Scrapped (22 page)

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Authors: Mollie Cox Bryan

Tags: #Cumberland Creek Mystery

BOOK: Scrapped
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Chapter 55
Vera canceled all the classes at the studio for the next day.
Damn.
She hated doing that, but her assistant was on vacation, of all weeks. But she could barely crawl up the stairs to bed at her mother’s house—she was certain she couldn’t teach dance.
“Where are you going?” Beatrice said.
“To bed. I’m exhausted.”
“I’m leaving at three. Who will stay with Elizabeth?”
“I’ll go into the office and wrap up some things. I can be back by then,” Bill said.
“Make sure you are. I have plans,” Beatrice said.
“Where are you going?” Vera said.
“I’m going to spend a few days with your—”
The doorbell interrupted her.
Vera wondered if she’d make it up the stairs—and if she did, if she’d actually be able to sleep. She turned around and started to go back down the stairs, just in time to see her mother open the door and clutch her chest.
“Jon!” Beatrice exclaimed.
What? Who was Jon? She rushed toward Beatrice to see a striking silver-haired man standing in the doorway, dressed impeccably in a dark blue suit, suitcase beside him, flowers in his hand. He reached out for Beatrice; then they kissed each other like Europeans, once on each cheek.
“Jon! I can’t believe you’re here. What a surprise,” Beatrice said, pushing Vera out of the way as she led him into the living room.
“Bill, can you get Jon’s bag?”
Bill had Elizabeth on his hip, and both he and Vera looked bemused as they stood looking at this dapper gentleman holding Beatrice’s hand as she led him to the couch.
What on earth was going on here?
Lizzie slid down her father’s body, and he went to get the bag and she went to her grandmother’s side.
“This is Lizzie,” Beatrice said, introducing them. “Lizzie, this is Jon, a friend of mine from Paris.”
“Hi,” she said shyly.
“Pleased to meet you, mademoiselle. Your grandmama has told me so much about you,” he said with a slight French accent.
Lizzie buried her face in her grandmother.
Vera cleared her throat.
“Oh,” Beatrice said, as if she just remembered her grown daughter was in the room with her. “This is Vera, my daughter.”
Vera came forward to where Jon stood, placed her hand in his, and shook it.
“Very nice to meet you. The dancer, yes?” he said.
His smile spread across his attractive face. High cheekbones. Lovely olive complexion and soft, heavy-lidded brown eyes that sparkled as they met with Vera’s. So this was why her mother never talked about Paris.
Vera nodded, unsure if she could actually speak to this charismatic man, who was obviously as taken with Beatrice as she was with him. She’d never seen her mother glow like this.
“This is Bill,” Beatrice said.
Bill stretched his arm across and shook his hand.
“The husband,” Jon said.
“Ex,” Beatrice said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Jon said.
“What are you doing here, Jon?” Beatrice said, delighted, after he sat down.
“I wanted to surprise you!”
“Well, you have,” Beatrice said and sat down.
“Besides, I was a little concerned that I’d not heard back from you.”
Vera sat in the closest chair she could find. She could sleep later.
“I’m sorry, Jon. I’ve a very busy life. And lately, it’s worse than ever. We’ve had a series of murders in town, and it’s pretty crazy.”
“Murders?”
“Nobody we know, yet, but a friend of ours is a suspect. We’ve been trying to prove her innocence.”
“I see. So busy that you can’t e-mail me?” he said, smiling.
Vera watched her mother awkwardly finger the button on her sweater.
“Look, Jon, do you think I sit around on the computer all the time? Besides, I have gotten back to you . . . once, I think. Right?” Beatrice squirmed a bit on the couch, wrapping her arm around the unusually still child sitting next to her.
“Yes, once.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m here now, and I’ve a room over at the Blackberry Inn.”
“I’ve got a room here you can have,” Beatrice said.
Vera sank back into her chair.
“Stay here. There’s plenty of room,” Bill said.
Vera shot him a look of reproach.
