A Veiled Antiquity (Torie O'Shea Mysteries) (12 page)

I poured the rest of my Dr Pepper into my glass even though the ice cubes had long since melted. I had a pencil behind each ear and one in my hand. I wore only a T-shirt, extra-large of course, and my underwear. I could never have lived in a society before the invention of extra-large T-shirts. For sleeping, nothing beats them.

Fritz had curled himself up under my chair right at my feet. If I was upstairs, he was either in the middle of my bed or at my feet. He was also strategically snuggled so that the light from my lamp on the desk did not hit his eyes. Fritz was a very smart dog.

I began with the first letter. There was no name given to whom the letter was written, just
Countess.
And it was signed only
Antoine.
But between the opening and closing of the letter there were a few names. One was the former Archbishop of Reims. All I had to do was figure out who was Archbishop of Reims in the mid-to-late 1600s. Antoine speaks of him as dying in 1694 so his reign must have been some time before that.

… Henri de Lorraine. The Duc du Guise.
The name jumped off the page in front of me.

I knocked over my desk lamp when I connected the name. It crashed to the floor, pulling the plug out of the wall. Fritz yelped.

“Not now, honey,” Rudy said from the bed.

It was dark as pitch and I didn’t want to turn on the overhead light, because it was bright and obnoxious. I had no choice. I couldn’t get the plug back in the socket by feeling alone. I can’t figure out why it is so difficult. You can feel the holes and you have the plug, but it just won’t go in. So I turned on the overhead light, and it shone directly into our room, onto the bed, and into Rudy’s eyes. He rolled over rather violently and shoved the pillow over his head.

“Sorry,” I whispered. I plugged the desk lamp back in and turned off the overhead light. I sat in my chair, listening to it creak, and stared at the book in front of me. Henri de Lorraine, the Duc du Guise, was descended from Charles de Lorraine, who was the heir to the throne of France when Hugh Capet usurped the throne at the end of the tenth century.

Charles de Lorraine was the ancestor of Marie Dijon; I recalled that from her family charts.

Louis XIV was the descendant of Hugh Capet the usurper.

Was this letter in 1756 pointing toward the possibility of overthrowing the French crown?

“Holy cow,” I said aloud. “The letter from Antoine says ‘his information to use against the crown is intact and somewhere safe.’ He was referring to Henri de Lorraine as having information.”

I drank down the last of my Dr Pepper. “It’s too far out,” I said. “Why would somebody die for this?”

“I don’t know,” Rudy answered from the bedroom. “But if you don’t stop talking to yourself
I’m
going to commit murder over it.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” I said.

“It’s one in the morning,” he went on. “That stuff is two hundred and fifty years old. One more night isn’t going to hurt anything. Come to bed.”

“Yes, dear,” I said. I didn’t want to, though. I was on to something. I wanted to stay up all night while my mind was in this mode. But, I thought as I yawned, maybe a good night’s sleep would give me a fresh outlook.

And Lanny Lockheart was a history professor.

And Andrew Wheaton referred to it as a “hobby.”

Marie was related to the people in this two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letter.

And somebody dug up her grave looking for this and nearly killed Camille for it.

“Torie!” Rudy pleaded. “My eyes feel pasty. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Henri de Lorraine,” I said to the photograph in the history book. “We have a date tomorrow.” I turned off the table lamp and walked carefully into our bedroom.

Henri de Lorraine must have been imprisoned for what he knew. It was the last thought I had as my head hit the pillow.

*   *   *

“I can’t seem to find any written documentation that Henri de Lorraine, Duc du Guise, was ever imprisoned,” Aunt Bethany Crookshank said to me. She stood behind the counter at the library looking very unlibrarianlike. Her blond hair was turning slightly gray, giving her hair a weird beige look. She was short, trim, and a snappy dresser. She looked quite a bit like her sister, my mother. The same dark eyes and aquiline nose, but blond and a rounder face.

“As a matter of fact,” she stated as she pulled her reading glasses off of her nose and let them dangle by their chain, “every source says that he was born in 1614 and died in 1664.”

“Fudge,” I said. “That can’t be. It has to be him that they are referring to.”

“Who?” she said.

