Pat was too nervous to sit. She paced the length of her small living room. She pushed her curls back from her face, twisted her hands together, and made small moaning sounds.
I was afraid she was near collapse. “Miss Pat, please, sit down. Tell me where you keep your coffee or tea. I’ll fix something warm for you to drink.”
She shook her head. “No, no, thank you kindly, Darcy, but I couldn’t swallow a thing.” She stopped in front of my mother and shook her finger at her. “Flora Tucker, there’s no way under the Lord’s heaven that I’m going to tell anybody in law enforcement about anything being buried under my garage floor. Why, if there’s something under there that’s bad, the first person they would suspect is my Jasper. I won’t have it. I won’t, I tell you.”
I got up, grasped her arm and led her to the floral pink upholstered chair in the room. I gently pushed her down into it then stood in front of her so she couldn’t get up and start that infernal pacing again.
“You must get hold of yourself. Nobody is going to arrest Jasper. Why should they? And we are not really sure what’s under the garage floor. Maybe it’s a . . . maybe it’s a . . . well, something entirely innocent.”
“Ha! You know better than that, Darcy. And I’m thinking you saw as much as I did. There’s more than just a piece of gold under that floor. I’ve got a real bad feeling about it. And you can’t fool me about Jasper. I’ve seen enough of those detective shows to know that Grant would think Jasper knows about it just because he lives here. Simple as that. And my boy couldn’t defend himself. We all know he’s a little different, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he’s never stole anything in his life. Why would he steal something and then bury it? That wouldn’t make any sort of sense.”
Mom looked thoughtful. “If that shiny thing is gold, it could be part of a batch that was buried way back in the ’30s when outlaws robbed banks and then came to the Cookson Hills to hide. If I were you, I’d want to know. You’d be rich, I guess, unless it would have to go back to wherever it came from.”
Pat covered her eyes with her apron and began to cry. “I wish I could believe that, Flora. But I don’t think that’s it. And I wish I’d never seen . . . what I saw. Why did I have to go poking around?”
Mom came to stand beside her. She rubbed her back until Pat quieted and looked up at us through eyes that swam with tears.
“Now, are you ready to talk sensibly?” Mom asked.
Pat nodded.
Mom looked down at her friend. “I didn’t get down on my knees and look into that crack so I don’t know what you and Darcy think you saw. You’re both talking in riddles and I want to know what you’re talking about.”
“Mom, I hate to say this but it looks like that piece of gold is attached to something under Pat’s floor. It’s something white and sort of looks like a bone—maybe.”
My mother snorted. “Well, of all the silly things! Could it be poor old Murphy hid a bone in there before the men poured the cement on it?”
“Could be. Miss Pat, do you feel calm enough to discuss this with us?”
Pat bobbed her head. “Yes, yes, I’m feeling better. And it could have been Murphy that put it there. He likes to dig. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t come, Flora. You’re always so down-to-earth.”
Mom glanced at me and rolled her eyes. “There are some who would disagree with you. But I believe in facing facts, and not go borrowing trouble. It won’t do to jump to conclusions.”
“Miss Pat, weren’t you here when the garage floor was poured?” I asked.
Pat shook her head. “No, I was over at Goshen Cemetery checking on some vandalism. It was all finished by the time I got back, except for drying, of course. I couldn’t use the garage for quite a while so the concrete would set.”
Mom walked back to the sofa. “How about Jasper? Was he here?”
“See? Even you, Flora. There you go with Jasper already. I don’t think so. Jasper was probably roaming around through the woods. He likes to do that.”
“So who poured your floor?” I asked.
“Why, I don’t actually know. I phoned the secretary at Gary Worth’s construction business. She said she’d send some guys out right away. I don’t know who actually came ’cause as I said, I wasn’t here.”
I opened my purse and took out my cell phone.
Pat grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to call Grant. This is what you should have done in the first place, Miss Pat. He has sophisticated equipment to check beneath that cement. That’s the only thing to do.”
Mom perched on the arm of Pat’s chair. “Shouldn’t you be calling somebody with a jackhammer, Darcy? If there’s nothing bad under there, seems to me you shouldn’t be bothering Grant.”
Pat drew a long, quavering breath. “No, I guess Darcy’s right, Flora. I’ve always been a law-abiding citizen. If it’s a batch of long-buried gold, it might be better to get it all out in the open and not try keeping secrets. Wouldn’t work anyhow in this town.”
Mom spoke in a soothing tone. “It will be all right, Pat.”
Yes, hopefully my mother was right. But I remembered somebody in Dilly’s Cafe saying that I should talk to Pat’s son. And of course, Jasper had told me he knew a lot of things that others didn’t know. He liked to keep secrets. Many people suspected that he murdered Ben Ventris before we found out the identity of the real bad guys.
Sometimes society as a whole looked with suspicion on people who were different. This was unfair and undeserved, but we are an imperfect species. Jasper moved in a realm of woods and animals. He was friends with the owls. Civilized society was locked into a set of established rules. Surely if someone liked God’s great outdoors more than he liked people, that little oddity should not cause him to be looked on with suspicion. But buried gold under Pat’s floor? No. If Jasper knew about the gold, he would not have buried it. He would have used it to help his mother. Maybe whatever was buried on this place was a remnant of those lawless days of the 1930s. And if there was a bone buried with the gold, perhaps it was some luckless person who got in the way of an outlaw’s bullet.
I dialed a familiar number and listened to a familiar voice on the other end of the telephone line. “Grant? This is Darcy. I’m afraid we need you to come to Pat Harris’s place.”