The Winding Sheet

By Peggy C Gardner

The dark and twisted past of her ancestor, Octavius Wolfe, ensnares his only living descendant in a web of century-old murders. Desperate to discover the link between recent deaths and the hasty burial of two young girls in her family cemetery, Isabella Wolfe challenges an instrument of death—hanging near her own family tree.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peggy C Gardner
• Release date: Apr 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301088850

Peggy C Gardner

Peggy Gardner began her career as a journalist, taught English Literature, managed medical education, clinics and research for a major hospital, and has traveled extensively with her husband, daughter, and son. She currently resides in Oregon for the incomparable splendor of its coast.

Book preview

A WINDING SHEET

Peggy Gardner

Copyright 2013 Peggy Gardner

All Rights Reserved

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

For my children, my husband, my nieces and nephews, my brothers and sister—and all of my cherished family and friends—who have listened to my stories and encouraged me to continue telling them.

Chapter One

"And what is so intricate, so entangling as death?

Whoever got out of a winding sheet?"

—John Donne

In October, the sandbars hump along the course of the Red River like a sleeping dragon, marking the boundary between Oklahoma and Texas. The river glides through Wolfe County’s lush valleys of post oak, pecan, hickory, mulberry, hackberry, and the leafless redbud trees.

It might have been the voices of those young girls in unmarked graves or simply late fall rains that woke the sleeping serpent and roused him to fury. Water, the color of dried blood, unleashed itself, writhing and convulsing, striking again and again at the steep bank protecting the Wolfe family cemetery.

Yards away from the manicured rose bushes and imposing granite slabs of the Wolfe family cemetery, the thorns of a single Bois d’Arc and the dried plumes of jimson weed drooped protectively over a pale tibia, the foam of the river’s breath wafting it up and down as lovingly as though it might be some live thing.

Wolfe Indian School for Girls

Indian Territory, June 28, 1905

The crescent of a waxing moon hung like a scythe in the sultry June night above the Wolfe Indian School for Girls, a two-story, white-frame antebellum tinderbox where young girls soughed in their troubled sleep. Chickasha, Choctaw, Kiowa, and Ponca dreamed the same dream. And Paul said: But I was free born.

Intent on the destruction of dreams, a sly thread of smoke unfurled from the kitchen, slunk along the baseboards of the dining hall, spiraled up the narrow stairs into a great, greasy cloud, and burst into bright flames alongside the hard cots of two dozen frenzied children.

Not that way! This! The younger sister, Mary, gripped the coarse, white cotton gown of Esther, who scrabbled under the bed, grabbing her watercolor pad and Mary’s notebook. Dragging her sister away from the farthermost doorway—already clogged with girls shrieking in their own forbidden languages—Mary edged along a bank of windows, grabbed the old sash lock of the center one and flung it upward.

The thick, humid, outside air formed a happy union with the turgid air inside, sending oily smoke into Mary’s lungs so that she could barely sputter into Esther’s fearful face. The Wisteria vine. Climb down. I’ll bring our books.

Huddled together against the gnarled roots of an oak tree, Mary and Esther shivered in their skimpy nightgowns as the school billowed in volcanic anger, and then subsided into a series of tender blazes that warmed twenty-four lost children and four fearful teachers who calculated blame with algebraic speed.

Horses, wagons, and buggies arrived all during the night as grateful children flung themselves at thankful parents.

No one came for Mary and Esther. Their Choctaw mother had been seeping into the Oklahoma Territory soil with her favorite pots and beaded moccasins for more than a year. Their sour-breathed father had failed to pay their room and board for two months. He loved his breed daughters. He loved forgetting with whisky more.

A black buggy with more gilt trim than a circus wagon pulled by two massive draft horses spun past the flames of hell and shuddered to a stop a few feet from two silent and frightened girls. They were a study in sepia, like some old photograph hidden in the bottom of a trunk, telling a story too fearful for words.

