A Comedy of Heirs

by Rett MacPherson

  “So it could have been his neighbors or his kids,” I stated.

  “Or his grandkids,” he said and nodded. “I don’t think that was really the motive for killing him. People hated him for plenty of other reasons. There were other motives.”

  “What happened to the land?” Sheriff Brooke asked. “The resort they were going to build?”

  “Found out that southeast Missouri is riddled with caves underneath it. They run all over and everywhere. Tons of sinkholes down there. Well, they couldn’t make a manmade lake. They tried it on a smaller scale to see what would happen. A few days would go by and the lake would drain down into the caves. Come back there’d be dead fish in the bottom of the lake and mud. No water. No resort.”

  The sheriff shook his head as if that meant something to him.

  “What were the other motives?” I asked.

  “Nate Keith was a no-account jerk, I’ll just say it plainly. Had giving and loving kids, a great wife and he was no good. He nailed any woman that wasn’t hairier than he was.” I had to choke back a laugh at his choice of words. “Della Ruth coulda got fed up.”

  “At sixty-eight? My great-grandmother would have been sixty-eight years old in 1948. You think she would have cared by then?” I asked.

  “I always thought Della Ruth had an agenda of her own,” he stated and looked me in the eye. He didn’t give me a chance to ask him just what he meant by that remark. “He was mean and his boys didn’t like him none too much and his grandkids were afraid of him.”

  “So this could have been a crime of passion, you’re saying.”

  “Anybody shoot a man on his own front porch and let him bleed to death, it’s a crime of passion. Man lay out there for hours before he died. They can say they didn’t hear anything all they want. He had to be out there begging for help. Nobody let him in.”

  I took a deep breath. A shiver ran along my spine and settled deep into my bones. I couldn’t skirt around the fact that with every word the man said, it didn’t look good for my beloved aunts, uncles and grandparents. Could I really have a murderer this close to me? I mean, I knew that I had a murderer way back there in the 1700s. My family tree had everything from horse theives to royalty. This was different. “What other motives? Are there any others?”

  “When Nate was a boy, he and a couple of the neighborhood boys went swimming in the swimming hole,” he said. “One of the boys drowned and died. It was always rumored that it was Nate’s fault. The drowned boy’s brothers swore they’d get him back for it.”

  “He was seventy-two years old!” I said. “You think they waited, what, sixty-five years for vengeance?”

  “Never said they waited sixty-five years, Ms. O’Shea. That coulda been the final straw. You really don’t know that much about your family, do you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. My hackles were raised and the sheriff could tell it. He placed a hand on my arm to tell me to calm down. How dare Hubert tell me that I didn’t know that much about my family! I knew more than anybody else did. I knew more than any of my generation. I’d worked long and hard to make sure that I knew everything I could find out about my family.

  Hubert ground his gums together and then smiled at me. “This was my only unsolved case, Ms. O’Shea. In all my years in law enforcement. All because a family decided to protect somebody.”

  “So you’re saying that you think it was a member of my family and not the surrounding property owners or the boy’s family from the swimming accident?”

  “One and the same, Ms. O’Shea. One and the same.”

  Twelve

  Man oh man, why didn’t I ever listen to my father?

  It was about four hours after I’d left Mr. McCarthy’s house in southwest St. Louis. I sat in my office at the Gaheimer House, for no other reason than I just had to get away from my family. All of them. I’d dropped the sheriff off at his car at McDonald’s, came straight to the Gaheimer House, called Rudy and sat down at my desk.

  I really wanted to crawl in a hole and stay there. I’d just had to know the details of Nathaniel Keith’s death and now that I did, I wished I didn’t. And yet, that’s not entirely true either. I’ve always had this burning desire to know everything. Everything. I can’t stand not to know something. It drives me crazy. My mother says that I’m just nosy. Whatever it is, I can’t control it any more than I can control blinking. I can for a while but then I just have to give in.

