A Widow's Curse (16 page)

Andrews was staring at me as if I had lost my mind. Doubtless, Skidmore was on the other end of the phone with more or less the same facial concern.

“One of the Barnsleys killed Shultz?” Skidmore was the first to react.

“Are you insane?” Andrews followed suit.

“Family legends take root.” I was looking at Andrews but speaking into the phone. “Someone in the Barnsley clan blames their family's ill fortunes on the cursed coin. In a time of need, someone in Blue Mountain allowed the coin to be sold. Now the Barnsleys have to get it back.”

“Why?” in stereo from both men.

“In order to rid themselves of the curse.” I tried to make it seem the most obvious thing in the world.

“Fever,” Skidmore began, irritated as he could possibly be, “you know I usually indulge your ideas because I believe they have a real meaning for you, and maybe for me, too. But if you think—”

“What I think is irrelevant,” I interrupted. “I'm not remotely saying I believe in this sort of thing. I'm only saying that some people do, and one of those people might be a Barnsley, and if he or she is, that would be reason enough to go to almost any lengths to get the coin back.”

“Why do they need to have the coin in their possession to get rid of the curse?” Andrews leaned forward onto the table.

“I heard that,” Skid said on the phone. “I'd like to know the answer myself.”

“Because the coin
contains
the curse.” That much was obvious, surely. “So when an object carries this much bad luck, the ancient ways are, I think, the best. Let's say we revert to Celtic lore. Get a black feather from a rooster, go to a crossroads, and, holding the feather and the coin, call out the name of the goddess Áine three times.”

“Stop,” Skidmore insisted. “Which goddess am I calling out?”

“Áine. She's one of the original Tuatha de Danaan, offspring of the goddess Dana—first tribe of Celts.” I watched Andrews shake his head. “She'll help you with the curse.”

“Right.” Skid was, I believed, on the verge of hanging up on me.

“And we revert to Celtic lore because?” Andrews spoke loudly enough for Skidmore to hear him.

“Appalachian folklore has its roots in a more ancient belief system brought to America by the Scots-Irish settlers in these mountains. That system belonged originally to the Celts. The people with whom we're dealing in this instance span the ocean, are genetically associated with both European and American variants of these beliefs, ergo—”

“Haven't I told you never to say the word
ergo
?” Skid broke in.

“Sorry.”

“Look, Fever,” Skid allowed, “I don't really care that you left the house when you weren't supposed to, or that your explanation for the murder belongs in an old-timey song more than in a crime investigation. But I am interested in the fact that you believe the Barnsley family has something to do with our situation, in light of what I've just found out.”

“You don't wonder if the Briarwood curse has anything to do with the Barnsley bad luck? You said yourself that everyone—with the apparent exception of myself—knows the stories about the Barnsley family foibles. So why wouldn't that same curse have something to do with the murder of Mr. Shultz? I'm talking about the
psychology
of a curse—nothing metaphysical whatsoever.”

“Do you want to hear why I called you?” Skidmore sighed, somewhat indulgently. “Or do you want to go on and on like a college professor?”

“‘Like a'—that's hitting below the belt a bit, isn't it?” I complained.

“I'm calling,” he insisted, losing patience with me, “because I've busied myself with a little actual police work. Melissa and I have been checking phone records, just like they do on television. And you might be interested to know that we discovered Mr. Shultz was called from England not long before he called you the first time. I recognized your number, of course. Right before that, someone in England called Shultz over a dozen times in two days.”

“From England?”

The surprise in my voice prompted Andrews to come to attention.

“What is it?” Andrews sat up straight.

“Someone called Shultz from England,” I told him, “shortly before he came up here.”

“Who called? Does he know?” Andrews asked.

“Melissa's still checking,” Skidmore answered, “but as far as we can tell, every call came from a household by the name of Barnsley.”

I moved to sit down at the table with Andrews.

“Who called?” Andrews insisted.

“He was called by the Barnsleys. In England.” My voice sounded hollow even to me.

“Hang on,” Andrews said slowly, suddenly tugging at his earlobe. “Hang on.”

“That's right,” I said, reading his mind.

“What's right?” Skid mumbled into the phone. “What's Andrews saying?”

“He's not saying anything,” I answered, “but I'll bet he's thinking the same thing I am. If you're right about those calls, then Mr. Shultz may have known a whole lot more about all of this business than we thought. Than he ever told us, I mean.”

