Trace Their Shadows (21 page)

“When did the rest of the men get back?”

“Oh, I reckon ‘round about the same time as the deputies got there. The Sheriff’s cars come tearing up the road, maybe thirty minutes after Mrs. Able phoned. And then the pick–up trucks come next, one at a time, not all together. All the mens, I think, went out looking for Miss Eva. Some swimming, some in the boat. Some of them beat through the bushes all along the water’s edge. Later, when we looked, all we found was Miss Eva’s overnight bag at the back door and her purse in her car.”

She shook her head mournfully. “Mr. Brookfield and the Ables, they went into town early that evening to tell her folks what happened. Lordy, I was glad I didn’t have that job! The Stones, they come out the next day and just sat and waited.

“The Southerlands felt terrible, too. Miss Grace come back out herself the next day, while the search was going on, and she stayed all night to help Mrs. Able. I was afraid the old lady would have a heart attack, she was so upset. And I guess Miss Grace tried to cheer up Mr. Brookfield, too, but lordy, she was so high strung herself, she didn’t help much.

“Mr. Brookfield, he went out day and night along the lake and in the boat, trying to find the body. After a few days, the sheriff’s men kinda give up. They left it to Mr. Brookfield. They said to call if anything washed ashore like clothing, but it never did.”

She dropped her voice. “Well, I reckon you know why they figured no one found the body. They needed to find it the first day or two. After that, I don’t think anyone would have reported what they found, anyway. It was kinder that way. You lives around these lakes. You knows what ‘gators can do.” They sat for a short time in silence.

The blue thread began once more to outline a needlepoint flower. “Miss Grace, she never liked the house after that, even after they got married, and I can’t blame her.” She sighed again. “Miss Sylvania, she’s let the place run down something terrible.

My son Bobby took me fishing out there in his little ole’ Jon boat last fall, and I saw all her mama’s pretty plants is gone. Miss Grace didn’t take no interest either when she lived there a spell. And Mr. Brookfield, all he did was to buy hisself a big boat and tear down that pretty bougainvillea to build a boat house. Now its falling down itself.”

“The boat house is gone now,” Brandy said. “And the whole house will probably be gone soon. Making room for a new development.” She leaned forward, hands clasped. “And why do you think Eva Stone drowned herself?”

“I reckon some gals, they just can’t stand to lose a man to another gal. That’s the onliest thing I could figure. Not that folks thought Mr. Brookfield was fixing to marry anyone but Miss Grace.”

Brandy looked squarely into the older woman’s eyes. “I ought to prepare you for news you may see in the papers. An awful discovery was made two nights ago. A woman’s skeleton was found on the Able property. The medical examiner says it’s been there between forty and fifty years.”

One plump hand flew to Mrs. Hall’s mouth, she gasped, and her dark eyes went moist. “My Lord. Got to be that poor child. But how could she be buried?”

“We’ll have to leave that to the Sheriff’s Office,” Brandy said. “They’re working on it. I have one more thing to ask you about.” She looked down, phrasing her next question carefully. “You’ve probably heard tales about that house, Mrs. Hall. About what some people claim they’ve seen there.”

The older woman laid her needlepoint in her lap and sat still for a moment. At last she said, “I don’t mind telling you, I wouldn’t go out there to stay again——even if I didn’t know about them bones. That’s a fact. Now I’m a good Christian woman. I never seen nothing peculiar there myself. But I’ve known good folks say they have, and I won’t say they didn’t, just because I never did. There’s more things in this world and the next than folks know about.”

A reasonable, if unsettling, point of view, Brandy thought——one Hamlet hadn’t phrased much better.

Lily Mae’s bent hands were now busy with her pattern. “Mess of white kids from town claimed they seen a ghost there by the lake last year. But folks just made fun of them.”

Brandy nodded. Charlotte and Seymour and company.

Mrs. Hall laughed. “Lordy, I notice, though, that nobody else has gone out there since. After dark, anyway. Except family, of course.”

Not even the family, Brandy knew. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Eva Stone, Mrs. Hall?”

The old lady’s dark forehead creased in a sudden frown. “They’s one more thing I might say, young lady. Mr. Brookfield never seemed to satisfy hisself that Miss Eva’s body could disappear so fast, even with ‘gators around. He kept looking, day and night.”