“I insist,” Beatrice said. “After all, I stayed at your place in Paris, and it was so nice.”
Surely not,
thought Vera.
“Well, okay,” he said.
“Great! But there’s one problem,” Beatrice said. “I have plans to be out of town until tomorrow. Will you be all right alone?”
He sighed and looked at Bill and Vera. “I’ve come all the way from Paris, and this woman, she still makes me wait for her.”
Chapter 56
Annie vaguely remembered the bumpy ambulance ride. Good thing there was already an ambulance close by. Mostly, she remembered wanting to sleep and the paramedics asking questions over and over again: What’s your name? What’s your birth date? Do you have any children? What are their names? Ages? Turned out that was a technique to keep her awake—because not only had she been shot, but she had also suffered a concussion from DeeAnn and Sheila trying to pick her up and get her to the van, then stumbling over themselves and dropping her. Annie was glad she didn’t remember that at all. But it was a weird feeling to have only spots of memory about an incident. She hadn’t even realized she was shot until she was in the ambulance.
“No,” she’d managed to say. “Not shot. I just . . . just . . . fell down . . . again.”
The paramedic had laughed. “No, honey. You were shot in the back.”
Mike was asleep in the chair beside her when she opened her eyes. Where were the boys? She wanted to wake him. She reached for him and found she was heavy with wires and tubes. Her arm fell back down on the bed. Her eyes felt heavy, and she closed her lids to the murky depth of a fitful sleep, where she dreamed of giant Mennonites chasing rabbits and Hasidic Jews dancing around a bonfire. At first the heat drew her in. God, she was so cold. Then the firelight mesmerized her—the way it flickered and shapes would move around within the center of it. A bird. A witch’s hat. A star. But the light started to hurt.
“Annie?” Mike’s voice called out to her.
Where was he? She looked around the bonfire, didn’t see him.
“Annie!” he said, touching her.
She opened her eyes to the harsh light. She squinted.
“Does the light bother you?”
“Yes,” she managed to say with a dry mouth.
She watched him close the heavy curtains.
“Sweetie?” he said as he came back to her bedside. “How do you feel?”
“Thirsty.”
“You can have some ice,” he said, turning around and reaching into a bucket. “No water yet. You just came out of surgery, you know. They don’t want you getting sick.”
“Surgery?”
“Yes. They removed the bullet,” he said, then placed an ice cube in her mouth.
It felt so good, so cool and wet. Such a relief on her dry, thick tongue.
He smiled. “You know a lot of guys would never imagine saying that to their wives. I’ve imagined it a thousand million times.”
She chewed the ice, relished the feel of the cool little chunks sliding down her throat. “Sorry,” she said.
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said, his voice cracking. “I thought moving here . . .”
“I know,” she said with a sinking feeling. “Where are the boys?”
“With Sheila today. They want to see you, but let’s, ah, give it one more day,” he said.
“What’s happened? I don’t remember much.”
“Everybody is safe, though your friends spent some time in jail,” he said.
Annie smiled. She couldn’t imagine.
Mike placed another ice cube in her mouth.
“The police had a couple of men at the station. The guy who shot you claims you were trespassing, so they let him go.” He rolled his eyes. “The police will be around soon enough to see if you want to press charges and all that. But I figure that’s hopeless. They are still questioning this Luther character, though, last I heard from Bill,” he said.
“Luther? But what about Zeb?”
“They questioned him and let him go.”
“What about Cookie?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything but rest now,” he said. “So I wish you would.”
Man, her head hurt. She looked around the room and suddenly saw all the flowers.
“Flowers.”
“Yes. How about that?”
“Oh, look at those beautiful yellow roses,” she said.
“Yes, those are from Beatrice. She dropped them off on her way out of town.”
“What? Where’s she going?”
“To stay with her cousin Rose.”
“Rose?” Annie said. Damn, her brain ached, and it felt like there was cotton in it. Who was Rose? Why did that strike a chord with her?
Oh, damn!
Beatrice was heading up to Jenkins Mountain! What was she up to?
