The Blood Ballad (25 page)

I forgot all of that sometimes and thought of it as just another piece of real estate that needed the foundation fixed, the trim painted, and the roofing tiles replaced, but it was much, much more than that.

In my office, I stared at the antique Rose of Sharon quilt that Glory Anne Kendall had made almost ninety years ago. I had debated whether or not to put it with the rest of the collection over at the Kendall home, but it had been a gift to Sylvia, and it had hung in my office forever. It got taken down every now and then and replaced with another antique quilt for a few weeks, while it was being cleaned, but I always made sure I put the Rose of Sharon back. It lent such a spark of cheerfulness to the otherwise cramped and cluttered room.

I booted up my computer and opened the file on the families of New Kassel.

Back in the seventies, during the nation's bicentennial, Sylvia had started collecting family group sheets and five-generation charts for all of the residents of New Kassel. Believe it or not, New Kassel was not the type of place that too many people moved to for jobs. My family happened to be one of the families that had moved here from someplace else, but such families represented about 10 percent of the population. Most families had been here since the 1920s, when New Kassel was a major stop on the rail line that ran along the Mississippi. When the train no longer stopped here, New Kassel had declined—that is, until Sylvia came along and turned it into an enchanting tourist attraction.

By gathering the five-generation charts and group sheets of the people who lived here in the seventies, Sylvia had been preserving the history of the town. Most of those people could trace their families here back to the mid-1800s, or at least to the turn of the twentieth century. So while my personal family charts wouldn't help anybody with the history of New Kassel, most of Sylvia's charts would. Not to mention that Sylvia had added a lot of her own research when working on this project.

I typed in the name Mercer and waited to see what came up. I clacked my fingers against the side of the computer while I waited for the information. Back in the seventies, before the age of genealogy software, genealogists recorded everything on charts. On a five-generation chart, a person puts his or her name in slot one, along with pertinent vital statistics, such as birth date and place, spouse, and so on. Then for generation two, he would give information for his parents; for generation three, his grandparents; for generation four, his great-grandparents; and last, for generation five, his great-great grandparents. When I first started tracing my family tree, I thought, Gee, I just want to get this five-generation chart completely full. Well, if you've done any research at all, you know you can't just stop there. If you know all the names of all of your ancestors for five generations, you should have thirty-one names on your completed chart.

A family group sheet is an individual's family. So, a group sheet for my grandparents would include all their vitals, plus information like their burial place, their occupation, et cetera. Then I would list all of their children, not just my direct line. If you do a group sheet on all of your direct ancestors, you can record who your ancestors' siblings were. Believe it or not, you can actually find out information on a direct ancestor by following the trail of one of that person's siblings. You never know who might have a family Bible, letters, or some other form of information.

When Isabelle Mercer's name came up, I wasn't surprised. Her family had lived in New Kassel during the first few decades of the twentieth century; that, I knew for sure. Unless Sylvia had submitted the information, somebody in the seventies or later had filled out a family chart for the Mercers. I glanced down at the name of the submitter. It was Frank Mercer. The chart was for the family of Huxley and Evelyn Mercer, whose children were Thomas, James, Isabelle, Lucille, and Grover. That meant Frank had to be a son or grandson of Thomas, James, or Grover. Frank Mercer's address was for Ona, a little bitty speck on the map just north of New Kassel. The town, situated on a bluff, had maybe sixty residents, a gas station, a church, and a little clock shop with cuckoo clocks sitting out on the front porch.

I picked up the phone to call him, then realized that even if he still lived there and still had the same number as the one listed on the chart, I shouldn't call right then, since it was at least eleven o'clock at night. Putting the phone back down, I pulled out some ancient volumes of biographies of the noted gentlemen of Granite County, Missouri. I love the way the women are never included in these old histories and biographies, except about three-fourths of the way through a biography, where it mentions whom the gentleman married. Then, more often than not, the woman is just named, and you get more information on her father than you do on her. It really irks me. It seems to me that women are treated as a footnote to history, when nothing could be further from the truth.

At any rate, I knew that Huxley Mercer would be in one of these volumes, since he'd been the mayor of New Kassel. Sure enough, there was even a photograph of him. The information included was typical of the biographies of that day. “Huxley Mercer was a noted and distinguished gentleman of great intellect and character. Educated locally in his youth, he later attended school in St. Louis. When he returned, he married Evelyn Geist and raised a very handsome and respectable family.” It was full of the usual adjectives—
noted, distinguished,
and
respectable,
among others. I've yet to read a biography in one of these books that doesn't include those terms. It then went on to describe his religious and political preferences and his career as mayor, as well as giving a very brief history of his family. For example, it mentioned where his parents and grandparents were from and that they were part of the “esteemed Mercer family of Connecticut,” as if that would mean anything to the average reader. It wasn't as if he were a Vanderbilt, for crying out loud.

I got lucky, though. At the time the biography was written, his daughter Isabelle was engaged to be married. They had to mention that, because she was engaged to a member of a “distinguished and esteemed” family in St. Louis. Her fiancé's name was Archibald Louis Patterson King III. A May wedding was planned. The ceremony was to be held in St. Louis, at the groom's residence on Westmoreland.

You don't realize how quiet a house is until somebody disturbs the quiet. I'd been happily reading along, and suddenly there was a loud knocking on the back door of the Gaheimer House. I jumped and let out a squeal, then felt silly. I got up to go answer the door, but and my cell phone rang at the same time. I skipped back into the office, picked my phone up, and flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Torie, where are you?” It was Rudy.

“I'm at the Gaheimer House, going over some charts. I was just about finished. Why? Am I that late?” I asked.

