A Widow's Curse Read online

  “Why?” Shultz’s face screwed up.

  “She’s an immortal,” I answered. “She outlived the man she loved, she outlived all the swans she knew—in time, she’ll outlive everything. She’s the world’s widow.”

  “Jesus.” Shultz shivered a bit. “I could never figure out why some people want to live on and on forever. Thank God you can’t really do that.”

  “But I’m afraid you can do just that.” I turned my eyes his way. “You can be the world’s widower, Mr. Shultz. What do you think a family is but a succession of people outliving their loved ones? Any two people who get married know one of them will end up widowed.”

  “Not to mention the legacy of family guilt that trails along behind us like a vapor,” Andrews added, “whether we’re completely aware of it or not.”

  I was momentarily silenced by Andrews’s melancholy, his own family’s curse.

  “Jesus,” Shultz repeated, standing. “You two are giving me the grand willies. I believe that’s the medical term I’m looking for.”

  “From the Latin, willikus maximus,” Andrews said immediately.

  “I don’t believe I’ve given anyone the willies since—when was it?” I looked to Andrews.

  “Well, I did, in fact, have a case of them the last time I was up here,” he reported. “But it’s hard to say if I actually got them from you or if they were just going around.”

  “And P. S., Dr. Shultz?” I tried to sound as serious as I could. “It’s a ghost story. It’s supposed to have that effect.”

  “Yeah, well, mission accomplished. Tell me a joke, or turn on the television or something. I don’t know why, but I got a chill.”

  “Like someone was walking on your grave,” Andrews intoned in his best Karloff.

  “Stop.” But Shultz grinned.

  He didn’t see the sudden flash of white out the window behind him. It was a burst of sunlight though the clouds, but it looked very much like a giant swan in the pine trees.

  Six

  “So let’s get this straight.” Andrews attempted to recover a smug tone. “You’re willing to admit that the thing, this coin, may have belonged to your family.”

  He didn’t really know what a difficult admission it was for me. Though we’d discussed my family many times, I’d never actually revealed to him anything but the surface of the matter: the entertaining oddities, the freakish stories, things that would entertain more than inform.

  To start with, if the coin had belonged to the Briarwood family, it must surely have been cursed. It had found its way back to me through the strangest series of coincidences. Someone had wanted to rid us of it, but it had returned. It was a ghost coin.

  More troubling to me was the inescapable ubiquity of my family’s darkness. Everywhere I looked in the house, I could see molecules of my mother trailing in the air like dust motes; I could hear my father’s thundering silences.

  Leave the house and walk through the town, they were there, and their parents before them: This one planted the chestnut in front of the courthouse; that one pounded the nails in the bench underneath the tree.

  Blue Mountain was no moving stream. Everywhere I stepped was a place a family member had walked. Invisible footprints padded the sidewalks, bent each blade of grass, shuffled the gravel in the roads; their skin was on door handles and windowsills, the bark of the trees and the crest of the rim—no place was untouched by my kith and kin.

  This man Shultz had brought me more evidence, and the implication was terrifying: No place in the world was entirely safe from their taint. Go to Atlanta, and there was the coin. Go to Ireland, and there was the grave of a man my kin had killed. Retreat to Wales, and there they were, leering from the ancient wells, over the wind-blasted hills, and rounding the swan-filled lakes.

  “Is he stalling?” Shultz peered at me as if I were in a trance.

  “Fever?” Andrews had at least dropped his air of self-satisfaction.

  “I’m just trying to scrub out the notion,” I began, “that my family members are everywhere, and that they secretly run the world.”

  “The world,” Shultz rejoined, “or your world?”

  “Point taken.” I tried to shake off a bit of the gloom that had shrouded me.

  “So what’s next?” Shultz’s voice had returned to its more characteristic boyish tones.

  “I have no idea.” I rubbed my face.

  The other two sat waiting, as if I were simply trying to gather my thoughts, but I could not shake the feeling that I would never rid myself of the family curse—if pathological loneliness could be elevated to such a mythic proportion.

