Authors: Mary Daheim
Jackie wore a victorious air when she returned to the den. “The Smiths,” she trumpeted. “A bunch of them, going back to eighteen-something-or-other.”
I congratulated her on tracking down the law firm. “Did you talk to one of them?”
“No.” She flopped down next to me on the sofa. “They’re all dead. But their files are stored in somebody’s back room. Meriwether and Bell took over the firm about twenty years ago. Or maybe it was forty.”
Paul had rejoined us, carrying a fresh can of beer and a bag of Cheetos. “Did you call Meriwether and Bell, Sweets?” he asked.
Jackie had, but they’d left for the day. She’d try again in the morning. “I may ask them about my parking ticket. There were extenuating circumstances. I’m pregnant, after all. In fact, maybe that’s what made me sick. I could sue the city for a threatened miscarriage.” She brightened at the thought, then reached for the Cheetos.
My warning glance to abstain was ignored. Paul
didn’t encourage his wife’s litigious mood, but he did let her grab a fistful of Cheetos. Checking the time, Paul noted that it was after five o’clock. “I’ll call Aunt Sara now. Let’s hope she’s home.”
Jackie scrambled to her feet and rushed after Paul. “Hey, Emma and I’ll listen in. Come on, Emma,” she urged. “I’ll go upstairs. You can use the phone in the basement by the washer and dryer.”
Feeling like an intruder, I started to protest, but Jackie was already headed for the stairs. I surrendered, since three sets of ears were better than one. Probably this would be our only chance to quiz Aunt Sara. I took the spiral notebook with me, wondering where Mike had gone. He wasn’t in the kitchen. Paul was already there, dialing his aunt’s number in Seattle.
By the time I reached the laundry room, Paul was still answering Sara Melcher Beales’s questions about renovating the house. Hearing the clicks as Jackie and I came on the line, Paul explained that his wife had joined him. He didn’t mention me, which was just as well. As silently as possible, I moved piles of dirty clothes, empty detergent boxes, and bleach bottles. The laundry room was clearly Jackie’s domain.
Aunt Sara had a strong, slightly reedy voice. I pictured her as a well-preserved dowager with a trim figure and expertly coiffed hair. I was probably wrong, but the image suited her voice and social status.
At last, Paul worked his way around to the pertinent questions. He surprised me with his cunning, by asking his aunt where Cornelius Rowley had come up with the idea of a small lift to haul firewood from the basement to the entry hall.
“Paul, dear,” Sara Melcher Beales responded with a rich laugh, “I may be old, but I’m not
that
old. Cornelius Rowley had been dead for over ten years when I was born. I never knew any of the Rowleys except
my father’s stepfather, Edmund. Even he is hazy. Edmund—Eddie, he was called—came up with the wood-basket idea. He fancied himself an inventor. Otherwise, he took a backseat to Lena, as I’m sure you can guess if you know any of your family history.”
“I know about Lena,” Paul said. “Do you remember her well?”
“Daunting,” Sara replied promptly. “All of us children were terrified of her when we were small. Grandmama was so
grim
. Very autocratic, very religious, very self-righteous. My papa—your grandfather, Sanford—was intimidated, too, I think. But my mother, Rose, would stand up to her. I don’t believe Mama liked living with her in-laws. Looking back, I have the impression that my mother was never a happy woman.”
Jackie’s voice came on the line for the first time. “Rose? Wasn’t she happy with Sanford?”
Sara hesitated. I envisioned her fingering a long strand of perfect pearls. “That’s difficult for me to say. Children want their parents to be happy. But again, in retrospect, we all left Port Angeles as soon as we could. Except for Arthur. Our generation was quite daring. My grandparents and parents had stayed in the family home, and so had Aunt Carrie and Uncle Jimmy until they moved to Seattle. Of course, it was a big house, with plenty of room, but still, it probably wasn’t emotionally healthy. Did you know that I was the first to go away even though I was the only girl?”
Jackie and Paul hadn’t known and chorused their surprise. I clamped my lips together to keep from making any giveaway noises.
