Murder Under the Covered Bridge (24 page)

twenty-eight

Francine pulled out the
box Merlina had given her at the law office. She inserted the small key she'd taken off Belinda Flowers's body and smuggled out of the funeral home in all the confusion. The key fit perfectly in the lock. She turned it and the box opened.

It, too, smelled of cedar and was smooth on the inside. Several items were stacked in the box. Francine lifted a leather bound notebook, slightly larger than traditional paperback size, from the top of the stack. She flipped through it. It was not a diary in a traditional sense, although it did have dated entries that went back to the late 1930s. The handwriting was clearly different than her grandmother's.

She skimmed the first few entries, adjusting her bifocals as she read.

Jonathan stood behind her as she turned the pages. “I wish I'd brought my reading glasses.”

“I wish you had too. It's hard for me to fathom this, but this appears to be Doc Wheat's journal on his natural remedies. What he tried, what worked, and what didn't.”

“His formulas?”

“Yes. The key seems to be that they were made from the water at that spring.”

“Then he believed the water had some kind of special properties?”

Francine continued to skim. “Right from the start. He presumed that from the growth around the grotto that stayed green so long.”

“Apparently others bought into that. He had a worldwide audience for a while. Does it say why he stopped selling his remedies?”

“I'm sure it's in here somewhere.” She turned to the end of the notebook, hoping the answer might be there. But what she saw made her heart falter. “Jonathan, the last entries are dated two weeks ago. The formula he was experimenting with calls for white snakeroot.”

Jonathan didn't say anything for a moment. “Is the handwriting the same?”

Francine almost said yes, because it looked nearly identical, but the implication was difficult for her to get her mind around. If the handwriting was by the same person, then Doc Wheat would be … Zed? It would account for the reason there was no record of the land being sold to Zed.

She flipped back and forth between entries at the beginning and at the end. “I'm no handwriting expert, but it seems to me they are very similar.”

Francine went back to the small cedar box and sorted through the remaining contents. The next item was yet another diary from her grandmother. This time Francine went immediately to the end to check the dates of the last entries. “This diary goes up to the last week of her life, right before the automobile accident. Look! She mentions me.”

“How old were you?”

She stopped reading for a moment and put the book in her lap, her thumb marking the page she was on. “I was seven. I'll never forget it. It was my first encounter with the death of someone I loved very much.”

Jonathan rubbed her shoulder. Francine went back to the diary. “
I took care of Francine today while Jane did chores
,” she read. “
Being a grandmother is one of the best experiences there could be. Tempting as it is to keep her at this age, I understand why the treasure mustn't be shared until adulthood. Even Jane needs a few more years before she learns the truth. My father has undergone three transformations already, the last one being the most difficult to manage. He says with the advancements in
record-keeping
, it will only get more challenging to hide the treasure, but to let the secret out would only invite disaster.
”

“The ‘treasure' again. My grandmother died shortly after this. But did my mother ever know about the treasure? Who was her grandfather? What does she mean by transformations? She couldn't mean Doc Wheat, or Zed, if that's what she's talking about. That would put him well over a hundred years old, and he appears to be younger than us.”

“I'm starting to get a picture I'm finding hard to believe,” Jonathan said. “Your grandmother died in an automobile accident. You never knew your grandfather. Your mother died of cancer at an early age. Your father disappeared sometime after your mother died. None of those were from old age.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“What happened to your
great-grandmother
? Where is she buried?”

“Her gravestone is next to Grandma and Grandpa's in a private cemetery on the land we used to own here in this county.”

“I think it might be a good idea to go see that grave.”

“When?”

“As soon as we can shake Charlotte, Robert Irvine, and whoever else is downstairs.”

They heard cane taps on the hallway outside the room. There was a knock on the door. Francine rushed to put everything back in the box and whisked it under the bed. She kissed Jonathan hard on the lips just as the door flung open and Charlotte bustled in.

“You have to come downstairs and meet Robert Irvine!” Charlotte said. Francine unlocked her lips with Jonathan's and gave Charlotte a stare. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Not anymore,” Jonathan grumbled.

“I would have thought you'd snuck away to try to open the box, now that you have the key.”

“Turned out to be more complicated than I thought,” Francine said. She stood and straightened her clothes. Jonathan did likewise. He cleared his throat like it was thick from desire.

