thirteen

Francine, Charlotte, and Joy made sandwiches and joined Mary Ruth and Alice in the large family room at the back of the mansion to eat a late supper. Marcy had come and retrieved Merlina, so they were back to their own group again. The room had a big-screen television on one side that Francine estimated to be at least a sixty-inch model. On the other side of the room was a Ping-Pong table, a Ms. Pac-Man video arcade game, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of board games. The women sat in front of the TV on a sofa and two easy chairs that had white L.L.Bean slipcovers on them. They put their food on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

Joy said she had arrived at the mansion immediately ahead of them. “Once the news team back at the station agreed they had enough recorded material and they didn’t need me live for the eleven o’clock news, I was able to leave. I told them I could either be live tonight for News at Eleven and dead tomorrow for Good Morning America, but not alive for both. Guess which one they chose?”

“How did the six o’clock news go?” Francine asked.

“We were just about to watch it,” Mary Ruth said. She doled out crudités with a dilled yogurt dip leftover from when she and Alice had eaten. “I set up the DVR to record it when Merlina, Alice, and I got back.”

Joy, who was slouched on an easy chair, sat up and stretched. “Needless to say, the tone for tomorrow’s report at the Roseville Bridge will be much different than it was for this morning’s, given that the bridge is a burned-out mess. The photo shoot may not come up at all, but I still need you all there just in case.”

Alice yawned. “Well, I for one am not going to be sorry if you can’t find a good segue from the tragedy of the bridge going up in flames to the sexy photos Francine and Jonathan were doing at the bridge.”

“You can’t throw Jonathan and me under the bus! You all took photos like that too.”

“Says who?” asked Mary Ruth. She fiddled with the remote control, but nothing seemed to be happening on the television. “We didn’t do ours at the Roseville Bridge.”

“Just a minute,” Charlotte said. “We have to think of how this will reflect on Joy. They count on her to get happy news stories about us senior citizens, and I think the sexy calendar idea with all of us involved has the potential to rival the skinny-dipping situation.”

“The very fact that anyone thinks the public will find it fascinating probably means they won’t. Who can predict what’s going to become newsworthy next? Pinup calendars by older women have been done before.”

Charlotte’s voice got a little louder. “It has been a good five years or more since those ladies in England did it. That was the last time. This bridge burning down could be just the ticket. Francine and Jonathan’s photo session yesterday contained perhaps the very last photos to be taken in the bridge.”

Francine wondered why Charlotte kept supporting the idea of the calendar being in the press. “The burning of the bridge needs to be the focus of Joy’s report, Charlotte. If the Bridgeton Bridge incident from 2005 is any indication, they’ll need to raise a lot of funds to rebuild it. That’s the better story.”

“You’re right, Francine,” Charlotte said, seemingly struck by the idea. “A national focus on raising money may be exactly what’s needed here.”

Francine got suspicious whenever Charlotte switched sides on an argument too swiftly.

Mary Ruth handed the remote disgustedly to Joy. “I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

“Why do you think I can fix it?”

“Because you’re the media person. And because you’ve got Toby in the basement copying all the video footage you shot this morning so I don’t have him to fix it.”

Charlotte mulled that. “He’s copying it so you can give it to Roy in the morning, isn’t he?”

Joy huffed. “Roy asked for it. Don’t make a big deal out of this.”

Charlotte put her hands up. “I’m just sayin’.”

Joy studied the remote. She pressed two buttons and the news anchor who had been frozen on the screen came to life. “There you go. Let’s see how it came off and then I think I may be off to bed.” She began to fast-forward through the newscast for her segment.

Mary Ruth returned to her spot on the sofa. “You might as well know I’m not going to the Roseville Bridge. Alice can go if she wants, but I have to stay back and get the cinnamon rolls baked and cooled and iced. They need to be fresh and ready to sell first thing. And we all remember the disaster the last time I appeared on Good Morning America.”

“I hardly think it was a disaster,” Charlotte said. “So you fell into the pool and had to be rescued by Francine. Look at all the good that came out of it.”

“Nonetheless, I’m glad it’s behind me and don’t see the need to relive it. Besides, this is business. I trust I can have everyone’s help again tomorrow after you come back from doing Joy’s GMA report?”

They nodded. Joy stopped fast-forwarding and hit the play button. “This is before Zedediah Matthew’s house went up in flames. Watch how I changed their focus when they asked about why we were there.”

