Died in the Wool Read online

  “He’s a man who puts flowers on the grave of Glory Anne Kendall every June. Even though she’s been dead for eighty-plus years.”

  “Why?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be going to see him, now would I?” I said. I made a turn onto Wyatt Drive and then went down two streets and made a right. “I’m hoping he’s not dead. The man has to be ancient, but Father Bingham said he saw him just last year.”

  Colin was quiet a moment, filling the space in my front seat with determined reflection. After a moment he spoke. “Who’s Glory Anne Kendall?”

  I rubbed my forehead and tried to fill him in best as I could before I pulled into Mr. Tarullo’s driveway. I only had a few short minutes, because Mr. Tarullo lived just eight or nine blocks from my mother and Colin.

  The story-and-a-half white house was quaint, with a small front porch and a round window where the attic should be. I love round windows—I suppose because they defy what “normal” windows are supposed to be. Maybe they remind me of Hobbit houses and windows. Or maybe they’re just cute. At any rate, the window lent a certain charm to the house, and there was an enormous weeping willow tree in the front yard that sort of capped it all off. Along the sidewalk, somebody had painstakingly planted petunias or pansies; I’m not sure which. They both sort of look the same to me. I just knew that they were colorful and low to the ground.

  I grabbed my purse and gave Colin last-minute instructions. “Listen, let me do the talking,” I said.

  He puffed his chest as if he were about to start beating it. I added, “Look, you’re not the sheriff anymore, you’re not in uniform, and you’re kinda big and scary, so if you go in there being all aggressive, you’re liable to freak him out. Me, I’m little and unassuming. So let me do this.”

  Colin chuckled a bit, most likely because of my “little and unassuming” remark. I just glared at him.

  “Right,” he said after a few moments.

  I rang the doorbell, and the door was answered by a woman who looked to be in her late fifties or sixties. Her hair color came from a bottle—it had sort of a pinkish tint to it, and last I checked, that particular hue didn’t appear in nature. “Yes?” she said.

  “Hi, I’m Torie O’Shea, the historian over in New Kassel. Father Bingham at the Catholic church told me that Mr. Tarullo could most likely help me on a matter that happened almost eighty years ago. Is Mr. Tarullo home so that I could speak with him?”

  “Dad’s out back in the garden,” she said.

  “In the garden?” I asked.

  “Fell and broke his hip three years ago pulling weeds. Can’t get that man to listen to nobody,” she said. She stepped outside onto the porch and then down the steps to lead us around to the backyard. “I keep telling him, ‘Dad, you’re ninety-four years old. You need to let one of your grandkids pull the weeds.’ But he won’t listen. Then again, maybe he’s lived this long by doing all of his own yard work. My grandpa worked every day until he was eighty-nine. Three days after he decided to stop working, he dropped dead. So maybe Dad has the right idea,” she said.

  “Well, maybe,” I said, smiling at her.

  She opened the gate to the backyard and sure enough, there was an old man, bent way over his walker, tugging on some stupid weed that was encroaching on his tomato plants. The vegetable garden was pretty big, I’d say twenty feet by thirty feet, and along the fence there were several rows of what looked like blackberries or raspberries. I used to help my grandma pick berries when I was a kid. I always ate more than I put in the bucket.

  “Dad, there are people here to see you from New Kassel,” the woman said. “A historian who wants to ask you some questions. Father Bingham sent them.”

  Marty Tarullo either didn’t hear her or didn’t care. His daughter smiled at me while waiting for her father to acknowledge our presence. “Oh, I’m Connie,” she said.

  I shook her hand. “This is my stepfather, Colin Brooke.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Ex-sheriff Brooke? How’s the new job?”

  “Different,” he said.

  “I like the new sheriff,” she said. “He seems good for the community.”

  Colin smiled at her, but I could have sworn I heard his teeth grinding in the process.

  Marty Tarullo stood up then. It seemed to take him a whole two minutes just to straighten his back. He moved his walker around and came toward us.

  “Dad?” Her voice got a notch louder. “I said, there are two people here—”

  “I heard you,” he said. He waved at Colin and me and then motioned to several Adirondack chairs on the back patio. “Have a seat.”

