The Blood Ballad (15 page)

… I cannot believe you refuse to acknowledge what you have done. Peggy is out of her mind with what to do. She has no income. You must give her some money. You have plenty. There is no reason for this. I know that you're away in Arkansas, but you must send her something. God will judge you, Scott William Morgan. What you have done to all of us is a crime. Johnny will someday see this for himself.

How can you deny the boy? He looks more like you than any of your own.

The next letter was similar, my great-grandma more insistent.

I will ruin you, and yours, Scott Morgan. Unless you do right by this boy, I will ruin you. How many more like him are there, scattered about while your wife sits at home, believing you love her? The boy is starving. Feed him, for God's sake. For I cannot keep doing it …

Then a third letter, written a few years later.

Why Johnny has anything to do with you, I'll never know. I told him to watch his back, as you'd be sticking a knife in it first chance you get. He'll learn. He'll learn the hard way. As you've never done right by anybody in your life.

Nowhere did she say he was John Robert's father.

I quickly made photocopies before Phoebe came back and changed her mind about sharing this with me.

As childish as it was, I smiled with relief. Everything would stay the way it was. My genealogy was intact.

Phoebe came sauntering back into my office and leaned up against the door frame. “So, what do you think? It really rocks the socks right off of your world, doesn't it?”

“It's very interesting, Phoebe. It's an amazing discovery,” I said. “But it doesn't mean that Scott Morgan is our grandpa's father.”

“But it says so right there,” she said.

“No, what the first letter says is that there is a boy who Scott Morgan needs to take care of, but she never says it's her own John Robert. In fact, she alludes to the boy's mother being named Peggy.”

“But right there it says Johnny.”

“She says that Johnny will learn someday what Scott is, but she never says Scott's his father. I think it's pretty clear that it's a boy by a woman named Peggy.”

“I knew you'd be too dense to understand,” she said and snatched the original letters from me.

“Phoebe,” I said. “This is an amazing thing you've come across. Who is Peggy? Who is the boy? And what does she mean when she talks about God judging Scott for what he's done to the boy? I mean, honestly, Phoebe, this is really amazing.”

She laughed at me then. “You always were the slowest one in the family,” she said. Then she glanced down at my dress again. “And the worst dresser. But we love you anyway, Torie. Don't think that we don't.”

I blinked at her. “Well, that's great, Phoebe. I love you, too.”

“How's your mom?” she asked.

“She's doing good,” I said.

“I have told her many times that if she would just project herself as walking, she could get out of that wheelchair and walk.”

My mother had polio at ten and could not walk at all. After decades of sitting in a wheelchair, she no longer had the muscle mass and her bones were entirely too brittle for her even to attempt to stand. Everybody knew that. Still Phoebe insisted on my mother “projecting” herself. On the one hand, it was annoying, but on the other hand, I had to give Phoebe credit for being so blasted optimistic all the time.

“So, what made you come by and share this with me?” I asked.

“Glen said you were ready to be shown the truth, finally,” she said. “Boy, was he wrong.”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you, Phoebe, but in my line of work, I need something a little more concrete than disjointed fragments of sentences to prove or disprove a pedigree. She must state ‘John Robert is your son' for me to believe it.”

“You don't know the first thing about faith, do you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Faith. You know. F-a-i-t-h.”

“I know what faith is, but what do you mean?”

She moved closer to me then, a wisp of her auburn hair falling just over her left eye. “I feel it in my bones that our grandpa is the son of Scott Morgan. Just listen to him play.”

My eyes narrowed on her. “What do you mean?”

“It's like listening to Scott play.”

“Scott was Grandpa's teacher. The student always retains some of the teacher's style and discipline.”

She smiled and made a dismissive noise. “Whatever you say. I'll see you around, Torie.”

Phoebe was a kook. I knew she was a kook. So why did I worry about what she'd just said the whole time I tried to worm my way out of my dress?

Fourteen

Leo King's studio was located in the upstairs loft of his apartment in Wisteria. Wisteria is located just west of New Kassel and is the largest city in Granite County. That's not saying a whole lot, but the jail, sheriff's office, and community college are all within Wisteria's city limits. It's also a fast-food haven, home to the county library, and boasts a movie theater, the only movie theater in the whole county. You must understand that Granite County is mostly made up of farms and little bitty towns.

