The Cemetery Club (Darcy & Flora Cozy Mystery Book 1) (2 page)

She quickened her pace. I
held the door as she slid into the passenger seat of her Toyota. Then I hurried
to the driver’s side, jumped in, and reached for the ignition. There was only
one route back to Levi, and, hopefully, the little creek below the hill had not
washed out the road.

Chapter 2

The return trip toward Levi
was an adventure in itself. Water washed up on the car as we splashed across
the creek, and the tires left deep ruts in red mud. I drove as fast as I dared,
my need to contact law enforcement urging me onward. Finally, mud became a
paved road and the Toyota picked up speed. Dodging a small tree across the
asphalt, we snaked our way up Deertrack Hill. When we were at last on level
ground, Mom tried the cell phone again. This time, it worked. She dialed the
sheriff’s office in Levi.

Even to me, her quavering
recital about finding Ben sounded unbelievable, especially when she mentioned
the missing finger. At last, she snapped the phone shut. “Grant said to stay
right here and he will meet us. He wants us to go back to Goshen with him and
Jim Clendon. That’s Grant’s deputy,” she said.

“Grant?” I asked. “Grant
who?”

“Why, Darcy, I thought you
knew that Grant Hendley has been sheriff of Ventris County for a year now.” She
pointed to a small grocery store on the right side of the road. “Why not wait
here in Tanner’s parking lot for Grant?”

So, my old flame became the
sheriff of his hometown. He would be good at the job. Always a staunch believer
in right being right and wrong being wrong—that was Grant Hendley.
Unaccountably, I thought about my hair, plastered down to my head by the rain.
My shirt and jeans were still damp and mud clung to my shoes. Grant probably
would not recognize me.

Driving onto the paved area,
I shut off the ignition and slumped against the steering wheel. “I don’t want
to go back to the cemetery. Not today; not ever.”

Mom patted my shoulder. “We
are going to have to go back.”

Closing my eyes, I asked,
“Do you have an aspirin in your purse?”

The sun was playing hide and
seek with harmless-looking clouds by the time the sheriff and his deputy
arrived. Grant swung out of his truck and strode to our car, looking much the
way I remembered him, only thinner. His eyes were as blue as ever, but gray
sprinkled his red hair. Pushing his Stetson back from his forehead, he smiled,
and an old, familiar warmth stirred in my heart—a disturbing feeling.

“Darcy,” he said, “good to
see you.”

Returning his smile, I
reached out to grasp his hand as he extended it through my window.

Jim Clendon squinted at me.
“What’s this about finding some poor devil dead on top of the ground at the
cemetery? Don’t you know that’s unlawful? You’re supposed to let ’em stay
buried.”

“Forgive me if I don’t find
that amusing,” I said between clenched teeth. My head pounded like a
kettledrum. Mom’s aspirin had yet to work. “And,” I added, “that is not ‘some
poor devil,’ that’s Ben Ventris lying out there.”

Clendon grinned and shot a
stream of tobacco juice into a puddle.

Mom threw me a warning glance.
“I think we’d better just show you what we found, Grant.”

Reluctantly, I put the car
into gear and led the way back to our grim discovery. As we stopped once more
at Goshen, only the thought of lending support to Mom gave me the courage to go
through the gate.

Grant and his deputy parked
beside us. “I see that the storm got the tool shed and that old oak,” Clendon
said.

“The tool shed can be
replaced,” Mom snapped. “What we can’t replace is Ben lying dead out there.”
She pointed toward the tumble of branches that was Ben Ventris’s coffin.

Halfway between the gate and
the body, Mom and I stopped to watch Grant and Clendon wade through the grass
toward that forlorn heap. They walked around, bending over the ground now and
then, obviously searching for something. At one point, Clendon kicked a branch
aside, then they both peered intently at the pile of debris where we found Ben.

At last, they came back to
where we waited. What would be Grant’s verdict? Would he find any clues?

