Killing Cousins (17 page)

“You wanna run that by me again?” said Colin.

I sat across from him in his kitchen, with my mother seated next to him. The sun was beginning to rise through the window behind them. They lived in a nice ranch house on Weeping Willow Avenue, in the heart of the residential area of Wisteria.

I had made Colin stay on the cell phone line until I arrived at their house. He sent out a deputy to dust the house for prints, but I didn't stay around to greet him.

“What part do you want me to repeat?” I asked.

“None of it makes any sense,” my mother said. “Open windows. Music playing. Are you suggesting there's a ghost in the Finch house?”

“No, of course not,” I said. Although I believed what I just said, I still got goose bumps thinking about the Victrola playing down the hallway, with me frozen on the steps. “I think somebody is trying to scare me.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Obviously, because she knows too much,” Colin said. “And she's got complete access to the house.”

“I think somebody is afraid of what I'll find.”

“The blanket?” my mom asked.

“Could be. Maybe there's something else in the house I haven't found that they don't want me to find. So they're trying to scare me off,” I said.

“Like in Scooby Doo.” Colin smirked.

“Zoinks, Shaggy!” I answered.

“Shut up, you smart aleck,” he said.

“Sorry.”

They were both quiet a moment. Mom picked at the design in the wood of the table, trying desperately to stay awake. Finally, Colin spoke. “I think you shouldn't go back out there alone. It's too dangerous.”

“They're just trying to scare me.”

“How do you know you won't end up like Patrick Ward?” he asked.

“I hate clam chowder.”

“Torie,” he said in his best fatherly tone.

“All right,” I said. “I won't go back out there alone.”

“Now what about the other part. The part about Byron and the woods. Why do you think he was in the woods that night?” Colin asked.

My mom's kitchen was done in country red and green, with apples as the accent. She had an apple cookie jar and apple canisters. I had to wonder how Colin really felt about all the apples, and the lace doilies in the living room. It was kind of funny, actually. “Mom, you like apples, don't you?”

“How can you tell?” she asked and smiled.

“Because they're all over your kitchen. When we walk into Elmer Kolbe's house, what do we instantly learn about him?”

She shrugged and then added, “That he's Catholic. There's a crucifix and a picture of Mary in the hallway.”

“Exactly. We know that Bill is a bowler by all of his trophies.”

“And his bronzed bowling shoes.”

“And Tobias is the biggest Cardinals fan west of the Mississippi,” I said. “Why else would he have Cardinal T-shirts, pennants and photographs all over his basement wall?”

“What has this got to do with Byron?” Colin asked.

“In the great room of the home of Catherine Finch, there is a large stained-glass window, almost the size of the whole wall. The stained-glass window depicts fairies.”

“Fairies,” he said.

“Yes. They're all over the window. Some are flying, some are playing, one is sleeping in a tree. And in her library there are books on the existence of fairies and other forest spirits.”

“Other forest spirits?” the sheriff asked.

“You know—brownies, gnomes, that sort of thing. Characters from what we would call folklore,” I explained.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm following, really I am.”

“No, you're not. You're as lost as you can be because you dismiss fairies as nothing more than folklore or the stories you tell children at bedtime,” I said. “But Catherine believed in them. She believed they were real.”

His expression was still blank.

“The changeling,” my mother said with horror on her face.

“Exactly,” I said.

“What?” Colin asked. “What are you saying?”

“The one thing in the window that I didn't pay too much attention to was the baby. There's a baby, behind a rock. I was so taken with the beauty of the window, and all the fairies dancing around, that I really didn't give the baby much thought. But last night, looking at it from the outside, I understood. It all made sense.”

“Well, it's still not making sense to me,” Colin said. He looked over at my mother as she shivered.

“Fairy folklore, Colin. The changeling baby. The fairies would take a human baby and replace it with a changeling,” I said.

He looked at me a moment and then shook his head. “Are you trying to tell me that a fairy took Byron? I must have left you in the cell too long.”

