The Rosewood Casket

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “So you want me to take the evidence to the crime lab to see if they can determine cause of death.”

  Spencer Arrowood frowned. “No, I don’t want you to. I don’t see that we have any choice in the matter, though. I wish to God that Nora Bonesteel had just left those bones where they were, if she’s going to be so secretive about it. It’s one thing to give this child a decent burial, but I don’t need to be dragging old folks into court for things that most likely happened way before we were born.”

  LeDonne shrugged. “No statute of limitations on murder.”

  “You just don’t see shades of gray, do you, LeDonne?” sighed Spencer Arrowood. “I am not letting a child killer get off. I went ahead with the Harkryder case, didn’t I? And I sure felt sorry for that little girl. But this child”—he indicated the yellowed heap of bones—“is probably older than we are.”

  LeDonne was unmoved. “That’s an S-W-A-G,” he said.

  “A scientific wild-ass guess? Sure, it is. I’ll bet I’m not far off the mark, though. Still, there’s no point in arguing with you, because we have to investigate this matter, like it or not, and the bones have to be sent for analysis.”

  “You’re not detaining Miss Bonesteel, then?”

  “You mean pay board for her to go sit in a jail in Erwin? I think she’s more in solitary in that house of hers on Ashe Mountain. A lot of folks wonder how she stands it alone up there. Besides, we don’t even have a cause of death for this individual, much less evidence of a crime. Being in possession of old bones, and asking that they receive a decent burial, is not against the law. I will agree with you that it is odd as hell, but that’s not illegal either. So, I’d say that detaining Nora Bonesteel is not an option, even if I were inclined to do it, which, Lord knows, I’m not.”

  LeDonne shrugged. “Okay, your call. I’ll deliver the package. You want a rush job?”

  “Not particularly. So we’ll probably know in two days. If I wanted an answer in a hurry, they’d take weeks. I wish we could wait until Martha got back from Walters State. Maybe she could get some kind of an answer out of an old woman.”

  LeDonne came as close as he ever got to a smile. “Deputize your mother.”

  “No,” said Spencer. “I think there’s somebody else I might try asking first.”

  * * *

  Nora Bonesteel had not said a word since Jane Arrowood put her in the car. Spencer had said that it was all right for her to take the old woman home, but he wouldn’t say what he’d talked to her about.

  “I was thinking about Randall Stargill,” Nora Bonesteel said at last. “We’ve been apart for a long time now, but it still seems strange to think of waking up in a world that he’s not in any more.”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “I felt that way when Hank died. I did miss him at first—more than I thought I would, perhaps—but above all there was that eerie feeling that part of me had gone, too. Of course, we had been married a long time, Hank and I. I’d have thought that you’d have got used to being without Randall.”

  “Oh, yes, I learned that lesson a good while back. Cried buckets about it, too, but I knew that’s how it was meant to be. It troubled him that I—saw things. And Clarsie was a sweet, quiet girl, who would give him a peaceful life. At least I hope he found peace. He wasn’t a happy young man.

  “We’d known each other since grammar school, you know. It was a one-room school—one teacher for all the grades—and they promoted you if you could do the work of the next grade, so pretty soon I got put up with Randall.” Nora Bonesteel smiled a little. “I lasted a day in second grade. When Teacher caught me reading Zane Grey behind my spelling book, she moved me on up to third. Randall was small for his age, and I was younger, so I guess we were just drawn together.”

  Jane Arrowood slowed the car down to take a curve of the two-lane Ashe Mountain Road. On the left, the trees parted for a few yards, giving travelers a glimpse of the brown vista below, just tinged with the first green of spring. “And the two of you became sweethearts when you got older?”

  “Yes. It just seemed natural for us to be together. We had been—most always. And I think Randall was lonely. He still missed—someone.”

  “Were your families close?”

  Nora Bonesteel considered it. “Neighbors,” she said at last. “Stargills kept to themselves. Old Mrs. Stargill didn’t much care for visitors. She could be a cold woman, although she liked Randall well enough—him being her grandson and all. Don’t think she cared for his mother much, though. My grandma used to speak about it now and again—not to me, of course, but children don’t miss much, do they?”

