The Blood Ballad (19 page)

I blinked at him. “That makes sense and all, but what if
we
decide to sell her? Then what's he going to do? I mean, hasn't he thought of that?”

“He's desperate. Probably not thinking straight,” Colin said. He reached over and took an errant chocolate chip off of my plate and plopped it in his mouth. “Did Mort say if he thought the guy was still out there in the woods?”

I shrugged, because neither Mort nor I could really answer that question. “Why have you been looking for me?”

“They found a body.”

“What do you mean? Where?” I asked, the hair standing up on my neck.

“At the bridge. That stone bridge—”

“
Hahn's Bridge!
” I exclaimed. I stood up so fast, my head spun. “Are you serious?”

Colin glanced around the room. “Hey, calm down.”

“No way. Are you serious? They found a body. A
human
body?”

“Yes, they found human remains.…”

I grabbed the files and my coat and all but ran out of the door of Pierre's, with Colin close on my heels. “Where are you going?” he asked. It irritated me just a little that all he needed to do was walk briskly, when I was actually running. It stinks being short.

“I'm going down to the bridge!”

“Wait,” he said. “If it's a crime scene…”

“Look, Colin. They've found her! This woman's been missing since 1936, and now they've found her. I was right.”

“Torie…”

I stopped at my car and threw my things in the seat. Then I smacked the top of my car and repeated, “I was right.”

“I'm going with you,” he said.

“Please, you'll just be in the way.”

“Oh, I will forgive you for saying that,” he said.

“Good, forgive me and get out of the way.”

“Torie,” he said. “
Please
take me with you.”

I stopped then and studied his face. He was begging me to take him. I was a special consultant on this case. Invited by the sheriff. I was the one who had given the sheriff the location of Hahn's Bridge. He would let me onto the scene of the crime. Colin, well, Colin was just a little old mayor of a small town that had nothing to do with Hahn's Bridge or Progress, Missouri. He could go only if I took him along. I think it was the first time in my entire life that I'd actually, really, totally, felt sorry for Colin. Okay, well maybe that time in Minnesota. But I'd seen Colin poisoned and shot in the leg, and I remembered thinking both times that I'd wished I'd done it.

What? It's not like he died either time.

But right then, Colin standing there begging me to take him to a crime scene … I was overcome with pity. It must have temporarily made me insane, because I heard myself saying, “Okay, but don't tell Mom.”

*   *   *

I was chomping at the bit the entire ride down to Progress. We got off the exit and took one of the back roads past an old feed and seed store. We traveled another eight miles out into the country. Eventually, the sprawl of subdivisions that used to be farmland gave way to actual farmland. We'd pass by an occasional house with a cluster of outbuildings, and I'd think to myself how scary it was to see civilization encroaching on the American farm. If we weren't careful, another twenty years and the “family farm” would be a thing of the past.

Blacktop turned into gravel road, and a few miles later, I pulled up at the old Hahn stone bridge. The CSU was present, along with the Progress police and sheriff, and a few Granite County squad cars. Honest to God, I had no idea why I'd actually come down to the bridge. It wasn't as if I could do anything. But I wanted to be there when they brought her out of the ground.

I found Mort amid the crowd of people and the ever-increasing cold fog that had seemed to settle in the valley as Colin and I arrived. The dark, heavy clouds overhead made it feel as though evening were just around the corner, when, in fact, it was still hours away. “Hey,” I called out to Mort.

“Torie,” he said. He glanced at Colin and nodded his head.

“I, uh, brought Colin with me. For security reasons.”

Mort just raised his eyebrows and flipped open his notepad. “Well, I think you may have done it, Torie. It's a human skeleton, small; they think it's a female. Clothes have all rotted, but she's wearing some jewelry that looks old. So they're thinking whoever she is, she's been there awhile.”