“No, I'm not,” I said. “What I'm trying to say is that Cecily and Aurora grew up being taught their mother's religion. Just like you were taught the Catholic way and my old boss was Jewish because he was raised Jewish. Cecily and Aurora were being raised, well…I guess it's what you'd call pagan. Anyway, they would have believed what we consider to be folklore.”

“I still don't understand what you're saying. So what if they believed it?” Colin said. “A fairy didn't come and take Byron into the woods.”

“No,” I said. “They did. I think Byron was fairy bait.”

Colin just looked at me as if I'd grown an extra head. Then, without finesse, he just threw his head back and laughed as hard as he could. He continued to laugh until I thought he'd pop a blood vessel.

“Don't laugh,” I said. “You're going to sprain something.”

“That's…preposterous,” he said.

“Think about it, Colin. If you were ten years old and you believed in fairies and you and your cousins decided you wanted to catch one, how would you go about it?”

He stopped laughing.

“You'd have to have bait. And everybody knows how the fairies love human babies,” I said.

“Oh my God,” he said and ran his hand through his hair.

“I think that was the plan of the cousins that night. They were going to try and catch a fairy. So they took the only baby they had access to out into the woods, never intending any harm to come to him. They laid him on the ground to wait for the fairies to come…”

“And he got struck by lightning,” Mom finished.

“It makes perfect sense,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. I can just see me basing an investigation on this,” Colin said.

“If he wasn't kidnapped, what other reason would there be for him to be in those woods? Somebody took him into the woods, where he was hit by lightning. Once he was dead, that somebody stuffed him in a semi-finished wall.”

Colin got up and walked over to the coffeepot, where he poured himself a huge mug of freshly brewed coffee. My mother looked at me across the kitchen table with that look. The one that said that she believed me but she wasn't sure what good it would do.

“You really believe this?” he asked and turned around to face us.

“It sounds exactly like something a group of kids would do. I believe they had absolutely no intention to hurt Byron. I think they panicked and hid him in the wall. I mean, Byron was Walter and Catherine's favorite child. What would life have been like for Cecily and Aurora if their parents found out they were responsible for the death of their favorite child? So they put him in the wall, snuck back in the house and the next morning went along with the kidnapping theory,” I said.

“Only, Catherine got wise,” my mother added.

“I believe so. I'm not sure how. Maybe it was just a mother's intuition. Maybe she found the blanket, too. Maybe there's something else in the house that I haven't found that Catherine did find, eventually. And then she became estranged even more from her daughters,” I said. “Because she knew they had been responsible and had known all along and watched her suffer.”

“Incredible,” Colin said. “It makes sense, yet at the same time it just seems so far-fetched.”

“Not for children. Mary is convinced that if she clicks her heels together three times and says, ‘There's no place like the North Pole,' that she'll eventually wake up in Santa's workshop. Kids are very impressionable. And trusting. They believe what their parents tell them.”

“So what do you do next?” Mom asked.

“Well, we either try and find more evidence in the house, or we get one of them to confess,” Colin said.

“What about Patrick Ward?” Mom asked. “One of the remaining five killed him. You know they did.”

“But why? If it wasn't Hope Danvers,” I said, “then who would have done it? After all these years?”

“Call it a hunch, but I don't think it was his sister,” the sheriff said.

“The sad thing is, if I'm right, there isn't anything anybody could do to the five of them. They were all juveniles. Very young juveniles. It was an accident. The only thing they did wrong was not telling the truth. There really isn't anything anybody could do to them at this point,” I said. “Until one cousin had to go and kill another cousin. Now someone has gone beyond the point of no return.”

Colin set his coffee cup down on the counter and stretched. A big yawn came out of him, and then he rubbed his eyes. “Well, as soon as I get to work I'm going to conduct some interviews with Hugh Danvers and Lanna Petrovic. Maybe even work my way around to Cecily and Aurora. Then you and I are going to go through the remaining things in that house,” he said. “There has to be something.”