They sat through the segment. Joy’s report was a capsule summary about the two incidents at the bridge. On a tight close-up of her, she described William’s being chased out of the cornfield by gunshots they believed to be from a rifle, his fall into the creek, Jonathan’s stopping him from drowning, and that he remained in a coma. Her report was accompanied by video she’d shot herself and supplemented by footage the station had obtained of the Clinton hospital William was in. Then the cameraman pulled back and the remains of the Roseville Bridge came into view. In the background, the firemen battled the blaze, but there was no question the bridge was a total loss.

As the segment concluded, the female anchor asked, “You were a live witness to the incident. Tell us how you came to be at the Roseville Bridge so early this morning.”

“The Covered Bridge Festival, of course. But we’ve just received a report that a house not far from here is also on fire and may be a total loss as well. The police haven’t yet said whether arson was involved or not. We’re heading there next. We’re in contact with the Parke County Sheriff’s Department about all these incidents and will keep you informed as the investigations unfold.”

Apparently there’d been no good way to turn the conversation back to Joy’s reason for being at Roseville Bridge because the anchors thanked her for the report and moved on to the weatherman, who was sitting in a chair beside them. He was the new, handsome face of the weather team and he smiled brightly with teeth that surely had been artificially whitened. Joy turned off the television.

After Francine, Charlotte, and Joy finished their meal, Mary Ruth pulled out some cookies. “We can all have one cookie for dessert, but no more than that. I’m saving everything else for tomorrow morning.”

Before long the women trudged off to bed. Though it was only nine o’clock, everyone needed to be up early. Mary Ruth would be up at four o’clock to pull stock out of the freezer and organize tasks for the morning. Alice was getting up at four thirty, and the rest of the women planned to stagger their showers starting at five o’clock. Joy said they needed to be out at the Roseville Bridge by seven o’clock.

The other women made their way up the staircase, but Charlotte seemed to be having trouble getting up the first step. Francine slowed her climb to wait for Charlotte. “What’s going on? Is your knee bothering you again?”

Charlotte put a finger to her lips and indicated she should keep quiet. Francine wondered what was going through her mind.

When they could hear doors closing, Charlotte motioned Francine to come back down the stairs with her, which she did. “Toby,” she whispered.

“What about him?”

“The photos you took of the bridge this morning, of the image carved in the beam. This would be a good time to have Toby analyze them.”

Francine felt exhausted. She couldn’t believe Charlotte wasn’t as well. “Why is this the perfect time?”

“Because Toby’s alone, he’s already working on something, and we won’t have to let anyone else know what we’re doing.”

Francine would have like to have excluded Charlotte from anything Toby might discover, but she’d remembered the photos and wouldn’t likely let go of the idea. Plus, there was also the matter of the second diary, hidden in her purse. Knowing what the carved image looked like might help her when she met Zedediah the next day at Bridgeton. Charlotte didn’t need to know that was the deciding factor.

The basement stairs turned out to be quite narrow. Francine went first, clutching the handrail. She made sure Charlotte was steady behind her. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was glad to see the basement was more than a cellar. At some point it had been built out. It had an open recreation room to the right and a bedroom with an adjoining bathroom to the left. Francine could see a light coming from under the bedroom door. She knocked. “Toby, it’s Francine and Charlotte.”

Toby opened the door. He had on an orange tank top that read, Sun’s out, guns out, and blue cargo shorts that covered his knees. The tattoos on his arms were on display, but what struck Francine was how much progress he’d made on losing weight. He had lost his beer gut and was gaining definition in his muscles. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” he asked. “I thought we were all getting up early?”

“We needed your help on something,” Charlotte said from behind Francine, still negotiating the final stair. “We—that is, Francine—took photos on the bridge this morning that we need some kind of enhancement of in order to be able to see.”

“You mean you need them lightened?”

“And maybe blown up, although I wouldn’t use that phrase around Sheriff Roy right now.” Charlotte chuckled at her own joke.

“Who? Never mind, c’mon in.”

He opened the door to let them in. The room was narrow and small—no more than a bed, desk, and two chairs crowded together across from the door and a closet on the wall adjacent to the door. Toby’s laptop sat on the desk. There was barely any leg room between the desk and the bed. Toby squeezed into the desk chair.

His laptop was an Apple computer with a large screen, and it was open to some video game that involved a lot of gunplay. He shrunk the game into a corner of the laptop. “I’m sorry there’s only one other chair in the room,” he said. “One of you can sit on the bed if you want.”

The bed’s comforter lay on the floor, revealing a plain white blanket. “I’ll take the bed,” Charlotte said.

