It was everywhere. The same quartered shield with its tree, flower, river, and tools. These crests had the words “Fortitude et Fides” appearing below them. The more I looked the more I realized how ubiquitous the crest was on the collection of items. The crest was carved into the center of the grandfather clock, embroidered into the quilts. The crest and words were even inlaid in delicate metal on the wooden base of the old gramophone. Someone had really been fond of this particular set of symbols and had marked them on everything they owned. Then someone, probably someone else, had taken great pains to hide the whole collection in this secret area of the attic. “Fortitude et Fides,” said Maya. “I’ve read it in my philosophy books a time or two. It means strength and faith.” “That symbol,” I said. “It is the same family crest...
Flipping through the pages, I found a series of beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, each of them captioned with a few excited sentences. While I was certainly no handwriting expert, it had all the signs of having been, as suspected, a personal notebook of Alma’s. Not even a journal, really. Rather, what I found there was more like a series of increasingly obsessive love letters. Instead of detailing some sordid love affair between Alma and one of the old farmers who sat in front of the courthouse all day, as I might have expected, it was instead a record of a relationship between a woman and an old house. The first two pages were a series of impressions of a grand antebellum manor. It became clear in studying them that the structure in question was unmistakably Myrtlebough. The sketches, which were mostly charcoal, showed the place in the state it had been in a few years ago when it was far more dilapidated. Kudzu vines, holes in the walls, bricks falling from the crumbling facade. The sad cherub that lorded over a fountain had fallen from his pedestal and drowned in his own decoration. Alma had traced these with a skilled and loving hand, and there was a sort of sad gravitas to the drawings that she’d captured well. In the margins surrounding these sketches, a flurry of brief but excited notes. Happy to record that today was the closing! I am now the proud owner of Myrtlebough. The grand old lady has seen some rough times, just like me. But now is to be her second golden age, if I have anything to do with it. Our golden age. Now, time to roll up the old shirtsleeves and get to work! On the next page, a series of detailed sketches featuring the scrollwork I recognized from the corners and gables that cloistered Myrtlebough’s grand porch. On the next, a row of proud, ancient looking columns—the tall, white support structures that gave the house its distinctive look. Restoration of the Doric columns has been going swimmingly with help from Mr. Clint Mercier, whose abilities with cypress wood are something to behold. Next, there are a few slats on the porch that need replacing. I myself have been engaged in an epic battle with kudzu creepers, and I must go on the offensive! “Clint Mercier,” I repeated, while my friend watched my face. But it didn’t mean anything. Not anything scandalous, anyway. All it meant was what I already knew. The woman had been restoring a dilapidated house with the help of the town’s resident bad boy carpenter. It didn’t lead me to any new or shocking discovery. “These are just Alma’s notes on her restoration projects,” I said. “I don’t see of what interest these would be to anyone other than the people who loved her. Particularly not to Evelyn.” “Just keep reading, Callie,” Maya said, turning the page as she licked her lips with excitement. Here we saw some artwork depicting the loading of riverboats, which I recognized as imagery from the entryway of the old manse. Was able to have the wall print redone by a local artist! It looks great, though I have found a bit of an anachronism in the paint he used. Touch ups will be needed, but work proceeds swimmingly! Next page. A drawing of what I quickly recognized was the central fireplace of the château. Mr. Mercier is a miracle worker! Together we have restored the fireplace to its original, historically authentic state. It took quite a bit of cajoling and pleading before we were able to get all of the details right, including my one very specific and special request. But stewardship over such a grand and storied estate certainly demands my strict adherence to the old ways! I turned another page. Amazing, fantastic, fabulous discoveries abound. An embarrassment of riches, one might even say! My renovations have unearthed a whole treasure trove of old artifacts. There was a room in the attic before unknown to me. And it is filled with exciting things. Details that have thrilled my senses! In particular, an old punkah has caught my eye. Just imagining all of the conversations the old ceiling fan must have been party to, as it wafted over the grand diners of this house’s past. Ah, to be a fly on the wall back then! Beneath this entry, Alma had sketched the aforementioned object. I had never heard of a punkah before, and it took me a moment to suss out what I was looking at. “It was an old type of ceiling fan, back before they hooked us up to the grid,” Maya said, pointing at the picture. It depicted a large piece of cloth hanging down from the ceiling over a dinner table. Unremarkable at first, but then I looked closer. The drawing was not as detailed as I would have liked, but in