Death in Living Gray

by John Clayton

  DEATH IN LIVING GRAY

  by

  John Clayton

  BOSON BOOKS

  Raleigh

  © 2008 by John Clayton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, including mechanical, electric, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  ISBN (ebook): 1-932482-63-6

  Published by

  Boson Books, a division of C & M Online Media, Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane,

  Raleigh, NC 27606-4470

  cm@cmonline.com

  http://www.bosonbooks.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 14

  Author’s Note:

  Chapter 1

  “Damn. Damn it all,” I screamed, thinking “Damn Henry too,” for telling me that the floor would support the weight. I don’t remember exactly what happened, except that I probably jumped on top of the sofa as it began to fall, so it wouldn’t pin me underneath. The next thing I knew, I was kneeling on one of the metal seats with pains running up from my kneecaps to the top of my head, staring up at Henry’s coffee-colored face peering down at me through the hole in the basement ceiling. It wasn’t Henry’s fault that the living room floor had gotten weak in its old age. It’s just that Henry Adams, the local blacksmith and my sometime welding mentor, knew how to do just about everything around a house or barn. So I’d taken his word that we wouldn’t need to put extra bracing under the floor. And now I was perched on top of four hundred pounds of iron sofa that should have been sitting in front of the fireplace one story above.

  Getting up, I was testing my knees slowly when Henry shouted, “Look out, Prudence!” Now Prudence is my name, but Henry never used it, because it was too familiar, and he never said Mrs. Abernathy, because it would have been too obsequious. He compromised by never calling me anything. Until now. So I knew he meant it. The bricks at the top of the fireplace were beginning to peel off. Forgetting my aching body, I leapt back, all the time watching the bricks, in seeming slow motion, one by one, and then in clumps, fall free from the face of the chimney and land on the spot that I had just vacated.

  The dislodging of the bricks from the front of the fireplace caused the whole mantel and the narrow built-in wooden bookcases on each side to fall away, exposing the “secret” compartment at the right side of the fireplace. I wasn’t supposed to know it was there, but that’s where my husband, Jack Senior, used to hide his good brandy back when the Abernathy clan still lived here and he could afford to buy good brandy. I used to borrow a nip for myself once in a while when things got a little out of hand. It was especially good in the winter when the almost continuous fire in the fireplace kept it at just the right temperature.

  After the bricks had finally stopped falling, I moved slowly onto the pile of debris, looking up at the remaining three walls of the chimney, trying to figure out what to do first: brace the floor or the bricks above the fireplace. Suddenly my upturned face was pelted by a spray of dust and dirty old rags falling out of the secret compartment, causing me to curse the housekeeping practices of my husband’s ancestors—until I realized that I was really pretty lucky for me that it wasn’t more bricks. As I picked some of the rags from my shoulders and tossed them onto the sofa, I could feel that they were actually gray wool fabric. But more important than that, some of the rags were wrapped around bones. In fact, one of the bones that fell directly onto the sofa wasn’t covered with cloth at all. And it was shaped pretty much like a human skull.

  As calmly as I could, I called up to Henry that a skeleton was falling out of the fireplace. That he should call Jack Senior—try Jezebel’s Bar—and Sheriff Overhouse—and anybody else he could find at home if he thought it would help.

  ***

  People were putting pieces of bone and cloth into little plastic bags, labeling them carefully—I supposed so they could try to reconstruct the configuration as it had been in the secret compartment. The sheriff was over talking to Jack Senior just like it’d been my husband who discovered the bones, but then the house belonged to him, or rather it belonged to his mother, Victoria Abernathy. On the other hand, it wasn’t really her house anymore, since she had rented it out to make ends meet. Victoria, Jack Senior, and I had had to move over to the little white frame tenant house, which was barely big enough for the three of us.

  Sheriff Overhouse turned and approached me slowly, twisting his broad brim hat in his hands, his ruddy complexion becoming redder, probably at the thought of dealing with a hysterical woman. But I wasn’t hysterical. So far, I had been calm and collected. But nobody knew that except Henry Adams, and right then he was outside stabilizing the chimney by hooking an old horse collar around the worn bricks and tying it off to the oak tree in the side yard, the weeping willow in the front near the creek and the magnolia out back.

  “Now you just relax, Miz Abernathy, and tell me just what happened here. If you can, that is.” The sheriff kept on twisting the hat and got even redder in the face. Lou Overhouse was as honest as they get in these parts but he only kept getting elected because an Overhouse had always been Sheriff in Mason County. Lou got by because there wasn’t much crime around here, and even when there was a small transgression, everybody generally knew who did it. Of course, that was before the commuters started moving in to escape urban violence but bringing with them all the new problems of white-collar criminality. I doubted that the sheriff was up to dealing with the emerging world and, in fact, the commuters were pushing to get a real police department—which would be a shame, because there was something comforting about Lou’s bumbling.

