The Silver Anniversary Murder (9 page)

“Well, for the moment then, my lips are sealed.”

I hoped the same thing would not be true of Joe Fox’s.

9

“Sorry,” I said, sitting down again.

“That’s all right.”

“Ariana, what I’d like to know from you is essentially a biography of your life: when you realized something was strange in your parents’ lives, what they told you, every place you’ve lived in, where they worked, what you’ve done with yourself.”

“And the reason you want to know all this is—?”

“Because somewhere in the past is an event or a group of events that made someone want to kill your parents.”

“Yes.” She didn’t look at me. Perhaps she was considering the consequences of telling me the things I wanted to know. Perhaps it had occurred to her that her parents, these wonderful people whom she loved so much, had once done another person a terrible injustice. She might think that it was better to let the killer go free than to have to own up to her parents’ indiscretions, to allow them to become public.

“If you’re up to it.”

“Chris, my parents were good people,” she said, confirming my suspicion.

“I’m sure they were. You of all people would know. Do you have brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “My mother once said something about not being able to have more children.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Where do you work?”

“In Chicago. I went there after college and got a job in a bookstore.”

“I bet that’s fun.”

“It is. It’s a wonderful store, near the university. We get so many interesting people coming in.” She spoke with an enthusiasm any employer would delight in.

“I’ve never been to Chicago,” I said.

“It’s a beautiful city. The lake is so lovely. You can drive along it to all the beautiful towns north of Chicago.” She stopped. “You’re not interested in all this. You want to find a killer. All right. I want to find him, too. I’ll tell you everything I remember.”

I flipped to a new page in my notebook. “Start as far back as you can recall.”

She drank some lemonade and pressed the napkin delicately to her lips. She came across as a well-behaved young woman who had learned the niceties of life and practiced them easily. She was wearing a long beige skirt with the texture of chambray and a matching blouse of the same fabric that covered the waist. The two top buttons were open but she still retained a demure look. Her fingers were ringless but two silver bracelets encircled her right wrist while on her left was a watch that she glanced at frequently. A pair of thin gold hoop earrings adorned her ear-lobes. They were so fine, I hadn’t noticed them till a few minutes ago.

“I was born in Portland, Oregon, but I don’t remember it at all. My first clear memory is a house in San Diego, or maybe it was outside of San Diego. I was very young. I went to nursery school where I met a little Japanese girl and we were friends. I didn’t know she was Japanese till someone told me. And the next thing I remember, we were living in Phoenix, Arizona.”

“How old were you then?”

She thought. “Four. About that.”

“House or apartment?”

“An apartment. It was very nice, sunny. My mother didn’t work at first. She stayed home. Maybe she started to work when I went into kindergarten. I’m not sure.”

“Do you remember an address?”

She thought. “A street. I think it was Cactus Lane. And the number was one-twenty.” She seemed pleased to have remembered. “We lived in Two C. There was a little balcony we could sit on in the evening. It was so nice there.”

“Friends? Any names at all?”

She shook her head. “My teacher was Miss Rodriguez— I’m sure of that.”

That would have been sixteen or seventeen years ago. The teacher might still be around, but what would I learn from her? “And then?” I asked.

“I’m trying to remember where we went after that. Maybe that’s when we moved to Wisconsin.”

“That’s some weather difference.”

“I must have heard my mother complain about that a million times. She hated the summer in Phoenix, but she hated the winter in Wisconsin even more.”

“Where did you live there?”

“In a house. I had a lovely little room, all decorated for me.”

I let her ramble on, describing the room just made for a little girl. She had an excellent memory for details—what the curtains looked like, what toys were spread across the pillows. She had a favorite doll, a favorite bedtime story, a favorite television program. She went to school and found a best friend, a teacher she loved, a group of acquaintances. It sounded like a happy time in her life.

“I don’t suppose you know whether your parents owned that house or rented.”

“I have no idea. It was our house, that’s all I know.”

“You haven’t mentioned grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles. Did you have any?”

“I don’t think so. Wait. There was a voice on the telephone. That was Grandma.”

“Didn’t she come to visit?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing her.”

“Do you know whose mother she was?”

“No idea. She was just Grandma, no last name.”

“What about the family next door in Wisconsin?”

“Mrs. Palmer,” she said quickly. “Old and gray and lived alone. People came to visit her on weekends sometimes. I don’t know where they came from but they drove a long white station wagon. I never visited when she had company.”

I asked her for the address, which she knew, and whether she could remember what work her parents did. Her father worked in an office. Her mother worked at the university, but Ariana wasn’t sure at what.

That location lasted a few years. It was her feeling that the cold winters just got to be too much for her mother and they decided to move somewhere warmer. I could see how you could deceive a child into believing such a ruse. What does a child know about parents’ real worries and real intentions? If I told Eddie we were moving to a bigger house because this one was too small for us, he would believe me.

“So you moved to a warmer clime,” I said.

“Baltimore. We had a house there and we visited Washington, D.C., a lot. My mother loved the cherry blossoms and we went every year when they were in bloom. They were so beautiful.” She smiled and stopped speaking, perhaps seeing the trees around the Tidal Basin. Then she said, “I went to a Catholic school there.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No, but my parents thought they had good schools and it was a good place for a girl to go.”

“I taught in one,” I said, “a women’s college up the Hudson. How old were you by then?”

“About ten, I would think. Do you want the name and address of the school?”

“Yes, please.” While I might not have special access to a Catholic school, my friend Sister Joseph, the general superior of St. Stephen’s Convent, would surely be able to get information for me if I needed it. And since Ariana went to Catholic school only about a dozen years ago, there was a good chance there were still teachers there who would remember Ariana and her parents.

