Read Online A Brilliant Death by Robin Yocum - Free Book Online Page B

seeing it as the ultimate test of my manhood. And I had indeed passed. I was a gladiator, a fearless warrior whose incredible courage had enabled him to return home after a great battle. I had been tested, and in my mind’s eye I was better for the experience. It was amusing that I viewed myself as some kind of stouthearted war hero—Sir Mitchell the Bold—when, of course, I had been scared totally witless.
    The collection of literature and baubles that we had mined in the attic were keeping Travis busy, so he was not causing me much discomfort with Operation Amanda. For a while, I assumed that he had learned all that he wanted about his mother. He had located a photo, her diary, and newspaper clippings. This, of course, was not going to settle the mystery of her death, but I believed that was beyond our reach.
    Travis made regular trips to the cemetery to visit the memorial garden erected in his mom’s memory, dragging me along with him more often than not. At least once a month we would find fresh flowers placed within the semicircle of granite benches or lying on the inscribed stone. During a Saturday morning visit in December we found the snow had been brushed from the stone and a pair of men’s boot prints led to and from the grave. It had stopped snowing at eight o’clock the previous night, so whoever had visited the grave had done so under the cover of night. The prints obviously didn’t belong to Big Frank, and Travis found it quite perplexing that someone was making regular visits to what amounted to his mother’s grave.
    “What if the guy she was out on the boat with lived and swam to shore, but she drowned?” Travis asked during one wintry visit to the memorial.
    I nodded. “That’s possible. He feels guilty or he’s still in love, so he keeps bringing flowers to her memorial? I like that theory.”
    “But who could it be?”
    “I don’t know, Trav.”
    “It’s not Big Frank, so who else would care?”
    I looked at him and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “Is it you? Are you just doing this to screw with me?”
    He was serious, and I could feel my left eye start to twitch at the accusation. “You know, every once in a while your train goes completely off the tracks. Be serious, Travis, you know I wouldn’t do that. Besides, I’m only a nine-and-a-half. Those boot prints in the snow were at least size thirteens.”
    Travis squinted and rubbed his chin. “I wonder what size shoe Clark Gable wears?”
    “Clark Gable is dead.”
    “Oh sure, that’s what they want us to believe.” He laughed. “Look, when the weather breaks, we’re going to camp out at the cemetery and try to catch the person putting flowers on the grave.”
    I had never cared for camping out and cemeteries gave me the willies, so there was nothing about this idea that appealed to me. I never joined the Boy Scouts because I didn’t like camping and soggy sleeping bags, and I was deathly afraid of and highly allergic to poison ivy, which I assumed lurked everywhere around the cemetery, along with all the tortured souls whose spirits roamed the hills each night.
    In the meantime, I remained the guardian of the attic treasures, making them available to Travis whenever Big Frank was out of town. He would take the diary or a stack of letters back to his house, where he was transcribing them into some kind of notebook. He had asked me not to look at the letters or the diary, which I had no intention of doing. I wanted no part of the information inside that box. I didn’t know what intimate thoughts had been written, but I considered them too private for my eyes. It made me nervous just having the stuff tucked deep in my closet behind shoeboxes of baseball cards and my collection of Matchbox cars.
    Travis, however, shared bits of the information with me. His mother, the former Amanda Virdon, had met Frank when he was in the Navy and stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father, a career Navy man, was also stationed in Norfolk. She