The Darcy & Flora Boxed Set

by Blanche Day Manos

  “So, does she think the earthquake damaged the garage?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why on earth does she want us to come? What can we do? We can’t even take care of repairs on our own house.”

  “Pat has always run to hysteria when something goes wrong. You’ve heard that misery loves company? Well, Pat does not suffer in silence. She called Earlene Crowder and Earlene was sympathetic but she didn’t offer to come help. All our lives, we were girls together, you know, Darcy, Pat has wanted me to come if she’s upset.”

  I checked the coffee pot. Empty. “She didn’t call for you when people suspected Jasper might have something to do with Ben Ventris’s death.”

  “No, that’s different. She is very protective of her son.”

  “I’m tired, Mom, and I’m sure you are. Why don’t we just forget about Pat’s phone call? Maybe she’ll calm down.”

  Mom went down the hall to the coat closet. “No, I don’t think she’s going to calm down until I go out there. I don’t know what she thinks is under her garage floor, Darcy, but I have the feeling we’d better go. She sounded like she was wound as tight as . . . as . . .”

  “As one of her pin curls?”

  “Good description. Grab your coat, Darcy. Let’s go.”

  Pat was waiting on the porch when we pulled into her driveway. She hurried down the steps and began talking before she reached my car. She was twisting her hands inside her apron and when she spoke, her words ran together.

  “Oh, Darcy and Flora, thanks so much for coming. I just didn’t know what to do. I don’t see any damage to my house, but when I was cleaning up some limbs and trash from the yard and I backed out the pickup to haul that stuff down into the woods, well, there it was. With the truck out of the garage I could see there were four big cracks and some little ones in the concrete floor, and when I looked down into the biggest crack . . . .” She paused and shook her head. “There’s something under there.”

  Murphy, the large red hound who lived with Pat and Jasper, thrust his wet nose into my hand.

  “There’s no need to get upset about it,” I told her. “Lots of floors in Ventris County probably have cracks after that quake. Even if it looks bad, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for a professional finisher to fix.”

  “Yes, but it’s not just the cracks. It’s . . . .” Her eyes were as round as Artie’s pancakes and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think there’s something under my garage floor.”

  Mom punched me in the ribs and spoke around her hand. “See what I mean?”

  “Miss Pat, there are things under everybody’s garage floor. Tree roots reach under the cement after it has been poured. Rocks, maybe even some small animals like moles and gophers could dig under there or—uh . . . .” I looked at Mom. “Trash that was washed under the floor by heavy rains, maybe?”

  “I know, but . . .” She circled around her old Ford pickup and headed toward the single garage. “I don’t think this is any of those things. I would say it is definitely not trash. No, no.” She shook her gray curls.

  “Now, Pat,” Mom put her arm around her old friend’s shoulders, “why would there be anything under your garage floor that’s not under every other garage floor in the country?”

  “What do you think is under there, Miss Pat?”

  She pushed Murphy out of the way and kept walking. “I don’t want to say ’cause if it’s not what it looks like, you’ll think I’m crazy. Come and see for yourself.”

  Like most homes in Levi, the Harris house was old, probably built in the thirties or before. It was white frame and small with a narrow front porch squarely in the middle. The tiny detached garage had been added after the house was built. I remembered seeing that the garage looked fairly new, at least a lot newer than her house, back in the spring when Mom and I came to talk to Pat about Jasper in connection with Ben Ventris’s disappearance. Mom remarked after that visit that it probably cost more to re-build Pat’s garage than her old house had cost originally.

  There was no automatic opener for Pat’s garage door, only two wooden panels that closed in the middle with a sliding bar. Both sides were now propped open by two-by-fours.

  The three of us and Murphy stepped inside. Sunlight filtered through, lighting the front of the garage but throwing the back into shadows. I glanced at the ceiling. No light bulb hung there; only a bare socket where the bulb should be.

