You know you live in a creepy old house, don’t you?” Christen stood from her chair at the kitchen table and retrieved the bag of mint Oreos from the counter.
Annalise gave the room a quick inspection. “It’s not creepy.”
“It has so many nooks and crannies. I swear, the Victorians sure knew how to add angles into their architecture. Shadows are everywhere. So, yes, considering recent events, it’s creepy.”
Christen raised an eyebrow as she came back to the table and plopped the Oreos down. Fingering one from its row, she waved it in a circular pattern as if selecting the items splayed out on the table. “Made more so, I might add, by the plethora of disturbing artifacts as seen here in Exhibit A.”
Annalise smiled a little at her friend’s overdramatization. But her vision drifted to the piles she’d created early in the evening after she escaped Garrett and the historical society’s laundry basket of research.
“So, explain all this to me.” Christen munched on the cookie. She’d dropped by after her kids were in bed, needing a break from home. Annalise was thankful Brent had an occasional night off.
Annalise drew a deep breath and reached up to adjust her ponytail, tucking wisps of hair behind her ears. “Okay. Pile one is newspaper articles photocopied by Eugene Hayes about the Corbin brothers’ revival in 1907. Pile two is obituaries, although it’s not really a pile so much as a few obits. Pile three is old photographs Eugene had on his wall and desk. Pile four is pictures of me.”
Christen nodded and swallowed her cookie, reaching for another. The packaging crinkled as she fumbled for an Oreo. “And we are assuming all of this is tied to you, and he’s not just a really dead, weird old man?”
“Well, considering there are at least fifty different pictures of me here, I think that fact has been established for some time now.”
“Hmm.” Christen adjusted in her chair. “Fine. So we know this is Harrison Greenwood?” She pulled the man’s picture from pile three.
“Correct.” Annalise reached for a few older photocopied pictures. “These are two photographs of Harrison Greenwood as well. One with some family members, I assume, and another in front of his church.”
“Was he a religious man?” Christen inquired.
Annalise gave her a wry smile. “Aren’t all Greenwoods?”
“Pardon me.” Christen rolled her eyes. “Was he a man of faith, not just pious and churchgoing for show?”
Annalise shook her head. “I’m not sure. But what I am sure of . . .” She reached for her iPad and flicked the screen on. “I logged on to that ancestry site and started researching Eugene Hayes. I need to understand why he felt connected to me, and frankly the Greenwoods. I found information that substantiated what Gloria at the historical society told me. I also found out some about his lineage.”
“Like?” Christen had depleted half a row of Oreos.
Annalise shifted in her seat. “Well, Eugene was only twenty when he fought in Vietnam. He was born in 1948, and his father, Lawrence, was fifty-two when Eugene was born. So he was an older father, which may or may not be important. It also means that Lawrence was only eleven years old when the Corbin brothers were in town for their revival.”
“Okay.” Christen sealed the cookies before she could eat another row. “So maybe Eugene started researching his own family tree and that’s one of the interesting time periods here in Gossamer Grove that his father lived through?”
“Maybe. But look at this other obituary Eugene had in his trailer.” Annalise reached for pile two. She set Harrison Greenwood’s obituary aside and lifted a copy of another obituary. “This was from the same year as the revival, 1907, and the same month of Harrison Greenwood’s death.”
“And?” Christen pulled her feet up onto the seat of her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees.
Annalise adjusted her glasses. “Dorothy Hayes. Lawrence’s mother, and Eugene’s grandmother.”
“Okay, now that’s weird!” Christen breathed.
“I know.” Annalise nodded.
“And is it all Edgar Allan Poe creepy like Harrison’s obituary?”
Annalise smoothed the page on the table. “It’s not.” She dropped her gaze and read. “‘Dorothy Hayes. Born September third, 1854, passed from earth into God’s loving arms on May fourteenth, 1907, after she was found in Gossamer Pond. Medical Examiner Dr. Rutherford Penchan has identified Dorothy as a victim of a tragic case of drowning. Funeral services will be held—’” Annalise stopped. “Blah, blah, blah. It’s bland and boring.”
Christen sniffed. “What’d you want? Another gloomy poem about buried sins and shameful secrets and the grave swallowing them whole?”
“No, but look at them.” Annalise placed the obituaries side by side. “Harrison’s is typewritten. Dorothy’s even has the header of the Daily Democrat on it. So, what if Harrison’s is fake?”
“Like a prank?”
Annalise shrugged. “I don’t know. I showed it to Tyler at the paper, and he said it probably wasn’t an obit run in the Daily Democrat because theirs of that time had an entirely different typeset.”
Christen reached for the iPad and pulled it toward her.
Annalise eyed her friend, whose nose was scrunched up in contemplation as she typed into the tablet. She grew antsy waiting for her unnaturally silent friend to say something.
Christen leaned closer to the tablet. “I wonder . . . what if the reason Eugene Hayes is so interested in Harrison Greenwood is because . . . bingo!”
“What?” Annalise hurried around the table to look over Christen’s shoulder. They both stared at the iPad’s screen.
“I just kept connecting the dots to suggested relations in Dorothy Hayes’s family tree and look what happens.”
Annalise frowned as she studied the online ancestral tree for Eugene Hayes. She blinked and leaned closer until her nose brushed Christen’s hair. “Is that—?”
“Yeah,” Christen breathed. She leaned away from Annalise, staring up into her face. “Eugene Hayes’s grandmother, Dorothy, was Harrison Greenwood’s sister-in-law.”
“Which means . . .” Annalise moved to the sink and gripped the edges of the stainless-steel bowl. She stared out the window into the evening’s blackness as a few pieces fell together in a very perplexing way. She turned back toward Christen, whose expression might have mirrored her own. Bewildered.
“Eugene Hayes is a distant cousin to the Greenwoods.”
“Yeeeeeep.” Christen dragged out the word, ending it with an exaggerated pop.
“Technically, then, Garrett’s great-great-grandfather died in the same month as Eugene’s grandmother.”
“Same month. Same town. Same family attending both funerals.”
Annalise bit the inside of her bottom lip. “With the probability that Eugene’s dad, Lawrence, was at both his mother Dorothy’s funeral and Garrett’s great-great-grandfather’s funeral.”
The iPad slowly dimmed to black, and Christen picked at a fingernail while Annalise contemplated what it all might mean.
“Gossamer Grove gets smaller and smaller every day, doesn’t it?” Christen broke the silence with her quiet mutter.
Annalise tried to take a deep breath, but the weight on her chest made her breath shudder. “Smaller and more suspicious.” She caught Christen’s look of empathy and shook her head. “I should have left Gossamer Grove years ago. I could have avoided all of this.”
“Would you still have Gia if you had?” Christen asked the question that made the air in the room feel heavy.
Annalise didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Gia was a door she had refused to open for years. Until Eugene Hayes’s death busted it wide open by force, leaving her exposed, weak, and very, very vulnerable.