Killing Cousins (20 page)

It rained a steady downpour of big warm drops. If I could have analyzed the raindrops, I would have sworn that they were gray. The sky was gray, my mood was gray, the world was gray. Only the gentle rustle of the trees reminded me that maybe not everything was gray in this bleak void.

I stood at the freshly dug grave of Byron Lee Finch with a single white rose in my hand. The rain pelted off the many umbrellas around me. Rudy held ours above us. Rachel held her smiley-face umbrella over herself and Mary. Aurora and Cecily were both in attendance, as were Hugh Danvers and Lanna Petrovic. The governor had managed to plead previous engagements as her reason for not showing.

The sheriff and my mother were in attendance, located right next to Rachel and Mary. Sylvia was there too, on my left, stoic as concrete. Father Bingham said his “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing and then “Amen.”

One by one, my family and the townspeople left. One by one, the reporters all left.

I remained. And I wept.

I'm not sure why I cried. I guess I cried for poor little Byron. He hadn't meant for all of this to happen. He was just an innocent baby sound asleep in his bed, and then carried through the woods, and then he was dead. I cried for his sisters, who had never wanted anything to happen to him. They just wanted to see the miraculous appearance of a fairy. They wanted to see the thing they'd read about and been told about by their mother. In a sense, it was for her approval that they had begun the adventure in the first place.

I cried for the other four children who had lost their innocence that night. With a flash of lightning, a life without nightmares was gone. They would never sleep soundly, they would never feel guiltless again.

I cried for Catherine, who had lost a child, the thing that had spurred me to solve this mystery in the first place. And I cried for Sylvia and Wilma, who had kept a secret all those years. I wasn't sure if what they'd done was good or bad. Mostly, I wept for Aurora and Cecily, though. In a sense, they had lost their brother
and
their mother on that night. But I think the real reason I cried for them was because they had never really had their mother in the first place. I could not imagine having a favorite to that degree. Oh, sure, I may like the way Rachel handles a situation better than Mary, but Mary always rebounds and makes me laugh at something so goofy that Rachel could never manage. I couldn't imagine giving birth to three children and only living for one.

Catherine Finch had been so cruel in that sense that I'm not sure she ever really knew what she had lost. That was the saddest thing of all.

“Torie?” a voice said.

I turned to find my husband Rudy standing in the rain. He'd left me the umbrella, and so he was nearly soaked. “Are you going to stand here all day?”

“I think I might,” I said.

He walked over to me and gave me a big hug, getting me wet in the process. “Okay, what is it? There's something you're not telling me.”

“I don't mean for there to be something.”

“Come on, tell me. What are husbands for?” he said. I looked up into his chocolate-brown eyes and smiled.

“If I tell you, then there's two of us who know,” I said.

“Who know what?”

“Are you sure you can handle it?”

“Bullets bounce off my chest,” he said, sticking his chest way out.

I explained to him, as best as I could, about Wilma, and how Sylvia and I suspected that Wilma had been the one to poison Patrick. He listened intently until I was finished. “I don't know what to say,” he declared. “Wilma can hardly be held accountable. We all know she wasn't in her right mind.”

“Sylvia said that for days after Patrick visited, she'd find Wilma saying things like ‘We must protect the children. Nobody can know.' It's pretty obvious that she didn't understand that they weren't children any longer. She'd lived with that secret for so long…”

“Remember that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“If you have any secrets, when you're old and senile you may start confessing to things you don't want me to know about,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah, but by then you'll be so old and senile, you'll forget whatever it was I confessed to you five seconds after I confessed to it,” I said. We laughed together, and I felt a little better. Which was what Rudy did best. He always made me feel better. Well, there were times when I could just strangle him, but then again I wasn't always an angel, either, so I should just forget about those times.

“What are you going to do?” he asked finally.

“About Wilma?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you going to tell anybody? I mean, technically, Sylvia knew. She was an accomplice.”

“That's the strange thing, Rudy. I finally know what it's like to be the one with information that others want. And I love the person too much to tell the truth. Is that bad?” I asked.

“Wilma's gone. No justice can be done now. So let it go,” he said. “And so far as Sylvia knowing about Byron, there really was no crime committed. It's not like she was harboring a murderer all these years. Besides, what could they do to her, besides ruin her name?”

I looked down at the little pile of dirt.

