Hidden Heritage

by Charlotte Hinger

  “Grand champion calf-roper,” she said, shooting arms away from her sides, as though she were being judged in a 4-H event. “Five years in a row.” There was nothing modest about her grin. “Grandfather would be proud.”

  “Where’s Jane?”

  “We untied her and told her to stay in the room. She’s not exactly combat-ready and we didn’t want to take a chance on her being used for bait.”

  I walked to the car and used the satellite phone to call the house. There was no answer. Keith was probably still in the pasture. Sam didn’t answer either. It was supposed to be his day off. In cooler weather he usually went fishing, but I suspected he was holed up in a movie theater today. Betty Central was dispatching. I called and asked her to send an ambulance for Francesca’s body. “Then get ahold of the sheriff in Copeland County and tell him to come to the Diaz Compound. He needs to pick up two men and take them to his jail.”

  Josie and I ran back to the well house. She knelt beside Tosca, who was trembling with terror.

  “I’ll help load Jane into your car so you can take her to the emergency room. I believe she’s okay, but I want her checked out really well. After you take care of her, go find Keith. He’s probably in the north pasture. Tom will likely be there, too. We have everything under control here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Watch your driving. Remember you’re on gravel roads. Elizabeth and Zola will keep watch until the Copeland County sheriff gets here.” I hesitated. “One last thing. There’s a hand mirror in the Old House. Please put it in my Tahoe. And there is a red crystal jar of herbs next to it on the counter. Please flush them down the sink.”

  “Are you okay?” She glanced at me as she picked up Tosca.

  “I’m fine. Just a little woozy. I’ll wait in the well house where it’s cool.” I waved her on. I managed to walk back and pass through the door. I sank to the ground and cradled Francesca’s head in my lap. I felt for a pulse long grown silent and began to weep.

  Then the walls of the well house shifted colors again and I swirled down.

  Down into total blackness.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I hear Josie whisper, “She’s had a nervous breakdown.”

  I am in my own bed floating on a feather sea. I turn my head to one side, too weary to wipe the tears that stream down my cheeks. Nervous breakdown is not a professional term, I think wearily. Josie shouldn’t use it.

  I fight to retain my thoughts. My thoughts are in the hand mirror at my side. I pick it up one more time. I am still in the mirror. Francesca left me there. But there is no one who will come after me. I’ve worn a groove scratching it over and over with my wedding ring.

  “I think we should take it away,” Josie says. “She’s obsessed with that damn mirror.”

  No, no, no. They don’t understand…Keith comes into the room and gently removes it. He leans over the bed and softly kisses my forehead and smoothes back my hair. I cannot make them understand that my soul is in the mirror. I cannot stop the trickle of tears and cannot speak.

  He gently closes my door. I’m doomed. There is no way out now. I’m left in the mirror forever. I need Francesca.

  I sleep again. My need for sleep seems to be insatiable. It’s too deep. Is this what it feels like to die? From a distance I can hear Keith’s guitar. Oh, my darling, my husband. I want to come back. I’m not through with this world yet. I want to stay here. I struggle and struggle. I know the song. I know it.

  “You’ll call my name and I won’t answer. You’ll call my name but I’ll be gone.”

  His voice is deep. Tragic.

  I won’t go. I’m not ready yet. Please I’m not ready. I’m asleep again now. It’s too deep, not a natural sleep and I’m being sucked under. I don’t want to be pulled under. Under and yet away. Then I hear a violin. It’s not Josie’s. The style is different. The melody is incredibly sweet. Keith’s guitar is fading away. Fading.

  From a distance, I see a white horse galloping toward me. It has an iridescent aura. I know when I mount, it will carry me up into a star-strewn sky. Then the stallion stops, neighs, rears on his hind legs and stays frozen like a polished marble statue. It has come for me. We listen to a last perfect note from the violin. The sky is utterly empty. There are no people and it breaks my heart. There is no sound but the violin. Just the deep void. I do not want to go. Grief floods through me as I walk toward the horse.