Annie tried to sit up.
“What are you doing?” Mike said, gently pushing her back down.
“When did Bea leave?”
“A little while ago. Why?”
“I think she’s heading up to Jenkins Mountain.”
“So?”
“She’s up to something.”
“You know what? She probably is,” Mike said and smiled. “But it’s not your problem. You can’t do anything about it. You just got out of surgery. Got it?”
Annie’s brows knit as she nodded, not meeting her husband’s eyes, unable to get the image of Beatrice, with her handgun, traipsing around Jenkins Mountain out of her achy, fuzzy brain.
Chapter 57
Rose had insisted over the phone that Beatrice bring her new friend with her. “We’ve plenty of room here,” she’d said. “You can’t leave him alone with Vera. She’ll make mincemeat of him with all her questions.”
Beatrice had agreed, so she and Jon made the trek up to the mountain, driven by Samuel, Rose’s youngest son. Jon was tired from his flight and napped most of the way. Beatrice didn’t mind. Bluegrass music filled the car, and she relaxed and let the music lift her spirits even more. Samuel had never been much of a talker, so the trip was mostly scenery and music, which suited Beatrice just fine.
When they arrived, Rose had laid a table for them. They ate a late supper of wild turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, pickled okra, and biscuits.
“I’ve not had wild turkey in years,” Beatrice said. “I’ve forgotten how good it is. How different.”
“It’s a magnificent feast!” Jon said, lifting his wineglass. “My compliments to the cook!”
“Thank you,” Rose said, blushing.
Beatrice laughed. She took another bite of her gravy-soaked mashed potatoes and swore she couldn’t take another bite of anything, until Rose brought out a pumpkin pie.
“Made from pumpkins out of the garden,” she said, smiling at Beatrice.
“You know me. That’s my favorite. Lord, I can barely stand canned pumpkin these days,” Beatrice said.
Jon’s eyes grew wider. “I’ve never seen this kind of pie before.”
“You’re in for a treat,” Beatrice said.
While Jon was working on his third piece of pie, Beatrice sipped her tea, more satisfied than she had been in quite some time. Homemade mountain cooking from her cousin always soothed her. But this time was different. She looked at Jon, and a warm rush of acceptance came over her. Now she felt able to admit how she felt about him to herself. He and Rose had taken to one another like family already. The food of home, the good company, and the surrounding autumn hills, trees ablaze in crimson, gold, orange. Yes, she was home.
“How is the murder case going?” Rose asked her.
Beatrice filled her in.
“And Cookie?”
“She is still in jail, as far as I know. Speaking of which, I have to take care of something for her tomorrow. I promised I’d take this scrapbook of hers and place it in the caves. It’s going to help her somehow.”
“Really? That’s an odd request.”
“You’ll have to trust me on this. Maybe someday we can talk about it. But for now, I can’t tell you much more than that.”
Rose’s gray eyes lit up as she lifted her eyebrows. “I love those caves. We had such fun there as kids. Remember?”
Beatrice nodded, looking at her cousin, a few years younger than herself, wrinkled, a little hunched over, with heavy lids, but still Rose as a girl was in Beatrice’s memory as clear as day. She still had the same smile, the same mannerisms. Beatrice thought about how time was not a friend to our bodies—but to our spirits, if we were lucky, it was the best thing.
“You know, there are all sorts of stories about those caves,” Rose noted.
“I sort of remember . . . ,” Beatrice said.
“The creek that runs underneath them, along with the calcite, and their exact coordinates make it a wonderful place for meditation, prayer, ritual. We used to have the best midsummer rituals there.”
“Do you go there often anymore?”
“No,” Rose said. “I’ve stopped. A few years back a new group started holding rituals and things up there. Moving rocks around. Taking too many herbs and plants and not reseeding. Bad energy.” Rose was a practitioner of what was frequently called PowWow, which was a combination of old German wisewoman beliefs and Christianity, blended with Native American precepts. Rose saw no irony in this belief system. It made sense to her to blend it all together.
