A Widow's Curse (20 page)

“Conner Devilin,” I began, only a little in a daze, “was born in Wales.”

I gave Diana and Kristin the shorter, more poetic version of the story as best I could, occasionally helped by Andrews: murder in Ireland, mayhem in Wales, a family curse, the education of Fever Devilin. We omitted any reference to Shultz. A murder in the past is a fascinating story; an ongoing homicide investigation was an entirely different matter.

“Unbelievable.” Kristin stared at the painting. “All because of her.”

That conclusion had not gelled in my mind exactly, but I considered that Kristin's observation was at least partly correct. Eloise Barnsley was indeed in some way responsible for even the events of the preceding days.

If that's not a curse, what is? I thought.

Diana shuddered. “I need more espresso.”

Andrews and I both turned to her instantly.

She read our faces. “Can I offer you some?”

“We couldn't.” Andrews had pitched his voice perfectly. It said, Ask me again and I'll take five, please.

Alas, at that exact moment, the hellhounds, having burst their confinement, marauded the room.

I was surrounded by, perhaps, seventy animals, by my now-conservative estimation.

“Why do you have so many dogs?” I failed to keep the terror from shining through every word.

“Five's not that many.” Andrews had knelt and was clutching one, a Dalmatian-looking puppy, the most energetic of the lot.

“There are only five?” I was trying not to look.

“I know they're all over the place—sorry,” Kristin told me sweetly, grabbing two dogs and holding them away from me. “But it's a good thing we have them. We think they might have kept someone from stealing this painting.”

“What?” Andrews stood.

“About a month ago.” Diana was holding a blond older dog and a more peaceful shepherd of some sort.

“We only had four then.” Kristin patted one of hers on the head. “Dogs.”

“Someone broke a stained-glass window in here while we were gone to Publix. Tried to get in.”

“The house alarm went off, but I don't think that would have stopped them.” Kristin stared at one of the windows. “They could have been in and out before the police got here.”

“When we got home, the alarm was ringing like all get-out.” Diana was looking at the paining. “We came rushing in, and all the dogs were in this room barking at the broken window.”

“They saved your painting.” Andrews glowed.

I glared at the animals.

“I see.” I managed a smile in Diana's direction. “Well. I think we should be going. We've inconvenienced you two enough. Can't tell you how much I appreciate—”

I began backing out of the room toward the front door.

“No espresso?” Andrews cast a forlorn glance my way.

His look had little effect on my retreat. I could see the dogs' eyes. They could see mine. The rending of flesh and the snapping of bones could scarcely be far behind.

Andrews properly read my face.

“We really should go,” Andrews admitted, shaking hands with Kristin.

“Sorry about the dogs,” Diana whispered to him.

“Please don't apologize. Dr. Devilin here is a biological experiment,” Andrews explained calmly. “We don't usually let him meet the public. He'll be much better once we get him back in his cage and sedate him.”

“Thank you again,” I called to them, hand on the front door, clearing my throat, “for letting me see the painting. Sorry about leaving like this. They really are lovely dogs. It's not them; it's me.”

I threw open the door and ran from the house, gasping, toward the truck.

The ride back to Blue Mountain was a blur. Andrews slept the entire way. I tried desperately not to think too much about Mr. Spivey and ended up obsessing about Eloise Barnsley's portrait instead.

We arrived back home, only to discover the presence of not one but three police cars in my yard
and
a dark sedan that could only belong to Detective Huyne.

Andrews woke with a start when the truck came to a halt. He rubbed his eyes before he noticed the plethora of constabulary vehicles.

“Christ on a crutch!” He slumped down in the seat. “We're going to jail.”

In something of a wild moment, I thought I might just turn the truck on again, throw it into reverse, and careen down the mountain. Maybe I could lose myself in the woods, but I didn't think Andrews would survive. I could have shoved him out of the truck, but before I had a chance to act on any impulse, Skidmore appeared on the porch, shaking his head and motioning me into my house.

“We're not going to jail.” I didn't even sound confident to myself; I'm certain Andrews didn't buy the sentiment.

I climbed out of the cab and moved with great deliberation right toward Skidmore, brimming with aggressive energy.

“I'm glad you're here.” I leapt up the steps. “You're not going to believe what we found out.”

Skidmore sighed.

“I know you think that your option here is to try for ‘The best defense is a good offense.'” He bit his lip. “But I told you not to go anywhere.”

Detective Huyne appeared in my doorway.

“I'm thinking of shooting you.” His eyes were glued to mine. “Just in the leg. Nothing serious—but you won't be able to get around anymore.”

I turned to Skidmore.

“I saw the painting.” I hoped he could read my mind—or at least part of it. “And P.S.: Someone tried to steal it recently.”

“Look.” Huyne came onto the porch. “The fiber evidence we found on your broken window seems to match the evidence we already have, and the blood we found in there isn't a match for your type or Dr. Andrews's.”