Francine sat in the other chair and handed her phone to Toby. He opened the photo app. “I assume you’re talking about the most recent photos taken today? These dark ones?”

She nodded. “Can you get to them?”

“I’ll just email them to myself.”

“Will it take long?”

“Shouldn’t.”

While he was waiting for the photos to go through the email, he said, “So these photos were taken at the Roseville Bridge?”

“Right where we were standing when we got shot at,” Charlotte said. “I made Francine look to see if there were anything significant about the spot.”

“And you found this carved into the beam?”

Francine nodded. “We did.”

The emails came in. Toby made the whole thing seem effortless. He pulled up the photos one at a time. “These all look the same.”

“They’re at slightly different angles. I wanted to make sure I got it.”

He shrugged. He picked one and kept enlarging the photo, almost to the point of distortion. Francine had recognized the image well before then.

“It’s the heart on the diaries,” Francine said. “Much cruder because it’s hand carved into the wood, but I’m sure that’s it.”

“Yes!” Charlotte said. “Wait. Did you say diaries, as in plural?”

Francine tried to put a confused look on her face rather than the sheepish one she was sure had appeared at first. “Did I say diaries? I meant diary. I’m just tired.”

Charlotte’s narrow-eyed frown suggested she was not convinced. Francine hoped she would not have to explain herself later.

Toby continued to play with the image. “You can see how dusty this is, and how it distorts if I blow it up larger. Now I want you to look at this.” He moved the photo up. There was something below the heart.

“Can you make it any sharper?” Charlotte asked.

“Only if I reduce the magnification.” He made two clicks with a button on the keyboard and the image was a little more focused. “I think it’s because of where it was located on the beam. It was a little more protected and collected more dust. Plus, the image is just smaller altogether.”

Charlotte jabbed at the screen with her finger. “It’s a key.”

Both Francine and Toby leaned toward the screen and knocked heads. Francine’s glasses were jammed into her face. “Oww!” She pulled away, removing the glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose where the impact had been felt.

“I’m sorry,” Toby said. He rubbed his temple where the corner of her glasses had made contact.

Charlotte continued to point the screen. “It’s an old-fashioned key, the kind you’d find that fits a door as old as this mansion is.”

Francine put her glasses back on and inched a little closer to the screen, wary of where Toby was. “I can believe that. But I haven’t seen that image before.”

“Have you had a chance to look at the diary yet?” Charlotte asked.

“Well, no, not much.”

“Then how can you be sure?”

Francine shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Is there anything else below the key?” Charlotte asked Toby.

“Maybe.” He reached over and used the cursor to move the key image up to the top of the screen. “There’s this carving, but unlike the heart, it’s linear, and I think it must be letters.”

The three of them guessed at each individual letter.

“It’s so fuzzy I feel like I need to clean my glasses,” Charlotte said.

“You do need to clean them,” Francine replied, “but that’s not necessarily the problem here.”

Charlotte pulled off her glasses and squinted at them to check their condition. She put them back on. “It’s like we’ve reached the end of the eye chart, where the letters are teeny-tiny and you’re making wild stabs at what the letters might be, and the doctor finally decides you’re finished.”

“Except in this case we can guess that there are words,” Francine said, “and spaces between the words. I think there are four words altogether and the first has three letters.”

Toby got out a sheet of paper. “I agree. And then this must be a space, and the second word is three letters as well.”

Fifteen minutes later Francine was satisfied they had a reasonable solution to puzzle. “So, do we agree it’s probably, ‘you are to mine’?”

Toby yawned. “Except it doesn’t make much sense.”

Charlotte stared at the screen. “Can you put the heart graphic and the key graphic and the words altogether, like it would be on the beam?”

Toby seemed exasperated. “I can, but that was exactly the first photo.” He went back to it. “The heart graphic is clear, you can barely make out the key, and the words are so faint that we would have missed them if we hadn’t spent time blowing it up and looking at each quadrant of the photo.”

“But let’s look at is as a whole,” she insisted. “Heart, key, you are to mine.”

Francine got it right away. “In a sense, ‘You are the key to my heart.’”

The three of them looked at each other. “Does that mean anything?” Toby asked her.

Francine closed her eyes for a moment. She was very tired, but sometimes when her mind was weary it went places and made connections it wouldn’t normally have made. “If we extrapolate what we know, that this is the bridge where the coachman and my great-grandmother made love the first time, we could guess—since the heart has the same design that’s on the diary—that either the coachman or my great-grandmother carved it into the wood.”