Since my dad didn't know exactly where Leo's studio was, he rode along with me. We arrived about 7:30. I still hadn't shaken the uneasy feeling Phoebe's visit had given me. The fact that she had just showed up with those letters unnerved me. There was something not quite right about it. I figured she would have fought me tooth and nail even to look at the letters. Instead, she'd just sauntered in and handed them to me. Of course, she'd snatched them away from me so quickly that I knew I'd never get a chance to have them looked at by a professional, but I was about as close to a professional as you could get in this area, and they looked authentic to me. The paper had been soft and yellowed, small, and lined with a faint blue. The handwritten ink had faded to sepia, but what really did it for me was the handwriting. A person might be able to fake old paper and old ink, or even find old paper and old ink to use in a new letter, but people wrote in a distinctive way back then. The cursive style was a little more formal in those days than it was now, a little blockier. In the letters Phoebe had shown me, it was definitely old cursive. So unless she'd hunted up a hundred-year-old person to write the letters for her, or gone to a lot of time, trouble, and expense to hire a professional forger, I'd say they were authentic.

But I couldn't help it. The whole thing felt odd to me.

Leo King was an old musician. Meaning he was from that school of honky-tonk from the fifties and sixties that had brought us the likes of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Even though nowadays he chose to play a more mountain style of country picking, rather than the slower crying-in-your-beer music. That didn't take away the fact that he'd been one of the great crying-in-your-beer music musicians. So had my dad. So they hit it off quite well. In fact, I just stood back for a good ten minutes while they discussed music. Finally, Leo remembered why I was there.

He was in his seventies, with a huge belly and hairy ears. Don't let that fool you. When he picked up a guitar, the man was magic. “Torie, I've got to say that these are some awesome recordings. Absolutely awesome.”

“Yes, but have they been doctored?”

“Not at all.” He handed me a stack of CDs. “I've put them on these CDs for you, and whenever they identified a song on the recording, I wrote it down on the liner notes. Quite a few of the songs, I just knew and recognized on my own. This is the Morgan Family Players, isn't it?”

“Most of it. With the help of my grandpa,” I said.

“I knew it,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. Then he turned to my father. “Hey, Dwight, you want me to burn you some copies?”

“I'd love it,” my dad said.

“Actually, if you could burn another set for my sister, I'd be totally indebted,” I added.

“Sure thing,” he said. “It's not often I get to work with original recordings of such a noted and talented family. So, what's your connection?”

“Apparently, my grandpa—his dad—” I said, pointing to my father—“wrote quite a few of their songs and jammed with them. Scott taught my grandpa to play the fiddle.”

“Wow. It's amazing to have that rich a musical history,” Leo said. “Wish I had that in my family. I'd be so proud.”

“Well, it seems we haven't had a chance to really be all that proud, since we just discovered it. Scott wasn't on the up-and-up, and my grandpa didn't get credit or money for any of the songs he contributed.”

“Oh, wow.
Yee-haw,
” he said. “Sounds like you're getting ready for a court battle.”

“No, not really,” I said. I glanced over at my father, who didn't seem to dismiss it so quickly. “Well, at least my generation isn't. His might.”

“Well, if you need an expert witness,” Leo said to my father. “I'd be happy to go to bat for you guys, saying these are authentic tapes.”

“I appreciate that,” Dad said.

“I'll give these copies to Torie,” Leo told him. “When I get them done. Will that be all right?”

“Sure,” Dad said.

“So, do you have any more?” Leo inquired.

“Any more what?” I asked.

“Recordings. I'd be happy to put whatever you've got on CD for you.”

I thought about the CD of “The Blood Ballad,” my name for the recording of the confession of Belle's murder. I couldn't help but wonder who had the original tape. And I wondered if I'd get back the one I'd given the police as evidence. Not that it mattered, since I'd made a dub onto tape before I'd handed the CD over to the sheriff. Still, the CD that I'd received would be better quality than the tape I'd made from it.