Charlotte looked from Jonathan to Francine. “I'll just be waiting in the hall.” She backed out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Francine put a finger to her lips to indicate Jonathan shouldn't say anything. She tiptoed toward him, but the floor creaked anyway. The two of them choked back a laugh.

“We got away with it for now,” Francine whispered, “but we'd better not push it. Let's go downstairs and see what's happened.”

Charlotte, true to her word, leaned against the wall outside the room, waiting. “You need to know, he's seen the calendar. In fact, just about everyone's seen the calendar. Joy caught a good part of what happened at the funeral room and filed a report that's already aired.”

Jonathan crossed his arms. “I don't detect any remorse in your voice about that. I thought this was just something that would stay inside the group.”

“And how does this play into Robert Irvine's visit?” Francine asked.

Charlotte was already working on the stairs, one step at a time. “Come down and find out.”

Robert was gracious but didn't stay long after they came downstairs into the kitchen. Mary Ruth had several bowls out, and it looked like she'd been demonstrating the prep work for corn fritter donuts while he had interviewed her. He shook Jonathan and Francine's hands and told them he enjoyed their photos in the calendar and hoped he was in as good as shape as they were when he was in his seventies. Francine felt it was a sincere comment, even though Robert Irvine was built like a Mack truck. She imagined him as a Jack LaLanne who would be forever in shape, pulling train cars into his eighties. When the Food Network camera crew finished packing up, they left.

The Bridge Club was all atwitter with what had transpired while Francine and Jonathan had been upstairs. “Between the footage he got at the booth today and this last bit here, he's going to do a very positive segment on my food booth at the Covered Bridge Festival,” Mary Ruth said.

The women crowded around Francine and Jonathan in their excitement. “And using our status as the
Skinny-Dipping
Grandmas and Joy's position as a reporter for
Good Morning America
, he's going to help us promote the calendar to raise funds to rebuild the Roseville Bridge,” said Alice.

Francine was stunned. “But I thought we were all in agreement that this was to be very private.”

“Not after Joy's next segment on
GMA
,” Charlotte said. “You heard Robert. The two of you look good. You'll probably come out of this with another appearance on Dr. Oz.”

“I don't want another appearance on Dr. Oz.”

“Too late,” said Marcy, coming out of the dining room into the kitchen. She pressed a button on her phone like she had just hung up after a conversation. “I've got a press conference lined up for tomorrow at what remains of the Roseville Bridge where you'll announce the calendar will be for sale by the end of the month to raise funds. After that and Joy's segment on
GMA
, I have you all booked on several local morning shows in Indianapolis, Terre Haute, and Fort Wayne. I also have a call into
Ellen
,
Wendy Williams
, and
The Tonight Show
. It's only a matter of time before the Dr. Oz people are calling me.”

“
The Tonight Show
!” Charlotte exclaimed. “I
love
Jimmy Fallon!”

All except Joy looked at her like they didn't know who she was talking about. “He's no Johnny Carson or David Letterman, of course,” she said.

“Don't tell him that,” Marcy said. “And I think this calendar is the kind of thing that might go viral too.”

“When did you become our publicist again?” Francine asked.

“I
re-hired
her,” Mary Ruth said. “To help me, not the Bridge Club, but I feel like my business is inextricably linked with the group.”

“Don't think of this as promoting yourself,” Marcy said. “You're saving the Roseville Bridge.”

As much as Francine didn't want to admit it, the Roseville Bridge was an important piece of history to her, even more so now that she was coming around to learning the truth.

Francine and Jonathan made their excuses as to why they couldn't stick around for dinner. The group was ordering out again, this time Chinese. Francine knew Charlotte suspected they were up to something because both she and Jonathan loved Chinese food. But with the mystery already solved as to who had been behind the deaths of William and Belinda as well as the two fires, Francine aimed to keep Charlotte's curiosity contained. “We just need to have dinner on our own,” she insisted. “And Mary Ruth, we'll be back in time to help finish up prep work for the food at tomorrow's booth. I know the visit from Robert Irvine put you behind.”

“Even if all you have left to do is dishes,” Jonathan offered.

Mary Ruth looked up from the batter she was preparing for a batch of corn fritter donuts. “You're on. Dishes would be much appreciated. Charlotte, don't try to stop them. We have a deal.”