“I should still tell the sheriff,” I said. “It's really up to him to decide if anything should be done. Not me.”

“What?” He felt my forehead. “Torie, are you feeling all right?”

“I just feel funny keeping it from him,” I said.

“Because he's your stepfather now?”

“No,” I said. “Because he's my sheriff.”

“Where are we going?” Sheriff Brooke asked from the passenger side of my van.

“We're going to Aurora's house,” I said. “To give her those boxes.” I pointed to the boxes that I had stacked in the very backseat of the van.

It was a week after the funeral of Byron Finch. The sun was shining but it was starting to get cool. Autumn would set in in full force in about three weeks. My favorite time of year.

“So, what am I giving her?” he asked.

“All the photographs I could find. You know, her and Cecily's baby pictures were still in the albums. I thought they'd appreciate them.”

“All of those boxes have photographs?”

“No, there's a set of china, a tea set, some jewelry—oh, darn it,” I said.

“What?”

“I keep forgetting to call that guy about the necklace. I've never found anything resembling the necklace that he asked about,” I said. “Probably just a rumor.”

“I wish it had been true. I might have been able to retire,” he said.

“Or at least make another trip to Alaska,” I said.

“Oh, no. I promised your mother that our next trip would be back to West Virginia. She wants to see her homeland,” he said.

“That's sweet,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and wondered if there would ever be a point in time when he wouldn't irritate me, even just a little. “I thought maybe you could give them the two big oil paintings in the house, too. And if they make a special request, you might consider giving—”

“You're going to bankrupt me,” he said.

“It's the right thing to do.”

He nodded.

“Speaking of the right thing to do,” I said.

“Uh-oh.”

“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up, okay? I'm trying to do something here and it's hard.”

“If it helps you any, I'll meet you halfway,” he said. He placed his hands on his chest and cleared his throat. “I'm sorry about…well, you know. Throwing you in Bertha. You're an okay kid, but, well, you just irritate the hell out of me most of the time. That's all. I know you mean well.”

“My mother put you up to that, didn't she?”

“No, she didn't.”

“Oh, yes, she did,” I said, smiling and pointing at him.

“No, she didn't. Now what was it you were going to tell me?”

“Sylvia and Wilma knew where Byron Finch was the whole time. The kids confessed to Wilma, because they knew she'd help them. She was the only grown-up they could trust. Wilma told Sylvia, and neither one of them ever did anything about it.”

I looked over at him, and his mouth was open. “You're kidding,” he said.

“No, I'm not. And there's more.”

“There's more?”

“Sylvia said that she agreed with Wilma. That if Catherine had known that the children had been involved, it would have been far worse. Byron, evidently, was Catherine's favorite and everybody knew it. I mean, he was the favorite to the point of the other children barely existing in her eyes,” I said.

“Oh, jeez.”

“I'm going to tell you the next part only because I think it's the right thing to do. It seems Wilma and Sylvia were the last people to see Patrick Ward alive,” I said.

“Oh, jeez!”

“Hope lied to you. Patrick was going out to the Yates house to finally remove Byron from his prison and expose them all. He was tired of the lies, and wanted the truth out. Especially when he realized that Hope was going to try and climb all the way to the top of the political ladder. In a way, he would be doing her a favor. Imagine if she became President and then the truth came out,” I said. “But I think he was doing it more for himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was coming to the end of his life, too. He was in his late sixties and he knew his time on this planet was getting short. I think maybe he thought if he was the one to break the silence and make things right, that maybe Saint Peter might think so, too. If you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah…I do.”

I turned onto Aurora's street and parked in front of her house. I turned the engine off and stared at the sheriff. “Sylvia said that Wilma acted very funny for days after Patrick was there. That she kept talking about having to protect the children. I just wanted you to know, because I think it's up to you to decide what to do about it.”

“What?” he asked and grabbed his heart. “You mean, you don't think it's your business to decide the fate of our law-breaking citizens? When did this revelation occur?”

“Don't be an ass, Colin. I loved Wilma, almost as much as I do my own grandmother,” I said. “That's the great thing about a small town. It's as if everybody is related to one another. I'm lucky to have such a large extended family.”

He said nothing. We both looked up at the house of Aurora Guelders.

“You're no fun when you're all serious,” he said.

“Well, you're never any fun.”