Outside a car slowed in front of the house. Mrs. Hall set the needlepoint on the side table and pushed herself up out of her rocker. “I reckon I wasn’t satisfied neither. Now looks like we was both right.”

She trudged to the door and opened it. A Ford station wagon was pulling into the driveway, a toddler behind the driver in a car seat. He crowed and waved his arms at the sight of his grandmother in the doorway.

“Thank you for your time. I’m truly glad I had a chance to know you,” Brandy said and meant it.

“Why, you’re more than welcome, young lady.” With a wide smile, Mrs. Hall turned toward the car. “There’s my grandbaby.”

The last Brandy saw of her, she was lifting him out and holding his round, happy face close to hers.

Brandy drove a few blocks, parked in front of a strip shopping center, and scribbled the most important details of Mrs. Hall’s story in her note pad. Tonight she would record them more fully in her loose leaf notebook. She had learned more specifics, but Mrs. Hall’s account matched the others——except for one detail. Neither Grace nor Ace Langdon had mentioned the bell. Certainly Sylvania hadn’t.

She glanced at her watch. She had thirty minutes to make her appointment with Mrs. Stone.

TWENTY
 

Alight shimmered behind the clouds as Brandy skirted Lake Dora and pulled up to the Hyer Retirement Home in Tavares, a gracious white building with colonial columns and a wide veranda. As she walked up the steps, the Lake County Sentinel reporter was sitting morosely on a porch swing, and his companion from the Commercial was standing with his back to the front window, gazing out at the street. When Brandy rang the bell, the door was opened by a thin, lean–faced man with glasses and a nervous smile.

“Miss O’Bannon?” he asked.

When she nodded, he swung the door wider for her, smiled and lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug at the two reporters on the porch, then closed the door behind her. “It’s hard on the others,” he said, “but Mr. Stone’s orders are quite explicit. She’s not to be bothered by reporters. She’s not in any condition to answer their questions. But she feels an obligation to you.”

Brandy followed him across a living room. Through French doors she could see into a Florida room where several elderly people were playing cards.

“Mrs. Stone’s room is on this floor. She doesn’t do the stairs anymore.” He lowered his voice. “Short of breath. Emphysema.

It’s not rare at her age. She’s ninety–three, you know. Such a lovely woman! We hope we can go on keeping her here. She doesn’t require any special care yet, and she likes our family setting. Of course, Mr. Stone would be glad to put his mother in any facility she wanted.”

They walked down a carpeted hall and stopped at an oak door. “We have suites here,” he said. Our guests usually have their meals together in the dining room.” He rapped gently, and hearing a signal from inside, opened the door. “Mr. Stone is with his mother now,” he said.

So I’m to meet the restaurateur again, as well as his mother, Brandy thought, remembering him from the Chamber of Commerce meeting. For Mrs. Stone the news of her daughter’s skeleton must be traumatic. She probably needed her son’s comfort. They stepped into a small, old–fashioned room with high ceilings and an oriental rug.

From the doorway Brandy could see into a bedroom where a patchwork quilt covered a woman in a four poster bed. On this dull afternoon a wrought iron lamp cast a circle of light around her. Mrs. Stone lay beside a bay window facing the lawn and propped up on several pillows. A huge magnolia tree rose before the window, its waxy blossoms a ghostly white through the mist.

At the foot of the bed stood a tall man, perhaps in his late forties, in a well–tailored navy blue suit, his dark hair graying at the temples. His brown eyes and the set of his head and shoulders looked like someone she’d seen before, not just at the Chamber meeting. Maybe also at The Pub on the Lake or another of his waterfront restaurants. Now he came forward, the lines in his forehead showing strain, and held out his hand.

“Miss O’Bannon,” he said. “I’m Weston Stone. Obviously, my mother must speak to someone from the press. We realize you’re not with a daily paper, but I expect they’ll get the news they need without badgering Mother.”

Brandy turned toward the fragile figure on the bed. She was the oldest person Brandy had ever seen. Across the sharp edges of her cheeks and forehead, her skin was almost transparent, but her eyes shone a clear, lively blue. They searched Brandy’s face.

