Now was no different. She came right to me and pranced around a bit as she registered the skunk smell. Then she settled in and let me pet her. I opened the door to her stall and walked through to the outside. All of the stalls had an opening out to the field. She followed me as I strode across the dark expanse and found my favorite part of the fence to sit on. I climbed up and sat down and she nuzzled me. “You don’t mind the smell, do you?”
She whinnied and stepped sideways.
“Okay, so you do mind. But at least you’re willing to keep me company.”
We sat there, alone like that, for at least a half hour. She ran off for a few seconds, but then she came right back. Even Cutter sauntered by briefly. Funny how I hadn’t wanted to spend the night outdoors, and yet here I was under the stars, in the dark, petting Nessie.
I took in the view that moonlight had to offer and realized that there was something strange about the field.
It had one too many horses.
“What the…”
Just then, I saw the headlights from the van and knew that Rudy and the kids were home. I glanced back at the field and counted again. Yes, there were four horses. I was sitting there contemplating how this had happened when I heard Rudy walk up behind me.
“Hey, are you all right? Colin called me on my cell phone when we got out of the theater and said a hunter mistook Eleanore for a deer and shot at you guys.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He grabbed me and hugged me and then said, “What is that smell?”
“It’s Dial-covered skunk.”
He started laughing then, and I jabbed him in the stomach.
“It’s just that … well, I’ll bet you’re the only one who got sprayed by a skunk at the first ever annual New Kassel Birding Olympics,” he said through laughter.
“There’s no annual,” I said.
“What?”
“I mean, this was it. There will be no repeat of this ridiculous event.”
“Wow, Torie, usually you have a little better attitude about the things that happen to you. No matter what happens, you can usually laugh about it.”
“Well, I’m not laughing this time.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“Why do we have an extra horse?” I asked him.
“We have an extra horse?” he asked and peered into the field. The moonlight allowed him to make out the shape and movements of four horses. “I’ll be damned. Was somebody pregnant?”
“No, besides, the new horse is even bigger than the ones we already had.”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know. Look, why don’t you come inside? Maybe Rachel told one of her friends she could board her horse here.”
“All right.”
We headed inside, and I played the phone messages while Rudy asked Rachel about the horse. There was a message from Glen Morgan, saying he would meet me the next day at the Kendall House. As much as I was excited about getting new info and pictures on my grandpa’s music career, the thought of having to go anywhere other than to the refrigerator was pretty daunting. The next message was from my mother: “I know you’re there. I know you’re avoiding picking up the phone. I hope you’re all right. I hope you don’t have an outdoor event in the woods during deer season ever again.” Then she’d hung up.
“Well, Rachel doesn’t know anything about a fourth horse,” Rudy said. All three kids went running past him into the night to see the horse that had magically appeared.
“So,” I said. “Did Colin tell you about the body?”
“The body?” he asked, getting out the milk. Then he stopped. “Wait. There was a body?”
I filled Rudy in on all of the events of the day, not just the skunk and the hunter part.
“So, what … a body just came flying over the edge of the cliff?”
“And Eleanore and I happened to be there when it landed.”
He leaned back and thought for a minute. Then, thinking better of it, he put the milk back and got out a beer. “Who was it?”
“Clifton Weaver? Shoe salesman over in Wisteria. Do you know him?”
Rudy shook his head. “No, never heard of him. Was he … shot?”
“I don’t know. If he was shot, he was certainly beaten up first.”
“Well, what do you think?… I mean, I don’t understand.”
“Me, neither,” I said. “Somebody obviously murdered him, shoved him in a trunk, and then tried to get rid of the body.”
“Which is ridiculous, because somebody would have found it eventually. People walk along the railroad tracks all the time. And it’s hunting season—everybody is out.”
“The only thing I can think of is that either they were in a super hurry and intended to go back and move the body later or they thought it was going to go into the river.”
Rudy popped the top on his beer and took a swallow. “This is terrible.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Call my mother and tell her I’m all right.”
“Why don’t you call her?”
“I’m tired. I just want to go to bed.”
“Sure,” he said. As I headed for the stairs, he added, “What do I do about Merlin the magical horse?”
I shrugged. “Feed him. I’ll have Eleanore run it in the paper.”
THE NEW KASSEL GAZETTE
The News You Might Miss
by Eleanore Murdoch
Fellow New Kasselonians. I have been at my computer all night to bring you the news of the birding Olympics. Aside from the fact that my partner, Torie O’Shea, and I were shot at by targetly challenged hunters, the birding Olympics was a success. Elmer Kolbe and Mayor Colin Brooke won, with a total of thirty-three species of birds sighted, including the blue heron, which Elmer claims has existed here for the past two years but nobody else has ever seen. Now that the mayor has witnessed the existence here of the blue heron, I concede that I can no longer doubt Elmer’s vision or birding skills. Second place went to Maddie Fulton and Lisa Berenger, third place to Tobias Thorley and Runa Williams.
