Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Dust motes floated through the beams of sunlight, hitting my face. At first I thought I was back home, that Aunt DeeDee would stop by later that day with a trayful of food she would try to force-feed me. But no.
I lay on the couch across from Lacy, who’d fallen asleep curled in an uncomfortable position on the wing chair.
I nudged Lacy awake, and within minutes we were both on our feet. After we sprayed on fresh deodorant and took a quick look at ourselves in the mirror, ignoring what we didn’t have time to fix, we were out the door and headed to the stables.
On the way we spotted the group of butt-busters shaking and jiving to “Master of the House” from Les Mis. Jemma was grinning and in her element, moving between the sweaty contestants and showing them the perfect squat. Whatever made her happy, I supposed.
The stable master recognized Lacy, so he agreed—after asking me several questions about my experience with horses—that we could take out a couple of the gentler mares.
Polly had a rusty-red coat and a dark brown mane. I introduced myself and told her about Bella as I stroked her nose and gave her a good rubdown, letting her sniff me before placing the saddle pad across her back.
When I asked the stable master where I could find a saddle, he pointed to a door in the barn.
Inside I counted seven rows with five or six saddles each.
Mr. Finch had said they had quite a collection, but I couldn’t have imagined anything like the leather craftsmanship covering the entire wall.
I ran a hand over the nearest one—soft and supple. Only the finest for the Finches.
There were messages inscribed on the cantle of most of the saddles: everything from simple dedications to ones so personal I wouldn’t let my eyes linger.
To My Diamond
To My Rose
Love You Forever
Love, Your Mom
Love You Always
To Another 20 Years
What a Wild Ride
I was reminded that in all the bustle yesterday, I’d never finalized what my talent would be in the show tomorrow.
A myriad showstoppers had scored big points over the years, according to Aunt DeeDee: a performance of “La Macarena” in the style of ballet, “Für Elise” played with wind chimes, Macbeth’s soliloquy given while dressed as Harry Potter. The show certainly seemed to award creativity.
I spotted a bucket and several cleaning supplies in the corner and considered requesting them backstage. If worse came to worse, I’d be able to give a detailed tutorial on the proper way to clean a saddle. Aunt DeeDee would be proud or horrified—I wasn’t sure which.
Lacy grabbed the first saddle she saw. She didn’t particularly like horses, but her parents had forced her to take dressage classes for a year, thinking she could specialize in a less-known sport for college scholarships.
The first time she’d accidentally stepped in horse poop, she’d gagged for five minutes and known it would never be a lifelong passion.
I turned toward her. “Do you think I can borrow one of these for my talent?”
Her brow wrinkled. “I guess, but why would you?”
“I want to wow the judges.”
She put up a hand. “Whatever you think’s best.”
After we ensured a secure fit for the saddles, Lacy threw her leg over the back of a quarter horse named Ginger as I climbed astride Polly.
The path to the back of the property wasn’t a straight shot, and branches poked at our arms as if reaching to hold us back.
Neither of us talked much as we navigated fallen branches and trees that had been struck by lightning.
There wasn’t much of a breeze and I wished for a bandana to wipe the sweat beginning to drench my face.
Thankfully, the dense foliage soon thinned and the scent of honeysuckle perfumed the air.
A stone wall at least ten feet high towered in front of us, topped by spindly wrought-iron spikes ready to impale intruders. The only break in the wall was a gate with more narrow spires an inch or two apart.
Lacy led Ginger toward it. “Do you think it opens?”
“One way to find out.” I hopped down and walked Polly to the metal slats, pushing against them, but the gate wouldn’t give because of the vines growing beneath the entrance.
I dropped the reins and put my shoulder into the effort, but it barely budged.
After yanking up the weeds while trying to avoid the prickly ones, I tried again.
This time, the gate opened enough for me and Lacy to squeeze through.
“I guess we can tie the horses here while we check things out.”
“It’s strange what the Finches want to do with this part of the property,” Lacy said, once we were inside the gated perimeters.
“Yeah, it’s weird, right? Putting a pageant museum out here when no one has been through this gate in a long time.”
“Unless there’s another way back here,” Lacy added. “Maybe that’s part of the appeal—a secret passageway. Mr. Finch seemed just eccentric enough to appreciate something like that.”
A few steps more and we realized we’d arrived at the edge of an expansive garden, wild and untamed, stretching for acres in every direction.
Directly ahead of us was a glass greenhouse with a dome rising from the center.
Panes had been shattered and some were missing, creating a kind of gap-toothed grin.
A picturesque hillock rose and fell, and behind it stood an abandoned two-story stone structure with steps ascending to a front door.
“This is the original house where the Finch family stayed while the Rose Palace was being built,” Lacy noted as we ambled toward it.
The looming mountains made this space feel nestled and held, and I realized that the acres featuring a beautiful home, a greenhouse, an overgrown grassy expanse, and a spacious garden had been “roughing it” for the Gilded Age Finch family.
We stepped up the stairs and opened the door to the house, our eyes adjusting quickly to the low light.
The style of construction reminded me of the historical homes in Williamsburg.
Every Christmas Aunt DeeDee asked me and Momma to tag along with her while she walked through house after house, decorated with evergreens, candles, and holly berries.
Momma and I would make it through two mansions before leaving to find hot chocolate until Aunt DeeDee finished.
In this house there were rooms branching off a long breezeway that stretched all the way from the front to the back door, a design that had allowed air to circulate before the era of air conditioning.
