by Brynn Bonner
Land records are not my forte. Acres and hectors, plots and plats, land boundaries and shifting creeks and rivers, it all makes me cross-eyed after awhile. Which was why walking River’s land with him had been helpful. Looking at the real thing helped bring the dry descriptions to life.
Esme was humming softly and I realized this was the first time we’d worked so companionably in a long while.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Hmm,” Esme said, which could have been interpreted in a dozen ways.
“I’ve missed it. We haven’t worked much together on this project,” I added, hoping she was ready to talk about what was bugging her.
“We don’t have to do every single thing together, Sophreena,” she said. “It’s fine.”
Okay, so she wasn’t ready. Leave it alone, I warned myself. And for once I heeded my own cautions.
I looked quickly through the stack of info I’d printed off from Ginger Holderman. My eye landed on a point of interest and I flipped through the papers until I came to the one with the contact info she’d sent. I punched in her number, expecting to leave a message, but she picked up.
“I see you have your great-grandfather’s occupation listed as mortician. What can you tell me about that?” I asked, purposefully leaving the question open.
“Creepy, isn’t it?” Ginger asked. “I mean, that’s not exactly like finding out you’re descended from royalty or something, right? Do you think it’s wrong to be sort of ashamed of your family tree? That’s blasphemy, right? I mean, I know there are all these cultures where they worship their ancestors and all that, but it just seems a lot of mine make me cringe.”
I laughed. “Mine, too. But you know, when you think about it, maybe if they’d made different choices, it would have altered everything and they would have ended up in a different place or gone to a different school or never met their spouses and had children, in which case you wouldn’t exist.”
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “I never thought of it that way. Anyhow, you asked about Virgil. He was born on a farm just outside Durham and grew up in North Carolina, moving from place to place, until he fetched up over in Hillsborough as a young man with big plans. He got involved in a scheme that went bad and moved to Baltimore to get away from his creditors. That’s where he went to school to learn his trade. Geez, I’m getting the willies just thinking about what that curriculum must have been like.”
“Do you know if he ever had anything to do with selling funeral supplies?”
“Yeah, it was something to do with that enterprise that got him in hot water. He was selling certificates for the Modern American Burial Company. I’ve got a copy of one of them. They’re beautifully engraved. Honestly, they look like money. They sold some kind of special burial vault or something.”
“Caskets,” I said. “Caskets made from glass.”
“You mean like Sleeping Beauty?” she asked.
“Not exactly.” I shivered, having my own case of the willies. I described the caskets and asked if she had any other information about Virgil’s involvement with the company.
“Don’t think so, but I’ll look through the stuff and if I find anything I’ll send it along. Then, you know what? I think I’ll lay off the genealogy for a while. I’m an aromatherapist, for God’s sake. I can’t be thinking about death and embalming or I’ll ruin my nose.”
“Probably best to take a break,” I agreed.
I summarized the call for Esme. “And that adds another few ounces to the weight of our evidence. We still don’t know the hows and whys, but I think we can safely assume Virgil Wright supplied that glass coffin and that it’s his brother inside it.”
Esme considered, then nodded. “What was that at the end about taking a break?”
“Oh,” I laughed, “she’s disappointed in her ancestors for failing to provide a more admirable pedigree.”
“Amen, sister,” Esme said. “I wish to all that’s holy whoever my forebearer was who passed on this so-called gift had skipped that bequest.”
“But then you wouldn’t be you, Esme. And you do good things with your gift.”
“At a cost,” Esme said. “At a dear cost.” After a moment she went back to unloading the last box we’d brought from River’s house. “What do you suppose this is all about?” she asked, lifting a cloth-wrapped bundle out of the dusty cardboard box.
She held it out as if it might have a live badger inside and I followed as she carried it to the card table we keep set up in the corner, covered with bath mats and curtained off from the rest of the room to contain dust.
The bundle was about the size of a bread box and wrapped in a coarse linen cloth tied several times around with tobacco twine. I instinctively reached out and felt the sides. “Feels like books, maybe.”
I turned it over carefully and switched on the light above the table. On the bottom someone had written on the cloth with a pencil, the letters now faded almost completely. I grabbed a magnifying glass and stooped to read, squinting to help fill in the gaps in the letters. For Lottie, someday.
I stood up, engaging myself in a spirited ethics debate. I’m happy to poke around in the possessions of deceased people. But Lottie Walker was still alive, and this was clearly meant for her. Had she ever seen it? Should I get her permission to open it?
“River bought the place lock, stock, and barrel, remember?” Esme said as if reading my mind. “This is his property now and he wants us to go through it. So let’s open ’er up.”
I allowed myself to be convinced, ethics trumped by curiosity. But I grabbed my camera first and took pictures of the bundle as we’d found it before we cut the string. Inside there was a photo album, some stacks of letters tied with the requisite pink ribbons, and three more of the small memo books I’d seen before among Sadie Harper’s things. Esme set in immediately to wipe things off with antistatic cloths, but I went straight for the stacks of letters, flipping through them like a deck of cards to look at the return addresses. This sent dust motes dancing into the stream of light from the lamp. Esme said a swear word in French and I felt ridiculously happy to hear it. She sounded more like herself than she had in days.
