Murder At The Mystery Mansion
The Doreen Sizemore Adventures Book 5
Serena B Miller
Contents
Main Body
Also by Serena B Miller
About the Author
Copyright © 2015 by Serena B Miller
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published By L J Emory Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-940283-19-7
Murder At The Mystery Mansion
* * *
I’ve seen a lot of things in my life I wish I hadn’t.
My name is Doreen Sizemore and I’m seventy-two years old. Take my word for it. If you ever get to be my age you’ll see things you’ll wish you never saw neither. Things that make you want to just wash your eyes out with lye soap. Most of them things happened to me while I was trying to help out my kinfolk.
Being tender-hearted can get a body in a world of trouble.
I live in a little bitty river town called South Shore, Kentucky. It might just be a blip on the map to some people but it is paradise to me. I especially love my little town after going away on some of them trips where I was a’trying to help somebody out and got my fool self scared half to death stumbling over dead bodies.
Like I always say, nothing good ever comes from traveling. Bad things happen when I’m far away from home.
I was born and raised in Kentucky and proud of it. Up until the past couple years, the furthest I ever traveled was over the bridge to Portsmouth, Ohio where I had a job working at Selby Shoe Factory. I started in sewing shoes right after my graduation from Greenup High School. That’s what us girls used to do around here. If you didn’t get married and start having babies, you got a job at Selby’s.
If you were fast at piecework--and I was--you could make a pretty decent wage. I used my pay check to help out Mama and Daddy with groceries and for things like buying football cleats for my little brother who weren’t all that little in high school and had to have them cleats special ordered. Back then, I’d also buy a little lipstick and rouge from time to time.
My life in this river town has been a good one. At least for the most part it has been. The people tend to be pretty decent. I’m kin to some, friends with others, and I can tolerate the rest. We got us a high rate of unemployment just like everywhere else in the country right now, but the difference between us and the rest of the country is that we’ve been in a recession for so long we hardly notice it. We’re good at rolling with the punches here in Appalachia. We have to be.
I remember seeing pictures awhile back in some magazine of a little kid with a dirty face a’playin’ in the dirt. Underneath it they was asking for funds to help poor little Appalachian children. Them pictures were a puzzle to me. That child just looked like about half the other kids running around town needing a good face-washing before dinner. I couldn’t see what the fuss was about, but then maybe they know something I don’t.
Now where was I?
Oh yes.
People in South Shore, Kentucky know how to roll with the punches and help out a neighbor. It feels real safe when I’m here in my little house on the river where I belong.
So, after coming home with Lula Faye after that incident on the river boat that landed both of us in jail, I had it all figured out. I wouldn’t leave town no more ever and nothing bad could happen to me. Nope. I’d stay in Kentucky where it was safe and I would mind my own business. That way I could depend on not getting mixed up in any more murders. Come heck or high water I weren’t leaving town ever again and that was that.
I got me a nice life. I like being able to walk over to the beauty shop. I like being able to walk down to Foodland and get me some fresh pickle loaf every now and again and maybe a moon pie if I feel like it. Sometimes I splurge and get an RC cola. It goes real good with the home canned green beans I raise in my vegetable garden in the back yard. RC kinda cuts the bacon grease I use to season the green beans.
When I’m outside walking someplace or working in my garden, I talk to my neighbors if they’re around and that gives me a good feeling. I have my social security check and my soaps on the television set every afternoon and a nice little church to go to come Sundays. And that’s exactly the way I like it. Everything stays nice and safe as long as I mind my own business and stay where I belong right here in South Shore, Kentucky.
One of the best things about staying put in the town you were born and raised in is that you know where everybody fits and what their temperament is and who you can depend on and who it’s good to steer clear of. For instance, there’s the little couple next door. My cousin, Bobby Joe and his wife, Esther. She’s got a brand new baby—her second one in two years. Her husband is not real work-brickle but he’s young and strong and can be helpful in a pinch. It’s good to have young muscle around when something needs to be moved or lifted and he’s nearly always around.
Then there’s old Mrs. Anthony who lives two doors down in that little bitty trailer that has all the rusty buckets of roses growing around it. I know I call myself old sometimes, but Charlotte Anthony is really old. She’s a hundred and one and still hobbles around with a watering can talking to her roses every morning and evening. Them roses must like what she’s a’saying because they grow awful good. Her daughter says if the roses ever start talking back to her mother they’ll put her in a home, though. Her daughter used to be my high school teacher, so being around them two makes me feel like a young pup.
My neighbors directly behind me, the Bruce’s, has a house that kinda hangs out over the the Ohio River. Since he retired from working at the A-plant over in Ohio, they become snowbirds who like to live in Florida all winter and come home during the summer. That’s fine by me. When they’re gone, if it ain’t too cold, I sometimes sit a spell in one of them deck chairs they leave out and then I got me a nice comfortable place to watch the Ohio River roll on down to Cincinnati.
