Search for the Shadowman (3 page)

Miss Winnie’s finger waggled at Andy’s nose. “Don’t ask me questions about him, because you won’t get any answers,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, he never existed. Forget all about Coley Joe, or you’re going to cause all of us a great deal of trouble!”

T
hat evening Andy had other homework to do. But he found time to call J.J., whom he told about Coley Joe.

“Maybe someone in our family really was a horse thief or a train robber,” Andy said. “I wish I could find out.”

“If Miss Winnie won’t answer questions about him, why don’t you just let it drop?”

“She didn’t say I couldn’t ask someone else.”

“But you said she didn’t want anyone to know about him because it would cause trouble,” J.J. reminded him.

“I don’t know what kind of trouble Coley Joe could cause. He was born in 1856. That’s a long time ago.” Andy paused and added, “J.J., I could see that my knowing about Coley Joe scared her.”

“Then why don’t you just do what she said?” J.J. asked. “Forget about him.”

Andy fingered the leather thong he still wore around his neck. “I just can’t.”

When J.J. didn’t respond to that, Andy said, “Listen, J.J., your family has an important great-great-great-great in it. Half the town’s named after him. And you’ve got a cousin who’s acted in two movies and an uncle who went to Washington as a congressman. Nobody in my family’s done anything like that. The most exciting thing that’s ever happened to anyone in the family was when Uncle Jeff, on my mom’s side, won a trip to the Super Bowl. Don’t you see? I
need
Coley Joe.”

“What about your aunt Winnie?”

“I won’t do anything that would hurt her. Whatever I find out about Coley Joe will be my secret. I think that’s fair.”

“Okay, I guess,” J.J. said. “It’s up to you.”

“And maybe to you. Or your great-grandmother, that is.”

“Miz Minna?”

“I’d like to talk to her. Just to ask if she ever heard of Coley Joe. Is that okay with you?”

“Are you sure you want to find out?” J.J. asked. “He may have done something you really don’t want to know about.”

Andy felt suddenly defensive. “Well, maybe he didn’t.”

“Then his name wouldn’t have been crossed out.”

Andy didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “You watch too many old cowboy movies,” he said.

“You’re the one who said maybe he was a train robber or—”

Andy interrupted. “I’ll see you tomorrow and stop off to visit Miz Minna when we walk home. Okay?”

As Andy hung up the phone he heard J.J. saying, “Okay … I guess.”

T
he minute the bell rang in history class the next morning, Mr. Hammergren asked, “How many of you have begun your interviews with relatives?”

Lee Ann Dooley waved a hand. “I can’t! My grandma in Florida just got married again and is off on a honeymoon. And my grandma who lives in a rest home can’t remember much of anything.”

“Then ask your parents if they’ve heard any of your grandparents’ stories. Go back as far as you can. Maybe your family history will begin when your parents were children.”

“Everyone else has grandparents.” Lee Ann’s lower lip curled outward. Her glance fixed on J.J. “Or even a
great
-grandparent.”

“Tell you what,” Mr. Hammergren said. “I’ll let you borrow my grandmother. She won’t know any stories about
your
family, but she can tell you about riding streetcars when she visited the big city and canning vegetables and making jam and sewing all the clothes for a family of six girls. See me after class and I’ll give you her phone number if you’d like to speak to her.”

He glanced around the classroom. “Anyone else having trouble getting started?”

Harvey Marks spoke up. “My great-grandpa has got some good stories about things he did with his cousins while he was growing up, but he can’t keep their names straight.”

“Did his cousins live in Hermosa?”

Harvey nodded.

“It won’t be hard for you to get the right names,” Mr. Hammergren said. “If they were born here, you can look for their birthdates in county records. If they died here, you can do the same.” He smiled. “Or you might even go to the cemetery and check the names on the tombstones. Some of the old tombstones have information on them that isn’t in the cemetery’s records.”

“But don’t visit the cemetery at night,” Nelson Banks growled in a scary voice, and everyone laughed.

Luke Martin raised his hand. “I’ve got a problem, Mr. Hammergren,” he said. “When my mom’s father was young, he got in a fight and went to jail. Mom said under no circumstances could I put that in my report.”

