Authors: Mary Daheim
Vida’s snort was audible. “You can’t expect Ginny to bail out your entire staff. She and I did our best. But I got stuck with all those summer vacation stories. How many ways can you write about Disneyland? My grandson’s adventures there were more interesting than the rest of them put together.”
That was all too true. Roger, the apple of Vida’s eye, had jumped overboard on the jungle ride, thrown up on the Matterhorn, and pantsed Pluto. I had secretly hoped that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs might give the little wretch the bum’s rush down Main Street, but Disney employees are trained to be nice to terrorists. Maybe on their next trip Roger’s parents will take him to Iraq.
The conversation with Vida ended abruptly when Cal Vickers came into the editorial office, asking why the ad for his Texaco station was upside down. Holding my head, I hung up so that Vida could calm Cal and whoever else would be surging into
The Advocate
after they received this week’s edition. If I was lucky, I might get back to Alpine before they torched the place.
Paul Melcher arrived home while I was still thinking about taking some Excedrin. He had contacted the prosecutor’s office. Of course they’d heard about the skeleton and were intrigued. They were also up to their ears in pressing business. However, they’d get the paperwork started and send an officer to the Melcher house in the next twenty-four hours. Like Alpine, Port Angeles officialdom worked at its own small-town pace.
Paul seemed to have mixed emotions. I wondered if he hated to part with his skeleton. Instead of regaling my host with the events of the day, I sent him off to the
den. Jackie could explain everything. I wished I’d taken Mike Randall up on his offer of a drink. I finally steeled myself and called Dusty’s.
The car would be ready by late afternoon, Thursday. Tomorrow. The fuel pump had arrived, but it had been for the wrong year. The replacement was due on the first ferry from Victoria in the morning. Dusty, or whoever he was, expressed mild regret. I had mixed emotions.
By the time I’d downed the Excedrin I carried in my handbag, I found Jackie, Paul, and Mike poring over the floor plan I’d brought from the third-floor storage area.
“Did you see this?” Paul inquired. He was on his hands and knees. He jabbed at the architectural rendering with his index finger. “Where’s the billiard room?”
I knelt beside him. “It’s right there,” I said, pointing to the basement. “It’s off the hall from what’s now the rec room … Oh!” I stared at the blueprint. “I see what you mean. It was supposed to go where the unfinished part of the basement is now. The billiard room was never completed.”
Paul tipped his head to one side. “That’s right. Do you suppose that’s because a dead body was there?”
My gaze flickered from Paul to Jackie to Mike. “Maybe,” I allowed. “It might be a coincidence.”
Paul got to his feet. “Jackie tells me I should call my aunt in Seattle. Do you think it’ll do any good?”
I asked Paul if he’d ever met Sara Melcher Beales. He had, though only on about three occasions. She’d missed his wedding because of a two-month trip to Europe. The Samuel Melcher and Vernon Beales families not only lived in different cities, they also traveled in separate circles.
“Aunt Sara and Uncle Verne sent silver,” Jackie chimed in. “We’ve only got place settings for three and a meat fork.”
I consulted the family tree. “Sara’s not old enough to know what might have happened involving Carrie. Still, she may have heard some family gossip.” I wasn’t about to surrender any possible leads.
“Go ahead,” Jackie urged. “Maybe she’ll be so tickled to hear from you that she’ll send another place setting. Sterling silver costs the world.”
Paul debated with himself, finally deciding to phone his aunt after five when the rates were down. The delay turned out to be a good thing because Tessie Roo rang up almost immediately. She asked for me.
“Three out of six are still alive,” she announced in a chipper voice. “Not bad, eh? Joseph Malone is retired in Arizona, Mary Ann Malone Strom lives in the Chicago area, and Claudia Malone Cameron’s address is Victoria, British Columbia.”
I pictured the family tree I’d just been studying. “Claudia is actually one of Carrie’s children, right? The other two are Minnie’s?”
“Yes, indeed. Julia and Walter are both deceased. They lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area at the time of their deaths, but their children were all spread out. Daniel, the eldest of the children by Minnie, never married and died last year at eighty-two in a retirement home on the Kitsap Peninsula, not far from Bremerton. I believe he was a navy man. But Claudia is just a hop, skip, and a jump away in Victoria. Oak Bay, to be exact. Are you game?”
The question flustered me. “Well … I could call, of course …”
“Good heavens,” Tessie exclaimed, “you could be there in less than an hour! Take the Victoria Express tomorrow morning. It’s passengers only and fairly zips across the strait! If I had the day off, I’d go with you.”
