A Widow's Curse (12 page)

“I always forget that.” I shoved into first gear.

“So what about the library?”

“Yes. How about if you go and try to find out more about the painting while I deal with Taylor.”

“The portrait by Cotman. You know I could access Galileo on my own computer.”

“In the first place, a library has actual books and a less superficial exploration of most topics than any Internet search,” I growled, “and in the second place, do you really want to stay alone in my house while I'm gone right now?”

“I love a good library,” he said without missing a beat.

And if our venture seemed a bit half-baked, or even more than a little desperate to either of us, we kept silent and did not share our doubts with each other.

Any action is better than inaction.

I dropped Andrews off at the Pine City Library. It was the best in the county, the product of an older generation's noblesse oblige to the poor mountain community that had spawned them. Railroad money had made some men in Pine City wealthy. Those who had prospered gave back to the community in the form of a hospital, a library, and a civic garden.

The library had been a fine modern design when it was built in 1954. My opinion of architecture from that era is that it reflects the sentiments of the age perfectly: It's square, unimaginative, determined to be boring—and proud of it.

This library was a sterling example of the genre: a low one-story L-shaped redbrick building with absolutely no distinguishing detail of any sort. The windows were eight or ten feet high and two feet wide, framed in white concrete. Landscaping in the form of militantly manicured boxwoods gave the look of the whole its final yawn. To make matters worse, the brick had gone to moss and grunge. It gave the whole place an appearance of never being used at all. Andrews looked so forlorn standing on the cracking entrance path that I almost told him to get back into the truck and go to Taylor's with me.

But he waved, a bit of cool wind tousled his air, and he was gone, disappearing into the shadows at the door.

The morning had opened up nicely: cooling breeze, warming sun, blazing sky. I headed to the offices of Taylor and Taylor, Attorneys at Law.

When I pulled my truck into the driveway, I couldn't see any other cars parked around the house. I got out of the truck and stomped onto the front porch, hoping to alert anyone inside that a large man who meant business was on his way in. My performance, alas, was in vain. The door was locked; the place seemed deserted.

Nevertheless, I pounded on the door like a man with a mission. Instantly, I heard noises within: a chair scraping across the floor, footsteps.

The door opened, and Becky Meadows was smiling up at me. She was wearing a pale blue spring dress and a white cashmere button sweater.

“I just knew it was you.” She lowered her voice. “I believe I might be just a little bit psychic. They say lots of southern girls are.”

“They do say that.” I smiled back.

“Mr. Taylor is in court—or, really, what they call ‘in chambers' with a judge. He won't be back until after lunch, he said.”

“May I come in?”

She sighed, did not move.

“I'm not supposed to let anyone in. I mean, he said, Mr. Taylor? He said not to let anyone in while he was gone.” Becky pursed her lips. “He said it was because he's worried about my personal safety, but I believe he might actually have doubts about my intelligence level, you know?

“I
do
know. And I'm not
anyone.
I'm a client—sort of.”

“Oh, you're a client all right,” she assured me.

“And you know why I'm here. Because there were several files missing from the group you showed me yesterday. And you know I know that—not only because you're a little bit psychic but also because your intelligence level is higher than you let on, and certainly higher than Mr. Taylor or your father can imagine.”

It was all conjecture, but a third of all the information I had ever collected from reluctant folk informants had been the result of what I thought of as “the flattering guess.”

Her eyes widened so dangerously that I thought they might actually pop out of their sockets. My technique had worked.

“How do you know all that?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

I matched her tone. “I might be a little bit psychic, too.” Alas, that was the best I could do in the way of
charm.

“Especially about those files.” She was amazed and wanted me to know it. “Everybody says you're a really smart man, but damn.”

“So…” I made as to take a step in through the door.

She stood aside.

The office was dark even on such a bright day, partly because the house itself had been designed in an era when dark rooms were the fashion and partly because all the curtains were closed and the lights were off everywhere except over Becky's desk.

“Or course I'd like to see any files pertaining to my family that I did not see yesterday. I think there were two of them missing from the group, but there may be more.”

“There are only two I know about.” She looked down. “I mean, there's more, you know, that pertains to your whole family as a whole—but I know the two you want. I'm supposed to say, if you ever asked, that I misfiled them—you know, because of all the correspondence sent overseas was in the name of Briarwood, not Devilin. It is confusing, but I didn't misfile any damn thing. Mr. Taylor told me to put them in another drawer and not to tell you about them. That's a lawyer's version of honesty: never lie, but always hide the truth and don't mention it, you know?”

She looked out the door for a brief second, as if we were both cheating spouses, then closed it and went immediately to the bank of file cabinets behind her desk.

“I'm not going to ask you why he did this.” I followed behind her. “I'd rather believe that you don't know.”

I had decided to let go of whatever other files she had concerning my “whole family as a whole,” at least for the moment.

“Believe away.” She waved her hand over her shoulder without looking back at me. “You could write a book on what I don't know around here.”

She made straight for a cabinet in the corner, pulled open the second drawer from the top, and fished out two manila folders.

“Here they are.” She turned back to me. Her face was grim. “How long you reckon you might be—looking at these things, I mean?”

“Two hours?”

“If you get close to lunchtime, I'll have to take them back. I can't let Mr. Taylor see—”

“Understood,” I interrupted. “Shall I just nip on back to the conference room where we were yesterday?”

“Uh-huh.” She held her breath for a second.

I could see she had something more to say.

“Yes?” I wanted to give her the opportunity.

“That'n you were with yesterday? The English accent man? Is he as old as you? I don't mean to be rude.”

I failed to keep a brief smile from lighting my face.

