Propping myself on one elbow to ease the strain on my arms, I said. “I’m ready to say that thing can stay down there. I’m freezing. The wind is coming up and I think I felt some sleet a minute ago.”
“Same here,” Mom said. “My teeth are chattering.”
“One—more—try,” Cub mumbled. “C’mon, Darcy. The bucket’s as close to the ledge as it’s going to get.”
I pushed the limb against the bundle just as Cub maneuvered the wide-mouthed pail under it. With a satisfying plop, the package fell into the bucket.
Cub let out a war whoop that echoed off the hills. Hand over hand, he carefully drew the bucket with its cargo out of the well.
Mom and I crowded around Cub, trying to see what the prize looked like.
Cub had brought up a whitish-tan package that was maybe eighteen inches long and twelve inches wide. The package looked like dirty, worn, tattered paper of some sort and smelled as musty as the well. I poked it with a finger. “It’s hard,” I said. “And kind of crackly.”
“What in the world is it?” Mom asked.
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Cub said, setting the bucket with its treasure on the ground.
I darted down and grabbed the package from under his hands. “No! That’s what Mom and I are going to find out!”
Cub’s eyes were pleading. “Aw, Darcy, come on now…”
“Sorry,” I said. “I sure thank you, Cub, for being so curious and uncovering this thing. There’s no telling what is in there. Could it be money from Pretty Boy Floyd’s last bank robbery? You know, stories were that he buried some loot somewhere around here.”
“Just let me have a look,” Cub begged, trying to grab the package.
“Nothing doing. Mom and I are going back home and finish that breakfast you interrupted. Have a nice day, Cub.”
The look on Cub’s face as we drove away almost made up for the dirty trick he played on me. Almost.
Chapter 2
Surrounded by Mom’s house designs, the long-buried relic from the past looked out of place on her kitchen table. That table was an heirloom, well over a century old, the grain of its wood a mellow sheen under the ceiling light. It had held many a family dinner, heard years of shared conversations, and if it could speak, might reveal a family secret or two. Her old yellow coffee pot filled the room with a wonderful aroma. In this homey, comfortable place, that mysterious, lumpy package looked forbidding, a discordant note to the harmony of the kitchen. On the way back from Granny Grace’s acres, we had decided to wait until we reached home to open it. We wanted to be sure that whatever lay within those tattered and soiled wrappings was not further damaged.
We hung up our coats and sat down, staring at the soiled bundle that had so disrupted our morning.
“I certainly can’t do one thing about house plans or breakfast or anything else until I know what’s in there,” Mom said, nodding toward the packet.
I poured two cups of steaming brew, set one cup in front of her and warmed my hands around the other as I sat down. “I’m not hungry anymore and I’m just as curious as you are. It will take a while to remove the paper or we could just use the scissors,” I said. “What is that stuff anyway?” I wondered, running my hand over the brittle surface.
Mom pursed her lips. “You’ll think this is silly, but I’m pretty sure it is an old sheepskin.”
I choked on my coffee. “Sheepskin?”
Mom turned it over. “Years ago, sometimes people wrapped things they wanted to keep in the skin of a sheep. I don’t mean the wooly fleece but the actual skin. It had enough lanolin in it to sort of preserve what was inside. My mother kept her silverware wrapped in a sheepskin.”
“This is absolutely crazy,” I said, touching that wrapping again. “Why would someone take the trouble to wrap up something and then toss it in an abandoned well?”
“Maybe it fell in by accident,” Mom said, gently returning it to the table.
“Do you get the feeling that it is somehow threatening?” she asked quietly.
Could objects, houses or places, retain the flavor of past events? I certainly did not sense a warm, fuzzy feeling emanating from the lumpy object on the table. It was cold and hard. I felt a revulsion when I touched it, almost as if an inner voice were telling me to leave it alone.
Mom picked up the package. “It’s heavy,” she said. “I’d guess maybe 4 or 5 pounds.” I fingered a loose edge. “I’m going to try to unwrap it, starting here.”
The skin had been folded in one position so long that it had melded together in places. She gently unstuck it but though she was careful, a few brittle bits broke off as she unfurled layer after layer. At last the wrapping mingled with house plans on my mother’s table and the secret lay exposed to the light.
She pressed both hands against her heart and stared at me, her eyes wide and frightened. Mom’s table had held many things but never anything as forbidding-looking as what now lay before us. Goose bumps covered my arms. There in front of us, the overhead light glinting off its long dark barrel, lay a gun.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then Mom whispered, “I knew we should have left it alone.”
Trying to absorb the fact that Cub had discovered an old-looking firearm in my grandparents’ hand-dug well, I stood mutely staring at it. The only sound was Jethro, crunching the Tender Vittles in his dish next to the stove.
“Is it . . . do you think that thing is loaded?” Mom asked.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t even know how to check whether it is or not. It looks ancient,” I said. “It doesn’t look like Dad’s pistol.”
“It sure doesn’t,” Mom agreed.
“I guess it belonged to Granny Grace or Grandpa George,” I offered, “but why would they throw it away?”