  “Would you all like something to drink?” Connie asked.

  “Water for me,” I said.

  “Any sort of soda,” Colin said.

  Connie disappeared to get the drinks. Marty wiped his forehead with a handkerchief he had stuffed in his back pocket. I’m often surprised by how good some people look considering they’re nearly a century old, or how well they move. If I hadn’t known my boss Sylvia was as old as dirt, I would not have been able to tell it. Marty Tarullo looked his age and moved like somebody whose joints had been rubbing together for a millennium.

  “My daughter thinks I’m deaf,” he said. “Can’t taste nothing no more. Takes me forever to pee. Got hairs growing out my nose and ears. Don’t look like myself no more. Oh, and I got two toes on my left foot that have no feeling. Can’t figure out why. So, pretty much, nothing works right on this old body. Except my hearing. My hearing is fine. Can’t seem to get that through her darned head.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Mr. Tarullo winked at me then.

  “Guess if I look like I’m deaf, she just thinks I’m deaf,” he said. “It’s something, you know? You let your kids live with you the first twenty years of their lives, then they let you live with them the last twenty of yours.”

  “So, this is your daughter’s house?” I asked.

  “Nah, it’s mine. She got a divorce. Her husband met some young thing and left her. After twenty-two years. Hell, they were just getting to the good part. Anyway, so my wife and I told her she could come stay here. That was eighteen years ago. My wife passed about eight years ago. Anyway, other than the fact she thinks I’m deaf and I’m too old to pull weeds, we get along fine.”

  “Does she have any children?”

  “Two,” he said. “Now she has two grandkids. They sure as fire light up the place.”

  I smiled. “So, Mister Tarullo,” I said. “I’m here about—”

  “You’re here about Glory Kendall. I know why you’re here.”

  “How could you know that?” I asked and glanced at Colin.

  “Don’t really know anybody in New Kassel except Father Bingham, and I only know him because of Glory Kendall. So that has to be why you’re here,” he said. “Somebody finally looking into that whole mess?”

  “Well, not in any official capacity, no. As a historian I’m investigating because I’m buying the Kendall house and I want to turn it into a textile museum. For quilts.”

  “Glory’s quilts?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Hers and those made by other historical women of the area.”

  “You want to know why I put flowers on her grave every year, don’tcha?”

  “That would be a good place to start,” I said and smiled.

  Marty Tarullo was quiet a moment, looking off at his garden. “I can still see her plain as day. I was about nine or ten years old the day she came to the house and told my brother that she couldn’t marry him. She’d come around in one of those fancy cars her brother Whalen had been driving. There were only a handful of people in the whole county who had a motorcar that early, but they were bankers, so everybody just assumed they would be the ones to get the first car. Anyway, Whalen brought her around in the car. I could tell Glory had been crying. Those big blue eyes of hers were swollen, and her nose was red. But she put on a good show. I was half in love with her myself. She was so beautiful.�
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  “Why did she call off the engagement?”

  His eyes peered at me sharply. “You want her reason or the real reason?”

  “Both,” Colin said before I could.

  Connie came out then and put our refreshments on the table. “You okay, Dad?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said and waved a hand.

  After Connie had gone back in and shut the door, he continued. “Glory wouldn’t even come in the house. She stood on the porch. I’d answered the door. She was wearing her hat with the feathers and a long yellow dress. I can still see her standing there. Anyway, she asked me to go get Anthony, my brother. So I went and got him. Then I stood behind him in the doorway. She said, ‘I can’t marry you, Tony. I’m not ready for it. Rupert still needs me.’ My brother told her that he could wait. He loved her, he was in no hurry, and he understood that Rupert came first right now, he said.” He paused then.

  “Did you ever meet Rupert?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Rupe was in bad shape. He was all messed up from those trenches. Only thing that got him through it was Glory’s letters. Then, he told me once, he got home only to find that evil lurked in tiny towns as much as it did in the trenches.”

  I glanced at Colin, who shifted in his chair. “Do you know what he meant by that?” Colin asked.

