I wouldn’t mind being more health conscious as long as I didn’t have to think about it.
“This is Torie O’Shea,” Elliott began. “Torie, this is Chester. His father was a miner for the Panther Run Coal Company and lived at the boardinghouse.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Who are you, exactly?” the old man asked.
“Clarissa Hart left Torie the boardinghouse in her will,” Elliott said.
Chester’s heavy grey eyebrows rose about an inch, and then he took aim and spit about six inches from where I was sitting. Wonderful. Made me wonder what else I was sitting in, besides dirt.
“ ’S’pose I should say congratulations,” he muttered.
‘Torie was wondering if you could give her some information on the building. On the boardinghouse itself,” Elliott said.
“Like what?” Chester asked.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said. “But what year were you born?” What year he was born would determine my line of questioning. There was no point in asking him things that he wouldn’t begin to know because he wasn’t alive yet.
“I was born on the twenty-seventh of February, 1910,” he said with his head held high.
Well, that made him pretty darn ancient, but not quite old enough for some of the things that I was curious about. For instance, he would not have a conscious memory of Bridie or her husband, other than through the eyes of an eight- or ten-year-old. “What do you know about two men named Doyle Phillips and Thomas MacLean?” I asked.
“Been years since somebody asked questions ‘bout them. People still talk about ‘em, but I ain’t been asked no questions in a long while,” he said. “Why do you want to know about ‘em? Seen their ghosts?”
“No, no, I haven’t seen any ghosts.” His question did not make me think he was off his rocker or anything like that. Ghost stories were a staple of mountain life, especially ghosts involving unsolved disappearances, murders, and star-crossed lovers. “Did your father ever talk about the men?”
“Sure,” he said. “Lily-livered sons a, uh-hem, excuse me. Forget myself sometimes. My dad always said them boys deserved whatever it was they got, ‘less a course they were on a beach in Hawaii or something.”
“Why?” I asked. “What did they do?”
Chester scratched his paper-thin white hair and spit again. Had he forgotten how to swallow? After a moment he stated, “Don’t know. Dad never told me. Don’t know if Dad even knew.”
“Okay,” I said. “Exactly what do you know about them?”
“I know that there was a dance a-goin’ on that night. Down at the fairgrounds. Everybody was there. Doyle and Thomas showed up in their best clothes, all spit shined and scrubby,” he said. “ ‘Bout an hour into it, they started tellin’ people that they had to go. They had dates. Kept tellin’ everybody that they was in for a good time and that they’d tell ‘em all about it the next day.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good. What happened?”
“They left and nobody saw ‘em again. Ever.”
“That’s not so good,” I said. “Is there nothing else that you’ve been told?”
“There was rumors aplenty. Some said that Bridie knew where the miners had gone. Others said that Bridie kilt them.”
“What?” I all but screeched.
“Nobody believed that. She had no business with them. What reason would she have to do something like that?” he asked. “Nope. Most nobody believed that. But most everybody believed that she knew where they’d gone off to.”
“Why? Why did people think that Bridie knew the fates of the miners?” Elliott asked before I had a chance to.
“Best as I can tell, when she was questioned about ‘em, she all but said that she knew their whereabouts. When they went and pushed her about it, she said that it wasn’t up to her to make people awares,” Chester said with a smile on his face, as if he was proud of her. “Since there was never no crime committed, she didn’t do nothing wrong.”
I unfolded my legs, but stayed seated on the ground. I stretched them out in front of me, trying to get the blood to return to my feet. I wiggled my feet and rolled my ankles. “What do you know about the lynching?” I asked finally.
“I saw that body,” he said. “He’d pissed himself but good.”
“That’s nice,” I said and nearly hurled my breakfast right then and there. Then I thought about what he’d said. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. How would he have seen the body? I’d lock my kids in the closet before letting them see something like that. “H-ow did you . . . Weren’t you terribly young?”
“Sure,” he said. “My dad had to quit mining because of the seventeen.”
“Seventeen? What exactly does that mean?”
“The cave-in of seventeen. Broke his back. Couldn’t mine anymore,” Chester explained. “So, to try and make extra money, before school I’d walk up to the boardinghouse and get the mending, ironing, things like that, and take them back to my mom. She got paid for doin’ that sort of thing. It was ‘long about five-thirty when I got there and there’s a big crowd. Just a minute.”
Chester jumped up and took the steps up to his house two at a time. I gave Elliott an amused look and he smiled back at me. Not even a minute later, Chester was back and handed me a picture. “That’s me,” he said and pointed to a hollow-faced boy who peered back at the camera with sharp eyes in a dull body. He stood in a crowd of people, who stood around a body hanging from the tree that stood in the front yard of the boardinghouse.
We desperately needed the voice of Danette here so that she could say her usual oh, gross. I said it for her. “Oh, gross.”
“Let me see,” Elliott said and took the picture from me.
“What do you know about him? Why would somebody do that?”