Before I could argue with Tessie, let alone myself, I had Claudia Malone Cameron’s address in Victoria as
well as her phone number. Tessie cautioned me to call first, after I arrived in the city.
“She’s well into her eighties, so she may be deaf,” Tessie added. “Judging from the address, she still lives at home, so her mind is probably keen enough. Good luck. Call me when you get back to Port Angeles.”
I broke the news to the others, expecting one or all of them to volunteer as well. But Paul had to work, Mike met three classes on Thursdays, and Jackie wasn’t yet feeling up to par.
“I’d get seasick,” she said, clutching her stomach as if she could already feel the waves beneath the boat.
“Are you sure you want to go to all this trouble?” Paul asked, his earnest face displaying mixed emotions.
I wasn’t, actually. But if I hung around the Melcher house while I waited yet another day for the Jag, I’d feel as if I were imposing. Two days and two nights of hospitality were plenty to ask of anyone.
“It could be a story,” I said, surprising myself as well as the others. “I know I’m not local, but if we figured this all out, it might make a feature for the wire service around the state. Then the IRS would let me write my trip off.” Suddenly I felt very clever.
Paul was nodding thoughtfully. “I got a call from
The Daily News
this afternoon. I put them off by saying we didn’t want to talk about it until we had some more information.”
I voiced my approval. “That’s the way to handle the press. But I’d be glad to let them write the story if I’m not around for the ending. If there
is
an ending,” I added.
Jackie sprang to life. “Emma! You have to be! You’re the one who’s done all the real work. As long as you’ve got to stay until tomorrow afternoon, you might as well take another day off from work and spend the weekend.”
Paul chimed in, also urging me to remain in Port Angeles. Mike said nothing, but his blue eyes seemed hopeful. I, however, was immovable.
“Things aren’t going so well at the office,” I admitted. “If the Jag is ready before five tomorrow, I’ll head straight back to Alpine and skip the rest of the Olympic Loop.”
A chorus of nays echoed in my ears. This time, Mike had joined Jackie and Paul. Instead of arguing, I challenged them to organize the known facts of our little mystery. If Paul intended to phone his Aunt Sara and I was actually going to call on Claudia Malone Cameron in Victoria, we needed to see where we stood. I asked Mike to take notes.
“We’ll stick with the theory that the skeleton is Carrie Rowley Malone, but we could be wrong,” I said, sipping from a can of Pepsi I’d bought at Safeway. “We’ve come to that conclusion because of the earring we found, which we also saw in Carrie’s photograph. Tessie Roo has cautioned me about discrepancies, inconsequential human actions that can alter family history.”
Jackie wrinkled her nose. “Like what?”
I gave a little shrug. “Oh, like Carrie lending her earrings to somebody else. Or the earrings finding their way into the unfinished basement in some other manner. Lost, thrown away, maybe even stolen.”
Mike’s expression was very solemn. “That’s true. There was another woman in the family about the same age as Carrie. Her stepmother, Simone.”
Jackie demurred. “Simone looks tall. She would have worn bigger shoes. I’m still voting for Carrie.”
It wasn’t up to me to argue. “It might be someone we know nothing about,” I went on. “If we believe what we hear, both Carrie Rowley Malone and Simone Rowley left Port Angeles around the same time in 1908,
after Cornelius Rowley died. We’re told that Carrie and her husband and children moved to Seattle. We have no idea what happened to Simone.”
“We need to consult a lawyer,” Mike asserted, looking up from the spiral notebook in which he’d been writing. “Somebody with a firm that’s been around forever. All we know is that Eddie and Lena Melcher inherited the house. Who got Cornelius’s money?”
Jackie and Paul exchanged blank looks. “We haven’t had a reason to see a lawyer,” said Jackie. “What about you, Mike?”
Mike flushed slightly. “I still use the family firm in Tacoma. The divorce, you know.”
Jackie bounced off the sofa, where she’d been sitting next to me. “I’ll get the phone book. We’ll call around until we find some old-timers. Meanwhile, we need a cast of characters. Suspects, you know? Who have we got?”
Mike was tapping the notebook with his ballpoint pen. He shook his head. “We can’t be sure of the victim.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s stick with Carrie,” Paul replied doggedly, as Jackie scurried away. “We don’t know that it
wasn’t
her. Anyway, I want to sort out these people. They’re my family, after all. Or at least somehow connected.”
“We’ve got Cornelius,” I noted, but I sounded uncertain. “We can’t eliminate him just because we think he died before the victim did. It might not have happened that way.”