“Not right now, but I'll let you know if I do,” I said. “Well, I hate to cut this short, but I've got a date with the libraries tomorrow, so I need to get home.”

“Libraries?” Leo asked. “What for?”

“I've got to find out everything I can about the Morgan family.”

“And when she says ‘everything,'” my father added, “she means everything.”

It was true, so I just laughed along with them.

*   *   *

The next day, Mary's picture as Santa Lucia was on the cover of
The New Kassel Gazette.
I bought ten copies and set them aside to distribute to all of her grandparents and to put in her scrapbook. She seemed pleased about the whole situation, and I thought her stint as Santa Lucia even garnered her some attention from that boy Tony, whom she was always mooning over.

As I dropped the kids off at school, Rachel couldn't possibly let the morning go down as one of the most pleasant ones in the history of our family. As she got out of the van, she turned to Mary and said, “I guess because you got your picture in the paper, you think you can keep my earrings. But you can't!”

Oh, for the love of God.

“Mom, tell her I want my earrings back,” Rachel said.

“Rachel, I've told her.”

“Then do something. Chain her to a wall and torture her until she confesses or returns my earrings!”

“Get out of my car,” I said and rubbed my now-throbbing head.

Mary grabbed her book bag, slammed the car door, and yelled at her sister across the parking lot. “Loser!”

I drove the quarter of a mile until I came to the elementary school building. “Your turn, big guy,” I said to Matthew.

He rolled his eyes. “I can't wait until all of this is over.”

“What's over? Rachel and her earrings?” Because I had news for him: Rachel was as stubborn as a rock, and she would not let this whole earring thing rest until Mary either returned the earrings or Rachel got to draw blood. I'd been through this before. Last time, it had been Rachel's bath sponge. It went missing and then turned up in the garbage disposal three days later.

“No, I mean school. When do I not have to go anymore?” he asked.

I hated to tell him that he had at least a decade to go. “A long time, buddy.”

He grabbed his Yu-Gi-Oh book bag and his Darth Vader lunch box—he believes in having broad interests—and climbed out of the van. “So there's no way at all I can hurry this up?”

“Afraid not, honey,” I said.

Then he turned, very dejected, and walked into his building as the bell rang. Poor kid. I hated school, too, when I was younger. Well, I loved to
learn
and I still love to, but that's not the same thing as liking school. Matthew was just like me. I probably would have liked school much better if I could have taken all the other children out of it—too many judging eyes for my unconventional self—and I suspected that was Matthew's issue, too.

When we lived in town, the kids used to walk to school unless the weather was bad. Now that we were out in the country, several miles from town and the school, they either rode the bus or I'd drop them off on my way to do something. Just as I was doing now.

I drove over to Wisteria and stopped by my mother and Colin's for breakfast as I waited for the library to open. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, because that's the way I always was. My best friend, Collette, says I'm too tame and not spontaneous enough, but I think I do all right.

Colin was at the office, but my mother was waiting with a butterscotch/brown sugar breakfast roll type of thing, as if she knew I would be coming. I kept thinking that this built-in sense of knowing when people were about to arrive at my house would kick in any day, since my mother seemed to have had it her whole life, but so far, no luck. People showed up at my door and they got a bowl of cereal or Fritos, depending on the time of day that they arrived.

My mom, for the record, is very pretty. Not in that “Oh, gee, I hate you” sort of way, but in that “Wow, I'm enthralled” way. She really does have that effect on people. Which can be a bit annoying when you're standing next to her, looking like your father. That's okay, because one thing I can say about my mom is that she's not arrogant about it in the least. She's always very humble and very polite when people gush about her beautiful doe eyes and her creamy skin. It never goes to her head, and most of the time, she actually still blushes. Part of her allure is the way she holds herself. She comes across as somebody who's gone to finishing school, when in actuality she never graduated from high school—due to an unfortunate encounter with polio—and grew up barefoot and wild as a polecat in the hills of West Virginia. I'm not sure where the magical metamorphosis occurred, but it did. I'm still waiting for my metamorphosis.