Mystery of the Sassafras Chair

by Alexander Key

  The colonel shook his head. “The old fellow was pretty sly. He must have had friends, but he never talked about them—unless it was to Tim here. Tim, did Wiley ever mention the name of anyone he might have had any dealings with?”

  “No, sir,” Timor answered truthfully. He could have enlarged on this statement and given an exact description of at least one person he had glimpsed at Wiley’s shack. But something warned him to silence. As Wiley had once said, “Ain’t always wise to tell everything you know. It’s like usin’ up all your ammunition before you track down your b’ar.”

  Timor, by now, was convinced that he had a very sizable bar to track down, and that he had better proceed cautiously. He had learned little enough at the courthouse, but at least his visit had started something—and he had met Rance Gatlin.

  He was relieved when the deputy left. There was a great deal to be done before dark. The colonel said, “If you kids will take care of things here, I’ll go up to the spring and turn on the water.”

  The colonel departed up the misty slope with tools and a flashlight. While Odessa cleaned, Timor connected the refrigerator and turned on the lights. The water heater, which had been drained for the winter, would have to wait until it was safely filled before he plugged it in. He was closing the fuse box when he noticed a fresh smear across the dusty cover. It suddenly occurred to him that whoever had turned on the lights last night must know the cabin well—for the fuse box was hidden in a cramped cabinet where no one would have thought to look for it.

  He was puzzling about this as he brought in their luggage from the station wagon. Odessa said, “Do you think Mr. Gatlin was right in believing someone stored liquor here?”

  “No.”

  “Then why would anyone come in last night?”

  “I—I don’t know yet, but there’s a reason. Something’s different here.”

  “I don’t see anything different.”

  “Well, something is.”

  She shook her head. “Honestly, Timmy, I don’t know what to make of you at times. Are you still convinced that Wiley didn’t have anything to do with what happened at the Forks?”

  “I’m absolutely sure he didn’t.”

  She sighed. “It doesn’t make sense, but I know you too well to say you’re wrong. If you feel a thing, then that’s that. Timmy, wasn’t there something in the paper about Rance Gatlin?”

  “Yes. He’s one of the deputies who chased Wiley that night. He drove the car.”

  “Oh. Wouldn’t he be able to give you some information if you had a talk with him?”

  He shook his head. “That man wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s the kind that never says what he’s thinking.”

  “How about the other deputy—what’s his name?”

  “The sheriff’s wife called him Brad. I believe the paper said his last name was James. I saw him in the courthouse. He wouldn’t be of any help—not to me, anyway. When you’re a stranger, and sort of a foreigner …”

  “I know. Some people up here are friendly, but others just stare at you. It was that way when I was shopping.”

  She shivered in the growing chill. He said, “I’d better get a fire going.”

  It was nearly dark when he went outside for wood. He brought in several loads, and soon had a fire blazing cheerfully in the big stone fireplace. It transformed the cabin.

  “Water’s on,” Odessa announced. “I’ll fix something to eat. It’ll have to be out of cans—I’m too tired to cook anything tonight.”

  Timor set the table, then stood frowning at the chairs flanking the fireplace. “Dessa,” he asked suddenly, “how many ladderback chairs do we have here?”

  “Only two. Don’t you remember? I bought them in Asheville when Daddy first brought us to the cabin. One went to your room, and I put the other by the fireplace.”

  “Well, we’ve got three now.”

  “But that’s impossible!” She came in from the kitchen and looked quickly at the two chairs. “Those are the two I bought. One of us must have brought your chair in here last fall. How do you make three out of it?”

  “Because there’s a chair in my room. I thought it was the one that had been in there all the time—until I noticed these.”

  He hurried down the hall, suddenly excited, and switched on the lights in his room. The room was too small to contain anything but a bed, a chest, a table, and a single chair. And there was the chair—a polished ladderback, placed by the table where a chair had always been.

  Timor stared. Earlier he hadn’t looked at it, or he would have noticed how different it was, even in the dim light. He had merely accepted it because it was there. This new chair was lower, broader, and made of a much paler wood than the others. The wood had a deep golden gleam. In fact, it almost seemed to glow.