the center of the so-called punkah, Alma had clearly depicted a set of symbols which I immediately recognized. It was the crest. The same crest that had been on the Bible I’d found right next to poor Alma’s cooling corpse. The Oak. The River. The blooming magnolia. It was all exactly the same. “Do you recognize this symbol at all?” I asked Maya. She squinted her eyes at it. “Not too up on my heraldry, I’m sorry to say. But it is definitely a family crest of some kind. I nodded. “So, what does it mean, you reckon?” Maya asked. “I don’t know.” I turned the page, but the journal seemed to end there. The remaining pages, and there were quite a few of them, were left blank. But there were also a few scraps of paper clinging to the binding and suggesting that some pages had been ripped out by someone. And that someone had been in too much of a hurry to pluck out the remnants of scrap that clung to the binding. In other words, they were in too much of a hurry to try and conceal the fact that they’d ripped out a chunk of the journal in the first place. “There are pages missing, I think,” I said to my friend. She took a look and nodded, solemn and fretting. Even so, the blank pages at the end made it clear to me that Alma had been planning quite a few more entries as she continued restoring the home to its former glory. Of course, I knew exactly what it was that had stopped her. The question was why? The question was who? And where were these torn out pages? “I still don’t see the interest Evelyn would have had in this,” I said. “Unless it was something written on those torn pages.” Maya was pacing now, animating the little elephant riders on her dress. She shook her head. “Forget about Evelyn. That old crone was probably just being nosey. What about Clint Mercier? The journal mentions him by name,” she said. My mind immediately flashed back to the late night snack I’d had with Josh the previous evening, and to the story he’d told me about a soused and angry Clint publicly badmouthing Alma. I debated with myself whether or not I should relay this detail to my friend. Gossip traveled fast enough in Honeysuckle Bend, it didn’t need my help. On the other hand, if Maya was going to help, she needed to know what I knew. “Clint was drunk the other night and apparently had some less than polite things to say about his employer, Alma.” “Who told you that?” I reddened a bit. “Josh.” “Oh … Josh,” she said, flashing me a devilish grin. “I would have thought you two love birds would have had better things to talk about over supper.” We were quiet a moment, the both of us lost in thought. Finally, I broke the silence. “What do you say we quit all this supposing and gossiping and go see if we can get anything from the horse’s mouth?” I said. “By which you mean Clint?” I nodded. “I like that idea,” Maya finally said. I watched her cheeks flash red for the briefest of moments as a smile played on her lips. I liked the idea, too. Though if I were honest, I felt a slight chill when thinking about confronting Clint. He was a rough customer who weighed more than Maya and me put together. We’d be approaching him in the wake of a very public tragedy, asking for details of his relationship with the dead woman. Things could go south very quickly if we weren’t smart about it. But I couldn’t very well unread the journal. I now had a responsibility. A duty even. “Well, we are in this now. For better or worse.” Smokie gave me a concerned look from her corner before rolling over onto her back. “Let’s just hope he is in a friendly mood,” Maya said. “Why don’t we bring him a bubble tea?”
~~~
You can do this, I whispered to myself. For Alma. First, I studied the body. My friend’s face looked peaceful, if mildly shocked. Her skin was mostly unbloodied and without any major blemish or bruise. Her neck was at a weird angle though, the only sign of trauma I could see. At least, that was all I could tell without majorly disturbing things any further. A pang of sympathy swept through me. Poor old Alma. She had died all alone, with no one to—
Alma had found her dreamhouse, but one that would need to be completely refurbished! She had the money and she wanted it brought back to its earliest splendor no matter what it would take to do that... Perhaps she had become obsessed, for many of the materials used originally were no longer easily available. That made no difference; she could wait and perhaps set priorities of what to do first... For it was plain that what work had been done was spotted throughout that old mansion. A local man had been hired, but even he was getting upset with her demands... Who knows what really brought about her death...
Because when her friend, Callie who owned a small bookshop along with her friend Maya, had come to return a book which she had found in a box of old books waiting outside their shop. But she had noticed one that looked especially expensive with a cover that was clearly some sort of symbol... Callie was positive that this book would not have been included in the box... or was she wrong? Perhaps Alma had sensed that she needed to let somebody else know that something seemed to be going wrong... We would never know. But Callie had looked at the other books and thought who might have sent them, so without opening this special book, she took it back...
Even as Callie walked toward Alma's home, she could not help but admire the finest home in their small town. It was the only "named" house she'd ever seen.