“Yes,” Sara went on, warming to the tale of her youth. “I suppose I was a bit of a rebel. I got into a lot of trouble—oh, nothing by today’s standards, but in a small town, in the Thirties, I was a scamp. Grandmama Lena thought I should go to a boarding school in Seattle,
not merely to tame me but to get a good education. Naturally, she was a great believer in educating women as well as men. She offered to pay my way. I was thrilled, though my parents were not. Lena, as usual, prevailed. Off I went to St. Nicholas School, by St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. It was very strict, very exclusive in those days. At first I hated it—the discipline, the uniforms, the lack of privacy. But after the first year I began to discover the city. And myself, as one does. I never went back to Port Angeles except for the occasional visit.” Her voice had taken on a brittle note. “I think I broke my mother’s heart.”
To my dismay, Jackie was weeping into the phone. “Poor Rose! Unhappily married! Estranged from her only daughter! A prisoner in her own house! Under the thumb of old Hatchet Face!”
“Really, Jacqueline,” Sara said in mild reproof, “it wasn’t as bad as all that. As I mentioned, Mama could get her back up when Lena became too overbearing. I was there for all the holidays. In any event, what’s done is done. I had my life to live. The real tragedy is that Mama never got the chance to live hers. Like all of us, she had only herself to blame.”
Jackie’s sobs subsided. Paul spoke again, but in my mind I heard the voice of Lena, speaking through her granddaughter, Sara. Out of the comer of my eye, I glimpsed Mike Randall coming down the hall from the unfinished basement. I gave a little start of surprise, then signaled for him to be quiet. Pointing to the phone, I mouthed Sara’s name.
“… a very gentle man,” Sara was saying in response to a question about Sanford Melcher that I’d only half heard. “Papa spent most of his time in the music parlor, writing. He played the piano, too, quite beautifully. It was his inspiration, he said. I never saw him angry, though he was often melancholy. He would watch my
mother with such sad eyes. Haunted, it seems to me now. Perhaps he blamed himself for staying at home with his mother and stepfather. As well he should. I don’t recall that he ever held a real job. Occasionally he would sell a poem. In later years my parents weren’t at all well off. Mama gave bridge lessons. Papa wrote more poems.”
Mike hovered at my elbow, trying to listen in. I held the phone out from my ear, sacrificing some of the conversation in order to let Mike hear, too.
Paul had brought up the subject of the ghost. I strained to catch Sara’s response. She laughed, that rich, brittle sound. “I never saw it! Oh, I remember listening in bed at night during a storm and
thinking
I heard a woman howl outside. But no, she never walked for me. My older brothers, Henry and Arthur, swore they saw her, with long black hair and a flowing cape. They made it up, I’m sure, to frighten John and your father and me.”
Jackie had now composed herself. “Who was she? I mean, did anybody ever say who they thought she was?”
“Certainly,” Sara answered calmly. “It was Cornelius Rowley’s second wife, Simone. There was some silly story that she was murdered. But it wasn’t true. Imagine! A murder in the Rowley house! Knowing the family, how could anyone believe such nonsense?”
P
AUL
M
ELCHER HADN’T
contradicted his aunt. No doubt she would have scoffed at him and insisted that he was being fanciful. What really surprised me was Jackie’s reticence. I’d expected her to blurt out the truth about the skeleton. But she didn’t. Even Jackie occasionally succumbed to an attack of discretion. Or else she really wanted another sterling silver place setting.
After I called to get the ferry schedule, we reassembled in the den. I began to realize that it was here that the Melchers lived, the other rooms being too large and too sparsely furnished. Someday, perhaps, the house would come alive with comfortable chairs and cheerful drapes and cherished possessions. Most of all, it would wrap its walls around a family again.
Briefly, I chided myself for romanticizing the Rowley-Melcher house. As far as I could tell, it hadn’t always been a happy home. Now, after hearing Aunt Sara describe her youth, I could picture Eddie Rowley, possibly relegated to the garage, seeking solace with his inventions; Sanford Melcher, playing sad songs on the piano and writing what I assumed was gloomy poetry; and his wife, Rose, restlessly going from room to room, readying herself for the next confrontation with her indomitable mother-in-law, Lena.
“It
could
be Simone,” Paul allowed, tapping his beer can. “She borrowed her stepdaughter’s earrings, maybe.
Or the other way around—Carrie had borrowed them from Simone for the photo session.”
Jackie’s eyes grew round. “What if they were both murdered. Carrie
and
Simone? We could keep digging and find another skeleton!” She was flushed with excitement.
Paul was shaking his head. “I don’t know … that’s pretty farfetched. But so is finding just one of them.”
I tended to agree with Paul. “It
is
odd that Simone seems to have fallen off the face of the earth right after her husband died,” I remarked. “We have birth and death dates for everyone in the family except Carrie and Simone.”
