Thicker than Water Read online

  I booted up my computer and placed the postcard on the scanner. I scanned the picture and enlarged it onscreen. At a greater magnification I was able to make out that the person standing behind the little girl was a man in some sort of uniform: a dark suit with big buttons on the front, and a hat. As to the thing in her hand, it looked like paper.

  So all I had to do was call up everybody in Dubuque and see if they knew of a Sylvia Pershing and a little girl with a doll. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? I mean, it’s not like people move or die or anything.

  I banged my head on my desk.

  Then I heard it.

  Sounded like footsteps upstairs.

  I sat perfectly still and listened again. It sounded like weight against the boards, something heavy. Not like an animal. Outside, New Kassel thrived. Most of the shops had closed, but all the restaurants and the bowling alley were open. I saw people passing by the window, one girl in her swimsuit. Guess she’d just come from the lake. The sun was beginning to set, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. Breaking into the Gaheimer House at such an early hour would be awfully brave for a … what? A burglar? A serial killer?

  Maybe it was just somebody who thought the house was still open for tours. I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse and headed through the house to look.

  “Hello? We’re closed for tours until further notice,” I called out.

  Nothing.

  I made my way up the wide staircase, careful not to step on the stair that creaked. When I got to the top I repeated my words. Still nothing. I pushed the various bedroom doors open. There was nobody there.

  I must have heard some noise from outside and thought it was inside. That made the most sense. In fact, now I wondered if this was what had happened to Sylvia that night. I’d have to ask Duran if the noise she heard was inside or outside the house.

  It was an old house. Old houses make noise, that’s a given.

  I shook it off and went back to my office. Really, since it was daylight and people were still milling about, I thought no more of it. I logged on to the Internet and found the GenWeb page for the county of Dubuque. GenWeb is a network of genealogical pages for each state. Each page has a host and various collections of things like wills, biographies, and census records for that particular state. I e-mailed the host and told her that I had a photograph taken in 1930 and wondered if she’d take a look at it and see if she could tell me where the photograph was taken, or if she knew somebody else who could. It wasn’t as much of a long shot as it might seem. If somebody e-mailed me with old photographs of New Kassel, I could most likely tell them what building was what, or at least what street the photo had been taken on. When you specialize in an area, you specialize in the area.

  I shut down my computer and started to rifle through the box I had set at my feet. More receipts. I’m not sure why the woman kept every piece of paper ever given to her, but she did. Just when I was getting really bored, I found a hand-drawn picture that had been yellowed by age and obviously colored by an preschooler. In bold red outlines was the Gaheimer House. The green shutters had been colored in crookedly. A bright yellow sun with giant rays peeked out of the corner, and three people stood on the sidewalk out front. One was Sylvia, one was her sister, Wilma, and the other was a little girl.

  Me.

  I must have colored this for Sylvia when I was about four or five. In crooked letters I had written To Silvera. Love Torie.

  There was no way I was going to cry. If I started to cry I might not stop, and I wasn’t sure I had the energy for it, anyway. How bad is that, when you’re too tired to cry?

  A few hours passed, and I’d made my way through that box started on another. This one was more recent. There were things in it from this past year. I had to pay more attention to this box, because there might be things in here that I would need. If I came across an owner’s manual for the new refrigerator, though, I was going to throw it out.

  What I found unsettled me all the way to my toes.

  Made out to Sylvia Pershing were ten receipts for the last ten months from one Michael J. Walker, PI. Private investigator?

  Sylvia had hired a private investigator? For what reason? And why didn’t I know about it? How could I not have known about it? I searched my memory for anything unusual. Could I remember a time in the past ten months that somebody unusual had come to visit the Gaheimer House? Oh, gee, just a couple hundred tourists every week or so.

  I wondered if the sheriff knew about this.

  Then I wondered if Mr. Walker knew about Sylvia’s death, and if he didn’t, why hadn’t he called here? Had he called here? Think. Think. Had a man called and hung up when I told him Sylvia was dead?

  Not that I could remember. Was he still on retainer, then?

  The phone rang, and I picked it up. “Torie,” I said.

  There was silence on the other end. “Hello?” I said. Just breathing. I slammed the phone down, irritated. I hate when people do that. Of course, now that I have caller ID in my home, it never happens. If I don’t know the name or the number, I don’t answer the phone. The phone-pervs can just leave a message. I didn’t have caller ID at the office, though. The phone rang again, and I answered it. “Hello.”

  “Torie, it’s Collette,” a voice said. My best friend Collette, the big-city girl. Of course, the big city I refer to is St. Louis, which is pretty small in the grand scheme of cities. It’s about a half hour to the north of us here in New Kassel.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I said. “Did you just call here?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Your mom called,” she said.

  “My mother?” I asked. “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, she said you needed to be taken out and shown a good time.”

  “Oh, right. My mother did not say that!”