“I certainly don’t expect you to include every single family story you discover,” Mr. Hammergren said. “Record the best. Make your report interesting. And remember that it’s better to leave some things out of the report.”

“Like the mystery man.” Andy realized he had spoken aloud when some of the kids turned and looked at him.

“What mystery man?” Lee Ann asked.

Andy carefully gave his explanation. “He’s one of my dad’s relatives, from way back in the eighteen hundreds. His birthdate was listed in the family Bible, but then his name was crossed out. My great-aunt Winnie first said he never existed. Then she told me not to ask questions about him because she wouldn’t answer them.”

“Then I’d suggest you forget this mystery relative,” Mr. Hammergren said. “This report is not intended to cause family problems.”

But Andy’s mind was on Coley Joe. He wasn’t about to forget him.

L
ila Martinez, the Gaspers’ housekeeper, opened the door just as J.J. reached for the knob. She smiled and said, “Hey, J.J. Hey, Andy. How’s it going?”

“Fine, Lila,” J.J. answered.

“You came because you knew I just took some cookies out of the oven. Right, Andy?”

Andy smiled. “I came for cookies and homework. We’re here to do some homework, Mrs. Martinez.”

She cocked her head as though she were studying Andy, and her eyes twinkled. “That doesn’t look like a homework face. It looks like you’re up to something.”

“We’re doing research on our family histories,” Andy said. “And we’re going to see if Miz Minna will answer some of our questions.”

Lila’s smile grew broader. “She’ll be glad for a little company. All her old lady friends were either at the beauty parlor, the doctor, or visiting relatives today, so Miz Minna’s been bored with no one to talk to. She’s in her sitting room. Please tell her I’ll bring up cookies and something cold to drink in a couple of minutes.”

Lila left, but J.J. hesitated at the foot of the stairs. “Why don’t we forget the history homework for now and shoot baskets?” he asked.

“After the questions,” Andy insisted. He marched around J.J. and up the stairs.

The door to Miz Minna’s sitting room was wide open. In a dark blue silk dress, with the opera-length pearls she always wore, she sat framed against the wide, velvet-swagged window. In spite of the puffiness around her eyes and chin, Andy was reminded of the painting of a duchess he had seen on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art.

Miz Minna had been watching a television show, and
she quickly clicked off the power as Andy tapped on the door frame.

“Come in, boys,” she called in her soft little sugar voice. “How nice of y’all to come and visit me. Does Lila know you’re here?”

“She said to tell you she’d send up cookies and something cold to drink,” J.J. answered. He bent to kiss Miz Minna’s forehead.

Miz Minna beamed and said, “Sit down. Please, sit down. Pull those chairs a little closer, but don’t break anything while you’re doing it. Watch the vase, J.J.”

“Yes, ma’am,” J.J. answered politely.

“Did J.J. tell you that I’m making it easy for him to write his history report?” Miz Minna asked Andy. “Over the past few years, not only have I researched our genealogy by hunting in old family records, but I’ve bought books about the time periods. I have volumes that show the kinds of clothes people wore, what they used for cooking, the buggies and surreys they rode in. It makes me glad that there’s a good deal of information J.J. can finally use.”

J.J. looked embarrassed, but Andy simply asked, “How did you do all that research?”

“Some of it came from old family records, including a very special journal kept by the first James Jonathan Gasper, but most of it I did by computer.” Miz Minna winked coyly. “The electronic age is not just for the younger generation.”

Andy glanced at the computer and printer on a desk at the far side of the room. “Do you mean you used the computer to look up stuff about your family?”

“Not only that. If you enter the Internet directly or subscribe to a computer service, you can link into some of the world’s finest genealogy centers, such as the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. And the bulletin boards are useful, too.”

“Bulletin boards?”

Impatiently, J.J. said, “You know about computers, Andy. Miz Minna uses the place where people send messages to each other. In the genealogy boards they write messages asking for help in finding information about old guys who are supposed to be part of their family trees.”

