Chapter 5
I swipe away the hair matting over my eyes and struggle to stand, my senses overwhelmed by being wet and hurt and covered with moistened grandma cremains.
“Diana? Diana!” the shrieking voice continues.
Once I can see more clearly…
Well, it doesn’t help at all.
It’s just me, Doris, and Colonel, who is decidedly not a shrieking woman.
Doris is struggling in the water, flapping her wings, her puffy feathers waterlogged.
“Come here, fool,” I tell her, scooping her up and holding her to my chest.
“I don’t know what the hell happened,” the strange voice continues, sounding panicked and annoyed, “but you’d better put me down.” It sounds like an elderly woman, but there are no women in the area, and Colonel isn’t reacting to the voice at all.
“I say, Miss Wolfe, are you all right?” he calls from his perch at the edge of the pool. “That looked like quite a tumble.”
“Well, for future reference, there’s no cavern behind the falls,” I tell him, sloshing toward land. “Just solid rock. Was my grandmother a practical joker?”
“I would not say that she was. Maybe you need to try a different part of the falls?”
I look back at the pounding water doubtfully.
“Tell him the ashes hit the falls, so it counts,” the voice says.
I reckon I might be losing my mind—maybe the waterfall gave me a concussion, or I inhaled too many cremains—but the voice is making as much sense as anything else right now.
“The ashes got behind the falls. That’s what the will said, right? That they had to go behind the falls?”
Doris tries to fluff herself, but I’m holding her tight as a football as I watch Colonel’s nose scrunch up.
“Well, now, that is true. I suppose there are definitely ashes behind the falls.” He looks down at the murky, gray-coated water with immense distaste. “The ashes are everywhere. I certainly do hope the sheriff doesn’t show up. I wasn’t expecting such a mess.”
“Me neither,” I say.
Satisfied that I’ve done my duty, I carefully step up on the shore.
My jeans and shirt are soaked—every bit of me is soaked—and I’m quickly learning that wet cremains would never work as a beauty treatment.
Maybe I should be more grossed out, but honestly, what’s the point?
Running wild in the neighborhood with my sisters, I learned long ago that dirt and blood both wash off.
This is just a temporary state, and at least I’ve already booked a room at the Magnolia Inn, a local B they just downloaded it off the internet and filled in the blank spaces.
Colonel hands me a weighty silver pen. “Supposed to. Those words don’t mean much, do they? Maggie chose a trust instead of a will because it was imperative to her that her legacy remained in Arcadia Falls. She has paid me to enforce her requirements whether I believe them wise or not.”
I sign on the line because there’s no reason not to.
When you’ve got nothing, pretty much anything is an improvement.
I return Colonel’s pen, and he bustles around, muttering about his assistant being out for the day as he makes a copy for me and then places the signed paper in the file as if it’s precious.
“I’ll file everything for you, go through all the proper motions, but as far as I’m concerned, you are now the sole beneficiary of all your grandmother’s holdings.
Should you wish to divide them up with your sisters, I can handle that for you legally, and if you’d rather rent out the spaces, I can help with that, too.
Any money you spend improving the properties, whether to occupy them yourself or rent them, must be reported to me with receipts, but I’m here most business days from nine until five. ”
“And that’s it? That’s all there is?”
“Everything in her apartment is yours now. You would’ve had her old truck, but I’m afraid there was nothing left but scrap.
Drunk drivers on these roads, I swear.” He shakes his head sadly.
“I understand Maggie has an account at the bank up the street, so they can help you sort that out. In any case, welcome to Arcadia Falls.” His smile is genuine, his eye twinkling.
“I do hope you’ll enjoy it here. Your family has always been part of this place, and I pray it will continue that way. ”
He slides a battered leather key ring across the desk, and there must be at least two dozen keys of all shapes and sizes on it.
“Do all of these keys go to something?”
He stands, struggling into his blazer. “Not a clue, darlin’.
The stairs up to the apartment are out back in the alley.
The parking spaces are marked. Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t know much.
A very private woman, your grandmother. I’ve never even been upstairs, so I have no idea what condition it’s in.
” He holds open the door and seems to relax a little once I’m dripping on his porch instead of his rug. “Just one more thing.”
Colonel locks his office door and looks suspiciously from side to side like he’s expecting someone to pop out from behind the shady fig tree.
“Your grandmother was tough and feisty,” he whispers.
“I’m not sure what happened, but the town seemed to turn on her a while back—some families, at least. No one would tell me why.
You might encounter some unfriendliness when the locals find out who you are.
Not that I would know, as I’m not a gossip, but just…
” He smooths back his white hair. “Just watch out, is all I’m saying. ”
With that, he gives me a jaunty nod, gets in his car, and drives away before I can drip on anything else of value, leaving me alone in his parking lot with a moist bird and a soggy butt.
“Well, that was strange,” I mutter to myself as I head for my car.
“It certainly was,” someone says—that same female voice from the waterfall.
I look around, and there isn’t another human being anywhere near us.
This is…too much.
I slam into my car seat, shut and lock the door, and put Doris’s backpack on the passenger side.
“Who keeps talking to me?” I say to my empty car.
“Come on, girl. You’ve got to be smarter than this.”
I look over and Doris is staring at me through the mesh panel of the backpack, her red eyes blinking expectantly like she knows I have popcorn and is hoping for a handful.