  “Tabé!” Odessa exclaimed behind him. “What in the world—”

  “Why—why, that’s the chair Wiley was making for me!” Timor burst out.

  “He was making you a chair?”

  “Yes. Last fall. Out of sassafras. See how yellow it is, and how it glows?”

  “It’s beautiful! But why sassafras? I mean, I’ve never heard …”

  “Well, it’s sort of a special wood. You see, people up here won’t cut it for firewood, even when it’s dead—they think it’s bad luck. Wiley had found a small tree that had been knocked over when the road was being fixed, and he hated to see it go to waste. You know how he was. Always making something out of pieces of wood he’d saved.”

  “I know,” Odessa said. “He was a wonderful craftsman. He could make anything. But why a chair for you—and out of sassafras?”

  “It—it was just an idea he had. We were talking about woods one day, and how some kinds have properties that others don’t have. Sort of magic properties, I mean. Apple is one, if it’s old enough, and holly is another. Then there’s hawthorn, and some kinds of willow. Witch hazel is very special, and so is sassafras. Wiley said a chair made of sassafras ought to be really—”

  Timor stopped. He had been so interested in the chair that he had failed to hear his uncle come back into the house. Now he turned as Colonel Hamilton appeared in the doorway and said wearily, “If supper’s ready, how about eating? What’s keeping you two?”

  Odessa pointed to the chair. Before she could explain about it, Timor saw something he had not noticed before. It was a small loop of rawhide on the back of the chair. He lifted it off and held it up. To the loop was fastened a brass key.

  “Look!” he exclaimed. “It’s Wiley’s key to the front door!”

  Odessa took it, frowning. “It is! Daddy, this explains how someone got in the cabin last night. He used this key, and left it with the chair Wiley made.”

  “Eh? What’s this about a chair?”

  Timor explained. The colonel stared at the chair and shook his head. “I’ll be doubly hanged,” he muttered. “Who on earth could have done that?”

  They discussed the mystery while they ate supper.

  “It had to be one of Wiley’s friends,” said the colonel. “Tim, didn’t you ever meet anybody up at Wiley’s place?”

  “No, sir. Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean by not exactly?” his uncle demanded. “Either you met someone or you didn’t.”

  “I—I never actually met anyone, Uncle Ira. I do know he had visitors at times, though he never told me who they were, or talked about them. I saw one leaving once, but Wiley said he was one of those seng hunters that lived over the gap.”

  “Eh? What’s a seng hunter?”

  “Ginseng hunter. They call it seng up here in the mountains. You know, it’s that little plant whose roots are worth so much. Dessa and I have seen it for sale in the drug shops back home. The Chinese pay awful prices for it.”

  “Oh,” said the colonel, “I didn’t know people still bothered to look for the stuff. Isn’t it pretty scarce?”

  “It sure is. Sort of like gold, but twice
as hard to find.”

  And those who hunted it, Timor knew, were secretive people who never told where they’d found it, or how much. Old Wiley, he suddenly remembered, always had bunches of ginseng roots hanging in his shack to dry. Quite a lot of it, in fact. At thirty dollars a pound, Wiley should have had plenty of extra money without being forced to borrow from the colonel or do any of the other things people said he did. As for trying to steal Nathaniel Battle’s gems …

  When bedtime came Timor went eagerly to his room and closed the door. Slowly he approached the new chair Wiley had made and stood looking at it wonderingly. It seemed to glow almost as if it were alive. If it had spoken to him at that moment, he would not have been surprised. Finally he sat down in it, and rubbed his hands over the polished wood.

  For the first time he realized it had a pleasant, aromatic smell—the same smell that had always been in Wiley’s shack. The aroma of fresh sassafras roots and shavings. As he thought of the shack and all he’d seen there, questions crowded his mind.