  When the silence moved from anticipatory to uncomfortable, Andrews roused himself.

  “Well,” he began hazily, “Shultz, didn’t you say something about your father insuring this coin?”

  “Dad? Yes. For five thousand big ones. That’s what he told me. Remember I said we should check insurance records?”

  “Right, Fever, what about checking records around here to see if Grandpa Conner did the same thing. Maybe we’ll find something. Then we’d know for certain if he’d ever owned it or not, and we’d know how to proceed—at least a bit better than we know now.”

  “Good point.” I nodded. “I know that the money he left was in some kind of trust or legal protection. I was too young to care about the particulars when I left home, and I really haven’t thought about it since I’ve come back. Maybe the lawyer who handled that also took care of other business. Maybe records were kept.”

  “Sounds kind of half-baked.” Shultz shook his head slowly.

  “Do you remember the lawyer’s name?”

  “No.” I stood. “But Conner kept everything of importance in this trunk, and papers of that sort would certainly be no exception.”

  “You wouldn’t have seen them already,” Shultz asked, “after all this time?”

  “As I was saying”—I sighed—“I wasn’t that interested in anything other than his stories when I was young, and since I’ve been back home, I really haven’t thought about anything like this.”

  I moved to the far right corner of the room. Though it was framed by two windows, it was still a darker part of the house. Its sole occupant was an antique trunk. In that trunk were the tortured writings my great-grandfather had left behind, and packets of other papers, long unopened.

  The lid creaked like a coffin top. Dust rose up like dead spirits. I sorted through heartbreaking manuscripts, unintelligible notes, and packets of unread letters before I saw several thick legal envelopes and gathered them up. One was printed with a return address: Brinsley Taylor, Esq. Pine City, GA.

  “Here we go,” I said, a bit too weakly to qualify as triumphant. “This might be something, then.”

  I only glanced at the first page of the long missive, but it was indeed quite something.

  A single phone call to Taylor and Taylor, Attorneys at Law, listed in the Pine City phone book, had confirmed that their founder, now deceased, had, in fact, been Brinsley Taylor.

  Alas, the phone call did nothing to assure us one way or another that any sort of helpful information could be had there. Only the secretary was in the office, and she could only tell us that everyone had gone but might be back later. I said I wanted to come in anyway, and she told me she’d be in the office until five o’clock. I thought a personal appearance was in order—I can be very persuasive in person—but Shultz didn’t remotely believe that the trip was worth the effort. He elected not to bother his vacation with such nonsense. He was a bit reticent to let me take the coin with me, but when I told him where to find the apple brandy, things seemed to change.

  He didn’t even bid Andrews and me good luck or happy hunting or any other such well-wishing. His last words were, “It’s a wild-goose chase, boys. You’re wasting your time. I’m staying here where it’s safe and dry.”

  So it was odd, in retrospect, that he waved good-bye.

  The road to Pine City had been repaved since the last time I’d
driven it, and the recent rain had made it a black mirror, glazed and glowing.

  The drive was tedious to me, but Andrews seemed to enjoy the scenery. Twice, he almost made me stop the truck so he could take advantage of a so-called scenic overlook. I persuaded him that the vista had not significantly changed in quite some time from that vantage point and was likely to be available to him at some other juncture when time was not of the essence.

  We pulled into the driveway of a palatial Victorian-era mansion just before 4:30. The somewhat weathered sign said TAYLOR AND TAYLOR MEANS BUSINESS.

  “They have their office in their home,” Andrews mused, “or did they buy this place because it makes an impression?”

  The place was a fortress of southern aristocracy clichés: painted Confederate gray and bloodred, American flag flying at a forty-five-degree angle from a white column in the front porch, and situated right next door to the Episcopal church.

  “Let’s ask.” I climbed out of the truck.

  Andrews bounded out the passenger side and was up on the steps in a flash.

