“Afraid so,” I agreed.
“Pat,” Mom said, “your family has lived in Levi a long time, probably as long as mine has. Do you remember hearing your parents or grandparents talk about what went on here in Ventris County during the time of World War I?”
Pat wrinkled her forehead and tugged at her ear lobe. “I’d have to spend some time thinking about that. It was a lot of years ago and, of course, most of the old folks who would know are already dead and gone. I guess about the oldest ones in this area are the Jenkins twins. From what my mama told me, their father was a judge in the early 1900s, a real strict, stern person. He was responsible for sending several men to the gallows. I remember hearing Mama say that Miss Georgia and Miss Carolina are so strait-laced because that’s the way they were raised.”
Mom went to the wood basket and pitched another log on the fire. “Yes, I’ve been to see the Jenkins sisters. They were friendly enough but they were close mouthed about giving out answers to any questions.”
“That’s just their old-timey way. What about that girl who died? Somebody said Darcy was right there when she was stricken or whatever happened to her.”
I squirmed in my chair. The investigation into Eileen’s death might involve me, if I were called upon to testify. That whole episode of possible poisoning sounded fantastic even to me. I could only imagine how a coroner’s jury might perceive it.
“I don’t know what happened to Eileen,” I said. “Yes, I was there when she started feeling bad but no decision has been reached in the cause of her death. Hopefully, the whole sad thing will be straightened out before long.”
Pat glanced at the clock. “If you’re going to be so close-lipped about everything, I might as well go. Jasper will be in for lunch. Honestly, I don’t see how that boy stays out in this weather. You know, I believe he’d rather roam through the woods than be in a warm house. Just between us, I’m kind of worried about him. He’s always liked secrets, but he has been real quiet lately and I wonder what he’s up to.”
“Jasper is a good boy, Pat,” Mom said as we all stood up. “He may not do everything the way other people do but he means well.”
“Sure. I know that. I just wish he’d talk to me.”
Pat started toward the door then turned to Mom with a grin. “By the way, was that you and Jackson Conner I saw at the new restaurant the other night?”
Mom sniffed. “Could have been.”
I retrieved Pat’s coat from the hallway. Mom and I walked with her to the front door. After she left, I turned to my mother.
“We sure didn’t get any help from her, did we?”
“Pat doesn’t know anything about our dilemma, Darcy. She’d be willing to help if she could. Somebody in this town knows some answers, but I sure as the world don’t know who. I just know it isn’t Pat.”
Chapter 17
Grant was on the phone later that afternoon when I hurried into his office. He lifted one hand in greeting.
“Yes, I know we’ll have to get specifics from the state lab, but you’ve been in the business long enough to make a pretty good guess, and you say you saw none of the indications of a sudden heart attack?”
He was making notes as they talked. “So it had to be a poison since it worked so quickly, and if it was a poison, you think it may have been one that was made from a rare tropical root?”
He paused, then said, “Yes, I’ll check back with you tomorrow.”
He replaced the phone, rose from his big leather chair and came around the desk to sit down beside me and take my hand. He was obviously very concerned.
“Darcy, Doc McCauley believes Eileen ingested some kind of poison that worked very quickly. He said he had only read about cases where the victim was poisoned like Eileen was. We’re just guessing here, but until somebody confesses to killing her, and I don’t think that’s likely, I’m saying Eileen put that poison in your cup when you went to find the man who gave Tony the message. Then Tony accidentally swapped cups when somebody bumped him.”
Sudden tears stung my eyes. I had just escaped death by a hair’s breadth. “I can’t believe Eileen really meant to kill me.” My voice sounded shaky to my own ears. “What could she hope to gain by that? Didn’t she know she couldn’t get away with murder?”