With that, he kissed my mother and disappeared down the hallway. I assumed he was going back to bed and that he was finished with me. My mother smiled an affectionate smile.

“What?” I asked.

“It's good to see you two working together,” she said.

“Well, it's either that or go back to Bertha,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, laughing. “You deserved that. I only wish I had had a jail cell when you were growing up.”

“Uh, you…you…You're terrible,” I said.

Suddenly, she turned very somber on me. “Children do stupid things, Torie. Ice-skating on a pond not totally frozen, playing with their dad's guns. Trying to summon a fairy doesn't sound all that outrageous to me. It's no more far-fetched than kids playing with a Ouija board or trying to conjure up Satan. And we all know that kids have done those things. When you think about how children play, especially before the days of Nintendo and television…It's not impossible at all, really.”

“I know,” I said. “It's one of those things that sound really far-fetched when you say it out loud. But when you think about it, when I was ten years old, I did a lot more stupid things than that. I just never had a baby brother who accidentally got killed while I was doing them.”

It was the morning of the first day of the Pickin' and Grinnin' Festival. This was one of my favorite annual events held in New Kassel. Some of the bands came back every year and so we were on a first-name basis with them.

The Murdoch Inn no longer had any vacancies and, in fact, many of the fans that came to the festival stayed in Wisteria or Meyersville. I sort of liked the idea of the Finch house becoming a hotel. It was certainly big enough and beautiful enough. If only we could fill it year-round and not just when we had a music festival, an October fest or some other event. But riverboat gambling was absolutely not the answer.

I was in the bathroom getting ready for the day when the phone rang.

“Torie, tell me you had nothing to do with the article in this morning's
Post,
” the sheriff bellowed.

“Okay, I had nothing to do with the article in this morning's
Post,
” I repeated. “Now, you want to tell me what this is all about?”

I carried the cordless phone to my bathroom, which was located on the upper floor, as was my bedroom. I picked up my mascara tube and began applying the dark brown sticky stuff to my poor eyelashes, which certainly had never done anything to warrant such punishment.

“There's an article in this morning's
Post
telling the whole story.”

“What whole story?” I asked.

“You honestly haven't seen it?”

“No, I've been trying to get ready for the festival,” I said.

“The article in the
Post
cites the finding of Byron's blanket in the Finch home as proof positive that one of the six children present that night kidnapped and murdered him,” Colin said.

I dropped the mascara tube into the sink, which left a dark brown trail of sticky stuff all over the white porcelain. “You're kidding. No, you're not kidding.” I sat down on the edge of the toilet.

All I could hear was Colin's steady breathing on the other end of the phone line, and Fritz downstairs barking at something. The rest of the world seemed to fade away, while those two sounds seemed to get louder.

“How is this possible?” I asked. My breathing came in forceful spurts. I'm pretty sure I was having a panic attack.

“I'd say somebody leaked the information,” he said. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he didn't believe me one bit. He thought that somehow I had leaked the information.

“Colin, I've told nobody about the blanket except you and my mother. And you've told the other deputies. You have the evidence, I don't even have it anymore,” I said.

I needed air. I tried to open the tiny bathroom window, but it was stuck as usual. If it didn't get shut just right, it would be in crooked somehow and it couldn't be opened without a crowbar.

“Well, it doesn't matter now, I guess,” the sheriff said, disgusted. “I have to haul all the cousins in for questioning.”

“Because of the article?” I asked. I walked out into the bedroom and opened the window there. I needed air. Of course, in my state of rapid-breathing-induced confusion, I forgot that the air outside was going to be hotter than the air in the house. I found out real quick, though. Shutting the window, I went to the air vent for the air-conditioning and stuck my face over it, where I took deep breaths and let the cool air flow over my face. I'm told that panic attacks are just all in my head. I didn't much care. Cold air always made me breathe better.

“Well, yes,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Are you not coming to the festival then?”

