“Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed, and then put both hands over her mouth for a moment. “You absolutely have to be a Lee!”
Chapter 11
Stanley was right—my face was a pretty good passport here in Riverton.
“A distant cousin of Miss Annabel Lee.” I offered my hand. “Meg Langslow.”
“Anne Murphy,” she said, shaking my hand with enthusiasm. “Call me Anne. I knew it as soon as I saw you. You do favor her a bit. And you’re a dead ringer for her late cousin, poor Ms. Delia, when she was younger.”
“So I gathered,” I said. “I’ll have to take your word for it. I never met Delia.”
“What a pity,” she said. “If you and Miss Annabel are related on her father’s side, then Ms. Delia would also have been a cousin. Her father and Judge Lee, Annabel’s father, were brothers, and the judge raised Ms. Delia after her father died when she was still in grade school.”
Strange and rather frustrating that almost any citizen of Riverton knew more about my grandmother’s life than I did. Then again, Anne was a librarian, and thus possessed of almost mysterious powers of information gathering, so she didn’t count as just any citizen.
“I’m hoping to find out all about that,” I said. “So far I’ve only just got my foot in the front door.”
Anne was frowning in puzzlement.
“Long story,” I said. “Our branches of the family lost touch decades ago, and I’m trying to reestablish cordial relations. Which isn’t easy with someone I’m told is the town recluse.”
“Oh, my, yes.” Anne was shaking her head sympathetically. “Your project would have been so much easier when Ms. Delia was alive.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m very worried that I’ll offend Miss Annabel and have the door permanently slammed on my genealogy research. Frankly, I’m looking for someone who can tell me a little more about my cousins. Help me avoid putting my foot in my mouth again.”
“Again?” Anne raised one eyebrow in interrogation.
“I almost sank the whole project from the start by wishing her neighbor a good morning as I passed him,” I said. “I was just trying to be mannerly, but I gather they don’t get on.”
“Mr. Weaver?” Anne’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, my goodness, no. Not at all. They’ve been bitter enemies for years. It all started not quite twenty years ago when Mr. Weaver chopped down Miss Annabel’s mulberry tree.”
Clearly I’d come to the right place.
“Chopped it down?” I asked. “Why?”
“It was a big old red mulberry tree, thirty feet high and almost as wide,” she said. “Shaded the south side of the yard so well that they got along fine without air conditioning until well into the sixties. It was on the Lee family side of the property line, but at least half of the fruit fell in Mr. Weaver’s yard.”
“Ah,” I said. “Very messy fruit, mulberries. Not the sort of thing he’d want on that super-tidy lawn of his.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Mr. Weaver had just moved in, and he didn’t like the mess. Asked old Judge Lee to chop the tree down. Which the judge ignored. They sniped back and forth for some months, and then the judge died, and before he was cold in the grave, Mr. Weaver up and hired a tree company to chop down the mulberry.”
“I’m surprised any local company would do it,” I said. “Wouldn’t everyone around here know they were stepping in the middle of a feud? Not to mention the fact that he had no legal right to do it?”
“He hired an out-of-town firm.” She pronounced “out of town” as if it were something rather worse than “bloodsucking insectoids from outer space” and almost as bad as “damned Yankee.”
“What did Miss Annabel do?”
“Miss Annabel wouldn’t have done anything,” she said. “Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, poor thing. But Miss Delia was in town for the funeral and stayed over to help. You should have seen how she went after Mr. Weaver!”
“Good!”
“She sued him and the tree-cutting firm, and tried to get them both arrested for trespassing and destruction of property and I don’t know what else,” Anne said. “And in Judge Lee’s time, Mr. Weaver would never have gotten away with it.”
“But he did?”
“The chief of police was a friend of his,” Anne said. “Chief Heedles—father of the present chief. Mr. Weaver swore up and down that before he died, Judge Lee gave him verbal permission to cut down the tree. He couldn’t prove it, but then no one could disprove it, either. And he offered to pay for planting a new tree to replace the one he’d cut down, and the chief wouldn’t do anything. Told the ladies to have a new tree planted and send Mr. Weaver the bill and be done with it.”