“The ancient ones,” I answered her in a snide tone of voice.

There was nobody else in the library at the moment. It was quiet and overly warm. My face felt hot and I knew that it was probably flushed.

Aunt Bethany reached over and conked me lightly on the head with the book she had in her hand.

“Ouch,” I said. “Aunt Bethany, I just got wounded the other day, you know.”

“Sorry, forgot,” she said. “But you shouldn’t get snotty with me because you can’t figure out a centuries-old puzzle. Next time I’ll hit you with
War and Peace,
” she said. “You’ll straighten up. Did I ever tell you about how long it took me to find your great-great-great—I think it was three greats—grandpa in the ships’ manifests?”

“Five years,” I said as she said it.

“Yes, that’s right. Hours and hours I would sit, cranking that microfilm reader. That was before they had the electronic ones. All told I probably spent…”

“Three hundred and fifty-seven hours.”

“Yes, about that. Three hundred and fifty-seven hours looking for one man’s name. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was when I finally found him.”

The thing I like about Aunt Bethany is that she tells the same stories over and over, until I have them memorized. That way I can correct her if she gets anything wrong. It’s also a trait that I possess and I like to see that somebody else is just as annoying as me. There’s security in numbers.

“So,” she went on. “You’ve only been looking for this duke for a couple of days.”

“Couple of hours,” I corrected.

“Well, for Pete’s sake,” she said, “you don’t have any reason to be so down about not finding him yet. When you’ve been looking for him for three hundred and fifty-seven hours, then you can come and complain to me.”

“It’ll be too late then,” I said.

She ruffled my bangs and smiled at me. It was entirely impossible to act or feel like a thirty-three-year-old mother of two around my family. My grandmother swats me on the behind, my mother frets over me eating too much or not eating the right things, Aunt Bethany still ruffles my hair. I suppose she will do that when I’m fifty-seven and she’s ninety.

“How have you been?” she asked me. “I see you every day almost, but we don’t always talk. Not really talk. Do you ever think about Norah?” she asked me.

Norah was the woman that Sheriff Brooke bought the antiques shop from. It was also the first dead body I had ever encountered outside of a funeral home. Believe me, there’s a difference.

“I think of her a lot.”

“I hope you try to think of her in a good way,” she said. Aunt Bethany was wearing a beige blouse with a big flowery scarf, rich in autumn colors, draped over her left shoulder. She was such a pretty woman. She was divorced and had three children, but those events of her life left no markings on her psychologically or physically. I’ve had two children and have this nice little bulge below the naval to prove it. Aunt Bethany had no such bulge. And no battle scars from one of the nastiest divorces I’ve ever heard of.

“You mean, think of her as being alive and not covered in blood,” I said. “Yes, I try to think of her the way she was when she came to my office the last time. But sometimes, the other image slips in. You don’t have any control over what you’re thinking when you’re dreaming.”

“I hate that,” she said.

“Yeah, me, too.” I sighed heavily and returned the book I had in my hand back to the shelf. “I don’t know what to make of this Duc du Guise guy.”

“Well, maybe they made an official statement of some sort announcing his death, but he was actually imprisoned instead.”

“I’ve thought of that. But surely there would be people who witnessed his burial.”

“Maybe that was a front, too.”

“Why?” It didn’t make sense. “I’m beginning to wonder if the documents are a hoax. The people who authored them are lying. But I can’t figure out why,” I said.

“Or maybe they could be telling the truth and we’ve been
officially
lied to down through history.”

Lord. I didn’t need to hang around Aunt Bethany too much. She was more conspiratorial than I was. “You’re dangerous,” I said to her.

“Just trying to help.”

I gave her a kiss on the cheek and a slight hug. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“Wait a sec,” she said. “Where did you say he was imprisoned?”

“I’m not sure. Something about Sainte Marguerite or some female name. Why?”

“I thought I’d try and find something on the prison itself.”

“Okay. I’d appreciate it,” I said and exited.

Fifteen

“I kid you not,” my mother said to me. “The mayor is thinking of building a strip mall along the wharf.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “When it floods we can barely save the buildings that are a hundred feet from the river. Much less buildings that would be right on the wharf. Is he nuts?” I didn’t really care if I got an answer to that question. I had my own personal opinions of the mayor, and it wouldn’t matter if anybody agreed with me or not.