  Then I see a man coming down the road the horse traveled. He looks shabby and disheveled. He does not belong on this beautiful star path. He is an Earth person. He draws closer and I realize it is Old Man Snyder. He has come for me. Exhilaration pulses through me like I’ve been struck by lightning. Francesca has sent someone.

  Then he stops and listens and in a bit, I hear it too. From afar another fiddle, begins. Old Man Snyder doffs his old fedora, looks at me and gives a slight bow. He lifts his bow.

  The other fiddle launches into a tune so exotic it might have come from the East, from another culture. And I understand that this entity is challenging Francesca and would like me to stay in the mirror.

  Old Man Snyder nods his head and matches the complexity of the minor composition that captures the poignancy of Gypsy violinists. Snyder launches into an insulting, repudiating bluegrass tune with his signature double-bow technique that jolts all my senses. He is of the Earth and proud of it.

  I sob at the incredibly sweet strains of the foreign fiddle, a ballad now. Poignant. Exquisite. All the heartbreak of every lover who has been betrayed, been lost. This is how Keith will feel if I must go.

  Oh, I don’t want to go, my darling. I do not want to leave this world.

  There were a few discordant strands, violent and urgent, and I understand then that some kind of deadly contest has begun. Whirling, first brave, and then frantic. The pace picks up and then it’s impossible to take in. Earth and hell blend. Heaven and the white horse are fading away. The instruments become as one.

  And I understand now that before God created heaven and Earth, he created music. In the beginning there was music. That is how the world began. With a spherical hum, a vibration that set the worlds spinning.

  I can only see Old Man Snyder. I cannot see the Other. But I know who he is. Francesca had told me about him. Tried to warn me. He was there when I fought the urge to hurt Angie’s husband. My own Book of Common Prayer warned me. He was there. He is here.

  Then there is silence. Not the silence of finality, but the breathless expectation that prefaces the beginning of an aria in a great opera. Or that expectant hush before the conclusion. Old Man Snyder seems to listen for an instant and then the two fiddles duel once again.

  And the Bible says Jesus descended to hell for three days after he was taken from the cross. The necessary hell that put the anguish in music. The discord, the melancholy. The wild despair. Was that why the Father sent you there? To bring back what was missing from a sweetly perfect heaven?

  I want life. All of life. My quarrelling stepchildren and sunshine and drought. My crazy contradictory Kansas. Little children and silly dogs. I want the blend of Earth and heaven and hell.

  I am the one who should be meeting this spirit. Old Man Snyder is taking my place. It is not right. The music winds down, fades. He looks at me across some dimension I don’t recognize and tips his old fedora.

  He walks off with his fiddle tucked under his arm.

  ***

  When I awoke the next morning, sunshine was streaming into the bedroom. There was no one around. Weakly, I shoved my feet into my slippers and walked to the bathroom. I lowered myself onto the stool with the help of the towel bar, then managed to walk to the sink where I washed my hands and brushed my teeth. I wanted to shower, but I was too unsteady. I reached for my pink summer seersucker robe and walked to the top of stairs.

  I could hear voices coming from the kitchen. Keith, Josie, and Zola putt
ing in her two bits. I eyed the steps and decided they would be too risky.

  “Hey,” I called. “What does it take to get a cup of coffee around here?”

  “You’ve been out of it for five days,” Elizabeth said. “We were worried sick. I don’t know who has been the most frantic, Dad or your sister. How much do you remember?”

  A dream, I wanted to say. I tried to remember fragments of a dream. It was slipping away. What I did remember sounded crazy, even to myself.

  A fever dream.

  “Francesca? What about Francesca? She’s dead, isn’t she? I sort of remember some of what happened.”

  Her face was solemn. “Yes. I’m sorry. I know how much she meant to you.”

  “That poor woman. That lonely old woman.”

