“Still in Linsey’s hassock.” He led me deeper into the warehouse. “I moved that thing over here after it didn’t sell last summer and I knew it was godawful heavy, but I didn’t realize the top could open. Then, when I was shifting it yesterday, I noticed a little keyhole up under the ledge.”
He pointed to a cube with a cushioned top. The thing was covered in scuffed brown leather. “I tried to pick the lock, but nothing worked, so I finally took a crowbar to it.”
Will lifted the hinged lid and I immediately saw that he’d wrecked the lock. “Doesn’t hurt the value,” he assured me. “It’s vinyl, not leather, and ugly as Aunt Sister’s pet goat.”
Aunt Sister’s a little younger than Daddy and her pet goat died when she was still a child. No one ever took its picture, so we don’t know if it really did have bald spots and a misshapen horn that curled in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, it’s the standard of ugliness in our family. Aunt Sister swears that Daddy exaggerates the goat’s bad features, but we’ve heard her say things like, “Now I won’t say that baby’s as ugly as my pet goat, but . . .”
Will cocked his head at that hassock. “I wonder if it came with a lock or if Linsey had it added? For a minute there, I thought I was going to find a real treasure—maybe the Thomas family silver or Confederate gold or something.”
I knelt down for a closer examination. “It could’ve started life as a trunk or a footlocker that someone upholstered. Who knows? Maybe Linsey bought it at an estate sale himself.”
The interior was deeper and slightly wider than the file folders that took up most of the space.
I lifted one and a packet of letters slid into my lap. The pale blue and green envelopes were tied with a faded satin ribbon. “Oh, Will! Look at the return address.”
“Meg Woods? Who was she?”
“His wife. She died of a ruptured appendix when she was only thirty. Mother said it broke his heart and he never remarried. These must be her love letters to him.”
I opened the file to put the letters back inside and found a photograph of a laughing girl with a pixie cut.
“Wow!” Will gave a soft whistle. “If that’s her, no wonder he never married again.”
Another folder was labeled DAD and seemed to be letters written to Linsey when he was in school over in Chapel Hill.
And then there was the folder labeled KNOTT.
As Will had said when he called last night, there were sheets of typescript, jotted notes, and several news clippings that chronicled my first campaign, my loss, and then my appointment. The papers were crammed in haphazardly with no apparent order and Will had to flip through to find a scrap of paper that looked as if it’d been torn from a yellow legal pad.
“See this?”
In what looked like Linsey’s distinctive printing, my name was circled with several arrows that pointed to different names: Kezzie Knott, G. Hooks Talbert, and the former governor. All were surrounded by aimless doodles that appeared to have begun as question marks, as if Linsey had been trying to work out a connection. Luckily for me, he was missing the name that linked the three of us, that of Talbert’s older son, the son whose crime furnished the material for Daddy to blackmail G. Hooks. “Help my daughter and I won’t send your son to prison.”
“What do you suppose that’s about?” Will asked.
“I haven’t a clue,” I lied, “but these look like Linsey’s personal files. Wonder why he had us in here?”
“Not just you and Daddy, kiddo. There’s files on half the commissioners, on our DA—”
“But here’s one with his birth certificate, his marriage license . . . hmm. Who’s this, I wonder?”
It was a picture of a teenage boy in a Confederate uniform, complete with sword and rifle. On the back, spidery handwriting identified the boy as Cpl. Joshua Thomas.
“Some of this stuff probably needs to go to the historical society. I’ll take my folder, but—”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” he said. “You want yours, you’re going to have to take them all and let me know what’s worth giving. And I want my name on it as the donor, okay?”
“Okay, but there’s no way I can go through everything now. Give me a box and we’ll stick them in my car.”
Ten minutes later, we had emptied the hassock and stashed the files in the trunk of my car. By then I was more than ready for some lunch. A small refrigerator stood in Will’s makeshift office and he brought out the chilled chicken salad sandwiches and soft drinks that he had picked up earlier.
As we ate, he finally got around to his real reason for getting me over there.
“Dwight says he and Cal are going up to Virginia and empty out Jonna’s house when school’s out. You think he’d like me to come help? I don’t want to step on the boy’s toes if there are things of his mother’s y’all think he might want someday, but it sounds like there’s gonna be a lot to get rid of.”
“There is,” I said, trying to remember the way the house was furnished. We had stayed there briefly after Jonna was killed. Because she had died intestate, Cal had inherited everything. “Dwight wants to sell the house and fatten up Cal’s college fund.”
“Many antiques?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’m no expert. Her family founded the town and she had nice furniture, but only five or six pieces looked really old. There were some family portraits that Mrs. Shay wants back and Dwight says she can have them since Cal’s her only grandchild and they’ll probably come to him eventually anyhow. You’ll have to ask Dwight, but you know something, Will? It might be easier on both of them to move it all down here to your warehouse if you’ve got room for it. Less emotional for Cal to think about it here than in that house, don’t you reckon?”
We finished eating and he walked me out to my car. Dee Bradshaw pulled in beside us as we stood talking.