A musty scent of closed rooms and abandoned belongings permeated the house.
I ran my hand along the peeling sage-green paint on the wall and tried to envision the late-nineteenth-century family who’d walked these halls.
Each room’s entryway featured crown molding, and only one had a modern door.
From behind it, I could hear a motor running.
“I bet that one room is temp-controlled to preserve whatever is inside,” Lacy said as she approached. “In college when I shelved books at the on-campus library, the archivist had a repository like that.”
I could see the Finches bringing out a crew to install AC in just one room in order to preserve history. But then, why not keep the items in the main house at the front of the property? Unless there was something they didn’t want visitors stumbling across?
I jiggled the handle, but it didn’t budge.
“Allow me,” Lacy said, stepping forward. She took an ID badge from her pocket and slid it between the doorframe and the lock mechanism. It took her a full minute of wiggling the card, but the click eventually let us know that her method had worked.
We walked inside a room that must have been the dining area at one point. The rectangular layout would have seemed spacious if not crammed with boxes and random pageant paraphernalia. I shivered in the much cooler air.
“Jackpot,” Lacy said, coming up behind me, studying the stacked metal boxes around the room. “This must be where they keep the goods.”
The space was filled with memories of the pageant world.
I lifted a drop cloth in the corner to find a guitar that had been signed, “To the Rose Palace Pageant, Love Dolly Parton.” Next to it was a large, framed photo of a young Dolly singing her heart out on the pageant stage.
There were a few dresses on wire mannequins, and cutouts of all kinds of people who’d visited the show over the years: movie stars, politicians, singers.
“I could’ve used these for the tent decorations,” Lacy mused, running a hand along Elizabeth Taylor’s cardboard hair.
I tapped my fingers against the lid of one of the black metal storage boxes before I took the one on top, lifted it, and peered inside…
to find a handful of items scattered along the bottom: a Rose Palace cookbook from 1964, charcoal sketches of women in gowns, a sweatshirt with the words We’re All Queens written across the bust.
“That’s a bit…” Lacy started.
“Unimpressive? Unhelpful?” I finished.
We moved to other boxes.
The next one contained stacks of rough-edged file folders from 1982 to 1988 filled with faded receipts and crumbling bank statements.
The box after that had a litany of pageant advertisements, some decent and some downright sexist. You can be pretty or smart at the Rose Palace, one read from 1993. Which one will you choose?
I shook my head as I pushed aside the material and kept searching.
It took me seven boxes until I found what I was looking for, and I almost skipped it because the label read, Misc. I figured the contents would be more of the same, but when I lifted the lid, I almost froze when I realized what I was holding.
“Lacy,” I said, gasping as I thumbed through material harkening back to the 2001 pageant.
Here was the welcome packet, the contestant itinerary, and the program.
The papers had yellowed and the edges were crinkled, but every word was legible.
“Why would they keep an entire box for this one show? And label it as miscellaneous?”
“Maybe they’re planning a whole exhibit around it? To explain what happened to Miss 2001?” Lacy suggested. “It could make for an interesting story.”
“Or maybe they wanted to ensure all of the evidence is in one tidy box that they can get rid of if needed,” I suggested less generously.
I flipped through the program and the alphabetical order of contestants, going straight to the Ps for Peabody, but someone had taken a pair of fine-point scissors to where her name and biographical information should’ve been. This person had excised Cathy Peabody from the pageant.
Lacy came to my side and squatted next to me, taking the program from my hand. “Why would anyone go to such painstaking effort to remove all traces of this woman?”
“A better question might be who would go to such lengths?” In my mind, the likeliest culprit was the runner-up that year: Mrs. Glenda Finch.
“Wait… here’s something.” Lacy handed me Cathy Peabody’s application. “Her address is listed as a PO box in Richmond.”
Richmond was an hour and a half from Aubergine, but the closest large city.
“Which tells us she could’ve been local. Relatively, anyway.”
I set aside the application for now and pulled out sleeve after sleeve of preserved photos of contestants in their gowns and sashes, all of them featuring one person: Dr. James Bellingham, his arm around a woman’s waist or shoulder.
Mr. Finch made an appearance in a few of the photos, including a candid shot in which he wore a blank look, as if someone had caught him unaware.
Another photo had been ripped, effectively decapitating the woman whose sash read Miss 2001, and instead of an arm around her, Dr. Bellingham held her hand like a paramour, their fingers interlaced and woven together.
“Cathy Peabody, I presume.” I held up the image. “Without a head.”
I dropped it next to the stack of pages and reached into the bottom of the box, finding a police report labeled with four words: POI FOUND. CASE DISMISSED.
“What’s a POI?” I asked.
“Person of interest,” Lacy said, without missing a beat. When I looked at her, she shrugged. “I’ve seen SVU.”
“Miss 2001 has been missing for more than two decades, so why would it say she’d been found?
” I mumbled, scanning the page. “Okay, here we go: Cathy Peabody was reported missing at seven a.m. on Sunday, July 8, which was the morning after that year’s pageant.
Found at eleven a.m. on the same day.” I squinted.
“Why would someone report her missing so quickly and why would they—?” I stopped as my eyes fell on the most important piece of information.
“What is it?” Lacy asked when I didn’t finish the sentence.
“She was reported missing because she took something with her.”
“The crown?” Lacy asked, echoing my initial thoughts.
“Yes, but…” I bit my lip. “On July 8, 2001, she also took… four-year-old Savilla Finch.”