Apparently even Charlotte couldn't argue with someone else doing the dishes.

Francine drove since she knew exactly where the cemetery was. The property was out past the
burnt-out
remains of the Roseville Bridge, so Francine slowed when they went by it. She shook her head. “Such a sad thing. I still have a hard time believing Dolly was behind it all.”

Jonathan wasn't looking in the direction of the bridge; he was looking in the opposite direction toward the Rock Run Café. “I know exactly where we should eat for dinner.”

Francine turned west onto a county road and they drove for a while through a wooded section. When they reached the intersection with a southbound county road, she took it and slowed to a crawl. “It's near here.”

They turned onto a dirt road that led deeper into the woods. Within a quarter mile they came across a small cemetery with an iron fence completely surrounding it. The gate to the cemetery was open.

Jonathan and Francine got out of the car and stood at the gate. The cemetery was not a large one. Francine went ahead of Jonathan walking toward the east side.

He followed, audibly reading the gravestones that were still legible. Several of the earliest ones were tablets that had weathered to almost nothing. “I thought you said this was private, not primitive.”

“It's both.” She stopped. “Here's what I was looking for.”

The gravestone she'd stopped in front of was a more modern one—large, solid, and upright with the decorative engravings still intact. Francine's
great-grandfather
's name was there, but she knew now that he had not been a biological ancestor. Her
great-grandmother
's name was next to it.

And the ground where her
great-grandmother
was supposed to be buried was freshly dug out.

twenty-nine

“So has she been
dug up or never buried?” Jonathan asked Francine.

A male voice said, “You know the answer to that.”

They both turned. Zed stood there with a shovel.

The sight of the him clad in
well-worn
jeans and a heavy flannel shirt grasping a spade in one hand made Francine think of an unpredictable horror movie villain, even though he was now neatly groomed. She was glad Jonathan was with her. “Where were you hiding?”

“In the trees. Your car is quiet when it's running on battery power, but the road is bumpy enough I heard the chassis bouncing as you came in.”

Francine felt Jonathan shift his stance to one of preparedness in case they were attacked. She had no idea if he was carrying his gun, but she assumed so.

Zed did not make any threatening moves. In fact, he acted jovial. “Well, congratulations, Francine! You figured it out. You found the key, you know the secret. You are our worthy successor.”

“I'm not sure I understand it all, but let me try. You are my
great-grandfather
, the carriage driver who inspired such passion in my
great-grandmother
that you had a tryst with her.”

“
Tryst
. An
old-fashioned
word. But then, we are
old-fashioned
people. Please continue.”

“The woman who died, Belinda Flowers, was my great-
grandmother. Somehow, you discovered this land and the geyser on it. The water has … restorative powers. You used them to develop remedies and
re-created
yourself as Doc Wheat.”

“And your
great-grandmother
?”

Francine had read enough of her grandmother's diary to know the answer. “She never stopped loving you.”

Zed approached the gravesite. He seemed anxious to finish shoveling the remaining dirt on the grave. “Again, you are correct. Our love affair continued during the arranged marriage.”

“More than that. When he died, she came to live with you. And my grandmother knew the truth.”

“She was one of us. We started her on the waters too young, though. We were still in the experimental phase then. We didn't know how it would affect aging. She seemed eternally young.”

“Her death was a blow to my
great-grandmother
.”

“The water can restore, but it can't prevent death. Accidents, fires, diseases that act too quickly—they all proved to be too much.”

“Is that why you gave up your Doc Wheat identity?”

He shook his head. “That came long before her death. Authorities were starting to look too closely. To protect the secret, we
re-invented
ourselves again.”

“As Zedediah Matthew.”

He didn't say anything.

“Did my mother know?”

“We had planned to tell her when she got older. We had decided amongst ourselves that she would need to reach a certain age before we introduced the water, so she wouldn't look so young, like your grandmother had. Sadly, she never reach the age at which we could tell her. So your grandmother had died, and then your mother, and Belinda became depressed. And then I discovered one other disease that we couldn't fix. Alzheimer's.”

“That's how William and Dolly found out who Belinda was, didn't they? When she came to live in the nursing home, she told stories that made her of an age that seemed impossible, but because of the family connection, they guessed.”

