Micanopy in Shadow

by Ann Cook

  “Bran,” John said, smoothing back his hair and straightening his ripped shirt. “You really do need to fill me in.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Brandy could scarcely crawl out of bed. She felt as if she had been in a physical battle, though John was the one who had. He stood before the mirror, slathered his face with shaving cream, and guided his razor with care around his mustache. “After all you told me, I don’t know what to do about the Irons house. I’ve lost my best client before he pays the full amount for the job.”

  Brandy leaned over the crib later than usual and lifted Brad into her arms. “I think you should go ahead with the work. One way or the other, it’ll be paid for, but we do need to see an attorney.”

  He gave her a tight smile and raised his eyebrow, this time signaling caution, not skepticism. “You’ve got two people arrested—Monty, and soon Snug. Your work’s done—if it ever was your work.”

  She laid a microsuede big shirt on the bed with matching tank and pull-on pants and switched on the shower. “Not yet,” she said.

  For breakfast Brad spooned oatmeal and fruit into his mouth while Brandy fixed their own cereal and banana. Kyra was to come in again, at least for the next few days. In another month she would leave for Tallahassee and the new semester. John hesitated in the doorway, briefcase in hand, again perplexed.

  Brandy ducked her head, a little apologetic, and gave him a reassuring smile. “Not to worry. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’m not quite finished. I need to go to the Irons house, too, this morning. We still don’t know Ada’s full story. Lily Lou mentioned something that could be significant. So did Mattie Washington. I’ll drive my car. I want to stop at Grandmother’s for a minute.” After John had gone, Brandy slipped a slender volume from a shelf. She had bought it a couple of months ago while researching a story. She turned through the pages, read a few minutes, then looked up, satisfied.

  Before Kyra arrived, Brandy put in a call to her grandmother at the hospital, warned her not to strain her voice, and gave her a succinct report on the papers in the box. She smiled at Hope’s quick intake of breath. She wished she could see her face. “It proves your mother was truly the sort of woman you hoped she was.”

  Brandy was slapping peanut butter on two slices of whole wheat bread and watching Brad when she heard Kyra’s footsteps on the stairs. The little boy was sitting on the kitchen floor with a large coloring book and trying to color a boldly outlined picture of a dog. When the green crayon dropped between his chubby fingers, Brandy let Brad pick it up himself. So a green dog, why not? She opened the door for Kyra, who followed her into the kitchen. Brandy pulled a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator. “I suppose you’ve told Grant about Irons?”

  Kyra looked uncertain. “I didn’t know any reason I shouldn’t. I told him Mr. Irons tried to, like, kill your grandmother.”

  Brandy threw a windbreaker over her big shirt, flipped her auburn hair over the collar, and picked up her bag, emergency lunch inside. “Let’s just say, there may be a postscript.”

  Brad whimpered when he saw her prepare to leave, and she knelt to kiss him goodbye. “Soon your mama will be able to stay home with you,” she whispered.

  “I’ll take him out a while, give him a snack, and later we’ll catch Baby Beethoven.”

  Brandy pocketed her grandmother’s house key. Outside, the clouds had lifted. She drove down Cholokka Boulevard, swerved into her grandmother’s street, and parked before the cottage. As soon as she stepped into the living room, Patches leapt down from her perch on the sill with a shrill “meow.” No one had fed the poor cat since John the night before.

  When Patches sailed into the kitchen, Brandy followed. As Patches continued her indignant complaint, the clear notes of a white-throated sparrow announced 10:00 A.M. Brandy dumped a generous portion of dry food in her bowl, filled her water dish, and cleaned the litter box.

  “Sorry for the neglect,” she said, taking the time to stroke the soft fur of the cat’s arched back. “Nothing’s too good for you, sweetheart.” Then Brandy darted down the hall to Hope’s bedroom. In a few minutes she emerged, an extra bulge in her canvas bag.