An odd little smirk twitched
the corner of Clendon’s mouth. He pulled a wad of tobacco from the back pocket
of his jeans, bit off a chew, and asked, “So, just where is this so-called
body?”

Air whooshed from my lungs.
“What do you mean?” I gasped.

Running through the sodden
grass, I reached the place where Mom and I had uncovered Ben. My mother jogged
along behind me. The jumble of branches, rocks, and dirt still covered the
ground, but Ben was gone. Not even an indentation showed that a body had lain
here.

Both men stared at Mom and
me with strange expressions. Grant cleared his throat. “Miss Flora, Darcy, are
you sure there was a body here? Nerves play tricks on us sometimes and even
make us believe—well—storms make a person nervous and you just went through a
bad one. Maybe you thought you saw something that wasn’t really here.”

Anger brought the blood to
my face. Had Grant Hendley changed in those years since we were both teenagers?
As I remembered, trust had been a large part of our relationship. How dare he
insinuate we had made up a story about finding Ben?

Clendon wiped his mouth and
snorted. “And, anyhow, are you for certain sure it was Ben Ventris, assuming
that you did see somebody on that brush pile, which don’t appear to be likely.
If that there body was all covered up, how’d you come to recognize him?”

Grant shook his head. “Now,
Jim, I’ve read some of Darcy’s articles in the paper and she’s a good
investigative reporter. If she and Miss Flora think Ben Ventris was here, we’d
better keep looking. Why don’t you take a walk down the hill a way and see if
you can find any sign of a body being moved or any drag marks or squashed
vegetation. It’s going to be hard to tell what the storm caused and what might
have been made by something or somebody else.” He turned toward us. “Are you pretty
sure it was poor old Ventris?”

“There’s no mistake about
that, Grant,” I said. “Mom has known Ben for a long time.”

Clendon interrupted, giving
my mother an up-and-down insinuating leer. “Yeah. I heard they were real good
friends.”

What did he mean by that? I
was on the verge of stepping forward, grabbing Clendon’s fox face, and twisting
it around nineteen times.

Grant
spoke sharply. “Jim, you go on down the hill and take a look.
Now!”

Mom didn’t seem to be aware
of any insult. She continued staring at the pile of rubble, her breath raspy.

“Sit down over there, Mom,”
I ordered, indicating the flat top of a gravestone. Surely she wasn’t going to
faint. Her color was pasty.

She fanned her face with her
hand, as if she found it hard to breathe. “This must be a nightmare, Darcy,”
she said. “It can’t be real.”

“Where did you get that
deputy?” I asked Grant as Clendon sauntered down the hill. “Surely you had more
candidates in the county that you could choose from.”

“I apologize for Jim,” Grant
said. “Sometimes his choice of words isn’t the best, but he’s like a bulldog
when it comes to going after the bad guys. Would you two ladies be willing to
make a statement saying you saw Ventris under all this brush? Think about it
before you answer. You say you found him, you say there was a bullet hole in
his chest, and that he was missing a finger? Do you want to put your names to a
statement like that?”

Stomping my foot sent water
splashing from the rain-soaked grass. “Now listen to me, Grant Hendley. It’s
just like Mom and I told you. Ben isn’t here now but he certainly was. A dead
man named Ben Ventris was lying right out here in all these sticks and limbs
before the storm hit. Why would we make up such a story? You know me better
than that!”

Clendon sloshed back toward
us. “Not a thing down the hill there, folks,” he said. “If somebody dragged a
body out of here, there sure isn’t any sign of it now. Maybe the rain revived
him and he just up and walked off.”

I bit my tongue and glanced
at Mom. She had begun to shiver and I started toward her, thinking that she had
had enough for one day. As it turned out, indisputable proof of our story lay
at my feet; proof that could provide positive identification of the body these
two officers doubted had ever lain here.

I kicked some soggy leaves
out of my way and froze in mid-stride. Although the grayish, swollen object
floating in the mud puddle looked like nothing I had ever seen before—pulpy
and misshapen—there was no doubt in my mind it could be only one thing—the
finger of a human hand.