  So I helped him along. “The floor gave way. And then the chimney,” I explained. That sounded a bit weak, so I started with how six months before a young couple named Midge and Bill Taylor had rented the house for a year to see if they liked the country and the commute to Washington and they had seen a tractor sofa in my shop/barn over between the manor and the tenant house and wanted me to make them one, and, as the sheriff knew, that was what I did for part of my living—make “junk” furniture out of old tractor parts for the technocrats who were beginning to commute from Mason County to their big important jobs in the Washington metropolitan area. And so with the help of Henry Adams, I had welded one together, but we had miscalculated either the weight of the sofa or the strength of the floor and it had fallen through, creating a chain reaction whereby the facing of the fireplace and the mantel had fallen into the hole along with me, and fortunately no one was hurt, but a bunch of old bones and cloth had fallen out on top of me. So we did the right thing and called the county law enforcement authority, namely him. Pretty succinct, I thought.

  At least the sheriff had become less florid. “And you never saw the deceased before?”

  Well, the deceased was pretty unrecognizable, but I answered anyway, “No, I never saw a Confederate soldier in this living room except for Jack Senior before the Confederate Memorial Day Ball over at Mr. Pickerill’s, and as you can see, he’s here, alive.”

  All of which was lost on Sheriff Overhouse. “Then I don’t suppose you know how he got into the chimney,” he said. His forehead wrinkled a bit. “How do you know he was a Confederate soldier?”

  “The gray wool cloth, for one thing, and you must have the same idea since you called him a h
e.” There were only a very few women running around posing as men during the war or even in the present reenactments, so the probabilities were strongly in favor of it being a man.

  The sheriff looked thoughtful, “Maybe. But that means he’s been there almost one hundred and fifty years. We’ll have to wait for the forensic report on that.” He drew up, and trying his best to be official, said, “Well, don’t leave town, and could you send Henry Adams in so I can talk to him?”

  I looked through the window at Henry tying a rope to the willow in the front yard and screaming at his helper, Stuart, up on the roof, to make sure that there was no slack. Noting that none of the deputies had offered to help with shoring up the fireplace, I suggested, “It would be safer for you to talk to Henry outside, since he’s pretty busy. Maybe you can help him pull the rope taut.”

  The sheriff peered through the front door, called his deputy, Weevil Tuttle, to help with the rope, and then trooped across the front porch, for once not twisting his hat—mostly because he’d plopped it down hard on his head.

  The forensic team continued to dust and photograph and collect, apparently unperturbed by the possibility of the rest of the chimney falling in on them.

  ***

  But about a half an hour later, I decided that they must have been aware of the danger because they had waited until Henry tied the chimney off before risking a foray inside the fireplace. Two specialists had crawled in to fingerprint the boards that had remained in situ after the crash. From where I stood, it looked as if they were just dusting the little bracing boards that were nailed into the cement between the bricks about halfway up. The boards must have held the shelf, which was the bottom of the upper half of the secret compartment and which formed the divider between the upper and lower parts. It looked like the only way to get into the lower half was to push the little iron lever inside the fireplace, open the door to the upper part, and remove the shelf. A shiver ran through my stomach as I realized I’d been nipping from a bottle that was stored just above a rotting body. But, by then the body was probably already a skeleton and the bottle contained a mild disinfectant. That helped a little. The rest of the forensic team, having finished their work, put the bones in a big box and loaded it into the back of the ambulance, which somebody had called in case the person might be still alive.

  That thought brought back the shiver and I turned away, my eyes looking for something familiar to grasp, latching out of instinct onto Jack Senior in the dining room. He was explaining the situation to his mother who just returned from a game of bridge with her friends from the Daughters of the American Revolution, generally abbreviated DAR by its pedigreed members.

  I could see her through the door, sitting on a side chair, wringing her handkerchief and complaining solidly that this would never have happened if Uncle George Ebenton hadn’t been killed in the war—that he had had all the brains in the family. It was somewhere close to the millionth time I had heard her say that since I married Jack Senior thirty years ago and moved here from California.

  And for about the half-millionth time, Jack Senior muttered that if Uncle George Ebenton had not been killed, then she, Victoria Abernathy, née Ebenton, would not have inherited the manor. From listening to the exchange, and knowing the ages of the participants, one might have assumed that Uncle George Ebenton had died in the Second World War. But that was not the case, as it had taken me about a year after my marriage to figure out: Major George Ebenton had been reported missing in action on July 3, 1863, after following some general named Pickett up some damned hill. He had married just before the war and had no children. The manor and about four hundred acres had devolved on his brother, John, Victoria’s great-grandfather, and had remained in the family through the male line until Victoria, who had no siblings, brought the estate in marriage to Carter Ball Abernathy, whose life, death, or other circumstances were never mentioned in the family. Victoria had one son named for her great-grandfather John, but everybody always called him Jack. When our son was born we called him Jack Junior, so John just naturally evolved to Jack Senior.

