A Widow's Curse Read online

  I shook my head. The brown liquid that surely had been warming in a Mr. Coffee in the “break room” since 8:30 that morning did not legally qualify as coffee to me, not remotely.

  “And then you may leave, Becky.”

  “You won’t need me any more tonight? You had me place those long-distance—”

  “Good night, Becky!” Taylor interrupted impatiently.

  “Good night, Mr. Taylor.” Becky motioned with her eyes in the direction we were to go.

  We followed her out of Taylor’s office and down the hall.

  The conference room was a cozy affair. A long oak table, perhaps two hundred years old, filled most of the room, but there was a fireplace at one end and a small buffet at the other. A French press and a coffee service for at least ten sat waiting on the latter. The wainscoting had at one time been painted, but it had recently been sanded, left natural and oiled, so that it brightened rather than darkened the room. Another chandelier hung over the oak table, but this one, at least, was somewhat proportionately agreeable with the rest of the room.

  Becky laid three manila folders at the head of the table.

  “Sure you won’t have some coffee, Dr. Devilin? It’s real good. It’s a French press, they call it. And I grind the beans right here. On the spot.”

  “I see,” I told her, delighted. “Well, you’ve talked me into it.”

  “Great, then.” She smiled, bright as a penny, pleased with her powers of persuasion.

  She busied herself with the appointed task; Andrews and I sat at the table—neither of us presuming to take the head seat—and each took a file at random.

  Andrews took the one entitled “C.D.”

  Mine was labeled “Correspondence.” In it I found papers indicating that the man named Jamison, to whom Conner had apprenticed in Ireland, had left Conner a bit of land in that country. Some of the letters were over a hundred years old. Fascinated, I began to read, but Andrews interrupted.

  “Here we go,” he said slowly. “This is something. In 1942, your great-grandfather ‘acquired at auction three items of value’—I’m quoting—‘best insured at top assessment,’ whatever that means.”

  I set my folder aside.

  “Does it say what the items of value were?”

  He leafed through several pages, then looked up.

  “This is exciting.” He was a child.

  “Isn’t it.” I was deadpan.

  “I love research.”

  “Could we…,” I encouraged.

  “Right.” He filed though the pages until he came to something that interested him. “Right.”

  “And?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Andrews.”

  “It says here, again,” he began slowly, “that the items were recently acquired—that is, in 1942—and they were as follows, and I quote: ‘a silver coin or medallion; an Indian artifact, possibly Cherokee; a portrait apparently by Cotman.’”

  “Wait.” I reached for the pages. “‘Recently acquired.’ Then they weren’t exactly Briarwood family heirlooms, including the coin.”

  “That means I was wrong.” Andrews couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Well, you were right about the idea that the coin might have belonged to my great-grandfather, but this is why I always say it’s best not to rush to judgment. Let me see here.” I read over the papers. “Oh.”

  I could feel the blood drain from my face.

  “Fever?”

  Becky glanced my way, then whispered to Andrews.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He gets this way all the time,” Andrews assured her. “He’s sickly. His first name is Fever, for God’s sake—what can we expect?”

  “Fever?” She didn’t seem to believe it. “Really?”

  “You know that I just told Shultz,” I said slowly to Andrews, “how I was afraid my family ran the world? And he said, ‘the world, or your world?’”

  “Yes.” Andrews had no idea where I was leading him.

  “I meant to say that whenever you find out something about your life, it applies to the entire world; and, conversely, anything you find out about the world has direct, exact relevance to your life. Everything in life is metaphorical.”

  “I don’t—,” Andrews began.

  “When I discover some new variant of a folktale, for example, it speaks directly to me, it tells me something about myself, even though I know its intent is more universal. And when I encounter some new insight about myself, I believe it opens a door to understanding the entire human condition, because I am everything, and everything is me.”

  “All right, but I still don’t—”

  “The variant with which I’m dealing at the moment—I mean, I have it in my head that if I can discover why my great-grandfather bought these things at auction somewhere, and what he did with them, I can also discover why and how Shultz’s father bought the coin, and what he thought he was going to do with it. It’s all tied up together.”

  “Right.” Andrews still didn’t follow me.

  “If I can find out about this—all of this business with fathers and sons—then I might be able to help Shultz.”

  “Help him what?”

  “Understand his father.”

  Andrews started to speak, then sat back in his chair instead. He pulled on his earlobe and nodded slowly, blowing out a soft sigh.

  “And the more you find out about other people,” he began, looking down at the tabletop, “the more you understand your own—”

  I interrupted before he could finish his thought out loud. “For example, the thing you just read, the part about the painting by this man Cotman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you look at the value attached to the painting, and the rest of the page?”

  “Not yet.”

  I turned the papers so he could see them.

  “It was valued at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. In 1942.”

  “Jesus.” Andrews leaned in to examine the document.

  “Apparently, it was the basis of my—what do I call it?—inheritance?”