  Pat was right about the cracks; there were several good-sized ones but what caught my attention was the fact that most of the cracks were on the left side of the floor, zigzagging out from what appeared to be a sunken spot in the concrete. That area interested Murphy, too. He immediately plodded over and started nosing and pawing at the cracks.

  “My floor is only a couple of years old. The first floor they poured cracked, so they came out and made a whole new floor and rebuilt the garage, too. They said the cement they used at first must not have been any good.”

  We stepped closer to the damaged area. Mom and I knelt down to look into the biggest crack. I pushed the inquisitive Murphy aside. The morning sun created a glare that nearly blinded me.

  I probed the sunken spot with my fingers. “Have you got a flash-light handy, Miss Pat? Some of these cracks are pretty deep and I can’t see anything.”

  Pat stood on tiptoe and reached up to a shelf at the back of the garage. She brought out a big flashlight. As she gave it to me, her hand was shaking. “I couldn’t see anything either at first, until I used this light.”

  Poking around on a garage floor while this near-hysterical woman fluttered above me was not my favorite way to spend the day. Why couldn’t she just say what she thought? I leaned closer to the largest crack. “Whatever is in there, if there’s anything at all, I don’t think it’s going to jump out and grab you.”

  Mom nudged me with her foot. “Darcy.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Well, I’m just not exactly sure what I saw, Darcy. You know what I mean? And I don’t want to say what it looked like yet until I get a second opinion. You and Flora know how to keep your mouths shut. ’Cause if it is what I think it is, I sure don’t want the whole county to know.”

  My ever-practical mother spoke. “Now, Pat, don’t get yourself all in a lather. Darcy and I are here to help you no matter what you saw. First of all, show us where you were when you saw whatever it is that’s upset you so much.”

  Pat did not move. Wordlessly, she pointed to the spot where I was crouched.

  Mom continued, “Now, tell us what it looks like. What color is it? What shape is it? How far down in the crack is it? Can you see most of it?”

  Pat closed her eyes. “Oh, Flora, it was glinty. It caught the light and when I looked closer, it sure looked like gold to me. There! I said it.”

  Gold? The woman had a wild imagination. “Now, Miss Pat, what would gold be doing under your floor? Have you lost a ring? Maybe something fell down in the crack while you were examining it.”

  Pat laughed. “Are you serious? The only piece of gold I’ve ever owned is my wedding ring and I put that in a drawer a long time ago. If I had any gold, Darcy Campbell, it’d be in a safety deposit box at the bank.”

  Was Mom listening? I hoped so. She didn’t believe in safety deposit boxes and kept all her valuables in a cedar chest in her room.

  Angling the flashlight’s beam at the largest crack, I slowly played it across the floor. Aha! Now I saw something. The object Pat was trying to describe was perhaps ten inches down. She was right; it was kind of glinty. It was also dirt-covered. But I needed to see more. I pulled myself up, hoping that my popping knee joint didn’t have anything to do with my age, and went out into the yard. I picked up one of the broken twigs from the maple. Murphy ambled out of my way as I came back into the garage.

  “I could go get an old rug for your knees,” Pat offered.

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just take a quick poke down here. Mom, can you hold the
flashlight for me?”

  My mother grabbed the light and I began scratching away some of the dirt from the glinty object that had Pat so unstrung. The thing was hard and seemed to be stuck. Normal, I guessed, since it was under concrete.

  “Maybe I could get it out of there if I had a hook. Do you have a wire coat hanger, Miss Pat?”

  “Sure.” Pat disappeared into the house and came back with the black hanger. I bent it into a longish shape and carefully pushed it into the crack.

  “I think I’ve grabbed onto that shiny thing,” I said. I tugged but nothing happened. If it was gold under Pat’s garage floor, it seemed to like its location. It refused to budge. I could only glimpse what was holding it down; something long and hard and white. I swallowed. No, I would not even go there. I did not want it to be what it looked to be.