“I'm not sure I understand that.” Skid's voice had gone quiet.

“Andrews and I have spent our considerable—as you so offensively referred to it—college professor prowess on research to come up with the Barnsley/Briarwood connection. Barnsleys called Shultz. What reason would they have for that except to ask him about the coin because they had somehow found out that his father had purchased it? They would have at least told him something about their family's claim to it just so Shultz would talk to them.”

“Got it.” Skid paused. “That's most likely how the Shultzes know that the coin used to belong to your family. Where does Shultz's father fit into this, by the way?”

“I'd like to know that myself.” I could feel myself grinding my teeth. “I'm assuming our Shultz didn't live with his father. I mean, you were checking our Shultz's phone, right?”

“The victim lived alone. Not with his father.”

“Hang on.” Andrews seemed stuck in a particular loop.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What if Shultz knew the murderer? Invited him to this house? Isn't that what Taylor said before he started to lie about us?” Andrews sat back, sheet-white, looking right at me. “Maybe the killer was here for you.”

“He's right, you know,” Skid said softly into the phone. “I heard that.”

What was more: that person could still be about somewhere, perhaps even nearby in the pine shadows just outside the sunlight in my yard.

Skid wanted to send someone over to the house, maybe Crawdad. As delightful as the prospect was, I declined. Andrews was with me, I would lock my doors for a change, and Skid was only a short drive away, no matter where in Blue Mountain he was.

The sun was going down by the time Andrews and I had finished talking over all our research, strange ideas, theories, guesses, and accusations: Shultz was evil or Shultz was innocent; lawyer Taylor was evil or he was in league with someone else to wrest my inheritance from me; Taylor was a small-town politico with pretensions too large for his capabilities; Taylor's secretary, Becky, was very attractive.

The final theory was almost exclusive to Andrews.

For my part, the more we talked, the less convinced I was that any rhyme or reason remotely applied to the facts as we knew them.

“Nothing makes any sense; nothing
means
anything,” I concluded. “Do you know what I was doing when Shultz called the other day, in fact?”

“What?” Andrews barely indulged me.

“I was moving big heavy rocks from one place to another. Rocks that will surely tumble back down in a very short time to the spot where they were in the first place.”

“Fine,” Andrews moaned. “You go ahead and be Sisyphus; be Camus or Genet or whichever depressed French existentialist it was who came up with the concept that life is meaningless, backbreaking work and then you die. Me? If it has to be French at all, I prefer the more bacchanalian Greek derivative: eat, love, drink more wine. And
cherchez la femme
all over the place.”

“I see.”

We had sat all afternoon at the kitchen table. I'd scrambled some eggs late in the afternoon. They went well, somehow, with the bottle of Veuve Clicquot that Andrews had given me last Christmas. I had been saving it for some New Year's Eve. Empty plates had been shoved to the middle of the table; empty glasses stood mute before us.

“But despite yourself, you were right about the connections among all of these things, you know,” Andrews went on. “I see the patterns now.”

“I was just thinking recently that if you spill a box of kitchen matches on a table, your brain will invent a pattern where there actually is none. That's how desperate we are for meaning in a universe that doesn't really offer an objective order at all.”

“God.” Andrews craned his neck around as if he had a crick.

“What?”

“You love this melancholy like a bleeding Frenchman. Is that your heritage, too?”

“In fact—”

“Look, I don't want to hear it!”

Even Andrews, I could tell, had been surprised by the sudden vehemence in his voice.

“All right.” I let out a slow breath.

“Sorry.” He looked around as if someone else might have yelled, not he. “I guess I'm a bit on edge. What the hell is the matter with me?”

We both glanced toward the living room for an answer.

“We're like two of the dwarves that didn't make the Snow White cut,” he said, obviously attempting to lighten the mood. “You're Gloomy and I'm Grumpy.”

“I think Grumpy actually
was
one of the seven.”

“No,” he corrected me breezily, “Dopey, Sneezy, Doc, Goofy, Happy, Gallant, and Dumbo.”

“Half of those aren't right.”

“I don't care.”

“And you know the actual story of Snow White—I mean, I could tell it to you if you're in a mood—”

“Not if you paid me one thousand dollars.” He sat back. “I've changed your name. You're not Gloomy; you're Snoozy.”

“Sleepy was one of the real dwarves, wasn't he? I think that's who I am right now.”