  Was it the ginseng hunter who had brought the chair into the cabin last night, and left the key? And why had Wiley borrowed a hundred dollars from the colonel when he could have sold his ginseng for far more than that amount? What had happened to the roots? Were they still in the shack?

  Suddenly he wanted very much to see the shack again. There were secrets there, and perhaps he could uncover something that would help explain the puzzle that everyone thought was solved. Not that there seemed to be any connection between Nathaniel Battle’s tin box and old Wiley’s ginseng—but the ginseng itself was a puzzle.

  Last summer, when he’d first come to the mountains, everything had been so new and unknown that he’d given little thought to the value of Wiley’s ginseng. The shack was always full of drying herbs and roots, and in the beginning he’d supposed most of the roots were sassafras. Now he knew they were not. He’d smelled only the sassafras. But ginseng has no aroma, and there had been pounds and pounds of it. Strange …

  Timor’s head began to nod. With an effort he managed to get undressed, and crawled wearily into bed. His last thought before sleep poured over him was the wish that he could talk to old Wiley again, if only for a few minutes.

  3

  Visitor

  SOME SMALL SOUND in the night brought Timor awake. He lay motionless, listening, not at once remembering where he was. For a moment everything seemed strange—the odd mustiness of the bedding that hadn’t been aired, the blackness of the room, the steady rushing outside that was like heavy rain. Through his mind flashed a vision of his home in Malaya, with the myna birds chattering in the great banyan tree shading the yard. But this was not the tropics—there were heavy blankets over him. He was in America, and back in the mountains. The rushing he heard came from the wild stream below the cabin.

  What had awakened him? Surely it wasn’t the stream. There’d been something else, something on the edge of consciousness he couldn’t quite recall.

  Vaguely uneasy, he raised up on an elbow and tried to identify the sounds around him. From somewhere in the tangle up the slope came the cry of a whippoorwill. Nearer, in the surrounding hemlocks, he made out the soft bubbling of an owl. Mice scampered through the cabin walls, and crickets chirped beyond the window. Though the bedroom doors were closed, he was aware of the faint snoring of his uncle across the hall. Odessa, in the next room, slept quietly.

  Reassured, he settled back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He was drifting away on the edge of sleep when someone seemed to call faintly from a point near the window.

  “Hey, Timmy! Can you hear me, boy?”

  The voice, though very faint, was familiar. He had heard it many times before in this very place, a friendly conspiratorial voice that always awakened him in the early hours when a fishing trip was planned. The best fishing came at daybreak—and only old Wiley Pendergrass knew the secret pools where the biggest trout lay hidden.

  To Timor, half asleep, the voice was like a magnet. Without thinking, he rolled out of bed and pressed his face against the window screen. “Mr. Pendergrass,” he whispered, “are you there?”

  There was no answer. Nor could he see anyone in the vague moonlight that dappled the rocks between the trees and the creek.

  Then Timor remembered. It couldn’t possibly have been old Wiley. He would never see Wiley Pendergrass again. Unless, of course, people sometimes came back for some reason, as Nani had said they did.

  Troubled, and more than a little upset, he crawled into bed again. Maybe he’d only dreamed it. But no, it wasn’t a dream. He was sure he’d actually heard old Wiley’s voice. Could it be a trick of the imagination? There had to be some explanation for it.

  Timor sat up and turned on the light above the bed. His questioning eyes moved from the window to the new chair beside the table, and he thought of the day last summer when he’d seen Wiley at work on a piece of yellow wood in his shop.

  Wiley had said, “Know what kind of tree this come from, young feller?”

  “It—it smells sort of like camphorwood,” he’d answered, sniffing the aromatic shavings on the work bench, “but that’s an Asian tree. I don’t suppose it grows around here.”

  He could feel again the stab of old Wiley’s sharp blue eyes, which glittered like sapphires. Wiley was a little man with a small foxy face, deeply lined, and a heavy thatch of dark hair that, in spite of his age—he was way past seventy—was only beginning to gray.

  “’Tain’t camphorwood,” Wiley had told him. “I’ve heard tell of it, but it don’t grow here. They say it’s right special—but it couldn’t be half as special as this. This is really special—more so than witch hazel. It’s sassafras.”