When the old woman spoke, her voice trembled and her fingers plucked at the quilt. “You found Eva.” She reached out an unsteady hand. Stepping forward, Brandy took it and with the other hand pulled up a chair. Weston Stone turned toward the window and looked out at the dying daylight, the muscles in his jaw working in a way that Brandy couldn’t yet understand.

“I’m sorry if I’ve caused you pain,” Brandy said.

The old lady’s eyes blinked rapidly. She shifted her head and Brandy followed her gaze. On the dresser sat the familiar yearbook photograph of Eva Stone, and next to it, the other portrait, the one that had been in the newspaper the night before. It revealed an older Eva Stone with the same delicately modeled features, the same large eyes.

“She was a beauty,” her mother said simply. “But she had inner beauty, too.”

Brandy leaned forward. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” she asked.

The old woman looked up, not at Brandy, but at her son. “I finally had to talk to someone,” she said. “I should have long ago. I had my reasons. But now…” Her lips quivered. “Now after you found——what you did, I can see that Eva didn’t take her own life. Everything is so different than I thought. In a way, it’s more painful, in another way it’s not.”

Weston took a tentative step forward. “Mother…” He hesitated. “You don’t need to say anything.”

“No,” she said, “I should have told the truth long ago. I should have told everything I knew, but I simply couldn’t at the time. Now I’ve told Weston and the detective. I intend to tell Miss O’Bannon, too.”

Brandy’s bewildered glance veered from one to the other. Weston turned back to the window as Mrs. Stone pressed Brandy’s hand. “You seem like such a nice young lady,” she said. “You remind me of my Eva.”

Brandy shook her head slightly. It was the second time she’d been told that.

“You’re about the same size and about the same age. You look very much like her. She was a spirited girl, you know, like I think you are.” She sat up straighter, gently withdrew her hand and laid it beside the other on the coverlet. “The truth is, I know why Eva went to the Able house that day. I know what she went there to do. She was in love with Brookfield Able.”

“Yes,” Brandy said quietly. “We know that.”

“Oh, but that’s not all. Not nearly all. They had an understanding. At least, Eva thought they did. When he was home on leave the year before the war was over, they were…” She paused, almost painfully, then forced herself on. “They were together a lot. They’d been so close in high school. She’d never cared for anyone else, even when he went away to college. Eva was always sure Brookfield would come back to her, even after he was sent overseas.”

She lifted her chin. “Today things would be very different. But when Eva found she was going to have a baby, it was a terrible crisis. She wouldn’t write Brookfield. Her father and I were the only ones she told. In those days girls were likely to feel guilty. Eva took the blame on herself.”

Her lips compressed in a bitter line. “Brookfield was in England flying bombing missions every day. She didn’t want to add to his worries. She thought that when he came home, everything would be all right, that he would be delighted they had a child. She hoped it would be a boy.”

The old woman groped under the pillow for a handkerchief. “Nobody seemed to guess why Eva’s father and I left our business here and moved up near Camp Blanding. We had family in Jacksonville, and we started up another café. We took care of her there. The baby was born in Jacksonville just two months before Eva died.” Mrs. Stone’s voice quivered. “The son she wanted.”

She stopped for a moment to wipe her eyes. “Eva had been concerned because she hadn’t heard from Brookfield in several months, but the mail was often late. After her father and I came back to re–start our business in Tavares, we read in the paper that Brookfield was coming home, and she joined us here.

“She left the baby with relatives, until she could sort things out. Right after she got here, she heard in the café about a welcome home party for Brookfield. She thought he didn’t know she was back in town, that her mail had probably been sent to her other address. She meant to surprise him with her news. She would go to the party and tell him he had a son. She had no doubt they’d soon be married, and everything would be lovely.” Mrs. Stone held the handkerchief again to her eyes.

“Can you imagine,” she went on at last, “how we felt when we had the call that our daughter had drowned herself?”

“Mother,” Weston Stone said again. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. It’s always wrong not to be truthful. I don’t want to die with this on my conscience. Not even Weston knowing.”

Brandy looked quickly at Weston Stone. He had his head down, his hands in his pockets.

“Apparently Brookfield had never written Eva that he was marrying someone else. That weekend she believed she was going to his welcome–home party. Instead she found herself at his and Grace Southerland’s engagement party. We felt sure she’d been in such despair that she walked into the lake and drowned herself. We held Brookfield responsible.”