The Turkey Tussle (The Morelville Mysteries, #9)

by Anne Hagan

  “You say we’ve met?” She didn’t look away from Jef as she spoke.

  “Yes ma’am. I was here just a couple of months ago with your granddaughter Mel...Mel and my little dog Boo. We sat outside and you watched Boo play.”

  Recognition dawned in her eyes. “The Boston terrier?”

  “That’s right.” At least she remembers dogs, I thought. Dogs and babies.

  “Did you bring the dog too?” Her look was so hopeful, I felt guilty.

  “No ma’am; not this time. There wasn’t room for Boo to come too. Maybe next time.”

  “That’s okay. At least Beth brought her little Jef back to see me.”

  “I’m not Beth...” Hannah started to say but I shook my head and she dropped it and smiled at Eunice instead. I didn’t see the harm in letting the senile old woman think Hannah was Beth and Beth was old enough to have a child but I shuddered a little at the thought.

  “She doesn’t seem to have a lot of coherent moments,” I whispered to Hannah while the other woman cooed at Jef. “Let’s just let her think what she thinks and let me see if I can get anything useful out of her at all.”

  Hannah nodded.

  I looked back across at Eunice to find her watching us closely now. I wondered how well her hearing was.

  “What’s that you say?” she asked, answering my question.

  I collected a wooden, bow back chair from the little writing desk in the corner of the room and set it adjacent to Eunice’s arm chair and took a seat. Hannah got down on the floor with Jef and pulled a couple of toys out of his diaper bag.

  “We wanted you to see Jef again before the weather gets too bad out Mrs. Lafferty. It’s November now and, well, you know the snow is coming.”

  She gave a little nod.

  “There’s something else too,” I pressed on. “I’m a writer, you know? I’m working on a...sort of a history of the Morelville area.”

  “Morelville?”

  I could see this was going to be tough going. “Where you lived growing up and where you raised your children Faye and Brian?”

  “Yes, I know it. There’s already a history of it. The lady ‘what runs the Cemetery Association wrote it.”

  Happy to have even a little lucidity from her, I smiled. “It’s not that kind of a history, ma’am. I, uh, used to work in law enforcement. I’m working on a book about...about local crimes.”

  “Crimes? What like vandals and such?”

  “Not so much that as crimes like murder.”

  Her eyes widened then. “Murder? In Morelville?”

  She really had been institutionalized and sheltered for a long time. “Yes Mrs. Lafferty...well, an old, unsolved one anyway from the 1970’s.

  She didn’t even blink.

  “It happened in your home back then.” I watched her face for a reaction. She shook her head no, ever so slightly.

  “A man named Tanner Mathis was killed on Thanksgiving Day, remember?”

  Her eyes flared then but she didn’t speak.

  “He was stabbed in your bathroom and he died there. The killer was never caught.”

  Eunice rocked side to side slightly in her chair.

  I prodded her a little. “What can you remember about that day?”

  She shook her head no harder then. “I remember it happening but it’s...it was so long ago. What year is this?”

  “It’s been more than 40 years, you’re right.” I waited patiently as I watched the wheels seeming to turn behind the old woman’s eyes.

  “The carvings...such carvings.”

  “Pardon?”

  “There were so many.”

  “So many what?” I asked as I glanced at Hannah. Jef was content with a little truck and she was watching the two of us intently.

  “Why, carvings.”

  “Like, wood carvings?” Hannah asked her.

  Eunice looked at her and then at Jef and just nodded.

  Faye hadn’t mentioned anything about carvings. “Did they have something to do with Tanner’s murder Mrs. Lafferty?”

  “Who?”

  “Tanner Mathis, the man who was killed in your home.”

  Her eyes took on a faraway look.

  He came into the kitchen when I was alone. He was so handsome but already drunk. He touched my hip as he opened the refrigerator to fetch another can. I slapped at his hand, told him to stop, he couldn’t do that anymore. He laughed and popped his top then waggled the finger that was through the tab at me. “It’s our secret,” he slurred. I shook my head at him. He dropped the tab on the counter beside me and turned on his heel as Jan came in through the back door. She was going on about something to do with the yams and he laughed at her. She set the serving dish she was carrying down in a huff and returned the way she’d come. He winked at me. I fluttered a hand at him to shoo him away but then I asked him if he’d grab the carving set out of the china cabinet and bring it back to me before he returned to the other men.

  Eunice looked over at me after several long seconds. “I don’t remember dear...Dana, you said?” A tear formed in the corner of her right eye.

  I didn’t know what to think but I knew it was a lost cause. If she had remembered something during her brief reverie, she wasn’t about to share it.

  “What did you think?” Hannah asked.

  I held up a hand but concentrated on the road in front of me. “I think, that if we ever do solve this puzzle, it probably won’t mean a thing to Eunice.”

  “Are you still going to try?”

  I considered that for a minute and then answered, “Yes because, if I can clear her father’s name, I think it will mean a lot to Faye.”

  Chapter 7

  Dana

  Friday, November 6th

  “Just look at that!” Rebecca Hershberger said as she watched her grandson toddle toward her. She squatted low in her ankle length dress to catch him as he started to wobble.