“He claims that he’s going to get a new and higher levee put in upriver at Lamont.”

“Just hush,” I said as I held up a hand. “I don’t want to discuss this any further.”

We were seated out on the back porch. Mom’s current work of art was on the easel. It was a painting of me as a child, looking out of a window. There were small inconsistencies in the painting, but she had captured the spirit. She had captured the life in me. My signature, staring out of the eyes on the canvas. When that was accomplished, it didn’t really matter what the rest of the painting was.

The chickens were restless, pecking away at the ground long after any remains of the morning’s feed were gone. It was a cool night in early October and the mayor had built a fire. Smoke swirled above his house, trailing into the woods beside our property.

Fritz snoozed under my chair with his long nose resting on the top of my foot. Nobody had come forward to claim him as of yet, and I was getting mighty used to having him around.

“Colin is taking me to see
La Bohème,”
she said.

“Puccini? How wonderful.”

“I want to say this and I don’t want you to get all upset and start talking before I can finish what it is I have to say. Your father does the same thing and it drove me nuts with him the same as it drives me nuts with you.”

“Yeah, but you can’t divorce me,” I said.

She smiled. I’m sure there were times when I was sixteen that she wished she could have divorced me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. I was a handful. But she didn’t give up on me. That’s the great thing about my mother. She never gives up. She might lay low for a while, but she’s only regrouping. She is an expert at it. It’s like guerrilla warfare for the dysfunctional.

“I hope that you and Colin have set aside your differences.”

“Well, yes. I suppose.”

“Because I think he plans on sticking around for a time,” she said and blushed.

“I guess if I was honest with myself I’d have to say that besides being stubborn and overzealous when it comes to citizens trying to get pregnant women to hospitals, he’s an all right guy,” I said.

“Gee, thanks,” she said. “I think.”

Sheriff Brooke was not mean. He was not abusive. He was not a murderer, cheat, thief, or drunkard. The problems that I had with him paled seriously when compared to some of the guys that my mother could be dating.

“No, really,” I said. “He’s all right. I think we’ve worked through our trivial skirmish.”

“Good,” she said. “Because you do tend to blow things out of proportion.” She smiled, and her crow’s-feet suddenly appeared.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“So are you gonna read that diary Sylvia gave you?” she asked.

“How do you know about it?” I asked.

“Everybody knows about it.”

Wilma must have mentioned it to the wrong person.

“Hello?” Sheriff Brooke came from around the side of our house. “Couldn’t get an answer at the door,” he said.

Fritz looked up from his nap long enough to see if the sheriff was friend or foe. He looked around groggy-eyed and laid his head back on my foot.

“We’re just enjoying the October weather,” Mom said.

He smiled at her. It was kind of neat to watch. I don’t think I could pinpoint what he was thinking or feeling at that moment, but it was the look. It was the look that a man gives a woman and every woman hopes to get.
You are my world.
That’s what it said. It didn’t say “I love you.” That was too easy.

What bothered me was that it came out of nowhere. When did they come to mean this much to each other? Had I been sleeping? Could I not see this growing between them because I was too submersed in my own world? Or was it that I hadn’t wanted to see it? Well, I could see it now.

I felt like a Peeping Tom. But, hey, it was my porch.

“Torie,” he began. “Got a report on a red Honda Civic seen in Marie’s driveway on Tuesday. The witness can’t remember what time of day it was, only that it was sometime Tuesday.”

“Any idea who it belongs to?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But I did run down the inhaler. One Andrew Wheaton got his Proventil refilled at the Rexall in Wisteria. Andrew Wheaton is one of the names on the guest registry of Marie’s funeral, and he’s staying at the Murdoch Inn.”

“Something’s funny there,” I said. “Lanny Lockheart told me that he was with Andrew the night Marie was killed and that he never got to see Marie. Andrew first said he was with his cousin, and then changed his story. I think he’s lying. I think he was alone with his cousin. So why would Lanny give Andrew as his alibi? It’s too easy to check. He must have known that Andrew would back him up.”