by Brynn Bonner
It did, but it cost me. She complained about everything, from the way I held the spoon to the tone of my voice. She muttered under her breath about all my ineptitudes, punctuating the litany now and again by swearing at me. Man, she was a grumpy old lady. She ate like a bird, but still, she did seem to get a degree more civil with each tiny bite.
“Miss Lottie,” I said, holding out a spoonful of mashed potatoes, “you grew up at the old Harper place, right?”
“Old Harper place,” Miss Lottie repeated.
“Do you remember someone being buried there? Was there a family cemetery on the property?”
“No, I told the lawyer, I want to be buried at Plainview. That’s where Howard is and I want to be laid out right by him. I bought the plot when I buried him. Stone’s already there. All that’s left is to put the date on when I go.”
“I’m glad you have that taken care of,” I said. “Are all the Harpers buried at Plainview, too?”
“Lord, no,” Miss Lottie said, giving me a glare. “They were all Methodists, they don’t go to Plainview. They get planted at Memory Gardens.”
“All of them?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “None of them were buried on the old Harper place?”
“You’re trying to trick me,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I grew up there. Lived there most of my life. Can’t remember the time before I lived there. Fact, I hardly remember anything that came before that night. And can’t forget a minute of what happened, though I surely wish I could.”
“What night was that, Miss Lottie?” I asked, trying not to look at the mystery meat as I scooped up a bite and offered it to her.
“Is it night already?” Miss Lottie asked. “I get so mixed up in here. They forget to open my shades and half the time I don’t know if it’s night or day.”
“No, it’s still daytime, Miss Lottie,” I said. “I was asking what you meant when you said you couldn’t remember a time before that night. You were telling me about when you were still a girl and living at the Harper place.”
“The Harpers are good people,” she said. “Real good people.”
“I’ve heard that about them,” I said. “Did you grow up with Oren and Sadie Harper?”
“Sadie was a beautiful woman, wasn’t she?” Miss Lottie said. “And brave. She had to do some hard things in her life, but she did what she had to do and I thank the Lord for that. I could have hated her for what happened in some ways, but I didn’t. Not a bit of it. I loved her like she was my mother.”
“What kind of hard things did she have to do?” I asked, excited that we finally seemed to be getting on some kind of track, a meandering one to be sure, but at least we had momentum. I scooped up another spoonful of the meat concoction.
She leaned over to take the bite, then immediately spat it onto her tray. “That’s the worse thing I ever tasted,” she squawked. “You trying to poison me?”
I wanted to point out that she’d already eaten two hearty spoonfuls of the sludge so she’d already be dead if I was trying to poison her, but we’d been trucking along so nicely and I was hoping I could get her back. “No, ma’am, I promise I’m not,” I said. “I’m sorry if it isn’t good. Here, let’s try a bite of the gelatin.”
She accepted the quivering orange spoonful and seemed to enjoy it so much that she forgave me for trying to kill her with the mystery meat. She pulled a few impressive swallows of milk from her straw, then pushed the tray away.
“Miss Lottie, could you tell me your maiden name?” I asked.
“Gave it up when I married Howard. I was an old maid when I met Howard Walker. Thirty-three years old and never even had a beau. I never did think about myself the way he saw me. It was new and strange, and just mighty wonderful,” she said, her eyes now staring off into the distance as if I wasn’t in the room. “We run off and got hitched quick, and the next thing I know I’ve got a baby in my belly and Howard’s got hisself killed down at the mill. I had no business raising a child. Some women ain’t cut out to be mamas and the proof is in the pudding. Marla didn’t turn out too good. She’s always in one kind of trouble or another. The only time she comes around is when she needs bailing out of some mess. Oh Lordy, is she here?”
“No,” I said, “she’s not here, Miss Lottie. But I’m sure she’d love to see you.”
Miss Lottie puffed out her cheeks and let out a whoosh of stale-smelling breath. “I ’spect not,” she said. “You don’t know Marla if you think that. She’d as soon kick you as kiss you.”
I wonder where she got that temperament, I thought. “Could you tell me your maiden name?” I tried again. “The name you were born with.”
“Charlotte,” she said. “It was my mama’s mama’s name, but everybody always called me Lottie, long as I can remember. I’m Lottie.”
“And your last name?”
She looked at me and her eyes seemed to bobble along lazily in their sockets. Apparently an afternoon nap was about to happen, ready or not.
“Right, that was my name,” she said, blinking very slowly.
“Yes, your maiden name, Miss Lottie. What was it?”
“Right,” she said, the word slurring.
And she was out, her snore like the purr of a kitten.
* * *
The afternoon hadn’t been a complete loss. I’d learned that Miss Lottie was indeed Marla’s mother and likely the grandmother of the murdered young woman. But that raised other questions. If Lottie had living grandchildren, why would she give so much of the money she’d gotten from selling the place to the Literacy Council and not to them? Assuming she hadn’t planned to leave something to them. After all, the woman wasn’t dead yet. Maybe she’d left them something in her will; that is, if the nursing home didn’t eat it all up before she passed.