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hands. “Nothing I can prove, only speculation. Anyway, so Tony understood about Rupe, and he knew Glory could never leave her brother until he was better. So Tony, being Tony, said that when they got married, Rupert could move in with them. Not only was my brother madly in love with Glory and woulda done anything for her, but he was very thoughtful of others, you see. So it made sense to me that he’d offer his house to Rupert. Glory said to him, ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t be married.’ Then she glanced over her shoulder to where Whalen was sitting in that car. I didn’t catch it at the time, ’cause I was too young, but now I understand a little more. Glory was scared. Whalen was making her say all this. So Tony said to her, ‘You mean not ever? You can’t get married ever?’ And she hung her head and said, ‘Not ever. It’s over.’”

  It was quiet in Mr. Tarullo’s backyard, except for the birds playing in his birdbath.

  “My brother got upset then, you see. Last time he’d seen Glory, everything was fine. Now all of a sudden she’s telling him she can’t be with him at all. So he said, ‘It’s because I’m Italian, isn’t it?’”

  “Because he was Italian?” I said. “Are you for real?”

  “Back then, the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians … we were all like contaminated goods. The Americans who’d come over on the Mayflower and such, they’d been here hundreds of years, and they didn’t trust us. We were dark. We were Catholic, we didn’t speak the greatest English—if we spoke it at all—and for the most part, we tended to stay to ourselves in little communities inside big cities, like ghettos, because the average immigrants were so poor they couldn’t buy a farm or move to a richer part of town. My family, well, we were a little better off than some, because my father had been fairly upper class back in Italy. So we had the money to bypass that whole ghetto, you see. But when we moved here to Granite County, everybody whispered about us.”

  He spoke the truth. I knew he did. The Irish had been just as mistrusted, if not more, because their numbers were so high and they had a large number of unchaperoned or unaccompanied women who immigrated. People felt as though that was trouble waiting to happen, and sometimes it did. At the turn of the century, established American families thought the new male immigrants would take all their jobs and their daughters. I knew this about our immigrant history, but unless I witness it firsthand, I often forget about it. Until Marty spoke the words, it never would have occurred to me that Glory would not have been able to marry Anthony Tarullo because he was Italian.

  “Tony told me later that Whalen had said more than once that he wasn’t good enough for Glory and that it would cause a scandal in New Kassel. Whalen told Glory that if she married Tony, they couldn’t stay in the county. They’d have to move, or else her marriage would force Whalen and her father to leave town.”

  “What did her father have to say about the match?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t think he was thrilled with it,” Mr. Tarullo said, “but he was allowing the marriage, and Tony said that Mr. Kendall had even offered him a job at the bank.”

  “Wow,” I said. “So it was Whalen who was opposed, not Sandy.”

  “I think her father woulda been happy if she’d found somebody else, but he was going to make the best of it if that’s what Glory wanted,” Mr. Tarullo said.

  “So you think the real reason she called off the wedding was because Tony was Italian?” I asked.

  “I think the real reason was because of Whalen. I think she was scared of him,” Mr. Tarullo said. “And I think she’da done whatever he said for her to do.”

  “Why?” Colin asked.

  I knew the answer before Marty Tarullo said it. “Rupert. He threatened Glory with Rupert.”

  “I think so,” Mr. Tarullo said, “but I can’t prove it.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Well, that would be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “You think it’s just because Tony was Italian?”

  “I think Whalen hated Tony and he was gonna get his way or else,” Mr. Tarullo said.

  I took a drink of water and watched a big white fluffy cloud float across the sky. “Wow,” I said.