  After probing around for a good ten minutes, I pulled to my feet and rubbed my aching back. “It is fastened onto something, Miss Pat. If you are really interested in seeing what it is, I think you are going to have to get somebody out here to further tear up your floor. It’s stuck under there and besides that, I think it may be too big to come through the crack.”

  I did not want to say aloud the reason I feared it would not come through the crack. Pat needed only a nudge to completely go over the brink into full-blown hysteria. I caught her questioning stare. Did she think it might be something a lot more sinister than gold? Was that the reason she was so upset?

  She scuffed the floor with the toe of her canvas shoe. “I think I’ll just have more concrete poured over it and forget it. As you said, it’s probably just a tree root or something. I don’t want any trouble at all. Uh-uh.”

  Chapter 26

  “Patricia Harris, be sensible. We have got to tell somebody. You can’t just cover up that damage and forget it.” Mom fidgeted on one end of Pat’s gray sofa. I sat on the other end, but I felt as if I would jump straight through the window behind me if anyone said “Boo.”

  Pat was too nervous to sit. She paced the length of her small living room. She pushed her curls back from her face, twisted her hands together, and made small moaning sounds.

  I was afraid she was near collapse. “Miss Pat, please, sit down. Tell me where you keep your coffee or tea. I’ll fix something warm for you to drink.”

  She shook her head. “No, no, thank you kindly, Darcy, but I couldn’t swallow a thing.” She stopped in front of my mother and shook her finger at her. “Flora Tucker, there’s no way under the Lord’s heaven that I’m going to tell anybody in law enforcement about anything being buried under my garage floor. Why, if there’s something under there that’s bad, the first person they would suspect is my Jasper. I won’t have it. I won’t, I tell you.”

  I got up, grasped her arm and led her to the floral pink upholstered chair in the room. I gently pushed her down into it then stood in front of her so she couldn’t get up and start that infernal pacing again.

  “You must get hold of yourself. Nobody is going to arrest Jasper. Why should they? And we are not really sure what’s under the garage floor. Maybe it’s a . . . maybe it’s a . . . well, something entirely innocent.”

  “Ha! You know better than that, Darcy. And I’m thinking you saw as much as I did. There’s more than just a piece of gold under that floor. I’ve got a real bad feeling about it. And you can’t fool me about Jasper. I’ve seen enough of those detective shows to know that Grant would think Jasper knows about it just because he lives here. Simple as that. And my boy couldn’t defend himself. We all know he’s a little different, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he’s never stole anything in his life. Why would he steal something and then bury it? That wouldn’t make any sort of sense.”

  Mom looked thoughtful. “If that shiny thing is gold, it could be part of a batch that was buried way back in the ’30s when outlaws robbed banks and then came to the Cookson Hills to hide. If I were you, I’d want to know. You’d be rich, I guess, unless it would have to go back to wherever it came from.”

  Pat covered her eyes with her apron and began to cry. “I wish I could believe that, Flora. But I don’t think that’s it. And I wish I’d never seen . . . what I saw. Why did I have to go poking around?”

  Mom came to stand beside her. She rubbed her back until Pat quieted and looked up at us through eyes that swam with tears.

  “Now, are you ready to talk sensibly?” Mom asked.

  Pat nodded.

  Mom looked down at her friend. “I didn’t get down on my knees and look into that crack so I don’t know what you and Darcy think you saw. You’re both talking in riddles and I want to know what you’re talking about.”

  “Mom, I hate to say this but it looks like that piece of gold is attached to something under Pat’s floor. It’s something white and sort of looks like a bone—maybe.”

  My mother snorted. “Well, of all the silly things! Could it be poor old Murphy hid a bone in there before the men poured the cement on it?”

  “Could be. Miss Pat, do you feel calm enough to discuss this with us?”

  Pat bobbed her head. “Yes, yes, I’m feeling better. And it could have been Murphy that put it there. He likes to dig. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t come, Flora. You’re always so down-to-earth.”

  Mom glanced at me and rolled her eyes. “There are some who would disagree with you. But I believe in facing facts, and not go borrowing trouble. It won’t do to jump to conclusions.”

