The Darcy & Flora Boxed Set

by Blanche Day Manos

  November 8, 1918—Why am I writing all this? Maybe to absolve my conscience? Maybe because it’s too great a secret? Or maybe because in writing it I can begin to make some sort of sense out of a horrible nightmare. After Judge Jenkins shot Markham, he and Papa wrapped him in one of Mama’s oldest quilts, put his gun in the quilt beside him, and they carried him outside. I didn’t ask where they were taking him. When they came back inside the house a couple of hours later, they just told us it was all taken care of and they wouldn’t say anything more. I don’t think I wanted to know what they did with him. Mama and Miss Polly were near hysteria. While the men were out, Mama was crying and she went to the family Bible and ripped out the page that recorded Markham’s and my wedding. She ran into the kitchen and dumped her silverware out of the sheepskin. She put the Bible page in that sheepskin. The judge had dropped his gun onto the floor after he shot Markham. I can still see Miss Polly’s face as she picked that gun up by the handle and put it on top of the marriage record. She said she didn’t care if it had belonged to the judge’s father and had seen use during the Civil War, she didn’t want it ever to connect the judge with murder. She didn’t want the judge to see it when he came back inside and she told Mama to put it someplace where it wouldn’t ever be found. Then Mama took the whole bundle and hid it under her mattress. She said she would dispose of it next day where it wouldn’t be found. Nobody ever mentioned it again.

  “I’ve got to have more coffee,” I said. Grant went with me to the coffee pot. We both refilled our cups.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Grant, it is like I’m reliving all the pain these people went through. What a terrible thing to keep secret all these years.”

  Pat too brought her empty cup to the coffee pot. “Darcy, is there more to that journal?”

  “One more entry, Miss Pat. We are almost finished.”

  We sat down and I opened the journal to the last page.

  November 30—It is like a dream, only it’s a good dream this time, almost too good to be true. My George is alive. He was injured and in a hospital but he did not die. His records got all mixed up. He said that happened to a lot of the soldiers. He is home and my world is sunny once again. I’ve told him all about Markham and I think Papa told him where they buried Markham. I didn’t know if George would understand or if he would blame me for not waiting but he loves me. Oh, my heart is singing. He loves me and we are going to be married.”

  It was a solemn group of people in my mother’s living room. Miss Georgia softly wept into her handkerchief and Miss Carolina stared at the lid of the cedar box, industriously polishing it with her sleeve.

  When I laid the journal down, I felt as if I had been working all day. I was completely drained. Mom wore a small smile and Jackson looked thoughtful, staring into the fireplace. Pat dabbed at her eyes and sniffed loudly.

  Burke cleared his throat then spoke slowly. “My father told me about the marriage between Markham and Miss Grace. He said he wished he had refused to perform the ceremony because he was afraid the marriage would not be a happy one but he hoped Markham would change his wild ways.”

  “I’m glad that the truth about my father’s part in this did not come out while he was alive,” Carolina said.

  Miss Georgia placed a trembling hand on Carolina’s arm. “Oh, Sister, it would have killed Mother if Father had been branded a murderer.” She looked nervously around the room. “Surely, now that the truth is known, it won’t be recorded anywhere or be brought up again, will it?”

  This was something I hadn’t considered. People kept warning me that sometimes long ago events were best left buried. Had my digging into the past resulted in pain for the innocent people in the present? Still, it seemed that I had no choice but to try to find out the secrets behind the gun and the baffling marriage of my grandmother to one obscure Markham Cauldfell.

  Grant glanced at Jackson Conner, drew a deep breath and said, “I see no reason this should go any further than this room. It happened a long time ago and I believe justice was carried out.”

  Jackson thoughtfully smoothed his mustache. “I agree,” he said.

  “Mum’s the word,” Pat added.

  Mom looked at Miss Georgia and it seemed an unspoken message flashed between them. The mystery of what had happened to Granny Grace’s first husband was solved but the secret of Mom’s parentage was hers and her mother’s. They chose to keep it.