“So what do you think I should do about this?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“I value your opinion.”

Since when? “I would do nothing. But then I'm very close to the subject. I think that keeping the secret all those years was wrong on one hand, but on the other…I don't know. And if Wilma did do something to Patrick—”

“Do something? You mean kill him, don't you?”

“If she did kill him, you can never prove it. And I don't think she was fully in her right mind, anyway. She was a sweet, sweet woman,” I said. “In her right mind, she would never have committed murder. I believe that.”

“Well,” he said after a long pause. “We'll never know, will we? Wilma's gone. And with her went the truth.”

“What if she didn't do it? Then Patrick Ward's killer is still out there,” I said.

“That's the problem with you, Torie. You're too critical. Sometimes you don't win them all. Sometimes, cases go unsolved. And sometimes, believe it or not, some cases are better not solved,” he said.

I appreciated his words, more than he would ever know. Basically, because I would never tell him. “Let's get this stuff unloaded,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“By the way,” I said. “Rudy told me that you found out who had been trying to scare me that night in Catherine's house. Who was it?”

“No surprise, really. It was Hugh Danvers. Some of the cousins were worried about what you were going to find in the house. Hugh thought if he could scare you, maybe you wouldn't go back. The silly thing is, eventually I would have gone through all of Catherine's things, and what if
I
had found the blanket?” he asked. “I'm convinced that if people really thought their actions through, they'd never do most of them. But people don't think. They think they're thinking, but they're not. They're thinking from a biased position. What's best for
them
.”

“So, are you going to do anything about it? How'd you find out, anyway?”

“After the funeral he confessed it to me. I'm not going to do anything about it. Unless you want me to,” he said. “It was you who he was scaring.”

“No,” I said. “There was no harm done, really. He was scared.”

“I figured you'd say that,” he said.

We got out of the van and walked around to the back. I looked up at Aurora's house and wondered what sort of reception we would get. This was my peace offering to her. I hoped she would forgive me.

“So, when are you going to make me a bona fide deputy?” I asked as I unlocked the door.

“When hell freezes over.”

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The Gaheimer House is one of the oldest houses in New Kassel, dating back to the mid-1860s,” I said. I was back to giving tours of the house, and I could finally fit into all seven of the reproduction dresses that my boss, Sylvia, had made for me several years ago when I started this job. I wish I could say that having a baby last year had added the extra pounds to my rather short frame, but it really hadn't. It wasn't my son's fault that I had eaten too much and reduced my exercising to chasing my chickens around the backyard. No, it was mine. All mine.

But a year later and about thirty pounds lighter, I could fit into the reproduction dresses and was giving tours twice a day. I wore my favorite, the 1870s deep blue polonaise gown with an open front that revealed an underskirt of the same color. It was trimmed with chenille-ball fringe in a deeper, almost navy blue.

I moved the tour of about eleven people into the dining room, my stiff and itchy crinolette swishing as I went. “For those of you who aren't from the eastern Missouri area, New Kassel was founded by a group of German immigrants in the 1830s. The Mississippi River was an excellent way of importing and exporting, and the town was located not too far from the Missouri River junction. The Missouri River is important because before the great railroads were built west of the Mississippi, the Missouri was the main route west. Unless you went by wagon.”

On this particular tour, I had a young couple with twin girls, an elderly couple, a threesome of mid-forties women, an ancient-looking man who could have passed for a midwestern version of Rasputin, and a solitary female about thirty.

“I want to remind everybody as we enter this lovely room filled with delicate china and silver that all of the items in the Gaheimer House are antiques, so we ask that you refrain from touching them,” I said, more for the couple with the twin girls than for anybody else. I'm the mother of three kids; I know how things accidentally get broken. Kids are great. I had been thoroughly amazed at how much I could love a little creature when Rachel was first born, but that didn't change the fact that kids live to touch things expensive, old, or irreplaceable. And if the twins on this tour were anything like my middle child, Mary, something would get broken.

“The wainscoting that you see here is made of sycamore. Mr. Gaheimer went to Connecticut on business in the late 1880s and brought back this dining table, which seats twelve. If you'll notice, the chandelier matches the gilt convex mirror….”