  “No. Not much.” Jane Arrowood had lived most of her life in Wake County, but she couldn’t remember anything about the Stargills. Not that far back. Seventy years ago. Odd to be gossiping about bad blood in families that had long since returned to dust. She searched her memory for details about the family, but she remembered nothing. “Who was Randall Stargill’s mother, anyway?”

  “Her name was Luray. She was a wisp of a blonde, chocolate box pretty, but she wasn’t the class of the Stargills. Father was a laborer in the town, I think. No land, no name, no money. Harsh things were said about her among the neighbors.”

  Jane Arrowood smiled. “It would seem funny to outsiders to think of poor farmers giving themselves airs above town folks who weren’t very much worse off. I guess the land made them gentry. I know what you mean, though.”

  “Of course you do,” said Nora Bonesteel. “You’re a Miller, married to an Arrowood. You’re blood kin to the Honeycutts, the McCourys, and the Barnetts. Your people settled these mountains before the Cherokee left for Oklahoma. That makes you one of the old ones—by marriage, at least. You belong.”

  “But Randall’s mother didn’t belong.”

  Nora Bonesteel nodded. “Never would. Takes more than a wedding ring to bring you in. I remember thinking how faded she looked, young as she was. Looking back on it, I think she may have been afraid of Old Miz Stargill. Randall’s daddy wasn’t around. I do remember that. It must have been hard for her, left on that lonesome farm where she wasn’t wanted.”

  “It’s a wonder she stayed.”

  “Where else could she go?”

  They were midway up the mountain now. Oak branches formed an arch over the winding road. Only a few miles more to Nora Bonesteel’s house in the meadow near the summit. Jane decided that she had to change the subject now, before the chance eluded her altogether.

  “Now, you know I’m not one to pry,” she began. She and Nora looked at each other and laughed. “Well, not more than usual for an old woman in a small town,” she admitted. “And I don’t know what my Spencer was talking to you about today, but I do know you were more than upset about it. I kept hoping you’d bring the subject up on the drive up here, but since you haven’t, I’ll just come right out and say that if there’s anything troubling you, I’ll do whatever I can to help. I’ve known you a long time, Nora Bonesteel, and you always have a reason for doing things—even if it takes the rest of us a while to figure out what it is.”

  The old woman sighed. “It’s for Randall—for old times’ sake. Something that had to be done. I keep forgetting how folks always want an explanation for every single thing, but it’s not mine to give.”

  “If you need anything, you let me know,” said Jane. “We’re old friends. I’ll talk to Spencer for you, if that would help.”

  “No, Jane. Just tell him—tell him to be careful—of old friends.”

  * * *

  Clayt Stargill lay on his back, and looked up at the blue sky, streaked only with wisps of clouds far in the distance. Beside him, Kayla squinted up at the brightness. “What are we looking for?” she asked.

  “Commuters,” said Clayt. “Look! Here comes one.”

  “It’s a big brown bird,” said Kayla, after watching a speck in the sky loom larger above her, until she could make out brown wings and a splash of white about the tail. “Hawk?”

  “Right. A
mountaintop is a good place to see one. See, this chain of mountains—the Appalachians—is a celestial interstate. The mountains run north to southwest all the way from Canada down to northern Alabama. Easy to see from the air. In the spring and the fall birds use the unbroken line of ridges as a navigation path when they migrate. Migrating means they go someplace warm for the winter.” He pointed up at the hawk, drifting above them in a lazy circle. “The big boys—like that fellow right above us—ride the thermals between the peaks and the valleys, using the changing air temperature to move them along.”

  After Clayt returned from his visit to the Stallards, he’d found Kayla sitting on the front porch in her blue windbreaker and her faded sneakers, waiting for him to take her on the promised nature hike. He got permission from Kelley, who seem relieved to have her daughter out from underfoot, and Kayla climbed back into the truck, ready to see the wilderness. Clayt took her up a logging road to a mountain meadow with a view of all creation. It was one of his favorite spots for thinking about the mountains, past and present, his and Daniel’s, and how they diverged, and when.

