1 News from Dead Mule Swamp

by Joan H. Young

  “I won’t,” I promised, and I meant it. I couldn’t get away from here fast enough. For some reason being touched by Kevin gave me the creeps, and both times I’d been here he had found some way to do it. I’d ask Tom all the questions I had for him another time.

  Tom saw us coming and walked out to meet me. “My mother said you’d be here t’ pick up the key to her upstairs. C’mon inside and I’ll make that copy for you real quick,” he bellowed.

  I gladly transferred my attention to Tom and he motioned me to follow him inside. We walked through the showroom, and I could feel Kevin behind us. The garden center, beyond the iron grillwork, was filled with bedding plants, bags of fertilizer, pots, shovels, hoes, saws, vicious-looking loppers, picks, axes, and other sharp items. Tom seemed oblivious to the power of Kevin’s eyes, which I could feel boring into the back of my head. We turned out of the path of that gaze and walked to the back of the store where the key-grinding machine was mounted on a workbench.

  Tom pulled a single brass key from his pocket, studied it and then spun a small kiosk filled with key blanks. He selected the correct one and fitted both pieces of metal into the grinder, tightening the thumb screws. The noise of the cutting deterred us from any conversation for the next few minutes. I was glad enough of that. I only hoped Tom would keep quiet about the key’s purpose. For some reason, I didn’t want Kevin to know anything about what it might reveal.

  “Here ya go, Ana. Say hello to Ma for me. I gotta get busy.” And without any further words Tom handed me the keys, gave a two-finger salute, and exited through a rear door. I hadn’t even had a chance to be polite and ask him what one did at a mushroom festival. Tom had seemed to be uncomfortable and was looking past my shoulder.

  I glanced back, but saw nothing. Rubbing the two pieces of metal against each other and wondering if they were the keys to this whole puzzle, I walked slowly back toward the garden center entrance. Standing in the one opening in the tall black bars was the garden center clerk, a large man, wearing a green company vest and holding a pair of heavy-duty clippers. Instantly, I felt trapped. The bars, installed for security, now seemed like a prison. I couldn’t take my eyes off those heavy blades, curved like the beak of some evil bird.

  But the clerk smiled, and rotating his body, swept his arm back in a gesture indicating that I should pass by. “Have a good day.” He said. “I was just returning these to the display rack.”

  Had I only imagined the menace in his demeanor?

  Chapter 24

  As quickly as I could, but hopefully not appearing too anxious to leave, I heel-and-toed my way to the car. Now that I had the key, nothing was going to slow me down. Well, almost nothing. I decided that I should provide lunch for Cora and myself today, so I stopped at Vogel’s. Going through town wasn’t exactly on the way to Cora’s, but it was only a few extra miles, and I was pretty sure it would be worth far more than that in good will.

  Adele was in the store this morning. She nodded to me from the checkout lane as I came through the doors. I waved and pointed toward the refrigerated cases.

  “Be right back, I said.” Vogel’s is a good store for a small town, but Adele can’t afford to stock and staff a true deli case. However, there are tubs of fresh salads available, and some sliced fresh meats, pre-packaged. I had never thought to ask her if the salads are homemade, or if she gets them from a supplier. Today, it didn’t matter, I was just glad to find some ready-to-eat items. I chose a pint of potato salad and some ham. I figured I couldn’t go wrong with those. I knew Cora had that luscious brown bread, so we could make sandwiches. I added Muenster cheese to the pile, which I was now juggling in my hands, having neglected to pick up a cart. Adele appeared at my shoulder with a rectangular plastic basket in hand. She chuckled as she eased the items into it.

  “Are you going on a picnic, Ana? With someone?” There was no way to keep ones activities from Adele. But it didn’t matter—I was happy to let her know what I’d discovered.

  “You were right to send me to Cora,” I began. “She certainly has quite a museum in her pole barn. We couldn’t find my mystery paper yesterday, but today we’re going to search the upstairs.”