They don’t mind me sitting back there on their porch. They like it. They even give me their phone number to call them in Florida if anything bad happens to the place while they’re gone, and a key to get in if I need to check on something like a busted water pipe. That key is not a temptation to me. I know I could go in and snoop, but what’s the point? Everybody’s life is about the same as another’s anyway. At least it is around here. A little more money here or there, maybe a little more booze, or a few more kids, but all in all we’re mostly just hanging on trying to make sense of things and cause as little fuss as possible.
Three doors down are the Hutchins family. He’s a Greenup County boy, born and raised. He got his wife someplace else though. I can’t remember exactly where. I think it was some place exotic like Nashville. I’ve always liked Glen Hutchins. He worked his way up to principal at the elementary school and he and Samantha have two fine-looking girls. One’s a senior at Greenup High and the other one is a freshman. Good girls, too.
Mrs. Hutchins, Samantha, is polite but she’s never warmed up to me much. I hear she was trying to get a name as a country-western singer back when they first met. Then the oldest girl baby came and Glen got a job back here at home, and whenever I’ve tried to talk to her she always looks like she’s either someplace else in her mind or wanting to be. I know I’m not the most interesting old woman on the planet, but I try not to outstay my welcome when people are busy.
They live in a house that Glen inherited from his grandma on his momma’s side. It’s a fussy sort of place. One of them Victorian-type houses w
ith lots of porches and banisters and lace curtains in every window. I’ve read that some people call houses like that Painted Ladies—like some of the old people used to call women who made their living doing things with men that they shouldn’t have been doing.
I can see why them kind of houses are called that. The Hutchins’ place has that sort of personality, like there’s been things happen behind closed doors that shouldn’t have happened.
Which seems likely. Glen’s great-granddaddy weren’t exactly a church-going man. He made his money as a gambler on the old river boats. His name was Mack McMurphy and it was rumored that he built that Painted Lady house out of gambling money. Not honest gambling money, mind you. Mack McMurphy was rumored to be an expert at cheating.
According to stories my grandma told me, McMurphy’s wife must have been a hard woman, too. Grandma said that Henrietta McMurphy ran a speakeasy in the cellar of that house at night during Prohibition. Then she’d turn around and serve tea and fancy little cakes to the neighborhood ladies in her formal parlor in the afternoon. I guess she thought it would make people less suspicious of the goings-on in the cellar.
People say that one of the builders told his wife there was some hidden rooms and secret passageways in the place. He weren’t supposed to tell, though, and he swore her to secrecy. But some people don’t stay sworn. She told a friend, who told another friend, and then it was Katie-bar-the-door and everybody in town thought there was some secret rooms—but nobody ever saw nothing and the speculation died down about it. Glen always laughed if anybody brought it up and would say that he wished the rumor was true, but he’d been all over the place and never found nothing.
My grandma said that some of the local women told her that they sometimes got the feeling that somebody was peeking at them when they were in the parlor. It gave them the shivers, they said. But my grandma said she was in that house plenty of times and never got the shivers. She said she thought the builder was just trying to make himself look big in his wife’s eyes and it got out of hand.
Anyway, Henrietta and Mack McMurphy’s days were pretty full.
They had one child, a daughter named Elizabeth Ann. Like so many children do when they become teenagers, she rebelled. Problem was, her parents were into so many shady dealings, the only way she could truly rebel was to get religion, so she did. She met a traveling salesman by the name of Hutchins who stopped by the church one Sunday probably hoping his piety would earn him some sales.
He stopped traveling once Elizabeth Ann married him and moved him into the Victorian mansion her parent’s ill-gotten gains had built. They started having Bible studies in the parlor and tried to talk Mack and Henrietta into joining them.
Mack and Henrietta were pretty elderly by then, but they decided that life weren’t hardly worth living anymore with Elizabeth Ann trying to get them to come to Bible studies beneath their own roof, so them two old people bought their selves a little riverboat and took off one night when Henrietta was asleep. They left a note saying they were headed down to New Orleans and for her to leave them alone. I guess she did. I never heard anything different.
You’d think all that drama would’ve rubbed off on the people born there, but Glen’s about as mild-mannered and boring as a man can be. I guess all the interesting part got used up by his ancestors. Elizabeth Ann must have squelched all the interesting right out of that family.
Even though it’s been owned by Hutchins people for years, around here some people still call the place McMurphy’s Mansion, although some started calling it Mystery Mansion because of the hidden rooms rumors. It ain’t really no mansion, of course. At least not anymore. But back when Mack and Henrietta first built it, the thing was so big and pretentious for these parts, calling it a mansion pretty much fit.
