Chapter 38
Adele was like a dog with a bone when it came to getting things organized for the Ball. She still insisted I come to her house after we left the Pine Tree. We made more lists and phoned people from all three churches. She extracted promises of tablecloths, more chairs, serving utensils, candle holders, trash cans and liners, and rolls of raffle tickets. People promised to deliver them to the school after their respective services the following day.
She boldly volunteered the Family Friends Committee to wash all the dishes. She did call the committee members to ask if they’d participate in the project, but each and every person she talked to knew that “no” was not going to be an acceptable answer. As I drove home, I made a mental note to ask Jerry if the sinks and hot water in the school kitchen were working.
The following morning, the Sunday worship service provided a much-needed uplift. For the past few months I’d been attending Crossroads Fellowship fairly regularly. I liked the mixture of hymns with modern praise songs. Dwight Morris kept the tempo up as he worked the organ with hands and feet, producing harmonious tones. Following the singing of the inspiring hymn, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” young men and women stepped to the podium and lifted guitars and a bass from their stands. A teenager slithered through the maze of electric cords and seated himself behind a drum set. He beat out a rousing paradiddle, and the worship team led us in “You Wear the Victor’s Crown.” The words to all the songs were displayed on a screen mounted at the front left of the church. Some people weren’t as familiar with the newer songs, but they were undaunted, and sang with fervor. The hymns had more complex words and music, but the newer tunes were easier for some people to sing. The variety of music was one of the things I liked best about the service.
Most everyone who attended this church was accepting, cheerful and kind. Of course, every sort of organization has a few members who are more interested in their own agendas, but overall, this congregation made me feel that it stood for right and good, but wasn’t trying to beat up those who didn’t agree with every detail of doctrine.
Following the opening songs, Rev. Dornbaugh began the announcements. I was distracted for a few minutes by a woman I didn’t know, sitting several rows in front of me, who had shiny hot-pink hair. It looked synthetic, straight off a fashion doll. She turned around and discovered me looking at her. Grinning widely, she rotated her head quickly back and forth, making the straight shoulder-length strands swing. Then she raised her hands, palms up, and fluffed the ends, making the most of the encounter. I smiled back at her, and she laughed.
The pastor’s voice broke into my thoughts as I heard the words “...Harvest Ball. We want to be sure to support this community effort, and I encourage everyone, of any age, who is able, to plan on attending. All the churches are lending a hand to make this the outstanding event of the year in Cherry Hill.”
There was a smattering of applause. Adele was sitting behind me, and she leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve got to get something organized for the children,” she whispered urgently. “There’s bound to be a hundred or more. See me afterwards.”
“OK,” I whispered as a new wave of panic washed over me, and then I turned back toward the front. The sermon began.
After every Sunday service Adele helped serve light refreshments in the Fellowship Hall, so it was easy to find her.
“You’d better head right over to the school,” she admonished. “There are deliveries expected from all the churches. You’ve got a key, right?”
“I do,” I verified, fishing in my purse to be sure it was there.
She grabbed Harvard Brown, the Sheriff’s Deputy who attended our church. He was in civilian clothes today. “Harvey, can you go with Ana to the school to help unload chairs and other things folks are bringing over?”
“Sure,” Harvey agreed, his toothy smile lighting up his dark face.
“And see if you can talk someone into planning games for the elementary school kids,” Adele added to me, as if it were nothing monumental.
Frankly, I was feeling more than overwhelmed with the number of tasks that remained to be accomplished in one week’s time. Nevertheless, as each car or truck pulled up, I asked the occupants for suggestions as to who might be a good person to organize games. A few names were tossed out. I then directed the vehicles to the rear where things could be unloaded without having to carry bulky loads up the long flight of front steps.
I was still there at one-fifteen. I hadn’t eaten a thing, and had convinced exactly zero volunteers to take on the responsibility of herding excited children. At least I had a water bottle in my purse. It was turning into a hot, bright October day, and I would have been miserable without even a drink. It seemed as if the stream of deliveries was winding down, and I thought I’d run inside and see how Harvey was doing.
Just then, Adele pulled up in front of the school in her sturdy Ford, followed by Jerry in his shiny silver Sebring. Riding with Adele was the woman with the pink hair. Adele bustled from the car to the door, balancing a paper plate full of sandwich quarters and cookies in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t give you a chance to grab a bite to eat,” she said, “but I hope you’ll forgive me. I brought something even better than food. This is Cheyanne Bascomb. Cheyanne, Ana. She says she’d be thrilled to handle the children.”
I looked at the young woman. Not only did she have pink hair, but there was a pink and purple butterfly tattoo on her neck and the light glinted off several studs which pierced her nose and eyebrows, as well as her ears.
“Are you sure?” I asked, incredulous.
“Absolutely.” Cheyanne grinned. “I love kids. I run a daycare center in Waabishki. It will be fun to spend time with some who are already potty trained, and can follow directions. There are lots of games we can play.”
“I told Jerry to come,” Adele continued. “We need to designate a room for this.”
