Micanopy in Shadow (6 page)

“I’m researching a book about Micanopy and the area.” Not the whole truth, of course. “The case could add human interest.” Better come clean about her connection. A former detective would

I.D. her and be even more suspicious. “I’m Hope O’Bannon’s granddaughter. She asked me to look into her mother’s death again.”

“Why you?”

Brandy tried to picture the man she was speaking to. Healthy sounding. A strong voice. Must have retired early. “I had some success with investigations in the past—in the Tavares-Mount Dora area, in Cedar Key, and three years ago, on an island in the Homosassa River. Unfortunately, I’ll be in Micanopy a fairly short period of time, and I’ve got to be out of town late tomorrow.” She didn’t explain she had an appointment with a medium. He’d have the same reaction as John. “Could you possibly see me in the morning?”

He paused. “I’ll check my calendar. Hold on.” A minute later he picked up the phone again. “Tell you what. I could see you about

10:00. I’ll check Dad’s files. Don’t expect much.” “I’ll be there.” Actually, Brandy didn’t expect much, even if he had it. These guys liked to get information, not give it.

She called Kyra, apologized for the lateness, and asked her to come in at 9:30. Kyra was glad to earn the extra money. “But I was planning to study with a friend,” she added. “She’s got another year, and we’re taking the same course next semester. Mind if I, like, bring her along?”

“Fine, just take Brad outside for while.”

Brad’s care settled, Brandy delved next into her two-drawer metal file and pulled out a manila folder labeled simply “Ada.” She wanted to re-read the verses etched on the monument, front and back. Both were excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Lenore.” As an English major, Brandy didn’t consider Poe in the first rank of American poets—too fixated on ghouls, horrific deaths, and the music of his verse at the expense on the sense. Yet his turn of mind suited the drowning of Ada Losterman. Someone else had made the same connection. Brandy settled back in an armchair and read:

“Ah, dream too bright to last!

Ah, starry Hope! That didst arise

But to be overcast!

A voice from out the Future cries …”

The stanza seemed prophetic. Brandy didn’t know what the “too bright dream” was, but Hope herself had been born and then abandoned or “overcast.” Hope indeed became a “voice from out the future,” crying for answers.

The poem took up again:

“Come! Let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!

An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young”—

The final lines had intrigued Brandy for years:

“Let no bell toll!—lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damnéd Earth. To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven—From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven—From Grief and Groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven.”

What if the “fiends below” referred to people on the “damnéd earth” in 1921—people responsible for Ada’s tragic death? From what “grief and groan” had Ada’s indignant spirit been wrenched to join her friends in heaven? And why hadn’t the person who grieved for her in such a public way come forward? The poem must be a kind of code. Somebody in Micanopy besides the donor must have understood it.

Brandy was slipping the copy back into its folder when she heard John on the stairs, along with another rumble of thunder, closer.

He came in and glanced approvingly around the room. “I see the good fairy’s been here.”

Brandy chose not to take the remark as sarcasm. “How was the game?”

“Lousy. I’m out of practice. These guys are good.” He picked up the latest copy of
The Gainesville Sun
and sat down on the sway-backed sofa.

Brandy curled up close beside him. “I made that appointment I told you about at 8:30 Sunday morning.” She sighed. “I’ll have to leave by 6:00 to be in Cassadaga in time.”

He glanced up from the paper. “I don’t want you starting out in the dark, trying to make a deadline. The road through Ocala State Park is isolated enough. It’ll be more so on Sunday. Better go over in the afternoon and stay overnight. Brad and I will be all right.”

Brandy didn’t tell him she’d already made that arrangement. She stepped to the porch door and looked out. The moon had ridden higher, lacquering the cabbage palms and oaks with silver. An echo of their disagreement about the medium shouldn’t end the evening. She turned back into the living room.

“That’s sweet of you.” She lifted the paper from John’s hand and, bending down, kissed him deeply. His eyes widened. She dropped her voice. “If I’m going to be gone tomorrow night, let’s make the most of this one.”

