Killing Cousins Read online

  It also made me look at the books on the shelves a little more closely. They, too, revealed a passion for material on the subjects of the hereafter, ghosts and fairies. There was even a book on different winged creatures. Everything from angels to gargoyles.

  I was deliberately saving her office to clean out for last. I figured that would be where I would find the most important information on her personal life: diaries, photo albums, that sort of thing. Right now, I was trying to get the bulk out of the way, things like lamps, statues, rugs, end tables.

  Not everything in this house was old. In fact, living room number one on the second floor had all new furniture with two matching recliners and a nice big television. I made a note to ask Colin if he could give me a good deal on the television. It had a remote control. Something we still didn’t have in my house.

  I had just begun wrapping a bronze horse about two feet high when I noticed that Mary was missing. Mary missing is a bad thing. Rachel I could trust to find her way back without destroying anything; Mary, I could not. My youngest daughter was the type of child who just walked by things and they broke.

  Rachel was seated on the big wingback mauve chair reading a book. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which I always thought made her face look so innocent. It reminded me that she was still just a little girl, no matter how grown-up she acted sometimes.

  “Rachel, where’s Mary?” I asked.

  “It’s not my day to watch her,” she snapped. She gave a big sigh and looked up from her book. “Tomorrow’s not looking too good either.”

  It was at times like this that I had to remember never to let her innocent childlike demeanor fool me. She was really just a pimply-faced, hormone-laden teenager waiting to pop through the innocent outside shell. She was headed for teenagehood in all its glory. “You just lost bike-riding privileges for today and tomorrow.”

  “Aw, Mom. I’m reading; how am I supposed to know where she is?”

  At that moment Mary came flittering down the stairs, spinning and dancing as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Well, that would be because she didn’t have a care in the world. That was my territory. At her age, it was her mother’s job to do all the worrying.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “Upstairs.”

  “You know you’re not supposed to be up there without me.”

  “I was up-upstairs. All the way up.”

  “You went to the attic?”

  “No, the third upstairs,” she said. “And I found this!”

  She walked over and handed me a sterling-silver hairbrush. A sterling silver baby hairbrush. Goose bumps broke out along my back and arms. I rubbed my arms self-consciously.

  “I thought Matthew could have it. Maybe Grandpa Sheriff would let us buy it for him,” she said with her slurred s’s.

  “W-where did you get this?”

  “In the baby’s room,” she said. “Silly. Where’d you think I’d get it?”

  “Rachel, stay down here with Matthew. Mary, take me to the baby’s room,” I said.

  She knew what she was talking about because she led me up the stairs straight to the third floor, talking incessantly all the way about what fun she could have in this house. I had not gone this far up before. We walked down a broad hallway with a lavender runner down the middle of it. To my amazement, there were more bedrooms along this hall and a room that looked like Walter Finch’s study. At the end of the hall, on the left, was the room that Mary had walked into, obliviously. I heard her as she went in. “In here, Mommy.”

  I entered the room and gasped, feeling the hair rise on the back of my neck and tears stand in my eyes. It was an old-fashioned nursery. I would venture to guess it had been kept exactly as it had been for over sixty years. Dust and cobwebs clung to the antique furniture and baby decorations. A redwork quilt, so popular in the thirties, had yellowed with age. I would lay money that this was little Byron Finch’s room and that Catherine had never changed a thing.

  In fact, stacked in a wicker holder there were folded cloth diapers, each with a scrolled “BLF” in blue embroidery. Stuffed animals lined the crib, and two pairs of shoes sat on the dresser. I opened the dresser, and it was full of baby clothes from an era gone by. Most were a faded blue or white. A few things in yellow. Almost all of them were cotton or linen.

  The window through which Byron had been stolen away seemed larger than it should be, as if it were a portal to an evil world. An empty, lonely rocking chair sat next to it.

  “Isn’t this cool?” Mary asked.

  I couldn’t speak. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was because I’d just had a baby boy less than two months ago and I could identify with Catherine Finch’s anguish. Maybe it was because it was eerie standing in the room where a baby had been stolen and never seen again. Maybe it was because I knew that, other than Catherine and maybe Walter Finch, I was probably the only person to step into this room in sixty years. Well, and Mary. Whatever it was, I couldn’t answer my daughter. I thought if I opened my mouth to speak I would cry.

  I motioned for her to come out of the room and then I shut the door.

  As we walked down the hallway I found my voice and chastised her. “Don’t you ever come up here again,” I said. “Do you hear me?”

  As we descended the bazillion steps to the bottom floor, I was hit with the fact that I would have to go up there eventually and catalog everything in that room. I would have to catalog Catherine Finch’s nightmare.

  Eight

  “They found a body!” Rudy said to me as I ate my Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Down at the Yates house,” he said. My husband was breathless and his eyes were wide, and it wasn’t from looking at me in my frumpy housecoat with my hair piled on top of my head.