How he knew what blood type I was—or Andrews—was a riddle I chose to ignore.

“Detective Huyne is changing his mind about who might be Shultz's killer.” There was a hint of light in Skidmore's eyes, almost disguised by the blur of his official demeanor.

“It's not changed yet, and I could still have you arrested for leaving your house when I told you not to,” Huyne grumbled.

I moved so quickly, I surprised myself. I was almost nose-to-nose with Huyne.

“In fact,” I growled, “you could not. I believe you I told you that Deputy Mathews would have to hit me with a tranquilizer dart to keep me from going where I wanted to. The same concept applies to arresting me. I've found a dead body in my house, I've been attacked by a lunatic, and now I'm being threatened by an out-of-town policeman. That's about all the distress I can eat at the moment. So unless you're going to get out your little gun, step aside. I'd like to go into my house and wash my hands.”

“Davis!” Huyne bellowed, staring at me.

The other detective appeared in the doorway.

“Those notes we got in Pine City.” His voice was granite. “What was it the lawyer said? About the phone call?”

Davis fished in his threadbare suit coat pocket, found a small spiral pad, flipped through it, and began to read the third page.

“Mr. Taylor stated that he received
no
phone call such as the one described by suspect Devilin—”

“Stop,” Huyne ordered. “Now why, Sheriff, would your friend lie about a thing like that?”

“My assumption would be that Mr. Taylor is lying.” Skid sniffed. “I'd spend a bit of time trying to find out the
why
of that.”

“Just because Devilin here is your pal—”

“Got nothing to do with that,” Skid said calmly. “I've a great mind to lock Dr. Devilin up myself for leaving his house last night. But the fact is, I know Dr. Devilin's patterns and I know Mr. Taylor's patterns. Fever doesn't lie, because it doesn't occur to him. While this character trait seriously impairs his ability to interact socially, it does make him a fairly reliable commodity. On the other hand, Taylor is a lawyer whose business—and, as far as I can tell, his life—is predicated on the well-placed lie, the political expediency, and the sociological misdirection.”

“
Political expediency? Sociological misdirection
?” I gaped at Skidmore. “Where the hell—”

“All a part of the seminar in Alabama,” he explained to me, then turned again to Huyne. “So, based on prior knowledge and years of local experience, I would have to call Taylor the liar, whereas Dr. Devilin is merely the idiot.”

“Thank you.” I nodded ever so slightly to Huyne. “There you have it.”

“I
hate
this place!” Huyne spun around, talking to no one.

“The feeling is mutual!” Andrews called, still sitting in the truck.

Skid stared at me.

“You're a big troublemaker, you know that?” He almost succeeded in sounding serious.

“I don't know what it is about that person that rubs me the wrong way.” I watched Huyne grab the notebook out of his subordinate's hand.

“Oh, I expect he affects everyone that way.” Skid stepped off the porch and into the yard.

I knew he wanted me to follow him.

“You know you
really
ought not to have left home.” He wasn't looking back. “It was dangerous in a great many ways. Why don't you just meddle in things around here the way you usually do?”

“Well, as it happens, the environs you call ‘around here' don't contain all the information I need.”

“So are you thinking of flying to England next?”

“It had occurred to me.”

It had not, in fact, but I was assuming a certain belligerence toward the concept of policemen telling me what to do. A trip to Europe was obviously a part of that demeanor.

“Even though you have work to do around here?” Skid was still staring off into the woods.

“My work—”

“I mean about all this mess. About Shultz.” He sighed and turned to face me at last. “I believe you're forgetting an important element of your…I don't know what you'd call this. Your business?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Weren't there three things your great-grandpa bought at the Barnsley auction?”

Three or four sentences jumbled in my mind; all of them jammed up when they got to my tongue. A single syllable escaped, alone and without content.

“Ah.”

“What?” He blinked. “I've got you speechless? Is this really happening? God, I'd pay ten dollars for a witness to this moment.”

“How did you know about the—I don't remember telling you that there were three things.” I stood my ground, trying to gather my thoughts.

“When you were ranting and accusing some nameless member of the Barnsley family of killing Shultz, you mentioned something about it.” He smiled. “But I actually do a little investigation of my own every once in a while. You do remember that I actually am the sheriff, right? Swear to God, you don't give me a lick of credit for that.”

“I do,” I began hesitantly. “I just forget how good you are at it sometimes.”

“Whereas I take in nearly everything you tell me.” He sighed. “How many times have you drummed into me the idea, for example, that the number three is important? Whenever I tell you it's just superstition, you tell me that it's more than that. You say—let me see can I remember the exact words—‘Mythology reflects the world.' Do I have that right?”

“Sounds like one of my more pompous pronouncements,” I agreed, properly chastised, “and I'm impressed that you remember the phrase. I think maybe—”

“Because every time the number three appears,” he said, having a good time teaching me a lesson, “it makes a triangle, and a triangle is a universal symbol—”

“Will you please stop.” I put my hands over my ears.