  “So … as to the reason I go to Glory’s grave every year,” Mr. Tarullo said. “Time went by. Rupert hung himself from the tree in their backyard. Now, if Glory hadda been telling the truth and she couldn’t marry Tony because of Rupert, then … there wouldn’t be nothing stopping her now, would there? So me and my brother, we went to the funeral. I’ll never forget this as long as I live. My brother got Glory off to herself, and I was standing guard. Tony said, ‘You cough real loud if you see Whalen or Mr. Kendall coming.’ So I did, I stood there at the edge of the wall in the hallway. I tried not to listen or watch them, but it was hard. Once I snuck a peek—my brother had just kissed her, and then Glory cried in his arms. Whalen came storming down the hall, and I coughed, and Glory ran up the stairs and Tony came around the corner as if he’d just been to the washroom or something. There was a big stained-glass window in the hall, and Whalen … Well, he never said nothing. Not one word. He just picked Tony up and threw him through that window. Glass went everywhere, and I stood frozen to the spot. Then Whalen walked by me and rapped his knuckles on my head. Tony and I left then. My brother was all cut up and bleeding. He had a scar on his arm until the day he died from that—but no matter. It was the last time either of us saw Glory alive.”

  “What happened next?” Colin said. “You can’t just leave us there.”

  “Seven months later, she was dead,” he said. “Even though my brother knew he wouldn’t get to marry Glory, he still loved her. In fact, he loved her until the day he died, back in 1982. He used to take flowers to her grave on the anniversary of her death. Then one day after his first heart attack, he asked me if I’d take over doing it for him when he couldn’t do it anymore. I said of course I would. I loved Glory, too. She was so kind. I had trouble with numbers when I was a kid, and Glory would help me with my division.”

  “So you take flowers to her grave every year for your brother,” I said. I had to swipe at a tear that had formed in the corner of my eye. The story was heartbreaking. His brother’s devotion was … so romantic.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Not sure how much longer I can do it.”

  “Let me test my understanding,” Colin said. “Whalen threw Tony out of the house, through a stained-glass window … and nobody did anything about it?”

  Mr. Tarullo gave a chuckle. “Whalen was a banker. Prominent citizen. Nobody even questioned it, other than in the private circles of the gossip queens.”

  “What did the gossip queens ha
ve to say?” I asked.

  “They said that Tony got Glory pregnant. That’s why Whalen hated him. When the Kendalls forbade the marriage, Glory killed herself rather than have to be an unwed mother,” he said. “All horseshit, if you ask me.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, if she was pregnant, she’d’ve been just about ready to give birth when she killed herself, and she didn’t look pregnant. I mean, I didn’t see her alive, but none of her friends or family mentioned it. There was no gossip about it until after she killed herself. At her funeral, she did not look pregnant. I know, because I was there. Plus, I can’t believe Glory woulda killed her baby, and that’s exactly what she woulda done if she’d killed herself and had been pregnant at the time. Besides, Sandy Kendall had enough money, he could have sent her away, like rich people sometimes did. She coulda had the baby somewhere else and come back like nothing had ever happened. Rupert was gone by then, it’s not like Sandy was afraid to send her away for Rupe’s sake. The whole thing don’t make no sense.”

  “Understatement of the year,” I said.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said, “then I’m finished with this whole subject.”

  Colin smiled at me, and I said, “What’s that?”

  “I think she was murdered.”

  “Oh, boy,” Colin muttered.

  “Why?” I said.

  “She never took laudanum.”

  “Yes, but she was distraught. First she had to call off her engagement to a man I think she clearly loved, then her brother committed suicide. Maybe a doctor prescribed it to help her sleep. Just because she didn’t use it before doesn’t mean she didn’t start using it,” I said.

  “See, this is the part I can’t prove,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the people involved are dead. But the next-door neighbor, Doris, she said that Sandy Kendall had come over to borrow her laudanum the night before.”

  “So Glory asked for the laudanum, her father borrowed the neighbor’s, and then Glory overdosed on it. If anything, it sounds more like an accident than a suicide.”

  “Except when Doris went over the next day to see how Glory was feeling, Sandy and Whalen let her into the house and told her that there’d been a terrible incident. That Glory had taken the whole bottle of laudanum. When Doris raced up the steps to Glory’s room, she was lying there dead, all right, but she wasn’t lying there all peaceful-like. Like one would expect from laudanum. No, her back was arched and her face was all in a grimace. Doris said she ran screaming from the room and couldn’t close her eyes for weeks without seeing Glory like that.”