  I swallowed hard and realized that I hadn’t actually chewed that last bite very well. I took a drink of orange juice to try and wash down a stuck Cheerio. “What do you mean, they found a body? Rudy, are you feeling all right?”

  “Deputy Duran wants you ASAP.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants to know if you can identify it,” he said.

  I suppose that’s the downfall to knowing everybody in the town and everybody’s business. “You mean, I have to go look at it?”

  “Stop eating,” he said and dragged me out of the chair. “He wants you down at the Yates house now. The coroner is waiting on you.”

  He was serious. He was totally and completely serious. I ran upstairs and threw on a pair of jeans and a faded pumpkin-colored T-shirt, slid my feet into my tennis shoes and headed down the steps. I finished the last of my juice and blinked at Rudy. “It would save us all a lot of trouble if it were the mayor.”

  “Torie! I can’t believe you said that,” Rudy scolded.

  In truth, I couldn’t believe I had said it either. I mean, we all have nasty little thoughts that we never vocalize. Sometimes I don’t realize that I’m on loudspeaker. “I didn’t mean that I wish he was dead. It’s just that since there’s already a body…”

  “You’re digging yourself in deeper,” Rudy said. “You really need to get your hormones checked.”

  “Oh, pooh,” I said and walked through the living room.

  “This is exactly what I mean when I tell you that you don’t have to verbalize every single thought that goes through your pretty little head,” Rudy called out after me as I went out the door.

  I looked down the street and saw the coroner, the sheriff’s car, the wrecking company and, of course, the onlookers. As well as some tourists. Even though it was before eight on a Friday morning, people were out in droves.

  A lead-colored haze hung in the air. The weatherman had said that it would be a “yellow-air day.” Can I just say for the record that having to categorize our air quality is just plain old depressing?

  I walked down the street as quickly as I could without running, and immediately I saw the mayor standing next to Deputy
Duran. After what I’d just said about him, I was actually relieved to see that he was okay. Now if something bad happened to him, I’d swear it was I who caused it.

  “Bill,” I said and then looked to Duran. “Deputy. What’s going on?”

  “We were about to tear down the building,” Bill cut in.

  “One of the wrecking crew guys went into the house, just to make sure that there weren’t any homeless people or hobos inside. Since we’re so close to the railroad and the river, they thought there was a good chance that somebody might be in there,” Duran said. “Seems that hobos in particular will travel the rail, jump off and stay in old abandoned buildings for a while.”

  “Uh-huh. And?” I asked.

  “There’s a dead person inside,” the mayor said in a whisper.

  “They found a body,” Duran said as if the mayor had said nothing. “I know it was dark the night you saw somebody coming out of there, but I just want to see if you recognize him.”

  “Oh, Edwin,” I said. “It was very dark. All I saw was a silhouette, really.”

  “Yes, but you might be able to determine if he was the right body type at least,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “Is he…I mean, what kinda shape is it in?”

  “Come on,” he said and started leading me into the house. “He just looks like he’s sleeping. Of course, we’ll do a complete autopsy.”

  As I walked into the Yates house, I saw Eleanore standing in the crowd. When she realized that I’d seen her she waved. God help me, I waved back. Maybe there was something wrong with my hormones.

  “Until we get autopsy results back,” Edwin said as we walked through the dark and dank living room, “I can’t really say what killed him. I swear, though, he looks like he just came in here and went to sleep.”

  Even though it was daylight, we still needed Edwin’s flashlight to get a really good look at the body. He flashed it on the man, and I would agree with Edwin that it looked as if the man had just curled up in the sludge and gone to sleep. Except that he was wearing a nice sport coat and shiny black shoes. Anybody who could afford decent clothes like this could afford a place to sleep other than a dilapidated building.

  “He doesn’t look like a hobo,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t think so, either. Because of the nice clothes and good shoes,” Duran said.

  “Yeah, that and the fact that I know him,” I said, taking the flashlight from Edwin. I shone it directly on the dead man’s peaceful face.

  Surprise registered on Duran’s face. “You know him?”

  “Well, not personally. I just know who he is.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Patrick Ward,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “He has a sister—oh, what is her name?” I said more to myself than to Edwin. “Patrick was an upstanding citizen of New Kassel until about twelve years ago, when he moved to Chicago.”

  “Chicago,” Edwin said back to me. “Why in hell would a man who lives in Chicago come back here and end up in this building dead?”

  “That would be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” I said with a shiver.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  “I work for the Historical Society, and one of the things that Sylvia had me do when I first started working there was to compile genealogical charts of the citizens of New Kassel.”

  “Huh?” the deputy asked.

  “See, people fill out the charts, as much as they can remember, including their siblings’ names, et cetera. Then I put them on file. Then later, if somebody wants to research their family tree, we have a lot of it done on file already for them. Plus Sylvia just likes to know everybody’s roots, for some reason. I remember the Wards because they were related to a few of the other families in the area and they were Mayflower descendants.”