Esme was in the kitchen preparing a vegetable tray for the club meeting when I returned. I don’t know why we continue to call ourselves a club. We have no real structure, no bylaws or rules, we’re just friends. Still, we do set aside this time each week to work on our family histories and talk about our progress, and most Tuesday nights, we walk down to Marydale’s shop after we eat and spend some time working on our heritage scrapbooks.
Winston’s ex-wife, may she live out her life happily far, far away, called us the “Ancient History” club, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment. She thought things from the past were best left there, not “dredged up for other people to paw over.” And she’d really soured on the whole thing when Winston traced one branch of his lineage back to a slave woman.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked Esme. “Make some dip?”
“No, I’ll do it. This kitchen is too small for both of us. You go on out to the workroom and see what I got done this morning.”
“Okay,” I said, though I couldn’t figure out how the kitchen had gotten too small for both of us to work in it. We’d done it a million times. “You got my message, right? About Dee identifying the dead woman?”
“Yes, wasn’t that something? Denny told me about it, too. I invited him to come tonight since this isn’t a regular meeting.”
“Good,” I said. “What, specifically, did you want me to look at in the workroom?”
“I set up all the records we’ve collected so far for River’s research and I got about halfway done with entering it into the database. I marked where I got to, maybe you can finish up before everybody gets here? And I went through that box of pictures and pulled out all the ones that were taken on the Harper place, for the scrapbook.”
I’m normally the methodical one, but over the time we’ve worked together, Esme has become a conscientious record keeper. She’d set out the records, sorted the way I like them, and had even taped a long sheet of paper to the worktable so I could start a time line, one of my favorite tools. I picked up a ruler and a pencil and started ticking in dates. Eventually this would document ever
ything we could learn about the Harper place, but for now I concentrated on the time frame from 1900 to 1950, since finding the identity of the Forgotten Man was the focus. I worked away on that for a few minutes, but then the guilt got to me. There was still a stack of records that needed to be entered into the genealogy program, so I woke up the computer and set to it.
I kept a close eye on the clock, since I knew I needed to tidy up the family room before our meeting. I finished with fifteen minutes to spare, but before I shut down the computer I ran the function that gives a display of everything that’s been entered so that I could see what Esme had put in earlier. I glanced over the screen and hooted a laugh so loud it brought Esme to the doorway.
“What’s so blessed funny?” she asked. “You scared me. I thought you were having some kind of fit in here.”
“Miss Lottie’s marriage certificate to Howard Walker,” I said, pointing to the screen. “I didn’t see this yesterday. Charlotte Wright and Howard Walker. Her birth name was Wright. She tried to tell me this afternoon and I didn’t get it. Her name was Wright and I thought she was acknowledging that she understood my question. Anyhow, now we know her name. We just have to figure out how she’s related to the Harpers.”
Esme frowned and came over to look at the screen. She traced her finger along until she came to the marriage license info for Oren and Sadie Harper in 1915.
“I couldn’t read this on our copy but I scanned it and put it through the guesser today,” she said, using her euphemism for a piece of software we use that extrapolates to complete the text or image in old documents. We don’t rely on what the guesser comes up with, but sometimes it can give us good clues to pursue. Esme had the entry highlighted in yellow, a signal that the information was tentative. Oren T. Harper had married Sadie Marie Wright in September 1915. She was seventeen and he was twenty-one.
“So Miss Lottie is likely from Sadie’s branch of the family, not the Harper side. We need to switch gears.”
“But, Sophreena, River tasked us with finding out who’s in that coffin, not with tracing yet another branch of the family’s history,” Esme said.
“I know. But I think the answer to the question of who is in that grave lies with Miss Lottie. If our time frame is right, she’d likely have been alive when that body was buried there. She’d have been a child but maybe old enough to remember. And since we’re not having any luck with the official records, so far she’s our best shot. We’ll have to go back to Cottonwood, probably a few more times.”
“Not we, you,” Esme said firmly. “I’ll do the entry, or make myself useful otherwise, but I can’t deal with that ornery old woman.”
I could have said it takes one to know one.
But I didn’t.
* * *
The club meeting was festive and mostly centered around the upcoming nuptials, but we did manage to get some business in. We all gave our usual reports about what we’d worked on since the last meeting. Not surprisingly, Marydale and Winston had nothing to report because they’d been busy with wedding plans. Through having her DNA tested, Coco had found a long lost cousin who had some information about her father’s side of the family. She was amused to find out her great-grandfather had been a gandy dancer for the railroad. “So I’ve got a fan dancer on my mother’s side and a gandy dancer on my father’s. No wonder I can’t sit still.”
Jack was finally getting back to working on his own family lines. He’d started the whole endeavor to find out if the family legend about being related to the infamous Ford who shot and killed the outlaw Jesse James was true. But when he got the proof, it put him in a blue funk for a while. I fully understood this, since I was going through something similar, as I reported to the group when it was my turn.
