The Good, the Bad, and the Emus Read online

  “Exactly,” I said. “I’m very worried that I’ll offend Miss Annabel and have the door permanently slammed on my genealogy research. Frankly, I’m looking for someone who can tell me a little more about my cousins. Help me avoid putting my foot in my mouth again.”

  “Again?” Anne raised one eyebrow in interrogation.

  “I almost sank the whole project from the start by wishing her neighbor a good morning as I passed him,” I said. “I was just trying to be mannerly, but I gather they don’t get on.”

  “Mr. Weaver?” Anne’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, my goodness, no. Not at all. They’ve been bitter enemies for years. It all started not quite twenty years ago when Mr. Weaver chopped down Miss Annabel’s mulberry tree.”

  Clearly I’d come to the right place.

  “Chopped it down?” I asked. “Why?”

  “It was a big old red mulberry tree, thirty feet high and almost as wide,” she said. “Shaded the south side of the yard so well that they got along fine without air conditioning until well into the sixties. It was on the Lee family side of the property line, but at least half of the fruit fell in Mr. Weaver’s yard.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Very messy fruit, mulberries. Not the sort of thing he’d want on that super-tidy lawn of his.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Mr. Weaver had just moved in, and he didn’t like the mess. Asked old Judge Lee to chop the tree down. Which the judge ignored. They sniped back and forth for some months, and then the judge died, and before he was cold in the grave, Mr. Weaver up and hired a tree company to chop down the mulberry.”

  “I’m surprised any local company would do it,” I said. “Wouldn’t everyone around here know they were stepping in the middle of a feud? Not to mention the fact that he had no legal right to do it?”

  “He hired an out-of-town firm.” She pronounced “out of town” as if it were something rather worse than “bloodsucking insectoids from outer space” and almost as bad as “damned Yankee.”

  “What did Miss Annabel do?”

  “Miss Annabel wouldn’t have done anything,” she said. “Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, poor thing. But Miss Delia was in town for the funeral and stayed over to help. You should have seen how she went after Mr. Weaver!”

  “Good!”

  “She sued him and the tree-cutting firm, and tried to get them both arrested for trespassing and destruction of property and I don’t know what else,” Anne said. “And in Judge Lee’s time, Mr. Weaver would never have gotten away with it.”

  “But he did?”

  “The chief of police was a friend of his,” Anne said. “Chief Heedles—father of the present chief. Mr. Weaver swore up and down that before he died, Judge Lee gave him verbal permission to cut down the tree. He couldn’t prove it, but then no one could disprove it, either. And he offered to pay for planting a new tree to replace the one he’d cut down, and the chief wouldn’t do anything. Told the ladies to have a new tree planted and send Mr. Weaver the bill and be done with it.”

  “Hardly fair,” I said. “They’re left with a sapling instead of a full-grown shade tree.”

  “Oh, but Ms. Delia took care of that,” Anne said. “She found a company that would dig up a full-grown mulberry from somewhere and plant it in the yard, right where the old one had been. Not quite as big as the old one, but big enough to drop a whole heck of a lot of mulberries across the property line.”

  “That must have cost a pretty penny.”

  “You know it!” She shook her head as if in awe of Cordelia’s gall. “And she sent that great big bill to Mr. Weaver. Took her forever to get him to pay it, but he did, finally.”

  “Good for her!”

  “And the ladies put everyone in town on notice,” Anne said. “That anyone who wanted to take down the new tree had better have written permission from both of them, and that if anything happened to the new tree, they’d raise holy hell. Pardon my French, but that’s what Ms. Delia said. And ever since then, they’ve been at each other’s throats. I think maybe Ms. Delia would have gone back to Richmond, where she’d been living, if not for Mr. Weaver. She was so mad at him. I think she moved back here to make sure he didn’t run roughshod over Miss Annabel.”

  Somehow the Annabel I’d met didn’t seem like someone who’d be easy to run roughshod over. But maybe several decades of living with Cordelia had toughened her up.

  Then again, Annabel hadn’t had much success in getting the local police to investigate her suspicions of Weaver.

