Murder At the Mystery Mansion Read online

  I figured Samantha would come home crying as soon as the truck driver dumped her. It weren’t like she was no spring chicken anymore. Samantha had some years on her even if she was good-looking.

  It probably sounds like I didn’t like the woman all that much and that ain’t true. She was nice enough. Even brought me some chicken soup once when she heard I’d been laid up with the bronchitis. I guess it was that country-music thing that got under my skin. She’d bring it up now and again as though she needed to remind herself that she was special. I couldn’t see why she wasn’t happy with just having the good luck of giving birth to two healthy girls and having a good man. Seems like some people always take the really important things for granted.

  “You hear anything from Samantha?” I asked Glen, as I handed him the brownies. “It’s been what, going on a month now?”

  “Twenty-eight days,” he said. “It’s like I got a counter in my head clicking off the time. And no, I haven’t heard a word. Do you want to sit down?”

  “Sure.” I knew he’d probably rather I’d leave him alone--grief does that to people--but I took a seat anyway. Sometimes what people want ain’t exactly what they need. I figured Glen needed to talk to someone and I’ve found that people tend to talk to me because they figure I don’t count all that much anyways.

  That front room was interesting. Old Mrs. Hutchins had always called it a parlor and only used it for company. She was one of them women who collected things and the parlor was stuffed with doilies and antique dolls and pretty china figurines. There was a flowered carpet on the floor and tassels on all the lamps. Truth be told, it was kind of a smothery room. It surprised me that the only thing Glen had changed over the years was hanging Samantha’s picture over the mantel.

  He offered me one of my own brownies and a napkin. Then he brought out some coffee and I settled in for a good chat. I had some things to say to that man whether he wanted to hear them or not. After all, I’d known him since he was a boy and I figured I had the right.

  “There’s some women at our church starting to talk about how you ain’t that bad-looking and they don’t understand why a woman would up and run away from you like Samantha did,” I said. “I’m thinking you might have a string of ‘em lining up on your porch before long if you ain’t careful. It happened to my uncle when his wife run off. Trust me—taking up with some other woman right now won’t do your girls a bit of good.”

  “I’m not interested in other women.” He had the grace to turn a little red in the face. “The only woman I’ll ever love is Samantha.”

  “That’s probably not true.” I took a bite of brownie and chewed while I thought about his comment. My brownies are from a box, they ain’t nothing special, but they’re still pretty good. “I think you’ll get over this someday and start to notice other women, but I think it might be best to wait until your youngest is graduated from high school before you start in with all that mess of dating.”

  “Seriously, Doreen,” he said. “I’m quite sure I’ll never be interested in another woman again as long as I live.”

  “Unless Samantha comes back.”

  “Yes, of course. Unless Samantha comes back. She was my soulmate.”

  Well, I always find that soulmate talk kind of gaggy. Especially when a man says it. That’s the kind of thing women say. Not men. I also noticed he weren’t eating any of the brownies. Instead, he just kept his head down while he busied himself weaving his fingers in and out with each other like he was trying to weave himself back together.

  My problem was, being me, I kept thinking there must be a clue. Something he’d overlooked. Like one of them computer dating things that might lead him to know where she went and who she went with so he could go try to get her back. Then it struck me that men who talked about soulmates are probably not the kind of men likely to go get their wives back. At that point I didn’t have a lot of hope for Glen.

  “Did Samantha spend a lot of time on the computer?”

  “What?” His head jerked up. The man had been a million miles away in his head. “Oh—I see what you’re asking. No. She wasn’t much one for computers. She left that up to the girls and me.”

  “So she didn’t meet some other man on-line?” I was proud of myself for knowing the term.

  “No,” Glen said. “She just up and went off.”

  “Did she tell you she was leaving before or after she climbed into the truck?” I asked. “Were you there?”

  He shook his head. “She left a note. I found it when I got home from work. It was lying on the ironing board.”

  “Oh.” This was the first I’d heard of a note. “What did it say?”

  “Just that she’d found someone else, a truck driver, and wouldn’t be back.”

  “No word to the girls?” I asked. “No excuses for what she was doing?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Do you still have the note?”

  “I threw it away. I couldn’t bear to look at it and I didn’t want the girls to see it.”

  “Oh.” I guess that made sense. The note had brought him a lot of pain. I suppose it would be normal to throw it away.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t talk to the police?” I asked. “Maybe they could at least go find her. Your girls need to hear from their mother.”

  He looked up at me with the most sorrowful eyes I’ve ever seen. “You think having the police make her contact us would make the girls feel any better?”

  I shook my head. It wouldn’t, of course. Them girls were going to have to live with the knowledge that their mother had abandoned them as well as their daddy. It ain’t a good thing to have a mother abandon you for a truck driver, not a good thing at all. Although with some teenagers I’ve known I could certainly see why it would be tempting.