  “I wondered what you had found. I thought you might call me last night.” Adele sounded a little hurt, and I recalled she had seemed rather chilly when we were discussing Cora on Saturday. I wondered if she was jealous.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I could have, but we didn’t really find anything yet, oh, except that the year of the paper is 1896. May, 1896, actually.” I paused, and Adele did not break the silence. “When I got home last night, I just needed some space. I didn’t talk to anyone.”

  “I know just how you feel!” Just for a moment I wondered if she realized that the townspeople, herself included, were not very good at giving people any social elbow room.

  “Anyway, Cora knows there’s a box of papers from the right year stored upstairs, and we are hoping to find the one we are particularly interested in today.”

  “Take one of these pies, then, for luck. Cora loves rhubarb pie. Janice Preston makes them for me every morning. I sell two or three a day at this time of year.”

  “Thanks for the tip!” I lifted a pie and we walked toward the checkout lane.

  “I don’t really dislike Cora,” Adele suddenly offered. “I just find her attitude toward Jerry Caulfield insufferable.”

  “I noticed she was pretty icy when his name came up.”

  “Old wounds fester deep,” Adele said, but she did not offer any more information. I paid for the food, and headed for my Jeep.

  I realized that I could have brought Tom’s map, with his fingerprint on it, in to the police station. However, I’d forgotten, and left it on my kitchen counter. I’d have to do that another time.

  Cherry Hill is so small that within a minute I was beyond the village limits and on the way out to Brown Trout Lane once again. Now that I knew how to get there, it was easy to find, and it did not require driving a lot of back roads except at the very end. I even felt that the potholes in the road were becoming familiar.

  Cora met me at her door. She had pinned her braids around her head in a very old-fashioned, but no-nonsense style. She wore the same overalls, but had switched to a yellow checked blouse, and she looked ready for work. She certainly didn’t seem like an “old lady” to me. We carried the food inside, safekeeping it to the refrigerator for later. She smiled and raised an eyebrow when she saw the rhubarb pie. When my hands were free, I produced the keys from the pocket of my jeans and waved them triumphantly. “Got ‘em!” I said.

  “Let’s see what we can find, then.” Cora answered. “I already turned on the heater in the barn, to take off the chill. I’m glad you wore jeans today. It’s much more dusty upstairs than down. The barn’s not that old, but the things I bring home seem to carry their own layers of grime.”

  We headed for the barn, and I wondered if Cora knew how excited I was. I was surprised, myself, at how absorbed I’d become in this little puzzle. I still thought it was tied in with Cliff’s death, but even if it turned out not to be so, I was glad that something besides anger and frenzied remodeling could hold my attention.

  Cora entered the barn and made a detour into the office space, carefully slipping one key on a ring and placing it in the desk drawer. She climbed the stairs opposite the door, and fitted the remaining key to the lock, which opened easily. Since there was no landing at the top, I had remained on the lower level.

  “Come on up,” Cora said, as she put the key in her pocket. She took a step out of my sight and in another second I could see the upstairs flood with light. With no windows, it would have been pitch black without lights, even in the daytime. I heard Cora cough.

  When I reached the second floor myself, I realized why. The huge open room was stuffed with piles of dirty, stained boxes, furniture with frayed upholstery leaking stuffing, and hand-held farm equipment like hay rakes and scythes. Newly disturbed dust hung in the air. I saw a spinning wheel, a
rack of clothing covered with clear plastic sheeting, and a dozen things I couldn’t identify. There was a pile of heavy, rectangular metal frames stacked against the wall in front of me. I almost tripped on them.

  “Cattle stanchions,” Cora said. “See the name on the top bar? Not just any stanchions; these were manufactured in Thorpe. It was their one industry.”

  Sure enough, I could read “Thorpe Metalworks” on the frame. I wondered if the plow-disc might have read “Teeter & Thorpe,” but the length of the word didn’t seem right for the available space on the plaque.

  “This is going to take a while,” Cora said. I looked around the room and I had to agree.

  Chapter 25

  Our search focused on the boxes, naturally. That decision was easy. Cora carried a stepladder over and set it beside a pile.