“J.J.!” Miz Minna snapped. “They are not ‘old guys,’ as you put it. I was able to trace our own branch of the family back to some highly respected gentlemen from the Carolinas.” As her voice softened, she preened and said, “Why, the first James Jonathan Gasper’s father, Wilfred Edmunton Gasper, fought as a major in the War Between the States.

Andy didn’t think he’d better ask which side, but he thought that if Miss Winnie could learn to use his dad’s computer, then she could look up her ancestors, too.

Lila Martinez brought in a tray of snacks.

“Miz Minna, you know just about everything about
everybody who ever came to Hermosa, don’t you?” Andy asked.

She almost giggled and said modestly, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

“Do you know anything about Coley Joe Bonner? He was born in 1856.”

A smug smile crossed her lips. “Why are you asking about Coley Joe Bonner?”

“Because he’s kind of a mystery man in our family. I found his name written in Malcolm John Bonner’s family Bible, along with their other children, but his name was crossed out, and there wasn’t a date of death.”

“Did you ask Miss Winnie about him?”

“Miss Winnie said he didn’t exist.”

Miz Minna leaned forward. “Oh, he existed, all right, or his name and birthdate wouldn’t have been written into the Bible.”

“Then why was it crossed out?”

Miz Minna sighed plaintively. “On rare occasions—very rare, you understand—a son or daughter so disgraced the family that a father would cross out the name. It was a symbol that the person was no longer a part of the family.”

Andy felt as though a rock had dropped into his stomach. Sure, he’d told J.J. that it would be fun to have a bank robber or horse thief in the family, but he realized he hadn’t really meant it.

“Do you know what Coley Joe did to get crossed out of the family?” Andy asked.

“Yes, indeed. There’s proof. However, it’s not up to me to rattle other families’ skeletons,” Miz Minna said. “You’d better ask Miss Winnie to tell you.”

Her eyes narrowed as she thought, and her voice shifted from sweet to salty. “On the other hand, maybe you’d better not,” she warned him. “Sometimes asking too many questions leads to trouble.”

“N
ow what?” Andy asked, after he and J.J. had said goodbye to Miz Minna and walked out to the front porch. “She told me to talk to Miss Winnie, but Miss Winnie said if I asked her any questions about Coley Joe she wouldn’t answer them.”

“Leave him out of your report,” J.J. said. “We don’t have to write about all of our relatives. Mr. Hammergren said so. We’re supposed to collect stories about how the older people in our family lived, way back when. Coley Joe Bonner has nothing to do with what Mr. Hammergren wants.”

“It’s weird. Miz Minna said if I asked questions I could cause trouble. That’s the same thing Miss Winnie told me.”

“Then don’t ask questions. Forget about Coley Joe.”

Andy looked up as he heard the exasperation in his best friend’s voice. “It’s just that to me Coley Joe is almost like a real person and …”

“He
was
a real person,” J.J. said, “but no matter what he did or didn’t do, he died a long time ago, and his problems are over. We’ve got a big test in math tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to study for it.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Andy said.

He walked home double time and unlocked the back door. There, still on one end of the kitchen table, rested Miss Winnie’s box of family mementos. Andy dropped his backpack onto the nearest chair. He felt himself drawn to the box as surely as if someone were leading him toward it.

He reached into the box for the Bonner family Bible, eager to see the list of names one more time, but he discovered that the Bible was missing.

Grabbing the framed photograph, an old bankbook, and a fistful of papers, Andy shoved them onto the tabletop. He rummaged through the remaining items in the box with a terrible, scary feeling. Some of the papers his mom had put together were gone, too!

Andy groaned and flopped into a chair. It was then he noticed the sheet of note paper held to the refrigerator door with a magnet. He walked across the room, pulled the paper off, and read:

With a wave of relief Andy flopped back into his chair, but as he did so, his elbow struck the framed Bonner family photograph, knocking it from the table. He grabbed for it, but he was too late. With a thud, one corner of the frame hit the floor and split. Andy groaned as he heard the glass shatter.

In an instant he was on his knees, cautiously avoiding the shards of glass. He gently held up the splintered frame. In his fingers the old wood slid apart, dropping to the floor with the remaining glass. The photograph and its cardboard backing sailed under the table.