“Or both,” Toby added.

Charlotte was more circumspect. “It was done more than ninety years ago? Seems hard to believe it could have lasted that long.”

Francine thought about that. “It was protected, obviously. Hard to see, hard to get to, and I bet it was no easy task to carve. It might not have been done all at once. It might have been done over a period of time.”

“What did you say happened to the coachman?” Toby asked.

“He was fired immediately.”

“Then he would have had time to do this in his misery.”

Charlotte pointed to the heart. “A man would never have created this heart. Look at the little doily loops that surround it. I have to believe a man would have just drawn a heart.”

“Maybe not if he’d seen the image before,” Toby said.

“We don’t know when it was carved,” Francine said.

The three sat back in their chairs.

Charlotte tapped her fingers together. “We still don’t know that it had any significance. The heart figure ties your great-grandmother to this carving, but it’s just a love note. Lovers carve similar things in trees, spray paint them on ghetto walls …”

“But people don’t get shot for standing next to them, though,” Francine said.

Toby snickered. “Depends on the ghetto.”

“Too bad this wasn’t taken with a really high-resolution camera. Maybe there’s something more there we can’t see.”

“There are the squiggly lines,” Toby said.

Silence filled the room for a moment while the two women processed what Toby had said.

Charlotte tried to take control of Toby’s mouse. “What squiggly lines?”

He wrested the mouse from her. He moved the photo up where they could see something below the printing they’d been examining. Two wavy lines stacked on top of each other came into view.

“Water,” Francine said. “It’s the universal sign for water.”

“I thought it was just an end mark,” Toby said. “You know, like ‘end of message.’”

“Under other circumstances I might agree with you,” Charlotte said. “But I think this is a subtle link. Key plus water plus love.”

He turned to her. “Then you know what it means.”

“No,” Francine said. “It’s just another clue.”

The two let Toby return to his video game.

“Do you think it has anything to do with the mason jar and the two vials?” Charlotte asked after Toby had closed his door and they were on their way to the stairs.

“I doubt it. That was probably carved a long time ago into the beam. The vials and the mason jar are from today.”

It was a long, steep climb up the basement stairs and then up the second staircase to the room they were sharing.

“I can’t believe they didn’t build this thing with an elevator,” Charlotte grumbled.

“It was 1899, for heaven’s sake.”

“I mean when they renovated it.”

“It probably would have ruined the character of the house to try to fit one in.”

“It has every other modern convenience. Did you get a look at the media room they created in the fifth bedroom? The television screen is so big it covers the wall. And the smell of popcorn was so strong I bet they own stock in Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn company. If there had been a bowl of kettle corn in front of me, I would have done a face plant right in the middle of it.”

“You do that anyway whenever we have kettle corn,” Francine remarked. “Doesn’t matter where.” She took Charlotte’s arm and helped her up the final stair. They made their way down the hall.

“Well, maybe I do like kettle corn a bit more than I should,” Charlotte said.

When they closed the door behind them, Francine decided to stop Charlotte’s complaining by asking a question that had been gnawing at her. “What’s going on in that devious mind of yours about this calendar?”

Charlotte gave her a forced innocent look. “Whatever do you mean? You act like it wasn’t my idea. It has all along been mine.”

“It was on your Sixty List to be a sexy pinup girl. Then you shifted it to where we were all a part of it and pushed us to do the photos, not just you.”

“It’s been a freeing experience for everyone to deal with their sexuality, especially as older women. We don’t have the same bodies we used to, but that shouldn’t keep us from taking care of what we do have and not being afraid to express our needs. Isn’t that what you said on The Doctor Oz Show?”

“Yes. No. I mean, you’re taking the words out of context. I didn’t say anything about sexuality.”

“You didn’t have to. The camera did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, you were on Dr. Oz because you looked good in a wet sundress. It wasn’t just a physical thing the public was clamoring for. They thought you looked sexy. And Dr. Oz brought the subject up.”

“You’ll recall, I deflected it. A lady does not talk about such subjects.”

“Which made the audience hoot even more. Your face turned red.”

“But I refused to talk about it anymore. It was like they wanted lurid details. Well, they have no business knowing how often Jonathan and I do it or how we do it. Dr. Oz respected that and didn’t bring it up again.”

“Only because they went to commercial right after you said that.”

Francine pressed her lips into a line. She regrouped. “Here’s what I think. I think you have plans for this calendar.”

Charlotte avoided eye contact. “You’re just letting the Hendricks County visitors bureau remark influence your thinking.”