  “The cause of death is undetermined. The men wanted to throw her down the well, I’m sure, but she died before they could get the job done. The KBI had hoped to pin murder charges on those bastards. Not that they don’t have enough attempted murders charges to put them away for life or more.”

  “Tosca?”

  Elizabeth grinned and filled me in. For once she had enough sense not to refer to Tosca as “that worthless little dog.”

  “She’s going to be fine. She’s playing the most recent traumatic experience for all it’s worth, of course. I understand she and Keith had reconciled before her latest misadventure.”

  “Oh, yeah. Big time.” I told her about the buddy poppy.

  “That’s my dad.”

  “And Jane? What about Jane?”

  “She’s fine. Scared as hell. Seems as though she was returning some articles and when Francesca saw them, she fell down like she had been clubbed. Jane started running toward the house to get to a phone. The two men had been lurking around. They wanted to catch Francesca alone. But they thought Jane had seen them. So they tossed her into the ante room off of Francesca’s workroom.“

  Tears trickled down my cheeks. “She had a hard life. She didn’t deserve to have a hard death, too.”

  Elizabeth looked at me and scowled. “We’re not too sure what all you remember, Lottie.”

  “Still just bits and pieces. What made all you women dash in like the cavalry?

  “We found your note you left for Keith. Believe me, I wouldn’t have had the guts to step foot on the place otherwise. Remember when I said I had to make that flying trip back to Kansas to tell Francesca she had no basis for pursuing a lawsuit? She fired me on the spot and told me never to darken her doorway again.”

  “You said you had other business to tend to also.”

  “Yes, she had asked me to prepare a will. I took Zola with me that day so she could witness the signature.” Elizabeth reached for the bedspread and twisted it a little before she looked me in the eye. “And I’m glad I did. After Francesca threw her little hissy fit, Zola managed to calm her down and came up with another solution. She has an uncle in Meridian who is a lawyer and she contacted him the very next day.”

  “Who did she leave her estate to? Cecilia or George?”

  “I don’t know. Zola doesn’t either. She wouldn’t say if she did. All she did was witness Francesca’s signature after her uncle was done. What I took out was just a boilerplate will with the intentions of making all the alterations and additions while I was there.” Elizabeth gave the little half-smile I so adored in Keith. “That was before everything blew up.”

  ***

  Everyone had gone home and now there was just Keith and me and Angie in the house. All the daughters had fussed over me like I was a total invalid, but Elizabeth and Bettina had day-jobs to get back to. I wanted to rebuild my strength but had to force myself to get out of bed. I felt oddly drained of energy. It was still too hot to walk even in the evenings. Zola wouldn’t hear of my touching a thing around the house.

  I had missed Francesca’s funeral. It was private and limited to the family. They couldn’t find a church that would allow a service because all the denominations worried about saying words over a pagan. She was buried on the compound in the little fenced cemetery where her husband and children were laid to rest. Even though it was well past her time to die, I would feel the loss.

  Reduced to watching old westerns, I sank into my chair and switched on the TV. I bypassed Gunsmoke and Paladin, and settled on Little House on the Prairie. Overly sweet perhaps, but it suited me right now. I couldn’t handle much turmoil. The episode ended and rolled through the names which gave proper credit to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the classic books on which the series was based.

  It was like a bolt of lightning striking a tree. Laura Ingalls Wilder. How could I have been so blind? Her father was the famous Kansas senator, John J. Ingalls.

  Senator Ingalls had written a long essay about Regis Loisel and the family squabble. Ingalls detested the man and regarded the “filthy hildagoes” as forerunners of the border ruffians. It was the most lengthy complex lawsuit in Kansas history.

  How many times had this show come to mind when I heard Francesca’s string of names? Doña Francesca Bianco Loisel Montoya Diaz. Her father was a Loisel. And her mother’s family was Montoya.