The obsidian eyes of Octavius Wolfe reflected the dying flames of his school. The whip in his hand thumped against his thick thighs. He nudged Esther with the toe of his boot.

Get into my buggy. Your pa wants me to take you girls to my house for a while. He’s not been well. The gloomy face scowling down at them might have been cast from basalt. The faint odor of sulfur seemed to be coming from Octavius Wolfe—not from the smoldering remains of their school.

Mary’s sharp little nut-brown face watched Octavius Wolfe appraising Esther. She knew that look. It was the same one Papa had when he was choosing which of his heifers might be coming into heat so he could pasture her with the new bull.

Wolfe Family Cemetery, Oklahoma

October 18, 2009

Stay back from the edge! The river is near flood stage! Don’t let me catch one of you near that old cemetery! The Scout Master’s high-pitched warning incited seven boys from Wolfe Flats Troop 23 to dash toward the Red River, swollen with fall rains, for a better view.

Troop 23’s loner, Phineas Simmons, broke left of the pack, his undersized head, peaked as an acorn, bobbed above the tall grass, his oversized calves, plump as a pig’s haunches, churned through a thick stand of bluestem. The Scout Master’s warning to stay away from the Wolfe house and cemetery reverberated in Phineas’ head like an unheeded tardy bell as he plunged up to his chin into the thick, orange clay crevasse of an unmarked grave.

Face to face with an eyeless skull, Phineas seemed to be engaged in a macabre but silent ballet with a jumble of yellowed bones and tatters of calico as he heaved himself helplessly against the slick sides of a rectangular ditch newly trenched by the gravedigger river.

A single, shattering scream rose above the crash and smack of a river out of control. Troop 23 might have acted as a unified rescue team at the edge of the grave had not the howler monkey impulse seized them. Circling the grave with shrieks of laughter as Phineas struggled with a disjointed skeleton, seven scouts ruptured the brisk fall morning and the Scout Master’s patience with their hoots.

Grab his other hand! Pull! Pull! The Scout Master shouted to a group of scouts who seemed to have forgotten the Good Turn Habit.

Crimson and mute, Phineas pulsated as helplessly as a beached fish among a jumble of bones and the thick clay that sucked off two shoes and one knee sock as he was pulled backward toward the low end of the grave, worked open by a tributary of the river.

The wide-eyed boys inched closer to the Scout Master who knelt above Phineas’ rigid form, the eyes locked wide-open, the carotid throbbing like a frightened lizard. He’s OK. Good pulse. In shock. You boys help me carry him to the van. We need to get him to the Health Center. Then, we’ll contact Sheriff Rowen.

Why? It’s just an old grave. One of the boys pointed toward a flock of distant stones, angled backwards against the prevailing winds.

It is an old grave, but it is not in the Wolfe cemetery, and it has no marker. The sheriff needs to be advised. The Scout Master herded a subdued group of boys carrying their silent comrade toward an old van parked on the country road. No one looked behind toward the recently molested grave or the Red River, crimson in its fury, sweeping relentlessly out of its banks.

St. Vincent’s Hospital, Kansas City

October 18, 2009

The glazed eyes and stoic face of the fifteen-year-old in the last stage of labor might have been some Fourth Century Madonna set into a mosaic wall, all passion drained, her past and future fixed into this single moment in time.

Better pay attention to the baby, Dr. Isabella Wolfe reminded herself as she pushed the knees framing the face ahead of her further apart and tenderly cradled the head of an emerging baby. A gentle shower of blood peppered the disposable towels on the floor at the base of the birthing chair.

As swiftly as a rose-speckled trout breaking the water, shoulders, arms, legs and a throbbing umbilical cord slid as a compact but slimy unit of humanity into its first home, St. Vincent Hospital’s OB ward.

It should have been a happy moment. Safe mother. Doting father. It wasn’t. The infant’s first jerky movements and tiny catlike cries sent an obvious message. Get the baby to the NICU. The mother’s drug history—what we have of it when she came in ER—is on her chart. Isabella pushed back her stool, leaving small tracks of blood behind its wheels on the gleaming floor.

