Killing Cousins Read online

  Eleanore, a woman in her late middle years, top-heavy and broad, had a knack for being irritating. Of course, that was probably what she thought about me as well, so I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. She had a small gossip column in the town newspaper and fancied herself a literary genius. Which was hysterical because she often spoke like a thesaurus on acid. She and her husband, Oscar, owned and ran the bed-and-breakfast known as the Murdoch Inn. She always stuck her nose where it didn’t belong, and she always thought she should be the first to know everything. There I go describing myself again. Why was it more irritating when she did it?

  “This couldn’t wait,” she said to me, with her big purple plastic earrings clanking together. Eleanore loved costume jewelry, the bigger and brighter the better. And, it seemed, the noisier the better, too. “Have you heard?”

  Her expression was serious, which made me sober up a bit. Eleanore was certainly the Drama Queen of New Kassel, but somehow her expression seemed genuine. “What?” I asked.

  “They’ve put the riverboat casino on the ballot.”

  “What?” I asked, dumbfounded. This was serious.

  “Bill wants to bring riverboat gambling to New Kassel.”

  Bill being Bill Castlereagh, the mayor. Funny, his name had come up quite a bit lately.

  “And evidently, he got the go-ahead from the gaming commission and it’s going to be voted on,” she finished.

  “No way,” I said. This was a catastrophe. An abomination. It wasn’t possible. New Kassel was a historic town. And although I realized that New Kassel was a tourist trap—the town is the commodity—a flashy casino was not the type of trap that New Kassel was all about. New Kassel was about going back in time and learning something about the days before Internet and satellite dishes. It was about history, antiques, crafts and good food. A casino would just…I don’t know, ruin the mood.

  Eleanore kissed two fingers on her right hand and stuck them up in the air. “I swear.”

  “But, that’s…that’s…”

  Honk. Honk. That’s the bad thing about stopping in the middle of the street to gossip. Some jerk always comes along and wants to use the road to drive on.

  “Lucrative,” she said, disgusted.

  “Ludicrous, Eleanore. Ludicrous.” I looked in the rearview mirror. It was nobody I could recognize right off the bat. “I’ve got to go.”

  “But what are you going to do about it?” Eleanore asked.

  “What can I do about it?” I said, although I was already thinking about what I was going to do about it. Bill was my neighbor. I was sure he’d put aside his petty grievances about my chicken coop and my chickens long enough to have a sensible conversation about how a casino would change the town. Right? I would talk to him this evening when I got home.

  “Torie, you have to do something” I heard her say as I drove away.

  Four

  The Finch estate was technically in New Kassel, but not within the city limits. It was off a two-lane road winding south between New Kassel and Greenwich. In between the two towns were farms, a few of those pop-up subdivisions in the middle of a field, thanks to low interest rates, and government land that I was hoping the government would forget it had. The front of the estate faced west and the back of it east, overlooking the mighty Mississippi.

  The house actually sat in a valley between two large hills. A huge sandstone wall edged around the estate, separating it from the rest of the world as if it were a lonely green island. An elaborate “F” was curved in wrought iron on the gate. I got out and opened the gate, pulled my car in the drive and then shut the gate behind me.

  As I drove up the driveway, I noticed that the house was three stories high, made out of what looked like the same sandstone as the wall. It reminded me of a small French château, complete with one turret that curved out from the south wall. This was going to be one of those buildings that had more rooms than I could find uses for.

  I got out of the car and put the key in the lock of the front door. It was a red door that was rounded on top with an oblong window in the center. The key didn’t work. The door wouldn’t open. Great. I was going to be really upset if I had driven all the way down here for no reason. I walked around the building to try and find the back door.

  An overgrown flower garden nearly assaulted me as I rounded the corner. The grounds had been kept mowed, so it surprised me that the garden had been left to Mother Nature. Who would have done that? A few bumblebees settled on the hollyhocks that were as tall as I was, and a butterfly floated somewhere above the black-eyed Susans. Unfortunately, there were as many weeds in the garden as flowers, and it took me a second before I could find the small red-bricked path that would lead to the back door.

