six

Mary Ruth squirreled away the remaining few cookies, scones, and slices of flourless chocolate cake and closed the booth.

“Whew!” She wiped her forehead, sweeping the damp auburn hair to the side where it tucked naturally behind her ear. “I’ve never felt so threatened in my life.”

“Second time today for me,” Joy said.

“Oh my gosh, that’s right! You said you’d been shot at while you were at the bridge. What happened?”

Joy and Francine filled in Mary Ruth and Alice in while they cleaned up the booth and got it ready for the next day.

“Do you know how your cousin is doing?” Alice asked. She stooped over and picked up loose change that had been dislodged from the cash register tray, holding back a lock of her graying hair so she could see where it had landed.

“I made a call to his wife once we got in cell phone range. I didn’t learn much other than he was in a coma.”

“Oh. You’ll be wanting to go visit him this afternoon, won’t you?” There was a hint of disappointment in Mary Ruth’s voice. She double-checked that the stove and the fryer were turned off and didn’t make eye contact with Francine.

“I’m sorry, but yes, I do need to go as soon as we finish up here. Jonathan should have turned in the horse and buggy and driven here by then.” It was clear Mary Ruth needed her, but William was family and besides, it was the right thing to do.

“I understand, of course,” Mary Ruth said.

Francine knew it was the truth. She wiped down the stainless countertop. “I’ll come back as soon as I feel I can leave the hospital. I’ll see if I can persuade Jonathan to stay an extra night. That way you’ll have both of us to help once we get back. If today is anything like tomorrow, you’ll need an extra hand.”

“That would be nice.”

“So what do we do now?” Joy asked. She leaned against the countertop.

“First, we head back to the house, make out a deposit slip, and get that cash in the bank,” Mary Ruth said. “Rule number one of catering: deposit the money. Then we plan for tomorrow and head off for the store. We’re going to need to do a lot more cooking and prep work. But I guess we have all afternoon now as well as the evening.”

“We can’t leave until Charlotte gets back,” Francine said.

Mary Ruth put a hand to her hip. “And where is she?”

Francine pointed to the tent behind her. “Getting her fortune told by the Great Merlina.”

“Great.”

“How did Merlina end up getting booth space right next to you?”

“I have no idea. They didn’t tell me who’d be around me when they offered me the space. All I knew was it was free, so I didn’t ask many questions. I think they’re trying to build up a food tradition here in Rockville since they don’t actually have a covered bridge. They don’t like the idea that Bridgeton and Mansfield get most of the action.”

Since Mary Ruth didn’t want to wait for Charlotte, Toby agreed to stay behind with the truck. The house was in walking distance of the booth for most of them, but not Charlotte, not with her bad knee. “I’ll find something to keep me happy,” he assured them. When they left, he was plugged into his phone and seemed content to wait however long it might take.

Francine made a call to Jonathan and found he was stuck in traffic not too far from them. “I’ll come to you,” Francine said, “and then we’ll head for Clinton.” She told him that’s where William had been taken.

“That’s fine. I don’t expect to move from this spot. Not anytime soon.” Francine walked up two blocks, found him, and got in his truck. She directed him around on side streets.

“I found out a few things,” he said. “The person who owns the cornfield by the Roseville Bridge is named Zedediah Matthew. It’s a large property, over three hundred acres. Apparently Mr. Matthew is very protective of his land and has a history of running people off his property. He probably pursued William, but we have no proof of that.”

“Why would William chance an encounter with someone like him?”

“Probably for the fortune that’s supposedly buried somewhere on the property. Zedediah bought the land from Doc Wheat, who acquired it in the 1920s. During the Depression he developed an interest in herbalism. At one time his home remedies were popular and shipped all over the world.”

“You know how I feel about herbalism. It’s unscientific.”

“I’m not arguing with you. The advent of the modern pharmacy killed his business. But supposedly he acquired a lot of money before that. He had a deep suspicion of banks, bred from the Depression. Rumors were he buried all the money on his property. For decades since, people have been trying to find it.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“I asked the owner of the horse barn.”

She finally got them to US 41 south, and the traffic eased up. They drove toward Clinton.

She wondered why William would have been after a fortune. As far as she knew, his nursing home businesses were doing well. “William must have had a powerful reason to believe in the hidden fortune. Otherwise he wouldn’t risk his life for it.”

“I hope it doesn’t cost him that.”

“Me too.”

