Quinn went bloodless with shock.
Cyndy, the Nurse, burst into tears. "She has to be buried in consecrated ground, I don't care what anyone says. "
"Buried in consecrated ground!" said Big Ramona. "All we have of her is some of her hair pulled out of her hairbrush, what are you talking about, Cyndy? Are we going to bury a hairbrush, for the love of Heaven?"
Nash Penfield was so frustrated, I could feel it. I didn't have to read it from his thoughts. He had wanted to take charge for some time, for the sake of everyone. But he felt he had no authority to speak here.
Mona came clicking down the marble-tiled hall and appeared in the door, soberly dressed in a high-neck black dress with long sleeves and tight cuffs and a high hem, and black heels, calves once again flexed magnificently. She took a place to the left of Quinn. Her face was very sweet and serious, the little dissembler.
Everyone looked at her at once, even Jasmine, with a covert turn of her head, but no one knew what to make of it. I refused to even give her a glance. I have excellent peripheral vision.
"When did this ghost appear to you?" I asked at once to distract everyone from Mona and the inevitable questions about her transformation.
"Now tell the story from the start," said earnest and forthright Grady Breen, "as we are dealing with what constitute legal documents. "
"What legal documents?" said Quinn patiently.
"Well," said Big Ramona, moving just a little bit forward in her chair, her dark face very commanding, "I think that everybody present knows that for years the ghost of William Blackwood has appeared often in this very room, p
ointing at that French desk there between the windows, and no one has ever known what
to make of it. Quinn, you saw that ghost plenty times, and Jasmine, you did too. And I have to confess, as God is my witness, so did I, though I always said a Hail Mary and the ghost went away like that, just like pinching out a candle flame. And when we opened up that desk, well, we always found nothing. Just nothing. And we put the key back into the cup in the kitchen, though why we so carefully kept locking up nothing I'm not the one to explain.
"But what you don't know is that right after you took Mona Mayfair out of here, Quinn, that is, right after your mother went missing, leaving all her medicine behind, the ghost started to appear again night and day! I'm telling you, all I had to do was to walk in this room and there was Grandpa William standing there pointing at that desk! And same held true for my grandchild Jasmine. Jasmine, sit up straight!"
(The desk in question was fancy Louis XV, with one central drawer, cabriole legs and much ornate ormolu. )
"Well, finally, Jasmine says to me she just can't stand this any longer, and she couldn't reach Quinn and she couldn't do her work, and neither could I, and then my boy Clem comes in here and even he sees this ghost, and so we decided, well, we were going to search that desk one more time, whether Quinn was here or not to give his permission. But before we had made up our minds that we were going to do this, Jasmine is laying up in the bed asleep with her blessed little boy, Jerome, and up to her window out there comes Patsy, yes, I'm telling you, Patsy, all full of swamp water and crying, 'Jasmine, Jasmine,' and scratching at the glass with her long painted fingernails, and Jasmine grabs up little Jerome and runs out of the house screaming!"
Jasmine nodded furiously, making of herself a tiny ball in my lap.
"Fact was," said Big Ramona, "Jasmine was the only one on this property who was ever kind to Patsy! Except for you, Cyndy, honey, but you didn't live here! And how's Patsy's ghost gonna crawl out of the swamp and find you all the way over in Mapleville? And then we told Grady Breen we were opening that desk, he best come on over here, because it was locked and the key was not in the cup in the kitchen after all these years of that key being in that cup in the kitchen, and we had to use a knife to get the desk open. "
"That makes perfect sense," said Quinn agreeably.
Big Ramona cast her eyes in the direction of Grady Breen, a most respectful man, who now drew from his brown leather briefcase what appeared to be a sheaf of handwritten papers in a clear plastic folder.
"And when we opened the drawer of the desk," Big Ramona proceeded, "what did we find but Patsy's handwritten letters, saying that 'by the time you find this I will be dead,' and then going on to describe how she meant to go out into Sugar Devil Swamp and lean over the edge of the pirogue and shoot herself in the right side of her head so she'd fall in the water, and that not one scrap of her remains would be left to put in the family tomb next to her father on account of her hating him, which we all knew that she did. "
"She was so sick," cried Cyndy, the Nurse. "She was in pain. She didn't know what she was doing, God help her. "
"Yes, indeed," said Grady, "and fortunately, well, no, not fortunately, but, conveniently, well, no, not conveniently, but coincidentally, Patsy had been arrested many times for drug possession and her fingerprints were on file, and so we were able to match up the prints on these pages with her prints, and also this is her handwriting-. " Grady rose and hurried across the room and presented the plastic cache to a stunned and silent Quinn-"and she did write about ten drafts of her letter, as she apparently wasn't satisfied, even with the very last, when she apparently jumped the . . . I mean when she finally decided to go out there and execute her plan. "
Quinn held the packet as though it was about to explode, merely staring at the letter that he could see through the plastic, and then he reached out and laid the packet on the famous haunted desk in which it had been discovered.
He said softly, "That's her handwriting. "
Everybody nodded, mumbled, concurred, the Shed Men murmuring that Patsy was a great one for scribbling notes saying, "Have my van gassed-up right now!" and "Wash my car and do it right," and they knew that that was her writing too.
Then the hefty sheriff, a devoutly ignorant man, cleared his throat and announced: "And then of course we found the conclusive evidence in the pirogue. "
"Which was what?" asked Quinn with a small frown.
"Her hair," said the sheriff, "which matched right up to the hair on her brushes upstairs, and everybody knew Patsy'd never gone out there for any other reason, so it had to be she shot herself out there, 'cause why else would she come to be in the pirogue?"
"You've made a DNA match this quickly?" asked Quinn coldly.
"We didn't have to. Everybody could see it was the same hair all stuck with her hairspray, you could smell it," said the sheriff, "but the DNA will be coming if you mean to bury the strands in that little cemetery of yours where you like to bury things and hold s¨¦ances with big fires and such!"