Those Who Mourn: A Wolf Creek Mystery (Wolf Creek Mysteries Book 1)

by Barbara Bartholomew

  “He’s your friend,” she said. “And the police chief too.”

  He nodded. “Heck and I are the same age. He was always the brightest boy in our class. Jon was older, his brother was my friend, but Jon was always looking after us. He adored his little brother and I came in for attention as a residual effect.

  “I had friends,” she said rather defensively. “When I was growing up, but most of my time was spent with my sisters and brothers. We were kind of isolated out on the farm and we played together, made our own fun. At least that what Gertrude said.”

  Realizing what she’d said, Susan corrected, “But I am Gertrude, so it’s what I remember.”

  And as she said it she saw herself and her sisters, making mud pies in the shade of the big mulberry tree in the front yard. Ma had shrieked when she caught sight of their mud-covered dresses. Washing laundry on Mondays in the big black pot in the back yard was hard work and they were expected to keep their clothes reasonably clean. The same couldn’t be said of their brothers who did the dirty work in the fields.

  Ma had always made them wear big aprons that covered their dresses for cooking and housework.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” David teased.

  She couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed. “I was back there when I was a little girl. I kind of got lost because, you see, I haven’t been remembering for long.”

  “I’ll bet you were adorable.”

  She caught a glimpse of a plain little girl with a freckled face and straight haystack colored hair in a looking glass. “Better to be pretty inside,” Ma was saying. “Outside don’t count.” To little Gertrude it had seemed that outside counted a whole lot. Other people couldn’t see the inside of you.

  “I had two pretty sisters,” she said honestly, “but I believe I was considered rather plain.”

  “See,” he said, bending closer to place a kiss in the air near her face. “I knew you couldn’t be Gertrude.”

  “I suppose he thought I looked good enough,” she added.

  “He who?”

  “The man I married. We had a son and three granddaughters.”

  “Susan, you make chills run down my spine.”

  She laughed. “Just wish I had a spine,” she said. She meant to be funny, but somehow it didn’t come out that way and she leaned her face against his shoulder and felt like weeping.

  David couldn’t spend much daylight time at the library with Susan because he felt the need to be constantly on guard at the house. He hoped June Allie was smart enough not to try anything when she had to know she was being watched—if, indeed, June or a member of her family was the guilty party—but he was afraid to count on it. She was a part of the household again, her pretty granddaughter trailing after her, though the two men, son and grandson, stayed outside.

  September had turned rainy so little could be done in the yard and Simp and his son were visible only when going back and forth to the vehicle purportedly belonging to June. Most often the old pickup was absent.

  June, however, was very much present as David, drowsy after being up most of the night, joined his grandfather at the kitchen table where pancakes and sausage patties were being served for breakfast.

  June had a triumphant air about her as she gave Grandpa his short stack and poured a second cup of coffee into his cup. “Not a speck of poison,” she announced and David noticed with interest that her granddaughter’s fair face flushed with embarrassed color. “But I don’t suppose you feel like eating, Dave.”

  Grimly David accepted his own coffee and pancakes, watching as Grandpa spooned sugar into his cup, then put a forkful of pancake into his mouth, chewing enthusiastically. “Real good, June.”

  “Ha!” she crowed, seating her tall form on the chair next to Grandpa and across the table from David in front of the plateful of food she’d placed there.

  Her granddaughter quickly finished cleaning up and, addressing herself to June, said, “Got to get to school,” and left.

  “Real good student,” June told Harry, “college material.”

  Grandpa nodded as though he had little interest in the subject. “Eat up, David. You could stand to put on a few pounds.”

  Reluctantly David began to eat. After breakfast, he spent most of the morning dozing in a chair while Grandpa watched a series of morning television programs, culminating in a noisy version of The Price is Right.

  David came to consciousness in time to watch a near-hysterical woman win a bounty of prizes including a new automobile. He glanced around with some pleasure to take in the fact that he and Grandpa were still alive.

  “Why don’t we take a ride out into the country,” he suggested, hoping he could convince Grandpa they could eat lunch while they were out.

  Grandpa clicked the television off of the fading game show and got to his feet. “Good idea,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Normally she didn’t spend much time in the children’s library, though she did like to attend story time and watch the little ones’ reactions to the reading of books that had been her own favorites.

  Today the librarian read from The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and she couldn’t but help being amused by the wide-eyed expression on the face of one sensitive-looking little boy. A born reader, she guessed. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be begging his mom to check out the whole series.

  Well she remembered the Christmas when she’d first watched the movie where Dorothy journeyed from Kansas to the magic land of Oz. Later she’d look at a map, trying to figure out where Oz was located and only came to the conclusion that somewhere on the other side of the rainbow hadn’t been detailed in her geography book.

  She’d hadn’t found the film too frightening, but her little sister had nightmares for months about the flying monkeys.

  Wait a minute. She hadn’t a little sister. She was the youngest of the Andrews girls. Only Toby, her brother, was younger than her. Gertrude was fifth born among the six children in the family.