Zed simply looked at her. She didn't think he would confirm or deny anything else, but she pursued the line of questioning.

“Who killed William?”

“I'm surprised you have to ask that question. The police have established who did it.”

“But Dolly had no reason to inject poison into his saline solution, not really. Not unless … she thought it would cure him.” She knew she was only guessing, that there was no way to prove the conclusions she was reaching. “You set her up.”

His stance became rigid and tense.

“She and William were getting too close, weren't they? In fact, they had already discovered the water, the source of your remedies.”

“It started off innocent enough. William was wrapped up in the whole Doc Wheat legend for his historical project. I allowed him to learn a little too much. Then he found where I hid my collection of water from the geyser.”

“He stole a jar of it, didn't he? A jar you let him steal. It had the poison in it. Charlotte and I found it in the trunk of the Lucerne.”

Zed threw a shovelful of dirt on the grave, looking like he didn't want to answer Francine. She waited him out.

“I had been watching for him since I first discovered the missing jar,” Zed explained. “I wanted to catch him in the act. I'd moved the jars into the greenhouse and locked the greenhouse and the cabinet. But he'd done something I hadn't anticipated. He discovered the source of the water, and he'd gone straight to it.”

“That explains why he only had a vial of it.”

“It takes a long time to collect a pint.”

“If you weren't expecting him, how did you know he was there?”

“I was headed into town when I saw Dolly's car go by me. I was surprised that she would be traveling out this way and so early in the day, so I turned around and went back. I found the car easily, but after casing the greenhouse, I determined he wasn't there. I was horrified by the thought that he'd found the grotto, but he had. I took my rifle and tracked him through the cornfield headed to the Roseville Bridge.”

“But that still doesn't explain how you ‘know' Dolly committed both acts of arson.”

Zed smoothed out the dirt on the grave. “Long memories in Parke County. Many years before she married William, Dolly was shacked up with someone infamous. The man arrested for burning down the Jeffries Ford Bridge. And he always claimed he was innocent.”

Francine blinked. So Dolly really was an arsonist, and she'd done it again to get revenge on Zed. Revenge for tricking her into poisoning her husband. “I'm still sorry for what happened to William. Aren't you?”

He shrugged. “Not my descendant. Although he was seeking to prove he was a relation with his version of our family history. If he'd been successful, he would have inherited this place, and not you.”

So heartless
. “But he's still my cousin!”

“But not a worthy successor. I never believed he could be trusted to make the right decisions once he knew the truth.”

Francine had a sudden flash of insight. “Dolly didn't kill Belinda. You did.”

Zed choked back a cry. “Belinda had fallen into a vegetative state. She wasn't there anymore. If the waters hadn't extended her life, she would have died by then. I decided I loved her too much to let her live like that.”

“You're going to let Dolly take the fall for those murders? She never meant to kill anyone!”

“Dolly burned me out of my house and took down the monument to the love Belinda … Victoria … and I shared for nine decades. The arson will be much harder to prove. So let her be put away for something. You are my heir.”

Francine looked at Zed's face and saw only grief there now. “What about you?”

“I'm going away, far from this place. I'm leaving the water behind and I'll age again. When I die, I die. I suspect it won't be long.”

“What if Dolly talks about it?”

He smiled sadly. “She would have to admit to her wrongdoing in order to make the case. And then, who would believe her about the water?”

“What am I supposed to do with it? If this is all true, it's like winning the lottery. It is both a blessing and a curse.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “But it's yours now. You will have to decide which you want it to be.”

The wind picked up. Leaves that had fallen to the forest floor stirred up around them. “Let's go,” Jonathan said. “He should be allowed some last moments here alone.”

“You're a good man, Jonathan,” Zed said. “I trust you to support Francine, whatever she decides.”

Jonathan gave no reply. When they turned to walk back to the car, Francine whispered, “You're not calling the sheriff's department, are you?”

“By the time they got here, he would be gone. I don't like that Dolly will be convicted of something she was duped into doing, but let's wait and see how the trial plays out. I think, in the end, it will be easier to allow the greater sense of justice play out.”

“Meaning let God take care of it?”

“Yes.”

They got in the car.

“I don't know what I'm going to tell Charlotte about this,” Francine said several minutes later.