Still, it’s always been Glen’s pride and joy and he spends a lot of time painting and scraping on it and keeping the yard tidy. Which, around here is seen as a little eccentric. South Shore ain’t exactly a fussy kind of place. No one minds if there’s a car or two up on blocks in a neighbor’s yard, or if an extra washing machine sits a spell on a front porch, or even if someone takes it into their head to plant begonias in that washing machine. The old McMurphy Mansion kinda stands out in our neighborhood because it’s so nice.
We had a nice, normal, quiet neighborhood until that Samantha Hutchins ran off with a truck driver, leaving poor old Glen and his girls all alone by their selves in that big old house.
“I never should have tried to tie her down to this place,” Glen told me a few weeks later when I took him and the girls a banana cream pie so I could say how sorry I was. “It was like trying to capture a beautiful butterfly and keep it in a jar. Samantha was meant for better things.”
Well, I’d heard about her trying to become a country western star and giving up her dream to have his babies, but from what I’ve seen, people tend to do about what they want to do. There’s some honkytonks around here she could have sung in if she’d really wanted to. Honkytonks was good enough for Loretta Lynn when she was starting out, but I guess Samantha weren’t no Loretta Lynn.
She was a looker, though, I’ll give her that. I’m sure plenty of truck drivers would have been happy enough to have given her a ride. Wait a minute. I didn’t mean that like it sounded. Offer her a ride in their trucks, I meant to say, although I’m not sure that sounds any better. Maybe I better go wash out my own mouth with soap and water right about now.
But anyway, after Samantha took off with the truck driver her daughters and husband didn’t seem to hardly know what to do with their selves. It’s hard on a family when there’s no mother in the house. It was as though they were just waiting around for her to come back and tell them what to do.
Her daughters are pretty girls like their mama, but without her there to guide them they started dressing a little trashy which was something that Samantha never did. Glen just walked around looking lost and sad. It was like they was all playing a part in a bad soap opera--keeping up their end of the deal, until Samantha came back and they could start living their normal lives again.
The house didn’t go to pot, though. Glen has always been good about keeping things clean and fixed up at his place. I guess it goes with the job of being a principle at a school in a small town. You have to keep up appearances no matter what. If anything, he made things a little more neat than usual, like he was keeping it especially nice for in case his wife came back.
It was enough to break my heart to watch that little family try to move on, and trust me, everyone most definitely did watch that family. It weren’t every day that a local principal’s wife took off with a truck driver.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about human nature, it is that where there is no information, people will make it up. Somebody will give an opinion and a couple more people will repeat it and before long you’re hearing an opinion stated as a fact. There were a lot of rumors and speculation flying around.
A few people suggested to Glen that he file a missing person’s report with the police because there was no telling what that truck driver might have done with her. Glen shook his head and said that she’d made it pretty clear she weren’t never coming back to him. One person asked him if he’d take her back if she wanted him to. Glen got all misty-eyed and said he’d take her back in a heart-beat no matter what she’d done because he still loved her so much.
The girls had been real involved in school before Samantha left. The oldest was a cheerleader and the younger one was in the marching band. People told me that Glen would go to the games and sit all by his lonesome watching his girls do their cheerleading and band-marching and it would be like he weren’t hardly there. They said he just stared way off into the distance like he was wishing his wife would come back.
As the days went on, there were some single women at my church I overheard talking about how Glen weren’t all that bad looking and why on earth would a woman walk out on a nice man with a good job and he did have that nice big ho
use. I knew it weren’t going to be long before the casseroles would start rolling in. I figured Glen was going to find himself up for grabs soon with or without having any divorce papers.
It got to the point I couldn’t stand listening to the talk any longer. I baked me some brownies, put them on a nice blue-flowered plate that I’d picked up at the Dollar Store, covered it all in tin foil and walked down the road to pay Glen a visit. He invited me in, all nice and polite as usual. I couldn’t help but notice that the house was clean as a whistle, just like he kept the outside.
Weren’t nothing wrong with him keeping the place nice. Cleanliness is next to godliness and all that but it struck me as real sad that the man didn’t have anything more to do with his extra time than clean his house. I mean, he had two teenage girls at home. I figured there should at least be a comb or a shoe lace out of place but there wasn’t.
It made me sad to see that he still had the big picture of Samantha over the fireplace he’d put there years ago. It must have been taken when she was in her country-western mode and was still thinking she’d be a big star. She was wearing a fringed cowboy shirt and tight jeans and cowboy boots and was looking soulfully into the camera while holding a guitar. I have an idea she didn’t know how to play the thing because her fingers looked real awkward on the strings.
You’d think that if a wife ran off with a truck driver the husband would be angry enough to take her silly-looking oversized picture off the wall, but that weren’t Glen’s way. He surely did love that woman.
It started me to wondering if that’s why she left. Some women can only take so much worship before they lose their respect for a man. A woman thinking her husband can’t draw a breath without her is a dangerous thing. In some women’s minds it gives them the license to do whatever they want. A person has to have some self-respect or there are people who’ll run right over you.
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