Jerry had joined our small group just as Cheyanne was delivering her promise to help, and Harvey poked his head out the front door at about the same time. We all entered the school building. It no longer looked dingy nor smelled musty. The primary aroma was fresh paint. Although I knew most of the rooms were still neglected, the hallway had been painted and the floors cleaned and buffed. Light fixtures had been fitted with working bulbs.
Jerry led the way to the end of the left hallway and opened a door which led into a classroom twice the size of any of the others I’d seen.
“This is the old kindergarten room,” he explained. “Everyone in town over the age of fifty learned everything they need to know, right here.”
The room had large cupboards beneath the windows, and there was plenty of open space for relay games or forming circles.
He turned to Cheyanne. “Do you think you can uphold that tradition, Miss Bascomb?”
She laughed again. “I’m not sure we can accomplish that in one evening of playtime, but we’ll try to keep the cherubs from pulling out each other’s wings.”
“Good enough,” Jerry agreed with a chuckle.
“Maybe I can get some of my friends to help. Don’t worry about a thing.”
“And we’ll get the painting volunteers in here tomorrow,” Jerry promised. “One more room shouldn’t be a problem.”
Chapter 39
Adele, Harvey and Cheyanne drove away, and I sat down on the front steps to eat the lunch my friend had brought. Jerry moved around to stand in front of me, a couple of steps lower.
“Take a step that way if you would,” I requested, pointing west.
“Why?” he asked, although he did shuffle to the left.
“Sun’s in my eyes,” I said, stuffing a pimento and cream cheese sandwich quarter in my mouth.
“Ah. Glad to be of service, madam.”
I spent the next few minutes eating, while Jerry watched me. My mouth was still full of chocolate-chip cookie when I thought about washing di
shes.
“Is the plumbing working in the kitchen? Will there be hot water? It will be so much easier for Janice and her helpers if she’s able to wash some dishes while the catering is going on.”
“I’ll find out,” Jerry said. He looked down at me kindly with a bit of a wistful expression on his face. “I want to thank you for all the effort you’ve put into this event.”
I stuck out my lower lip and blew upwards to move a stray hair that was hanging in my eyes. “It’s not a problem,” I said. “It’s just that there’s a ton of stuff to prepare, and the building is going to be great, but I can’t count on any of the amenities one usually expects in a facility. That makes it a bit stressful.”
Jerry shifted, and I squinted as the sun glared in my eyes again. “Oh, sorry,” he said, repositioning himself so that his shadow fell across my face. “I think it will be worth all the work, on so many levels. Have you talked to Cora?”
“I have. And that’s such a mystery to me. She really is jealous; she all but said it! Thinks you and I are spending a lot of time together, and she feels neglected.”
He rubbed his hands together and smiled. “Perfect. I told you I knew her.”
I swallowed the last of my coffee and started to stand, assuming we were done talking, but Jerry motioned for me to sit down again.
“What?” I asked.
He seemed to change his mind and instead beckoned me to come. “Let’s take a walk. That way the sun won’t be in your eyes, and it will look good for adding fuel to the green fire.”
“Out back? Did I tell you I took a look at the river to see if someone could have floated a body from the school to Jalmari?”
“Really? It seems as if it would be too shallow here.”
“That’s what I discovered.”
“No, let’s walk through town. Much more reliable for being seen.” He stuck out his elbow and I slipped my arm through it. We looked at each other and stepped out in the direction of downtown in a very good imitation of an old fashioned Sunday stroll, but without fancy clothing or a parasol. The sun had become so bright I thought the parasol would have been quite useful.
We’d only gone about half a block when Jerry’s body language lost its casual feeling. He stiffened slightly and leaned toward me. “There is one thing I want to tell you about. I’ve been working on tracking that phone call you received.”
When I stopped and glared at him he held up his free hand in protest.
“Don’t get all legalistic on me. I talked to Tracy. She thought I might be able to talk to some people without creating such a stir as if she went after them. After all, you’ve been doing some sleuthing on your own.”
I sniffed, but I was curious. “Did you learn anything?”
“I learned that Mavis Fanning is devious and ruthless when she wants something,” he said seriously. She's a client of a very high-pressure lawyer in Emily City.
“What does she want that I have?” I asked, totally mystified.
“I wondered that too. I thought maybe we made the wrong woman jealous, so I did some digging.”
“She’s mooning over you so much she’s threatening me?” I was incredulous. “You have a bigger ego than I thought.”
“Well, it was only a possibility. But everyone I asked seems quite certain that she and Harold are happy together. He’s always meek around her, although a good leader when he works alone.”
“He does seem to get around,” I said. I recalled hearing that he’d been a teacher, principal, and was of course, now the city manager.
“The note from your car seemed to focus on the school building, so I checked into more of the recent history on it. There are five people who have been connected with it in the past couple of months. First, there’s Virginia Holiday.”
“Yes,” I said, “but she was just handling the property.”
“True enough,” Jerry said, “but let me finish the list. There’s Jared Canfield, who was killed there and who had a Holiday Realty card in his wallet.”
