“No, but it might take a while to find it. That garage is packed full of forty years of Carl’s crap. He don’t believe in throwing anything out. He’s still got his daddy’s old shoes.”
Ralph took a couple of young deputies with him, and after two hours of hot, sweaty work pulling down boxes, they found the one they were looking for. And by God, there was something wedged in the wood frame in the back of that painting. Ralph opened the envelope and saw what it was. He wasn’t quite sure why it would be important, but he took it over to the judge.
—
SHORTLY AFTER RALPH CHILDRESS located the copy of Hanna Marie’s original will and presented it to Judge Thorneycroft, two arrests were made. They located the woman lawyer, and she took a plea deal for a lesser sentence in exchange for a written confession explaining in detail how she and Michael Vincent had falsified the will. The lawyer got two years for fraud. He got ten, with no time off for good behavior. As one juror said after his trial, “That man wouldn’t know what good behavior was if it walked up and bit him in the ass.”
Another man said, “It just goes to show you, the old saying is true.”
“Which one?”
“?‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ particularly a redhead. She laid that bastard out to filth, and I think she enjoyed doing it, too.”
The headline read:
* * *
Dairy Owner Michael Vincent Convicted
* * *
2015
Her father had started The Elmwood Springs News in 1949. This morning, Cathy Calvert sat down at her desk and looked around the office, the same one she had worked in all her adult life. It was a mess—papers everywhere, things stuck up on the wall. She had vowed for years to clean it up one of these days, but she never had. And now the newspaper was closing.
The town had lost population, her subscriptions were down, and she couldn’t compete with the Internet. She’d come to hate the thing. With so many tweets and instant news, she couldn’t keep up. She was exhausted at the end of the day, just trying to answer all of her emails. Now every kid with a camera was a reporter and could get a story on Facebook within seconds.
For the past thirty-five years, she had written a weekly editorial under the byline “Chatty Cathy,” and she found that lately, she really didn’t have much left to say that she hadn’t said already. It was time to go. She was retiring from the newspaper business and starting a new one. She had been saving her money for a long time and had bought a large piece of land and a farmhouse and planned to raise goats.
It would be a big departure from what she had been doing, but she had always loved baby goats, ever since she was a child and had played with them out at Elner Shimfissle’s farm. So now she was typing out her very last “Chatty Cathy” column.
Dear Reader,
As you know, I will be leaving Elmwood Springs and closing down the paper. Sadly, this will be our last issue.
I find that after all these years of being your “girl reporter,” it is very hard to say goodbye. I have learned so much from all of you: The true meaning of family and friendship and what it means to be a good neighbor. I have known most of you all my life, and I have been especially honored that you entrusted me with the job of writing your obituaries. It’s a sad thing to lose loved ones or contemplate our own mortality, not knowing what will happen after we leave this world for another.
But what I can say for sure is having known all of you, I leave here with a very high opinion of human beings. I bid you a fond farewell until we meet again.
Cathy Calvert
P.S. You may write to me in care of the Off-the-Grid Goat Farm, P.O. Box 326, Two Sisters, Oregon, 94459.
A couple of years later, when Ralph Childress arrived at Still Meadows, people were very eager to talk to him.
Merle Wheeler said, “Hey, Ralph, we heard about you finding that copy of Hanna Marie’s will. How’d you do it?”
“Yeah,” added Verbena. “How’d you figure it out?”
Ralph chuckled. “Well, I’m kinda embarrassed to tell you, but it sure wasn’t no fancy police work on my part. Somebody told me to go look behind the portrait, so I did.”
“Who?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know. It was an anonymous tip. One day, I was flipping through my phone on my things-to-do list, and there it was, written right in my calendar.”
“And you don’t know who put it there?”
“No, and it wasn’t Edna. She said she’d never seen it before. All we can figure is whoever did it must have hacked into my phone.”
Ruby said, “Well, personally, I think it was somebody who must have seen Little Miss Davenport hide it there that did it.”
Tot agreed. “Yeah, or else was told about it by someone who had seen her.”
Verbena said, “I sure would love to know who it was…and why they waited so long to speak up.”
Merle said, “I think it was the redhead.”
“Maybe so,” said Ralph. “But we’ll never know now.”
Norma had been gone for more than three years, and Macky was just hanging around the house. Their daughter, Linda, had begged him to come and live with them in Seattle, but he wouldn’t go. He needed to be in Elmwood Springs, where Norma was.
He took care of her grave, made sure it was kept up. Even though he missed her so much, he was glad she had gone first. She’d been so scared at the end, and if he hadn’t been there with her, it would have been terrible for her.
Today was the Fourth of July, but he didn’t feel like going to the parade. The kid to whom he had sold the hardware store had asked him to ride with him, but he had no interest in seeing it. The way the world was going, Macky knew that the old guys marching in the parade today in their VFW hats would look foolish to the young people watching them go by. And maybe a lot of them were foolish old men trying to hang on to their glory days. But they had been young men once, ready to fight and die for their country. And where would America be today if it hadn’t been for a lot of foolish young men?