  The key worked on the back door and I was happy. I don’t know what I was expecting on the inside of the house, but what I found wasn’t it. Everything had been left just as it had been five years ago when she died. There was a five-year-old newspaper on the kitchen table, unopened mail scattered on the counter, dish towels hanging on the oven door. I held my nose and peeked in the refrigerator, which had been emptied. So, I assumed that somebody had come in just long enough to clean out the perishables and then locked the place up. I opened the dishwasher and inside were clean dishes.

  Suddenly the thought of going through every item in this house seemed unfathomable. I made a mental note to make sure that when I got old I should just start giving stuff away so that nobody would have to come along after I died and do it for me.

  To me, it seemed as though the bathroom would be the easiest place to start. Most of the things in the bathroom could be thrown away, especially given the date of most of the items. As if anybody would want or could use five-year-old shampoo. So I found the trash bags under the sink and then went into the great expanse of Catherine Finch’s house to find the bathroom.

  Finding the bathroom took a long time. I had to make it through a lot of house first. The great room was…well, great. A large cathedral ceiling with dark wooden beams was the canopy above a rather rustic room with a bearskin rug and a stuffed jaguar. On either side of the fireplace were two shelves of books. Cool. Books were good. A gorgeous stained-glass window lined the entire east wall. The stained-glass window depicted several fairies in different positions of flight, hovering above flowers or dancing amid the trees. It truly was one of the most gorgeous things I’d ever seen. I was awestruck, trying to imagine that it was actually made out of little pieces of painted glass.

  Eventually, I found three bathrooms, two downstairs and one on the second floor. I started with the one downstairs closest to the kitchen. I opened the medicine-cabinet doors and just threw everything away. Under the vanities I did the same thing, except for a hair dryer and hot rollers that I found in the upstairs bathroom. Colin might be able to sell those. The washcloths I put in a bucket to use as rags and the towels I put in a pile on one of the beds. In no time at all, I had the bathrooms finished, with only a small pile of things to keep. Obviously, I pitched the personal-hygiene items. The woman loved Coral Mist lipstick and blue eye shadow. Her favorite perfume was Windsong, because the five bottles of it I found in the house were all half empty, whereas all the other perfumes were still mostly full. Funny that she was wealthy beyond my comprehension and her favorite perfume could be bought at Walgreens.

  I opened my notebook and dug a pen out of my purse and wrote down a list of things to bring tomorrow: radio with batteries, fifty-to-sixty boxes, notebooks, packing peanuts/bubble wrap, travel playpen, crayons and coloring books for the girls.

  I did not go up to the third floor, nor did I go into the basement, but I did take a quick glance through the rest of the first and second floors. There were no less than six bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, great room, family room, den and, sure enough, three unidentifiable rooms. If pressed, I’d say that they were living rooms one, two and three. I couldn’t imagine what was on the third floor, or what could possibly be in the attic.

  In livin
g room number two, on the second floor, was a black baby grand piano, and hanging above the fireplace was an oil portrait of a woman I assumed was Catherine Finch. In the portrait, she stood next to a fireplace in one of those long-waisted flapper dresses; her blond hair was bobbed short and curved under her ears. She wore bracelets on each wrist and a large necklace. Her smile was composed but, somehow, seemed all-knowing.

  In the middle of the room a crystal chandelier hung too low, I thought, but what did I know about decorating big fancy houses? All along the mantel and the piano were silver and bronze frames filled with pictures taken in the twenties and thirties.

  Yes, it all seemed quite daunting.

  And the most daunting thing of all was the thought creeping in my mind about confronting the mayor about the gambling boats. But I loved New Kassel and I was not going to let the mayor bring in the casino. No way. I thought about that a second standing in the middle of living room number two. Even though I had this job to do for the sheriff and a job for Sylvia, my thoughts had meandered back to the threat of a casino. It was too important to me not to do something, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I supposed it would depend on what the mayor had to say to me.

