by J. L. Salter
Mitch assembled and stacked his material. “Well, anyway, I think I can sink my teeth in to this story.”
“You mean, as opposed to your lake interviews.”
“Yeah, besides the locals, I have to track down tourists and non-propertied boaters — the Ohio Navy — for short features on how they’re adjusting to the lower water.” The whole direction of the series was to reassure people in the area, and those who visited, that everything was okay; Russell, Wayne, and Pulaski Counties still had the best water in the Commonwealth. The articles should encourage people to continue to visit, continue to buy, continue to move here, et cetera. Even though he accepted its fundamental validity, Mitch was tired of the song.
****
After breakfast, Kelly watched Mitch put his tablet and loose papers into a large folder and then stand near the back door gazing out toward the woods.
“Do you ever wonder about the girl who disappeared suddenly from Pop’s farm house,” he asked, “the year before I rented it?”
“What on earth made you think about Ginny?”
He shrugged. “Well, I’ve thought about her quite a few times actually.”
Kelly glanced toward a straw cowgirl hat in her bookcase. Of all the clothing and shoes Ginny had left behind in the farm house, about ten months before Mitch arrived, the hat was the only item Kelly had kept. “You still have that single, ugly red shoe Ginny left?”
“Right beside my desk. Remember what I was like last fall?”
Kelly smiled as she crossed to the back door where Mitch was standing. “Yeah, among other things, you were searching for yourself.”
“But it wasn’t until I found you that I realized I was missing.”
She pinched his midsection. “Sometimes you’re still missing.”
Mitch reached his long arms around Kelly and his face turned serious. “But I always find myself again, when I locate you.”
“You don’t have to hunt very hard, I’m right here.”
Mitch surely realized that, but didn’t respond. Appearing pained like he had a lump in his throat, he just hugged her silently. Kelly disengaged a few moments later and ran a finger below her eyes. Mitch picked up his folder and slowly headed to the front door.
Kelly stared beyond him, over the miles of fields and roads to the east. “I sometimes wonder where Ginny ran off to, or whether she’s even alive.”
“Yeah, she’s still a missing person.” Mitch left to prepare for his interview.
After Mitch departed, Kelly thought back over her boyfriend’s new assignment, to make a decent case for the stranger’s identity or the killer’s I.D., or both. But the scene itself had a surrealistic feel to it. Kelly ran through it again: a stranger rides up to a church on Sunday evening, probably speaks to someone, and then — as he leaves — he’s shot dead in the middle of the road. Quickly killed and hurriedly buried behind the church, beside the road, near where he fell from his horse. Poor stranger. Plus, nobody ever said what happened to his horse.
Oh well, Kelly had her own assignment to work on, and it didn’t involve any church-house murders.
Plus, she had extra breakfast dishes to wash. Rats.
Chapter Four
Friday, April 6
Kelly was on her cabin porch, her morning ritual, without particular focus. Having already written a few pages in her journal, she made some other notes on a tablet, where she kept separate words and phrases which might be ingredients in a poem someday. She still wasn’t writing much… not from deep within, anyway.
Last fall, she had figured she’d be jogged from her stall. Some people call it writer’s block, but that was a bit too melodramatic. Kelly viewed it more like a sailboat caught in an unexpected calm, drifting with the current, and not even a breeze to puff out her sheets. It was a dead calm, as sailors would say. The thing about dead calm was that one had to be ready, usually with little or no notice, to hoist the sails and tend the tiller.
But one also had to be ready for sudden storms, perhaps out of nowhere — nothing visible on the horizon. Maybe it could be felt in the bones, or smelled in the air, but nothing could be seen. For such times, you’d better have your charts ready, strap on your life jacket, find your flare gun, and make some sandwiches.
Never know how long a storm will last.
****
Later that cool morning, Kelly drove to the library to check e-mail. She first turned toward the terminals, but pivoted back to her friend at the reference desk. “Sallie, have you ever heard anything about an unidentified man murdered at Possum Knoll Church on a Sunday night, some time before 1870?”