Night birds and dark wind filled the air outside my house. A pale moon struggled up the sky. Andrews and I did our best to ward off the night with deliberate laughter.

As human beings have always done, even before the discovery of fire.

 

Deeming it best to turn in early, we left the kitchen light on—our version of leaving the fire burning—checked all the windows, locked all the doors, and retired upstairs.

“I'm thinking of sleeping with my cell phone in my hand.” Andrews yawned at the top of the stairs. “I put Skidmore's number on speed dial.”

“I'm thinking of not sleeping.” I followed him up.

“Fever.” He didn't turn around, but his voice flooded the house with warm concern. “You have to get some sleep.”

I stopped on the stairs for a second, because it was the first genuinely kind utterance from Andrews in recent memory. I had the impulse to cry—a testament to how right he was about my need for slumber.

He went to his room; I went to mine. We both closed our doors.

Instantly, every sound outside, every creak of the floorboards, every thump on the roof took a beat out of my heart. I was more awake than I had been all day, and I could actually feel adrenaline diluting my blood as it pounded through me.

I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the bed fully clothed and on top of the covers. The little glass lamp on the bedside table didn't give much light to the room, but I left it on.

I tried to breathe slowly, counting my breaths as I exhaled, but every sound broke my concentration and caught my breath in my throat.

I felt hot.

I spent ten minutes trying to decide what to read, but nothing seemed interesting. I thought of getting out of bed and doing a few sit-ups and push-ups, but inertia kept me in bed.

Every time a random thought would leap out of the shadows and into my skull, I'd have to fight it off as if it were a bat trying to eat my brain.

I couldn't say when I finally drifted off to sleep.

But the violent explosion of breaking glass is what woke me back up.

I threw myself out of bed. Still in my clothes and my stocking feet, I moved as silently as I could to the door. I glanced at my watch. It wasn't even nine o'clock yet.

As I turned the handle of my bedroom door, I could hear noises downstairs. Every sound I made was like thunder: floorboards complaining, hinges screaming, my own breathing like a hurricane.

I was hoping I'd find Andrews in his own doorway, but his door was closed. By the time I stood at the top of the stairs, I could clearly hear someone walking around in my living room.

I stood for a moment, trying to plan how I might attack the intruder.

I heard him in the far corner of the room; I heard him lift the lid of Conner's trunk.

What was he looking for there? He'd already cleaned it out. Maybe he thought there was a secret compartment. He would never know that the secret compartment was in my mother's windowsill. That thought made me consider going back into my room, barring the door, and waiting until the intruder went away, frustrated at not finding the coin.

But of course I had to stop him. He'd murdered a man; he would stop at nothing.

I drew in an enormous breath and called on all the demon anger I had stored at the back of my brain.

“Stop!” I bellowed.

I heard the man downstairs stumble and take a short gasp.

I also heard Andrews fall out of bed.

“Don't move!” I shouted, almost as loudly as before. “Sit down on the floor.”

I started down the staircase, blood pounding in my ears, skin tingling with rage. Before I was halfway down, I saw the man bolt past the bottom of the stairs, heading toward the front door in the clear kitchen light.

“Stop!” I screamed again, so violently that it clawed my throat.

The man was desperately trying to figure out the lock. The front door was still secured. I took a few more steps down and could see that he'd gained access to the house by smashing in the living room window that looked out onto the front porch.

Suddenly, I heard Andrews behind me.

“We've got a gun,” he said, clearly still half-asleep.

“We don't have a gun,” I said instantly.

The man turned. He was carrying a cricket bat. He snarled but did not speak. He was something trapped in a corner, less than human.

Shadows obscured his face. He was dressed in thrift-store rags—torn jeans, a flannel shirt three sizes too big, a wool cap. The look made his weapon surreal. But it was just the kind of thing to use if you wanted to break a thick window and didn't care about the noise—or if you wanted to make a dent the size of a brick in the back of someone's head.

“We do, in fact, have a gun.” Andrews came up beside me on the stairs, aiming a small silver barrel at the intruder. “Hey! He's got a cricket bat!”

“I know,” I said, trying to get my bearings.

“Put it down and have a seat on the floor,” Andrews said calmly, pointing his weapon directly at the man's chest.

The intruder erupted, a howl escaping him that shook what was left of my windows. He spun around to face the door again and with one crashing blow of his bat knocked the handle and the lock off my front door.