As I turned off River Road, my first sight of the mansion by the levee filled me with wonder, as it always had. Myrtlebough was a classic piece of antebellum architecture. Its name came from the fact that all around the main building it had these huge crepe myrtle trees, their trunks as big around as your body and their boughs cabbaging up to fill the sky with pink and purple flowers every spring. They were nearly bare now in fall, but the house still had all of the other iconic things: the massive live oaks flanking an oyster shell drive, the white Doric columns all in a row, the wide porch hung with sleepy swings and drooping fans, the hurricane shutters, the wrought-iron upper balconies. I slowed my old Ford pickup to a crawl as it crunched the oyster shells under its tires, giving me ample chance to drink the place in. Pulling down that long drive always filled me with thoughts of times gone by. It must have been something to live in an era when people built houses like this. When the hustling worries of today took a back seat to such sleepy elegance. Maybe beauty was just more important to people back then. I knew these thoughts were foolish, but I couldn’t help it. To see an image like Myrtlebough was to wonder if all of the past wasn’t somehow more profound than the present. To dream of simplicity and quiet and ease. When no one had cellphones or electricity bills. And they never once set foot in a DMV. I parked near Alma’s restored 1979 Beetle convertible and sighed looking up at the palace where she lived. As with all beautiful things, Myrtlebough also carried about it a sense of dark mystery. The palatial property was touched with all the intrigue that long shadows, Spanish moss, pietà statues, and a questionable history could provide. No one seemed to know the house’s exact story. The date of construction, its original owners, and its possible first use were all lost to the ages. This left a tinge of uncertainty about the place. If one knew their history, as I did from reading plenty of books on slow days at the cafe, one also knew that other houses in this style sometimes had very problematic histories, indeed. I shuddered a bit as I walked across the Bermuda grass and prepared to climb the porch steps. The house itself had long sat abandoned, and for a great while (including most of my childhood, in which we’d all dared each other to explore the creepy ruins but habitually chickened out), it had been allowed to fall into disrepair and neglect. That was, until Alma had purchased it for an undisclosed sum. The amount was also a great mystery, and a serious topic of debate and speculation at barbershops and hardware stores across the parish, as were the whims and motivations of Mrs. Jessup herself, who had long spurned any ambitious suitors. Now, things were slowly improving, and new projects seemed to pop up every time I made a visit. I saw obvious signs of a dozen different renovations in various states of completion. Fresh paint adorned one column in stark contrast to the faded alabaster of the others. Kudzu creepers and honeysuckle vines had been totally removed from the railing of one end of the porch, but were already commandeering the other with their long green tendrils. Some of the old architectural flourishes had obviously just been redone, while others were still slowly mouldering with decades of humidity. I reached the top of the porch and knocked on the old wooden door...
Callie could not realize what she saw from the distance, but she had gone into the house, knowing that Alma was home--her car was there. When she realized that it was a body, surrounded with a rug. She had apparently fallen through the floor above...
It took her awhile to absorb what she saw, and decided Alma wouldn't mind if she got herself a drink. She noted that she had to open a new bottle, so nobody had been with her socially she realized... Sipping, she began to absorb the scene--she had read so many mysteries, her favorites, that she knew exactly what to consider... She took her time before she called in the police. Let's just say, she was not impressed with the locals...
Once all the questioning was over, Callie went back to the shop, asked for a double Bubble Tea from Maya, and began to tell her friend what had happened. It was then that she considered whether to open the book with Maya or not... Knowing that she planned to investigate--she owed it to Alma--she decided she would need Maya's help... and they opened what appeared to be a diary... But it wasn't a lover she talked about... She was in love with restoring her new home and had hand-drawn small illustrations which captured her intentions for the final result... But as they moved forward, they discovered that pages had been torn out toward the end! Why? By whom?!
First, I want to say that I would love to taste Bubble Tea!
Second that this was a fascinating start to a new cozy mystery series!
The author's writing brings readers right into the scenes within the story. We find that Callie is a fervent and aggressive woman when she needs to be--and acting on behalf of her murdered friend--yes, it was verified she was murdered--was a priority that must be completed... even when dangerous situations arose! And they did... I loved the descriptions of the mansion and the discovery of a secret room with items that had to be hidden for a reason... Rapid page turning came naturally as the book moved toward the ending... Enjoy this one!
As he looked up at me, I got the sense that something was deeply troubling him. Perhaps it was just a mid-day hangover, a fight with one of his many girlfriends, or some other working man problem the type of which trouble country-western songs. But some fraction of his machismo seemed to have fled the man since our last encounter. There was a slight droop to his shoulders. A hangdog expression and a darkening around the brow line. Could it be something more serious that was bothering him?
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