“Is this your new mystery?”
“Mine won’t likely be in any published sources. The church murder is one Mitch is working on.”
Sallie made some notes on the back of an old catalog card. “Doesn’t ring any bells, but I can hand it to the ladies in the historical room. They might know something.”
“Thanks.” Kelly got the last open terminal.
****
It was close to noon when Kelly returned from the library. She’d also exercised at the Y and made a quick grocery run for dog food. Lately, Perra only ate moist food from pouches.
Arriving home, Kelly remained in her Jeep. If she did this in a typical subdivision, the neighbors would gawk and wonder why she sat there with the engine off and just seemed to stare into the distance. Subdivisions were much too claustrophobic; one couldn’t live with neighbors eight feet away on either side.
But Kelly wasn’t merely staring. Some of her best thinking came when she was in the shower, on her porch, or sitting in her Jeep. When your brain’s running smoothly in a good forward gear, don’t mess it up by shifting back into neutral. She let her mind continue whatever revolutions per minute made her thought motors hum. When it hummed like that, she often got flashes of inspiration. Don’t ruin it.
She reflected on her two assignments from Pop.
One. Write up something about the founding and growth of the cemetery to mark its 144th year. Gather all the family stories about the Confederate soldier who died in the Butler cabin and synthesize them into the most cohesive and accurate version possible.
Two. Research Pop’s Aunt Belva and try to establish whether she actually had a big secret. If so, then there are bigger questions: what the secret was, what form it was in, why Belva hid it, who she hid it from, why she saved it, and who she saved it for. But mostly, does it still exist… and where is it?
Kelly wondered briefly if her two new assignments might be related. Fat chance!
Pop hadn’t explained the sinkhole business very fully. He wanted to clear it out and fill it in, for safety reasons, but also wanted to search for a discarded headstone which might be down there. Pop additionally hinted the sinkhole was a possible hiding place for whatever Belva’s secret was, since she was said to pass by it so often. But Kelly recalled Pop’s caveat, “She might’ve just passed by the sinkhole a lot ‘cause it’s pretty close ta the little spring.”
The sinkhole sounded like a dead end, but better to fill it up anyway so no kids got hurt.
Distilling the existing variations of the dead-Reb-buried story would be relatively easy, assuming she could track them all down. Plus, Pop’s second cousin, Don Norman, had already done some research on the battle itself.
But what about Belva’s secret? What kinds of secrets do unmarried old ladies take to their graves? She immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who evidently loved — but never married — and wrote hundreds of odd little poems which were mostly unknown during her short lifetime.
Oh well, Kelly was not likely to discover another Emily D. there in the hilly terrain of the former Possum Knoll community. Or would she? What a fantastic find. Poetry in Belva’s original hand, buried in the sinkhole. Nah, probably not poems. No surviving stories about the Butler family suggested they’d ever had a poet in their cabin. Maybe letters…
Pop had mentioned a couple of vague suspicions. He said he’d heard abou
t a few things but wasn’t certain they existed. He hadn’t accessed them himself because one of the cousins was still sore about some disagreement from years ago. But, Pop had reasoned, maybe the cousin would cooperate with Kelly, especially if he didn’t know who’d hired her.
If anybody did have another piece of the puzzle, they seemed to be jealously guarding it from other family. If that was the kind of secret Aunt Belva had, it wouldn’t be very easy to pry it out of living people… much less all the dead ones.
But Kelly was getting ahead of herself. Research first, then pose your theories. She wondered if any of the family of William Butler’s first wife were also in the wartime household; some were probably teens or young adults. No, the list Pop provided had eight children from William’s first marriage; the two boys were married themselves and all six daughters had married into other families. She pulled the page from her jeans pocket and checked it again. So the Butler cabin during the Civil War just had William and Mary, and Mary’s four children: Belva (1847), Edna (1849), William Jr. (1851), and Naomi (1853). Nicely spaced.
