Buried Bones Page 26

  Though I sifted through her things, I was on the alert for something to show Harold’s tenure of residence at Rathbone House. Perhaps he’d always planned on bailing her out financially by purchasing the place for her. Once, not so long ago, he’d indicated his willingness to save Dahlia House for me.

  Saddened by that memory and how far things had progressed down a slippery slope for Harold, I moved into the guest rooms. It was there I found evidence of Harold’s occupancy—a sock under the bed, some Obsession on the dresser. Knowing his passion for neatness, it didn’t surprise me that he’d chosen to store his things in an orderly room. Had he tried to move into Brianna’s closet, he wouldn’t have been able to hang a shirt.

  My last hope was crushed. Harold had moved in with Spiderwoman, even if it was only a minimalist move. And he’d loaned her a lot of money. Money he would never recover if she went to prison for murder. Perhaps that was why he’d proven such a willing helpmeet for her. Duty, obligation, an attempt to recoup the money he’d loaned her—anything was better than the possibility that he was actually in love with her.

  Opening the guest room dresser drawers, I came upon a handsome leather briefcase embossed with Harold’s initials. I flipped the snaps up and stared. A single page of typewritten, doubled-spaced manuscript rested in the bottom. I scanned it quickly. The implications were so complex I reread the entire passage:

  By the time my book has blown up a storm gale of denials and outrage, I’ll be long dead and buried. There is no art in telling secrets. The art is in keeping them. For all of these years I’ve harbored the truth, giving it a safe place to rest, until it was time to tell it. This was my last promise to Lenore, the thing she asked—no begged—of me when she was huge with child and learned that they would take the baby from her.

  It was the last thing she asked of anyone before she took her own life. So now I, the man who loved her and could never win her, have told the truth, finally and ultimately putting it all down for future generations to read, or not.

  Rosalyn will forgive me. I never judged her for actions I wasn’t forced to take. It was not a hospitable world for women in the summer of 1940. The common sentiment was that she got what she deserved for daring to have ambition, for possessing talent. Who can blame her for turning a cruel tragedy into a means of support? Certainly not I. Hopefully not the reader.

  Our only true flaw was our youth and naïveté. We went to Moon Lake with two simple desires—to enjoy life and to perform. We stayed that summer and developed a political conscience. It was an experience that shaped each of us, molded us into the people we became. That summer informed us of the treacheries of life and the intricacies of human nature. It was the seed for fiction and the spur to action.

  If my friends are still alive, they’ll know that I await them in a place where the desire for life, the joy of creation, and the heady thunder of applause is given freely. When we’re all together again, the curtain will rise once more.

  The End

  My hand shook as I held the page and let the words wash through me. Lenore had been pregnant just before she took her own life. She’d given birth to a child that someone subsequently took from her. Odd that neither Bev nor Rosalyn nor Harold had mentioned such a thing. Odd and disturbing. Lenore had been in her early forties when she’d given birth. A grown woman who was bullied into giving away her child—an act that resulted in a suicide. What was it Bev had said? Something about how Lenore was the quiet one, the instigator, yet too shy to enjoy performing herself. She’d returned to her family home in Greenwood after that summer and slipped from view.

  And Madame. “A cruel tragedy into a means of support.” What could it mean? I examined Lawrence’s words again, wondering how this single page had been left. Who would steal a book and leave the last page? It didn’t make sense.

  I considered returning the page to the briefcase when I noticed something else, a dusting of fine, white powder. Cocaine was the first thing that came to my mind. The second possible explanation was worse. Poison.

  Still holding the damning page, I backed out of the room and stood in the hallway, the sound of my breathing harsh in the silent house.

  My formal training as a private investigator is rather sketchy, but I’d always been a good observer of the people around me and a student of human nature. Harold had been in my gunsights for a long time. I found myself thinking of his image and wondering if somehow I’d failed to learn him at all.

  Good people can become diseased. The Christian religion has a single name for evil—Satan. In psychology, cruelty is called by a number of names, most describing aberrant mental conditions.