She wrote down the home address, the school address, and the names of some teachers she remembered. Then she went on, telling me where her parents had worked during the years they lived in Baltimore.

After Baltimore they did a stint in Boston, a city Ariana liked. She went to a Catholic high school there and then went to college in Pennsylvania. Her parents had crossed the country as she grew up and didn’t want her too far from home, not more than half a day’s drive, her mother said. That was all right with Ariana. She had Philadelphia down the road and friends from around the country.

“What made you decide to work in Chicago?” I asked.

“By that time I knew that my parents were running from someone. I had been in one place for four years and they wanted me to pick up and go somewhere else, make a new start. My father said it would make him sleep easier.”

“So you’ve been in Chicago about as long as your parents were in Oakwood.”

“Yes, just about.”

“Now I want to ask you about the names you’ve used,” I said.

She smiled a bit. “I knew this was coming.”

“I’ve learned that your parents used the names Peter and Holly Mitchell in the apartment. Your mother was Rosette Parker at the bank and the place where she had her nails done. Your father was Charles Proctor on his driver’s license and the registration of his vehicle.”

She looked troubled. “How did you find all these things out? My parents were so careful.”

“Part of it is that we knew they must be using other names because there was no car registered to Mitchell and we knew they drove one. My first break was the nail place. Your mother was identified there as Rosette Parker. I simply took it from there. A good part of it was luck,” I conceded. “An old woman in the pharmacy recognized the sketch of your mother and said her license plate started with BBB. With that kind of information, together with the type of vehicle, the police were able to find the registration.”

“That’s scary.”

“When did you become aware that your parents’ lives were not the norm?”

“In my teens. Maybe when we moved to Boston, maybe before that. I asked my mother one day because by then I knew they used more than one name. At some point, before I went to college, I asked her what was going on.”

“It must have been difficult for you,” I said.

“It was terrible. A lot of things became clear—why I never met my grandmother, why I was never left with a babysitter, why mail went to a box, not to the house, a lot of things.”

“And what did she tell you?”

“She said there had been a problem years ago and it was better if I didn’t know what it was. That someone was very angry at them and had been looking for them for several years. I can’t put a date on it, Chris. I don’t know exactly when I asked the question and I have no idea when this incident happened. My parents were very careful about what they told me. Mom wouldn’t answer my question till she and Dad had talked about it, and then the three of us sat down in the living room and discussed it. I was left feeling that I knew less when we finished than when we began. These were good, kind people who had spent their lives caring for me and loving me, and somehow they had enraged someone to the point that they had to run for their lives.”

“Did you ever get a sense of what was behind it? Money? Real estate? A terrible and tragic accident?”

“I thought of all those things. I thought of worse things. They never gave me a clue.”

“Do you know their real last name?” I asked.

“I know mine. I have my birth certificate. I’m Ariana Brinker. My mother is listed as Elaine and there’s no maiden name. My father’s first name was Ronald. Nobody called them by those names, except maybe where I went to school.”

“So I guess the first time they moved, they changed names.”

“Probably.”

“Have you ever looked into their past? Tried to find relatives?”

“Never. They made it very clear that they feared for their lives. I’ve often wondered whether I had blood relatives out in Oregon but I couldn’t put Mom and Dad in jeopardy. Or myself. What if this person wanted to kill me too?”

It was a possibility. “Ariana, the police want to find their killer or killers. Do you?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I just found out this morning that they’re dead. But yes, I want to know who did this and I want them punished.”

“What if facts turn up that indicate your parents were involved in a terrible crime?”

She leaned back and looked away. Tears fell down her cheeks. I had posed an unanswerable question. If I were asked the same thing, I would know absolutely that my parents had never committed a crime. But her situation was different. She knew there was something unspeakable in their past.

“They never hurt anyone,” she said finally, wiping the tears away with a tissue she took out of her bag. “If they stole money, it would have been to give me a safe, happy life, and I don’t believe they stole. They both worked at good jobs and they were appreciated. Whenever they left, they were given parties and gifts. They were good people. You won’t uncover the kind of crime I would be ashamed of hearing about.”

“OK.” I leaned back myself, letting her regain control.

“When you got that strange phone call, you don’t know whether you were speaking to my mother or a possible killer.”

“No idea. But there is one other thing. The woman said that day was her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, her silver anniversary.”

Ariana opened the little book in which she had found her mother’s phone number at work and skimmed some pages. She read the date off to me.

“That sounds about right. It was a Tuesday, I remember.”

“Yes, it was.” She closed the book. “That was their twenty-fifth anniversary. You may have talked to my mother.”

“Or someone who knew her well enough to know when her anniversary was.”

“I don’t know who that could be.”

“I’m going to try to find out, Ariana.”

“What about the police?”

“Let me say this. I won’t tell them about you unless the building manager tells them something first. As far as we know, he’s the only person around here who knows of your existence. But eventually I have to turn over what I find out.”

“I understand.” She dropped the little book in her bag. “I don’t know why I trust you, but I guess I have to trust someone and you’ve been nice to me. All I ask is that you tell me what you know before you call the police.”

“I will do that. Ariana, your parents were careful people. They must have told you what to do in case of their death.”

“They did. I was just thinking about that. I know they had a will written in Massachusetts when we lived there, but they did it again in New York State when they moved. I have a copy of their will but it’s back home in Chicago. The lawyer’s name and address are with the will. He may have instructions from them that I don’t have.”

“Have you read the will?”

“Just once when they gave me the copy. There’s nothing complicated about it. I think they have bonds put away somewhere. It’s all written down.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to go back and get it,” I said.