  The fifteen minutes it took to drive to the Irons house seemed like an hour. She hurried through the front door, called a greeting to John in the parlor, and took only a brief glance at the newly widened entrance hall before dashing up the stairs. Would the steamer trunk still be there? Lily Lou had asked some workmen to carry it down from the attic, intending for Montgomery to sort through the old papers and destroy the discards. Her heart sank. What if he already had?

  On Brandy’s last visit to the house, Lily Lou said receipts from Adrian’s time were stashed in the trunk and apparently forgotten.

  If Brandy were lucky, she might find a receipt that resolved the murder of Ada Losterman.

  The door was open to the bedroom at the left of the stairs where she had talked with Lily Lou. Sunlight slanted in through a window, making a bright pattern on the newly polished hardwood floor. It reminded her of the sunlit spot on the bare floor of Mattie Washington’s cracker cottage. This empty room smelled of fresh paint, and its walls now gleamed a pastel blue.

  The painter had pushed the old olive green trunk into its center and folded the metal chair against it. The lid was closed, but to her relief, it wasn’t locked, only latched. Lily Lou had managed to force up the tarnished latch before she peered inside.

  Brandy crouched down and pressed against the lid with both hands. The hinges creaked in protest but it opened, and again the odor of mildewed papers drifted out. Her task was formidable. On top were receipts from the more recent era—that of Monty’s own father.

  She set the folding chair up in front of the trunk, leaned over, and began lifting out receipts. The Irons family had purchased everything from clothing, house wares, and expensive furniture to farm machinery for their truck farms. She noted dates, watching for the magic number 1921 and earlier. The more recent years were typewritten, but as she dug deeper, increasingly they were in ink, dim and hard to read. Still, she could usually decipher the year. She tried to keep each in order. Her purpose did not involve destruction, only discovery.

  It took half an hour to identify those dated later than 1951, the year Adrian died. The receipt from the Gainesville funeral home lay at the bottom of the ones she’d removed. Brandy sat back for a minute, calculating. If he had married Ada in 1917 when twenty-three, he had died relatively young at only fifty-seven. She had never seen his grave in the cemetery where Ada lay. Why? Receipts for 1921 were not as numerous, but she persevered.

  “What in the world are you doing up there?” John called after she had been working an hour and a half, “I don’t need to spend the day here!”

  She straightened up. Her back ached. “Searching, damn it!” she barked back, and then realized she shouldn’t take out her weariness and exasperation on him. “Sorry, busy,” she added in a softer tone.

  Brandy toiled through all of 1921 without finding anything more significant than a new corset and bodice for Sybil, a garment identified as an Artistic Dress, hats, a walnut sideboard, floral wallpaper—items from the daily life of the decade’s well-to-do. Brandy might find what she was seeking earlier, but not likely before 1918. Her watch ticked on.

  John called up the stairs once more. “Brandy, whatever you’re doing, I’m leaving. Aren’t you hungry? It’s past lunch time.”

  “Brought a sandwich.”

  “Come on home when you can. Lock up when you leave.” The front door closed behind him and a few minutes later his van growled out of the driveway. Brandy dug into her canvas bag, brought up the small paper bag with the peanut butter sandwich and the can of Diet Coke, and took a few precious moments to eat.

  The streak of sunlight had vanished from the floor when at last she sat back, one hand gripping a receipt dated November 5, 1920. She had held her b
reath as she pulled it from the file. As she read it, her fingers shook. Now she breathed again, removed a magazine page filed with it, and slipped the receipt and page into a clean plastic sleeve she had brought, hoping for just such a discovery. She laid it carefully into her bag. It took her another half hour to replace the stacks of papers and close the lid.

  At the bottom of the stairs she took out her cell, phoned John and left a message at his Gainesville office and the apartment. “Checking in,” she said. “I’m on my way to see Grandmother.

  Fortunately, the traffic was light. After she entered Shands Hospital, she nodded to the volunteer in pink uniform, and strode straight to the elevators. On her grandmother’s floor she paused at the nurse’s station and asked to see Hope.

  “We haven’t finished picking up lunch trays,” a nurse said. “You can go in for a few minutes. She still mustn’t strain her voice.”