Paul agreed. “Right. Then we’ve got his wife, Simone. There’s Eddie and Lena, the odd couple. Then comes my grandfather, Sanford, and my grandmother, Rose. The skeleton can’t be Rose or I wouldn’t be here.”
I found Rose on the family tree. “Sanford didn’t
marry Rose until 1909, but she was local, so she would have been around. Okay, we’ll count her in. And let’s not forget Carrie and Jimmy Malone. Who else?”
Neither of the men answered. Jackie returned with the phone book. Apparently, she’d caught my last question.
“Servants,” she said firmly. “You said so yourself, Paul. There had to be servants in this house. There are servants’ quarters, and I can’t imagine Simone lifting so much as a tea towel. Or Lena, either. She was too busy being a suffragette.”
Jackie’s point was well taken, but we knew nothing of the Rowley-Melcher staff. The den was silent as Jackie ran a finger down the listings for lawyers in the Yellow Pages.
“Oh, poopy! I can’t tell much from all these names. Why don’t they say stuff like ‘Blah-blah and Blah-blah, established 1902—over a billion clients exonerated’?”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s not five yet. You could call one of them, and they’d probably know which firms go back to the early days.”
With an aggrieved sigh Jackie lugged the phone book out of the den. Paul, Mike, and I studied the family names on our list.
“As mysteries go,” mused Mike, “this isn’t much of a cast. Let’s say that Carrie is the victim. Let’s also say she was killed after Cornelius died. Carrie was listed as a survivor in her father’s funeral notice, right? That leaves her husband, Jimmy, her brother, Eddie, and his wife, Lena, Lena’s son, Sanford, and the stepmother, Simone. Oh, and Sanford’s bride-to-be, Rose Felder. Six suspects in all. Now why would anyone want to kill a young wife and mother? Did she get the money instead of Simone? We know she didn’t get the house. Did she quarrel with her brother over the inheritance? Did Jimmy Malone want out of his marriage?”
I had turned back to the photo albums, flipping through the thick black pages with their sepia-toned pictures: Cornelius Rowley, with his bristling beard, high forehead, and sharp eyes; Simone Dupre Rowley’s exotic sophistication and undeniable beauty; Eddie Rowley’s weak chin, his engaging smile, the cane not a prop but a necessity; Lena Stillman Melcher Rowley’s chiseled features and the determined set of her shoulders; Carrie Rowley’s soft blonde curls and innocent air.
“If Jimmy Malone was a bigamist, he definitely might want to get rid of a spare wife,” I said. For the first time I felt a real connection with the Rowleys and Melchers of over eighty years ago. They were coming to life in my mind, possessing personalities, physical qualities, human emotions. I felt a rush of excitement. Ambivalence fled. I wondered what time the ferry left in the morning for Victoria. I’d call for a schedule as soon as Jackie was off the phone.
“Where
is
Jimmy Malone?” I asked out loud, searching through the album. At last, toward the back, I found a wedding photo. Weighed down by the ten-foot veil and train, a demure Carrie Rowley Malone stood behind her seated groom. Jimmy Malone looked smug, his broad features and burly build not quite in harmony with the satin-faced lapels on his frock coat and the high, white dress-shirt collar. I felt that he’d have been more at home in rumpled linen, leaning on the bar of a Belfast pub.
On the adjacent page I found another couple I hadn’t noticed earlier. The young man was dark, with feral features, a forest creature frightened by the crack of a gun. Or maybe the soulful eyes were startled by the photographer’s flash. The woman’s head leaned stiltedly toward the man. She was no more than twenty, with a gentle face that was not quite spoiled by an overly long chin. I offered the album to Paul.
“Your grandfather, Sanford? And Grandma Rose?”
Paul studied the photo. “Yes, I’ve seen this picture someplace else. My folks must have had a copy. Or else I saw it here when I was a kid. Do I look like them?”
I considered. “Your coloring, maybe. Like Rose. But no, I don’t see any resemblance to Sanford.”
Lightly, Paul touched the photograph. “I vaguely remember Grandma Rose. I was only about four when she died. She stood and sat very straight. We had to mind our manners when we were around her. Luckily, it wasn’t often.” He smiled shyly and offered Mike a second beer. Mike volunteered to get it himself. I wondered if he preferred not to be left alone with me. Maybe Mike thought I was going to play the part of a wisecracking female journalist again. Paul went with Mike. It occurred to me that, like women going in pairs to the ladies’ room, men must seek beer together.