Tom Hoke - Murder in the Grand Manor

Jim walked around the bar and picked off four packs of potato chips, grabbed a plate of cheese from the table, and took his goodies to where Janet Wharton was sitting cross-legged. It occurred to him the wind was losing strength, or maybe he was just getting used to it. He walked to the door to the lobby and looked through the small window at the top. The wind spun the spokes of the ceiling fan round and round over nothing. Even the well anchored desk was gone. As he looked, a piling came through the front door. It slammed against something which must have been the rear wall of the dining room. If the back of the hotel was still around, it was a barricade of desks and chairs. He hoped it was.

He returned to Janet Wharton who had pulled open a sack of potato chips and was making a meal of them. She pointed to her glass. "Can I have a little water for a change, Jim?" she asked softly. He found a pitcher back of the bar.

Janet licked her fingers. She had stopped looking haughty. Instead she verged on sarcasm. "You do know Indians inhabited this land before the white man came here. I mean the whole United States?"

Indians! What did he know about Indians.

His association with them was connected with a picture of Custer's last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in a history book. He grinned at her. "Yes, you might say I do know that much." Apparently she needed the water.

"The Indians did not refer to themselves as Indians." She was giving the first grade treatment. "They were the Shawnee, the Navajo, and so on. In the West Florida States there were a number of tribes, but in what is now known as Mississippi and Alabama, there were a great number of the Choctaw Tribe."

She pointed a finger at me. "And, of all of them, the Choctaw's were probably the most superstitious. For your information, most of the descendants of the people who settled in this area have a smidgen of Choctaw blood in them." She helped herself to a piece of cheese.

"Maybe that's why I'm superstitious." She shrugged. "Oh, I don't go for the whole bit…not enough Choctaw, I guess."

"Superstitious? I suppose you won't walk under a ladder, and a black cat scares you to death?" Jim suggested.

"Pooh! Those fancy superstitions must have come over on the Mayflower. Have you ever heard of sheep jumping out of the ground, or sudden wild winds that spring from nowhere to protect Choctaw hallowed ground?"

"No!" he said without proper respect for her remarks on superstition. Then he yelled "NO!" so loud it should have brought everybody to their feet, if it hadn't been for the wind. He got his voice down. "And what did the Choctaws regard as hallowed ground?"

"Burying grounds…cemeteries…for one," she said. "I know you won't believe it, but a bunch of us went into an Indian cemetery when I was in high school. This was up near Picayune.

There was a sudden wild wind that sprang up from nowhere. It scared us half to death. We got out of there in a hurry, and we didn't go back."

He looked to see if she smiled when she said it.

She was in deadly earnest.

Jim's mind went back to following Jerry Duprey to an abandoned graveyard on property belonging to his aunt. He had remarked to himself at the time Duprey took off from that spot almost in terror. For Jim there was no wild wind, but for a Choctaw, the superstition might be so embedded, imagination might have played tricks with his mind, as it had with Janet's. Jim supposed, under the circumstances, it must have taken more courage than he had ever thought to go out to a cemetery in the middle of the night.

He looked at Janet. "Let's go back to a question that needs answering. Who recently got your curiosity up concerning the Dupree family, Janet. Come now, you didn't have it on the tip of your tongue, not all of it. Some of it, yes, but the whole thing, no! Who has been gracing your library with questions about the Dupree land?"

She gave a mischievous smile. "Which one do you want me to start with, Jim?" She twirled a lock of her hair. Her eyes watched his face.

He looked at her in exasperation. "Oh, just start off wherever you want. I'll follow."

She frowned. "Lately, a tall thin man, who started skipping through the history books about like you did."

"And you, of course, immediately gave him the fascinating history of Mississippi and your legends?"

She ignored his sarcasm. "No. He didn't ask about the mint being robbed. He seemed to know about that." She rested her chin in the palm of her hand. " He was looking for a map."

"What did he look like, besides being tall and thin? And how did he find out about the mint being robbed, and what map was he trying to find?"

Janet put her hands across her brows.

"Eyebrows from here to here, black headed, mean." She had pegged Beau Mitchell down to a T. "The mint robbery is alluded to in several books. But more than likely he found a copy of the original article my father wrote. It was the best account and the most realistic. The story is not really a secret, but where the money might be buried is something else. He told me a woman in the courthouse referred him to me for an early map of this area.

"Did you have a map like that in the library?"

Jim's voice rose in excitement.

"Yes," she replied, then shook her head, anticipating the next question. "No, he didn't take it. It was on the east wall in the corner of the library, just tacked on the wall, unframed.

It had been there for years based on the looks of it. After the man scanned a couple of books, he went over and looked at the map. He stood looking at it for a long time. Then he jingled some change in his pocket, smiled and said,

"Well, well…Jerome!"

"He acted as if I weren't there at all, then he stalked out without another word. "

"You said the map WAS there. He didn't take it, but it isn't there now. Explain." Jim watched her squirm.

"Day before yesterday the map disappeared. I went across the street for a cup of coffee. We don't have much happening anyway in the library. I wasn't being negligent. There's hardly anything worth stealing in the place. I was gone about ten minutes. When I returned, the map was gone. I didn't notice it until lunch time."

"O. K., so you had another visitor before the map disappeared. Who was it? Stop playing games!" He waited for her explanation.

Janet twirled the glass in her hands. Then she leaned over and whispered in his ear. "Just before I went out for coffee, a woman came into the library. She browsed through Mississippi history and asked me a bunch of questions. She's here in this room." She nodded toward his old gal friends. His eyes went with hers to Aunt Annie, curled up sleeping innocently on the bench. "That's the one," she said.

Aunt Annie! Dear old Aunt Annie from Detroit, who appealed to him for protection! It was Aunt Annie who claimed him as her nephew with the able assistance of Lena. She took charge of getting him a room in the Grand Manor. She handed him all that chatter about the demise of Jerry Duprey's Aunt Edith! It was she who told him her room was bugged.

It was Aunt Annie who managed to slip into his room to get the story on his activities.

Maybe Jerry had warned her. Somebody had.

He looked sorrowfully at Lena asleep beside her friend. He supposed Lena wanted to get Aunt Annie out of the hotel safely. She knew something was wrong. So, she announced he was the long-lost nephew and played right into Aunt Annie's hands. Except Aunt Annie didn't know he was running after Jerry Duprey.

What was the old girl after? And what did the map have to do with it? It might tell him the one thing he wanted to know. He didn't automatically believe all the stories of buried treasure, but the possibilities were interesting.

He turned toward Janet and asked, "What can you tell me about the map? Was it very old?"