  We made a pair, I suppose. Andrews had not been convinced to change, so his wrinkled Hawaiian shirt seemed to wrestle the American flag for attention in the breeze. I was in black, a funeral mourner or some rebellious priest in jeans, sans collar.

  Andrews shoved through the front door of the place as if he were entering a shop on the town square.

  “Hi,” he trumpeted before I could even get to the door. “We called.”

  I hurried in behind him. The reception area was huge: a wide wooden stairway to the right, a dozen overstuffed chairs to the left, and tall potted palms, perfect for the place, in three corners. The ceilings seemed fourteen feet high, with a pounded tin pattern and framed by thick crown molding. The area had been artfully arranged as a reception area and waiting room.

  The person behind the reception desk had, as I feared, been frightened. The nameplate on her desk read BECKY MEADOWS.

  “I’m Dr. Devilin.” I shot out my hand. “This is Dr. Andrews. We’d like to speak to one of the Taylors, if anyone’s come back yet.”

  “Oh.” Becky blinked three times, her tongue between her lips, then took my hand for a split second. “Doctor…yes. You called.”

  “I said that.” Andrews looked at me.

  “Shh.” I smiled. “I did call. Is anyone available?”

  Becky was a short brunette, not long out of high school. My guess was that her father knew the Taylors—hunted quail with them or was an old fraternity brother. Her charcoal suit coat was a bit tight over a frilly white blouse; her skirt was a tad short. I decided that Becky’s father had gotten her the job to “straighten her out”—and I was a little uncomfortable by what he might have meant by that phrase. I assumed he wanted to make his daughter into a good churchgoing wife and mother, but Becky’s eyes betrayed at least a restless, if not a wild, heart.

  “Mr. Taylor?” she called suddenly. “It’s him.”

  “Oh?” The voice came from the hallway behind Becky’s desk. “Well, send him back.”

  “He’s got someone with him,” she sang out.

  “Then send them both back, Becky.” The voice betrayed strained patience.

  She smiled quickly up at us both.

  “You can go on back,” she whispered, as if it were somehow a secret.

  “We can go back,” Andrews whispered to me.

  “Behave, or wait in the truck.” I smiled at Becky and navigated around her desk.

  “First on the left.” Becky was still whispering.

  “Thanks,” Andrews told her, his voice barely audible.

  The first room on the left had been, I thought, the formal dining room of the house. It was huge, oval-shaped, not rectangular. A brilliant chandelier, perhaps twenty lights and hundreds of crystal bobs, hung in the air, exactly centered in the room, and spotlessly clean. Beneath it lay a round rug, royal blue and antique gold. In the epicenter of the rug was an oak desk that looked presidential. Behind that desk sat a man with the best haircut I had seen in three years. He was in his fifties, wore a starched French-cuffed shirt with infinitesimally thin blue vertical stripes. His tie was silk, of the palest blue, and matched his cuff links perfectly. He did not stand.

  “Gentlemen.” He stared.

  He did not offer us a seat, and there were no chairs in front of his desk. Andrews took care of the dilemma in characteristic manner. He sat down on a corner of the man’s desk.

  “I’m Dr. Andrews,” he began in dead earnest, “and this is Dr. Devilin. I’m afraid we have a bit of bad news. Your chandelier? It violates what we call the Phantom of the Opera law: It intimidates the rest of the room and threatens to overshadow the main plot action. It’ll have to come down.”

  Mr. Taylor only exhibited the slightest pause.

  “It is quite something.” His voice was dulcet and calm. “Original to the house.”

  His accent stuck pins in my forehead, right between my eyes. His were the tones of noblesse oblige, of deigning to respond, of season opera tickets purchased but rarely used and hidden back-room conversations that signed whims into laws. His voice was the equal balance, on the rich end of the cultural spectrum, for the screaming, red-faced, out-of-work mechanic who terrorized his wife and attended Klan meetings.

  I hated judging him by his few words. It was a reflex conditioned by years of painful experience in a South I kept forgetting was not quite gone, not yet. I hoped I was wrong about him.