“Never in all my life did I know of your Grandpa George owning a pistol,” Mom said. “He had a rifle on pegs over the front door but I don’t think I ever saw him take it down and fire it.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think this gun belonged to my family.”
I ran my fingers down the barrel. “Maybe it dates back even further than Grandpa and Granny.” I started to pick it up.
Mom slapped my hand. “No, don’t do that, Darcy. We don’t know if the thing is loaded.”
“If it is or not, it looks to me like there’s so much rust on it that it would never fire,” I told her. Nevertheless, I withdrew my hand and absently picked up my coffee cup.
“What should we do with it?” Mom wondered.
I swallowed my coffee and fingered the largest sheet of sheepskin lying on the table. “We could take it to Grant. He might be able to tell us what kind of gun it is and whether it could relate to an unsolved crime in Ventris County.”
Mom sat down as if her legs had buckled. Her hands shook as she reached for her cup. “Unsolved crime? Don’t tell me you think this gun might have been used to kill someone?”
“Now, Mom, don’t get excited. Let me refill your cup.”
“Thanks.” She made a face. “This coffee is cold.”
“Grant is the sheriff, Mom, and this is a weapon. Antique guns are his hobby, or at least, I remember they used to be his hobby years ago, but the question remains, Why would someone wrap it up and then just throw it away?”
She took her full cup and set it, untasted, on the table. Her eyes never left our deadly-looking discovery.
“How about this?” she asked. “Suppose somebody wrapped it up, maybe had it in their coat pocket and while they leaned over the well for a bucket of water, it fell in.”
“Yes, I guess that would be a logical explanation.”
I picked up the brittle parchment. Something about it caught my eye. Dim markings of some sort covered the inside of the skin, the side that had been against the gun.
“What are you looking at?” Mom asked.
I held the skin toward her. “What does that look like to you?”
Mom pulled her reading glasses from her pocket and held the wrapping close
to her nose. “Hmm. Sort of looks like an imprint, maybe some words but they are strange words. They’re faded and I can’t make head nor tail of them.”
She handed it back to me.
“Could a message have been written on this?” I asked. “You know, scribes of long ago wrote on animal skins they called parchment.”
“Darcy, I don’t think anybody has used animal skins to record messages for centuries.”
I ran a fingernail across the skin. Flakes of something that looked like paper dropped onto the table.
Mom squinted at it. “What in the world?”
Something had been stuck on this hide of a long ago sheep. Could a paper have imbedded itself into the skin through the years? Was there enough lanolin or oil in the skin to have absorbed it?
“Where’s your magnifying glass, Mom?”
“In the front room, in the drawer of the desk.”
I hurried from the kitchen and came back with the magnifier. Holding it above the sheepskin, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
“I think there’s funny-looking writing on this skin. Maybe a message?” I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered. There was no one to hear but Mom and Jethro.
“My digital camera,” I said. “It shows up things that my naked eye can’t see.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Mom said. “Although I can’t imagine why there’d be lettering on the inside of a skin that somebody used to wrap their silverware.”
“Or in this case, a gun,” I amended.
My camera was within reach, in a pocket of my purse. I carefully unrolled the sheepskin, moved the camera within inches above it and pressed the shutter. A few minutes later, I had plugged my camera into my computer, downloaded the image, hit “Print” and waited for a copy of the faded letters to appear.
Gently, I moved the hide of some long-dead sheep to one side. I spread the printed sheet on the table and studied it through the magnifying glass.
“Mirror writing,” I said.
“What?” Mom looked at me sharply.
“Come with me. Let’s hold this up to the bathroom mirror.”
Mom followed me down the hall to the bathroom. I flipped on the light and leaned in close to the mirror, holding the print-out in front of me.
“I can see a faint outline, like a small page from a book,” Mom murmured.
“Yes, it is an image of a page with faded letters on it. I think that someone put a piece of paper in the sheepskin and through the years, the paper sank into the skin, leaving the ink imprint of the words imbedded in the sheepskin.”
“That sounds far-fetched,” Mom said. “But I guess anything is possible.”
“And I can see a few letters, faded though they are. ‘Un_t_ed _n H_ _y _a_ _ _mony.’” I grabbed her arm.
“Mom, I believe this says “‘United in Holy Matrimony.’”
She nodded. “It’s about the size of a page in the Bible, you know, in Family Records section. Could it be that?”
“Could be. There’s lots more writing. What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I’ve got a headache, Darcy. I don’t know if it’s the cold wind when we were there at the well or if it’s the excitement of finding the gun or what but I’ve got to take an aspirin and lie down.”
She looked pale and her hands, when I touched them, were icy.
“Will you be all right? Can I do anything?”
“No. I haven’t been really warm since being out so long and my feet are freezing. An old remedy for a headache is to warm up the feet so I’m going to heat that little corn bag in the microwave and lie down for a while.”
“Call me if I can help,” I said. “I’m going to keep on trying to decipher whatever this is we found.”
I painstakingly held the parchment to the mirror and wrote down each letter on the notebook page. After an hour, I read and then re-read the amazing message the parchment contained. It was unbelievable and frightening. It didn’t solve anything but it sure opened up a whole lot more questions.
