In a Dark Season

by Vicki Lane

  “My great-grandfather was fascinated by the people of this region. He wrote numerous vignettes that found publication in the periodicals of his day. This has always been one of my favorites.”

  The ancient hickory bark seat creaked as Blake seated himself in the high-backed chair opposite them. He opened the book to a page marked by a yellowed envelope, adjusted his glasses, and began to read.

  “We proceeded with all dispatch along the Buncombe Turnpike but were forced by Old Sol’s departure from the heavens to arrest our voyage at Flores’ Stand. Though less commodious than most inns or ‘stand houses,’ it is an hostelry far surpassing all others in wild beauty and Lucullan fare. The innkeeper, Ish Flores, is a swarthy man of a somewhat forbidding countenance but his gentle nature becomes evident whenever his dark eyes rest on his wife, the lovely Mariah.

  “Our first glimpse of this dusky beauty was as we filed into the long low room filled with rustic tables and benches for the entertainment of travelers. Through an open door at the back of the room, we could see a spacious garden, a veritable cornucopia of fruit and flower. Beyond it lay a snug stone house, the living quarters of our hosts, as I learned later. A wide path led from the house through the garden, and down this path came a veritable vision! Taller than many men, she carried a willow basket laden with rosy-cheeked peaches and her waving black hair cascaded unconfined almost to her knees. There were white flowers at her brow and a smile of transcendent beauty welcomed our weary company.”

  Blake passed the open volume to Elizabeth. Engravings decorated the printed pages—one titled Mariah of the Flowers. The woman was just as he’d described her: smiling, stately, with an exotic beauty that seemed totally incongruous with the time and place.

  “She’s lovely,” Elizabeth murmured, lingering over the illustration before handing the book to Rosemary, who peered intently at the portrait.

  “Does your great-grandfather say where this Mariah and her husband were from?” Rosemary asked, offering the book for her sister’s scrutiny. “Flores seems like a strange name to encounter at that time in western North Carolina. And she’s so unusual looking—not Native American, with that wavy hair; not African-American either. Where was their stand?”

  Blake answered with smug satisfaction. “Just a few miles downriver, as a matter of fact. The little stone house he describes still exists, though the stand is gone. My ancestor was evidently fascinated with the Floreses. He made frequent visits to them after his marriage. The Flores people were Melungeons.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Melungeons…I think I’ve heard that term but—”

  “They’re a people of mixed race; the name may come from the French word mélange.” Thomas Blake removed his glasses, breathed on the thick lenses, and began to polish them with his shirttail as he continued his explanation.

  “Some ethnologists call the Melungeon people tri-racial isolates—a mix of African-American, Caucasian, and Native American who’ve maintained a distinct identity over the years—but there are other, more romantic theories—a hypothesized connection with Portuguese explorers or shipwrecked Carthaginians intermarrying with Native Americans.”

  Laurel looked up from the picture of the dark-haired woman. “Awesome! And they lived near here? Are there any people like that still around? I’ve sure never heard of anyone called Flores in Marshall County. And I’ve never heard of Melungeons.”

  “The people who identified themselves as Melungeon seem to have been concentrated in east Tennessee. The Flores couple evidently came to Marshall County from that region by a rather circuitous route. It speaks well for the tolerance of the region that these two who were, after all, people of color, should have prospered as landowners and innkeepers. I’ve tried to learn more of them but there’s very little—and I haven’t been able to trace any descendants.”

  He held up the yellowed envelope he’d taken from the book. “This is a transcript of a letter my honored ancestor sent to his brother after his marriage to a Ransom girl. It contains the only other reference to Ish and Mariah Flores that I have discovered.”

  Blake resumed his glasses and unfolded the closely typed pages. He quickly skimmed the first page, moving his lips slightly as he read. “Hmm…no…this first part isn’t relevant—suffice it to say that he was resigned to his marriage and equally resigned to the fact that he and his untutored mountain bride would be an embarrassment to his wealthy family in Charleston.”