  Victoria had always held Uncle George Ebenton up as a paragon of virtue, and maintained that things would never be quite right again since the South had lost the War Between the States (Civil War for those readers from above the Mason-Dixon Line). And judging by Jack’s and my personal finances, they never would be. But it did get tiresome, particularly those sudden outbursts where you didn’t have enough forewarning to turn off your listening.

  Suddenly Victoria’s lamentation was overwhelmed by a hubbub from around the fireplace. The sheriff was picking his way over the kneeling workers to where the head forensic guy was kneeling down carefully emptying a bag onto the boards next to the hole in the floor.

  He held up a glittering sparkling object, about ten inches long. Everybody stood up and just looked. Everybody that is but Victoria who had pushed her way through to a position in front of Sheriff Overhouse. There was silence. Even from across the room, I recognized what it was: a diamond bracelet, part of the jewelry that had been stolen from Mr. Pickerill’s house about the time of the Confederate Ball last May, almost a year ago. The burglar had taken the jewels from a safe hidden in a nightstand in the master bedroom. Although the total value was about one and a half million, this bracelet was worth only around seventy-five thousand. Pictures of all of the pieces had been displayed at length in the local newspapers. The Sheriff’s Department had made multiple rounds of the county looking for leads. Somebody had made an anonymous phone call alleging that I had taken the jewels while working over at Mr. Pickerill’s, so they made a real job of searching the manor house and my shop—mostly, I guess, because they didn’t have any other leads. They didn’t find anything.

  The locals had been augmented by a team from the Greystone Insurance Company that had systematically covered all the same ground that the sheriff had. But the case was still open. At least, I assumed it was open, since there had been no announcement of the jewels having been found, in spite of the fifty thousand dollar reward that Mr. Pickerill had offered.

  I craned my neck. The forensic man was carefully turning the bag inside out. Nothing. A second guy inside the fireplace called out that there didn’t appear to be anything else hidden in the secret compartment.

  Well, we’d found part of Mr. Pickerill’s hoard—the only bad thing was that it was hidden along with a dead Confederate soldier in the Abernathy fireplace.

  ***

  The forensic team had unloaded all their equipment for a second time and was carefully tearing up the floor around the hearth. Sheriff Overhouse had already called Mr. Pickerill to come and formally identify the jewels, although they looked pretty much like the photographs that had been circulated last year. Jack Senior, Victoria, and I were on the other side of the room, talking to the sheriff.

  “Must have been somebody dressed as a soldier at the last Confederate Day Ball,” the sheriff mumbled at Jack Senior, casting only a halfway sideways glance at me, twisting his hat again since he was inside and felt obligated to take it off. “Maybe he was hiding Mr. Pickerill’s jewels in here.”

  “But then why would he be in there with them?” It was better for Jack Senior to ask, since I was keeping a low profile, hoping that the sheriff would forget about the anonymous tip. My husband and Lou Overhouse had been classmates at the local high school before Jack Senior went off to the University of Virginia and Lou did two years of law enforcement at the local junior college. Still, they had more in common with each other than they did with commuters—or with me, for that matter.

  “And who killed him?” Victoria asked. “Did he get shot and then crawl into the hiding place? Nobody’s ever used that compartment for anything. Even in the War Between the States, Uncle George Ebenton had all the silver hidden under a plowed field because all the rows looked alike—that is, unless you had a map. Uncle George was pretty smart that way.” Victoria, who brought the family history up on every possible occasion, apparently didn’t
know about Jack Senior’s brandy.

  “Maybe he had an accomplice. They met here to divide the jewels and the accomplice killed him, stuffed him in the compartment, and left the bracelet by mistake.” The sheriff made what appeared to be a wild guess, but he was looking around at me to see if it hit a nerve. It looked like he hadn’t forgotten the tip.

  While I was trying to shrink out of mind, Victoria asked, “Then why didn’t he take all the jewels? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe they had a fight outside and the wounded perpetrator ran in here to hide—bringing the bracelet with him just because he happened to be holding it,” the sheriff suggested—another leading guess. This time he was looking at Jack Senior, who was staring at the floor cogitating.

  At this point, I really wanted to ask how a live human could compress himself through the door into the top and then wiggle down into the bottom. The section of the bookcase that swung out when you pushed a little lever was only about two and a half feet high by two feet wide. Of course he could have taken the shelf out, but then how did he know the bottom of the top half was just a shelf? Even then it would have taken quite a gyration since the bottom of the opening was chest high. I suppose a corpse could have been stuffed into the top, but even that maneuver would have been hard.

  But I didn’t want to raise the issue aloud and let slip that I’d known about the compartment for years. I know that’s odd, but there were some things my husband and I never talked about, and his hidden brandy was one of them. So I didn’t say anything and focused my mind on getting the sheriff to raise the issue.

  But my mental telepathy didn’t work. The sheriff was listening attentively as Jack Senior, without raising his head, spoke to the sheriff, causing the latter to lean forward too. “I don’t see how that would be possible. Mother and I were the only people who knew about that compartment,” my husband explained quietly, “unless of course some of Mother’s second or third cousins heard about it from their grandparents.”