  “I wish I could remember when I acquired the box we are looking for,” she said. “I’ve worried the question since you left. It might have been at the Kepler’s estate sale about four years ago, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I’m very careful about making notes, but sometimes so many things come in that the best I can do is to slip a label into the box and hope to sort it out later. Frankly, papers that old seemed a low priority. I’m sorry.”

  “We’ll find it,” I assured her, although I didn’t feel too confident myself, looking at the stuffed expanse of floor space. “There’s no way you could have known that someone would want to look at one of the issues before you got it sorted out. I don’t know how you’ve made as much progress as you obviously have.”

  Cora seemed pleased to hear me say that. I climbed the ladder and opened a box. The main problem facing us was the number of boxes there were. Most of them were not labeled. I discovered fairly soon that even if they were labeled it might not be helpful, even if it was correct. A box labeled “Granny Tess” contained a beautiful tortoiseshell toilet set. I did notice that inside the box was a piece of notebook paper with details handwritten in a cramped script. “Property of Theresa Gandolfi. Donated by Edward Gandolfi, 1976. Believed to have come from Italy. Set complete and used by TG for 68 years. Brush, 2 combs, 2 decorative combs with applied silver design, mirror, 2 button hooks, a soap box, toothbrush and toothbrush holder, 2 trinket boxes.” I touched one of the smooth caramel-swirled pieces gently, just because it was so appealing, and then handed the box down to Cora. We needed to focus.

  The next carton had “1932—Summer Storage” written on the side in grease pencil. Inside that one was a woven shawl wrapped in tissue and smelling strongly of mothballs. I didn’t take time to read the inserted notebook paper. I knew Cora had meticulously inventoried every box, but putting those lists inside would not help us very much, today. Cora took that box too, and moved it to an empty space on the floor.

  After we had about ten boxes removed from the top layers, we realized there was going to be a problem. Lighter boxes had been stacked on top of heavy ones. That made perfect sense for storage, but there wasn’t enough room to lay the light ones all out and still have room to move and search the heavy ones. A box of newspapers would certainly be near the bottom of a stack.

  “How about if we take some of these boxes downstairs?” Cora suggested. I’ll be ready to do some more cataloguing soon, and I might as well start with these.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Why don’t you bring up paper and markers? We can make some labels for the cartons while we’re sorting.” I had already settled in for the long haul, and I liked Cora enough to want to help her with her unbelievable life project.

  By the time she reappeared with the requested items and tape, I had figured out how to make this sorting project work. With some boxes taken downstairs, there was room to spread the top two-thirds of any stack on the floor. Then we would be down to the boxes that were packed solid with things like books, and presumably, old papers. These could be used to start a new stack, with enough space to maneuver between the pile we were searching and the new pile. I would do the hauling, and Cora could do the labeling. She liked the plan when I suggested it, and sat right down on the floor to work. She seemed exceptionally spry and almost childlike in her delight at opening each box.

  At first, Cora was having trouble keeping up with me. She lingered over boxes, trying to decide how to tag them. “It’s hard to do this quickly,” she admitted. “I’m afraid I’m thinking too hard about what to write. I’m not used to having someone else who is waiting for me to finish something.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “But, maybe you can just take a peek and write what you see, instead of reading every inventory list.”

  “Yes, I’ll try. You are very patient to humor me and do this project slowly.”

  “We might as well do it carefully. Whatever the 1896 paper has in it isn’t going to change in a couple of hours.” I hoped that events weren’t already set in motion that would make me regret my forced calm, but in truth, I had no idea if there was a genuinely pressing reason to find my newspaper or not.

  We worked steadily for nearly an hour. Cora managed to examine and tag boxes with more speed, and I unstacked and restacked and dusted. When Cora began to slip behind again she suggested I get the vacuum cleaner from the closet off the kitchen in the house, and maybe some water to drink. We’d both been sneezing in the enclosed space.