  “Sassafras? The same tree whose roots you use to make tea?”

  “The same.”

  “Those roots sure make a wonderful tea—but what’s so special about the wood?”

  “Ha! D’you think the tea’d be worth drinkin’ if there wasn’t a heap of magic in the tree itself?”

  “I—I hadn’t thought of it that way. Still, there are trees back home, like the ilang-ilang and the banyan, that have all kinds of properties. So I guess you’re right.”

  “’Course I’m right!” Wiley had said emphatically. “Near everything that grows has a little magic in it, though some has a heap more than others. Take wild plum in bloom—it puts a spell on folks at night. An’ witch hazel—everybody knows you can find water in the ground with it, an’ even gems. That is, if you got the power. The same goes for willow, though it ain’t near as strong. As for hawthorn, it’s full of good luck—so long as you don’t cut it. But sassafras, well, it’s the most special of all. It’s got life in it—a sort of spirit, mebbe.’

  “It has?”

  “By Dooley, you’ll find out! I’m going to make a chair out of this sassafras wood—and it’s goin’ to be your chair. You’ll learn how special it is when you start usin’ it. But there’s just one thing you gotta remember.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All the magic in the world don’t do nothin’ for the feller that don’t believe in it. It’s really believin’ in a thing that does the trick.”

  “Oh, I believe in it,” he’d told Wiley. “In Malaya everybody knows the truth of that.”

  Now, in the small hours of the night, Timor looked curiously at the finished chair, wondering what special properties it might have. There was something almost magical in the way it seemed to glow. Maybe, if he sat in it again and concentrated, it would help to solve some of the questions that were puzzling him. The colonel, of course, would say it was nonsense. Still …

  In the next instant he forgot the chair as his ears again caught the faint sound of his name.

  “Timmy!” came the familiar voice, pleading. “Can you hear me now?”

  “I—I hear you!” Timor exclaimed. “But just barely. Where—where are you?”

  “I’m right here, ding blatt it, shoutin’ my head off! Can’t you see me, Timmy?”

&nb
sp; The voice did seem a trifle nearer, though it was very faint.

  “I—I can’t see you at all, sir, and I still can’t hear you well.”

  “By Dooley, there must be some way! I gotta make myself plain to you. I just gotta!” There was a pause, then the faint voice said, “Timmy, watch the chair. If I sit down in it, mebbe the sassafras will help.”

  Fascinated, Timor stared at the chair. The curious glow brightened, and a vague form began to take shape in it. Suddenly the shape became real, and there was Wiley Pendergrass sitting hunched before him, gnarled hands clutched nervously together, sharp blue eyes intent upon him and glittering with hope. The old man was wearing faded overalls and a patched jacket; he was wheezing a little as if he were out of breath, and his wizened face was puckered with worry.

  It was several seconds before Timor could get over his astonishment and find his tongue. Then he burst out happily, “Mr. Pendergrass, you—you’ve come back!”

  Old Wiley’s fingers tightened and he leaned forward. “You see me now?” he gasped between wheezes. “You hear me good?”

  “I sure do! How—”

  “Thank Pete an’ bless Joe,” the old man muttered, and sat back with a sigh of relief. “I near lost my cackle trying to get here. I been shoutin’ an’ shoutin’, movin’ from one sassafras tree to another tryin’ to make you hear me. If only I’d thought of the chair earlier—lemme get my breath …”

  Timor was bursting with questions. He started to speak, but Wiley held up his hand.

  “I better do the talkin’, son. I dunno how long I can keep myself visible tonight. It takes some doin’, an’ I ain’t rightly got the hang of it yet. Anyhow, I ain’t got much time—only till the end of the week, just three more days.”

  “Three more days?” Timor repeated wonderingly.

  “Yep. I got special permission to come back—promised I’d give up my glory crown if they’d give me five days. Now two days is gone already, so we gotta work fast. Timmy, I need your help bad!”