No charges were filed in the high school principal’s death.
Charges had been made for trespassing on town property.
Other charges were pending (i.e. bank robbery).
He called a small press conference at Mark the Shark’s insistence to issue a formal statement. Two reporters showed up, Bradley Hancock from the Burpyville Gazette and Lucius Plancus from WZUR, a small AM station down near Pitsville.
Mark Tidemore was happy with the squib in the Gazette:
‘Ghost’ Turns Out to Be Vagrant
The reported sighting of a “ghost” in Caruthers Corners turned out to be Marvin “Moose” Johansson, 34, an unemployed watermelon picker who had been squatting in the abandoned building, according to Police Chief James L. Purdue. Chief Purdue, who personally made the arrest, says he was alerted to the possibility of a trespasser while investigating the recent death of Caruthers Corners High School Principal Robert S. Daniels. The result of natural causes, Daniels had collapsed near the building where Johansson was later arrested. Johansson will be arraigned next Tuesday in county court.
The radio report was a bit more salacious. Citing an exclusive interview with Mrs. Joseph S. Daniels, it claimed that her son Robert had been murdered by “persons unknown” and that the Caruthers Corners Police Department was deliberately covering it up on orders from Mayor Mark Tidemore. During the on-air newscast, ace reporter Lucius Plancus alleged the cover-up was part of a multimillion-dollar real estate deal involving Beasley Mansion, site of the man’s murder.
“Murder!” shouted Mark Tidemore. “What murder? The coroner ruled death due to heart failure.”
“At least, there wasn’t any mention of ghosts,” noted Jim Purdue.
“Jim, we’ve got to find a way to squelch this murder business.”
“It doesn’t help that your brother-in-law saw somebody in the window of that old house,” sighed Jim Purdue. “That fuels the claim of Maisie Daniels that her son was frightened to death by a ghost.”
“Not to mention the babblings of her psychic, Madam Blatvia.”
“Forget that old charlatan. You need to get Freddie to withdraw his statement about seeing somebody in the Beasley house.”
“But he did see somebody. And you arrested the guy, Moose Johansson. A trespasser, for god’s sakes. Not a ghost.”
“Don’t know if we can make it stick that Johansson was the guy Freddie saw. Both Morris Hickensmith and his sister Myrtle give him an alibi. They swear he was at the pizza parlor that whole afternoon.”
“Hickensmith’s not a credible witness. You just arrested him for the Savings & Loan robbery, for God’s sake. And his sister has a record for shoplifting – you said so yourself.”
“Still, Freddie can’t positively ID that face in the window as Moose Johansson. So we’re back to a ghost.”
“Don’t say that, Jim. The Beasley Arms project will never get off the ground unless we silence this stupid ghost business. Not even poor folks – uh, I mean low-income citizens – want to live in a haunted house.”
“Can’t say I’d move into an apartment there.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the supernatural, a hard-nosed cop like you.”
“Don’t. But anybody can get spooked.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
All Purpose Doctor
“Well, well, well. To what do I owe this visit, Maddy?” clucked Doc Medford. A local physician, he also doubled as coroner. With his office located next door to the Yost & Yost Mortuary, he got a lot of ribbing about the effectiveness of his medical practice. But the funeral home provided storage for any corpses under investigation by Doc when wearing his coroner’s hat.
If there were any questions about Doc, a sign on his door told all: FRANKLIN D. MEDFORD, MD. Underneath was listed GENERAL PRACTITIONER. Then, ONCOLOGY AND RADIOLOGY. Below that, PODIATRY AND REFLEXOLOGY. And finally, COUNTY CORONER AND FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST. He was literally a one-man medical center.
“Hi Doc, I wonder if you’d be willing to talk with me about Skookie Daniels?” Maddy broached the subject straight-out. She wasn’t the type to beat around the bush.
He smiled. “So the Quilters Club is looking for a ghost, eh?”
“Just the opposite,” she replied firmly. “If anything frightened Skookie, I’m sure it was something – or someone – of this earth.”