“Are they gonna—”

“They'll do carbon testing to determine exactly how long she's been there, and I'm going to request one of those fancy facial-reconstruction things.” He glanced over his shoulder and gestured to another sheriff. The man was about fifty and had a head full of white hair and belly the size of a watermelon. “But it's really his call. This is his county, not mine.”

“Well, does he seem game or not?” I asked.

Mort cleared his throat. “Well, when I told him that I suspected the skeleton was the body of Belle Morgan, he sure as hell perked up. So I think he'll spend the money for it.”

“If not, I will.”

“What?” Mort said.

“Well, I mean, I guess. How much does it cost? Tell him I'll split it with his department,” I said. Seriously, I had money just sitting there doing nothing, thanks to Sylvia. The least I could do was find out if this was truly Belle Morgan.

“All right, I'll tell him.”

“You know what this means, don't you? If this turns out to be Belle?”

“What?”

“It means the song that was sent to me by Clifton Weaver really is a confession of murder. I mean, it goes from being just a song about a murder to a confession of Belle's murder. Or it was written by somebody who witnessed her murder and wrote it down as a confession. One of the two.”

“Which makes Clifton Weaver's murder take on a different slant, as well.”

“I think whoever killed Clifton Weaver was looking for ‘The Blood Ballad.' That's what got him killed. I know it.”

“But why?” Mort asked. “So it's a song. Big deal.”

“Well, it would be the song of the century. It would solve the country music industry's greatest mystery.”

“True,” he said and scratched his head with his pencil. “Or maybe it points the finger at a loved one and whoever killed Clifton Weaver doesn't want his loved one revealed as a murderer.”

“That could be, too.”

I glanced over at Colin, who was standing away from the CSU at a respectful distance, but wanted to jump right in. I could tell by his body language. At one point, knelt down to watch as they started lifting bones from the unmarked grave. He was waiting to see what was lying beneath the remains. Classic Sheriff Brooke. I'd seen him do that a few times.

A hush crept over the scene as they lifted the first bone. I shook my head, still amazed after all these years that people could do really horrible things to one another. I blew warm air into my hands, as they were beginning to go numb. Then I turned to Sheriff Mort. “Look, my daughter pointed out a resemblance between Belle Morgan and a girl named Isabelle Mercer, who disappeared from New Kassel a few years before Belle showed up in Progress, married Eddie Morgan, and began singing with the family.”

“Your daughter?”

“Mary.”

“What, are you
breeding
historical sleuths? How did Mary just happen to see the resemblance?”

I explained how she'd been doing research to help Rachel. I shrugged. “Sorry, I don't do it intentionally. I guess from living with me, they just look at things differently and have access to things that other teenagers don't.”

“So, you think she's right?”

“I'd almost bet on it. Sylvia thought so, too. She wrote a big long chapter about Isabelle Mercer in a book she wrote on unsolved mysteries. She went to call on Belle Morgan, who refused to see her.”

“You think that's proof of guilt?” he asked.

“I think it means Belle had something to hide.”

“Or maybe she just didn't want to talk to some crazed fan? You know, if she really wasn't Isabelle Mercer, that's how Belle Morgan could have taken Sylvia's visit,” he said.

He had a point, and I admitted it to him. “Still, the photographs are uncanny. I really wish I could get my hands on some of Eddie Morgan's personal family photographs to compare to the ones of Isabelle Mercer.”

“Well, becoming a famous musician would be a really stupid thing to do if you wanted to disappear,” Mort said.

“That's just it, Mort. I'm not sure she was trying to disappear. I think she just wanted out of her life. She wanted away from New Kassel. I don't think she especially cared if she was found. But then, when Sylvia showed up … I dunno, maybe she didn't want to have to answer to those she'd left behind after all.”

“Well, we can speculate all we want, but first we need to find out if these remains are hers or not,” he said.

“They're hers,” I told him.

“Hey!” Colin called out. “There's something under the hipbone!”

Mort and I ran over and stood as close as we could get. Someone from the CSU called out, “This is a crime scene, not a circus!”