  “The funds that paid to get you out of Blue Mountain and into your university were all gleaned from—”

  “It seems,” I picked up, “that it was all financed by the sale of this painting—something that my great-grandfather went to buy at some auction. On a whim.”

  “Why couldn’t it have been any one of the three items that you’re talking about?”

  “Look at the asterisk,” I told him.

  He squinted, saw the asterisk, and went to the bottom of the page, where it said, “Sold/money held in trust for Fever Devilin/see attached.”

  He shuffled through the rest of the papers in the folder.

  “The painting is the only thing that was sold?” He kept looking. “So where’s the piece of paper that says what happened to the coin?”

  “Right.”

  We spent the next twenty minutes in silence, raking through yellowing evidence, pages that had been amended, erased, altered with white-out, torn, folded, and stapled. It was hard to make anything out of them. At least two generations of small-town father and son lawyers had seen fit to correct or update almost everything on the original page, when it seemed to me that a more ordinary practice might have been to keep the old pages intact and create new documents for new situations. But, of course, I had no law degree. The system that had been used by the people who had attained such degrees rendered the documents impossible to understand clearly. Perhaps that was their aim. Or perhaps such is always the case when a son tries to rectify the mistakes of the father; when the sins of the father are visited upon the son.

  Becky brought us coffee and left silently. She even tiptoed out. I assumed she went home. I heard the phone ring once, then the sound of Taylor’s voice on the telephone, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying. I tried harder to focus on the folders.

  The third file, marked “Misc.,” offered almost nothing in the way of u
seful information. It did have several typed pages describing the coin Conner had purchased: “Saint on one side, capital B on the other,” but otherwise it was filled with petty receipts and inconsequential notes.

  My “Correspondence” file yielded little better, offering tantalizing new mysteries. There was a letter from an art dealer that said, fairly plainly, “John Sell Cotman was, of course, a landscape artist and rendered no portraits.” Another letter from a rare coin collector reported that the coin in question was not a coin at all, but a medallion and, in fact, a fake.

  Nowhere could we find a document or even a notation that indicated any sale of the coin, nor was it insured or given a monetary value in any folder.

  Andrews looked up at last.

  “The painting was the only thing sold, it seems, and maybe that was a fake, too.”

  “Little mention of the coin, and less of the so-called Cherokee artifact.”

  “Any idea what that might have been?”

  “The Cherokee thing? None. Not really my field.”

  He pushed the file away from himself.

  “Did any of this tell us what we wanted to know,” he asked, “or do I have to chalk this up to just another of your many and much-needed psychological breakthroughs? I mean about your father—”

  “Well.” I folded my hands. “In no particular order: We can be relatively certain the coin Shultz’s father bought had once belonged to my great-grandfather; we know that neither he nor my father sold it to Shultz’s father, and so we know that the sale may well have been illegal. We hear from an alleged expert that the coin is fake, though I believe that assessment to be incorrect. I discovered just enough about the Cotman painting to want to know more about it, and him—the painter himself. In fact, we learned many things from these files—not the least of which is the certainty that lawyer Taylor is hiding something from us.”

  “What?” Andrews sat up at that.

  “Take a look at the outside of the folders. Line them up: ‘C.D.’ first, then ‘Correspondence,’ then ‘Misc.’ Lay them out side by side in that order.”

  “I’ll bite.”

  He arranged the files in alphabetical order from left to right in front of him.

  “Now look at the front of each folder.”

  He did.

  It took him a moment, but he finally saw what I had already noticed.

  “They don’t—how would I say this?” He stared down at them. “They don’t line up.”

  “Right.”

  The front of each of the old manila folders was faded and indented in the exact shape of the folder that had been in front of it, and the tab part of each folder was located at a slightly different place than on the other folders, so they could be placed in a cabinet in such a way as to have no tab hidden by any other tab.

  Andrews had realized, after his brief examination of the three folders in front of him, that there had been at least one other folder, maybe more—something between “Correspondence” and “Misc.” It was obvious.

  “I thought you just meant that the information in the folders was shoddy on purpose, to hide something,” Andrews said, still wondering at the clear evidence in front of him on the table. “Because they certainly are a mess. But it looks very much like they’re keeping another folder from us. What the hell?”

  I could hear irritation growing in his voice.

  I waxed somewhat more philosophical.

  “I often have this problem in my folk research,” I told him. “You think you’ve asked the perfect question and all you need to complete your work is that one answer. But one answer, even a great one, can lead to a dozen more questions, issues that confuse the path beyond all recognition, and the work has just begun, because I often also discover that the person I’m talking with is hiding something—sometimes deliberately; just as often without their even realizing it. Maybe the missing file has nothing to do with Conner Devilin; maybe the files got shuffled—it could be an innocent mistake. You haven’t learned an important academic axiom: ‘Never impart malice to what is more likely incompetence’?”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled on his earlobe.

  The short musing silence that followed our comments was blasted quite suddenly.

  “Gentlemen!”

  Andrews and I both jumped.

  Taylor stood in the doorway of the meeting room, a mask of gloom clouding his face.