“What do you mean?” Beatrice asked.
Rose shrugged. “I used to go up there and collect herbs and mushrooms. The mushrooms stopped coming. The herbs left there are not quality. I’ve found evidence of ritual, but not earth-friendly ritual. They leave their trash. Also, the calcite is disappearing.”
Interesting.
Didn’t Cookie mention calcite?
“Will you stop mincing words with me? What’s going on up there?” Beatrice said.
“It’s a group of people who call themselves the New Mountain Order. Zeb McClain has set himself up as some kind of guru. I don’t know what they are up to. Some folks say they are Mennonite. Some say they are pagan.” She stopped and looked at Beatrice. “But they are neither,” Rose said.
“How do you know?” Beatrice said, feeling a little scared now about taking Cookie’s beautiful scrapbook up there and leaving it. She had said. ‘You’ve got to be careful, Bea, to see that nobody catches you or takes the book before you have it in place’.”
“I was talking to some people about them. What they are doing is making up a religion based on some other religions. They claim they are going back to their German roots and practicing an old Germanic paganism called Asatru. But they seem to be blending some Mennonite precepts into it and, from the looks of it, neo-Nazism,” Rose said.
“It’s stupid young people wasting their time,” Beatrice said.
“Oh, Bea, I wish that was so,” Rose said. “But there seem to be new people coming here as their ‘followers’ all the time. And they know enough about magic and the elements to be dangerous. Lawd, have mercy.”
Cookie’s words came back to Beatrice. Cookie was telling the truth.... At least this part of her story held up.
“Magic? Humph,” Beatrice said.
“Call it magic or call it prayer. Call it whatever you want.”
Beatrice’s brain clicked. “Do you think these folks would know anything about the baby? Or the murders? You know, that Luther boy was questioned, and his DNA was taken to see if he was the father.”
“Land sakes, Beatrice, everybody up here knows who that baby’s father is. It’s Zeb.”
“What? He’s old enough to be Rebecca’s father!” Beatrice sat back and crossed her arms.
“And that’s who she was living with, off and on, during her pregnancy.”
“Why don’t the police know this?”
Rose sipped more of her herb tea. “I should think they do by now. All they’d had to do was talk to anybody in Jenkins Hollow about it.”
Beatrice sighed. There was Annie and Vera and all the scrapbook club trudging around on the mountain the other night, among all these crazy people! They could’ve been killed. Oh, the stupidity.
 
 
The next morning the alarm went off at four. Beatrice was loath to rise from her bed of quilts, but she could smell the coffee brewing and was hoping for a piece of pie before they went up to the caves. Sure enough, Rose had the pie there—along with biscuits, gravy, and scrambled eggs.
Beatrice was grateful for a full stomach and a thermos of herb tea as they took off through the woods. She was surprised to find that Jon kept up with two old, strong-legged mountain women. It was a slow and steady climb compared to their youthful jaunts.
Once, while taking a break and sitting on a boulder, Jon looked out over the quickly fading fall-colored landscape and marveled at the beauty of it. “No wonder you never want to leave here,” he said.
“I don’t get up here often enough,” Beatrice told him.
“C’mon, you two. Let’s go,” Rose said.
The caves were almost exactly as Beatrice remembered them, but the entrance looked smaller. Huge mountain laurels grew around the craggy opening. She found herself grateful that they’d not be going far inside today. When they were kids, they had no idea what dangers were inside. These caves were wild and not some tourist attraction.
Beatrice clutched the scrapbook as she watched Rose enter the cave opening. The caves had grabbed her by the heart from the first time she’d entered them.
As Beatrice grew up, she had learned about the mystical meaning of caves. In literature, caves represented many things—the womb, a place of safety and creativity, a sanctuary, a mysterious or unexplored part of ourselves. Of course, mythology was rich with cave references. Zeus was raised in a cave by Rhea. Somnus, the god of sleep, resided in a cave where the sun never shone and everything was in silence. And the great Oracle at Delphi was deep in a cave. Beatrice loved great stories—whether they were about myths, mathematics, love, or crystals.