  Pat rose. “Are you going to prefer charges against my boy, Grant?” she asked.

  “That is up to Darcy and Miss Flora,” Grant answered.

  “Charges? Whatever for?” Mom asked.

  Jackson stood up too and shook his head. “Someday that boy is going to come up against someone who is not as kind hearted as you, Flora. Better keep a close rein on him, Pat.”

  Pat sighed. “As if I could.”

  “I’ll walk out to the car with you ladies,” Burke told the Misses Jenkins. “It’s a mite slick underfoot. Can’t have either of you falling and breaking a bone.”

  Only Grant was left of our visitors. He picked up some empty coffee cups and carried them to the sink.

  “A couple of generations ago, five people kept the secret of how a man was killed,” he said. “Do you realize that we are still keeping that secret, a hundred years later?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Now it is something that eight people know and I don’t think any of us will repeat what we’ve heard here tonight.”

  “Grant, do you know what was so important about our land that it cost Eileen her life and very nearly cost Darcy hers?” Mom asked.

  Grant nodded. “I do. But I’d like to show you instead of telling you. If the weather is good, could I pick you up tomorrow morning and take you for a little ride in the country?”

  “If this is the way you want to explain it to us, Grant, we’ll be ready,” I said.

  Chapter 34

  The next day was Sunday. My mother and I should have been in church thanking the Lord for bringing us through a month of dangers, close calls, and amazing revelations. Instead of sitting in a pew, singing praises to God and offering up our heartfelt prayers of thankfulness, we were in Grant’s double cab truck, on our way to Granny Grace’s acres.

  True to its changeable temperament, the weather was perfect. The sun shone and only traces of snow clung to the hillsides. The temperature edged toward sixty degrees. Birds sang as if spring had already made her appearance and the sky was that clean, azure color that caused human spirits to soar. However, one human was doing battle with her conscience.

  “We will go to tonight’s service,” Mom said. “I’m sure Pastor Huggins’ sermon will be just as good tonight as it is this morning.

  Grant smiled down at me. I was snuggled between him and my parent, as close to his warm, broad shoulder as I could get. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “It’s a good day for an outing,” Mom admitted, nudging the hamper at her feet. “I believe the Lord understands when we need to be in His great out-of-doors instead of stuck within man-made walls.”

  I giggled. “‘Stuck’, Mom?”

  She sniffed. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Mom had packed a lunch and brought along a blanket. We were adding a festive air to our trip, by way of a picnic lunch.

  Grant drove to my grandparents’ old home place along a back road, the same way I had gone the day the spider webs clogged my vision, the day Grant had declared he loved me.

  At last we arrived at our destination. Grant jumped from the truck and held the sagging wire fence down with one foot while my mother and I stepped over it onto Tucker land. Taking the hamper, he led the way on the stepping stones across Lee Creek.

  “Darcy, do you remember that you heard a pickax or a shovel the day you came out here by yourself?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I sure thought I did but then I ran into those giant cobwebs and looking back at it, I don’t know if they were real or not. Maybe I imagined
them and maybe I just thought I heard some-body digging.”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t imagine it. Follow me. Be careful of these rocks and bushes. There’s poison ivy in among them.”

  I grasped Mom’s hand as Grant walked in front, holding limbs out of our way and offering help in the rough places. At last he led us to a gravel bar jutting into Lee Creek. The rocky limestone bluff met the land here. The little creek was a small rivulet hugging the side of the cliff.

  He stepped across the creek and climbed a short way up the bluff. Moving aside a large bush, he revealed a large hole in the overhanging rock and a pickax lying beside it.

  “So I did hear somebody digging,” I said, “but digging for what?”

  Grant looked down at Mom. “Silver,” he said. “There’s quite a large vein of silver running through your land, Miss Flora.”

  “What did you say?” Mom asked. “Did you say there’s silver in the rocks there?”