“Right,” Colin said and shoved his hands in his pockets. He was on the other side of the unmarked grave from us. He raised his hands in a motion that implied he was striking something with a hammer. Then he mouthed to us “murder weapon.”

The white-haired sheriff of Progress came over to us then and held out some jewelry in a transparent evidence bag. “Look familiar?”

Like I was supposed to know what Belle Morgan's jewelry looked like, but I took the bag and examined it closely anyway. The first piece looked like a wedding ring. It was most likely white gold, since it wasn't yellow gold, and silver was not normally a choice for a wedding ring—and besides, silver would have tarnished. This ring, other than being covered in dirt, wasn't tarnished. It had four diamonds, about the size of a quarter karat each, lined up in a perfect row. “This should be easily identifiable by family photographs or even by her children, if they're still alive.”

“I thought her kids were young when Belle disappeared,” Mort said.

“True,” I said. “Well, maybe there's a photograph of her we could find that shows her wedding ring.”

Mort jotted it down in his notebook. Then he pointed at another ring with his pencil. This one was also white gold and had what looked like two small rubies and three diamonds all in a cluster. “Those real diamonds, you think?”

I shrugged. “Possibly.”

“You think even a successful music family would have bought diamond rings during the Depression?”

“I honestly don't know. It looks older than that, though. Like from the early twenties.”

“I'll take your word for it,” he said.

“Ask Colin; he owns an antique store.”

“Oh, right,” he said. Mort held up the evidence bag and pointed at it. Colin nodded and walked around the hole made by the CSU, careful to make a wide path around the crime-scene tape. There were no prints or fibers that he could disturb, not after this many years, but old habits die hard. “How old would you say this ring is?”

Colin took the bag and looked at it. “Um, I'd say early twenties.”

Mort made another note in his notebook.

“Can we get pictures of the jewelry?” I asked.

Mort nodded. “I'll ask. Sheriff Marceau is probably going to want to ask you a bunch of questions. Since you led him to a dead body.”

“Of course,” I said. I had sort of forgotten about that. Colin reached in his pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. I assumed he was blushing considerably because he was embarrassed. I'd certainly never seen him wear them before. Then he held the jewelry bag closer. He rubbed the bag, as if that would make whatever he was looking at clearer.

“What is it, Colin?” I asked.

“This necklace … look here,” he said.

I leaned over and looked. The dainty chain was silver, or possibly white gold, and there was a locket hanging from it. There was no fancy inscribed initial on it, but, rather, a delicate filigree design.

“What's inside?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “Right now, I'm more interested in this.”

“What?”

Colin flipped the locket over to look at the back. Down at the very bottom was a tradesman's mark, the mark of the jeweler who had made the piece. “Cunningham Brothers.”

“Famous jeweler?” I asked.

He snorted a laugh and then looked at me over the edge of his new glasses. “Only in Wisteria.”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“There are no jewelers in New Kassel. In fact, the only jeweler in Granite County, then or now, is Cunningham Brothers.”

“Are you telling me this necklace was made by a jeweler in Wisteria?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'd say anywhere from 1910 to 1925. I'll know for sure when I go home and check my book.”

“I don't believe it,” I said.

“So we know our dead body here bought at least one piece of jewelry five miles from New Kassel,” Mort said.

“Right,” I agreed.

“Our first connection to Isabelle Mercer?” Mort said.

“Possibly,” I replied.

One of the crime-scene investigators then bagged and tagged an ax that was found with the body.

“Oh my God, it's the murder weapon.”

Sheriff Marceau was kind enough to bring it over for us to inspect. I flipped the ax over inside the bag and my blood ran cold. The air around me seemed to drop twenty degrees. I sucked my breath in hard.

“What is it?” Mort asked.

There, inscribed on the blade of the ax, were the initials J.R.K. John Robert Keith. “I think this was my grandfather's ax.”

Sheriff Marceau clicked his teeth and said, “We need to be having our talk now, Mrs. O'Shea.”