“So you think he was scared to death?” He ran his fingers through his snowy hair, an impatient habit. He had a busy schedule.
“Yes. But I want your professional opinion.”
“Impossible to say.” He glanced at his watch as if counting heartbeats. “You see, Skookie had a congenital heart problem. He could have blown an aorta at any given minute. Sure, a bad shock could have precipitated it. But there’s no way to tell.”
“Your best guess?”
Doc Medford shrugged. “I think he just dropped dead.”
≈ ≈ ≈
Maddy reported her findings (such as they were) to her Quilters Club comrades over a cup of coffee at the Cozy Café. Aggie had a chocolate milk instead. This was fast becoming their headquarters.
“So that’s it, Skookie just dropped dead?” said Cookie. “Nothing caused it?”
“That’s what Doc Medford thinks.”
“So Jim’s right about there being no foul play,” muttered Bootsie, sounding a little disappointed to concede this point to her husband.
“We never said there was a deliberate murder,” Maddy reminded her. “We just wondered if something or someone gave him a shock that caused a heart attack.”
“Like a ghost in the window,” said Lizzie, not quite ready to give up on the supernatural.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Aggie repeated the mantra, as if it might ward off evil spirits.
“That’s right, dear,” said Maddy. “It’s just that we find it hard to accept that a bright young man in the prime of his life would just drop dead.”
Bootsie nodded. “Yes, a high school principal, engaged to be married, going to pay off the mortgage on his mother’s home …”
“Engaged?” said Lizzie. “To whom?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Bootsie. “But that's what his mother said.”
“Was there been an announcement in the paper?” asked Cookie. A voracious reader, she was sure she couldn’t have missed it. As town historian she paid particular attention to obituaries and birth announcements, weddings and engagements.
“I don’t think so,” said Maddy, thinking over the back issues of Burpyville Gazette stacked in her garage. She was saving them for quilt stuffing, the way old-timey needlecrafters used to do it.
“It’s no big secret,” Aggie spoke up as she slurped the last drop of chocolate milk from the bottom of the glass with her straw. “Everybody at school knows Skookie Daniels was sweet on Miss Pritchard, the Latin teacher.”
“They still teach Latin?” said Lizzie, raising her eyebrows in dismay.
“Never mind about Latin,” said Maddy. “Are you sure about this, Aggie.”
The girl nodded, blonde hair catching the sunlight through the café’s plate-glass window. “The kids have been writing SKOOKIE LOVES ELLIE on the blackboards. The words get erased but nobody denies it.”
“Ellie?” said Bootsie.
“Eleanor Pritchard,” explained Cookie, keeper of information. “Ellie for short. She transferred in from the Indy school district last year.”
“Skookie works fast,” noted Lizzie, still the romantic under all her cynicism.
“Apparently not fast enough,” said Maddy, reminding them of his current status.
≈ ≈ ≈
That night Maddy and Beau were watching a rerun of Sanford and Son on some retro TV channel. Not many people realized that Sanford was comedian Redd Foxx’s real name. Based on BBC’s Steptoe and Son, the Norman Lear sitcom had been included on Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best TV Shows of All Time.”
Beau laughed out loud every time Fred G. Sanford
gripped his chest, looked heavenward, and cried “This is The Big One, Elizabeth! I’m coming to join ya, honey.”
But tonight Maddy wasn’t laughing along with her husband. After her visit to Doc Medford, a heart attack didn’t seem like a joking matter. It seemed as serious as … well, you know.
Despite his impatience, Doc had been very helpful, explaining that an aortic dissection occurs when a tear in the inner wall of the aorta causes blood to flow between the layers of the heart. Although fairly rare (about 3 per 100,000), it tends to be more common in males. And 40% of all cases result in rapid death.
The first recorded case was in 1760, a post mortem of King George II of Great Britain.
“It’s a fool’s errand to try to assign blame,” Doc Medford had said to her. “Unless you think someone deliberately tried to frighten him into an acute myocardial infarction, no crime has taken place. Do you know of anyone with a motive to see Skookie Daniels dead?”