“Every time I enter this place, I think of Jesus being buried in a cave,” Rose said once Beatrice and Jon were at her side.
“That was more common than you think,” Beatrice said.
“Many people worshipped in them. Before . . . anything. . . caves were recognized as the womb of Mother Earth,” said Jon.
Beatrice smiled and turned back to look at him. She ran her fingers along the rocky walls and breathed in the cool, damp air. The three traveled together in single file, Beatrice in the center, until she spied the diamond-shaped rock.
She blinked hard. Was she seeing things, or did something give off a little spark? She remembered her murky childhood dreams of this place. She was often mesmerized by the sparks coming from the calcite that was all around and by the light from small openings here and there. It bounced and created an otherworldly effect, depending on the time of day.
“Here it is,” she said. “The rock I need to leave this thing on.”
She placed the shiny, thick book in the center of the dusty gray-brown rock and was relieved to have shed its weight. She glanced down in the ravine next to the rock. She’d dreamed about that spot, too, about falling into it. One of her mother’s fears and admonitions.
“Shall we go a little farther?” Rose asked.
“Certainly,” Jon said.
Beatrice hesitated. “Why don’t you two go without me? I’ll catch up or catch you on the way back.”
Rose shook her head. “Now, Bea, we can’t leave you here by yourself. Against the rules. You know that. We stick together.”
Beatrice knew she would say that.
“Jesus, Rose, I’ve been coming up here since I was a child. I’m not going to do anything foolish. I just want to sit here with the scrapbook a few more minutes.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. We’ll stay together until you’re ready to move on.” She looked at Beatrice with a firmness in her jaw, which, Beatrice knew, meant she was resolved to stay.
“Suit yourself,” Beatrice said, sitting on the ledge of a rock that was there. Jon sat beside her, reaching for her hand. She looked down at their hands touching like this. Such a human gesture. She thought about the generations that came before her and what the simple act of holding a hand could mean. She wondered who the first human was that discovered how important touch was to life. How important this one gesture was.
Yet she dared not look at her cousin, or else they would burst into fits of schoolgirl giggles. So she kept her eyes lowered. Then, suddenly, the sparks in the cave became more vibrant, and she lifted her eyes to see her cousin looking at them and smiling in awe at the little lights everywhere.
The light was bluish, then white, and it seemed to get brighter. All three of them were spellbound by the lights and shadows. It felt like time was standing still. Beatrice wanted to imprint this moment on her brain so she would never forget the beauty.
And just as suddenly the lights faded, and Beatrice swore she could hear something scuttling. A rat? A bat? A bear?
“I’ve never seen that before. In all the years I’ve been coming here,” Rose finally said.
Beatrice nodded. “Me neither.”
“Extraordinary,” Jon said in a hushed tone.
Beatrice glanced at the diamond-shaped rock, where she’d placed the scrapbook. It was gone. Vanished. She walked over to the rock and ran her hands along it. Yep. Gone.
“What happened to the scrapbook?” Jon asked.
“Maybe it fell,” Beatrice said, shining her light into the crevice. Even with the flashlight, it was hard to see, for the hole reached farther into the mountain than her light could reach. “I don’t see it.”
“Well,” Rose said and placed her hands on her hips, “it couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. It must have fallen. We can’t do anything about it now.”
Beatrice thought a moment. Could it be that everything Cookie had told her was true? Up until this moment, she had entertained the possibilities but hadn’t exactly believed any of it. Did the scrapbook of shadows disappear into a time warp?
Beatrice shrugged. “I guess we will never know.” As a quantum physicist, she was used to such conclusions and accepted them readily, but Rose was not and took off toward the entrance.
“Now, either someone took the damned book while we were stargazing or it fell. If someone took it, we damned well are going to find them,” Rose declared.
When they came out into the open air, it didn’t look like anybody was around. But Rose pointed to a boot print in the dirt. “Was that here before?”

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