  “How is she?”

  The nurse smiled. “Feisty. That’s a good sign. She doesn’t understand why she can’t just go home. But we must be sure. She’s had a little difficulty swallowing. There’s injury to the cartilage of the larynx and the hyoid bone.

  When she noticed Brandy’s anxious expression, she said, “She’s going to be all right. I was only explaining why she isn’t ready to go home yet.”

  In Hope’s room Brandy confronted her impatient grandmother. She was sitting bolt upright in the only chair, gripping street clothes that lay across her lap, plainly ready to leave.

  Brandy kissed her cheek. “Not yet. Take it easy. I have something to show you. Brandy removed the slim jewelry box from her bag and then the plastic sleeve. Carefully, she extracted the yellowed receipt and the page.

  “I want you to read this receipt and see if you draw the same conclusion I do.”

  Hope’s thin hand reached lovingly for the black and gold brooch on its broken chain, then stared at the receipt. Brandy handed her the accompanying page, a description of the item, and peered down to read it aloud: “Victorian Etruscan Cameo Brooch, 14 K Gold; Etruscan period lady in classic tunic with grape leaves in her upswept hair and a leaf on one shoulder. Gold frame; loop on top for a chain, 2 inches by 1¡ inches. The receipt itself was briefer, gave the price as $100, and was marked “paid.”

  It took a moment for Hope to make the connection. Her slate gray eyes opened wide. “My God!” she said in a hoarse gasp.

  “One and the same,” Brandy said. “The one you’ve cherished all these years. Thank goodness they saved receipts.”

  Hope looked up at her, the lines of her face taut. “What does it mean?”

  “One thing, I think.” Brandy perched on the edge of the bed. “At the last minute, when your mother was going under, she snatched the pendant Sybil was wearing. She went down clutching it. The chain snapped and she dragged it down with her.”

  Brandy looked out the window, at the branches of a live oak where the white half moon had hung the night before. Shafts of sunshine replaced it among the rustling leaves.

  “The cameo brooch was gone from Sybil’s jewelry box the next day. Adrian had given it to her, and she knew he would miss it. So she accused her maid of stealing it. The night after the drowning, the electricity in Micanopy went off for several hours; a neighbor near the pond saw a light flickering around the water’s edge. I think Sybil Irons came back then, looking for the only clue she’d left behind. A few days later the newspaper published a brief list of Ada’s belongings. Adrian would have recognized the description of the pendant found with Ada.

  “Not only did Sybil claim the poor woman stole her pendant. She also claimed she couldn’t mend a muddy blouse. It was badly torn down the front.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid I thought Adrian tore it. It was Ada—before she drowned.

  “Think about the scene. Ada thought she was coming to meet Adrian’s parents. Instead she learns her husband has been alive all the time she grieved for him. Had re-married. She must’ve been heartsick and furious. Adrian was as shocked as Ada to find she was alive. He was struck dumb, no doubt, helpless, with two wives. Clearly only the first was legal.

  “But Sybil wasn’t the kind to feel helpless. Remember, she offered the distraught Ada a brandy. Ada probably told her she’d never tasted it. We’ll never know for sure what Sybil laced it with, but my book on poisons suggests a large dose of ‘Mother’s Helper.’ It was made from opium or ‘laudanum,’ and still used then for colicky babies. Sybil had a baby, remember. The practice was stopped about that time. The effect is drowsiness. That would explain the pastor’s description of the way she stumbled past his church.”

  Hope released her grip on the pendant, repelled. “Oh, Brandy, how dreadful!”

  “Coroners then weren’t usually even doctors. No one would have done an autopsy. No one would’ve detected the drug.”

  “Sybil Irons,” Hope said, wonderingly, a lift in her voice. “She killed Mother? Not my father? Sybil?”

  “Protecting her marriage,” Brandy added, “and her husband’s and son’s inheritance.”

  For the first time, Brandy understood the depth of her grandmother’s recent horror. When she learned about the documents in the box, she thought Montgomery was trying to conceal what his grandfather had done.