  And television hadn’t even been invented when Gertrude was a little girl.

  Memory crowded memory, a download of conflicting images. Gertrude, the plain-faced little girl who had grown up to marry, have children, work as a farmer . . .

  She remembered that her husband had been a young man when he died and how Gertrude had worked with a hired man and her own little daughters to keep the farm going and feed the family.

  That hadn’t been in the obituary. That was a memory. How frightened and lost Gertrude had been at first, missing the man who had died too young, unaccustomed to the idea of being totally dependent on her own efforts to support her girls in such hard times.

  Susan had been so proud of herself when she heard the story. The word spoken in her own mind startled her. Heard. She had a memory of hearing the story, told so clearly it had imprinted as an image in her own brain. As though it had happened to her.

  She felt as though she’d dropped from a many-storied building. She didn’t breathe and yet she couldn’t seem to catch her own breath.

  The children were clapping their appreciation for the story reading and then rushed past her toward the refreshment table, only to be stopped by a commanding young voice. June Allie’s granddaughter had taken charge and demanded a quiet and orderly process before goodies could be consumed.

  Susan glanced back to the relieved look on the tired face of the children’s librarian and realized that young Miss Allie was either a teen volunteer or the newest member of the library staff. From the authority she was assuming, she guessed it was the latter.

  She waited until the children and their parents had left the library, hoping to catch more revealing conversation between the two remaining.

  Instead the woman and the teen girl went to work without saying anything, restoring order to books pulled from shelves and left on tables and, in one case, in the trash basket.

  “I wonder if this was meant as a review,” Meri Allie commented, her facial expression wry a
s she held up the discarded item.

  The children’s librarian laughed. “Not likely,” she said, glancing at the brightly colored picture book. “It’s a popular favorite.”

  “Must be nice to be a popular anything.”

  “Things going better for you?” the librarian asked in an almost too casual tone.

  “Sure. Fine. Since I’m at the school for the awkward and the bad.”

  Susan frowned, not understanding the reference. But as the conversation went on she determined that the girl had been moved to a special part of the public school, a campus intended for what the librarian called those needing to work at an individual pace and the teen termed ‘juvie school.’

  She also learned that the girl fitted neither category of volunteer or paid employee. She was working what she called ‘public service hours’ as sentenced by the court.

  She seemed caught between gratitude to her friend who had arranged for her to fulfill those hours working in the library and embarrassment that she’d been so assigned.

  Susan wondered what the girl had done to get in trouble with the law.

  “It’ll be good experience,” the librarian pointed out, “when you go to college, you’ll be able to work in the library.”

  “That’s what I want,” the girl said, momentarily sounding wistful. Then she turned abruptly away. “Nobody in my family goes to college.”

  Susan couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her even if she was June Allie’s granddaughter. Maybe because she was June’s granddaughter.

  David was a little surprised when Grandpa pulled into the driveway that led to the old house and stopped in the side yard. The older man turned off the purring engine of his car and just sat there, his gaze fixed on the tumbling wreck of what had once been his home.

  Finally he spoke, “A lot of water under the bridge,” he said.

  David wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a lively family where the house rang with laughter and dissention, the normal days of such people, and to end up now with nothing but one grandson, who these days brought so much more sorrow than joy.

  “What’s it like to be the last one?” he asked. “To outlive your whole family?”

  Grandpa snorted as though to disdain such sentimentality. “Nonsense. I’ve still got a whole pack of cousins and I’ve got you.”

  David grinned sardonically. “Much comfort I’ve been to you.”

  “Don’t be a fool boy. I’d never say it right out loud to your face, but you’ve made me one proud grandpa.”

  David supposed it was because he was tired from the sleepless night, but he found himself blinking hard to keep his eyes dry of tears. “Goes both ways,” he said gruffly. “Though, of course, I’d never say it outright. You’re vain enough as it is.”

  They got out, each going exploring in different directions as though some alone time was needed after such emotional moments. Grandpa went down to the old barn, carefully maintained for hay storage by the current farmer holding the lease on the property. Unlike the house, it was still in good shape, though David vaguely remembered that it was much newer, having been built after the house was abandoned.

  Wheat and grass were the crops on the farm now, though it was the black angus cattle that brought in most of the profits for the farmer. Grandpa had explained to David in his youth that it didn’t pay to let a farm go fallow and see it either grown up in weeds and scrubby trees or blown away by erosion.

  “Don’t see why you keep it then,” David had protested. “You can’t make much from the lease.”

  “They ain’t making more land, son,” Grandpa put on an old timey accent while he repeated the old axiom. “Besides this place pays its way in oil production.” He pointed to the pumps working away in the furthest pasture.

  Even a town-bred boy like David knew better than that. “You can sell the land without selling the royalty. You’d still make money from the oil.”

  Now so many years and so much experience later, he could better understand what lay beneath Grandpa’s spoken excuses for hanging on to the land.