The letters were from an Inez Wright. I went to the table and flipped through the things Ginger Holderman had sent, locating the woman on the Wright family chart. She was Virgil Wright’s wife. She and her sister-in-law, Sadie Wright Harper, had apparently kept up a correspondence over many years.
Esme opened the photo album to the first page and turned it to show me the picture of a snaggletoothed boy of around six, with the name Samuel Lemar Wright written underneath in irregular block letters. Esme quickly flipped through more pages. There were images of a young Samuel in a baseball uniform, school photos, a few snapshots of Samuel and a young woman, several of Samuel in uniform, then a wedding photo of Samuel and Eugenia, labeled in handwriting full of flourishes. Then there were a few snapshots of Samuel and a baby, who grew into a toddler through the series of shots.
We were interrupted by the doorbell, which meant it wasn’t one of the club or Dee. They all held with the old custom of “helloing the house” by letting themselves in the front door while calling out to find out where we were.
Esme went to answer and came back a few minutes later with Claire wheeling in behind her. “I don’t mean to interrupt your work,” she said, “but I thought I’d swing by on my way home and see if you had a few minutes to talk.” She glanced around the tables of Harper family mementoes and documents. “Well, as Coco would say, ‘Crikey!’ I never realized you two had such an operation going here.”
“People accumulate many things over a lifetime,” I said, “and we love people with pack-rat mentalities. We find out a lot by plowing through stuff like this.”
“Well, I’ll let you work; we can get together another time,” Claire said, backing her chair toward the door. “I should have
called.”
“No,” Esme and I said in unison, Esme hitting a low note and me the high.
While Esme went in to fix us tea and serve up the zucchini bread Winston had baked for us, I guided Claire into the family room. I cleared off the coffee table, tossing magazines, notebooks, pens, and stray receipts onto the easy chair by the window. I really needed to tidy up in here. I hadn’t been carrying my half of the housecleaning chores lately. Maybe that’s what had Esme so cross.
“At the risk of being the world’s worst hostess,” I said as Esme set the tray on the coffee table, “could we start right off with the story, Claire? I’m supposed to meet some people at five and I’m dying to hear this.”
“And I’m eager to tell you,” Claire said. “Right after it happened I told it over and over until I had no voice left, but I couldn’t get anybody to listen to me. Then somewhere along the way I gave up trying to convince people. This was all before you came to live here, Esme, and close as we’ve become, I don’t think I’ve even told you.”
“No, I’ve never heard you speak about it. I thought maybe you didn’t like to remember,” Esme said.
“Well, it’s not pleasant to remember that night, but it’s important to set the facts straight. This is the way it actually happened, as opposed to what you’ve likely heard around town through the years. I was a young teacher, twenty-six years old and filled with idealism. Honestly, if you could have heard me talk about my call to teaching, it probably would’ve made you puke. I was obnoxiously evangelical about it. Quentin was working at a small manufacturing company that made electronic thermostats. We’d been married nearly three years and we’d just bought the house. Now, I grant you, we were not the romantic fantasy of happily ever after. We fought and made up and fought again. We gave in and held out and got over and saw through. We were both immature, but we were finding our way in making a life together. We were happy. Our own version of happy.
“A few days after school was out that year, I ran into Nash Simpson at the hardware store. I’d known him since we were kids. We went to school together, or at least we did when his folks bothered to send him. His family was dirt poor and didn’t value education much. Anyhow, he pulled me aside and asked very quietly if I could teach him to read. He’d just gotten on at the power plant, sweeping floors and doing gofer jobs, but he could see a chance to make something of himself there, except he knew he needed good reading skills. So I told him I’d be happy to work with him. Then he laid down the rules. No one was to know. He was embarrassed about being illiterate. So I agreed it would be just between the two of us.
“Quentin was working second shift, so we made plans for Nash to come over to our house two nights a week for me to work with him, and all went along fine for a while. Our house was isolated—well, still is pretty isolated, but even more so back then. No one was likely to see his truck there and he wasn’t married at the time, so he didn’t have anyone to answer to as to his whereabouts. He was making good progress and I was feeling pretty self-righteous about my part in it.
“Then one night I heard Quentin’s truck come roaring into the driveway while we were working at the kitchen table. He came up the back porch steps at a run and flung open the door and nearly ran over the two of us before he stopped. He was wild-eyed and red-faced. Quentin had always been the jealous type, and to my everlasting shame, I sort of liked it. I thought it meant he really, really loved me. Never occurred to me in my romantic fog that it also meant he didn’t trust me.