  The Troll’s eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses. “The Blakes seem to have been of some consequence in that fair city before the War Between the States. The fact is, my esteemed progenitor was a remittance man—as long as he stayed away from Charleston, he received a quarterly allowance from his family.”

  The thin onion-skin pages crackled as Blake turned them over. “Yes, here it is. He refers to ‘a Melungeon family—those strange dark people of mixed race who insist that they descend from the intermarriage of early Portuguese explorers with indigenous peoples. The Flores, whose stand is just downriver from Gudger’s Stand (of which more later) is owned by the swarthy Ish Flores, a self-proclaimed Melungeon. His equally dusky wife, Mariah, is a noted herbalist and bee mistress. She makes fragrant, clean-burning, beeswax candles, a vast improvement upon the tallow candles and bear oil dips that most households employ. Mariah is also renowned for her honey wine—a potent libation that must be identical to the metheglin of Olde England.

  “‘The comely Mariah is a veritable Pomona—her vegetables, fruits, and flowers are horticultural marvels. She says that these all derive from seeds and slips given her by an old man she and Ish encountered in their travels before coming to this county.

  “‘I give you Ish’s own words: “We come out of Tennessee along a trail the Cherokee used, just us and our old piebald mare, heavy-laden with our household goods. Up on the bald some call Max Patch the weather turned wicked and Mariah was took bad with a fever in her lungs. She would surely have perished had not a man called Suttles, a true good Samaritan on a white mule, found us there and made us welcome at his place, the warmest snuggest cabin-house you ever did see. We stayed with this fine man for quite a little time and when Mariah was better and able to travel, he gave her seeds and starts of some of the plants we have here. Hit seems like they always bloom fuller and their flowers are brighter and the fruit sweeter—” ’”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Blake, what was the name of the man on the white mule?” A jolt of recognition had shot through her at the mention of Max Patch; Elizabeth once again felt the dizzying sensation of being on the other side of the mirror. Even this room, a jumble of old and new, and this man, Thomas Blake, reading to us the words of Thomas Blake of a century and a half ago.

  The present-day Thomas Blake looked up from the typescript. “Suttles—a not uncommon name, I believe. Interestingly enough, some of those very fruit trees mentioned here still survive around that little stone house. I hike down there occasionally to, as it were, commune with the spirits.”

  He folded the pages carefully and returned them to the envelope. “That’s the sum of what Great-grandfather Thomas had to say about the Floreses directly. But from passing references in his writing, I am led to believe that he saw their place as an idyllic refuge from family life. He and his wife had thirteen children and they all lived on the upper floor of this very building, after his father-in-law erected this establishment and put him in charge.” The Troll gestured at the venerable oak rolltop desk behind him. “That was his, as were many of the volumes in the bookcase beside it. I wonder what kind of shopkeeper he made. I suspect that my great-grandmother Nettie Mae must have been the business mind of the two—I have some of the account books from their time and they are in a precise feminine hand—not the dashing scrawl of his writings.”

  “That’s so cool—that you’re living in the same place where your great-grandfather lived—I’ll bet you feel really close to him.” Laurel’s look of wide-eyed wonder glanced over the framed photos on the wall, groups of dark-garbed, unsmi
ling individuals. “Do you write too? This is an awesome place for a writer.”

  Thomas Blake was silent for a moment. Then, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular, he said, “I tell myself I’m writing a great antiwar novel, the next Red Badge of Courage or Catch 22, but I fear—I’m very much afraid that what I’m really doing is drinking myself to death.”

  Chapter 23

  Converging Threads

  Saturday, December 23

  A whorehouse—here in bone-dry, Bible-thumping Marshall County? Go on, Mac, pull the other one! The church ladies would have raided this place with pitchforks.”

