A Comedy of Heirs (20 page)

“This is amazing,” I said, still pacing across his front room. My boots clicked on his hardwood floor.

“What do you mean, amazing?”

“I just can't believe that this has been in my family's past all of this time and nobody even so much as gave a hint! My father witnessed a murder—his own grandfather—and I knew nothing about it,” I said. “It just scares me. What are people hiding every day? The lady at the grocery store, the librarian, the mayor? How could you keep this from me?”

He went back to plucking his guitar.

“How long did you stay in the barn?” I asked, my blood pressure rising with every question.

“About half an hour.”

“It took him four hours to die. Where were you for the remaining three and a half hours?” I asked.

“Jed had been in the smokehouse. I think he hid out in there for a while like I did, because he didn't want to get shot himself. When it was evident that the killer had left, he came and got me. He knew I was out there,” Dad said. “The two of us walked to town.”

“You walked all the way to town? Nine miles. Why didn't you go to a neighbor's house and borrow a car? Or a horse? Where was Jed's car?” I asked.

“Dana had dropped him off and gone back to town to shop,” Dad said. “Not that many of our neighbors had cars. This was 1948 in dirt-poor rural Missouri. Besides, Jed told me he didn't want to involve any of the neighbors. Said we wouldn't appreciate any of our neighbors mixing us up in something ugly like this, and he wasn't going to do it to them.”

“Wasn't anybody concerned about saving the man's life?” I asked, my voice raised just a little too loud.

My father stopped playing his guitar once again and looked me straight in the eyes. “No,” he said simply. “Couldn't of anyway. Gunshot. Gut wound. He was as good as dead as soon as he was shot.”

“So you walked to town,” I said, frustrated.

“Yeah, and we went straight to Hubert McCarthy, who drove us back out to the house,” he said.

“How do you know Jed didn't do it?” I asked.

“Because he said he didn't do it,” Dad answered.

“Yes, but how do you really know? He could have lied to you.”

“He was my brother. If he said he didn't do it, I believed him,” Dad said.

“So tell me, Dad. How do I find out who did do it? Who saw it?” I asked.

“I'm not sure if she saw the whole thing or not, but when I peeked out of the barn doors at the house, your aunt Ruth was looking out the window in the house. She might have seen who it was,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “Aunt Ruth. The one person who wouldn't tell me even if she wanted to just for spite.” There was a lesson here about burning one's bridges. I'd think about it more when my head wasn't hurting so bad and I wasn't on a personal quest.

“And there was nobody else outside? Hubert said something about one of Granville's daughters or something?”

“Dolly. I think she was in the chicken coop.”

“How old was she?” I asked.

“About sixteen,” he said. Old enough to hold a shotgun, I thought.

“And her story?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “She died that winter of typhoid. She never spoke of it, and none of us ever asked her.”

“So, you sent me the articles because you didn't want to be the one to break the silence.”

He said nothing.

“You lied to me when I asked you about them. Thanks for dumping this into my lap, Dad. Thanks for letting your daughter have the responsibility of deciding whether or not to tell the family.”

“I didn't dump anything,” he said.

“Yes you did. You knew I wouldn't be able to leave it alone. You knew,” I said. I walked toward his front door.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, standing.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm going to try to find out who did it by every means possible, except involving Aunt Ruth. If I can't do it any other way, then I'll have to ask her.”

“No, I mean about telling everybody?”

“I don't know, Dad. It's a lot more complicated than that. I'm not even sure Nate Keith was the father of John Robert. Do I want all the family to know that, too? I'm not sure. It's a huge responsibility telling people ugly things—a responsibility you so cleverly avoided.”

Twenty-seven

The next day I went to Velasco's Pizza for lunch.

I needed to be away from my family. All of my family. Except Mary and Rachel, whom I had brought along. I couldn't handle another cousin, aunt, uncle or anything. My children and I were enjoying a pepperoni and mushroom pizza, thin crust with extra cheese and a big pitcher of soda.