  Well, this time instead of gleaning satisfaction for myself, my nosiness has only made me more miserable. I walked out of my office and to the soda machine in the hall. I put in my fifty cents, pushed Dr Pepper and nothing happened. The temporarily-out-of-stock button flashed on my choice of beverage. The Coke and 7-Up and all the caffeine- and sugar-free junk was all in stock. Not my Dr Pepper. I punched the Dr Pepper button with my fist in case it needed stronger coercing. It didn’t work. I pushed the Change button but it wouldn’t give me my change. No change. No soda. I could get more change. I’d just do without.

  I walked back in to my office and contemplated screaming, but then thought better of it. I paced back and forth across what floor that there was in my office and pondered just what I was going to do with the information that Mr. McCarthy had just given me. I could forget about it, or I could pursue it. Easy as that. I could smile and spread the hunting accident story to my children and their children as if I didn’t know any better. Or I could try and find information on the swimming incident and maybe interview some of Granville’s kids or Lea’s kids. How did I know that they’d tell me what I need to know?

  I didn’t even know that if I pushed my father, he would finally tell me that, yes, he knew the true story as to how his grandfather had died.

  I was tired of pacing so I grabbed my coat off the coat rack and headed down the hall and through the ballroom. The Christmas tree that Sylvia had decorated was absolutely gorgeous. She had bought a real tree and decorated it with small, homemade candles, a seventy-year-old chain of beads, glass ornaments ranging from the 1930s to the 1940s, ribbons and various ornaments. Even though the candles weren’t lit, it looked majestic strategically placed in front of the large picture window in the ballroom. Sylvia had tried to keep the ribbons that perched on the upturned branches within the green and purple color scheme of the ballroom. She had beauty in her heart, she just usually never let you see it.

  I turned off the lights, locked the door, set the alarm and stepped outside. I decided almost instantly that I didn’t want to drive home. My house is only a few blocks from the Gaheimer House and Rudy’s van was at the house in case of an emergency. The night was cold, but the air was heavy. I wanted to walk. I was struck by how quiet the town was. By how quiet the world was.

  I would have to tell my mother about the fact that I was pregnant within the next few days, because she and the sheriff would not be at the big dinner on Sunday when we planned to tell everybody else. I honestly didn’t know what her reaction would be.

  I was so deep in thought that it took me a few minutes before I realized that it was snowing. I looked up at the sky and big fat wet flakes were falling to the ground. My heart skipped a beat. It was snowing. It was snowing! Real snow. Not just a dusting. These were big heavy flakes and they were sticking to the ground and accumulating fast. Aunt Sissy had brought that Minnesota snow with her after all.

  I couldn’t help but walk a little faster and when I arrived home I walked in the front door with a rush of cold air and announced at the top of my voice, “It’s snowing! Everybody outside!”

  Rudy sat in his easy chair all comfortable and warm with his feet propped up watching a Seinfeld rerun or something like that. Aunt Sissy sat on the floor doing her yoga, my cousin Damon and his wife, Tillie, and their son two daughters were all in the kitchen talking with my mother.

  Disappointment filled my heart when nobody leapt up to go outside.

  “What’s the matter with you people? Get up, get on your coats, mittens, gloves, hats, scarves, w
hatever you’ve got. Outside!” I yelled.

  Aunt Sissy opened one eye from her yoga and then uncrossed her legs and stood up. “Well, come on everybody,” she said. “Let’s do as she says. Rudy turn that idiot box off and get your shoes on.”

  Rudy looked at her with a pained expression but he finally sat up. I walked into the kitchen. “Hi, Mom. Where’s Dad?” I only asked because I saw his beat-up truck sitting out in front of my house so that I knew that he was here.

  “Downstairs with Jed,” she said.

  “Men can find more things to do in a basement than anybody I know,” I said. “Rudy!” I yelled. “Wake up Mary and Rachel, we’re going outside!” Damon smiled at me with that mischievous look he gets in his eyes when he knows I’m up to something and he wants in on it. “Now, Rudy, not in two hours.”

  Finally I heard the squeak from the spring in his chair and knew that he was up on his feet. Rachel broke the spring when she was two years old from jumping up and down on the chair. I was upset with her at the time, but I’ve since thought about giving her a reward for doing it. It’s one of the ways I can tell if Rudy’s still lounging or doing what I asked him to do. See, sometimes bad things turn out to be good things later—you just have to wait for it to happen.