  “Miss Pat, weren’t you here when the garage floor was poured?” I asked.

  Pat shook her head. “No, I was over at Goshen Cemetery checking on some vandalism. It was all finished by the time I got back, except for drying, of course. I couldn’t use the garage for quite a while so the concrete would set.”

  Mom walked back to the sofa. “How about Jasper? Was he here?”

  “See? Even you, Flora. There you go with Jasper already. I don’t think so. Jasper was probably roaming around through the woods. He likes to do that.”

  “So who poured your floor?” I asked.

  “Why, I don’t actually know. I phoned the secretary at Gary Worth’s construction business. She said she’d send some guys out right away. I don’t know who actually came ’cause as I said, I wasn’t here.”

  I opened my purse and took out my cell phone.

  Pat grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to call Grant. This is what you should have done in the first place, Miss Pat. He has sophisticated equipment to check beneath that cement. That’s the only thing to do.”

  Mom perched on the arm of Pat’s chair. “Shouldn’t you be calling somebody with a jackhammer, Darcy? If there’s nothing bad under there, seems to me you shouldn’t be bothering Grant.”

  Pat drew a long, quavering breath. “No, I guess Darcy’s right, Flora. I’ve always been a law-abiding citizen. If it’s a batch of long-buried gold, it might be better to get it all out in the open and not try keeping secrets. Wouldn’t work anyhow in this town.”

  Mom spoke in a soothing tone. “It will be all right, Pat.”

  Yes, hopefully my mother was right. But I remembered somebody in Dilly’s Cafe saying that I should talk to Pat’s son. And of course, Jasper had told me he knew a lot of things that others didn’t know. He liked to keep secrets. Many people suspected that he murdered Ben Ventris before we found out the identity of the real bad guys.

  Sometimes society as a whole looked with suspicion on people who were different. This was unfair and undeserved, but we are an imperfect species. Jasper moved in a realm of woods and animals. He was friends with the owls. Civilized society was locked into a set of established rules. Surely if someone liked God’s great outdoors more than he liked people, that little oddity should not cause him to be looked on with suspicion. But buried gold under Pat’s floor? No. If Jasper knew about the gold, he would not have buried it. He would have used it to help his mother. Maybe whatever was buried on this place was a remnant of those lawless days of the 1
930s. And if there was a bone buried with the gold, perhaps it was some luckless person who got in the way of an outlaw’s bullet.

  I dialed a familiar number and listened to a familiar voice on the other end of the telephone line. “Grant? This is Darcy. I’m afraid we need you to come to Pat Harris’s place.”

  Chapter 27

  Grant pulled into Pat’s driveway an hour later. We three met him on the porch. He was followed by an older man driving a nearly new white Ford Ranger. Grant introduced him as Paul Hubbard, the owner of a construction company in Oklahoma City. Hubbard was silver-haired and appeared to be about sixty but moved with the agility of a twenty-year-old.

  “Paul’s been building houses and pouring cement all his working life and he probably knows more about concrete floors than anybody in Oklahoma,” Grant said. “He happened to be working on a job here in Levi so I took advantage of that and called him. He’ll take a look at the cracks in the garage floor. We may need somebody with a jackhammer before we can do a whole lot. It depends on what Paul finds.”

  “Since Gary Worth poured the floor in the first place, I thought you might have him come back again. Sort of have him lick his calf over,” Mom said.

  Grant took off his white Stetson and ran his hand through his hair. He looked and sounded tired. I wondered what, of all the things a law officer faced, was keeping him awake at night.

  He turned toward Mom. “And I thought, Miss Flora, that we might should have a new set of eyes look at the situation. If Gary didn’t pour that concrete like he should have, do you think he’d be much interested in licking his calf over, as you said?”

  Mom looked down and shook her head. It was unlike Grant to speak abruptly, especially to my mother.

  I put my arm around her. “Did you get any sleep at all last night?” I asked him.