“No, no. You're not that late. Somebody just set off a smoke bomb in the stables.”

“What?” I stopped in my tracks.

Another knock at the door.

“Yeah, it spooked the horses like crazy. And while we were all out trying to calm the horses down, somebody slipped in the house and ransacked your office.”

The knock at the door grew louder and more insistent.

Chills scooted along my scalp. My hair moved involuntarily. “W-what do you mean?”

“Somebody was looking for something in your office!” he yelled.

“Okay, you don't have to scream.” I stepped into the hallway and peered at the door in the kitchen.

“Well, you're not hearing me,” he said.

“Are the kids all right?”

“They're fine.”

“Is that a siren I hear?”

“Yes, the fire department is out here.”

“Why?”

“The smoke bomb. Look, are you all right?”

Another knock at the door. This time, the curtains moved with the force of the knock.

“Can you stay on the line and call the police if you hear me scream?”

“What? What! Torie, God—”

I stepped toward the door and took a deep breath. Then at the last minute, I glanced around for some sort of protection. I grabbed the rolling pin off the wall and set my cell phone down on the counter. Grasping the end of the rolling pin, I yanked the door open and smacked Eleanore square in the forehead.

“Oh, for the love of God!” she screamed.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I said.

“You're crazy!” she screamed, holding her head. Her eyes were watering. “You're a menace. A plague!”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “Come in.”

“I'm not stepping foot in any building that you're in ever again,” she said, and raised her chin—just enough for me to see the huge goose egg that was forming in the middle of her forehead like a third eye.

“I really wish you would move to California … or Canada!” she said, seething.

“I said I was sorry. You know, you shouldn't sneak up on people.”

“Sneak up! I was banging on the door!”

“Well, you shouldn't do that, either,” I said.

She glared at me. “I just came by to give you the results of our national standings and the photographs of your kids in the horse show we had last fall.”

“Our national standings for what?” I asked.

“For the birds that we saw on Olympic day.”

“You mean we weren't the only town having a birding Olympics?”

“No, there were cities all over the country,” she said as snottily as she could with a giant bump on her head.

“Oh.”

“You really are a menace to society,” she said and shoved a handful of papers and photographs at me.

“This couldn't have waited until morning?” I asked.

“I was excited. I saw your light on. It's not like we live in a big city. People can walk around here at night. We do it all the time.”

I ran to the refrigerator, got out an ice pack, and handed it to her. “Well, you know, Eleanore, I was feeling pretty guilty about your forehead until you told me that you were out wandering around at eleven just to give me bird statistics!”

“You bludgeon me, and I'm the one to blame, is that it?”

“Well, something like that,” I said.

“Stay away from me,” she said and left with my ice pack.

“That's what I've been trying to do for twenty years!” I called after her.

I picked up the cell phone and said, “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Did you just maim Eleanore?” Rudy asked.

“Yeah, I thought she was the same person you just told me ransacked my office. Or a burglar.”

“Does a burglar ordinarily knock?” he asked.

I was quiet a moment, contemplating that. “Well, it wouldn't have happened if you hadn't just called and told me about somebody ransacking my house. You freaked me out.”

“As well you should be freaked out. Can you come home now?”

“I'm on my way.”

Twenty-three

As soon as I arrived home, Colin, Rudy, and Sheriff Mort were all thundering toward my car in the snow and the cold, their breath billowing away in puffy clouds. If it hadn't been for the fact that they were all upset—some more than others—I would have made some joke about how they reminded me of the zombies from some B horror movie. When I got out of the car, Rudy put his hands on his hips and said, “Thank goodness you're all right.”

“Well, of course I'm all right. I wasn't here when everything happened. The question is, Are
you
all right? How are the kids?”

“I told you everybody's fine.” Then he hugged me, but I could tell he was upset. It wasn't as if I had done anything to provoke this; he just needed to be angry with somebody in general. Quite often a spouse is the default punching bag.

“Why were you at your office this late?” Colin asked.

“I can be at my office as late as I want,” I said. I'd say I was a bit defensive, but that would be an understatement.

“You should be more careful,” Rudy and Colin both said at the same time.

“I can't believe you went off and met that cousin guy of yours without taking anybody with you,” Colin chided.

“Wait just a doggone minute. I am a grown woman. I can go wherever I want. Hell, Colin, I've done far stupider things than this, and you know it,” I said.

After a moment's pause, he said, “Well, that's true.”

“See?” I said. I figured this was probably the only time that I'd be happy that Colin agreed that I'd ever been stupid. “There you go. In the grand scheme of things, this was barely stupid at all.”

“All right, all right, I need to talk to Torie,” Mort said. Rudy and Colin exchanged glances and then decided to leave me alone with Mort, although they took only about ten steps to the left and stood at the fence, watching the sheriff and me the whole time. Mort looked me straight in the eye and said, “What did you find out?”

“About what?” I asked.

“Somebody was after something,” he said. “You have to
have
something for them to be looking for it.”

“All right, I'm going to pretend for a moment that sentence made any sense whatsoever,” I said.

“You know what I mean. What is it you have?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Has anybody checked on my cousin Phoebe's whereabouts?”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, whoever did this went to great lengths to make sure he or she didn't actually hurt anybody. Not even the animals. Which makes me think it's somebody who knows me. Phoebe's crazy. She could think I have some information that I'm not sharing with her.”

“I don't understand,” he said.

“She's been working with Glen Morgan. Who knows what she's thinking?”

“What about Glen, anyway? He could have followed you, seen that you didn't go home, and then come out here to try to get whatever it is you have.”