“She must have gone away,” Paul said. “Back to Paris, maybe. She probably had family there. I wonder why she came to this country in the first place. And how did she get to Port Angeles? It seems like an odd choice for a young woman from Paris.” His gaze flickered from Jackie to me to Mike.
I realized that Mike had been very subdued since returning from the basement. Jackie and Paul seemed to notice the same thing at the same time.
“Hey,” Paul said, grinning, “what’s up? You’ve turned into a clam, Mike.”
Mike, who was using a packing crate as a seat, rubbed his scalp in an agitated manner. “It’s bizarre. Especially the speculation about two women being killed. And yet …” His hand now chafed his chin. “I went back down into that unfinished section. I felt inept, not noticing the damaged skull. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed anything else. I had. So had the doctor. There were more bones.”
Next to me, Jackie jumped. Paul fumbled with his beer can. I stopped thinking about my gnawing hunger panes.
“From the skeleton?” Paul asked in a strange, dry voice.
Mike shook his head. “No. It’s remarkably well intact. And this may not mean anything. The bones are tiny and there are only three of them. It could be from a cat or a dog. There might be more, but I didn’t take the time to dig farther. To really go over all that dirt would be a major task.”
“Where are the bones?” Jackie asked breathlessly.
Mike had found an old fruit jar. He’d left them on a shelf near the door to the unfinished area. “Maybe we could have them analyzed up at the college. Shall I go get them?”
We agreed that he should. Jackie was still agog. “This is so thrilling! To think I was about to give up! But it sounded like so long ago. And then Aunt Sara talked about these people as if it were yesterday!”
“She only knew some of them,” Paul reminded his wife. “Not Carrie, not Simone, not Cornelius. Not Jimmy Malone, either. And we forgot to ask her about the servants.”
Jackie dismissed the servants with a sniff. “She wouldn’t have known them. Not the ones who were with Cornelius and Simone Rowley. I can’t imagine Lena keeping on the same people Simone had hired. Hatchet Face is the kind who’d want to choose her own staff.”
Jackie’s assessment rang true. The portrait of Lena was coming into sharper focus. Yes, she had probably been a rigid, stubborn, obsessed creature, self-righteous and devoid of sentiment. But her motives were admirable, and she had matched word to deed by paying for Sara Melcher’s tuition to boarding school. Lena also seemed to have instilled a sense of independence and self-confidence in her granddaughter. Some good qualities
were emerging to offset the chiseled bronze image in the park.
“Frivolous,” I said, apropos of nothing, certainly not of Lena.
“What?” Jackie gave me a puzzled look.
I offered her a wry smile. “I was thinking of what Lena would least admire in another woman. The word
frivolous
came to mind. It might apply to Carrie. Or Simone.” My smile turned self-deprecating for Paul. “Your grandmother Rose doesn’t sound lighthearted enough to qualify. Was she living here when she died?” I asked as Mike reentered the den carrying a dusty fruit jar.
“Oh, yes,” Paul replied. “She stayed on with Uncle Arthur and his wife.”
“And Sanford?” I inquired, hearing my stomach growl.
Paul’s earnest face sagged. “That’s weird … I’d forgotten about him. I mean, what happened to him. He had to be put in a home or something. I think he had a breakdown after Uncle John was killed in the war. My dad always said John was Grandfather’s favorite.”
Jackie pounced on her husband, who was sitting on the soft footstool. “You never told me your grandfather was crazy! There’s insanity in the family! Our baby could be a maniac!”
Paul tried to pry Jackie loose. “I didn’t say he was
crazy
. That was fifty years ago. It was probably depression. After listening to Aunt Sara, I’d guess he was a pretty depressed guy all along.”
Jackie relinquished her hold on Paul. “He sounds morbid. I don’t want a morbid baby, brooding all over the playpen. Maybe we should ask Dr. Carlisle about it.”
Paul ignored Jackie and turned to Mike. “Well? Let’s see those bones.”
As Mike had said, they were tiny. They could have belonged to a chicken. “I’ll take them to the college lab tomorrow,” Mike promised. “If that doesn’t work out, we can ship them off to the University of Washington.”
Paul nodded. “Might as well. We’re in too deep now to give up.” His grin took in all of us. “This is so strange. One minute I’m scared I’ll find out something really horrible about my relatives, and the next I can’t wait to see where all this leads us. The worst thing would be if we never come up with an answer.”