Black River (15 page)

“I’ve usually been okay at seeing the big picture. I could use a new career, maybe intern for a while, I might have an eye for it. I was pretty quick with jigsaw puzzles. Thanks.” O’Brien opened the door to exit.

“Hey, what’d you say your name is?”

He smiled. “I didn’t say, but it’s O’Brien…Sean O’Brien.”

“In a slight way, you look like the actor on the old TV series, Wyatt Earp. I like the old shows on the TV Land channel. His name was Hugh O’Brian. He wouldn’t be your grandfather, would he?”

“Different spelling of the last name.” O’Brien smiled.

“One of the off-line editors over at the post-production suite in the Hilton is free-lance. He’s very good, and he’s an old friend of mine. He cuts features, TV spots—a lot of episodic TV. His name’s Oscar Roth.” She used a pen to write on a slip of paper. “Here’s his number. Tell him I told you to call. My name’s Shelia Winters. If he isn’t with the director and has some time, maybe he’ll let you sit in and watch for a little while…to see if you might like it. Good editors stay busy. Although Oscar always schedules at least three weeks a year to fish.”

O’Brien took the paper, folded it, and put it in his jean’s pocket. “Thank you. Maybe you’ve opened the door for me to a new career.”

“If the editing doesn’t work out, you should really think about acting. I think you have the chops.” She smiled wide. “Here’s my number. Let’s stay in touch.”

O’Brien smiled, took her card and walked out the door. He called Kim Davis as he approached his car. She answered and he said, “Kim, describe the Civil War re-enactor that kept staring at you when you were on the film set.”

“Why, Sean? What’s going on?”

“Just curious.”

“He’s tall and thin. A narrow face with a handlebar moustache. Dark Elvis-style sideburns. When he tipped his hat to me, I saw he had a full head of brown hair. Have you seen this guy? Why the call?”

“No, I haven’t seen him. I called because I’m concerned, and I’d like to know what he looks like should I happen to bump into him.”

“You don’t just
happen
to bump into someone, not you. You intentionally bump into them. I’m fine, I guess. I don’t know if he left the rose in
my mailbox. He was polite, but beneath his ‘yes ma’am’ manners, under all that Civil War chivalry, I felt there was some kind of sociopath staring at me. Don’t go slaying dragons. I’m not some damsel in distress. Let sleeping monsters lie. Talk to you later, Sean.”

O
’Brien walked down the long gravel driveway toward his Jeep, a mockingbird chortling in the live oaks, the sounds of children laughing and playing near the shore of a small lake. He heard the crunch of tires rolling over pecan shells. He stopped walking and turned around to see a woman riding a turn-of-the century bicycle, coming down the middle of the driveway Her hair was as black as a raven’s feather, a blue bonnet tilted on her head, face like porcelain, red pursed lips, white dress billowing as she raced the summer wind.

O’Brien lifted one hand to wave, stepping out of her way. She kept riding, knees pumping, eyes trained on the distant bend in the old drive, beyond a pecan grove. She rode beneath the canopies of live oaks, limbs arching across the drive, the speckled sunlight breaking through the branches in pockets of light flaring off her white dress.

When she passed, O’Brien could smell lavender in the air. He thought she was probably an actress deep in character, someone taking a bike ride between scenes. Watching her ride the old bicycle down the road, he felt there was something unusual about the woman that was odd in a

place of movie set facades, make-believe—where strange was normal.

Then he heard the whinny of a horse. O’Brien looked to his far left, one hundred feet beyond his Jeep, across the gravel road, a man dressed in a Confederate uniform sat tall on a horse. It was the same chestnut-brown horse and the same actor he’d seen earlier. He assumed the actor was keeping from boredom between the slow shooting of elaborate scenes.

As O’Brien walked toward his Jeep, the man led his horse around the perimeter of the pecan grove, the long shadows of trees cast by a setting sun rolled across the man’s whiskered face. He dismounted, took the horse by the reins and directed the animal into a cleared area almost hidden in the deep shade from the century-old oak trees.

O’Brien looked up to see something swirling in the hard-blue sky. Black carrion birds circled. From the pines through a barren meadow scattered with broken and dry corn stalks, came the cries of a mourning dove, the haunting call of the wild across an abandoned field of time.

O’Brien stepped around his Jeep in the direction he’d seen the actor and his horse disappear into the shadows. He walked through blackberry bushes and over rocks the size of pumpkins, the breeze tossing the pastel green leaves of kudzu vines clinging to tree trunks. He stepped over jagged hoof prints and feces left in the dirt by wild boars. The earth looked like a drunken man had plowed it where the hogs had rooted, the soil torn and left in corkscrew trenches.

When O’Brien got to the clearing enclosed in dense shadow, he could see it was a small cemetery. The re-enactor in the Confederate uniform had tied the horse to the limb of a sycamore tree. The man stood in the center of the cemetery. Head bowed. Moss-covered gravestones worn, stooping by neglect and age, drenched in shades of sepia-tone brown. The breeze stopped and tree leaves became motionless. A young crow flew to the top of a cottonwood tree, tilted its head, cut one blue eye at the horse and called out.

O’Brien watched the man in uniform place a flower on a grave. He stood there a moment, whispering something, perhaps praying, and then he turned and walked back to his horse. He was an older man, white whiskers and a narrow face. He held a Confederate officer’s slouch hat loosely in one hand, uniform clean, black boots polished. He placed his left boot in one stirrup and mounted the horse. He rode at a slow pace to the opposite side of the cemetery. As O’Brien approached, the man tipped his hat, turned and trotted away.