  I made sure I had my list for tomorrow, picked up my purse and headed downstairs to return to New Kassel.

  The New Kassel Gazette

  The News You Might Miss

  by

  Eleanore Murdoch

  My fellow residents of New Kassel! May I just say that the wedding of Ms. Jalena Keith and Sheriff Colin Brooke was the social event of the decade! Anybody who is anybody was in attendance. The cake was scrumptious, the party favors simply melted in your mouth. (Thank you, Helen.) Can everybody tell what my favorite part of the whole day was? Oh, the bride was lovely in a handmade crocheted dress from our very own Wilma Pershing, and the sheriff made hearts flip all over Granite County. The attendants were Jalena’s daughter, Torie O’Shea, and her husband, Rudy. In other news, Father Bingham wants to thank whomever made the unusually large donation this past Sunday in the basket.

  And now for the serious news. We as residents must not allow gambling into our home, which is our sanctuary. Vote No on Proposition 7. No riverboat casino!

  Until next time,

  Eleanore

  Five

  Velasco’s Pizza is probably my favorite casual hang-out place in New Kassel. Chuck had decorated it in 1950s memorabilia, which he’d done way before the movie Pulp Fiction came out, so he liked to tell people that Quentin Tarantino had ripped him off. I tried explaining to him that somewhere in the world somebody else had probably thought of it before Tarantino did, that sometimes good ideas will be thought of simultaneously, but he resisted that notion.

  It was later on Sunday evening, and Rudy, Rachel, Mary and I were all seated in a booth. Matthew was sound asleep in his pumpkin seat, which was cradled in one of the high chairs that we had turned upside down. Who would have thought that one of those straight wooden high chairs, turned upside down, was the perfect pumpkin seat holder? I thought about things like that and things like baby monitors, car seats, bottle warmers, bottle carriers that keep milk cold, and thermometers built into pacifiers, just to name a few. How did anybody ever raise a child without those things? It seems like the sixties were the Dark Ages. I don’t think my mother even owned a diaper bag when I was a baby.

  We were halfway through a half veggie deluxe and half pepperoni pizza when none other than the mayor walked into Chuck’s. “There’s Bill,” Rudy said. He didn’t really mean anything by that declaration. If Elmer or Wilma had walked through the door, he would have looked at me and said, “There’s Elmer. There’s Wilma.” It was something to say.

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged, giving the mayor a dirty look.

  “Don’t talk to him about the casino thing right now, okay?” Rudy asked. “Let us eat dinner in peace, without making a scene.”

  “When do you suggest I talk to him about it? When it’s too late?”

  “No, now, Torie, quit being so touchy over everything,” he said. He took a bite of pizza and made that slurp sound that means he nearly burned the roof of his mouth.

  Rudy telling me not to talk to the mayor right now about the casino just made me want to waltz right over there and talk to the mayor about the casino. I wouldn’t, though, because I didn’t plan on holding anything back if Bill was unreasonable about it, and I really didn’t want everybody else in the restaurant to witness it.

  I wanted to be able to say to Bill that he was a complete money-hungry idiot, if the situation called for it, and how could I do that with an entire restaurant watching? No, I would refrain.

  “Mom,” Rachel said, “when are we going to get our school supplies?”

  “This week, probably,” I said to her.

  “Cool!” she said and made a fist.

  “I want a Backstreet Boys lunchbox,” Mary said.

  “You will get no such thing,” I said. “You’re six years old and you will get something befitting a six-year-old. Like Tigger or Pokémon.”

  Mary’s expression dropped.

  “What’s a Backstreet Boy?” Rudy asked.

  “Only the coolest band in the world,” Rachel said.

  “No, they are not,” I said. “None of them play instruments, so therefore they cannot be a band. Am I right, Rudy? You have to play instruments to be a band.”

  “Last time I checked,” Rudy agreed, “you must have instruments to be a band.”

