“If Cal heard what he thought he heard and if Jonna really did need a quick five thousand, I don’t know where she would get it. Especially if Mrs. Shay wouldn’t give it to her. She left a message on Jonna’s machine yesterday morning. Wanted to know if Jonna was still mad at her.”
“Because of the money?”
“Maybe. When I asked her about it, though, she claimed she didn’t remember saying it.”
“So what about her two best friends? Sandy Radcliff says they both have wealthy husbands. If I suddenly needed money, Portland would get it for me in a heart-beat, so wouldn’t they?”
He shrugged. “But five thousand or she’d get her face smashed in? What the hell is that all about and what does it have to do with Cal?”
The heaviness had settled back in his voice, and I was out of suggestions. All I could do was reach across the table and clasp his hand and try to keep the optimism flowing.
“We’ll get him back,” I said briskly. “And at least he has Carson to hang on to for right now, so let’s go do the Morrow House, get that out of the way, and then talk to her friends.”
The Morrow House anchored what Shaysville was pleased to call History on the Square, the square itself consisting of a small town commons complete with massive old oaks and a bandstand of filigreed ironwork painted white. The house and grounds originally took up the whole block across from the commons. After passenger service was discontinued here, the town’s nineteenth-century railroad station had been moved onto the south end of the grounds and turned into a combination senior center and craft workshop. The two structures were separated by a commodious parking lot.
Directly across the street, on the other side of the 19 square, was the old Shaysville High where Jonna must have gone to school. Set back from the street, it boasted a wide flagstone terrace with benches and a rather ugly central fountain that I later learned had been a gift of the last class to graduate from there. The front looked out of balance to my untrained eye, what with its fairly ornate main entrance on one side and a plain blank windowless wall on the other. Built around 1920 from native stone that matched the Morrow House, it still looked like a school on the outside.
Dwight gamely tried to play tour guide. “The old classrooms are subsidized apartments for the elderly,” he said as we circled the square. “And its auditorium is a community theater now.”
This early on a chilly Sunday morning, the sidewalks bordering the square were empty of pedestrians, and only a few cars were about. Despite the bright sun, last night’s ice had only grudgingly begun to melt from the parking lot and walkways, and I was glad for my boots, not to mention Dwight’s strong arm, when I almost lost my footing.
The Morrow House surprised me. For some reason, I’d been expecting one of those antebellum Taras so prevalent in tidewater Virginia and the lower South. Instead, as I soon came to hear from the Morrow House’s unquenchably informative director, the first Shaysville Morrow had erected a stone version of his grandfather’s brick house back in Philadelphia: “a foursquare, three-story Federalist that was gracefully elegant within its chaste constraints,” according to Mr. Mayhew, a thin, stooped-shouldered man with rimless glasses that kept sliding down on his nose.
Dwight went straight to Jonna’s desk, but Mayhew was clearly eager to show the house to new eyes and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get to know the man Jonna had worked with. I also thought it might be helpful to get an overview of the place where she had spent so much time. Unfortunately, Mayhew was one of those single-minded enthusiasts who miss the woods because they’re too busy documenting every leaf on every tree.
He wanted to discuss the finer points of each object his eyes lit upon and he proudly caressed a cut-glass syrup pitcher on the dining room sideboard that he himself had donated to the house. To my eyes, it looked like something you could buy in any flea market or antiques mall, but for Mayhew it was his personal link to this house because it had originally belonged to a female ancestor of his, “the sister of Peter Morrow’s daughter-in-law.” It seemed to be a lifelong regret that he was only collater-ally related to the Morrows and that none of his own people were in the direct line.
As we passed from room to room, I soon realized that he had an ulterior motive for trying to infect me with his own enthusiasm. With Jonna dead, he knew that if Cal was found—not
“Heritage” was one of the man’s favorite words, and he used it when alluding to the two portraits that Jonna had hanging in her living room. Nothing so crass as “pro-bate” or “trust” passed his thin lips that morning, but I 20 was given the distinct impression that he rather thought Jonna’s will would include a bequest to the house.
A sizable bequest. Not just the portraits but money, too.
Evidently, Mr. Mayhew labored under the same mis-conception as Cal’s teacher. I wasn’t sure if Jonna had actually made a will. I certainly hadn’t seen a copy in her papers, and it suddenly occurred to me that unless there was a legal document saying otherwise, then her house and everything else she possessed would automatically go to Cal, which meant that Dwight—and by extension, I as his wife—would decide what to keep and what to let go, including those portraits and any other Morrow heirlooms. I was repelled by the man’s single-mindedness, because he had surely worked it out that if anything did happen to Cal, then as the boy’s next of kin, Dwight would be in line to inherit whatever estate Jonna had left.
This was such a disturbing thought that when we got to the library, I almost didn’t connect Peter Morrow’s missing presentation gun with the gun Jonna’s killer had used.
“I was rearranging things when you rang the bell.
Chief Radcliff kept this room locked until closing time last night so I wasn’t able to get in here to move this,”
Mayhew said, touching the display case on the center table in the library.
“Must have been an awfully big handgun,” I said, looking at the shape left on the velvet by the gun that had shot Jonna.
“It was an early Colt revolver,” said Mayhew. “One of the first postwar models. Post–