  “This is exactly the sort of thing I want to hear about,” I said. “Family history. Town history.”

  “I’d love to talk to you,” she said. “Except that I’ve got a busy afternoon today. How long are you staying?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “That rather depends on the emus.”

  “The emus?”

  “My grandfather’s come to town to rescue them,” I said.

  “Your grandfather?” she said. “Is he part of Dr. Montgomery Blake’s rescue team?”

  “News travels fast here,” I said. “Actually, Dr. Blake is my grandfather.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” She was standing with her mouth open, staring at me as if I had suddenly achieved celebrity status. In a way I had. Any second now she probably would tell me she watched all of Grandfather’s TV shows.

  “Dr. Montgomery Blake is your grandfather!” she exclaimed. “I am such a fan! I have all his books. My own copies, I mean, not just in the library.”

  Shame on me. I should have realized a librarian would focus on Grandfather’s printed oeuvre. I wondered if it would be discreet to tell her that he actually did write them, for the most part, although he did keep a tame English major on staff to clean up his syntax.

  “If you like, I’ll ask him to drop by and sign them while he’s in town,” I said instead.

  “I would be so honored!” she said. “Do you suppose there’s any way we could prevail on him to speak here at the library? On any topic he chooses.”

  Would Grandfather object to her handing him an audience to perform for? Clearly she didn’t know him as I did.

  “I’ll ask,” I said. “And frankly, if you want to make him immensely grateful, you could help me out with a personal project of his.”

  “If I can,” she said.

  “I think Grandfather intended to get down here to rescue the emus before now,” I said. “But it took a while to arrange, and—well, he’s disappointed that Ms. Delia won’t get to see the rescue.”

  “They were friends?”

  “Not that I know of.” Not anymore, anyway. I was trying not to lie too much, in case the whole story eventually came out. “But she and Miss Annabel were the ones who brought the plight of the emus to his attention. And he knows about Miss Annabel’s belief that her cousin was murdered.”

  “I’m not sure she’s wrong,” the librarian said. “But there’s not a whole lot any of us can do if the police won’t take any action.”

  “I think maybe Grandfather feels a little guilty that he waited too long for Ms. Delia to have the satisfaction of seeing the rescue,” I said. “Or maybe he actually agrees with Miss Annabel. Whatever the reason, he’s hired a private investigator to look back over the evidence. To see if there’s anything that would convince Chief Heedles to reopen the case. Or get the state police involved. Or maybe just leak it to the press.”

  “Oh, my!”

  “And I’ve decided that helping the PI might be cooler, cleaner, less tiring work than chasing after emus.”

  “Lord, yes,” she said. “So what would you like to research?”

  “The Lee family. Riverton itself, past and present. Mr. Weaver. Cordelia’s demise. Any and all local history you’ve got.”

  “You have a seat in there, where it’s comfortable,” Anne said, pointing to a smaller side room containing several stout oak tables with comfortable chairs around them. “I’ll start bringing you local history material. Goodness knows, we’ve got enough of it.”

&
nbsp; She wasn’t kidding. After delivering a second armload of books to my table, she giggled at my startled expression.

  “Just let me know when you need more,” she said, and returned to her work.

  I studied the volumes she’d selected. I was puzzled by the first book in the stack—a cookbook published by St. Sebastian Episcopal Church in the 1970s. But when I checked the index, I found three different Lees had recipes in it—Ginevra, Morgana, and Annabel. Annabel had six recipes in it, which was two more than anyone else in the book. Cordelia wasn’t represented, under either Lee or Mason. Was she not Episcopal like the rest of her family? Not a cook like her cousin? Or simply not living in town when the book was published? I opened up my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and made a note to find out. And was either Ginevra or Morgana my great-grandmother? Another note. I also jotted down a reminder to copy out a few of the family recipes and reached up to grab the next book on the stack, a thick coffee-table-sized book.

  To my astonishment, its cover featured a beautiful color photo of a piece of the same white-and-aqua pottery that decorated Annabel’s kitchen. The title of the book was Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery.

