A Widow's Curse (17 page)

“Your language really has gotten worse since you've become sheriff,” Andrews said absently.

Skid stared.

“Do you two make these things up before you see me just to vex my mind?” He squinted.

“What?” Andrews didn't know what he'd said to vex the sheriff.

“You got some plywood you can nail up over that window for tonight?” Skid was on his way to the door.

“I'll find something.”

He stopped with his hand on the open, broken front door.

“I'm going to leave Melissa's squad car in your yard tonight,” he said without turning my way. “That's why we brought two cars.”

“It's locked, though, so you can't get anything out of it,” Melissa volunteered.

“You know you can't go anywhere now, right, Fever?” Skid still wasn't looking at me. “I mean it this time.”

“I understand what you're saying,” I responded.

He offered me a low, exasperated mumble—completely unintelligible—then pulled the door open and headed toward his car.

 

Not five minutes later, I was on the road to Hek and June's house. I knew I would wake them, but I was angry enough to break down the door if I had to.

Andrews had all but stood in the doorway to prevent my leaving, but when I told him to come with me, he declined.

I insisted. I wasn't going to leave him in the house alone.

“Aren't you afraid the guy will come back?” Andrews said, arms folded tightly against the chilled air.

“With every light in the house on and a police car on the lawn?” I said. “Not likely.”

“What about the open window?”

“Close the curtains and shove a chair up against them to hold them shut until we get back. I'm not planning to be gone long.”

Without much more argument, Andrews gave in, pulled on a jacket, and ran after me out the front door to my truck.

I spun the tires and scattered mud, some of it onto Melissa's squad car.

“What do you think you're going to get out of Hek and June that you haven't already?” Andrews sank down into the passenger seat.

“You don't understand.” I ground my teeth around the words. “They know everything. They know about the coin, the painting, the murderer, God knows what else.”

“What? You're losing your mind.” He swallowed. “They don't know all that.”

“They know
so
much more than you think they do.”

“No.” He was firm. “They know so much more than you
wish
they did.”

“Maybe.”

The road was all black water, a snaking river. Clouds cut and bisected the air, sliced at the moon. The wind was cold as a silver nail and twice as biting. Stars had no hope in the wilderness of that night and seemed to have blinked out, waiting for a more opportune sky.

Andrews and I traveled the rest of the way to Hek and June's house in silence. By the time we pulled up close to their door, I was tense as a bowstring, ready to snap.

I shot out of the car. Andrews barely caught up with me as I bounded up the porch steps and began pounding on the door with the back of my fist. Yellow light from an upstairs window spilled onto the lawn and my truck behind me, but I kept pounding on the door.

“Stop.” Andrews was whispering for some reason. “They're up.”

I stood poised right at the threshold, shaking a little. The rage I had built to help me deal with the intruder and the leftover adrenaline still spoiling my blood were causing minor tremors. I must have looked like a demon when Hek opened the door.

He stared at me for less than two seconds, then nodded as if he'd been expecting me. He stood aside and opened the door wide enough for me to shove past him.

Andrews followed, nodding politely.

June was already in the kitchen at the percolator, wrapped in the same navy blue robe she'd had for decades, hair somehow perfect even under the circumstances. She didn't look up.

“What happened?” She didn't stop scooping coffee into the metal basket inside the pot.

It wasn't at all a strange first thing to say to me. In Blue Mountain if the phone rang after midnight or, worse, someone came to your door, it only meant something wrong had happened.

Nothing good ever came to the door after midnight.

“Someone just broke into my house.” I sat at the kitchen table, more from habit than from a genuine desire to sit down. “He broke out my living room window, went through my house, and threatened my life.”

“Mine, too.” Andrews sat beside me, not certain of the proper behavior for such an odd convocation.

“You remember Dr. Andrews.” I inclined my head in his direction.

“We heard about your Mr. Shultz,” Hek said, taking a seat opposite me at the table.

Hek had thrown a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt, but nothing covered his long johns. He was wearing indoor/outdoor slippers that, obviously, someone had given him for Christmas.

“Bad business.” Hek stared at the tabletop as if he were trying to read it. “So what is it you want to know?”

“What is it I want to know?” I repeated, hoping to drive my astonishment into his brain. “I want to know all the things you wouldn't tell me about this mess when I came over here just the other day.”

“About Conner.” June plugged in the percolator.

“Yes.” I could barely keep myself from exploding. “About Conner.”

“He's upset,” June explained to Hek, taking a seat beside him. “Coffee be ready in a minute.”

“Ordinarily, I stay calm about this sort of thing,” I began, voice strained, “and I believe I'm very patient.”

Hek coughed. It turned into a laugh immediately.

“You can believe the funniest things about yourself,” he finally managed to tell me. “You don't have the patience God gave a moth.”

“I don't know what that means and I don't care,” I began.

“He's unhappy because somebody broke his window.” June was doing her best to inform Hek.

“No,” I insisted. “I'm unhappy because someone killed a man in my house and then came back to try and kill me. This has nothing to do with a window.”

“I've got some glass out in the shed,” Hek told me calmly. “We'll see what we can do about that window tomorrow or the next day. You got some plywood you can put up over it in the meantime?”

“I'm not here about the window!”

The percolator responded with a gurgle. The rest of the room remained silent.

“He wants to know about Conner,” June said at last. “About those things.”

“I expect he does.” Hek took in a deep breath. “That coffee ready?”

June got up and stood by the pot, hoping to make it work faster.

“I believe it was 19 and 42,” Hek began. “Now, you understand Junie wasn't hardly born yet and I was no more than a mite.”

“So how do you know this story?” I leaned forward. “How do you have this information.”