  I couldn’t come up with anything else to say and Glen didn’t seem interested in keeping up his end of the conversation, so I left. I’m not sure what I wanted to discover, but there was nothing there. I walked back to my little house and sat for a while and stewed. Seemed to me if I was a husband, I’d be chasing that woman down and giving her a piece of my mind over what she was doing to me and them girls. But Glen just weren’t the type I guess. Made me wonder what kind of principal he was. From the looks of things, maybe not a very good one.

  * * *

  Life is hard, plain and simple. It just is. People need to get themselves some gumption if they’re going to get through their lives with any self-respect at all. I’d always known Glen was a nice man but I’d never suspected until now that having his wife leave would cause him to sit there in his house like a noodle.

  It weren’t long until them girls of his weren’t only dressing trashy, but they were acting trashy, too. The oldest one got kicked off the cheerleading squad for picking a fight with another girl. The youngest one quit the band for no particular reason. Just walked off the field smack dab in the middle of a half-time show. At least that’s the way I heard it down at the beauty shop.

  “She was a good player, too,” Holly said as she pulled the curlers out of my hair. It was a relief to get them curlers out of there. Holly rolls a really tight perm and I’m always glad to get it over with. One thing good about getting a perm though, is that you can learn a lot while you wait around for your hair to process.

  “According to my daughter,” Holly said, as she pulled the curler papers out, “The Hutchins girl said she was tired of practicing that stupid clarinet and now that her mom was gone, she was going to have some fun.”

  “Uh-oh,” Edith said. “That don’t sound good. Teenage girls having fun means we’ll probably see another welfare baby showing up before long.”

  Edith works in housekeeping down at King’s Daughters Hospital in Ashland. One glance at her poor legs and feet and it’s easy to see why she never has anything good to say about anything or anybody. Edith’s been through too much and has gotten a real negative attitude. She’s also helping raise two grandbabies right now because there’s n
o daddy in the picture. Edith definitely considers herself an expert on what happens when teenage girls are out having fun.

  “It’s Jerri Lynn, the oldest girl, that I’m worried about,” Holly said. “She seems to be the one most tore up, picking fights with the other cheerleaders like that.”

  “Glen will have them girls running all over him before long,” Betty said. “He’s too nice of a man to try to keep two daughters out of trouble all by himself. He can’t even make the kids at school behave is what I heard. One of his teachers says she don’t bother sending a trouble-maker to the principal’s office anymore because the kids know that nothing bad will happen to them. She says Glen tends to have a long talk with them and send them back with a piece of hard candy in their pocket. All the teachers are upset about it. It ain’t much help when the principal is nicer than the teachers.”

  “I never cared much for Samantha,” Holly said. “She always drove all the way to Huntington to get her hair done—like my beauty shop just wasn’t good enough for her. Now that she’s gone I keep wondering if we all should have been nicer to her or something.”

  We all sighed. The fact of Samantha taking off with that truck driver had blown a big hole in our little neighborhood and there weren’t nothing that could be done about it except maybe try to keep an eye on the girls and help out when we could.

  It was the beginning of September when Samantha left and it had already turned November when I had the occasion to talk privately with Jerri Lynn. I was sitting on the Bruce’s back porch a’watching the boat traffic. We’d had a late fall and the colors of trees along the riverbank on the other side of the river were really something. I’d made me a late dinner of boiled potatoes, cottage cheese, and creamed peas with a little bit of green onion in them and I weren’t thinking about anything much except how pretty the fall colors were and how good my stomach felt.

  I didn’t hear Glen and Samantha’s oldest until she’d already sat down beside me on the old glider I was using.

  “Well, hello there, Jerri Lynn,” I said. “I didn’t hear you sneaking up on me. Gonna have to get me some hearing aids I guess.”

  Truth be told, I was tickled she’d come to see me.

  “I was taking a walk, Miss Doreen,” she said. “And saw you here. I thought it might be nice to have someone to talk to. Momma always liked you. She said you had a lot of good sense.”

  Well, that was a revelation. I’d always thought Samantha was kind of stand offish with me. Never dreamed she’d ever bother to say something good about me to her daughters. I realized I was hearing a catch in Jerri Lynn’s voice. I took a good look at her and saw that the girl had been crying her eyes out. She’d taken to wearing too much eye make-up since her mother had left and now it was messed up all around her eyes something terrible. The poor girl looked like a blonde raccoon sitting there beside me with her hanky all wadded up in her hand.

  “Always glad to have some company,” I said. “What’s troubling you, girl?”

  Instead of answering me directly, she pulled something out of her pocket and handed it to me like I was supposed to know what it was. The thing was slender and plastic and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I looked at her, puzzled.

  “It turned pink,” she said.

  Jerri Lynn started sobbing, and then I got it. I’d never seen a gadget like that up close before but I was pretty sure this was one of them home pregnancy kits they’re always advertising on television, usually with the woman being all excited about it.

  This poor girl weren’t excited. She was devastated. I just hate it when Edith is right. I had hopes she’d be wrong this time and this girl wouldn’t be doing nothing except getting ready for college next fall.

  “You’re having a baby?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “And you’re not happy about it?”

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “You going to keep it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Have you told your daddy yet?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “Ah.”