  “I’m lost,” he said.

  “The Wards are descended from one of the original Mayflower passengers, and if there is one thing I never forget, Deputy, it’s a person’s family history,” I said. “There’s a picture of Patrick Ward in the historical society archives from about 1970. He donated a spinning wheel that had belonged to one of his ancestors in about 1780.”

  “You know,” Deputy Duran said, “I really didn’t think that you could identify the body when I had Rudy send you down here. I just thought you could tell me if he was the same build as the prowler we had the other night. I never expected this.”

  “It’s a curse,” I said. “And so far as comparing him to the prowler, I can’t. It was too dark. But if it was him, what was he doing in here? What was he looking for? I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I think he was pretty well off up there in Chicago. What was he doing here?”

  “Why did he come back?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can we get out of here now?”

  “Yeah,” he said and led me back through the living room. Before we could make it to the door, something with lots of legs crawled across my foot and I jumped, screamed, and all but climbed on Deputy Duran’s back.

  “What?” Duran asked and whirled around with his hand on his gun.

  “Nothing,” I said, regaining my composure. “Something…with lots of legs.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry, I’m a little freaked out from all of this.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at the dead man lying in the sludge.

  “Hey, about those charts,” Duran said as we emerged into the light of the hazy day. “Can you give them a look for me?”

  “What for?”

  “Find out who his sister is. The one whose name you can’t remember. See if any of his family still lives here. He looks close to seventy, so he may not have any family left. But you never know. Maybe he was just visiting, got drunk and then got lost. Who knows, maybe he was an Alzheimer’s victim and wandered away from his family.”

  “That’s true. There may be no malicious intent here at all. Sure will,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  I started to walk up the hill toward my house and then remembered something. “Hey, Edwin. Are they still going to tear down the building today? I mean, since it’s a crime scene and all?”

  “Of course we are,” the mayor interjected from next to the squad car.

  “Maybe,” Duran said, throwing the mayor an evil look. “I’ll let you know.”

  “What do you have to let her know for?” Bill asked as I walked away.

  Nine

  I felt like a mother duck walking down the street with my children trailing behind me, with Matthew in one of those backpack baby carriers. I wondered if there was any order to the ducklings when they followed their mother or if they just fell into place however they happened to leave the nest, as my girls did.

  The heat rose off the brick of the Gaheimer house and I knew it was going to be a scorcher today. August is usually pretty hot in Missouri, though the first half of this month had been the exception to the rule. But even the heat was bearable; it was when the humidity settled in on the land like a warm wet blanket that you would lose your blooming mind and your air-conditioning bill would be in the triple digits. It felt as if it was going to be one of those days.

  We walked into the Gaheimer house and immediately Sylvia was in the parlor like an ancient vulture ready to pounce on my children if they even looked as though they were going to touch anything. “Don’t touch anything,” I said to the girls, and then looked up and smiled at Sylvia. “Good morning, Sylvia.”

  “To what do I owe this visit?” she asked, her head shaking from age.

  “I’ve come to look at the charts. I’m still looking at software, you know. I think it would be easier to put the information on the computer,” I said as I headed back to my dinky office. My gaggle of ducks and I walked through the long parlor, everybody’s shoes clicking on the floor. Sylvia had had the pine floors waxed recently. The sunlight coming in through the long windows took on a blinding effect once it hit the floors. I passed
the soda machine in the hallway and then silently counted to five.

  “Can I have a soda?” Mary asked. Like clockwork. I love being able to predict my children.

  “Nope.”

  “Please?”

  “Nope. You’ll just have to go to the bathroom then. You can split one with Rachel on the way out,” I said. “Sit down and don’t touch anything.”

  Wilma Pershing appeared at the door. She was about two years younger than her sister Sylvia. Just recently she had started using a walker to get around. It broke my heart to see her have to use the walker because the Pershing sisters had always represented the independence that I hoped I would have at their age. Seeing Wilma with the walker just reminded me that eventually time gets everybody, and that was just depressing. I admit that it bothered me much more than it seemed to bother her.

  She was pudgy, the epitome of the joyous old woman. She stood in the doorway and twirled the end of her hair around one finger.

  “Children, children. All the children.” It was also a very sad, well-known fact that she was becoming senile. More and more she made no sense and seemed to revert to childlike rhymes and repetitions.

  “Yes, Wilma. All of the children are with me today.”

  “Hi, Wilma,” Rachel said. Wilma just waved to her. Her expression changed as she realized that her sister Sylvia was coming down the hall and headed in her direction.

  “Bye, children,” she said and turned around and left. I had to wonder how much of her senility was real and how much of it was just to irritate her sister. Was this what I had to look forward to? Would Rachel and Mary try to irritate each other their whole lives? Would they never become best friends, as I’d hoped?

  “So, it was Patrick Ward, was it?” Sylvia asked as she came into the office.

  “Yeah,” I said as I headed for the file cabinet. “How did you find out so quickly?”