“Um. So are you taking over the dad jokes, then?”
She laughed and slapped my arm playfully. “Anyway, I know what you mean. It all reminds me a little of this book I read when I was a kid. The Westing Game. Did you ever read that?”
I searched my meager literary roots. “I don’t know.”
“It was about this old guy who planned a whole murder mystery around his own death.”
“Wait. If he was dead, how did he do that?”
“Exactly!” Addie sounded like this all made sense, but I guessed it did have some parallels to my idea that Filene had somehow planned all this for us.
“Okay, open the other stuff.” I pushed the envelope toward her.
“There’s newspaper in here.” She unfolded the yellowed paper and her eyes widened as she scanned whatever words it held.
“Well?” The suspense was killing me.
“There was a murder,” she breathed, and handed me the page.
I read out loud:
“Matthew Elias Tucker, local esteemed townsman, was found shot dead early Friday morning on the edge of his property at 54 Maple Lane by the local constable on his morning rounds. He is survived by his son Elias and his wife Ina.
“It is surmised that the suspected murder is one more dastardly deed in the ongoing feud between the Tucker and Tanner families. As readers surely recall, last summer saw the grisly devastation of the Arnold Tanner’s barn and livestock after he attempted to assert his ownership over the property at Maple Lane.
“With no witnesses or any real evidence, it is likely this murder will remain a mystery, but there is no doubt it will fuel the ongoing animosity between the two families.”
I finished reading and stared at Addie. “You said ghosts were people who had unfinished things or wanted revenge, right?”
“Yeah.” Addie’s expression was dark.
“So if Matthew Tucker was killed by a Tanner, right here on this property, then I could see him wanting revenge.” I still didn’t believe in ghosts, but if there was going to be one, I could see it being this guy.
“And haunting the house where he was killed,” she finished, eyes wide.
We stared at the article for a moment and then Addie pushed the other papers toward me. “What’s this?”
I unfolded the papers and spread them between us. “It’s a land deed,” I said, reading. “For plots 54, 55, and 56 in Singletree Township. To Matthew Tucker.”
She shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
I shrugged. “The mystery grows.”
“Wait, what’s the date on that?” She asked, pushing the deed at me again.
“1828.”
She stared at the paper for a long minute. Then looked up at me. “Well, if those plots are the one this house sits on, then that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Mom found a record of the land purchase. And it was bought by a Tanner, not a Tucker. In 1827, not 1828.”
I felt my brow wrinkle. Mysteries were not my strong suit and it was getting late. Plus, I was on my second big glass of wine. “And?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. If a Tanner bought it, why did the deed say Tucker?”
“No idea.”
“Tuckers stole it.” She said this very matter of factly. Like she believed it. I felt the knee-jerk reaction starting inside me, but pushed it down.
“I thought we’d gotten past all that feud stuff and had moved on to solving a mystery together, Addie.”
She lifted a shoulder. “If the shoe fits,” she said, but there was a comic lilt to her voice.
“It’s too late for this kind of confusion,” I said.
She glanced at her watch. “Oh, it is late. And Dan comes tomorrow?”
Though I loved my son, and I lived for the time I spent with him, I felt a twinge of sadness that this close quiet time with Addie would come to an end in the morning.
Normally it would be Shelly’s week, but she said she’d picked up some extra shifts and wouldn’t be around in the evenings when he might need her. It was confusing—Shelly acted like she wanted to keep Dan from me, but then she also seemed to enjoy the flexibility that having me in his life offered her. That was Shelly. “He does.”
And with that, we each went to bed and miraculously, slept the night through with no otherworldly screaming.
22
Vintage ‘Vette
Addison
Friday morning arrived with a thunderstorm, and Dan was delivered by Shelly, who gave me evil looks the entire time she was in the house, which was much longer than anyone seemed to want her there. Evidently she was taking some different shifts at The Shack, and needed to drop Dan off early.
“Mom,” Daniel said after Shelly had interrupted breakfast and then demanded Michael give her a tour of the house to prove it was a safe place for Daniel to be for the weekend, “you can go now.”
“That’s not very loving,” she scolded him, looking hurt. I felt a little bad for Shelly. But Dan had sounded like he was trying for a joke that just didn’t go off well.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, and he gave her a warm hug that softened my heart a little bit toward her.
“All right,” she said. “But if anything at all happens, you call me,” she told her son.
“I still don’t think he needed a cell phone. He’s twelve,” Michael said, in a voice that suggested he didn’t want to rekindle the fight they’d had when she’d arrived, but that he also didn’t think the conversation was over.
“How else is he supposed to reach me if he needs me?”
“The same way he always has? On my phone.”
“If he doesn’t feel safe, he needs to be able to tell me.”
Michael took a step back, looking as if she’d slapped him. I had dueling impulses—one, I wanted to go to him, put a hand on his back or his shoulder to comfort him, and two, I wanted to step between them and give Shelly a piece of my mind. Michael was probably the best father I’d ever seen, though I honestly didn’t have a lot of experience with fathers in general.
“Fine,” Michael said, his voice tight. “He’ll call you if he needs you.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Bye Mom.”
Shelly hugged her son again, shot me a glare, and then turned and left. Daniel disappeared up the stairs.
And it was then that I noticed that the box with the ring, the one we’d left sitting open on the table the night before, was now empty. Had she taken it? Had we forgotten to put it back? Where was the ring?
“Michael?”
He rubbed a hand through his hair, sending it all standing on end as his shoulders slumped. “Yeah?”
“Did you put the ring somewhere? For safekeeping?”
His lips pulled up in confusion and he shook his head. “No, why?”
“It’s gone.” I pointed to the empty box on the table.
We both stared at it for a minute as Daniel’s footsteps overhead thumped and clunked.
“You don’t think Shelly took it, do you?” I asked, wondering if he was thinking the same thing.