  “I’m afraid I have a bit of odd news.” Taylor took a step into the room. “Something has occurred at your home, Dr. Devilin, in your absence.”

  I stood.

  “What’s happened?”

  “You’ve just had a phone call.” Taylor paused. “Something about bringing a coin back home. Are you entertaining houseguests?”

  Seven

  The drive home was a tense affair. Shultz had called the law offices in something of a panic, according to Taylor. Apparently, a man had broken into my house or gotten in somehow; Shultz had fallen asleep on the sofa, and so the intruder startled him. After a moment, Shultz determined that the man must be an acquaintance of mine. He seemed quite distraught; said he urgently needed to speak with me, even more desperately wanted to see the coin. So Shultz called.

  The problem was, when I went to the phone in Taylor’s office, it was dead. When I called Shultz back, no one answered.

  The road home seemed longer than it had ever been.

  “And Shultz didn’t say who it was.” Andrews kept going over the minuscule information we had, mumbling to himself. “Only that the man—”

  “You can repeat what Taylor told us a hundred times, but you won’t wring anything out of it. Just have a little patience and all will be revealed in a minute—when we get home.”

  “Can’t this heap drive any faster?” He rocked back and forth a little, unconsciously, I thought.

  “The roads are still slick, it’s almost dark, and I’m going as fast as I can.”

  “Damn.” He said it to himself.

  “Is there a more impatient man on the planet than you?”

  “No.” He rocked faster. “But there’s something more to my immediate discomfort than that. I have a stupid premonition. I know it’s ridiculous, but I’m thinking about Shultz’s saying the name of the Scottish play.”

  “You can’t be serious.” I gave him a sideways glance that I hoped would demonstrate my derision. “You’re afraid something’s happened because he said Macbeth in a diner?”

  “And now you’re saying it!” he exploded. “Drive faster.”

  The last of the light that had kindled itself after the rain had gone was raging at the western horizon. Burnt red went to rococo pink and was eventually overtaken by a Parrish blue canopy that was settling over the nighttime sky. It was bruised sky, an autumn sky. September may have taken on summer’s disguise for a while, but the costume was wearing thin.

  Night always falls hard in Blue Mountain, and the dirt road up to my house was pitch-black by the time we got to it. No lights were on at my place, not even the front porch sconces, as we climbed out of my truck.

  “Is he just sitting there in the dark?” Andrews wondered as we pulled up into my yard.

  “He could be watching television. You like the lights off when you watch horror movies.”

  “But I don’t see the—thing, the flicker or whatever you call it. It doesn’t look like the set’s on.”

  And the house was silent as a tomb. Windows open as they were, we should have heard something.

  I slammed the door to the truck and took three steps before I froze.

  “Wait!” I held up my arm.

  Andrews looked around wildly.

  “What?”

  “Shh. The front door’s open.”

  He looked.

  The door to my house was ajar by inches.

  “This can’t be good.” Andrews’s voice had taken on a hushed tremor.

  I stood for a moment, wondering what to do. It wouldn’t have been the first time my house had been left open, o
r the first time anyone had gotten in. I rarely locked the door. But where was Shultz?

  I took a slow breath.

  “Shultz!”

  Andrews jumped.

  “Jesus, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m helloing the house.”

  “You’re scaring the peanuts out of my M&M’s.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Andrews sighed, then called out, “Shultz, come on!”

  Nothing.

  “He went off with the intruder?” I ventured.

  “Right.” Andrews didn’t move.

  I bit my upper lip, then headed for the door.

  “Wait.” Andrews couldn’t believe I was on the march.

  “Only one way to find out what’s in a dark house is to go inside and turn on the lights.”

  “Oh,” he called after me, mocking my insight. “I understand that metaphor all right. Well, you venture into your ‘dark house of the soul.’ I’ll wait for the paperback to come out.”

  “Honestly.” I hit the front steps. “Shultz?”

  “God.” Andrews followed me, stomping.

  I opened the door and hit the switch that turned on the kitchen lights to my right, the closest inside switch. They were enough to reveal the nightmare image.

  Shultz lay on the living room floor, facedown in front of the sofa, dead as a coffin nail. The back of his head was sunken in with a hole the size of a rotten plum, oozing.

  Outside, the night was black by the time Deputy Mathews’s squad car roared into the front yard: no moon, no stars, only the glare of the headlights.

  Inside, Andrews and I had turned on every light in the house, even upstairs, and had sat silently in the kitchen, trying to think of what to say to each other—not wanting to think about Carl Shultz. I’d seen dead bodies; I’d even witnessed murder. Nothing compared to sitting in my own house with a corpse ten feet away.

  I couldn’t stop wishing Skidmore were in town. When we were younger, we’d been inseparable. When I left Blue Mountain, he was the only one to say good-bye. When I came back, he was the first to welcome me home. Now that he was sheriff, we spent a little less time together, but it would have been nice to have that sort of a friend nearby—under the circumstances.