He reached for my other hand. “Let’s assume she wanted you dead for reasons of her own. Or maybe she didn’t want you to die, just to get sick. Doc McCauley said that this plant is volatile and sometimes reacts more violently on one person than it would on another. It looks like she and the bushy haired guy, whose name, by the way, is Jude Melton, may have been working together. Now, tell me exactly how you came to be having lunch with her. You didn’t know her from before, did you? Maybe from the time she was the dispatcher here in Curtis’ office back when he was the sheriff? Or maybe even before that?”
I shook my head. “No, I never saw her before that day here in your office.” I couldn’t resist adding, “The day she hugged you and seemed so friendly.”
“Yes, well, believe it or not, that was the first time I’d seen her for quite a while, too.”
“She phoned and wanted us to have lunch, Grant. She said we had something to talk about. She was already at Dilly’s when I got there. The place was jam-packed. We both had coffee, but I didn’t plan on actually eating. I couldn’t imagine she’d have anything new to say since I thought she said it all when she came to the house. Just a few minutes after I sat down, Tony came and told me that a stranger at the front door has ask to speak privately to me, but when I reached the entryway, the man Tony described was not there. Tony said he had been busy and all he remembered about the fellow was that he wore a cap and his hair stuck out all around it.”
Grant frowned and looked down at my hands. “And then right after you got back to your booth, somebody bumped into Tony and he knocked your coffee cups around?”
My mouth felt dry. I didn’t even want to remember how close I had come to drinking the poisoned coffee.
I thought back to my first meeting with Eileen. “I didn’t like or trust her from the very beginning, you know? And her new-found friendliness by inviting me for lunch seemed false.”
Grant stood up, strode to the window behind his desk and spoke with his back toward me. “This meeting at Dilly’s happened shortly after that guy from Tulsa stopped at your house and talked to your mom about buying some of her land that wasn’t really for sale?”
“Yes. His name was Stuart Wood.” I dug in my handbag for the card he’d given us.
Grant took the card and turned to his computer. After five minutes of pressing keys, he said, “That’s strange. I don’t find any record of an Oklahoma company called Innovation Technology, but according to this card, it’s located on Irwin Street in Tulsa.”
He reached for the phone and punched in the number on the card. He listened, then replaced the receiver. “And this confirms it. AT&T says this number has been disconnected.”
“So the guy didn’t really represent a company and he was lying?” I rubbed my temples. My head ached from trying to make sense of the gun, marriage certificate, Eileen’s death and now it seemed that Innovation Technology was a front for some kind of scheme to grab my mother’s land.
Grant dropped into his desk chair and stared at a spot over my head. He raised his index finger. “Fact number one: these strange things seem to have begun when you and your mom started building your new house.”
He lifted a second finger. “Cub found that very old gun with one bullet missing and the remains of an old marriage document in an abandoned well.”
A third finger joined the first two. “And then Eileen suddenly puts in an appearance after an absence of five or six years and begins to make efforts to contact you and your mom with a rather unusual request that she ‘needs to see you about something important’.”
“Yes, it all seems to have started when Cub dug the foundation for our house. It’s like Mom said, that package containing the gun and record is like Pan
dora’s box. When we unwrapped it, trouble began. Whatever the gun and Bible page mean, they must be somehow connected with Eileen.”
Grant nodded. “Then the clincher: it appears that she had a partner, and the reason she needed to see you was because she wanted to get rid of you or frighten you.”
“You mean the bushy headed guy, that Jude Melton?”
“Uh-huh. And I’m betting that if her plot to kill you had succeeded, your mother would have been next.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Oh, no.”
“All this stuff can’t be coincidental, Darcy. I don’t like it at all. It appears to be tied to the land your mom owns, and we need to find out why that land is so important to Eileen and her companion.”
He rose from his chair and went to a filing cabinet at the back of his office. “I’m going to contact somebody I know at the university and see if he can think of any reason why that piece of property might hold a secret we know nothing about.”
I stood up. My legs felt shaky. I held onto the chair back until I was sure I could make it to the door without wobbling. “And I’m going to go home and start some research into the background of the woman who apparently had every intention of sending me to the cemetery.”