“From your dad,” June said quietly. “Mostly.”

The “mostly” implied someone else. I assumed it was my mother. June rarely talked about her.

“Okay.” I was willing to let that part go if Hek was going to tell me what he knew. “In 1942—”

“Conner, it's been said, was strangely compelled to travel over to Adairsville, to the Barnsley estate. They were having an auction.”

“The family had almost nothing by then.” June stared at the coffeepot. “Funny how having lots of money and then losing it seems sadder than never having money at all.”

“Conner went to the Barnsleys'.” I tried not to sound as irritated as I was.

“Yes, he did.” Hek nodded once. “He was said to have gone there to bid on several items at that auction.”

“Said he wanted to buy some thing that were of ‘immense personal value' to him.” June put her hand on the handle of the pot. “That's the phrase he used: ‘immense personal value.'”

“Of course that didn't make a lick of sense.” Hek sniffed. “We didn't hardly know anything about the Barnsley estate, nor the family. Nobody had the least idea what Conner was talking about. Still. He traveled to the Barnsley auction, which was a trek in those days.”

“He went by mule.” June seemed satisfied with the progress of the coffee and began taking down snow-white cups and saucers from the cupboard in front of her.

“He bid on three items, outbid everybody—no telling how much money he gave. Then, without a single word to explain himself, he came home, locked the items in a trunk, and was never heard to speak of them again.”

Hek's telling of the story had the sound of a well-worn bit of gossip.

“Never spoke of it again.” June piped up in confirmation. She began to pour the coffee.

That was all I was going to get.

“You were right,” Andrews whispered. “They do know everything.”

“What?” Hek's hearing wasn't what it used to be. “What'd that boy say?”

“He asked me why you won't tell me these things unless there's a life-or-death crisis.” I sat back.

“No,” June said gently, handing Hek his coffee. “He said Fever was right.”

“About what?” Hek's voice had become angular.

“Obviously, these three items are the things we saw evidence of in Taylor's office—the coin, the painting, and the thing.”

“Taylor?” Hek's coffee cup had stopped halfway to his mouth.

June had also frozen on her way to fetch more cups.

“Over in Pine City.” I shot Andrews a quick glance. “Do you know him?”

“He's no good.” Hek had spoken. “Anything you found in his office is tainted. He's a liar and a thief. Don't go near him again.”

Rarely had I heard Hek string together so many negative sentiments about another human being.

“Too late,” Andrews chimed in before I could stop him. “We went there, found out about Conner's trust for young Fever Devilin, and in the meantime learned that Taylor is, in
fact,
a liar. We got a phone call from Shultz—”

“But if we could stick to the subject,” I interrupted. “What do you make of Conner's strange behavior?”

I wanted to know what Hek had to say about lawyer Taylor, but I simply wanted to know about Conner
more.

Collecting folk information is sometimes like sifting through sand to find one tiny diamond. I may be looking for a specific diamond, but the informant doesn't know what I'm looking for, may not even know that it's there in the first place. So I often have to guide the sifting process.

This same technique, I had found, could work almost as well in any situation when a group of people were sitting around a kitchen table just chatting, but I wanted to know something more particular. Always direct the conversation back to the point. I generally did it with more finesse when I was speaking with strangers, but with Hek and June, I could use a degree of shorthand that they understood.

“Conner was a strange man, by any accounting.” Hek sipped. “Your dad never understood him.”

“Conner's wife never understood him.” June poured more coffee, her back to us. “Poor Adele.”

Adele, Conner's wife, had been driven mad because when Conner died, his last request was to be buried with several reminiscences of Molly, the woman he'd loved in Ireland—long dead—instead of anything remotely having to do with Adele.

“But I can tell you this,” Hek began softly.

Here it comes, I thought to myself. Everything in Hek's demeanor revealed that he was about to tell a secret.

“Conner loved his family more than anyone knew.” Hek looked up at me. “He set you up pretty good, when you were barely more than a sprite—didn't hardly even know you. He helped your mom and dad, and I'm not supposed to ever tell you that. And he gave a good deal of his time to the church.”

“Your church?” I couldn't believe it.

“He never came to service.” Hek smiled. “But he helped me put up the new building.”

Hek's new building, nearing fifty years old, was a white wooden square with a roof in the middle of the woods. Tall pines and giant rhododendrons surrounded it, and various members of Hek's strange congregation had added bits and pieces to it. It was a kind of church that filled a certain kind of person's spirit without ever discussing theology, rarely mentioning the tenets of any religion despite long, perfectly remembered Bible quotations.

When the time would come for Hek to die, the work of his church would be done. The congregation would drift to other churches and the building would return, in time, back to the earth. At Easter, a near-perfect circle of red rhododendrons would bloom enough to please the spirits of everyone who had ever known Hezekiah Cotage.

That would be his legacy.

“Everything Conner did in his last years,” Hek said, rousing me from reverie, “was done for the family. Best to keep that in mind.”

“It was almost an obsession.” June set a cup of steaming coffee in front of Andrews.

“Look,” Andrews said, nodding a thanks to June, “far be it from me to suggest something useful, but I wonder if we shouldn't try to find out who bought the painting from your father. Maybe they have some sort of useful information, and maybe they don't. But wouldn't you at least like to see the portrait of the face that launched your little ship?”

He stared directly into my pupils.

I understood.

Andrews had come up with an idea that he didn't want to talk about in front of Hek and June, for some reason.

“In fact, I would like to see that portrait,” I answered, “now that I realize how seminal it has been to my path. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a bill of sale in the shambles that Taylor called ‘my files,' and I'm not really going back to his office, so I don't know how we'll find out who bought the thing.”

Andrews and I both turned to Hek and June at the same moment.