  I opened the basement door and yelled down. “Dad, it’s snowing! Get your scrawny butt outside right now, or you’re a good-for-nothing wuss. Come on, snowball fight now. I challenge you.”

  It was quiet at first. Then I heard him say, “Do I get to pick who I want on my team?”

  “As long as I get Aunt Sissy, I don’t care if you take all of New Kassel,” I said and walked back up the steps. Tradition. Dad and I had a tradition that went back as far as I could remember. Every year we had one massive, all-encompassing, no-holding-back, test-of-skill-and-natural-instincts snowball fight. And he almost always won.

  Not tonight. I felt lucky.

  “Come on, Mom. You can come out on the porch and watch,” I said.

  She didn’t hesitate one bit. She unlocked her wheels, went to get her heavy-duty poncho and headed out onto the porch.

  By the time we all made it outside the snow was falling faster and heavier. At least three inches covered the ground. I let out a whoop of joy and pent-up energy. “Aunt Sissy, you’re with me.”

  My dad took three large steps toward me, put his thumbs in his belt loop and stopped. He nodded.

  I took three steps toward him, put my hands in my pockets and nodded. “I’ve got Sissy,” I said.

  “I take Damon.”

  Crap. I really wanted Damon, too. “I’ll take Jed.”

  My father sort of smiled at that. “I want Mary.”

  “Fine. I’ll take Rachel.”

  “Hey, doesn’t anybody want me?” Rudy asked.

  “I’ll take Rudy,” Dad said.

  “Tillie’s mine.”

  “I’ll take her son, can’t remember his name,” Dad admitted, but still trying to seem tough.

  “His name is Jeremy,” I said.

  “Okay, Jeremy.”

  “I’ll take Courtney,” I said, who was Damon’s twelve-year-old daughter. “You can have Madison.”

  My dad nodded to me. I nodded back. “Okay, the chicken coop is your castle, the porch is ours. The object is to drive the enemy back to their castle.”

  My dad nodded to me again.

  “The picnic table is the middle of the kingdom. You leave the backyard and you’re disqualified. You can use anything in the yard. You get hit with a snowball more than ten times, you’re out,” I said.

  I looked over at my kids. Rachel was rubbing sleep out of her eyes and scratching her head. Mary yawned, sending a billow of warm air out into the night. She might have yawned but her eyes sparkled with anticipation.

  “Mom’s referee,” I said. Dad nodded that he understood the rules and that he probably wouldn’t abide by them. He never did. My group lined up on the house side of the picnic table. Me, Aunt Sissy, in her cut-off jeans even in the snow and tennis shoes with no socks. Tillie, Damon’s wife, was bundled so heavily she probably wouldn’t be able to move much. She was about thirty-seven and five foot nine and she could kick serious butt if need be. I’d had her on my touch football team one year. Rachel, ready albeit groggy. Courtney, who was eighteen and taller than I was. I hate it when my cousins’ children are taller than me. And Uncle Jed, who I’m not even sure was aware of where he was, much less that the object was to throw snowballs at the opposing army.

  Dad’s army lined up on the opposite side of the picnic table. Him, Rudy, Damon, Jeremy, who was fourteen and built like a football player, Madison, who was ten, tall and scrawny, and Mary, who just looked entirely too little to be on their team. They had youth and vitality on their team. Rudy was injured, though. So we had that going for us. My team was older, but we were … well, I’m not exactly sure.

  Mom said her speech about being nice and playing fair, yada yada yada and GO!

  Snowballs began whizzing and whirling around the backyard. I could never figure out how my father did it, but he could throw five snowballs for every one of mine. I picked up one of the kid’s yellow snow saucers and used it as a shield.

  “Oh, not fair!” I heard my father say.