  Mackenzie Blaine wiped at the dusty glass of the window and peered out toward the river. “Well, I guess it was more like a house of accommodation, not actually a bordello or whatever they used to call them. From what I’ve been told, when the railroad came through and the big cattle drives ended, whoever owned the stand put in these partitions to turn the drovers’ inn into a regular hotel. Thing was, there were better hotels not too far off, in Ransom or, going the other way, in Hot Springs.

  “So before long, this turned into the area’s no-tell motel—fellas wanting to get drunk away from their wives’ eyes and still have a bed to pass out on, fellas slipping around on their spouses, couples looking to break the Seventh Commandment in more comfort than a hay barn allowed—that sort of thing. And there were usually a few country girls hanging around downstairs where the bootleg beer and liquor was sold, girls who were hoping to get together enough money for a ticket out of the mountains. They weren’t quite hookers; they called themselves waitresses—but most any man with a few dollars and a need on him could find company for the night.

  “And when the passenger trains quit running, old Revis kept on selling liquor, and there were still plenty of underage young folks and boozy old lowlifes to keep him in business. No one even bothered to pretend that this was still a hotel, but anyone could slip the old boy a few bucks and get the use of one of these rooms for the night, no questions asked. It went on like that till Revis got himself killed. Then Miss Barrett locked up the place and threw away the key.”

  Phillip looked at the stained mattress, then at the bolt on the door. “Where the hell was the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department when all this was going on?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Well, I’d guess they were likely getting a taste of Revis’s profits. Or some action, on the house. Or both. But I don’t know that for sure. One of the old-timers told me that the Holcombe brothers mainly saw Gudger’s Stand as a convenient way of knowing where the criminal element on this end of the county was likely to be on any given night.”

  “So are we looking for something, Mac, or what? I appreciate the tour and all; it’s an interesting old place—but why are we here?”

  “We’re here because all the threads lead here. Revis died in the room below us; Miss Barrett jumped from the porch out there; the preacher’s suicide note mentioned that silo across the road; there were human remains in the silo…even that Hummer someone burned up ties in with the stand, since it belonged to the developers who want to buy this place. But I just can’t seem to get a fix on how all these things are connected.”

  As he spoke, Blaine turned away from the dusty window and gave Phillip an embarrassed half-smile. “Hell, I don’t know, Hawk, I guess I came here looking for inspiration—maybe hoping the house might tell me something…or you might get an idea. And then there’s the time element—if the county commissioners go through with the taking people are whispering about, that company young Holcombe’s friend owns is likely to gut this place and turn it into a lodge or god knows what—if they don’t just burn it down and put up something on top of the ashes. If there’s anything to find here, this could be our last chance.”

  Phillip moved to stand beside his friend, bringing his face close to the windowpanes in an attempt to see the fields that lay by the river.

  “You forgot the other thread, Mac—that alleged gang rape in the old school bus. That bus is right over there—and didn’t the woman say she’d been drinking just before? Maybe she’d been.”

  Sweet Jesus, what is she up to now? The thought interrupted his sentence, but then he resumed. “Mac, did you notice Elizabeth’s jeep down there in front of that old brick building? And, yep, there they are—Lizabeth and the girls coming out the door. What the hell are they doing down there?”

  Mackenzie’s response was succinct and surprising. “Investigation, I have no doubt. Open the window and holler at your lady friend, Hawk. Ask her to join us. Maybe the house’ll talk to her.”

  “Why does Mackenzie want to see me?” Elizabeth asked as she made her way past the sheriff’s cruiser. “Will it take long? The girls are in a hurry to get back to the farm. I was going to run them back home, then go see Nola.”

  Phillip lifted open-palmed hands. “You got me, Lizabeth. I don’t know exactly what Mac wants. But you were saying the other day that you’d never seen the inside of this old place. Now’s your chance and with two armed escorts to keep the ghosts away.” His face relaxed into a cheerful expression. “Tell you what, why don’t you let the girls take your car on back to the farm and you come with me? We could grab a bite somewhere first and then I’ll take you to see Miss Barrett.”