  And the author’s name was Jeremiah Lee. Another ancestor, or at least cousin? Was this pottery factory merely a piece of town history, and did it have some connection to my family?

  I opened the book and eagerly began scanning the photos. In addition to the white-and-turquoise pots Annabel collected, there were other striking color schemes—gray and rose, salmon and teal, and a surprisingly modern purple and green.

  I tore myself away from the pictures and began racing through the text. Apparently my ancestors had settled on Biscuit Mountain in colonial times, intending to farm, and found they’d landed in the middle of a morass of clay. They’d had a lean time of it until they stopped trying to grow crops on their land and began digging it up and baking it into pots. After that, the family’s star began to rise. The book mentioned that they made both stoneware and porcelain, and were among the first to make porcelain on this side of the Atlantic.

  They really hit their stride in the 1880s when they jumped onto the bandwagon of the Art Pottery Movement, and for a while Biscuit Mountain’s wares had rivaled those of more famous Art Pottery manufacturers, like Roseville, Rookwood, Van Briggle, and Weller. They’d had a commercial advantage, since they were able to dig several kinds of useful clay out of their mountain. Riverton grew from a sleepy village to a prosperous town. The Lee family grew rich, and many of their employees had also made small fortunes.

  But the company’s prosperity began to decline after World War I. Apparently, my ancestors were savvy enough to have invested most of their money in something other than pottery, so when the pottery business went belly up during the Depression, they managed to hang onto their position as the town’s wealthiest and most influential family. But only because everybody else had lost so much more. Riverton had never recovered, and its population had been in a long, slow decline for the last eighty years.

  I looked around to see if the library offered Internet access to patrons. Yes, and one of the two slightly outdated computers was unoccupied. I went to eBay to see if any Biscuit Mountain pottery was on sale. I found two pieces, each going for several hundred dollars. If people really paid that much for the stuff, Annabel had several thousand dollars’ worth of the family crockery in her kitchen. And I’d bet that wasn’t her only stash.

  But still, Biscuit Mountain was small potatoes compared to its rivals. There were over 800 listings for Van Briggle pottery, for prices up to $5,000. Over a thousand Rookwood, over two thousand Weller, and nearly eight thousand Rosevilles, all at even steeper prices than Biscuit Mountain pots.

  I went back to my stack of books, loyally telling myself that I’d rather have my family’s pots than any of that other stuff. Well, than most of it. And at least, since the Biscuit Mountain crockery was selling in the low three figures, maybe I could splurge and buy a bit of the family history.

  Next on the stack was a slim pamphlet about the Biscuit Mountain Ostrich and Emu Ranch. Which, according to the text, had been founded in 1992 by Mr. Hosmer Eaton on property that had formerly been part of the Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery Works. I wondered if that meant Mr. Eaton had bought the land directly from some of my family, or if they’d lost the land when the pottery factory went out of business. And was the ranch—

  Just then my stomach growled, and I realized it had been a long time since my chili lunch.

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. Anne came bustling over.

  “You’re probably going to kick me out before too long,” I said.

  “Not for another hour,” she said. “Nine-to-six weekdays, ten-to-five on weekends.”

  “Would it be okay if I left these books here?” I asked. “I didn’t even get to look at more than the first few.”

  “No problem,” she said. “This is now officially your carrel, for as long as you need it. And if Dr. Blake would like a peaceful place to think and write, he’s more than welcome to a table.”

  “I’ll let him know,” I said.

  Leaving the library was like stepping into a sauna. Were the boys out in this? I stopped on the steps, pulled out my cell phone, and called Michael.

  “How’s the research going?” he asked.

  “Well enough for today,” I said. “I decided to quit before I go cross-eyed. Where are you guys?”

  “At the lake. Don’t ask me what lake, because it has an unpronounceable six-syllable Native American name, and don’t ask me where it is, because Caroline brought us here in the caravan. It can’t be too far from Riverton; the horse only goes so fast. It’s got a swimming area with a lifeguard, and a snack stand that serves pizza by the slice, and I plan to bring the boys home cooled off, well fed, and so tired that they will sleep like angels tonight.”