The hum in Kelly’s brain engine had started to sputter. She got out of her Jeep, went inside the cabin, and tore open a pouch of food for Perra. The cat was content with dry food as his staple. Why would the mutt start being so finicky? If you eat moles, mice, birds, squirrels, and rabbits, why turn up your nose at dog chow?
****
Mitch called later, in the cool early evening. He was picking up some chicken and asked if Kelly wanted to join him. He’d bring it over.
“Sounds good. You getting any sides?”
“I figured a pint of coleslaw and some mashed potatoes. That all right?”
“Perfect. I’ll furnish dessert.” Kelly had gotten several apple turnovers from the orchard and store near Nancy the previous day.
Kelly cleared her table of the material she’d assembled on her new assignment. She hadn’t yet had a chance to go over any of it with Mitch, but doing so would likely help her digest it better. He had a really good sense about breaking down things into components and re-assembling them, and Kelly had come to rely on his insights as a wonderful supplement to her own.
When Mitch arrived, they dined on paper plates. Aunt Mildred would be horrified. The chicken was good, the potatoes fair, and the slaw too soggy. But… dessert.
Kelly warmed the apple pastries in the microwave and brought them out to the porch to Mitch, already wearing his jacket. The night temperature in mid-fifties, Kelly stepped back inside to get her sweater. When she sat next to him in the other rocker, Mitch served her one of the turnovers.
“Pop wants my help researching the development of this cemetery to commemorate its 144 years. Maybe it can also be a feature for the local paper.” Kelly dabbed at her lips with a paper towel. “He also wants me to get to the bottom of his great-aunt’s story.”
“What’s her big story?”
“Nobody knows. Some kind of family secret. Something she knew, something she hid maybe.”
“Is Pop gonna pay? He’s pretty tight, you know.”
“He implied he’ll deduct as much from rent as I’d earn for my time. Only we didn’t nail down the exact rate per hour of research.” She tucked the paper towel into the top of her jeans pocket. “You know, the newspaper should want this — it being local history — but if not, maybe your magazine will be interested.”
Mitch sighed as he finished his last morsel of dessert. “I wish we could work together on another story.”
“Maybe we are and don’t even know it.”
Mitch watched her face and possibly wondered if she were serious. Then he smiled. “So why does Aunt Who’s-it’s story grab you? Other than the money, of course.”
“Well, you know how I love a mystery, but this is even more. It’s the story of a woman who lived a long time for that era, and survived a very hard life — from her youth during the Civil War, through World War One. Her little brother died in the 1870s.”
“And she was an old maid, did Pop say?”
“I don’t like the term, but no, she didn’t marry. Could’ve been her own choice, hard to tell. A lot of boys died during the Civil War. Maybe she was in love with one of them, or possibly would’ve been, if things had been different.” Kelly paused. “Plus, I’m already beginning to get inside Belva’s head a little. I really admire her grit. Reminds me of my own Aunt Mildred a little. Not the Civil War stuff, of course, but her strength and spirit of independence. Belva didn’t even have running water when she died.”
Kelly realized she probably would have researched the Belva mystery for free, but she didn’t say it out loud to Mitch and wouldn’t bother Pop with that little detail.
Gato appeared from the darkness, leaped up to the porch, and then to the rail. He sauntered along the rail until he reached the rockers, then the big cat jumped to the floor with a distinct thud.
Kelly noted Mitch’s chair was closer to the door. “Would you let him in, please?”
He sighed. “Yeah, but I get tired of holding the door. What’s with your cat? He stops, sniffs, twitches his bushy tail, glances around, and takes one step at a time… if he moves at all.”
Kelly chuckled. “Yeah, and just when you’re ready to give up, he suddenly launches himself through.”