“No, I'll be there eventually. Although I may have to go wherever Hope Danvers is, rather than have her come to me.”

“Okay, I'll see you there,” I said.

“Torie?”

“Yeah?”

“You're telling me the truth?”

“I swear to you that I did not tell anybody about the baby blanket,” I said. “Except you. And Mom.”

“All right,” he said. “I'll see you later.”

I sat down on the floor next to the air vent wondering just how this story had leaked. It couldn't have come at a worse time.

An hour later, I was standing next to Tobias Thorley, who was making kettle popcorn. He was about the scrawniest person in New Kassel. A good wind could knock him over.

Kettle popcorn was the best-smelling stuff in the world. It smelled like popcorn, but it had a more robust country smell. Since it was made in a big iron kettle, the oil and the kettle smell actually mixed with the popcorn smell.

One booth down was Chuck's booth. He was serving beer and pizza by the slice. Obviously, he was running a very popular booth. Across from us was Helen's booth. She was selling four different kinds of fudge from her business, The Lick-A-Pot Candy Shoppe. She was also selling rock candy, cinnamon sticks and pralines, all made by her wonderfully talented staff.

Soda booths, cotton-candy booths and hot dog stands dotted the landscape, all adding, not just color, but wonderful aromas to the air. Elmer had set up the berry booth. It was filled with our leftover strawberry and blackberry jams, preserves, syrup and pies from earlier festivals of the year. The pies had been frozen, of course.

Mary and Rachel were on the rectory steps handing out maps of New Kassel to the tourists. The maps pointed out where the public rest rooms were, along with historical buildings and all the shops. The girls looked especially cute today. Rachel wore a lime-green dress and Mary a lemon-yellow one. Wilma had made them and Rachel had requested that they wear them today. It was the first festival without Wilma, she had said, and so she and Mary wanted to do something special. Underneath those pre-teen hormones was still a thoughtful little girl, which made me very happy. It made me feel confident that she would survive her teenage years without too much turmoil.

The only thing I didn't like about the Pickin' and Grinnin' Festival was that I only got to sit down and actually listen to a few of the bands. The rest of the time I had to work.

I walked through the crowd of people to find my grandmother sitting in a lawn chair before the stage. She was right smack-dab in the middle of the front row, where she sat for all of our music festivals. I'm not sure who she thought she was, but she definitely thought she was entitled to a front-row center seat. I sat down next to her on a piece of lawn. “Hey, Gert.”

“Don't talk too much,” she said. “I want to hear the music. Reminds me of home.”

As it should. Most of the music that would be played this weekend could be traced back to the Appalachian region that was her home. And her parents' home and their parents' homes. She was of the predominantly Scotch-Irish stock that had come from the British Isles in the eighteenth century and settled in the mountain region of Appalachia. Mostly Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky.

With the people of the British Isles had come the music. The jauntiness of American fiddle music is really the Scotch-Irish highland music, just Americanized. It moved west with the settlers in the form of centuries-old folk music. My father's family was just as influenced by this music as was my mother's. My grandpa Keith was a fiddle player whose great-grandfather had come from North Carolina. I used to sit at his feet and listen to him play that fiddle, and I was completely entranced with the speed his fingers would move across the neck. I still am. There are no chord markings on the neck of a violin, as there are on the neck of a guitar. How did he know where to put his fingers?

Maybe that's why this music is so well loved. It reminds people of family, of home. It puts us in touch with days gone by, with people and places that we would never have an opportunity to know. And yet, through this music, they are stretching out across time and mountains to reach us in little old New Kassel.

The Blue Ridgers had just finished a traditional song called “Ragtime Annie.” It was one of my favorites and it combined a guitar, bass, banjo and fiddle. “College Hornpipe” was next, and they finished up with “Wildwood Flower.” For that final piece a little girl about ten years old came out and played the fiddle part. Her fingers flew across that violin with such familiarity that I knew she could probably play it in her sleep.