  “Okay, not in so many words, but she said, ‘Call her. She could use your contagious energy.’ So I translated that to mean that I am to take you out and get you as dog-faced drunk as I can and have a great time dancing and maybe sticking some one-dollar bills in some scantily clad muscle-bound man’s underwear.”

  “No.”

  “You always say no.”

  “I really can’t. I have tons to do,” I said, fingering the receipts from the private investigator.

  “There’s this really cool band playing in Soulard tonight,” she said. “Everybody there keeps their clothes on.”

  “No. No offense, Collette, but I just really don’t feel like it.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked in a slightly more serious voice. “We don’t have to get wild. We could go see a movie.”

  “Truth is … I’m a bit … I dunno,” I said, and shrugged as if she could see me.

  “Depressed?”

  “I am not depressed,” I said. “I’m in … transition and it’s just weird.”

  “You know, you deserve all that money Sylvia left you,” Collette said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are the only person in that town mourning her. I think she knew you would be, and that’s why she left it all to you,” Collette said.

  “That is not true,” I said. “You should have seen all the people at the funeral. The whole town showed up.”

  “Probably making sure she didn’t jump out of the casket at the last minute,” she said.

  “Collette!”

  “Hey, sorry, Torie, but she was a mean old bat. She was even mean to you. You just never let it bother you,” Collette said.

  “No,” I said. “You’re wrong. A lot of people loved her.”

  “Whatever. Last offer for a movie.”

  “No thanks.”

  “How about a pizza and conversation with your witty and wonderful best friend?”

  “Sorry.”

  “All right, your mother can’t say I didn’t try,” she said. “Oh, I hear Mommy Dearest is coming to town.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re really
that upset?”

  “I’m not upset because she’s coming for a visit,” I said. “She has the right to come for a visit. I’m upset because she’s staying in my house. It’s like asking a wolf to sleep in a barn with a lamb.”

  “You’re the lamb?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Just making sure.”

  “And I’m really upset that Rudy knows this and didn’t even bother to ask me,” I said. “I guess I’m really more angry about that than anything.”

  “Well, look at the bright side,” Collette said. “By the time she leaves, your canned food will be organized by color, your plants will be organized alphabetically, your son’s ears will be so clean he’ll be able to hear somebody cough in Guam, and your socks will be lint-ball free.”

  “And I will be in an insane asylum drooling all over my nice new white suit.”

  Six

  My sister, Stephanie, arrived at the Gaheimer House at precisely nine o’clock the next morning.

  We only met a year ago, my sister and I. She was the child of an affair my father had. I hadn’t been real keen on the idea at first. Well, actually, I had wanted a sister all my life. It was my father’s neglect in telling me she existed that bothered me. To be even more precise, it was the fact that he knew her, he had a relationship with her, and he had kept her from me. That was really the thing that had hurt me. Once I got over that, Stephanie and I bonded like … well, long-lost sisters.

  And I forgave my father because he had finally forgiven himself.

  But the great thing was, I had a sister! Somebody who was more like me than anybody I’d ever met—except she wasn’t nearly as obnoxious as I was. Give her time.

  “Good Lord, you really are pregnant,” I said, smiling at her bowling ball of a belly. Stephanie is a bit taller than I am as well as five years younger. That hardly seems fair, I know. Being half sisters, we don’t really resemble each other that much. We both have our father’s hazel eyes, but that’s about it. Our similarities are more in spirit than in body.

  “Yup,” she said and rubbed her belly.

  “But I just saw you like three weeks ago and you didn’t look … so … pregnant.”

  “I know, the kid just suddenly grew,” she said.

  “How’d the doctor’s visit go yesterday?”

  “They’re ninety-nine point nine percent sure it’s a boy. Either that or it’s a girl with three legs,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said. “Matthew will have somebody to get into trouble with.”

  Stephanie laughed as if I were joking.

  “No, you don’t understand. Matthew is going to need all the help he can get against Mary.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. What was I thinking?”

  “Well,” I said and sighed. “I need you to start by going through the boxes I’ve got lined up on the kitchen counter. I just want you to make piles, like utilities, private papers, legal papers, that sort of thing. Then all I have to do is look through each pile and see if there’s anything I need to keep. When you’re done with that, you could take all the dishes out of the kitchen cabinets.”

  “Why?”

  “Other than a handful of things, I really don’t need the dishes here. I mean, this was Sylvia’s home. She lived here. I won’t be living here. I just need a few things to use when I’m working.”

  “What are you going to do with the things you’re not going to keep?”

  “Well, there are things throughout the whole house I’m going to have to get rid of. Like I need twenty sets of sheets? No,” I said. “I’m going to give some of it to some charities up in north St. Louis. Then I’m going to have a rummage sale or something, and with the proceeds I’m going to set up a fund of some sort in Sylvia’s name.”

  “What sort of fund?” she asked as we began walking back toward the kitchen.

  “Sylvia was Catholic,” I said, “so I might set up a scholarship in her name. You know, if parents want to send their child to a Catholic school but can’t afford it, the Sylvia Fund would pay for the child’s tuition.”