  Grant nodded. “Sure is. Enough to make you a very wealthy woman, Miss Flora. Do you mind if we spread out that blanket, Darcy? Did you bring some of your famous coffee, Miss Flora? This is going to be a long story. We might as well be comfortable.”

  A large, flat rock on the gravel bar made a perfect table. Grant set the hamper on it.

  Sitting on the blanket, coffee in hand, Grant began to put the finishing touches to the unbelievable mystery that had very nearly taken our lives.

  “Stuart Wood of Innovation Technology is a shady character operating just within the limits of the law,” Grant began. “His business is a fly-by-night outfit. He bilks unsuspecting people out of their money if he can. Evidently he had heard rumors that this part of Oklahoma might have deposits of valuable minerals. Have you two heard of the legend of bars of Spanish gold and silver being buried somewhere around Comanche, Oklahoma?”

  I nodded.

  Mom poured three cups of coffee, handing two to Grant and me. “I’ve heard that old tale all my life,” she said, “but a lot of people have hunted for it over the years. If the legends were true, I’d think it would have been found by now. Personally, I think it’s just that, an old tale. Nothing to it.”

  “Stuart Wood believes it,” Grant said. “He’s a treasure hunter with his sights set on digging up a fortune somewhere. He had heard the legends about gold being buried around these parts too, maybe loot of outlaws like Jesse James or more modern ones like Pretty Boy Floyd. Anyway, he did some research and found a descendant of one of those bad guys, Chester Overton. Can you guess who that relative is?”

  “Jude Melton?” I asked.

  Grant shook his head. “Bruce Dowell. Bruce is a great-grandson of old Chester.”

  Mom smoothed a corner of the blanket we sat on. “I guess that explains Bruce’s interest in what Cub found in the old well. And maybe that also explains why he wanted to pasture his cattle on my land. It would give him a good excuse to be snooping around while he was supposed to be taking care of his cattle.”

  “Correct,” Grant said. “He thought if there was any treasure buried out here, it should rightfully be his and you can bet if he had found anything, he wouldn’t have told anybody.”

  I shook my head. “That’s twisted thinking, Grant. How could Bruce assume that renting a pasture gave him ownership of what’s under the ground?”

  Grant grinned. “If you haven’t noticed, Darcy, Bruce is just a little bit of a twisted character. He also carries around a big chunk of self-pity and suspicions. He convinced himself that old Chester had buried something on your land.”

  Off in the distance a couple of crows cawed. A squirrel scooted headfirst down an oak and bounded away through tall grass, probably on his way to a buried cache of nuts. This was such a peaceful scene, unchanged for centuries except for that scar in the hillside and the pickax that lay beside it.

  “What about Eileen and Jude Melton?” I asked. “Were they related to Bruce?”

  Grant poured another cup of coffee from the thermos. “No, they were two people that Mr. Wood picked up to use for his own purposes. They were drifters, both of them. Eileen was never in one place very long. Somewhere along the way she met Jude, another man with a chip on his shoulder and sort of shiftless. He felt that the world owed him a living. Somehow he and Eileen met and hit it off. He idolized her.”

  “And they were just the kind of people Stuart Wood could use,” I mused.

  “Yes. Wood was the brains of the group. Eileen and Jude along with Bruce did his leg work for him, the dirty work. He tried buying your land first, Miss Flora. That would have been a lot easier and a lot more legal. Wood knew that it would never do for you to move out here in your new house. You would hear and see the digging he is doing. When you wouldn’t sell, he was ready to resort to violence. He would have been in the clear, or so he thought. Eileen and Jude were the ones doing the spying and putting poison in your coffee, Darcy. If they had been caught, he would have been in the clear, or so he thought.”

  “So that’s the reason he offered me a lot of money for a little bit of rocky land,” Mom said, tossing a stick into the water.

  “What are you going to do with the land now that you know there is silver on it?” I asked her.

  “What do you think I should do?” Mom asked. “You’re the one who will be inheriting all this someday.”

  These hills, with Lee Creek running through to the river, the rocks, trees and animals were forever a part of me. My family’s history lay here among the trees, the rocks, Lee Creek and the Ventris River.