“A lie,” Jonathan said, and then laughed. “Or tell her a truth that makes sense to tell her. She's a pretty good detective. It will take something good to keep her off the case.”

Francine and Jonathan stopped at the Rock Run Café for dinner. There was a crowd, but the owner recognized them and set up a table in one of the back rooms for them. “We don't usually use this room,” he said, “but I can tell the last thing you want is attention. I'll serve you myself back here.”

He set candles on the table and lit them. The soft glow of the candlelight seemed magical, like the only thing that existed was what they could see by its light, and that was a very small world. Light jazz played in the background. The owner brought table settings, two menus, and a bottle of
brand-name
sparkling water. He presented it to them as though it were a fine wine. “We don't serve alcohol so this is the best we can do. But it's on the house.”

He poured them each a glass and left, promising to come back in a while and take their orders.

Jonathan held up his glass of fizzy water. “Here's to your good fortune.”

“Our good fortune,” she replied, clinking his glass with hers, “if it's to be believed.”

“It's an amazing story.”

Francine swallowed a sip of the water and felt the bubbles tickle the back of her throat. In spite of her tiredness, the surreal story she was contemplating as truth, and the knowledge that she and the Summer Ridge Bridge Club would be back in the spotlight tomorrow at the press conference, she smiled. “A bit ironic, isn't it? To be sitting here in the restaurant where we started down the path to answer the riddle of what happened to William, to have the journey turn out to be nothing like what we'd imagined, and now to be sipping a glorified version of spring water, which, let's be real, is the answer to the riddle.”

He tipped his glass toward her, nodded, and took his own swallow of the water. “You're not only a good detective, you also have a bit of the muse in you.” He gave her a crooked smile.

She eyed him curiously. “You say that like you have thought of a solution.”

“Not me. You have.” He picked up the bottle of water, turned it around so the label faced her, and handed it to her.

“It says Pellegrino.”

“Yes, but it's much more than that. Read the label.”

“It's bottled at a source in Italy.”

“What if it were bottled right here in Parke County? What if William's history of the county were modified to make that suggestion?”

Francine thought a moment. “Jonathan, you're a genius. The geyser is the source of the water Doc Wheat used in his remedies. William and Dolly wanted to bottle the water for their own purposes. A craft water with ‘restorative' powers, at least that's the
ages-old
myth. Zed wouldn't permit it. No more, no less. It sounds like a snake oil proposition, doesn't it? Best of all, no one will believe there's any truth in it.”

“Not even Charlotte,” he said.

They clinked glasses again. Francine began to giggle, which made her feel silly and young and free of the worries of the world. Jonathan began to chuckle with her, and when the owner came back to take their orders, he found them dancing to a jazz version of “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.”

Francine, Jonathan, and the Summer Ridge Bridge Club put on their best faces for the press conference the next morning. Joy presided over the announcement of the pinup calendar and how the proceeds would go to rebuild the Roseville Bridge. Marcy prowled in the background, passing out sample copies they'd couriered the previous night from Indianapolis. In the end, the tragic story of William's death, Dolly's rampage of arson and poisoning, along with the semi-nude photos of the women baring their all, reached around the world.

Five weeks later, Francine and Charlotte sat in the kitchen at Francine's house. The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were Francine's favorites, and she always decorated for them. With Thanksgiving upon them, she had placed pumpkins and gourds in strategic nooks throughout the house, multicolored ears of dried corn lay on tables and hung from hooks in the kitchen, and on this particular day, the promising smell of apple pie cooling on a counter filled in the air.

“How are sales?” Francine asked. She poured Charlotte a cup of
tea.

“You ask me that every week when you have me over for tea.”

“I don't keep track of where we're at, but if I remember right, we're closing in the amount needed. I know you monitor it closely.”

“Marcy is preparing to release the information to the press. Net proceeds from the calendar total half a million dollars, and the
crowd-funding
site Marcy set up has raised an astounding $2.3 million. We've passed the goal.”

“So you've accomplished your Sixty List item
sixty-nine
, Be a Sexy Calendar Girl, and fifteen, Be More Generous and Philanthropic.”

Charlotte started to say something, and then got choked up. Francine reached over and rubbed the back of her arm in reassurance. “Is everything all right?”