A Widow's Curse (14 page)

“What are you doing?” Andrews lurched forward. “You actually have to
drive
this truck or I'm walking back to your place.”

We came to a complete standstill on the road.

“What if the auction where Conner purchased all three items,” I said, “was at Barnsley Gardens?”

I was of two conflicting minds by the time we got back to my house. I hadn't been worried about the police while I'd been gone, but once Andrews and I clattered up the porch and through the front door, a certain dark mood took hold of me. When I walked into my living room, the entire matter of dead bodies and murder investigations made it difficult for me to find solace in the comforts of hearth and home. And I had a shiver thinking about lawyer Taylor and the Atlanta police.

“Are you hungry?” I glanced toward the kitchen, trying to remember what I had in the refrigerator.

“I don't know.” Obviously, Andrews was battling a mood of his own, or he would never have been ambivalent about food.

“I could wait.” My eye was on the kitchen phone. “I really want to know more about the painting. And now, thanks to you, we also have to find out more about this Barnsley Gardens place.”

“Not to mention finding out more about the coin.” Andrews matched my abstracted tone almost exactly. “Speaking of which, where is it now?”

“Hidden.”

In my mother's room, there was a loose windowsill. I knew because I'd seen her hide things there when I was little—when I'd been spying on her. On all those nights when she'd come home late, I would, on occasion, crawl out of bed as silently as I could and watch her. Those moments, sadly, were my favorite memories of my mother, watching her when she didn't know I was there. Sometimes I would see her pick up the board of the windowsill and put something there in the hollow under the window frame.

After any one of those incidents, during a long period when both parents were gone, I would steal into my mother's room to see what she had hidden there. I only looked in the spot a few times. I'd like to think that I matured eventually and didn't need to discover what secrets she was keeping from me, but the truth was probably based more in my discomfort at what I found in her secret place.

The first time, I found an old love letter from my father to her; the second time, I found a small plastic bag with a white powder in it. I didn't know what it was at the time, but it was almost certainly cocaine. The third time, I found a loaded gun. That was sufficiently strange to keep me from ever looking in her hiding place again while she was alive.

It seemed an oddly appropriate place to hide the coin, considering that it was the room where Shultz had slept. His things were still in the room.

“Right now, I feel I would trade everything about that damned coin to know who killed Shultz.” I glared at Andrews, as if it were his fault that I was filled with questions.

“Then why are we wasting our time on this painting?” He was responding to my scowl.

“The coin and the painting are a part of the same package.” I tried not to sound as if I thought Andrews were the slowest man on the planet. “Someone wanted the coin enough to kill Shultz for it. The coin and the painting are linked. I believe that the murderer is interested in the painting, too. We have a million things to find out about it. Who bought the painting from my father? Why did the London gallery say it wasn't worth much, when, in fact, it sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Why did Conner acquire it in the first place?”

“Okay.” Andrews stopped me before I could rattle on. “So we're abandoning our quest for more information about the coin?”

“No. God. The painting, the coin, and this Indian thing—whatever that was—aren't three separate things. Not for our purposes, I mean.”

“Then what are they?” He glared. “Are you coming unhinged?”

“They're all pieces of one puzzle, and the puzzle is clearly—”

“Cursed,” Andrews concluded. “That's the watchword, really.”

I sighed. “I was going to say that even though the pieces fit together, the final picture of the puzzle is still impossible to see.”

“I like my idea better.”

I ignored him and started up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Andrews stood staring up at me.

“I am going into my father's room,” I told him, “to rummage through his trunk—an enterprise I dread.”

“Upstairs? The trunk is right here.” He pointed to the dark corner, farthest away from the front door.

“No,” I corrected as patiently as I could manage, “that's Conner's trunk. It's empty. You may recall, I've been robbed recently. Whereas my
father's
trunk, upstairs—”

“Why are you looking in your father's trunk?” He was about as short with me as I'd been with him.

“In the hope of finding some way to contact my relatives in Wales. Obviously, they could answer some of our questions.”

“Leave me out of it,” he mumbled. “They're
your
questions. Your loony questions.”

“I seem to remember a packet of letters from Wales. I never really paid much attention to them, but they could be something.”

“Fine, then.” He put his hands in his pockets. “And what am I doing?”

“You're finding out more about the Barnsleys and their alleged garden.”

 

I wouldn't admit to Andrews what I could barely face myself: that I had no idea what I was doing.

It did seem remotely plausible that Shultz's murderer was someone who wanted the coin, and that the coin and the other two items Conner had purchased along with it were somehow related. They were certainly related to me. But apart from those patently obvious observations, I was flailing, grabbing at straws.

A significant failing of the human psyche is the inability to admit that so much of existence is random hazard.

I knew it was just as likely that a passing stranger had come into my house. Since I hadn't actually talked with Shultz, and could no longer trust lawyer Taylor, if I ever had, my supposition that there was a connection between the coin and the murder—and, by
that
implication, between the coin and the other two members of our sad trinity—was only the mind's vain attempt to make sense of a senseless tragedy.

Spill a small box of kitchen matches on a table, and the brain will find a pattern—
invent
a pattern where there is none. That's just how desperate human beings are for meaning in a meaningless universe.

Still, any action is better than inaction—a phrase fast becoming a mantra.

Andrews had acquiesced to my assignment silently and gone to his laptop computer, preferring to sit at the kitchen table than in the more comfortable seats in the living room.

I had gone upstairs to rummage through my father's old trunk—

Again.

The theory of
the eternal return
originated in ancient Egypt, later refined by Pythagoras. The basic idea is that time's not infinite in a linear fashion; instead, we repeat a finite series of actions over and over again throughout eternity. All time is cyclical.

