For the first few miles Edith had entertained the driver by reading aloud the autopsy report on Chevry Morgan-with perhaps more enthusiasm than was strictly warranted. She then switched to the photocopy of Donna Jean Morgan’s account of the last day of Chevry’s life. By the time she finished her oral interpretation of that document, they were turning off the main road, and she had to shift roles, from talking book to navigator.
“I don’t know what you expect to find out here,” Edith remarked. “Not that I mind a nice ride in the country. Do you think the police will have overlooked a clue?”
“There’s little chance of that,” said Elizabeth. “I’m sure they were thorough, but there may have been something they overlooked. Something that didn’t register to their senses as evidence. Remember, they went in with a strong belief that Chevry had been poisoned by his wife.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Elizabeth. “I only hope we find it.”
After a few more miles Edith spotted the correct road sign, and minutes later they pulled up in the gravel parking lot of the little country church. Elizabeth stopped the car and got out to look at the scene of Chevry Morgan’s revelations. “So this is it,” she murmured.
“This is it.”
Elizabeth shook her head at the shabby old building, and then walked past it to the cemetery beyond. The gravestones were worn granite slabs, with an occasional lamb or cross scattered among the rectangles. All the graves were well tended, even those whose inscriptions were faint, their death dates in the 1800s. Here and there a plastic arrangement was propped against a stone. Near the stone wall that marked the cemetery’s outer boundary lay a cluster of graves, each marked with a cinderblock-sized headstone. The death dates ranged from 1862 to 1865, and the birth dates were barely twenty years earlier. Each name was followed by the initials C.S.A. These were the Confederate dead, resting in peace under a spreading oak tree that had seen them born and then outlived them by more than a century.
Chevry Morgan’s grave was out in the sunlight, heaped with sprays of red and white carnations, and a few bedraggled bunches of roses from parishioners’ gardens. There was no headstone yet. The newly dug grave would be left to settle for several months before a permanent marker was installed. Elizabeth wondered who would choose the monument, and what it might say. Would Tanya Faith put down a modern bronze marker, or would the faithful take up a collection for a marble angel to mark the resting place of their controversial prophet? Elizabeth couldn’t imagine any marker commissioned by Donna Jean for her errant husband.
“That’s an interesting inscription,” said Edith, who had been trailing after Elizabeth, reading the older inscriptions. “‘Behold I shew you a mystery.’” Elizabeth nodded. “It’s a Bible verse, but I’ve never seen it written on a tombstone before. Whose grave is it?”
Edith knelt down to read the fading letters. It was an old tombstone, weathered and chocked with weeds. “Lucy something Tod-something…”
“Lucy Todhunter! Let me see!” Elizabeth rubbed the dirt from the inscription. “It is Lucy Todhunter. Donna Jean’s deadly ancestor. I remember now. In Everett Yancey’s manuscript, he mentions that epitaph. I don’t remember him saying where she was buried, though. So here she is. Maybe she did it.”
“I’m still plumping for divine intervention,” said Edith. “This wasn’t her house, was it?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “I think her place was closer to Danville. It was badly damaged by fire in the Thirties, and they tore it down. That would have been spooky, though, wouldn’t it? If she had lived in the house where her great-grandson-in-law was murdered?”
“It would have made an interesting defense for your brother,” said Edith. “He could have had Donna Jean plead demonic possession.”
“Bill is unconventional enough as it is. I just hope we can help him prove her innocence.”
A few yards from the cemetery wall stood the house that the preacher had been fixing up for his child bride. They stepped over the low stone wall and started for the back steps. “Did you remember to clear this visit with the widow?” asked Elizabeth.
Edith reached in her purse and pulled out a modern key. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yes, but it still leaves me with about five hundred other questions. How did Lucy Todhunter kill the major? And how did Donna Jean kill Chevry? Or if she didn’t, who did?” She shivered as she looked up at the decaying structure nestling in a thicket of weeds. “Maybe it’s the house.”
“Edgar Allan Poe was from Virginia, but he never got this far west,” said Edith. “Let’s see what you can find out from the inside. It’s hot enough out here to melt polyester.”
Moments later they were inside a narrow, old-fashioned kitchen. The imitation parquet linoleum looked new, and the cabinets had been freshly painted, but the lightbulb still hung from a bare socket in the center of the room, and the walls were an unappetizing shade of green, streaked with grease and decades of accumulated dust.
“If I had to live here, I’d drink the poison willingly,” Edith remarked.
“It has potential,” said Elizabeth, glancing approvingly at the high ceilings and the oak wainscoting. She tore a paper towel from a roll on the drain board and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Want some water?” she asked Edith. “There’s probably a glass around somewhere.”
Edith shook her head. “Ill go check out the rest of the estate.”
Elizabeth found a dusty jelly glass, rinsed it out in rusty tap water, and refilled it when the water ran clear. “They need a water filter,” she muttered, making a face, but because she was thirsty, she drank it. “Well, I suppose no one needs a water filter here anymore. Tanya Faith will go home to Mommy and Daddy and finish high school. Maybe someday she’ll realize how lucky she was that it worked out this way.”
She joined Edith for a tour of the rest of the house. The old place had been built at least a century earlier as a simple wooden farmhouse, with two large rooms on either side of the modest entrance hall, where a straight staircase led upstairs to four bedrooms, one of which had been subdivided with wallboard to form an upstairs bath. Each bedroom was resplendent with multicolored deep-pile shag carpeting in iridescent colors, clashing almost audibly with the peeling floral wallpaper from decades past.
“Maybe it was the house,” muttered Edith, after they had contemplated the riot of color in stunned silence.
“Maybe it would have looked better after he’d painted the walls,” said Elizabeth, who was loath to criticize the decorating taste of the recently departed. “Anyhow, I expect he got a good discount on the carpeting, since he was in the business. Let’s look around for anything that seems out of the ordinary.”
Edith pointed to the pink-and-purple heather shag monstrosity that seemed to be exhaling dust motes before them. “That qualifies.”
“I mean, bottles in medicine cabinets, or loose floorboards, or-”
“Secret passages?”
“Oh, sure. Or an empty mummy case, with a sign that says Back in half an hour. Any little thing, Edith.”
The house’s tin roof made the upstairs rooms almost shimmer with heat from the morning sun, but they searched diligently for more than an hour, finding nothing more interesting than a few empty beer bottles tucked in an otherwise empty closet. The bathroom medicine cabinet consisted of two tin shelves behind a paint-spattered mirror. Apart from an accumulation of dirt and two rusty razor blades, it, too, was empty.
Downstairs, they checked the pantry, the parlor, and the dining room, without success. No floorboards were loose. No mantelpieces swung open. No walls concealed hidden rooms. The house was as simple and shabby as it had appeared, offering no clues about the death of the man who had tried to restore it.