Wax is not equivalent to cleanliness despite Sister Ermelda’s belief. Isabella repeated silently to herself as she stripped off her gloves. She motioned the first-year resident toward her stool.

She was already late to ER. No sleep in twenty-four hours and off to another shift in Emergency. The regulatory agency, the infamous RRC, would hang her Family Medicine Program out to dry if it found out. But then, the RRC didn’t have to deal with a virus that seemed fixated on resident physicians this week. Her Chief had asked for help. She couldn’t refuse. Residents never refused service requests. It wasn’t part of the culture. Neither was sleep.

Isabella stood by the perspiring face of her patient, looking into eyes which seemed to register nothing related to the last agonizing hour of bringing new life into an old world. She stroked the side of the teenager’s face. Rachel, your little girl is beautiful but very small. We’ve taken her to neonatal intensive care. You’ll be able to see her and touch her when the nurses get you out of postpartum—I mean when you feel able to get out of bed.

Isabella frowned as she caught herself speaking medicalese to this young girl whose face remained passive, responding only to the sound of her doctor’s voice. Bad habit. Endemic to people in medicine. Postpartum. What could that mean to a teenage girl so spaced out on crack that she may or may not have known that she had just given birth to a baby with God knows what kind of problems caused by her addiction?

The girl’s parched lips moved slightly. I saw her little head. I know you tried to help me. Tears welled into her eyes, but her words were flat, emotionless. I don’t want to see her. You find someone nice to take her.

Isabella nodded, turned and pushed her way out of OB, heading toward the lockers. She tossed her stained scrubs and grabbed clean ones off of the shelf. Not even time for a quick shower.

You find someone nice to take her. Her patient’s words brought back a flood of memories that stopped her short. Isabella had been thirteen when her father, Arthur Wolfe, and her mother, Marta, his German wife, died in a blazing car crash in Kansas City.

The Aunts took her. They were not someone nice. They were aging spinsters, twin sisters, Venetia and Pauline Wolfe, the aunts of her father, two solitary, set-in-their-ways women who took her reluctantly and with a great show of forbearance.

That expression of forbearance, duplicated on the faces of the two women, who stood in the front door of their gingerbread monstrosity of a house when Isabella arrived, confirmed everything that Isabella had grown up hearing about the Aunts.

Arthur’s aunts are from another century, always going on and on about family history and membership in the DAR. I had to get us out of there. That mausoleum of theirs depressed me. You’d think that old ancestor of theirs, that Indian who named the county was royalty. Her mother’s slightly guttural accent gave the words more of a bitter overtone than she might have intended.

Her father’s retorts were always conciliatory toward his wife but carried an edge of pride. Half-Indian. Marta, Wolfe County is Isabella’s history too. Her great-great grandfather, Octavius Wolfe, was a very important person in his day. He owned more land and cattle than anyone within a hundred miles before statehood. He kept a cellar of French wine and acquired an impressive library. Important people traveling through that part of the country always visited his house. It was the showplace of the county.

Marta’s mother swept a lock of raven hair off Isabella’s cheek. I know you miss that place, Arthur. We’ll go for a very short visit one of these days and show the Aunts their beautiful niece. Her flippant manner was a way of dealing with her husband’s ever-present sense of guilt that he had not seen his only aunts in ten years, not since he had walked away with his family after a heated argument when Isabella was three.

Isabella looked out of the hospital window down into an enclosed courtyard with an assortment of chalk deer that would gladden the heart of Bambi. A soggy day. It had been this same kind of overcast morning, that day after her thirteenth birthday, one of those days in which the sky seems to move darkly in the throes of something best described as imminent. Isabella’s parents had rushed out the door, late to an appointment at their bank, shouting something about finalizing the trust and back in an hour.

The hour went on endlessly. While Isabella waited for them, they had moved to another place, moved on violently. Her parents’ car, sideswiped by an unknown driver, had plunged, end over end, down a steep embankment and settled into a small, self-contained inferno.