I beckoned to Grant then
pointed at the ground. Nobody said a word. Even Clendon’s sneer vanished. The
only sound in the cemetery was a cardinal in a distant tree telling us to
“Cheer up, Cheer up,” and my mother, softly sobbing.

Finally, Grant broke the
silence. “Okay. I reckon you were right. I’ll take this to the lab boys and see
what they tell me.”

“Darcy,” Mom whispered, “I
want to go home.”

We turned toward the gate.

“Hey! Hold on there!” yelled
Clendon. “Where do you think you’re going? We haven’t gotten your written
statement.”

My cheeks burned and I spun
on my heel. “You just hold on yourself,” I said. “We are leaving. If you decide
you want a written
statement today, you know
where my mother lives. If not, we’ll see you
tomorrow.”

Mom and I walked away with
as much dignity as two traumatized women could summon. I felt the gaze of both
men boring into my back as we trudged toward Mom’s car.

Chapter 3

Afternoon shadows pointed
toward evening by the time I stopped the Toyota in Mom’s driveway. Her
old-fashioned two-story farmhouse had never looked so good. Every one of my
mother’s sixty-seven years showed on her face. The skin stretched tightly
across her prominent cheekbones. For many years, her curly hair had been laced
with white, but tonight those curls appeared limp and tired.

Climbing the porch steps, I
unlocked the front door. “We both need warm baths and food,” I said. “I’ll
scramble some eggs and make some coffee for supper.”

She did not reply.

After showering, I slipped
into blue jeans and a red long-sleeved sweatshirt and stepped into my favorite
fuzzy blue house shoes. Being warm and dry made me feel nearly normal. The
mirror above my dressing table showed a face that left no doubt as to my
Cherokee ancestry. The older I got, the more I looked like my mother. I only
hoped that at her age I had the stamina that kept her going. If would also be
nice if I developed some of her faith.

Surprisingly, I looked a
whole lot better than I felt. Two spots of color shone in my cheeks without the
aid of a blusher. Somewhere, I had read that people who come into close contact
with violent death and survive often feel and look unusually alive and vibrant.
Of course, that psychology probably would not apply if the murder victim had
been a lifelong friend.

Mom’s old yellow coffee pot
sat in its accustomed place on the counter in the kitchen. By the time she
appeared, I was warming my hands around a steaming cup. I poured a mug full for
her.

She looked doubtful. “I
don’t think I can drink this,” she said.

“You need the caffeine,” I
assured her. “Something hot will make a new woman out of you.”

Sinking into a chair, she
said, “It’s going to take a whole lot more than coffee to make me feel anything
but old and bewildered.”

I cracked two eggs into a
bowl. “Let’s have a bite to eat and then we’ll talk. We need to be sure we’re
both clear on exactly what we saw and when we saw it, before we give our
written statements tomorrow.”

Mom’s gaze slid toward the
kitchen window but I had a feeling she wasn’t seeing the apple tree in the
yard. I needed to ask several questions and while I stirred the eggs, I
pondered how to ask them without upsetting her further. “Had you seen Ben
lately?” I asked.

She nodded.

“First, do you have any idea
why someone would hate him enough
to kill
him and then do a gruesome thing like cutting off his finger?” I
shuddered.

She closed her eyes for a
second. “Probably his finger was cut off because somebody wanted the ring he
wore and that was the only way they could get it. As far as his death, well,
Ben had a premonition that might happen.”

“Do you mean that somebody
killed him in order to get a ring? That doesn’t make any kind of sense, Mom.”

“This wasn’t just any ring,
Darcy. It was, maybe, two hundred years old and worth more than a diamond the
size of a possum grape.”

The coffee I was about to
swallow caught in my throat. Possum grapes grew wild along creek bottoms in
Texas and Oklahoma, and although they weren’t as large as Concords or wine
grapes, they were bigger than a black-eyed pea. Grabbing hold of the idea of a
gold ring worth more than a pea-sized diamond was hard.