As he held my coat for me, I said, “Grant, I know personnel files are usually confidential, but this is an unusual situation. May I have a copy of whatever Eileen had in her file when she started working here as a dispatcher?”
He shook his head and shrugged. I loved the way his eyes crinkled and he ran his hand through his short-cropped hair when he was perturbed. “Darcy, you know I can’t do that. In the first place, I need those files here so I can refer to them.”
“And in the second place, that would be unethical?”
“Among other things.”
He walked me to the door, his arm around my shoulders. “And I would like to keep a deputy at your house around the clock, be-ginning tomorrow.”
“Not necessary, Grant.”
He drew me into a tight hug. “Listen, Darcy, I can’t stand the fact that I almost lost you. Now, please go home and think about something else for a while, maybe your house plans or that new school Miss Flora is building . . . I’m ordering you to let me handle this. Whatever or whoever is at the bottom of all this is a dangerous person.”
“Yes, Grant,” I murmured obediently to his shirt pocket. “I’ll go home and just relax for a while.” I snuggled against him, loving the feel of his arms around me. I had come home to Levi to find peace and healing after my husband’s death. So far, I had not found much peace. Instead, danger seemed to dog my trail. Although peace eluded me, I had found a second chance at love with the sheriff of Ventris County.
As it turned out, I did go home but relaxing was not on my agenda. In fact, that cold night was one of the few times in my life I did not sleep at all. I spent the night alternately getting up to peer out the window, and sitting down in front of my computer to search the internet for any information on the mysterious Eileen. Before the sun peeked over the hills to the east, I learned that Eileen Simmons had worked as a file clerk for a trucking company in Tulsa and a receptionist in a dentist’s office before she was hired as dispatcher for Ventris County’s previous sheriff. She currently owned a five-year-old Chevy Tahoe and had two speeding citations in Oklahoma. She had never been married, and I could find no documentation of her birth. In fact, so far as I could determine in a sophisticated electronic search, the woman had not existed until the day she was hired by McLean Trucking in Tulsa.
More pressing questions circle in my mind, including why any law enforcement office anywhere would hire her without a comprehensive background check. But a more pressing question, at least in my mind, was what was so important about Granny Grace’s land? Was Eileen in any way connected with Stuart Wood? It had been a while since I had explored the back acres of Granny Grace’s land. Maybe I should take a little trip out there in the morning and see if I could find any reason why there was a sudden interest in buying that piece of property. Weather permitting, first thing tomorrow that is just what I would do.
Chapter 18
The snow that had been in yesterday’s forecast still hadn’t materialized the morning after my visit with Grant. At breakfast, I told Mom my plan to drive out to Granny Grace’s acres and look around.
“I’ll come with you, Darcy,” she said.
“No, please don’t. I’m going to walk a lot and maybe climb over a few fences and up a few hills. It would be rough going for you, Mom.”
“I worry that something may happen to you. I guess a mother never gets over worrying about her children, especially a child who is as danger prone as you, my dear daughter.”
I grinned and ruffled her curls. “I’ll be fine, Mom, I promise. I believe the Lord is watching over both of us.”
“Yes, I’m sure He is but I’m going to say an extra prayer for you this morning,” Mom called as I went upstairs. “Couldn’t hurt anything.”
I pulled on a pair of my most comfortable blue jeans, a yellow sweatshirt topped with a button-down-the-front green and yellow plaid flannel shirt, and stepped into my brown hiking boots. That, and a denim jacket would do fine for this day. Although the temperature was forecast to be in the low 40s, the sun was shining and there was little wind. I pulled my dark hair into a pony tail and noted a new gray hair. Time was surely marching on, and I was starting to feel the wear and tear of all this intrigue. Maybe Grant was right. Maybe I was a magnet for mysteries. And Mom was right too…if the happenings had been accidental.
I drew a line of rose-tinted lip gloss across my mouth, moved Jethro off my bed, and decided I was ready for a trip into the country.
