Page 35 of X-Ray in the Xanth (Lovely Lethal Gardens Rewind #3)

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M ack groaned. “Doreen, you can’t just stay at home. Everybody wants answers.”

“They can have answers as soon as I get them.”

“You said gotcha and then raced out of the office,” Mack said in frustration. “I don’t believe that you’re being theatrical on purpose, but people need to know what’s going on.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” she told him.

“So, are you not exactly sure? I mean, what was that gotcha if you didn’t have it all figured out?”

“The gotcha was that I had guessed right,” she explained.

“The gotcha was because I’m on the path.

I just don’t quite have the right answers yet.

That’s the problem. I want to get those answers before I have to explain to everybody what’s going on.

Now,” she added, with a snort, “we have a last name. Can you check to see if there happens to be an Eli who’s alive? ”

“An Eli Woodstock?” Mack asked.

“Well, his Grandmother was a Woodstock…”

Then Mack cursed.

“Now what?” she asked.

“What if the mother didn’t die of cancer and actually remarried?”

“Yes, that could work too.”

“Yes, let me check to see what I can rustle up.” He groaned. “I want answers, and I want them fast.”

“Me too,” she muttered, “and I know time’s running out.”

“No, time’s not really running out,” he argued. “I highly doubt anybody else will die in this. However, we already have the two bodies, Eli and his sister. So what about the senator’s daughter?”

“This apparently doesn’t have anything to do with her,” she conceded. “I was wrong on that.”

“Okay, because the captain will make that case a priority.”

“He can make it a priority after we solve this one,” she muttered.

Mack snorted. “You know it doesn’t work like that, right? He’s got people to keep happy, and senators tend to come above the common folk.”

“They shouldn’t,” she snapped.

“Easy now,” he muttered. “I know that you’re getting stressed out, and I need to know that you’re okay.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m okay, but something is going on here, something I don’t understand, and it involves all of them.”

“All three of them? Meaning all three Woodstocks, the old man, his wife, and Meghan, who isn’t related to those two?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m just not sure how.”

“Okay,” he said, “I will do some research, and I’ll get back to you.” Then he ended the call.

She smiled, then sent him a text. Thank you. And she added a heart emoji.

He sent back a thumbs-up, and she figured that meant he was still pissed at her. But, being Mack, he wouldn’t hold it against her. There was a lot to be said about a man who could move when circumstances required it, and that was definitely him.

As she sat here, going through as much of the internet as she could, she needed Nan’s help. “Nan,” she greeted her grandmother, as soon as she picked up the phone. “Do you know anybody down on the coast?”

“No, I sure don’t,” she muttered. “Why?”

“I just wondered if you knew any Woodstocks down that way.”

“No, I sure don’t. You still haven’t figured it out?”

She frowned. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Nan replied cautiously.

“I know you didn’t,” she muttered. “I’m just feeling the pressure on this one.”

“Just relax. Nobody is expecting you to have this solved today.”

As Doreen ended the call, it felt exactly as if she was expected to have it solved today. And that was a problem. She groaned as she looked around her small kitchen, until her gaze landed on Solomon’s files again.

She got up and headed over to them. even though she had written the summaries, that didn’t mean that she hadn’t missed something in all of them. As a matter of fact, she could quite easily have missed quite a bunch.

It was an odd thing to see so many files.

She knew that she had put so many in order, but what if she had put something back maybe not quite right.

She frowned as she stared at the pile of boxes and then pulled out her printed copy of all the file summaries.

Something could be there—something had to be there.

Then she went back to the internet and looked for a visual of these people.

She didn’t have anything for Eli or his sister and couldn’t for the life of her come up with a picture of the mother or the grandmother.

She frowned and called the library. Thankfully she got the librarian she absolutely loved and asked, “Is there any way to get an image of somebody who would have worked at one of the mental health homes or would have been a patient there, over the last thirty years?”

“You could always talk to them about their archives,” she suggested. “Images would not be that good necessarily because they probably have been scanned in.”

“Right,” Doreen noted. “And scanning archives is definitely what they might have done, I guess.”

“Absolutely.”

“It’s hard enough for anybody to handle that level of scanning without it being a professional company.”

The librarian pointed out, “It’s been a long time ago, and nobody’s likely to have any of that information. Plus, that kind of medical data is probably confidential, even down to photographs of patients. Don’t quote me though.”

“ Right . What about locals? What about the hospitals? What about…”

“Whoa, whoa. Who is it that you’re looking for?”

“A picture of Eli Woodstock, potentially Woodstock. His mother was born as a Woodstock, and I don’t know what her married name would have been. Mack is doing some research on that for me right now.”

The librarian pondered that. “A bunch of Woodstocks were in town here.”

“I know, and short of hitting the phone books and individually dialing every one of them,” Doreen noted, “I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do.”

“Did you check the marriage registration?”

“Do you have that there?”

“Sure, I do. Come on down.”

And, with that, Doreen raced out of the house, with Mugs barking as she closed the door behind her and bolted down to the library.

“That was fast,” the librarian noted, as Doreen raced in.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know why, but I just feel as if an awful lot is riding on this.”

“In that case,” she added, “you’ll be happy to know that, while you were getting down here, in the whole three minutes I had, I did find a Glenda who married a Woodstock, and then they had two children, of which Mary was one, and Mary married a Blackwell.”

“Blackwell.”

“Yes, but I don’t know if there are any relationships to Blackwells anywhere else.”

Doreen muttered, “Blackwell, Blackwell. So, do you have any details on who the husband is?”