  There is a process in both psychology and religion where good becomes corrupted, where the strong are brought to weakness. Whether one believes it’s the work of Satan or a process of mental deterioration, the end result is the same—suffering.

  For the first time I accepted that Harold Erkwell, the man I’d known as a good businessman, an educated man with a sensitive side that I’d never anticipated but definitely appreciated, the man I’d considered—on more than one occasion—crawling into bed with, was someone I didn’t know at all.

  The sound of something sliding came from downstairs. It was a soft, subtle noise. Very much like the shush the window had made when I opened it to slip inside the house. I’d taken care to park my car in the barn so that no one who happened up would know I was here. Now my only choice was to pick a hiding spot and employ it.

  I snatched the page and out of some misguided loyalty I grabbed Harold’s Obsession, his sock, and the briefcase, and dove under the guest bed. It wasn’t a position of strength if someone wanted to harm me. The ugly truth was that there wasn’t a hiding place in the house that would protect me if someone meant to get me. Sucking in my gut I crept to the center and listened.

  There were two of them—both creeping up the stairs in slow, stealthy movements.

  “What makes you so certain the manuscript is here?” one asked.

  I gripped the carpet. I recognized that voice. It was Cece Dee Falcon!

  “Because Willem said it was here.”

  And that was Tilda Grace. I started to wriggle out from under the bed, then thought better of it. They’d broken and entered into Brianna’s home. They’d come to look for the manuscript, and they had to have good reason for such a search. The two of them together. It was a twist in the case I hadn’t expected. If I stayed under the bed and remained perfectly quiet, maybe I’d learn something useful.

  The two women stopped in the doorway of Brianna’s bedroom. “My God, what a mess,” Cece said.

  “Come on,” Tilda ordered, her voice stronger than I’d ever heard it.

  They continued closer.

  “Why did you ever send that information to Lawrence?” Cece demanded in a voice roughened by emotion. “I never did anything to you. I didn’t even know about you until you walked in that door. He was my teacher. I never thought to ask if he was married.”

  “I never blamed you.” Tilda spoke with amazing calm. “You’re as much a victim of a monster as I have been.”

  “But if this gets out, if this scandal is started, I’ll lose my job. No one will ever hire me again. You don’t know—” She broke off.

  Tilda’s sigh was deep. “I’m sorry. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t. But I was so angry, so hurt. He was so cruel to me, furious that I’d dared to enter his private world. He’d made me believe that I was less than a woman, someone he married out of pity but could never love. His cruelties were immense. Then I walked into the room and saw you both. He’d destroyed me so that he could have his life exactly as he wanted it.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him?” Cece asked.

  “I was afraid. I had no place else to go, no family, no money, no job. On the very day that I found you, a young man, with my husband, I should have left. But I didn’t. When he said that we would never consummate our marriage and never have a baby—I didn’t leave him, as I should have done.
Instead, I wrote it all down and sent it to Lawrence.”

  I had to work hard to regulate my breathing. It felt like the box springs of the bed were pressing down on me, and the revelations that I was hearing made me want to inhale sharply.

  “Why?”

  “Lawrence was my friend. I see now he’d tried to warn me against marrying Joseph. He hinted at things, but I didn’t understand. I was naive and young and so very desperate to find someone to cling to. Somewhere to go to escape my family.”

  Now Tilda sounded as if she were crying. I closed my eyes, regretting that I had overheard such intimate details. Sorry that now I had reason to suspect both Tilda and my friend Cece in Lawrence’s death.

  “We have to find that book,” Cece said. “What did Willem tell you?”

  “He said Brianna had called him. He said she’d found the book and taken it, and that she was going to publish it and that it was filled with things that would ruin us all.”

  “If Brianna’s gone, then the book is probably gone, too. That bitch’ll find someone to publish it and everything I’ve worked so hard to leave behind will be headlines again.”