  It took me two trips, but I collected cold drinks and the vacuum, and we resumed our work with no conversation. It would have been impossible above the whine of the vacuum cleaner, anyway.

  By the time our stomachs were growling we had examined and moved and labeled eighty-six boxes. It took longer to check out the cartons on the lower levels because they were often mixed books, magazines, newspaper, files and pamphlets. These boxes had to be emptied, so that we were sure the 1896 papers weren’t among the treasures. Then, of course, they had to be re-packed. So far, the oldest newspaper we had found was from 1931. All the local papers we uncovered one of us immediately carried downstairs. “You’ve gotten me interested in these again,” Cora said. “My focus lately has been buttons, but I think it’s time for a change.”

  She stood up and looked at the tall piles of newly-labeled boxes. “Ana! This is such a help, you can’t imagine! I should have been taking the time to do this all along. Of course the complete information is most important, but this will allow me to locate specific things much more easily.”

  I thought that some of her labels were cryptic, such as “2009, NEC 341” or “Jalmari Garden Club” on a box I recalled as being full of books, but “Theresa Gandolfi Tortoiseshell” seemed obvious enough for even a future helper to understand the general idea of what the box contained.

  We made our way to the house, complaining light-heartedly about stiff arms and backs. The salad and ham sandwiches hit the spot, and Cora mixed up some lemonade that really helped to cut the dusty coating in our mouths. We spoke very little, but commented occasionally about an item we’d seen in our search to this point. “Let’s save the pie for later,” Cora finally suggested. “I’m full.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Back to work?”

  “Absolutely! I feel good about this afternoon.” It couldn’t hurt to sound optimistic. The number of boxes yet to open was daunting, but that also meant there were still plenty of chances to find the papers we wanted.

  We climbed the stairs in the barn again, but neither of us felt as energetic as we had a few hours earlier. During the morning hours we had chatted a bit, joking about spiders—which didn’t bother either of us at all, and the sisters neither of us had had. But now we seemed more focused on a mission, rather than just having a puzzle to solve. Any conversation we made consisted of short fragments related to the task.

  “Here?”

  “No, I’m not done with this one.”

  Or, “That’s the next stack. I’m starting number fifteen now.”

  “Seems impossible.”

  Cora resumed her position on the floor, but added a cushion from one of the couches to sit on. I continued climbing the l
adder, grabbing a box, descending, and placing it near Cora. Then I would take any she had labeled, carry them to the other side of the room and pile them up again, paying attention to long-term stability. If the boxes had really mixed contents, I helped with the sorting.

  At the very bottom of stack seventeen, I uncovered the heaviest box yet. I could barely slide it across the floor. It was a perfect foundation block for the piles of history. The lid was depressed downward a bit, but it was solidly filled with something. I pulled open the flaps, and not surprisingly, it was newspapers. It was hard to get excited immediately; it was the third box of papers I’d seen that day. However, when I flipped over the topmost, yellowed edition, I knew we had found the right box. The banner matched the other 1896 ones I’d seen downstairs.

  “We’ve found the box.” I said with suppressed excitement.

  Cora scrambled up from her cushion.

  Chapter 26

  Because the light was better, and the dust less stirred up, we each took half the newspapers from the box and went downstairs. We lifted them carefully because the paper was brittle. The long work table near the archival boxes was perfect for our task. Cora said, “Wait a minute, please.” Once again, she produced lightweight cotton gloves. “Put these on so the oil in your hands won’t damage the paper any further.”

  My heart was beating fast, but I put on a pair of gloves, and so did Cora. “May I?” I asked.

  “Of course, dear. Just be careful. Papers this old tend to break easily. I suppose that’s obvious.”

  I began to sort the papers by date. There appeared to be only about 100 in the stack, so I knew it was possible the one I wanted wasn’t there, but somehow I couldn’t let myself consider that. I was working on the ones I had carried, and Cora started sorting hers. Although I was reading the dates, I knew I’d recognize the issue I was looking for instantly, if it was there. My unsorted stack was getting smaller and smaller, and I hadn’t seen any May dates yet.