  The wind was brisk, as it always was on a mountaintop in March, but Kayla claimed she wasn’t cold, so they trooped out into the meadow, examining a coltsfoot plant in bloom and deer tracks as they went along.

  Kayla got to her feet, and looked out at the folds of mountains that stretched away into the distant haze, like so many colored headbands piled in a drawer. “No houses,” she said. “Can’t see any traffic, either. So, you come here a lot?”

  “Right often.”

  “Why? Is this what Daniel Boone saw?”

  “Not even close,” said Clayt. “But it’s the best we can do nowadays.”

  Kayla looked around her—long brown meadow grass, evergreens and just leafed hardwoods, and here and there a splash of a golden forsythia. “Everything looks okay to me. How is it different?”

  Clayt pointed to the clouded peaks on the horizon. “It’s a brisk spring day. Not much pollution, compared to the summertime haze. I’d say you’re seeing mountains that are about twelve miles away,” he told her. “In 1761—Daniel Boone’s time—you could have seen into the distance for ninety miles.”

  “How far is that?”

  “All the way from here to Knoxville. To the Virginia Blue Ridge. I can’t even imagine it myself.”

  “So how come we can’t do that today?”

  “Pollution.”

  Kayla peered up at the blue sky. “Looks okay to me.”

  “You’ve never seen a clear sky,” Clayt told her. “When I was a kid, visibility was maybe twenty miles—a far cry from Daniel’s time, but better than now.”

  “So can we fix it?”

  “I doubt it. Too many cars, factories, furnaces. Even burning wood in a log cabin messed up the air quality, so it was starting to go, even back in Daniel’s lifetime. We’ll never get back to 1761. You asked how it was different. Look around you. See the trees? They’re different now. Small, for one thing. There was a lot of virgin timber up here then. Full grown trees that had never been cut, hundreds of feet tall. These woods of today would look mighty puny compared to them.”

  “There’s still deer around, isn’t there?” She said idn’t, not isn’t; Clayt wondered if that nugget of regional speech could be traced back across the water to the Hebrides or the glens of Antrim.

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t expect to see them in broad daylight, though. They don’t like to be easy to spot out in the open. Look for them at the edge of the woods at twilight. The old Celtic word for deer meant the children of the mist.”

  “Celtic?”

  “Like Ireland,” Clayt explained. “St. Patrick. Leprechauns.”

  “Johnny Cash,” said Kayla. “He’s got a song called ‘Forty Shades of Green’ that he wrote about Ireland. He’s really nice, and we have all his albums.”

  “You must enjoy living in Nashville, and getting to meet all those famous people,” smiled Clayt.

  “I wish we could live up here,” said Kayla.

  “It’s not to everybody’s taste. Charles Martin never cared for it. You can’t make much money up in these hills. The Irish had another saying: the Green Martyrdom. Martyrdom means that you are put to death for what you believe, like ancient Christians getting thrown to the lions in the arena. And green martyrdom was when the missionaries had to go to some backwater place like Ireland—like this—to convert the local heathens. They must have thought that being stuck out here in the wilderness was like being dead. So sometimes I tell people that staying up here in the Smokies is my green martyrdom.”

  “It’s not, though,” said Kayla. “Those old fellas in Ireland thought it was punishment to have to live in the country, but you think it’s heaven up here.”

  Clayt smiled at her. “I guess sainthood is a state of mind.”

  * * *

  Charles Martin Stargill had been sent down the mountain for provisions. His sister-in-law Lilah had checked the larder and found it wanting, so the women had conferred, weighed the merits of several possible menus, and after due consideration, they had drawn up a list. Charles Martin, who had the misfortune of being the first male to walk into the kitchen after the list had been made, was sent off to the Hamelin Mick or Mack to purchase supplies.

  He had parked the Lexus in the gravel lot as far as he could get from the rusting Chevys and battered pickups. Now, squinting at the penciled list, he pushed the shopping buggy down the canned goods aisle, searching for the brand names Lilah had specified. He wondered if he could make substitutions.