He galloped in the direction of the plantation house for a half-minute, and then spun left and trotted across the barren field of bent and broken
corn stalks. He soon disappeared into the trees as a mist rose from the pine needles on the floor of the forest.

O’Brien felt a chill in the evening air when he stepped over the rusted wrought iron fence into the cemetery. He walked slowly around the timeworn gravestones, glancing at threadbare inscriptions, the scent of damp moss in the motionless air. He looked down at the headstone, a fresh-picked red rose next to it.

A Confederate rose. Very similar to the one delivered to Kim.

O’Brien slowly lifted his eyes from the grave, looking in the direction where the soldier had ridden across the field. A crow called out. O’Brien glanced at the burial plot. There were two graves to the left of the marker and a barren plot next to the headstone that read:

Angelina Hopkins
1840 - 1902

O’Brien opened the folder and stared at the women’s face in the picture, remembering what Gus Louden had said his great, great grandfather had written:
‘My Dearest Angelina, I had this painting commissioned from the photograph that I so treasure of you…’
O’Brien said, “Is this your grave? If I find the painting, what will that tell me?”

He placed the photo back in the folder and walked out of the cemetery in the twilight of a copper-colored landscape. O’Brien stood under the tall cottonwood tree and looked back in the direction the man on horseback hand gone. He didn’t match the description Kim gave of the re-enactor who approached her on the film set. ‘
He’s tall and thin. A narrow face with a handlebar moustache. Dark Elvis-style sideburns. When he tipped his hat to me, I saw he had a full head of brown hair.’

O’Brien didn’t move for a moment. His mind raced, looking for patterns or contradictions in the people and places he’d recently seen. The older re-enactor didn’t fit Kim’s description.
Why the Confederate rose on the grave? Where is the guy with the long sideburns, the man called Silas Jackson?
O’Brien stared at the forest in the distance, the trees falling into deep silhouette, the last flickers of a sunset fanning dying embers of cherry in the bellies of clouds as gray as the old soldier’s uniform.

O’Brien turned to walk to his Jeep when he heard a noise in the cottonwood tree. A scratching noise. From the top of the tree, the raven
dropped down, branch-to-branch, stopping on a dead limb twenty feet above O’Brien. The bird tilted its black head, one pale blue eye glowing in a drop of disappearing sunlight, unblinking, staring at O’Brien like a diamond emerging from a fist of coal.

O
’Brien wanted to spend time at his cabin on the river doing physical work. Sweating. Thinking. In four days, he replaced and stained some of the wooden planks on his dock and cut brush around his property. He now was chopping wood near the river, shirtless, sweat rolling off his biceps and down his chest. He thought about the conversations with Professor Ike Kirby, the director and art director on the movie set—the casting agent.

Where was the painting?

Its discovery might provide Gus Louden with what he needed to prove his relative wasn’t a war deserter.

And it may prove why Jack Jordan died on the movie set
.

Just let investigators handle it. Move on
.

He lifted the ax above his head, his eyes focusing on the top of a log he was about to split in the side yard of his cabin on the river. He stopped, lowered the ax and reached down scooping a ladybug off the log. “It’s your lucky day,” he said, releasing the insect in the grass. Max trotted over and sniffed. “Leave the ladybug alone, Max. She almost lost her tiny head on the chopping block. She has a second chance.”

O’Brien turned and drove the ax into the wood, splitting the log into two pieces. Max followed him as he pushed a wheelbarrow filled with cut firewood. He stacked it in a bin he’d built near his screened-in back porch. He turned to Max and said, “We’ll get a few chilly nights here in Florida. This half cord ought to last ten years. I always heard that wood warms you
three ways: when you cut it, when you stack it, and when you burn it. We did two of them today. How about some lunch?”

Max barked and trotted ahead of O’Brien up the path leading to the back porch. O’Brien loved the way Max enjoyed the outdoors—such a trooper, following him from place to place as he did his chores, like it was her job, too. He showered, changed to shorts and a T-shirt, and then turned on the TV in the kitchen as he fixed Max a bowl of food. The news was on the screen. O’Brien muted the sound and began making a turkey, hot mustard and sweet onion sandwich. He picked his phone up from the kitchen counter and made the call. “Mr. Louden, this is Sean O’Brien.”

“Did you find the painting already?”

“No. I did spend some time following a circuitous path. An antique dealer in DeLand bought it at an estate sale and then sold it, more than eight months ago, to a couple—Jack and Laura Jordan.”

“Do they have it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you going to check?”

“No.”

“May I ask you why?”

“Jack Jordan’s dead. He was killed on a movie set. Police say it was an accident. He’d lent the painting to the movie producers to be used in a few scenes. It was apparently stolen from the set and the theft was reported to police. You can check with the Volusia County Sheriff’s department if you want to. Or you can call the man’s widow, Laura. I have a number I got from the antique dealer, but I’m not going to intrude on her privacy at this time in her life.”

“I understand. I read about that shooting. My heart goes out to his wife and daughter.”

“How’d you know he had a daughter?”

“It was mentioned in the news story.”

O’Brien said nothing.

“Mr. O’Brien, you did a lot…you managed to track it down this far and fast. I will send you a check. You earned it.”

“But I didn’t finish the job and find it. Just send me a check for gas and lunch money. I wish you luck with the recovery of the painting. One
other thing, do you know where the woman in the painting—the photo—is buried?”