Mom had a bulging brown paper lunch sack waiting for me downstairs. “Here’s a sandwich and a piece of pie, Darcy, just in case you don’t get back by noon.”
I shook my head. As she said, mothering must be a lifelong process. Amy had said the same thing. “Thanks. Stay close today and be watchful,” I said over my shoulder as I opened the front door.
Mom snorted. “Ha! Look who’s talking.”
Sunlight shone through the windshield of my Escape. Dressed as I was, I didn’t need the car’s heater. The road to Granny Grace’s acres led through some of the prettiest country in Ventris County. In every season but winter, it was striking with the tree-covered hillsides and the glimpses of the river in the distance. In winter, it was not as beautiful but certainly spectacular enough. Gray rocky bluffs shone through pines and the dark limbs of deciduous trees. Cardinals and blue jays flashed across the road, and high in the cloudless sky, a hawk circled.
Is it possible that when we leave this earth, some of our emotions are left behind in places that are particularly dear? Granny loved her home here in the hills with Grandpa George, and when I returned to these hills, I felt a bit of the contentment and sheer joy that she must have felt. It was a peaceful feeling, as warm as the sunshine. With a jolt, I remembered a different emotion on the day that Cub discovered the package in the well. That day Granny’s old home place seem lonely and even desolate.
I decided to drive the back way to those acres, and save visiting the place where our new house was going to be for a later time when Mom could view it with me. Now I wanted to take a little- used road that would necessitate my crawling over a fence and scrambling on rocks across a small creek. I had the feeling that if there were anything out here more desirable than the land itself, it would be along the bluffs or small hidden hollows of the back part of the woodland.
Parking my car on the grassy edge of the dirt road, I scooted out and straddled a sagging wire fence. A little creek, old-timers called it Lee Creek, flowed lazily along the bottom of a knoll. The spring-fed stream was so shallow that it was easy to hop from one flat rock to the next and get across Lee Creek without getting wet. Clumps of water cress poked out of the water. Breaking off a piece, I savored the tangy, sharp taste. I paused under a tall pin oak and gazed at the forest of trees and a
zure sky, listened to the gurgle of the creek, and basked in the feeling of coming home. Tree, sky, creek, all seemed to soak into my very bones, a part of me and I, a part of my surroundings.
The air had a crisp, damp smell to it, as old as time and as new as the morning. I filled my lungs with the fragrance of pure air. Leaves rustled in the pin oak and an acorn dropped to the ground by my feet with a soft thud. Gazing up, I saw a squirrel glaring at me from a high limb.
“Sorry to disturb your peace,” I called.
Getting out of town, soaking up the feel of the country invigorated me. At that moment, I could hardly wait to make the move to our new house and have all this wildness at our doorstep.
Another sound broke the stillness of the morning, a noise that clashed with the rhythm of creek and leaves. I held my breath and listened. It sounded like metal striking flint rock. Maybe a pickax biting into the side of the cliff somewhere?
The ringing of the pick seemed to come and go with the breeze and echoed off the high sides of the bluff. Ducking under tree limbs, I moved toward the sound. Thickets and tangles of briars grew under the trees and the low-hanging limbs had cobwebs dangling from them. I brushed them aside but the webs grew heavier and covered my face to the extent that I could not see. I squatted down on the ground and wiped the sticky threads away with my gloves.
The noise began again, closer this time and I cautiously raised my head and strained my eyes to see its source, but the cobwebs hanging from the trees completely obscured my vision. What was this? I had never seen so many webs. Had I blundered into a colony of spiders? A gust of wind brushed past me, causing the webs to do a wild dance, like white sheets hanging on a clothes line. The sound of the pickax stopped.
Once again, I dropped to the ground with my back against a tree trunk. The spider webs did not reach this far down. It was only when I stood up that they covered my face. I was trying to think of an explanation for the webs. No spiders were visible but my progress had been stopped by a mass of tangled silky threads.
The Darcy & Flora Boxed Set Page 43