  Hope had thought her father had murdered her mother.

  Epilogue

  Brandy sat on her sleek new sofa before the bow window, gazing at the waters of Lake Tuscawilla in the afternoon sun.

  “I can’t get my head around the whole thing, Bran,” John said. He stood, one hand in the pocket of khaki jeans, the other smoothing his mustache. “I worked hard on this job. I had no idea I’d be restoring the house for us.”

  Brandy reached for his hand. “It’s a fair distribution of the Irons estate. Hope gets the house and substantial investments. Lily Lou gets the balance of the holdings. She never wanted to live in Micanopy, and Grandmother doesn’t want to move. She says the house goes to us eventually; we might as well have it now. It’s ideal for me to work in, and it’s close to your Gainesville office. Keeps me near Grandmother, also. I’m all she has.” She gazed around her. “Anyway, it’s beautiful.”

  He turned and reached for his jacket. “And what happens to Montgomery?”

  “Noble brought me up-to-date a few days ago. Montgomery goes on trial for murder and attempted murder. He says the lab matched the two bullets that killed Hunter to the 357 Magnum they dug up in his back yard. It’s registered to him. A recent purchase, incidentally. The bullets still had traces of cardboard from the box he used to hide the gun. They also found shreds and ashes of a file folder in the barrel.”

  “Ever find out what was in it? The folder you saw at Hunter’s house?”

  “Noble suspects Hunter’s father found evidence that could lead to Adrian’s first marriage. Montgomery isn’t talking. Noble says the state’s attorney might charge him with the assault on me, too. That’s harder to prove, but they can nail him for the attack on Grandmother. Deputies found his fingerprints on her back door and on the papers in the box. He burned a scarf in the barrel. They’ll try to prove it was used around her throat.”

  She raised her eyes to Adrian’s portrait still above the mantle. His knowledge of Sybil’s guilt must have made him despise her. But if he exposed her, he identified himself as a bigamist and deprived his son of his inheritance. And for what? Ada was dead. Brandy remembered his photograph in the family album as well as this portrait. She noted in both his deep-set, haunted eyes, but she attributed the look then to his experience in the trenches of World War I.

  Sybil Irons’ portrait had been banished again to the attic until Hope decided what to do with it.

  Brandy rose and walked across the dining room, running her fingers along the edge of the new Scandinavian table, and on into the remodeled kitchen. There she lifted a bouquet of pink and white carnations out of the sink and
rejoined John at the front door.

  “For several days I’ve been planning a pilgrimage,” she said. “I dropped Brad off at Grandmother’s for an hour. She’s fixed up a box of toys for him.”

  John didn’t need to ask where they were now going. As Brandy stared at the live oaks arching above the van, he drove down deeply shaded Whiting Street. “This road was called Sandy Lane when Ada took her fatal walk,” she said.

  But John had more to ask. “How did Montgomery know Lieutenant Hunter was talking to you? Or that you went to Mrs. Washington’s?”

  “He—or someone he hired—followed me from the time I started asking questions.”

  “So what about your other suspects—Caleb Senior and Zeke Wilson?”

  “I think Caleb murdered the revenue agent, but Ada probably didn’t know it. As for Wilson, he was hardly the plaster saint people think, but his meeting with Ada was innocent enough. I even wondered about Grandmother’s foster father. He seemed to be a careless provider and not much of a father to Grandmother, but not a killer. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.”

  She turned her gaze to the passing cottages. “I keep remembering what the medium said, I mean, that the pendant conveyed enormous sadness and danger, even terror.”

  “Lucky guesses.”

  But Brandy’s thoughts were now on Hope’s theory of time. Einstein had said the passing of time is an illusion. We don’t really trudge forward like the engine of a train, pulling our days along with us. We’re all caught in the changeless embrace of space/time. We grow from seeds, reproduce, wither, and are gone, but our past continues to exist. Brandy hoped that Ada still lived hers in a dimension that a few of the living could occasionally detect.