Death Opens a Window
Page 25
Chapter 42
Within minutes of arriving at Willow Springs Retirement Home the next morning, Emory and Jeff delivered the news to Ms. Mary Belle of her nephew’s accidental fall. (They omitted the details of Luke’s crimes to preserve her memory of him.) The PIs consoled her and waited for her to come to terms with his passing before bringing up the fact that he had been successful in getting her property back.
With the help of her new friends, Ms. Mary Belle needed little time to pack her things and leave. On the way to her once and future home, she was as gabby and giddy as a schoolgirl, giving Jeff and Emory scant time to comment before she began each new story. Once the car came to a stop in front of her old house, she hopped out and told the men, “Get m’ stuff inna m’ house. I’m gonna see m’ woods.”
“Ms. Mary Belle!” Emory called. “Wait! I have something to show you.”
Copper cane in hand, she didn’t wait. By the time they caught up to her, she was standing in front of a gravestone just inside the woods.
Emory wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulder. “I wanted to tell you. I had your Specter buried here.” He saw tears pooling in her eyes before the flood started. “Is that okay?”
Ms. Mary Belle dropped her cane and threw her arms around his waist, squeezing with all her might. “Thank you,” she exhaled in between shudders of quiet wailing. When she broke from him, she wiped away her tears and knelt at the gravestone. “I got lots ta catch you up on, Specter.”
Jeff picked up her cane and handed it to her, and she walked – or pranced – into the woods, talking to her Specter.
“You didn’t tell her about the zinc?”
“I will. I’m just letting her get settled in.” Emory gestured toward her. “I really don’t think she’s going to care about the money. She loves the land too much to destroy it with a mine.”
“What’s going to happen when she dies?”
“I doubt she has a will, so the state will get it. Hopefully, a good portion of the money will stay local. These mountain communities could use it.”
Jeff sighed and kicked at the ground. “So I guess this is it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The case is over. You’ll be going back to the TBI.”
“And here I thought you were a detective. You really do need my help.”
“What are you saying?”
Emory grabbed Jeff’s collar and drew him in for a kiss. When they parted, Ms. Mary Belle was standing there, staring at them. She pointed to Jeff. “I made that love charm too po’erful. You’re attractin’ men. Gimme it, and I’ll dampen it for you.”
Jeff laughed. “Don’t worry about it. It’s working fine.”
Emory told him, “I just thought of something. We still don’t know the identity of the ski mask man.”
“That kiss made you think of him. You’ve got some hidden issues.”
“No, I just don’t like loose ends.”
Jeff put his arm around him as he led him back to the car. “Maybe that will be our next case. Partner.”
Jeff and Virginia walked down the sidewalk, leading a blindfolded Emory. “Guys, is this really necessary?”
Virginia answered him. “It’s called a surprise for a reason.”
Jeff positioned Emory in front of a window. “And we’re here.”
Emory removed the blindfold and realized they were standing outside the building attached to theirs. “Am I facing the wrong way?”
Virginia laughed, and Jeff explained it to him. “This is the surprise. We’re buying this little store so you can have your own office.”
Virginia patted her chest. “So I can get mine back to myself.”
Jeff clutched Emory with one hand and used the other to paint an imaginary canvas. “We’re going to break a hole into the wall and put a door to connect your office to Virginia’s, across from the door that leads to mine.”
“Plus, it has a basement,” said Virginia. “We can also knock down the wall between it and the one in our building to increase our storage space.”
Jeff dropped his arms. “I didn’t see a basement.”
“If you had taken the time to tour the place with the real estate agent –”
“I didn’t need to. I trust your judgement.”
Virginia turned her attention back to Emory. “Well what do you think?”
Emory was stunned and didn’t know what to say at first. “I love it. I really love it.”
“Excellent!” Jeff gave him a bear hug. “We’ll fix it up nice like mine.”
“Like yours? It’s my office. I should decorate it the way I want.”