Francine connected her phone to the truck’s radio and scanned the playlists for something soothing. “Do you think it’s just anger that’s got Mr. Matthew shooing people off his property with guns?” Francine thought of The Beverly Hillbillies when Jed ran “revenuers” off his land. “If there’s no treasure, what’s he got to hide?”

“That sounds like a Charlotte question, so I’ll give you a Charlotte answer. Maybe he’s one of those survivalists. Maybe he’s got a whole arsenal stored on his land and he’s doesn’t want anyone to find it.”

Francine laughed. “I can’t imagine why William would be looking for a bunch of guns, Charlotte.”

“Maybe William is a federal agent. Maybe being a nursing home owner is just his cover.”

“William does not look like he’s even remotely capable of being a federal agent.”

Jonathan leaned over and raised an eyebrow a couple of times. “Then he’s perfectly unassuming. No one would suspect.”

Francine smirked. “That is exactly what Charlotte would say.”

“I’ve been around her a lot lately.”

“I have to say, though, Zedediah does sound like the name of someone who would be a survivalist.”

“I’m not sure I know enough survivalists to make that call,” Jonathan replied.

They finished joking and settled into their own thoughts. Francine fretted over the situation with William.

Neither she nor William had had siblings, and neither had their parents. However one defined cousins, she and William were about it when it came to blood relatives. She found the lack of family lonesome, and it played into the decision she and Jonathan made to have three children, all of whom turned out to be boys. In contrast, William and Dolly had no children. Of course, they’d gotten a late start in life, and Francine presumed that was the reason.

Dolly was an odd duck. She and William were clearly devoted to each other, but Dolly wasn’t the woman Francine would have guessed he’d marry. They found each other when Dolly was in her mid-forties, divorced from a man she’d let on had an unsavory past, though nothing more specific than that. If it hadn’t been for Dolly’s looks and her pursuit of William, who was then in his fifties, the two would not have gotten together. At least that was Francine’s opinion.

Dolly came from a blue-collar background. She had been working as a bartender before they married. While Francine respected Dolly as a hard worker and knew that without her help William would never have built up the successful chain of retirement homes, she was more shrewd than smart. In fact, Dolly could be ruthless when called for, which had served the business well in taking over existing retirement homes. There was no question who was in charge. William was probably good with it, though. Dolly was as social as William was introverted.

The last time Francine had seen William and Dolly had been at the wedding of her middle son, Adam. In some sense, the encounter had been a microcosm of their relationship. As family, Francine made certain her cousin was seated at her table. Yet, William had seemed uncomfortable and hardly talked, even when he was asked a question directly. He mostly drank. Dolly, on the other hand, talked nonstop, none of it worth hearing. The only time she stopped was to seethe at William’s drinking, which led Jonathan to compare her to a volcano with an active lava flow: “You know any minute it could just explode.”

Had it been some kind of remorse on William’s part, that Francine had a son to be married and two other sons seated at the table of bridesmaids and groomsmen? Had Dolly’s verbosity simply shut off William’s need to speak? Or had William never conquered whatever demons had made him a socially backward teenager? Francine could easily see William running an efficient set of nursing homes, filled with elderly or infirm people whose basic needs were supplied by people he hired to do that. As the owner, with whom did he really need to communicate besides the few managers who worked under him?

Francine remembered when they were very young, when they shared secrets and played together in the attic of her grandmother’s house. How differently they had grown up. But because of the good times, she still felt an attachment to William.

When they came to State Road 163, they turned onto it and crossed the Wabash River into Clinton. They followed the blue H signs until they found Union Hospital. Even given the traffic, it hadn’t taken more than a half hour to get there.

Dolly was in the ICU when Francine and Jonathan finally succeeded in getting admitted as visitors. Dolly looked like she’d just spent an hour in front of the mirror despite having a husband in the ICU. Her makeup was perfectly applied, down to the faint blue eye shadow and red lipstick. She wore a casual white blouse and black jeans.

“I’m so glad you came.” Dolly gave Francine a quick awkward hug. She shook hands with Jonathan. “It’s been so difficult to just sit here, watching him sleep.”

Dolly walked to the hospital bed and they followed. William looked like himself, his bald head sporting scraggly stands of gray hair that popped up indiscriminately over the shiny dome. It was scratched and marred with angry red wounds, though. A thick fringe of salt-and-pepper hair curled around the back and sides of his scalp. His color was good, but he was hooked up to a ventilator to help him breathe and his neck was in a brace. As a former nurse, Francine knew the odds William faced. “What did the doctors say about the coma?”