“So anyway,” Rachel said. “So, like Buffy comes out and stakes this vampire, like she usually does, but she's wearing this really cool black dress.”

“What was the vampire wearing?” I asked.

“Huh?” she asked. Her large dark eyes rolled heavenward. “Who cares what the vamps are wearing, unless it's Drusilla. You should have seen this dress, Mom. I want one just like it.”

My soon-to-be nine-year-old was acting entirely too old for my own good. I wasn't upset about her choice of TV material. When I was her age, I couldn't wait to watch
Nightstalker.
It's a universal thing, I guess. I was a little perturbed by the fact that she was more concerned over what the slayer was wearing than the fact that she was slaying at all. It made her come across as fourteen and unconcerned with the world, unless it was fashion-based. At her age, she was supposed to still be human and caring about living things. Or undead things, as the case may be.

“Mom,” Mary interrupted, “do you think Santa will bring me a Tigger sleeping bag or Mulan?”

“Why do you need a sleeping bag, Mary?” I asked. “It's not like we go camping that often.”

“'Cause they're cool,” she said. My five-year-old just said cool. This lunch was depressing me. “Besides, I don't hafta go camping to sleep in it. I can sleep in it in my bedroom. On the floor.”

“You have a bed,” I answered.

“So,” she said and gave me this look that said I was totally stupid.

“You'll just have to put it on your list,” I said. “With all the other two hundred items.”

She smiled, her green eyes dancing at the thought of adding another object to her list. It didn't bother me too much, because so far on Christmas mornings, she's been thrilled with what she gets and forgets what she asked for in the first place.

“Hi, Sheriff!” Rachel said and waved across the room. I turned around and saw the sheriff walking over toward my table with a file folder in his hand. He stopped at my table and ruffled each girl's hair, which infuriated Rachel to death. That was all right. She needed some infuriation.

“What's up?” I asked him.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I told Rachel to scoot down so that he could sit next to her and across from me.

“I've read through the file,” he said. “Most of it is just his personal notes jotted here and there. There are a few snapshots of the house, the porch and all that in relation to the barn, the smokehouse and the chicken coop. There's a photograph of the porch with…” The sheriff glanced over at the kids. “Not a person, but a puddle,” lowering his voice.

“Gotcha,” I said.

“A puddle of what?” Rachel asked.

“Nothing, Rachel,” I said.

“He's got everybody down on the date that he interviewed them, and why he thought they were suspect. Let me just tell you that Nate Keith was just awful. And his actions had long-reaching repercussions. One man killed himself after he found out that his youngest son really belonged to Nate. He might have been a monster, but the women seemed to be very … attracted to him.”

“Great,” I said.

“And that's pretty much it,” he said and handed it to me. “Nothing you can't see and I didn't take anything out of it.”

“A puddle of what?” Rachel asked again, more demanding this time.

“The way I see it, half the county had a reason for killing him,” I said, ignoring her.

“Kill
who
Mom?”

“Yeah, but only one of them actually did it,” he said.

“Yes, and about a hundred people benefited from it.”

“Can't argue with that,” he said.

“Want some pizza?” I asked.

“No, I can't stay. Jalena and I are going to go see about renting the KC hall for our reception,” he said.

He could have gone his whole life without telling me that. I smiled and pretended that he didn't really say anything. He got up and said goodbye to all of us and he was out the door.

“Do I have to call him Grandpa?” Rachel asked.

The thought of the forty-something sheriff being called Grandpa was rather humorous. It was actually very funny. “Will it bother you to call him Grandpa?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, “No, guess not.”

“Then, yes, you should call him Grandpa. It will make his whole life,” I said.

“What puddle was he talking about?” she asked.