“Yes, he’s here,” she said. “That’s what you were missing, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Doreen replied. “I was just missing the name.”

“So, he was a Blackwell, Cody Blackwell,” she muttered, checking the files and then whistled. “And that marriage was,… ooh, that was a long time ago, in 1976.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“And they had,… let me keep looking here for children born of the marriage,” she said, sifting through more files.

“That’ll be under the birth registries. Here it is,” she said.

“There’s the son, who is Eli,” she noted, with a nod, “and a daughter born a few years later, and her name was Hope. Hope, huh ? Nobody ever talks about Hope,” she noted.

“Nobody ever talks about any of them from what I can determine,” Doreen pointed out. “It seems as if the family was just unlucky, time and time again.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the daughter also appeared to have been sick,” Doreen added.

The librarian sighed. “Not a brain tumor issue too?”

“Yes, I think so,” Doreen confirmed. “Eli was extremely tall and in a wheelchair for most of the time. After a car accident, I guess, he ended up with badly broken legs that didn’t heal.

He had some endocrine disorder discovered when his legs wouldn’t heal, and that’s when they found the brain tumor as well. ”

The librarian looked at her and muttered, “That’s hardly fair, is it? He’s suffered so much only to have that also be a part of his world.”

“I know,” Doreen agreed. “It’s been a very strange case.”

“They all are,” she murmured, “but it never seems to matter.”

“I couldn’t find any obits on them.”

“But now you have the last name.”

“Right,” Doreen agreed, pulling it up and sending a picture of it to Mack. Then she sent him a text, asking for anything on other Woodstock or Blackwell deaths.

He phoned her back and said, “Just because we have last names now doesn’t mean I can get information that quickly. I’ll check to see what we have under the DMV under those names, but I would need a little bit more information to confirm.”

“Yeah, the information will be in the grave,” she said.

First came silence on the other end. “You want to explain that?” he asked.

“Unfortunately I have a really ugly idea of what’s going on,” she replied.

“And I hate to say it, but I have to run.” She looked back at the librarian.

“Thanks a lot.” And, with that, Doreen bolted home again.

There she grabbed all the animals. “I don’t even know why I need you to come, except for the fact that it feels very much as if I need the talisman of having you around. ”

Thaddeus cried out, “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.”

She laughed. “Exactly. Maybe that’s all I need. Maybe you’re my good luck charms,” she murmured.

As she stepped outside, Mack was pulling up. She glared at him, and he glared right back.

“Wherever you’re going, I’m coming too.” He smiled as he saw the animals. “And I’m really glad you thought to bring them.”

“I am to,” she said in exasperation. “At this point in time, it feels as if they’re my good luck charm.”

“They probably are,” he agreed, “so hop in.”

She sighed. “You won’t be very happy with me.”

“What else is new?” he asked, with a laugh. “Your methods are unreasonable at best and crazy at the very least, but you do tend to get results. And when the captain heard me yelling at you to stop, he told me to go get you.”

“Go get me, or go help me?”

“Same diff in his world.” Mack laughed. “So here I am. Now, where are we going?”

“Back to the park.”

“Of course we are,” he grumbled. “Do you care to explain just what it is you think is going on?”

She sighed. “Since all the Woodstocks worked at Sky Manor, I think the old man found Eli after he fell out of his wheelchair. Or maybe the old guy was trying to move Eli and lost his hold on him, and Eli fell to his death. So I think the old guy feels guilty about Eli dying, but I don’t think he actually killed him.

However,… his wife probably knew where her husband buried Eli.

In fact, she may have helped Welford carry the body to the park. ”

“And the sister?” Mack asked.

“I haven’t worked that out yet. She could have just showed up at Sky Manor to visit Eli out of the blue, obviously after his death. Which led to her own. But…”

“But what?” Mack asked.

“I don’t think the old man knew the sister was buried with her brother.”

“So who killed the sister?”

Doreen groaned. “I’m working on that still.”

The closer and closer they got to the park, she started to pivot and twist uneasily.

“What is wrong with you?” he cried out in exasperation.

She turned to him and asked, “Could you please go to another address instead?”

He glanced at her, catching the expression of horror on her face, and pulled out from where he was about to park and asked, “It’s not very far from here, is it?”

“No, but I think it’s probably already too far.”

He shot her a look and turned on his siren. As soon as they got there, she bolted out of his truck, raced up to the front door, and knocked and knocked and knocked. She looked back at Mack. “Can we just go in?”

“If we have a reason to suspect that there’s a problem.”

“We do,” she declared.

With that, he just shrugged, and, stepping back, he kicked in the door.

She raced in. “Meghan, Meghan, are you here?” she cried out, “Meghan?” She raced up to the bedroom, and there on the bed, a blanket over her and her hands folded on her chest, as if she had just laid down to rest, was Meghan. Doreen approached her cautiously. “Meghan, are you okay?”

Mack strode straight forward, pressed two fingers against her neck, looked over at Doreen, and shook his head.

She looked up at him and whispered, “I was too late. I just didn’t get it in time.”

“Easy, easy, easy,” he muttered, as he looked around. “Are you telling me that this is not a natural death?”

“No, it’s not a natural death,” she said sadly. “It’s definitely not.”

He groaned. “Let me bring in the team. You are not going anywhere.”

She nodded. “I’m not going anywhere. And, when I do go somewhere, I’m going with you.” He looked at her, and she nodded. “I know the drill.”

His lips twitched, and he nodded. “This is serious. We need answers.”

“I know it is,” she whispered. “And sometimes, sometimes that’s all we ever have and what we can’t get.”