We clapped and clapped and then took a break to wait for the next band to come onstage.

“Can you do me a favor?” my grandmother asked. She was a lovely, although grouchy, octogenarian, with beautiful skin and high cheekbones.

“Sure,” I said and stood up. I wiped the grass from my backside and waited for her request.

“Can you help me up?”

I laughed because I had known that was what she was going to ask. The lawn chair sat way too low to the ground and gave no support, so I knew she wasn't going to be able to get up. She was sharp and she was healthy, but she wasn't Sylvia.

I put my hand out and helped her up. As we were walking across the lawn, I saw a woman approaching us. I knew that I should have known her, but I couldn't place the face. She grabbed me by the arm.

“Can we speak somewhere, please?” she asked.

I studied her face. She was in her late sixties, had dark brown eyes and was about my height. I had seen her before. I should have known who she was, but I could not remember.

“Sure,” I said. I turned to my grandmother. “Gert, Rudy is standing right over there by Tobias. You go on over by him.”

I then gestured to the Santa Lucia Church. The woman led the way, and within a minute we were standing inside the church. There was nobody else inside. She walked up to the front, genuflected and sat down in a pew. I wasn't sure what it was that she wanted, so I just sat down next to her.

“You have no idea what you've done, do you?” she asked.

“What?” I said. “Do I know you?”

“I am Lanna Petrovic. Used to be Ward. I'm Patrick's sister.”

And one of the six cousins.

Now I recognized her. She was a native. I'd seen her before on several occasions. “Of course,” I said. “I should have known you. What have I done?”

“You found the blanket,” she said. She moved her hand up to cover her mouth. A tear ran down her cheek.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“You have no idea of the number of lives you are going to ruin. What will my grandchildren think of me?” she asked.

“You were just a kid,” I said.

“How did you find it?” she asked, ignoring what I'd said.

“You mean you didn't know where it was?”

She shook her head no and swiped at a tear. “Aunt Catherine found it. She hid it as blackmail.”

“What?” I asked. “Wait. Start at the beginning.”

Lanna said nothing, she just picked at her thumbnail.

“You guys went out in the woods to catch a fairy, didn't you?”

Her eyes registered surprise. “How did you know?”

“The stained-glass window. The books. The fact that Catherine believed in the existence of fairies, so I assumed that her children would, too. Why else would Byron be outside during a storm?”

“Patrick didn't want to go. It had been storming, but he wasn't worried about lightning. Who would have thought in a million years that something like that would happen? He just didn't want to get caught out in the rain, because then we'd get in trouble,” she said. “Hugh and Cecily insisted. So we all snuck out after everybody was asleep. It was a typical summer storm. It stormed and then it stopped. Only we didn't know that there was another front moving in. Hugh convinced us that the storm was over and that we'd be fine.”

I never said a word. I tried not even to breathe because I didn't want to bring her back to the present. I just sat there and listened.

“So, we picked Byron up, blanket and all, and headed out to the woods. It was the woods between Aunt Catherine's house and the town limits. We found the spot that we'd picked out days before on another visit, and laid him down on the ground. It was a clearing, a meadow. There was one solitary tree in the meadow. We put him under it. We thought he'd be safer there because we could see him. And we'd be able to see the fairies when they came,” she said. More tears rolled down her face. “The storm came up fast. When we realized that it was a new front coming through, we all ran into the clearing to get Byron. Before we could get to him…the…light…lightning—”

She broke down into a fit of sobs. For a full minute she just sobbed and heaved, her body racked by every one of them. I was imagining a lone tree in a meadow, with the wind blowing and the lightning licking across the sky. And six scared children. I shivered.

“It was horrible,” she said finally. “The smell…”

I hadn't thought about there being a smell. I didn't want to think about a smell.

“We didn't know what to do. We panicked. We were standing in the middle of a field with a storm raging all around us. Hugh was yelling above the storm. ‘We have to get rid of him. We have to get rid of him.'”