“You're not the least bit rude. Dr. Andrews is only a year younger than I, but he looks, I realize, closer to your age than mine. That's the boyish, ruddy complexion of an English heritage working overtime.”

“I'm not entirely sure what that means, but he
is
cute.”

“He is that.” Why not make a bit of a match? I thought. “And I'm certain he felt the same about you.”

“Doubt it.” She blushed and looked toward the filing cabinet as if she'd forgotten something.

“I'll go and have a look at these files now.”

She nodded without looking at me.

I headed down the dark hall, flipped on the light in the conference room, took a chair across the table, facing the door, and got to work.

 

I'd sorted through ten or twelve long legal documents in one of the folders, marked “C. Devilin, Instructions, Various,” before I'd come across the first one that chilled me.

It was a detailed list of what should be sent to “one Molly O'Shea, without her knowledge of the sender.” Attached to the list was a letter dated May 3, 1919:

I knew that Molly was the woman for whom Conner had killed a man. I knew about the silver lily, and its importance. What I found fascinating was the list attached to the letter: items that were all, apparently, fair game for selling to convert to cash, which Conner had instructed was to be sent to Molly O'Shea. They included, among other things, a deed to a silver mine in Wales.

At the bottom of the list there was a forlorn little note: “Void, see attached letter.” It was stamped with the date September 7, 1919, and after the stamp there was another handwritten note that said, “Ref. Silver Mine, doc. #31.”

I shuffled through the folder and, surely enough, found a single piece of paper with the number 31 in the upper right-hand corner. That page outlined the details of a sale of the deed to a silver mine in Aberystwyth, Wales. The proceeds were invested, and then the entire account based on those moneys was closed in 1942, when Conner, quite abruptly, took the money out and bought “3 items at auction. See doc. 42.”

“Doc. 42,” as it happened, was in the other folder marked “Proposed Disbursements.” It was a bill of sale for the portrait by Cotman. Attached to it were several other pages. One was a long letter from my father to Conner, the upshot of which was that my father had done as he'd been told; the portrait had been sold in order to pay for my university education. There was an entire paragraph imploring Conner to explain why the portrait was so important—obviously it had been the object of some argument.

That letter was dated 1975, which was, if I remembered correctly, the year Conner died.

But as I read further, I encountered my second chill.

My father wanted to know what to do with the rest of the proceeds. The painting had sold for $250,000.

 

Apparently, no one had realized that the painting would be so valuable, with the possible exception of Conner, who, it was beginning to seem, possessed as much brilliance as he did stubbornness—a mighty accomplishment.

Another one of the documents attached to that same swath was a letter from the Ashton Gallery in London attesting to the authenticity of the painting: “…rare, perhaps one-of-a-kind portrait by Cotman, of Lady Eloise Barnsley, circa 1804.” The letter went on to say, however, that it was impossible to assess its value properly because there was no way to compare it with any of Cotman's other works, and that Cotman was a “negligible artist.” Their explanation was: “Cotman often used a gray underpainting and thickly brushed color, which dull his paintings rather than let the light shine through. This muddy style is grim; not to the tastes of our London collectors.”

So why, my father concluded in his letter to Conner, had it sold for such an astonishing price in 1975?

I set the papers down and took a breath.

What struck me most about all of this information was how a strange series of events had transpired in order to reach into my life and change it profoundly: a false love, a murder, a silver mine, a whim, an auction, a portrait: my ticket out of town.

And, with a pinch at the back of the jaw, I wondered, too, at the odd path a silver coin had taken from a mint in Wales to a rich man's son, who gave it to me just before he became a corpse.

The astonishing connection between seemingly random events was nearly overwhelming to me at that moment. It all seemed to confirm, as most things in my life did, my deep belief in folklore, in mining the past for the real treasure: my own desperate, mysterious attempt to prove an interconnectedness between all events and all human beings.

It was an attempt that had always failed, to my great disappointment.

Still, it was, I knew, the reason for the work I did—among the greatest reasons for doing anything on the planet: proving faith.

When you're looking at a dusty, yellowing piece of paper, you could actually be looking at the root of your tree.

When you listen to an old man tell a long, boring story about how things used to be, you're actually listening to the beginnings of human culture.

When you hear a tinny song cautioning young women in eighteenth-century Dublin not to be “easy and free,” you're genuinely hearing a life-and-death warning, today, from your wisest ancestors.

If you don't know your roots, you'll never know your path. If you ignore the beautiful past, you're in for an ugly future. These stories and songs comprise precious information about the past and make the greatest mirror devised by the human will, because in it we can see ourselves. If you know the song “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier,” then you know the privation of all war. If you know the story of your grandmother's courtship, then you know the enduring, cyclical nature of all love. If you really listen to the sound of a fiddle scraping silver notes in a moonless night as they pierce like a dagger into the darkness, then you know all there is to know of life.

But just as my self-congratulatory silent sermon rose to a nearly anthemic pitch in my brain, it was interrupted by Becky Meadows, in a panic.

“He's in the driveway!” She was already shuffling papers and gathering folders. “He's back early, and he blocked your truck in, so you can't get out!”

“Easy,” I told her, standing. “We'll tell him whatever he wants to hear.”

“Like hell,” she shot back. “He
wants
to hear that you didn't come by today, but he's not likely to believe that now, is he?”

“I can be pretty convincing.” I smiled, I believed, wanly.

She was in no mood.

“What
are
you going to say, Dr. Devilin, no kidding?”

“Have you ever heard the saying, The best defense is a good offense?”

“No.”

I handed her the last few papers just as we both heard the front door open.

“Watch and learn.” I took a deep breath. “Taylor! Is that you?”