Gato did exactly that and Mitch sat back down. He winced slightly, and Kelly knew he’d landed wrong on his sore hip. He didn’t speak much about the problem, saying only that it was due to heavy labor in a feed store as a young teen. She did remember him saying the pain had significantly worsened about the time of his wife’s leukemia diagnosis, and that it had bothered him continually ever since.
Kelly placed her paper plate on the porch floor so Perra could examine the few remaining specks. “Did you know sinkholes and caves are related?”
“I’d hardly even heard of sinkholes ‘til I got up here.”
“Pop was telling me the other day. Collapsed limestone, collected rainwater, eons of time… and slowly a cave comes into being.”
Mitch reached for her, a bit awkwardly between their moving rockers. “Tell me more about your caves and mountains.”
“Sinkholes, not mountains.” Kelly slapped his hand lightly and stood up. It pleased her that being near made Mitch’s hormones crackle, but she also wanted to talk seriously at times. She pulled a small tablet from her back pocket and flipped over a few pages. “Pop says the soil around here is Mountview silt loam. Ring any bells?”
Mitch shrugged.
“The limestone in these parts is called St. Louis limestone, part of the Mississippian Age Formation, which dates back 300 million years, supposedly. This particular limestone is not necessarily pure. Most areas have traces of dolomite, whatever that is. Anyway, when this limestone freezes, it flakes off. You can break it with your hand.”
“Geology is mildly interesting, but I don’t get the significance to your assignment.”
“Pop’s gonna excavate at least one sinkhole — maybe two — to see if we can find whatever Aunt Belva tossed in there, if anything. And to search for old Jonathan Butler’s headstone. It couldn’t hurt to understand how limestone, over millions of years, forms sinkholes and caves.” Kelly flipped through more pages.
“You’re thinking too hard, Kelly. It’s just a family legend that Pop’s old great-aunt hid something. We don’t even know which sinkhole it was, plus — whatever she maybe hid — whether it’s still there.”
Chapter Five
Thursday, April 12
The mid-April warm periods were growing slightly longer each day, but mornings and evenings were still cool. Everybody said a cold snap was coming up soon, but it didn’t feel that way. Little blooms appeared here and there, and all signs pointed toward spring in progress.
After a long morning of her porch time, Kelly went to the library to check e-mail and pay bills online. She researched some topics related to Pop’s assignment, mostly information about Pulaski County during the Civil War, but soon realized the Internet wou
ldn’t provide much useful assistance. Most of this topic’s research was going to be digging through people’s recollections and, if she was lucky, some family records or photo albums from the period.
Kelly grabbed a sandwich from a drive-thru, took it home, and ate rather absent-mindedly.
****
Later that afternoon Kelly and Perra walked on the broad hill to the south of her cabin — partly exercise, for both of them, but mostly to check out one of the sinkhole sites. She’d seen one of the larger sinkholes over at the edge of the big, upper meadow beyond the large section of woods. That was where Pop had said the mule, the plow, and one of his brothers all fell in. Pop said some sinkholes would sometimes collapse in on themselves and sod over.
She’d never actually stopped to investigate the only sinkhole she knew about in this southeast corner of Pop’s acreage. Her buddy, Wade, had pointed it out one time as they whizzed past in his souped-up golf cart. But when Wade careened through the woods, on some trails only he seemed to know about, riders mostly sensed a jarring blur of green and brown.
Kelly wasn’t positive she could even locate it, though she understood it was very close to the overgrown logging road near that side of Pop’s acreage and also near a small clearing. In fact, it was Perra who found it. Something down there tickled her sensitive canine nose, possibly a varmint or its residence.
The sinkhole was some 450 feet behind Pop’s old family farm house, just a bit inside the tree line up on the hill. Kelly was peering into the woods, so it startled her when a woman’s voice came from behind her on the wide path.
“Miss Randall, isn’t it?” Her breathing was heavy from the climb.
Kelly turned. “Yeah, Kelly Randall. Hi.”