  “My great-grandfather, Conner Devilin, had, I believe, some business with Brinsley Taylor, who was the founder of this firm.”

  “He was.” Taylor sat back in his chair. It did not squeak, did not make a sound. “He and your great-grandfather were—well, not friends, exactly, but they were acquainted.”

  “In what way?” I clasped my hands behind my back, reminded myself to stand up straight, and peered down at Taylor.

  “They were both Masons.”

  That made sense. No one in Blue Mountain would ever discuss Masonic affiliations, but Conner had certainly been a brother, and would have taken it seriously. In small mountain towns, that sort of bond was significant, and often formed the basis of all manner of relationships. Conner had doubtless become a silver Mason in Ireland, though it was harder to determine the exact nature of Brinsley Taylor’s craft.

  “Is this your family’s home?” Andrews allowed his eyes to roam the room. “We were wondering.”

  “It was not. My father purchased it in the 1950s, when it was about to be condemned and torn down. He had a passion for architecture as well as the law. Of course, owning an old home is tantamount to a good marriage: It takes daily care and a good bit of money just to keep up appearances.”

  He smiled with his mouth but not his eyes.

  “So,” Andrews concluded, “business must be pretty good.”

  “You called,” Taylor said to me, ignoring Andrews, “and drove here for a reason.”

  I locked eyes with him and drew an envelope from my hip pocket.

  “I have a letter from Brinsley Taylor to my great-grandfather. Shall I read it to you? It is the proximate cause of our visit.”

  Taylor sipped the slightest breath.

  “You would prefer to read it to me rather than let me see it for myself?”

  I held the envelope before me.

  “It says that Conner Devilin helped to establish this firm of yours, in that he was its first big client. It goes on to say that if he or any of his heirs ever has a legal question concerning the Devilin family that we will have immediate pro bono counseling and swift action. I believe most of those phrases are exact quotes. But, of course, you can see it for yourself.”

  I tossed the envelope onto the desk; it landed exactly in front of Taylor. He didn’t look at it or move to take it. He kept his eyes on me.

  “Then I assume you’re here about your trust.” He didn’t blink.

  I kept my face stony, though my mind seesawed. My trust.

  “Along
those lines.” I didn’t want to give him any more information than that if I didn’t have to.

  After another long moment of lid-itching eye lock, he leaned forward.

  “Remarkably, we still have all those old files. I mean the real files, not on the computer. If you give me a hint as to what it is you’re looking for, I might even steer you to the exact folder.”

  “Looking for anything that would establish legal ownership of a certain valuable item, perhaps insurance records or some document transferring title of something…” My voice trailed off.

  “Ah.” There was the joyless smile again. “Then it does have to do with the trust. Which item?”

  Andrews gave us away. He shot a look at me like a bullet before he could contain himself.

  Taylor sighed heavily, clearly irritated, I thought, by our reticence to share with him.

  “Becky!” His voice was so sudden and so loud that Andrews jumped off Taylor’s desk.

  “Yes, sir?” Becky sounded terrified.

  “Would you bring in those files I asked you to pull, please, ma’am?”

  She was in the doorway, holding manila folders, before he had even finished his sentence.

  “If you’ll follow her,” Taylor said, suddenly quiet again, “she’ll take you to a conference room where you can look over those documents. I believe you’ll find what you’re looking for, but of course I can’t be certain, since you won’t tell me what you’re looking for. And would you please keep in mind that we’re at the end of our business day. I’ll stay until you’re done, of course, in case you have any questions, but Becky will be leaving soon.”

  “I can stay,” she ventured.

  “Absolutely not, Ms. Meadows,” Andrews insisted. “We’re a nuisance, and you’ve already been inconvenienced.”

  “It’s Miss,” she insisted.

  “Even more so,” Andrews concluded, somewhat inexplicably.

  She turned to Taylor.

  “You know I can stay, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Coffee, gentlemen?” Taylor asked.

  “Love some,” Andrews said immediately. “Lots of cream.”