  Francesca was a descendant of the French Canadian fur trader Regis Loisel who had received an enormous land grand from Spain! I had goose bumps despite the heat. Montoya. Montoya was another great land grant family. If the two families had intermarried, it was hard telling how much land was involved.

  How many times had I heard her and Cecilia say “We have always lived here”?

  Francesca was the heir to the Loisel fortune and had proof of the location of the lost land.

  The infamous Loisel land grant was due to a historical dirty trick: the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. When “we” were the British and there was no America. When the French knew they would lose the French and Indian War to the Brits, they gave “Louisiana” to Spain in a secret treaty. Louisiana then covered the entire Mississippi Valley from the Appalachians to the Rockies.

  The next year, when the war ended, “we” and France hammered out the Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War. The Brits got everything east of the Mississippi, and France got everything west of it. Eastern French Colonists who didn’t want to live under British rule were given eighteen months to move west where they thought they would be governed by France.

  Then, surprise! They were in Spanish territory, not French. The cagey French King Louis wrote a charming note to the governor of the territory asking that he play nice with the settlers there, as he had given a good chunk of the country away to Spain.

  All hell broke loose. Treaties flew around like politicians’ promises. French settlers tried to throw out the newly appointed Spanish governor. By the time President Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon agreed to the Louisiana Purchase, land-ownership was quite muddled. Maddest of all were the families who had received enormous land grants from the Spanish government due to the Treaty of Fontainebleau.

  The Spanish government had given Regis Loisel a huge tract of land after receiving his petition claiming it was his just reward for doing whatever it took to get along with the Indians and “in the interests of future commerce.”

  No doubt about it. Loisel had been a real humdinger. He had extended fur trade from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains.

  Just like that, he received a staggering number of acres. The governor told him not to bother with having it surveyed.

  Loisel made a will on his deathbed leaving everything to his wife and two daughters and named his business partners, Jacques Clamorgan and Auguste Chouteau, executors. Clamorgan stole the whole grant from Loisel’s heirs by buying the land for ten dollars’ worth of deer skins.

  With the Louisiana Purchase, land grants made by the French and Spanish were honored, but Clamorgan’s claim simply didn’t sound right to confused government officials. Loisel’s land sold without his family knowing—for
a mere ten dollars? Really!

  Loisel’s heirs and Clamorgan’s heirs slugged it out.

  This took a half a century. Lawyers came and went. Heirs came and went, but the lawsuit went on forever. Finally in 1858, the land went to Loisel legal heirs, but the claim was to be relocated to “any vacant lands.”

  Just wherever. And whoever claimed to be an heir. They popped up like jackrabbits. Then the fight became over the location of those “any vacant lands.”

  As for the Montoya land grants, that would require more research.

  Francesca wanted me to know the proof of the location of the “any vacant lands” lay at the bottom of the stream under the well.

  I flushed with excitement. I looked at the time and date on the clock. I was the only one who knew the secret the well was hiding. I had the hand span required to rotate thumb to pinky to thumb to locate the buried zinc washer.

  County was a clear winner over state.

  I picked up the phone to tell Dimon what I had learned and then thought better of it. He would claim the credit. I sat down and quickly composed a story and emailed it to Ken McElroy, editor of the Gateway Gazette. I had promised Ken he could publish details about Victor Diaz’s murder first. He would be tickled plumb to death to be ahead of the pack with this bombshell of a story. I knew he would honor the “please hold for verification” in the subject line. The story:

  “Sheriff Sam Abbott and Undersheriff Lottie Albright discovered the motive behind the Victor Diaz murder case today. Albright, working closely with the late Francesca Diaz, learned of a mysterious map which Doña Francesca claimed entitled the family to a substantial tract of land.

  “The KBI was making no progress whatsoever,” Undersheriff Albright said. “Sheriff Abbott had to step in and take over the investigation. He tapped into an information network that agents from Eastern Kansas would not have access to. This paper will provide further details in tomorrow’s edition.”

  Then I called Dimon and asked him to meet with Keith and Sam and me at the compound.