Читать книгу Murder in Mayberry - Jack Branson - Страница 12

Chapter 1

Blood Ties

Saturday, January 11, 2003. I packed for a short trip to Alabama the next day. Jack phoned his mother, then Ann. Ever since Ann was widowed nine years earlier, Jack had made it a habit to call her once a week.

Jack came into the bedroom as I finished packing.

“Did your mom have anything to say?” I asked.

“No, not really,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “Her leukemia’s flared up again. She said it’s not serious, but I can’t help worrying about her.”

I nodded. “What about Anna Mae?” Only close family called Ann by her full name. In fact, Jack and I were about the last hold-outs.

“No big news.” Jack paused, then added, “I told her she needs to kick that crazy renter out.”

“He’s still bothering her?”

“Yeah. He calls her in the middle of the night, begging her to come over and chase the ghosts out of his attic. She said she’s not afraid of him, but he makes her uneasy. I told her to have Earl evict him if she didn’t want to.”

Earl was Ann’s younger brother. All five siblings lived within a few miles of each other—two brothers and three sisters. Earl was a widower with grown children, so he was the self-appointed protector who repaired broken locks, helped the sisters find a good plumber and chased away scary renters.

“Anything else?” I asked Jack.

Jack laughed. “She said she doubts she’ll ever get back the money she loaned Russell.”

“I can’t believe she loaned him that much money in the first place,” I responded. “I don’t think she would have done that for us and you’re her favorite. He must know how to charm older women.”

Ann had been mentioning the money for a couple of years, but never with much intensity. Russell, a mining engineer, was Earl’s son. He’d borrowed $10,000 to buy a piece of mining equipment, thinking he could resell it for a profit. He’d had trouble locating a buyer, and now Ann was finally impatient.

Ten thousand dollars was nothing to Ann. She was a millionaire in rental property alone. But she also was a serious businesswoman, and she kept a journal of every rent receipt, every loan and every payment. She’d often let renters who were down on their luck delay payments, sometimes letting them catch up when they received their tax refunds, but she eventually collected her money.

It wasn’t like Ann to let a loan drag on for years. When a young man in town borrowed a couple of thousand from her, she had him sign a promissory note. When he didn’t pay her back in a timely manner, she threatened to put a lien on the house he’d bought for his mother.

But Russell was kin, and Ann believed in the blood connection. Just a few weeks earlier, over the Christmas holiday, I’d been reminded of that. Earl’s other child had married a man with a daughter the same age as her daughter. The two girls had grown up like twins. I asked Ann what had happened to her niece’s now grown stepdaughter.

Ann began talking about her and casually commented, “I always got her a Christmas gift—of course, not as nice as I got my own niece.” I couldn’t imagine the two little girls, raised as sisters, receiving Christmas gifts of different value simply because one was a blood relative.

However, the blood thing was a family trait, probably part of their Kentucky roots. Not being a Kentucky native, I found it a little disconcerting. Jack said Ann and Carroll had, at one time, considered adopting a child, and I was grateful—for the child’s sake—that they hadn’t. I doubt an adopted child could have been fully welcomed into their lives. Jack’s great aunt had raised a neighbor’s child—from a poor family with too many kids—and when his great aunt died, she left little or nothing to this woman who had shared her home. Instead, this wealthy woman left stock and money to distant blood relatives, including Jack.

The blood connection was so strong that Russell could take his time paying Ann back, but eventually she’d want her money. Ann discussed all her business ventures with Jack in their weekly calls, but family loans were rarely mentioned. The fact that she’d brought up Russell’s loan showed she’d reached her limit, even for a family member.

“What’s the latest on Ann’s fiancé?” I asked. We’d only met him once when we’d come to Kentucky a few months earlier. We’d joined Ann, her fiancé Bob, Jack’s mom and another older couple for supper at a local restaurant. Bob was a dignified older man, attentive to Ann, and eager to make a positive impression on her favorite nephew.

“She told me she wasn’t sure she was ready to get married again, at least not right now,” Jack responded. “She wants to wait until Grace dies.”

The conversation turned to the conference I was attending the next day. Soon our grandsons, Taylor and Elliott, would be dropped off to spend Saturday with us, as they did each week. So we stopped thinking of the conversation with Ann, the conversation we would replay hundreds of times in the weeks and months that followed.