“That's how you go on.” He drew in a heavy breath.

“How do you put up with me?” My own voice sounded a bit thin to me.

“Sometimes it isn't easy.”

“I can't believe you remember my ravings.”

“I remember them,” he said quietly, catching my eye, “because I know it means something to you. So I pay attention.”

I broke eye contact, gave a quick nod—too much emotional content for me in his words, too much to think about.

“The third object in question,” I began, erudite to a fault, “is a Cherokee artifact. Its disposition is unknown to me at the moment.”

“Maybe it would help to find out about it. You've gone to great lengths to investigate the other two.” He shrugged. “Or maybe I'm just trying to get you to stick around your house long enough for me to get you completely shed of a murder charge.”

“Either way.” I smiled.

“How are we going to find out anything about that Indian thing?” Andrews yelled from the truck.

I turned his way. “Have you been listening to our conversation?”

“As much as I could hear.” He finally opened his door. “You both mumble too much.”

“I'm going back inside.” Skid headed for the house.

“I suppose,” I said to no one in particular, “I could start with my father's trunk. Again.”

 

The most fascinating thing to me about my father's trunk when I was younger was its seemingly endless hidden places—pockets in black velvet, envelopes inside of hat linings, false heels on well-worn two-tone shoes. If he'd wanted to, I always believed, my father could have hidden our mountain in his trunk. He had done something more powerful to me already: He had hidden himself in it.

When I'd returned to Blue Mountain as an adult, years later, I did as little exploration or rearrangement of anything in either parent's room as I could without turning into Dickens's Miss Havisham. Still, I had been going through my own house, my little town, my troubled mind since I returned to Blue Mountain, looking for clues about my life—and every other mystery had been a metaphor. But I'd probably looked in that trunk more since Shultz's visit than anytime in the previous several years.

As I opened the lid that day in the darkness of my father's room, the familiar revulsion danced in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was, in fact, the third time I had looked inside the trunk since Shultz had first called me—was it only days ago?

Now, I thought, where would my father hide something about a Cherokee artifact?

I'd played the game since I was seven or so, trying to find rhyme or reason to his method, even long after it had become obvious that there was none.

Still.

I had a hopeless, sinking feeling, realizing I had been over and over everything in this chaos a thousand times or more. I would have noticed anything remotely resembling an Indian piece of art long before that day.

Still.

The lining of the trunk had long since been explored. The envelopes had recently been ransacked. Pockets and chambers and secret drawers had all been discovered. Every secret, surely, had been revealed—and the greatest of these was that there were no secrets at all, only tricks.

I sat on the floor, just staring at the thing before me. A sudden and completely inexplicable impulse to weep washed through me; then I thought I might actually throw up.

One last try, I thought, if only to defeat the intense and baffling emotional circus barreling through my rib cage.

Summoning preternatural powers of concentration, it occurred to me, only slightly, what a great reader of Poe my father had been. Could it really be that the now-exhausted cliché of hiding a thing in plain sight had been in his consciousness?

I tried to stare into the trunk and take in the whole of it, not its parts. I tried to see the contents as a single image rather than a disordered assemblage of dozens of individual puzzles.

Rolled up in a corner of the trunk, there was a sheaf of perhaps ten maps. I'd looked at them several times as a child, dismissing them as an adult. The most interesting was a map of Blue Mountain made by a government surveyor at the beginning of the twentieth century and amusing as much for its inaccuracies as its misspelling of our part of the mountain, which was recorded as belonging to the “Deverling” family. The rest were copies of older maps, some made as early as the 1700s. The whole affair had held little interest for me as a boy, and I had not looked at them since I'd returned home. What could be more boring than an old map?

A good trick that the mind plays is that it can disregard what it does not like. Furthermore, what it disregards can then become invisible.

Hence my dismissal of the coil of maps tied with yellowed string.

I plucked them from the corner and worked the string off them. The knot was too old to disturb.

I did my best to lay them out in the bad light of the room and began to search each one for anything resembling a clue, not for a second expecting to find anything.

One of the maps—entitled “Georgia, 1835,” a date that seemed significant in the back of my brain—had strange markings on it. Some of the letters looked like ornate medieval script; others weren't letters at all, just calligraphic designs. The note had been written on the map. It hadn't been part of the printing. I was about to move on to other maps, when I realized I was looking at a note written in “Talking Leaves,” Sequoyah's Cherokee alphabet.

 

Andrews, Skidmore, and I had been gathered around the map on the kitchen table for nearly an hour before Andrews stated the obvious.

“We'll never be able to read this.” He sat back.

“Why does 1835 seem a significant year?” I was talking to myself.

Skidmore sighed.

“Didn't you
ever
pay attention in elementary school?” He rolled his eyes. “The Treaty of New Echota was signed in December of 1835, and it ceded the last remaining Cherokee territory in Georgia.”