The events committee would like me to remind everybody that we are having a Scherenschnitte demonstration next weekend at the visitors center. Scherenschnitte is the art of German paper cutting and should be a big hit with all of our tourists. In fact, the entire Wisteria German Club has signed up for the event.
Torie and Rudy O’Shea wanted me to announce the arrival of a new horse. Apparently, the Percheron just showed up in their field yesterday, and they’d like for the rightful owner to come and claim her.
Annette and Tom Lodke had their first child over the weekend, a girl!
Charity Burgermeister has handmade mittens and scarves for sale. She says she’ll make you a matching hat but must have your head measurements first.
I shall go for now. Be sure to ask Sheriff Mort Joachim about the body that he told me not to give details about in the paper.
Until next time,
Eleanore
Six
“The Incredible Hulk does not have X-ray vision!” Mary screamed at the top of her lungs. My eyes had just parted to allow the morning sun to filter in when I heard this.
“But I’m pretending like he has X-ray vision!” Matthew countered.
“But that’s not how it goes. Superman has X-ray vision.”
“But Superman’s dumb.”
“Well, so are you!”
I rolled over and covered my head with my pillow and snuggled into Rudy’s back. I could just lie here like this all day, right? I thought. Rubbing my feet back and forth on the supersoft sheets, I relaxed back into a semisleep state. After all, was there any reason I actually had to get out of bed?
Glen Morgan and the Kendall House. I had to open the museum. “Ugh.”
“Mary! Where are my angel earrings?” Rachel screamed from down the hall.
“I don’t have your stupid earrings,” she said. “Why would I want those earrings. They’re
ugly and lame anyway!”
“Mom!” Rachel called. Her voice got louder as she bounded into my bedroom. “Mom. Tell her to give me back my earrings.”
“Mary, give your sister back her earrings,” I said.
“I don’t have them!” Mary said, now standing in the bedroom, too.
“Mom, Mary says the Hulk can’t have X-ray vision,” Matthew chimed in.
“Well, he doesn’t have X-ray vision, honey, but you can pretend that he has whatever you want him to have.”
“See,” he said and stuck his tongue out at Mary.
Mary turned and stormed out of my bedroom. “I knew you’d take their side!”
“You have to seriously do something about her, Mother!” Rachel said, her dark brown eyes furious with sisterly disgust.
“I am doing something,” I said, putting my robe on and stretching.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m not killing her,” I said.
Rudy rolled over, leaned as far over as he could and patted my butt, and said, “That’s my girl.”
“You are insufferable,” Rachel said and flew out of the room. Matthew used the distraction to jump on the bed and tickle Rudy, and then the two of them descended into a massive pillow fight and tickling marathon.
After a breakfast of Raisinets and Dr Pepper, I went outside to see Merlin. Although, upon closer inspection, I could tell that Merlin was actually a girl and I’d have to come up with a new name for her. She was also a Percheron. She was head and shoulders bigger than my quarter horses, with a gray speckled coat and a happy little lilt to her gait. I thought of the people around town who owned horses, but I couldn’t think of anybody who had a Percheron.
Oh well, I thought, somebody will claim her eventually.
I drove into town and made my way to the Kendall House. My newest acquisition was two stories, with white clapboard and newly painted blue trim. In the spring and summer, all sorts of blooming vines and bushes smothered the house, including some supernatural morning glories. In this part of Missouri, the old-fashioned morning glories are annuals. Meaning they don’t usually make it through the winter. There are some new and improved breeds, I suppose, that would—or so I’ve been told. But at the far edge of the porch on the Kendall home lived some freakishly hardy old-fashioned morning glories that bloomed all morning, all day, and into the evening and came back every year, going dormant only about six weeks during the winter. As a result, the Kendall home was now on the register of haunted places, because a lot of people believed that the house was haunted by Glory Anne Kendall, thus the freakish morning glories. I personally had never seen the ghost of Glory Anne, but there were times I felt something … unexplainable. Someday, we’d probably discover that what was growing at the end of the porch weren’t morning glories at all, but some unidentified flowering vine, and then I’m not sure if we would still be eligible to be on the register of haunted places anymore. At any rate, the place was quite gorgeous in summer and autumn.
The Kendall House was a museum. Not so much a family museum, unlike the Gaheimer House. The Gaheimer house was filled with all of Mr. Gaheimer’s furniture, antiques and the likes, so that one could see how life was at the turn of twentieth century. With the exception of the World War I mural done by Glory’s brother Rupert, the Kendall home was a haven for women’s textiles. Not only did we have all of Glory Kendall’s quilts to display but we had also acquired many other textiles from around the state, going back as far as the late 1700s—everything from quilts, chintz coverlets, rugs, and doilies to dresses, undergarments, samplers, and children’s clothing.
This was my baby. Everything else I had inherited from Sylvia Pershing. In fact, most of the town still had the stamp of Sylvia and Wilma Pershing’s hard work all over it, but this museum had been my brainstorm. When the house had gone on the market the previous year the owner had agreed to sell me Glory Kendall’s quilts and textile-related objects. Then I bought the house. After learning the tragic story of Glory’s life, I felt like I should make some sort of monument not just to her but to all women like her.