“But, who would know that
the ring would be worth that much?” I asked. “And what was so special about
it?”

Mom passed her hand wearily
over her forehead. “Very few people would know the value of that ring,” she
said. “That’s why we need to look only at those few to find Ben’s killer.”

I opened my mouth to ask
what she meant by “we” when it was clearly a job for the law; then, I thought
better of it and let her go on with her story.

Mom stared at her mug, but
her next words told me she was seeing far back into the past. “Ben’s family has
lived here in Oklahoma longer
than most.
They were here before the Cherokees arrived on the Trail of
Tears. Ben’s
ancestors were part of the Old Settlers bunch. They came
mostly to Arkansas in the early 1800s from the
eastern states. Some of
them settled in the territory before it became
the state of Oklahoma.
Ben’s family came
from Georgia, around the area where gold was
mined.”

“Gold? I never knew Georgia
had gold.”

“Neither did a lot of other
people. According to old-timers, quite a bit of gold was taken out of the
ground in Georgia beginning sometime in the 1500s, in a place called Nacoochee
Valley.”

My mother, the historian.
“So, how did you come to learn all this and why didn’t I know before now?”

She smiled. “Ben told me a
lot, but, you forget, my dear daughter, that I’ve lived for a long time in
these hills and you and I had Cherokee ancestors too. I liked to listen to
stories my dad told. Anyway, at first, Ben’s family kept the nuggets because
they were beautiful, but when they found out that non- Indians would steal or
kill to get their hands on them, they decided they’d better quit talking about
the gold. Some of Ben’s people were goldsmiths. The ring Ben wore came from his
father and grandfather before him. All I know for sure is that the gold in that
ring is from Georgia and was engraved with some sort of symbol.”

Pausing, she swallowed more
coffee. “Ben said a little silver mixed with the gold when it was being formed
in the ground. There’s no other gold like it anywhere and that’s what the ring
was made of. It came from the area around Dahlonega, Georgia. Dahlonega means
‘yellow’ or ‘place of the yellow’ in the Cherokee language. It’s very
valuable.”

Mom spoke so softly I had to
strain to hear her. What an amazing story, and to think that I had never heard
it before!

Scooting her chair away from
the table, she went to a cabinet over the refrigerator and pulled out a small
red and black tin box, her old recipe box. She returned to her chair and drew a
wrinkled leather drawstring bag from among the recipes. She turned the bag
upside-down and a gold ring rolled onto the table.

“This ring is a little
different than Ben’s,” she said. “It’s made from the same kind of gold and is
about as old as Ben’s ring. See this scrollwork? It is supposed to bring me
peace and happiness.”

Picking up the small
circlet, I held it under the light and studied it. A greenish-yellow glow shone
with subdued brilliance. With a million questions in my mind and on the tip of
my tongue, I turned to my mother but she answered before I could ask.

“Yes, Ben gave me that ring
many years ago, for my seventeenth birthday. He wanted me to keep it as a
symbol of our friendship. Although I don’t believe happiness comes from a ring,
no matter how valuable, I kept it because it was from Ben. He clung to the old
ways, the Cherokee ways.”

Swallowing a couple of
times, at last I said, “But a ring! Doesn’t that mean some sort of commitment?
I mean, even fifty years ago . . . .”

Mom’s eyes twinkled. “Darcy,
did you ever stop to think that maybe you don’t know everything about this
family? Way back then, before I ever met your father, Ben and I were sweethearts.”

If she had said the donkey
across the road who insisted on braying his head off was a dinosaur, I could
not have been more shocked. Surely, my mother had never loved anybody else but
my father, Andy Tucker. Their marriage had seemed perfect to me, two people who
were destined for each other. Never would I have imagined she had any other
suitor. Yet, here she was, confessing that she had!

“Even after we married other
people, Ben’s family and Andy and I remained friends. Your father said he had
never known a finer man than Ben Ventris.”

Shaking my head, I hurried
to turn off the heat under the scorched eggs. I would have to start again on
our supper.