  “We can’t give up. We have to look,” Tilda insisted. “We’re here, so let’s look. The bastard probably has the book and Brianna. They were so cozy-cozy lately.”

  They opened the door of the guest room, looked in, and moved on. I slowly exhaled after I heard their footsteps moving down the hallway. My inclination was to crawl out from under the bed and talk to them, but I held back. Based on what I’d read of Lawrence’s book, a single page that would wreck at least two lives, it was highly probably that Joseph Grace and Cece, who had been Cecil while attending Ole Miss, would be served up as appetizers. If Lawrence didn’t spare his childhood friends, he’d think nothing of torpedoing Cece.

  But there was the off chance that he’d left out that chapter. And if he did, I never wanted Cece to know that I knew. She’d kept her secret for so long, there was no need for her to ever worry that I might reveal it. No matter how much Joseph Grace deserved punishment for what he’d done.

  I followed their search by the flow of their sporadic conversation. When they were in the study, soon to become as absorbed by the details of Brianna’s life as I had been, I slipped from beneath the bed. The study was on the far side of the house. With a little luck and good timing, I could make an escape.

  I folded the page of the book and slipped down the stairs. They’d left the window open, so my departure went without a sound. The barn was far enough from the house that when I started the car, I knew they wouldn’t hear. There was an old farm road that led to the now empty pastures and I took it, trusting that since all of the horses had been sold the gates wouldn’t be locked.

  I glanced back at the house once in the rearview mirror. A curtain in a third-floor room dropped quickly back in place. They’d seen me after all.

  25

  The Christmas decorations glittered in the noonday sun as I drove through the empty streets of downtown Zinnia. Without all the cars and people, it was easier to see the decorations. Lillian Sparks was right. The old tinsel and lights that were strung along the telephone lines looked tacky in the daytime. But I loved them still, and in the flutter of the silver tinsel, I hung on to Christmases past and a sense of something bigger than myself.

  The conversation I’d overheard had greatly upset me. If Joseph Grace had stepped off the curb in front of my car, I wouldn’t have even tried to brake. And what I had to confront was going to be even harder.

  I took a right and headed for the Sunflower County courthouse. The stately old red-brick building was adorned with huge red ribbons on the white columns. Holiday pranksters had be-wreathed the statue of the bedraggled Johnny Reb that guarded the front entrance. I had no intention of stopping, but I wanted to see who was at the sheriff’s office. Harold must have driven from Memphis with his foot on the floor. His Lexus was parked beside the jail.

  I took a couple of left turns and pulled into Madame’s driveway. A leafless crape myrtle framed the porch where she sat in the swing, a plumed hat on her head, her gloves and handbag in her lap.

  My emotions had been slammed, jammed, and brutalized, and I wanted some straight answers. But just when I needed it most, my anger abandoned me. Madame looked old and tired and worried. I found myself walking up to her porch with a lump in my throat.

  It wasn’t necessary to say anything. I pulled the folded page from my jeans pocket and handed it to her. She was a tough old lady. Her expression never changed as she read the page and handed it back to me.

  “I never dreamed Lawrence would actually write it,” she said, “and in such a sanctimonious tone. His years in Paris, when he and Ramone Gilliard were so involved with the French Resistance. That would have been plenty for a book. It begged to be made into a movie. I honestly never thought that Lawrence would trade on his friends for a few moments of glory.”

  If I’d had her check in my pocket, I would have torn it up in front of her. I wasn’t angry anymore, but she had betrayed me by not telling me the truth. She was upset because Lawrence had told her secrets, and yet she hadn’t hesitated to lie to and deceive me.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, lightly shaking the page. “What is Lawrence talking about?”

  The edge in my voice made her stare at me. It was a long stare, one that probed for the old weaknesses she’d tried to dance out of me.

  “Your mother would be proud of you, Sarah Booth. I thought when your parents died that you might not make it. I was afraid you’d fold. But you didn’t. You’ve grown to be your own person, a rare luxury.”