The surprising thing? It was a huge success. I had more visitors per week to the Kendall home than any other landmark in town. People began calling me up, telling me how they wanted to donate their great-grandma’s things because they didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, or they didn’t want the family fighting over them.
There was a guest house in the back, where I kept some acquisitions in storage, and someday I planned to rotate the things I had on display. None of this would have been possible, though, without the help of Geena Campbell, a quilt historian and textile artist. I’d learned a lot from her, but without her, I wouldn’t have known a two-hundred-year-old quilt from one made fifty years ago. She pulled a shift once a week at the Kendall House and said it was the highlight of her week.
At any rate, this took a lot of my time now, which is why I was hiring somebody to take over giving tours for me at the Gaheimer House. Of course, I was still head of the historical society and the only genealogist in town. Not that there was a huge rush on people needing me to trace their family trees, but I still did, on occasion, have somebody request that I find an ancestor of theirs. The sad part about genealogy as a hobby is, well, once you’ve sort of flushed out all of the lines on your family tree, all that’s left are brick walls. Those aren’t a whole lot of fun, until they come tumbling down, and then you have this whole new family to absorb. That’s the point that I was at now. My family tree was pretty much traced, with the exception of those brick walls.
I opened the museum at ten o’clock, and exactly five minutes later a man walked in and rushed toward me. “Are you Torie O’Shea?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, extending my hand. “You must be Glen Morgan.”
He shook my hand, glanced around the room, and said, “I must speak with you at once. Alone.”
Well now, I’d been known to do some stupid things in my time, but when a perfect stranger told me that he must speak with me at once, alone, I was a bit leery. Especially when I was the only one working the museum. I’m not saying it would have stopped me from speaking with him alone—because I’d been known to do some pretty silly things—it just made me nervous.
“Well, I can’t really disappear, Mr. Morgan. I’m working.”
Glen Morgan was about my age, maybe even a few years younger, so late thirties or early forties. He was tall and lean, like a teenage boy. His body was sort of long in the torso and he had big hands. His face was pleasant enough, with expressive black eyes, and he had a head full of brown hair. The resemblance to his grandfather was slight, but I could find it around the chin and the curve of his mouth.
“I’ve made a huge discovery,” he said.
“What’s that?”
As he leaned in toward me, he whispered, “I don’t think your family tree is what you think it is.”
I laughed, until I realized he was serious. “What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly somber. Nobody, I mean nobody, tells me my family tree is incorrect.
“A few months ago, your cousin Phoebe contacted me.”
“Phoebe … what, Uncle Ike’s daughter? Why would she contact you?”
“She’s been tracing the family tree,” he said.
“She has? Why would she do that?” I’m not sure why the news was so upsetting to me, but it was. Maybe because Phoebe was a nutcase most of the time. She was notorious for just taking off and living in the woods in a tent for weeks on end. Then she’d reappear with some new “vision” that the spirit of the oak tree had given her. Now, I’m not knocking trees. I’m not saying that there isn’t wisdom to be learned from our natural environment, because I think there is, but Phoebe was also the same cousin who’d said that Lee Harvey Oswald had impregnated her mother from prison and was really her father. So that sort of put that whole tree wisdom stuff in a bad light.
While her acid-tripping days were over, and she realized that she was the daughter of Ike Kei
th after all, I still couldn’t understand why she’d retrace what I’d already traced. I’ll be the first to admit that every family has its secrets. I’ll be the first to admit that ancestors pass on their familial “knowledge” and stories to us, and I think for the most part our ancestors are telling the truth. Or, they’re telling what they believe to be the truth. I also know that sometimes ancestors will do whatever they can to keep something they’re ashamed of a secret, but the data on my family tree was all documented. I only used the family legends as background. The documents were what hold up all of the branches.
“Does she even own a computer?” I asked.
He looked at me weirdly and shook his head. “That’s not the point. She has information that suggests that John Robert Keith may not be the son of Nate Keith.”
My head spun. Not the son of Nate Keith? I’ll tell you right now that Nate Keith was a son of a bitch, but he was still responsible for me being here, and we can’t pick our ancestors. Among other things, Nate Keith was vindictive and beat his wife. I’d love to not have his blood running through my veins, but I do. It’s who I am, regardless of whether it makes me happy. I’d had customers come to me before, trying to manipulate data so that they could be descended from the person they thought they ought to be descended from. I had a friend who’d started tracing her family tree just so she could find the famous French theater actress that her mother claimed her great-grandmother had been, only to find a family tree full of Irish and Germans, no French, and definitely no famous French actress.
In my own family, I’d been told many times how my great-grandmother had died when my grandma was only four years old. But then I found her obituary and death record, which showed she’d died five years later than I’d been told she had. My grandma was actually nine when her mother died, not four. How does that happen? There are all sorts of reasons, but I had two independent records giving the exact same date, and the obituary couldn’t exactly have been faked, since it was published when the event actually happened.
The Blood Ballad Page 5