“No. I’m just going by his mother’s accusations.”
“And she thinks a ghost did it – Major Samuel Elmsford Beasley, to be exact.”
“Sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way,” Maddy had admitted.
“Maddy!” Her husband’s voice snapped her back to reality. She looked up just in time to see Fred Sanford chasing his son Lamont around a table as the theme music kicked in and the end credits began to roll.
“Yes, dear?” she managed to respond.
“Do we have any watermelon pie left?”
“No, I’m afraid not. But I have some fresh ginger cookies I baked today. I was planning to take them over to Freddie tomorrow, but he won’t miss one or two.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Circus Boy
That next morning Maddy caught up with her son Freddie at the Haney Bros. Zoo. She used the excuse that she was dropping off some ginger cookies for his daughter Donna Ann, but he smelled a rat right away.
“Come on, Mom. What’s up?” he said as she handed over the tin of freshly baked cookies. “You didn’t bake these for my daughter. You know she can’t have sweets.”
True, his adopted daughter recently had been diagnosed with early onset diabetes, Type 2. Maddy had been so wrapped up in what she wanted to discuss with her son, she hadn’t really thought through her trumped-up excuse.
“Got me,” she admitted. “I wanted to have a motherly word with you.”
He smiled, making the leathery skin of his face wrinkle in strange way. Damn scar tissue. “You don’t need to manufacture a reason to do that. Let me take a guess: You want to ask me more details about finding Skookie Daniels’ body?” Word had spread through the family that the Quilters Club was on another case. Aggie was excited by the idea that they were searching for a ghost – real or imagined.
Maddy grimaced. “Not that,” she said. “About the other thing.”
“Oh, you mean the fire … my burned face … my reduced to being a clown … my turning into a lousy husband and a not-so-good father?”
“Yes, that.”
“Anybody else, I’d tell them it’s none of their business and that they can go take a flying –”
“–but I’m your mother,” she cut him off.
“Let’s walk out back,” he said, nodding toward a worn path in the grass between two large circus tents. “Bombay’s finished exercising Happy for today.”
“Happy?”
“The elephant.”
They strolled back to a large fenced-in field where an Africa pachyderm stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Meet Happy. He’s about ten feet tall and weighs some 12,000 pounds. We think he’s around 40 years old.”
“Is it safe to be this close?” She noted the elephant wasn’t tethered.
“Happy’s a friendly boy. Being an African elephant, he has those large ears and big tusks. Makes him look more fearsome than he really is. Happy loves giving children rides on his back. He as tame as a cocker spaniel.”
“You seem to like him.”
“We have a lot in common, if you notice his tough, wrinkly skin.”
“Freddie, don’t feel so sorry for yourself. You came out of that fire alive. And you saved that little girl. Now you owe her a good home, a good family.”
“Like that old Chinese saying, ‘He who saves a life is responsible for it’?”
“I was thinking more of that old Yancy Derringer TV show where a Pawnee Indian named Pahoo-Ka-Ta-Wah is required to watch Yancy’s back after saving his life.”
“Same idea, I guess.”
“So what are you going to do to get out of this funk?”
“Dunno, Mom. I just feel like I’m worthless. That I have no real purpose.”
“Entertaining children may not be curing cancer, but it’s not a bad thing to be doing.”
He hung his head. “I can’t even entertain my own daughter.”
“What about your wife?”
“Amanda’s great. But I feel I’ve let her down. I’m not the man I once was.”
“Oh. Did the fire damage any… delicate parts?”
“Not that. The damage, I think, is more inside my head than on my skin.”
“So how do we fix this?”
“I’ve got a plan. But I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
≈ ≈ ≈
The Phantom had been hanging out in the old Beasley place for several months now – at least before the police came. Everybody knew it was abandoned, had been for nearly a century. A wonder the building was still standing, although those granite boulders were as solid as a mountainside.