  The cleared area where my grandparents’ house had stood, the old apple orchard in bad need of care, the lonely cemetery with its leaning headstones and the one unmarked grave. I loved it all with a fierceness that surprised me. I could not imagine heavy equipment digging up the hillside, trucks muddying the stream, trees being cut and animals without their habitat.

  I shook my head. “I like it just as it is”

  “If people knew about that silver, they would say you are standing in the way of progress, Darcy. Are you ready for that?” Mom asked.

  I picked up a flat pebble and expertly skipped it across the stream. “Sometimes progress is just another word for greed,” I said.

  “Besides, who is going to know?” Grant asked. “I can cover up that hole and I doubt that Stuart Wood or Jude or Bruce will be in much of a position to say anything.”

  I tapped him on the shoulder and feigned shock. “Why, Sheriff Hendley! Are you going to be withholding evidence?”

  Mom nodded. “Or obstructing justice?”

  Grant grinned and caught my hand. “At this moment, in a jail in Levi, justice is being served and as for evidence—what evidence? I don’t see anything here of interest to anybody but us, do you?”

  We three along with our circle of trusted friends were getting pretty good at keeping secrets. It was absolutely alarming, the secrets we had uncovered and wouldn’t be sharing with anybody else. Cub’s ears would certainly twitch if he got word of the truth inside that parcel he had found. By the time it made the gossip circuit of Levi, the true story of Granny Grace’s first husband, Cauldfell’s murder, the murderer, Mom’s and my brush with death, and the silver on our land, who knows how that story would have changed? What truths would be twisted?

  My mother and I had wished many times that Cub’s curiosity had not led him to look into the old hand-dug well, but maybe instead of being the villain, Cub was the hero here. He had started us on a strange pathway into the past. We had uncovered a mystery we didn’t know existed. Because of Cub’s nosiness, Mom had discovered her birth mother and a new bond was being forged between her and Miss Georgia. I had come face to face with greed and lies and death but in the process, I had discovered how much a good man loved me and how much I loved him.

  I twined my fingers through Grant’s and smiled up into those clear blue eyes. “You’re right, Sheriff. There’s nothing on this land that would interest anybody else in all of Ventris County. Who needs a silver mine? I’ve go
t everything I could ever want, right here. Already, I am a rich woman.”

  Grant raised his coffee cup. “Well said, Darcy Tucker.”

  Mom and I lifted our cups and we three clicked them together. I smiled and for once, didn’t correct him. I liked the sound of Darcy Tucker Campbell but I also liked Darcy Hendley. I believed I could get used to that new name with no trouble at all.

  — The End —

  About the Authors

  It may seem strange to some that a mild-mannered kindergarten teacher would become an author of cozy mysteries, but it’s actually a good fit. A teacher is a word craft. So is a writer. A teacher wants the efforts of her labor to have a positive outcome. So does a writer. A teacher prays and hopes that each student has a positive take-away from her work. A writer hopes that for her readers too. A teacher would like each of the children in her classroom to achieve a satisfying life. Although she can’t control that, as a writer she can control the way her books conclude!

  A native Oklahoman, Blanche has a deep familiarity with the Sooner state, so it’s the logical setting for her books. Her Cherokee heritage and feeling at home in the rural settings of Oklahoma are vividly woven into the background fabric of her books. Her other published cozies include The Cemetery Club and Grave Shift, books one and two on the Flora/Darcy Series, co-authored by Barbara Burgess.

  Visit Blanche at www.BlancheDayManos.com

  Barbara Burgess is a retired trial court administrator who says she found many good story ideas in the courtroom. One of those ideas evolved into her first suspense novel, Lethal Justice, published in 2010. She also co-authored The Cemetery Club, a mystery novel based on Cherokee history. Her father was half Cherokee and she says much of her family history involves Cherokee legend and beliefs similar to those found in Grave Shift. She has also written short fiction for Woman’s World and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and freelanced for several Arkansas newspapers.