“I’ve had a breakthrough,” I said. “I did a Skype interview with a woman who was a friend of my late grandmother, my mother’s adoptive mother. She’s elderly, but her memory is sharp and she remembered details I won’t recount since this is a night for happy things. Suffice it to say, my mother’s adoption was, as I suspected, quite irregular, almost certainly illegal, and, I fear, unethical. But now I’ve got some dates and names of other people involved and at some point I’m going to make a trip to the Marshall Islands to see what I can find out. For now, I’m letting it sink in for a while.”
“Can I have a turn?” Dee asked, raising her hand. “I know I’m just a visitor, but I’d like to report that I’m about to have a whole new family.” She reached over to pat Winston’s thigh, and I could have hugged her when I saw the smile spread over his rugged face. Marydale, too, was beaming.
Esme took that cue to give them our gift and Marydale burst into tears as she leafed through the book. The front part was filled with pictures we’d gathered of the two of them taken over the past few years; the rest of the book was filled with scrapbook pages we’d designed, waiting for new photos and memories. The remainder of the evening was spent reminiscing over the pictures.
Denny and Jack stayed on after everyone else had left. I almost invented some pretext to get Jack out to the workroom with me to see if we could resume our talk, but it would have been too obvious. The chatter soon came around to the topic that was never far from our minds these days, the murder at River’s place.
“I understand you’ve been out to see the grandmother,” Denny said. “Is she of sound enough mind for me to do a notification? We haven’t been able to find any other kin.”
“She comes and goes. Today when we talked she didn’t even realize her daughter was dead. But she has moments when she’s clear. You haven’t been able to locate the brother?”
“Not yet,” Denny said. “You get a full name or location on him in your poking around, you let me know.”
“Any idea why she was killed?” Esme asked.
“Nothing solid,” Denny admitted with a sigh.
“She must have died sometime after the vigil was over,” Jack said. “Or surely somebody would’ve seen or heard something. And it must have been after that rainstorm came through. That was a hard rain. You think she went to the tent looking for shelter?”
The tumblers clicked. Of course, that’s why it had been important that her clothing and hair looked soaked through.
“Could be,” Denny said. “She died sometime in the mischief hours. Rainstorm moved through here about two thirty a.m. The ME puts time of death between two and four a.m. Now we’ve just gotta find out what evil creature was afoot in the land at that time.”
“Have you talked to any of the people who were friends with her when we were kids?” I asked.
Denny nodded. “Talked to all three of them. Laney says she hasn’t seen or talked to her in years, but Bryan says he kept in touch. According to him she bounced around a lot. Last he knew, she was a bartender down in Miami. They got together when he was there for a golf expo a while back. But he hadn’t heard from her lately. We’ve contacted the department down there.”
“How about Gavin?” I prompted when Denny didn’t go on.
“Gavin was a little dodgier. He first said he didn’t know her. Then he knew her but hadn’t talked to her since they were kids. Then she wrote to him while he was undergoing his ‘unfortunate incarceration’ for auto theft. He swears, maybe a little too vociferously, that he didn’t know she was in these parts until he heard about the murder.”
“Are you saying he’s a suspect?” I asked, almost laughing at the idea.
“You know the answer to that, Sophreena. Everybody’s a suspect until they’re ruled out. And since his alibi is that he was home in bed, alone, where any sensible person would be at that hour, I haven’t struck him off the list.”
“Well, she was staying somewhere,” Esme said. “Did you check the local motels?”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that,” Denny said with a laugh. “That sounds like something a cop might do.”
Esme gave him a
withering look.
He cleared his throat. “Yes, we checked all the hotels and motels, B and Bs, guest cabins, and rooming houses in a fifty-mile radius. We’re on the lookout for cars that haven’t moved in a couple of days and checking bus, train, and airline records. So far, zip.”
The room fell silent for a moment until finally Esme spoke up.
“Well, she didn’t fall from the sky,” she said. “And she must have had more with her than what she was wearing. Sooner or later you’ll turn up something.”
Denny nodded. “I sincerely hope so.”
“At least she’s not the Forgotten Woman anymore,” I said. “She’s got a name.”
“But I wonder who’ll remember her,” Esme said, her voice soft. “And whether they’ll remember her fondly.”
eight
I was at Cottonwood bright and early the next morning, sans Esme and armed with a six-pack of root beer.
“You’re getting to be a regular,” the desk attendant said when I signed in. “I think Miss Lottie is in the community room. You can visit with her there if you’d like, or if she’d rather have you to herself, you can push her back to her room. Community room’s right down that short hall.” She pointed to a wide entryway at the far end of the lobby, but I didn’t need directions; all I had to do was follow the cacophony of voices accompanied by someone plinking away on a painfully out of tune piano.
Miss Lottie was sitting with three other women at a table in the corner and seemed to be, wonder of wonders, laughing merrily. She and another woman were in wheelchairs. The other two looked too young to be in a nursing home. As I approached the table, Miss Lottie frowned, but I had the sense it wasn’t a grumpy frown, simply that she was concentrating. As the other women looked up, I introduced myself and told them I was a genealogist and was tracing the Harper family history and that Miss Lottie was helping me. All true as far as it went.