“With the numbers 1-8-4-5 written on it. Whatever that means.”
“How do you know that?”
“Tracy told me,” I said, gratified that I knew something he didn’t.
“OK, so he had an appointment with her, on some day, at six-forty-five in the evening.”
“You don’t think it’s a year?”
“Twenty-four hour time. Lots of men use it, a habit they picked up in the military.”
“Huh,” I said. “Who else?”
“There’s Harold Fanning, who did all the paperwork for the city when it was listed with Virginia and then when the city took it back. There’s me, I really did buy it. And there’s Mavis Fanning.”
I looked up at Jerry’s face. He didn't seem to be guessing. “How does she fit in? Adele said she wants it, but why?” I blurted out.
“Yes, she wants the building very badly, to start a gym and fitness club. She feels that I robbed her of the opportunity because she couldn’t get the down payment together quickly enough. And I guess she thinks you talked me into buying it.”
“How on earth did you find all this out?” I asked. “You’re getting as good as Adele at digging up dirt.”
Jerry smiled down at me with pleasure. “Why thank you. Now we’ll have another jealous woman in town.”
I felt like stamping my foot. “Seriously. How do you know this?” I asked.
“Not so difficult. I took Harold out for an evening at a nice club in Emily City. Told him as community leaders we should become better acquainted. He loves Mavis, but finds her a bit frightening at times. It’s amazing what men will share when slightly drunk.”
“So now we know that she really does want the school, and why, but we don’t know that she’s the one who called me. Harold didn’t know about that, did he?”
“No, but I did find out one more thing. I called their daughter Claire myself.”
I glared at Jerry.
“Just stop. I had Tracy’s blessing.”
I wiggled my head from side to side, giving in to his ability to do as he pleased without consequence.
“It was an interesting conversation. When she understood that I was a friend of yours and was concerned for your safety, she admitted that she thought she knew who had the phone.”
“Now that is interesting,” I said.
“She said she’d been thinking about it a lot since Tracy and you called her. She knows she had it a few days before parents’ weekend, and that it wasn’t there the next time she went looking. She wanted to loan it to another friend.”
“What are you saying?” I wanted him to spell it out.
“She thinks her mother took it out of her drawer, but she can’t prove it.”
We walked past the police station and through the park in the center of town, circling the block, and finally returning to our cars which were still at the school. People who saw us greeted us politely, but I had the feeling they were trying to assess our relationship as well as being friendly.
As Jerry opened my car door for me, I turned to him and spoke the question that was in both our minds, “Could Mavis want the old school so badly she’d kill for it?”
Chapter 40
The final week before the Harvest Ball passed in a blur of checklists and activities. Mother Nature did not favor us with helpful weather. After the glorious sunshine of Sunday, Monday dawned wet and rainy. Forecasts predicted rain, drizzle and fog for the rest of the week, with plummeting temperatures on the weekend. Great, now we need another room cleaned to use as a coatroom, I thought.
Tom took several friends out to his mother’s place and they loaded all the Oldfield furniture into his truck and covered it carefully with a plastic tarp. Cora insisted that some of the interpretive materials be displayed as well, and she actually came into town with them, clutching a scrapbook on her lap. She’d spent the previous week collating and copying materials to fill the book, which would provide extra detail about both the judge’s family and his
killer’s. She was sure people would want to read more. I urged her not to be disappointed if most visitors were content to just see the skit. When Tom and company arrived at the school, it took two hours to set up the judge’s staged bedroom. Cora and I decided it worked best on the actual stage, but it had to be to one side because the band would need the other side.
Since we didn’t know exactly how the college kids would make their entrances and exits, we had to do some guessing. But Cora insisted they would get it right since we’d sent them pictures of how everything had to be arranged. The stained and tattered stage curtain wasn’t going to be replaced, so set changes would be made in full view of the audience.
We pulled the scrapbook apart and mounted all the pages, the nightshirt and the gun into a locked display case on the outside wall of the former school office.
Todd Ringman had tripled up his jobs and taken on custodial duties as well as fixing the boiler and plumbing. He said he needed to stick around anyway to be sure the heating system was working right. The floors had been cleaned and buffed, and I suspected he’d used some sort of anti-fungal cleaner on the woodwork because the general odor of mold had been replaced with a medicinal smell. That sent me scurrying to the drugstore for cinnamon-and-spice heated fragrance diffusers.
Todd had also located two tall ladders, and in between receiving even more deliveries of both decorative and useful items, and directing volunteers as to how to arrange the tables in the hallway, I climbed and descended and hammered and taped and adjusted décor until I was exhausted.
The front page of the paper on Wednesday carried a full spread of photos designed to entice people to the Harvest Ball: the front of the school, wheat shocks being delivered, Sherri Sorenson’s handsome team of Percherons hitched to the wagon that would bring people to the school, Janice Preston and Jimmie in white aprons smiling broadly and holding trays filled with food, kids cutting and pasting paper lanterns, and more.
Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp Page 18