  “You think you’d have enough money from one rummage sale to do that over and over?”

  “Probably enough to do it a few years,” I said. “And who knows? By then I’ll have all our finances worked out. I could probably continue to pay it.”

  She nodded. “Well, I’ll get started.”

  “I really appreciate this,” I said.

  “No problem,” she said. “I don’t get to see you enough, anyway.”

  I smiled. “I’ll be upstairs. I’m going to start going through the bedrooms.”

  I couldn’t help but think how morbid it was to go through a dead person’s belongings. At the top of the stairs, I looked back over the balcony at the room below me. I had looked down at this view a thousand and one times, but never from the point of view of it being mine.

  I was uncomfortable having to go through this woman’s things, even though I’m nosy by nature. The personal and private collection of Sylvia’s life was laid bare to me, and I could do with it as I chose. Rather disturbing, I thought. You can’t take any of it with you, of that there is no doubt, but there was something eerie about leaving your life for somebody else to decipher, decode, dismantle, and disperse. And I wasn’t even a relative.

  When I reached the top of the stairs, my heart was heavy, and not from the climb. The first bedroom I came to was the first bedroom I tackled. The brown room, as I had often called it. I opened the closet door and there, hanging, ready to be worn, were Sylvia’s clothes. I took them out and laid them on the bed. All of them would go to charity.

  It was unbelievable what a person would find in somebody else’s closets. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this sort of thing before. I catalogued an estate once for Colin, but that woman, Catherine Finch, had not been my lifelong friend. It’s different when you know the person. For example, I knew that the Louisville Slugger I pulled out of the closet at that moment was not, as some would suspect, for protection. No, it had come from a charity softball game we had one year, when I was only about seventeen. Sylvia had hit a home run in that game—the game-winning home run. She had been at least eighty at the time. This was the bat she had used. She had written the date with a Magic Marker on the end. It had obviously meant a lot to her. Those were things I would never have known if I’d been cataloguing the estate of a stranger.

  I decided I would keep the bat for Matthew.

  Farther back in the dark recesses of the closet, I found a few mousetraps—none with mice in them, thank God—and an old tripod for a camera that looked like something John Huston would have used on African Queen. A box of … shoes. A box of … baby shoes? They must have been hers and her sister Wilma’s. They looked like miniature Mary Poppins shoes, with the hooks and the laces meandering up the ankles.

  I set those on the bed. Those I would keep.

  And so it went for hours. In the top of the closet I found boxes of old photographs. Now, normally this would send me into fits of excitement. Old photographs are like gold to me. In fact, I would rather relatives leave me pictures than money. Rudy laughs and jokes that if I was buried alive in a pile of old photographs, I’d die with a smile on my face. But these pictures would be frustrating for me to go through, because I knew from looking at some of Sylvia’s pictures before that she probably hadn’t labeled them, and the only person who could tell me who was in these photographs was now gone. So there was something else to drive me crazy. Maybe she did this on purpose.

  I picked up a handful of photographs and looked at them. When I flipped them over I was stunned. Sylvia had written on the backs of most of them, and she had done it recently. The ink was new, not faded, the handwriting shakier and more unsure than a youthful hand would have been.

  I flashed back to a scene of me talking to Sylvia about a year ago, when a 1920s shipwreck had been visible in the Mississippi thanks to a low water level. I had expressed my outrage over photographs she had shown
me then without writing on the backs. I suppose she had realized that these photographs would go into the ranks of the unidentified, so she sat down and labeled them.

  The woman would never cease to amaze me.

  I took the boxes downstairs, put them on my desk, and booted up my computer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stephanie go walking by but thought nothing of it. I logged on to the Internet and checked my mail. There was nothing from the Iowa GenWeb page.

  Stephanie came into my office then. “How long have you been in here?”

  “In my office?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “About fifteen minutes,” I said. “Why?”

  A peculiar expression crossed her face. “I just went upstairs to ask you about this, and you weren’t there, but I could have sworn I heard you up there.” All I could do was stare at her. “I mean, I heard you walking. The floor creaks, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I … well, I was here. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Weird,” she said.

  “Yeah, weird,” I said. “Whatcha got?”

  “Oh, should I put this in with the legal stuff?”

  “What is it?”

  “It looks like police reports. Or something like that. From … 1972.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Stephanie shrugged and handed the papers to me. “Maybe I’m wrong on what they are. You take a look.”

  I took the papers from her. Indeed, they were copies of a report of some kind from the Granite County Sheriff’s Department, dated October 1972. My brows creased and my head began to hurt.

  “Hey, it’s lunchtime,” she said. “That’s the other reason I was coming upstairs to get you. I don’t know about you, but us pregnant ladies need to eat.”

  “Oh,” I said. I managed to tear my eyes from the papers in my hand. She was smiling at me, a big, broad, healthy smile, although somewhere deep in the recesses of her eyes—eyes that looked just like mine, just like my father’s—there was a hint of concern. “Sure. You want me to order a pizza from Chuck’s?”