A few strategic buttons undone and he forgot the news, stood, and pulled her close. She squeezed his hand—it could be so gentle—and led the way into the bedroom. Brad lay facing the wall, breathing softly. She tugged her blouse off over her head. She liked him to take care of the rest.

Later, deliciously tired, she lay beside him and stroked his fingers. She thought of Ada, her remains lying all these years under the lofty memorial stone. Ada had known love, too—at least had a lover, if not a wedding ring. Her daughter was evidence of that.

Did Ada lose him in the Great War? Or had she come to this little Florida town to find him and found the Smith Street pond instead?

FOUR
 

Saturday dawned with gray skies. John was up earlier than Brandy and standing in the bedroom doorway, briefcase in hand, when she awoke. Rising on one elbow, she surveyed her husband. He was really a fine man—clean, trim, and purposeful looking in his khaki Chinos and open-necked beige polo shirt. She loved the way a wisp of dark hair curled above his collar. Essentially a kind man, too. Not as high maintenance as some.

“I need to stop by the Irons house this morning,” he said. “I’ll be back before you leave for Cassadaga.”

Brad was stirring in his crib, trying to pull himself up and climb out. John slipped a digital camera in his briefcase and left. He planned to photograph another Victorian house in Ocala. Brandy set the little boy in his high chair, fed him a breakfast of egg and cereal, and carried him into the bedroom. She sat him down with a large wooden puzzle while she showered, leaving the door open wide enough to glance out and see him. At the bathroom mirror she blow-dried her coppery hair. Should she look for a hair salon? Hope probably had her own silvery mane chopped off at a barbershop. For Hope, a stylist was out of the question.

No woman is ever satisfied with her own appearance, and Brandy was no exception. Although her face had her grandmother’s bone structure, it didn’t have a classic oval shape. Once she had an assignment in Holland, Michigan. When she gazed at the round-faced, blue-eyed pedestrians, she knew these were her people, although most were blondes. She turned sideways, surveyed the curve of her stomach, and sighed. Still slim, but better watch the calories. After her critical appraisal, she led Brad back into the kitchen to let him help stack silverware in the dish drainer.

North Central Florida’s crisp fall weather had not yet arrived. The air still felt moist and oppressive, but Brandy bundled the little boy into his jacket and overalls and carried him downstairs. It was only 8:30, time for a walk together. He held tightly to Brandy’s hand, stopped to admire the scarlet blossoms of the hibiscus and stooped to study a low-growing bed of golden Wedelia edging the sidewalk. Across the street an elderly man came out of the drug store. He paused and stared at her, although he didn’t look familiar. But everyone in town knew Hope. He probably also knew Brandy was the granddaughter.

“Pretty,” Brad said, patting one of the flowers. Brandy bent down to listen to him and thought no more about the man watching her.

Promptly at 9:30 Kyra rang the doorbell. A slim black girl in jeans and a Florida State tee shirt, her hair in cornrows, waited behind her. Kyra introduced her classmate as Sheshauna Hall, a native of Micanopy. Brandy saw the shyness in her chocolate-colored eyes.

She held out her hand. “Glad to meet you here,” she said.

Sheshauna nodded, eyes grave. While Kyra settled down on the living room floor with Brad, the other girl perched on the couch, clutching her copy of
Statistics for Social Work
. She eyed Brandy with frank curiosity, but remained silent. Perhaps Kyra had told her friend about Brandy’s quest.

It was time for her interview with Shot Hunter. A few minutes later Brandy drove her Prius slowly down a narrow road in the northwest corner of town, peering at mailbox numbers. Cottages here were widely spaced and set between tracts of undeveloped woodland. At 10:00 she pulled up before a small, white frame bungalow with a hip roof. “C.K. Hunter” was the name on the mailbox. A brick walkway and two steps led to a plain front door flanked by a low viburnum hedge. Narrow green shutters trimmed both front windows. As Brandy stepped out of her car, she noticed a small silver car parked beside a vacant lot in the next block. She saw no one on the property. For a moment she was curious. Then Hunter’s door opened and the retired Sheriff’s Office captain stood in the doorway.