I could say this stuff in my sleep. I've been doing this for almost ten years. I'm also the archivist for the town, compiling things like marriage and land records for Granite County. Sometimes I even write biographies, and I'm usually the one in charge of any displays we put up, as well. I know this town inside and out, and I know the job inside and out. Every now and then, though, if something distracts me, I forget my monologue and end up staring out at the tourists, stammering and stuttering. Just like today.

The solitary female, whom I mentioned before, was staring back at me. Not staring at me like you'd expect someone might when listening to a tour guide, but
really
staring at me. She was about my height, maybe an inch taller, and had brown hair and hazel eyes. Something about those hazel eyes disturbed me, beyond the fact that they were boring through me as if she were trying to read my soul. There was a…familiarity, but I couldn't place it. Dark lashes and eyebrows stood out against her rather pale face. She hung on my every word, my every gesture. And soon it became very difficult for me to speak.

“And uh…um, this punch bowl at the end of the room was a gift from…from…” Who was it a gift from? I couldn't remember.

“Torie,” somebody said.

“No, not Torie. Susan B. Anthony, that's it!”

“Torie,” the voice said, more persistent now. I snapped out of my stupor and realized that
my
name was Torie and somebody was calling me.

“What?” I looked over to the entrance, where I saw my boss, Sylvia Pershing, standing there. Sylvia must be close to a hundred by now. Of course, I've been saying that for the last twenty years. I just knew that she was old when I was a kid, and now she seems immortal. She's thin, frail, bony, and full of piss and vinegar. She has never cut her silver hair in her life, and she braids it into twin braids every morning and wraps them around her head. She is the president of the Historical Society, where I am employed, and she owns half of the town, including the Gaheimer House. Her sister Wilma died last year, and Sylvia has not been quite the same since. She can still do more than half of the people in the town, and she can still cut you with her razor-sharp tongue, but it's as if she doesn't enjoy it anymore.

“Yes, Sylvia…what is it?”

“I hate to interrupt the tour, but when you're finished, you need to call the school,” she said with a slight tremor caused by age.

“Oh, all right,” I said. I resumed the tour, wondering just what Mary had done that would require me to go and bail her out. The rest of the tour went much like the first part had, with me stumbling over words and finding myself stealing glances at the woman staring at me. I found myself doing things like wiping at my nose to make sure there were no errant boogers, and cleaning my teeth with my tongue. I mean, was there something gross about me? What was her problem?

Finally, the tour was over. I headed down to my office as fast as I could. I put sixty cents in the soda machine, got a Dr Pepper, and went to my office. I shut the door and took a long, fizzy sip of my soda. Then I dialed the school, whose number I've had memorized since Mary started kindergarten.

Of course, New Kassel is a tiny town. There's one school for kindergarten and all twelve grades, and the graduating classes have about forty students each. And so when Francine answered the phone and I said, “Hi, it's Torie,” she knew exactly who was calling.

“Yeah, Torie,” Francine said. “We got a problem with Rachel.”

“Rachel?” I asked. My oldest. This, I hadn't expected. “Are you sure?”

She laughed a little. “Of course I'm sure.”

Rachel. Hmmm. “W-what's the problem?” I asked. I would have sat down, but you can't sit down in a dress like the one I was wearing. Potty breaks are an event that take as much organization as the invasion of Normandy. And nearly as much time.

“She got into a fight,” Francine said.

“A fight?” I asked. “Francine, this is Torie O'Shea. Are you sure you got the right kid? Rachel O'Shea. You're sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure. She gave Davie Roberts a bloody nose because he flicked her bra strap.”

“Oh jeez,” I said. Yes, it had been one of the great emotional moments of my life when my prepubescent daughter became pubescent and had to go out and buy her first training bra. She was still a kid, for crying out loud, but boobs are boobs. She was humiliated beyond belief, no matter how many of her friends I could name who were wearing training bras already. It also didn't matter when I pointed out that usually she couldn't wait to wear what everybody else wore, so why was this one item of clothing any different? But it was, and she didn't see my logic at all.

“It's pretty bad,” Francine said.

“What do you mean, ‘pretty bad'?” I asked.

“I mean, I think she broke his nose. His eyes turned purple within twenty minutes.”

My first reaction was to say, “Well, then Davie should keep his hands to himself,” but that didn't make what Rachel did right. I don't know how many times I've told my kids, “I don't care who throws the first punch, it's the kid who throws the last one—the one who retaliates—whom I will punish.” Yes, Davie should have kept his little twelve-year-old perverted hands to himself, but Rachel should not have broken his nose. “I'll be right there,” I said to her.

