting on the sidelines by the bonfire talking.
The snow fell lightly, just giving the trees a dusting. This wasn’t a serious snow, yet. The lights around the lake turned the snowflakes a bluish color as they came down out of the sky.
The sheriff sat under an awning that the Rotary Club had built the spring before last, with my mother right next to him. He wouldn’t be caught dead ice skating. At least he had come to watch, though. I looked down at Mary. Her coat was Christmas red, and her mittens were white. Well, they were white when I bought them. She looked up and smiled at me, her cheeks nearly as red as the hood on the coat.
She was a much better skater than I was, but then she took lessons once a week and I rarely skated. I’d had an accident on my grandparents’ farm when I was about six. We thought the ice was frozen, but it wasn’t and it broke, plunging me into the muddy abyss below. My cousins, who were also only about five or six just stood there frozen in shock as I bobbed up and down. There was no time to yell; every time I surfaced I gulped another breath in time to sink again. Eventually the mud and muck just sucked me down farther. The only thing that saved me was that my father, who happened to be outside chopping wood for his mom and dad, came around the corner of the house and saw what was happening. I remember this very large hand appearing out of nowhere and raising me out of the muck and saving my life. Those same hands then beat the living tar out of my cousins.
So, needless to say, frozen ponds hold a certain level of fear for me, but I try not to pass on my fears to my children. I figure they’re going to come up with their own set of fears and phobias, why should I add to them. So, here I was, standing on a frozen body of water ready to ice skate.
Rudy and Rachel were already on the ice. They waved at me from the middle of the lake. Mary stood, ready to skate. We moved out onto the ice, and Mary and Rachel instantly started some sort of romantic make-believe stuff on ice.
Damon Sneed, my favorite male cousin, came swooshing by and nearly spun me around with his g-force, he was skating so fast. “You think you’re something,” I said to him with my hands on my hips. He did a little flip thingy, an axel of some sort, and then came over by me.
“Wow, Damon,” I said, impressed. “When did you learn to skate like that?”
“That is the result of two years in Canada,” he said. “My wife and I skated every weekend.”
“Cool,” I said. I loved Damon. When we were kids I used to call him Demon Seed, instead of Damon Sneed. God he hated that. He was always trying to come up with something to get back at me with, and it was just never as good. He was tall and slender, with black hair and syrupy brown eyes. His complexion was olive and he definitely took after our grandmother, who was French.
“You got a great town, Torie,” he said. “I’ve been here two days and I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun.”
“Well, it’s not my town,” I answered him and fumbled on a bump in the ice. “I just live here.”
“You do much more than just live here,” he said and smiled. “Wish I could have come back in ninety-one.”
“Yeah, where were you again?”
“That was when we were in Canada.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. Damon lived in Arizona now and I’d gone to visit him once. Couldn’t believe it could be so hot and not have one mosquito.
“Hey Damon,” I said. “What do you know about our great-grandpa?”
“Not much,” he said. He was Aunt Charlotte’s son, so I knew that what information he had would come filtered down through his mother. “My dad never liked him too much.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why is that?” I was surprised by this. People never went around praising Nathaniel Keith, but I can’t say that I actually heard anybody put him down either.
Damon shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t think of anything specific,” he said. “Just that he was a drunk and that he liked to chase women.”
“Well, that’s pretty specific if you ask me,” I said. His words didn’t really mean too much to me, because getting drunk and being a womanizer seems to be the thing that people of days gone by tacked on to anybody that they didn’t like.
“I don’t know,” he said and shrugged again. “Why do you ask?” He turned around backward on his skates and skated in front of me, facing me.
“I’m working on a scrapbook type of thing and wanted little anecdotes or personality traits to put with each ancestor,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Then you don’t want the bad stuff.” He looked around his shoulder to see if he was going to run into anybody else on the ice. I was having difficulty in keeping up with him. He was a flawless skater and I was having to work at every stroke.
“If that’s what he was, then that’s what I’ll put in the scrapbook,” I said. I was lying, of course, about the scrapbook. I seemed to do that a lot lately.
“Let me see if I can think of anything that I’ve heard that was good,” he said. “You should really ask Uncle Jed or Aunt Ruth, even Uncle Isaac. They were adults when he died. All I can give you is secondhand stuff.”
“I’m going to,” I said.
“Um,” he said and stroked his chin, deep in thought. “I think I heard my mother say something one time about him being in a swimming accident…”
“Hunting accident,” I corrected.
“No, swimming. He was a young man and saved some boy’s life—from drowning or something like that,” he said.
“Oh,” I answered. I hadn’t heard that one. “Do you know how he died?”
“No,” he said. “How did he die? Wouldn’t you, Miss Genealogist, already know that?”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I just thought I’d see what you knew about it.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “How did he die?”
“Hunting accident,” I said. My nose was numb from the cold and my lips moved slower than normal. Which I’m sure was a relief to Damon. I outtalk most anybody. There was a shirt at the mall I was thinking about buying for myself. It said HELP, I’VE STARTED TALKING AND I CAN’T SHUT UP. Anybody who knows me in the least knows that is perfect for me.
The Doublemint twins skated by, each one holding on to the other one for dear life. That made me feel better. They were Wendy’s kids and not perfect at something. Damon winked at me and went off to chase the twins. Their squeals could be heard all the way into town, I’m sure.
Rudy skated over to me and grabbed my hand. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Oh, fine,” I said. I really needed to tell him about that blue stick at the doctor’s office. He smiled at me and gave me his cutesy look. The one that d
eclared that he was lovable and that I couldn’t resist him in the least. He wore a brown leather coat and one of those toboggan hats that had a ball of fringe at the very end of the yard of material. His hat literally came down to his butt. It looked like one of those long turn-of-the-century sleeping hats. He was just too cute for words.
“Hey,” he said. “How’d your doctor’s appointment go? Do you have mono?”
“No, I don’t have mono,” I said in a vague tone of voice.
“Oh that’s good,” he said. Suddenly a serious look crossed his face. I guess he just thought that maybe I had something worse than mono. I suppose, depending on the angle you took, being pregnant could be worse than mono. I had a cousin once who wished for a tumor when she thought she was pregnant. She was pregnant.
“It’s nothing real serious,” I said to appease his sudden uneasiness. “Well, I guess that depends.”
“What?” he asked. We had made it to the side of the lake where my mother and the sheriff were. They waved to me and I waved back feeling like I was eight years old.
“Well, see…” I began. “There was this blue stick at the doctor’s office—well, actually it was white when it began but it turned blue halfway through it—”
“What are you talking about?” he asked and laughed. “Sometimes I think you deliberately think of the most difficult way to say something just so you have more time at talking.”
“I’m pregnant.”
At that Rudy fell face first on the ice. He yelled out in agony as I heard him go thunk. “Oh my God, Rudy,” I said. I looked down and then I saw the ice turn red. Rudy came up holding his nose, blood soaking his gloves. He gave a real low painful-sounding moan and his eyes watered.
“You’re what?” he said through the glove. “You’re pr … pr … did you say you were pregnant?”
“God, Rudy. Shut up and get over here and sit down.”
The sheriff came walking out onto the ice and all of my family started to gather around. Rudy’s wide-eyed stare never left my face as the sheriff and I helped him walk off the ice. Every now and then his eyes would involuntarily cross. God, that must have hurt.
A Comedy of Heirs Page 5