“O’Bannon?” He moved aside. “Come on in. I have a few minutes.”

Hunter looked about sixty-one or two and stood a compact 5’8”. As Brandy held out her hand, she took in the salt and pepper hair—thinning only a little—the tanned, deeply lined face and the creases around light-colored eyes. Hunter’s gaze was sharp, but his face closed. Above a wide jaw and cheekbones, his forehead narrowed to a hairline that shaded from brown to gray. He wore a tidy, open-necked polo shirt and pressed jeans. Brandy would have spotted him on the street as law enforcement.

A blue couch, two overstuffed armchairs, an uncluttered coffee table, and piecrust end tables furnished the pristine living room. Ethan Allan pieces, she thought, and everything new, including the green Berber carpet. Yet something was missing. The room had no pictures on the walls, no family photographs, no magazines, books, no feeling of being lived in. As she glanced about, puzzled, Hunter noticed.

“Been here only a month.”

Still, didn’t he read the newspaper? Books? Take a few magazines? She did see a stack of CD’s, but no stereo.

Hunter ran a large hand through his hair and followed her gaze around the room. “A gift for my wife. She put up with the law enforcement life in Gainesville for a lot of years. Too many, I guess.” He gave a short, harsh laugh. “Took her a week to move in and another to move out. The joke’s on me. Rejected the house—
and
me. She’d found another guy. He didn’t work nights.”

Brandy hesitated. What could she say? “Sorry to hear it” was all she managed.

He shrugged. “I like to sit out in back. It was the arbor I liked best.” He led the way through the formal dining room with its oblong maple table and six chairs and down a short hall. The door to the bedroom stood ajar. She could see an unmade bed, a pair of pajamas trailing onto the floor. She also saw a file cabinet and a desk, bare. He walked on into the small kitchen, where a plastic topped table stood next to the sink and counters. On it sat a half empty coffee cup and a fat file folder. Brandy glimpsed the name “
Losterman
” on the folder, but Hunter had pushed open the screen door, and was holding it for her. He must have refreshed his mind about Ada before Brandy arrived.

“Guess I’ll sell,” he said. “I thought Micanopy would be a nice change. Not for her, I guess. Now it’ll be too quiet.”

He gestured toward a narrow strip of lawn and two benches under a latticework gazebo laced with Confederate jasmine. A small CD/tape player sat on a plastic table beside one seat. He did play music but out here, away from the reminder of his rejected gifts.

Hunter glanced at the lush green leaves overhead. Next spring it would burst into fragrant white blossoms. “Come May, the whole yard will smell like jasmine.”

Brandy didn’t ask about the separation. Hunter obviously needed to talk to someone. She couldn’t be that person.

“About the Ada Losterman case,” she began, “can you help me with it?”

He paused, then leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “My dad was a rookie in the Sheriff’s Office when the Losterman woman drowned. He was only twenty. The older guys were still getting back from the war. He tried more than anyone to figure out who she was and why she died. The coroner’s jury called her death a suicide. No evidence of anything else. Still, Dad thought it odd, coming here like she did and then drowning herself the same day. Especially since no one even admitted knowing her. An ugly place to die, that muddy pond.” He gave her a penetrating look. His eyes were steely blue. “Strange to leave a child here like she did. Dad was never satisfied with just forgetting about her. But he was too young to influence decisions in the department, and there wasn’t a provable crime, you see.”

Brandy slipped her notepad out of her tote bag. “I told you, my grandmother is that abandoned child. She still wants to find out what happened. Did he discover anything helpful?”

“Truth of the matter is, the family who took the little girl in didn’t welcome an investigation. Afraid they’d lose her. They had help from people in town, so supporting her wasn’t an issue. The extra money wasn’t a bad thing for the Havens. They weren’t well off. If Dad found out who the child was, her family would get custody. But …” He tilted his head back for a second, then glanced down at Brandy and dropped his voice. “Dad did leave notes. He always thought someone would care enough to really investigate. I told your grandmother I’d look into the old case again, now that I’m retired.”