Years ago his father had taken him to the quarry where the stones had been mined. Once it had been a major source for building materials. Many of the early skyscrapers in Chicago were constructed with blocks from this quarry.
Now a big hole in the ground that was halfway filled with water, kids swam in it during the summer. But this time of year, nobody would be around. It would be a great place to test his homemade Napalm B.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Heritage Quilt
With barely any advance notice, Cookie Bentley called a meeting of the Quilters Club. Even Aggie was invited. Again, they met at the Cozy Café, the little eatery next to the DQ. Together these establishments served as the town’s “food court,” the choice being blue-plate specials and watermelon pies … or toasted cheese sandwiches and watermelon shakes.
The four women and girl took their usual corner booth, for it was big enough to hold five. The red leatherette was worn slick from people sliding in and out over the years. It was the same upholstery Maddy remembered from when they were in high school, popular girls on the cheerleading squad. Matter of fact, Beau had proposed to her on graduation night in this very booth.
After the waitress took their orders for pie and coffee – chocolate milk for Aggie – they settled down to listen to Cookie’s news.
“Go ahead, Cookie,” urged Maddy. “Tell us what’s got you so agitated?”
The blonde woman surveyed the table, catching each of their eyes. “Today I received that photograph of the Beasley Heritage Quilt from that little museum in Massachusetts.” She pulled a FedEx pak out of her oversized purse and slapped it down on the Formica. “I haven’t looked at it yet. I was saving it for all the group to see.”
“Let’s have a look without further preamble,” urged Lizzie. Having a nervous bladder, she was not one for waiting.
“Oh boy, an historical quilt we haven seen before,” gushed Bootsie. “I can hardly wait.”
The women leaned closer as Cookie tore open the red-white-and-blue pak. She pulled out the letter first. It read:
Dear Mrs. Bentley,
The Beasley Heritage Museum is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of the Beasley family. It was established by Major Samuel Elmsford Beasley of Hobson’s Landing, Massachusetts, and Caruthers Corners, Indiana. In 1829 Major Beasley led a wagon train from the East Coast to the Indian Territory. There he heroically fought i
n the Battle of Gruesome Gorge against a fierce tribe ofPotawatomi Indians. Upon routing these savages, Major Beasley helped found the town of Caruthers Corners. It was originally named Beasleyville, but in a political upset the name was changed by a vote of the early settlers led by Jacob Abernathy Caruthers. Major Beasley’s wife Madelyn Taylor Beasley recorded that early history in a magnificent one-piece quilt that is on display as the centerpiece of the Museum. It is considered a masterpiece of Colonial-style needlework. Enclosed are photographs of the quilt per your request.
Cordially yours,
Eunice Smith-Cardwell
Executive Director
Maddy stared at the letter. “Madelyn Taylor Beasley?” she sputtered. “I was born Madelyn Taylor. Does that mean I might be related to the Beasleys?”
≈ ≈ ≈
Cookie Brown rolled her eyes. “That’s doubtful, but I’ll check the genealogy charts,” she promised. The Historical Society kept records of local family trees. “I should know the answer, but truth is everybody always focused on Major Beasley, paying little attention to his wife’s lineage.”
“Don’t be too fast to discount that possibility,” warned Maddy. “My great-great grandfather was Rev. Thaddeus Barrington Taylor. He and his wife Millicent were members of that wagon train. Could they have been related to Major Beasley’s wife?”
Bootsie wagged a finger of warning. “We shouldn’t take this letter at face value, Maddy. It says Old Sam led the wagon train, but we know it was actually led by Col. Beauregard Madison – your husband’s great-great grandfather. The history books are quite clear on that.”
“That’s right,” nodded Cookie. “You can find the details in The History of the Indian Territory, 1800 - 1900 by Nelson Lawrence Chadwick. According to the book, Major Samuel Beasley played a minor role in the founding of the town. And it was never known as Beasleyville.”
Sewed Up Tight (A Quilters Club Mystery No. 5) (Quilters Club Mysteries) Page 7