“He demanded to know what was going on and I started to tell him, but Nash put his hand on my arm to stop me, reminding me with that one gesture of my promise. But it only made us look guilty of something else. I stammered some lame thing and then Quentin turned toward Nash and took a step. But here’s the thing, the big thing. Nash swung first. He started the fight. He hit Quentin in the stomach so hard he doubled over and then the rage was let loose. They fought all over that kitchen, both of them snarling like animals. Somewhere in all the confusion I got knocked down, and my back struck the edge of our old dinette table, which had been turned over during the fight. My scream ended the brawl.” She stopped and I could see she was struggling not to cry, her voice coming out in a strained whisper. “My scream ended life as we’d known it.”
“Oh, Claire,” Esme said. “Darlin’, how awful for you.”
“So you see,” Claire went on, “we were all guilty of something. Quentin was hotheaded and acted before he thought; I was wrong to agree to keep things from him and to encourage him to feel jealous; and Nash was guilty of an excess of pride for not wanting to be open about his illiteracy and for starting the fight in the first place. I might have been able to calm Quentin down if Nash hadn’t thrown that first punch. They arrested Quentin that night while they were still working on me at the hospital. I was in no condition to tell them what had happened and Nash insisted on pressing charges.”
“That’s not the way I’ve heard the story at all,” I said.
Claire nodded, her eyes swimming with tears. She wiped them away impatiently. “You’d think as many times as I’ve told this I’d be over the crying by now. Anyway, while they were still discovering the extent of my injuries, charges were being drawn up against Quentin, and they kept piling them on. First it was simple assault, then aggravated assault, then assault with a deadly weapon, which, by the way, was a turkey platter we’d gotten as a wedding gift. It was absurd. And to make matters worse, Quentin had been in a couple of scrapes when he was a kid and because he had a record, he came in under three strikes. James Rowan, curse his hide, was trying to make his bones as DA and wanted to show he was a law-and-order guy. Quentin was sent off for a seven-year stretch in prison.”
I did the math. “But that means he should have been out . . .” I began, still calculating.
“Should have,” Claire said, “but Quentin still had anger issues and things didn’t go well his first couple of years inside. He kept getting weeks and months tacked on to his sentence for one infraction or another. I couldn’t go see him at all in those early years because I was struggling with my rehabilitation and he had to earn visitor privileges, but as soon as I was able, I started visiting. He’d thought during that whole time that I blamed him, and maybe there was a part of me that did, but gradually we got through it and he started taking his own rehabilitation seriously. He got into counseling and picked up some computer training and we started planning for a life together when he got out. But it’s been a long road, and we’re not newlyweds anymore. We’re trying to get to know each other again. We’ve agreed to live apart for at least a year and try to work on things slowly.”
“One thing I’m curious about,” I said, thinking back over her story. “What made Quentin come home that night?”
“There it is,” Claire said, nodding. “That’s the big question. He got a call at work. His boss came and got him off the assembly floor, told him it was an emergency. The voice on the line told him he should come home quick if he wanted to catch his wife with the other man she’d been seeing behind his back.”
“Surely there were phone records they could have checked to find out who placed the call,” Esme said.
Claire nodded. “From the pay phone at the Kwik-Mart, plenty of pay phones around back then, remember?”
“And Quentin didn’t recognize the voice?” I asked.
Claire shook her head. “He said it sounded like someone had something covering the receiver. The words were clear enough, but he couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.”
“Who do you think it was?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve thought a lot about that over the years. Nash was dating Connie back then. She’s his wife now. She had a really bad temper, and she still does, by the way. If she knew anything about him coming to my house, she’d have been really angry. And Quentin had some coworkers who didn’t like him much and were always trying to shaft him in one way or an
other. I had a couple of ex-boyfriends who hadn’t taken kindly to being rejected. Those are the only people I can think of, but honestly, I don’t think it was any of them. To this day I still can’t think of anyone with cause to do something like that. So, that’s the story and I’m happy to have you two actually listen and believe, or at least I hope you believe me.”
“I would never doubt your word on anything, Claire,” Esme said. “And I hope you’ll forgive me for some of the things I’ve said about Quentin. I spoke out of turn.”
“What about Nash?” I asked. “What’s up with him? He bears some fault in this, too. What’s with his attitude?”
“Guilt, I think,” Claire said with a sigh. “Or shame. He knows this might have gone differently if he hadn’t thrown that first punch. And it was ridiculous to hold me to the pledge of not telling about tutoring him. But it’s easier to make Quentin the villain. Quentin and I would like to stay here in Morningside and try to pick up the pieces of our lives. I love it here, and my work and my friends are here, but if things don’t settle down soon, we may have to move away to get some peace.”
“Well, we can’t let that happen,” Esme said. “You’re needed here.”
“I’m glad Quentin didn’t move back in with me right away, and that he has an iron-clad alibi,” Claire said. “Else they’d probably have tried to pin Sherry’s murder on him, even though I don’t think he ever even met Sherry or Luke.”
“Luke is here, did you know that?” I asked.
“So they found him?” Claire said. “I knew they were looking for next of kin. Well, that’s good. I’d love to see him.”