  I didn’t know what to say after that, so I sat there looking out over the river, rocking gently on the glider with that seventeen-year-old bundled up in her coat beside me, blowing her nose from time to time.

  I guess I did the right thing just keeping quiet because after a while I felt a hand creep into mine and we sat that way for a long time, just holding hands, thinking our thoughts. I’d been the old lady down the street for most of her life, and I guess just being with another person gave her some comfort.

  “Did you ever have any kids?” she asked, after a while.

  “No.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  I had to think about that for a while. Not having children was a mixed bag for me. On one hand, it would’ve been nice to have had a son or daughter. On the other hand, from what I’d seen, children tended to break their parent’s hearts pretty regularly.

  I answered truthfully. “Sometimes.”

  “If you’d ever had kids, would you have walked away from them to take up with some man?”

  “No.” That was something I could answer truthfully. “If I’d ever had children, there’s not a man in this world who could have made me leave them.”

  I was sorry the minute I said it. It sounded like I was criticizing her mother and I wasn’t. It was just how I felt.

  “Sometimes I wonder what I did wrong to make my mom want to leave and never come back,” she said.

  “You don’t know that she’s never coming back,” I said. “She might. People change their minds.”

  “But she didn’t even send me and my sister a note. I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand either, Jerri Lynn,” I said. “I guess the only thing you can do is take good care of your own baby now that you’re going to have one.”

  “Do you think Daddy will be mad?” She sounded like a five-year-old child who’d spilt some milk instead of a nearly-grown woman getting ready to give birth in a few months.

  “I think your dad will be surprised, but he’ll help you.”

  “Thank you.” She gave me a quick, totally unexpected kiss on the cheek and then flew off, leaving me there on the glider with that stab in the gut that I get sometimes when I allow myself to wonder why some people get to have such sweet children and don’t appreciate them. And them of us who would have cherished even one chick have to live our whole lives trying to convince ourselves that we didn’t really want a child at all.

  I did something the next day I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I went to the Dollar Store and bought me some baby yarn and a crochet hook and set to making a little yellow afghan.

  In the meantime, I was proud of Jerri Lynn in spite of the circumstances. The pregnancy kind of settled her down and made her serious. She studied hard while her belly grew. The younger sister, Maggie, seeing the fix her sister had found herself in, straightened up and got serious about her school work, too. She even took up the clarinet again.

  Glen, however, just kept looking seedier and seedier. His hair went uncombed a lot, his overcoat developed a drooping hem and he didn’t do nothing about it. When I tried to talk with him, he seemed preoccupied and distant. I began to wonder if the man might lose his job from sheer grief. Or maybe his mind. He even kinda drooped when he walked. The talk at church about him being a good-looking man with a good job who’d been abandoned by his wife died down. None of the single women brought any casseroles over that I know of. Jerri Lynn told me that she and her sister started teaching themselves how to cook off of YouTube…whatever that was.

  There was a bond between me and Jerri Lynn from that night on the river bank when she showed me the results of her home pregnancy test. She started dropping by from time to time after school. Sometimes she’d just want to talk. Sometimes she’d show me a little outfit she’d bought. Sometimes she’d just sit beside me while I watched my soaps—not talking, not crying, just needing a little compan
y from someone who didn’t judge her for what she’d done.

  The thing about being a washed up cheerleader was that there weren’t a lot of her girlfriend relationships that lasted through the pregnancy. I never asked about the boyfriend. She never told me about him, neither. I got the impression he hadn’t stuck around or else she hadn’t wanted him to.

  Christmas weren’t much to write home about. I saw Glen putting up some lights around the house but he didn’t bother to take them back down again afterward. That’s not too unusual in our neck of the woods. Taking down Christmas lights tend to be more optional here than in other places, but in the past Glen had always taken them down the morning after New Year’s.

  My brother and sister-in-law in Texas sent me a scarf and gloves and I sent her a nice box of chocolates and him a fruitcake. My brother hates fruitcake, so that was fun.

  Jerri Lynn graduated with honors in the spring. She told me she intended to take on-line college courses for a while until the baby was older. She wanted to be a pediatrician. I didn’t think there was much chance of that happening but I’d been wrong about other things so I didn’t discourage her none. This was one of them things I hoped I was wrong about.

  It seemed to me like the bigger Jerri Lynn got around the middle, the skinnier her daddy got. Glen had been kind of a rounded-out man before Samantha left. Not really fat, but not muscular either. The kind of man who looked like he spent a lot of time eating good and sitting at a desk. The further she got in her pregnancy, the more cadaverous her daddy became.

  It was early June when Jerri Lynn came to my door crying her eyes out again. Once she stopped crying long enough to talk, it turned out that her mama had finally called but it was while she and Maggie was out getting groceries. Her daddy had taken the call. He said her mama was traveling way out West someplace and told him again that she weren’t coming home ever. She said she was having too good a time with the man she was traveling with. Told him she was tired of being a wife and mother and liked going new places. She’d used a pay phone so he couldn’t call her back.