  “He’s been working on his technique all week and he’s getting pretty good,” I told the older Amish woman. “We’ve had to block the doorway to the kitchen because he’s become far more curious about what’s in all the low cupboards now that he’s more mobile.”

  “Ah, we’ll do the same then and block his path to the wood stove too. It wouldn’t do to have him touch that.” She scooped Jef into her arms and then turned her attention back to me.

  “He’s looking more like Katie these days and she walked about the same age.”

  I smiled and nodded. “That he is.”

  “How long can he stay today?”

  “That’s up to you. How long do you want him?”

  “Did Hannah have plans this evening?

  “Not that I’m aware of. She’s at her shop right now and she should have class later.”

  “Such a hard worker.”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “We have relatives coming for dinner who would be interested to see him. Would it be all right if you didn’t pick him up until the seven hour?”

  “That would be fine. I’ll leave you now to enjoy him and get on with your day. I’m sure there’s a lot of cooking to do if you’re having guests this evening.”

  It was her turn to offer a smile. “I’ve already been cutting noodles this morning. I’ll send some along with you tonight.”

  I rubbed my belly in anticipation and Jef mimicked me, making us both laugh.

  “I just dropped Jef off with Rebecca,” I said to Hannah.

  She leaned down onto the front counter and yawned. “Sorry. Thank you for taking him.”

  “They want to keep him later this evening. I hope that’s all right with you.”

  She waved a hand at me. “It’s fine. You can get some stuff done and I can maybe take a nap after I close up here.”

  “Why are you so tired? Did Jef keep you up?”

  “No, nothing like that.” She shook her head. “I was having the oddest dream last night...over and over. I’d wake, go back to sleep and have it again.”

 
; “What about?”

  “It was about going to the nursing home and hearing Mrs. Lafferty talk about carvings. You told me that man was killed with a knife. Do you suppose she was remembering something to do with him and not about any sort of carvings at all?”

  “I don’t know sweetie. After talking with Faye, it doesn’t seem like Eunice knew Tanner Mathis very well.”

  “The dream felt so real to me.” She shuddered then as she went over it again in her mind. “The old lady may not be entirely lucid but I think maybe we need to look into the carvings thing some more.”

  I listened to Hannah but I wasn’t so sure. “I’m going to do a little more digging, talk to a few more people and see if I can get a little clearer picture of what happened that day.”

  “If you like, I can go along with you if you can wait until the shop closes.”

  “What about your nap and class?”

  “A nap can wait. I’m afraid if we don’t find out something, the dream will keep coming and I don’t have class tonight.”

  “Then I guess I’ll hook back up with you later. Right now, I want to go and talk to Faye’s younger brother, Brian.”

  I really like Brian Lafferty. He’s two years younger than Faye and her polar opposite in temperament. Where she can be high strung at times, he’s far more easy going. I figured he was only about 14 at the time of the murder but I hoped he could remember some detail of that day and that my questions would trigger different memories for him than they did for Faye.

  I called his shop. One of his crewmembers told me he was out on a job. When I expressed that I needed to speak with him about a non-urgent but important family matter, the guy put his office assistant on the phone and she gave me his cell number and the location of the job site.

  Feeling bad about my little bit of subterfuge, I decided not to call him. Instead I went and tracked him down at the site where he was busy framing a house, trying to get it under roof before the typical Ohio winter set in and the snow started to fly.

  “Dana, hi,” he called out when he spotted me approaching. “What brings you out here? Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine Brian; I. didn’t mean to alarm you. Your assistant told me where I could find you. I wanted to talk with you about something, if you have a few minutes you can spare, that is?”

  “Sure, sure.” He looked at his watch. “It’s after eleven...might as well call it lunch.”

  After he retrieved his bucket from his truck, we found a stack of wood to sit on that was inside the framing, partially shielded from the wind.

  While he unwrapped a sandwich I said, “I wanted to say thank you, by the way. The ramp you built for me at Kris’s house and then moved to our house, we use for Jef’s stroller now. It’s been great to have.”

  “You know, Mel was always great with kids and it’s nice to see a new ones in her life. She always doted on Kris’s kids...to the point of spoiling them.”

  I grinned knowingly and nodded. “Jef’s getting the same royal treatment.”

  “No doubt!” He laughed. “What about you two?”

  “What about us?”

  “Do you ever plan to have any kids of your own,” he blushed a little but pushed on, “either ah, artificially or maybe adopt? Oh, never mind! It’s really none of my business.”

  “No, it’s okay. You’re fine. Honestly? It’s something we’ve only recently talked about but...well, we just have no idea how accepting the family will be with it either way and, quite frankly, your sister is the toughest nut to crack in that regard.”

  He nodded as he chewed. “I guess I have to agree with that but Faye really loves her grandkids and she’s really taken with Jef. That’s about as non-traditional as it gets.”

  “True.” He had a point.

  “She seems to have come around a little with regards to you, if that’s the problem.”

  “Maybe so but what I’m doing now may change that for the good...or for the bad.”

  “So now we’re getting to the real reason you’re here?”