Chapter 3
A baffling record of a long ago secret marriage lay on the table in front of my mother and me. I had worked on deciphering those faded backward letters while my mother napped. Now I almost wished I hadn’t because they opened a door to an unbelievable event that had been unknown to either of us until today.
“But Darcy, I don’t know this man, this Markham Cauldfell. My father, your grandfather’s name was George Daniels. My parents were married on December 27 in the same year that’s on that sheepskin, 1918. Look there—you’ve written that Mama and this Markham Cauldfell were married on October 7, 1918.”
I shrugged. “That’s what was faded into the sheepskin.”
My mother gazed again at the accusing page. “Maybe somebody did this as a joke, do you think?” she asked in a small voice.
“Whoever wrapped this all up took the trouble to put it where they didn’t think it would ever be found. I just imagine that the person tossed it in the well and had no idea it snagged on something before it hit the water.
My mother had come downstairs for lunch, ready for the tomato soup and cornbread I had waiting for her, but neither of us was hungry. We had been knocked for the proverbial loop by the faded message on the sheepskin.
“What I think, Mom, is that a page from a Bible was wrapped up in that old skin. It must have been put into the sheepskin print side down, then the gun put in on top of it. I mean, that much is obvious. Only thing is, what was the purpose and who threw it in?”
“Yes, who and why,” she repeated, vertical worry lines forming between her eyebrows.
“Somebody wanted to get rid of the marriage record and the gun. But why not burn the page? That would have completely gotten rid of it. There had to be a reason that the page and gun were together. One has to be connected with the other.”
She sighed. “Oh, I just don’t know, Darcy. I’ve never heard of such a puzzle. It seems like a nightmare.”
“I know. This seems to be credible evidence that Granny Grace was married before she married Grandpa George. It even lists the witnesses and the preacher, a Reverend Hopkins and lists the place where they got married as Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Did Granny ever speak of a first husband?”
Mom shook her head. “Of course not. And, if she had been married twice, somebody would have said so. If my Mama had been married before she married Papa, you know that everybody in Levi would have known. In a small town like this, everybody pretty much knows everybody else’s business.”
“Not necessarily. Siloam Springs is several miles away and travel and communication in those days weren’t nearly as good as they are today. Even though Granny and this Markham fellow got married in Siloam, at some point, Granny was back in Levi. Didn’t she live here when she married Grandpa George?”
“Yes. So far as I know, they didn’t live anywhere else but out there on that land close to the river, the place where we’re going to build our house. I’ve got my mother’s family Bible. It has a marriage record right in the front. I’ll go get it.”
She hurried to the front room and soon came back to the kitchen table with a large, leather-bound Bible. She opened it to the front. “Look, Darcy. Just look at that.”
On the beautifully illustrated flyleaf was a record written in the flowing style of a few years ago attesting to the fact that George Daniels had married Grace Wolfe on December 27, 1918 in Levi, Oklahoma.
“I’ve looked at that record many times, Mom. It has been on our bookshelf since Granny died. Nobody ever hid it away somewhere but, even though we hate to admit it, this page that Cub brought up bears a different record. The question is, why was it kept secret and why was it hidden? Or maybe somebody just filled in the blanks, wishfully thinking, and the marriage to Markham didn’t happen at all.”
Mom turned her coffee cup around and around in her saucer. She started to take a drink then set the cup back down.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I
am or not. I feel like my world has tilted.”
“Please eat your soup and cornbread, Mom. It has been snowing lightly while you slept and it would not be a good day to get out. But tomorrow, weather permitting and if you feel like it, I think we should take this old gun to Grant. We might not be able to figure out the marriage license but maybe he can help us identify the gun. Old guns and their history are a hobby of his. If we knew more about the gun and its age, it might shed some light on everything else.”
“You’re right, Darcy. Tomorrow bright and early we’ll go see the sheriff.”
Chapter 4
“This gun is a rare find,” Grant said, holding it under the reading light on his desk. “It is a Remington .44 caliber.” He turned it over, and ran his hand down the barrel. “What a beauty.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small can of lubricant and a piece of flannel and began oiling the old firearm. “Where in the world did you get it, Darcy?”
“That’s sort of a long story, Grant. We want to see what you can tell us about it.”
“I keep this handy for Jim’s and my guns.” He squirted oil on the old revolver and gently wiped it with the soft cloth. “The cylinder is pretty much stuck but with a little patience, I might be able to work it open. I’ve seen a gun like this only once, in a museum.” With infinite patience, he rubbed, oiled, and wiped again. As if he were talking to himself, he said, “What stories this old gun could tell. Who knows where it has been or who it belonged to.”
Grant Hendley, sheriff of Ventris County, is what some people might call an “old flame” of mine. I would take issue with the “old” since he and I are the same age. When we were sixteen, we were in love as only youngsters can be. That attraction lasted for several years, until, in fact, Jake Campbell came into my life. I left Grant and my hometown of Levi, Oklahoma, behind in favor of Jake and Dallas, Texas. Now that Jake was with the Lord and I had returned to Levi, Grant and I were rediscovering that the flame which once burned brightly could be re-kindled with very little effort.
The Darcy & Flora Boxed Set Page 36