Even now, almost twenty years later, Isabella’s face froze with the memory of a cremation that she didn’t know was happening—not until a policewoman and social worker knocked on the door and were tediously slow to tell her that life as she had known it had come to an end.

Stopped short by the force of that old memory, Isabella stared down the empty, gleaming hospital hall, at the staff door to the Emergency Department standing ajar. It was strangely quiet just after shift change.

Her cell phone thumped against her pocket. Her husband, Ken. His voice as angry as she knew it would be. Do you get a kick out of never answering my calls? This is the fourth call I’ve made since 6 a.m. I know you got my page. The operator told me it went through.

Bad delivery, Ken. Teenage mother. Crack baby. I couldn’t get away. One of the first years didn’t show up on OB. It’s been a zoo. Isabella’s voice was thin with exhaustion and a few small lies. She had listened to the first one of Ken’s messages, then, ignored the other three.

Your Aunt Pauline’s lawyer is frantic to reach you. He says some uncle of yours, a sheriff, has questions about her death. The lawyer needs to talk to you. For God’s sake, Isabella, answer the phone when I call. That lawyer says you need to contact him immediately. Ken’s voice smoldered with irritation.

You’re not the only one with a bad schedule this week, Isabella. I’m due in surgery in five minutes and I’m just now pulling onto the Interstate. I’ve been on the phone with that lawyer for half an hour, trying to explain why you don’t call him back. You need to call him and get this mess of your aunts’ estate settled. You can’t ignore that money. The cost of my fellowship in Boston will . . . God damn it. Move over you stupid bitch.

Isabella flinched at the anger in her husband’s voice even though it was directed this time to some woman driver who wasn’t performing the way he demanded.

Surgeons were primed for action, expected immediate responses, and were intolerant of anyone who hesitated. It’s just that operating room discipline of medicine, Isabella reminded herself. No, she shook her head ruefully. It was Ken. The darling of overindulgent parents. Top of his class in medical school. Chief in his surgery residency. A perfect charmer who always got what he wanted, just like a puppet master who knows that he controls the stage and the strings. And the puppet—her. Not much more than a year of marriage, and he had no doubt that control was his due.

A small chill went through her body as she recalled the viciousness of their argument two nights earlier about her reluctance to deal with her aunts’ estate in Oklahoma.

Her brief marriage had never seemed to be the sanctuary it should have been. Maybe her natural pessimism kept her prepared for disaster to strike. It did, but slowly and perniciously—the way some liver cancers take over so quietly until the bile pools and pools. You can see it yellowing the whites of the eyes almost before the victim senses an invader.

Like everything with Ken, his change had been a gradual metamorphosis, so carefully orchestrated that it was barely noticeable. Their lives as residents were so busy, so frantic, that there was no time to take stock of things like a marriage growing increasingly troubled.

When the disagreements started, they were so petty that Isabella felt miserably mistrustful of herself. Passion or love or whatever the attraction had been for Ken now felt trapped in her silent anger. Lately, as she purposefully avoided dealing with her aunts’ lawyer, all the warmth, the heartbreaking charm that she could barely remember, had gone out of Ken—his stare was as cold and contemplative as his father’s. That stare was always the signal for Ken’s mother to grovel.

Isabella shifted the phone to her other ear. Groveling was out of the question. I’ll talk to you later, Ken. I’ll call the lawyer—eventually. Her voice fizzled down to a murmur as her finger moved to the end button. The bark of her angry husband reverberated somewhere in cyberspace, somewhere that it could no longer quicken her pulse or bring on an attendant violent headache.

She backtracked away from the ER down the hall toward the call rooms. She could not face another shift without a quick shower. Then, she’d stop by the cafeteria for a jolt of caffeine or she wouldn’t survive the next twelve hours. That sour liquid that masqueraded as coffee in the ER break room wouldn’t do the trick. The ER staff could just wait