  I searched for Mary and found her over by the chicken coop doing nothing but making snowballs. They were using her as an ammunitions maker! She had a big pile of snowballs next to her in nothing flat, and all they had to do was go over there and pick up four or five and nail us! Gosh, I was infuriated. Mainly because I hadn’t thought of it first. No wonder my father wanted Mary. He had this planned all along.

  Tillie had shoved her way into Rudy’s face and knocked him down on his back. She stood over him just pummeling him with snowball after snowball. Jeremy saw what was happening and went over and saved Rudy before Tillie managed to hit him with ten snowballs, so he was still in the battle.

  Uncle Jed was already out. He was far too drunk to really know what was going on and he just stood there in the middle of the backyard with his arms up, saying. “Hey, that’s not nice. Quit hit-tin’ the old man.” He talked about himself in the third person quite often. Especially when he was drunk.

  Suddenly I felt the sting of a snowball in the neck. Oh, that stung! I turned around to find Damon up on top of the girl’s swing set zinging snowballs down at unsuspecting victims. Like me.

  Rachel was giggling way too much to be doing too much damage to anybody. We were losing ground fast. And then I noticed that Aunt Sissy had taken Tillie’s guerrilla snow-fighting tactics and was rushing the enemy and knocking them on the ground. I did the same thing. Instead of being worried about getting hit with the snowballs, I just went after my victims and didn’t stop until they were on the ground. In this case it was my father. He squirmed and tried to get away, but I just threw snowball after snowball in his face. Then as he tried to get away I shoved a big handful of snow down his shirt.

  God, this was great. It was exhilarating and I could feel the tensions of the day just leaving my body. Maybe it was also because I was getting to pummel my father without getting in trouble, and I had a lot of pent-up anger against him at the moment. By the time the fight was over, it was Aunt Sissy, Tillie and me and we had backed the other team all the way to the chicken coop, what was left of them, that is. The only ones left at the end of the battle were Mary, who was still vigorously making snowballs, and Damon.

  I had won.

  “What in blazes is going on out here?” Mayor Castlereagh yelled from his yard. His floodlights came on with a blast of halogen brightness. A ladder went against my privacy fence and then his bald head appeared in the snowy night sky above the fence. He was not happy.

  “People are trying to sleep around here!” he yelled.

  “Evidently you’re not trying hard enough,” I said. We all walked back inside for hot cocoa and coffee, and left the mayor to stew in his own anger.

  Thirteen

  Morning came early and I bounded out of
bed with abnormal energy. Part of it was because I knew that if I wanted to get this quilt going and find out who had sent me those newspaper articles, I had to do it fast. If I have a definite mission to accomplish I can make myself get up early. The excitement of finally pounding the living daylights out of my father at a snowball fight did a lot to give me that extra push to get out of bed as well.

  I bought a large piece of white fabric at the local twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and had the piece of material marked by ten o’clock. I traced the template over and over on the white fabric for the sections of the quilt that everybody was supposed to sign. I knew there was no way that I could get it all cut out and everything, so I was just going to have everybody sign one of the places and I’d cut them out later.

  I came down the steps of my bedroom and found Uncle Jed sitting at my kitchen table. Uncle Isaac, the third child of my grandparents, sat across from him. About seventy-four years old, he was a retired steel worker, and a heavier version of my father. His hair was thinner and nearly white, but the same square jaw and prominent nose were evident. Looking at Uncle Isaac’s hazel eyes was like looking at my father’s, thus like looking at my own.

  “Hey, Uncle Isaac, how are you?” I asked. I had barely had a chance to talk to him since he arrived.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. I got the distinct impression that I had interrupted something that I wasn’t supposed to. I looked at Jed, who was staring at Isaac.

  “Would you guys do me a favor and sign your name in one of these squares?” I asked. Well, they weren’t exactly shaped liked squares but they got the picture. “I’m going to make a signature quilt to commemorate this reunion and I need everybody to sign it.”

  “Sure, sure,” Uncle Isaac said. He had a habit of repeating the first word of every sentence. He didn’t stutter, because it never happened at any other time and he didn’t sound like he had trouble getting the word out. He just repeated it twice. Uncle Isaac was the very first one to put his signature on what would be the Keith Kin Quilt.