  “Good plan,” I said. “I’ll see you back at Camp Emu.”

  “Could be a few hours,” he said. “And if we’re late, don’t worry. We can bed the boys down in the caravan on the trip home.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Give them my love.”

  A car had pulled into the parking lot while I was talking to Michael—a familiar and very distinctive car, painted lavender with a few purple and green vines twining around it. My cousin Rose Noire hopped out. She was wearing an odd outfit—loose-fitting white pants tucked into knee-high brown faux-suede boots, a flowing white tunic belted with a lavender sash, and a broad-brimmed straw hat decorated with dried flowers and lavender ribbons. Presumably, this was her equivalent of my grandfather’s multipocketed expedition outfit.

  She seemed taken aback when she saw me.

  “It’s not closed is it?” she asked.

  “The library? No, it’s open for another hour.”

  “Good! I need to look up a few things. I had such a fascinating time up at the emu ranch!”

  “I didn’t realize anyone was going up there today.”

  “They weren’t,” she said. “But I was worried about what we might find, so I went up there to see if I needed to do a cleansing to make it safe for the rest of the brigade. And Meg! It’s really lovely up there! A beautiful aura! I smudged the area with some sage and herbs, just to be sure, but you can tell it’s a happy place that’s only recently been through hard times. And it’s looking forward to having nice people back. You can just feel it.”

  “That’s nice.” I didn’t entirely believe in Rose Noire’s self-proclaimed ability to read the auras of people, pets, and now geographical areas. But I did believe she had sound instincts. If she thought the emu ranch was a good place, maybe I wouldn’t worry quite so much about taking the boys up there tomorrow.

  “Did you see any emus?” I asked aloud.

  “No, but I found a couple of their feathers. And such a lot of interesting other stuff. I’ll show you later—I need to look something up before the library closes. See you back at camp!”

  She was running up the steps by this time
, with her lavender sash and lavender hat ribbons trailing behind her.

  I hoped Anne was ready for such an energetic new patron this close to closing.

  My stomach growled again, and I hopped into my car and headed back toward camp.

  Although when I reached the stretch of road in front of Miss Annabel’s house, I decided to stop in and check on her. Make sure the denizens of Camp Emu hadn’t done anything to annoy her during my absence.

  And maybe enjoy a bit of her air conditioning while the day still remained hot. If I was correctly remembering the schedule they’d posted on the bulletin board, I still had half an hour to go before dinner was served.

  A twenty-something man was seated in a folding lawn chair to the left of the gate, doing something on his smartphone. He came to attention when I stopped my car in front of the house, but then recognized me, waved genially in my direction, and focused his attention back on his phone.

  Dr. Ffollett wasn’t in the yard, so after calling out “hello!” from the gate a few times, I tried it. Unlocked. I let myself in and strolled up to the porch.

  She opened the door before I had a chance to knock.

  Chapter 12

  “Noisy crew, your bird lovers,” Annabel said as I stepped inside. “Want some lemonade?”

  “I’d love some. Dr. Ffollett not around?”

  “He doesn’t live here,” she said. “Just comes over to be helpful.”

  She ushered me into the living room and then disappeared into the kitchen. Before sitting down, I strolled around the room, looking at things. I spotted a couple of purple-and-green pots that looked to be from the Biscuit Mountain Pottery Works. And a framed picture facedown on a table. When I picked it up to set it right, I found myself looking at my own face.

  Well, not actually my own face, but very close. Cordelia, clearly, and probably Annabel beside her. They were both wearing light blouses and dark, square-shouldered jackets. From the 1940s, I guessed, although I was no expert on fashion history. But they looked as if they could step into a movie beside Joan Crawford or Bette Davis and fit in just fine. They were standing in front of a white frame house with a picket fence, and looked tall and happy. Their heads were almost level—in fact, Cordelia was perhaps an inch or so taller. Clearly I’d gotten my height from her.