“I’m still wondering if this isn’t something sneaky you’re doing without our permission. You practically bullied me into getting my photo done in the first few weeks of October. If you’d just let it rest until later, I wouldn’t have been forced to do anything in the early morning during the Covered Bridge Festival and Joy wouldn’t be tap dancing around it on Good Morning America.”

“This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, that Joy will be pressured to reveal things we’re doing on our bucket lists.”

“I’m just saying I suspect this is working to some kind of nefarious advantage you are hiding from us.”

Charlotte huffed. “I love it when you use words like nefarious, even when they don’t apply to my motive. I am only helping others get through their Sixty Lists, just like you are. What about tonight’s séance? Didn’t I help Alice check that off her list? I arranged for that whole thing to happen. And boy, did it turn out spooky. It would have been better if Merlina’s head had spun around once or twice, but you can’t fault that creepy ‘and you’re responsible’ line she said to you. She practically spat in your face.”

“She also said that you, Charlotte, know why.”

“I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. Do you think she means I know the motive or that I will figure it out? I am pretty good at figuring out these kinds of things.”

Francine knew she’d inadvertently let the conversion drift in a different direction, but she figured at this point Charlotte had to know she was watching her like a hawk. If she tried to do anything with the calendar like let it slip into the public realm, they’d put a stop to it. “I do not put a whole lot of stock in Merlina’s ability to conduct a séance or believe that she really did contact the spirit world.”

“We’ll see. At any rate, I depend on you to focus our investigation. You’re the logical one; I’m the creative one. Together we make a great sleuthing team.”

Francine yawned. She was physically tired and tired of conversation as well. “Let’s just go to bed.” They each made a trip to the bathroom down the hall, changed into nightgowns, and eventually climbed into the queen-sized bed that was high up off the floor. She made sure the little wooden stepstool was on Charlotte’s side so she could get the height necessary to get in. Francine fluffed a pillow and pulled it behind her head, propping herself up. “I’m wondering if Mary Ruth will let you near the food booth tomorrow.”

Charlotte took off her white-framed glasses and set them on the dresser. “She might. Her business promises to be even more popular than it was today. Think of all those customers who didn’t get her corn fritter donuts. And after tomorrow’s GMA report we’ll be back in the news big-time, which will help drive business the rest of the week.”

“Maybe you’re right, but if you get any flak from her, I’d like you to scoot out and do a little investigation at the Rockville Public Library.”

Charlotte put her hands on the mattress to stabilize herself and took the two steps up that enabled her to get a leg into the bed. She pushed and pulled herself into sleeping position. “What do you have in mind?”

“Find out what you can about Doc Wheat.”

“You keep bringing him up. What for?”

“You heard the story from Zed. Doc Wheat owned the property before Zed bought it. He said Doc was the original herbalist medicine man. Claimed he could cure all kinds of illnesses. He made a fortune some people still believe is buried on his land. Zed intimated that William believed it, and so have others. It’s why he’s gotten the reputation he has for being unfriendly. He’s had to drive fortune hunters off his land.”

“You seem to know all about him. What do you want me to track down?”

“For one thing, find out if Zed is telling the truth, if he’s gotten in trouble for chasing people off his land.”

“How am I supposed to track down these rumors?”

Francine frowned in exasperation. “Like you always do, Charlotte. Nose around. Ask questions. You can start at the Rockville Library. It’s just down the street.”

“It is?”

“Didn’t you see it when we drove by the Methodist Church, the one with the hot pink windows? It was right next to it.”

“The Carnegie building?”

“Yes. What else did you think would be in a Carnegie building?”

“In Brownsburg, it housed the Chamber of Commerce for a while. In Plainfield, it’s the headquarters for a fraternity. In Carmel, it’s a restaurant,” Charlotte argued.

“But in Danville, it’s still the library. And in most little towns it still is. What’s happened to your powers of observation?”

“They are tired and are ready for sleep.” Charlotte flopped over on her side. “What time do we have to be out at the site of the Roseville Bridge tomorrow?”

“O-Dark Thirty. Not to worry. I’ve set the alarm.”

Charlotte chuckled. “Good night, Francine.”

Francine lay in the dark and waited for Charlotte to fall asleep. Next to her, she clutched the two diaries she’d taken possession of that day: the one Jonathan had taken from William and forgot to turn into the police, and the second one Zed had given her. Although she hadn’t lied about being very tired, her curiosity about her great-grandmother and how that history connected her and Zed would keep her from falling asleep.