Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Eden Moore 1)

Eliza Dufresne.

"Old Tatie," I said under my breath. "The million-year-old matriarch. Where do you live, Tatie?" I flipped the envelope over and held it up to the small, primarily decorative lamp on the wall. There was no return address, but the postmark read "Macon, GA. " Ah ha.

In the dusty stack I found half a dozen more canceled checks, all with Eliza's spidery signature. She'd paid Pine Breeze every month on the f

irst or second day like clockwork. Why? What did she care? Who was A to her that she would pay to hide his lover?

I might have lingered over this question longer, except that another letter captured my attention—at least my shock, and then, though I wouldn't have cared to admit it, my horror. It was simple enough in appearance, in an ordinary white sleeve with a damp-obscured postmark.

Mrs. Finley, you must give up that girl's baby. That baby should never be born. He's going to cause a world of pain to many people—not just myself. You may go to hell too, for all I know, just for protecting her there and helping her give birth to that thing. I don't know. But the best thing you can do is send her home and let her mother deal with it. Her mother knows what to do. Her mother wouldn't pussyfoot around like you people are. This isn't a matter for an institution, it's a matter for family and you know it. You're interfering, you're not helping. Send that child home or else there will be consequences.

There was no signature.

I wondered if Lulu knew anything, but I only wondered it briefly. I'd never get it out of her. She'd buried my mother deep—and her own mother beside her. She'd marked their graves with a secret sign that she'd never share with anyone, especially not me.

What to do, then? My grandmother was dead, and her daughters were silent. I didn't understand it, but I was determined to find a way around it.

I thought again of the nameplate on the office door. Could Marion Finley still be alive? If she was getting threats like the one I held before me, maybe she'd had a good reason to help keep my mother's indiscretion quiet; though that train of thought brought me right back around to my own family, and the question of whether or not anyone really knew.

Someone outside the Pine Breeze staff knew, this much was clear.

I flagged the waitress down and asked her for another glass of wine and a phone book, if she could scare one up. She came back with both, and I thanked her. Inside I found a dozen or more listings for Finley, none of which were preceded by Marion. There was one R. M. Finley, though, so I filed that away for future reference. I knew more than a few people who went around signing their middle name instead of their given first. It was worth a shot. And later, I might even call a few of the other Finleys to see if there were any relations. Perhaps she'd married, or died. I closed the heavy book and pushed it away.

There should have been more letters, but I didn't see any. I gathered my findings up in a pile and went to put them back the way I'd found them, when a stray bit of coarse paper fell loose. It was another envelope, made of cheap paper with nasty yellow gum to seal it. A grimy smudge of a thumbprint made a dark shadow across the place where the return address should have been written.

I opened it and found nothing except another canceled check from Eliza. But all the rest had come from her in heavy white stationery, mailed with fancy stamps boasting pictures of flowers and birds. The postmark on this one was strange as well.

"Highlands Hammock, Fla. "

Surely it was an error. Someone else's envelope, Tatie's check. Bureaucracies make mistakes all the time. The handwriting on the front looked like hers, though; I lifted another envelope to compare, and yes, the script matched up. I supposed she must have taken a trip, or at least I hoped so. Macon's only a few hours away, but it's a good six hours to the Florida state line from Chattanooga. Heaven knew how far south I'd have to go to catch her. Highlands Hammock. I'd have to look it up on a map.

Before I rose to leave, I went back to the first, most revealing item in the folder.

A's letter to Pine Breeze loomed beige and brittle before me. I read it for the umpteenth time, still amazed—still bewildered by a fact the letter made abundantly clear.

Leslie had wanted to be there.

I paid for my wine and left a good tip, even though the waitress hadn't been terribly helpful. At least she hadn't gotten in the way, and lately I felt even that much deserved to be rewarded.

The digital clock on my car's dashboard read 11:14 when I pulled into the driveway of the Signal Mountain house I still called home.

The next morning, over coffee and some doughnuts Dave hadn't killed off, I dragged out a more recent phone book than the one at the restaurant and scanned through the Finleys again. No Marion magically manifested in the latest offering by Bellsouth, so I gazed at the R. M. and wondered if it would be worth my time to let my fingers do the walking. It might mean Roger Michael or Rebecca Marion, or anything else in between. It was a long shot, to say the least, but I could either see about calling or I could do something rash like pack my bags and strike out for Macon.

For a moment, I seriously considered going with the devil I knew instead of the one I didn't; but Eliza's specter loomed in my imagination, and I shook the thought away. No. Not yet.

Before I started pressing buttons, I went to the window and pushed the curtain out of my way. Mine was the only car in the drive; and when I peeked into the garage, it was empty. Good. They were both gone. I knew from experience that mere silence could not promise that I was alone, but if both cars were absent, the coast was probably clear.

I reached for the phone and checked the numbers on the newsprint-thin page. I punched the soft round buttons on the handset and listened to the seven-note chime. Then I held still, waiting while the connection went through and the other phone announced my call. Four, five, six . . . after seven or eight rings I was confident that I wasn't going to reach an answering machine, which was unfortunate. To hear a deep, manly voice declare that I'd reached Randall Finley would have made the process of elimination all the more simple.

I hit the button to cancel my call and looked at the entry again.

Beside R. M. Finley there was an address, one that implied a location on the other side of town by the East Ridge tunnel. I didn't know the area well, but it was midmorning, and even if I lucked upon the right home within thirty minutes, I wouldn't be surprising anyone awake.

I fished around in the oversized coffee mug at the end of the kitchen bar. From the bouquet of writing instruments contained therein, I selected a black felt-tip pen and used it to scrawl R. M. 's address onto my palm. Maybe R. M. was out getting breakfast or, as I realized the day of the week, still at church.

I took my time going down the mountain, which turned out to be a good thing. Otherwise, I might have hit a pair of gawkers who'd stopped in the middle of 27 to catch a good stare at the UFO house. As I grouchily swerved past, I wondered how many auto accidents the spaceship-shaped domicile had caused in the last twenty years. In my rearview mirror, I caught the tourists flashing their middle fingers and swearing—because God knows I was the idiot who parked on a busy highway's hairpin curve for a science-fiction photo op.

I survived the rest of the drive without incident, though, and I made my way over to the city's east tunnel around 11:00 A. M. As you might expect of a city surrounded by mountains and ridges, Chattanooga has several tunnels that run conveniently beneath these ridges to provide a fast outlet into the suburbs at the east, northeast, and north sides of town. All other major points on the map find the city fenced in by the mountains or the Tennessee River, which bisects the burg at one point into north and south sides—the north side largely residential and the south side hosting downtown proper plus the detritus of industrialization.