“They say he has a head injury, probably from the fall, that’s caused swelling in his brain. The swelling is minor, and they’re hopeful he’ll regain full consciousness. But they don’t know how long. A few days, a few weeks. Weeks, Francine! Weeks!”

Since their initial hug had been fast and uncomfortable, Francine didn’t go there again. Instead, she put her arm around Dolly’s shoulder.

“They say the prognosis is good,” Dolly continued, “but it’s too difficult to predict how he might respond when he wakes up. I’m thankful you were there, Jonathan, to pull him out of the creek. Even though it might have injured him further.”

Francine released her hold on Dolly’s shoulder momentarily as the thought ran through her mind that Dolly might try to file some kind of lawsuit against them because of Jonathan’s action. She hoped she was being paranoid.

Jonathan seemed to be of similar mind. “It was a difficult decision to make. But I couldn’t let him slip into the creek.”

Francine gently finished his thought. “If he’d been pulled any farther into the water, he would have drowned since he was unconscious.”

“Oh, I know. I understand. Jonathan saved his life.”

Francine wished that last sentence was on tape, just in case. “None of the shots that were fired at him touched him, did they?”

Dolly tenderly traced the red scratches on the top of his head. “No. He had some bleeding, but that was likely caused by hitting tree branches when he fell down the bank.”

Francine wasn’t sure how to ask the next question because she didn’t want to look like she was prying, when in fact she was. “What was William doing out at the Roseville Bridge anyway? Who was shooting at him?”

Dolly turned away. “I don’t know why he was out there.”

“I found out the property he was running across belonged to a man named Zedediah Matthew,” Jonathan asked. “Did William know him?”

“Everyone around here knows who Zedediah Matthew is. He’s a mean man, cranky and threatening.”

Francine rubbed Dolly’s upper arm supportively, though she worried the gesture came across as a means to coax more information. “Did you know he was carrying two items? One of them was a diary that belonged to my grandmother. The second was a vial of some kind of liquid. Do either of those make sense to you?”

Dolly stiffened at the question. Francine wasn’t sure if that was because she didn’t know, or if she knew and was alarmed to discover that Francine also knew.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Do you know who has them now?”

“The sheriff’s department.” It was only a half lie. The police did have the vial. She didn’t qualify her answer further. She made eye contact with Jonathan to make sure he didn’t give her away, but he sat there with a smug look on his face.

“He fancied himself a historian,” Dolly said. “I knew he’d found a copy of your grandmother’s diary at some flea market. Why he had it there, I don’t know. As for the vial, I have no idea what might have been in it.”

“So William just left your house this morning and went out there carrying those two items? He didn’t say why or what he was looking for?”

Dolly answered testily. “He said he was going into Rockville. You know one of our nursing homes is there. It operates twenty-four hours a day, so the fact that he was heading there very early wasn’t out of line.”

Francine pictured William leaving their home, a Victorian manor out near the tiny town of Montezuma. He should have taken Coxville Road toward US 41 and then turned north toward Rockville. For whatever reason, he went straight across US 41, continued down Coxville past the Roseville Bridge, and went traipsing across a dangerous man’s property, a man who hadn’t been happy to see him. She wondered where he had parked. “Have you looked into where his car is, Dolly? Has anyone seen it?”

Francine saw something cross Dolly’s face. For a moment she thought it was a look of panic, but on second thought it settled into one of surprise. “No. It hadn’t crossed my mind. Sheriff Roy was in and he asked what kind of car William drove, but I didn’t put two and two together, not until now.”

Sheriff Roy? Then Francine remembered that Roy Stockton had been the sheriff before he’d settled into retirement as a detective. “Finding the car could be the key to discovering who was responsible for shooting at William.”

“Well, I assume it was Zed Matthew.”

How odd that she called him Zed. It felt almost familiar. But if he’s that notorious, everyone probably had nicknames for him, and Zed would be kinder than most.

Jonathan had crossed the room to a visitor’s chair and let the women talk. But now he spoke up. “While that’s likely, everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”

Francine agreed, but she didn’t need him prickling Dolly’s mood while she was fishing for clues. “The sheriff has to operate under that premise. I’m sure that’s what Jonathan was saying.” She flashed her eyes at him. “Just out of curiosity, do you still own the Buick? What was that, a light blue Lucerne?”

Dolly focused back on William. She took hold of his hand and held it in hers. “Yes. We had OnStar too. It should be easy to track.”

“Do you want us to help you with that?”

“You’re being a dear, Francine. I can’t concentrate on anything but William. Yes, it would help. What do you need?”

