Micanopy in Shadow (35 page)

“But Sybil wasn’t the kind to feel helpless. Remember, she offered the distraught Ada a brandy. Ada probably told her she’d never tasted it. We’ll never know for sure what Sybil laced it with, but my book on poisons suggests a large dose of ‘Mother’s Helper.’ It was made from opium or ‘laudanum,’ and still used then for colicky babies. Sybil had a baby, remember. The practice was stopped about that time. The effect is drowsiness. That would explain the pastor’s description of the way she stumbled past his church.”

Hope released her grip on the pendant, repelled. “Oh, Brandy, how dreadful!”

“Coroners then weren’t usually even doctors. No one would have done an autopsy. No one would’ve detected the drug.”

“Sybil Irons,” Hope said, wonderingly, a lift in her voice. “She killed Mother? Not my father? Sybil?”

“Protecting her marriage,” Brandy added, “and her husband’s and son’s inheritance.”

For the first time, Brandy understood the depth of her grandmother’s recent horror. When she learned about the documents in the box, she thought Montgomery was trying to conceal what his grandfather had done.

Hope had thought her father had murdered her mother.

Epilogue
 

Brandy sat on her sleek new sofa before the bow window, gazing at the waters of Lake Tuscawilla in the afternoon sun.

“I can’t get my head around the whole thing, Bran,” John said. He stood, one hand in the pocket of khaki jeans, the other smoothing his mustache. “I worked hard on this job. I had no idea I’d be restoring the house for us.”

Brandy reached for his hand. “It’s a fair distribution of the Irons estate. Hope gets the house and substantial investments. Lily Lou gets the balance of the holdings. She never wanted to live in Micanopy, and Grandmother doesn’t want to move. She says the house goes to us eventually; we might as well have it now. It’s ideal for me to work in, and it’s close to your Gainesville office. Keeps me near Grandmother, also. I’m all she has.” She gazed around her. “Anyway, it’s beautiful.”

He turned and reached for his jacket. “And what happens to Montgomery?”

“Noble brought me up-to-date a few days ago. Montgomery goes on trial for murder and attempted murder. He says the lab matched the two bullets that killed Hunter to the 357 Magnum they dug up in his back yard. It’s registered to him. A recent purchase, incidentally. The bullets still had traces of cardboard from the box he used to hide the gun. They also found shreds and ashes of a file folder in the barrel.”

“Ever find out what was in it? The folder you saw at Hunter’s house?”

“Noble suspects Hunter’s father found evidence that could lead to Adrian’s first marriage. Montgomery isn’t talking. Noble says the state’s attorney might charge him with the assault on me, too. That’s harder to prove, but they can nail him for the attack on Grandmother. Deputies found his fingerprints on her back door and on the papers in the box. He burned a scarf in the barrel. They’ll try to prove it was used around her throat.”

She raised her eyes to Adrian’s portrait still above the mantle. His knowledge of Sybil’s guilt must have made him despise her. But if he exposed her, he identified himself as a bigamist and deprived his son of his inheritance. And for what? Ada was dead. Brandy remembered his photograph in the family album as well as this portrait. She noted in both his deep-set, haunted eyes, but she attributed the look then to his experience in the trenches of World War I.

Sybil Irons’ portrait had been banished again to the attic until Hope decided what to do with it.

Brandy rose and walked across the dining room, running her fingers along the edge of the new Scandinavian table, and on into the remodeled kitchen. There she lifted a bouquet of pink and white carnations out of the sink and rejoined John at the front door.

“For several days I’ve been planning a pilgrimage,” she said. “I dropped Brad off at Grandmother’s for an hour. She’s fixed up a box of toys for him.”

John didn’t need to ask where they were now going. As Brandy stared at the live oaks arching above the van, he drove down deeply shaded Whiting Street. “This road was called Sandy Lane when Ada took her fatal walk,” she said.

But John had more to ask. “How did Montgomery know Lieutenant Hunter was talking to you? Or that you went to Mrs. Washington’s?”

“He—or someone he hired—followed me from the time I started asking questions.”

“So what about your other suspects—Caleb Senior and Zeke Wilson?”

“I think Caleb murdered the revenue agent, but Ada probably didn’t know it. As for Wilson, he was hardly the plaster saint people think, but his meeting with Ada was innocent enough. I even wondered about Grandmother’s foster father. He seemed to be a careless provider and not much of a father to Grandmother, but not a killer. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.”

She turned her gaze to the passing cottages. “I keep remembering what the medium said, I mean, that the pendant conveyed enormous sadness and danger, even terror.”

“Lucky guesses.”

But Brandy’s thoughts were now on Hope’s theory of time. Einstein had said the passing of time is an illusion. We don’t really trudge forward like the engine of a train, pulling our days along with us. We’re all caught in the changeless embrace of space/time. We grow from seeds, reproduce, wither, and are gone, but our past continues to exist. Brandy hoped that Ada still lived hers in a dimension that a few of the living could occasionally detect.

“If energy cannot be created or destroyed, consciousness might be a form of energy and continue on,” Brandy said.

“You won’t find a credible physicist or molecular biologist who thinks that.”

John turned onto West Smith Avenue for a few blocks before wheeling between the cemetery pillars. “I admit, your medium was an astute observer,” he said. He parked a few yards down the entrance road. On either side, the cemetery lay in the dappled shade of aging oaks.

“There’s been research, you know,” Brandy said defensively, “on ‘anomalous cognition.’ It’s a kind of intuition, a way of knowing something there’s no ordinary way of knowing.”

John looked over at her and raised his left eyebrow. “To verify an experience, you must be able to observe it objectively. You have to be able to replicate it. Extrasensory perception has never been verified.”

Brandy shrugged. “It occurs in moments of deep emotion. You can’t test emotions in the lab.”

They both stepped out of the car. “I’ll say one thing,” John guided her around the small cement figure of an angel, “at the risk of resorting to New Age physics, living with you tends to verify the uncertainty principle.”

The only sound came from the wind in the trees, the only smell from the moldy odor of decaying leaves. Brandy knew now why Adrian wasn’t buried here. Sybil survived him. She wouldn’t want him near his true wife. As it was, she had to live with his monument to Ada.

Cradling the flowers, Brandy led the way over a deep bed of pine needles and past weathered headstones and overgrown family plots. She stopped near the outer fence and a thicket of crepe myrtle and looked up at the memorial that had dominated her thoughts for weeks. The limb of a water oak cast a shadow across the base, but a ray of sunlight shone over the firm stone face, the uplifted arm, the purposeful stance.

Again Brandy read the still visible lines from “Lenore.” She whispered, only partly to John. “We finally exposed the ‘fiends’ below.’” She turned to John. “If you stare for a few minutes at Ada’s face now, she seems to smile.”

“Stare at any object long enough, and it appears to waver.” He took her hand and said, not unkindly, “An illusion. She isn’t really here, you know.”

But Brandy was only half listening. She was thinking again about her grandmother’s theory. “I don’t know where she is,” she said, her eyes still on the silent face and the line of its stone lips. For an instant they seemed to curve upward.

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