  He’d never spent much time out here, but as he circled the old house, he felt a strange kinship with this place with its spreading acres of good farm and pastureland. Grandpa’s family for several generations had lived here—his great-great grandparents, Grandpa and his brothers and sisters, even his own dad and mom when they’d been young before they gave up on the hard life and moved away to Dallas where he’d been born and raised until they’d both been killed in an accident.

  Maybe if they hadn’t moved away, maybe if they’d stayed here, they’ve have lived to raise him and he’d be coming out here now to visit them in a still strong and tall farm house.

  No use thinking that way. What had happened had happened and the roof of the old porch had collapsed on to its floor and with the doors broken away he could see into the damaged interior of the house with its hanging timbers and rotting debris. Years of rain and snow had penetrated the dissolving debris, leaving only haunting traces of the life that had once lived within its walls.

  He heard Grandpa calling him from the distance and mentally stepped away from the sense of the past that had enveloped him. Remembering the days when he’d been able to run without jolting pain hitting his joints, he walked rapidly in the direction of the summons. Still caught in the sense that he must keep his grandfather safe, he feared the old guy had fallen and felt a frisson of annoyance when he saw him, bright-eyed and fully alert, standing down by the barn, waving his hand at his grandson.

  As he approached, he saw that Grandpa held up a tiny object for him to see.

  “It’s a ring,” Grandpa said as he drew nearer. “The lost ring.”

  Frowning, David approached. “What lost ring?”

  Grandpa held out what appeared to be a lump of the red dirt distinctive to the area. He scraped at the dirt with his fingernails to expose a dull-looking circlet with a good sized stone so encased in dirt that he couldn’t see what it looked like.

  “Surely I’ve told you that story.” Briskly his grandfather walked past the barn to the gate that led to the pasture below, unlocked the gate and motioned David to follow. He left David to close the gate while cattle, obviously hoping that they were about to be fed high protein cottonseed cake crowded around them in a way that David found to be slightly threatening. He knew Grandpa would not have led him into a group of wild and dangerous cattle, these were obviously domesticated, but he couldn’t help being aware of the large if benevolent size of the big angus cows and a disapproving looking bull. They didn’t have to want to hurt you to do harm and his bones were feeling somewhat vulnerable these days.

  Grandpa ignored them, pushing his way through to the metal water tank where he doused the old ring, washing it clean of dirt. Then he rubbed it against his shirt, polishing it thoroughly.

  Then he held up and David bent closer to see a green stone set in yellow gold glistening in the sun. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He’d seen that ring before. It was the one Susan wore on her left hand.

  “A peridot,” he said after he got his breath back, “the August birthstone.”

  Grandpa snorted. “Not hardly, son. Look at that color. That’s no pale peridot. That’s a genuine for sure emerald.”

  “And you found it in the ground up by the barn?” he found himself speaking as though by rote, going through a conversation of necessity because Grandpa expected a response.

  “Stumbled over a piece of wire. Dug into the dirt with my boot and Grandma’s old ring popped up. That’s amazing, considering three generations of Johnsons have searched for that ring.”

  David was beginning to vaguely remember hearing about the missing ring. Grandpa had told him how his grandparents had gotten to a big fight. “They were middle aged by then and ought to have known better,” he’d said. “But Grandma was the fiery type and she got real mad at Grandpa about something or other. Nobody ever explained exactly what. Anyhow he brought her this ring for her birthda
y and she was so mad she yelled something about how he wasn’t going to buy his way back into her affections with a ring. And she tossed it away down into the pasture.”

  “I kind of remember something about this,” David admitted. “Though I’ll admit I thought it was just a story you made up.”

  “Why David,” Grandpa protested, touching the hand holding the ring to his heart. “You should know I’m always strictly honest in my story telling.”

  His eyes sparkled with mischief as they both recognized that Grandpa wouldn’t let something as mundane as facts get in the way of a good story.

  “Sure they looked for it, but it never turned up. The pasture came up near to the house in those days, Grandpa wanted to take advantage of every square inch of land. And it was fall and the grass was tall, halfway up his leg, Grandpa said. They never found the ring and with their kids and their kids kids looking for it, it got to be a kind of family legend. We figured whoever found it would be real lucky.” He looked approvingly at the glittering object. “’Guess that turned out to be me.”

  David kept his gaze fixed on the ring. It couldn’t be the same ring. After all a gold ring with a green stone couldn’t be that unusual. Nor could the same ring be in two places at the same time.

  Chapter Twenty One

  June Allie came back to the library that afternoon. Susan, in an effort to distract her whirling thoughts, was reading over the shoulder of a patron absorbed in an old copy of Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night, which, of course, she had read more than once, but was still worth another reread, especially when concerned with the more modern books others were currently perusing.

  She could hardly sit and turn pages in a book of her own choosing right in front of the librarians and guests and so felt happy to have a read so palatable to which she could direct her attention.

  The only problem was that the reader, a middle-aged mystery lover, was the kind to absorb her reading slowly, savoring words and plot, and leaving Susan who liked to skim rapidly across the pages in pursuit of what happens next, with too much time in between page turnings.