“The license plate number and the keys. If we can find the car, we should be able to retrieve it for you.”

Dolly indicated a small table on the other side of William’s bed where a knock-off Vera Bradley purse tote lay open. “The keys are in my purse. Let me get it for you.”

Francine was thinking that the bright orange and pink paisley pattern was one she would never be seen carrying when her eyes spotted something else inside the purse: a small vial, similar to the one Jonathan had pulled out of William’s pocket. This one, too, had a cork stopper on it. Francine couldn’t tell whether it was full or empty, not without picking it up.

Dolly reached the purse and found the key to William’s car. “Here it is. I put a light blue dot on the key. It was easy to remember that way.” She looped the handles of the purse over each other so it was no longer easy to see inside.

“Thanks,” Francine said, taking the key from her. “Didn’t the Buick have a vanity license plate number?”

“It still does. ‘WRM MMIES.’ He thinks it advertises the retirement community, but I think it could also be ‘Worm Mummies’.” She smiled at Francine, but Francine could see the pain in it. “Everything closer to ‘Warm Memories’ was already taken.”

Francine eased into a second visitor chair, identical to the one Jonathan was in. It was simple in design—a cube on legs—but upholstered in a rust pattern and comfortable to sit in. She noted how hospitals had changed over the years that she’d been a nurse. Rooms used to feel cold and sterile. Now hospitals tried for a hotel feel. She patted the other chair in the room, which was next to her. “Let’s sit for a while.” The gesture was genuine even if she felt a little strange doing it.

Dolly left William’s side. She plopped into the chair by Francine, but she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees as though she would lurch out of the seat any moment. “Thanks. My sister is coming up from Memphis to stay with me, but she won’t be here for another couple of hours.”

Francine couldn’t remember ever meeting Dolly’s sister, though it probably would have been at William’s wedding and that was decades ago. “I’m glad to know she’s coming. So, how are things going at the retirement homes? You and William are certainly the king and queen of the elderly set, at least in western Indiana.”

She half shrugged. “Business is okay, although the rules change constantly. The government is giving a lot of financial support to encourage folks to stay in their homes and get end-of-life care. William says we have to adapt by offering different services. He’s so business savvy. I could never do this by myself. He’s got to recover.”

“I’m sure he will.” Francine caught Jonathan’s eye and tried to implore him to help the conversation.

Jonathan steepled his fingers. “What are you doing now, Dolly? Are you managing any of the properties?”

“One of the Terre Haute properties, and also the one in Clinton. They’re good, both profitable. I’m also responsible for all the memory care units. The one in Rockville is full and we have a waiting list.” Dolly concentrated on the perfectly manicured nails she was picking to imperfection.

Jonathan seemed to feel he’d done his part of the socializing and sat back in his chair.

Though Francine had difficulties relating to Dolly, at least at the hospital she was in her element. The antiseptic smell of the room, the whispers of concerned visitors in the hall, and the scrolling LED lights of the EKG equipment monitoring William’s heartbeat were all features of a scene she’d watched play out over and over again. “Memory care is a growing business. It’s good but it’s sad. Once a person can’t function and becomes difficult to deal with, it’s good to have a place where they can get proper care. But some relatives dump them into a care unit and hardly visit them.”

“I see it all the time,” Dolly answered. “We have this one older woman. She tells the most interesting stories.” Dolly hesitated like she realized she shouldn’t be talking about it.

Francine wanted to keep Dolly talking. It was easier that way. “What about the stories?”

“They … she … they’re just unusual. It’s like she’s living in the late 1800s. I feel like I’m listening to an audio book of Little House on the Prairie, only set in Indiana.”

“Does she get visitors?”

“Her husband. I don’t know if he works odd hours, but he only comes in very late at night, and only once a month. I’ve never met him in person. He stays a half hour, then leaves.”

The nurse came in and checked the monitoring devices. “Mrs. Falkes!” she said. Dolly stood and went over, completely absorbed by the nurse’s concerned look.

Francine took that as the right moment to end the visit. Jonathan apparently had, too, because he stood up at the same time she did.

“Maybe this would be a good time for us to get going,” Francine said. “We’ll see if we can find William’s car for you.” She approached Dolly and handed her a note. “Here’s my cell phone number and the address of the place we’re staying in Rockville. Make sure your sister has it too. Call if you need anything.”

As Jonathan opened the door for her, she glanced back at William. Would she ever see him alive again? She hoped so, but the figure under the hospital blanket twitched like something was very, very wrong.