  “Uh, yeah. There’s no delicate way to approach this so I’m just going to dive right in, okay?”

  He nodded.

  I’m working on a true crime book and an unsolved murder in Morelville from years ago was brought to my attention earlier this week.”

  “The one on Thanksgiving at our house is the only one I know of.”

  “That’s it. Yes, I’m planning to write about it, at least a little – maybe not a whole book – but, more than that, I want to see if I can solve it for the family. Faye wasn’t very committed to wanting to know what happened herself but she seems to want some sort of closure for your mother.”

  “I don’t know how much anything would help gram’s piece of mind at this point,” he said as he tapped his head with a finger, “but I’ll help as much as I can.”

  “What do you remember about that day?”

  He tipped his head to one side and pursed his lips as he thought for a minute. “As far as the, what do you call it? The back story? As far as that’s concerned, I don’t know a lot. I was just a kid. It was Thanksgiving and it was a huge, blowout party.”

  “I do know that my dad and my uncle hit an oil well and they thought they hit the big time. They were passing cigars and whiskey all around, even before dinner. The fridge was full and the back porch was stacked with cases of canned beer. Lots of our neighbors were there too and there were other people were in and out of the house all day. Some of ‘em I knew, some I didn’t.”

  “Me and my cousins were playing football outside while all the men watched the Lions game in the living room.”

  “They cheered and cheered when the Lions beat the Jets. I remember because we could hear them outside. It was pretty warm and the windows in the house were open.”

  “You remember more than you thought.”

  “Only about the football. I was a big fan even back then and I wanted to be inside with the men.”

  He took a bite of a banana and barely chewed before swallowing and continuing. “We all hated Dallas and that game was on after the Lions game. Me and a couple of my cousins managed to leave the game in the side yard and squeeze into the front room for that game.”

  “Maybe half way into the second quarter, Dallas was already losing to the 49ers and all of us were pretty riled up about it when mom and some of the other women started making sounds that dinner was almost ready and for everyone to get away from the TV and get cleaned up.”

  He shook his head hard. “Someone – one of my older cousins, I think - went into the bathroom and found that guy.”

  “Tanner Mathis?”

  “He was already dead, bleeding out, on the floor.”

  “What happened then?”

  “After that, it was bedlam in the house. I think a couple of women fainted and a couple of kids, even though they kept us pretty far from the body, got sick. Nobody got dinner...at least not for a while and we all spent hours sitting around while the police came and then tried to talk to everyone.

  Chapter 8

  I was dumbfounded that, after such a murder – any murder, the family could still live in that house and I told him so.

  He shook his head as he said, “We didn’t. Didn’t you know?”

  “No...where...where was this house then? I’m confused.”

  “It was two houses up from the one Kris lives in now. We stayed in that house hardly at all right afterward...after the murder, and we were moved out of it completely by a couple of months later. I remember that part pretty well because it was cold and snowy by then and we were moving things down the street, piece by piece, as the weather allowed.”

  “Mom and Dad were renting the first house from the people that lived next door to it, that owned it too. They’d been renting it out for years from them. That’s why, I guess, striking the well was such a big deal to my dad.”

  “Because they could finally buy a place of their own?”

  Brian nodded. “The guy that ow
ned the new house, Theo McCabe, had built a place just outside of the village. Him and Dad were hunting buddies. He never thought, from day one, that my dad had anything to do with that murder.”

  “When dad hit with the well, Theo was the one to urge him to consider the house. Dad ended up putting a down payment on it no one even knew he’d been saving for over a few years and he took on payments to Theo he thought he wouldn’t have to make for long to cover the rest. When Kris moved in there with her kids, Mom was still trying to make the payments from back then. That’s part of the reason Kris moved in; to help out.”

  I started to ask a question but he wasn’t done so I let him keep talking.

  “The owners of the other house at the time completely gutted it and renovated it themselves. I actually helped replace part of the roof and did some other stuff on it too. That was my first experience with a hammer. Dad always thought I’d be an oil man like him but, by the time I was out of school, he was still waiting for his ship to come in and I knew that life wasn’t for me.”

  “But the well;” I asked, “what do you mean, waiting for his ship to come in? Why was your mom still struggling with house payments, later?”

  “The well ran slow at first and then it completely dried up a few months or so after they struck – not long after the papers were final to buy the house. It never produced another drop. That’s the real reason most of our family and some of the other smaller oil families around here began pulling up stakes and moving on. Most of the oil had been found. The area was tapped out.”

  “Wait, what about all the drilling rigs I see around?”

  “Most of those have been in place since the early ‘50s and on up until about 1970. Some of the working ones only produce 30 barrels a day or so now-a-days and that’s all they have been doing for years.”

  “That’s a lot, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. We’re on the edge of what’s called the Utica Shale region here in this part of Ohio. Back in the big time, the oil guys could get ten times that in barrels out of a well, 300+ a day. Further into the region most of the small drilling rigs can still pull out 50-60 barrels a day but, at the current prices, none of the small-time oil men are getting rich anymore unless they’ve got dozens of wells. The fracking guys are the only ones that can get to the bigger pools of oil that are left now.”