“Why?” Chester asked. “Why not? Big-shot company man. He could have your job in a second. Always tryin’ to squeeze the local man out and bring in some foreigner that would do the job cheaper. There’s a hundred people that coulda done that.”
I thought that Chester was still a little touchy over this particular subject and that I needed to be very careful about what I said and how I said it. Elliott handed the picture back to me and I studied it. I tried to look at the body without really looking at the body, as if the evil presented there could somehow jump out of the picture and invade my safe world. As if just by looking at it, I was bringing his misfortune to myself.
“All right,” I said. “I understand that. But seriously, who could have done it?”
“Oh, they caught the guys that did it,” he said. He snapped his fingers and tapped his temple as if that would help him remember exactly who they were. “Arlo Davis and William Gross.”
I heard the words that Chester said, but I didn’t really hear the words that Chester said. That was because I was engrossed in looking at the lynched man in the photograph. I thought about how unusual it was that in the only photographs of this man that I had ever seen, he was dead. This was Aldrich Gainsborough.
And this was the man in the casket in the photograph that hung above the fireplace at the Panther Run Boardinghouse.
Twenty-four
What does it mean?” Elliott asked me. His brown eyes were serious and yet somehow there was a certain look of wide-eyed disbelief to them. He downshifted the gears in his Eagle Scout as we came to a four-way stop at the foot of the hill. How brave he was, I thought, to drive a stick shift in a mountain state.
“I don’t know,” I said and gazed out the window at the supreme foliage all around. “Why would Clarissa have a picture of a dead guy hanging above her fireplace? Since 1918, I might add. Why would Clarissa hang a picture of the superintendent of the Panther Run Coal Company above her fireplace?”
“In his casket, no less.”
“Yes, we’ve established that. Creepy in and of itself,” I said. “Then add the fact that he was lynched in the front yard. . .”
Elliott turned his vehi
cle to the left, and we headed up over a mountain. “Okay, so the superintendent of the company gets lynched in the front yard of the boardinghouse, and Clarissa forever hangs a picture of him in his casket above her fireplace.”
“Do you think it was a reminder?” I asked.
“A reminder of what?”
“Of the fact he was lynched? I don’t know. I read in one of the books you checked out for me that the superintendent was pretty much loathed within the community. I didn’t really get a chance to read why he was loathed, but suffice it to say that he was. So why would she hang a photograph of him in his coffin in her house?”
“Maybe Gainsborough did something really horrible to her and she wanted to see his dead face every day as a reminder that he was dead,” Elliott said and shifted gears yet again.
I sort of stared at him from the corner of my eyes. “You have an active imagination,” I said. “I’m almost afraid to ask where that came from.”
“Well, think about it. Let’s say. . . he killed her father or something horrible like that. She absolutely despised him and wanted her own revenge. Now, we know that tiny Clarissa Hart couldn’t lynch a man all by herself, so that’s out of the question. But somebody else does lynch him and makes her day. So, she takes his picture and hangs it in the boardinghouse as a reminder every day that the guy got what he had coming to him,” Elliott said, all worked up at his own devices.
I thought about it a moment while Elliott waited for me to reply. “Well, your theory holds merit. In fact, it’s the best theory we’ve got so far. . . but Lord, it sounds like a plot to a Monday night movie or something.”
“You know they get ideas for movies from real life,” he stated.
“Okay,” I said. “Say you are correct. Where’s the connection between him and the miners, Phillips and MacLean?”
“Who said there has to be one?” Elliott asked. “Maybe they were suspects in the Gainsborough lynching. Nobody ever said they actually did it, and besides, Chester said they caught the guys that really did it. You know, if the papers print that you are suspected in the murder of Clarissa Hart, we all know that you didn’t do it, but somebody eighty years from now may question it, like you’re questioning Phillips and MacLean right now.”
I gave him a sideways glance and pondered what he’d just said. “Well, that’s comforting,” I said. “So you don’t think that there is a connection between the Gainsborough lynching and the missing miners?”
“I didn’t say that, either,” he said.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Elliott. You’re giving me a headache,” I said.
“What does any of it matter?” he asked. “I mean, seriously. Does any of this really help determine who killed Clarissa Hart? Can it possibly help?”
“I think it could,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many thorns from the past pop up in the present day.”
“I suppose you’re right. We could just as easily be wrong,” he said. Elliott pointed up to the top of the mountain where an absolute mansion sat gleaming in the summer sun. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“Wow,” I said. “Don’t hit any really big bumps.”
Before we could even get out of the Scout, two very large and well-fed German shepherds came to greet us. Large and absolutely beautiful, the two barked at us as if they’d never bark again but did not bare their teeth. They were interested, and maybe slightly alarmed, but not ready to attack.
“Nice doggy,” I said as I stepped out of the truck. I made no sudden moves and kept my hands palm down and to my sides. They sniffed and sniffed and I really wished that their owner would come and call them off. “Nice big doggy.”