“Okay,” Francine said.

“But, hey…are you guys going to do anything to Mr. Frisky Hands?”

“Yes, he's getting detention. That is, as soon as he returns to school.”

“Oh jeez,” I said again, wondering just what Davie's mother was going to say to me at the next PTA meeting. There was a knock at my office door just as I said good-bye and hung up the phone.

“Come in,” I said.

The door opened and in walked the woman from the tour. The one who had kept staring at me. I was a little surprised, but yet…was I really? “Can I help you?” I asked. I sounded a little defensive, maybe even hateful. The woman flinched.

“Um, I was wondering if I could…I can come back at another time,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I'm sorry. It's just that I have to go to the school to get my daughter. There's been a…disagreement with one of her classmates.”

“Oh.”

“Could you…I'll listen to you, if you'll help me out of this stupid dress,” I said, turning my back to her and exposing the buttons.

“Oh, sure,” she said, and began undoing the buttons. There was an underslip, chemise, and crinolette, so I knew she wouldn't actually see any flesh. Women in the nineteenth century were packaged in layer after layer, so the only person who could ever glimpse their bare skin was the person who was supposed to. A satin and lace prison, if you will.

“What can I do for you?” I asked as I unbuttoned the sleeves.

“I understand that you trace family trees? You are Torie O'Shea, correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wouldn't wear these tombs if I weren't.”

“Well, I was wondering if I could hire your services?” she asked.

It was January. No major holidays or projects coming up. No marriages or births. There was no reason I couldn't take on this job. I just wasn't sure I wanted to, though. I always react this way. I am a historian. A genealogist. And yet when somebody actually asks me to do my job, I always balk.

“It might take me awhile. And even then, I can't say that I'll have every branch fleshed out as far back as it will go. What I'll do is establish a certain number of generations and try to fill that in. If I get more in the time allotted, then that's a bonus for you.”

I turned around and began looking for my car keys.

“How many generations do you go back to?” she asked.

“When were you born?”

She looked around the room, self-conscious suddenly. It was as if she wasn't sure if she should answer. How could I trace her family tree if she wasn't even willing to give me her birth date? “Nineteen seventy.”

“Then I'll try and finish eight. That's about two hundred years. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure,” she said, and shrugged.

“All right,” I said. “What's your name?”

Again, that semifrightened bunny-rabbit look. Her eyes darted from the Rose of Sharon quilt hanging on my wall, to the window, to the poster advertising all of New Kassel's charms, to the floor. Finally, she spoke. “Stephanie.”

“Stephanie…” If I hadn't been so rattled over Rachel, I would have asked her more questions, like why she had been staring at me so intently during the tour and why she was acting so weird over simple things like her name and age. But my anxiety about Rachel mounted with each moment that passed.

“Connelly.”

“Nice to meet you, Stephanie Connelly,” I said, my dress hanging on my shoulders. “I'll leave you a form to fill out as best you can. And my rates are on there as well, so you can see how much this is going to cost you. But right now, I need to get down to the rest room and change my clothes so that I can go and pick up my daughter.”

“Okay,” she said, putting her hands in her jean pockets.

I pulled a form out of the top desk drawer, set it on my desk, and put a pencil next to it. “Just fill it in, leave me your phone number and e-mail address, if you've got one, and I'll get back to you. I'm sorry. I have to go.”

“Sure, that's fine.”

Realizing that my keys were in my jean pockets—where they always were—I picked up my jeans and shirt and tennis shoes from the chair next to the door. “Thank you so much for undoing these buttons. You have no idea how difficult it is to get in and out of this dress.”

“Oh, you're welcome,” she said, and smiled brightly.

Immediately to the right was the kitchen. I walked through it to the rest room that Sylvia had built for staff use. Nobody could see me walking through the kitchen with the dress unbuttoned to the small of my back, unless Sylvia happened to be there. But since Sylvia was usually the person to help me out of the blasted things, I didn't really care if she saw my slip-covered back or not. As soon as my clothes were changed, I was out the door and on my way to the school. But I couldn't help feeling a little weird as I left. I remembered an occasion a few years ago when a tourist had approached me after a tour and had hired me as a genealogist. She had ended up dead.