It was a wild, desperate gesture. The locking mechanism remained intact, and of course the door opened inward, so it would have been nearly impossible for him to force it out. When it wouldn't open, he screeched again and came toward us with the bat, pounding the stairs.

Andrews fell backward; I wondered that his gun didn't fire. Whether I was too frightened or too stupid to move didn't matter ultimately. Standing my ground seemed to confuse the man at the bottom of the stairs.

He grunted, not quite knowing what to do next.

“I'll shoot!” Andrews managed from his reclined position.

The man snorted, shook his head, and walked toward the window he had broken.

Andrews got to his feet and sighed.

“You're not going to stop him?” he asked me.

“You're not going to shoot at him?” I countered.

He held out his hand. He showed me his cell phone. It had a thick antenna, which almost looked like the barrel of a small pistol. I remembered his telling me he had to use it when he was making calls from the mountain, a special attachment of some sort—good for communication, completely useless as a firearm.

The man was scrambling out the window. A bit of his shirt caught on a shard of glass. I thought he cut himself a bit on the back of his hand. He thumped onto the front porch before Andrews and I were able to mobilize.

We clattered down the stairs, only to see the man lumber across the lawn in the early moonlight.

“Well, if you can't use that thing to shoot at that man,” I stammered, glaring at Andrews, “could you at least call Skidmore? Didn't you just say that Skidmore ought to be on your—”

But he had already hit the speed-dial button.

 

Skidmore was in the process of asking us to describe the events of the break-in for a third time when Melissa came into the kitchen.

“Got a blood sample and a tissue sample,” she said, holding up what looked like small sandwich bags. “Also threads from the shirt, or whatever he was wearing.”

“So he didn't speak,” Skid said, making doodles on his notepad around the few words he'd jotted down. “He was dressed like a homeless man, and he had a cricket bat in his hand?”

“Torn jeans,” I said as I had twice before, “flannel shirt—mostly red and gold—and a wool cap.”

“And a cricket bat.”

“It doesn't matter how many times you say it.” I glared at Skidmore. “It won't make any sense.”

“Sorry, Dr. Devilin,” Melissa said gingerly. “But I don't believe I've yet heard you mention his shoes.”

“Shoes?” I looked at Andrews.

“Hang on.” Andrews raked his hand through a blond wreckage of hair. “He wasn't wearing sneakers or work boots or anything that went with the rest of his outfit.”

“He wasn't?” I was at a loss.

“He was wearing Marks and Spencer oxfords.” Andrews could not believe what he was saying, and he was more pleased with himself than I had ever heard him. “He was wearing dress shoes from England.”

“What?” I thought I'd heard him wrong. “Are you sure?”

“They were my first adult footwear; wore them for my confirmation. They don't look like any other shoes in the world, and I'll never forget them.”

“Confirmation?” I blinked. “As what?”

“In the Church of England, when a boy turns twelve,” Andrews began.

“Could we stick to the shoes for a minute,” Skid intervened. “You're saying he was wearing fancy dress shoes from England?”

“The jeans and work shirt were a disguise.” I was certain of it; I found I'd suspected it all along once I said it out loud. That would explain his not speaking and deliberately odd behavior, I thought.

Skidmore stared at me, waiting.

“I've been developing a theory that doesn't hold much water,” I admitted, “but here it is: Some Barnsley is after the coin, as I've said. He followed Shultz up here—your discovery of the phone calls to him might confirm that. Once here, he demanded the coin from Shultz. When Shultz didn't have it, they argued and Shultz got the thick end of that cricket bat. Have a look at his skull, the way it's caved in. I think you'll see I'm right. That Barnsley came back tonight, dressed in such a manner as to hide his true identity. He's the murderer.”

“Because of this old silver coin from England.” Skid hadn't moved.

“Wales,” Andrews corrected.

“Because of a curse that one of your kin put on it.” Skid shook his head and folded up his notepad.

“All right, then,” I countered, “because it's worth however much money Detective Huyne said it was.”

“Shoot,” Skid said, “you're just guessing. You're trying to make sense of something that's most likely a random event.”

I turned a jaundiced eye on Andrews.

“Please,” he begged Skidmore. “Now you're just feeding his angst.”

“I don't know what that is,” Skidmore said, standing, “but Melissa's got some real evidence, and my plan is to use it to get Dr. Devilin out from under suspicion of murder and, in the process, get the aforementioned Atlanta policemen off my ass.”