  As she followed Phillip along the back porch to the door, Elizabeth noticed, with a familiar pang of revulsion, the dangling rubber dolls. Their once pink bodies were dappled with black mildew, and they shuddered and danced on the weathered clothesline. It’s the vibration of our footsteps that’s making them jiggle—that’s all. Maybe I could just pull them down and never have to look at them again. Maybe—

  But Phillip was opening the door and motioning her in. “Look at the size of these logs, sweetheart. And wait till you see the fireplaces!”

  She stepped through the door into the little passageway and was assailed instantly by a confusion of sensations—cold dry air, carrying the scent of decay and rat droppings; the loom of the giant chestnut logs to either side of her; and the ceiling pressing claustrophobically low, mere inches above her head. There was hollow silence in which the pounding of her own pulse seemed amplified till it could be mistaken for the heartbeat of the old house itself.

  Dizzied, it’s coming from the light outside into this dark stuffy little hall, she put out a hand to steady herself. The slight curve of the log met and accepted her hand, its polished smoothness speaking of the many other hands, long gone to dust, that had slid over it. Closing her eyes, she seemed to hear the tread of heavy boots, the scrape and whine of a fiddle, the laughter of drunken men and women, accompanied by a phantom whiff compounded of sweat, whisky, and tobacco.

  “Lizabeth, are you all right?” Phillip’s voice brought her back to the present.

  “I’m good. Just trying to get adjusted to the dim light. Here and now, Elizabeth, here and now. Where’s Mackenzie? I want to find out if I’m in trouble.”

  “In here.” The sheriff’s voice emanated from the open door to the right. As she entered the room, Mackenzie Blaine turned a wry look on her and gestured to the tarnished brass bed in the corner. “Thought as long as you were out investigating things, Elizabeth, you’d be interested in the scene of a crime. This is where Revis died, back in ’96.”

  It’s odd. The first time I met Mackenzie, when Miss Birdie was trying to find out about Cletus, I really disliked him. And he thought I was just a nosy woman, trying to second-guess the authorities. Which, I guess, I was…am. But now that I’ve gotten to know him as a friend of Phillip’s, I can understand his point of view a lot better. And, for whatever reason, at least he no longer treats me like a meddling idiot. What was it Phillip told me he said—Miz Goodweather has that blasted woman’s-intuition thing going for her, plus the instincts of a snapping turtle—she won’t let go of a problem.

  “Hey, Mackenzie, how nice of you. I’ve always wondered what this place looked like inside. But what’re you and Phillip doing here?”

  She was surprised at his
candor as he explained the various threads of the several unsolved cases, concluding with “…and they all lead to Gudger’s Stand. So I thought Hawk and I’d come here and brainstorm a little about how or if all these cases connect. Maybe get some inspiration from the place. Then, what d’ya know, Hawk looks out the window and there you are, coming out of Blake’s crib. And I figure you’ve been asking questions and I also figure he may have told you more than he’d tell me. So, what have you learned from our resident eccentric?”

  Before replying, Elizabeth looked around the lifeless room. The mattress had been stripped bare; two lumpy ticking-covered pillows had been tossed casually at the foot. To one side of the vast stone fireplace, a vinyl-covered recliner extended its footrest, almost touching a cheap television atop a flimsy metal stand. Strips of foil on the rabbit-ears antenna suggested that reception had been poor.

  “Okay, Mackenzie, I was asking some questions. But really it was more about an ancestor of his way back. Mr. Blake has a wealth of information about the mid-1800s. But he’s not inclined to dwell on the recent past.”

  “No, he wouldn’t be,” Blaine agreed. “He’s probably killed enough brain cells that the recent past is just a blur.” The sheriff was moving cautiously around the room now, inspecting first the battered chest of drawers, then the contents of an ancient trunk that stood at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know why I bother; after this long if there was anything incriminating, the murderer would likely have gotten rid of it.”