Mom traced the rim of her
mug with her finger, speaking as if she were talking to herself. “I saw Ben
fairly often these last few years. He and I knew the same people and we were
both lonely, but that’s all we were, just good friends. Sometimes, we went for
drives along the river; sometimes, we just sat on the porch and talked. But
now, that is all over and it’s mighty hard to accept.”

For the life of me, I could
not think of an adequate response.

Once more gazing out of the
window, she continued, “It must have been a couple of weeks ago that Ben
stopped in and we talked about gold. He told me that I should keep quiet about
what he was telling me, that nobody must ever find out that he had let me in on
the secret or I might be in danger too, as he felt he was. He said he had some
items made from Dahlonega gold and that they were worth a lot of money. Ben
believed in “warnings” as he called them. He said he had a feeling that bad
things were going to happen to him and he wanted to be sure somebody knew about
the treasure he had and where it was. He didn’t trust lawyers. He told his
daughter, Skye, about the gold’s hiding place. She was the only one who knew,
besides Ben himself.”

My head was swimming. I
gingerly touched the gold ring on the table. “Are you saying there are more
gold items besides Ben’s ring and this one?”

Mom shrugged. “I don’t have
any idea how many relics are left, but Ben did say there’s a bunch and they are
worth a lot of money.”

“Did he give you any idea of
where that stuff is?”

“No. He said he would ask
Skye to mail a map to me. He trusted me and he wanted me not to even look at
the map unless something bad happened to both him and his daughter. Skye lives
in Oklahoma City,”

I interrupted. “Ben never
lived like a rich man.”

“Ben was just Ben,” Mom
said, smiling. “He preferred the old ways. He wouldn’t have been comfortable
any other way. However, he was able to send Skye to the University of Oklahoma,
and I never knew her to want for anything in her whole life.”

The setting sun warmed Mom’s
west kitchen window and painted the sky in varying shades of chartreuse,
purple, and crimson. That same lovely sunset would be lighting Goshen Cemetery
too. My mind strayed to the storm-damaged grounds and building and that
strangely empty jumble of tree branches and brush. What had happened to Ben’s
body? Somebody must have taken him away but why? And how? And where? Most of
all, who?

Mom broke the silence. “Ben
said the knowledge of the gold’s hiding place was passed down from generation
to generation; in fact, to only one person in each generation. I feel honored
that he broke that tradition by including me in knowing about the hiding
place.”

“I don’t agree, Mom! I think
it was selfish of Ben. If he was killed for more than that gold ring, your
knowing the secret of the hiding place may have put you in danger. Maybe
somebody was trying to make him tell where the rest of it is hidden. Or maybe
they succeeded in finding out and killed him anyway. Thank goodness he didn’t
tell you. If you
knew, and if Ben was
actually killed because he wouldn’t divulge the
location of that gold,
your life could be in danger!” I got up and started pacing the floor. What had
Ben Ventris been thinking? How dare he even mention that gold to my mother? Why
couldn’t he have just kept quiet?

Slowly, my mother shook her
head. “Now, Darcy, don’t get all upset. Nobody except Skye would know that Ben
talked to me about the gold. Besides, that’s beside the point now. I don’t give
a hoot about any old treasure. I want to know who killed Ben!”

“Sure, Mom, so do I, but I
still can’t help wishing . . . .”

“Ben was a lot deeper than
he seemed,” Mom said. “He even owned some oil lands in western Oklahoma at one
time. Maybe he used part of the gold to buy them; I don’t know, but he didn’t
want the responsibility of being rich. He gave all that oil land to his
daughter.”

I stopped pacing and leaned
against the table. “I wonder if the killer tortured the hiding place out of Ben
before he shot him.”

“I don’t think so, Darcy.
Ben would never have told. But killing Ben would be like killing the goose that
laid the golden egg, seems to me.”

“Murder is always an insane
act,” I said. “What if Ben’s killer has a terrible temper? What if he became so
angry at Ben for not telling, that he just shot him?”