The house was an amazing piece of modem architecture with more points and angles to it than I thought possible in a building. I swear there had to be rooms that had five or more walls instead of your standard four. It was a white sandstone with what I assumed were large solar panels along the roof. The yard was immaculate, and every pane of glass seemed to be a veritable commercial for Windex.
“Can I help you?” I heard a deep voice ask from behind. I jumped as if I had been shot and was comforted by the fact that Elliott actually shrieked.
I turned to find a large black man in overalls and a navy blue thermal underwear shirt. His boots were clean and his face freshly shaven. I looked to Elliott, hoping he would speak up, because I had no clue as to who we were there to visit.
“I. . . I. . . jeez, you scared the vinegar out of me,” Elliott said, still trying to catch his breath. The dogs had calmed down and were seated on their haunches. “I’m looking for Robert Miller.”
“What’s your business with him?” the man asked in that voice that seemed to grow from his chest.
“Uh. . . we’re wanting some help with some local history,” he said.
The man looked at Elliott’s vehicle and spied his West Virginia license plates. “You’re local.”
“Yes,” I interrupted. “But I’m not and I’ve just inherited the Panther Run Boardinghouse.”
The man eyed me, I swear, all the way from the top of my head down to my toes, which were sticking out of my sandals. “I’m Bobby Miller. What do you want to know?”
“You’re Robert Miller?” Elliott asked.
“What’s the matter? You weren’t expecting a black man in this big mansion on the hill?” he asked.
“Well, actually,” Elliott began. “I. . . I don’t know what I was expecting. I was told Robert Miller had been a miner, and I’ve never seen many miners end up in houses like that one.”
Bobby Miller was at least six feet three, with forearms the size of my thighs. Okay, my normal thighs, not my pregnant ones. He was maybe fifty years old, which was only alluded to by the grey at his temples. Otherwise, there were no wrinkles, except around his eyes, and he was as fit and firm as any thirty-year-old.
“Come on in,” he said and walked up to his house with the dogs quickly on his heels. “Been trying to keep the panther off my property at night. I’m not having any luck.”
“How are you attempting that?” Elliott asked.
“I put up an electronic fence two acres out. She doesn’t seem to care,” Mr. Miller said. “She’s a mean one.”
He led us into his house and showed us to the family room where he told us to sit while his wife brought us iced tea. I didn’t ask if it had caffeine or not. I drank it, hoping that it would have caffeine and I would be innocent of any wrongdoing.
“What is it exactly that you’re wanting to know?” he asked as he sat down in a large tan recliner. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows, which was really cool in the daytime because you could see forever and see all the wildlife. The flip side meant that at night anything and everything could see right into your living room. Surely there must have been some sort of miniblind system that I just couldn’t see.
Bookcases were built into the walls, with a fireplace made out of a cream-colored marble taking up the only space not covered in books or windows. The floor was an expensive tongue-and-groove. Being the practical person that I am, or else the pessimistic negative wonder that I sometimes can be, I could only think of what a pain in the butt it must be to keep clean. There were pluses to being lower middle class, in a small house with yucky brown carpet. Only having to vacuum twice a week was one of them.
“Mr. Miller, my name is Torie O’Shea, by the way,” I said. “Is this house really run on solar power?” I don’t know where that came from. I was all prepared to ask him about the boardinghouse and the mines, and instead that question just sort of tumbled out of my mouth.
“Call me Bobby,” he said, and smiled. “And, yes. It is.”
“Oh, that is just too cool,” I said and looked up at the ceiling.
“You didn’t come here to ask me about my house,” he said.
“No, you’re absolutely correct,” I said. “Forgive me.”
“It’s all right. My house has been in quite a few magazines. It is one of a kind.”
“You were a miner?” I asked.
“When I was a child,” he said. “I was eight years old the first time I stepped foot in the mines. My father took me in.”
“How long ago was that?” Elliott asked.
“Nineteen forty-eight,” he answered.
He was older than I thought, but still not quite old enough to actually remember the era that I was most interested in.
“Thought I’d the of claustrophobia,” he said. I looked at his house with all of its bright open spaces and twenty-foot ceilings. Windows that went all the way to the sky. His confession was no surprise to me. “I swore I was not going to end up like my father or his father or his father.”
“What happened?” I asked. “How did you break the cycle?”
“Clarissa Hart,” he said. “She married a man who was educated and was on his way to being somebody. They had money. One day she was down at the mines—”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would she be down at the mines by that point in her life?”
“She would come down and visit every now and then. Just so happens I’d come down with the flu or something that day and my father sent me out ahead of him, early. Said for me to go on home. Clarissa saw me coming out of the mine and she stopped me. She asked me a few questions, like if I could read and write, which I could. My mother had made sure of that. Clarissa said that no boy who could read and write should be wasted in the mines . . .”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Most of the children who worked in the mines couldn’t read or write,” he explained. “She said that there were plenty of things that I could be doing. She made me promise her that if she got me out of that mine that I wouldn’t waste my life on things like whiskey and gambling. That I would go to school and go to college and be somebody. I said I would.”
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