Twenty-eight

Harlan Clayton hung himself in August of 1942. He fed his pigs, hosed his barn, ate his dinner and went out to the garage to die. He left sixteen children and a wife. Nate Keith had stolen what self-respect the man had when Nate announced to the world that Harlan's youngest son, Charlie, was actually his. Mrs. Harlan Clayton had not denied it.

Gee, that was a nice new reason to hate my great-grandfather. There was a new one every day. I only hoped that I found out who killed him soon, so that I could congratulate them.

I looked at the photographs in the file and was amazed at how much the place had changed from the late forties to the early seventies when I was a kid. It had changed even more in the past few years. It was now abandoned.

In a few photographs there was a large puddle of blood right in front of the door on the porch. There had always been a rug there when I was a child. I'd played right there with my Sweet April Play Land. There were two windows from which the porch was visible, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. And there was another window on the east side of the living room, looking out on the yard and the dirt road and the barn.

The last page of notes in Hubert McCarthy's file was a piece of paper with the words
Nobody saw anything. Nobody saw a soul. Nobody knows anything.

The words were repeated over and over, as if McCarthy had been doodling his last few days on the case—the doodling of a frustrated man or the doodling of a man trying to convince himself that nobody saw anything.

I called the hotel that my cousin Damon was staying at and asked him if he'd like to take a ride down to Pine Branch. I wanted to go down to the old house, but I didn't want to go alone, and Damon was the only one I felt I could tell any of this to, if he asked. He agreed and I picked him up a half-hour later.

“So, what's this all about?” he asked.

“What? Why do you ask?”

“You've been acting strange this year, Torie. I mean, you've always been a little stranger than most of us,” Damon said. “We just assumed it was from your mother's side of the family.”

“Ha ha ha,” I said to him. “I'm pregnant.”

“I heard,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I looked over at him as he looked straight ahead, eyes on the road. He wore a navy blue parka, with a red and black flannel scarf. The rich colors complemented his swarthy complexion and black hair.

“Who'd you hear it from?” I asked. “No, don't answer that. I don't care at this point.”

“Aside from being pregnant, something is going on. We're all shook up over Uncle Jed, but you should have seen your face that night. You looked like a ghost. And now you invite me on an impromptu trip to the old place,” he said.

“Can you keep a secret?” I asked as I turned off the highway and down the outer road. We were nine or ten miles from Pine Branch. We went down the outer road and finally I turned onto a two-lane blacktop. We were in the country. Houses dotted the landscape every half mile or so and once in a while we'd come upon a farm with all the outbuildings and such. For the most part all we saw were snow-covered trees and fields with cows looking bored.

“A secret, eh? One that deals with the family?” he asked.

I sighed heavily. “It seems that we, the heirs of one Nathaniel Ulysses Keith, have inherited not a fortune or a legacy but a secret. An ugly little secret. Nice inheritance, huh?”

“What is it?” he asked, eyes sparkling with interest.

“Nate Keith was murdered.”

“The man you were asking me about the night we were ice skating,” he said.

“One and the same. And the only, thank God,” I said. “Shot on Grandma and Grandpa's front porch, only then it was his front porch,” I said.

“No way. Get outta here,” he said.

“While the whole family was held at gunpoint by Great-Grandma Keith to stay put in the house, until he was finished dying.”

“Holy Jesus,” he said and gave a whistle. It took him a minute to really hear what I was saying. The whole family included his mother. The dawning realization hit with force as he turned to me, eyes wide. “You mean my mother…”

“Yes. Aunt Charlotte was in the house with the rest of them, except my father, who was in the barn, and Uncle Jed, who was in the smokehouse. They had a cousin, Dolly, who was in the chicken coop. Everybody else was inside,” I said.

The blacktop road had now turned into gravel and I had to raise my voice a little to be heard over the pinging of the rocks on the underside of my car. “Did she ever mention it to you? She ever mention anything at all?”

“No,” he said with a glassy look in his eyes. “Wow. Did Great-Grandma Keith do it? Did she kill him?”