  There had been a time when I would have groveled at her feet for such words of praise. Even now they affected me, but I refused to show it. “What is Lawrence referring to here, this tragedy turned to support?”

  Very slowly she took her hat off. As she did so, she regained some of her posture. She sat up in the swing a little straighter, with a little more pride. “Hosea Archer raped me that summer at Moon Lake. It was a vicious rape that required a hysterectomy. His father paid me not to press charges.” Madame’s dark eyes were flinty as she laughed. “The loss of my health and innocence were of little consequence to Jebediah. What mattered was that he not come under scrutiny.”

  “I was right all along. That summer at Moon Lake.” The words were like a dark chant. “It all started then.”

  “For the most part,” she agreed.

  “Why did Jebediah kill his son?”

  “It’s complicated, but time has a way of simplifying things. It all started with the rape. Lawrence was out of his mind with rage. One night Lawrence followed Hosea out on the lake. I honestly believe he planned on killing him. Instead, Lawrence learned a secret.”

  “What?” Moon Lake still exerted a powerful magnetic pull on me. I was enthralled with Madame’s tale.

  “That night Hosea was paddling instead of using the little outboard motor. That in itself was strange, Lawrence said, because that boy never did a lick of physical labor if he could avoid it. Lawrence followed him into a cypress cove, one of the hundreds of little inlets on the lake. Lawrence hid so they didn’t see him. But he watched. Hosea met some men there. Not Germans. Americans who supported the Third Reich and wanted our country to stay out of the war. Money changed hands.” She leaned back in the swing and pushed it gently with her toes. “I swore I would never tell that story. So did Lawrence. We made an oath.”

  “Jebediah Archer paid for your silence. And Lawrence’s, too?”

  “Oh, no. Lawrence never took a penny. He left the country and went to fight against the Axis powers. He and Ramone Gilliard were very active in the underground. Lawrence did some very brave things that no one will ever know.”

  “But the senator paid you.”

  “Yes, and he’s continued to pay me all this time, a small monthly allowance. It’s how I’ve managed to live.”

  Very slowly I sat down on the top step. Words were inadequate, and I had s
ense enough to know it. So I’d learned the big secret of Madame’s past, of why she’d come home to Zinnia, of why she’d never married. I suddenly thought of Jitty and the safety and repression of the decade she’d decided to embrace. What must it truly have been like for women in the forties and fifties? What had Madame and others like her suffered because they wanted to dance on a stage, to revel in movement and beauty? What would she suffer now?

  She reached her hand out for the page, and I gave it to her, watching as she read it yet again. “I simply can’t believe he did this,” she said. “Not Lawrence. You have no idea how he took care of me that summer, how he nursed me back from the brink of insanity.” She shook her head, lowering the page to her lap. “And then Lenore. My God. We were wild. Young and wild and completely unaware how the decisions we made then would affect us in the years to come.”

  “What about Lenore?” I had to ask though the words tasted of ash as they passed my lips. I didn’t want to hear more secrets. I didn’t want the burden of knowing.

  “She was having an affair with a married man. A prominent man. She was desperately in love.”

  “Who?”

  Madame looked past me out into the street. She must have seen the Thunderbird coming, but she made no motion to indicate she saw it. “Sarah Booth, there are secrets I won’t reveal. If they’re in that book, then Lawrence must accept the blame for telling them. I’m an old woman, and though I’d prefer to avoid the label of blackmailer, I have only a limited number of days left to endure such censure. Long ago I gave my word. That has to mean something.”

  The crunch of the tires made me turn around. Willem Arquillo got out of the Thunderbird and walked toward us. This time his million-dollar smile was missing.

  “Let me offer apologies for what I’m about to do,” Willem said in that lovely voice. “I need the key to the storage vault, Miss Bell. Please give it to me now.”

  “It’s too late, Willem,” I answered for her. “Harold knows the Pleshettes are fakes.” For someone who was solving a mystery, I found no satisfaction in delivering the coup de grâce.