This idea is basic to Hinduism and Buddhism, represented by the Wheel of Dharma: an endless repetition of birth, life, and death. But even in the European Middle Ages, this same symbol was found in the image of Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, the alchemical representation of eternity. Time is constantly devouring itself, never finishing the meal, always hungry.

The round nature of time, we are told, exists because the universe is always in the process of becoming and will never arrive at a final state of being. Eternity consists of an infinite number of identical circles.

I was fourteen years old when I discovered this idea, and I had nausea for three months afterward. I was depressed for the better part of that year. I wanted to kill myself, but, of course: what would have been the point? I'd just end up killing myself over and over again. What escape was there?
This
was a truer vision of Hell to me than anything Dante or a snake-handling preacher could invent. Just the idea that I'd have to repeat my high school experience even once more in eternity was enough to render me catatonic.

Over the years, a balanced regimen of philosophy and alcohol had eased the panic, but as I opened the lid to my father's trunk, the same stomach-churning ennui I had felt when I was an adolescent swept over me, and I had to sit on the floor.

Because there I was, participating in my own eternal return, going through my father's trunk once more. I took a moment to look around the room, hoping to calm my swirling brain. Andrews had already managed to demolish the thorough cleaning job I had given the place. Clothes were everywhere, and there was a half-eaten sandwich on my nice antique quilt at the foot of the bed.

I couldn't escape the sensation that I was still trying to fathom the meaning of meaningless events, as I had when I was young—still trying to make sense of a random series of events, hoping, ultimately, to find out why something had happened, when, in fact, there would never be an answer.

And the same old things were there in the trunk.

I picked up my father's flash ring and tried it on. The last time I had done so, the ring had engulfed my finger, but it fit just fine at that moment. The silver ring had a small open container compartment, about the size of a raisin, that was to be worn on the palm side of the hand. At the edge of that container was a circular flint that would spark enough to ignite a bit of flash paper that had been stuffed into the container. The result: fire.

My father could make balls of fire fly out of his hand at the audience; he could ignite an entire white screen onstage, which would vanish in an instant, revealing my mother, dressed as a harem girl, wrapped in a huge snake.

I dropped the ring back into the darkness of the trunk. I reminded myself that I was looking for a specific item this time, not vague, impossible clues to the existential dilemma.

I dug down to the bottom, underneath a heavy cloak, gnarled gloves, a copper pot. I found a small packet of letters, perhaps five or six envelopes. They had always been there, of course, but had held little interest for me when I was a boy. They were tied with white kitchen twine; all of them were from Wales.

Light slanted into the room through the window, but I turned on the glass lamp by the bed, as well. I sat back in one corner of the room, where the sunlight and lamplight collided.

The top letter was from a Professor Devin Briarwood. He had apparently written before. The return address was University of Wales, Aberystwyth, King Street, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 2AX, Wales. The envelope proudly declared:
Founded in 1872, the first university institution established in Wales.

The letter began, “Dear Mr. Devilin, Thank you for your charitable response, I did not, myself, believe that the coin would be in America.”

It went on at some length about “the coin of Saint Elian” and its value to Welsh history. Some unnamed person had told this Welsh professor that my father had come into possession of the coin, but apparently my father had denied it. Considering how secretive everyone in my family had always been, I thought it quite plausible that Conner had, in fact, never told my father anything about the coin.

Still, it seemed that Professor Briarwood, very possibly a distant relative, though he himself didn't seem to realize that possibility, was the ideal person with whom to start my inquiries. The letter indicated that he knew much more about the coin than I, perhaps more than anyone alive.

The other letters in the bundle were less promising. Three were from lawyers attempting to find out about Conner's will. The last one in the bunch was a bizarre and somehow heartbreaking handwritten genealogical chart of the Briarwood family. As far as I could tell, it started some time in the Middle Ages and one of the bottom lines ended with Conner, but it was mostly an incoherent mess. The note attached to it provided the emotional tug: “If you are Conner B., don't let our family die in America. Have you children? Please, please tell. Many questions.” It was unsigned.

Who could say how many years these letters had sat in the bottom of my father's trunk. I assumed they had gone unanswered, or there would have been more.

I tied up all but Professor Briarwood's missive, nestled them in a snug corner of the trunk, and closed the lid. I realized I was wishing, as I left the room, that I could have done the same with everything else having to do with my family—our tree.

 

Nearly an hour later I had made at least seven long distance calls, mainly encountering anger, ire, and unbelievably rude behavior, not to mention a plethora of curses in Welsh that had surely made a small black cloud easily seen from outer space. My Welsh was so bad that I couldn't make myself understood no matter how I pronounced the words, and I didn't know enough profanity in the language to keep up with the various Briarwoods I encountered.

Their general complaint, as far as I could manage to figure it out, was that there
were
no American Briarwoods, that Conner's family were Satan's spawn and, finally, that I should please rot like a mossy log in hell. One of the men actually used the words “mossy log.” The general attitude seemed a combination of economic covetousness—they all assumed that everyone in America, yours truly included, was richer than Midas—and a genetically encoded national pride: no true Welshman would abandon his native land for so paltry a place as America. I tried to explain that Conner had been wanted for murder. They all knew that. It was the only trait of his that they admired. They assumed he'd died in Ireland.

My first call had been to the university, but an answering machine had told me that Professor Briarwood was on sabbatical and would not be back before Christmas. I left a message with no hope of its ever being returned.

So I dialed information and took a stab at speaking with the distant kin, resulting in frustration and the aforementioned cursing.

I had long since chased Andrews out of the kitchen. He'd gone up to his room, my father's bedroom, to continue his research.

In absolute desperation I tried calling the university again. The phone rang for a while before a woman answered in Welsh.