  “Hello, Charlie,” said a familiar voice behind him.

  He turned, with his celebrity smile plastered on, and ready to make small talk until he could figure out the identity of this well-wisher from his past, but the delaying tactics proved unnecessary, and the smile sagged. He would have known Dovey Stallard anywhere. She had that same dark hair, and the freckled nose, shiny from lack of face powder, and she looked just the same as he remembered her, Levi’s and all. She wasn’t holding any groceries.

  “Well, hello, Dovey,” he said, giving her the quick kiss on the cheek that passes for a cordial nod among show business folk. She did not return the embrace. “I was hoping I’d get to see you,” he lied. “I wish we could go somewhere and catch up on old times, but I have to get this shopping done, or Robert’s wife will have my hide.” He waved the list with a helpless smile.

  Dovey looked at him. “Charlie, you can’t read that fine print worth a damn without your reading glasses, can you?”

  His smile froze. “How did you—I mean—”

  “I was watching you. You were holding the paper about a mile from your face, and squinting at it like it was Greek. You couldn’t even read the labels on the cans. Why don’t you wear reading glasses?”

  “Left ’em at home,” he said.

  Her look said that she knew exactly why he wouldn’t wear them, but she only smiled and reached for the list. “Why don’t I walk along with you and read out the items?”

  “It’s mighty nice of you to offer, Dovey, but don’t you have shopping to do?”

  She shrugged. “Not much. With just Dad and me, there’s not much cooking to be done. He’s been off his feed lately anyhow, what with all this farm trouble. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

  “Clayt told us about you two finding Daddy, and getting help, and all. I sure do want to thank you for that, Dovey.”

  “We did what we could,” she said. “Don’t get that mayonnaise, Charlie. You know y’all won’t eat anything but Duke’s. Your sister-in-law is from Ohio, so she doesn’t know any better.” She put a black-labeled jar into the buggy, and motioned for him to replace the one he had chosen. “Take a left at the end of this aisle.”

  “How have you been?” Charles Martin asked, wondering as he said it if it was a safe question.

  “I’ve been better,” she said. “We’ve had a run of bad luck on the farm. Barn burned down last year, and now they’re after us abou
t the taxes. I guess you were right, Charlie.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I guess I should have married you.”

  Right in the middle of the aisle at the Mick or Mack, he thought. Dovey Stallard never did have a lick of tact or timing. And that admission could hardly be called a triumph on his part, because she still wasn’t saying she loved him. Just that she’d missed out on a good investment. He patted her arm, and put on his aw-shucks grin. “Shoot fire, Dovey,” he said. “You had a narrow escape. Show business is a hard enough life for the performer, but for the person who’s married to one, it must be like doing life in Leavenworth.”

  She was stacking packages of spaghetti on top of the canned goods in the cart. “I probably wouldn’t have been any good at it,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was stay up here, and after Tate died, I had to help Daddy keep the farm going. People always said I should marry one of you Stargills so that we could join the two farms. Didn’t work out, though.”

  “No,” said Charles Martin. Talking about it still hurt after all these years, and that surprised him. All the Stargill boys had been sweet on Dovey Stallard at one time or another—except Robert Lee, but he was so much older that he had hardly figured in the childhoods of any of them. Charles Martin remembered a fistfight with Garrett over which of them would take Dovey home from a basketball game; it hadn’t mattered to either of them that they were going home in the same car. He had lost that battle, but he knew he was going places, so he always assumed that he would win the war. It hadn’t turned out that way, though.

  “Well,” he said, “Dwayne, now. Dwayne never was much on farming. I don’t reckon any of the rest of us would have been any better, but he wasn’t exactly the pick of the litter, Dovey.”

  For an instant he was gratified to see the look of pain mirrored on Dovey’s face, and then the wrinkle between her eyes smoothed out, and her thoughts were closed to him. She shrugged, not bothering to deny it. “I didn’t think anybody knew about it,” she said. “I never told your folks—or mine, for that matter.”