  “Does Rachel get a Backstreet Boys lunchbox?” Mary asked with her lower lip looking impossibly fat and protruded.

  “Mary, pick your face up before it gets in your pizza. No, Rachel’s not getting one either.”

  “Mom!” Rachel said. Now her face was all droopy, too.

  “They don’t even make lunchboxes with them on it, anyway,” I said. In truth, I didn’t know if they did or didn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to say. “So don’t worry about it.”

  “If they did make them, would you let us have one?” Rachel asked.

  “Nope.”

  The mayor sat down in the booth next to us, the vinyl seat making a scrunch sound as he did so. Rudy gave me that look. You know, the one that says, “Keep your mouth shut or I’m going to put my foot in it.” He’s so cute.

  “Rudy,” the mayor said and nodded.

  “Bill. How ya doin’?” Rudy asked.

  “Good, good.” The mayor opened his newspaper and began reading.

  “Your wife kick you out of the house?” Rudy asked him.

  “No. She’s visiting her sister,” he said. “They’re planning a baby shower for their niece.”

  “Oh,” Rudy said.

  “So, I’m fending for myself tonight,” Bill said. He hadn’t looked up from his newspaper. The restaurant lights made his bald head look shinier than it really was. Otherwise, I’d say that he had to buff it to get it that shiny. He was short and cantankerous and loved to bowl. From his backyard I could see into his family room, which was decorated in nothing but bowling trophies and bowling mementos. He even had his bowling shoes bronzed. Not that I ever really studied what was in his family room.

  “I was supposed to eat one of those chicken potpie things,” he said. “But I only eat those when my wife’s watching. To me, pie should be made out of pudding or fruit.”

  “Won’t she get wise to the fact that the chicken potpie is still in the oven?” Rudy asked. “I mean, I can’t even throw stuff away, because Torie goes through the trash.”

  I nudged Rudy’s leg under the table. He just smiled at me.

  The mayor smiled and looked over at Rudy for the first time. “You think your chickens are getting that fat on the feed you guys give ’em? Hell, no. I give them whatever food my wife cooks that I don’t like.”

  Rudy and I stared at each other across the table. We were both too flabbergasted to say anything: first, that he would actually do such a childish thing; and second, that he would admit it to us. And didn’t that mea
n that our chickens were cannibals now? But that was Bill for you. He thought he was above any sort of code of conduct. In any arena.

  “Well, gee,” Rudy finally said. “Bill. You might ask next time. Our chickens are going to get hardening of the arteries.”

  “Ahh, pooh,” he said and waved a hand in our direction.

  We sat in silence a moment and then the mayor looked over and winked at Mary. She became all goofy and snarfed her pizza and waved back.

  “How are you today, little lady?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Mary said. “Mom won’t let us have a Backstreet Boys lunchbox.”

  When Mary spoke, all of her s’s ran together because she was missing so many teeth. It seemed as if every tooth in her head had got loose all in the same month. We teased her that she was missing more teeth than she had teeth. I couldn’t help but smile when she smiled because there were no less than four gaps in the front of her mouth.

  “Well,” Bill said. “Mean old Mom.”

  “Yeah,” Mary said and then looked at me. Suddenly realizing I was sitting right there, she blushed and looked away. She was quiet a minute, and then out of nowhere she spoke like a true six-year-old, without regret or knowledge of what it was she was actually saying. “My daddy told my mommy not to talk to you about that casino thing.”

  The mayor said nothing. He only looked at Mary, with the color rising slightly in his face.

  “He said that he wanted to eat in peace for once,” she added.

  It was my turn to squirm. My face grew hot.

  “We never eat in peace,” she added dramatically, with her eyes downcast.

  And it didn’t look as though this meal was going to be any different. “Mary,” I said and tugged on her sleeve.

  “You got something you want to say to me, Torie?” the mayor asked.

  “Ahh…well.” I looked to Rudy, who narrowed his eyes and tried to look as evil as he could. “Now that you mention it…”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Rudy said and threw his hands up.