Jeff dismissed the idea. “Oh no, I’ve seen your anti-style.”
Emory suggested, “Let’s put it to a vote.”
“Vote? Virginia agrees with me.”
They both waited for her response. “I’m going to have to side with Emory on this. It’s his office.”
“What?” Jeff followed the other two back to the office. “Is that how it’s going to be now, the two of you ganging up on me. Virginia, you’re supposed to be my friend.”
Chapter 43
Emory walked into his living room with a glass of wine in one hand and the unopened manila envelope in the other. He placed the glass on the end table, sat on the couch and opened the file. He pulled out a thin stack of documents and began reading. He had only skimmed to the middle of the first page when he gasped, “Oh my god!”
After the last business closed for the night in the Old City district of Knoxville, a rental truck pulled in front of Mourning Dove Investigations and parked. Wearing gloves, Jeff Woodard jumped from the driver seat and retrieved an empty dolly from the back.
Rolling the dolly inside Mourning Dove, he made sure the front door locked behind him before pushing it into his office. He pulled on The Secret in the Old Attic to open the passage behind the bookshelf near his desk. Instead of taking the spiral staircase to his second-floor apartment, he carried the dolly down the stairs that led to the basement. After the last step, he reached his free hand up to yank the pull chain of the ceiling lightbulb.
To his right, beyond a few antique chairs and tables, he saw the old leather bar from the building’s speakeasy past. Behind it, on a melting wall of mirror, a sign in faded red paint proclaimed, “The Prohibition Perdition.” The setting always sparked a Gatsby-esque daydream of What if I had been born 100 years earlier?
His eyes veered left, over the plastic bins of office records and memories from his past to the red brick wall opposite him. That’s the common wall with the new space.
Leaving the dolly at the foot of the stairs, Jeff looked for something he could use as a shovel. He grabbed a three-hole punch from the metal office supply shelf at his left and proceeded to the wall. Each step he took puffed dust into the air, as the untended hardwood floor had long since disintegrated into the earth it had once covered. The dust trail stopped in front of several bins stacked against the wall. One at a time, he moved the bins a few feet away before dropping to his knees.
Jeff raked the dirt with the edge of the three-hole punch over and over again until it scraped against a solid wooden surface that had been buried beneath. He dug a trench to outline the wood – a rectangle about six-and-a-half feet by two feet. He dropped the three-hole punch and dusted the midsection of the wood with his palms, exposing text painted in cerulean blue:
The mourning dove flies
On the broken heart’s wings.
The mourning dove cries
While the thoughtless bird sings.
And the mourning dove dies
In the fervor hate brings.
Jeff wrapped his fingers around one of the long edges of the wood and pulled open the pine coffin. He glanced at the decomposing body inside, lowered his face and sighed.
Epilogue
Curled up on his couch with Bobbie nestled beside him, Jeff finished typing his case report into his laptop. When he was done, he closed the file and looked at the name
of the document, which as usual, he left as a sequential case number until it was finished. He right-clicked on the file and changed the name to “Case of Death Opens a Window” before moving it to the folder named…
Case Closed
Don't miss out!
Click the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever Mikel J. Wilson publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.
https://books2read.com/r/B-A-ULHF-YJEV
Connecting independent readers to independent writers.
Also by Mikel J. Wilson
Mourning Dove Mysteries
Murder on the Lake of Fire
Death Opens a Window (Coming Soon)
Watch for more at Mikel J. Wilson’s site.
About the Author
Mystery and science fiction author Mikel J. Wilson received widespread critical praise for his debut novel, Sedona: The Lost Vortex, a science fiction book based on the Northern Arizona town’s legends of energy vortexes and dimensional travel. Wilson now draws on his Southern roots for the Mourning Dove Mysteries, a series of novels featuring bizarre murders in the Smoky Mountains region of Tennessee.
Read more at Mikel J. Wilson’s site.